The Back of His Head (30 page)

There you go again, see—
out of the blue
. It's like it gets into everything! He must've thought it was
me
that was the problem, Mr Semple must've, because I shot off when he said that.
Excuse me
, I'm saying to him, and I'm off. Next time I see him though he calls out to me, you were right!—he'd taken a look at Dot and he said yes, definitely blue. Sort of blue-grey? I asked him, and he said, no, definitely blue, she'll be the same as the Blue Room next—which is exactly what Mr Lawrence'd told me! So next time she was typing I made an excuse and I managed to get a good look at her. From one angle I'd think
yes
, and then I'd wander round the other side and I'd think
no
. I couldn't decide. So I began to think, maybe he was making it up, Mr Semple, because like I say you could never tell with him. I started to wonder, was he pretending to think Dot Round had turned blue, was he just pulling my tit and I couldn't tell? After a while I didn't know if I was making stuff up, too. But he told me one thing, Mr Semple, he said, did you know Dot isn't all that well? And I said no, I didn't know that and I was very sorry, and then he told me what it was she had but I can't remember the details except she was meant to have regular blood transfusions and that clashed with her beliefs. It felt a bit like he was starting to pull my leg again, like when he told me about Catholics having colds all the time. So I just left it. I tried to concentrate on what I was meant to be doing, but the more time I spent with Mr Lawrence the more I thought about Dot and what he said he was going to do to her.

And after a while she did start to go downhill, and that's when I really began to get the wind up. There was a week when she didn't turn up and then another, and then all of sudden there's this new woman doing the typing. She seemed really nice, pretty young, and I thought,
I wouldn't mind
. This wasn't all that long after Raewyn and me had, you know. So when I see this new chick with Either-Or in the dining room—he was showing her the typewriter and he was telling her what he wanted—I slip back down the ladder and come in like I had to do the insides. Oh, hullo, I say, like I didn't know she was there. Either-Or doesn't look across at me but he says, Aileen's covering for Mrs Round. And then he says to her, this is Gradus. She says to me, pleased to meet you, Mr Gradus, and when she says that he laughs, the prick, it was the only time I ever heard him laugh. It's Thom Ham, I said to her—pleased to meet you, Thom, she says to me.

Really nice girl, I really liked her, though for a while she thought my name was Tom Gradus, she used to put that on notes for me.
Thom Ham
, I'd tell her.
T-H-O-M, new word, H-A-M
. Anyway, Mrs Round, she didn't come back, and a couple of months after Aileen turned up, she died—that's her name, Aileen Cross, this girl that took her place. No, it wasn't much more than two months. Mr Yuile told me that at the funeral. Her liver packed up, he told me. You don't get long with the liver. And it wasn't your usual sort of funeral, I haven't been to that many but it was in someone's house and people took turns to say something and Dot wasn't there, I mean you couldn't see her. I was hoping for an open coffin, I thought I'd be able to check on her colour if she was sitting up in a coffin looking like one of the wax bananas—but the lid was down. I asked Mr Semple, and he said yes, he'd seen Dot just before she passed on and she was definitely blue, but he had this silly look on his face when he told me and I wondered why I'd bothered in the first place.

Right Butt said an interesting thing, though—when I asked her, was Dot blue at all, she didn't laugh at me, she said, no, more a sort of silvery-grey colour. So what d'you make of
that
? I don't know what I think when I look back. But when I go back to when things really started to happen, I reckon there might have been something to what the old man said. I mean, he told me he was going to do it, then her skin definitely changed, then she died. You can't deny that. Every time I try to remember back then, though, I have trouble with the colour. Sometimes I remember what I told you just now, you know, not quite sure, then a couple of times I dream about her, and each time she's bright blue—shit, I feel stupid talking like this! And the dreams started to get mixed up with how I think of it when I look back so I'm not sure what exactly happened.

But the old man was clear about it.
Bright blue
, he says to me.
I told you
. We were down in the garden room, after the funeral, he didn't go to it because of his bladder.
Poor old Dot
, he says.
I sure hated doing it to her
. Doing what, I asked him.
You remember
, he said.
I told you I'd turn her blue and then she'd die
. You mean you killed her? I asked him.
I mean she'd come to the end of her sentence
, he said.
I chose her because of her nickname. Dot. Full stop. Period. She was there to end the sentence. There to end the sentence?
I'm asking myself, and I asked him about that because it seemed such a cold hard thing to say.
She switched typewriters and I didn't like that
, he says to me.
That was the other thing. That plug-in golfball thing
, he says,
why'd she ask for one of those, what's wrong with the old Imperial we used to have? I told you her time was up, and it's up
.

But then when he's said this he looks up at me and he gives me a smile. He's got his teeth in for a change and he gives me this—I don't know—he gives me this really, really nice—smile. No, it was better than that, it was—tell you what, it was like when—d'you remember, Patrick?—when I first come across him back at the Residence? You know, he comes up the wheelchair elevator like Old Nick coming up out of Hell, and he winks at me when he gets to the top? It was like that. I can't explain it to you but it was like something happened between us? It was like he looked right
into
me? These pale blue eyes, I couldn't look away?—I didn't want to. It was like he really
knew
me, and it was like, that was all right, he liked what he was seeing, everything was okay, I could do anything I wanted and it'd be okay. And
he
could do anything
he
wanted, too, that was part of it, and I wanted him to. I wanted to reach out and hug him and say
sorry
. Sorry what for, I don't know, I just don't—Christ, this doesn't make much sense, does it? But you said you wanted to know everything and here it is. I wanted him to do anything, I don't know what it was I wanted him to do, but whatever it was I'd've let him do it, I knew that. I'd've done anything he wanted when he was looking at me like that. I'd've followed him into Hell if he'd asked. It was only five seconds I was thinking all this, but shit, it was big. Making any sense to you, Patrick? You ever had anything like that happen to you?
Shit
, it was powerful.
You are mine
, it was like he said that to me. That's what I thought to myself afterwards, it really got to me.
I am yours, and whatever you ask me I'll do, just ask me and I'll do it
. How d'you like
that
? How d'you like

Slowly, reluctantly, I settled into my new role—well, that's what I'd like to be able to write, but it's not true, it's not true at all. In fact I settled into my new, responsible, everyday life eagerly, easily, happily, and it became a part of me straight away. I was dismayed—I was appalled! This was the period when we began to make the transition that turned the house, step by step, into the Residence and the centre of the Raymond Lawrence empire. To say I made this business mine simply doesn't say enough.

To start with, we got rid of Raymond's terrible old chicken coop from up behind No. 23: out it went, chickens and all, and in its place came the prefabricated second house that took its name. We'd waited for Raymond to turn his back—by
we
I mean me and the others, Marjorie and Robert, all three of us by now very much wedded into the life of the Master. Then we made our move: and, when he came back from one of his many nostalgic jaunts to North Africa, as they seemed to us then—why, there it was, the Chicken Coop, newly named and a sudden, bland structure looming up behind his own.

He pretended to be much annoyed that we'd
done it behind his back
, but he really
was
annoyed at the colour we proposed to paint it.
Not
that
blue!
he shouted at us when we showed him the colour-chart:
that's blue-rinse blue!

Anything but blue, he said, when calmed: the Coop was a civilian buidling after all. In the end we settled on an insipid, creamy-yellow-tallowy sort of colour instead:
might as well be a school building
, he grumbled when we were done.

I managed all this myself, pretty much, young as I was at the time: not yet twenty, not quite—extraordinary, isn't it? Phone calls, lawyers, boundary negotiations, permits, meetings with the builder and his men: above all, the financial jiggery-pokery involved. It seemed I could make decisions, it seemed, above all, that I was
good with money!

Realising
that
took me aback, I can tell you—what had happened to the sensitive child of the arts, son of the muses? I was shocked to see how easily it all came to me, the
business of business
, and taken aback at how much I enjoyed it and at the banal satisfaction I felt at the end of each busy, phone-shot day. Was this all there was to me after all, had the old man been right all along: was I really made for nothing better than the butyric whiff of the getting-and-spending world? Well, yes, it seems he was right, disconcertingly so, and that a rather large part of me
was
.

Not all, though. The more I spent the day getting and spending, the more I reached, each Friday at six o'clock (and, some weeks, more frequently than that), for the compensations of Art. How quickly I turned to the Amontillado and the Bristol Cream, how eagerly I pressed the black shellac discs onto the soft dark felt of the turntable one after the other and awaited the redemptive, cleansing hiss of the diamond needle. Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Mozart, the incomparable choral works of Johannes Brahms—oh, ‘Longing Laid to Rest', with Jessye Norman: this allowed to myself but once a year, so wrenching is it to hear. And Elgar, anything by Elgar. Richard Strauss as well.

From time to time, too (I hesitate to admit this), I would listen to
Hansel and Gretel
, an opera that reduces me to helpless tears from its very first note: ridiculous, I know, but every time I hear it I am pulled, blubbering, back into a world more real than anything else I know: into
that
world—the enchanted forest in which everything is so very much more than just itself, and which has no end. Whose captive children are set free at its conclusion and are yet
are children still
: and
that
is the nature of their freedom.

As you can see, I'd never fully left behind, after all, that magical world from which I'd been banished. It was there as I pressed out phone numbers and totted up lists of figures, found the cost of things, tut-tutted with builders and research librarians alike: it was around me in every daily moment like the smell of an animal. It was in my mind as I explored the beginnings of a trust with the Master and first realised that he intended, to my dismay, that any such venture should involve Marjorie and Robert as well. It was present as I slowly persuaded him, later, that Julian should be part of the venture as a sort of a balance.

It was present again a little later, too, when, out of a clear blue sky, Geneva's crass little critical biography appeared. It was I who dealt with the fallout of
that
venture, or much of it—managing the media and also, when things had settled a little, interviewing our staff to see from whence the leaks had come: our gardening ladies dwindled in number after
that
unpleasant little episode, I can tell you. I still have suspicions about others of the Master's followers—about Semple, most obviously.

There you are! Raymond said to me after a while of this deediness, when I was twenty-one or two or three. You really are a moron! A worldly man, he meant, I suppose: but, oh, how the words hurt me, how like a knife they cut at my soul, at the very bowels of my being. I'd like to say he meant no harm, except, of course, that he did. A civilian, he meant:
no, no, I'm still an artist
, I used to insist to myself each time he made my lesser status clear to me like this. But in my heart of hearts I knew it wasn't true.
An artist?
he would demand, if ever I dared assert myself with a brave little occasional squeak, and then he'd hold up his pen to me, or a page of manuscript, or, indeed, one of his novels entire:
where's yours?
he'd ask.
Mm—?

Instead, for him, I must have seemed no more than those lesser beings who gather at the foot of Parnassus. At worst, those broken-winged gulls I mentioned many pages ago, people like Marjorie and Robert but also creatures even less than that, far less, the desperate and the disturbed and the inconsolable, squawking and squabbling at the crumbs of fame. At best, no more than Julian or I—useful idiots of the art world, organisers of readings and conferences and even (sometimes) publication, experts at finding funding, handling correspondence and getting writers in and out of taxis and onto planes.
Artholes
, Raymond sometimes called us.

And behind his shoulders all the time, as we his followers scurried about hewing his wood and drawing his water, the rustling of that wondrous, magical, now-forbidden forest. The feared and beloved weald of the European imagination, in which all our childhood minds are formed and from which all our stories come. Gone.

Not so far so, though, that I couldn't hear the rustle of its leaves from time to time. For one thing, I still knew whenever he began to write again. Those sounds, those familiar scents, the change in the mood about the place—they started up straight away, as soon as I'd been banished, as if getting rid of me had set him free in some way.

Such signs were as unmistakable as ever in this time I describe. First, the familiar jaunt to my uncle's spirits that always came with inspiration, the sudden warbling and whistling and flirting, the reckless teasing of Mesdames Round and Butt and even the redoubtable Mrs During as she bent to scrub his loo.
Raymond's in love again
, I remember someone saying when
the moment
of one of the earlier novels arrived upon us like this—
Bisque
, it was, possibly, and maybe it was Basil Bush who said it to me. I remember my uncle bursting out of the garden room one day early in the creation of one or other of his novels back then:
By God, 'tis good!
he cried:
and if you like it you may!

And, now, as I say, all this was unmistakably with us once again. There was I, his bumboy newly hatched, struggling (I think I remember this right) to get a cache of his documents out of the old wooden garage down below the house and into a van and off to the local university research library for cataloguing. One of the librarians helped me and a miserable, limp-wristed pair we were, too, grunting and sweating each filing cabinet and laden cardboard box out and into the van and off and away. And there was Raymond, up above us in the garden room of No. 23, doors flung wide apart as he sat scribbling at his
écritoire
, and there he was again, bounding up the outdoor steps with fistfuls of manuscript, and hugging Dot Round with delight (as she told me later) above her typewriter in the room above, and there he was yet once more, singing at the top of his voice and urging the others to join in. Ah, yes, a
nest of singing birds
they certainly were at this early stage of things. Such elation!

And then, after that but not soon, the next phase.
Christ on the road to Emmaus
, he used to call it, my uncle: meaning the sense that, suddenly, someone else was with us.
Who is the turd who walks always beside you?
he'd ask when he knew the house had begun to fill with these new presences.
It's almost as if there's someone there
, I remember no less than Mrs Butt saying once when the house had begun to fill with the sense of his creations, or possibly it was no less than Mrs During who said it to me.
It's almost as if you can feel the things he's writing about
.

Whichever woman said it I knew what she meant, and I knew it was uncomfortable for her not least because the apprehension was so plausible—I mean the overwhelming sense that some kind of created presence-of-the-moment really was about the place,
in
this world with everything else—the dog, Mrs During, Mrs Round, the gardening ladies, the milkman each morning at the gate, the paper-boy in the afternoon: present, and up to its unknowable business. These presences were the other side of the process which had started, for me, when he held up that second-hand frock all those years earlier and asked me to be his momentary Julia. We'd stepped into the universe of his imagination: now, back it came, stepping into our safe, predictable little orrery universe, with its house and its garage and its garden and the people who lived in and around them.

No apparitions, not yet: instead, just the creak of a floorboard, perhaps, or the closing of a door that, when checked, might still be open after all: even, sometimes, the sense of the murmur of a voice: something, someone, about the place. Smells, too, of apples or cigarette smoke—or, once, for a moment, petrol—all these when the house was otherwise empty: and, always, always, the smell of the sea. That
Mediterranean smell
as we came to think of it, the smell of his writing. By this stage the ecstasy and the agony were past and the rest of it was just work, the usual toil and pain. Raymond was himself again, become more nearly a human being once more or as much so as he might ever be: a little
buffled
, as he used to say—another of his nonce words—but busy, sometimes tormented in the old way, sometimes less so, and always very much preoccupied, pushing his work along, worrying at it, worrying it along.

What
was
this work, though, what was he writing about this time?
Mind your fucking business
, he told me when I tried to find out.
You'll know in due course. Just wait your patience
, he said to me another time, when I tried to ask the question circuitously.
Like everyone else
. And then:
how's the cataloguing going?

That was how he kept me away from where I most wanted to be—where I
yearned
to be again, now he'd so utterly cut me from it. He always answered questions about art with answers about life:
my
life, that is, my new life as his
trainee personal assistant
(the term we settled on in due course). He always reminded me, in other words, of what I'd given up and of what I'd turned into. Where've you got to? I'd asked him, hopefully, idling at his door:
Out of ink
, he'd say, briskly, sometimes, holding up an empty inkbottle.
That's where I've got to. Off you go—Stephens Radiant Blue, go on, go on, you know where to get it
.

Then:
ta
, nothing more, whenever I scurried back from the store in the laundry with a fresh bottle for him, as eager to please as Daisy the dog. I'd stand in the doorway of the garden room, the pliers still in my hand with which I always tweaked off each new cap for him, ink on my fingers from filling the Parker 51, and hoping—
hoping
—that he might let something slip about what it was he was writing at the moment. He'd look up:
that's all
, he'd say, knowing full well, I'm sure, what it was I'd been waiting for. Oh, love locked out, locked out!

Thus it was that
Nineteen Forty-Eight
, when it appeared, was as much a surprise to me as it was to anyone else. A satire of the Orwell novel, of all things!—set somewhat closer to home, of course, in the actual Oceania from which his protagonists—a couple of youngsters not much older than the children of the
Miss Furie
novel—come and go via a dilapidated suburban kitchen remarkably like the one we show visitors to the Residence: a portal to the past, to the year of the title, a period he became increasingly obsessed with as he went on.
It all began then
, I remember him saying to me.
That's when we started to fuck it all up
. As his readers will know, it doesn't become all that much clearer in the novel.

He spent more and more time in the Dodge when he was writing it, I remember, driving around or just sitting there—and, it must be said, he enjoyed the same prepositional relationship to Marjorie, too, at the time: she who, by this stage, had long been his lover well and truly. By this time she was more or less living at the house—much tut-tutting from Mesdames Round and During and from Mrs Butt as well. Marjorie had to be there, of course, if for no better reason than that Raymond's favourite creation was back in this new novel, adding a further dimension to Orwell's famous line
do it to Julia
. It was that kind of novel.