The Back of His Head (25 page)

‘Yes—he got off, though,' I remind them. ‘Remember that.'

‘Well, so he should have—he obviously had nothing to do with it.'

Not this again. ‘But he was
there
, for goodness' sake—when it
happened
. He was
right there!
'

‘Oh, come on, Norman, he just happened to be there. Apart from anything else he was too fucking stupid to do what they accused him of—wasn't that the defence, he was too thick to follow a plot?'

‘And the jury bought it!'

‘They didn't
buy
it, Marge—'

‘Don't call me Marge—'

‘—they could
see
it was
true
and they let him
off, that's
what the jury did—'

‘Now, now.' Julian the peacemaker. ‘It's all in the past—'

‘No it's not, not as long as Norman Bates here still thinks Thom was a secret agent from—what did you say it was? The BLT?'

More laughter. I despise them, I despise them.

‘The French foreign intelligence service,' I tell them, as coolly as I can manage. ‘The DGSE.'

This to Semple, in fact, since he's the one who has most to say on the topic. I'm appalled that they should treat it so lightly, given what it involves.
Gradus
. I'm resolved to say nothing more on it, though—I regret my outburst a moment ago, but the miscarriage of justice involved has always been too much for me.
I can't believe I'm having to think about this man again
—

The full meaning of what's happening is still coming to me as I stand here watching the other three fiddling with the tape. I'm beginning to understand something of what Geneva has done and what this new irruption into our lives really means: she's made contact with this dreadful man, with whom I associate such chaos, such utter destruction—she knows him and
that is who is being interviewed
—

‘Are you all right, Peter?' Marjorie has caught sight of me. ‘Just eaten a plastic bag or something?'

I stare at her. Of course, I can't say a thing. She really
is
blackmailing us, Geneva, of that I'm certain now. Towards the end Raymond would blurt out anything—who knows what he told this idiot who was looking after him then, and who knows who's been paying him to find that out? Who knows what he says on these tapes? Who knows what Geneva knows?

Again, in my rear-view mirror as I drive home from all this, the damson-coloured Dodge. It's as jolting a moment as the first time I saw the car looming up behind me where there was nothing a second or two before, far too close and very determined to overtake me—again, I signal and pull over to let him by. This time, as he blares past me, I'm
certain
that it's him, Raymond, crouched over with that grubby little trilby hat on as he holds the wheel—yes,
surely
it's him: he even flicks me a glance as he goes past. You, is it you? He gives me a couple of long blasts on the horn as if to tell me
yes, yes, I'm still here
—

Quite apart from anything else,
Thom Ham
is, by a slightly disconcerting coincidence, two fragments of
Thomas Hamilton
, the name of the protagonist of the Master's early and middle-period novels. I remember telling the old man, back then, that I was about to interview one of his characters for a job at the Residence: he seemed unsurprised.

Naturally, I'd been keen to have some kind of literary applicant to a position the Trust had felt was well overdue for creation once the old fellow began his long, lamentable slide towards his end. All this was happening more than fifteen years ago now, not long after the apotheosis at Stockholm and at a point when it was becoming clear what the final stages of Raymond's illness were actually going to bring us.

For a long time, the occasional unfortunate lapse in his social behaviour could be seen as a hiccup within a normality that was often better than that: whatever went wrong, within hours it seemed he was Raymond Thomas Lawrence once again: familiar, reliable enough around the house at least and well worth the occasional risk outside it—capable of walking Daisy the dog, for example, even up to the Summit Road and down again, in those days, or down to Tony's and back again with a small order of groceries, arriving at the door pleased with himself and puffing, apple-cheeked and white of beard like a miniature Santa Claus. It was charming, there was no doubting that, often it was charming to see, and, given his condition, not a little touching as well.

The thought that he might in fact be in the process of crossing some sort of psychological Rubicon was prompted when he went missing for two days—you can imagine what we thought had happened and the relief when we heard his car had been found on a riverbed outside town and then Raymond himself a little later on, at the foot of the nearby motorway bridge—it was when this episode occurred and once we'd brought him back home that we made our decision. He was raving on about industrial fertiliser, of all things, and it took us a while to work out what he might have meant by
that
, of course. As far as he was concerned he'd been back in North Africa in the late fifties, no question about it, and fighting the
Pieds-Noirs
once more, blowing up bridges and railway tracks—at one point, he claimed, an entire Esso fuel dump.
Boof!

And then, shortly afterwards, there was that unfortunate—most unfortunate—event that I've mentioned before, at the opening of the very writing school the local university had gone to the trouble of setting up in his name. By this stage we were in no doubt that, for him, things had begun to turn about, and that his lucid episodes were becoming the hiatuses in an emerging pattern of misjudgements and misfortunes and, sometimes, just plain old disasters. It was his condition, we thought: it was the illness taking him over.

Bailey's, Marjorie said. She meant a geriatric-care firm: she'd used them for her parents when their time came. They were very good, she said: first-rate. Polished my father off in six months and my mother in twelve.

Bailey's. No one could blame them, of course. The initial phone call told me little: yes, in point of fact, they said, there
was
someone they'd just trained who had a university background, though they couldn't guarantee the degree was actually in English literature. Ah, but can he lift and turn, I asked, shrewdly foreseeing impending requirements. Oh, yes, they said, he can lift and turn all right. We'll send him round, you can take a look at him.

Take a look at him!—there was no alternative. He appeared the following day at my office: he simply walked in. I looked up from my desk and couldn't believe what I saw. The most extraordinary build, first of all, massive, looming, filling the doorway to the top and sides, his height even requiring him to duck a little to get his head quite under the lintel. Six foot six or seven, in the old measurement, or a couple of metres in the new?—whichever way, the effect was overwhelming. Yes, weights, he said when I asked him: weights footie boxing and that. He bowed the legs of the office chair I'd indicated he should sit in.

It didn't take very many questions for me to decide, privately, that this was not the man for the job. For a start, the way he spoke began to irritate me, the way each of his sentences sounded like a question, lifting up at the end as if it were asking something when there was nothing in any of them that actually required to be answered, and, in fact, nothing particularly much in them at all. Then there was the laugh, itself like a form of punctuation that occurred every few seconds, a cachinnation completely without purpose or wit and which, at the moment, I'm completely at a loss to find words for. A silly, irritating neighing sound, or sometimes (it used to occur to me, when I heard it coming through the wall of the Residence or up in the Coop) like the honk of a goose. It appalled me, it obsessed me. It was the desolating, contentless quack-quack of the universe, the very sound of vacancy itself.

Oh, there was more to my response than just these things, I assure you of that, and I'm willing to admit that in himself he didn't entirely deserve all the reaction that he received from me in the time he was with us. I'm not as utterly shut off to myself as some have assured me I am, not at all.

As the interview went on, though, it began to dawn on me that this fellow—this Thom Ham person, I mean, this enormous, inconsequential hunk of muscle and meat that had come through my office doorway—had no idea whatsoever of where it was he'd come to. I mean that he'd walked right up to the Residence—had even banged at the front door down there, he told me, and looked in at the windows and tapped at them and called out before he'd turned away and tried the Coop next door—all this without the slightest inkling of where it was that fate had brought him. He'd even walked past, and ignored, the sign that read
Raymond Thomas Lawrence Residence/Home of the Nobel Laureate/Tours by Arrangement
—!

Raymond Lawrence, I said to him. Nope, he said. Raymond Thomas Lawrence? I asked. Never heard of him, he said, and gave that extraordinary laugh again as if he had not a single thought in his head. Not heard of Raymond Thomas Lawrence? I asked him. Do the words
Nobel Prize
mean anything to you? Nobel Prize, he said, to himself, as if it were a question off
Mastermind
. Then: Nope, sorry.

When I spelled it out for him, though, he couldn't believe what I told him. The
Nobel Prize
? he asked, and he kept saying it to himself over and over again. He lives right here and he won the Nobel Prize? Far out, he said. You wouldn't credit it. Then he said, tell me again what he won it for?

So I took him on a tour of the Residence. And that is where he met Raymond, and the whole terrible business, as it would prove to be, began.

They hardly met, no more than a minute at the top of the elevator once the old fellow had come up on it, rather unexpectedly, to find out who it was he could hear me taking around the Residence. After that—and rather impressively, I have to admit—this weightlifter person carried the old man up to the Coop for me, wheelchair and all, and then he left us there and off he went on his racing bike, which seemed tiny beneath him, I remember, ridiculously slight, like a wafer between his massive legs. Cheers, he called back to us, over his shoulder, and of course I hated that, too. What can it mean: what's so very wrong with
goodbye
or
thank you
?

That's the man
, the old fellow told me as soon as the weightlifter had gone.
What's the bugger's name?
I stared at him, I remember: I couldn't believe my ears. What d'you mean, I demanded. What d'you mean,
that's the man?

This
is the moment that really took me by surprise. To my knowledge, none of the Trust members had said anything to Raymond yet about getting a little help for him—as far as we were concerned, we thought we'd find out what was available first, and then, if we found somebody suitable (and I'd already crossed this feckless iron-pumper off the list in my mind), we'd set about the business of gently breaking the news:
Raymond, we've come to the conclusion that maybe it's time to look for a little help
—and so on. A companion, we were going to call this person: someone who, if not quite in their eighth decade as he was, would certainly be closer to it than this inane failed geographer with his enormous body and (it has to be said) his tiny, disproportionate
cranidumb
. Someone to
hang out with
, we would have said. A mate.

Well, what Raymond meant by
that's the man
, it seemed, was that our search was at an end. I presumed it was Semple who told him that it had begun in the first place, though of course he loudly denied having done so when I confronted him later that day. Raymond had worked it out for himself, he insisted: we all of us knew he had a second sense about this sort of thing, we all knew he was nobody's fool. He'd obviously worked it out, he said, and he'd gone and made his choice. After all (he reminded me), he was the one whomever we hired would have to work with, and he'd obviously decided this was someone who could work with him.

Love at first sight, he said. Go with it.

But he's an idiot! I said to Raymond, after I'd finished with Semple. He doesn't know one end of a book from another!
That's
why he's the man! the old fellow said—I couldn't believe it, I simply couldn't believe he'd say something like that. But surely you want someone you can talk with, I suggested, someone you—but at this point he really exploded at me, Raymond, he simply blew up in my face.
Fuck
it, man!—and he brought his little fists up like a boxer and bared his grimy bottom teeth at me. I don't need someone to sit with knitting under a fucking
travel
rug, he hissed. I want a fucking
follower
!

It was a disturbing moment. I gazed at him, I remember, trying to assess the status of what he'd just said to me. It was easy to see these explosions as part of the illness as it was taking him over—and perhaps as part of his frustration, too, at a world that was becoming more and more in-and-out-of-focus for him, presenting alarming
non sequiturs
out of the blue, moments of sheer, inexplicable terror at the presenting world. On the other hand I could remember these gallus performances from when I was a lad, that boxer's stance of his and the bared lower teeth: seeing these once again always brought back memories, made me tighten up a little down below, revived some of that old primal fear and panic. Around Raymond at any age, it was easy enough to become twelve years old again in half a second: less.