I’ll Go To Bed At Noon

by Gerard Woodward

  Shortly after their marriage, however, Bill had unexpectedly developed a fear of heights and had plumped instead for the ground-level life of supermarket butchery. He’d always been proud of his hands, which were a working man’s hands, and an artist’s hands. The torn nails, the wounded, stigmatised palms. These days he always had a set of cuts to show, some fresh (an arc across the ball of the thumb), some mature and scabbed (the cloven end of an index finger), some fading and ghostly (a V on the back of the wrist), some few permanent scars, little crescents of shiny pink scar tissue on the tanned surface of his skin.

  The problem with Bill, however, was that he was a drinker, and had formed with Janus a drinking partnership that seemed hell bent on scaling ever higher peaks of debauchery and derangement. At the same time, Bill was one of the few people, perhaps the only person, who could control Janus when he was drunk. He had a reputation as a gentle giant, a Hercules of colossal strength gained from a working life of hauling bricks up ladders, so that he seemed to act, in the friendship that had developed between himself and Janus, as keeper to Janus’s lunatic, his bodyguard, henchman, minder. One particularly troublesome night at Fernlight Avenue, when Janus had passed into the violent, penultimate phase of his drunkenness (the ultimate phase being sleep), after most of the family had tried and failed in various ways to calm, restrain or wrestle him, Colette had pleaded with her son-in-law to use his strength to subdue Janus.

  ‘Can’t you just punch him in the head and knock him out?’ she’d said.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ replied Bill, almost shocked.

  ‘Just a punch to the head, just so we can get him into bed.’

  ‘You can’t just punch someone in the head. I might break his jaw, or something. I might give him a brain haemorrhage. This isn’t some Hollywood movie.’

  Instead Bill preferred to use his eloquence, his drunkard’s camaraderie, his rambling abilities as a storyteller to soothe fretful Janus. And when this failed he would sit on his chest for half an hour.

  This Sunday Colette had made a spaghetti bolognese for lunch, a carefully crafted meal, long in preparation, but which went almost unnoticed beneath the vociferous discussions that were conducted during its consumption, and which continued afterwards, when Aldous had taken the plates and cutlery to the sink for washing up. James was home for the Easter holidays, and seemed particularly keen, after two terms at university, to display his newly acquired knowledge.

  ‘Wages are like prices,’ he said, answering a point Bill had made, ‘goods that are in high demand cost more. It’s the same with wages, they reflect the availability of skills.’

  ‘Well, well, well,’ said Bill, who was leaning with an elbow propped on the mantelpiece, threatening to inadvertently cause a small avalanche of bric-a-brac, ‘I’d never have had you down as an acolyte of that raving fascist Ted Heath. But then even Heath can see you’ve got to have wage control. You’ve got to have an incomes policy. You can’t treat wages like tins of baked beans, paying less if there are more. There has to be a moral dimension to wage allocation, you have to pay people according to their value as people . . .’

  ‘But if everyone’s equal,’ said Colette from her armchair by the boiler into which she’d recently flopped, ‘they all get the same pay, is that right? The doctor, the dustman, they both get paid the same?’

  ‘Well answer me this,’ said Bill, ‘What would cause more disruption to society, doctors going on strike or dustmen going on strike?’

  James laughed knowingly, as if to let everyone know he’d heard this argument before.

  Colette thought for a second before saying

  ‘Doctors.’

  ‘Why doctors?’ said Bill, raising a finger.

  ‘Because if dustmen went on strike, their work could be done by soldiers, or even by volunteers if things got desperate. But if doctors went on strike – well, it would be a disaster. You couldn’t have soldiers doing brain surgery.’

  ‘Do you realize,’ said Bill, ‘that 95 per cent of doctors’ work could just as easily be done by nurses? Do you realize that if the dustmen went on strike, the army couldn’t dispose of more than a quarter of the rubbish, and that within a few weeks we’d be overrun by epidemics of cholera, typhoid, diphtheria, influenza, polio . . . Thousands, maybe millions of people would die. A doctors’ strike would result in just a handful of deaths . . .’

  ‘Isn’t that amazing?’ said Colette, who looked genuinely convinced, ‘So you think they should swap around? Pay the dustmen what we pay doctors now, and let doctors live on dustmen’s wages.’

  Bill nodded, laughing, ‘Doctors are just parasites. We should be talking about the poor nurses who, like I said, can do most of the doctors’ work, yet just because the doctor spent a few years at university, paid for by his rich parents, he thinks he deserves to get paid fifteen thousand a year, or whatever obscene salaries they earn.’

  ‘So get rid of doctors altogether?’

  ‘Yes. Just better train the nurses and we won’t have any need of doctors.’

  ‘That sounds a wonderful idea. Darling!’ She called to Aldous behind her at the sink, ‘I’m a communist!’

  Janus was sitting at the table. The silver spotted crippled cat, Scipio, his mother’s gift to him seven years ago, was sitting in his lap.

  ‘You tell them comrade,’ he said, raising his clenched fist.

  ‘What I don’t understand about communism,’ said Aldous, drying his hands and re-entering the main part of the room, ‘is what happens in this perfect society, where everything is free and equal, when some selfish person comes along and tries to take advantage?’

  ‘Selfishness is a by-product of private ownership. If everyone has what they need, why should they want any more?’ Bill said this with a grimace, as though pleading to be understood.

  ‘People are always wanting more than they need,’ said Aldous.

  ‘Like the miners,’ said Colette, laughing, ‘thirty-five per cent!’

  ‘That’s right,’ said James, ‘none of us need more than the basics for survival – a warm cave and lots of wild boar to hunt, but we all want more . . .’

  ‘I can’t believe you just said that about the miners, mother,’ said Juliette sharply, the sherbet lemon rattling like dice against her teeth as she spoke, ‘have you any idea what it’s like to work down a coal mine?’

  ‘No. Have you?’

  ‘People only want more because they want the same as what other people have,’ said Bill, ‘it’s a caucus race, the poor are always trying to catch up with the selfish rich who just get richer and richer. If we are all equal, this cycle of envy will stop . . .’

  ‘But it would just take one greedy person taking more than they need to start the cycle up again . . .’ said Aldous.

  ‘Yes, you still haven’t answered dad’s main question,’ said James.

  ‘I told you,’ Bill spluttered, ‘the situation wouldn’t arise . . .’

  Howls of derision from half the room, Bill shouted to be heard above it, ‘. . . but if it did then we’d shoot the buggers . . .’

  The howls intensified.

  ‘Just like we’ll shoot Ted Heath and Prince Charles and all the rest of them – string them up and let them dangle from the balcony of Buckingham Palace – you can’t have a perfect society without first cutting out the rotten wood . . .’

  For once Bill’s voice was almost lost amid the noise generated by his opponents, who, sensing a rare victory, continued to pour scorn on his argument long after it had died. Bill, having given up verbally, resorted to gestures, spraying his extended family with machine gun fire, and lobbing invisible hand grenades to every corner of the kitchen.

  These post-prandial Sunday afternoons were usually passed, as if by some unspoken agreement, without the accompaniment of alcohol. A kind of alcoholic truce, a drinker’s cease-fire, the one point in the week when everyone agreed to pass the time soberly. But this particular Sunday afternoon it was clear that Janus had been drinking. Aldo
us had noticed how, every half an hour or so, he would leave the room for no obvious reason, to return a few minutes later. Once he followed him and crept up the stairs while he was in his bedroom. He could hear the gasp and sigh of a beer can yielding its pressurized contents, the muscular clenching of Janus’s neck as he swallowed. When he came out of the room he leant across to the lavatory and pulled its chain, to provide a motive for his going upstairs. The traditional abstinence of Sunday afternoons had encouraged Janus to drink secretly. At any other time he would have drunk openly, not to say blatantly, but today, it seemed, he felt a need to drink furtively.

  Aldous foresaw a day of troubles that depressed him deeply. For Janus to begin drinking so early would mean a long afternoon and evening of steadily growing tension and hostility, to culminate in heaven knew what drunken mayhem at night. Now he wished Colette had laced his lunch with crushed Antabuse tablets, as she had done in the past. They’d never managed those pills properly, somehow. The idea was that they induced a state of nausea if one took them before drinking alcohol, so deterring heavy drinking. Janus refused to take them voluntarily, so a couple of times Colette had crushed them with a rolling pin and mixed them in with the gravy of his roast dinner, or the sauce of his bolognese. They’d been warned by the doctor that to allow someone to go out drinking, unaware that they’d taken the tablets, could be dangerous, they were to be treated rather as a form of voluntary deterrence. So Colette would tell Janus, after he’d finished his dinner, that she’d spiked the gravy, in the hope he would abandon any plans for drinking that evening. But she’d underestimated his drinkers’ resolve. His first action, on learning of her trickery, was to swallow a pint of heavily salted water, and then to vomit into the toilet, bringing up most of the tablets with his dinner. Aldous said she shouldn’t have told him, just fed him the drugs and let him take the consequences, or at least let him digest more of his meal before she told him. That was rarely possible, as his evening drinking often started the moment he’d finished his dinner. So they’d given up on the Antabuse idea pretty quickly. Colette wasn’t even convinced that they worked anyway. And for a few weeks after that Janus refused, like some paranoid Roman emperor, to eat any food she’d prepared for him.

  Having succumbed to a rare defeat against James, Bill had retired to the music room where he sat on the windowsill next to the piano, leaning back against the window frame, almost hidden by one of the tall, viridian green curtains, reading Under the Volcano, and smoking his pipe. He was shortly joined by Julian, who was passing through a brief passion for the game of chess. He’d carried his little set into the music room, anxious for a partner.

  Bill was known to be a good chess player. He could beat everyone in the family, including James, although Janus would usually put up a good fight. So chess was more than one of Bill’s Marxist affectations. He was genuinely good at the game, and Julian had never known him decline an offer to play.

  They set up the board on the piano stool and Julian knelt on the floor, plopping the pieces into position, while Bill folded a corner of his novel down and closed it. Bill’s copy of Under the Volcano was the Penguin Modern Classics edition with a Diego Rivera painting on the cover. It was creased and scuffed almost to the point of disintegration, the corners of the cover nipped with white, the spine a cluster of parallel scars where it had been folded back too far. The wear and tear of this book was due to the fact that Bill Brothers had been carrying it around in the paperback-sized pockets of his jackets and coats for more than a year, continually reading and rereading the novel.

  ‘This is the best book in the English language,’ he said to Julian, showing him the front of the book and tapping the picture with his finger.

  ‘Janus always says Nostromo is the best book in the English language,’ said Julian, recalling the evening when Janus had given him a long lecture on Joseph Conrad.

  ‘Janus is merely parroting a man called Leavis who decided, one day, that Nostromo was the greatest novel in the English language, and for some reason everyone has decided to agree with him, just because he’s the Mr Big at Cambridge. In fact, no one has actually read Nostromo . . .’

  ‘Janus has,’ said Julian, with a certain amount of pride in his voice, ‘he’s shown me bits of it where Conrad uses triple quotation marks . . .’

  ‘Triple?’

  ‘Yes, you know, like someone saying someone else’s words . . .’

  ‘And that, of course, means it’s a great novel . . .’

  ‘And Conrad wasn’t even English. He ran away to sea didn’t he?’

  ‘He did. But was he a drinker? That is the question, Julian. It is a well-known fact that no one can write a great novel in a state of sobriety, and I’m pretty sure Conrad never touched a drop of the hard stuff, or even the soft stuff. Now if he had had a can of Special Brew always to hand, or at least a few Gold Labels on his desk, we might be able to read Nostromo . . .’

  ‘Oh,’ Julian laughed, ‘yeah . . .’

  They played chess. Bill rapidly overpowered Julian who’d agreed to be Bobby Fischer to Bill’s Boris Spassky. Shortly after the game started, Janus came into the room, the three remaining cans of a four-pack swinging in their plastic nooses from his hand. He began playing the piano.

  Julian was so absorbed in his game the conversations of Bill and Janus passed over his head unnoticed. He could sense that their talk was louder and ruder than it had been, and that Bill was now giving only half his attention to the game, which impressed Julian all the more. Julian would ponder for ten minutes over his move, only to have Bill negate it with a casual sideways move of a knight. He concealed his thought processes with a slow, distracted commentary, ‘you’re moving there are you, Julian, well, in that case . . . I shall have to . . . move . . . there’. Julian couldn’t at first understand why Bill spent so much time moving and reinforcing his pawns, until it became apparent that his forces had been sundered into two uncoordinated halves by a v-shaped wedge of them. Then came a small armada sailing down the queen’s side that swallowed his bishops. Julian’s queen was stranded in dangerous territory on the king’s side in the distant ranks towards Bill’s rooks. But by this time Bill and Janus were into their second can of beer and Bill had drifted away from the game and towards the piano, where he exhorted Janus to play Mussorgsky’s The Great Gate of Kiev, which Janus did with all the gusto and flamboyance he could manage.

  ‘Muchas Loudas!’ cried Bill. ‘If you play this on the piano at The Lemon Tree it is bound to attract some New Zealand foxes. Play more muchas loudas Janussimus, it is good for me to think much of my fatherland, even though we are speaking of a pre-Revolutionary bourgeois composer . . .’

  Julian left the game, his queen still stranded. He’d been waiting perhaps half an hour for Bill to make his move, and he left the room unnoticed by the others.

  In the kitchen there was still a lively discussion going on, James, it seemed, having taken the place of Bill at the mantelpiece.

  ‘But how do you know the oak tree really exists? If you see it or touch it, you are experiencing mental sensations. How do you know that these have any relationship to what is actually out there?’ He gestured grandly towards the kitchen windows which were filled with a frothy display of apple and cherry blossom.

  Aldous and Colette seemed unable, or were reluctant to grasp the argument.

  ‘I still don’t understand, James,’ said Colette, ‘how can the tree be there and not be there?’

  Juliette beckoned to Julian again and whispered to him.

  ‘Go and tell Bill to come in here.’

  Julian went back to the music room. As he opened the door, what had previously been the sound of muffled levity was now pronounced and intricately noisy. Janus and Bill sitting side by side at the Bechstein’s keyboard. Two long haired, heavily bearded men, it was as though Marx and Engels were playing a duet – puffily red faced, Bill trilling tunelessly in the upper registers while Janus provided a variety of accompaniments – raunchy boogie-woogie, Moz
artian Alberti sequences, lavish Lisztian flourishes. They didn’t notice Julian enter. His chess set was still on the floor.

  Julian walked round the piano and pulled gently at Bill’s sleeve. Bill, in the midst of a cacophonic piece of improvisation, and laughing blearily all the while, didn’t notice until Julian had almost pulled him off the piano stool.

  ‘Juliette wants to speak to you,’ Julian said once he had his brother-in-law’s attention. He noticed a little flurry of worry pass over Bill’s face, which quickly dissipated.

  ‘Does she? In that case I must now take my leave of the concert platform. Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, standing to address the wall, ‘there will be a short intermission while Janussimus my vice-pianist will entertain you with tunes he heard while on an expedition to discover the source of that great river . . .’ his speech petered out for want of a river name.

  ‘I suppose your savages never worry about whether trees exist or not,’ Aldous was saying as Bill came into the kitchen.

  Aldous and Colette were still trying to adjust to this new James that had emerged since he’d gone to university, the James that was full of ideas, mostly half-formed, but propounded with an authority that they didn’t like to challenge, that wore faded denims deckled with patches, that had grown its hair long with a girlish centre parting. This weekend he was wearing a faded yellow cheesecloth shirt and a denim waistcoat with silver buttons.

  Though still only in his first year, James did his best to talk about anthropology with the air of a seasoned expert.

  ‘On the contrary, there are many societies who believe the whole of the empirical world to be the dream of a mystical creature, like the rainbow snake of the Aborigines, or the . . . the giant moth-pangolin of the Dorbourgon . . .’

  Aldous was half-laughing, half-wincing, as though he found the idea gloriously repulsive.

  ‘They sound just up Janus Brian’s street,’ said Colette, ‘It’s such a shame you didn’t come down a couple of days earlier, James, you could have come to Mary’s funeral. I think you’d get on with Janus Brian these days – he’d love to hear about these Bourbons whoever they are.’