The Back of His Head

by Patrick Evans

  Early evening by then, still light but not that warm, and there he is above the road, he’s up on a bluff and he’s waving to me with the gun! Up! he’s saying—hardly hear him in the breeze. Up! So up I go with the stuff I’d got from the Residence, and he just can’t wait to tell me. Shot the bastard, he calls out before I’m twenty foot away. Wasn’t easy but I shot him and dressed him and he’s cooking. Christ, I thought—he’s shot a ram, that’s going to be tough eating. He drags me down the other side of the hill and there’s gorse and this little sheltered area there and he’s got a fire going and the meat’s on it, right in the fire. Give us that skillet, he says, and he grabs it off me. It’s burning the way it is, good thing it’s so fatty. I could see a tin of peas in the fire, too, and he had a bullet-hole through the side of it as well—you wouldn’t believe it, he’d shot the tin of peas? Turns out he’s got a lot of things stashed away up there. This is where I’m going when it starts to happen, he says to me. You never know what it’s going to be like when things really start to happen.

  When what happens, I ask him, but he doesn’t say, he’s got his head in the gorse and he’s pulling out stuff he’s hidden away all wrapped up in an old piece of waterproof jacket, I could see the pocket on it when he brought it out. There’s a few tins of peas wrapped up and some dried stuff, and he pulls out a bottle as well. Good thing no bastard’s found that, he says. Catch! And then he pulls a pouch out of the waterproof pocket! And this, he says, and he starts to roll one like he’s done it a few times before. You’re not meant to smoke, I tell him, and he gets really pissed off when I say that to him. Might as well be back down there if you’re going to talk to me like that, he says. Eating fucking walnuts with the rest of them. All the time he’s rolling the paper and licking it like he wanted to eat it up. He puts it in his mouth and ducks down into the fire for a second and then he comes back up and it’s lit. When I was fighting with Rabah Bitat, he says, we’d light up with a pistol shot. Oh yeah, I said. One silly fucker tried it with a rifle, took the end off his own bloody nose, the silly prick. I never really listened when he was slinging me that sort of stuff. He’s sitting back and he’s sucking the smoke in like it’s the best thing he’s ever done in his life. This is my world up here, he says to me. Now. 1948. Before it all started to go wrong.

  What d’you think he meant when he was talking like that, Patrick? Maybe he just meant, this would all be in his book, this was what he had to do to get it going. And all the time he’s poking the fire and stirring the meat and turning it over, and it’s starting to smell pretty good—and I have to tell you, Patrick, it wasn’t that bad up there on the south-east side. It’s out of the wind, we’re wrapped up and there’s the fire, plus you get the view across the harbour. I’d had a couple of shots out of his bottle, it looked like water and it tasted like liquorice and the good thing was, it did the trick. He’s talking all the time I’m drinking and admiring the view, he’s telling me about when he was a kid back on the family farm. Hamilton Downs it was called, and he reckoned he used to have a hideaway there like this one, and he’d shoot rabbits and possums there and dress them and cook them for his supper on an open fire the way he was doing in front of me while he was talking. He was always going on about the farm but he never went there except the once at the end, that I’ll tell you about when I get there—Christ, I’ll never forget that.

  And now and then he’d poke at the meat in the skillet and then he’d lean back and smoke some more—he rolled three while I was counting. I can’t remember what he said but I remember it was funny, Christ, he could be funny, he made me laugh all right and he made himself laugh a bit as well. I stopped taking notice of the weird things he’d said earlier on—like I told you, we had really good times together and that was one of them. I’ll never forget the times we had like that. And all the time there was the meat, it was starting to smell good. What we’re really waiting for, we’re waiting for the peas, he said. That can’s going to be a bugger to open hot. It was too when he got round to it, he swore a lot and he kept dropping it and flapping his hand and blowing on it but in the end he got the opener going and worked a hole could shake the peas out, half on each plate. There you go! he says. You could have done that at the start, I told him, when it was cold. Opened it with the opener. Yes, I could, he says, but I wanted to put a bullet through it, then everything we’re eating’s been shot by me, see?

  What about the bananas? I ask him, and he says, bananas? Stole some bananas for you, I said, and I showed him. You silly prick, he says, they’re wax bananas, can’t you tell the difference? And he marches off with them and puts them on a rock. Target practice after supper, he says. Then he’s back and shoving a piece of meat into his mouth and gobbling at it. Here, he says, he’s holding out a plate. Wolf that down, the meat’s falling off the bone. It’s better than it looks, get that in you. And I was that hungry I wolfed it down like he told me to. It was pinky-red like rabbit meat but fattier, quite greasy, first off I thought I was eating an old sheep, some full-mouth ewe he’d got from somewhere. But it wasn’t fatty enough—to tell the truth though I was that bloody hungry I didn’t really care what it tasted like. Him, too. There’s the two of us kneeling on either side of the fire tearing at the meat even when the rest of it’s still cooking!

  It was a good five minutes before I got to where I could ask him what it was. He looks at me. You’ll have to guess, he says. Can’t, I tell him. He’d got grease all over his face and his beard and his hands and down his front. Mutton, I told him. Mutton! he says. Where’d I get a fucking sheep from? I’d have to climb an electric fence. And so I went through the list. I said possum for a joke because I had a mate’d eaten possum once and he said it was better than you’d think. And then just for another joke I said, cat. Close to home, he says, but it’s not quite fatty enough for cat meat, try again. And when he said that my mind went, click. I just froze there with my mouth full of hot meat for five seconds and then I spat it out and it’s just sitting there sputtering in the fire. What a fucking waste! he says, and he’s happy as hell, you’d think it was the best joke ever. I could have hit him, he was that pleased with himself.

  I kept asking myself how could he do it, how could he do it? I’m lying there that night back down in the Coop and he’s asleep the other side of the en suite, burping and farting—I keep asking myself, how could he do it? And of course I asked him, I asked him as soon as I’d spat the meat out, with him cackling away at me—Christ, he can be frightening when he’s like that and his top plate’s out and there’s just his eyeteeth sticking down like Dracula. But then I got real pissed off with him and he toned it down. All right, all right, he says. It wasn’t easy. You couldn’t do it, remember? That was a test for both of us, well, I’ve passed the test. So have you, he says, now you’ve eaten her. Her? I ask him. Yes, her, he says. Daisy. You mean Rommel, I told him, we’ve eaten Rommel. I mean Daisy, he says, you’ve eaten Daisy the dog, Rommel’s still around. We’re both of us in a different place now we’ve done that, we’ve passed through something together. Pity you couldn’t keep it all down. And he holds me out another bone. There! he says. Have a drumstick, and he laughs and he says, looks like a dog’s hind leg! But I had another good spew instead, right into the fire, I had a bloody good reach, and him laughing himself silly behind me all the time I’m bringing my guts up. Now you’ve undone the spell! he’s telling me. You’re back to square one, you silly arse—

  I’m lying there in bed like I said, and I’m thinking it through, and I start thinking, hold on a minute. This is bullshit. How does a man his age in his state kill a dog? Forget the fact it’s Rommel, you know, his four-legged soulmate or whatever he’s supposed to be. It’s just a dog but how does he do it? No well don’t forget it’s Rommel, it’s all one thing, he’s meant to have killed his best friend and cooked it and eaten it, even though he reckons now he’s done it the dog’s called Daisy and Rommel’s still around somewhere. How did he do it? He can hardly hold his knife and fork. I
t was me that had to keep the fire going. On the other hand, he was Dead-Eye Dick when it come to shooting the wax bananas after dinner, you could tell he knew what he was doing, he put a shot through the middle of each one, bang-bang-bang like that, and then he shot what was left to buggery. So he could shoot a gun all right.

  Julian is standing against the carved dresser in the Residence dining room, his trousers drawn a little too tight at the crotch: he keeps adjusting himself.

  ‘So,’ he says. ‘Geneva’s sent us a tape that proves she means business. And we can’t hear what’s on it—right?’

  ‘Right,’ I tell him.

  Semple leans back in his dining chair as he usually does, and, as usual, the chair gives out a sharp crack at the moment of apogee. As always when it makes this noise, he eases it forward, carefully, till it’s four-square on the floor again.

  He flattens his palms against the tabletop, as if he’s trying to press it down.

  ‘Where does that leave us?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes’—Marjorie now, dabbing at her nose—‘I still don’t understand what she’s got over us.’

  Parp, into a tissue.

  ‘Well.’ Julian again. ‘We heard enough to know it’s Thom speaking on the tape. Maybe that’s the name she wants us to hear. Thom.’

  ‘So. What did Thom know that we don’t want to get out? We all know how Ray went, so—it can’t be that—’

  ‘There’s not just that, there’s what happened before.’

  ‘Everyone knows about that. We talked about it last time.’

  ‘Everyone knows he was a shit.’

  ‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean we want them looking into the pot, does it?’

  ‘Thom Ham wouldn’t have known about that sort of thing, though—would he? What the old man used to get up to? Ray was past it by the time Thom turned up—that’s why he turned up, isn’t it?’

  ‘He had that stick thing,’ Semple says suddenly. ‘Ray did.’ He looks across at me. ‘Is that it? Is that the clue? Pandy? Did she say that? Geneva? On the phone? Pandy?’

  What does he mean? ‘Pandy?’

  ‘You remember. He used to call it the pandybat. When he brought it out. That Arab stick-thing of his.’

  ‘Did he?’ For the life of me I can’t remember this detail. ‘Pandy?’ How could I have forgotten it had a name?

  ‘I remember the stick,’ Marjorie says. ‘Why’d he call it Pandy, though?’

  ‘Think Joyce.’

  ‘Joyce who?’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Semple, thumping forward over the tabletop. ‘Joyce who—’

  ‘Oh—him.’

  ‘The pandybat at Clongowes. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan—’

  ‘No, that’s in the other one—’

  ‘What other one?’

  ‘I don’t know that I know about this,’ Julian says. ‘What sort of a stick?’

  ‘I’ll get it,’ I tell them. ‘It’s in his bedroom.’

  I slip out. Julian’s voice behind me, reminding Semple about Ulysses. What d’you mean, never read it? I hear him say. Raymond’s room smells unaired, with a slight back-story of mould. I remember coming in here and finding the second paua shell on the desk. Quite a lot I haven’t read, Semple is saying, truculently, back in the dining room.

  I don’t need the light this time: I know where the drawer is. I reach in and rummage for the thing. Haven’t read Shakespeare? from the other room. A pulse trills in my neck.

  Julian’s eyebrows lift to me as I come back with the stick in my hand.

  Semple stares. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he says. ‘He’s actually kept the fucking thing—’

  ‘Is it a sort of wog-hitting stick?’

  ‘No.’ Julian takes it from me. ‘I’ll tell you what it is, it’s a British army swagger stick.’

  He explains: a short, leather-bound stick used by British Army officers to help point up otherwise pointless parade-ground choreography. Nothing more to it than that, and definitely (when I ask him) nothing to do with North African peoples—or with anything very much at all, it seems.

  So that’s what it is! And it must be so: peaceable Baby-boomer that he is, Julian knows his military memorabilia, even though it’s at odds with every other part of his life.

  Now, after all these years, Raymond’s story has changed a little. The old man must have found this thing in a North African market: possibly it reminded him in some unhappy way of the school that swallowed up much of his second decade. I wonder at myself for bringing it out: but it seems to be having its moment, it seems to be attracting attention.

  Is this what Geneva meant me to find, and, if so, what might that mean?

  The others are passing it from hand to hand. Semple thwacks it reminiscently across his palm. ‘He got me with it a few times,’ he’s telling Marjorie. ‘Caught me stealing copper off him, that was the first time.’

  ‘On the bottom? The bare bottom?’

  ‘Me? No! On the back, the old bugger, when I was trying to get away from him.’

  ‘But schoolboys, when they—’

  ‘The Dark Ages are over,’ Julian says. He’s holding the stick up and looking at it.

  ‘—they used to bleed,’ Marjorie says. ‘They were flogged naked, apparently. Schoolboys. They used to be flogged naked till they bled.’

  ‘Schools haven’t flogged for fifty years.’ Julian doesn’t look up: he’s gazing and gazing at the pandybat. ‘Not even the religious schools.’

  Robert and Marjorie, though, are still back in the locker room together. ‘Really?’ he’s just asked her. ‘You? With the pandybat?

  ‘No, with his hand. On the bare bum, sometimes. I still can’t decide whether I liked it or not.’

  ‘But isn’t that the point? You love it and hate it at the same time? The borderline of kink?—the kink is the borderline, that’s where it’s at?’

  Now Julian is becoming interested, too. They’re fizzing! The pandybat has excited them—the swagger stick, as Julian has renamed it. I wait till the spanking talk around me exhausts itself. It takes a minute or two, and there’s definitely more energy in the room once they’re done.

  Now Marjorie wants to know why I’ve brought the bat out, what my point is.

  ‘Well—we’re assuming there might be something about it on Geneva’s tapes, aren’t we?’

  We’re all staring at the stick now, as it sits in the middle of the dining table’s surface commanding attention but resisting explication.

  ‘So—he had a stick, and he called it—’

  ‘The pandybat. Apparently he did, I never—’

  ‘—and she’s told you it’s mentioned on these tapes.’

  ‘No—she said she had a name, and that the name was on the tape. The one she gave us.’

  ‘Which we couldn’t hear.’

  ‘I think we’re going round in circles again.’ Julian, of course: he adjusts his trousers once more. ‘We’re not getting anywhere. We’re trying to find a name, and—’

  ‘We want the thing first.’

  ‘No,’ I tell them. ‘The name first.’

  ‘We need to get hold of those other tapes.’ This is Semple, suddenly, urgently. ‘We don’t know what else is on them—’

  I stare at him. Does he know something? He was there at the start, after all, or very nearly. This could be trickier than I thought.

  Julian leans forward, elbows on the table. ‘Isn’t that the challenge?’ he says. He picks the stick up. ‘To make some kind of intervention?’

  ‘What d’you mean, intervention?’

  ‘To get off our bums and—make something actually happen for once?’ He looks around, leaning forward, his forearms on the table, the stick up stiff in his fist. ‘Here we are, representing one of the most active writers there’s ever been, his fiction’s full of people doing things—people blowing things up, getting killed—decisiveness, that’s what he preached, isn’t it? Isn’t that one of the things he preached?’

  ‘The consequential writer
,’ I remind them. ‘The consequential writer and the consequential life.’

  ‘His words. Raymond’s words.’ Julian rolls the pandybat away from himself, across the table. He sits back. Semple gazes at the stick. He picks it up.

  ‘You’re suggesting killing Geneva Trott?’ he says. ‘I’m up for that.’

  ‘But is bumping off biographers really the sort of thing literary trusts do?’ Marjorie creaks. ‘Don’t we just handle copyright?’

  ‘Geneva’s an exception. There’s no rules for people like Geneva fucking Trott.’ Semple whacks the pandybat into his left palm. ‘Anything goes, that’s what I say.’

  ‘What I’m suggesting is, we do something about these tapes. We don’t know what’s on them but we know it might be damaging—and anyway, it’s not her story. Geneva’s. Isn’t that what we moaned about when Years of Lightning came out? That book of hers? Didn’t we say, it wasn’t her story and she’d just helped herself without asking?’

  ‘Oh, Julian! You’re getting quite excited, I’ve never seen you like this before!’

  ‘Yes, but he’s onto something, Marge, for Christ’s sake.’ Semple is leaning forward now, his arms on the tabletop, his hands opening and closing as he speaks. The bat lies in front of him: he stares at it. ‘Are we just going to sit here and let things happen—or, are we going to, you know—?’

  ‘Lay a plot?’ Marjorie. ‘D’you realise that’s what we’re talking about? Isn’t that the term? Laying?’

  ‘Laying—?’

  ‘Shh, Robert. Grubby mind. That’s what they used to say, though, didn’t they? Writers? Back in the day? Laying a plot? Like laying the foundations for a house?’

  He stares at her. ‘So—?’

  ‘Well, that’s what we’re doing, aren’t we? Laying a plot? Without Ray to help us? We’re all on our own now and we’re trying to lay a plot.’