One more contribution from Julian, however.
I’ve cracked the tape, he told me one evening. The one with the secret. I’ve listened to it. I think you ought to hear it. When he said this to me I was astonished—I thought he’d given up trying. It’s on the reverse side, he said, the thing I want you to listen to.
He’d rummaged up a much newer tapedeck, apparently, and had played Geneva’s tape on it. Not perfect, he said, but good enough. Marvellous, I told him, and I remember he looked across at me when I said that. I watched him push the plug of the deck into the wall socket and slip the tape into its portal.
He shut the lid and looked across at me. He had a remote control in his hand.
Now, you’re sure you want to hear this? he asked.
All right, time to get down to it. First I know about any of the stuff coming down the track’s when the old boy says, we’re off for a drive. So I pack him into the Dodge and off we go down to the gate. I hang a left and he says, no no no, we’re off to Springfield today, go right. Springfield? I ask him. What’s there? That’s the first time I heard him talk about it. You stupid arse, he says. You’ve been there a hundred times. No I haven’t, I tell him. Anyway, he says, we’re going to play a trick on him. And when I ask who, he says you know who I mean. This is what he’s like by this stage, he’s that much away with the fairies he’s like a pack of cards someone shuffles every night, next morning you don’t know what you’re going to get, five of clubs or the ace of spades. Turned out he meant Left Butt—you know, Eric the gardener, with his bloody organic garden and his walnut tree—turned out we were off to get some nitrogen fertiliser to put on his garden to piss him off. What d’you want to do that for, I say, and the old boy says he had it coming to him, Eric, apparently he’d told on him, he’d told his missus about this packet of savs the old man’d got in his bedroom after one of his raids down at Tony’s. So he was going to fuck his garden up for him, that was the story, pardon my French.
An hour’s drive, bit more, and then we’re bowling past this notice that says Hamilton Downs Homestead / Working Farm and there’s this house coming up ahead. That’s when I start to think what the old boy must be worth. It was stone and if you counted in the dormer windows it’d be three storeys. Been there years and years, by the look of it, turns out no one lives in it anyway because it’s condemned—the real farm’s behind it, this big newish farmstead building like an ordinary bung out in the burbs but bigger, know what I mean? And that must’ve been worth a bit, too. These dogs come yapping out tails going like it’s tucker time, and we keep crunching past on the gravel and the old Dodge she’s bucking round like a boat and we fetch up in front of this big corrugated iron shed. Here we are, the old boy says. Told you it’s a time machine, he says. Here’s Ernie.
Ernie’s a big guy, all arse and pockets. He’s the cousin that runs the farm for the family since Mr Lawrence’s brother kicked the bucket. Did you know about that, Patrick? I didn’t. Old Mr Lawrence, he just yarns a bit and then Ernie opens up the shed for us. Don’t look over in the corner, he says, and of course we do and there’s this big drum of 2,4,5-T just sitting there! Meant to cover that up, Ernie says, and he tugs a tarp off a pile of bags and pulls it over the 2,4,5-T. There, he says and then he points to the pile of bags, they’re all stacked up neat and tidy, and he says, there you go, help yourself. All these white sacks with the same thing on them, Ammonium Nitrate 50kg. That’s it!! The old man says. He’s fussing the dogs and he’s got their names all wrong, he must’ve been thinking of dogs from fifty years back because Ernie keeps saying to him that’s not Girlie that’s Fly, that’s not Stride that’s Beauty and so on. Then he says what d’you want the fertiliser for? And the old man says, we’re going to blow up a building!
Well, me and old Ernie, we just cracked up when he said that, the both of us. I know it doesn’t sound funny now but it’s the way the old bloke looked, he’s got his hat all cockeyed one way and his glasses all cockeyed the other, and he’d have weighed less than one of the sacks of fertiliser at that stage. He’s standing there all five foot two of him bent forward with his neck rattling round in his collar—and he reckons he’s going to blow up a building! Laugh? I was feeding off Ernie and he starts feeding off me, and then Ernie, he starts farting and he can’t stop, and he’s going, oops, pardon, and then he’d let rip with another run, and he says to Mr Lawrence, he says, you don’t need fertiliser, mate, I’ll blow the building up for you myself! And, I’m telling you, they just about had to throw a bucket of water on me I was that hysterical when he said that. Good luck with that, Ray, Ernie says when he’s finished laughing. Good luck with blowing up your building. He tosses me the keys and he says, help yourself, drop the keys back at the house. He’s walking off and he calls out over his shoulder, good luck with the sabotage work! And he’s laughing away, you can hear him, and he’s popping away, too, you could hear that as well. Oops, pardon, he’s saying. Talk about laugh. Guess you had to be there.
So there you are, Patrick, what d’you make of that? Can you blame me? What would you have done? What I did was play along with him, Mr Lawrence, I mean. He was taking himself that seriously I played along with him the way I always did when he was serious. I loaded fertiliser into the boot and then on the back seat, you could hardly see over it, and then he says, diesel, we need some diesel, and we end up trying to take it out of the old stuffed tractor in there. I didn’t even know whether it ran on diesel, I just joined in the game. It was the same way it always was with the old boy, you know, all a big plot, he says I’ll keep cavey and you milk it, meaning the tractor, though in the end what he did was, we found a jerry-can a quarter full of diesel and he nicked that. Keep cavey, that’s what he always says when we were up to something around town, stealing or whatever. So we’re packing this stuff into the car and I ask him, you going to use Tampax, are you? And he straightens up and he says Am I going to use what? On this building you reckon you’re going to blow up, I tell him. You stupid arse, he says, you mean Semtex. Listen, I’d like to use dynamite in honour of Mr Nobel, but we live in an agricultural economy, so we’re using fertiliser, this fertiliser here. Fertiliser? I ask him. Fertiliser, he says. The Oklahoma City bombing, he said. That was fertiliser. And the King David Hotel, too. The King David Hotel, I ask him. Is that the one we went past in Darfield?
Can you see what I’m trying to say, Patrick? If you don’t know, you just don’t know. I’d had that much bullshit from him by that stage I couldn’t tell what was real anymore and what wasn’t. Anyway, back at the Residence he sort of left me to it. When I look back, there was, like, about a month when I’d notice him round the place and he seemed really busy but he was keeping himself to himself? Except morning and night, you know, when I’d give him his pills and check him out? One or two times he even went off in the Dodge on his own when he wasn’t meant to, but he always did it when Either-Or wasn’t around. I came across him in Left Butt’s greenhouse one time and he looks up at me and he says, the human body has secret hidden bones, did you know that? Oh, is that right? I say back to him. But that’s where he was doing the business, Mr Lawrence, I realised that later on when I was sitting there putting it all together, he was in this sort of little potting shed area that’s at one end. You could smell the diesel but did I take any notice of it? I thought it was Left Butt’s lawnmower.
And then boom! One evening we’re all sitting there up in the Coop, we’d had dinner if you can call eating walnuts having dinner, and we’re all sitting there watching the six o’clock news, Right Butt Left Butt Mr Lawrence and me. And d’you remember that time some prick blew up part of the old railway bridge by the North Road? Years ago now, a bit more. Remember that? They reckoned it was farm kids fooling round with gelignite. It lifted this concrete pad clean out the riverbed. You could see it there on an angle, down in the river. Remember that? Well, it comes up on the news and I look across at the old man and he’s just sitting there, and I say to him, that you, is it, you do that with
your grass seed, did you? Well, his face set, I told you he could be scary even though he was half my size and a hundred years old. Keep your fucking mouth shut, he says to me afterwards when I was putting him to bed. Or I’ll get someone to shut it for you. D’you understand? All right, all right, I tell him, calm down, I was just joking. This is when I’m tidying him up for bed, and he’s glaring up at me in his shitty little underpants. That’s how we did it in Médéa, he says. Right, right, I’m telling him. Show us your toenails. If I can do it there I can do it here, he says. Right, I tell him. Tomorrow morning I’m cutting your nails for you.
So next day I’m clipping his nails up in his bedroom and he says to me, I don’t need all that fertiliser. Right, I tell him. Hold still. I’ve got more than half the sacks left, he says. And I don’t need more than a Coke bottle of the diesel to do what I want to do with it, I realise that now. Right, I tell him, and I’m clipping away. It took just a few bags to do that bridge pile, he says, and you see what they did. Right, I’m saying. Can you get rid of the rest of it for me, he says. Yeah, sure, I tell him. The fertiliser, he says. I’m going to have to go down to Tony’s and nick a bottle of Coke. All this is going in one ear and out the other, Patrick, that’s what you got to understand, as far as I was concerned he was just raving? If he wanted to make out he blew up the bridge support down the North Road that was fine by me, the only part of it I believed was him wanting to nick a bottle of Coke from the store down the foot of the hill, and I nipped out as soon as I’d got him set up in the garden room with his writing board and I went down and bought him a bottle just in case. There you go, I tell him when I get him up to the Chicken Coop for his lunch. Things go better with Coke. He stares at it and he stares at it and then he says to me, what the hell do I want a bottle of Coke for?
See what I mean? Why’d you take him seriously? And as far as the ammonium nitrate was concerned, I was glad to be rid of it. A couple of days later I took what was left of it and I emptied it over the lawn in front of the house, every square inch of it, and I flung some of it onto the shrubs and the flowerbeds and then I forgot about it. I forgot about it that much the first time I remembered what I’d done was when the lawn starts growing a foot high, you should have seen it a couple of weeks later, a foot high and thick and it was that green it was blue, know what I mean? Will you look at that, the old boy says when I take him into the garden room one morning. It was like we had magic glasses on, the lawn was blue, the flowers were bursting out of their beds, the leaves on the shrubs were like they had a hardon. Left Butt, he was hopping mad. Who’s been putting chemicals on my lawn, he says. This is an organic garden, why d’you think I spend all that time making compost? But the old man couldn’t take his eyes off it. Will you look at that! he says. A blue lawn! It’s a sign! No idea what he meant by that then, but now I suppose what he meant was, he was on the right track. There’s all sorts of bits and pieces he said and did back then that I never took any notice of, and now I look back and it all falls into place.
The thing is, Patrick, I tell all this to the pigs when they first get hold of me—you know, after I wake up in A&E—and they keep saying, run through that again, you sure that’s all there was to it? And one of the pigs, the less shitty one, he says to me, now mate, if the bomb’s like what you’ve just told us it wouldn’t go off, d’you understand that? And I’m, like, right, if you say so. And the other one says, run it past us again, what’d you make it out of? And we go round and round in circles like that and then the less shitty one, he leans back in his chair and he says, you want to know something, you’re a very clever boy? Y’know that? You make a bomb, it wipes out a car and a toilet block, you have to know what you’re doing? The Dodge? I said. It blew up the Dodge? First time I knew about that, you see. They never told me anything, they just said, property’d been destroyed. I guess they were trying to get me to trip myself up. You wiped out the Dodge, they told me. And you blew up a shithouse. It wasn’t a shithouse, I tell him. It was a couple of classrooms. Well it’s a shithouse now, the pig says, and, boy, did the other pig laugh when he said that.
Anyway, they keep on telling me how clever I was, you know, and they’re like, where’d you get the detonator from? And I’d keep saying, ask the old boy, it’s his bomb, and they’d keep telling me, well, Mr Lawrence, he reckons it was you that made the bomb. Does he? I tell them back, and I’m wondering, why’d he say that? They were just trying to trip me up again, I could see that later on. And they wanted to know where we got the fertiliser from, the pigs did, and I wouldn’t say, I thought, why get old Ernie in the shit, he seems like a good enough guy? It’s just fertiliser, I told them. You can pick it up anywhere. Yes, and it was just a Coke bottle, sunshine, one of the pigs says, and you can pick them up anywhere, too, and we’ve got you on Tony’s security camera doing just that, buying the bottle of Coke. They were bullshitting there, my lawyer told me that. But I tell you what, you have to hand it to old Mr Lawrence—he’d crapped on about what he did in North Africa when he was younger than me, and I’d be going, yeah, yeah, right, but it looks like it wasn’t crap after all!
Right. So, anyway, you want to know what actually happened when the bloody thing went off. Like, you’ve got to remember, as far as I’m concerned, all that’s happening is, the old boy’s getting me to take him down to the uni and park there and how many times did we do that? He never said anything special to me except the one thing and it was this. We got to his parking spot outside his bloody writing school and I put the nose of the Dodge in first and he went apeshit at me. Turn it round, you stupid arse, is what he says to me, pardon my French but really it’s his French, isn’t it, I can’t help what he says and you told me, tell me everything. That’s what he says. Then he says, I want the rear bumper in against the wall, and so I turn the car round and I back it into the park. He’s standing by the car and he’s calling out closer, closer, and then he holds his hand up and he says stop! And the bumper’s right up against the wall of the building.
Don’t have to tell you why, Patrick—he’d got the bloody stuff in the boot! Like I say, I’d no idea. That’s all I can remember, it was all a bloody accident anyway. I’m over by the gingko tree putting a Bounty Bar wrapper in the waste bin over there, and I turn round and he’s standing next to the Dodge and he’s patting his pockets, and just then he catches my eye and he gives me that special smile, remember I told you about it? He gives me that special smile of his and he winks, and I just felt great, the way I always did when that happened. He’d give me all this shit and then there’d be this, and it’d make you feel so special, like there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for you because you were the most important thing in his life. Just looking at you and then the smile, that’s all it was, and the look, the way he looked at you, like he knew you like he owned you—like he’d taken you over and he was going to look after you for the rest of your life. That’s how it felt. Just the two of us looking at each other like that, it made me want to hug him, I don’t know why but it did, it made me want to hold on to him and hold on to him.
So that was what was going on when it happened, one second things are like that and the next
X
At the Residence I find a surprising number of visitors, most of them climbing down from a tour bus while the rest walk up the drive from cars parked below on Cannon Rise. Spring air, and weather but one remove from perfection—sunshine, a sea breeze, and, very high, a slight haze that is beginning to wash out the deeper blue of the middle of the day. On the trees, the blush of new growth and a froth of blossom: in the air, the flap and chatter of birds.
It is the start of a new season for the Raymond Lawrence Memorial Residence, and, as always at this time of year, there is the sweet scent of a new beginning, of new life, of rebirth and hope and renewal. As the visitors come gabbling up the front steps I fancy the Master still with me, in the air about us, an invisible presence, keeping an eye on things. Is he, is he here?
I count the arrivals: twenty-tw
o, twenty-three, twenty-four—and, now, another woman jogging after them, up the front steps to the door: twenty-five. Quite a number to get through the signing of the Visitor Book—quite a number needing to be asked not to stand on the elevator platform as we wait. We’ll all take the plunge together when everyone’s signed the Book! Others I ask to wait their patience with their questions about Phyllis’s magisterial painting. All will be revealed in a few minutes! This time, only one of them wants to know why visitors must sign in: security, security, is always my response to this question.
I raise my voice to the group: Now, we’ve had some security issues over the years, unfortunately. Over the years some important items have gone missing on tours of the Residence. In order to preserve the authenticity of your experience, the members of the Raymond Lawrence Memorial Trust have always declined to use roped-off areas, and the only items secured to their place are the Painting here, the Citation, which we’ll see quite soon in the Blue Room, and of course the Medal itself, next to the Citation. We’d appreciate it if you’d respect the freedom of movement we’ve chosen to give visitors to the Residence by making sure that you look, but don’t touch—
The Tour begins. They look, but don’t touch.
First for them to look at, of course, is the Painting. The questions are the usual ones—why the back of his head? Because that is where she was trying to reach in the painting, to his deepest, most hidden self. Why so much paint flung about? At this late stage of her career, the artist was attempting to reach through the medium to the man himself. How come it seems so detailed when you really look at it? Some would say that that is the power of art, to trick the eye and the mind into seeing something beyond mere representation. This is a theme which Raymond Lawrence himself returned to constantly in his writing, and which was especially mentioned by the Nobel Committee: the power of Art to deceive the eye. What would a painting like this be worth? The Trust has insured the Painting for a very substantial sum—that’s why they insist that it’s bolted to the wall!
The Back of His Head Page 30