The Back of His Head

by Patrick Evans

  Semple looks irritated. ‘I don’t mean talking,’ he says. ‘I mean doing.’ He stares at me. ‘I’m up for it.’ Across at Julian. ‘What d’you think, Jules? A commando raid?’

  ‘A commando raid? On what, where’s she staying? Geneva?’

  ‘Where is she staying?’

  ‘Don’t know yet. She’s down sometime next week, that’s all she told me.’

  ‘If we could just distract her—’

  ‘What? And nick the tapes?’

  ‘Get hold of the tapes,’ Julian says. ‘Play them, put them back. Find out what’s on them, find out if she’s really got something on us.’

  ‘No!’ Semple is on fire: the bat is back in his hands. ‘We don’t have to play them, we have to piss on them. Then it doesn’t matter what’s on them.’ He turns to me. ‘Where’d you say she’s going to stay? Geneva? In a brothel somewhere? How’re we meant to distract her?’

  ‘Take her out somewhere. Take her to dinner.’

  ‘We’ll need longer than that. If we’re going to listen to these things—how many are there? Fifty-minute tapes—we’d need to keep her busy for—twenty-four hours at least.’

  ‘Well!’ Marjorie’s moment. ‘There’s only one man I know who’d keep a woman busy for twenty-four hours!’

  Semple stares at her. He pushes back from the table, his hat rising slightly as he straightens. ‘Steady on!’ he says.

  ‘Come on, Robert.’ Julian seems to be serious about this mad scheme that’s somehow evolving under our noses to the thwack of the pandybat. ‘Take one for the team. We have to do something.’

  Robert stares around himself, wildly. ‘I could take her for a drive, I suppose,’ he says. ‘Someone could take her for a drive.’ He looks at Marjorie. ‘You could. You could take her to see the pancake rocks.’

  ‘And meanwhile—?’

  ‘Meanwhile.’ Julian has his fists around the stick now. ‘The rest of us can take care of the tapes.’

  Marjorie stares at him. ‘You mean, steal them?’

  ‘Borrow them.’

  ‘But how are you going to get them?’

  Julian taps the stick on the tabletop. ‘We’ll find a way in,’ he says.

  ‘Breaking and entering’s against the law, Jules, dear. Even a motel room.’

  ‘I don’t think we should do this.’ I stand. ‘I think this is a very silly idea.’

  Semple whacks his hands down on the tabletop—we all jump a little. He stands there looking as if he’s about to do it again. ‘We need to do something,’ he says.

  ‘But we’re literary folk—’

  ‘We’re trying to protect his reputation.’ Julian this time. ‘Raymond’s. That’s all we’re doing.’

  ‘You’re protecting his secret.’ Marjorie stands, too, and starts picking up her bags. ‘There’s a lie at the bottom of this place, that’s why I don’t like being here in the evenings.’

  I stare at her.

  ‘Same thing. We’re protecting that. Anyway, he has to have a secret.’

  ‘Why does he have to have a secret?’

  ‘Because all writing is about secrets. He said it himself.’

  ‘He said all writing is about killing.’

  ‘No, he said all writing was a crime, each work of art was a crime—’

  ‘About a crime—each one is about a crime—’

  I let them rattle on. They’re all wrong about this business, although each of them is almost right. Each version is very nearly the thing that Raymond used to say. It would appal me whenever he did—as if he were deliberately tempting fate, deliberately flying too close to the wind to see what he could get away with. Here it is, flaring up in front of me, as if he’s breathing on the very flames himself: and here it is, come back again: concealment, secrets.

  From the front door I watch them leave for their cars, down by the garage. Semple is holding Raymond’s swagger stick like a club. It’s clear something is going to happen, but I’ve no idea what it is.

  Nothing that has occurred this evening has been at all what I expected. Instead, again, the present: inert, insentient, unsatisfactory, rolling away from us in different directions like mercury on a plate. Waiting to become past, in order to find a meaning. Seeking the forest—

  Wear this, he said to me, abruptly, as I came into the Residence one day in my later teens—exactly the same words that started off that strange cross-dressing business all those years earlier when he handed me the pale blue frock and, till usurped, I became Julia Perdue and, for the first time, entered a work of fiction as a character.

  This on this occasion, though, was not a dress but a piece of fabric, one I remember enraging Raymond with in my early days by unknowingly using it as a dish-cloth: it was in fact (as he explained to me at the time), a keffiyeh, headwear completed by (look, watch: he assembled these on his head as he explained) the agal (always camel-hair, he said), the circlet of rope that held it in its place. And with several days’ growth on his face he suddenly looked as if he had indeed been in North Africa, had in fact taken part in one of its foundational struggles at a time when he was not all that much older than I was as I stood there in front of him and watched his transformation. He looked newly arrived, and with the sun and the heat still upon him.

  Along with his French he’d picked up more than a little Arabic during his rather more than a Wanderjahr in North Africa all those years before, and from the start a few Arabic words and phrases were coughed and hawked around casually between us. Most of them I half-understood at best. You’ll have noticed he called me sidi from time to time—ironically: it means master—and he’d also call me tefel and farid and walid, which always gave me the curious, fleeting sensation of being somebody else. Sometimes, in the early days, I called him Qaid, which I knew also had some respect in it.

  By the time I’m talking about here I’d got sick of all this, though, not least when he spoke Arabic in front of me in shops. I was well past that course of bitter little Anastrozole tablets I’ve mentioned earlier, which I’d taken for four months and which had suddenly made me more than a little taller, and I was past the aching joints, the slight exhaustion and the dizzy spells that came with it: hidden, my scoliosis was already beginning its secret, slow, reactive twist. My voice had broken at last (as much, Raymond said, as it sounded likely to do), and I was ready, in my piffling way, for a fight. I was trying out a bolshie attitude, as he used to call it.

  Don’t tell me, I asked him as he handed me the keffiyeh once more: the muse has struck again? And: no, as he tried to put the thing on me—that, and a sort of loose shirt arrangement. I backed away from him. This is ridiculous, I told him. You can’t go on doing this sort of thing to people—no!

  I really meant it, I remember. I remember really fighting him off as we swept and lurched and slammed around the kitchen—he backed me into cupboard doors at one point and I remember a pot knocked off the gas stove just after that and its contents burped over our feet and the lino, and all the time the push-and-pull on the keffiyeh that was between us taut and loose and taut again—

  Twenty seconds of this, maybe, and then he stopped, abruptly, and pulled away from me. The cloth dropped to the floor. He stooped and picked it out of the mess of macaroni cheese down there. He looked up at me: there was the horror of his gaze. I’ll cut ’em off, he said, quietly. You know that, don’t you?

  He straightened up. He meant it, I knew that, I knew this was going to be different. That thing in him was back, I could see, I could see: so cold, so hard. Behind him his hand was in the drawer, I could hear him rummaging blindly amongst the knives, I could hear the clatter of his fingers in the steel. I suddenly realised: he was going to do it at last, he was going to do it at last—I knew that and that he had to: behind this moment so much history, and no way now to stop it—

  I crouched there in front of him, seeing everything happening very clearly, move by move, and his hand coming back up to me from out of the drawer with the glitter of steel in it:
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  Evviva il coltellino!

  Except that, when the moment actually came, what he brought out of the drawer, what he absolutely whipped out from behind him, was—

  We stood there, the two of us, neither moving, both of us staring at the thing in his fist. To this day I’ve no idea whether all this was a stunt or a blunder—but no way of telling, either, since he carried it off so well:

  An eggbeater, for God’s sake—

  He held it there between us for a terrifying second or two and (it seemed) at the height of his rage: until one or other of us (I can’t remember which) started to laugh, and then that was that. Raymond, I think. Yes, it was Raymond. He’d wind the handle in my face for a few seconds and the beaters would mix through each other at the end of my nose, and it really did seem the funniest thing either of us had ever seen in our lives. Then he’d pull it away and bring it back and wind the handle at me again and off we’d go once more. I laughed, I remember, till I cried. The relief! It was over at last!

  For now, it was over for now—

  After we’d worked out of ourselves the ten or fifteen minutes of fear and anger we’d been building up between us—worse than that for me: for me, sheer terror—a knife, after all—when that was done he flung the eggbeater back into the drawer behind him and the headcloth onto the sinkbench, and butted the drawer shut with his bottom, and subsided. One over the other he folded his arms, as if tucking them into bed. He seemed to have let something go, or maybe it had let go of him.

  You’re a strange little prick, he said, quietly, not looking at me: just leaning against the sinkbench as he talked, and looking here, looking there, looking at the floor and up and away as he spoke, and then down at the floor again and all the time getting his breath back while the words came out, and never once looking me, least of all in the eye.

  It’s been hard, all this, he said. For me. What d’you think it’s been like? I took you in, I wanted you—I wanted to make something of you, I wanted you to understand all this shit I’m into. I wanted you to start thinking differently, I wanted you to become a different person. Another person. I didn’t want you turning out some fat-arsed nonentity like your fucking awful parents. But it’s no use, it’s no use.

  He stared past me. He looked away.

  I mean, it seems it’s no use, he said. Doesn’t it?

  Well—you can imagine the effect this had on me. The effect all this had on me, the anger and then the sudden calm, so gentle, so regretful, so genuine as it seemed to be at these moments: and always was, I’m sure, I’d like to think that’s true. Always so loving, after the anger and the violence. Always so intimate. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know what to say. I was still on the edge of tears, as usual whenever he brought me to this complicated pass. It felt like love, that was the thing, it felt as if someone loved me after all.

  You told me not to write, I said. There was a silly tremor still in my voice, I remember. You’re the one who told me not to go on writing—

  It was all I had, it was all I could think of saying back to him. He ignored it competely, of course. He picked up the keffiyeh again and looked at it.

  What d’you think it’s been like, he said—murmured—I could barely hear him: it was almost as if he wasn’t really talking to me. How d’you think it’s been, watching you grow up and away from me like this? What d’you think you’ve been to me? D’you think I wanted all this?—he flung his arms apart, dramatically: the soiled keffiyeh flapped and dangled from one hand. I had no idea what he meant, no idea at all. It was almost as if I wasn’t there.

  Then he simply turned away from me.

  That’s it, he said. That’s it.

  He was walking away. He was walking out on me—he was walking out of my life!

  I tried to follow him: Uncle—

  No—he stopped and turned towards me—no, no, don’t worry, he said. Oh, Jesus, there’s no need to start crying in front of me again, the fucking hormones were meant to stop that shit—stop crying, for God’s sake—

  And off again, into the creaking little corridor: I hurried after him. He was at his most opaque, his most baffling, his most utterly seductive. I wanted to call out to him but I didn’t know what to say—I didn’t even know what to call him: uncle didn’t seem right anymore, as if he’d just abdicated that role and there was nothing else for him to be to me, and nothing for me to be back to him. Qaid? Father—?

  C’était notre rupture, I slowly realised, but only later, much later, looking back at all this: I mean the point at which he decided to start letting go of me, or of a certain part of me.

  You want to know my biggest regret? he asked later that day, or sometime soon after, and pleasantly, conversationally: we were in the front room, by the fluttering light of the fire in the Residence’s stone fireplace. That prick Pepper, he said—Hugh Pepper was our doctor: he was the one who’d written the prescription that had made a man of me. Letting him give you those hormone tablets, my uncle said. D’you know that? I wanted you to be my boy, always my marvellous boy. And look what he’s done to you!

  He was drinking, I remember—we both were, not Ouzo but something else, something neither here nor there in comparison, beer or gin or something like that, a drink with no particular redolence: Ouzo, the poor man’s anise, the elixir of transition, drunk as you moved from now to then and from here to there.

  No more of that for me, I knew: he was giving me up to time, and, whatever it was he’d hoped for me till then (and who knows what that was, who really knows what fantasy he had centred on me up till that point), I’d been abruptly returned to ranks. No longer the marvellous boy—if ever I’d been quite so in fact—but about to become the lesser, safer thing I’ve actually been in the long years since: his steward, his private secretary, his majordomo, someone to be taken for granted. That all-purpose bumboy—dreadful phrase, shameful concept: I hate to reproduce it but those were his words: the factotum whose role and tasks he announced to me a few months after he said it. His Pooh-Bah. But, also, in due course and (as it’s proven) for the best, his successor.

  He’d made me clean up the macaroni cheese from the kitchen floor and, the following day, or some day soon after this strange episode, he made me clean the toilet bowl as well. At this time we had a cleaning lady, as such people are known, her name (of course) Mrs During: but what about Mrs During, I remember protesting to him. She cleaned it today, she was in this morning? Old Mother During be fucked, he said while he bustled me into the water closet, as she always called it. She just scrubs the fucker. You’ve got to find its inner meaning. Go on—go on—

  And go on I did, miserably and at length, gazing bleakly at that extraordinarily crackled interior with its lime-green weep that no work of the brush seemed able to revoke. What was it he wanted me to see in the worn craquelure of this bowl? My new status, I suppose, reflected back to me in the turbid waters beneath my face. As soon as I was done he was in there, of course, to bomb Dresden, and undo thus my hour of work—well, fifteen minutes of it, let’s say. Bombs away! he called out, as he usually did at these moments—he had a lavatory pun on Eau de Cologne, too, I remember that. I was back in the quotidian, and (it seemed at the time) I would never enter hand-in-hand with him again, a marvellous boy, the world from which he had just expelled me.

  Whenever I’d go through the en suite and into his bedroom and he’d be sitting there with his Auto Trader I’d know we were in for a good time. He’d put it away fast when I came in, he’d put it under the sheets like I’d caught him with a porno, but I’d just think, shit hot, it’s an Auto Trader Day! I’d wheel him down to the Residence and round the front and into the downstairs sunroom from the garden and leave him there with his writing. He’d have half a dozen pages by his afternoon nap and I’d take what he’d written to Dot Round to type, and she’d always make out she was pissed off, like, oh, you’re not bringing more work for me sort of thing, but I could see it was all a big show and she loved it really, you know, I-work-for-this
-famous-writer-he-couldn’t do-without-me sort of thing. Anyway, I’ll tell you what happened to her. The old man bumped her off. That’s what he reckoned, anyway. I still haven’t worked the whole business out, I worry away at it.

  It starts like this. We’re up at the top of the hill in the Dodge again, him and me, you know, his afternoon drive and all that, we’re sitting there watching the wind on the tussock, and suddenly he says to me, y’know Dot Round? That does my typing? Yes, of course I know Dot, I tell him, what about her? Well, he says, I’m going to turn her blue. That’s what he says to me! I just sit there and I’m, like, what? He says, you heard me, blue. Just sitting there next to me. Like, you mean her skin? I ask him. That’s right, he says. I’m going to turn her skin blue. Same colour as the Blue Room. Did you know I can do that? So I sit there for a minute, and I’ve got the list of medications running back through my brain Sinemet-Ropinole-Mirapex-Eldepryl and I’m trying to remember if I’ve dosed him up twice on something or left one of them out and that’s why he’s hit the jackpot like this? Then he says, after that I’m going to kill her—she’ll die soon. I can do that, I can kill people—and I’m telling you, Patrick, I didn’t know what to do. It might sound funny when you’re playing this back to yourself but I was filling my pants sitting there next to him. I needed my bike clips on I was that scared.

  So, anyway, I wait there a bit and he seems to go inside himself the way he does every now and then, and after a minute or two I start the car up and take him home. I settle him in for a nap and then I check his medication and I’d been on time with everything, it was all ticked off. I thought, he’ll have a blue fit if I go and tell Either-Or and he finds out, but that’s what you’re meant to do, it’s in the Bailey’s Care manual, any variation in your patient’s behaviour should be reported immediately to your client. So there’s me tapping on the door of Either-Or’s office, and he’s doing that trick I told you about where he knows you’re there but he doesn’t look up because he’s such an important prick, and he says, yes? with his head still down reading something. What? he says to me, when I tell it to him. Blue? he says, like he’s never heard the word before. Turn her blue?