The Back of His Head (18 page)

And thus it was that I became Julia Perdue, protagonist of
The Outer Circle Transport Service
and (I like to think) a recurring figure in a number of the later fictions, where, sometimes, she has a different name and different details but is always, at heart, I feel, the same child-girl-woman. And that child-girl-woman is—
me
. I can still read parts of
The Outer Circle
, the early parts, and find myself living and breathing there. The magic of writing, the magic of reading it! And of
being
that person—because that (I remember) is what slowly took me over as the frock absorbed me into itself.

I can remember, too, the day I first wore it
for me
and not just for him: he was out or away or late, I can't remember which, and there was no one else about the place either. I stripped myself to my underclothes and slipped the thing over my head as I had learned to do, with my heart bumping away naughtily in my breast. It was when he was writing
The Outer Circle
still, and there was a scene in it he told me troubled him, in which Julia sees a particular man on her bus and follows him home when he gets off it.
Why, what happens, why does she do that?
Raymond wanted to know.
She gets off and follows him and I've no idea why she does, no idea what they do together. I haven't
got
her, I haven't
got
her today
, he said,
she's not
mine
. She's so bloody difficult, this girl
—

I sat there listening to the afternoon wind blowing about the house, I remember, and knowing why I'd done it, why I'd followed the man, and knowing as well why it was I wouldn't tell Raymond about it, ever.
He
was the man, that was the thing, and the power he was talking about was the power I felt I was coming to have over him. I sat in his room, the room of the man in the book, and
felt that power for the first time, the greatest power of all, which is when a man wants you and you both know he desires you and he knows you know and you know you'll never let him have you, ever. It was the first time I felt that, sitting in my pale blue dress in this dull, close room of his as he watched me and watched me and tried to work me out. And all the time I wanted him, too, that was the thing that was hidden from him, the fact of it and my knowing it
—

That was her. That was me. That was when I became a fictional character. I've never felt so utterly whole before, so absolutely complete, I've never felt so utterly
written
as in those days—
written up, stitched up
:
stitched together:
the Great Wound closed at last. Annealed into Art, if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor. Healed and made whole—yes, that's it! That's it!
Healed and made whole
—

The Outer Circle
is his breakthrough novel, it's generally agreed, the work in which, if you go back, the Raymond Lawrence who was to win the Prize of Prizes may first be seen, stepping out towards Stockholm. It's set in Birmingham, England, of all places—when he was first overseas he'd worked there for a while in minor public schools—but is full of a yearning for his homeland that took everyone by surprise when they read the book. Its Julia is a young colonial who, in the usual way, has to go
there
to appreciate
here
, but realises that if she comes back to her birthplace she will still feel the pull to leave it that is a part of being born in this particular time and this particular place: the bus service of the title takes her around and about the outer limits of Birmingham city as a figure for her plight and, courtesy the obvious reference, for the human condition as well.

All very shopworn, you have to say now and as Raymond did at the time, almost as soon as it was out: an excellent example of his prescience is the fact that he was the first to reject it, as if it'd been a drunken overnight assignation he'd woken up to regret. In fact even now it reads well, if slightly unfashionably, with real poetry in some of it—much of it—and a continuous wash of literary reference that most reviewers mentioned as one of its greatest achievements. Julia's names are only the first of this slub of received writing that can be felt through his text.
Make it sound literary and they'll like it
, he told me.
Drop in Dante and two fucking Shakespeare quotes and suddenly it's great art, suddenly they forget all the buggery and bestiality and cannibalism in the first three books, now I'm fucking shortlisted for a prize!
And so he was, too, and won it, the National Book Award for the year, edging out another Mabel Carpenter trot (quite a fuss about
that
) and a find-yourself-in-nature novel about a man scraping rust. He was on his way.

For all their excitement over the
frissons
of classical literature, though, what the reviewers and readers seemed to like most was Julia herself.
By far his most believable character to date
, one of them said.
Now he's got his first three novels out of his system
, said another,
he's found a subject he makes worth writing about: a young woman, waking up to the world. Who knew he had it in him to make something memorable of a weary theme like that? But he has, no doubting it, in an extraordinary act of empathy
. And a third:
She lives and breathes as few characters do, leaping off the page and into the mind as the pages turn. Given the nature of his early work—his juvenilia, as we ought now to begin to term it—one inevitably wonders where this Julia Perdue comes from, so to speak
. And Raymond's verdict?—
Terrible book, easily my most fuckable character. I kept writing about her because I wanted to get to the bonking scenes
—

I read all this in
deep
confusion, as you might imagine. There was no doubt about it, Julia had become a very real being in his mind. There was also no doubt that, to a large extent, certainly in her origins, she was
me
. Only I would know that, of course, because only I knew what he'd asked me to do while he was writing it.

I ought to explain here what I was in early teenage, which is the time I'm writing about here: not
much
of a young man, it has to be said, since I was still betwixt and between, as you might say. I mean that not everything that usually takes place at that stage of life had in fact necessarily done so, and in the end—I mean when I was fifteen and still flute-voiced—I had to be given a course of tiny, bitter-tasting hormone tablets to
gee me along
, so to speak. Quite soon (almost overnight, it seemed at the time) I grew a foot and more, my voice began and then completed the awkward business of breaking, I started to grow a muscle or two and all the rest of it.

At the time I'm writing about, though, when I was first caught up in Raymond's cross-dressing art-world, I was still the Flying Dutchman of adolescence, as you might say, caught between earth and sky in a state of perpetual androgyny.
You looked like Audrey fucking Hepburn
, Raymond told me much later.
Wished I hadn't got you those bloody pills—ruined everything, look at you now!
And so on:
should've had your knackers off
, he told me on another occasion.
You were at your best when you were a boy soprano. I should've bitten them off there and then and been done with it. I've done that before, y'know
—

And so on. He'd just finished
the fucking Birmingham novel
, as he always called it after that, and he wasn't quite his true self. Or perhaps he was. Whatever he was, he was worn out, he didn't know what he was doing, he was beside himself—and then, suddenly, one night, he was beside
me
. I woke and there he was, next to me in the dark little second bedroom of what was not yet called the Residence. I could smell the aniseed on his breath—he'd been drinking Ouzo, the nearest he could get, here, to the anise he used to drink in North Africa. I didn't know that then, I mean its proper significance to him, and all I could smell was his strangeness, the terror of
difference
tasted for the very first time: for me, it would always taste of aniseed, just as it was always lit by that redolent
boof!
of the gas burner.

Here, hard up beside me, was all the rest of the world, everything that existed that wasn't me, and it was
touching
me: my throat, first, gently stroked, my earlobes, pinched, no more than a touch, and then (
then
) down to my chest—my breast, I suppose, my breasts, since who knows what I was to him in that moment? Julia, I guessed, the imaginary character of his fiction, the young, flat-chested girl-woman of his imagination, made real, in his sodden mind, in the form of an epicene youth with his breath held tight: what would the man do next, where would he go?

And, yes, of course, the thing he was mumbling all through this was (I realised much later, much, much later) the Herrick poem, Herrick's Julia poem, with that wonderful word in it that melts reality into itself and becomes the whole thing, the very thing that it is about: words—language falling into imagination:
words
creating
things:

The liquefaction of her clothes
—

Realising that, being able to think like that, arrived much later, long after I'd begun to try to come to terms with what Raymond had made of me in the time in between. The morning after that first midnight visit to my bed he was comatose: I have no doubt he remembered nothing and, certainly, I told him even less. Of those times I, though, remember everything, but I remember them the way I remember what you read on the page—the way I remember the Birmingham novel itself, in those scenes where Julia is liquefied into reality by his words, and walks across the page for the reader (and, increasingly, runs, for that Outer Circle bus that comes looping past her every day).

That, I remember, is what it was always like—always unrecalled, always scented by the Barbary coast: until the point at which, as I grew older and those times began to fall away from me, and, as I say, they started to have much the same slightly hallucinated reality that
The Outer Circle Transport Service
had, or
Natural Light
before it and
Bisque
which came next, and in which Julia appears again in her early twenties or
Understanding the Cardinal
, where she makes a curtain call in two stories as a slightly older woman. No more reality, and no less, either: all I have to do now is uncap the ancient, seven-eighths-full bottle of Ouzo still in his drinks cabinet for the scent of her to come back, which is the smell of that time, those times, and the reek of him as well—what a mixture, what an elixir! Proust's Mediterranean madeleine!

These evening thoughts, as always, in the Blue Room, as the sun sets and the Medal is touched yet again by this particular day's final, plangent light. Tonight, from the radiogram, the music of Schumann, turning and turning—he to whom I came late and guiltily, suddenly seeing his genius where I had been blind to him and resisted it, thinking him an unsubtle piano-thumper, but then gradually finding my way to him, or he to me, through the earlier works,
Papillon, Carnaval
and so on, till I was mature enough to approach at last the
Dichterliebe
, so long withheld from me by my mereness of sensibility: but, now, filling the room with its knowing sad beauty.

Where does reading stop? Who reads us? What does
writing
mean, when you share your life with the writer? Where do we ourselves stop, and where does the character begin? What is
ours
and what is
his
? And what, then, is a novel? Or was writing always like this?

Bugger. Tape ran out. Can see why you get pissed off when I run off the rails! Anyway, next thing the old boy decides I'm going to be his
chauffeur
, that's what he calls it—no money in it, no flash uniform or anything, he just fancies having someone big and buff driving him round like he'd got a bodyguard. Either-Or wasn't happy, you should've seen his face first time I showed up at a function behind the old man. This reception at the Town Hall, I was meant to be just dropping the old boy off, idea was they'd come back afterwards together in Either-Or's car—by the way, he drives a Beamer, did you know that?—feeble. But then when we get there, Mr Lawrence, he tells me,
come on, you're my date for the evening
. And I'm thinking, what the hell, why not? He looked really sharp toddling off in front of me in his penguin suit with the white shirt and black bow tie, he even had his teeth in! Little geezer rubbing his hands together, can't wait to get in amongst it—Mr Magoo! He seemed to light up when people started shaking his hand and clapping him on the back, he was talking away and laughing and I was laughing, too—couldn't tell what they were saying but it looked that much fun I was joining in, part of the crowd, know what I mean? And then this young chick comes up in almost like a Bunny outfit and she offers me a thing on a stick off a tray and a paper napkin for afterwards, and I knew I'd arrived, I knew I was in with the toffs.