The Back of His Head

by Patrick Evans

  At its end (I remember) I burst into tears, and when Raymond came into the room I flung the book in his face. I wish I’d never read it! I screamed at him. I wish you’d never written it! But you did read it! he said to me. You made it happen! You read it to the end! It didn’t exist till you made it exist! You’re as guilty as anyone!

  He was delighted, in other words. Turn you on, did it? he asked. And he seized me by the wrists when I tried to hit him, or hit out at him: nothing very much, of course, and easily enough handled. I’d never done this before—I’d never so much as raised my voice to him—and here I was, pushing and pulling at his shirtfront. I think I even tried to knee him in the crotch!

  He shoved me back and pinned me down. We were on the Louis Quatorze couch in the Blue Room: there was the weight of him on me and the cheesy smell of his breath. This is how it started with the little Amazigh shit in the desert, he said. Up close and personal, like this. Dumb prick tried to pull a knife on me. Remember, you haven’t got a knife. And he held me there for several seconds more as our bellies breathed against each other. His eyes were pale, grey, almost no colour at all, that fine dark ring around each iris like nothing I’ve seen in anyone else before or since.

  Of course as far as I was concerned at the time it was all a part of the act, this insistence that he’d actually done the things he wrote about himself, sometime in his overseas years. There was no doubt he’d been about the globe in this part of his life—there were photos and memorabilia, after all: that Shoji screen in the Blue Room, for one—and North Africa was obviously one of the places he’d been, and stayed.

  But his claim (for example) to have lived with the Berbers for years took me some time to understand, as you might imagine. How did you get there, though, how did you get to actually be, you know, with them, I remember asking him when he first brought it up. Oh, I landed up amongst ’em, was all he’d say. I’d been smoking kif, not too much before and after when you’re smoking kif. There I was, and there they were, looking after me, he said, that was all. It was like the beginning of time.

  You have to understand that, sidi, he told me on another occasion. We all have to remember being born, we can’t just rely on being told about it. We have to know our beginning or we can’t understand what comes next, we can’t understand what we mean, what our lives mean. We can’t understand the end of things. I remember they killed a camel and wrapped me in the hide to keep me warm, I can remember the stink of the camel fat to this day, it smelt the same as rancid butter but peppery as well. They looked after me, they’d rub me with argan oil and wrap me up and they’d keep me in their tents. They took me everywhere they went, they were looking after me till I got better. Yes, but what was wrong with you? I asked him. It doesn’t make sense, what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense. I’d say this to him over and over again—what was wrong with you, why were you sick?—and he’d answer like that, by not really answering at all.

  And then one day I asked him one time too many, and, suddenly and abruptly, he turned on me. Fuck it, man, he said, I was being born—don’t you understand that, what’s wrong with you, why is it I always have to spell everything out to you? It’s in the book, if you can’t understand it, read it again, if you still can’t understand it, fuck off and do a creative writing course. Go to teachers’ college. What d’you think writing’s for if it doesn’t make things real—?

  Well! I was fifteen by the time he told me this, you understand, or maybe sixteen, definitely not more, and, as I’ve said before, fighting my own rather curious battle with my hormones: or in fact not, since there was nothing much, at that point, to fight. I could’ve been taken for twelve or less, to judge from the photos of the day, or quite simply for no age at all, like Peter Pan: I was still paying half-price at the cinema and on the bus! Given all this, it was rather a lot to expect of any young lad—particularly one as literal-minded as he sometimes accused me of being—to make the leap into the mythic world I came to realise, over the years, he was talking about. The physical world had such a claim on me at the time, after all.

  Did he believe it, did he believe in it, was it real? Sometimes in the next few years I would think yes, sometimes in the next few years I would think no. Now, of course, now—yes, yes absolutely, of course it was real. Especially given that it seems he’s started coming back to tell me about it. Because surely that’s what’s been happening, isn’t it—? He’s coming back to tell me something? Of course it was real, that world he was talking about. Of course his story was real—

  What Marjorie said about the old man beating me and burying me is absolutely true, and completely untrue at the same time. I’m going to teach you about pain: I remember him telling me that, one day early in my time with him. I’m going to take you through pain and out the other side. I remember him staring and staring down at me when he said that: those blue-grey eyes, that thin dark bezel around each iris. I remember my terror. If you’re going to come to anything in life, he told me, you have to know pain. Otherwise you’re just going to spend your life pursuing happiness like every other stupid prick on the planet. Christ, he said, happiness—and he spat the word out as if it revolted him.

  Take your shirt off, he told me. Come on, come on, do as you’re told. Haul it up at the back. What d’you want? I asked, but I was pulling it over my head all the same and my singlet, too. There’s nerve in a man’s back, he said, and he ran his thumb up and down my spine. If you find it you can paralyse him. Paralyse him? I said—Shut up, he told me. Sit still—

  I couldn’t move, I couldn’t let myself breathe.

  We used to do this out on a haraka, he said. Saved a bullet. There—his hand stopped: everything stopped. I sat there, smelling him: sweat and aniseed and dark cigarette tobacco. I press there, he said, and you’ll never move again.

  I sat there. I could feel his thumb against my spine.

  I sat there.

  Don’t press—I couldn’t believe the voice that came out of me. No no, don’t say anything, he told me. Hold your tongue. Just try to think what it is that’s happening to you. Just think what you’re close to now—will I press or won’t I—please don’t press, I snivelled up him. I’m going to count to ten and then I’m going to press, he said. Or maybe not—you don’t know. Count with me—

  And then he pulled away from me: his hand dropped. For God’s sake, he said. Go and clean yourself up—go on. I couldn’t help it, I whined. Just clean yourself up, he said. It just happened, I told him—I was crying now. I couldn’t stop it. He turned from me as if I was nothing, nothing at all, nothing to do with him.

  Trust, he told me later on. And courage—for Christ’s sake, I’ve never met a kid who cries so fucking much—it’s what you do to me, I told him, and started crying again, poor child that I was. This is what I went through over there, fuck you! he yelled at me in some later episode, when I failed some other test of his. This is how they do it over there and they know what kind of universe it is we’re all fucking living in!

  That is why, au fond, there was always a certain level of contempt in his treatment of me: I couldn’t quite enter the world as he saw it, the world in his head and on his page: not fully. You might say he couldn’t write me—and he tried to do that once, literally, at a time rather later than my miserable little performance above and when I’d learned to fight back a little. We were struggling together over something or other and suddenly there was a knife. No, he said, I’m not attacking you, you dumb little fuck, not yet—stay still, stay still—no, don’t move, fuck you—

  He was trying to trace the tip of the knife, the very tip, into the skin on my neck—no, I told him, and pushed him away.

  If I do this you’ll never forget me, he said. Wherever you go. I’ll be written on you.

  No, I said, and he came at me again—

  I failed his trials and his tests, as he called them: I broke down and gave up long before the end and I learned nothing better from them than to fend him off as I’ve shown you here.
I let him down, and he treated me accordingly and turned elsewhere. But as it happened his contempt served a purpose, it turned out that it had a role to play in me after all. It became a part of me, and—I know this, I told you that I know something of myself—it became my defence against other people. Turned end for end, so to speak, and applied to other people, it became what I know I’m known for now. It became part of the thing that I am, the thing that is me, the thing that protects me.

  The price lies somewhere else. In these years there slowly evolved between us what I came to think of as a lash of love. I don’t think I’ve ever been so close to anyone in those moments when, somehow, I got something right—except in those moments when I got something wrong. Almost, I began to yearn for these failures: not quite, not exactly, but very nearly so. I became less and less able to know what I felt, who I was: whatever had happened, that moment of feeling close to him—of being forgiven and feeling loved, even—put it all right again. I yearned for them. When he punished me, and then forgave me, and I was shriven and made whole once more.

  And, slowly, as I grew older and came to terms with my youthful passage through his strange, strange imaginary life, it became for me the price of greatness, the price of knowing it, of living with it. I came to understand that if I hadn’t accepted the things he made me do and the things he did to me when I first came into his life, I would never have walked with gods. We all did, the four of us, I know that, the four who have become the Trust: and I know that in their different, limited, fumbling ways, they know it, too. I tell them so, from time to time. Look where he took us, I tell them. He took us to Stockholm—

  VII

  Back then, I was just starting out, see, I hadn’t got to the stage when I shifted into the Chicken Coop to look after him full-time, it was early days and I was in and out like I told you. It was just a job—except the bullshit-chauffeur business, that wasn’t in the original contract, and I was starting to do more and more of that. And I really fell for it, I almost wished I had a uniform so people could see I was official, so they could see I was with him. I’ve got to admit, it was a big buzz. I remember I drove him to some interview on the riverbank, all these people hanging round watching, and he says, stand behind me and look staunch. On the news that night it was up close and you couldn’t see I had shorts on. He says to me, you know you’ve made it when they stop asking you about books and they start asking you about the Middle East—what do I know about the Middle bloody East, I’m just a writer? You sounded good, I told him, and I meant it, he just rattled stuff off. That’s because I was talking bullshit, he said. And then he says to me, you look pretty good yourself, standing there. But, d’you know what, you’ve got a weak mouth? I didn’t mind that, I know my head’s a bit on the small side for my body, or maybe my body’s a bit big for my head. It’s more a facial expression sort of thing, though. Now and then I’ve caught myself in a shop window and I’ve always got this stupid grin like I’m waiting for something to happen. That’s what he said to me. It’s like you’ve got no thoughts of your own, he tells me. I’m going to shape you up, you’re my private bodyguard, remember that—what’s that programme with the bodyguard?

  It really helped when he told me that because I just started to be like the actor who was the bodyguard in this series except I wasn’t losing my hair like he was. The old boy told to me to chew gum to help with my mouth, too, make it look less weak, he told me, make it do something, maybe even tighten your lips up a bit after a while. So I drove him round and I chewed gum, and I sort of fell into his way of life, I sort of fell into this part I had in his life, and soon that was all I had. That was the start of the problem. To tell the truth, I didn’t notice till Raewyn started to moan about it. We’re not seeing each other enough, she starts telling me, you’re always up at Cannon Rise, isn’t it meant to be a part-time job? And that suit, she says. It’s too big on you, it’s too loose, you look like David Byrne. Mr Lawrence’d bought me a couple of suits, see, and a whole lot of other stuff, shirts and even undies? Socks, too, and hankies because he said I should be ashamed of my old snotrags—what, you only own the one or something, he says to me. Look at it, what did you do, deep-fry it or something? Him and Mr Orr had a row about buying me clothes, I listened through the wall of his office and Mr Lawrence, he give him as good as he got. I’ll do what I want, he kept saying. I’m not dead yet, and you’re nothing till I am, if you’re not careful I’ll change things. That shut him up, Either-Or, he’s saying oh, oh, well then, well, and that made me laugh. But it put another edge on things between me and him, me and Either-Or, specially if I turned up in the new clothes. I’d be loading the old man into the Dodge and I’d be dressed up in my new duds, and he’d be watching from up in the Residence, and I’d feel his eyes boring into my back.

  I’ll tell you some of the things we did in town, the old man and me. I’d leave the car in that personal parking spot he’s got at the uni—he’d remember where everything was that’d used to be there. There was a bike shop over there, he’d tell me, and this was Warner’s. A pub, I guessed, because in a minute we’d be in some walk-in bar and he’s ordering Ouzo, would you believe that? And there’s this guy there and he says Roger, how are you? And he shakes hands and then he says, this is Thomas Hamilton, my bodyguard, and he points to me. Pleased to meet you, Thomas, this Roger says to me, and he shakes my hand. And I didn’t say back to him, no, it’s Thom Ham, and I’m not quite sure why. I didn’t stop him. Thomas Hamilton. After that it’s back to the uni, he’s striding along ahead like we weren’t togther, me with this big white David Byrne suit flapping each time I took a step—Raewyn was right, it was too big, even for me, but that was the size Mr Lawrence reckoned he wanted. Over the road we go and into this bookshop, and he’s looking round and then he spots something and he says ah and he goes over to this stand that’s full of his books! Big cardboard cutout next to it of him much younger, and this sign saying Nobel Prize-Winning Author and so on, and all these books, and quotations written up in capitals.

  This crap, he mutters to me, and he’s pulling books out and looking at them. This fucking new edition my publisher’s brought out, he says, meant to be a standard edition, will you look at it? He shows me one of the books, and it’s real leather-looking with this gold lettering. Why’s it in its own little box? I ask him, and he says, oh, that’s called a slipcase, how fucking pretentious can you get? Then he looks round and he says, here, and he shoves it inside my jacket! He shoves a couple more in, and looks round, and shoves in some more—hold on, hold on, I’m saying to him, but of course you’ve got to keep your voice down, this guy’s stuffing books into the jacket of your David Byrne outfit as fast as he can go and you don’t want to start telling people he’s doing that—

  Then, come on, he says, let’s get out of here!—and we’re scrambling out with six or eight books in my jacket! I was shitting ball bearings, I can tell you. But the same time, I was excited. I thought, that’s why he made me buy the David Byrne suit, for shoplifting! That’s all we stole first off, and just his books, books he’d written himself. Once we’re away from the bookshop we find a dumpster and he makes me shove the books in. Go on, go on! he’s telling me. Hurry up!—and he’s looking round the place. But they’re good books, I told him, they’re brand new books—throw ’em in, he says to me. You stupid prick—that’s the point, that’s why we’re getting rid of them, can’t you understand that? I sold my soul to the fucking devil, he says. Getting involved in all of this, it’s the only way to put it right. I sold myself for thirty pieces of fucking silver, I remember him saying that to me but not then. The Judas of world literature, he tells me, I should fucking change my name and put it up in lights, Judas Lawrence.

  Course, I’d no idea what the hell he was talking about at that stage, I was just caught up in all the excitement, and I tell you what, he was bloody exciting. We shoplifted that much stuff, I feel really bad about it now, we never had a drink in a bar he didn’t slip the empty glasses into one
of my pockets when we were done. We pinched that much—sometimes I’d just about cack my David Byrne outfit. What if we get caught? I ask him, back in the car, what do we do then? What d’you mean, we? he says, and he’s laughing up at my face with his teeth out. Remember the turd and the orange peel! he tells me. Remember them, on the way to Baton Rouge! The glasses are in your pockets, he says, it’s you that’s wearing the suit—why d’you think I bought it for you in the first place? But later on he gets all serious with me. You’re breaking through something, he says to me. That’s the first thing we’re doing here. You’ve never done anything real in your life, he tells me, hardly anyone has, that’s the trouble. Prostitutes of the unconscious, that’s what you all are. I’m saying what? Who? And he tells me, never mind.

  Death, are you afraid of death? he says to me one time. We’re sitting outside a McDonald’s with each of us a double meat burger with cheese and fries and a Coke, and he asks me that! I’m not, he says, are you? Well, I didn’t like to say anything, like, you know—what’s the point? I’m not, he says. I am, I said, and I don’t know why, it just sort of blurted out either side of my double meat burger and cheese. And he’s staring up at me and chewing away. And you a meat-eater, he says. You accept death every time you eat meat, he says. You know that? That’s why they fill me up with that shite up the hill, he says. Fucking walnuts. They’re afraid of death and they give me walnut loaf. Isn’t that because of your cholesterol and your heart? I ask him. He stares and stares at me and all the time he’s getting rid of the last bit of the burger. Ever kill anything? he says. Just like that, out of nowhere—he’s wiping his hands together and he’s still chewing away and looking up at me. Ever kill anyone?