The Back of His Head

by Patrick Evans

  Geneva’s name certainly livens them up again, though! Hardly is it out of my mouth at last than Semple is crashing forward in his chair:

  ‘That slut again?’ he cries. ‘What’s she want this time?’

  ‘She is not a slut.’ Marjorie. ‘She may well be a major pain in the arse but she’s not a slut—’

  ‘Let’s put it to the vote, then—those who think Geneva’s a slut say aye—’

  ‘You’re out of order,’ I tell him, and then he makes his out-of-order joke, and Marjorie, as she always does when he does, says Oh for God’s sake, Robert, grow up. Then I ask: Well, what d’you think she wants? and, of course, Semple has a schoolboy answer to that, too—

  Marjorie turns away from him. ‘What’s Geneva got cooked up this time?’ she asks me. ‘A best-selling sequel?’

  I tell them, carefully, paying it out before them, across the two shell ashtrays.

  A pause.

  ‘What d’you mean,’ Julian asks. ‘A tape?’

  ‘A series of tapes. She’s come across them somehow.’

  ‘What kind of tapes?’

  ‘Audiotapes. From a few years ago.’

  ‘You mean audio cassettes?—who uses cassettes now?’

  ‘Do they still work—is there anything to play them on—?’

  ‘You’ll have something,’ I say to Julian. ‘In your studio? Some old tapedecks?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Has she played them through? Geneva?’

  ‘She claims to have heard all of them. She claims to—’

  ‘What’s on them—where’d she get them from?’

  ‘Yes, who’s the vendor?’

  ‘She wouldn’t say.’

  ‘What’s all this about—?’

  Marjorie looks at me shrewdly. ‘Why are you being so mysterious, Peter—?’

  ‘Oh, you know Norman, he likes holding his cards.’

  But the thing is, I don’t know what’s on the tapes. I know what I fear might be on them, but of course I’m not going to mention that, not in any company.

  When she told me on the phone my hands went cold: my neck, my face, even my feet went cold as I stood there. Many hours of interviews with one source, she told me: identity unknown, relationship with the Master unknown, and one detail revealed, only one, but enough to convince me of their authenticity.

  ‘She didn’t say what was on them,’ I tell the others. ‘But I have reason to believe they’re authentic.’

  Then of course there’s the other business as well: her price, I mean. And your purpose in telling me this—? I asked her, as coolly as I could manage. Well, she said, and I thought of her coyly be-scarfed online image. I’m sure you understand, she said, that I’d like to write another book on Raymond? On Mr Lawrence? I asked. Yes, on Mr Lawrence, she replied. I understand the official biographer hasn’t been appointed yet.

  So there you are. Either (a) she keeps these wretched tapes and pours their unknown contents into another unauthorised life of the Master over which we have not the slightest control, or (b) we authorise her imperishable new work and get the tapes in return and at least some idea of what is really in them, and, of course, some measure of control of what gets put into print. Possibly—

  Naturally, I’d prefer the latter, she breathed down the line at me when I spelled things out for her like that. I’m keen to pursue my higher promotion, she said, and an authorised biography would give me even greater standing in my career. It’d acknowledge my status in Raymond Lawrence studies. And that’s something I feel has been neglected over the years—a full and proper recognition of the work I’ve done for Raymond?

  All this I spell out now to the other members of the Trust.

  A moment’s pause, and then an explosion:

  ‘Official biographer!’ Semple slams both hands on the tabletop. ‘Christ, what a cheek—what a fucking cheek! Official biographer! Fuck me dead!’

  ‘Does she really say that?’ Julian. ‘I can hardly believe she’d come right out and, you know—did she really just ask for the job, straight out?’

  ‘She’s holding us to ransom. It’s a stick-up—’

  ‘Official biographer—?’

  ‘That’s what she wants, yes. Pretty much.’

  Then Julian asks the key question: ‘If she’s holding us to ransom, what is it she’s got on us—?’

  Marjorie looks at Semple. Semple shrugs.

  ‘Was it that bad, back then?’ he asks. He shrugs again. ‘I suppose it was. But how’d anyone know?’

  ‘It’s all in my book,’ Marjorie says. ‘Isn’t it? The way Ray treated people?’

  ‘In ravel-me-up—?’

  ‘You know the title, Robert, dear, do try to get it right. The love-hate thing, I mean. The way he’d make you kiss his arse and then cut you dead. It’s all in Unravel Me.’

  ‘Nice try, Marge.’ Semple shakes his head. ‘But it’s not. There’s lots more to it than Ray’s charming habit of wiping his backside with his nearest and dearest from time to time. It’s usually called sado-masochism, as far as I recall—’

  ‘There was that rumour, wasn’t there? Just before the Prize.’

  ‘What? Which one’s that, Marjorie?’

  ‘Order—’

  ‘The kid he brought into the country, he was supposed to have—’

  ‘No, that was in Natural Light.’ This is Julian, bless him. ‘And Other-people. It was in those two, wasn’t it?’

  ‘No, it really happened, I’m sure of that, he—’

  ‘You weren’t here, you were overseas at the time—’

  ‘Well, so were you—apparently Ray brought this teenaged kid back from—’

  ‘Order—’

  ‘Teenage? I heard he was—’

  ‘No.’ Julian again. ‘It’s fiction—what you’re thinking of is fiction. It’s what he wrote.’

  ‘The North African boy that thing brings back. The hero. What’s his name? The protagonist? He brings back that albino boy from Algeria?’

  ‘Albino? I don’t remember that.’

  ‘Yes, that’s why he bumps him off—’

  ‘I thought he gets bumped off because—’

  ‘Order—order, please.’ I let my chair drop forward. ‘We’re drifting away from the agenda—’

  ‘What agenda? All you’ve got’s a piece of paper with today’s date on it. We’re trying to work out whether Geneva’s got a loaded gun or a load of shit. Until we know that, we can’t tell whether—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I do understand, I do understand. My assumption is that she’s heard a number of these tapes and—has some information she believes we wouldn’t want to make public. That’s what I’m assuming.’

  We look at one another and away. We all know we’re on dangerous ground here. As I’ve said, we each have a past with Raymond, and each past involves—well, a different kind of intimacy, as I heard someone put it once: sardonically, but with a certain amount of knowledge, albeit not at first hand. Each of us in the room knows something of what this might mean, but none of us knows all of it. Even I, who know so much, can’t yet put it into words. Least of all the topic that they’ve raised. Of all things, we need to steer clear of that—

  ‘I’ll ring her back and see if we can get a sample cassette,’ I tell them. ‘She wouldn’t hand over the lot. I’m not even sure exactly how many—’

  ‘Stewart,’ Marjorie says, abruptly. ‘In Understanding the Cardinal. The hero. His name’s Stewart. I’ve just remembered. The one who murders the albino boy. Youth. The wog person.’

  ‘Understanding the Cardinal is short stories. It’s a collection of—’

  ‘Oh—is it? Yes, that’s right, of course it is. Then which one’s the one where he gets, you know—?’

  Such an unsatisfactory meeting: the business of the paua ashtrays still lingers, for one thing, and Geneva—who seems now to have been conjured up, somehow, out of the very return of them—Geneva needs to be dealt with, too. All this chaos, all this confusion: once again, once again, the
curse of the present tense—

  Afterwards, as so often following one of our meetings, I stand at the top of the front steps and listen to their voices down by the old garage, and then the slamming of car doors and the gravel crunching under tyres, and, after that, the fall of silence upon the house once more. A sort of silence: the sea wind is in the pines outside and in the eucalyptus trees, and, up behind the Residence, it hums and moans richly through the walnut tree.

  In the Blue Room I sit in darkness with the two ashtray shells. The possibility that we’re in the middle of another of Robert’s stunts has already occurred to me. He, after all, is the man who, some years ago, persuaded an elderly professor at the local university to dump his telephone into a bucket of hot soapy water in order to improve reception from overseas. But Robert likes the payoff for his japes to come fairly quickly, and to be revealed—likes to reveal himself, usually—as he most thinks we think of him: the licensed fool. And you’ve seen his reaction above, which seemed nothing like that. Or is he becoming subtler?

  I press the shells together and snuff up the smell of them: salt, the sea. Dear Lord, the thing that has come up tonight! It’s always there, of course, that’s the difficulty, quivering on the boundary of Art and Life, waiting to be dragged in either direction. I know that in this long, dark room I’m at Ground Zero of the whole strange business, the place where the yin and the yang of the entire venture of Art always meet: the Medal and the Citation up there on the wall, their vivid fulgence lost at the moment, and, somewhere under my feet, their opposite, the rest of the adventure: equally unknowable, there but not there, both imaginary and real. The thing that can never be mentioned.

  I press the shells to my nose again: the smell of salt, the smell of the sea. It is as if I am snuffing up the past itself, the very past.

  I say the name out loud, terrifyingly, into the old house’s knowing void, its sentient emptiness.

  I wait.

  I wait—

  The smell, salty still, musty, gradually insistent, gradually declaring itself to me: something that hasn’t been in the house for years. I lift the shells, cupped together in my hands, and smell them. Yes. No. Yes, yes—

  Now, slowly, a slight change in air pressure in the house: as if a door has been opened somewhere, as if something has begun to happen. I’m in the Blue Room with not a light on and thinking all the thoughts I’ve been giving you—where else to think of them?—and they’ve taken me away from where I am and why.

  Something has definitely happened, something is definitely changing—

  I’ve already stood, as if I’m somebody else. Something is going to happen. Oh, the smell of the place: it suddenly overwhelms me, that pastness of the past I know from what he used to tell me, Raymond, the man I know I’m awaiting, madly, long after he has died. Dear Lord, he’d be over eighty now: what am I thinking of, what am I imagining? Yet there’s somebody here, somebody is in the Residence with me: I can hear him, out in the dining room, someone is moving about. I can hear the creak of the floorboards—the creak, that creak, from the little hallway just outside the door—

  I can’t move. He’s standing there. I am beginning to see him in the dark, and at the same time I can’t see him in himself: he is visible to me only if I look away from him, like a distant star: he is an absence, like a vortex, he is what everything else is not. A default, a lack, a someone, a something, nothing, standing there in the doorway: standing there surely, or come up through the floorboards to me:

  He’s back—he’s coming back—he’s coming back to me—

  Anyway, there’s that and then there’s the car. I’m shining up the Dodge one day like a sort of hint and all of a sudden he says to me, get in. The old man. Just like that. It’s early evening, round six, I’m squatting down shining one of his hubcaps for him and I see him coming up behind me in the chrome I’m polishing, Mr Lawrence, he’s leaning on his stick and bulging at me in the chrome. I stand up and I take a look at him. Go on, go on, get in, he tells me, and he jerks his head at the car. Go on. And then he says—I’m going round the passenger side, see—he says, no no no, you prick, the other side. And when I stop and look at him he says, what, can’t you drive one of these things, what sort of man are you? Go on, it’s easy. So there I am, getting into the Dodge at last, I’m slipping in and I’m sitting there with my hands on the wheel and I’m feeling like a prize tit because I don’t know what to do next!

  Breathe in, he tells me. I sort of look at him, like, what? Go on, breathe in, he says, so I breathe in. That smell’s blue, he says. That’s what blue smells like, that’s what the past smells like. That’s where we’re going, we’re going into the past. When you’ve learned to drive this thing properly. Know what this is? And he points to the steering wheel. It’s called a horn ring, he says. What d’you think of that, got one on yours? Then he says, now, what’s that? and he points to a lever off the side of the column. Go on, try it, he says, so I give it a tweak and there’s this sort of double thump up behind us, one on each side, and he starts laughing. Know what they’re called? he asks me. They’re called semaphores!—the indicators, they popped out the top of the door posts when I tweaked the lever. Isn’t that great, semaphores? he says, and then he says, I’ll tell you what, when my semaphore can’t do that anymore I’ll know the game’s up! Which is really sad, him saying that, because, I told you, I used to shower him every day. Talk about hunt-the-thimble. You don’t mind me saying that, do you, Patrick?

  Anyway, on with the story. Next thing is, he gets me back in the Dodge for another lesson? Turns out he means double-declutching—and there’s me, never double-declutched in my life! But I made out I had, so out on the road he pulls up and swaps sides and he says, go on, then, show me what you can do. And I’m in behind the wheel and he says, where’s the gear lever? He thinks I don’t know but it’s on the column, anyone knows that, and I know what’s going on down on the floor, too—they’re the size of dinner plates, the floor pedals on those old cars, you ever seen them? Clutch brake accelerator, I tell him, and he says, yes, but which one’s which, go on? And wouldn’t you know it, it’d been that long since I drove manual I got the wrong one. No no no, he says, on the other side, it’s on the other side, you prick. And then he says All right, ignition, and I turn the key in the dash and it’s whoom-whoom-whoom-whoom-whoom from under the bonnet, great sound to it, always works for me. Straight six under there, thought it was eight but he told me six. Into gear and we’re off, whoom-whoom-whoom-whoomp-whoom—

  Well!—the first time I go to change gear out on the road, you’d think I’d wrecked the gearbox it sounded that bad. I let the car roll onto the gravel berm, and he gets out and swaps back with me. It’d help if you didn’t tell me lies, he says, and then off we go with him driving. And I tell you, he could drive the Dodge. He took us up the hills and he just let rip, he’d wind it round corners like my mum stirring the Xmas pud. Great fun, but I tell you what, I was shitting myself. Pardon my French. Watch my feet, he calls out to me—and you should’ve seen them going left and right! Because that’s what double-declutching’s about, see, what you’re basically doing is, you’re changing gear into neutral and giving the engine a rev, then you’re changing into the next gear you want, up or down. See? Like neutral’s a gear? Clutch-and-change-into-neutral, accelerator, clutch-and-change-into-gear, he says to me. Got it? Yes-yes-yes, I’m telling him. Course I got it.

  Weirdest feeling, back in the driver’s seat. You driven a manual, Patrick? I suppose all you older guys started out on manuals, no offence meant but you know what I’m saying. Tell you the truth, I didn’t even know they were still around—well, I hadn’t even thought about it, really. Forgotten how different it was, I mean, just sitting in a car like that was different, it’s like you’re in a tank! But after a minute it smooths itself off and we’re crackling away down the road, and when we’re doing that it feels almost like an automatic? I told him that when we were out and rolling along in third, I said to him, feels lik
e just another car, and he says to me just another car, what do you mean? It’s not just another car, he tells me, it’s a time machine.

  Where we going? I ask him, and he laughs and he says, we’re off to the shops! Not sure he was meant to be going anywhere, to tell the truth. But down to the foot of the hill we go, know where I mean? Here! he says, and we pull in and he’s out of the car before it’d hardly stopped. I watched him shuffle off down the pavement on his stick—that stage you couldn’t tell he had anything that wrong with him except he was old. I got out after him and what-you-know, it’s the butcher shop he’s after—look at that, he says when I come up next to him, he’s standing there he’s perving the meat! Look at that roast, he says. You’re not meant to eat meat, I told him. Who says, he says, and he really was just about dribbling while he was looking, he couldn’t take his eyes off it. Look at that rump steak, he says. Look at the arse on it.

  He’s rubbing his hands together. I haven’t got any money, he says. Either have I, I told him, which was a lie but it was true he wasn’t meant to eat meat on account of his heart. Like I said, they only fed him walnuts and this soy stuff you can buy that tasted like this time at school I ate the end off a rubber eraser for a dare? It tasted like that, like nothing and something at the same time. You ever tried eating that, Patrick? Soy substitute, I mean, not rubber erasers.

  Well, next he says, wait in the car. Go on go on, he says. Turn the engine on and be ready to go. He’s tapping off down the footpath and he’s heading into Tony’s, you know, the store down there? Go on, he says over his shoulder. Don’t worry, they know me in here. And I’m telling you, he was in and out of there like a robber’s dog, you’d think that’s what he was the way he comes out with a packet of something in his mouth. He’s scuttling along with all these bits and pieces clutched up against his chest and one in his mouth, and he’s looking left and right. Then he tries to get in the car too quick and he gets tangled up in the door. Move it, he says like in a gangster movie, and then he’s straight into one of the packets. I was concentrating that hard getting the old bus out into the traffic I didn’t notice what he was doing, but when we get moving again and we’re off up the hill whoom-whoom-whoom I look across and he’s lacing into a meat sandwich!—that’s what he’d got from the store! He was after me, he says, he spotted me. The prick who owns the shop. He knows I pinch stuff off him so he chased me out. You stole that? I ask him. Well, he says. What am I expected to do if I want a feed, sell my body for money? Then no no no, you silly shit, not in here—I was starting to turn off for Cannon Rise—keep on going, we’re not going back home!