The Back of His Head (22 page)

I've heard these things several times, of course: she used to say she was drawn to me as a confidante by my lack of compassion, my ruthlessness, by my (her phrase)
neuter quality
. Sometimes, at these moments, when she talks about her early days with Raymond, I tell her she's fantasising: and she always stares past me when I do. I can't tell, I remember her saying on one of these occasions. It's all fantasy, isn't it? One shrink told me I was fantasising about what I wanted my father to do to me. He was a Freudian, he said it's
all
transference and projection—relationships, he said that's all they are, that's how they start, he said, and they end when the transference and the projection have served their purpose, whatever that might be. I
cried
and
cried
when he told me that.

She wiped her nose with a tissue and flicked a naughty glance at me. He had
you
at ten, she said.

She'd made this sort of claim before. I
met
him at eleven, I reminded her. And he did
not
have me. Yes he did! she said. Every time he hit you with that bat-thing of his he was having you! It's about pain and power and humiliation, doesn't that sound like sex to you?

At this point I stopped her short. He hardly touched me, I said. Anyway, he was trying to make a man of me. She stared back at me, boldly, I remember. He broke your back, she said. That's what
he
did. He did
not
, I told her—I wanted to get this straight there and then, to get it straight and put it away for good and all. That was the hormones, I told her. They did the trick but that's the price, spinal scoliosis in later years. She was still staring at me. Hormones my
bottom
, she said, coolly. He beat you to death. Then he tried to bury it, he tried to cover it up.

Oh, I
stared
at her when she said that, I
stared
and
stared
at her. At what level of fantasy was she speaking when she was saying something like
that
? What did she
know?

There's a terrible scene in
Flatland
where the protag-onist, Hamilton, takes a young Amazigh deep into the Algerian desert, beyond the Aurès—a youth, really, barely that—and eventually, lingeringly, kills him. It's appalling for all the obvious reasons, and for the details of the business itself, which seems to go on and on: but it is appalling most of all (I can barely let myself write this)
because of the love in it
, and the way that love suffuses and elevates the writing, and draws the reader into what is being described, however much we try to resist its pull. The scene is unreadable, and so extraordinarily, obscenely beautiful that it
has
to be read, it
must
be read. It pulls you down into itself, it makes you into itself and of itself.

When I first read it as a youth—half a boy still, really, more than half a boy—I was numbed by its obscenity. I wanted to stop and I couldn't, I wanted it to end and it wouldn't. And so I was sucked under, appalled and by degrees, till I'd become a part of what I read—an agent, a protagonist, in effect Thomas Hamilton himself: I was a torturer and a murderer, I'd done these things myself and felt the love and the desire in both of them. Oh, God, to admit that! He'd reached into me as his reader, Raymond, and made me realise how much I was complicit in every single thing I'd made him describe for me in such painful, lingering detail. I've never quite forgiven him for it. Remember, I was the Amazigh's very age at the time: well, more or less, whatever it was. I mean I was
him
as well, the boy as well, the youth. You have to understand that, you have to understand that to know what I'm trying to tell you.
He was me. I was him
.

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.