The Back of His Head

by Patrick Evans

  The full meaning of what’s happening is still coming to me as I stand here watching the other three fiddling with the tape. I’m beginning to understand something of what Geneva has done and what this new irruption into our lives really means: she’s made contact with this dreadful man, with whom I associate such chaos, such utter destruction—she knows him and that is who is being interviewed—

  ‘Are you all right, Peter?’ Marjorie has caught sight of me. ‘Just eaten a plastic bag or something?’

  I stare at her. Of course, I can’t say a thing. She really is blackmailing us, Geneva, of that I’m certain now. Towards the end Raymond would blurt out anything—who knows what he told this idiot who was looking after him then, and who knows who’s been paying him to find that out? Who knows what he says on these tapes? Who knows what Geneva knows?

  Again, in my rear-view mirror as I drive home from all this, the damson-coloured Dodge. It’s as jolting a moment as the first time I saw the car looming up behind me where there was nothing a second or two before, far too close and very determined to overtake me—again, I signal and pull over to let him by. This time, as he blares past me, I’m certain that it’s him, Raymond, crouched over with that grubby little trilby hat on as he holds the wheel—yes, surely it’s him: he even flicks me a glance as he goes past. You, is it you? He gives me a couple of long blasts on the horn as if to tell me yes, yes, I’m still here—

  Quite apart from anything else, Thom Ham is, by a slightly disconcerting coincidence, two fragments of Thomas Hamilton, the name of the protagonist of the Master’s early and middle-period novels. I remember telling the old man, back then, that I was about to interview one of his characters for a job at the Residence: he seemed unsurprised.

  Naturally, I’d been keen to have some kind of literary applicant to a position the Trust had felt was well overdue for creation once the old fellow began his long, lamentable slide towards his end. All this was happening more than fifteen years ago now, not long after the apotheosis at Stockholm and at a point when it was becoming clear what the final stages of Raymond’s illness were actually going to bring us.

  For a long time, the occasional unfortunate lapse in his social behaviour could be seen as a hiccup within a normality that was often better than that: whatever went wrong, within hours it seemed he was Raymond Thomas Lawrence once again: familiar, reliable enough around the house at least and well worth the occasional risk outside it—capable of walking Daisy the dog, for example, even up to the Summit Road and down again, in those days, or down to Tony’s and back again with a small order of groceries, arriving at the door pleased with himself and puffing, apple-cheeked and white of beard like a miniature Santa Claus. It was charming, there was no doubting that, often it was charming to see, and, given his condition, not a little touching as well.

  The thought that he might in fact be in the process of crossing some sort of psychological Rubicon was prompted when he went missing for two days—you can imagine what we thought had happened and the relief when we heard his car had been found on a riverbed outside town and then Raymond himself a little later on, at the foot of the nearby motorway bridge—it was when this episode occurred and once we’d brought him back home that we made our decision. He was raving on about industrial fertiliser, of all things, and it took us a while to work out what he might have meant by that, of course. As far as he was concerned he’d been back in North Africa in the late fifties, no question about it, and fighting the Pieds-Noirs once more, blowing up bridges and railway tracks—at one point, he claimed, an entire Esso fuel dump. Boof!

  And then, shortly afterwards, there was that unfortunate—most unfortunate—event that I’ve mentioned before, at the opening of the very writing school the local university had gone to the trouble of setting up in his name. By this stage we were in no doubt that, for him, things had begun to turn about, and that his lucid episodes were becoming the hiatuses in an emerging pattern of misjudgements and misfortunes and, sometimes, just plain old disasters. It was his condition, we thought: it was the illness taking him over.

  Bailey’s, Marjorie said. She meant a geriatric-care firm: she’d used them for her parents when their time came. They were very good, she said: first-rate. Polished my father off in six months and my mother in twelve.

  Bailey’s. No one could blame them, of course. The initial phone call told me little: yes, in point of fact, they said, there was someone they’d just trained who had a university background, though they couldn’t guarantee the degree was actually in English literature. Ah, but can he lift and turn, I asked, shrewdly foreseeing impending requirements. Oh, yes, they said, he can lift and turn all right. We’ll send him round, you can take a look at him.

  Take a look at him!—there was no alternative. He appeared the following day at my office: he simply walked in. I looked up from my desk and couldn’t believe what I saw. The most extraordinary build, first of all, massive, looming, filling the doorway to the top and sides, his height even requiring him to duck a little to get his head quite under the lintel. Six foot six or seven, in the old measurement, or a couple of metres in the new?—whichever way, the effect was overwhelming. Yes, weights, he said when I asked him: weights footie boxing and that. He bowed the legs of the office chair I’d indicated he should sit in.

  It didn’t take very many questions for me to decide, privately, that this was not the man for the job. For a start, the way he spoke began to irritate me, the way each of his sentences sounded like a question, lifting up at the end as if it were asking something when there was nothing in any of them that actually required to be answered, and, in fact, nothing particularly much in them at all. Then there was the laugh, itself like a form of punctuation that occurred every few seconds, a cachinnation completely without purpose or wit and which, at the moment, I’m completely at a loss to find words for. A silly, irritating neighing sound, or sometimes (it used to occur to me, when I heard it coming through the wall of the Residence or up in the Coop) like the honk of a goose. It appalled me, it obsessed me. It was the desolating, contentless quack-quack of the universe, the very sound of vacancy itself.

  Oh, there was more to my response than just these things, I assure you of that, and I’m willing to admit that in himself he didn’t entirely deserve all the reaction that he received from me in the time he was with us. I’m not as utterly shut off to myself as some have assured me I am, not at all.

  As the interview went on, though, it began to dawn on me that this fellow—this Thom Ham person, I mean, this enormous, inconsequential hunk of muscle and meat that had come through my office doorway—had no idea whatsoever of where it was he’d come to. I mean that he’d walked right up to the Residence—had even banged at the front door down there, he told me, and looked in at the windows and tapped at them and called out before he’d turned away and tried the Coop next door—all this without the slightest inkling of where it was that fate had brought him. He’d even walked past, and ignored, the sign that read Raymond Thomas Lawrence Residence/Home of the Nobel Laureate/Tours by Arrangement—!

  Raymond Lawrence, I said to him. Nope, he said. Raymond Thomas Lawrence? I asked. Never heard of him, he said, and gave that extraordinary laugh again as if he had not a single thought in his head. Not heard of Raymond Thomas Lawrence? I asked him. Do the words Nobel Prize mean anything to you? Nobel Prize, he said, to himself, as if it were a question off Mastermind. Then: Nope, sorry.

  When I spelled it out for him, though, he couldn’t believe what I told him. The Nobel Prize? he asked, and he kept saying it to himself over and over again. He lives right here and he won the Nobel Prize? Far out, he said. You wouldn’t credit it. Then he said, tell me again what he won it for?

  So I took him on a tour of the Residence. And that is where he met Raymond, and the whole terrible business, as it would prove to be, began.

  They hardly met, no more than a minute at the top of the elevator once the old fellow had come up on it, rather unexpectedly, to find out who it
was he could hear me taking around the Residence. After that—and rather impressively, I have to admit—this weightlifter person carried the old man up to the Coop for me, wheelchair and all, and then he left us there and off he went on his racing bike, which seemed tiny beneath him, I remember, ridiculously slight, like a wafer between his massive legs. Cheers, he called back to us, over his shoulder, and of course I hated that, too. What can it mean: what’s so very wrong with goodbye or thank you?

  That’s the man, the old fellow told me as soon as the weightlifter had gone. What’s the bugger’s name? I stared at him, I remember: I couldn’t believe my ears. What d’you mean, I demanded. What d’you mean, that’s the man?

  This is the moment that really took me by surprise. To my knowledge, none of the Trust members had said anything to Raymond yet about getting a little help for him—as far as we were concerned, we thought we’d find out what was available first, and then, if we found somebody suitable (and I’d already crossed this feckless iron-pumper off the list in my mind), we’d set about the business of gently breaking the news: Raymond, we’ve come to the conclusion that maybe it’s time to look for a little help—and so on. A companion, we were going to call this person: someone who, if not quite in their eighth decade as he was, would certainly be closer to it than this inane failed geographer with his enormous body and (it has to be said) his tiny, disproportionate cranidumb. Someone to hang out with, we would have said. A mate.

  Well, what Raymond meant by that’s the man, it seemed, was that our search was at an end. I presumed it was Semple who told him that it had begun in the first place, though of course he loudly denied having done so when I confronted him later that day. Raymond had worked it out for himself, he insisted: we all of us knew he had a second sense about this sort of thing, we all knew he was nobody’s fool. He’d obviously worked it out, he said, and he’d gone and made his choice. After all (he reminded me), he was the one whomever we hired would have to work with, and he’d obviously decided this was someone who could work with him.

  Love at first sight, he said. Go with it.

  But he’s an idiot! I said to Raymond, after I’d finished with Semple. He doesn’t know one end of a book from another! That’s why he’s the man! the old fellow said—I couldn’t believe it, I simply couldn’t believe he’d say something like that. But surely you want someone you can talk with, I suggested, someone you—but at this point he really exploded at me, Raymond, he simply blew up in my face. Fuck it, man!—and he brought his little fists up like a boxer and bared his grimy bottom teeth at me. I don’t need someone to sit with knitting under a fucking travel rug, he hissed. I want a fucking follower!

  It was a disturbing moment. I gazed at him, I remember, trying to assess the status of what he’d just said to me. It was easy to see these explosions as part of the illness as it was taking him over—and perhaps as part of his frustration, too, at a world that was becoming more and more in-and-out-of-focus for him, presenting alarming non sequiturs out of the blue, moments of sheer, inexplicable terror at the presenting world. On the other hand I could remember these gallus performances from when I was a lad, that boxer’s stance of his and the bared lower teeth: seeing these once again always brought back memories, made me tighten up a little down below, revived some of that old primal fear and panic. Around Raymond at any age, it was easy enough to become twelve years old again in half a second: less.

  Here, at this particular moment, though, I put his behaviour down to the illness, and the slight tinge of paranoia and grandiosity of the sort you can see in what I’ve just told you I attributed to the same thing: just an episode, a momentary flare-up. Oh, what a misjudgement that would prove to be, I can tell you, the decision to discount an open statement of intent like this. I had no idea then—how could I?—that Raymond was already planning his final chapter, his dénouement, his Götterdämmerung. And that (if you like) the Sorcerer had found his Apprentice.

  First thing I did when I turned up, I sorted out his pills for him. He had to take them at different times each day and I’d mark it off on a chart every time I’d give him a dose. Then someone said, get those bubble packs, the chemist sorts the pills for you, you can see straight away when there’s been a miss. One of his pills, though, if you miss it you have to phone the specialist straight off and tell him you’ve cocked it up. But I never cocked it up, ever, not once. The big change for me was when I moved into the Chicken Coop, and that’d be—I don’t know, 1999? When he started falling out of bed and having nightmares? Jeez, the nightmares. What happened was, I was more or less living with Raewyn back then and me and her were in the sack and it’s past midnight and the phone goes—Mrs Butt’s ringing me, old Edna, Right Butt, and she’s saying, Mr Lawrence isn’t well at all, he’s talking to a chair, Mr Orr’s not here and we don’t know what to do—

  So next thing, I’m up at the Residence again, and there’s the old boy sitting on his bed having a good old yack to someone who’s not there! Part of me knows what’s happening and part of me’s got the tomtits big time because it was that weird—I mean, you could see he really thought there was someone sitting in front of him. Get an ambulance, I tell the Butts, they’re just standing there, turns out they didn’t want to because they didn’t believe in ambulances!—ever heard anything like that before? They wanted me to get down and pray with them instead! So I go up to the old fellow and I say excuse me, and he says, excuse me, I’m talking to this young lady here, and he points to the chair in front of him. There’s no one on it, I say to him—and he reaches across and smacks me across the side of the head! Don’t you be so bloody cheeky, he says to me. You black bastard. So I thought, bugger you, and I wrestled him down on the bed. I can hear the Butts in the next room praying, and after a while the old bloke stops struggling and then he mutters I’ve pissed myself, and that was that. I tell Either-Or when he turns up later on, and he says, Julia? He was talking to Julia?

  Anyway, that was split city for poor old Raewyn, she told me it was like I was running another woman except it was an old man, and if an old man turned me on more than what she did, then it was time I got a hold of myself. And next thing the trust people decided to shift the old boy out and up to the Coop and me with him. And he did change around then, there was the shakes and the nightmares but they were just seeing things from one of the pills he was on, it might’ve been the Clonazepam. The doctor told us that, he put Mr Lawrence on some new stuff and maybe that was why he seemed to become sort of—less human? I don’t know. Just now and then, you’d look at him and it was like he’d switched off, boom—tell you what it was like, it was like he’d changed gear? There you go—he’d double-declutched himself! He’d driven off somewhere else and we didn’t know where it was!

  But I’ll tell you when I first started to think, there’s something really weird going on here. It was one time he took me up the hill with him to look for the dog. It was me that drove, I’d started to get on top of the double-declutch thing, sort of, anyway, but he’d yell at me if I tried to sneak a change without doing it. He was brought up on old jalopies out on the farm, he learned on an old Essex out at Springfield, he told me, and he could double-declutch a car in his sleep. Once we’re up at the top he says, we’re back there. What d’you mean, I ask him, and he says, now, I mean now, we’re back in 1948. He waves out at the city. See? he says. You wait, when the streetlights come on later you’ll see, the city’ll be that much smaller, it’s a smaller city now it’s 1948, it’s only a few thousand people. Then he turns on the radio in the dash—and it starts playing music from back then! What’d I tell you! he says, we’re back in 1948! I got a hell of a shock, I can tell you, I’d had a go at it earlier on and it wouldn’t even turn on when I tried, and now here it was, all these Yank stations and a woman singing inju-u-ure yerself, it’s later than you think—what’s that she’s singing? I ask the old man—injure yourself? He’s laughing and laughing at me and I don’t know why. Doris Day? he’s saying to me. She couldn’t injure a
baby!

  Then he says to me, it’s my new novel. This, he says. What we’re doing now. It’s my new novel. Living like this. It’s what I’m writing now. Like, you know, he was making it all happen himself?—him, me, the car, the wind off the sea—even, you know, the hill the car’s standing on? It’s what I’m writing now, he says. I’m writing all this. So I ask him, what’s it called, then, this new book of yours? What d’you think it’s called, he says. I’ve told you, and it’s not new, it’s the book I’ve been writing all my life, it’s called 1948. Right, I tell him. I’m going to stick it up Orwell’s arse, he says. It’s backwards that matters, not forwards, it’s 1948 that matters, not 1984. Then he’s out the door and round the back and he’s opening the boot, and here he is with a bloody shotgun!

  Well, talk about fill my pants—I thought I was going to fill the car. But then he says, come on, wheel your arse, we’re going to get our dinner! Where’s the stuff I told you to bring? 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. I’ll go back down and get the stuff, I told him, but what I really meant was, I’d go back down and ring the cops. And I went back down to the Residence and I sat there in the car under the bluegums and the pines, and what I found was, it felt different compared to the way it felt back up the hill. He seemed so happy, Mr Lawrence. It was fun, I’ve never spent that much time with an old bugger like that, my parents died fairly young and my grandparents, too. So I just helped myself to a few things around the house, you know, couple of mugs, couple of plates, couple of knives, couple of forks and a few other things, a skillet and so on, and I grabbed some fruit out of the fruit bowl to piss Right Butt off—apples, hand of bananas and that—I load all this in the Dodge and I dodge back up the hill with them.