The Back of His Head (28 page)

‘
Laying
—?'

‘Shh, Robert. Grubby mind. That's what they used to say, though, didn't they? Writers? Back in the day?
Laying a plot
? Like laying the foundations for a house?'

He stares at her. ‘So—?'

‘Well, that's what we're doing, aren't we? Laying a plot? Without Ray to help us? We're all on our own now and we're trying to lay a plot.'

Semple looks irritated. ‘I don't mean talking,' he says. ‘I mean
doing
.' He stares at me. ‘
I'm
up for it.' Across at Julian. ‘What d'you think, Jules? A commando raid?'

‘A
commando
raid? On what, where's she staying? Geneva?'

‘Where
is
she staying?'

‘Don't know yet. She's down sometime next week, that's all she told me.'

‘If we could just distract her—'

‘What? And nick the tapes?'

‘Get
hold
of the tapes,' Julian says. ‘Play them, put them back. Find out what's on them, find out if she's really got something on us.'

‘No!' Semple is on fire: the bat is back in his hands. ‘We don't have to
play
them, we have to
piss
on them. Then it doesn't matter
what's
on them.' He turns to me. ‘Where'd you say she's going to stay? Geneva? In a brothel somewhere? How're we meant to distract her?'

‘Take her out somewhere. Take her to dinner.'

‘We'll need longer than that. If we're going to listen to these things—how many are there? Fifty-minute tapes—we'd need to keep her busy for—twenty-four hours at least.'

‘Well!' Marjorie's moment. ‘There's only one man I know who'd keep a woman busy for
twenty-four hours
!'

Semple stares at her. He pushes back from the table, his hat rising slightly as he straightens. ‘Steady on!' he says.

‘Come on, Robert.' Julian seems to be serious about this mad scheme that's somehow evolving under our noses to the
thwack
of the pandybat. ‘Take one for the team. We have to
do
something.'

Robert stares around himself, wildly. ‘I could take her for a drive, I suppose,' he says. ‘Someone could take her for a drive.' He looks at Marjorie. ‘
You
could. You could take her to see the pancake rocks.'

‘And meanwhile—?'

‘Meanwhile.' Julian has his fists around the stick now. ‘The rest of us can take care of the tapes.'

Marjorie stares at him. ‘You mean, steal them?'

‘Borrow them.'

‘But how are you going to get them?'

Julian taps the stick on the tabletop. ‘We'll find a way in,' he says.

‘Breaking and entering's against the law, Jules, dear. Even a motel room.'

‘I don't think we should do this.' I stand. ‘I think this is a very silly idea.'

Semple
whacks
his hands down on the tabletop—we all jump a little. He stands there looking as if he's about to do it again. ‘We need to
do
something,' he says.

‘But we're
literary
folk—'

‘We're trying to protect his reputation.' Julian this time. ‘Raymond's. That's all we're doing.'

‘You're protecting his secret.' Marjorie stands, too, and starts picking up her bags. ‘There's a lie at the bottom of this place, that's why I don't like being here in the evenings.'

I stare at her.

‘Same thing. We're protecting that. Anyway, he has to have a secret.'

‘Why does he have to have a secret?'

‘Because all writing is about secrets. He said it himself.'

‘He said all writing is about killing.'

‘No, he said all writing was a
crime
, each work of art was a
crime
—'

‘
About
a crime—each one is
about
a crime—'

I let them rattle on. They're all wrong about this business, although each of them is almost right. Each version is
very nearly
the thing that Raymond used to say. It would appal me whenever he did—as if he were deliberately tempting fate, deliberately flying too close to the wind to see what he could get away with. Here it is, flaring up in front of me, as if he's breathing on the very flames himself: and here it is, come back again:
concealment, secrets
.

From the front door I watch them leave for their cars, down by the garage. Semple is holding Raymond's swagger stick like a club. It's clear something is going to happen, but I've no idea what it is.

Nothing that has occurred this evening has been at all what I expected. Instead, again, the present: inert, insentient, unsatisfactory, rolling away from us in different directions like mercury on a plate. Waiting to become past, in order to find a meaning. Seeking the forest—

Wear this
, he said to me, abruptly, as I came into the Residence one day in my later teens—exactly the same words that started off that strange cross-dressing business all those years earlier when he handed me the pale blue frock and, till usurped, I became Julia Perdue and, for the first time, entered a work of fiction as a character.

This
on
this
occasion, though, was not a dress but a piece of fabric, one I remember enraging Raymond with in my early days by unknowingly using it as a dish-cloth: it was in fact (as he explained to me at the time), a
keffiyeh
, headwear completed by (
look, watch
: he assembled these on his head as he explained) the
agal
(
always camel
-
hair
, he said), the circlet of rope that held it in its place. And with several days' growth on his face he suddenly looked as if he had indeed been in North Africa, had in fact taken part in one of its foundational struggles at a time when he was not all that much older than I was as I stood there in front of him and watched his transformation. He looked newly arrived, and with the sun and the heat still upon him.

Along with his French he'd picked up more than a little Arabic during his rather more than a
Wanderjahr
in North Africa all those years before, and from the start a few Arabic words and phrases were coughed and hawked around casually between us. Most of them I half-understood at best. You'll have noticed he called me
sidi
from time to time—ironically: it means master—and he'd also call me
tefel
and
farid
and
walid
, which always gave me the curious, fleeting sensation of being somebody else. Sometimes, in the early days, I called him
Qaid
, which I knew also had some respect in it.

By the time I'm talking about here I'd got sick of all this, though, not least when he spoke Arabic in front of me in shops. I was well past that course of bitter little Anastrozole tablets I've mentioned earlier, which I'd taken for four months and which had suddenly made me more than a little taller, and I was past the aching joints, the slight exhaustion and the dizzy spells that came with it: hidden, my scoliosis was already beginning its secret, slow, reactive twist. My voice had broken at last (as much, Raymond said, as it sounded likely to do), and I was ready, in my piffling way, for a fight. I was trying out a
bolshie attitude
, as he used to call it.

Don't tell me, I asked him as he handed me the
keffiyeh
once more: the muse has struck again? And:
no
, as he tried to put the thing on me—that, and a sort of loose shirt arrangement. I backed away from him. This is ridiculous, I told him. You can't go on
doing
this sort of thing to people—
no!

I really meant it, I remember. I remember really fighting him off as we swept and lurched and slammed around the kitchen—he backed me into cupboard doors at one point and I remember a pot knocked off the gas stove just after that and its contents burped over our feet and the lino, and all the time the push-and-pull on the
keffiyeh
that was between us taut and loose and taut again—

Twenty seconds of this, maybe, and then he stopped, abruptly, and pulled away from me. The cloth dropped to the floor. He stooped and picked it out of the mess of macaroni cheese down there. He looked up at me: there was the horror of his gaze.
I'll cut 'em off
, he said, quietly.
You know that, don't you?

He straightened up. He meant it, I knew that, I knew this was going to be different. That
thing
in him was back, I could see, I could see: so
cold
, so
hard
. Behind him his hand was in the drawer, I could hear him rummaging blindly amongst the knives, I could hear the clatter of his fingers in the steel. I suddenly realised:
he was going to do it at last, he was going to do it at last
—I knew that and that he
had
to: behind this moment so much history, and no way now to stop it—

I crouched there in front of him, seeing everything happening very clearly, move by move, and his hand coming back up to me from out of the drawer with the glitter of steel in it:

Evviva il coltellino!

Except that, when the moment actually came, what he brought out of the drawer, what he absolutely
whipped
out from behind him, was—

We stood there, the two of us, neither moving, both of us staring at the thing in his fist. To this day I've no idea whether all this was a stunt or a blunder—but no way of telling, either, since he carried it off so well:

An
eggbeater
, for God's sake—

He held it there between us for a terrifying second or two and (it seemed) at the height of his rage: until one or other of us (I can't remember which) started to laugh, and then that was that. Raymond, I think. Yes, it was Raymond. He'd wind the handle in my face for a few seconds and the beaters would mix through each other at the end of my nose, and it really did seem the funniest thing either of us had ever seen in our lives. Then he'd pull it away and bring it back and wind the handle at me again and off we'd go once more. I laughed, I remember, till I cried. The relief! It was over at last!

For
now
, it was over for
now
—

After we'd worked out of ourselves the ten or fifteen minutes of fear and anger we'd been building up between us—worse than that for me: for me, sheer terror—a knife, after all—when that was done he flung the eggbeater back into the drawer behind him and the headcloth onto the sinkbench, and butted the drawer shut with his bottom, and subsided. One over the other he folded his arms, as if tucking them into bed. He seemed to have let something go, or maybe it had let go of him.

You're a strange little prick, he said, quietly, not looking at me: just leaning against the sinkbench as he talked, and looking here, looking there, looking at the floor and up and away as he spoke, and then down at the floor again and all the time getting his breath back while the words came out, and never once looking me, least of all in the eye.

It's been hard, all this, he said. For me. What d'you think it's been like? I took you in, I
wanted
you—I wanted to
make
something
of
you, I wanted you to understand all this shit I'm into. I wanted you to start thinking differently, I wanted you to become a different person. Another person. I didn't want you turning out some fat-arsed nonentity like your fucking awful parents. But it's no use, it's no use.

He stared past me. He looked away.

I mean, it
seems
it's no use, he said. Doesn't it?

Well
—you can imagine the effect this had on me. The effect
all
this had on me, the anger and then the sudden calm, so gentle, so regretful, so genuine as it seemed to be at these moments: and always was, I'm sure, I'd like to think that's true. Always so
loving
, after the anger and the violence. Always so
intimate
. I didn't know what to do, I didn't know what to say. I was still on the edge of tears, as usual whenever he brought me to this complicated pass. It felt like love, that was the thing, it felt as if
someone loved me after all
.

You
told me not to write, I said. There was a silly tremor still in my voice, I remember.
You're
the one who told me not to go on writing—

It was all I had, it was all I could think of saying back to him. He ignored it competely, of course. He picked up the
keffiyeh
again and looked at it.

What d'you think it's been
like
, he said—murmured—I could barely hear him: it was almost as if he wasn't really talking to me. How d'you think it's been, watching you grow up and away from me like this? What d'you think you've been to me? D'you think I
wanted
all this?—he flung his arms apart, dramatically: the soiled
keffiyeh
flapped and dangled from one hand. I had no idea what he meant, no idea at all. It was almost as if I wasn't there.