‘What have you got there?’ said Colette with idle curiosity, taking a sip of whisky from the tumbler on the bookshelf.
‘A brain,’ Janus replied, quietly and flatly.
‘What?’
Janus had lowered the wrapped object onto a cleared space on the table. He was carefully lifting the folded corners of the newspaper. He didn’t speak.
‘Did you say “a brain”?’
Colette was amused, thinking it some sort of joke.
‘It’s a brain,’ said Janus, as though having confirmed something for himself now that the paper was open. From Colette’s sitting position she could see nothing but folded newsprint.
‘A real one? You don’t mean a real, human one?’
‘Yes,’ said Janus, ‘come and see.’
Colette stood up, but a weakness came to her legs as her line of sight approached the centre of the big open flower of newsprint on the table. She felt a powerful shyness come over her, an unexpected sense of dread and horror, of nausea. She could stand but wouldn’t approach.
‘I don’t want to see it Janus. Just tell me you’re joking.’
‘I’m not joking.’ Janus seemed amused by Colette’s alarm.
‘Where did you get it?’
‘From work. I was helping out at the mortuary last night.’
‘Mortuary? You don’t work in the mortuary . . .’
‘Someone has to wheel the dead bodies over. How do you think they get there? Stan, the mortician, is a good friend. He lets me watch some of the post-mortems. He even let me hold one of the circular saws once . . .’
‘And he let you walk out with someone’s brain?’
‘They were only going to throw it away.’
‘Throw someone’s brain away?’
‘They always throw the brain away. Come and have a look, mother. It’s a wonderful thing. Look how big it is. When I first saw a human brain I was amazed at how big it was. I thought how could that possibly fit in someone’s head? But they expand in the open air. In the head they’re all tightly packed, but when they’re outside they sort of flop out . . .’
Colette inched forward, her eyes fixed on the bundle of paper as though expecting something to leap out of it. Suddenly she caught a glimpse of something – organic matter, yellowy grey, shiny, convoluted . . .’
‘Oh Christ,’ she said, ‘Oh Christ.’
‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘I can’t believe you’ve done this Janus.’
‘Done what? They were only going to throw it in the bin like I said . . .’
‘They wouldn’t throw a brain away, not at the hospital.’
‘You’ve no idea have you mother? In some post-mortems the brain is sliced up like a salami. It disintegrates like junket, they can’t put it back in the head. They usually put the heart in the head wrapped up in a copy of the Sun. Then they throw the brain away. It was my job to dispose of this brain, but I saw that for once it was a relatively undamaged one. They’d only poked at it a couple of times because they knew what the cause of death was, and it wasn’t anything to do with the brain. So I thought I’d keep it. It was very easy to sneak it back to my locker, where I kept it until I found this bag. Now I’m going to find a way of preserving it before it starts going off. I need to get some embalming fluid from somewhere, or some formaldehyde. I would have got some from the hospital stores but it might have attracted suspicion. Can I keep it in your nice new fridge for now?’
‘No you can’t. You’re not even going to keep it in this kitchen, or in this house. I want it out of this house now.’
Janus looked a little disappointed.
‘But it’s such a good fridge,’ he said. ‘Do you really want this brain to rot?’
‘I don’t want the brain at all,’ then Colette added, in a quieter tone, ‘whose is it?’
‘It’s mine.’
‘You know what I mean. Whose is it?’
‘It belonged to Mrs Ritchie. She died of cancer a couple of days ago. I was always wheeling her here and there. She knew she didn’t have long to go. She used to give me her fags. I sometimes used to nip out and get a Chinese takeaway for her. She only ever ate the rice. She would ask for chicken curries and sweet and sour porks but she only ever ate the rice. Where’s your egg-fried rice now, eh?’
Janus addressed the brain.
‘Funny to think this object once desired sweet and sour pork isn’t it? But Mrs Ritchie always used to say to me, “Janus, whenever I eat Chinese I always feel that there is a food I like more than this, but I don’t know what it is. Can you tell me?” And I would say “Indian? Spanish? French? Italian?” and she would shake her head disgustedly at each one. We never did find out what that food was, did we, dear?’
Janus was looking down on the brain. Colette took another peep, glimpsed blood vessels, felt sick again.
‘When people die in hospital they are never spoken about afterwards. The staff pretend they never existed. When I went in yesterday and asked what had happened to Mrs Ritchie the staff nurse looked really shocked and didn’t know how to answer me at first. She behaved as though no member of staff had ever asked her a question like that before. You’d think in a hospital people would be more open about death, but the opposite is the case. It’s more taboo than ever. There are no signs to the mortuary. There are signs to every other place, but none to the mortuary.’
‘Well how would you like it if you were seriously ill and you didn’t know what was wrong with you and someone was wheeling you down a corridor and you saw a sign saying “To the mortuary”?’
‘I’d feel happy,’ said Janus, ‘to know that I was in a place where they take care of the dead.’
‘And is that what you call taking care of the dead? Stealing someone’s brain and wrapping it up in newspaper to take home and gawp at?’
‘I went to the mortuary afterwards to look for Mrs Ritchie. I found her in one of the fridges, middle shelf, still in her nightie, just dumped there like a sack of potatoes. There was frost in her hair . . .’
‘Shut up Janus. I don’t want to know. Just take this thing away from here, I don’t care what you do with it, just take it away from here . . .’
Janus was silent. He looked at the brain, folded the papers over it protectively.
‘You want me to throw it away?’
‘Yes.’
‘In the dustbin?’
‘Yes – no. Not this dustbin. I don’t know . . .’
‘Shall I bury it in the garden?’
‘No. It’s a person. I’m not having a person buried in my garden. You can’t throw it in the bin, it wouldn’t be right . . .’ Colette was desperately confused. She didn’t know what Janus had done. Somehow it seemed to her akin to murder, but perhaps it was only theft, but what order of theft? What magnitude? Kidnapping? And yet at the same time it was only a piece of organic tissue. She had to call for Aldous, who was unhappy to be drawn from his haven in the front room, where he spent the mornings until Janus went to bed. He was unusually decisive.
‘Take that brain away or I’ll call the police.’
‘And what do you propose I do with it?’
‘That’s your problem. And you’re not disposing of it here. It needs to be treated properly.’
‘I keep telling you, at the hospital they were only going to throw it away.’
‘Throw it away where?’ said Colette, ‘Tell us exactly what they do with them.’
‘They go in a big bag that gets taken to the incinerator along with all the other hospital rubbish.’
‘But they probably have a special incinerator for body parts,’ said Colette.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Have you actually seen it, though?’
‘No.’
‘Well it’s probably a special incinerator that’s been blessed by the local bishops and rabbis and all the other religious people.’
‘I doubt it mother. The hospital regards things like this as waste, nothing more, there�
��s nothing special about it. A hand is not a person, just as a person is not a hand. This brain is no one. Saying this brain is someone is like saying the television is Tommy Cooper or Des O’Connor, or whoever happens to be on at the time. This is merely the atrophied machinery that was once operated by a conscious force.’
‘Then why is it so important to you? You associate this thing with the living woman it once belonged to. This Mrs Ritchie, if you were thinking of keeping it as some sort of memento you can see yourself that it is a special thing, it is a part of a human body.’
‘So is a toenail clipping. Should we bury those in consecrated ground?’
‘This is getting us nowhere, Janus,’ said his father.
‘It’s interesting though isn’t it?’
‘No, Janus, it’s sick. You have only one option. Take this brain back to the hospital where it can be disposed of properly, or I’ll call the police this minute.’
It seemed, after a little more discussion, that Janus was seeing sense.
‘I’ll take it back when I go to work tonight.’
‘No, Janus, take it back now. Immediately.’
Reluctantly Janus left the house with the brain in his bag. He’d first complained that it would be difficult to smuggle the brain back into the hospital system if he went there outside his shift, but his parents persuaded him that a suitable excuse for his presence could be found.
‘I can’t take any more of this,’ said Aldous once they were alone, ‘worrying about the next thing Janus does. We’ve been worrying like this for more than ten years, worrying about what we’ll find when we get home, worrying about what Janus will be like when we get home, worrying about what he’ll bring home with him. A brain! What’ll it be next time, a whole corpse? How long before he kills someone . . .’
‘Don’t be so melodramatic Aldous. The boy just has a natural curiosity about things. He’s been obsessed with death since Scipio died . . .’
‘You always find some way of justifying his behaviour don’t you? You always have done. If you could be made to see sense about that boy he could have been living in his own place by now like a relatively normal human being instead of wasting his life wheeling dying people down corridors . . .’
‘Oh don’t come all that wasting his life muck with me, Aldous, we all know you’re just jealous of the boy . . .’
‘Jealous?’
‘. . . yes, jealous, jealous of his gifts, jealous of the fact that he’s a true artist while you’re just an art teacher . . .’
Colette bit her lip. Aldous retired hurt to the front room. They rarely argued along these lines and rarely discussed Janus together. But Colette was disturbed by Janus’s behaviour to an unusual degree, not just by his morbid curiosity, but by the presence of human organic matter in the house, as though a stranger had intervened in their affairs, and that was what had made her snap at her husband. She apologized later, but Aldous had affected a vague indifference, as he always did in situations like that.
They waited for Janus to come home from having returned the brain. But he didn’t come home, and that concerned them. Janus had not been on a bender for over a year, more like two. Colette had begun to think that those days were over. They can never be over, Aldous had said. No matter how long Janus stays off the bottle, he will always be in between drinks. Not until he drops dead without taking a sip can you say he has truly quit drink.
‘Something’s gone wrong,’ said Colette to her husband that night. ‘Should I phone the hospital to see if he’s turned up for work?’
‘No,’ said Aldous.
‘I’ve got this horrible feeling that he’s in trouble for stealing that brain. Supposing he was found out. Suppose someone saw him with it. Would it be a serious crime, do you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Aldous.
Janus didn’t come home the following morning, and was absent the entire day. Colette’s imagination raced.
‘I think he tried to put that brain back where he found it. I think he tried to put it back in Mrs Ritchie.’
‘Don’t be absurd.’
‘She might still have been in the fridge, he might have cut her open . . .’
Janus didn’t return home the morning after that either. He was gone, in all, for three days. And then, one evening, Aldous and Colette sitting alone in the kitchen, heard an odd noise. It was a little bell ringing. A little tinkling bell, like those the little altar boys ring during the celebration of mass. Tinkle-tinkle-tinkle, distant at first, then it came nearer. At one point it was so close that it sounded as though it was in the alleyway beside the house.
‘Go and see what it is,’ said Colette, ‘there’s someone in the alley.’
Aldous hesitated. It was dark outside. Then the tinkling receded, and eventually faded into the distance.
But it came back. Tinkle-tinkle-tinkle, distant at first, coming nearer. Again it came as close as the alley. The noise rose and fell as the bell went back and forth along the alley.
‘See who it is, Aldous,’ said Colette.
‘It’ll be Janus,’ said Aldous, standing up, ‘who else would do something so ridiculous as walk around ringing a bell?’
‘Go and have a look all the same. I’d ask Julian but he’s out tonight.’
Aldous went to the back door and opened it. The house lights lit up the nearby leaves of the fruit trees, but beyond that was blackness. To the left the gate that led to the alley. He leant across and peeped over it. He could see that the alley was empty. The ringing had stopped as soon as he’d opened the door. Aldous came back into the kitchen.
‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘Just Janus mucking around. He must have run off.’
‘There it is again,’ said Colette, ‘over there this time. It’s on the other side.’
‘Just ignore it,’ said Aldous.
They tried to ignore it. The ringing continued for half an hour or more, receding into the distance, returning, receding, returning. Sometimes it sounded as though it was in the streets beyond the garden-ends, in Hoopers Lane or Woodberry Road. Sometimes, when near, it was as though it was in the garden itself. Then, just as they were beginning to think that the sound had stopped, there came a new sound, shockingly loud, as though inside the house, not a bell this time but a peculiar sound, like the chopping of wood, but with a ringing undertone to it.
‘The piano,’ said Aldous, and went to the music room. Colette followed. In the music room they found Janus, who had broken in through the French windows. He had a stone in his hand, a large white chunk of quartzy rock, probably picked from a front garden rockery. With this he was knocking splinters of black wood out of the body of the piano.
Aldous and Colette took a moment to react, because Janus looked so different. He was wearing a long, brown, suede trench coat with the collar turned up, and a white panama hat. To the belt of the coat, whose strap was hanging down, he had tied a small brass handbell. Bending down to take another blow at the piano with the rock his face was invisible. When he lifted himself and they could see his face, they saw that it looked very calm and pale, but cold. It was not the sort of face he had when drunk, which was red and floppy.
Aldous was immediately firm in his schoolmasterly way, marched towards Janus demanding that he stop.
‘This instrument’s worth thousands of pounds, you fool.’
He was unprepared for the way Janus pounced on him. Perhaps he was sober after all, because he could never have managed such a manoeuvre in the slurred states of his drunkenness. He grappled his father, twisting his arms behind his back so that he was helpless. Aldous yelped. It had been some years since he had had to use force on Janus, and during that time he’d become an old man, while sober Janus had a new-found strength built up over the two years he’d spent pushing and lifting patients of all sizes and weights.
‘No, Janus,’ shouted Colette, bashing Janus with her fists as he passed, pushing her husband before him, rather like one of the trolleys or stretchers at the hospital. Her blows we
nt unnoticed. Janus was talking matter-of-factly.
‘Let’s see how you like it now, dear father. Think of all those times you’ve had me thrown out of the house. Now it’s your turn. How would you like to be thrown out on the streets like a dog, eh? But at least you’ll have shoes on.’
Janus was pushing Aldous through the hall towards the front door.
‘What’s the matter, Janus, what’s wrong?’ called Colette, following behind, trying to pull Janus back.
Janus paused and turned to her.
‘You’ve got me the sack from my job, so I’m going to throw you out of the house . . .’
‘What do you mean, the sack? You haven’t been sacked have you?’
‘I think that’s what you call it when they say you can’t work there any more. I was trying to put the brain back like you told me to, and they thought I was taking it, so there we are. The sack. Now you’re getting the sack.’
‘Janus, just think for a moment,’ said Aldous, as Janus opened the front door.
‘I’ve been thinking for days, father, thinking for days of all the ways you’ve tried to spoil my life, of all the times you’ve had me thrown out of the house, of the times you’ve punched me in the face. You are a very violent man, father. I’ve thought of all the times you’ve tried to stop me working in the jobs I love, and all the times you’ve separated me from the women I’ve loved. Gwen, Christine, Angelica, Mary, you frightened them all away didn’t you, and now you’ve separated me from my true love . . .’
‘What’s he talking about?’ Aldous called to his wife as he was pushed through the front door. Janus let go of his arms and gave him a shove that nearly knocked Aldous over, but he managed to keep his balance and instead jogged calmly along the path to the pavement. He made no attempt to retaliate, but waited on the pavement, his hands in his pockets.
‘What do you mean your true love, Janus?’
‘Your turn now, mother,’ said Janus, taking his mother by the arms as he had done Aldous, and pushing her out of the door. He slammed the front door shut and turned the hall light out.
Aldous and Colette, alone on the pavement, noticed how chilly it was, and silent.
‘We’ll have to call on the Milliners,’ said Colette, after a moment’s thought.
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 34