I’ll Go To Bed At Noon

by Gerard Woodward

  There were more people to come. Next through the window was a man with long dark hair and a Frank Zappa moustache with its accompanying tuft of a beard. This man Julian recognised as Guy Sweetman, a long-time drinking partner of Bill’s, whose wife, Angelica, had become an object of fascination for Janus, his ‘Angel’. Julian had never seen Angelica, but he’d noticed poems about her written on Janus’s bedroom wall, such as the following

  To Angelica Sweetman

  My sweet Angelica Sweetman,

  It’s you I want to meetman,

  It’s you I want to greetman

  On any road or any streetman,

  Let me kiss your little feetman,

  Let me kiss your lips and teethman

  Let me have you in my sheetsman

  You’ve got me all on heatman

  I can’t drink and I can’t eatman

  So nurse me at your teatman

  My sweet Angelica Sweetman.

  which Janus had written in his mother’s pink lipstick across his ceiling.

  Then came Hugo Price, another long-time friend of Bill’s, a dark haired Welshman with bushy sideburns and black sunglasses, he reminded Julian a little of the pop singer Engelbert Humperdinck.

  ‘I thought we were all dead men,’ he said quietly as he lowered himself into Julian’s bedroom. As he did so, sliding in on his backside, his shirt rode up exposing a midriff matted with black hairs, as though this man’s clothes concealed the body of a gorilla. Julian knew Hugo by sight again, he was married to a woman called Veronica, whom Janus and Bill had taken a teasing dislike to. They seemed to think she was a bit of a snob, affecting a life of middle-class affluence with her fondue sets and her hi-fi’s, her prissy little dinner parties where bottles of cheap supermarket wine were decanted into earthenware carafes.

  Other people followed Hugo Price into Julian’s bedroom, but Julian didn’t recognise them – a man with blond, curly hair, whom Bill introduced as ‘Steve, celebrated actor of stage and screen’ (it later transpired that Steve had had bit parts and work as an extra in several television cop shows, including The Sweeney, where he had played a leather-clad hit-man, and Special Branch, where he had played a corpse – ‘much tougher role’, he quipped). He was carrying a small bottle, almost empty, of whisky, and gave quiet, half-hearted whoops, a watered down version of Janus. Then, through the window, came a much older person, a man with a grey beard and triangular eyebrows, whom Julian had never seen before, and who seemed rather embarrassed to discover that there was a young boy in bed in this room.

  ‘I think we may have been following a false tributary,’ said Bill, ‘I left a trail of cheese and onion crisps but they’ve been eaten by marabou storks.’

  ‘There’s a lot of books in here,’ said the older man, who was called Graham, ‘it’s like a bookshop.’

  Julian felt rather elated that these people should all be in his room, these exotic emissaries from the adult world, taking an interest in his books. He usually experienced a sensation of near total invisibility in their presence.

  ‘What’s this? Pony For Sale?’ said the actor, picking up from a shelf one of Juliette’s old books.

  ‘What about this’, said Hugo Price, picking up another book, ‘Sue Barton – Student Nurse.’ He opened it and pretended to read, ‘“She looked into his eyes with passion and squeezed his stethoscope.” Not sure this is appropriate reading matter for an impressionistic young comrade.’

  ‘The Story of Wimpy – A Wump,’ read Bill, going through the spines on a shelf, ‘Anne of Green Gables. Sue Barton – Staff Nurse, Sue Barton – District Nurse, Sue Barton – Night Nurse, Sue Barton. . .’

  ‘Sue Barton Lesbian Nurse,’ continued Steve, ‘Sue Barton – Nymphomaniac Nurse . . .’

  ‘Civilization and its Discontents,’ read Bill, almost accidentally, rather dampening the growing wave of giggling, then, as an afterthought, ‘Sue Barton – Psychiatric Nurse.’

  Julian was starting to regret incorporating Juliette’s juvenile library into his own, and determined afterwards to remove these books from their shelves. Though he had, in fact, read Sue Barton – Student Nurse, and had rather enjoyed it.

  ‘Look at all these Beanos,’ said Steve, fingering through a stack of comics, ‘There must be hundreds here. Good old Biffo.’

  The echoey, distant sound of a cascade told them that Janus was being sick in the lavatory, and with much near falling, slurred yodels and cries of triumph the company left Julian’s room, and Julian got up to close the window into the dark.

  Female voices could be heard downstairs – there was Juliette, sounding rather cross, and Veronica Price herself, a rare visitor to Fernlight Avenue, whom Julian had seen only once, at Juliette’s wedding. She was a teacher, so he understood, and as such she rather frightened him, since she carried herself with considerable height and breadth, a towering figure amongst his sister’s friends, so tall it almost seemed her face was out of sight. And there was Rita Michaelangeli, a smaller darker woman, possibly prettier, though it was difficult to tell as she always wore dark glasses, and had frizzy hair that concealed much of her face. Julian hung around on the landing listening to the voices downstairs. It seemed that the women, especially Juliette and Veronica, were cross with the men for climbing up the ladder and walking across the kitchen roof, when the back doors to the music room were open anyway, as they always were. Fernlight Avenue was never locked. ‘Where is he?’ he heard Juliette saying, then, told that he was upstairs with Janus, a kind of groan.

  Laughter was pouring out of Janus’s bedroom. Having had his own bedroom invaded Julian felt at liberty to wander in there and investigate the source of all the amusement. Bill was dominating the proceedings, as ever. It seemed that, at Janus’s request, he had embarked upon a portrait of Janus and Angelica, a vast mural filling the entirety of the plain wall on the door-side of Janus’s bedroom. Bill kept up an amusing Rolf Harris like commentary as he worked, while Janus posed, and James, Steve and Graham watched on in genuine, awe-struck amazement at their friend’s abilities. Bill’s skills. For, within just a few minutes, an image had emerged on Janus’s bedroom wall, recognizable Janus and recognizable Angelica, the two figures naked but for fig leaves, Angelica with plump, voluptuous breasts and curvy hips. Bill’s portrait was an imitation of Massaccio’s depiction of Adam and Eve. Bill was laughing almost hysterically as he produced this portrait using a thick pencil he had to resharpen with a small pocket knife almost continually, and then, full of excitement, he rushed about the house looking for Aldous’s paints, wanting to borrow them to complete his portrait.

  ‘You’ve got to give it to him,’ Graham said, when Bill had left the room, ‘Even when he’s pissed out of his skull he can get a good likeness. He’s still got a steady hand.’

  Steve the actor seemed utterly mesmerized by the image.

  ‘That is very beautiful,’ he said, approaching closely the pencilled, life-size image of Angelica, whose breasts, even though composed of just half a dozen strokes of a 4b pencil, seemed to have all the weight and volume of real breasts, so that he couldn’t resist reaching out to touch them, ‘That is very beautiful, and very clever.’

  Bill had rummaged through three rooms in search of painting materials. By this time Colette and Aldous were back from The Red Lion, relieved, like Julian, to find the house full of people. On evenings like these they tended to encourage the guests to stay for as long as possible, or at least until Janus was too tired and too drunk to be a problem.

  Interest was beginning to mount in the downstairs rooms as to what precisely was going on upstairs.

  ‘What do you need paints for?’ said Rita Michaelangeli.

  ‘I am, like your noble namesake, executing a fresco for his holiness Pope Janus the second.’

  Eventually, people began climbing the stairs to have a look as Bill, with a skill that dazzled everyone, began colouring his painting. It had the splashy, drippy, sketchy feel of the rushed portrait, though there was such sincerity
in every mark and stroke, such accuracy in the proportions, and in the expressions on the faces, that it drew gasps of astonishment from everyone who entered the room. Though no one seemed to have thought of what Guy Sweetman, who was married to the naked Eve in Bill’s portrait, would make of it.

  Guy had been distantly tolerant, so it seemed, of Janus’s infatuation with his wife, and had taken his drunken eulogies and anonymously posted love-letters as part of some sort of game, the extension of one of Janus’s many pub-personae. But this evening, when he ambled into Janus’s bedroom to see what all the laughter was about, he was less tolerant.

  Guy Sweetman had been a schoolfriend of Bill Brothers, he was tall, slim and dark haired. He was handsome, and he knew it. He wore black velvet jackets, jeans belted with a big silver buckle, Cuban heeled suede shoes. He looked, as many young men seemed to these days, like Jesus Christ, and sometimes he would play up on this resemblance by affecting an all-knowing, miracle-working, parable-telling manner. When introducing himself to strangers he would say ‘I am Guy’, not ‘Hi, I’m Guy’, but simply ‘I am Guy’, placing this awesome emphasis on his name as a state of existence, no mere label, but an entity. He had, as far as anyone could tell, never worked for any length of time, apart from short stints of bar work or behind the till in Windhover Hill’s one betting shop, and yet he never seemed to be without money. He subsisted on the borrowing of small change from his countless acquaintances, the calling in of favours, the affection and generosity he seemed to inspire in people. Bill always said how Guy could talk himself into and out of anything. He could charm the birds from the trees. A sweet-talker.

  To Janus, however, Guy was a mere brute, a talentless, hirsute waster who tried to conceal the abject nullity of his personality with these contrivances, his Christ-persona, his half-hearted hippiedom (he once, after an absence from The Quiet Woman of more than a year, claimed to have hitch-hiked to India, though it was discovered through a friend of a friend that he had been merely living in a squat in Balham).

  Janus’s infatuation with Angelica had begun at a party at the house of Hugo and Veronica Price, where she had allowed Janus an evening of clumsy smooching and sympathetic listening. Janus’s whole life, from then on, seemed to be devoted to repeating that experience with Angelica.

  Guy put a hand on Bill’s shoulder.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Guy said, his voice quiet, as ever.

  Bill turned, his loaded brush dripping on the floor.

  ‘I’m just daubing a quick Sistine Chapel style painting on my brother-in-law’s i.e. Pope Janus II’s bedroom wall,’ he gave a laugh that would normally have placated Guy, a laugh that was meant to seem out of control, but wasn’t.

  ‘I’m not happy with it,’ said Guy, gesturing towards the image of Angelica, ‘I don’t like it . . . you’ve painted my wife on the wall, man, she’s starkers for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘I know,’ Bill’s voice had become imploring, realising, suddenly, that Guy was very cross. Janus watched, annoyed at how quickly Bill seemed to defer to Guy, as though he had some sort of power, as though he’d really been taken in by Guy’s messianic persona, ‘Shall I paint a bra on her, perhaps, you know, a Playtex cross your heart . . .’

  ‘It’s my woman, man,’ he said, by way of explaining everything, ‘come on, man, it’s my woman.’

  ‘It’s my fucking wall,’ said Janus.

  ‘Yeah, well if it’s your wall what’s my wife doing on it?’ said Guy, turning suddenly to face Janus.

  The crowded room became silent. Angelica herself was not in the house. She had never been to Fernlight Avenue.

  ‘It’s my wall, I can have who I like on it.’

  There didn’t seem to be a strong argument against this statement. Guy instead concentrated on the principle at stake, ‘But she’s my woman, and I’m not having her in the nude on the bedroom wall of this piss artist. I don’t care whose wall it is, the wall is not the point. The point is the woman depicted, she’s mine, not yours, you’re a sick-in-the-head bastard, and I’m telling you to get this off your wall now.’

  ‘Hey, Guy,’ Bill said, ‘this is a – you know – for Christ’s sake, man,’ (Bill was trying to speak to him in his own language, that sad mixture of Americanese and Sixties flower power) ‘this is a work of art, man, it’s an image of beauty.’

  Guy didn’t seem convinced. He made further protestations, declared repeatedly that the image depicted was of ‘his woman’, and as such was his property. His behaviour dumbfounded the people in the room, who knew Guy to be a peaceable, easygoing sort of person, astonishingly vain, it was true, with a whiff of arrogance about him, but never one to make a scene like this.

  When, finally, he made a lunge for the paints and brushes that were set up on the floor, with the intention, it seemed, of destroying the image himself, Janus physically intervened, and a tussle ensued, with the two men rolling silently about the floor and across Janus’s bed, until separated by Bill and some of the others. Ruffled and red faced, Guy left the room, spitting quietly to himself, and that would have been an end of it, but for the fact that as Guy retreated, approaching the top of the stairs, Janus went quickly after him and gave him a strong push from behind that sent him crashing into the top of the stairs and down the stairwell, Guy just managing to remain upright as he plunged the depth of the staircase to the bottom. In the process he smashed his face into the wall at the top of the stairs and bloodied his nose. Bill and Steve rushed out onto the landing to restrain Janus, the women downstairs came out of the kitchen to see wounded Guy standing stupidly in the hall, his hand over his nose.

  Rita Michaelangeli gave a little shriek at the blood that hung on Guy’s beard. Veronica made stern, schoolteacherly noises that expressed a despairing opinion of men in general, and these men in particular.

  ‘Has anyone punched Hugo?’ she said, almost hopefully.

  ‘I hope not,’ said Rita, ‘or anyone else. Blimey. All that blood.’

  There was still disturbance upstairs, as though Janus was trying to make his way downstairs in pursuit of Guy.

  ‘Don’t let that bastard anywhere near me,’ cried Guy through his blood, spitting red as he shouted up the stairs, the women were shocked, having never heard Guy shout before, ‘If he comes anywhere near me or my wife again, he’s a fucking dead man, do you hear me!’

  Guy left through the front door, slamming it.

  The noises upstairs continued. Julian came down. He was pounced on for information.

  ‘What’s going on up there Julian?’ said Juliette.

  ‘Janus is punching everyone.’

  ‘Everyone?’ said Juliette incredulously, as she made for the stairs.

  ‘Don’t go up there, Juliette,’ said Veronica, ‘it sounds dangerous.’

  ‘What are they doing?’

  To an unenlightened listener, the noises upstairs could have been made by a party of large men attempting to move a very heavy and awkwardly shaped piece of furniture. There was a general sense of weight shifting, objects being dropped, occasional grunts and cries of exertion.

  ‘Bill!’ Juliette called up the stairs.

  ‘It’s gone quiet now,’ said Veronica.

  Bill appeared at the top of the stairs. He looked shocked, and his jacket sleeve was ripped. He seemed just about to come down when a cry made him return to the front bedroom.

  Then the cacophony of broken glass, something landing in the bushes of the front garden. Colette rushed to the window and looked out.

  ‘There’s a dressing table in the garden,’ she said, ‘I’ll go and get Mr Milliner.’

  ‘Mr Milliner?’ said Veronica.

  ‘The next door neighbour,’ explained Juliette.

  ‘But there are about four men up there, surely they can control Janus.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like it, does it? Mr Milliner’s a policeman, he knows all the holds . . .’

  ‘Hugo!’ Rita called up the stairs.

  ‘Why worry about Hugo?’ said
Veronica, ‘It’ll do him good if he gets a punch in the gearbox. I’m sorry, Juliette, I shouldn’t be so flippant. I’ve never known Janus like this, does he often get violent?’

  ‘Only every other night,’ said Juliette

  ‘Really? But he’s never like this in the pub.’

  ‘No, he saves it all for when he gets home.’

  A sound from upstairs that could have been a piano landing on someone’s toe. Then Janus’s yelp, ‘But you’re my favourite brother-in-law!’

  Hugo appeared at the top of the stairs. He was without his dark glasses. He was carrying the velvet jacket he’d previously been wearing, carefully folded over one arm. He glanced behind him, then descended the stairs silently, almost as if in a trance. He acknowledged none of those in the hall as he reached them. His face was shiny with sweat and he was breathing heavily, as though having run for a bus.

  ‘Hugo, what’s been going on up there? Where are you going?’

  ‘Out of this house,’ said Hugo, fumbling with the catch on the front door.

  ‘What’s Janus doing?’

  ‘An imitation of a mad dog,’ said Hugo quietly, finally succeeding in opening the front door, unintentionally readmitting Colette. He left as she entered.

  ‘That’s right,’ called Veronica after him, ‘just piss off and leave us on our own with a madman . . .’

  ‘Mr Milliner’s out,’ said Colette, ‘on the night shift with the vice squad. I’ve telephoned the real police . . .’

  ‘You expect me to walk home on my own?’ Veronica went on calling after her husband, who’d long gone.

  ‘I’ll get him back,’ said Rita, running out of the front door after Hugo.