‘An old man with a funny hat on,’ she said. ‘He told me to tell you something.’ She took a long drink of her chocolate, emerging from the cup with a frothy foam moustache. Jay felt suddenly shivery, almost afraid.
‘What did he say?’ he whispered.
Rosa frowned.
‘He said to remember the Specials,’ she said. ‘That you’d know what to do.’
‘Anything else?’ Jay’s mouth was dry, his head pounding.
‘Yes.’ She nodded energetically. ‘He told me to say goodbye.’
57
Pog Hill Lane, February 1999
IT WAS TWENTY-TWO YEARS BEFORE JAY WENT BACK TO POG HILL. Part of it was anger, another part fear. He had never felt as if he belonged before. London certainly wasn’t home. The places he’d lived all looked the same to him, with small variations in size and design. Flats. Bedsits. Even Kerry’s Kensington house. Places in passing. But this year was different. Pick your own cliché, as Joe would have said. Perhaps it was simply that for the first time there were greater fears than going back to Pog Hill. Nearly fifteen years since Jackapple Joe. Since then, nothing. This went beyond writer’s block. He felt as if he were stuck in time, forced to write and rewrite the fantasies of his adolescence. Jackapple Joe was the first – the only – adult book he had written. But instead of releasing him it had trapped him in childhood. In 1977 he had rejected magic. He had had enough, he told himself. Enough and enough and enough. He was on his own, and that was the way he wanted it. As if when he dropped Joe’s seeds into the cutting at Pog Hill he was also letting go of everything he’d clung to during those past three years: the talismans, the red ribbons, Gilly, the dens, the wasps’ nests, the treks along the railway lines and the fights at Nether Edge. Everything blowing away into the cutting with the litter and the ash of the railbed. Then Jackapple Joe put it to rest at last. Or so he had thought. But there must have been something left. Curiosity, perhaps. An itch at the back of his mind which refused to be scratched. Some remnant of belief.
Perhaps he’d mistaken the signs. After all, what evidence had he found? A few boxes of magazines? A map marked in coloured pencils? Perhaps he had jumped to a false conclusion. Perhaps Joe was telling the truth after all.
Perhaps Joe had come back.
It was something he hardly dared imagine. Joe back at Pog Hill? In spite of himself it brought his heart into his throat. He imagined the house as it was, overgrown perhaps, but with the allotment still well ordered behind the camouflage of Joe’s permanent solution, the trees decorated with red ribbons, the kitchen warm with the scent of brewing wine… He waited several months before he made the move. Kerry was supportive, cloyingly so, imagining perhaps a renewed source of inspiration, a new book which would propel him back into the limelight. She wanted to come with him; was so persistent that he finally agreed.
It was a mistake. He knew it the moment they arrived. Rain the colour of soot scrawling from the clouds. Nether Edge reclaimed as a riverside building development; bulldozers and tractors crawling across the disused railbed and neat identical bungalows. Fields had become car showrooms, supermarkets, shopping centres. Even the newsagent’s, where Jay had gone so many times to buy cigarettes and magazines for Joe, had become something else.
Kirby’s remaining mines had been closed for years. The canal was being renovated, and with the help of millennium funding there were ongoing plans for the development of a visitors’ centre, where tourists could go down a specially converted mine shaft or ride a barge on the newly cleaned canal.
Needless to say, Kerry thought it was charming.
But that wasn’t the worst.
In spite of everything, he was expecting Pog Hill at least to have survived. The main road was still more or less unchanged, with its graceful if slightly blackened Edwardian houses and its avenue of lindens. The bridge, too, was as he remembered it, a new pedestrian crossing at one end, but the same line of poplars which marked the entrance to Pog Hill Lane, and Jay’s heart played a funny little riff against his ribs as he pulled the car up to the yellow line and looked up the hill.
‘Is that it?’ Kerry was checking her reflection in the passenger-seat mirror. ‘I don’t see any sign or anything.’
Jay said nothing and got out of the car. Kerry followed him.
‘So this is where it all began.’ She sounded a little disappointed. ‘Funny. I thought it would be more atmospheric, somehow.’
He ignored her and took a few steps forward up the hill.
They had changed the name of the lane. You won’t find Pog Hill on any map now, or Nether Edge, or any of the places around which his life had revolved for those three long-ago summers. It’s called Meadowbank View now, the houses knocked down to give way to a row of brick-built two-storey flats with little balconies and geraniums in plastic planters. A sign on the nearest building read, ‘Meadowbank Quality Retirement Flats’. Jay went to stand where Joe’s house would have been. There was nothing. A small tarmacked parking area – residents only – to the side. Behind the flats, where Joe’s garden had once stood, was a bland square of lawn with a single small tree. Of Joe’s orchard, of the herb garden, the rows of blackcurrants and raspberries and gooseberries, the vines, plums, pears, the carrots, parsnips, the Specials, nothing remained.
‘Nothing.’
Kerry took his hand. ‘Poor darling,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘You’re not too terribly upset, are you?’ She sounded almost pleased, as if the prospect appealed to her. Jay shook his head.
‘Wait for me in the car, OK?’
Kerry frowned. ‘But Jay-’
‘Two minutes, OK?’
Just in time. He felt as if he might explode if he held it in any more. He ran to the back of the garden and looked over the wall down into the cutting. It was filled with rubbish. Sacks of household waste covered the ground: discarded fridges, car tyres, crates, pallets, tin cans, stacks of magazines tied together with twine. Jay felt a kind of laughter welling in his throat. Joe would have loved this. His dream come true. Rubbish sprawled down the steep hill, as if flung there by passers-by. A baby’s pram. A shopping trolley. The frame of an ancient bicycle. Pog Hill cutting had been converted into a landfill site. With an effort, Jay pulled himself up so that he could straddle the wall. The hidden railbed looked a long way down from here, a sheer drop for most of the way into a scrub of bushes and a continent of litter. On the far side of the wall graffiti artists had been at work. A scree of broken glass sparkled in the sun. One unbroken bottle lay against a protruding stump, the light gleaming on its dusty base. A red cord, grubby with age, was knotted around its neck. He knew at once it was Joe’s.
How it had escaped the demolition of Joe’s house Jay couldn’t imagine, still less how it could have remained intact since then. But it was one of Joe’s bottles, all right. The coloured cord proved it, as did the label, still legible in the old man’s painstaking handwriting: ‘Specials’. As he made his way down towards the bridge he thought he saw more of Joe’s belongings strewn down the banking. A broken clock. A spade. Some buckets and pots in which plants had once grown. It looked exactly as if someone had stood at the top of the hill and simply hurled the contents of Joe’s house into the cutting below. Jay picked his way across the sad wreckage, trying to avoid broken glass. There were ancient copies of National Geographic and pieces, of a kitchen chair. And finally, a little further down, he found the seed chest, its legs broken off, one door hanging. Sudden, white rage pumped through him. It was a complex feeling, directed as much at himself and his foolish expectations as at Joe for letting this happen, or at the person who had stood at the top of the hill and dumped an old man’s life into the gap, as if it were just rubbish to be disposed of. Worse, there was fear, the dreadful knowledge that he should have come here sooner, that there had been something here for him to find, but that, as always, he had come too late.