The Back of His Head (29 page)

Then he simply turned away from me.

That's it, he said. That's it.

He was walking away. He was walking out on me—he was walking out of my life!

I tried to follow him:
Uncle
—

No—he stopped and turned towards me—no, no, don't worry, he said. Oh,
Jesus
, there's no need to start crying in front of me again, the fucking hormones were meant to stop that shit—
stop crying, for God's sake
—

And off again, into the creaking little corridor: I hurried after him. He was at his most opaque, his most baffling, his most utterly seductive. I wanted to call out to him but I didn't know what to say—I didn't even know what to call him:
uncle
didn't seem right anymore, as if he'd just abdicated that role and there was nothing else for him to be to me, and nothing for me to be back to him.
Qaid? Father—?

C'était notre rupture
, I slowly realised, but only later, much later, looking back at all this: I mean the point at which he decided to start letting go of me, or of a certain part of me.

You want to know my biggest regret? he asked later that day, or sometime soon after, and pleasantly, conversationally: we were in the front room, by the fluttering light of the fire in the Residence's stone fireplace. That prick Pepper, he said—Hugh Pepper was our doctor: he was the one who'd written the prescription that had
made a man of me
. Letting him give you those hormone tablets, my uncle said. D'you know that? I wanted you to be my boy, always my marvellous boy. And look what he's done to you!

He was drinking, I remember—we both were, not Ouzo but something else, something neither here nor there in comparison, beer or gin or something like that, a drink with no particular redolence: Ouzo, the poor man's anise, the elixir of transition, drunk as you moved from
now
to
then
and from
here
to
there
.

No more of that for me, I knew: he was giving me up to time, and, whatever it was he'd hoped for me till then (and who knows what that was, who
really
knows what fantasy he had centred on me up till that point), I'd been abruptly returned to ranks. No longer the marvellous boy—if ever I'd been quite so in fact—but about to become the lesser, safer thing I've actually been in the long years since: his steward, his private secretary, his majordomo, someone to be taken for granted. That all-purpose
bumboy
—dreadful phrase, shameful concept: I hate to reproduce it but those were his words: the
factotum
whose role and tasks he announced to me a few months after he said it. His Pooh-Bah. But, also, in due course and (as it's proven) for the best, his successor.

He'd made me clean up the macaroni cheese from the kitchen floor and, the following day, or some day soon after this strange episode, he made me clean the toilet bowl as well. At this time we had a
cleaning lady
, as such people are known, her name (of course) Mrs During: but what about Mrs During, I remember protesting to him. She cleaned it today, she was in this morning? Old Mother During be fucked, he said while he bustled me into the
water closet
, as she always called it. She just scrubs the fucker. You've got to find its inner meaning. Go on—
go on
—

And go on I did, miserably and at length, gazing bleakly at that extraordinarily crackled interior with its lime-green weep that no work of the brush seemed able to revoke. What was it he wanted me to see in the worn
craquelure
of this bowl? My new status, I suppose, reflected back to me in the turbid waters beneath my face. As soon as I was done he was in there, of course, to
bomb Dresden
, and undo thus my hour of work—well, fifteen minutes of it, let's say.
Bombs away!
he called out, as he usually did at these moments—he had a lavatory pun on
Eau de Cologne
, too, I remember that. I was back in the quotidian, and (it seemed at the time) I would never enter hand-in-hand with him again, a marvellous boy, the world from which he had just expelled me.

Whenever I'd go through the
en suite
and into his bedroom and he'd be sitting there with his
Auto Trader
I'd know we were in for a good time. He'd put it away fast when I came in, he'd put it under the sheets like I'd caught him with a porno, but I'd just think,
shit hot, it's an Auto Trader Day!
I'd wheel him down to the Residence and round the front and into the downstairs sunroom from the garden and leave him there with his writing. He'd have half a dozen pages by his afternoon nap and I'd take what he'd written to Dot Round to type, and she'd always make out she was pissed off, like,
oh, you're not bringing more work for me
sort of thing, but I could see it was all a big show and she loved it really, you know,
I-work-for-this-famous-writer-he-couldn't do-without-me
sort of thing. Anyway, I'll tell you what happened to her. The old man bumped her off. That's what he reckoned, anyway. I still haven't worked the whole business out, I worry away at it.

It starts like this. We're up at the top of the hill in the Dodge again, him and me, you know, his afternoon drive and all that, we're sitting there watching the wind on the tussock, and suddenly he says to me,
y'know Dot Round? That does my typing?
Yes, of course I know Dot, I tell him, what about her?
Well
, he says,
I'm going to turn her blue
. That's what he says to me! I just sit there and I'm, like,
what
? He says,
you heard me, blue
. Just sitting there next to me. Like, you mean her
skin
? I ask him.
That's right
, he says.
I'm going to turn her skin blue. Same colour as the Blue Room. Did you know I can do that?
So I sit there for a minute, and I've got the list of medications running back through my brain
Sinemet-Ropinole-Mirapex-Eldepryl
and I'm trying to remember if I've dosed him up twice on something or left one of them out and that's why he's hit the jackpot like this? Then he says,
after that I'm going to kill her—she'll die soon. I can do that, I can kill people
—and I'm telling you, Patrick, I didn't know what to do. It might sound funny when you're playing this back to yourself but I was filling my pants sitting there next to him. I needed my bike clips on I was that scared.

So, anyway, I wait there a bit and he seems to go inside himself the way he does every now and then, and after a minute or two I start the car up and take him home. I settle him in for a nap and then I check his medication and I'd been on time with everything, it was all ticked off. I thought, he'll have a blue fit if I go and tell Either-Or and he finds out, but that's what you're meant to do, it's in the Bailey's Care manual,
any variation in your patient's behaviour should be reported immediately to your client
. So there's me tapping on the door of Either-Or's office, and he's doing that trick I told you about where he knows you're there but he doesn't look up because he's such an important prick, and he says,
yes
? with his head still down reading something.
What
? he says to me, when I tell it to him.
Blue
? he says, like he's never heard the word before.
Turn her blue
?

I've just played that bit back, Patrick—see what I said back there? About the old boy having a blue fit? Well,
I
just about had a blue fit when I heard that—like he was really starting to get into my mind, Mr Lawrence, I mean, he's even in your
words
? But the thing is, get this,
Dot turned blue
. After a while she
started turning blue
. I was with her one day and I saw this mark on her arm and it was
blue
. I don't mean she'd turned bright blue like a Smurf but there was definitely this one patch on her left arm, below the elbow.
She was turning blue
. It gave me such a
hell
of a shock I got out there and then, I just dropped what I was doing and I said
excuse me
and I left. She must've thought I had the runs and I more or less did, it was that scary, I was standing outside swallowing and swallowing and looking around, like, you know,
dear God please find me something normal to look at!
—and there was old Val down the bottom of the garden so I settled myself down to watch her. After a bit I made myself go back into the house and get back to whatever it was I'd stopped doing, but really I was looking at old Dot and her arm and the blue spot, and, you know what, I couldn't find it again?

I hung around her so long she thought I was up to something with her, I think, she was typing away
bang-bang-bang
the way she usually did, and all of a sudden she stops and she looks up at me and she says,
what?
like I was hanging around for something. And I didn't know what to say, I felt bloody stupid—like, am I going to say to her,
sorry, I was just checking to see if your arm's turning blue
?—so I tell her, I'm admiring your style, and she says
awwww
like that and turns back and starts up typing again but you could see she was pleased. I could see there was a sort of a
brown
spot on the back of her right hand that stuck up off her skin, quite big, thumbnail-sized, more, and where I'd seen the patch of blue—where I remembered seeing the blue—there was definitely something, but it wasn't what I'd seen a few minutes before, not quite. So I put it out of my mind again and got busy with other things, had a Bounty Bar and so on.

But I didn't forget it and after few days I checked her out again, and this time her
entire left arm
was blue—I saw it, through a window, just for a second. I slipped away and then I came back for another look, and of course it'd changed, but it hadn't gone away. It was like a kind of iron-colour, her arm, I could definitely see a sort of iron-blue tinge almost under the skin like a bruise. It turned me up, I can tell you, and then when I looked at her face—she's looking round at me again, she must have thought I was stalking her or something—I could see it under her eyes, too, it was a dark bluey-bruised looking. It was
in
her. I was hanging around staring, I was that caught up I forgot what I was doing, and then she stops typing like she did the time before and she says,
Thom, if you've got something to say to me would you mind spitting it out and not standing there like Mr Orr's dog
? And I say,
I didn't know he had a dog
. And she looks at me like Mr Tinetti and then she says, really carefully,
The one that's gone missing
, and that threw me.
Rommel?
I ask her, and she says,
Rommel?
Well anyway, turns out we'd eaten Either-Or's dog for him!
Didn't even know he had a dog
, I told her, and when I said that she sat up straight and stared in front of her like she was posing for a photo, and then she says,
how many dogs have we got around here that you've seen
? Well, of course, there's just the one, and I told her that and she says,
Well, then
, and she turns back and starts typing again.

So—there you go, there's another mystery for you. I'm really feeling caught up in something and I didn't like it one bit. So I decided to fix my mind on other things, I was off to the gym next morning as soon as I'd sorted Mr Lawrence out back at the Residence, and I benched 165 kegs, squatted 200, and deadlifted 200. And
that
took my mind off my problems, I can tell you – 200 kegs! Pity there wasn't more people there to watch me, but, tell you what, I let everyone know about it for a couple of days! But the blue thing never went away once the old man'd put it there. I'd be going about my business and then suddenly I'd be thinking about it, and I'd be off to see if Dot was about, and she'd get all pissed off, you could see she was getting sick of me. Then I got this brainwave, I decided I'd clean the Residence windows so I could look in and check her out while she was typing? So I'm up this long ladder wiping the old chamois across the glass, and there she is inside at the dining room table, tapping away at the typewriter—all of a sudden Left Butt's down at the foot of the ladder and he's like,
what d'you think you're doing, that's my job, you think you can do it better than me or something?
And I'm like,
just giving a hand, Eric, don't worry
, and then I see Mr Semple wandering round the garden in that hat of his he was born in and I think,
maybe he knows what's going on
—

And that's what I did, I was that full of this business by this stage I got down the ladder and I told him about it, even though Bailey's manual tells you
Never break the confidential relationship between carer and client/patient
. But I did, I told Mr Semple, and the main thing I got out of it was, his breath stunk of onions. I kept backing off and he kept coming close like he couldn't hear me. Course, it might've been on purpose, him eating onions and then going up to people and breathing on them, with him you can never tell. Anyway: blue? he says to me. The old boy? Did he say that? What else did he say? So I told him some of the other queer things Mr Lawrence used to tell me and he just laughs! He's no use to me at all, Mr Semple, he's never serious, not with me, anyway, I wished I hadn't told him anything in the first place. Blue! he says. He's going to turn her blue! Then I go and tell him that other thing I told you about, remember, that time Mr Lawrence looks up at me out of nothing and he tells me,
lipstick and wine are made out of fish scales
, just like that? I told him that, Mr Semple, I told him about the old man telling me that and I thought he was going to fall over he laughed that much. Did he
really
? he keeps saying to me. Did he
really
say that? Just out of the blue?