The Back of His Head

by Patrick Evans

  It might’ve been that time but it was definitely sometime around then he got me to drive him back up to the hilltop after one of these functions, back to where we’d been when we’d watched the city lights go on and Rommel’d come bouncing up to the car. We drove up past the tearooms and I dropped a cog and hung a left and after a couple of minutes we pulled in at the same viewing bay off the top road we were in last time, when it was really cold—remember? It must’ve been spring or early summer this time, though, because I remember there was a breeze, but it wasn’t as cold as the first time. You could see the shape of the hills in the dark, these big blank shapes with no lights on them, they were really there, like you could feel them, like people, almost? Looking back at you? Well, we sit there in the car together and he tells me about the city lights again. Look, he tells me. Everything’s regular from the centre out, the centre of town, see the lights? Like a waffle iron? And then, he says, after that, the further you go out, the more disorganised the city is—see?

  Well, I looked hard at the rows of streetlights and I could get what he meant, sort of, but it seemed to me he was making more of it than what was really there. That point, he says, where it stops being organised, he says—see? Where the street plan starts going all over the place? That’s 1948, he says. Right, I tell him, but I’d no idea what he was talking about. Everything inside that square is before that date, he says. And everything outside it is after. And that’s the date you’ve got to remember. 1948. Right, I said. I see. But I didn’t, I thought he was raving—I mean, does it make any sense to you, Patrick? And anyway, he could tell I couldn’t understand. That’s the date they started to build houses again, you silly prick, he says. After the war. It’s all about the war, he says. Don’t you get that? That’s what we’re looking at. Right, I told him. He’d really lost me by that stage, though, I was just pretending, and I wasn’t feeling all that comfortable with it, either, to tell you the truth.

  About then, though, this Commodore station wagon comes up next to us in the viewing bay with this young couple in it. The bloke looks across at us for a second. Let’s move it, the old boy says. Don’t want to cramp their style, do we? So I reverse the Dodge and we go back down to where the tearooms are. Park over there, he says. I want a piddle. So I park in the viewing bay and watch him creak out into the wind and walk across and up to the tearooms. They’re closed! I’m calling out to him, but of course he can’t hear. Takes me a minute to catch up with what he’s doing, standing there looking in the front door of the place. He’s peeing on the door. I laughed—I mean, you can’t help it, like, of course he’s peeing on the tearoom door, what else would he be doing? Doesn’t he ever stop?—that’s what I’m thinking. Then here he is, back again. Come on, he says. Should’ve given them enough time by now. Who? I’m asking him.

  But he’s off, and I have to follow him because he doesn’t look like he’s coming back. Off like a rabbit and onto this track that runs under the top road—I didn’t even know it was there. I could see the tip of his walking stick flashing back and forward up ahead of me and his back bent over and bobbing along. Probably five minutes—then he stops. Shh, he says, though I’m not saying anything, breathing a bit but I wasn’t saying anything. We’re standing there and he’s got us back under the viewing bay where we left the Commodore!—I can see the grille and the number plate through the wooden railings up above us. Worked out what he was doing, Patrick? That’s right, he was up by the car, he crawled up, he’s crouched down near the back doors, and he starts flapping his hand at me, come up, come up. And I’m shaking my head at him, no way I’m going up there, no way. I’m quite clear about that. Because by this stage I know what it is he’s doing and I’m not having any part of it.

  Except—I did go up there with him, that’s the bit I can’t understand even now. There I am, on my knees next to him at the back of the Commodore and this young couple hard at it inside. How does he do that to you, Patrick? How does he make you do exactly the opposite of what you’d do if he wasn’t there, how does he make you do what you’d never do in a hundred years if it was just you left to you, and there you are, doing it like you’ve suddenly become a different person, or just nobody, you don’t really exist at all? That was the first time he took me over like that and it scared the shit out of me, I didn’t like it, I didn’t like the way it made me feel afterwards. I mean, nothing happened—well, you know what happened and there we are listening to it, right through to the end, you know, ooh-aah-ooh—and I kept thinking, what if a car goes past, what if the cops go past? But mainly I was feeling like a piece of dirt, all the time we were listening and all the time we were crawling down to the track afterwards and back to the Dodge. My heart was going like, y’know, boom-boom-boom. The wind blowing round the car and neither of us saying anything.

  Sick—it’d turned me on, see, that was one thing, and then it was having him there next to me listening made it feel worse, it felt really mental. I couldn’t look at him. Home, James, he whispers to me. We drive down to the Residence a bit and he says, all of a sudden, my mind’s not right. I think for a bit and I think, well, you can say that again. He was sort of telling it to himself, he wasn’t really saying it to me I didn’t think. But I reckon he was onto something. And all the time, this is the other thing, no Rommel. We didn’t go looking for the dog that time, and he didn’t come looking for us. Good thing, really, I mean, imagine if he’d turned up while the pair of us were crouched down at the back end of the Commodore with these two hard at it inside. But it was a bit disturbing, when I thought about it. Where was he, I wanted to know that. That’s all I said to the old man when we got back to the Residence. No Rommel, I said to him when we were getting out. That’s right, he says back to me, quite calm like he wasn’t worried about it. No Rommel. And I took him inside.

  Then came the moment, when, suddenly and abruptly, I was replaced.

  Piss off, he said to me one morning when I came into the garden room downstairs, as I usually did.

  I stared at him: I had the frock over my arm. What on earth could he possibly mean?

  P.O, he said. He had his back to me. Go on. Buzz off. You’re not needed anymore.

  There was a pause, and then he looked across my shoulder.

  Meet Julia Perdue, he said. New version—

  I turned: a girl—a young woman—of (it seemed to me) about the same age I was: attractive enough, with dark auburn hair in ringlets now long gone, her tomboy freckles with them. Her face, I remember, was at that stage completely unlived in: quite simply, unwritten. In those days she was docile—we all were, even Robert when he turned up was docile—confronted as we were with a being of a sort of which, to that point, we’d never conceived, a phenomenon we could never possibly have imagined: Artist Erectus, the artist rampant. No: worse than that, exceeding those words, exceeding all words.

  As far as this young woman was concerned, her unwritten quality—her emptiness, almost, as I came to see it—seemed to be exactly what Raymond wanted of her, of all of us. There was something missing, he told me at a much later stage: not sure what, but it just wasn’t there, she had a kind of docility about her, a kind of passiveness. What was attractive about that? I asked him. Nothing to get in the way, you silly prick, he said. What d’you think, I wanted her to have a bubbly personality? I wanted to make her, not find out more about her quivering inner being, for Christ’s sake. And, later: you’re the same, I made you—you were nothing when you came to me, you were barely even a boy. I was the Blue Fairy and you were Pinocchio. I made all of you, I can unmake all of you—

  As if I could forget. At the moment of usurpation, this sudden changing of the Julias felt like the utmost cruelty, the most terrible desolation. You can get your pants on again, he said to me, and then, to her, my nephew. He dresses up in girls’ clothes—of course you’ll need something a little more mature in style, Miss Perdue. And then (back to me) Go on, piss off, you’re not needed anymore.

  I thought I was being banished altoge
ther, of course, from the house, from his life, from life itself, and broke down there and then in childish sobs. Naturally, she remembers it all completely differently these days, or very much of it—herself a good deal younger than she obviously was at that time, for a start: obscenely, impossibly young. I was a child when he first got his hands on me, she said once, when she’d been drinking. He should be in jail. You were sixteen in your book version, Semple reminded her. In your magnum opiate. That was my publisher, she said, my publisher made me say I was legal. And it’s called Unravel Me, Robert, dear. Do try to get it right. When I was writing that I couldn’t prove how young I was when he got to me. And, besides, the old charlatan was still alive when it came out. Now he’s gone, she said, I’m thinking of writing what actually happened—you know, when he came to me in my cot with his cock in the air? What you going to call it, then, Semple asked. Unravish Me?

  Yes, this young lass was Marjorie, of course, as you’ll have seen straight away when she entered the story of the Master: she was the docile girl who replaced me as the fictional Julia halfway through the writing of The Outer Circle Transport Service and the source of an undeniable lift in that character’s personality from that point—it’s true, it’s true, I have to admit it, it’s there any time I read the wretched book, and, anyway, sufficient reviewers and critics pointed it out when the novel appeared—yes, an undeniable lift in the protagonist’s characterisation as she made her way out of that novel and into Bisque and onto the island of Ibiza.

  He actually took her there, he actually took Marjorie to Ibiza in the Balearics, to the Mediterranean, Raymond did, he took her to the very island he’d reached alone years before on a flimsy raft he’d made himself, and from the Barbary Coast, of all things: the same mad, suicidal feat that became Kerr’s in Kerr. God alone knows how he’d managed to get there, but then God alone knows how he managed to do it a second time with a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl in tow: but he brought it off all the same, leaving me at home in an absolute paroxysm of jealous rage. I left a girl and returned a woman, she claimed later on, when she really had become a woman, in body at least: he debauched me in a tiny pine forest near the old cathedral up in Dalt Vila with a donkey watching—I think he debauched the donkey afterwards as well.

  As you’ll know, of course, if you’ve read Bisque, that’s exactly where Julia loses her innocence in the novel, although the debaucher in the fiction is the charlatan poetaster American whom she meets soon after arrival on the island. The donkey is there, too, and so many of the other things Marjorie claimed to have experienced herself on Ibiza that it’s obvious the character has become as much a part of her as she was a part of the character. He made her on that island. He made her, and he unmade her as well, as you will see.

  The American poetaster whom Julia meets on Ibiza is modelled (it is generally agreed) on the younger Robert, although he of course has always refused to see anything of himself in the American’s greasy hair, his troubled complexion and his shocking teeth: replaced long since, in Robert’s case at any rate, by plausible, well-fitting dentures Marjorie told everyone about when she found a dental adhesive in his bathroom cabinet whilst exploring during a party.

  Instead, he sees himself in Thomas Hamilton, the cruel, romantic hero who dominates the early fiction and who, at a later stage, has his way with Julia Perdue. Even Raymond’s heartless pastiches of Robert’s verse in Adam’s poems (the American in Bisque) seemed to give him no clue to the character’s provenance: the old man’s pitch-perfect mimicking of the slightly cloth-eared quality of Robert’s writing, those opportunities always narrowly missed, those risks never taken, escape his eye and ear. Who d’you think is Robert’s muse?—a question at a dinner party from someone taking both himself and Robert far too seriously. L’esprit d’escalier, Raymond replied.

  Robert turned up in our lives, I mean Raymond’s and mine, not long after the Julia business began in its first manifestation, in that time soon after I’d become my uncle’s charge and my uncle’s alone, his petit jouet, his bonbon. Another silly young prick wanting to be a writer, is how I remember Raymond announcing his entry to our lives when a callow, embarrassing letter arrived in our letterbox unbidden—no envelope, just a fold of paper: barely a letter. Rich and famous, Raymond said. He actually says he wants to be rich and famous. Well, he can mow my lawns for a start, that’ll make him rich and fucking famous!

  He did, too, once he turned up, Robert, a gawky boy who’d already outgrown himself and who had dreadful snaggled teeth and a shady complexion almost lunar in texture. You a darkie, is that it? Raymond demanded when he first saw him. Touch of the tarbrush somewhere in the family? To me he said he’s got a face like a truffle. I cringed from this, of course, and again when I eventually worked out why he’d sometimes call Robert Heathcliff. Whenever the boy was toiling back and forth with the push-mower Raymond would take visitors to the front window to look down on him at work: Come and see the worst young poet in the country mowing my lawn, he would say, and then read aloud poor Robert’s latest piece of juvenilia as the boy worked on obliviously below: Lips like wine, raspberry breasts is a line I particularly remember from that early vintage, along with shrieks of accompanying laughter from Raymond’s visitors, as well (alas) as my own. Simon, he sometimes called him, or, more obviously, Semple Simon—

  What did we see in a man like this—in Raymond, I mean? I know we all asked ourselves that question, and each other, over the years. I also know I’m not going to be able to sell him to you easily: or, quite possibly, at all. Once, when very drunk—very deeply drunk—Robert claimed Raymond had destroyed him as a poet and as a human being as well, an extraordinary admission in someone who usually took his own writing far more seriously than was required. When sober, he claims Raymond did exactly the opposite, and that he would never have got where he has—wherever that is—if the Master hadn’t taken him there. Brutally, unforgivingly, my uncle made a writer of him, made him a man and a poet: as far as Robert is concerned, that’s the official line. Tough love on the road to Parnassus, and a few hundred feet up its side as well, but no further: that line is Raymond’s. A few inches, he sometimes said. Six. Six inches up Parnassus and then he runs out of oxygen, same as when he’s fucking. Make that five and a half inches. No, four. Three—

  Robert had some other pretty wild claims that drunken night, too, and I put his earlier statements in there with them, as ravings, pretty much, as self-pitying fantasies. I won’t dignify them by repeating them here. He has survived, after all, as a sort of B-grade poet who, in this country of the blind, passes for better. Some years ago, he won the Kennerman Prize for a chapbook of harmless, inoffensive poems called Up Yours: before that, there was a writing fellowship somewhere or other, and then other, lesser, appointments in between. Of course he teaches part-time in the creative writing school, as Marjorie does, too, and he still lives among the students near the university. Half his old house he rents to a rollover population of the young, with whom he socialises and to whom he stands as an odd combination of soothsayer and (in a scrambling, increasingly intermittent way) lover: a poor man’s Raymond, someone once observed. Raymond without the talent: which of course comes to mean nothing very much at all.

  Between and among his present and discarded women—each marking an ancient glacial movement in his life, each resigned to her Jurassic or Cretaceous fate—he lives a life I sometimes feel I do not quite understand. At other times I find myself gazing at him across a room, afraid he might, after all, be mon semblable, mon frère. We are all Raymond’s children, whether we know that or not. Each of us, all of us.

  Does Marjorie know what we all see in him, in Raymond, I mean?

  She certainly spread him across the headlines with the loose, wildly confessional Unravel Me, in which the Master appears almost undisguised, as Begg, a great painter who casts his spell over the (equally undisguised) ingenue who is her protagonist, named (in a bold theft from Raymond himself), Julia: the writer representing herself as a fi
ctional character based on a fictional character played by her actual self when young. Or was she just Julia after all by this time, as she claimed, had she actually become the fictional thing, Julia through and through? There’s no me, she said once, when in her cups. What chance did I have to become a person? He took me when I was a child and I’m just that character in those books of his and now he’s gone there’s no book to be in. We’re all like that, she said. All four of us, even Jules, even though he came in late he’s a part of it, too. We’re all looking for our book. Even him.

  Ah, yes, Julian. He’s been much on my mind lately, after that episode the other night at the Residence. Such an extraordinary moment, that, with its frightening sense of imminent transition—the change in air pressure throughout the house was genuinely disturbing, and that strange, salty-seaweed smell. I felt as if I were trapped in a sunken ship.