He awoke, needing a drink, twenty miles from Marseilles, with the countryside a long bright blur at the window. He went to the minibar for a vodka and tonic and drank it slowly, then lit a cigarette. It still felt like a forbidden pleasure – guilt laced with exhilaration, like playing truant from school.
He pulled the brochure out of his pocket once more. Decidedly crumpled now, the cheap paper beginning to tear at the folds. For a moment he almost expected to feel differently, to find that the sense of must-have was gone. But it was still there. In the duffel bag at his side the Specials lolled and gurgled with the train’s movement, and inside the sediment of past summers stirred like crimson slurry.
He felt as if the train would never reach Marseilles.
14
Pog Hill, Summer 1976
HE WAS WAITING ON THE ALLOTMENT. THE RADIO WAS PLAYING, tied with a piece of string to the branch of a tree, and Jay could hear him singing along – Thin Lizzy and ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’ – in his extravagant music-hall voice. He had his back turned, leaning over a patch of loganberries with secateurs in one hand, and he greeted Jay without turning round, casually, as if he had never been away. Jay’s first thought was that he’d aged; the hair beneath the greasy cap was thinner, and he could see the sharp, vulnerable ridge of his spine through his old T-shirt, but when the old man turned round he could see it was the same Joe, jay-blue eyes above a smile more suited to a fourteen-year-old than a man of sixty-five. He was wearing one of his red flannel sachets around his neck. Looking more carefully around the allotment Jay saw that a similar charm adorned every tree, every bush, even the corners of the greenhouse and the home-made cold frame. Small seedlings protected under jars and bisected lemonade bottles each bore a twist of red thread or a sign crayoned in the same colour. It might have been another of Joe’s elaborate jokes, like the earwig traps or the sherbert plant or sending him to the garden centre for a long weight, but this time there was a dogged, sombre look to the old man’s amusement, like that of a man under siege. Jay asked him about the charms, expecting the usual joke or wink, but Joe’s expression remained serious.
‘Protection, lad,’ he said quietly. ‘Protection.’
It took the boy a long time to realize quite how serious he was.
Summer wound on like a dusty road. Jay called by Pog Hill Lane almost every day, and when he felt in need of solitude he went over to Nether Edge and the canal. Nothing much had changed. New glories on the dump: abandoned fridges, ragbags, a clock with a cracked casing, a cardboard box of tattered paperback books. The railway, too, delivered riches: papers, magazines, broken records, crockery, cans, returnable glass. Every morning he combed the rails, picking up what looked interesting or valuable, and he shared his finds with Joe back at the house. With Joe, nothing was wasted. Old newspapers went into the compost. Pieces of carpet kept the weeds down in the vegetable patch. Plastic bags covered the branches of his fruit trees and protected them from the birds. He demonstrated how to make cloches for young seedlings from the round end of a plastic lemonade bottle, and potato-planters from discarded car tyres. They spent a whole afternoon dragging an abandoned box freezer up the railway banking to make a cold frame. Scrap metal and old clothes were piled into cardboard boxes and sold to the rag-and-bone man. Empty paint tins and plastic buckets were converted into plant pots. In return, he taught Jay more about the garden. Slowly the boy learned to tell lavender from rosemary from hyssop from sage. He learned to taste soil – a pinch between the finger and thumb slipped under the tongue, like a man testing fine tobacco – to determine its acidity. He learned how to calm a headache with crushed lavender, or a stomach ache with peppermint. He learned to make skullcap tea and camomile to aid sleep. He learned to plant marigolds in the potato patch to discourage parasites, and to pick nettles from the top to make ale, and to fork the sign against the evil eye if ever a magpie flew past. There were times, of course, when the old man couldn’t resist a little joke. Like giving him daffodil bulbs to fry instead of onions, or planting ripe strawberries in the border to see if they’d grow. But most of the time he was serious, or so Jay thought, finding real pleasure in his new role as a teacher. Perhaps he knew it was coming to an end, even then, though Jay never suspected it, but it was that year that he was happiest, sitting in the allotment with the radio playing, or sorting through boxes of junk, or holding the vegetable-cutter for Joe as they selected fruit for the next batch of wine. They discussed the merits of ‘Good Vibrations’ (Jay’s choice) versus ‘Brand New Combine Harvester’ (Joe’s). He felt safe, protected, as if all this were a little pocket of eternity which could never be lost, never fail. But something was changing. Perhaps it was in Joe: a new restlessness, the wary look he had, the diminishing number of visitors – sometimes only one or two in a whole week – or the new, eerie quiet in Pog Hill Lane. No more hammering, no singing in the yards, less washing hanging out to dry on clothes lines, rabbit hutches and pigeon lofts abandoned and derelict.
Often Joe would walk to the outer edge of his allotment and look over the railway in silence. There were fewer trains, too, a couple of passenger trains a day on the fast line, the rest shunters and coal trucks ambling slowly north to the yard. The rails, so shiny and bright last year, were beginning to show rust.
‘Looks like they’re plannin to close the line,’ Joe remarked on one of these occasions. ‘Goin to knock down Kirby Central next month.’ Kirby Central was the main signal box down by the station. ‘Pog Hill, anall, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘But that’s your greenhouse,’ protested Jay. Since he had known Joe, the old man had used the derelict signal box fifty yards from his back garden as an unofficial greenhouse, and it was filled with delicate plants, tomatoes, two peach trees, a couple of vines branching out into the eaves, escaping onto the white roof in a spill of broad, bright leaves.
Joe shrugged.
‘They usually knock em flat first off,’ he remarked. ‘I’ve bin lucky so far.’ His eyes moved to the red charm bags nailed to the back wall and he reached out to pinch one between finger and thumb.
‘Thing is, we’ve bin careful,’ he continued. ‘Not drawn attention to usselves. But if they shut that line, there’ll be men taking up the track all down Pog Hill and towards Nether Edge. They might be here for months. And this here, it’s private property. Belongs to British Railways. You an me, lad, we’re trespassers.’
Jay followed his gaze across the railway cutting, taking in, as if for the first time, the breadth of the allotment, the neat straight rows of vegetables, the cold frames, the hundreds of plastic planters, dozens of fruit trees, thick stands of raspberries, blackcurrants, rhubarb. Funny, he’d never thought of it as trespassing before.
‘Oh. D’you think they’d want to take it back?’
Joe didn’t look at him. Of course they would take it back. He could see that in the old man’s profile, in the calculating look on his face – how long to replant? How long to rebuild? Not because they wanted it, but because it was theirs to take, their territory, wasteland or not, theirs. Jay had a sudden, vivid memory of Zeth and his mates as Zeth booted the radio into the air. There would be the same expressions on their faces as they pulled up the railway, broke up the greenhouse, tore up plants and bushes, bulldozed through the sweet drifts of lavender and the half-ripened pears, unearthed potatoes and carrots and parsnips and all the arcane exotica of a lifetime’s collection. Jay felt a sudden brimming rage for the old man, and his fists clenched painfully against the bricks.
‘They can’t do that!’ he said fiercely.
Joe shrugged. Of course they could. Now Jay understood the significance of the charm bags hanging on every surface, every protruding nail, every tree, everything he wanted to save. It couldn’t make him invisible, but it might … might what? Keep the bulldozers away? Impossible.
Joe said nothing. His eyes were bright and serene. For a second he looked like the old gunslinger in a hundred Westerns, strapping on his guns for a final showdown. For
a second everything – anything – seemed possible. Whatever might have happened later, he believed in it then.
15
Marseilles, March 1999
THE TRAIN REACHED MARSEILLES AROUND NOON. IT WAS WARM but cloudy, and Jay carried his coat over his arm as he moved through the aimless crowds. He bought a couple of sandwiches at a stand by the platform, but was still too nervous, too energized to eat. The train to Agen was almost an hour late, and slow; almost as long as the journey from Paris. Energy drained away into exhaustion. He slept uncomfortably as they nudged from one small station to another, feeling hot and thirsty and slightly hungover. He kept needing to take out the leaflet again, just to be sure he wasn’t imagining it all. He tried to get the radio to work, but all he could get was white noise.
It was late afternoon when he finally reached Agen. He was beginning to feel more alert again, more aware of his surroundings. He could see fields and farms from the carriage, orchards and ploughed chocolate-coloured earth. Everything looked very green. Many of the trees were already in flower, unusually early for March, he thought, though his only experience of gardening was with Joe, a thousand miles further north. He took a taxi to the estate agent’s – the address was on the leaflet – hoping to get permission to view the house, but the place was already shut. Damn!
In the excitement of his escape Jay had never considered what he would do if this happened. Find a hotel in Agen? Not without seeing his house. His house. The thought lifted the hairs on his forearms. Tomorrow was Sunday. Chances were that the agency would be closed again. He would have to wait until Monday morning. He stood, hesitating in front of the locked door as the taxi driver behind him grew impatient. How far exactly was Lansquenet-sous-Tannes? Surely there would be something, even something basic like a Campanile or an Ibis or, failing that, a chambre d’hôte where he could stay? It was half-past five. He would have time to see the house, even if it was only from the outside, before the light failed.
The urge was too strong. Turning back to the bored taxi driver with unaccustomed decisiveness Jay showed him the map.
‘Vous pouvez m’y conduire tout de suite?’
The man considered for a moment, with the air of slow reflection typical of that part of the country. Jay pulled out a clip of banknotes from the pocket of his jeans and showed them to him. The driver shrugged incuriously and jerked his head towards the cab again. Jay noticed he didn’t offer to help with the luggage.
The drive took half an hour. Jay dozed again in the leather-and-tobacco scented rear of the cab, whilst the driver smoked Gauloises and grunted to himself in satisfaction as he blared without indicating through files of motorway traffic, then sped down narrow small lanes, honking his horn imperiously at corners, occasionally sending flurries of chickens squawking into the air. Jay was beginning to feel hungry and in need of a drink. He had assumed he would find a place to eat when they reached Lansquenet. But now, looking at the dirt lane down which the taxi jolted and revved, he was beginning to have serious doubts.
He tapped the driver on the shoulder.
‘C’est encore loin?’
The driver shrugged, pointing ahead, and slowed the car to a rumbling halt.
‘Là.’
Sure enough, there it was, just behind a little copse of trees. The red slanting light of a modest sunset lit the tiled roof and the whitewashed walls with almost eerie brightness. Jay could see the gleam of water somewhere to the side, and the orchard – green in the photograph – was now a froth of pale blossoms. It was beautiful. He paid the driver too much of his remaining French money and pulled his case out onto the road.
‘Attendez-moi ici. Je reviens tout de suite.’
The driver made a vague gesture, which he took to be agreement, and, leaving him to wait by the deserted roadside, Jay began to walk quickly towards the trees. As he reached the copse he found he could see more clearly down towards the house and across the vineyard. The photograph in the brochure was deceptive, showing little of the scale of the property. Being a city boy Jay had no idea of the acreage, but it looked huge, bordered on one side by road and river, and on the other by a long hedge, which reached beyond the back of the house on to more fields. On the far side of the river he could see another farmhouse, small and low-roofed, and beyond that the village – a church spire, a road winding up from the river, houses. The path to the house led past the vineyard – already green and leggy with growth among drifts of weeds – and past an abandoned vegetable plot, where last year’s asparagus, artichokes and cabbages reared hairy heads above the dandelions.
It took about ten minutes to reach the house. As he came closer Jay noticed that, like the vineyard and the vegetable plot, it was in need of some repair. The pinkish paint was peeling away in places, revealing cracked grey plaster beneath. Tiles from the roof had fallen and smashed onto the overgrown path. The ground-floor windows were shuttered or boarded up, and some of the upstairs glass was broken, showing toothy gaps in the pale facing. The front door was nailed shut. The whole impression was of a building which had been derelict for years. And yet the vegetable plot showed signs of recent, or fairly recent, attention. Jay walked around the building once, noting the extent of the damage, and told himself that most of it looked superficial, the work of neglect and the elements. Inside might be different. He found a place where a broken shutter had come away from the plaster, leaving a gap large enough to look through, and put his face to the hole. It was dark inside, and he could hear a distant sound of water dripping.
Suddenly something moved inside the building. Rats, he thought at first. Then it moved again, softly, stealthily, scraping across the floor with a sound like metal-capped boots on cellar concrete. Definitely not rats, then.
He called out – absurdly, in English – ‘Hey!’ The sound stopped.
Squinting through the gap in the shutter Jay thought he could see something move, a dim shadow just in his line of vision, something which might almost have been a figure in a big coat with a cap pulled down over the eyes.
‘Joe? Joe?’
It was crazy. Of course it wasn’t Joe. It was just that he’d been thinking of him so much in the past few days that he had begun to imagine him everywhere. It was natural, he supposed. When he looked again the figure – if there ever was a figure – had gone. The house was silent. Jay knew a fleeting moment of disappointment, of something almost like grief, which he dared not analyse too closely in case it should reveal itself to be something even crazier, a conviction, perhaps, that Joe could have actually been there, waiting. Old Joe, with his cap and miner’s boots and his baggy overcoat against the cold, waiting in the deserted house, living off the land. Jay’s mind crept remorselessly to the recently abandoned vegetable plot – there must have been someone to plant those seeds – with a mad kind of logic. Someone had been there.
He looked at his watch and was startled to see that he had been at the house for almost twenty minutes. He had asked the taxi driver to wait at the roadside, and he didn’t want to spend the night in Lansquenet. From what he had seen of the place it was unlikely that he would be able to find a decent place to stay, and he was beginning to feel very hungry. He broke into a run as he passed the orchard, goosegrass clinging to the laces of his boots as he passed, and he was sweating when at last he rounded the curve out of the copse and back onto the track.
There was no sign of the taxi.
Jay swore. His case and duffel bag were lined up incongruously by the roadside. The driver, tired of waiting for the crazy Englishman, had gone.
Like it or not, he was staying.
16
Pog Hill, Summer 1976
KIRBY CENTRAL WENT IN LATE AUGUST. JAY WAS THERE WHEN they closed it, hiding in a tall clump of seedy willowherb, and when they had gone – taking with them the levers, light signals and anything which might otherwise be stolen – he crept up the steps and peered in through the window. Train registers and route diagrams had been left in the box, though the lever frame gaped
emptily, and it looked strangely inhabited, as if the signalman had just stepped out and might return at any moment. Jay reckoned there was plenty of usable glass left, if Joe and he came to fetch it.
‘Don’t bother, lad,’ Joe said when he reported this. ‘I’ll already have me hands full this autumn.’
Jay needed no explanation for his words. Since the beginning of August Joe had become more and more concerned about the fate of his allotment. He rarely spoke about it openly, but he would sometimes stop working and gaze at his trees, as if measuring the time they had left. Sometimes he lingered to touch the smooth bark of an apple or a plum tree and spoke – to Jay, to himself – in a low voice. He always referred to them by name, as if they were people.
‘Mirabelle. Doin well, int she? That’s a French plum, a yeller gage, a goodun for jam or wine or just for eatin. She likes it here on the bank, it’s nicely drained and sunny.’ He paused. ‘Too late to move t’old girl, though,’ he said regretfully. ‘She’d never survive. Yer sink yer roots deep, thinkin yer goin to stay for ever, and this is what happens. The buggers.’
It was the closest he had come in weeks to mentioning the allotment problem.
‘Tryin to knock down Pog Hill Lane now, anall.’ Joe’s voice was louder now, and Jay realized that this was the first time he had ever seen him close to anger. ‘Pog Hill Lane, that’s bin standin for a hundred year-a-more, that were built when there were still a pit down Nether Edge, and navvies workin down at canal side.’