The Back of His Head

by Patrick Evans

  I’ve just played that bit back, Patrick—see what I said back there? About the old boy having a blue fit? Well, I just about had a blue fit when I heard that—like he was really starting to get into my mind, Mr Lawrence, I mean, he’s even in your words? But the thing is, get this, Dot turned blue. After a while she started turning blue. I was with her one day and I saw this mark on her arm and it was blue. I don’t mean she’d turned bright blue like a Smurf but there was definitely this one patch on her left arm, below the elbow. She was turning blue. It gave me such a hell of a shock I got out there and then, I just dropped what I was doing and I said excuse me and I left. She must’ve thought I had the runs and I more or less did, it was that scary, I was standing outside swallowing and swallowing and looking around, like, you know, dear God please find me something normal to look at!—and there was old Val down the bottom of the garden so I settled myself down to watch her. After a bit I made myself go back into the house and get back to whatever it was I’d stopped doing, but really I was looking at old Dot and her arm and the blue spot, and, you know what, I couldn’t find it again?

  I hung around her so long she thought I was up to something with her, I think, she was typing away bang-bang-bang the way she usually did, and all of a sudden she stops and she looks up at me and she says, what? like I was hanging around for something. And I didn’t know what to say, I felt bloody stupid—like, am I going to say to her, sorry, I was just checking to see if your arm’s turning blue?—so I tell her, I’m admiring your style, and she says awwww like that and turns back and starts up typing again but you could see she was pleased. I could see there was a sort of a brown spot on the back of her right hand that stuck up off her skin, quite big, thumbnail-sized, more, and where I’d seen the patch of blue—where I remembered seeing the blue—there was definitely something, but it wasn’t what I’d seen a few minutes before, not quite. So I put it out of my mind again and got busy with other things, had a Bounty Bar and so on.

  But I didn’t forget it and after few days I checked her out again, and this time her entire left arm was blue—I saw it, through a window, just for a second. I slipped away and then I came back for another look, and of course it’d changed, but it hadn’t gone away. It was like a kind of iron-colour, her arm, I could definitely see a sort of iron-blue tinge almost under the skin like a bruise. It turned me up, I can tell you, and then when I looked at her face—she’s looking round at me again, she must have thought I was stalking her or something—I could see it under her eyes, too, it was a dark bluey-bruised looking. It was in her. I was hanging around staring, I was that caught up I forgot what I was doing, and then she stops typing like she did the time before and she says, Thom, if you’ve got something to say to me would you mind spitting it out and not standing there like Mr Orr’s dog? And I say, I didn’t know he had a dog. And she looks at me like Mr Tinetti and then she says, really carefully, The one that’s gone missing, and that threw me. Rommel? I ask her, and she says, Rommel? Well anyway, turns out we’d eaten Either-Or’s dog for him! Didn’t even know he had a dog, I told her, and when I said that she sat up straight and stared in front of her like she was posing for a photo, and then she says, how many dogs have we got around here that you’ve seen? Well, of course, there’s just the one, and I told her that and she says, Well, then, and she turns back and starts typing again.

  So—there you go, there’s another mystery for you. I’m really feeling caught up in something and I didn’t like it one bit. So I decided to fix my mind on other things, I was off to the gym next morning as soon as I’d sorted Mr Lawrence out back at the Residence, and I benched 165 kegs, squatted 200, and deadlifted 200. And that took my mind off my problems, I can tell you – 200 kegs! Pity there wasn’t more people there to watch me, but, tell you what, I let everyone know about it for a couple of days! But the blue thing never went away once the old man’d put it there. I’d be going about my business and then suddenly I’d be thinking about it, and I’d be off to see if Dot was about, and she’d get all pissed off, you could see she was getting sick of me. Then I got this brainwave, I decided I’d clean the Residence windows so I could look in and check her out while she was typing? So I’m up this long ladder wiping the old chamois across the glass, and there she is inside at the dining room table, tapping away at the typewriter—all of a sudden Left Butt’s down at the foot of the ladder and he’s like, what d’you think you’re doing, that’s my job, you think you can do it better than me or something? And I’m like, just giving a hand, Eric, don’t worry, and then I see Mr Semple wandering round the garden in that hat of his he was born in and I think, maybe he knows what’s going on—

  And that’s what I did, I was that full of this business by this stage I got down the ladder and I told him about it, even though Bailey’s manual tells you Never break the confidential relationship between carer and client/patient. But I did, I told Mr Semple, and the main thing I got out of it was, his breath stunk of onions. I kept backing off and he kept coming close like he couldn’t hear me. Course, it might’ve been on purpose, him eating onions and then going up to people and breathing on them, with him you can never tell. Anyway: blue? he says to me. The old boy? Did he say that? What else did he say? So I told him some of the other queer things Mr Lawrence used to tell me and he just laughs! He’s no use to me at all, Mr Semple, he’s never serious, not with me, anyway, I wished I hadn’t told him anything in the first place. Blue! he says. He’s going to turn her blue! Then I go and tell him that other thing I told you about, remember, that time Mr Lawrence looks up at me out of nothing and he tells me, lipstick and wine are made out of fish scales, just like that? I told him that, Mr Semple, I told him about the old man telling me that and I thought he was going to fall over he laughed that much. Did he really? he keeps saying to me. Did he really say that? Just out of the blue?

  There you go again, see—out of the blue. It’s like it gets into everything! He must’ve thought it was me that was the problem, Mr Semple must’ve, because I shot off when he said that. Excuse me, I’m saying to him, and I’m off. Next time I see him though he calls out to me, you were right!—he’d taken a look at Dot and he said yes, definitely blue. Sort of blue-grey? I asked him, and he said, no, definitely blue, she’ll be the same as the Blue Room next—which is exactly what Mr Lawrence’d told me! So next time she was typing I made an excuse and I managed to get a good look at her. From one angle I’d think yes, and then I’d wander round the other side and I’d think no. I couldn’t decide. So I began to think, maybe he was making it up, Mr Semple, because like I say you could never tell with him. I started to wonder, was he pretending to think Dot Round had turned blue, was he just pulling my tit and I couldn’t tell? After a while I didn’t know if I was making stuff up, too. But he told me one thing, Mr Semple, he said, did you know Dot isn’t all that well? And I said no, I didn’t know that and I was very sorry, and then he told me what it was she had but I can’t remember the details except she was meant to have regular blood transfusions and that clashed with her beliefs. It felt a bit like he was starting to pull my leg again, like when he told me about Catholics having colds all the time. So I just left it. I tried to concentrate on what I was meant to be doing, but the more time I spent with Mr Lawrence the more I thought about Dot and what he said he was going to do to her.

  And after a while she did start to go downhill, and that’s when I really began to get the wind up. There was a week when she didn’t turn up and then another, and then all of sudden there’s this new woman doing the typing. She seemed really nice, pretty young, and I thought, I wouldn’t mind. This wasn’t all that long after Raewyn and me had, you know. So when I see this new chick with Either-Or in the dining room—he was showing her the typewriter and he was telling her what he wanted—I slip back down the ladder and come in like I had to do the insides. Oh, hullo, I say, like I didn’t know she was there. Either-Or doesn’t look across at me but he says, Aileen’s covering for Mrs Round. And then he says to her, this
is Gradus. She says to me, pleased to meet you, Mr Gradus, and when she says that he laughs, the prick, it was the only time I ever heard him laugh. It’s Thom Ham, I said to her—pleased to meet you, Thom, she says to me.

  Really nice girl, I really liked her, though for a while she thought my name was Tom Gradus, she used to put that on notes for me. Thom Ham, I’d tell her. T-H-O-M, new word, H-A-M. Anyway, Mrs Round, she didn’t come back, and a couple of months after Aileen turned up, she died—that’s her name, Aileen Cross, this girl that took her place. No, it wasn’t much more than two months. Mr Yuile told me that at the funeral. Her liver packed up, he told me. You don’t get long with the liver. And it wasn’t your usual sort of funeral, I haven’t been to that many but it was in someone’s house and people took turns to say something and Dot wasn’t there, I mean you couldn’t see her. I was hoping for an open coffin, I thought I’d be able to check on her colour if she was sitting up in a coffin looking like one of the wax bananas—but the lid was down. I asked Mr Semple, and he said yes, he’d seen Dot just before she passed on and she was definitely blue, but he had this silly look on his face when he told me and I wondered why I’d bothered in the first place.

  Right Butt said an interesting thing, though—when I asked her, was Dot blue at all, she didn’t laugh at me, she said, no, more a sort of silvery-grey colour. So what d’you make of that? I don’t know what I think when I look back. But when I go back to when things really started to happen, I reckon there might have been something to what the old man said. I mean, he told me he was going to do it, then her skin definitely changed, then she died. You can’t deny that. Every time I try to remember back then, though, I have trouble with the colour. Sometimes I remember what I told you just now, you know, not quite sure, then a couple of times I dream about her, and each time she’s bright blue—shit, I feel stupid talking like this! And the dreams started to get mixed up with how I think of it when I look back so I’m not sure what exactly happened.

  But the old man was clear about it. Bright blue, he says to me. I told you. We were down in the garden room, after the funeral, he didn’t go to it because of his bladder. Poor old Dot, he says. I sure hated doing it to her. Doing what, I asked him. You remember, he said. I told you I’d turn her blue and then she’d die. You mean you killed her? I asked him. I mean she’d come to the end of her sentence, he said. I chose her because of her nickname. Dot. Full stop. Period. She was there to end the sentence. There to end the sentence? I’m asking myself, and I asked him about that because it seemed such a cold hard thing to say. She switched typewriters and I didn’t like that, he says to me. That was the other thing. That plug-in golfball thing, he says, why’d she ask for one of those, what’s wrong with the old Imperial we used to have? I told you her time was up, and it’s up.

  But then when he’s said this he looks up at me and he gives me a smile. He’s got his teeth in for a change and he gives me this—I don’t know—he gives me this really, really nice—smile. No, it was better than that, it was—tell you what, it was like when—d’you remember, Patrick?—when I first come across him back at the Residence? You know, he comes up the wheelchair elevator like Old Nick coming up out of Hell, and he winks at me when he gets to the top? It was like that. I can’t explain it to you but it was like something happened between us? It was like he looked right into me? These pale blue eyes, I couldn’t look away?—I didn’t want to. It was like he really knew me, and it was like, that was all right, he liked what he was seeing, everything was okay, I could do anything I wanted and it’d be okay. And he could do anything he wanted, too, that was part of it, and I wanted him to. I wanted to reach out and hug him and say sorry. Sorry what for, I don’t know, I just don’t—Christ, this doesn’t make much sense, does it? But you said you wanted to know everything and here it is. I wanted him to do anything, I don’t know what it was I wanted him to do, but whatever it was I’d’ve let him do it, I knew that. I’d’ve done anything he wanted when he was looking at me like that. I’d’ve followed him into Hell if he’d asked. It was only five seconds I was thinking all this, but shit, it was big. Making any sense to you, Patrick? You ever had anything like that happen to you? Shit, it was powerful. You are mine, it was like he said that to me. That’s what I thought to myself afterwards, it really got to me. I am yours, and whatever you ask me I’ll do, just ask me and I’ll do it. How d’you like that? How d’you like

  VIII

  Slowly, reluctantly, I settled into my new role—well, that’s what I’d like to be able to write, but it’s not true, it’s not true at all. In fact I settled into my new, responsible, everyday life eagerly, easily, happily, and it became a part of me straight away. I was dismayed—I was appalled! This was the period when we began to make the transition that turned the house, step by step, into the Residence and the centre of the Raymond Lawrence empire. To say I made this business mine simply doesn’t say enough.

  To start with, we got rid of Raymond’s terrible old chicken coop from up behind No. 23: out it went, chickens and all, and in its place came the prefabricated second house that took its name. We’d waited for Raymond to turn his back—by we I mean me and the others, Marjorie and Robert, all three of us by now very much wedded into the life of the Master. Then we made our move: and, when he came back from one of his many nostalgic jaunts to North Africa, as they seemed to us then—why, there it was, the Chicken Coop, newly named and a sudden, bland structure looming up behind his own.

  He pretended to be much annoyed that we’d done it behind his back, but he really was annoyed at the colour we proposed to paint it. Not that blue! he shouted at us when we showed him the colour-chart: that’s blue-rinse blue!

  Anything but blue, he said, when calmed: the Coop was a civilian buidling after all. In the end we settled on an insipid, creamy-yellow-tallowy sort of colour instead: might as well be a school building, he grumbled when we were done.

  I managed all this myself, pretty much, young as I was at the time: not yet twenty, not quite—extraordinary, isn’t it? Phone calls, lawyers, boundary negotiations, permits, meetings with the builder and his men: above all, the financial jiggery-pokery involved. It seemed I could make decisions, it seemed, above all, that I was good with money!

  Realising that took me aback, I can tell you—what had happened to the sensitive child of the arts, son of the muses? I was shocked to see how easily it all came to me, the business of business, and taken aback at how much I enjoyed it and at the banal satisfaction I felt at the end of each busy, phone-shot day. Was this all there was to me after all, had the old man been right all along: was I really made for nothing better than the butyric whiff of the getting-and-spending world? Well, yes, it seems he was right, disconcertingly so, and that a rather large part of me was.

  Not all, though. The more I spent the day getting and spending, the more I reached, each Friday at six o’clock (and, some weeks, more frequently than that), for the compensations of Art. How quickly I turned to the Amontillado and the Bristol Cream, how eagerly I pressed the black shellac discs onto the soft dark felt of the turntable one after the other and awaited the redemptive, cleansing hiss of the diamond needle. Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Mozart, the incomparable choral works of Johannes Brahms—oh, ‘Longing Laid to Rest’, with Jessye Norman: this allowed to myself but once a year, so wrenching is it to hear. And Elgar, anything by Elgar. Richard Strauss as well.

  From time to time, too (I hesitate to admit this), I would listen to Hansel and Gretel, an opera that reduces me to helpless tears from its very first note: ridiculous, I know, but every time I hear it I am pulled, blubbering, back into a world more real than anything else I know: into that world—the enchanted forest in which everything is so very much more than just itself, and which has no end. Whose captive children are set free at its conclusion and are yet are children still: and that is the nature of their freedom.

  As you can see, I’d never fully left behind, after all, that magical world from which I’d been banished. It w
as there as I pressed out phone numbers and totted up lists of figures, found the cost of things, tut-tutted with builders and research librarians alike: it was around me in every daily moment like the smell of an animal. It was in my mind as I explored the beginnings of a trust with the Master and first realised that he intended, to my dismay, that any such venture should involve Marjorie and Robert as well. It was present as I slowly persuaded him, later, that Julian should be part of the venture as a sort of a balance.

  It was present again a little later, too, when, out of a clear blue sky, Geneva’s crass little critical biography appeared. It was I who dealt with the fallout of that venture, or much of it—managing the media and also, when things had settled a little, interviewing our staff to see from whence the leaks had come: our gardening ladies dwindled in number after that unpleasant little episode, I can tell you. I still have suspicions about others of the Master’s followers—about Semple, most obviously.

  There you are! Raymond said to me after a while of this deediness, when I was twenty-one or two or three. You really are a moron! A worldly man, he meant, I suppose: but, oh, how the words hurt me, how like a knife they cut at my soul, at the very bowels of my being. I’d like to say he meant no harm, except, of course, that he did. A civilian, he meant: no, no, I’m still an artist, I used to insist to myself each time he made my lesser status clear to me like this. But in my heart of hearts I knew it wasn’t true. An artist? he would demand, if ever I dared assert myself with a brave little occasional squeak, and then he’d hold up his pen to me, or a page of manuscript, or, indeed, one of his novels entire: where’s yours? he’d ask. Mm—?