"Harris, Joanne - Blackberry Wine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harris Joanne)

smooth, cool floor and go to sleep, perhaps for ever. No-one
would look for him here. But instead he felt very wide
awake, very alert, as if the silence had cleared his head.
There was a charged atmosphere in spite of the stillness,
like something waiting to happen.
The new bottles were in a box at the back of the cellar. A
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broken ladder had been laid across the top of it, and he
moved this aside, dragging the box out with an effort across
the flagstones. He lifted out a bottle at random and held it
up to the light to decipher the label. Its contents looked
inky-red, with a deep layer of sediment at the base. For a
moment he imagined he saw something else inside there, a
shape, but it was only sediment. Somewhere above him, in
the kitchen, the nostalgia station was still tuned to 1975 -
Christmas now, 'Bohemian Rhapsody', faint but audible
through the floor - and he shivered.
Back in the kitchen he examined the bottle with some
curiosity — he had barely glanced at it since he brought it
back six weeks before - the wax seal at the neck, the brown
cord, the handwritten label - "Specials 1975' - the glass
grimed with the dust of Joe's root cellar. He wondered why
he had brought it back from the wreckage. Nostalgia
maybe, though his feelings for Joe were still too mixed
for that luxury. Anger, confusion, longing washed over him
in hot-cold waves. Old man. Wish you were here.
Inside the bottle something leaped and capered. The
bottles in the cellar rattled and danced in reply.
Sometimes it happens by accident. After years of waiting
- for a correct planetary alignment, a chance meeting, a
sudden inspiration - the right circumstances occasionally
happen of their own accord, slyly, without fanfare, without
warning. Jay thinks of it as destiny. Joe called it magic. But
sometimes all it is is simple chemistry, something in the air,
a single action to bring something which has long remained
inert into sudden, inevitable change.
Layman's alchemy, Joe called it. The magic of everyday
things. Jay Mackintosh reached for a knife to cut the seal.
HAD WITHSTOOD THE YEARS. HIS KNIFE SLICED IT OPEN AND THE
irk was still intact beneath. For a moment the scent was i immediately pungent that all he could do was endure it, ieth clenched, as it worked its will on him. It smelt earthy ad a little sour, like the canal in midsummer, with a
larpness which reminded him of the vegetable-cutter
ad the gleeful tang of fresh-dug potatoes. For a second
ie illusion was so strong that he was actually there in that
anished place, with Joe leaning on his spade and the radio 'edged in a fork in a tree, playing 'Send in the Clowns' or
'm Not in Love'. A sudden overwhelming excitement took
old of him and he poured a small quantity of the wine into
glass, trying not to spill the liquid in his eagerness. It was
usky-pink, like papaya juice, and it seemed to climb the
;des of the glass in a frenzy of anticipation, as if something
iside it were alive and anxious to work its magic on his