Janus went to see Bill at work. It was the only sure way he could think of contacting him. In all the time he’d known Bill he’d never seen him at work and he didn’t recognize him at first. He was at the back of the Lo-Fare, a crowded, slightly shabby supermarket near Southgate tube, behind the butchery counter. He was wearing a white doctor’s coat with a traditional butcher’s striped apron, blood-splattered, tied across it. On his head was a white trilby hat, and his long hair was tucked up behind him in a bun.
‘How could you work for a firm that makes you look so stupid?’ Janus said, with a tone of deep disappointment in his voice.
‘I’m only wearing this because we’ve had the health inspectors in today. Normally I can leave the hat off. Look, I’ve cut myself today.’ He held up his left hand, the thumb heavily bandaged, as though this made up for the hat.
‘I got your letter.’
‘Letter?’
Had Bill forgotten the letter?
‘Here.’
Janus produced the letter from his inside pocket, as though providing the proof in some intense legal dispute.
Bill took it and read it with interest. He had forgotten writing it. He must have been very drunk.
‘May I draw your attention to paragraph four section three, where you propose a drinking session at The Quiet Woman?’
‘Yes,’ said Bill, thoughtfully, ‘Guy has stopped going there, I’m not sure why . . .’
‘That’s what you said in the letter . . .’
Bill scanned the letter quickly several times. He was having difficulty deciphering his own script.
‘Yes, that’s right. The coast is clear. The coast is clear, the beaches uncluttered, the sands refined . . .’ He broke down into exaggerated chuckles, ‘I must have been so pissed when I wrote this.’
‘So are we going tonight?’ Janus was having trouble holding his patience.
Bill performed an elaborate mime. Somehow, purely with his hands, he managed to convey the information that Juliette was making it difficult for him to go drinking with Janus.
‘My learned sister?’
‘Her of the scholarly persuasion.’
Juliette had recently been attending evening classes. She was doing two A Levels, English and History, with a view to going to university. Her evenings were now spent in quiet study. Bill had to have the television down low while she worked on her essays in the bedroom. If they went to the pub they went together, once a week. Already Bill sensed the fledgling vocabulary in her conversation, those words that had crept in – imagery, structure, narrative, filling out week by week, day by day . . .
‘But we need to discover the source of the Limpopo,’ said Janus, somewhat pathetically. The sentence was difficult to say sober, coming, as it did, from the furthest reaches of their drunken theatricals, it writhed in the late afternoon air like an excised worm.
‘I have a plan,’ said Bill, consolingly, picking up an alarmingly bright and long knife, which he then sharpened against a steel.
‘I’ll try and slip out of The Quiet Woman tonight,’ said Bill, the double entendre so commonplace it passed unnoticed, ‘and call for you at Fernlight Avenue . . .’
‘Why don’t I meet you in The Quiet Woman?’
‘I don’t think . . . I mean, I can try and suggest that my beloved wife sees some of her student friends instead of coming to The Quiet Woman, or else spends an evening indoors to work on her latest dissertation or symposium or whatever she calls them . . . It would be best if you wait for me at Fernlight Avenue.’
The two were silent for a few awkward seconds.
‘I’ve got some readies,’ said Janus, offering Bill a glimpse of his dole money.
‘I’ve just remembered, Mary Fox has got a job at The Owl. She started there last week. Why don’t we go to The Owl?’
‘I’m banned from The Owl.’
‘But The Owl changed hands a few weeks ago. I think we should go to The Owl and pay a visit to Mary Fox. I’ve also heard Lucy Fox and Cassie Fox drink there now as well.’
It had been the appearance of Carl, an American from St Louis, Missouri, in The Quiet Woman one evening a couple of years before, that had started Janus and Bill’s referring to sexy women as foxes. Carl, befriended by the pair for the duration of his brief stay in Britain, made a point of referring to desirable women as ‘foxy’, and since then Janus and Bill had used this term and developed it and elaborated it, so that now they conferred upon any fanciable woman the surname ‘Fox’, and indulged an anthropomorphic fancy when talking about them, a kind of code, favoured particularly by Bill, to disguise the meaning of what he was saying when talking within earshot of his wife, who, he believed, had no idea that when he talked about fox-hunting he meant prowling for dames.
‘I want to go to The Quiet Woman,’ said Janus with quiet emphasis, ‘I want to see my friends again, it’s been a long time . . .’
Bill looked uncomfortable.
‘You realize that since Guy has stopped coming, Angelica Fox has not been coming either . . .’
He spoke carefully, as though fearful of igniting something.
‘I don’t care about Angelica. I just want to see my friends again . . .’
‘Ok,’ said Bill with his eyes closed, as though he’d reached a final decision. ‘I’ll call for you at about nine o’clock tonight. I promise, Janus, I will. You just stay sober and keep some money and I’ll call for you.’
‘Promise?’
‘I promise.’
On the way home Janus bought a four-pack of Special Brew from the off-licence on the corner near The Goat and Compasses. In the kitchen at Fernlight Avenue he ate rapidly the dinner his mother had made, and then retired to the music room.
He played Schumann’s Carnival from memory, then cracked open the first can, drank it in one go. He dallied for a while with his transcription of Beethoven’s Quartet Opus 130. This project had engaged him, on and off, for several years, and was, he believed, the finest version for solo piano of that piece that had yet been written. The only other transcriptions Janus knew of were for two pianists, which even then failed to render the four-part complexity of Beethoven’s music adequately. Janus worked on a couple of bars from the opening of the last movement (he’d originally intended to restore the Grosse Fugue to its rightful place here, but couldn’t resist the flirty jig of Beethoven’s substituted finale), before cracking open his second can, drinking it.
Then it was Fats Waller. Janus sang as he played. Art Tatum. Cole Porter. Gershwin. Dorothy Fields.
Janus opened another can, taking swigs intermittently but steadily. Errol Garner, Oscar Peterson. He was becoming a little tired by now. His back was beginning to hurt, his fingers began to feel numb. He left the music room and went into the kitchen, where Colette was sitting alone. Julian was upstairs. Aldous was in the front room, his territory on Friday nights, an area implicitly out of bounds for Janus.
Janus walked over to the sink, opened his mouth and vomited into it. He didn’t hear his mother’s cries of disgust. He turned on the taps to wash away the puke, and then looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. It had gone past nine. It was well past. It was getting on for ten. Still that bastard hadn’t called. Had he really been playing the piano all that time? Why hadn’t he called? Nine, he’d said. He should have called by now.
Janus left the house and walked up Fernlight Avenue towards the corner with Hoopers Lane, marked by a house with a spire and a tall, thin oak tree. In the front garden of the house there was a wishing well newly installed. Mrs Bird had gone to the trouble of bringing into her garden a full-size replica – brick and mortar base under a wooden canopy complete with winding gear, handle and bucket, but no well beneath. Like someone in the future having a replica of a bath in their front garden, or a lavatory.
There were other wells in Windhover Hill, though none were as new as this. Most of them were installed, it seemed, shortly after the building of the houses. A fad before the war, a boom in undug wells. Some h
ouses even managed a fountain. He could hear them trickling in the dark as he walked past, along Hoopers Lane towards Windhover Hill Green.
Windhover Hill Green was mostly antique shops and pubs. There was The Marquis of Granby, where the nouveau riche of the district liked to park their Ford Capris and lean against their bonnets on summer evenings with pints of fizzy beer in their hands. The Volunteer was an old coaching inn overlooking the Green itself, its clientele mostly the old people of the area, who could remember, almost, the place when it really was a village. The Quiet Woman was a few yards down Chapel Road, past the station, in between a florist’s and a pet shop.
Had a piano been playing, it might have stopped as Janus entered the pub. As it was, the newly installed jukebox carried on with its thumping melodies. Janus found Bill at the bar, drinking with Steve, the actor, and a woman Janus didn’t know. Bill and Steve were well into their session, Bill was looking bleary and slightly hysterical, Steve’s blond curls were fastened with sweat to his forehead. The woman, as small and alert as an antelope with eyebrows plucked almost to nothing, the empty spaces beneath filled with green eyeshadow, was looking at Steve in an admiring way, though saying nothing.
‘You didn’t call for me . . .’
Bill took Janus’s arm and spoke reassuringly into his ear.
‘I’ve only just managed to shake off your dear sister. I was just going to make my way over . . .’
A pint of lager arrived in Janus’s hand, having been conveyed from the bar via Steve and then Bill.
Janus drank the beer quickly, draining the glass and handing it back to Bill.
The chain operated again in reverse, the glass returning to the bar for a refill.
‘I want some nuts as well,’ said Janus, with the sulkily defiant tone of a child testing the limits of its parents’ generosity.
The beer and nuts were delivered.
‘The others are over there,’ said Bill pointing at a table some way away, ‘I’ll be over in a minute, I’ve just got to settle some business with Steve and his little fox . . . I’ll be over in a minute.’
Janus found the others seated in a circle around a large table. There was Hugo Price and Veronica, Rita Michaelangeli, Terry, Graham, Scott, Lucy, Hazel, and some others he didn’t know. No Angelica. Janus took a seat in this circle, the others shuffling their chairs to make room. There was an uneasy silence.
Janus then made a sudden exit to the toilet. When he returned to the table there were some empty chairs. Terry, Lucy and Hazel had made their escape. The others looked as though they’d been in the act of escaping as Janus returned, they looked sheepish, knowing now they were lumbered.
Janus took a pull on his beer then opened the first packet of dry roasted peanuts, and emptied the entire contents into his mouth. While he chewed on these he opened the second packet and added those to the half-chewed nuts already in his mouth. He opened a third packet, added them. By the fifth packet he could barely fit the nuts into his mouth, his cheeks bulging like a hamster’s. Then, his mouth packed to capacity with half-chewed nut he said ‘Bollocks!’ as loudly as he could, spraying chewed peanuts widely before him. Wet pieces of nut landed in Hugo Price’s treacly hair, in Veronica’s frizzy afro, they stuck to the tinted lenses of Rita’s glasses, they plopped into grey-bearded Graham’s Double Diamond and Scott’s pint of Watney’s Red Barrel. Normally such a stunt would have met with whoops of laughter from those sprayed upon, but somehow Janus’s drunkenness had outgrown the pub that had nurtured it, and he was now regarded here as an embarrassment. Thus Janus was in a dilemma. The quality which had won him popularity in the early days was now having an opposite effect.
For some time the others at the table carried on a conversation as if Janus wasn’t there, and Janus’s attention wandered. He noticed a couple sitting at a nearby table. A man with shaggy black hair and a winsome moustache sitting alongside his girlfriend or wife, a pristine little thing with cropped blonde hair and dangly earrings. They had been engaged in some intimate conversation of a gently competitive nature (‘yes you did’, ‘no I didn’t’) that had now come to an end, and they were looking vaguely around them for want of anything else to say. The man caught Janus’s eye for a moment, and so Janus said, quietly, ‘Cunt.’
He said the word in a relishing sort of way, with an emphasis on the final consonant which he spat out, almost giving the word two syllables – cun-t. Quiet though it was, the couple picked up on this word instantly, and seeing that it was directed at them, assumed a kind of collectively sulky expression. Janus repeated and elaborated.
‘Cunts. Fucking cunts. Fucking shitheads. Shitfaces. Fuckers.’
‘Janus,’ said Hugo, who’d noticed this vituperative digression, ‘take it easy.’
‘No, come on,’ said the man, ‘let’s hear some more of what he’s got to say.’
‘Sorry,’ said Hugo to the man, who seemed to take this apology rather indignantly.
‘Doesn’t bother me,’ said the man, ‘but if he says anything more he’ll get this glass in his face.’
Janus let the incident pass. It had done its work. He had impressed himself upon this drearily happy couple, had stirred the man to an apelike hostility and had frightened the woman. He felt satisfied.
By this time, however, some other people had arrived at the table, and were sitting either side of Janus. Janus knew them vaguely as the ‘heavy’ friends of Guy that Bill had referred to. They were large, it was true, but they hardly looked threatening. One, in fact, looked rather like the television presenter David Attenborough. They were trying to engage Janus in some sort of conversation, of the ironically jovial type that heavies seem to specialize in, full of concealed threats and violent implications, ‘that’s a nice suit you’re wearing, wouldn’t like to see that spoilt. Play the piano don’t you, be terrible if something happened to your hands.’
‘Do you like penguins?’ said Janus.
The Attenborough lookalike shrugged, as if to say he didn’t get the implication, and he didn’t care.
‘I think it’s terrible about the white rhinos,’ Janus went on, ‘and the giant pandas.’
‘Yeah, well you’ll be an endangered species soon,’ said the other man, cottoning-on remarkably quickly – was it well known that his friend looked like David Attenborough, Janus wondered – ‘if you get my meaning.’
‘Why is spunk white and piss yellow?’ said Janus.
The heavies offered no answer.
‘So an Irishman can tell if he’s coming or going.’
His old boss at Swallows, Mr Hawes had told him that one.
‘Yeah, well you won’t know if you’re coming or going pretty soon,’ said David Attenborough, ‘if you keep causing my mates grief.’
‘We’re talking Mr pretty-boy Sweetman here are we, gentlemen?’
By this time Janus noticed that the table at which he sat was empty, apart from the three of them. Gradually, one by one, the others had departed, to the bar or to the toilets, never to return.
‘Why don’t you come outside with us,’ said David Attenborough, taking hold of Janus’s arm.
‘What for?’ said Janus.
‘We’ve got something we’d like to show you,’ said the other, taking hold of Janus’s other arm, the two men then lifting Janus.
‘What is it?’
‘You’ll see.’
They began walking Janus to the door. Janus felt suddenly weak. The two men were holding him so tightly his arms were hurting. He was escorted through the double doors of the pub and out onto the pavement. Here Janus’s arms were held behind his back by the other man while David Attenborough prepared himself to deliver a sharp blow to Janus’s midriff, savouring the moment like a bowler about to bowl. Visions of gorillas in leafy jungles, the grizzly bears of Yosemite, of mountain lions came into Janus’s mind as he braced himself for the punch, but the process was interrupted by a voice.
‘Len,’ said Bill Brothers, who’d appeared behind David Attenborough’s shou
lder. Attenborough looked round.
‘Oh. Hello Bill.’
‘What’s happening.’
‘Oh, you know. Just going to teach this joker a lesson. He’s been bothering people.’
‘But that’s Janus Jones.’
‘Yeah, I know. Arrogant bastard. Needs his spleen stretching.’
‘But you can’t do that to Janus Jones, he’s a special man. He’s an important person.’
David Attenborough was rapidly losing his fire. He looked deeply bereft and cast Bill an expression that said something like ‘Not even a little punch? Not even a smack in the chops?’ And eventually Janus was released and the two heavies had to make do with scowls and nose to nose stare-outs, warning Janus to be ‘careful in future’ and to ‘watch his step’, before they reluctantly went back into the pub.
Janus and Bill stood beneath the sign of The Quiet Woman, a headless Elizabethan, which swung, with a squeaking sound, back and forth. Bright spotlights that lit the front of the pub made everything look blue.
‘What’s happening?’ said Janus, ‘I need to piss.’
He did so, copiously, casually, into the gutter, making no attempt to conceal himself. The incident with the heavies had reaffirmed yet again Janus’s sensation that he was blessed, touched, indestructible.
By the time he had finished Bill was with Steve, the actor, though the girl that had been with them was no longer around.
The actor had a habit, when drunk, of snapping his fingers, both hands simultaneously, annoyingly out of synch with each other. He snapped his fingers now, as though anticipating delights.
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 16
