So, anyway, Patrick, that’s how I got started at the Raymond Lawrence Residence! Part-time at the start and that suited me fine except I had to get the old geezer out of the sack first thing every morning, and, just my luck, he’s always up at sparrow-fart! So I’d be up before six just to get there on time, I’d bike across town and up to Cannon Rise and he’d be lying there reading Auto Trader. He’d always say, got a Bounty Bar on you? I’d tell him no, and he’d say, well, looks like a country breakfast, then. He meant, just a pee and a look-round.
Sometimes I’d ask myself what I was there for, other times I’d be earning my money because I’d have to get him going the way I told you. Never very often back then, and if you ran into him later in the day you’d never pick anything wrong. Then I could do what I liked till the evening, I’d bike to the gym or I’d spend time with Raewyn, this woman I was seeing, and then I’d bike back across town and up to the Residence and he’d be ready for me to help him into bed, ten or earlier. A hard life!—not. Tell you the truth, I couldn’t work out why they’d hired me?
He’d work in the downstairs sunroom like I said, but he’d go into it from the garden not the house. I’d look in the drawers in his bedroom upstairs and there’d be his things there, like hankies and ties I mean, but he never went in to get one. It was like he’d left his life in the Residence behind. Old Either-Or caught me doing that, one time, having a look-round, and he gives me hell. I’m just getting him a hankie, I tell him, and he says, Mr Lawrence has plenty of handkerchiefs up in the Chicken Coop, there’s no need for anyone unauthorised to be in the Residence. But he’s the author, I tell him, and he gives me his fly-on-a-fruitcake look. The Residence is a museum, he says to me. No human life occurs in it, it’s about the past, that’s the point of it. Something like that is what he says. He says, like his fiction, it’s about the past and the pastness of the past. And then he says—just turning away, this is his style, you know, fuck-you Noddy just piss off, know what I mean?—he says to me, as you’d find in his work if you were able to read it. Well, up yours, is what I thought, and I made up my mind right there to have a go at one of the old man’s books sometime, though like I’ve said, I’m not a reader. So a bit after that, I slip one of his books out of the Residence. It had treasure hunt in the title, I thought it might be interesting, I thought it might be a mystery story?
Well, I have to tell you, Patrick—have you read it? I guess you must’ve. Anyway, I couldn’t make that much of it, I’d read a bit and I’d be thinking of something else, and then I’d make myself read some more and I’d be looking out the window. I’d look down and it’d be like, you know, page five. Couldn’t get anywhere with it. I skip ahead and there’s weird things, like when the children get into the forest and this witch turns up, except it’s not a witch? Is she really doing what it seems like she’s doing to them? How’d he get someone to print stuff like that? And give him a prize for it? And what’s she meant to be, this witch lady, what’s she meant to be if she isn’t a witch? All this death stuff all the time, on and on about death. Is she a beetle in the end, is that what she turns into? I had a peek at that bit but I couldn’t work it out. I gave up on it. I felt bad about that but I thought, how can anyone read stuff like that? They give you the Nobel Prize for that? Crikey dick!
Anyway, where was I—yeah, I was telling you about the Chicken Coop. The Butts are in one of the bedrooms and Either-Or’s in one of the others, and Mr Lawrence, he was down the end, he was in this bedroom with an en suite that opens on another bedroom the other side, and that’s the one I went into when I shifted in later on. Four bedrooms. I’d just walk through into his room, and when I’d give him a shower I’d lug him into the en suite and I’d get the wet weather gear on and I’d hold him up under the spray with one hand and soap him up with the other, and I’ll tell you something, Patrick, the only way you can do that is while you’re thinking of something else! Doesn’t worry me now, but it sure as hell did when I started off, it shook me up but you don’t want to know about that. So I’d think of Raewyn while I was doing it and sometimes I’d think of Val, the way I’d call out to her when she was gardening just so she’d stand up and I’d see the Jersey Bounce.
Where was I? Right—early days, that’s what you asked for. When I turned up the place was still crawling with visitors, and that’s when they first started talking about shifting Mr Lawrence out—he didn’t like it, I can tell you that, he kicked up a hell of a fuss, you should have heard the language. I swear a bit—can’t help it, just comes out—and I thought I’d heard everything, but Mr Lawrence, some of the things he used to say! And he said it to everyone, he didn’t care. I asked him about it once, I say to him, ever have your mouth washed out when you were a kid? And he stares at me that hard I wish I hadn’t said it. What d’you mean? he says, and I tell him, your language. And he says, what language? I was getting a bit rattled by now. The bad language, I told him. What bad language? he says. Enlighten me. Listen, they’re all just words and no one tells me which ones I can use and which ones I can’t, right? And he screws up his eyes at me when he says that. I thought he was going to hit me, I really did, that was the first time I thought that, and then later on he did, he did use to hit me towards the end, not hard but he was trying.
Right, where was I?—yeah, back when he got the big prize and everyone wanted to know him. Mrs Butt told me the day the news come out, the place was crawling with people. The Nobel people ring you up, she said—you know, how’s your day, oh, by the way, you’ve won the Nobel Prize? Then they announce it and everyone wants to know you. There was reporters and cameramen hanging off the trees, she told me. One minute it was peaceful, she says, and the next, there’s the phone going all day and there’s twelve dozen bunches of flowers delivered in four days! It was October and we had a garden full of spring flowers, she reckoned, but there’s flowers in cellophane out the house and down the path to the garage, we were giving them away? Any Tom, Dick and Harry’d turn up with stuff, they’d bake the old fellow a sponge or they’d leave a bloody casserole on the front step! There was people standing down by the garage and just staring up at the house, just staring, and she used to wonder what it was they were after, she told me. It’s not his books, she says, apparently there’s special things in them but it’s no good people like us trying to get them out. That’s what she told me. Fancy folk like Mr Orr and his friends, literary folk, that’s their job, that’s what they do, that’s the point of them, she says. Down at the university. Well, after I’d had a go at reading him like I said, I reckoned she was right, Either-Or and his arty-fart friends can keep the books for themselves and the rest of us can have what’s left over. The people who come to visit the Residence, they’re after something else, she says. Mrs Butt, Right Butt, she told me that. They don’t care about the books, she said. There’s something else they want.
OK, from Julian, when he replies to my text, and from Semple, after I contact him later in the day: Thks fr fkg up my rdg.
In person, though, when we gather in the Residence dining room, he seems to have got over it.
‘Where’s Marge?’ he demands, and then, inevitably, makes an unpleasant suggestion, one which I won’t record here.
‘You’ll have to be Hon. Sec., Jules,’ he says. ‘Be buggered if it’s me.’
Julian, being Julian, reluctantly agrees: he fumbles up a piece of paper and begins to scribble at it. I look at my watch. 7:07pm.
Semple has a paper package, though, which he is sliding onto the table.
‘Guess what I’ve got here,’ he says.
The three of us stare at it. Oh, where is Marjorie, that we might start?
‘Look!’ Semple, tearing the wrapping from the parcel.
Julian stares. ‘Well—what d’you know?’ he says. ‘It’s back!’
The stolen ashtray—the stolen paua shell ashtray, unwrapped and on the table in front of us!
‘Stuffed in my letterbox sometime last night. Just that, no writing.’
I stare at the thing. That’s it, all right, I’d recognise it anywhere—the size, the ancient smear of cigar ash, so much darker than cigarette ash, the oh-so-tiny chip on its finer edge. His ash, Raymond’s ash—my heartbeat quickens. I can’t stop staring at the thing, as if it’s arrived from outer space. Raymond’s ashtray is back—Raymond is back. First Geneva, and now him.
How? Why? From where?
‘Well—well!’ I’m trying to sound calm. ‘You really have upstaged events. What an extraordinary thing.’
‘Second thoughts,’ Julian says. ‘Isn’t that what it is? D’you think we’ll get anything else back? One of the wax bananas went last week.’
‘Really? Why didn’t you tell me?’ But I’m gazing at the shell in my hand. ‘I’ll put it back on his desk.’
‘Who d’you think’s behind this?’ I can hear Julian as I tread the gunshot board in the hallway. Semple is saying something back to him, but I can’t make it out.
The Master’s desk is against the sill of his bedroom window. There’s an ancient bowl of potpourri on it, a baccarat paperweight, and a lamp that throws a small, soft light on all these when I turn it on, and onto the ashtray beside it.
A paua shell ashtray, already in place, near the lamp.
I stare at the thing, and at the other shell in my hand.
‘Look at this,’ I call to the others.
Julian comes in and stands next to me, mouth-breathing audibly. Together, we gaze at it. In the circle of light the shell has a dull, subtle gleam.
Semple is behind me. ‘Bugger me dead,’ he says. ‘Look at that.’
An extraordinary moment. The shell in my hand: and, at the same moment, it seems, on the desk in front of us as well—
I look more closely at the interloper. Exactly the same size, exactly the same shape, and with exactly the same ancient dark grey smear of tobacco within: it could be the shell in my hand, caught at exactly the same moment of its former usage and held there. Except that the shell in my hand is a separate thing. It is a shell in my hand.
The moment seizes me. I take the shell from the desk and, slowly, fit it against the other. The two halves come together as a single thing, complete, entire. For a second, I can imagine what it originally was, and, for that second, doing so seems the most powerful idea in the world, something that urgently needs to be thought through.
We return to the dining table and sit.
A silence. Julian breaks it.
‘Robert brought in the one that was returned to him yesterday—and the other one—was already there?’
‘Correct. Placed there by persons unknown. They’re identical. And—look at this.’ I pull them apart and put them together again. ‘They turn into the former—animal. Creature. Whatever it was.’
Silence. Then:
‘Whoop-de-do. So fucking what?’
‘No, no!’ Julian is eager. ‘I can see what Peter means. It sort of recovers the status quo ante—’
‘They’re just seashells.’
‘Identical seashells—’
‘Yes, but are they? Really identical?’
And so the two of them sit there turning them about, and squinting at them at the ends of their noses and then again at the lengths of their arms. Julian brings down the spectacles on his brow and Semple brings up the half-glasses that always hang from the cord at his neck. With these he has to tilt back to see, and I find myself looking away from the sudden, wild, preconceptual tangle in his nostrils.
‘You know what?’ Julian says, after half a minute. ‘They really are the same—’ He flicks me a glance, full of significance. ‘It really is two parts of the original thing—’
Semple thumps his shell onto the tabletop. ‘No, it isn’t,’ he says. ‘They don’t fit. They never did. They’re—what’s the opposite of bivalves?’ He cups his hands together. He pulls one away. ‘There’s only one of them. They cling to rocks. Like that—’ He slaps one hand on the tabletop. ‘Just one shell. The whole thing.’
‘Really?’ Julian is still fiddling with the shells. ‘I’m sure these’re fitting together, though—’
‘They can’t, they’re not oval, they’re—’
‘Yes they are.’ I seize them from Julian. ‘Look—’
‘It’s nothing like a fit—look, there’s an overlap—’
‘Not much of an overlap.’ I hand them back to Julian.
Semple leans heavily back in his seat. ‘The point is, someone’s playing tricks with us,’ he says. ‘That’s the point. Whoever sent me the parcel’s playing tricks. You’re wasting your time.’
‘No, we’re not, it’s a message.’
‘Message my arse—’
‘I think Julian’s right, I think we’re being told something.’ I didn’t really want to say this, but I’m encouraged by Julian’s reaction. ‘I think it’s a clue.’
‘A clue about what?’
‘Well, we don’t know, do we, that’s what clues are, they’re just hints, they’re not answers—’
‘Clues from who? Raymond? D’you really think he’s still out there somewhere like Elvis? Living in a fucking cave in the desert, horribly deformed? With JFK and Hitler?’
‘No, I don’t think that,’ Julian says. ‘But if the shells aren’t actually from someone, then explain these—’ He holds them up like castanets. ‘Explain why they’re the same.’
‘All shells are the same—the same as all bananas are the same. Except wax ones. Look, I could find you a hundred more fucking shells clinging to rocks and they’d all look the same.’ Semple struggles up from his usual slump. ‘You know what’s happening here, we’re back to the last meeting—you know? Is He present in the wafer? We’re back there, it’s just a different way of asking the same question. It’s Cavaliers and Roundheads all over again—’
‘We are back there!’ This is Julian, amazingly.
‘We’re not—they don’t join up, there’s no original fucking bivalve—’
‘—and you want to know something?’ Julian holds the shells up again, but together this time, closed, as one thing in his hand. ‘I’m changing my mind!’
‘About what?’
‘I’m going back on what I said last time about the furniture. I’m changing my mind because these things fit.’
‘Because of two paua shells? What are you talking about?’
‘Order—’
‘Oh, fuck off, Norman.’
‘I’ve been thinking things through since the last meeting, and this’—Julian gestures towards the two shells—‘this seems like, I don’t know, a message. It’s more than a coincidence.’
‘So we’re being told by higher powers we should pay homage to the organic wholeness of the past? As represented by two fucking abalone shells?’
‘They’re two halves of—’
‘They’re not, I told you, they’re only ever one shell, stuck to a rock.’ Semple stares at us wildly. ‘That’s how they work, there’s no lost original with two shells waiting to be discovered. You’ve got one in each hand—that’s all you’ve got, a different animal in each hand—snails, or whatever they were—’
Julian slowly brings the shells together again. ‘I don’t think we should touch anything in the house,’ he says.
Now there really is a pause.
‘You mad fucking bastard,’ Semple says. His voice has dropped—he’s really angry, I can see that. ‘I can’t believe this. It’s a set-up—which one of you planted the shells, which one of you told Marjorie to stay away so she couldn’t vote?’ He stands up from his chair. ‘There’s no vote, anyway—we voted last time, the furniture’s up for sale and that’s that—’
‘There’s no vote on the table now because the meeting hasn’t started. We’re simply discussing the return of the paua shell. And the fact that somehow there’s a second one.’
A pause. We look at the shells. Then:
‘Which is the second one?’
Julian.
It’s an awful moment. I stare a
t the two shells in front of me. Which the second, which the first? After Julian and Robert have picked them up, and passed them to each other, and passed them back, and returned them to the tabletop—I don’t know. I just don’t know.
I can feel the panic rise.
‘This one.’ I point at the one on my right.
‘You mean that’s the second? Or that’s the original?’
‘That’s the second.’ But, really, I’m not sure.
Semple stands and stares across the table. ‘No, it’s the one on the right. My right. Your left.’
‘No, that’s the first.’ I hold up the one on my right. ‘This is the second.’
‘No, the second one’s the first one.’
‘No—the second one’s the second one. I can tell.’
‘How? If they’re the same? You’ve just said they’re exactly the same, haven’t you—?’
We sit there, breathing hard at one other.
And Marjorie walks in: unexpectedly, but, given the situation, not at all unwelcome.
‘My reiki man stood me up,’ she creaks at us. ‘Just think, I’ve got nothing better to do than come here.’ She dumps her unhappy clutch of bags on the floor. ‘My, there’s an atmosphere in here, are you all cross or something?’
‘Norman’s having a crisis. He’s lost his original.’ Semple indicates the seashells. ‘They’re both replicas now.’
‘No—no, don’t touch them.’ I push Marjorie’s hand back from the two shells. I’m staring and staring at them.
‘Why are there two ashtrays, anyway?’ she asks. “How come they’re back? How come there’s even one? What’s happening?’
It’s a long evening, as you might imagine. There’s an argument whether Marjorie should take over as Hon. Sec., there’s an argument about what to do with the paua shells—eventually it’s agreed that they should be placed à deux in the Trust’s safe, up in the Coop. Julian remains Hon. Sec., with little opposition from Marjorie. By now it’s nearly nine and the Trust is showing fatigue. Semple in particular yawns and lolls about, though with him it’s never quite clear whether he really means it, and maybe after all these years even he doesn’t know whether he’s tired or just pretending.
The Back of His Head Page 12