The Back of His Head (17 page)

So up the hill we go and the Dodge is just sucking the road up in top, no bullshit, and me really starting to get used to it, though the more I did the more I felt I wasn't completely in control, like it was alive, you know, like an animal? Some hairy moments but we got to the top, I mean the Summit Road—I took that hairpin left by the tearooms and I had to change down for that, and I did all right but there was a bit of a grind in the gearbox, just a little crunch, and I could feel Mr Lawrence jump a bit when I did that. But then we were okay, we were cruising along round the bends and there was the view across the city and you could see the wind in the tussock—I could watch that all day. Well, turns out we did—we drive round for a while and then we come back to the viewing bay near the hairpin and we sit there for hours with the light going, well, two hours definitely, and it's getting harder to see and then harder than that. The sun's gone about an hour by then, more, and the wind's coming in off the sea and it's bustling round the car, it's rocking even a car that size, quite a breeze, I'm telling you. Wasn't the warmest, either, I'm starting to wonder what we're up there for—he's just sitting there looking out his side of the windscreen not saying anything. That's okay, but once the sun's gone it's all getting away on us pretty quick.

Then all of a sudden he says,
there!
like that.
There it is!
he says, and he's pointing through his side of the windscreen. Where, I'm saying, what? I'm looking round and I can't see anything to see!
In front of you
, he says,
right in front of you, what d'you look with, your nose?
Well, I didn't mind that. It's a bit like Mr Tinetti's special class but it's not too bad. Because I
was
being dumb, I'm looking straight at what he's pointing at and I can't get what he meant me to see—the lights, the city lighting up for the evening! One minute there's nothing, just the smudges across the city, mist and smog and that, and you could see houses lit up further down the hill and onto the plain—nothing much—then, couple of seconds and there's something, lights coming on in ribbons, the streetlights, everything at once or almost, streets coming on,
flick flick flick
like that. I never expected it but he was right, it was worth looking at.

Oh, right, I tell him, the lights. But then he says,
what else?
And he's leaning forward next to me and jabbing his finger at the windscreen. This stage I hadn't seen him that lively. Well—just the lights, I tell him.
Yes, the lights
, he says,
but what about the lights? For Christ's sake look and think
. And
that
gave me a jolt, it really did, 'cause it's
exactly
what Mr Tinetti used to say—it was his words, even the
for Christ's sake
bit. I looked round sharp at the old bastard then, I can tell you! That was one of the times I thought there was something going on, I mean it was the first time I thought he might be—into something? Plugged into something maybe even
he
didn't really know what it was? Something big? Up there in the dark on the hills, and the car lifting in the wind every twenty seconds, up on its chassis and no one for miles—
that
wasn't where I wanted to be when I felt
that
about him, either, I can tell you. It was like we were going to take off, and
then
where'd we be heading? Where'd we go?

Anyway, all of a sudden he says,
Oh here he is
!—and I look out the window and, bugger me dead, there's Rommel outside the car, suddenly he's jumping up at the door and barking his nuts off! Remember I told you this dog of his'd gone missing and we were worried he was off attacking sheep? Well, there's Mr Lawrence opening his door, and Rommel's coming in, and he's all over us both, the dog, I haven't been licked that much since I gave Raewyn this Indian sex manual for her birthday? And Mr Lawrence, he says,
I brought him up here last week, he's been up here five days
. You brought him up? I say to him, and he says,
yes, and let him loose. Life's not a bed of roses, I wanted to see if he could make it on his own, feed himself, I'm not going to be here forever by the looks of things, I want to know he can look after himself. Come here, Rommel
, he says.
He's a bit thin but he's definitely been eating something. He has to learn to kill
, he says,
he has to learn that again, we take it out of them and it has to be put back in
. Then he looks across at me.
Ever killed anything?
he asks me.
Ever killed a living thing?

And
shit
, that was a queer moment, I can tell you that for free. I had us rocking back down the hill half a minute later, I didn't care how I was driving, I just needed to get us back to Cannon Rise, back to
people
—anyone'd do, even if one of them was Either-Or! This was after we'd settled on what to do with the dog, I wanted to take him with us but no, the old man wouldn't have it, he booted him out and shouted at him to get away till the poor old pooch was just sitting there looking at you the way dogs do when you're leaving and making this sound I couldn't listen to—I lurched the car off down the road just to get away from that, too, and I made up my mind to get back up there as soon as I could on my own to get some meat to him, to Rommel, though where was I supposed to find any meat at Walnut City? Where

I'd been visiting Raymond secretly almost every weekend for well over a year when my mother and her second husband were killed instantly in a road accident fifty kilometres up the motorway north of the city.
Kenneth Newstead Orr
and
Catherine Orr
, the newspapers called them, my polite, slightly indifferent adoptive father and his wife who was my late father's widow.
Architectural designer
and
primary school teacher
their occupations, their car a
late model saloon
, the weather conditions at the time of the accident
normal
. An ambulance and two police vehicles
attended the scene of the crash
, and my mother and Ken
died at the scene
. The driver of the other vehicle, a mobile library, was
shaken but unhurt
.

I remember the words, I remember all the words.

In fact I can remember every detail of that afternoon—the principal of my school appearing at the door of the classroom to ask for me, the hush over the class as I stepped carefully between the desks to follow him out, the linoleum of the corridor rolling beneath my feet as I walked, the policeman and policewoman waiting in the principal's office, my clear understanding that something of tectonic significance had occurred. I can remember every detail of that office in the moment the policewoman spoke the simple sentence to me. There was a plastic lunchbox on the principal's desk and I can recall wondering if it was his. Did he have a lunchbox exactly like mine, and had his mother placed inside it sandwiches, biscuits and an apple, as my mother had done for me that morning?

There was a section of his office wall I especially remember at the moment the words were spoken: it was between the end of a bookcase and the dull green curtain on the right side of the window. Its
faux
woodgrain is bonded forever in my mind with the words of the sentence
I have to tell you your parents have died in a car accident on the northern motorway
.

Would you like to sit down, dear? the policewoman asked me.

The northern motorway
.

No, thank you, I replied, politely. I'd rather stand, if that's all right.

I have to tell you
—

Death, and laminated Pinex.

What were they doing there, on the motorway, my mother and the man she married so soon after my father died? That was one of the things I remember thinking as I stood in front of the principal's desk, waiting to be told what to do next. That, and this:
Uncle Raymond, I'll be able to live with Uncle Raymond
—

I remember him as pushing in past the door of the principal's office at that very moment, as I was thinking that thought, as if he'd come into existence entirely through my thinking about him. He didn't knock. He walked in and stood there and stared at me, holding his hat in both hands by the brim, pushing it around gently in his finger-tips in front of his belly: clockwise for him, anticlockwise for me. He didn't say anything, just milled the hat around and around and stood there like a
non sequitur
embodied, a
thing
that had presented itself requiring explanation: my uncle, as if come up through the floorboards and standard-issue public service linoleum the colour of chewed gum.

The hat intrigued me: he rarely wore one. It was a big decision, he told me later, much later.
I wanted something dramatic
, he said.
I was thinking of a cape as well. A cape and a stick and a hat
. But how did you know to come? I asked him.
Oh, I made the whole thing happen
, he said.
The accident. Why d'you think they ran into a mobile library? It'd have been a bus or a truck if it'd been left to anyone else. Nice touch, don't you think?
And, when I wondered where they might have been going, the two of them, my mother and her husband, driving up the motorway:
they were trying to get away from you
, he said.
They were sick of you, they were making their getaway. They'd had enough, they'd had a gutsful of you. That's the explanation. I decided it was time I stepped in and took you over. Took your story over, made sure it was worth telling, made sure you amount to something. Made a man of you
.

All this he said two or three years after the event. By then, following a long war with the authorities, I was well lodged in the way of his life at 23 Cannon Rise and the house that was eventually to become known as the Raymond Lawrence Residence.

War with the authorities
was his phrase, but it wasn't entirely melodramatic or an outrage uncalled for: I was twelve and he was a single man in his late thirties, and there were always those early, child-munching novels of his for people to fret about as well. And—worse, worse—he was a
writer
, of all things—a
writer
, for goodness' sake! All but unemployed! An alternative lifestyle! He was
different!

Eventually, it was decided by the courts and the social workers that Raymond had sufficient proven contact with women in his life to be thought more or less
normal
(Lord! If they'd only known about some of
them!
). It was also concluded that I'd begun to form something of a
positive relationship
with him, which was more or less true, of course: I had conversational French (no other language allowed during my visits, after a while, till I was
au fait
), I could thump out
Für Elise
for the court-appointed advisory panel, I could sit there in front of them playing chess. And—look!—behold!—I was following a reading programme! On the basis of such things it was decided that I should have a trial period in my uncle's care involving monthly invigilation while I settled in. Raymond's anthropophagous early fiction didn't even come up: none of them knew about it.

I remember him at his scrubbed-up hair-slicked-down necktie-strangled best in this time, when the court-appointed advisory panel made their laborious inspections as, alas, they did—
menstrually
, as he described the timing of their visits. I remember the frenzy of each day-before, too, as he worked his
upright
—his name for his old Hoover—across rugs and carpets still in the Residence as I write this, while I ducked around picking up magazines and books and glasses from the floor and emptying ashtrays.

A bloody Anglican vicar! he said after the first of these ordeals, as he thumbed the cap from a bottle of Ward's Pale Ale. A vicar and a professional virgin and what was the middle one, d'you think, a girl or a boy or a potplant? Fucking Protestants, he said, and upended the bottle at his mouth. There was a glugging pause. Been dodging them all my bloody life, he said when he'd done. And here they come through my own front door to spy on me!—see them looking in the crapper? I wish I'd put
un préservatif usagé
in there for them. Talk about
dis pas fuck à la femme du mair
—

Eventually, though, and at last—at long last, it seemed to us—their final visit, and the same front door closing on the three of them, and the sense of a collective exhalation of breath long held. I remember Raymond turning to me with one hand still on the doorknob and his head down slightly as he looked at the floor for ten seconds, as if he was counting. Then he looked up.
Got you, you little bastard
, he said.
Now, d'you know what Ouzo is?
I wasn't quite a teenager then, not even into my teens.

The moment I came into his life, he told me years later, he stopped writing. He'd been in the middle of a short story collection, set variously here and there—
there
being the Mediterranean, of course, the North African coast of his recent past. You walked out of the words, he told me. I knew why you'd come. It felt as if I'd been waiting for you. That's why I had to arrange the car crash, he said. I hated doing it.

I'd
stare
at and
stare
at him when he said things like that. But, from the moment the door closed on the social workers, from the moment he really had
got me
, it seemed he was able to begin writing again.

Point blank, completely unprepared, I was confronted with what that meant—for a start, with the abyss of despair that seized him each morning when he
entered the salt mine
, as he used to describe those times when he was being pulled by his muse and pushed by Quentin Wilson, the new publisher who came into the picture about then: and with the stupefied figure, half-clothed and wandering from his bedroom each morning, butting into doorjambs, dropping cups in the kitchen, spilling tea or coffee or water and all the time
farting like a carthorse
, as he used, alas, to say and do.

When I first saw this horror I thought he must have been drinking again, as he sat there muttering and swearing to himself and even, sometimes, terrifyingly, crying like a little boy—crying into his hands, crying over nothing that I could see or know or understand. I remember endless morning searches for his slippers and in due course his upper teeth, and the time I realised he'd somehow put his trousers on back to front, and pointed it out to him, and watched him standing there looking down himself, stupefied: how could this possibly have happened to him?
Lordosis of the flies
, I heard him mutter to himself. He hardly knew how to dress himself!

Through two doorways I'd watch a half-clothed monster sob its way to the desk and sprawl itself against it, and reach out to roll up, and then down again, the piece of paper he had left the night before in the little Olivetti he sometimes used to try out particular feints and phrases after he'd been scribbling with his pen. After that, the groaning: appalling when first heard, shocking—what, was he dying?—remember, I was a bereaved child at this stage, an immature child—the groaning, and then the muttered words and half-sentences. After
that
, and eventually, silence, and the faint scribble beginning of the nib of his Parker 51, just audible in the utter, unbreathing quiet I kept up for him: that sound, and the occasional chuckle at his own wit. His writing day had begun. Once again, as happened each morning, it seemed that he had given birth to himself.

On other days, though, it just wouldn't happen—that's how he'd describe it,
it won't happen, it's put up its hand to me and said no, it's just not happening, it's giving me the fingers
—without any explanation of what
it
was: the birth process itself, perhaps? Or the life that began immediately after? Sometimes this terrifying blank, as it seemed to be, would follow a day of chirping, whistling activity at his lap desk down in the sunroom, with Mrs A. Round a floor above him hammering away on the old Remington as I brought the freshly written pages up the front steps for her, the ink on them still drying.

On his lay days, though, as he sometimes called them, he would become more and more panicky, more and more hunted. And days they were, as a rule, plural, sometimes lapsing into a week, then weeks, a prospect that terrified us as they stretched on and on. The mood would begin to grip everyone: his secretary, the gardeners, his housecleaner, me. Unease came up through the floorboards, like a miasma.

It didn't take long to get drawn into all this. The entire business fascinated me, once I got the hang of it—he wasn't mad, he wasn't dying, it was just that
artists
were different from
civilians
, as he used to call those who do not create. Artists, I slowly began to realise, came from a different planet.

As soon as I saw this I began to be drawn towards it: I wanted to live on that orb, to feel the massive gravity of it anchoring me: I wanted to write, or, failing that, to be a handmaiden to the strange, messy, captivating nonsense I saw taking place in front of me. I stared, uncomprehending, at my uncle's books and into them, I crept into his bedroom when he was out and gazed, rapt, at his upstairs desk and the pieces of paper on it, I stood in the downstairs garden room and gazed at his
bureau d d'écritoire
. When the stories were published as
Natural Light
I learned to see myself in some of them: not the local stories, to my surprise, but the North African ones, first as one of the Pieds-Noirs, a boy called Gaspard, and later as a Berber boy called Anir, a young
Amazigh, djellaba
and all, sly in the background, running secret messages, risking his life, squatting at night to poop in the sand.

Means
angel
, Raymond told me. Anir. Is he supposed to be me? I asked him, excitedly, pointing to the name on the page. No, you're supposed to be
him
, he replied. And how I learned to live my way into the reality of
that
remark!

In due course, too, I accompanied him to the launch of
Natural Light
at Bevan's bookshop down at the university, and there met literary folk for the first time, those strange, broken-winged seagulls who follow writers around, looking for—
what?
I still don't know the answer to that question, I still don't, and yet, in truth, I sometimes fear that, over the years, I have become one of them: another literary camp follower, looking for scraps, seeking immortality, following the shoot in order to
mumble of the game
—and that I am nothing, nothing without it, nothing whatever or at all. A captive of the secondary muses, and less and less than that as my creator fades away.

And, slowly, I was drawn further in.
Wear this
, he said to me one day as he walked in the kitchen door.
Go on, go on, shut up and put it on
. He'd been to a garage sale and
it
was a
frock
, for goodness' sake!
I'm not wearing that
, I told him: but I did, because he kicked me in the bottom with his knee, firmly and twice, and with a fist tight around my upper arm while he was doing it,
really tight
. That held me still, all right. He
dug
his nails into me, I remember that, he dug them in till I bled.

I'd no idea what was going on, though, until he'd finished watching me walking around for a while in this frock. You make a fucking awful teenage girl, he said. But not a bad heroine in a book, d'you know that? I'd rather have been a hero, of course, but despite myself I was tickled pink when I realised what was happening. I just need a
presence
around, he said, I want the feel of a young person in a dress for a few days while I work something through. Your name's Julia, by the way—no, you don't have to wear it outside, you silly prick. Just don't
go
outside for a few days, that's all, outside'll still be there when we're finished—what d'you think, the great outdoors is going to pack up and piss off just because
you're
not out in it? Who d'you think you are?