Janus was relishing the moment. Death made visible, an entity, a thing with shape and noise, approaching. Whatever happened next, whether he saved Bill, or Bill saved himself, or if either or both of them died, nothing would be the same again after this moment. Like witnessing a birth. Janus was enjoying the last moments of his old life. He stepped onto the track with Bill, in-between the rails that were now shining like double shafts of sunlight breaking the darkness.
‘We’ve got about eight seconds, Brothers,’ said Janus to Bill, at his feet like a dog.
The train gave a sound from its horn. They’d been seen. The sound came again, shrieking with urgency. Bill, as if roused by this sound, grabbed wildly at Janus’s leg, knocking him off balance. They fell across the track, lit now in a blaze of leading lights, they heard in their ears the ringing of brakes biting into steel wheels, the wheels biting into the rails, and a screaming of such ferocity it was as though the metal itself was crying out, as though the earth was crying out . . .
Janus could not properly recall how he managed to remove both himself and Bill Brothers from the path of the train, nor how they managed to effect an escape through the brambles while the guard and the driver, having brought the train to an agonizing halt over the spot where they’d lain, had searched with torchlight all over the cutting, later joined by police and firemen. All Janus could properly remember was the wheezing of Bill Brothers close to his ears, the drawing in and out of air through restricted airways. Bill’s breathing sounded like something grotesquely heavy being dragged through deep grass, and all the time Janus wondered why he bothered with such weight, why he couldn’t just drop it, let it go, be free of it.
13
Aldous, Colette and Julian arrived at Janus Brian’s bungalow just after noon on the first day of their summer holiday. Net curtains were lifted in neighbouring bungalows about the turning circle, as Colette, after repeatedly ringing an unanswered doorbell, let herself in. Janus Brian had, of course, been constantly reminded of the fact that Aldous and Colette would be calling for him that morning. Only the day before yesterday she’d spoken to him on the phone to make sure he would be ready, and he’d sounded perky and optimistic, said he was looking forward to going away, that he would be ready with his suitcase at 12 o’clock, understanding how Aldous and Colette didn’t want to wait around, that they wanted to get to Tewkesbury in good time.
So she was surprised, for once, by the squalor in which they found him. Semi-conscious and semi-naked on the bed, he’d evidently urinated while lying down, merely aiming himself roughly over the side of the bed, because the carpet beneath was drenched with pee.
Colette slapped him about the face, showing a rare loss of patience with her brother. Aldous, too, was cross, and stomped about the bungalow, rooting out Janus Brian’s stock of alcohol, while Janus Brian wailed huskily.
‘I’m not going,’ he said, ‘I can’t do it. Buzz off without me.’
‘You’re coming with us,’ snarled Colette, ‘you’re coming with us if I have to tie this bed to the back of the car.’
She yanked her brother out of bed and he fell in a crumpled heap on the floor. She and Aldous dragged him, his feet trailing, to the bathroom, where he was stripped and dipped. The quietness of his voice did slightly worry Colette. It was almost as though he’d lost his voice completely, and although he was trying to shout, barely more than a whisper was coming out.
Aldous did his best to tidy the bungalow, while Julian drifted from room to room, sometimes reading from the paperback he’d brought with him, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, noting with interest the faecal deposits in the bedroom where, in the top drawer of the chest, he found two pornographic magazines, a Penthouse and a Men Only. Almost instinctively he stole one of these, the Penthouse, slipping it into his inside pocket, then pushing it down into the lining of his jacket.
Colette soaped her brother’s face and shaved it, sponged his scalp and brushed his hair. There were no clean clothes in which to dress Janus Brian, they had to make do with the least soiled elements of his meagre wardrobe, with the promise of clean clothes in Tewkesbury.
Aldous found several bottles of Beefeater gin, mostly empty, though one was nearly full. As Colette finished her grooming of Janus Brian in the living room, he caught a glimpse of Aldous passing the door with his arms full of bottles.
‘Christ,’ he whispered, ‘what’s he doing. No, don’t let him.’
‘No more gin now, Janus,’ said Colette, ‘not today.’
‘Stop him for fuck’s sake,’ he cried, faintly, as a clinking sound came from the kitchen, of several empty bottles falling into a bin. Somehow he mustered the energy to escape his rocking chair and make it into the hall, where he met Aldous returning from the kitchen. A brief tussle ensued which resulted in Janus Brian falling onto the floor, where he seemed to writhe mechanically, like a piece of expiring clockwork, his false teeth gnashing.
‘You bastard,’ he moaned, ‘you big bastard, you big bastard . . .’
Aldous and Colette conversed above Janus Brian, ignoring completely his floor-level invective.
‘Shall we let him have some?’
‘I’ve kept the full bottle, I suppose we could.’
‘It might settle him down.’
‘Okay. I’ll lock the rest away in the boot, let him have some now and then, once we’ve got underway.’
‘Okay.’
Janus Brian, still muttering expletives, was lifted back into the swivel chair. A cup of gin was put into his hand and he drank it lustily, spilling much out of the corners of his mouth. The transformation was instant. His voice returned, some colour (a pale violet) came to his face and his eyes began to focus.
He reached feebly across to a drawer in the television table and extracted a wad of five and ten pound notes, flipped through them rapidly, muttering, ‘that should do’, and pocketed them loosely.
‘He’s just been testing us, that’s all,’ said Colette to Aldous, ‘to see if we really wanted him to come.’
But his drunkenness was real. His filth and his lassitude were genuine. He could hardly stand, let alone walk. Aldous and Colette took an armpit each and carried Janus Brian to the car. Ridiculously light, he was easily lifted, and on his journey down the cement drive, though his feet went through the motions of walking, they didn’t actually touch the ground.
Janus Brian sat in the back of the car moaning weakly, Colette beside him, Julian in front with his father who locked the bungalow, under the covert observation of half a dozen other bungalows.
And then it was north, across the grain of the Chilterns, to Princes Risborough, Aylesbury and across the plain, all the way Janus Brian moaning in the back seat, occasionally uttering tremblingly assertive demands for gin, reaching out, when he could, to take hold of Aldous’s shoulder and shaking him. Aldous, ignoring him most of the time, now and then called over his shoulder for him to be quiet, saying he wouldn’t have any more gin before Bicester.
An American bomber passed low over the road towards its unmapped roost and everywhere there were the wintry carcasses of elms that had fallen to the disease that had recently sheared a layer off the English landscape. Colette was astonished and saddened by their abundance, so many dead trees, so suddenly dead.
Nearing Bicester Janus Brian’s demands for gin grew increasingly frantic until at one point he reached forward and took hold of the back of Aldous’s head, tugging weakly at his hair, while Colette tried pulling Janus back, and the car swerved into the path of an oncoming juggernaut, and then out again. Aldous yielded and pulled into a lay-by beneath pylons and, while traffic hurtled past, poured a cup of neat gin from the bottle in the boot, fed it to Janus Brian, who then slept.
After Bicester they left the busy roads, following the route Aldous and his sons had taken when they cycled to Wales. Aldous found himself looking out for cyclists as though seeking comfort in the idea that the art of cycling over long distances had not entirely died. All through the little vi
llages in the increasingly complex landscape – Middleton Stoney, Lower Heyford, Middle Barton, Church Enstone, not a single cyclist.
By the time they reached Chipping Norton it had felt like a very long journey to everyone but Janus Brian, who now expressed a wish to urinate. They parked in the High Street while Aldous and Colette, again taking a shoulder each, escorted Janus Brian to the public lavatory under the limestone town hall. He walked with the cautious deliberation of someone who expected every pace to be the first step on a staircase, lifting each foot higher than necessary.
After Chipping Norton Janus Brian calmed, and began to accept his situation. He agreed to Aldous’s rationing of his gin, being allowed another cupful before they left the village, and agreeing to have no more before they reached Tewkesbury. He submitted himself to his sister’s summer holiday.
The rich verdure of the Cotswolds, starved of rain, had died. Everywhere there was yellow, that made it seem these dairy lands had become arable. But it was grass that shone golden in the fields, not wheat, grass that should have been lushly green, feeding the cows and sheep. Even the trees were beginning to wilt, apart from the elms that had already died, starkly vivid against the other trees, oaks and ash trees began to sicken, their leaves hanging loosely, shrivelling. Some people in the newspapers were talking about a permanent shift in the climate, that we may see the introduction into Britain of a Mediterranean, or even of a sub-tropical weather pattern, that the greenness of England may soon become a thing of the past, the land might dry up completely and be good only for the growing of olive groves and cork-oaks.
Colette tried to imagine it as they descended the Cotswold scarp and proceeded through the Vale of Evesham (even more emaciated, it seemed, than the previous hills), peasants taking in the wine harvest, orchards of lemon and peach, or perhaps banana plantations growing around the country pubs, the tower of a perpendicular church peeking above the orange groves. Or perhaps just desert. The Cotswolds eroded to rocky stumps above a dustbowl, cacti and vultures, the bleached skeletons of horses recumbent on the plain . . .
When they arrived at Tewkesbury, Aldous and Julian pitched the tent at the municipal site overlooked by the venerable Norman tower of the Abbey, while Colette went into the town to seek accommodation for her brother, who slumbered in the car. The town’s B & Bs turned out to be full. The best Colette could find was a room in a guest house that wouldn’t be available until the following day. The house was a quaint old Georgian place on the High Street, all varnished panelling and ancient furnishings, run by a tubby little woman called Mrs Brown, who wore her hair as Colette had worn hers in the 1940s.
‘Does your brother smoke?’ she said, after showing Colette the room.
‘No,’ said Colette, wondering if she could persuade Janus Brian to abstain from the habit for a while, or how she might explain his stained fingers and his blackened teeth.
‘Are you quite sure?’ Mrs Brown went on. She must have detected some hesitation in Colette’s voice, ‘because I really can’t have a smoker staying here, this house is a firetrap . . .’
‘Is it?’
‘Oh yes. The only exit is the front door. All this varnished wood, it’s very flammable. It may as well be soaked in petrol.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Colette, handing over a deposit taken from the wad of cash Janus Brian had given her charge of, ‘my brother is a model of clean living.’
Mrs Brown seemed pleased.
There was still the problem of where to accommodate Janus Brian that night, however. The only bed Colette could find in the whole town was in The Grapes, an overpriced, pretentious hotel on the main street, which traded on an obscure association with Dr Johnson (at The Grapes they dined on beef and oysters was a line from Boswell the hotel displayed on a small plaque by the entrance). The staff were cool and aloof, beyond the reach of Colette’s charm, on whom they looked down with sour, disdainful eyes as she booked her brother in for the night.
‘Are you sure you’ll be okay?’ Colette said as she settled Janus Brian into his room that night after an evening spent in the bar, under the mildly disapproving glances of both customers and staff.
‘I suppose so,’ said Janus Brian, taking off his stained tweed jacket, ‘why the hell have you brought me here?’
‘Shall I take this jacket for you?’ said Colette, choosing to ignore her brother’s remark, ‘I can get it dry cleaned tomorrow morning.’
Janus Brian handed her the jacket, then took his trousers off.
‘Where are we again?’ he asked.
‘The Grapes.’
‘I mean what town?’
‘Tewkesbury.’
Janus Brian muttered the name to himself several times, as though trying hard to memorize it.
Eventually Colette left her brother semi-conscious on top of the bed clothes, half naked, with a tumbler of gin on the bedside table. She skipped down the narrow corridor as quickly as she could, knocking loudly on all the doors as she passed them, a quick thump-thump, left and right, with the flat of her hand as she ran past.
When she went to collect him in the morning she was relieved to find him up and dressed and looking far better than he had done the day before.
He told her how he’d spent the night searching for water. He’d woken in the middle of the night with a raging thirst. ‘My tongue was like a parrot’s cage.’ He’d had no idea where he actually was. It took him half an hour just to find the light switch. He’d tried getting a cup of tea from the teasmade, but all he could get was the World Service Shipping Forecast, which made him feel even more thirsty.
Eventually, remembering that he was in a hotel, though he had forgotten in which town, he went to the bathroom for some water but had locked himself out of his room in the process. He was dressed only in his underpants. He couldn’t find the bathroom either. He went wandering all round the hotel in the middle of the night, up creaking spiral staircases, along the warren of twisting corridors that led nowhere. Eventually he found the hotel bar, but the drinks were all locked away behind a metal grille. He stood there with his tongue hanging out, his fingers curled through the grating, staring longingly at bottles of bitter lemon and cream soda.
‘Then I found myself in a truly wonderful place, which was the dining room, and everything was laid out ready for breakfast. There was a reverential quality about the place, as though I’d happened upon a small chapel or other holy place – all these crystal tumblers and folded napkins like little angels, shiny knives and forks, everything sparkling in almost darkness, it suddenly all looked very mysterious and almost sacred. And I walked between the set tables, creeping, as it were, looking at the tables as I passed between them in a state of wonderment. And then I discovered, on a large serving table beneath some tea-towels, an array of tiny little china jugs of milk. There must have been twenty or thirty of them, each enough for one or two cups of tea. So I drank them. One by one I drank the lot. They were lovely and cold. I found a napkin and wrote a little message,
Sorry, but I was so thirsty
and left it on the table amongst the empty jugs. They’d satisfied my thirst, and I laughed to myself on the way back to my bedroom, to think of the happenings at breakfast when they found the empty jugs, and my note.’
Eventually he found a night-porter who, having no access to a spare key, had had to crawl along a sloping extension roof and in through a window into Janus Brian’s room.
‘Very nice chap he was. Very helpful. Not like the day staff.’
Even after only two days there was a visible improvement to Janus Brian’s state. His first night in the bed and breakfast went well and he was glad to be out of The Grapes (he said he couldn’t afford more than a single night) and he reported that he even managed to eat the precisely cooked egg that Mrs Brown had provided for his breakfast. His first breakfast for months and he’d kept it down. He even seemed to be enjoying himself.
They had found somewhere to eat – Sam’s Café, a snazzy little luncheonette on the High
Street, a few doors down from The Grapes. The swanky modishness of the interior – red melamine table-tops, wallpaper with a crimson zigzag motif, chromium jukebox in a corner, seemed at odds with the character of the proprietor, a small, portly, ageing gentlemen with a bald head and a grey, handlebar moustache. He took their orders on a little pad of paper.
Janus Brian seemed quite keen to eat. On the laminated menu there was listed, under ‘Lite Bites’, a buck rarebit and a welsh rarebit. These dishes were rarities now, and evoked, for the elders, memories of pre-war suppers lovingly prepared by long since dead mothers.
‘Do you know, I quite fancy a buck rabbit,’ said Janus, using that fond old contraction.
‘One buck rarebit,’ said the waiter as he wrote, relishing the full version of the phrase, rolling it on his tongue. He was of their generation, the waiter, and knew food as they knew food, as something safe and predictable, without any of the dangers and threats posed by lasagnes and bologneses.
Many lunchtimes, afternoons and evenings were spent at Sam’s Café. Janus Brian ate buck rarebits, scrambled eggs, beans on toast. As the days passed his appetite grew. He managed a shepherd’s pie, a plaice and chips, ham and cheese omelettes. Of larger meals he always left a substantial percentage uneaten, but at least he was trying, thought Colette, at least he was interested in food, at least he was thinking about it. After eating they would sometimes sit in the café for hours, while Julian wandered off on his own, and they would read papers, or write postcards. One afternoon Colette wrote several cards while they sat at a table next to the rarely played jukebox.
‘There,’ she said when she’d finished the third one, shuffling them together, ‘that’s those done. Janus, are you going to send a card to Lesley and Madeleine?’
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Janus Brian without looking up from his tabloid newspaper.
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 25
