The Back of His Head

by Patrick Evans

  I’d no idea what was going on, though, until he’d finished watching me walking around for a while in this frock. You make a fucking awful teenage girl, he said. But not a bad heroine in a book, d’you know that? I’d rather have been a hero, of course, but despite myself I was tickled pink when I realised what was happening. I just need a presence around, he said, I want the feel of a young person in a dress for a few days while I work something through. Your name’s Julia, by the way—no, you don’t have to wear it outside, you silly prick. Just don’t go outside for a few days, that’s all, outside’ll still be there when we’re finished—what d’you think, the great outdoors is going to pack up and piss off just because you’re not out in it? Who d’you think you are?

  And thus it was that I became Julia Perdue, protagonist of The Outer Circle Transport Service and (I like to think) a recurring figure in a number of the later fictions, where, sometimes, she has a different name and different details but is always, at heart, I feel, the same child-girl-woman. And that child-girl-woman is—me. I can still read parts of The Outer Circle, the early parts, and find myself living and breathing there. The magic of writing, the magic of reading it! And of being that person—because that (I remember) is what slowly took me over as the frock absorbed me into itself.

  I can remember, too, the day I first wore it for me and not just for him: he was out or away or late, I can’t remember which, and there was no one else about the place either. I stripped myself to my underclothes and slipped the thing over my head as I had learned to do, with my heart bumping away naughtily in my breast. It was when he was writing The Outer Circle still, and there was a scene in it he told me troubled him, in which Julia sees a particular man on her bus and follows him home when he gets off it. Why, what happens, why does she do that? Raymond wanted to know. She gets off and follows him and I’ve no idea why she does, no idea what they do together. I haven’t got her, I haven’t got her today, he said, she’s not mine. She’s so bloody difficult, this girl—

  I sat there listening to the afternoon wind blowing about the house, I remember, and knowing why I’d done it, why I’d followed the man, and knowing as well why it was I wouldn’t tell Raymond about it, ever. He was the man, that was the thing, and the power he was talking about was the power I felt I was coming to have over him. I sat in his room, the room of the man in the book, and felt that power for the first time, the greatest power of all, which is when a man wants you and you both know he desires you and he knows you know and you know you’ll never let him have you, ever. It was the first time I felt that, sitting in my pale blue dress in this dull, close room of his as he watched me and watched me and tried to work me out. And all the time I wanted him, too, that was the thing that was hidden from him, the fact of it and my knowing it—

  That was her. That was me. That was when I became a fictional character. I’ve never felt so utterly whole before, so absolutely complete, I’ve never felt so utterly written as in those days—written up, stitched up: stitched together: the Great Wound closed at last. Annealed into Art, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor. Healed and made whole—yes, that’s it! That’s it! Healed and made whole—

  The Outer Circle is his breakthrough novel, it’s generally agreed, the work in which, if you go back, the Raymond Lawrence who was to win the Prize of Prizes may first be seen, stepping out towards Stockholm. It’s set in Birmingham, England, of all places—when he was first overseas he’d worked there for a while in minor public schools—but is full of a yearning for his homeland that took everyone by surprise when they read the book. Its Julia is a young colonial who, in the usual way, has to go there to appreciate here, but realises that if she comes back to her birthplace she will still feel the pull to leave it that is a part of being born in this particular time and this particular place: the bus service of the title takes her around and about the outer limits of Birmingham city as a figure for her plight and, courtesy the obvious reference, for the human condition as well.

  All very shopworn, you have to say now and as Raymond did at the time, almost as soon as it was out: an excellent example of his prescience is the fact that he was the first to reject it, as if it’d been a drunken overnight assignation he’d woken up to regret. In fact even now it reads well, if slightly unfashionably, with real poetry in some of it—much of it—and a continuous wash of literary reference that most reviewers mentioned as one of its greatest achievements. Julia’s names are only the first of this slub of received writing that can be felt through his text. Make it sound literary and they’ll like it, he told me. Drop in Dante and two fucking Shakespeare quotes and suddenly it’s great art, suddenly they forget all the buggery and bestiality and cannibalism in the first three books, now I’m fucking shortlisted for a prize! And so he was, too, and won it, the National Book Award for the year, edging out another Mabel Carpenter trot (quite a fuss about that) and a find-yourself-in-nature novel about a man scraping rust. He was on his way.

  For all their excitement over the frissons of classical literature, though, what the reviewers and readers seemed to like most was Julia herself. By far his most believable character to date, one of them said. Now he’s got his first three novels out of his system, said another, he’s found a subject he makes worth writing about: a young woman, waking up to the world. Who knew he had it in him to make something memorable of a weary theme like that? But he has, no doubting it, in an extraordinary act of empathy. And a third: She lives and breathes as few characters do, leaping off the page and into the mind as the pages turn. Given the nature of his early work—his juvenilia, as we ought now to begin to term it—one inevitably wonders where this Julia Perdue comes from, so to speak. And Raymond’s verdict?—Terrible book, easily my most fuckable character. I kept writing about her because I wanted to get to the bonking scenes—

  I read all this in deep confusion, as you might imagine. There was no doubt about it, Julia had become a very real being in his mind. There was also no doubt that, to a large extent, certainly in her origins, she was me. Only I would know that, of course, because only I knew what he’d asked me to do while he was writing it.

  I ought to explain here what I was in early teenage, which is the time I’m writing about here: not much of a young man, it has to be said, since I was still betwixt and between, as you might say. I mean that not everything that usually takes place at that stage of life had in fact necessarily done so, and in the end—I mean when I was fifteen and still flute-voiced—I had to be given a course of tiny, bitter-tasting hormone tablets to gee me along, so to speak. Quite soon (almost overnight, it seemed at the time) I grew a foot and more, my voice began and then completed the awkward business of breaking, I started to grow a muscle or two and all the rest of it.

  At the time I’m writing about, though, when I was first caught up in Raymond’s cross-dressing art-world, I was still the Flying Dutchman of adolescence, as you might say, caught between earth and sky in a state of perpetual androgyny. You looked like Audrey fucking Hepburn, Raymond told me much later. Wished I hadn’t got you those bloody pills—ruined everything, look at you now! And so on: should’ve had your knackers off, he told me on another occasion. You were at your best when you were a boy soprano. I should’ve bitten them off there and then and been done with it. I’ve done that before, y’know—

  And so on. He’d just finished the fucking Birmingham novel, as he always called it after that, and he wasn’t quite his true self. Or perhaps he was. Whatever he was, he was worn out, he didn’t know what he was doing, he was beside himself—and then, suddenly, one night, he was beside me. I woke and there he was, next to me in the dark little second bedroom of what was not yet called the Residence. I could smell the aniseed on his breath—he’d been drinking Ouzo, the nearest he could get, here, to the anise he used to drink in North Africa. I didn’t know that then, I mean its proper significance to him, and all I could smell was his strangeness, the terror of difference tasted for the very first time: for me, it would always taste o
f aniseed, just as it was always lit by that redolent boof! of the gas burner.

  Here, hard up beside me, was all the rest of the world, everything that existed that wasn’t me, and it was touching me: my throat, first, gently stroked, my earlobes, pinched, no more than a touch, and then (then) down to my chest—my breast, I suppose, my breasts, since who knows what I was to him in that moment? Julia, I guessed, the imaginary character of his fiction, the young, flat-chested girl-woman of his imagination, made real, in his sodden mind, in the form of an epicene youth with his breath held tight: what would the man do next, where would he go?

  And, yes, of course, the thing he was mumbling all through this was (I realised much later, much, much later) the Herrick poem, Herrick’s Julia poem, with that wonderful word in it that melts reality into itself and becomes the whole thing, the very thing that it is about: words—language falling into imagination: words creating things:

  The liquefaction of her clothes—

  Realising that, being able to think like that, arrived much later, long after I’d begun to try to come to terms with what Raymond had made of me in the time in between. The morning after that first midnight visit to my bed he was comatose: I have no doubt he remembered nothing and, certainly, I told him even less. Of those times I, though, remember everything, but I remember them the way I remember what you read on the page—the way I remember the Birmingham novel itself, in those scenes where Julia is liquefied into reality by his words, and walks across the page for the reader (and, increasingly, runs, for that Outer Circle bus that comes looping past her every day).

  That, I remember, is what it was always like—always unrecalled, always scented by the Barbary coast: until the point at which, as I grew older and those times began to fall away from me, and, as I say, they started to have much the same slightly hallucinated reality that The Outer Circle Transport Service had, or Natural Light before it and Bisque which came next, and in which Julia appears again in her early twenties or Understanding the Cardinal, where she makes a curtain call in two stories as a slightly older woman. No more reality, and no less, either: all I have to do now is uncap the ancient, seven-eighths-full bottle of Ouzo still in his drinks cabinet for the scent of her to come back, which is the smell of that time, those times, and the reek of him as well—what a mixture, what an elixir! Proust’s Mediterranean madeleine!

  These evening thoughts, as always, in the Blue Room, as the sun sets and the Medal is touched yet again by this particular day’s final, plangent light. Tonight, from the radiogram, the music of Schumann, turning and turning—he to whom I came late and guiltily, suddenly seeing his genius where I had been blind to him and resisted it, thinking him an unsubtle piano-thumper, but then gradually finding my way to him, or he to me, through the earlier works, Papillon, Carnaval and so on, till I was mature enough to approach at last the Dichterliebe, so long withheld from me by my mereness of sensibility: but, now, filling the room with its knowing sad beauty.

  Where does reading stop? Who reads us? What does writing mean, when you share your life with the writer? Where do we ourselves stop, and where does the character begin? What is ours and what is his? And what, then, is a novel? Or was writing always like this?

  Bugger. Tape ran out. Can see why you get pissed off when I run off the rails! Anyway, next thing the old boy decides I’m going to be his chauffeur, that’s what he calls it—no money in it, no flash uniform or anything, he just fancies having someone big and buff driving him round like he’d got a bodyguard. Either-Or wasn’t happy, you should’ve seen his face first time I showed up at a function behind the old man. This reception at the Town Hall, I was meant to be just dropping the old boy off, idea was they’d come back afterwards together in Either-Or’s car—by the way, he drives a Beamer, did you know that?—feeble. But then when we get there, Mr Lawrence, he tells me, come on, you’re my date for the evening. And I’m thinking, what the hell, why not? He looked really sharp toddling off in front of me in his penguin suit with the white shirt and black bow tie, he even had his teeth in! Little geezer rubbing his hands together, can’t wait to get in amongst it—Mr Magoo! He seemed to light up when people started shaking his hand and clapping him on the back, he was talking away and laughing and I was laughing, too—couldn’t tell what they were saying but it looked that much fun I was joining in, part of the crowd, know what I mean? And then this young chick comes up in almost like a Bunny outfit and she offers me a thing on a stick off a tray and a paper napkin for afterwards, and I knew I’d arrived, I knew I was in with the toffs.

  About then is when Either-Or spots me, just when I was sucking a shrimp off a toothpick. What are you doing here? he says to me. He’s looking round and trying to keep his voice down. Mr Lawrence invited me in, I tell him. I told you to wait in the car, he says back to me. No you didn’t, I tell him, you said, drive back to the Residence and wait there. I’m your employer, he says, remember that. He looks me up and down. You’re improperly attired as well, he says. Well, he had a point after all, I was the only one there in T-shirt and shorts and flipflops, but then I hadn’t expected to be invited in, so what did he expect? I’m not a mind-reader, I told him, I didn’t expect to be here. The Bunny girl with the tray was quite near and she had an arse on her like an upside-down heart, know what I mean?—couldn’t take my eyes off it. He’s just making trouble, Mr Orr’s saying. That’s his life’s work. I can see he’s as angry as hell but he’s not really saying it to me. As soon as he’s gone someone starts stuffing something into my back pocket—Mr Lawrence. Keep an eye on that for me, he tells me. Whatever you do don’t eat it, it’s my supper, I’m off for some more, he says. I had a feel-round—couple of sausage rolls in a paper napkin, and a minute later he comes up again and this time it’s cupcakes, not proper cupcakes but little fancy cakes with cream and that, know what I mean?—anyway, in they go, into the other pocket. Then it’s four little sandwiches, all wrapped up like the other stuff. You’d think they’d supply doggy bags, he tells me. Bloody sausage rolls at a civic reception, they’ll be serving fucking pizza and doughnuts next—

  Is Mr Lawrence putting food in your pockets?—Either-Or again. I’ve only got two pockets, I told him, and I’ve got my snot-rag in one and my inhaler in the other. Which was more or less true except for the inhaler. He’s not meant to eat this sort of food, Either-Or says. He’s on a carefully controlled diet on account of his condition. This is not part of your job description, he tells me. He knows it’s not appropriate, Mr Lawrence, asking you to come in, you know that, don’t you? I’m considering bringing this up with Bailey’s Care. But just then some prick goes ting-ting-ting on a wineglass—you know, oh-shit-no ting-ting-ting, could I have your attention please ladies and gentlemen?—and the speeches start. The bloody speeches. All those words and I can’t remember one of them?—I couldn’t remember the front end of the sentences even when the back end was still coming out! But then after a while it was the old man’s turn, and I tell you what, Patrick, I won’t forget what he had to say, I won’t forget it for a long, long time, I was laughing that much I thought I was going to have to go outside. I’m feeling my age, he starts off, and then he says something about Groucho Marx that not everyone liked—I was a bit surprised myself but I didn’t really get it, not all of it, but some people did and you could see they weren’t happy with it. Mr Orr was standing across the room from me and I could see his face just clamp up like a Venus flytrap, you know those plants? You’d have thought he had a blowfly in his mouth. You’re only as old as the woman you feel, that’s what Mr Lawrence said, it’s just come back. Mainly it was the men that laughed. I laughed, like I said, but there was a real murmur went across the room when he said it.

  Old Mr Lawrence, he wasn’t put off, though, he went on, and there’s a few more laughs and one or two people begin to walk out, which I thought was stupid. I can’t remember everything he said, just the good bits, especially how he finished up. I didn’t quite follow this last part, either, but it was some weird
yarn about a turd and a piece of orange peel floating down the Mississippi together, and after a while the turd turns to the orange peel and it says, what time do we get to Baton Rouge? And the orange peel turns to the turd and it says, what d’you mean, we? I remembered it because I couldn’t quite get it, you see, and I wanted to keep it in my mind so I could work it out later on—can you work it out, Patrick? You can tell me what it means next time you pick up the tapes. Funniest thing I’d ever heard when he says it, though. What d’you mean, we?—all these toffs in evening dress and he just comes out with it and says turd. Big up-you sign, might as well just give ’em the fingers and leave! You could hear the gasps, a lot of people laughed and a lot of people didn’t. I clapped as hard as I could. The old bugger just didn’t seem to care what any of them thought, he seemed pretty pleased with himself. Out in the foyer afterwards, though, there’s this blazing row, him and Either-Or, like an old married couple. The mayor’s just given you the freedom of the city, Either-Or’s telling him, and that’s how you say thank you? And Mr Lawrence, he didn’t take any notice, he just says to me, Home, James, and don’t spare the whores. All the way back to the underground carpark he’s fumbling in my back pocket. Where’re those fucking cupcakes? he says. You didn’t sit on them, did you? If you’ve squashed them you’re fired. Like my speech?

  And I told him it was the best speech I’d ever heard, which it was. The thing I had trouble working out, though, he didn’t seem to care about people who read his books—all the people who’d turn up when he did a reading? I drove him to some of those over the next couple of years before he got too sick, and they were a lot more boring than those people at that Town Hall function before he came on. Mainly women, as far as I could see, I mean the ones that came to his readings, that’s one thing I noticed, women on either side of sixty with whitey-silvery hair cut like a German tin helmet, almost—know what I mean? Hundreds of them. Brenda, he says to me, they’re all called Brenda and they’ll blow anyone who’s written a book, man or woman, doesn’t make a difference what the book’s about, whitebait or sandflies, doesn’t matter, as long as it’s a book down they go and start sucking, no questions asked, you can hear the joints crack from out on a Korean fishing boat. Really? I’m saying to him, is that true, do they really do that? And he laughs at me when I ask that. Then he says, to hell with these and he hauls his top teeth out and he puts them in the ashtray, it’s a little semi-circle thing sticking out of the dash? He lays his top plate there and he folds his arms. There you go, he says. Look at that. Perfectly fitting dentures.