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)
– 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.’
She then took a piece of paper and handed it to Colette. On the paper was written her new address.
‘You mustn’t let Janus see this,’ she said.
Colette meant it when she said her daughter’s announcement hadn’t surprised her. Juliette and Bill seemed to lead entirely different lives these days. They didn’t come round together on Sunday afternoons any more, they were rarely together. Colette could hardly remember the last time she’d seen Bill. So the news didn’t upset her. She was fond of Bill, but had always felt the marriage to be a mistake. Juliette was far too young. Now, through college, she was getting back onto the road she had so wantonly abandoned when she was sixteen. But to move in with a telephone engineer from The Quiet Woman. That was disappointing.
Their conference in the garden ended when Colette realised what time it was. She and Julian were going to be late for the cinema. Aldous had taken the car into a garage for servicing in preparation for tomorrow’s journey and they were reliant on public transport.
‘I’ll catch the bus with you,’ said Juliette, who was going back to Polperro Gardens.
Colette went into the house and got dressed. She put on an extravagantly floral shirt that made her look like a walking rhododendron bush, and bluebottle-coloured earrings. Julian found it a little grotesque that she should doll herself up to go out with him. As though she was his girlfriend.
With the tumultuous sounds of the final movement of Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata filling the house, Juliette, Julian and Colette were making their way through the hall to the front door when the music stopped and Janus appeared from the music room. He had the stiffly unstable gait of the slightly drunk. His hair and beard looked rumpled. Janus had become so lushly hirsute in recent years he reminded Julian of the Beatle George Harrison as he appeared on the cover of Abbey Road. Though on this occasion Janus wasn’t wearing any trousers.
‘Where are you going?’ he said.
‘Out,’ said Colette.
‘Where?’
‘Just to the shops.’
‘Great!’ Janus suddenly whooped and then winked, ‘I’ve got to go to the shops as well. I need new shoes.’ Janus was holding a coffee mug that contained a transparent liquid, either vodka or gin. ‘I’ll come with you.’
The trio’s hearts sank.
‘Just let me get some trousers and feed the Scipplecat.’
‘We’ve got to go now.’
‘I’ll catch you up.’ Janus tottered vaguely into the kitchen, clicking his tongue for Scipio.
Colette and her two children left the house quickly and walked down the road.
‘He doesn’t know which shops we’re supposedly going to, he’ll probably go to the Parade and lose us,’ said Colette. It was a long walk down gently sloping Fernlight Avenue, and Julian continually looked back to see if his older brother was in pursuit and was pleased to see an empty street. Finally they turned the corner at the bottom of the road, and crossed over the busy Green Lanes to the bus stop.
‘He won’t think of coming down here,’ said Colette, ‘and with luck a bus will come in a minute.’
They waited with an assortment of people, a mother and child, an elderly couple, two bored-looking teenagers, but the bus was a long time coming, and before it came Janus appeared from the end of Fernlight Avenue, riding Julian’s old bike, which even Julian found too small for him now, and which looked ridiculously little beneath Janus, whose feet whirring round on the pedals were almost a blur. His hair and beard flapping in the wind, he shot straight out into the heavy traffic of Green Lanes, narrowly missing a lorry, wobbling between cars which honked and veered as Janus wove a drunken path between them. Colette was relieved to see that he was wearing trousers. The people at the bus stop gasped and laughed as Janus mounted the pavement and swerved up to them. As the wind lifted his jacket, Colette could see that his inside pockets were bristling with the necks of bottles.
‘Where are you going?’ Janus said.
‘Wood Green,’ said Colette, ‘and there’s no point in you coming, you won’t be able to get on the bus.’
‘I can cycle,’ said Janus, ‘and I’ve got a meeting with Bill today . . .’ he scooted off on another highly dangerous circuit around Green Lanes, returning to the bus stop. The ridiculousness of the spectacle, this tall, Jesus-bearded man on the small bicycle, his legs whirring, looping in and out of heavy traffic, couldn’t help but cause Julian and Colette to laugh. People were looking at them as though they were somehow responsible. Mutterings of disapproval could be heard all around.
Juliette was feeling gloomy.
‘I can’t let him get together with Bill today. If him and Bill get drunk together – I don’t know . . . I’ll just leave him tonight and let him work out for himself what’s happened.’
When the bus arrived Julian and Juliette and Colette climbed aboard and sat upstairs, praying that Janus would be left far behind. After a little while they heard a commotion downstairs. Janus had been hanging on to the back of the bus as it sped along, and the driver had stopped the bus and insisted that Janus let go. Janus had demanded that the conductor stow his bike under the stairs, the conductor refused, saying the bike wouldn’t fit, which was true. Janus, in protest, held on to the back of the bus, and the conductor refused to let the bus go while Janus was holding on. Eventually the driver left his cab and came to the back to take charge of the situation, physically pulling Janus off the hand rail at the back of the platform and pushing him down onto the kerb, throwing his bike after him, to a small round of applause from the passengers.
Call the police, call the police, call the police, Julian repeated to himself, mentally urging Janus on into ever more outrageous actions. An encounter with the police and Janus would be in prison, which would mean, Julian supposed, the restoration of harmony to their house.
‘Perhaps they’ll call the police,’ Julian said to his mother, hoping that his mother would be equally as enthusiastic. But she wasn’t.
‘Why do you keep saying that?’
‘I want Janus to go to prison.’
‘But why? Surely he’s not that bad . . .’
She had this talent for forgetfulness, Colette, Julian thought. How amusing Janus was being. But what would he be like by the evening?
‘Anyway, Janus could never survive in prison, could you imagine it? Those delicate hands, his educated voice – what are the bank robbers and muggers going to think of him? If you send him to prison you might as well kill him.’
When the conductor came up the stairs Colette went out of her way to apologize to him on her son’s behalf, again to Julian’s embarrassment, who believed if they’d kept quiet the conductor wouldn’t have known of any connection between them.
‘I know what it’s like,’ Colette said, ‘I was once a conductress myself.’ The conductor, an amusing, grey-haired Pakistani who kept up a constant witty banter with his passengers, held out his ticket machine to Colette, ‘You want to take over for a while?’ Colette giggled while Julian looked out of the window and saw to his horror that Janus was managing to keep up with the slow progress of the bus. Surely someone would call the police soon, a maniac on a bike swerving in and out of oncoming traffic, whooping and shrieking and whistling, even if only for his own safety.
The bus journey from Windhover Hill to Wood Green was through three miles of increasingly decayed suburbs. Beyond the Triangle the road crossed the New River, then the area became distinctly shabbier, the tall Victorian houses mostly converted into flats and bedsits. There were Greek bakeries, a driving test centre, bookmakers and off-licenses. Then the huge edifice of Swallow’s Builders’ Merchants, where Janus had once worked, to the left Our Lady’s Convent, where Juliette had been schooled before ending it all so abruptly to marry Bill Brothers. The school had since closed down and was now being used as a warehouse. Almost opposite was Polperro Gardens, where they now lived, and at the next bus stop, the grimly jaunty façade of The Carpenters Arms, where they’d met. The stop after that was Wood Green Town Hall, the concrete and glass monolith where they’d married.
Janus had managed to keep up with the slow progress of the bus as far as the North Circular, whistling and whooping at his family on the upper deck, but by Wood Green he had fallen a long way behind.
At Polperro Gardens Juliette got off.
‘If you see Janus don’t tell him I’ve gone home, say I’ve gone down London with Bill, or something.’
‘Don’t worry, he’ll be looking for us in the shops. If he rings, pretend you’re not in.’
On the steps of Wood Green Odeon, beneath its fairy-lit portico, Julian paused.
‘They won’t let me in,’ he said.
‘Yes they will,’ said Colette, reaching into her handbag and producing a hairbrush.
‘Mum, what are you doing?’
‘I’m brushing your hair.’
‘What for?’
‘It’ll make you look older.’
‘Not out here for God’s sake.’
Colette went at Julian’s hair vigorously, nearly knocking him over as she pulled at the tangled mass of curls. Julian’s hair was less curly now than it was when he was born. As a baby it was as though his head was encrusted with gold sovereigns. Old ladies drooled over him in shops and begged for locks. Colette had one she kept in a stoppered, blue-tinted glass jar filled with wood alcohol. She’d snapped the top off the stopper so that it was unopenable, fearing that Janus might, in one of his more desperate states, drink it. But Julian’s hair had darkened over the years and was now a very deep brown, almost black, and the curls had unfurled slightly, so that his locks hung in big, unruly loops that the teachers at his school were constantly complaining about. One teacher, a priest, even brought Julian home one lunchtime in a Renault 5 while Colette was sitting having a quiet fag and a beer, demanding that the boy be shorn before he returned to school. Julian hadn’t been to the barber’s for about three years, and so Colette got out a pair of blunt scissors and hacked away at his head until a sort of order was restored. But ultimately it was a losing battle. And Julian, anyway, was hoping to be expelled from St Francis Xavier’s, and, too nervous of authority to challenge it directly, was channelling all his rebelliousness into his hair.
Otherwise Julian was on the cusp of adolescence, his skin was becoming greasy, his pores enlarging, a first crop of spots appearing. He was losing that miraculous body children have, that hairless, fatless marmoreal figure where every childish muscle is visible, like the little angels in Blake paintings, and instead had developed a clumsy ineptness of movement, as though always carrying something cumbersomely broad and heavy, which he was – his future adulthood. But he had always looked older than his years. Always the tallest in his class, even as a five-year-old. Now, as a young teenager, he could easily pass for an immature eighteen-year-old, if his hair was combed back, and he didn’t come too close to the ticket booth.
The attendant didn’t even give Julian as much as a second glance as they passed through to the upper circle of the huge cinema to watch One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
‘What a bitch,’ Colette kept saying of the tyrannical nurse Ratched as she determined to extinguish the sparks of life that Jack Nicholson’s presence had brought into being, ‘such a bitch, I can’t believe it.’
Her expressions of disgust were so voluble that heads turned in the crowded cinema, and people hissed for her to be quiet. Colette seemed oblivious of these, even when the person sitting directly in front of her turned and gave her a long, disapproving look.
‘Mum,’ Julian whispered, ‘will you be quiet?’
‘I am being quiet.’
‘No you’re not.’
Then came a loud whistle from behind them. Janus was standing at the back, grinning broadly, leaning over the rear seats and the heads of those occupying them, his jacket hanging open revealing bottles.
‘Thought I’d find you monkeys in here, hallelujah.’
He stumbled down the steps of the aisle and blundered through the legs of those seated on Julian and Colette’s row to the vacant seat that was, unfortunately, beside Colette.
Janus talked without pause at full conversational volume. He took the mug out of his pocket and poured himself a mugful of neat gin, insisting on Colette having some. She acceded, and wiped clean the ice-cream carton she’d had since the interval; Janus filled it with gin.
‘There you go my darling sweetheart mother,’ said Janus, handling the brimming carton with care, passing it to Colette, who drank with a resigned acceptance, and was soon giggling alongside her son.
‘What’s this film about?’ Janus yelled.
‘A mad nurse,’ said Colette.
The man in front turned around and addressed Colette.
‘Would you mind taking your foot off my shoulder?’
Colette, who’d had her legs crossed, the foot resting on the back of the chair in front, said, ‘Do you mind, I’ve got a bad knee.’
‘Yeah well I’ve got a bad shoulder, get your foot down.’
‘How dare you speak to me like that.’
Janus was keeping quiet.
A woman sitting alongside the man joined in.
‘You’re disgusting, the pair of you.’
‘Look at them, they’re drinking . . .’
The usherette came over and shone a torch on Colette. The usherette was a woman of about Colette’s age, and seemed nervous.
‘Would you mind keeping the noise down?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Colette, then reached out and took hold of the hand that was holding the torch, ‘I do most sympathize with you, my dear. I was an usherette once . . .’
‘Thank you . . .’
‘In the Beaumont, Stamford Hill, an eight-hundred seater, full every night . . .’
‘Yes, thank you . . .’
‘Shhh!’
‘It’s a most unrewarding job, standing there in the dark, people jeering and jostling, and you have to watch the same film over and over again. Mind you . . .’
‘Will you be quiet?’ someone hissed.
‘. . . I watched The Ladykillers it must have been a thousand times and I was in hysterics each time, so much I couldn’t do my job. But for you to have to watch a film like this every day three or four times a day, it must make you want to kill yourself.’
‘Yes, it is a horrible job, thank you . . .’
The usherette managed to drag herself away.
An idea struck Julian, once Janus and Colette had resumed their raucousness. He slipped out of his seat unnoticed and went in search of a public telephone, with the idea of calling the police, who then might come and arrest Janus and put him in prison. As he was leaving the auditorium, however, in the opposite direction came a brigade of four bouncers in dinner jackets with bow ties, who marched swiftly through the darkness, almost sweeping Julian aside. How disappointing. He would be too late. In the lobby he found a telephone and dialled anyway, nine, nine, nine.
‘There’s some people making a noise in Wood Green Cinema.’
‘That’s hardly an emergency call. This line is for emergencies only. ‘
‘But they won’t be quiet.’
‘Very well, we’ll send someone, but this really shouldn’t be an emergency call.’
As Julian put the phone down Janus emerged from the darkness beyond the double doors with a large escort at each shoulder, followed shortly by Colette, also with two escorts. While Janus was ejected firmly by his escorts, Colette was treated with an embarrassed sort of deference, her bouncers didn’t know quite what to make of her. She recoiled if they tried to hold her, and so were reduced to an ushering role as Colette made loud protests, demanding to see the manager who, it turned out, was one of the bouncers.
‘And this boy,’ she said, spotting Julian who had withdrawn to a corner of the lobby, ‘what do you think this sort of scene has made on an impressionable young boy like this, he’s only fourteen for Christ’s sake, seeing his mother thrown out of a cinema as though she was a common drunk. I’ve worked in cinemas before now, in the days when cinemas were real cinemas, picture palaces we called them, call this old fleapit a palace? It’s a disgrace. You’re a disgrace . . .’
‘Fourteen you say?’ said the smarmily polite manager, ‘and yet this film is an X-certificate . . .’
Colette affected not to hear.
‘Come, Julian, we won’t grace this trashy little establishment with our presence any longer,’ and took hold of Julian’s hand, which made him appear even younger than his years, and flounced out of the cinema.
Outside, re-entering the broad afternoon daylight, the grinding noise of the heavy traffic and the fat, overspilling queues of shoppers filling the nearby bus stops, they found Janus at the bottom of the steps talking to a West Indian in a flat-cap who was laughing toothsomely at the anecdotes of recent adventures Janus was relating.
Meeting up with these two at the bottom of the steps, Colette burst into shrieks of laughter which she shared with Janus, who whooped.
‘There’s Bill,’ said Janus suddenly.
‘Bill?’ said the West Indian. In a hoarse, chuckling sort of voice, ‘No. Where?’
‘He’s over there,’ Janus was pointing across and down the street towards the main shopping area. ‘I’ve been looking for him all day.’ He put his fingers in his mouth and produced a piercing whistle that had all the nearby heads turning in his direction. Neither Colette nor Julian could see Bill, though Janus walked swiftly off in the direction he’d whistled. The West Indian, his hands in the pockets of his white, flared trousers, sauntered after him.
A police car drew up outside the cinema and a tired-looking policeman emerged.
‘Shall we go?’ said Julian.
‘Yes,’ said Colette, still laughing, ‘let’s get something to eat.’
Three doors up from the cinema was a Wimpy Bar, crowded, for some reason at that time of the late afternoon, with drunks. Colette and Julian sat at a table facing each other, a large plastic tomato between them, it’s green spout scabby with dried ketchup.
‘Mum,’ said Julian, ‘Can we go to Tewkesbury on our own tomorrow? Just you, me and dad?’
‘What do you mean? Janus Brian’s coming with us. I’ve explained to you . . .’
‘But it’s not too late to change things – and Janus Brian doesn’t really want to come. He’d forgotten about it when we saw him last week. Don’t you remember?’
It was true. It had taken an afternoon of patient explaining and re-explaining before Janus Brian could be made to remember. Even then, when they thought the matter was settled, he would suddenly turn away from the television and say – ‘Dear, can you tell me again – what are we doing next week?’
‘Julian – Janus Brian has been looking forward to this holiday for months. What are you suggesting, that I just don’t bother calling for him tomorrow? He would be devastated. It would kill him.’
A man who was sitting directly behind Colette, who’d turned round the moment Colette had sat back to back with him, had been following this conversation with a leering sort of interest.
‘It would kill me,’ he said, ‘to not holiday with you . . .’
He was dark-haired and ageing, his face loose and empty with drink. He continued to make barely comprehensible noises, rough growls and vague but loud exclamations, sometimes accompanied by clumsy hand gestures.
‘You’ve got to try and make some allowances for your uncle. You’ve got to try and be nice to him . . .’
‘Be nice to me,’ said the man. He seemed to be of Eastern European origin, and spoke English with a richly pronounced rolling of vowels.
‘Do you mind?’ said Colette over her shoulder.
‘Why not?’ said the man, ‘I have a thousand sheep.’
‘In that case,’ said Julian, ‘can I stay at home? I don’t want to come with you.’
‘Come on holiday with me,’ said the man, who, up until now, had been unable to see Colette’s face properly, but now, finally turning fully in his seat, he put a hand on the crown of Colette’s head, patted, then stroked her hair. ‘I can take you to the Black Sea. Come with me to Odessa. I will take you to Transylvania. You like?’
‘I don’t think so. We’re going to Tewkesbury.’
‘And so they make wine there?’
‘No.’
‘Where I live, the rivers flow with wine. You ask my wife. I took her there last year. Margaret!’ He addressed the female sitting at his side, a small and dour woman in spectacles who was scowling fixedly into her coffee.
‘I don’t think you should be talking to a strange woman like this if you are married.’
‘What, you’re not strange, are you. Tell me, what have you been doing. What have you been doing today?’
‘We’ve been to the pictures,’ said Colette, who slowly had grown to enjoy the slurred attentions of this man.
‘The pictures? Last Tango In Paris, eh?’
‘No, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.’
‘You should see Last Tango In Paris, it’s my favourite film. Come, I’ll take you to see it now. Give me your hand. A beautiful woman . . .’ He took Colette’s hand, planted kisses on the back of it, red lips pouting from beneath a boot-brush-thick moustache, ‘I shall take you out . . .’
‘No, I’m not a beautiful woman,’ said Colette laughing, withdrawing her hand.
‘What, you’re not a woman?’
‘Yes, I’m a woman.’
‘Let me see if you are a woman, eh?’ he reached for the buttons on Colette’s floral shirt, tried undoing them.
Colette gave a shriek of laughter, took hold of the man’s hand and pushed it away.
‘Let me see if you are a woman,’ he repeated, laughing, ‘let me see, let me see.’
‘Julian,’ Colette said, smiling, ‘would you mind hitting this man for me?’
‘Why don’t you hit him?’ said Julian, rather crossly.
‘Aha, your husband, eh?’ said the man, as if noticing Julian for the first time.
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘We can settle this thing man to man eh?’ he continued, glaring at Julian, ‘with honour. You and me, outside of here . . .’
‘He wants you to fight a duel over me,’ Colette laughed.
‘Swords,’ the man said, making swishing movements with his hands, ‘you and me, for the honour of this woman . . .’
By this time the man was leaning so far over the seat back he was almost sitting next to Colette. But then his wife, who’d barely stirred in all this time, leant across and, with controlled anger, whispered something in her husband’s ear. This seemed utterly to deflate the man, who shrank to about half his original size, and was then led tamely from the restaurant by his wife.
‘What a strange man,’ said Colette, who’d watched his departure closely, following his progress through the doors, then, along the High Road, supported by his small wife, and out of sight. Julian could see how his mother looked flushed and bright-eyed, glowing with the attention she’d received. ‘He was just drunk, I suppose.’
Julian wanted to bring his mother back to the subject.
‘Do you mind if I stay at home for the holidays?’
‘Yes I do. And I think you’d mind. Do you really want to spend the summer in the company of your brother?’
‘Why don’t you give me some money so I can go on holiday on my own?’
Colette laughed.
‘At fourteen? It would be against the law. I’m sorry, Julian, but you’re stuck with us. Between a drunken brother and a drunken uncle I know you don’t have a great choice, and you’ll hate me for ever and ever, but I have to put Janus Brian first. He’ll be dead soon and then you can dance on his grave, but until then I want to make what life he has left as enjoyable as possible . . .’
Colette hesitated. Her son was looking devastated. She thought for a moment he was going to cry.
‘Of course,’ she went on, trying to repair some damage, ‘I don’t really want him to come. I’d much rather it was just you me and daddy . . .’
‘No,’ said Julian, ‘you want him to come. You’re actually looking forward to it. You like the company of drunks – you’ve proved that this afternoon. You’d be happier if the whole world was drunk.’
Colette laughed, thinking Julian’s remark rather charming, and not quite knowing how to take it.