‘I keep wondering if he had my body. I inherited his mouth and his eyes and his hair. What about the rest of me?’ Colette knew what he was going to say next, she could see the mischievousness in his face, ‘I keep wondering if I’ve got a bigger cock than Dada.’
‘Well, I couldn’t say,’ said Colette.
‘If I had ever seen him naked, I don’t think I would have been so scared of him. And I feel cheated by the fact that he died before he became very old. I was denied the opportunity of cradling his weakened body in my arms. We should be able to do that to our fathers.’
‘You were very scared of him weren’t you?’
‘I was scared of something he was capable of being. I don’t know if that was him or not.’
He meant the violence.
Dada was gifted with violence. He was an expert, a virtuoso, he could modulate violence to match exactly to the prevailing situation, he could express the subtlest nuance of anger with it. He could orchestrate and choreograph his violence with the skill of a Stravinsky or Diaghilev.
There is one variation of Dada’s violence that Colette always remembered in relation to Janus Brian.
Janus Brian was scientific. As a youth he had dreams of being a scientist splitting atoms, or an engineer, building bridges. He loved the world of nuts and bolts, of test tubes and pipettes. As a boy his favourite toy was Meccano, with which he was always building elaborate contraptions. He once spent several weeks making, to his own design, a most beautiful racing car. Every day he would be at the table bolting together delicate metal plates with little nuts, bolts and washers. He saved up his pocket money for the parts, the most expensive being the friction motor that would propel it. Then the four large rubber-rimmed tyres. Janus Brian was continually modifying it, dismantling a section when he saw design faults, reassembling it until he had created a small and ingenious masterpiece of childhood engineering. Nearly two feet long, with a steering wheel that worked, it was a perfect model of a full size racing car such as those that raced at Brands Hatch.
One Sunday evening in the living room Janus was playing with the car he’d only just finished constructing, giving it its first test run. He would wind up the motor and let the car go, its flywheel rasping, so that it shot across the floor and crashed into something – the skirting board, the foot of the dresser, a chair. Dada was in the room, sitting in his armchair reading a newspaper. He showed no sign that he was at all bothered by Janus’s playing until, for the second time, the car crashed into his foot. Amongst the people in the room there descended an awkward hush. Dada’s next action was slow, deliberate and meanly purposeful. He leant over, put one foot on the front of the car, took the rear end of the car in his hand and, with a sudden, brief and violent wrenching, twisted the whole thing into a U-shape. Nuts and bolts snapped from their joints and plopped onto the floor. A wheel fell off and rolled across the carpet. Then, discarding the ruined toy, Dada settled back into his armchair and raised the white cliff of his newspaper.
How sorry Colette, then scarcely more than a baby, felt for her older brother. He didn’t show any sign of emotion but just scuttled over, picked up the warped body of his car and the scattered debris, took it back to his bedroom. The only sign of how he felt was in the manner of his handling of the car, he seemed to nurse it, as though it was a wounded animal, a bird with a broken wing.
How savagely their father had acted upon that distraction. A mere distraction. Such brute ruthlessness. He seemed to Colette as merciless as if he’d just torn the head off a kitten. And so controlled. Dada never seemed to lose his temper, his violence always seemed considered and planned, even though it was often spontaneous. And he was equally capable of violence to his sons as to objects. Always his sons. He never raised his hand against a woman. In fact, he seemed to be instinctively scared of them.
That is what Janus Brian and Colette talked about, as Janus Brian stood naked before the mirror, Colette behind him. It is something she has often thought but has rarely spoken about. Dada was afraid of women.
He thrashed his sons with a belt for the least misdemeanour; dropping food on the floor, not speaking clearly, a breakage of something in the house. Janus Brian was so terrified of him that once, after having broken a cup, he spent a whole Saturday hiding in a wardrobe, waiting for his father to go out. He didn’t even dare go to the lavatory in case his father heard him, so he went in the wardrobe. Colette still had the wardrobe. It was in Julian’s room now and she could still, more than forty years later, see the stain in its wood, and detect the odour that still lingered there.
Only women could control Dada. Sometimes the intervention of his wife or one of his daughters would save Janus or Lesley from a beating. She remembered Agatha, who could only then have been a teenager, scolding her father for excessively beating Janus, and Dada grumpily submitting to the young girl’s chastisement. It meant that a curious power structure existed in the household, where Dada was the instrument of discipline under the control of the females. The boys were the oppressed of the house, almost totally powerless, leading miserable lives.
‘I think you should get some clothes on,’ said Colette, in an attempt to distract Janus Brian from these thoughts about his father, which she could see were disturbing him.
‘I was going to have a bath,’ said Janus Brian, ‘but then I noticed this mirror. Have you noticed how no two mirrors reflect you in exactly the same way? There are several mirrors in this house, and they all show a different me. This one is the best. It seems to show me as I was twenty years ago. The one in the living room shows me as a corpse.’
‘I’ll run the bath for you,’ said Colette, turning on the taps. ‘It looks like I’ll be having my baths here in future as well.’
‘Will you?’
‘Someone’s cut the pipes out of the bathroom – the sink and the bath. Aldous thinks we’ll need a new bath, and we’ll have to wait till he retires before we could afford one of those.’
Janus Brian adopted his ‘stop talking like a mad woman’ expression.
‘What do you mean “someone’s cut the pipes out of the bathroom”?’
‘Exactly what I say. I had a bath this morning and flooded the hall. It baffles me completely – who would do such a thing, and why?’
‘My dear,’ said Janus Brian, ‘isn’t it obvious?’
‘Not to me.’
‘Were they copper?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I should think they were.’
‘So what?’
Janus Brian explained, as if to a dim-witted child.
‘Copper piping could fetch quite a few pounds at a scrap dealers.’
The penny dropped.
‘You think Janus has . . . no, surely he wouldn’t do something like that.’
‘Why not. Let’s face it dear, from all that you’ve told me, he sounds like a raving alcoholic, and he’s just lost his job. My dear, I know what it’s like when you can’t get hold of a drink. Look at what I did with the Cherry Blossom. Alcoholics turn to alchemy when they run out of money. I tried to turn boot polish into gin, your son has turned your bathroom pipes into Special Brew.’
When she returned from Leicester Avenue that afternoon Colette was slightly horrified to find that her son was sitting in exactly the same position by the table, as though he hadn’t stirred a muscle in all that time. Only slightly, because it had happened before when Janus was on the dole, that he would fall into these silent, motionless, almost catatonic states, neither moving nor talking for hours on end.
She could also tell from the moment she entered the room that he’d been drinking. It wasn’t just the ceramic mug at his elbow that a stranger would have assumed to contain tea, but which was brimful of beer. He was a different colour – redder, there was a very thin layer of sweat on his face and when he did speak his voice was fuller and louder than normal.
The sickliness of the situation struck her. That the kitchen had been untouched for four hours, so that the hurriedly
displaced breakfast things of that morning were still where they’d been left, the only difference being in the falling-off of temperature, the entropic dullness of everything, and this despite the continued presence of a living thing, her son, in the room. That he should have sat there all day slowly consuming the beer he’d obtained through a deal with a scrap merchant after stealing the bathroom pipes.
In the hall the vessels were full, and some had overspilt, although the dripping seemed to have stopped.
‘You could have changed them over,’ she said, in her annoyed voice, ‘instead of just sitting there.’
Janus gave no response.
His mother sighed, tipped a panful of bathwater down the sink, refilled it with fresh water from the tap, and boiled it.
Colette paused for the first time that morning while the water grew to a slow rage in the pan, and felt, as she sometimes felt after coming back from Janus Brian’s house, that she was seeing her kitchen as it really was, and not as she imagined it. In its reality it horrified her. An uncoordinated mess of decorations, overspilling cupboards, shelves teetering on the edge of avalanche beneath the accumulation of bric-a-brac, most of it trivial. The porridge-coloured carpet had seemed a great find when Aldous brought it home from the public waste disposal site one day after having dumped some old furniture there. It had seemed nearly new, and fitted the kitchen floor almost perfectly, covering that old cracked and worn red lino that had been there for nearly twenty years. But the carpet proved almost impossible to keep clean. It had darkened to a dirty grey and was steadily accumulating scabby stains as each day’s spillages hardened. They wouldn’t budge. The ceiling seemed to mirror the floor’s defilement, registering the condensed fumes and vapours of two decades of cookery, a parchment of spreading brown stains and pockmarks like a diseased hide. Then there were the walls, four of them, each a different colour, representing four unsuccessful attempts to decorate the entire kitchen in one scheme.
‘Do you know anything about the bathroom?’ she said, as if to herself. When Janus was like this it was easy to forget he was there.
Then Janus spoke.
‘Do you know how to make a Möbius strip?’
Thinking it to be some sort of joke, of the ‘how do you make a Maltese Cross’ variety, she said ‘No, I don’t. How do you make a Möbius strip?’
‘I’ve made one, look.’
And she saw that he had a loop of paper in his hand, and learnt that a Möbius strip was a thing, not a process.
‘It’s just a loop of paper,’ she said.
‘But it’s only got one side, look,’ and as she came over he picked up a pen and handed it to her. ‘Try drawing a line along one side.’
She did so, carefully moving the paper under the pen as it scored a blue mark along the length of the strip. After a while, her pen met the beginning of the line it was drawing, joining up with itself. Colette was confused.
‘You see,’ said Janus, ‘you haven’t changed sides, and yet if you look, there is a line on both sides of the paper.’
It was true, but Colette was still more confused than astonished.
‘The loop has a kink in it, the ends being sellotaped together after a half-turn. It is a two-sided object with only one side.’
‘Is that what they call a paradox?’
‘Paradox lost,’ said Janus, browsing the book from which he’d learnt about the Möbius strip, ‘paradox regained.’
‘Is that what you’ve been doing all morning? Making this thing?’
‘No. The rest of the morning I’ve been thinking about it.’
Colette went back to the kettle, filled a cup with boiling water and dropped a tea bag into it. Tea tasted so much better from the pot, but like everyone else, she was sacrificing quality for convenience. Pouring brewed tea from a pot through a strainer aerates it in such a way as to enhance the perfume of the leaves. Tea stewed in a mug is stagnant and, moreover, the paper of the tea bag always contaminates the flavour.
‘So, can you explain what happened in the bathroom this morning?’ Now that Janus was talking she decided to try again.
‘No. What’s happened in the bathroom?’
‘Someone’s cut all the pipes out.’
‘Have they? I wondered why it was raining in the hall.’
‘Don’t try and be clever, Janus. Just admit it.’
‘Admit what?’
‘You did sell them, didn’t you? Sold them so that you could buy some drink.’
‘Ye-es,’ said Janus, drawing out the word as though it was unbelievably obvious.
‘But why?’
‘Because I didn’t have any money.’ Janus laughed the answer, again as though it was obvious. As though whenever you find yourself without any money the obvious thing to do is cut the pipes out of the bathroom.
‘Who did you sell them to?’
‘A bloke.’
‘What bloke?’
‘Just a bloke I know who buys copper piping.’
Colette was speechless at Janus’s blatantness. He went on, made a little nervous by her silence, ‘If it’s bothering you that much I’ll get a job and pay for the pipes to be put back.’
‘It’s not that easy. Daddy says the way they’ve been hacked about we’ll need a new bath and a new sink.’
‘What’s the problem. It’s not like you have a bath every day. Or even every week. You can get a bath round Janus Brian’s when you start smelling too much.’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘What is the point?’
‘The point is that you’ve done something so awful, I’d doubt it even of you. Just to make a few quid to pour beer down your neck.’
Janus made a face, the tongue half-extended, the teeth showing, the head jiggling from side to side, that translated, roughly, as I couldn’t care less.
‘So how much did you get for them?’
‘Not much.’
‘How much?’
‘A fiver.’
‘Five pounds? And you’ve spent it all, I suppose?’
Janus reached into his trouser pocket, and after some fumbling brought out two ten-pence pieces and a penny.
‘So where have you been getting the rest of the money?’
‘What money?’
‘You’ve been out drinking every other day, where’ve you been getting the money?’
Janus shrugged, as though he didn’t actually know where the money came from.
‘Just friends,’ he said. ‘I borrow a bit here and there. I play the piano, people buy me drinks.’
‘In that case why did you need to sell the pipes?’
‘There’s only so much you can borrow. And they’ve got a juke box in The Quiet Woman now, if you play the piano people start shouting at you . . .’
It was almost an unconscious piece of deduction that led Colette upstairs to Janus’s room. She knew that if he’d resorted to cutting the pipes out, he must have sold easier, more missable things than the pipes already. And then she’d remembered the bag she’d found one day in Janus’s room, a canvas hold-all that seemed to contain all the moveable treasures of the house – James’s Woebley air-pistol, her own Agfa camera with a built-in light meter, the binoculars, the Tri-Ang stationary locomotive that had been one of Julian’s favourite toys, and many other long-forgotten objects – vases, antique heirlooms from her mother’s house, her grandmother’s house, the little cottage in Wales where Aldous’s father was born. She’d had no idea at the time why Janus should be storing all this stuff in his room and was rather touched by the care he was evidently taking in looking after these objects.
Now she found the bag in a different corner of the room. It was empty.
She took the bag downstairs to the kitchen where Janus was still sitting. She flung it at him.
‘What have you done with it all?’ she screamed.
‘All what?’
‘Everything that was in that bag – my camera, the binoculars – all those things you had in there . . .’
‘Have you been poking around in my room?’
‘It’s my house. Just answer me.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘You’ve sold them, haven’t you – the moving camera, that was in there – there was Nana’s marquetry, her brass vase, that statue of Our Lady, those apostle spoons, I saw them all.’
Colette was furious at having not guessed Janus’s intentions with those objects. To think she’d thought he was simply treasuring them when he’d done nothing less than burgle his own house. A swag bag.
‘They were just a few things,’ said Janus impatiently, ‘nobody was going to miss them.’
Colette reached over and hit her son across the face. His hair and beard were so thick it was like thumping a pillow, yet Janus was evidently hurt. A long strand of spittle fell from his lower lip. It took a moment for him to react. With a jerk of the whole body he pushed the table away, hemmed in as he was by it, sending everything on it crashing to the floor. The table toppled over, and being a stout piece of utility beechwood its falling seemed to shake the whole house.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ said Janus, holding his face and standing up.
‘Shouldn’t I?’ said Colette, who’d gathered herself after the initial shock of the table falling over. She hit Janus across the face again with her other hand, so that she struck the side of his face he wasn’t holding. She wanted him to know, to feel the depth of her anger. She could have gone on hitting his face for the rest of the afternoon, and she may have, had not Janus hit her back.
Colette had never been hit by anyone before. Even in the countless drunken tussles that broke out when Janus was drunk, he never actually struck his mother, although he had inadvertently knocked her over or caught her with a flailing elbow a few times. But he had never deliberately hit her. But now he had. A sharp blow from those piano-playing hands across the side of her face. Her glasses were knocked off. She saw a blinding light, then silence, then noise, and finally burning pain.
‘Get out of the house,’ Colette screamed when she’d recovered.
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 10