‘Why should I?’ said Janus. His voice had a tremble in it. Colette could sense he was shocked by what he’d done.
‘Get out of the house now.’
‘Why don’t you get out of the house? You’re the one causing all the trouble. You hit me first . . .’
‘But you’ve sold all those things . . .’
‘They were just things . . .’
‘They were special things, how would you like it if I sold all your music?’
And she went into the music room that was a storeroom of all Janus’s records, and music manuscripts. She went to the shelves and started scattering their contents – the old, fragile books were flung across the room, the Mozart sonatas, pieces by Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, all of which bore Janus’s textual markings and notes. Then she went for the record player.
‘No you don’t,’ said Janus, who seemed fully recovered from the initial shock of striking his mother, and took her by the shoulders, pulling her backwards. She fell on the floor, amid the scattered music. Then Janus took hold of the record player, he reached into it and gripped the pick-up arm. With a few twists and pulls it came away and Janus held it, as though in triumph in his fist. Feeble wires hung from its tip, like the roots of an unusual flower.
At that moment they heard the front door go, and Julian, in his school uniform and a briefcase in his hand, stood in the doorway.
‘Is dinner ready?’ he said.
‘Julian,’ his mother gasped from the floor, unable to get up because Janus had his foot on her chest, ‘do something to stop him, he’s destroying everything.’
Julian looked at his older brother who was taking no notice of him. Janus was looking down at Colette.
‘Would you like me to stamp on your breasts?’ he said.
‘I’m going upstairs,’ said Julian, ‘tell me when dinner’s ready.’
‘Aren’t you going to do something to save me?’ screamed Colette as Julian receded, ‘don’t you want to save your mother’s life – Julian, you little coward, come back, he’s going to kill me . . .’
But Janus had finished. He took his foot off his mother, left the room, and then left the house, singing to himself.
By the time Aldous came home late that evening, Janus had been gone for several hours. In that time Colette had recovered herself, had tidied up the mess in the music room, had uprighted the table and cleared away the fallen things. The house appeared undamaged, apart from the record player, but Aldous rarely played records. He wouldn’t notice the ripped-out pick-up arm.
She made Julian’s dinner and he came down to eat it silently. She was still furious with him for not coming to her assistance. How could he have just left her lying on the floor with Janus running amok? But she didn’t say anything.
Aldous came home at about eight o’clock, flushed and bright with the acclaim of the south coast.
‘The windows looked wonderful,’ he said, ‘as the curtain fell the sun came out at just the right moment and sent a shaft of sunlight through the glass. The light came through the moving trees outside in such a way that the birds in the glass seemed to dance . . .’ He paused for breath, full of his experiences, ‘. . . do you know, I got to the station and I was looking for a bus stop when this chauffeur in jackboots whisked me off in a limousine, straight to this huge reception at the town hall, where I was guest of honour at a table sitting next to the mayor and his wife, and waiters with bow ties were serving up dish after dish, I don’t know what I ate. Beautiful stuff. Then to the crematorium, loads of press people interviewing me, asking me what other work I’d done. People kept handing me business cards saying they’d be in touch. Then the windows. I couldn’t help feeling a bit proud of them. They did look good. Makes it a bit of a shame the only people who’ll see them are people at funerals . . .’
The maiming of the bathroom hurt Colette. The damage was severe and they didn’t even dare think how much it might cost to repair. There was no cash. Aldous’s money for his windows had come and gone six months before the unveiling ceremony. So the bathroom fell into disuse. The family now washed at the large stone butler sink in the kitchen, almost as big as a bath itself while the bathroom became a desiccated, rarely visited space. Dust collected around the plug of the sink, and coated with grey the inner slopes of the bath. The bathroom gradually became a boxroom. Unused junk that couldn’t quite be thrown away was stored there – a broken chair, an old bicycle that was too small now for Julian. Sometimes Colette used the bath as a bird hospital, where the injured blackbirds that she occasionally rescued from Scipio’s claws could recuperate. Flightless, they would skip about on the porcelain for a few days, and then die. Some lasted a little longer, and one even made it back into the garden. She would cut a branch from one of the fruit trees and put it in the bath to make the sick birds feel at home. She would dig up worms from the garden, chop them with a knife into many living parts, and poke them with tweezers down the young birds’ throats. The birds, raw with their injuries, would remain motionless at first, apart from a sort of trembling, but later, if things went well, they would perk up and then hop around, and even fill the bathroom with song, in a cheeky attempt to claim it as their own territory. But there was always the longer term problem of how to get them back into the skies. Their injuries nearly always meant they’d lost their flight feathers, and Colette was never sure if these grew back, or if they did, how long they would take. Without flight, a bird in the wild is nothing more than cat food. And there was only so long a wild bird could endure the captivity of the bathroom. So Colette’s efforts nearly always ended with a little feathered corpse in the bath, which upset her more than finding them injured in the first place. The way they nearly always perked up, hopefully fluttering their useless wings, before giving in. Colette could never understand. She gave them everything they could want in the bathroom, she fed them on sops, nursery food, mashed-up Weetabix, milk, worms, a truly splendid diet, and they seemed all glossy and alive one day, but then the next they would be dead. When they had been so tenacious of life. It really puzzled her.
5
Julian had often thought about killing his brother. Sometimes he felt that if he had a gun he would shoot him. He liked to imagine the night when, armed with a real gun (not James’s pellet-firing air pistol), he would steal into Janus’s bedroom, picking his way through the litter on the floor to where his unconscious brother lay folded in blankets. Then three plump bullets sent into the soft mass on the bed.
What would he get? Even if he got life he could be out by the age of twenty-five. A sympathetic judge might let him off altogether. If he was told about how he’d found his older brother standing on his mother, destroying the record player, if he knew how often Julian had had to listen to the crash and tinkle of domestic violence, if he’d known how many nights he’d feared for his life (an exaggeration, perhaps, but a judge wouldn’t know), or those of others in the house, he was sure the sternest judge would see sense and let him off, pat him on the shoulder and say, ‘there there young lad, not to worry, I’d have killed my brother in the same circumstances . . .’
Julian had been hurt by Colette’s accusations of cowardice. He always knew it would happen one day that she would call upon him to deal with Janus, that she would notice how her youngest was approaching adulthood, and so could no longer wallow in the luxury of uselessness. He was destined to become a resource, part of the armoury Colette drew upon, along with Mr Milliner next door, James when he was home, and as a last resort the police, to control Janus. But now was too soon. His mother didn’t realize (just because he was big for his age) that Julian wasn’t ready to tackle Janus. He needed a little more time, another inch or so of height, a few more layers of muscle.
His mother had taunted him when they were alone at breakfast the next day.
‘I told Juliette what you did last night, and she said you were a coward too.’
Julian hadn’t said anything but carried on reading his Beano at the kitchen table. He was attached to
reading the Beano as a means of prolonging his childhood. His mother had placed an order for the comic at Hudson’s on the Parade when he was six, and every week she collected the Beano for him, which had ‘Jones’ pencilled on its cover. Julian these days liked her to leave it for a while so that the Beanos mounted up, then she would bring home a batch of five or six for him to read at once. That he still poured over the Beano every week Colette found rather charming, but it annoyed her now.
‘It’s no good hiding behind Biffo the Bear doing the strong, silent routine, young man,’ she said.
Julian hadn’t taken her up on the point that Biffo the Bear had recently been replaced as the Beano’s cover story by Dennis the Menace.
‘Any normal son would have done something to help their mother, instead of drifting off upstairs.’
Julian had sunk further into his comic.
A few years ago, when the Beanos had started to accumulate, Colette had nagged and nagged at him to throw them away, and he had. He remembered sitting on the edge of his bed with a stack of fifty or so Beanos with Biffo the Bear on the cover, building up the courage to dispose of them. Eventually, in one swift, brutal movement he binned them. It was a moment he spent continually regretting and he wondered now why he’d done it. Somehow his mother had conjured up an apocalyptic vision of accumulating Beanos, piling layer upon layer like sedimentary rock until there was no room left in the house, and he’d felt a sense of guilt at using up so much space.
And then the Beanos changed. A complete editorial rethink had removed Biffo from the cover and replaced him with Dennis the Menace, relegating the former cover star to a half page strip tucked away somewhere in the middle. At the same time the older, more skilled artists had retired, to be replaced by incompetent, cack-handed idiots who couldn’t even draw in perspective. Lord Snooty had been lovingly drawn, Bunkerton Castle’s neo-Gothic architecture rendered sensitively in pen and ink. The new artist revelled in the vulgar craftlessness of the post-decimal era, and even put long trousers on Roger the Dodger. The effect, for Julian, who still loved the Beano for the wit of the Bash Street Kids and The Three Bears, the latter of which was still beautifully drawn, was to render the ‘Biffo’ Beanos of immense historical importance. His first encounter with a ‘Dennis’ Beano had been a horrible shock, to compare with the end of steam as a piece of wanton cultural vandalism, and so he had begun collecting them again, in case they should change even further for the worse. And he mourned his old ‘Biffo’ Beanos, having only two or three in his current collection. It made him feel angry and cheated and he vowed never to throw anything away again
Julian had refused to be drawn by his mother’s taunts. He said nothing, and the taunts ended when his father, who was still unaware of the trouble the day before, came into the room.
O for a gun, thought Julian, a real, true, faithful gun. How else might he do it? A swift, accurate stabbing, again while Janus slumbered in drink. What about garrotting him with a length of piano-wire taken out of the Bechstein? Every little vein proud on his brother’s head, every little capillary, even the ones in his eyes, bursting. Would his mother call him a coward then? Would she call him a coward when he walked into the kitchen, his hands dripping with blood, ‘Mother, there’s something I think you should see in Janus’s room . . .’
But Julian would never have the stomach for that. It was an indulgent fantasy with which he vented the anger that had built up over the years of witnessing, or hiding from, the violence. He had long given up hope that Janus would leave Fernlight Avenue and find a home of his own. Colette had gone through a phase of suggesting it to her son on a weekly basis, but she never seemed convinced herself that it was a good idea, saying there would be no one to play the Bechstein. When Juliette placed small ads for affordable flats under his nose he simply laughed in her face. What Julian really desired was a means of controlling Janus, rope to bind him with, drugs to dope him, some form of electronic tag that would show as a blip on a radar screen so that his whereabouts could always be known. If the blip could also show his level of intoxication, by gradually turning a deepening shade of green, say, that would at least provide some form of warning.
Julian was alone in the house, as he usually was on Friday and Saturday nights. Bill had been round earlier and had taken Janus out for a night at The Quiet Woman. Aldous and Colette, after they’d left, set off for The Red Lion. It had become a habit over the last few months, since Janus Brian had been on the scene, for Aldous and Colette to go to the pub together. Suddenly, it seemed, Julian had become old enough to look after himself.
‘You’ll be all right, won’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘You can come with us, if you want, but you’ll have to sit in the car.’
‘No thanks.’
He had accepted this particular offer once, but sitting in the car in a dark car park for a couple of hours on a cold night was not an enjoyable experience. Instead, he had come to rather look forward to his evening at home on his own. Suddenly he had a freedom he hadn’t had before. To explore his own house.
When he was much younger he’d found the house at night, especially upstairs with its open doors leading into huge, unlit rooms, rather frightening, and had to ask someone to come with him when he wanted to go to the toilet, but these days, somewhat to his surprise, he didn’t find the house frightening at all, despite the fact that it was just as dark and shadowy as it had always been, darker, if anything. Seven empty rooms. The occasional drip from the tank in the loft, the echoey plop of water into water, a breeze stirring the branches of the cherry tree which almost touched his window, the hysterical calling of the screech-owls who lived in the oak tree.
Now he realised the house was more frightening when it contained people. Alone he could watch any programmes he liked on television, and later could prowl around Janus’s bedroom hunting for pornography, which he’d heard it rumoured was hidden somewhere in there. But Janus’s bedroom was such a catastrophic mess, the floor invisible beneath a heap of litter, that his furtive searches always proved fruitless.
Eventually Julian would go to bed at around ten o’clock, a while before the pubs closed. That meant he was out of the way if there was any trouble when the drinkers returned home later, which there often was.
This particular evening he was in bed going through the card index system of the library he’d founded in his bedroom. His mother hadn’t believed him when he said he was opening a library in his bedroom. She just thought he meant he was putting up some shelves for all the homeless books of the house, the ones stacked up in corners of rooms, or lying forgotten on floors, or in the loft. He had done that, but he had also catalogued them. And when his mother came into his room one day hunting for her old copy of Summer Lightning, he’d insisted she became a member before he would let her take it away. She’d reluctantly agreed (it was a pound membership fee), and he’d stamped a date in the book, and fined her when she forgot to return it.
Having appointed himself librarian of the house, Julian soon found himself swamped with books. Scattered throughout the house they could pass unnoticed, but condensed into a single room they soon overspilt the shelves, and had to be stacked in columns on the floor. There were some of his mother’s father’s books (mostly exotic tales of colonial exploration and conquest), and her mother’s (yarns of anthropomorphic animals), and the remains of the library his father had amassed in the days of his lodging with Lesley (translations of classical poetry, The Golden Treasury, The Lives of the Artists, The Geology of the Chilterns, John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens). Communism and the British Intellectual was a title he liked to have on display, though he wasn’t sure where it had come from. The Weimar Republic, From Utrecht to Waterloo. Those must have been leftovers from James’s history A Level. There were a lot of Juliette’s old books as well. Sue Barton – Student Nurse, Pony For Sale, Fury – Son of the Wilds, The Story of Wimpy – A Wump. Julian was undiscriminating in his fondness for books. So long as they were b
ooks was all that mattered. Many were old library books his family had failed to return. His family never quite understood libraries.
There was a tap-tap-tap at his window.
Being an upstairs bedroom, Julian’s window was never knocked at, though when he heard accompanying noises – coughs and quiet chuckling, he went quickly over and opened the curtains. Bill Brothers’ face was peering through the glass at him, his thick hair awry. When he saw Julian, Bill gave a small whoop of delight and asked him to open the window, which he did. Bill had to lean back to avoid the outswinging glass, holding precariously onto the mullion with one hand. He stamped with one foot upon the slates of the small, sloping kitchen extension roof beneath him and called to someone Julian couldn’t see.
‘This is a bloody good roof, speaking as a one-time steeplejack, I can say – my professional opinion – is that this roof is one of the best bloody roofs in Windhover Hill,’ then addressing Julian, ‘Greetings, little brother-in-law, forgive this ungodly intrusion, my fellow travellers and I appear to have no key to these premises, so Janussimus here kindly showed us an alternative route, up the ladder and across this fine slate roof to your bedroom, whose light betokened that you were yet awake, and through whose window we thought we might gain entry to the aforementioned premises,’ while saying this Bill hauled himself in through the window and half-stumbled in amongst all the books of Julian’s room. Janus then appeared at the window, whooping ridiculously.
Julian got back into bed as Janus climbed through the window. Bill laughed a long giggly laugh that deeply reddened his face.
‘We were searching for the source of the Limpopo,’ he said, ‘which we believe is in this vicinity.’
‘I thought it was the Zambezi we were after.’
‘Zambezi, Limpopo, Irrawaddy,’ Bill shrugged, as though it didn’t matter which. ‘Mr Mungo Park, my fellow Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute,’ Bill went on, laying a comradely arm across Janus’s shoulders, ‘world renowned expert on the sexual lives of the savages of Windhover Hill’s unexplored regions . . .’ Julian also laughed. He was glad that they were in such good humour, and that Bill had returned with Janus, because Janus rarely caused serious trouble while Bill was around. Books were spilling everywhere, the carefully arranged piles merging into one slithering mass.
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 11