She then took a piece of paper and handed it to Colette. On the paper was written her new address.
‘You mustn’t let Janus see this,’ she said.
Colette meant it when she said her daughter’s announcement hadn’t surprised her. Juliette and Bill seemed to lead entirely different lives these days. They didn’t come round together on Sunday afternoons any more, they were rarely together. Colette could hardly remember the last time she’d seen Bill. So the news didn’t upset her. She was fond of Bill, but had always felt the marriage to be a mistake. Juliette was far too young. Now, through college, she was getting back onto the road she had so wantonly abandoned when she was sixteen. But to move in with a telephone engineer from The Quiet Woman. That was disappointing.
Their conference in the garden ended when Colette realised what time it was. She and Julian were going to be late for the cinema. Aldous had taken the car into a garage for servicing in preparation for tomorrow’s journey and they were reliant on public transport.
‘I’ll catch the bus with you,’ said Juliette, who was going back to Polperro Gardens.
Colette went into the house and got dressed. She put on an extravagantly floral shirt that made her look like a walking rhododendron bush, and bluebottle-coloured earrings. Julian found it a little grotesque that she should doll herself up to go out with him. As though she was his girlfriend.
With the tumultuous sounds of the final movement of Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata filling the house, Juliette, Julian and Colette were making their way through the hall to the front door when the music stopped and Janus appeared from the music room. He had the stiffly unstable gait of the slightly drunk. His hair and beard looked rumpled. Janus had become so lushly hirsute in recent years he reminded Julian of the Beatle George Harrison as he appeared on the cover of Abbey Road. Though on this occasion Janus wasn’t wearing any trousers.
‘Where are you going?’ he said.
‘Out,’ said Colette.
‘Where?’
‘Just to the shops.’
‘Great!’ Janus suddenly whooped and then winked, ‘I’ve got to go to the shops as well. I need new shoes.’ Janus was holding a coffee mug that contained a transparent liquid, either vodka or gin. ‘I’ll come with you.’
The trio’s hearts sank.
‘Just let me get some trousers and feed the Scipplecat.’
‘We’ve got to go now.’
‘I’ll catch you up.’ Janus tottered vaguely into the kitchen, clicking his tongue for Scipio.
Colette and her two children left the house quickly and walked down the road.
‘He doesn’t know which shops we’re supposedly going to, he’ll probably go to the Parade and lose us,’ said Colette. It was a long walk down gently sloping Fernlight Avenue, and Julian continually looked back to see if his older brother was in pursuit and was pleased to see an empty street. Finally they turned the corner at the bottom of the road, and crossed over the busy Green Lanes to the bus stop.
‘He won’t think of coming down here,’ said Colette, ‘and with luck a bus will come in a minute.’
They waited with an assortment of people, a mother and child, an elderly couple, two bored-looking teenagers, but the bus was a long time coming, and before it came Janus appeared from the end of Fernlight Avenue, riding Julian’s old bike, which even Julian found too small for him now, and which looked ridiculously little beneath Janus, whose feet whirring round on the pedals were almost a blur. His hair and beard flapping in the wind, he shot straight out into the heavy traffic of Green Lanes, narrowly missing a lorry, wobbling between cars which honked and veered as Janus wove a drunken path between them. Colette was relieved to see that he was wearing trousers. The people at the bus stop gasped and laughed as Janus mounted the pavement and swerved up to them. As the wind lifted his jacket, Colette could see that his inside pockets were bristling with the necks of bottles.
‘Where are you going?’ Janus said.
‘Wood Green,’ said Colette, ‘and there’s no point in you coming, you won’t be able to get on the bus.’
‘I can cycle,’ said Janus, ‘and I’ve got a meeting with Bill today . . .’ he scooted off on another highly dangerous circuit around Green Lanes, returning to the bus stop. The ridiculousness of the spectacle, this tall, Jesus-bearded man on the small bicycle, his legs whirring, looping in and out of heavy traffic, couldn’t help but cause Julian and Colette to laugh. People were looking at them as though they were somehow responsible. Mutterings of disapproval could be heard all around.
Juliette was feeling gloomy.
‘I can’t let him get together with Bill today. If him and Bill get drunk together – I don’t know . . . I’ll just leave him tonight and let him work out for himself what’s happened.’
When the bus arrived Julian and Juliette and Colette climbed aboard and sat upstairs, praying that Janus would be left far behind. After a little while they heard a commotion downstairs. Janus had been hanging on to the back of the bus as it sped along, and the driver had stopped the bus and insisted that Janus let go. Janus had demanded that the conductor stow his bike under the stairs, the conductor refused, saying the bike wouldn’t fit, which was true. Janus, in protest, held on to the back of the bus, and the conductor refused to let the bus go while Janus was holding on. Eventually the driver left his cab and came to the back to take charge of the situation, physically pulling Janus off the hand rail at the back of the platform and pushing him down onto the kerb, throwing his bike after him, to a small round of applause from the passengers.
Call the police, call the police, call the police, Julian repeated to himself, mentally urging Janus on into ever more outrageous actions. An encounter with the police and Janus would be in prison, which would mean, Julian supposed, the restoration of harmony to their house.
‘Perhaps they’ll call the police,’ Julian said to his mother, hoping that his mother would be equally as enthusiastic. But she wasn’t.
‘Why do you keep saying that?’
‘I want Janus to go to prison.’
‘But why? Surely he’s not that bad . . .’
She had this talent for forgetfulness, Colette, Julian thought. How amusing Janus was being. But what would he be like by the evening?
‘Anyway, Janus could never survive in prison, could you imagine it? Those delicate hands, his educated voice – what are the bank robbers and muggers going to think of him? If you send him to prison you might as well kill him.’
When the conductor came up the stairs Colette went out of her way to apologize to him on her son’s behalf, again to Julian’s embarrassment, who believed if they’d kept quiet the conductor wouldn’t have known of any connection between them.
‘I know what it’s like,’ Colette said, ‘I was once a conductress myself.’ The conductor, an amusing, grey-haired Pakistani who kept up a constant witty banter with his passengers, held out his ticket machine to Colette, ‘You want to take over for a while?’ Colette giggled while Julian looked out of the window and saw to his horror that Janus was managing to keep up with the slow progress of the bus. Surely someone would call the police soon, a maniac on a bike swerving in and out of oncoming traffic, whooping and shrieking and whistling, even if only for his own safety.
The bus journey from Windhover Hill to Wood Green was through three miles of increasingly decayed suburbs. Beyond the Triangle the road crossed the New River, then the area became distinctly shabbier, the tall Victorian houses mostly converted into flats and bedsits. There were Greek bakeries, a driving test centre, bookmakers and off-licenses. Then the huge edifice of Swallow’s Builders’ Merchants, where Janus had once worked, to the left Our Lady’s Convent, where Juliette had been schooled before ending it all so abruptly to marry Bill Brothers. The school had since closed down and was now being used as a warehouse. Almost opposite was Polperro Gardens, where they now lived, and at the next bus stop, the grimly jaunty façade of The Carpenters Arms, where they’d met. The stop after
that was Wood Green Town Hall, the concrete and glass monolith where they’d married.
Janus had managed to keep up with the slow progress of the bus as far as the North Circular, whistling and whooping at his family on the upper deck, but by Wood Green he had fallen a long way behind.
At Polperro Gardens Juliette got off.
‘If you see Janus don’t tell him I’ve gone home, say I’ve gone down London with Bill, or something.’
‘Don’t worry, he’ll be looking for us in the shops. If he rings, pretend you’re not in.’
On the steps of Wood Green Odeon, beneath its fairy-lit portico, Julian paused.
‘They won’t let me in,’ he said.
‘Yes they will,’ said Colette, reaching into her handbag and producing a hairbrush.
‘Mum, what are you doing?’
‘I’m brushing your hair.’
‘What for?’
‘It’ll make you look older.’
‘Not out here for God’s sake.’
Colette went at Julian’s hair vigorously, nearly knocking him over as she pulled at the tangled mass of curls. Julian’s hair was less curly now than it was when he was born. As a baby it was as though his head was encrusted with gold sovereigns. Old ladies drooled over him in shops and begged for locks. Colette had one she kept in a stoppered, blue-tinted glass jar filled with wood alcohol. She’d snapped the top off the stopper so that it was unopenable, fearing that Janus might, in one of his more desperate states, drink it. But Julian’s hair had darkened over the years and was now a very deep brown, almost black, and the curls had unfurled slightly, so that his locks hung in big, unruly loops that the teachers at his school were constantly complaining about. One teacher, a priest, even brought Julian home one lunchtime in a Renault 5 while Colette was sitting having a quiet fag and a beer, demanding that the boy be shorn before he returned to school. Julian hadn’t been to the barber’s for about three years, and so Colette got out a pair of blunt scissors and hacked away at his head until a sort of order was restored. But ultimately it was a losing battle. And Julian, anyway, was hoping to be expelled from St Francis Xavier’s, and, too nervous of authority to challenge it directly, was channelling all his rebelliousness into his hair.
Otherwise Julian was on the cusp of adolescence, his skin was becoming greasy, his pores enlarging, a first crop of spots appearing. He was losing that miraculous body children have, that hairless, fatless marmoreal figure where every childish muscle is visible, like the little angels in Blake paintings, and instead had developed a clumsy ineptness of movement, as though always carrying something cumbersomely broad and heavy, which he was – his future adulthood. But he had always looked older than his years. Always the tallest in his class, even as a five-year-old. Now, as a young teenager, he could easily pass for an immature eighteen-year-old, if his hair was combed back, and he didn’t come too close to the ticket booth.
The attendant didn’t even give Julian as much as a second glance as they passed through to the upper circle of the huge cinema to watch One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
‘What a bitch,’ Colette kept saying of the tyrannical nurse Ratched as she determined to extinguish the sparks of life that Jack Nicholson’s presence had brought into being, ‘such a bitch, I can’t believe it.’
Her expressions of disgust were so voluble that heads turned in the crowded cinema, and people hissed for her to be quiet. Colette seemed oblivious of these, even when the person sitting directly in front of her turned and gave her a long, disapproving look.
‘Mum,’ Julian whispered, ‘will you be quiet?’
‘I am being quiet.’
‘No you’re not.’
Then came a loud whistle from behind them. Janus was standing at the back, grinning broadly, leaning over the rear seats and the heads of those occupying them, his jacket hanging open revealing bottles.
‘Thought I’d find you monkeys in here, hallelujah.’
He stumbled down the steps of the aisle and blundered through the legs of those seated on Julian and Colette’s row to the vacant seat that was, unfortunately, beside Colette.
Janus talked without pause at full conversational volume. He took the mug out of his pocket and poured himself a mugful of neat gin, insisting on Colette having some. She acceded, and wiped clean the ice-cream carton she’d had since the interval; Janus filled it with gin.
‘There you go my darling sweetheart mother,’ said Janus, handling the brimming carton with care, passing it to Colette, who drank with a resigned acceptance, and was soon giggling alongside her son.
‘What’s this film about?’ Janus yelled.
‘A mad nurse,’ said Colette.
The man in front turned around and addressed Colette.
‘Would you mind taking your foot off my shoulder?’
Colette, who’d had her legs crossed, the foot resting on the back of the chair in front, said, ‘Do you mind, I’ve got a bad knee.’
‘Yeah well I’ve got a bad shoulder, get your foot down.’
‘How dare you speak to me like that.’
Janus was keeping quiet.
A woman sitting alongside the man joined in.
‘You’re disgusting, the pair of you.’
‘Look at them, they’re drinking . . .’
The usherette came over and shone a torch on Colette. The usherette was a woman of about Colette’s age, and seemed nervous.
‘Would you mind keeping the noise down?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Colette, then reached out and took hold of the hand that was holding the torch, ‘I do most sympathize with you, my dear. I was an usherette once . . .’
‘Thank you . . .’
‘In the Beaumont, Stamford Hill, an eight-hundred seater, full every night . . .’
‘Yes, thank you . . .’
‘Shhh!’
‘It’s a most unrewarding job, standing there in the dark, people jeering and jostling, and you have to watch the same film over and over again. Mind you . . .’
‘Will you be quiet?’ someone hissed.
‘. . . I watched The Ladykillers it must have been a thousand times and I was in hysterics each time, so much I couldn’t do my job. But for you to have to watch a film like this every day three or four times a day, it must make you want to kill yourself.’
‘Yes, it is a horrible job, thank you . . .’
The usherette managed to drag herself away.
An idea struck Julian, once Janus and Colette had resumed their raucousness. He slipped out of his seat unnoticed and went in search of a public telephone, with the idea of calling the police, who then might come and arrest Janus and put him in prison. As he was leaving the auditorium, however, in the opposite direction came a brigade of four bouncers in dinner jackets with bow ties, who marched swiftly through the darkness, almost sweeping Julian aside. How disappointing. He would be too late. In the lobby he found a telephone and dialled anyway, nine, nine, nine.
‘There’s some people making a noise in Wood Green Cinema.’
‘That’s hardly an emergency call. This line is for emergencies only. ‘
‘But they won’t be quiet.’
‘Very well, we’ll send someone, but this really shouldn’t be an emergency call.’
As Julian put the phone down Janus emerged from the darkness beyond the double doors with a large escort at each shoulder, followed shortly by Colette, also with two escorts. While Janus was ejected firmly by his escorts, Colette was treated with an embarrassed sort of deference, her bouncers didn’t know quite what to make of her. She recoiled if they tried to hold her, and so were reduced to an ushering role as Colette made loud protests, demanding to see the manager who, it turned out, was one of the bouncers.
‘And this boy,’ she said, spotting Julian who had withdrawn to a corner of the lobby, ‘what do you think this sort of scene has made on an impressionable young boy like this, he’s only fourteen for Christ’s sake, seeing his mother thrown out of a cinema as though s
he was a common drunk. I’ve worked in cinemas before now, in the days when cinemas were real cinemas, picture palaces we called them, call this old fleapit a palace? It’s a disgrace. You’re a disgrace . . .’
‘Fourteen you say?’ said the smarmily polite manager, ‘and yet this film is an X-certificate . . .’
Colette affected not to hear.
‘Come, Julian, we won’t grace this trashy little establishment with our presence any longer,’ and took hold of Julian’s hand, which made him appear even younger than his years, and flounced out of the cinema.
Outside, re-entering the broad afternoon daylight, the grinding noise of the heavy traffic and the fat, overspilling queues of shoppers filling the nearby bus stops, they found Janus at the bottom of the steps talking to a West Indian in a flat-cap who was laughing toothsomely at the anecdotes of recent adventures Janus was relating.
Meeting up with these two at the bottom of the steps, Colette burst into shrieks of laughter which she shared with Janus, who whooped.
‘There’s Bill,’ said Janus suddenly.
‘Bill?’ said the West Indian. In a hoarse, chuckling sort of voice, ‘No. Where?’
‘He’s over there,’ Janus was pointing across and down the street towards the main shopping area. ‘I’ve been looking for him all day.’ He put his fingers in his mouth and produced a piercing whistle that had all the nearby heads turning in his direction. Neither Colette nor Julian could see Bill, though Janus walked swiftly off in the direction he’d whistled. The West Indian, his hands in the pockets of his white, flared trousers, sauntered after him.
A police car drew up outside the cinema and a tired-looking policeman emerged.
‘Shall we go?’ said Julian.
‘Yes,’ said Colette, still laughing, ‘let’s get something to eat.’
Three doors up from the cinema was a Wimpy Bar, crowded, for some reason at that time of the late afternoon, with drunks. Colette and Julian sat at a table facing each other, a large plastic tomato between them, it’s green spout scabby with dried ketchup.
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