The Back of His Head

by Patrick Evans

  She came in, cut flowers in her arms. Haven’t you heard? she asked. We’re getting an extension to the house, a big new living room—this bedroom of yours’ll have to be smaller, they told me that. And the window’s going to be moved!—I think that’s what Mr Lawrence told me, she said.

  He’d decided all this sometime before, apparently. She sounded pleased as she mentioned it, and sly.

  I was flabbergasted. Decided sometime before, and didn’t tell me? Money wasn’t the issue, certainly not in those days: nor was the proposed diminution of the Residence’s second bedroom. What worried me was the unexpectedness of this plot development, as it might be described. It couldn’t have made me feel more excluded, more pushed to the margins—utterly irrelevant, once again. I was fairly rattled. What had been going on while I was away?

  Later, I stood in the garden beyond and below that suddenly doomed window of mine with the sun on my neck and the breeze in my hair, and looked at what had been done while I was gone. Not much, to tell the truth: some of the lawn had been dug up and some hadn’t, all this inside an oblong area marked out with stakes, a shape perhaps fifteen foot wide and projecting a good twenty from my side of the house—taking in the mature robinia frisia that had long been the bright lemon-yellow spring-and-summer glory of that part of the garden. Some of its upper branches were already sawn and on the ground.

  It was with this particular detail that I first confronted my uncle, when confront him I did. Oh, you’re back, he said—as offhandedly as that. Yes, it’s coming down. Unless you want it growing up through the floor of the Blue Room? The what room? I asked. The crowning touch to the house, he said, and rolled out a large piece of paper on the dining room table. Look! He rapped the thing with his knuckles. The Blue Room!

  It took me a second to see that they were his own plans, not an architect’s but dashed off in pencil on the back of a torn-off square of wallpaper and with barely a ruler used on it—not the slightest sign an architect or a draughtsman had been near them. The drawing had some detail, all the same, and was covered with scribbles, some in my uncle’s writing and some in someone else’s. Across the top, in heroic fist: THE BLUE ROOM.

  Hold on, I told him. Where are the proper plans, what about a permit? These are the proper plans, he said. And fuck the permit. But you can’t expect a builder to work from these, I told him. A builder already is, he said. They put those sight lines in, they take the tree down tomorrow. Then—he flapped the paper in my face—this bastard gets built. It’ll be up in a month. Now the other two’ve pissed off you’ll have to paint it for me, you and what’s-his-name. The librarian.

  Me? I said—I was aghast. I couldn’t believe all this was happening!

  It was, though, and it did: the Blue Room was built, and in almost exactly the time he’d told me—by Eric Butt and his unexpected brother Alan, who, it transpired, had been builders in prior incarnations. Together, they woke us each early morning with their hammering and sawing—by this time I’d decamped to a room in the recently built Chicken Coop, where I’ve stayed—and the spare, distant implication of their talk. The robinia came down, heartbreakingly, and its stump disappeared under the boards of the new floor along with perhaps two hundred square feet of lawn and that mound of soil I saw on my first afternoon back from overseas.

  And, thus, the Blue Room.

  I stood in it once it was done, on its echoing bare boards and between the unpainted wooden panels of its walls—none of it new, as it happens, something the old man insisted on throughout: used kauri floorboards, the walls in recycled pine and the massive French doors salvaged from a local nunnery recently lost to the wrecker’s ball (Raymond delighted in that detail, of course). Why nothing new, why so much rubbish? I shouted, as we stood watching Alan Butt banging brown old nails out of used wood and straightening them one by one. Because men dispossess one another, Raymond shouted back over the noise: and I knew where that quotation came from, without a doubt I knew.

  They’d done a splendid job, though, the Butt Boys, as Raymond insisted on calling them, and I have to say that when it was done the new addition completely transformed the house for the better. Against the nostalgic bloom of our freshly painted walls was contrived, bit by bit, an extraordinary, distinctive elegance: the Steinway in the corner, the long canapé settee, the fauteuil, the carefully placed lamps—not a single thing absolutely matching anything else yet everything unified in a series of happy accidents that took the form of cushions whose colours caught one another in a certain way and in turn picked up a fleck or pattern in carpet or curtains, perhaps, or a tint in one of the paintings—extraordinarily satisfying, once one picked up the rhythm of it, and looking, all of it, as if it had always been there. Satisfying, and, even, at times, sublime.

  I couldn’t believe so much magic could be found in so little, and I always thought of the house as the Residence from that point on, even though it wasn’t officially so till later. Looking back, though, it seems as if he was anticipating what was to come next: the call to Stockholm, I mean. Seen now, it seems inevitable.

  It’s too long ago now, though, for me to remember exactly when, in all this racket of shouting and hammering and sawing, I began to think there might be something more to the Blue Room than first I’d thought. That mound of earth I saw in my first minutes back from overseas—those upturned grassy clods within the larger oblong of boards and strings that was the Blue Room in ovo—that was the thing I began to think about as the actuality of it disappeared under the timber, bit by bit. The glimpse I gave you a page or two back was all I saw of it, too, but, perhaps because of that, the thing began to change into something else in my mind as soon as it went from sight. I was well aware of what was happening, but the thought seemed to have its own life in me. It grew.

  For one thing, the mound so obviously echoed the last of Flatland and then of Other-people. In those books, Hamilton digs the youth a grave in the shadow of a curiously flat-topped mountain of the Ouled Naïl range. There’s much nonsense in the former novel to the effect that he’s come across the body ten days gone and as if it’s just happened to be there as part of the roadkill of war, but the latter makes very plain who it is who’s really finished the youth off and how: the details are shocking. In both books, the last vision of the lad’s face, before it’s closed up forever beneath the red, inorganic soil of the Hodna, is agonising, wrenching, and—oh, God—the part that most undid me when I first read it as a boy. Those blue, unexpected Vandal eyes, not quite closed, still looking, and the cicatrice, drawn livid at his neck: the final, final statement. Even as a man, knowing what the scene intends—the art in it, its higher purpose—I find the words unbearable to read, unbearable to think of.

  I read Other-people yet again. Much that he’d written was demanding—I’ve made that clear enough—but I kept coming back to this novel and its ending. Where I’d used to finish each week with the sherry and the radiogram, now, each night, locked in my bedroom up in the Chicken Coop, I’d turn my back on the daily this-and-that and return to the single, same text. At one stage, late at night, I even went down into the garden and stood outside the nearly completed Blue Room, amongst the scaffolding and the planks, as near as I could get to that secret mound of earth, and read aloud to myself in the sea wind, with a torch on the page, that penultimate scene. It was as if I was trying to bend the words towards a final reality, to a fusion that might unlock—everything, might unlock it all, all of it, at last. Whatever it was, whatever it was. The something that was down there. And yet a part of me has always known.

  After too much of this, I confided in Julian. We sat there in his studio, with a fan heater labouring on the floor and moths beating the night against his panes.

  His face was unreadable as I began. Lord, but it sounded rubbish when I gave it a voice like that!—I was embarrassed at myself, but I kept going. By now I trusted him enough to do that.

  Cicatrice? he asked, when I got to that point, and when I explained it I saw his hand go up to
his neck. Really?—he did that to you? Raymond? Well, I think he’d have liked to, I told him. On your neck? he asked. With a knife? Really? Yes, I told him—something I’d never admitted to anyone. But he didn’t mean it, I said. Raymond. I don’t think he meant it—it was as if he was writing on me, that’s how he made it sound. With the tip of the knife. He did it to the boy instead. I mean Anir. At the end of Flatland. And Other-people. You remember the burial scene—?

  Oh, is it him who gets buried then? Julian looked a little puzzled. I’d always thought it was that other chap, he said. The older one—doesn’t he get buried at the end? Oh, I don’t think so, I told him, and he shifted on his stool a little. No?—I’m going to have to read it again, he said. I was sure it was the older boy. Isn’t that him who gets buried at the end? I think you’re thinking of a minor character, I told him—reminded him.

  We were drinking his homemade elderberry wine, I remember, and that must have loosened our tongues a little—his, certainly, because he was more direct with me than I can remember him being before. And mine, too, since I found myself at one point of the evening confessing my midnight trip to the foundations of Raymond’s new room with book and torch in hand. I remember him gazing at me as I told him about this, gazing at me and saying nothing. He was a good listener, as I’ve mentioned. I found myself telling him more, and more and more—in the end, everything, until it was late in the evening and the moths were gone from the window and small rain was just beginning to splatter on the glass.

  So that when I was done, and he sat there for half a minute with his eyes closed and his hands clasped in front of him like a vicar, I was fairly apprehensive. What was it he was going to say?

  You need to get away from him. I couldn’t believe it. He rubbed his face with his palms, massaged his face. Uncle Raymond, he said. You need to get away from him.

  Amazing how clear he was—shocking, shocking. I sat there, on that reclaimed barstool of his.

  Right away, it turned out he meant. You’ve never got away from him, he said. Last month was your first trip overseas and you’re thirty. Not quite, I told him—I rest my case, he said. Nearly thirty, and your first time overseas. I was hoping you’d come back with a better take on him, on Ray, but it’s like he’s sucked you back in again.

  I stared at him. But he’s pushing me away, I said, I can’t get near him since I got back. From before that, he’s pushing me away—

  Julian slapped his hands together when I said that. That’s how he holds on to you! he said. Push and pull! Oh, he’s a great man, and a great writer, I believe all that—but I’ve told you before, he’s a fucking monster! He manipulates everyone like that!

  I was astonished—Julian, saying that word? There was more, though: I’d never heard him say so much about Raymond. A monster? I demanded, when he was done. There you go again, he said, shifting about, across from me on the other recycled barstool. Rushing in to defend him!—you can’t wait, can you?

  And so on: all of it quite right, too. I’d had more than a glimpse of myself from North America and Europe a month before, a whiff of a different scenario, and I knew in large part, as I sat there, that what he said was true.

  Quite right, but (I’d realised this while I was away, too) there was always that magical world. I knew I couldn’t stop believing in it. That was the thing. I tried to explain it to him, to Julian, I mean, and he listened as carefully as ever. And, as ever, how very silly it all sounded when I said it aloud to somebody else like that! D’you understand, d’you understand? I kept asking him along the way, I remember, and I’m trying, I’m trying, he’d reply. Then: say that bit again, would you? Under the house? What’s going on under there?

  That was the detail that got to him in the end, and marked what lay between us. He went silent when I tried to explain it, went silent and looked away. Then: you’ve caught his madness. It was a shock, but I trusted him. He’s a great man, he said, but not a little potty. It’s part of the greatness but it rubs off on people. And it’s rubbed off on you. You just have to remember—sometimes a mound of earth is just a mound of earth—

  It’s taken me a long time to understand the full meaning of the things I’ve been telling you about here. It’s taken me so much of my life to begin to understand how this strange, mad business works: writing, I mean. The pen on the page, the type on the paper, the cursor on the screen. Anything can happen in the house of fiction, Raymond used to tell us, over and over again, and because he was drunk many of the times he said that I took little notice of him when he did.

  But Anir happened in that house, the boy he kept writing about, and the truth is that he’s still there, and that he needs still to be there for all the other things to have taken place that were to come about. They make no sense without him. Of all the critics and reviewers only one seemed to understand that, and to help me understand it in turn: always in the house of fiction, this man wrote in some grave English literary magazine or other, the sacrificial body. And it’s true. Nothing can happen without it. The Blue Room was built for him, I realised, for the boy and for the Medal. They belong together. He must be there—

  There was more to come from Julian. Sometime after this episode, he rang and asked me to come to his studio again. Something rather disturbing, he said. Raymond himself was out of town at the time, and it occurred to me later that Julian had chosen his moment.

  Take a look at this, he said as soon as I got through the plastic fly-strips. This was a small clipping he was holding out to me: just a torn rag of brown-edged newsprint from some unknown newspaper and showing a headline and a brief telegraph from Singapore, dated in August 1952:

  TIMOR SEA CROSSED ON RAFT SCOTTISH ARTIST’S FEAT

  Mr I. Fairweather, the 60-year-old Scottish artist who recently crossed the Timor Sea on a small craft, today said that he set out from Darwin at the end of April to call on an old friend in Indonesian Timor. He built a triangular raft with three old aircraft fuel tanks which he found in a dump, and the minute sail was fashioned from three panels of an old parachute canopy.

  There wasn’t much more than these few words, and all of them quite straightforward: a report of an extraordinary journey this expatriate Scot had made in the early 1950s from Darwin north to one of the islands across the Timor Sea—several hundred miles through shark-filled waters, and the entire mad, terrifying journey done alone on a home-made raft. His name was completely unfamiliar to me—if he was an artist, he can’t have been a particularly successful one. The connection, though, was obvious.

  Kerr, I said. That’s what Kerr does in Kerr.

  Yes, Julian said. Worrying, isn’t it?

  It jolted me, seeing this. Julian had found it while working through Raymond’s papers at his library. It was obvious why it was among them. To call on an old friend: exactly the fictional Kerr’s laconic explanation of the fictional trip he makes in the novel, nearly two hundred miles, albeit through slightly friendlier waters, from Algiers to the Spanish island of Ibiza to the north. Exactly the same words.

  And on exactly the same raft, too, it seems. After all, as I’ve said, Kerr’s self-imposed task in the novel is to make his vessel from the relicts of the Mediterranean theatre of the Second World War—the 75-gallon drop tanks from Mustang fighter aircraft, the USAAF parachute, found tangled nearby, high in the paradise of the Kabylia, and picked by him, bit by bit, from a thorn bush, its three intact panels converted into his sail: those other, smaller details as well. All faithfully drawn from life: but whose?—for here they were, these things, owned in every detail by someone who, by the time Raymond began to write, had already made the journey.

  What to say? I really didn’t know how to think of this unexpected little scrap from an unknown, possibly Australian, newspaper. Plagiarism, I expect you’ll all be thinking. Well, yes, plagiarism indeed, except that, legally speaking, we can’t plagiarise something that’s actually happened out there in the world. Whomever it’s happened to, it seems that no one owns an experience: help you
rself.

  And help himself he had, my uncle. You can see his haughty possession of the things of the world, the imaginary Kerr bundled under one arm and the Scottish artist under the other—about whom he’d said not a word, nor of his home-made raft, nor of his wild trip on it across the Timor Sea. Instead, he’d told the story as his own, first to me and then to everyone in the world, told it as the fact that validated his fiction of it. I saw it straight away: he’d stolen his raft, he’d made his trip without touching the water. Ian Fairweather the eccentric Queensland-based Scottish artist no longer existed, because the fiction now lived in his place.

  Raymond had devoured the historical man: he’d eaten him up, and the fact of the novel validated instead the authenticity of the man who had written it, and of his made-up home-made raft trip as well. Now it was real, now it had actually happened—it must have happened: he’d written a novel about it and there was the film of the book as well. How real can something get to be?

  What I felt about all this was made even more complicated when Julian appeared again—looking back, it seems like days later, as if he were on a mission, but I know that in fact it was not long after Raymond died, perhaps six months after the horror of that, and, thus, a few years after the episode above. We were tidying up his affairs, and Julian was about halfway through the business of cataloguing his papers.

  He came into my office with a book in his hand and sat across the office from me watching me turning its pages, each of them with its many pencilled underlinings.

  A tiny thing, this unexpected book, its spine long gone and its fewer-than-a-hundred-pages long pressed from years crammed on a shelf at the back of Raymond’s garage: one of literature’s many little freaks, a memoir in French which brought back—vividly, at times, at times astonishingly, in the verbal dabs and dashes of the amateur—the life of a particular time in French North Africa: its author one of the thousand and more curiosities of the late nineteenth century who tried to shrive themselves of Europe’s colonial sins on a camel and in a burnous.