12
Janus put a hand to his face. It hurt. He fingered the strange, rough texture that adhered to its left side, followed it from his eyebrow all the way down to his jaw. Dried blood. He recognised the sensation.
Janus discovered that he was nestled in a rose garden. Thickly tangled rose stems studded with thorns were all around him. If he moved, they dug into his skin. It was a kind of trap into which he had somehow fallen. Or perhaps he had been pushed. Janus had no memory of how he came to be among roses. He wondered if he had been asleep for a hundred years.
It was hot. Looking up through writhing stems and the lush crimson heads of roses he could see bright blue sky. Then thirst struck him. The drought was in his mouth. His whole body was a desert.
He rolled to the side, crushing stems, feeling thorns against his legs. He could feel the pain but wasn’t hurt, and discovered the roses he’d rolled out of were the ones that grew in the front garden of Bill and Juliette’s house. He found himself facing their front door. At least, it was the front door to the house in which they occupied an upper floor. One ring of the doorbell would produce the landlady, Miss Steel, who lived downstairs. Bill and Juliette required two rings.
It was a little Victorian front door set in a recessed porch like a small cave, tiled attractively in terracotta arabesques to the sides, black and white diamonds on the floor. Janus stepped into the porch and pressed the bell twice. There was no reply. He rang the bell once. No landlady came. What day was it? Sunday. Miss Steel probably went to church on Sundays. What about Juliette and Bill? They didn’t come round to Fernlight Avenue any more. They stayed in bed on Sunday mornings. He rang the bell twice again. No answer.
Still Janus felt no pain. He felt he could easily have punched a hole through the frosted glass panel of the front door and turned the handle. He wouldn’t have felt anything. But he didn’t want to. He wanted to go home and lie down. So he began walking.
He tried to remember what had happened the day before. He could remember playing the piano in the afternoon, then following his mother and the others to Wood Green on Julian’s bike. What had happened to that bike? Janus paused and looked back at the squashed rose bed to make sure the bike wasn’t in there. He could have cycled home. But the bike wasn’t there.
It took Janus nearly a whole day to walk home. He had no money for a bus, and the new pay-as-you-enter buses wouldn’t admit the unmonied.
He took giant strides along Green Lanes, the events of the day before slowly trickling back into his mind . . . So we’ll go no more a-boozing . . .
He’d followed the others to Wood Green. Then he’d gone into the cinema and found his mum and Julian watching a film. Couldn’t remember what film. Then what? Getting thrown out of the cinema. Then seeing Bill walking along the High Road, only it wasn’t Bill but his doppelganger. Then he went to Polperro Gardens. That was it. Polperro Gardens to call on Bill. He gave two rings of the bell, but only Juliette answered. Bill wasn’t there, she said. Where was he then? She said she didn’t know. You must know where he is, he’s your husband for Christ’s sake. She tried to shut the door, Janus put his foot in. You can’t stop me from seeing my best friend, Janus had said. He’s not your best friend, his little sister had replied. And Bill doesn’t drink now, that’s what she said. That’s what the doc told him. So we’ll go no more a-boozing. Or Bill could be dead. If Janus takes Bill out for a drink it could kill him. Kill Bill. She was telling lies. Of course he can still drink. Janus had seen him in pubs from which he himself was banned. He’d seen him reeling out of The Quiet Woman, or quaffing ale among the Tyrols and flock wallpaper with that barmaid in The Volunteer with the orange plaits and the ginger-beer coloured pubic hair (so he’d heard). He was in The Coach and Horses drinking with washed-up footballers, failed actors, gone-to-seed glamourpusses whose heyday was a bit-part in Upstairs Downstairs. Bill’s liver is on the edge, said Juliette. Bill is jaundiced and his blood full of urea, Bill doesn’t socialize now, just stays at home with a mug of Horlicks and his feet up in front of Nationwide.
‘I’ll call the police,’ Juliette had said.
That was as far as Janus could remember.
Janus had written Bill a letter. It began ‘Dearest Bill, so the sun has finally set on the golden age of our friendship . . .’ but didn’t go on, and Janus never sent it. In their epistolary exchanges Janus always felt outdone.
Bill Brothers was a fucking fascist.
Janus passed Swallows, the North Circular, the Cock, the Bus Depot, the Library, the Triangle. He was thrown out of a Greek Cypriot Cafe (Kafe Aphrodite), whose aroma of coffee and cheroots had soothed him. The grey-whiskered, poker-playing proprietor had tolerated his penniless presence for an hour before finally asking him to leave. He had amused the clientele by spouting Euripides in the ancient version of their language.
My barque is freighted full with sorrow, there is no room to stow aught further. All hail!
My house and portals of my home, how glad am I to emerge to the light to see thee. Ha! What is this? I see my children before the house in the garb of death, with chaplets on their heads, my wife amid a throng of men, and my father weeping o’er some mischance.
He wandered for hours among the cedars of Brimstone Park, watched mandarin ducks nibble at the soggy nubs of Wonderloaf that were silting-up a corner of the ornamental lake, and visited the museum that occupied the ground floor of the stately Tudor home at the centre of the park.
He drifted through a room full of stuffed animals with waxy tongues and realistic eyes. Another room of local history. A penny-farthing. An ancient, wooden ice cream stall. A relief map, under glass, of Windhover Hill and environs before their suburbanization, a swathe of rumpled greenery, teeny-weeny trees sculpted in green sponge, the lanes marked in white, labels here and there marking the sites of present-day landmarks. The Goat and Compasses was said to be the oldest pub in the district, in existence long before the railway came, and The Red Lion, as well, was there at a corner of Green Lanes. On the map you could see how Windhover Hill was really a hill, a distinct though shallow prominence on the edge of the basin of the river Lea, geologically it was one of the first foothills of the Chilterns, though formed not of chalk but syrupy London clay.
There were some old postcards displayed on the walls. Scenes of an almost unthinkable rusticity, taken around the turn of the century, not long after the railways came. ‘Mr Withens’ smallholding, Windhover Hill Woods’. There was Mr Withens with his prize pig. An enormous, pink, tusked brute that looked only one generation away from a hippo. Janus laughed. There was a picture of a prize bull, a rosette on its horn, that once trod the soil of farmland near Fernlight Avenue, its proud, handlebar-moustachioed owner standing dangerously alongside. There were many other pictures of this sort. ‘The stables at Windhover Hill Farm’, showing a row of mucky-looking work-horses, another of horses harnessed to a plough, turning the soil of Grange Farm. ‘Young girls in Hoopers Lane Orchard for apple picking’. This was a picture that struck Janus especially. Those beautiful young virgins in their smocks and floppy hats, sitting in dappled light beneath heavily fruited boughs, laughing. Girls then, dead by now, but those orchards must have practically bordered the garden at Fernlight Avenue, and extended all the way along Hoopers Lane almost as far as The Goat and Compasses.
Eventually Janus found his way back to Fernlight Avenue. He couldn’t find his key so knocked but, as at Polperro Gardens, there was no reply. Is there no one in, in the whole world? thought Janus. He had to walk through the side alley, climb, with difficulty, over the tall gate at the back, and walk round to the music room’s French windows. These were fastened, on the inside, by string, which snapped after one good tug. The house was empty. On the kitchen table there was a note.
Be good. We’ll see you in three weeks. There is plenty of food in the cupboards, but you will need to buy some cat food.
Love Mummy
There was a five pound note set beneath a vase on the table. Of course, he had been told many times that mum, dad and Julian were off on holiday today. He’d forgotten. The reason he’d forgotten was that they had never told him where they were going, so the holiday hadn’t seemed like a real event to him. Colette claimed that she didn’t know where they were going herself, but would leave it until the last minute to decide. Janus felt the sudden thrill of having the world to himself.
So we’ll go no more a-boozing. Janus remembered much wandering yesterday. Much roving from pub to pub, from park to park and back to Polperro Gardens. In one pub he had seen Rita Michaelangeli and Hugo Price. Or was it a pub? Was it a restaurant? Whatever, they were alone, sitting at a table, looking at each other with lovey-dovey eyes. How long had they been having an affair, Janus wondered. It seemed to have been going on for years. On and off. Everyone knew about it, except for Veronica, Hugo’s wife.
Veronica Price. Her name stuck in his mind. There was something important about Veronica Price. Something to do with this weekend. Then he remembered. It was Veronica’s birthday. She was having a party. Was it tonight? Odd to have a party on a Sunday night. Perhaps it was to be more of one of those genteel soirées with decanted wine and canapes that she was so fond of having. Whatever it was, Bill would be there.
Hugo and Veronica lived in Hoopers Lane, not far from The Goat and Compasses. Janus bought some Special Brews with his mum’s five pound note and drank them quickly. Then he went to Veronica and Hugo’s house at twilight.
Their front garden was asphalted, the sort of deep, black asphalt that is sprinkled with little chips of white stone. Their garden had been converted into a car park, though neither Hugo nor Veronica drove. The curtains were closed. Party noises, heavily muffled, were audible. Janus knocked and Veronica answered. A tall woman, the back-lighting of the house made visible the outline of her skull through the fine mesh of her tight, frizzy perm. Her eyes, as always, were set within greasy troughs of eye-shadow and mascara. She wore a black velvet choke to which the neck of her pleated dress seemed to hang. The dress was a Romanesque garment, bright red, pleated all the way to the ground, like a fluted column. Beneath it, clearly visible in outline, was a black brassiere of sturdy construction. Veronica’s hostility towards Janus probably stemmed from the time, at another party, when he’d taken hold of her plump bosoms and jiggled them about. It must have been years ago, but the memory of their weight in his hands had stayed with Janus ever since, rekindled by the sight of her bra he now had. In certain lights Veronica had a mysterious, towering beauty.
She’d been laughing as she answered the door but when she saw that it was Janus her laughter stopped instantly and she closed the door a little, so that there was only room for her face, which said ‘No. You weren’t invited.’
‘Charming,’ said Janus.
Seeing she was about to close the door he blurted ‘Is Bill in there?’
Veronica hesitated, as though not sure how to reply. She glanced back into the house, from which was coming tremendous laughter, oblivious of Janus’s presence.
‘I’m not sure . . .’
‘You’re not sure?’
Rita Michaelangeli’s small dark head appeared beside Veronica, peeking out, childlike, from beneath Veronica’s armpit.
‘Who is it?’ she said in a giggly, excited voice, then, seeing Janus, said ‘Oh,’ and withdrew.
‘Anyway, whether Bill’s here or not,’ said Veronica, reasserting herself, ‘I can’t have you in my house Janus, not after the last time . . .’
‘What last time?’
Did she mean the bosom-jiggling incident, but that was years ago, surely . . .
‘You know perfectly well Janus, now go away.’
She began again to close the door.
‘I’m surprised you invited her.’
‘Who, Rita?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘But I suppose you’ve made it up with Hugo, otherwise she wouldn’t be here. Very forgiving of you . . . very tolerant.’
Veronica gave one of her slightly disgusted, wrinkle-nosed, tight-mouthed don’t-you-dare-try-and-pull-that-one-on-me faces and closed the door.
Janus walked back to the pavement and then along Hoopers Lane towards the railway bridge. How long should he give it? How long before the fuse he’d lit sparked its way up to the dynamite. How long before Veronica, dismissive of his hint at first, allowed it to grow and grow until she could contain it no longer. Poor old Veronica. She thought she’d landed the catch of the year with Hugo Price, beery old clapped out second-class honours graduate trading on his school playground reputation, which was fading fast. Turned out to be a ravenous womaniser bedding his pert little female students with monotonous regularity. Discovered affairs led to ferocious rows and temporary separations, Hugo and Veronica were always teetering on the brink of divorce. Veronica was capable of a seething, almost delirious jealousy at any suggestion her husband was being unfaithful. She would find the morsel of doubt he’d offered her impossible to resist.
The railway ran behind the houses of Hoopers Lane. Hugo and Veronica’s garden backed onto the dense undergrowth of the cutting. All he had to do was hop over the bridge and down onto the cutting, a short walk along the tracks and then a scramble through the mulberries and under the sycamore clumps and over the low fence into Hugo and Veronica’s garden. The party would, on this balmy night, have spilt out onto the lawn long ago, there he could mingle in the dark with the party guests unnoticed.
A simple plan, yet every stage of its execution was fraught with difficulties. The bridge wall itself was higher than it looked, as was the drop into the cutting on the other side. Janus twisted his ankle on landing, then stumbled through an invisible mess of suburban detritus – bottles and beer cans, tangles of wire, rubble. He cut his knee. A train hurtled past. The railway here was a suburban commuter branch line that connected the merchants of the City of London with the countryside of Hertfordshire, and yet down there at track level, in amid all the brambles and clinker, these trivial little local trains seemed immense and powerful machines that sundered the dark with their blazing carriage windows. At this time of night there were few trains about, and Janus was surprised to see one at all. Thinking it likely that it was the last train of the night, Janus walked confidently along the tracks in between the rails, from sleeper to sleeper, small amid the vast engineering of a suburban railway line. Then the ascent through the cutting’s undergrowth, a terrible struggle through thorny scrub to attain the Price’s garden.
When finally he crossed their rickety wooden fence he found himself at the silent, far end of a hundred feet of garden, in something like an orchard. A wilderness of decaying apple trees bounded by a rustic bower straggled with passion-flowers, then a broad almost dead lawn with benches of white wrought iron, in the centre a small circular pond with a fountain in the middle, the operation of which was now banned by the emergency legislation brought in by the Minister for Drought. There was also a swing in the garden, a fixture left by the previous occupants and allowed to remain by childless Hugo and Veronica who had once, it seemed, hoped for a family.
Janus’s entrance to the party went unnoticed due to the fact that Rita Michaelangeli was threatening to commit suicide having climbed out onto the roof from an attic window. There was a commotion in the garden below her, where some party guests tried to reason with Rita while others, too drunk to realize what was happening, blundered about stupidly on the dimly lit lawn, paddled in the stagnant pool, played on the creaking swing.
‘Get a blanket,’ someone was shouting, ‘something to catch her in.’
‘Lets all take our trousers off and tie them together to make a trouser-trampoline,’ slurred a drunk, unbuckling his belt.
‘She couldn’t kill herself from there, it’s not high enough.’
‘What if she landed on her head?’
‘Probably just end up a vegetable.’
Oddly, Rita had taken up onto the roof with her two bunches of celery, and she was slowly, methodically, breaking off stick after stick and hurling them down on the spectators, but especially on Hugo Price, who was on the patio and in a dilemma. Veronica was shrieking at him. Her pleated dress was torn, exposing the left cup of her bra. In some previous struggle this bra had slipped out of position, and her breast was shakily over-spilling, half her nipple was exposed, peeping cheekily above the lacy trim. Had no one thought to tell her?
‘She’s saying it’s her or me,’ a drunk that Janus vaguely knew said to him, ‘so if he goes with Veronica he’s got a death on his hands, if he leaves her he’s probably risking a kitchen knife in the groin, at the very least. Between you and me I think a full castration job is on the cards.’
Another tussle erupted between Hugo and Veronica. Hugo received a swipe in the face from Veronica’s hand, who then shrieked up at the rooftops for Rita to throw herself off. Yet Rita, dressed in a flowery, flowing, diaphanous dress that fluttered in the light nocturnal breeze, seemed almost in a trance, her treacly cascade of hair fluttering, she continued to lob celery stalks down into the garden rather like, Janus thought, a mourner tossing flowers into a grave.
From the shadows just beyond the reach of the kitchen lights Janus observed all this, finding himself almost yearning for Rita’s fall, not because he particularly disliked Rita, in fact he was quite fond of her, she’d more than once bestowed upon him plucky little kisses and bosomy embraces, but just for the witnessing of something spectacular, a young woman plunging to her death, landing head first on patio concrete. What would happen? Blood and nervous, post-mortem convulsions? Screams from those nearby? Panic. Silence. So Janus watched, his heart lifting, edging Rita closer to the guttering, let her take just one step, let her fall, let her fall . . .
Bill was down there with Hugo and Veronica, trying to act as peacemaker, not succeeding very well. Veronica seemed to be holding him responsible for the whole mess, perhaps mixing him up with Janus, and she clawed at his beard, pulling away tufts.
Kill Bill, Janus thought. Veronica, get your best knife, your kitchen devil, put it through his mean little heart, get one of your fondue forks and take out his eyes, one by one, like pickled silverskins. Chop him up and put him in your Moulinex. Liquidate him. Pour him into glasses and chill him in the fridge, then drink him with a salt-rimmed glass and a slice of lemon. Just for the spectacle. Just for the event.
But Bill was retreating. He had come away from Hugo and Veronica and was tottering down the garden and into the shadows toward Janus.
‘Oh, hallo,’ he said, seeing Janus murderous beneath apple trees.
‘Hallo,’ said Janus.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve just been trying to save Rita’s life, but I’ve given up.’
‘Not worth it, really.’
‘No.’
Bill giggled quietly and put a hand on Janus’s shoulder, then attempted to embrace both shoulders with the single arm. Janus flinched.
‘Veronica Fox has found out about Hugo Rat’s secret love life vis-à-vis Rita Fox.’
Bill yawned, then drank from his glass, Janus having moved a few paces back to release himself from his brother-in-law’s embrace.
‘I thought the doctor said you couldn’t drink any more.’
‘What does he know?’ said Bill, shrugging. ‘Anyway, he said cut down, not give up, or did he say give up? I don’t bloody know any more. I don’t care.’
‘I thought you weren’t going out any more, that you didn’t go to the pub any more . . .’
Bill took a swig, made some incomprehensible gestures, ‘Me? The world is my pub, Janus, you know that. Anyway, what am I going to do but drink, now that your dear, sweet angel sister has fled?’
‘Fled where?’
‘Fled off to make a nest somewhere else.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since yesterday, my old fruit. You should know, you were round our flat while she was getting her stuff together. An emotional turning point in my life disrupted somewhat by the uninvited intrusion of a drunken maniac. Packing her things last night for immediate departure. Don’t remember do you? My pleas for her to stay fell upon deaf ground, not helped by intrusion of aforesaid drunken person, who thus rendered my pleas worthless, since she blames my partnership in crime with you for the loss of our marriage. Thus I was required to remove you from the flat. In one last desperate attempt to save my marriage, I hung one on your beak, as they say . . .’
Janus touched his face.
‘I don’t remember.’
Though he did. Being pushed backwards out of the front door. Resisting. Finally Bill’s fist in his face. Not once. Not twice. Three times. The final punch had sent Janus into the flower beds.
‘You weren’t there this morning.’
‘I’ve been looking for her all day. Went round your mum and dad’s but they were just going off on holiday. I made a nuisance of myself with your mum. She is a divine woman, your mother. She let me cry on her shoulder for an hour. It meant they were late getting away . . .’
‘Didn’t you see me in the front garden?’
‘No? At Fernlight Avenue?’
‘Polperro Gardens. I was in the rose bushes asleep.’
‘Didn’t see you, but my mind was on other things, old chap.’
‘So you just walked off and left me to rot . . .’
Bill’s manner suddenly changed. His warmth went.
‘Don’t you understand what I’ve just said? The woman I love has just left me . . .’
‘Yes, but she’s only my sister. You yourself said you never loved her . . .’
‘I said that to you . . .’ Bill began, but couldn’t explain further.
‘The good news,’ said Janus, ‘is that we can devote all our energies to discovering the source of the Limpopo.’
‘I don’t want to discover the source of the fucking Limpopo.’
‘Well you can get stuffed, then,’ said Janus, his manner also changing to match Bill’s. Then more assertively, ‘Get stuffed!’
Without saying anything, after a moment’s pause, Janus took a swing at Bill’s head, a wild, flailing swipe in the dark that missed Bill’s beard by a good six inches, but which carried Janus’s body with it, spinning around in empty space until it flopped clumsily on the grass.
Bill laughed, but it was a jeering laugh, such as he’d never directed at Janus before, and it angered Janus further, who launched himself at Bill’s legs, knocking him off balance and onto his bottom with a thud. Bill said ‘ouch’ loudly, then gripped Janus’s head with his legs while Janus growled. Janus, if anything, was taller than Bill, but Bill hadn’t lost the muscle he’d built up as a steeplejack, and which was still kept toned by the physicality of carrying sides of beef, chopping and sawing them into steaks. Janus was pathetically out of his depth in challenging Bill physically, he was almost literally tied up in knots.
Bill had Janus on his tummy, his arms locked behind his back, sitting on him, Janus’s long hair was bunched in his fist, he tugged at the hair and so lifted Janus’s face off the grass.
‘I could break your neck now with one pull. Kill you, or leave you paralysed for life. What do you say to that? Look what you’ve brought me to. Violence. I’ve never been a violent person. In fact last night when I punched you in the face was the first time I’d punched anyone. And now you’ve given me a taste for it. I’d like to stamp on your silly face again and again, until it’s a pulp. Juliette’s gone off with Boris the Wires and it’s all because of you you useless fucker . . .’
‘Not Boris . . .’ said Janus, once Bill had let go of his hair and thrown his face back into the grass.
Bill sobbed, and then lay down. Janus rubbed his scalp and lay down as well.
‘I thought she might be here,’ said Bill quietly. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have come. I’d have stayed at home and swallowed a bottle of tablets . . .’
‘No,’ said Janus, ‘No, don’t do that,’ he said it with some alarm in his voice, ‘Dying is a horrible thing. It’s disgusting. Death is for idiots. People like us should never die . . .’
Bill smiled at Janus. The warmth returned.
‘Boris the Bold,’ said Bill, thoughtfully.
‘Boris the Billy Goat,’ said Janus, equally thoughtfully.
‘Boris the Bastard.’
They laughed.
‘Has Rita jumped yet?’ said Janus, who had his back to the house. Bill lifted his head.
‘Well she’s not on the roof any more. She’s either jumped or someone’s talked her down.’
The garden had emptied. Rita’s threatened suicide seemed to have put a dampener on things, and many people had left, and the rest had gone inside.
‘I wonder if Hugo and Veronica will split up,’ said Janus.
‘I hope so,’ said Bill.
‘That’ll be two in one day. A record.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing. Why don’t we ransack the house for booze and go somewhere . . . ?’
‘Good idea,’ said Bill, sitting up, ‘tell you what. I’ll nip inside, procure a couple of bottles of vodka, perhaps some tomato juice, and meet you out here, in five minutes.’
Bill stood up and made for the house. Janus sprang up and pulled him back by the arm.
‘No,’ he said, ‘you won’t come back will you?’
‘Of course I will . . .’
‘No you won’t, you’ll run off like you did that time at The Owl, you bastard. You’ll make your escape.’
Janus’s face was wrinkled with an indignant frown.
‘I promise I’ll be back . . .’
‘Cross your heart?’
‘Cross my heart. I promise . . .’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Well what do you want me to do?’ Bill said, exasperated.
‘Stay out here with me.’
‘Okay.’
‘We’ll do something.’
‘Okay. What’ll we do?’
Janus thought for a while, looked around him, like a child looking for something to play with.
‘I think,’ he said, slowly and carefully, ‘that we may be very near the source of the Limpopo.’
‘Do you?’ said Bill, soberly.
‘I do. I think we are very close to making a truly remarkable discovery, our names will be displayed on one of those boards they have on posh clubs in Pall Mall, and old bastards with white moustaches will talk about us over their scotch and sodas . . .’
‘Will they?’
‘Yes, look, it’s this way.’
‘Aha,’ said Bill, pointing to the little fish-pond with its inoperative fountain, ‘this must be it.’
‘Oh no. That’s a mere tributary. That’s nothing. The river itself is this way. Come on, follow me this way.’
And Janus walked to the end of the garden through the little orchard, to the low fence at the end. Bill followed. Now in complete darkness, beyond the reach of the lights, they moved carefully among the thorny scrub of the railway cutting. Janus was conscious of Bill’s quietness. Things had changed. Normally he would have been all giggles and sniggers on such a venture, but now he was silent, apart from the occasional throat clearing cough, and some rather noisy breathing. Janus had never known Bill, sober or drunk, so serious.
‘There it is,’ said Janus, once they cleared a certain level of the cutting, coming upon a view of the railway tracks beneath them, ‘By Jove Dickie, this is it, old bean. The source of the Limpopo, what we’ve been looking for all these years, we’ve finally made it.’
The rails glinted green in the light from a distant signal.
‘Yes,’ said Bill, and coughed, ‘what ho.’
‘Careful,’ said Janus as they moved through the scrub towards the tracks. Bill was holding onto Janus for support and guidance. He gave a sudden, spluttery, untidy cough that almost exhausted him of breath. They were on the tracks now. Again that sense of space, of being dwarfed by engineering.
‘We’ve made it,’ said Janus.
Bill was gasping. He fumbled about in his pockets for an inhaler.
‘I feel weird,’ he said, pantingly, ‘it’s what the doc said about the booze . . .’ He coughed again, then gasped for air, gaping like a fish, down on his knees, then all fours, drawing desperately for air which had suddenly become a remote, elusive thing, difficult to catch.
Janus, on the other track, watched, amused, amused even further by the warm glow that was highlighting the interior arch of the Goat and Compasses Lane bridge, from which Janus had earlier jumped. It looked like the faint glow of sunrise. A train was coming.
The light bled along the rails, giving them form, and the steel suddenly filled with sound, the twanging, mewing sound that always came with the faster trains, as though the steel rail was suddenly full of trumpeting angels.
Bill had found his inhaler, he was puffing at it, shaking it, puffing, it didn’t seem to make any difference.
‘Get up,’ Janus said, loudly and a little irritably, as a father might speak to a child who’d fallen in the playground for the tenth time.
‘I can’t move,’ said Bill, his voice a crackly whisper.
The bridge was now a bright archway of light and the rails were tweeting and lively with vibration. Bill found himself in a cradle of twittering metal.
‘It’s coming pretty fast,’ said Janus.
‘Which way?’
‘Up there.’
Bill seemed to think he had plenty of time but the train was nearly at the bridge. Janus estimated he probably had about twenty seconds to get out of the way, and Bill was still on his hands and knees.
‘Can you go up there and stop it, Janussimus, because I can’t move.’
It was the ground that was singing now, a low, mighty croon that made the earth seem suddenly a malleable thing, full of springs, like a mattress, or quicksand.
Intense light at the bridge now, then the train itself came into view, like the sun returning after a total eclipse, a sudden, piercing shining forth that cast long shadows.
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.