The Back of His Head

by Patrick Evans

  He’s asked me this before but I just about choke on my bun all the same. Kill anyone? I ask him. What d’you think? He stands up and gets his hankie out. I think you need to kill something, he says. That’s how I overcame my fear of death. I killed someone. What? I’m asking him. What are you talking about? And it turns out he reckons he’s killed this boy while he was in North Africa. A youth, he says. Walad, they call them, just the scrapings off the streets. I caught the little shit stealing off me. Life’s cheap over there, he knew that. And then he says to me, I knew he’d knife me if I let him, so I shot him. I took him out the wasi and I shot him, I played around with him for a while, I shot him in the gut and I waited a while, then I shot him in the balls. Right up close, bang, like that. I took my time, he says. I wanted to watch someone die, so I took my time with it. I shot him again a couple of times and he died of blood loss, that’s how he went in the end. And then he says to me, the death agony’s quite something, it’s like listening to Bruckner—

  I’m just sitting there staring at him while all this is coming out. There’s people around and I guarantee they can hear everything, and I’m thinking, this place’ll be crawling with cops in a minute—so I get him up and walking, and after a minute he takes the lead, like, come this way sort of thing, and all the time he’s telling me over his shoulder about the guy he reckons he murdered. Keep your voice down, I’m saying to him, and I’m looking around the place. It’s partly because I don’t want to hear him myself, see—like, he’s telling me where the blood came out of this guy when he shot him, and you just don’t want to know, Patrick. In the end I put my hand across his mouth and he got that angry I remember thinking, maybe it’s not all bullshit, maybe he did kill that kid? Because he did look like he could do it, not so much when he was really angry but the minute he closed all that down, he switched it off like it’d never been there—he goes from one thing to another and he’s looking up at me and it was just the eyes, I can’t explain it. Of course it might’ve been his condition, I’ve never known him before he got Parkinson’s so I don’t know, do I? But his eyes were flat, not dead but flat, blue like I’ve said. They used to give me the shits, those pale eyes. They could go dead, like that. Just staring up at me like a cod on a block. He’d stare right at you, he’d stare right through you and then just go on staring. Right through you.

  Anyway, all this time, he’s taken us back to the varsity again, you know, where the college is, where we left the car. You going to kill someone here, then, I ask him—you know, he’s been talking about murdering someone all this time, I thought, maybe he’s got someone in mind? Not yet, he tells me, and you can see why I’d remember to tell you that! Not yet, is what he said. He’s walking on ahead of me, past the bookshop and on a bit, and through under the archway again—you know where he’s taking me, Patrick, you know what’s going to happen. Yup, the writing school building. That’s the first time I had a good look at it, we’d parked the car up against it the first few times we’d been there and we’d walked away. It was the first time he really talked about the place. The Raymond Lawrence School of Creative Writing—that’s what it said, there was this sign on the building. You know where I mean. What’s this? I ask him. He’s standing there with his hands in his pockets and he’s looking up at the place. My biggest bloody mistake, he says, but it’s like he’s not saying it to me. Lending my name to this fucking abortion, he says.

  And that was the first time I knew he had a problem with it. At that stage, I didn’t even know what creative writing was—I’m still not sure! And I still don’t know why he was the way he was about it, either, the way he was talking it was the worst thing in the whole wide world. As far as I could see when he told me what it was, it was just these people trying to be writers. Just writing stuff out of their heads? I ask him. Well, it’s what I’ve spent my life doing, he says. Difference is, I didn’t need some stupid prick to tell me how to do it, and d’you know why?—because you can’t, you can’t teach some fucker inspiration, you can’t teach technique, you can’t give them something to write about. You can’t let them think they’re going to be fucking famous when they’ll be off selling cars in five years’ time or insurance door to door or crockery. This is right outside his own school he’s saying this, yelling it out, this angry little old geezer with crumbs all round his mouth, and there’s me next to him in my big white suit, leaning over him going shh, shh—

  And you want to know something else? he says. No one should be allowed to start to write until they’ve killed something or killed someone and watched them die! These two women walking along across the other side of this quadrangle and you could see them turn their heads our way when he’s yelling that! Shh, I tell him, and he says, don’t shh me. You’ve got to kill something if you want to create, he says, and he’s gone all wild in the eyes by this stage. Death and killing’s at the heart of the creative act! All the time I’m trying to edge him away from the place because it’s obviously not doing him that much good being there. I don’t want to kill something, I tell him, and I don’t want to be a writer. You don’t want to be a writer? he says, and he starts pointing at the writing school building. You should join up with them, he says, they’ll help you with that!—when they finish with you, you won’t want to pick a book or a pen up ever again! And he’s so pleased with that line he slaps his hands together like he’s clapping himself. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I hardly ever pick a book or a pen up anyway. And of course at that stage I had no bloody idea what

  On the following Monday a single audiotape arrives by post, as promised. It’s in a bubble bag that’s been reinforced within, unnecessarily, fussily: I get a little whiff of a someone when I see the cotton wool that has been pressed in around the tape. Bitten fingernails anxiously picking at things: on the finger a nicotine stain, perhaps. Geneva Trott.

  In bright blue ink that obviously imitates the Master’s, its label states Interview # 7, 24 August.

  Of which year? Where? Who is interviewing whom, and why did I not know it was happening?

  I park the car in the rampant couch grass of Julian’s berm and walk up his drive. On the tangle of his twitchy lawn his old black dog casts a knowing, world-weary eye at me and away. Here is the fallen, unachieved rural property of the visionary utopian: every view a vista of unfinishment, crazy paths half done and overgrown, a vast vegetable garden all blowsy cabbages and seed-heads, a pergola so long unpainted that incompletion has become its completion. Chickens, stepping and pecking among fruit trees whose branches trail long on the ground: a stooping wooden bungalow with a propped verandah, behind it a studio in which that massive printing press takes up half the space.

  Blue and white plastic strips stir in the breeze at his studio door: I press through them.

  Inside, Julian has rummaged up for me from his extraordinary reliquary of antique electronic devices a 1980s tapedeck, a Panasonic with six flat black buttons along the bottom and a slightly toasted plastic finish, as if it has been placed under a grill. Its upper half has begun to lift from the lower where they join, as if the whole thing is about to snap open like a playground lunchbox. When he presses the first of the buttons, the dulled plastic lid of the portal slowly lifts, like a portent: here is the news.

  He stares at the audiotape. ‘So,’ he says. ‘She sent it after all.’ He brings his glasses down from his brow. ‘24 August which year?’

  ‘I was going to ask you.’

  ‘Well, it’s an old tape, but she could’ve recorded on it last week for all we know.’ Julian puts the cassette carefully into the portal and presses the lid shut with his big, soft, reddened hands. ‘Isn’t it funny none of us’ve ever met her?’

  ‘Geneva? Not really.’

  ‘You never know, she might turn out to be a smasher.’

  Now, abruptly, entering stage left, Robert Semple, pushing his way through the plastic strips: they trouble his hat and the long cigarillo centred between his lips. He has his overcoat hunched dramatically over h
is shoulders like a cape, its arms dangling, emptied.

  ‘Ooh,’ says Julian. ‘Put out that light.’

  ‘I’m nearly through it. Who might turn out to be a smasher?’

  ‘Geneva. Julian’s got her audiotape in the deck here.’

  ‘Come on, Robert, you know the rules around here.’

  ‘Three more puffs and it’s history. So the tape’s arrived, has it? What’s on it?’

  ‘Haven’t started yet, we were waiting for you and Marjorie.’

  ‘No, she’s not going to be here, Fahti the farter rang and snapped his fingers. She told me to tell you. Play the thing, go on.’

  ‘Point of order, no smoking, there’s a sign on the wall.’

  ‘Point of order be buggered, this isn’t a Trust meeting. Press the tit.’

  Julian presses, and there’s a soft, fat, synchronised cluck and then the furred sound of the tape starting up.

  Semple leans dramatically against the jamb of the studio door, blowing smoke into the garden. ‘What are we listening to?’ he asks, over his shoulder.

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to find out.’

  ‘Shh—shh—’

  Julian and I bend over the Panasonic. The faint, rhythmic swish, swish of the tape.

  ‘Is that something—there?’

  I bend to the deck. The spools turn dimly under the scratched plastic of the lid. It really is impossible to tell. There might be a voice, buried somewhere in the sound of the work of the tape or deep beneath it: or there might not. It might be an effect of the machine, a mechanical voice, an accident, a phantasm. The ghost in the machine, as they say. Or it might be nothing much at all.

  ‘Plenty of time,’ Julian says. ‘Don’t forget they’re two-sided, these things.’

  Semple is still at the door, looking out at the chaos of Julian’s yard. ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice,’ I hear him say, but not to us. He flicks the cigarillo butt and turns back inside. ‘Heard anything yet?’

  ‘Shh—’

  ‘Is that it? Is that someone speaking—?’

  We all bend forward to listen. I’d expected something unequivocal, a voice—voices, somewhere we could begin. A narrative of some sort. Most of all I expected Raymond’s voice, speaking to us, to me, out of the past, and with a tale to tell, even a message from the great beyond. I hadn’t expected what we’re getting instead: irresolution, indeterminacy, plain old waste. It seems somehow at odds with the space-age promise of the tape and the deck—not their promise now but the promise they had back then, twenty years ago, thirty years ago, fifty, when they lay smart and bright on desktops around the world and, along with Dot’s golfball typewriter and a hundred other marvels, implied the coming command of the stars.

  Instead—here, now—there’s something almost vegetal about this performance, in the slight buckle and curl of the plastic of the deck, the fungal blur of the portal lid, this damp, mossy miming of recollection that is performing itself right in front of us. Who knew, back then, that the future would prove to be creeping and confused like this, random, dendritic, not forward-looking at all but forever peering back over its shoulder, as if asking for further instructions?

  Now, though, Julian is ducking down, his head on one side. ‘There,’ he says. ‘There—’

  The three of us lean again, towards the swish of the turning tape.

  ‘She’s pulling our tit,’ Semple says. ‘Geneva is.’

  ‘Shh—shh—there’s something on it—’

  ‘There—’

  Is it? The machine definitely has a voice, by now I’m clear about that: whatever it plays, this reedy mechanical sound will come out of it—the voice of an age: time’s voice, the spectral, Apollonian voice of the late twentieth century, speaking to us with a mouthful of dust. But there’s something else as well—is there? It’s so hard to tell. I’m sure I can hear something: someone’s voice, something human that is speaking to us—

  ‘No.’ Semple, pulling up and away. ‘I told you, she’s pulling our tit. What a fucking waste of time—’

  ‘Shh—shh—there—’

  Julian’s right, there is something. It sounds lost, distant, as if from the bottom of a well, as if time really is a long, dark tunnel we draw things from and toward ourselves. But a voice, faint, down there in the distant waters, a reedy, metallic voice, half of it just the machine speaking but half of it something else, a human being as well, we’re going to eat it raw—

  ‘Turn it back. Reverse it. Just a bit.’

  Julian whizzes the tape back a few seconds, and stops it and starts it again.

  You didn’t tell me to bring anything, I tell him—so we’re going to eat it raw, he says back. I thought, Christ, he’s going to shoot a sheep—

  ‘That’s Raymond.’ I tell them. Dear Christ—that’s Raymond!

  ‘Well. So. That’s Raymond.’ Semple. ‘So what if it is?’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Julian says. ‘Peter? It’s not Ray, I don’t think it’s Ray.’

  ‘Well, if it’s not Ray, why are we supposed to be listening to it? It’s an interview, isn’t it? Isn’t that what she says it is? This fucking Geneva woman? So, who’s being interviewed if it’s not him?’

  ‘She didn’t really say what it was, she said we’d know what it meant when we heard it.’

  I bend down again: Julian has the volume raised now but what’s coming up to us is more static than anything else. A voice, all the same, forming out of it, Raymond’s voice—What we’re really waiting for, we’re waiting for the peas—

  A little tickle of memory, something unwanted: I pull back and away. ‘Raymond,’ I tell them. ‘It’s him. The Master.’

  ‘It’s no one, it isn’t anybody.’ Semple again. ‘I’ll tell you what she’s gone and done, Geneva, she’s given us the wrong tape, the bitch, to throw us off the scent. That’s what she’s done—’

  ‘She’s just given us the wrong tape, plain and simple.’ Julian. ‘It’s a cock-up, that’s all. She cocked the book up and now she’s cocked this up.’

  Now, though—suddenly, unexpectedly, splendidly, in hat and dark glasses—Marjorie, bursting through the doorway behind us: plastic strips fly about.

  ‘Why is there a dead dog on your lawn, Jules, dear?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s Nebuchadnezzar. He’s always like that.’

  ‘There’s stuff coming out of its mouth and it’s not breathing.’

  ‘Oh, hell.’ Julian’s off, through the plastic strips.

  ‘Listen to this,’ I tell her. ‘Who’s that?’

  She leans to the tape recorder and listens. ‘Oh—it’s him,’ she says. She straightens up. ‘So this is whatsit’s tape, one of her tapes?’

  ‘Geneva. It came this morning. It’s Raymond, isn’t it? Raymond’s voice?’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘See,’ says Semple. ‘Told you it wasn’t.’

  ‘It’s whatsit,’ Marjorie says. ‘Whatsisname—’

  ‘Who—?’

  ‘How can you be so sure? That it’s not—?’

  ‘Because it just isn’t, Peter. Plain and simple not. No, it’s thingie—’

  Julian bustles in again. ‘I think he’s eaten another plastic bag,’ he says. ‘Nebuchadnezzar. Damn.’

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Thomas,’ says Marjorie, as if she’s trying to get rid of a hair in her mouth. ‘It’s Thomas.’

  ‘No, he isn’t dead. But then he brings them up again, that’s the problem. The plastic bags. He vomits them back up.’

  ‘Once he’s got the goodness out of them?’

  ‘Tom. That’s who it is. On the tape.’

  ‘The bags the meat comes in, he gets into those—he had to be cut open at the vet last time and he had four of them in his gut, can you believe that?’ Julian stares at the tape, which is still mewing away on his worktable, unattended. ‘Tom?’ he says. ‘Do we have a Tom?’

  ‘You remember. Listen.’

  We all lean in to the tape, all four of u
s now. It’s what I’ve been trying not to think these last ten minutes, the knowledge I’ve been trying to deny since the disembodied voice began to form. Slowly, the Master’s voice I’ve confidently heard coming up through the static dust of time turns into something else, higher, looser, sloppier, a tenor which takes the beginnings and endings off words and elides the consonants between into a rolling sludge of language, lifting lifting lifting to the end of each sentence and collapsing into the next so that, soon, soon, there are no sentences, instead just one long diarrhetic flow punctuated by pellets of giggling, sprays of tittering, loud flatulisms of inanity that pass as laughter—

  Gradus.

  ‘Oh, him.’ Julian pulls away, nodding. ‘For goodness’ sake.’

  ‘“Thom with an H—my name’s / Thom Ham—”’

  ‘“Wham-Bam / Thank you Mam—”’

  Laughter.

  ‘Remember the trial? It wasn’t funny. Poor bastard.’

  ‘Yes—he got off, though,’ I remind them. ‘Remember that.’

  ‘Well, so he should have—he obviously had nothing to do with it.’

  Not this again. ‘But he was there, for goodness’ sake—when it happened. He was right there!’

  ‘Oh, come on, Norman, he just happened to be there. Apart from anything else he was too fucking stupid to do what they accused him of—wasn’t that the defence, he was too thick to follow a plot?’

  ‘And the jury bought it!’

  ‘They didn’t buy it, Marge—’

  ‘Don’t call me Marge—’

  ‘—they could see it was true and they let him off, that’s what the jury did—’

  ‘Now, now.’ Julian the peacemaker. ‘It’s all in the past—’

  ‘No it’s not, not as long as Norman Bates here still thinks Thom was a secret agent from—what did you say it was? The BLT?’

  More laughter. I despise them, I despise them.

  ‘The French foreign intelligence service,’ I tell them, as coolly as I can manage. ‘The DGSE.’

  This to Semple, in fact, since he’s the one who has most to say on the topic. I’m appalled that they should treat it so lightly, given what it involves. Gradus. I’m resolved to say nothing more on it, though—I regret my outburst a moment ago, but the miscarriage of justice involved has always been too much for me. I can’t believe I’m having to think about this man again—