I’ll Go To Bed At Noon

by Gerard Woodward

  Later, as they passed down Taunton Road to The Lemon Tree, he talked further.

  ‘Would you mind, dear, if I talked about my bowel movements? I know you are not my doctor, but they have been bothering me lately. You see, I seem to have been passing live fish.’

  ‘Have you?’

  Janus Brian shrugged, as though it was beyond explanation.

  ‘I mean, it is ridiculous. I know I eat a lot of fish, especially those boil-in-the-bag ones that you buy for me, but, you know, last night I was passing a motion on the toilet, not much came out, just a dribble, really, but when I looked in the bowl there was this brightly coloured – a sort of electric blue with yellow stripes – tropical fish in the pan swimming about. I don’t know if I imagined it or what, I suppose I must have, but it’s been happening for a few days now. Once I looked down and there was this little shoal of tiny red fish, absolutely beautiful, a sort of pinky red, like valentines, all turning at the same time, like a flock of birds. They swam round the U-bend as I looked, and were gone. I don’t mind really, as long as they are nice colourful ones, but they do give me a bit of a start. The thing is, would you mind having a look for me, to see if you can see them as well? To prove to me that I must be hallucinating?’

  Colette nodded in a tired sort of way. She was no longer surprised by her brother’s faeces.

  ‘Yesterday I had . . .’ he paused briefly, as he always did before uttering any expletive or other unsavoury term, ‘what I can only describe as an, inverted commas, “wet fart”. Do you know what I mean?’ He suddenly seemed pleased with his invented term, ‘In fact that is what I seem to have nowadays instead of proper craps. But anyway, I had this wet fart yesterday, and afterwards I was absolutely sure there was a small goldfish in my pants. I could feel it wriggling there, gasping for breath. I had to pull my trousers down and have a look. There was nothing there, just a brown stain. Do you think I’m going mad?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Colette.

  At the house Janus Brian paused on the doorstep, after opening the front door, and turned to the street below and shouted ‘Bollocks!’ as loudly as his weakened voice would allow. ‘Sorry, but I sometimes feel this incredible urge. I’m beginning to hate the people in this road. When Mary was alive they were always popping in, but since she’s gone and I’ve gone off the rails, they’ve shunned me completely.’ There was no response from the street, not even the twitch of a curtain. ‘There’s a taxi-driver a few doors down who starts his taxi up every morning at about half past six and lets it run for half an hour to warm up. Bloody thing sounds like a tractor, keeping me awake. I don’t see why I shouldn’t retaliate once in a while.’

  Colette did her usual tidying up, conscious, as always, that she worked far harder at her brother’s house than she ever did at her own. At Fernlight Avenue it was Aldous who was usually lumbered, after a day’s work, with hoovering, doing the washing-up and making the beds.

  Janus Brian chatted, as he always did.

  ‘Have you seen these new cigarettes they’ve just brought out? Reg brought me some over on Saturday. John Players Special.’ He showed her a pack. They did look unusual, packaged in shiny, black boxes with the monogram JPS in gold. The pack Janus Brian handed her was empty. ‘I’ll have to get myself some when we go to the shops today. You can get these special plastic drum packs, a sort of cylinder, same colour, must hold about fifty.’

  Janus Brian always had a taste for the luxuries his modest but comfortable draughtsman’s salary would allow. He probably earned less than Aldous but without any children all his earnings, and Mary’s as well, went on themselves. This made Colette very angry when, as sometimes happened, Janus Brian would gently criticize Colette for the impoverished nature of her lifestyle; the fact that she had no fridge, telephone or washing machine, that Aldous’s cars were always at least a decade old, that they had no furniture in their house that wasn’t handed down from Nana, or from their dead sister Meg. Janus Brian had always enjoyed the newest styles and the latest gadgetry. His furniture was straight out of the Sunday supplements. He smoked Dunhills which he lit with a silver-plated Dunhill lighter, and he stubbed them out on an onyx ashtray with a spinning mechanism. He listened to Schubert and big band jazz on something called a hi-fi that he was always talking about in a jargon Colette couldn’t follow, and which irritated her.

  Colette’s lack of a telephone particularly annoyed Janus Brian. He even offered to pay for the installation of a phone at Fernlight Avenue. He himself had what he called a Trimphone, a grey-green modernistic piece of plastic that warbled electronically instead of ringing.

  ‘I’ve told you, Janus, Aldous won’t have a phone. He just doesn’t like the idea of it.’

  ‘There you are, you see,’ said Janus, ‘you’re always saying it’s the kids that keep you living in the dark ages, but in fact it’s your own choice. You choose to live like that.’

  As Colette spruced up Janus Brian’s house, particularly musty and dour after a weekend alone, she came upon something odd in the kitchen. In a small saucepan there was an open tin of Cherry Blossom shoe polish. The shoe polish seemed to have melted, coating the inside of the pan with a mushy, strong smelling tar.

  ‘What’s this mess?’ she said.

  Janus Brian seemed unconcerned.

  ‘Sunday night. I’d run out of booze and I was going crazy for a drink. Nowhere to buy anything. Nothing open. Fucking Sundays. Pardon my French.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with shoe polish in your saucepan?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, seeming to think that he’d already provided an explanation, ‘I tried to extract the alcohol from it. Bloody waste of time. In theory it should be possible. I ended up with a teaspoonful of brown sludge that tasted like hell . . .’

  ‘You mean you’ve been drinking shoe polish?’

  ‘Refined shoe polish, if you don’t mind. You see, if you boil it in a double boiler, catch the steam, in theory you should be able to separate the spirit . . .’

  ‘Janus,’ said Colette, ‘What are we going to do with you?’

  Colette smiled when she heard herself uttering that phrase. The last time she’d heard it, it had been applied to herself by Mrs Lawrence, a large and loud Jamaican woman she had befriended when Julian had started going to primary school. Their children Julian and Nicky were friends, and as the Lawrences lived nearby, in a flat above a hardware shop on Green Lanes just at the bottom of Fernlight Avenue, she and Mrs Lawrence caught the same buses when they took their sons to school (another awkward non-radial journey – two buses to go less than a mile!). It was around that time that Colette began sniffing bicycle glue and taking sleeping pills, a combination that meant, some mornings, she was just too far gone to take Julian to school. Then Aldous would have to take Julian down to the hardware shop and ask Mrs Lawrence if she could take him to school with Nicky. A favour-exchanging relationship soon developed between them, and sometimes Julian would go to Nicky’s home after school and play with his toys for an hour or two, and likewise Nicky would sometimes come to Fernlight Avenue. It was when Mrs Lawrence came to collect Nicky one day that she witnessed Colette in one of her states, staggering, delirious, mumbling nonsensically, her hair awry, her glasses crooked. Mrs Lawrence had been brisk and humorous in her reaction

  ‘What you going to do with her, Mr Jones,’ she said to Aldous loudly, ‘You going to sell her?’

  She felt sad when the Lawrences moved, just as they were getting to know them. Mr Lawrence had landed a job in America and the whole family had uprooted and gone to Florida just in time to watch the Saturn Vs taking off. Nicky had been such a sweet little boy. Colette remembered the time he’d been sick at one of Julian’s birthday parties, a pink trough of puke on the floor, and two silver tears rolling down that little brown face.

  Now it was Janus Brian’s turn to be useless. And yet with him the question had a more urgent feel. What were they going to do with him? Something needed to be done, but what? Colette couldn’t go on being his housek
eeper for ever. Whenever she thought he was getting better, that he was beginning to pull himself together, she would find something like this, a little home-made shoe polish distillery, and everything would be back to square one. She suspected, though couldn’t be sure, that his level of alcohol intake was steadily increasing.

  Whenever she confronted her brother with the question of what plans he was making, he would always end up in a trough of suicidal self-pity.

  ‘Bring some cyanide with you next time you come, will you dear? This poison,’ he pointed to a gin bottle, ‘is working too slowly.’

  This is what he said after she found the shoe polish. He flopped in his Mastermind chair and wept faintly. Little tears again, sweet as Nicky Lawrence’s, like silverfish scurrying down his face.

  ‘Don’t talk like that.’

  ‘Well, what am I good for? I’m just waiting to join Mary. That’s all I want.’

  ‘Why don’t you move,’ she said, ‘sell up and buy somewhere smaller. Somewhere without all these memories.’

  ‘The only house I want is a wooden one,’ he moaned, ‘six feet under.’

  Colette understood how central she had become to Janus Brian’s life. She was his main support. She felt like the rampart of a dam. If she weakened, if she cracked, the waters came dribbling through, and soon there was the flood. She was holding back the lake of Janus Brian’s despair.

  Colette sighed, exasperated, suddenly wanting to slap her brother’s bald pate. Then she found herself thinking about Aldous. While she was sitting in this stale house, he was somewhere on the south coast lunching with dignitaries. She wondered what he was doing at that precise moment. Being chauffeured to the crematorium, like a film star, watching the curtain fall from his monumental windows. No, she thought, looking at the clock on the mantelpiece, too early. He was probably still on the train.

  ‘Come on, Janus,’ Colette said, with sudden assertiveness, ‘let me read you something.’

  And Janus Brian brightened. He had come to adore being read to by his little sister. He himself had chosen Bleak House, suggesting the novel only half-seriously for the dark aptness of its title. Its main effect, it soon transpired, was soporific, and Janus Brian would often fall asleep after a few pages of the wranglings of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. At this rate Colette reckoned it would take about two and a half years to read Bleak House, and around half a century to read the complete works.

  When Janus Brian slept, as he did that morning, Colette slept as well. Zonked out in his Mastermind chair, Janus Brian could sleep for two or three hours. Colette would go upstairs and have a long nap in her brother’s double bed, losing herself in the luxury of space, what seemed an acre of mattress in comparison to the put-u-up bed-settee she and Aldous had become used to. It sometimes struck her that that was why she enjoyed her visits to Leicester Avenue so much. Whereas she lived in a crowded house made shadowy and awkward by its accumulated objects, Janus Brian lived in a house that had few objects and little history. What there was instead was space, open reaches of carpet, walls not shrunk with shelving and cupboards, rooms that with their absence of things seemed to her like ballrooms, arenas, stadia.

  But it was not how she would have liked her house. After a few hours the absence of history became as intrusive, in its own way, as stacked books or mounds of outgrown clothes. And she could never sleep deeply in the double bed, troubled by the odd space she was occupying, her brother’s wife’s, whose absence from those pillows had emptied the house to an intolerable degree, for Janus Brian. After a shallow and restless sleep the thought struck her that day – supposing as she’d slept, Janus Brian, half-cut, had come up the stairs to find her in his bed. In his state of mind he might have taken her for a ghost. The thought made her sit upright suddenly. She was stupid to use her brother’s bed. There were other beds in the house, though not as comfortable as this. And as she sat there, she had the distinct feeling that Janus Brian had visited her while she slept, she could sense it in the subtlest of spatial shifts – the door ajar by an extra half-inch, perhaps, or another millimetre of light between the curtains. She wasn’t sure, but she felt a need to go and investigate her brother’s whereabouts. She found him soon enough. He was in the bathroom, contemplating his naked self in the mirror.

  Colette had become used to her brother’s nakedness, though it had shocked her the first time, when he appeared in the kitchen one evening while she was making the dinner. He’d made no excuse or apology for his nudity, he simply drifted into the kitchen, poked about in some of the cupboards, and then drifted out. Aldous recalled the same event with some amusement. He’d been in the living room, and had noticed a faint breeze rustle the pages of his Daily Telegraph. He lowered it and saw a rear view of nude Janus Brian, tall, yellowish pink, skinny, heading for the kitchen. He raised his paper and continued reading. A few seconds later another breeze set the pages fluttering and he lowered it, to see nude Janus Brian passing in the opposite direction. Without clothes Janus Brian made no sound as he walked. He was a visual event only.

  At first Colette thought her brother’s nudity was a form of laziness, that he couldn’t be bothered getting dressed, even to answer the front door, but Aldous realised that Janus Brian was obtaining a certain thrill in exposing himself, and he himself confessed to her, ‘I’m afraid, my dear, that I am what is called a “narcissist”.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes. I am falling in love with my own image. I will stand before the wardrobe mirror for hours admiring myself. My body. I am sorry but I believe I am beautiful.’

  Now Colette watched her brother through the ajar door of the bathroom. He was standing before the long mirror, naked except for a pair of black socks and his glasses. His back was to her, his front reflected in the mirror. He was just standing there, his arms hanging by his sides, full square before himself, unexcited, still, absorbed in self-contemplation. She tried to gauge the expression on his face. Her brother had always had one of the least expressive faces she had ever seen. It hardly seemed to move, even when he was talking, or laughing, or crying. It was no different then, naked before the mirror. His body looked unbearably feeble, like a baby’s, quite pink and solid, but totally without any visible musculature. His body was all loose skin and tendons, it seemed, and little pouches of fat.

  As she watched he lifted his hands to his chest, cupped his breasts and lifted them, then pushed them together to create a wizened cleavage, then let them fall back into their shapeless repose. He repeated this two or three times, after which his hands moved down his body towards his genitals. Colette failed to avert her eyes. She was amused by the fluffiness of the hair down there and the way everything seemed neatly folded and tucked away. He lifted his flaccid penis by its foreskin, let it fall back, doing this several times as though testing for signs of life in a dead kitten.

  ‘When we were at school,’ said Janus Brian, showing no other sign that he’d noticed Colette’s presence, ‘we used to compare cock sizes, me and Reg. Mine was always the bigger. Mind you, he was circumcised, so mine always had the additional bulk of the prepuce. I knew I had one of the biggest, if not the biggest cock in the class. But since those days I’ve never seen another man’s cock, so it’s hard for me to know where I rank in the league of penis length . . .’ Janus Brian now turned away from the mirror and faced his sister, ‘What about Aldous?’ he continued, ‘how do we compare? I mean on a purely dimensional level?’

  ‘To be honest I never pay much attention to dimensions. I wouldn’t say there was much difference.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ Janus sighed and turned back to the mirror. Then he said, ‘Do you think another woman will ever gaze with fondness upon this sight again?’

  Colette remembered the trouble she’d gone through to find him a wife, his seeming indifference to all the possible mates she’d procured, the unusualness of Mary Moore. She thought it highly unlikely, almost impossible.

  ‘Maybe one day, Janus, when you’ve got over all this.’
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br />   Janus didn’t seem to hear her. He turned back to his reflection.

  ‘You know who I keep seeing in this mirror?’ he said. Then, before Colette could reply, ‘Our father. I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately.’

  Colette was tempted to say Dada was a dream, dear, but she said ‘Have you?’

  ‘Yes. I keep seeing him in my face in a way that I’ve never noticed before. And then I realized it was because I can’t remember him as being much younger than I am now. In fact I am now older than he was when he died. I am older than my father. Isn’t that what they call a paradox?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So now I look like my father as I remember him. But I must have looked like him all my life, it’s just that I never knew him as a young man. And then I find myself thinking about his body. I never saw it. Did you?’

  ‘No.’

  Their father took a bath once a week in the zinc tub that was kept in the scullery and was brought into the living room before the fire. When their father was bathing no one was allowed in the living room.

  It disquieted her to think of it now, her father behind the oak door of the living room, in the middle of all their living room things, their books, furniture and carpet, standing, as he must have done, utterly naked. Colette can remember her father on the beach at Broadstairs, sitting stiffly in a deckchair, fully clothed even to his trilby hat, reading The Times on a hot day.