The Back of His Head (27 page)

It was a good five minutes before I got to where I could ask him what it was. He looks at me.
You'll have to guess
, he says.
Can't
, I tell him. He'd got grease all over his face and his beard and his hands and down his front. Mutton, I told him.
Mutton!
he says.
Where'd I get a fucking sheep from? I'd have to climb an electric fence
. And so I went through the list. I said possum for a joke because I had a mate'd eaten possum once and he said it was better than you'd think. And then just for another joke I said,
cat. Close to home
, he says,
but it's not quite fatty enough for cat meat, try again
. And when he said that my mind went,
click
. I just froze there with my mouth full of hot meat for five seconds and then I spat it out and it's just sitting there sputtering in the fire.
What a fucking waste!
he says, and he's happy as hell, you'd think it was the best joke ever. I could have
hit
him, he was that pleased with himself.

I kept asking myself
how could he do it, how could he do it?
I'm lying there that night back down in the Coop and he's asleep the other side of the
en suite
, burping and farting—I keep asking myself,
how could he do it
? And of course I asked him, I asked him as soon as I'd spat the meat out, with him cackling away at me—Christ, he can be frightening when he's like that and his top plate's out and there's just his eyeteeth sticking down like Dracula. But then I got
real
pissed off with him and he toned it down.
All right, all right
, he says.
It wasn't easy. You couldn't do it, remember? That was a test for both of us, well, I've passed the test. So have you
, he says,
now you've eaten her
. Her? I ask him.
Yes, her
, he says.
Daisy
. You mean Rommel, I told him, we've eaten Rommel.
I mean Daisy
, he says,
you've eaten Daisy the dog, Rommel's still around. We're both of us in a different place now we've done that, we've passed through something together. Pity you couldn't keep it all down
. And he holds me out another bone.
There!
he says.
Have a drumstick
, and he laughs and he says,
looks like a dog's hind leg!
But I had another good spew instead, right into the fire, I had a bloody good reach, and him laughing himself silly behind me all the time I'm bringing my guts up.
Now you've undone the spell!
he's telling me.
You're back to square one
, you silly arse—

I'm lying there in bed like I said, and I'm thinking it through, and I start thinking, hold on a minute. This is bullshit. How does a man his age in his state kill a dog? Forget the fact it's Rommel, you know, his four-legged soulmate or whatever he's supposed to be. It's just a dog but how does he do it? No well don't forget it's Rommel, it's all one thing, he's meant to have killed his best friend and cooked it and eaten it, even though he reckons now he's done it the dog's called Daisy and Rommel's still around somewhere.
How did he do it
? He can hardly hold his knife and fork. It was me that had to keep the fire going. On the other hand, he was Dead-Eye Dick when it come to shooting the wax bananas after dinner, you could tell he knew what he was doing, he put a shot through the middle of each one,
bang-bang-bang
like that, and then he shot what was left to buggery. So he could shoot a gun all right.

Julian is standing against the carved dresser in the Residence dining room, his trousers drawn a little too tight at the crotch: he keeps adjusting himself.

‘So,' he says. ‘Geneva's sent us a tape that proves she means business. And we can't hear what's on it—right?'

‘Right,' I tell him.

Semple leans back in his dining chair as he usually does, and, as usual, the chair gives out a sharp crack at the moment of apogee. As always when it makes this noise, he eases it forward, carefully, till it's four-square on the floor again.

He flattens his palms against the tabletop, as if he's trying to press it down.

‘Where does that leave us?' he asks.

‘Yes'—Marjorie now, dabbing at her nose—‘I still don't understand what she's got over us.'

Parp
, into a tissue.

‘Well.' Julian again. ‘We heard enough to know it's Thom speaking on the tape. Maybe that's the name she wants us to hear. Thom.'

‘So. What did Thom know that we don't want to get out? We all know how Ray went, so—it can't be that—'

‘There's not just that, there's what happened before.'

‘Everyone knows about that. We talked about it last time.'

‘Everyone knows he was a shit.'

‘Yes, but that doesn't mean we want them looking into the pot, does it?'

‘Thom Ham wouldn't have known about that sort of thing, though—would he? What the old man used to get up to? Ray was past it by the time Thom turned up—that's
why
he turned up, isn't it?'

‘He had that stick thing,' Semple says suddenly. ‘Ray did.' He looks across at me. ‘Is that it? Is
that
the clue?
Pandy
? Did she say that? Geneva? On the phone?
Pandy?
'

What
does
he mean? ‘
Pandy
?'

‘
You
remember. He used to call it the pandybat. When he brought it out. That Arab stick-thing of his.'

‘Did he?' For the life of me I can't remember this detail. ‘
Pandy?
' How could I have forgotten it had a name?

‘I remember the stick,' Marjorie says. ‘Why'd he call it Pandy, though?'

‘Think Joyce.'

‘Joyce who?'

‘Oh, come on!' Semple, thumping forward over the tabletop. ‘Joyce
who
—'

‘Oh—
him
.'

‘The pandybat at Clongowes.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan
—'

‘No, that's in the other one—'

‘What other one?'

‘I don't know that I know about this,' Julian says. ‘What sort of a stick?'

‘I'll get it,' I tell them. ‘It's in his bedroom.'

I slip out. Julian's voice behind me, reminding Semple about
Ulysses. What d'you
mean
, never
read
it?
I hear him say. Raymond's room smells unaired, with a slight back-story of mould. I remember coming in here and finding the second paua shell on the desk.
Quite a lot I haven't read
, Semple is saying, truculently, back in the dining room.

I don't need the light this time: I know where the drawer is. I reach in and rummage for the thing.
Haven't read Shakespeare?
from the other room. A pulse trills in my neck.

Julian's eyebrows lift to me as I come back with the stick in my hand.

Semple stares. ‘For Christ's sake,' he says. ‘He's actually kept the fucking thing—'

‘Is it a sort of wog-hitting stick?'

‘No.' Julian takes it from me. ‘I'll tell you what it is, it's a British army swagger stick.'

He explains: a short, leather-bound stick used by British Army officers to help point up otherwise pointless parade-ground choreography. Nothing more to it than that, and definitely (when I ask him) nothing to do with North African peoples—or with anything very much at all, it seems.

So
that's
what it is! And it must be so: peaceable Baby-boomer that he is, Julian knows his military memorabilia, even though it's at odds with every other part of his life.

Now, after all these years, Raymond's story has changed a little. The old man must have found this thing in a North African market: possibly it reminded him in some unhappy way of the school that swallowed up much of his second decade. I wonder at myself for bringing it out: but it seems to be having its moment, it seems to be attracting attention.

Is
this
what Geneva meant me to find, and, if so, what might that mean?

The others are passing it from hand to hand. Semple
thwacks
it reminiscently across his palm. ‘He got me with it a few times,' he's telling Marjorie. ‘Caught me stealing copper off him, that was the first time.'

‘On the bottom? The bare bottom?'

‘Me? No! On the back, the old bugger, when I was trying to get away from him.'

‘But schoolboys, when they—'

‘The Dark Ages are over,' Julian says. He's holding the stick up and looking at it.

‘—they used to bleed,' Marjorie says. ‘They were flogged naked, apparently. Schoolboys. They used to be flogged naked till they bled.'

‘Schools haven't flogged for fifty years.' Julian doesn't look up: he's gazing and gazing at the pandybat. ‘Not even the religious schools.'

Robert and Marjorie, though, are still back in the locker room together. ‘Really?' he's just asked her. ‘You? With the pandybat?

‘No, with his hand. On the bare bum, sometimes. I still can't decide whether I liked it or not.'

‘But isn't that the point? You love it and hate it at the same time? The borderline of kink?—the kink
is
the borderline, that's where it's at?'

Now Julian is becoming interested, too. They're fizzing! The pandybat has excited them—the swagger stick, as Julian has renamed it. I wait till the spanking talk around me exhausts itself. It takes a minute or two, and there's definitely more energy in the room once they're done.

Now Marjorie wants to know why I've brought the bat out, what my point is.

‘Well—we're assuming there might be something about it on Geneva's tapes, aren't we?'

We're all staring at the stick now, as it sits in the middle of the dining table's surface commanding attention but resisting explication.

‘So—he had a stick, and he called it—'

‘The pandybat. Apparently he did, I never—'

‘—and she's told you it's mentioned on these tapes.'

‘
No
—she said she had a name, and that the name was on the tape. The one she gave us.'

‘Which we couldn't hear.'

‘I think we're going round in circles again.' Julian, of course: he adjusts his trousers once more. ‘We're not getting anywhere. We're trying to find a name, and—'

‘We want the thing first.'

‘No,' I tell them. ‘The name first.'

‘We need to get hold of those other tapes.' This is Semple, suddenly, urgently. ‘We don't know what else is on them—'

I stare at him. Does he know something? He was there at the start, after all, or very nearly. This could be trickier than I thought.

Julian leans forward, elbows on the table. ‘Isn't that the challenge?' he says. He picks the stick up. ‘To make some kind of intervention?'

‘What d'you mean, intervention?'

‘To get off our bums and—make something actually
happen
for once?' He looks around, leaning forward, his forearms on the table, the stick up stiff in his fist. ‘Here we are, representing one of the most active writers there's ever been, his fiction's full of people
doing
things—people blowing things up, getting killed—
decisiveness
, that's what he preached, isn't it? Isn't that one of the things he preached?'

‘The consequential writer,' I remind them. ‘The consequential writer and the consequential life.'

‘His words. Raymond's words.' Julian rolls the pandybat away from himself, across the table. He sits back. Semple gazes at the stick. He picks it up.

‘You're suggesting killing Geneva Trott?' he says. ‘I'm up for that.'

‘But is bumping off biographers
really
the sort of thing literary trusts do?' Marjorie creaks. ‘Don't we just handle copyright?'

‘Geneva's an exception. There's no rules for people like Geneva fucking Trott.' Semple
whacks
the pandybat into his left palm. ‘Anything goes, that's what I say.'

‘What I'm suggesting
is
, we do something about these tapes. We don't know what's on them but we know it might be damaging—and anyway, it's not her story. Geneva's. Isn't that what we moaned about when
Years of Lightning
came out? That book of hers? Didn't we say, it wasn't her story and she'd just helped herself without asking?'

‘Oh, Julian! You're getting quite excited, I've never seen you like this before!'

‘Yes, but he's
onto
something, Marge, for Christ's sake.' Semple is leaning forward now, his arms on the tabletop, his hands opening and closing as he speaks. The bat lies in front of him: he stares at it. ‘Are we just going to sit here and let things happen—or, are we going to, you know—?'

‘Lay a plot?' Marjorie. ‘D'you realise that's what we're talking about? Isn't that the term? Laying?'