I did go a couple of times to see him. In a way I suppose I wanted to plead with him not to abandon me. For Janner, with his pipe-stem torso sheathed in the stringy tube of a sleeveless, Fair Isle sweater, and with his eyes wetly gleaming behind round lenses, was more than a friend as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t admit it to myself but I was a little bit in love with him. He told me that his hut was a faithful reconstruction of an Ur-Bororo traditional dwelling. I didn’t believe him for a second; anyone looking at the hut could see that it had been ordered out of the back of Exchange & Mart. Its creosoted clapboard sides, its macadamised roofing, its one little leaded window, the way the floor wasn’t level with the ground. All of these facts betrayed its prefabricated nature. Inside the hut we drank tea out of crude clay vessels. Once again Janner assured me that these were of traditional Ur-Bororo manufacture, but I couldn’t really see the point of the statement. By now I could see just by looking at him that he was lost to me. He no longer needed me as a passive intermediary between his mind and the world he studied. He had found his destiny.
I left the hut without pleading at all and cycled back to Reigate. I had accepted that from now on I would be alone. But it’s difficult to get that Wertherish in Reigate, certainly not when you’re lodging in a clipped crescent of double-glazed, dormered windows. My depression soon ate itself. Without Janner to talk to I was forced back among my fellow students. I made some other friends; I even had a girlfriend. It wasn’t that I forgot about Janner, that would have been impossible, it was just that I tried to construct a life for myself to which he wouldn’t be relevant. I succeeded in this, but it had its own consequences.
During the next ten years very little happened to me. Sure, I left Reigate and went to teach at a school in Sanderstead. I met, fell in love with, and speedily married the geography and PE teacher at a neighbouring school. We became owner-occupiers and a child arrived, who was small, well made and finished; and dreamy and introverted to the point of imbecility. We had friends and opinions, both in moderation. It was a full life, seemingly without severe problems. I had grown through my modest and unturbulent adolescence into a modest and unturbulent adult. I even gained a certain celebrity for my phlegm at the school where I taught, because I could face down aggressive pupils with indifference. Some of my colleagues became convinced that within me lurked quite violent impulses. This, I’m afraid, was far from the truth. The reality was that I felt padded, as if all the gaps in my view of the world had been neatly filled with some kind of cavity life insulation. I felt ludicrously contained and static. I saw events unroll around me. I felt, I emoted, but the volume control was always on. Somewhere along the line someone had clapped a mute on my head and I hadn’t any idea who, or why.
During this whole period I heard nothing of Janner. I knew he had graduated from Reigate with unprecedented first-class honours and, with Dr Marston’s blessing and a none too generous grant from the SSRC, had gone abroad to visit his precious tribe. But beyond that, nothing. The only evidence I had of Janner’s existence during that ten-year period was finding by chance, while looking absent-mindedly through a stack of World Music records, an album Janner had acted as ‘consultant producer’ for. It was entitled Some Chants from Failed Cultures. I bought it immediately and rushed home.
If I had hoped for some kind of enlightenment, or to recapture the rapture of our scrubland walks together, I was to be disappointed. The album was gloomy and perverse. The producers had visited diverse groups of indigenes around the world, remarkable only for their persistence in chanting to no avail. Here were the Ketchem of Belize with their muttering eructation ‘Fall Out of the Water — Fish’. The I-Arana of Guinea, disillusioned cargo cultists who moaned gently, ‘Get Me Room Service’, and many others too tedious and depressing to mention.
The gist of all these failed chants I gathered from the sleeve notes, written by Janner. The chants themselves were badly recorded and incomprehensible. After two or three plays the needle on our record player started to score twists of vinyl out of the bottom of the grooves — and that was the end of that. Janner’s sleeve notes, as far as I was concerned, were unilluminating and discursive. They told me nothing concrete about his involvement with the project and gave me no clue as to where he might be now. When I tried to find out more through the record company I drew another blank. Ha-Cha-Cha Records had gone into receivership.
I may not have found the friend of my adolescence, but the record had gravely unsettled me. I had assumed that Janner was by now safely ensconced in some provincial university’s anthropology department, his tremendous enthusiasm and drive winding down through the dreary cycle of teaching. But the record and its sleeve notes presented an alternative picture, a picture of a different Janner and a more unsettled career. The evening that I brought the record home I sat in the living-room for hours, using the time while my wife was at her class, to try and fathom Janner’s fate, with only the flimsy record sleeve to go on.
My son James didn’t help. He’d picked up a couple of the failed chants and as I put him to bed that night he said, in passable Uraic, ‘Lo! The crops are withering.’ Somehow, even among the cartoon stickers and the bright bendy limbs of bendy toys, this didn’t sound as incongruous as it perhaps should have.
Then, nothing. For another two years no word or sign of Janner. I didn’t pursue him, but I did go to the trouble of finding out about the Lurie Foundation, the body which I knew had part-funded Janner’s research into the Ur-Bororo. The secretary of the foundation was unforthcoming. He wrote me a letter stating the aims of the foundation in the barest outline: ‘To contribute to the understanding of the Ur-Bororo, a bursary will be provided for one postgraduate student every twenty years. Following his field-work the student will be required to lodge a paper of not less than 30,000 words with the Lurie Archive at the British Library.’ The letter was signed by Dr Marston. I spoke to a librarian at the British Library, but she told me that all the documents relating to the Lurie Foundation were held in a closed stack. I had reached a dead end.
Janner had represented for me a set of possibilities that were unfulfilled. Even after twelve years these wider horizons continued to advance beyond my measured tread. Occasionally, sitting in the staff-room during a vacant period, I would suddenly find myself crying. I felt the tears, damp on my cheek, and into my stomach came a bubble of sweet sentimentality. But my hands gripped the edges of the Education Supplement too tightly, held it too stiffly in front of my face. All around me the talk was of interest rates. From time to time a corduroy trouser leg loomed into view.
Then one day in late summer, just after the school sports day, I was walking down the hill towards Purley when something caught my eye in the window of a launderette. An etiolated, waxy-looking individual was having an altercation with a rotund, middle-aged woman. Voices were raised and it was clear that they were on the verge of coming to blows. I heard the woman say quite distinctly, ‘Coming in here and sitting staring at other people’s laundry, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Haven’t you got any laundry of your own to look at, you filthy pervert?’ She raised her hand to strike the man. As he turned to ward off the blow I saw his profile. It was Janner.
I stepped inside the launderette. Janner had evaded the first blow and was backing off to avoid a second. I touched him on the shoulder and said in my best disciplinary manner, ‘Would you step outside for a minute please, sir?’ The Protectress of Gussets was immediately convinced that here were the Proper Authorities. She surrendered her temporary deputy’s badge with good grace. Janner stepped outside.