‘Janus Brian doesn’t walk anywhere,’ said Colette. She was peering through a gap in the living room curtains at her brother who was slumped in a chair in front of the still-glowing television. The colour television.
He was wearing his dark suit, but without a tie, and without shoes or socks. His lemon yellow shirt was open, revealing a vertical strip of bland, pallid, grey-haired flesh. She knocked on the window. Janus Brian didn’t stir.
The question of whether or not Janus Brian was dead quickly entered the minds of Colette and her family, but even through that thin gap in the curtains to the dimly lit room beyond, it was evident that he was alive. His body had the motionless animation that all living bodies have. No living body can truly mimic the stillness of the dead. But it was also clear that Janus Brian was more than asleep. He was in a denser, more opaque form of unconsciousness.
It had not occurred to Colette that her brother was much of a drinker, even when she found out about his hobby of winemaking, or when he took the trouble to explain to her his methods for increasing the alcoholic yields of his homebrews. (It was very technical – all to do with sugar.) Surely, she thought, he didn’t actually drink the stuff, except in an emergency, as at the funeral, when the sherry had run dry. It was just something to inflict on relatives at Christmas. It was a harmless pastime, a by-product of his gardening.
Janus Brian did finally stir, after much tapping at the window, and hallooing through the letterbox. Colette saw his eyes open and look at her, uncomprehendingly, for a long time. He closed them again. Colette rapped on the glass, enough to make Janus Brian sit up. Then he lifted himself shakily from his chair, immediately losing balance and falling forwards, luckily face-first into the plump leather couch. He picked himself up again from this, gave an odd, trembling salute of acknowledgement to his sister, who had watched the spectacle all the while as a dumb show, through the glass. She saw him leave the room, so hurried across the front of the house to the door, and peeped through the letterbox. Janus Brian in his hall, leaning at almost forty-five degrees, a shoulder propped against the wall, half-sliding, half-walking towards the front door, which he opened after much clumsy messing with bolts and latches.
And when he opened the door, Colette immediately caught a smell that she’d never noticed at her brother’s house before – sweetness. It reminded her of the savour she would sometimes sniff if she opened the lid of a tin of Golden Syrup that had been forgotten about in the back of the cupboard. Still a radiant shock of gold beneath the lid, but the syrup would have crystallised, and the smell would be a rank, rancid parody of sweetness.
No words were exchanged when Janus Brian opened the door. He seemed too weak to utter any. Colette and Aldous silently and urgently took an arm each, since he looked perilously close to collapse, and guided him back into the living room. Julian idled in unnoticed, and gazed at the colour television.
Settled in his chair, and at close quarters, Colette and Aldous were able to appreciate Janus Brian’s condition more fully. He looked very ill. His face was grey, his eyes yellow. Around his lips there was an orange, flaky crust. His hands were as white as something sculpted in alabaster, but the skin under his fingernails was deep purple, as though he was wearing nail polish.
‘I’m sorry that you should find me like this,’ Janus Brian at last moaned, leaning back in his swivel armchair, a black leather seat pivoting on its feet by means of a ball and socket joint, a very precarious and disconcerting piece of furniture for a drunk, ‘but it’s the house – it’s so empty. I’m stupid.’ He clutched his head and the seat wobbled. Janus Brian began revolving unintentionally. Colette grabbed the arm of the chair to steady him. ‘The first week was okay. I thought “this isn’t so bad. Not as bad as you imagine it might be.” But then by week two the house had changed. Everything had changed . . .’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Colette, stroking her brother’s bony shoulder, ‘sit there and I’ll make some coffee . . .’
Janus Brian weakly called after her as she made for the kitchen, revolving as he did so, ‘I don’t think there’s any . . .’
There wasn’t. There seemed to be no food of any kind, the cupboards being mostly empty save for condiments – HP Sauce, a tin of Coleman’s Mustard and such like. The one thing there was, in vast quantities, was sugar. One cupboard contained nothing but, white paper packets of it stacked neatly like sandbags. One had burst on the floor, and a train of ants was at that moment busily carrying it away, grain by grain, to a nest under the door. There was more spilt sugar on the draining board. Sugar crunched beneath Colette’s feet as she stepped across the lino. White sugar. Tate & Lyle. Refined.
And there were wine bottles everywhere, some standing, some on their side, some in pieces on the floor, all empty. She read their labels: Cucumber Cordiale 1972, Banana Wine 1972, Tomato Sherry 1971, Runner-Bean Wine 1970, Swede Wine 1969, Carrot Wine 1969, Raspberry Wine 1965, Asparagus Wine 1964, Melon Wine 1963.
‘Sugar turns to alcohol,’ Colette now recalled Janus Brian’s explanation, ‘if you increase the temperature and put extra sugar in, you get a higher specific gravity. If you increase it too much you kill the yeast, and the fermentation falls off. You don’t often realize, do you dear, that alcohol is really just another form of sugar?’
Sugar adulterated. Ruined sugar, its molecules like crumbling battlements, admitting the spirit of drunkenness. Sugar that is full of dreams, of loss of balance. Topsy-turvy sugar. Tipsy sugar. Sweetness at the point of burning. Sweetness so sweet it plumbed the senses and set them awry. Sweetness beyond sweetness. Transcendent sweetness . . .
Janus Brian had, it seemed, been drinking his way through the vintages of his little, homespun vintner’s. As his cellar depleted so he desperately had tried to brew some more. That was what all the spilt sugar was about. In the scullery she found several fat demijohns of brown liquid bubbling through airlocks. One of these was smashed and had leaked a broad puddle of immature wine across the floor, leaving a sticky residue.
How forethoughtful, thought Colette. There can’t be many self-sufficient drunks in the world, autarkic alcoholics who never once have to burden the off-license but who simply press whatever fruit, flowers or vegetables are growing in their gardens and transform the juices into alcohol. But home-brewing is a slow, painstaking process. It takes method, routine, care and above all patience. The slow chemistry of fermentation can only happen over weeks and months. Janus Brian was down to his last couple of bottles of kitchen garden wine, while the stuff he was brewing was by now barely more potent than lemonade.
She later learnt that the matter that was fermenting in the scullery was nothing more than tea wine. Incapable of reaping anything from the garden to use, Janus Brian had simply gone to the kitchen cupboard and taken the first thing that had come to hand – a packet of PG Tips tea bags. It surprised her really, that he’d even gone to those lengths. It wouldn’t have surprised her if he’d just mixed some sugar, yeast and water together and had hoped for the best.
‘I keep seeing her dear,’ Janus Brian said as he continued to swivel, ‘I keep hearing her. The floorboards upstairs will creak, and I’ll think it’s Mary getting dressed. I see her passing behind the crack of the door. I hear her in the kitchen opening cupboards . . .’
‘You need time to get used to it. It will take a long time,’ said Colette. It was natural, she said, that his mind should go on seeing her and hearing her, when that was what it had been doing constantly for nearly thirty years. ‘It is like an echo,’ she said, ‘Mary will go on echoing around the house. But like any echo, eventually she will begin to fade.’
‘But the echo’s getting stronger, not fainter, dear,’ said Janus Brian, ‘at the start there was nothing, but now she’s busy around the house all day.’
‘Perhaps you should think about moving house, make a new start.’
‘I couldn’t.’
That night Colette stayed with her brother, sending her husband and son home alone. She washed clot
hes, hoovered and made the bed. The shops were closed, so she searched the cupboards again for food but found little – a box of candles, a can of shoe polish, a packet of spaghetti. In the fridge, to her surprise, she found a dish of fresh kidneys and a small block of cheese. She made a meal of grilled kidneys and spaghetti with cheese.
Janus Brian ate tentatively before being violently but unproductively sick in the downstairs loo.
After tidying up the rest of the house, and filling Janus Brian’s dustbin to its brim with empty wine bottles, under protests from her brother who wanted to re-use them, she settled him down in the big double bed that filled the master bedroom. He asked her to stay with him for a while and talk, so she sat on the only chair, a little dressing table stool upholstered in white leather.
Janus lay in the bed, the sheets up to his chin. His body gave very little shape to the broad counterpane, so that he appeared as nothing more than an old, yellowish, wispy head, talking on the pillow. He was still wearing his glasses.
‘You’re very fat,’ he said, in the manner of someone making a commonplace observation.
‘Am I?’ said Colette, shocked by her brother’s bluntness.
‘Yes. You didn’t used to be fat, did you? You used to be very thin.’
Although a little hurt, Colette also felt curiously gratified by these remarks. They meant that Janus Brian had noticed her, had registered and accepted her physical presence in the world as something real.
‘How much do you weigh?’ he went on.
‘I don’t know. We don’t have any scales.’
‘There are some scales in the bathroom.’
‘I’d rather not know at the moment, thanks.’
‘I bet you weigh more than me.’
It was possible, despite his five extra inches of height.
‘Do you still sniff those little tubes of glue?’
She felt real shock that Janus should know about the addiction that had almost destroyed her five years ago.
‘How do you know about that?’ she said, quietly.
‘I saw you doing it once, when I called at your house. I’d discovered a blood clot in my wrist which turned out to be one of my wrist bones, but which at the time I thought was about to give me a fatal embolism, and I’d called round to break the tragic news to you. You answered the door with a wad of lavatory paper over your nose. I thought you had some sort of bad cold, but I couldn’t get any sense out of you at all – you were away with the fairies. Eventually you took the pad off your nose and offered it to me. I took a sniff and nearly passed out straight away. Then I saw all the squashed up tubes by your armchair. What were they – rubber solution of some sort?’
‘Romac,’ said Colette, ‘from puncture repair outfits.’ She was still astounded by her brother’s recollection of the event. She had no memory of it whatsoever.
‘I mentioned it to Aldous once, when I happened to see him, and he sort of waved my question away as though it was nothing important, just one of your little fads . . .’
‘Well,’ said Colette, refocusing herself, ‘in answer to your question – no, I don’t sniff them anymore.’
‘But why did you do it?’
‘It’s like drink,’ said Colette, ‘it has the same effect, only much faster . . .’
The next morning, shakily sober, Janus Brian drove his sister to the shops and they filled his boot with convenience food – tins of ravioli and spaghetti, frozen faggots, rissoles. Janus Brian bought six sliced loaves.
‘They’ll go stale, Janus Brian,’ said Colette when she saw them.
Janus Brian looked at his little sister pityingly.
‘They’re for the freezer, dear.’
‘You can’t freeze bread, can you?’ said Colette, amazed. She had no fridge, let alone a freezer.
‘Of course you can freeze bread, dear. It’ll keep for months, and when you defrost it, it tastes even fresher then when you bought it.’
Unloading the food at Janus Brian’s house, Colette thought her brother looked almost back to his old self. All he needed was a shave and he would appear fully recovered.
He gave her a lift back to Fernlight Avenue.
‘You will look after yourself, won’t you?’ said Colette, as she prepared to get out of the car.
Janus Brian gave her a reassuring nod, closing his eyes to add emphasis, though behind his glasses they were difficult to see.
‘Shall I call round again?’ Colette said, rather hopefully.
‘Pop over next week,’ he said, to her delight.
She leant over and gave him a kiss on his bristly jowl, before leaving the car.
A week later Aldous, Julian and Colette, after another early evening drink in the garden of The Owl, called again on Janus Brian, and found the events of the previous week repeated in almost every detail, except that Janus Brian’s drunken sleep was deeper, and his overall condition worse. Flat out on the couch with dried vomit down his front, he had grown a shallow, white beard. The food Colette had so optimistically bought the week before remained mostly untouched. There were six sliced loaves in the freezer.
Any hope that Janus Brian’s drinking had been a one-off act of desperation in response to the shock of sudden loneliness now vanished. Colette quickly realised that her brother would need more than weekly visits. For the following week she called on him nearly every day, and thereafter a routine quickly established itself. Every other day, or sometimes daily, Janus Brian, already dangerously sozzled but appearing sober, would drive over to Fernlight Avenue sometime in the mid-morning to collect Colette and she would spend a few hours keeping house for him – washing, cooking, tidying up and chatting. Sometimes he’d take her back, and sometimes, if he was too far gone, she’d take the bus. Conveniently the W2 went almost from door to door. She was usually home in time for Julian’s return from school.
Once or twice a week she’d fit in an evening visit as well, sometimes accompanied by Aldous and Julian. They’d sit watching TV with him. Janus Brian loved TV, even though he scarcely seemed to comprehend what happened on the screen. It was while watching TV that Janus Brian became most animated, as though he actually drew energy from the machine. He liked action films, particularly those portraying World War Two. He liked American detective shows, especially Kojak. With the cop shows it was the style of the thing he seemed to enjoy, rather than the stories. He loved the way Kojak talked, the way he dressed, he loved his car, and the wisecracking sidekicks who trailed around after him. Whenever Kojak offered a choice phrase Janus Brian would repeat it and laugh.
‘He’s like Yul Brynner, isn’t he, Aldous – you know Yul Brynner, don’t you Colette? Who loves ya baby?’ Janus Brian produced a deep, growling New York accent, ‘Look at those rings he’s wearing – he makes Sherlock Holmes look a bit old-fashioned, doesn’t he? That’s a Buick, Colette – a Buick. When he wants to show it’s a cop’s car he puts a portable revolving light with a magnetic base on the roof and plugs it into the cigarette lighter.’
Julian, during these evenings (he preferred visiting his uncle to staying at home with his brother), sat silently on the couch doing his homework. Janus Brian seemed not to see him.
Despite her regular visits, Colette found she could do little to stop Janus Brian’s drinking. Out of home-brew, and having been dissatisfied with unfermented tea wine, he had soon resorted to buying drink from the off-license. He had followed, at first, the habit of his long-standing hobby and had bought wines, mainly German, but had soon found them watery and weak in comparison to his powerful home-made brews, so had switched to the fortified varieties – sherries and ports. Over the following few weeks, however, Janus Brian realized, as all novice alcoholics do, that as a ratio of drunkenness to the pound, only the spirits offered reasonable value. He was soon on the gin. A bottle a day.
It is surprisingly easy, he said to Colette after confessing to the volume of his new mode of alcoholism, to drink a bottle of gin in a day. If one begins in the morning and continues throughout th
e day at an even pace one can maintain a kind of anaesthetised variety of drunkenness without ever tipping over the edge, quite, into oblivion. This was the state Janus Brian obtained, for the most part. The best Colette felt she could do was to prevent her brother’s consumption of alcohol overtaking his body’s ability to process it, and to make sure that he was taking in food as well as booze.
She found that the only food he would eat and keep down was fish. He developed a liking for the boil-in-the-bag varieties that had just come out. Colette had never seen them before, and thought them fascinating. A frozen, misted brick was dropped into a pan of boiling water. A few minutes later it emerged as a steaming, semi-transparent pocket which, when snipped at the corner, bled a creamy parsley sauce and an oblong of cod onto a plate.
On a diet of fish and gin, Colette began to hope that her brother would slowly pull through.
4
Colette and Aldous were in the bathroom at Fernlight Avenue – Colette in the blue-tinted foamy waters of the bath, Aldous in his trousers and vest at the sink, shaving.
Aldous was a cautious, rather nervous shaver. He had a sensitive skin that was easily nicked, and he bled every morning – little scarlet puddles on his face that in the lather looked like strawberries in snow. He endured the painful ritual because he could never bear the thought of being bearded.
Once, during a wartime razorblade shortage, he’d let his whiskers grow for three days, but the itchiness had nearly driven him mad. He’d resorted to fishing a blunt blade out of the rubbish and shaving painfully with that. And any beard he grew now would be white, and a white beard was out of the question. He would look like Father Christmas, as ridiculous as the beard of lather he wore each morning before the bathroom mirror.
The greying of Aldous’s hair had begun when he was in his forties, and had been a slow process that seemed to have accelerated in recent years. It was still thick, combed straight back in a single, brimming wave that added an extra inch and a half to his height, but was now almost pure white. That the same had happened to his whiskers he could tell in the morning, when he saw them on his jowls. His beard grew slowly, and each morning there was a barely perceptible sheen of silver on his face, like dew on a lawn. It weighed him down, his hair – almost black when he was a young man, it now sat on his head like a puff of cumulus, reminding everyone who cared to look that this man hadn’t, in the scheme of the average lifespan, long to live.
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 7
