5
Julian had often thought about killing his brother. Sometimes he felt that if he had a gun he would shoot him. He liked to imagine the night when, armed with a real gun (not James’s pellet-firing air pistol), he would steal into Janus’s bedroom, picking his way through the litter on the floor to where his unconscious brother lay folded in blankets. Then three plump bullets sent into the soft mass on the bed.
What would he get? Even if he got life he could be out by the age of twenty-five. A sympathetic judge might let him off altogether. If he was told about how he’d found his older brother standing on his mother, destroying the record player, if he knew how often Julian had had to listen to the crash and tinkle of domestic violence, if he’d known how many nights he’d feared for his life (an exaggeration, perhaps, but a judge wouldn’t know), or those of others in the house, he was sure the sternest judge would see sense and let him off, pat him on the shoulder and say, ‘there there young lad, not to worry, I’d have killed my brother in the same circumstances . . .’
Julian had been hurt by Colette’s accusations of cowardice. He always knew it would happen one day that she would call upon him to deal with Janus, that she would notice how her youngest was approaching adulthood, and so could no longer wallow in the luxury of uselessness. He was destined to become a resource, part of the armoury Colette drew upon, along with Mr Milliner next door, James when he was home, and as a last resort the police, to control Janus. But now was too soon. His mother didn’t realize (just because he was big for his age) that Julian wasn’t ready to tackle Janus. He needed a little more time, another inch or so of height, a few more layers of muscle.
His mother had taunted him when they were alone at breakfast the next day.
‘I told Juliette what you did last night, and she said you were a coward too.’
Julian hadn’t said anything but carried on reading his Beano at the kitchen table. He was attached to reading the Beano as a means of prolonging his childhood. His mother had placed an order for the comic at Hudson’s on the Parade when he was six, and every week she collected the Beano for him, which had ‘Jones’ pencilled on its cover. Julian these days liked her to leave it for a while so that the Beanos mounted up, then she would bring home a batch of five or six for him to read at once. That he still poured over the Beano every week Colette found rather charming, but it annoyed her now.
‘It’s no good hiding behind Biffo the Bear doing the strong, silent routine, young man,’ she said.
Julian hadn’t taken her up on the point that Biffo the Bear had recently been replaced as the Beano’s cover story by Dennis the Menace.
‘Any normal son would have done something to help their mother, instead of drifting off upstairs.’
Julian had sunk further into his comic.
A few years ago, when the Beanos had started to accumulate, Colette had nagged and nagged at him to throw them away, and he had. He remembered sitting on the edge of his bed with a stack of fifty or so Beanos with Biffo the Bear on the cover, building up the courage to dispose of them. Eventually, in one swift, brutal movement he binned them. It was a moment he spent continually regretting and he wondered now why he’d done it. Somehow his mother had conjured up an apocalyptic vision of accumulating Beanos, piling layer upon layer like sedimentary rock until there was no room left in the house, and he’d felt a sense of guilt at using up so much space.
And then the Beanos changed. A complete editorial rethink had removed Biffo from the cover and replaced him with Dennis the Menace, relegating the former cover star to a half page strip tucked away somewhere in the middle. At the same time the older, more skilled artists had retired, to be replaced by incompetent, cack-handed idiots who couldn’t even draw in perspective. Lord Snooty had been lovingly drawn, Bunkerton Castle’s neo-Gothic architecture rendered sensitively in pen and ink. The new artist revelled in the vulgar craftlessness of the post-decimal era, and even put long trousers on Roger the Dodger. The effect, for Julian, who still loved the Beano for the wit of the Bash Street Kids and The Three Bears, the latter of which was still beautifully drawn, was to render the ‘Biffo’ Beanos of immense historical importance. His first encounter with a ‘Dennis’ Beano had been a horrible shock, to compare with the end of steam as a piece of wanton cultural vandalism, and so he had begun collecting them again, in case they should change even further for the worse. And he mourned his old ‘Biffo’ Beanos, having only two or three in his current collection. It made him feel angry and cheated and he vowed never to throw anything away again
Julian had refused to be drawn by his mother’s taunts. He said nothing, and the taunts ended when his father, who was still unaware of the trouble the day before, came into the room.
O for a gun, thought Julian, a real, true, faithful gun. How else might he do it? A swift, accurate stabbing, again while Janus slumbered in drink. What about garrotting him with a length of piano-wire taken out of the Bechstein? Every little vein proud on his brother’s head, every little capillary, even the ones in his eyes, bursting. Would his mother call him a coward then? Would she call him a coward when he walked into the kitchen, his hands dripping with blood, ‘Mother, there’s something I think you should see in Janus’s room . . .’
But Julian would never have the stomach for that. It was an indulgent fantasy with which he vented the anger that had built up over the years of witnessing, or hiding from, the violence. He had long given up hope that Janus would leave Fernlight Avenue and find a home of his own. Colette had gone through a phase of suggesting it to her son on a weekly basis, but she never seemed convinced herself that it was a good idea, saying there would be no one to play the Bechstein. When Juliette placed small ads for affordable flats under his nose he simply laughed in her face. What Julian really desired was a means of controlling Janus, rope to bind him with, drugs to dope him, some form of electronic tag that would show as a blip on a radar screen so that his whereabouts could always be known. If the blip could also show his level of intoxication, by gradually turning a deepening shade of green, say, that would at least provide some form of warning.
Julian was alone in the house, as he usually was on Friday and Saturday nights. Bill had been round earlier and had taken Janus out for a night at The Quiet Woman. Aldous and Colette, after they’d left, set off for The Red Lion. It had become a habit over the last few months, since Janus Brian had been on the scene, for Aldous and Colette to go to the pub together. Suddenly, it seemed, Julian had become old enough to look after himself.
‘You’ll be all right, won’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘You can come with us, if you want, but you’ll have to sit in the car.’
‘No thanks.’
He had accepted this particular offer once, but sitting in the car in a dark car park for a couple of hours on a cold night was not an enjoyable experience. Instead, he had come to rather look forward to his evening at home on his own. Suddenly he had a freedom he hadn’t had before. To explore his own house.
When he was much younger he’d found the house at night, especially upstairs with its open doors leading into huge, unlit rooms, rather frightening, and had to ask someone to come with him when he wanted to go to the toilet, but these days, somewhat to his surprise, he didn’t find the house frightening at all, despite the fact that it was just as dark and shadowy as it had always been, darker, if anything. Seven empty rooms. The occasional drip from the tank in the loft, the echoey plop of water into water, a breeze stirring the branches of the cherry tree which almost touched his window, the hysterical calling of the screech-owls who lived in the oak tree.
Now he realised the house was more frightening when it contained people. Alone he could watch any programmes he liked on television, and later could prowl around Janus’s bedroom hunting for pornography, which he’d heard it rumoured was hidden somewhere in there. But Janus’s bedroom was such a catastrophic mess, the floor invisible beneath a heap of litter, that his furtive searches always proved fruitless.
Eventually Julian would go to bed at around ten o’clock, a while before the pubs closed. That meant he was out of the way if there was any trouble when the drinkers returned home later, which there often was.
This particular evening he was in bed going through the card index system of the library he’d founded in his bedroom. His mother hadn’t believed him when he said he was opening a library in his bedroom. She just thought he meant he was putting up some shelves for all the homeless books of the house, the ones stacked up in corners of rooms, or lying forgotten on floors, or in the loft. He had done that, but he had also catalogued them. And when his mother came into his room one day hunting for her old copy of Summer Lightning, he’d insisted she became a member before he would let her take it away. She’d reluctantly agreed (it was a pound membership fee), and he’d stamped a date in the book, and fined her when she forgot to return it.
Having appointed himself librarian of the house, Julian soon found himself swamped with books. Scattered throughout the house they could pass unnoticed, but condensed into a single room they soon overspilt the shelves, and had to be stacked in columns on the floor. There were some of his mother’s father’s books (mostly exotic tales of colonial exploration and conquest), and her mother’s (yarns of anthropomorphic animals), and the remains of the library his father had amassed in the days of his lodging with Lesley (translations of classical poetry, The Golden Treasury, The Lives of the Artists, The Geology of the Chilterns, John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens). Communism and the British Intellectual was a title he liked to have on display, though he wasn’t sure where it had come from. The Weimar Republic, From Utrecht to Waterloo. Those must have been leftovers from James’s history A Level. There were a lot of Juliette’s old books as well. Sue Barton – Student Nurse, Pony For Sale, Fury – Son of the Wilds, The Story of Wimpy – A Wump. Julian was undiscriminating in his fondness for books. So long as they were books was all that mattered. Many were old library books his family had failed to return. His family never quite understood libraries.
There was a tap-tap-tap at his window.
Being an upstairs bedroom, Julian’s window was never knocked at, though when he heard accompanying noises – coughs and quiet chuckling, he went quickly over and opened the curtains. Bill Brothers’ face was peering through the glass at him, his thick hair awry. When he saw Julian, Bill gave a small whoop of delight and asked him to open the window, which he did. Bill had to lean back to avoid the outswinging glass, holding precariously onto the mullion with one hand. He stamped with one foot upon the slates of the small, sloping kitchen extension roof beneath him and called to someone Julian couldn’t see.
‘This is a bloody good roof, speaking as a one-time steeplejack, I can say – my professional opinion – is that this roof is one of the best bloody roofs in Windhover Hill,’ then addressing Julian, ‘Greetings, little brother-in-law, forgive this ungodly intrusion, my fellow travellers and I appear to have no key to these premises, so Janussimus here kindly showed us an alternative route, up the ladder and across this fine slate roof to your bedroom, whose light betokened that you were yet awake, and through whose window we thought we might gain entry to the aforementioned premises,’ while saying this Bill hauled himself in through the window and half-stumbled in amongst all the books of Julian’s room. Janus then appeared at the window, whooping ridiculously.
Julian got back into bed as Janus climbed through the window. Bill laughed a long giggly laugh that deeply reddened his face.
‘We were searching for the source of the Limpopo,’ he said, ‘which we believe is in this vicinity.’
‘I thought it was the Zambezi we were after.’
‘Zambezi, Limpopo, Irrawaddy,’ Bill shrugged, as though it didn’t matter which. ‘Mr Mungo Park, my fellow Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute,’ Bill went on, laying a comradely arm across Janus’s shoulders, ‘world renowned expert on the sexual lives of the savages of Windhover Hill’s unexplored regions . . .’ Julian also laughed. He was glad that they were in such good humour, and that Bill had returned with Janus, because Janus rarely caused serious trouble while Bill was around. Books were spilling everywhere, the carefully arranged piles merging into one slithering mass.
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.
‘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.
‘Me and Bill will walk you back,’ said Juliette.
‘If Bill’s still alive. Do you think we should do something, Juliette?’
‘Perhaps Bill will knock him out,’ said Colette hopefully, ‘I can’t understand why it’s taking him so long, he’s usually so good at handling Janus. Where’s Aldous? Has he vanished again?’
Aldous had developed an ability to dematerialize in times of stress, reappearing a while later, usually in his red armchair by the bookcase in the front room, the Complete Works of Shakespeare open in his lap.
A period of silence followed from the rooms above, before Bill appeared once again at the top of the stairs. This time the ripped jacket sleeve had been removed entirely, revealing the white shirt beneath. Bill had the appearance of someone who’d been leaning out of the window of a high-speed train. He puffily and rather cautiously descended the stairs.
‘Are you hurt?’ said Veronica.
‘Not much,’ said Bill.
‘Where’s Janus?’
‘He’s having a lie down.’ Bill appeared ominously calm, ‘Graham’s reading to him.’
‘Reading to him?’ said Juliette.
‘It was the only way we could get him to stop thrashing about. I tried everything else, he just wanted a story.’
‘What’s he reading?’ said Colette, but the question was lost.
‘Bill, you’re bleeding,’ said Juliette, noticing a red stain in his beard. Bill touched it with his finger, looked at the blood thoughtfully and shrugged. There was a knock at the door. A sliced-up image of a policeman was visible in the warped glass.
‘That was quick,’ said Colette opening the door. It transpired that neighbours had already called the police before Colette had got to the phone box.
The situation was explained to the policeman, a bearded man in late middle age. Julian, who’d been in the hall all the time, experienced the fascination he always felt when seeing a policeman at close quarters, and marvelled at how the house always seemed to shrink and decay slightly in their presence. Colette and her daughter had an urgency in their voices, like advocates pleading a case, fearful the policeman would wonder what all the fuss was about, since the house had been calm and silent since his arrival. But the fact that neighbours had first called the police, and that a dressing table was lying in a nest of broken glass in the front garden, along with the testimony of Colette and Juliette, seemed enough to convince him that Janus could be taken away for the night. ‘For a breach of the peace?’ the policeman suggested, as if not caring which law he was arrested under.
He went upstairs to see Janus on his own, having been directed to his bedroom. Listening at the foot of the stairs the others could hear Janus’s voice talking with a cheery amiability to the policeman, as though to an old friend; they heard the deep, firm baritone of the policeman, equally amiable.
After a few moments the policeman came down the stairs.
‘Your son seems quite calm . . .’
‘No,’ Colette interrupted him, ‘it’s one of his tricks, as soon as a policeman’s on the scene he’s as meek as a baby. Don’t be fooled by him, as soon as you’ve gone and Bill’s gone and everyone else he’ll be back to how he was, and then it’ll just be me and my husband to manage him – he could kill us, you saw what he did to the dressing table.’
The policeman looked a little troubled, then went back upstairs.
‘I don’t think your mum and dad should be left here with Janus like this,’ said Veronica to Juliette, ‘if the police don’t take him away . . .’
The policeman returned.
‘Your son will come voluntarily with me to the station for the night. I’m not arresting him or charging him with anything. He’s just getting himself properly dressed.’
The party waited in the hall for a while. Veronica went into the kitchen to get her things. The policeman whistled, asked Colette, by way of conversation, where her husband was, was told he was probably in the front room. The policeman popped his head round the door and saw Aldous sitting in his red armchair reading from a large, thick book.
‘Good evening sir,’ the policeman said.
Aldous looked up, smiled, then continued reading his book.
Then Janus descended the stairs. He looked as if he’d spent his evening doing nothing more than sitting in a chair. His face was pale, dry, his clothes clean and untorn. He had no blood on him. He was wearing a brown shirt. Colette thought he looked thinner than she’d ever seen him, and that his head was made absurdly huge by the thickness of his hair and beard.
He shook hands with the policeman, as though greeting an old comrade, then made several requests that delayed his departure.
‘Can I just get my jacket?’ He went upstairs to get his jacket.
‘Can I say goodbye to my father?’ He popped his head round the front room door and said goodbye. Aldous didn’t look up.
‘Can I just say goodbye to my cat?’ He went upstairs and nuzzled his face into the silver fur of Scipio’s tummy.
Such requests may have gone on indefinitely had not the policeman finally put his foot down and left with Janus, pulling him gently by the arm.
A weight lifted. Aldous emerged from the front room.
‘Ah, you’ve resurfaced,’ said Colette.
Juliette scolded Bill.
‘You’re not going out with Janus any more,’ she said.
‘I shouldn’t think you’ll want to, will you?’ said Veronica.
Bill looked surprised.
‘Janus is my friend . . .’
‘Friends don’t give you nosebleeds,’ said Juliette.
‘That was an accident.’
‘An accident?’
‘The back of his head hit my nose, that’s all . . .’
‘What about your jacket?’
‘That was another accident.’
‘I can’t believe you’re defending him, after what he’s been like tonight . . .’
‘People don’t understand Janus, I’m the only one that does, and perhaps your mother as well. You don’t understand him . . .’
‘I understand him all right.’ The two were alone in the hall now, the others having removed to the kitchen.
‘No you don’t, because you don’t understand the artistic temperament.’
‘Ha! Is that what you call it? You think getting blind drunk and throwing dressing tables through windows amounts to artistic temperament. So those people who hurl roofing slates at each other and put traffic cones on their heads outside The Carpenters Arms every Friday night are all artists are they?’
The conversation went on like this, quietly, in the hallway, for some time, until eventually they left, with Veronica. Before closing the door Juliette had a word with her mother.
‘We’ve got to do something, he can’t live with you here any more . . .’
‘I’m sure things will settle down soon,’ said Colette, closing the front door on her daughter before she could disagree.