I’ll Go To Bed At Noon

by Gerard Woodward

  Blacked out was how they often found him. Eventually, towards the spring, Colette, after having picked her brother out of yet another swamp of his own filth, bathed him, shaved him, cut his toenails and dressed him, said ‘Janus, you’ve got no choice, sell up and move back to London. You don’t have to buy a house like the one in Leicester Avenue, you could buy a nice little flat near us. There’s even one over the road that’s going for sale.’

  ‘No, dear . . .’

  ‘But I just can’t cope with the journey out here any more. It’s just too much to ask of Aldous and Julian . . .’

  ‘The kid doesn’t have to come . . .’

  ‘But I can’t leave him at home with Janus for the weekend, it’s not fair . . .’

  Janus sighed.

  ‘Shall we play the organ?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Kojak’ll be on soon. I know it was a mistake to move out here,’ he said, consoling his sister’s weeping, ‘but it’s too late. I’ve done it. And I can’t move back, it would be too retrograde. One has to go forwards, one mustn’t go backwards in life . . .’

  ‘You call this forwards?’ snapped Colette. ‘You’re in a worse state now than you were in Leicester Avenue, it hasn’t done you any good at all . . .’

  ‘Let’s give it some more time. I haven’t even been here for a year yet. And you don’t have to come out here every other week, I’m coping, honestly. I may not look as though I am but I am.’

  ‘No you’re not, you’re drinking yourself to death.’

  Janus Brian gave an apologetic laugh, then said nothing. After a while Colette, lowering her voice so that Julian in the other room couldn’t hear, said, ‘Janus, I want you to come on holiday with us this year, in the summer. We’re going camping in Tewkesbury. We went there a couple of years ago, there’s this lovely little campsite in the middle of the town, we could put you in a nice B & B for a couple of weeks, it’s a lovely town.’

  ‘Tewkesbury?’

  ‘Yes, have you been there?’

  ‘Near Gloucester, out that way isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, I don’t think I have. I may have passed through. No, I’d be in the way, dear, very nice of you to offer.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be in the way. Julian wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t had a holiday for a long time,’ said Janus Brian thoughtfully, ‘a very long time indeed.’

  Part Three

  11

  30th July 1976 – 7.15pm

  – He’s shot him.

  – There’s the light.

  – Where did he get that coffee from?

  – Polystyrene.

  – What’s going on? I haven’t got a clue.

  – There are some faggots in the freezer.

  – A faggot (laughs).

  – Valse Oubliez. Follow the fingering.

  – Every stiff that comes in the joint owes you.

  – Aldous, do you remember that?

  – Count Basie.

  – Do you know what’s going on?

  – There are some faggots in the freezer.

  – Do you know Kojak calls homosexuals faggots?

  – You figured a cockamamie heist.

  – The only heist round here’s a parking meter.

  – Those cars.

  – He’s got two sedans inside.

  – A first class wheel-man.

  – If you said there were some faggots in the freezer to an American he would think you were very queer. (Laughs)

  – The lights keep going.

  – Do you know you use a gallon of water every time you flush the loo?

  – I can’t drink coffee any more, it makes me fart.

  – Tell me what he’s doing, Colette, can you follow these things. What? No. (Coughs)

  – Yes. In the cupboard.

  – Do the faggots need defrosting?

  – Look at the stars.

  – He’s one cute cookie, I’ve had a tail on him for two days and I can’t pick him up for jaywalking.

  – A gallon of water to flush away what can’t be more than a cupful of urine.

  – I wish I knew what was happening.

  – Someone’s going to get shot.

  – He’s just done ninety days on Riker’s Island.

  – I think there’s a bulb in the bathroom.

  – Gambling, prostitution, razzle dazzle.

  – What’s going on?

  Colette, Juliette and Julian were sitting in the garden at Fernlight Avenue. It was noon on a Saturday at the beginning of August.

  The heat was so intense that Colette had taken off her blouse and was wearing nothing but a pair of navy blue slacks and a black bra, lounging in the laminated wicker hoop chair that had once furnished the music room with its graceful modernism. She was made-up because she had been getting ready to take Julian to the pictures. Her lipstick was vivid and complete, her eye shadow subtly applied, so that its peacock blue was not quite as shocking as it might have been. In addition to her make-up she was wearing a coronet of sunflowers which she had constructed, picking the small heads from the array that grew within reach of her chair.

  ‘I’m still not sure why you’ve done it, Julian,’ she called to her son who was wandering aimlessly around the garden, wearing the sulky expression he’d adopted since learning that Janus Brian was coming on holiday to Tewkesbury with them tomorrow, ‘you’ve written it down, word for word, everything that Janus Brian said last weekend.’

  ‘Read some more,’ said Juliette, who was sitting in the grass beside her mother, ‘I almost get the feeling I’m in High Wycombe.’

  Colette had found the papers on the kitchen table. A whole sheaf of intricately scrawled A4. She had assumed them to be some schoolwork of Julian’s. Then she supposed he was writing a play. Then, on closely reading the pages, she recognized the monologue as Janus Brian’s, and she relived the previous weekend’s visit to the bungalow. They had watched Kojak, Aldous had (very badly) attempted some of the pieces he’d found in the piano stool, Colette had made a supper of faggots and instant mashed potato, which Janus Brian hadn’t eaten. Then she read through more. There were pages and pages of the stuff. Preserved monologues dated and going back to their first visits in the spring of 1974, more than two years ago. If she learnt anything, it was that Janus Brian’s small talk hadn’t changed in that time – snatches of reiterated TV, babble about music and food.

  Julian hadn’t seemed bothered when she found the papers and had brought them out into the garden, where he was talking with Juliette, who’d come round for a visit. In fact, he seemed amused, and wanted his mother to read them aloud.

  ‘Are you going to make it all into a play, or something?’ she asked him.

  Julian shrugged, picked up a yellow plum that had fallen from the Warwickshire Drooper.

  ‘It’s what writers do,’ said Juliette. ‘Copy down what people are saying, then try to pass it off as their own invention.’

  Juliette had been a full time student at Ponders End Polytechnic for a year, studying English and Sociology, and was eager to demonstrate an academic disdain for amateur writers.

  That Julian was a writer was still a joke in the family, although he had been writing novels since primary school. The first had already been rejected by a London publisher. It worried Colette a little when Julian, at the age of ten, packed up his novel in a heavy brown envelope with shining layers of Sellotape and posted it off to Pan Books whom she knew would not publish it. She wondered how the inevitable rejection would affect him? If he really was going to be a writer shouldn’t he leave it until later in life, when he was more confident of his abilities? Rejection at such an early age might put him off writing for life and, indeed, when the novel came back with a polite card from Pan Books saying they didn’t print original novels being ‘mainly a reprint house’, she thought that might be an end to Julian’s career, since he didn’t seem
keen to send it anywhere else. But instead he began another one.

  She remembered reading his early attempts at fiction. He’d filled several school exercise books with pencilled stories which he would ask her to read to him, without pause, and then demand critical appraisal.

  ‘Is it a good story mum?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it very good?’

  ‘Yes, it’s really very good.’

  ‘But is it really, really very good?’

  ‘Yes, it’s really, really very good.’

  ‘Are you just saying that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you mean it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it good enough to be published?’

  Here Colette would have to pause, caught in the dilemma between discouraging promise and raising unrealistic hopes.

  ‘Well, it just needs a little bit of . . .’

  ‘A little bit of what?’

  ‘It just needs polishing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, just little things, like spelling and punctuation . . .’

  ‘But apart from the spelling and the punctuation, do you think it could be published?’

  ‘Yes, probably, if you polished it up in other ways . . .’

  ‘What other ways?’

  ‘Sometimes you use two short sentences when you could run them together into one longer sentence. Things like that.’

  So hard to convey to an eleven-year-old what their prose lacked in comparison to P.G. Wodehouse or John Buchan, his rather obvious role models. Now that he was a young teenager, Julian had become secretive about his novels. He didn’t show them to anyone.

  The grass in the back garden was yellow. Where the bare earth showed through the lawn, as it did in several places, it was patterned with deep cracks each wide enough to take a thumb. Above them the seven trunks of a neighbouring poplar towered. Its leaves looked shrivelled. Scipio lay curled in a patch of shade beneath the lilac, panting.

  With a languid regularity, every few seconds a few drops of water would pour over the top of the fence, the overspill from next door’s lawn sprinkler, and land with a patter on the sunflowers.

  There was talk of banning lawn sprinklers. There had already been a ban on fountains. The government was worried about the water levels in the reservoirs. There had been no rain for nearly two months. People were advised to have showers instead of baths, or to bathe in no more than four inches of water. Someone had suggested people put bricks in their cisterns to cut down on water usage. The government had appointed a minister for drought.

  ‘I do think you should consider going on a diet, mother,’ said Juliette, who shared with Julian a mild sense of horror at the sight of their mother’s torso. Her body seemed to consist of layers, each overhanging the other – neck, bust, stomach – giving the overall impression of a person disappearing beneath their own bulk.

  ‘Aldous likes me like this,’ said Colette, and was about to start talking about Rubens, when Juliette suddenly snapped.

  ‘Well dad always likes you, whatever happens – it doesn’t mean it’s good for you . . .’

  ‘Well he doesn’t try and nag me into dieting. Is that all you came round for, to give me a lecture?’

  They had been talking like this for some time – for the most part amiably, but every now and then flaring into moments of petulant discord, usually sparked by some criticism of Colette her daughter was unable to resist – of her drinking (she had a mug of Gold Label in the grass beside her chair), of her weight, of her shameless back-garden exhibitionism, even of her neglect of the garden itself, criticism which Colette was always eager to be hurt by.

  Julian was bored. He’d promised his mother he would go to the pictures with her that day for an afternoon showing of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest at the Wood Green Odeon. They’d both been eager to see the film but hadn’t been able to, Julian because it was an X-certificate, and Colette because she had no one to go with (Aldous didn’t want to see it, since he found madness, even cinematic depictions of it, repulsive). Julian was feeling embarrassed at the idea of going to the cinema with his mother, and wasn’t convinced (as his mother seemed to be) that he could get in to see the film, but accepted that going with his mother was probably his best chance.

  His strongest desire, at that moment, was to be alone in the garden and so have the opportunity of peeping through a knot hole in the new fence and watching his next door neighbour sunbathing topless, as she often did on days like this. As it was, on tiptoe, he could just see over the top of the fence to the fence beyond, and then the next fence, fence after fence all the way down the road with hollyhocks and fruit trees sprouting between, and twinkling cascades of lawn sprinklers nodding back and forth.

  ‘No,’ said Juliette, ‘I came here to tell you something else.’

  A burst of piano music came from the music room, whose French windows were open, though the room itself was barely visible through the screen of fruit trees. The music was furiously rhythmic, a melodious piece of industrial machinery.

  ‘It’s Prokofiev,’ said Colette, noticing how Juliette was distracted by the music, ‘Janus has been practising it for days. He says it’s one of the hardest pieces he’s tried.’

  ‘Has he been boozing today?’

  ‘No,’ said Colette, as though shocked at the suggestion, ‘He couldn’t play like that if he’d been drinking . . .’

  They debated for a moment if Janus’s playing sounded drunken. Juliette insisted that it did, being loud and cacophonously atonal. Colette said that Juliette didn’t understand the music, and that if she knew more about Prokofiev she would know how sober the playing was.

  ‘Besides,’ said Colette, ‘you know how he hasn’t been drinking since he got that suspended sentence.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not true, mother.’

  ‘Apart from the odd lapse now and then . . .’

  ‘It’s been more than the odd lapse. He’s been seeing Bill again. After Bill finishes work on Fridays they meet up, then on Saturdays, sometimes Sundays. The whole weekend. Bill tries to put him off, he tries to turn him out of the flat, but once he’s had a couple of drinks his mood changes and he starts being all sentimental and saying how Janus is the best friend he’s ever had, how we’re all being cruel to him, that we don’t understand him . . .’

  Juliette hung her head for a moment, trying to control her thoughts. Julian pitched in from beneath the plum tree, ‘Why don’t you call the police out?’

  ‘No,’ said Colette, ‘she couldn’t do that. One call to the police and he’ll be in prison.’

  ‘I’ve resorted to a simpler solution,’ said Juliette. ‘I’m leaving Bill.’

  ‘Leaving Bill?’ said Colette, quietly, resettling the sunflower diadem that had slipped down, ‘are you really? When?’

  ‘Tomorrow. That’s what I came here to tell you. I’m moving in with someone else.’

  ‘Who? Some professor or other I suppose.’

  ‘His name’s Boris.’

  ‘Boris?’ Colette said the name as though she couldn’t believe it was a real name, not a name that people actually had. She reacted as though her daughter had said she was moving in with someone called Rumpelstiltskin, or Pinnochio. ‘I don’t believe you know anyone called Boris.’

  ‘Well I do.’

  ‘And what’s he a professor of? Vampires?’

  ‘He’s not a professor of anything. He works for the GPO.’

  ‘So what’s he studying?’

  ‘I didn’t meet him at college mother, he’s nothing to do with the college. He’s a regular at The Quiet Woman. We’ve known each other for a long time. He’s an old friend . . .’

  ‘I can’t believe,’ her mother said, allowing certain latent snobberies to surface, ‘that after a year at a polytechnic . . . I mean, I could foresee that you and Bill would grow apart once you became a full-time student, that doesn’t really come as a surprise to me – but with all the
fascinating people you must be meeting, you’re shacking up with some postman who boozes in The Quiet Woman . . .’

  ‘He’s not a postman, he’s a telephone engineer. He’s skilled. Anyway, I didn’t come here to ask for your opinion on him, I just came here to tell you my new address, as from tomorrow.’

  ‘We’re going on holiday tomorrow . . .’

  ‘I know, that’s why I came over today.’

  ‘And what does Bill think of all this?’

  Juliette paused, then looked around her, as if to make sure no one else was listening. The continuing noise from the music room meant Janus was out of earshot.

  ‘I haven’t told him yet. I’m telling him tonight . . .’

  ‘How will he take it, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just hope he doesn’t get all pathetic and start begging – I’d almost prefer it if he got angry. It’s such a mess. I won’t have time to sort my things out. Then we’re supposed to be going to a party tomorrow night – Veronica’s birthday party. I’ll have to miss that I think.’