The Back of His Head (33 page)

I'm trying to be really, really honest here, Patrick. I've told you I liked it, I told you I was starting to do really weird things, more than what I've told you, and it was like someone else was doing them? Like, I started wandering round in the nick, just between his room and mine, through the
en suite
, and sometimes he'd be gaga and sometimes he wouldn't and he'd be watching me.
And, I have to admit it, I liked it when he did
. Just him, no one else. I liked it when he'd sit there watching me wandering round in the nick. It was like
I
was watching, too, I was watching
him
watching
me
with no clothes on. And I started to leave the doors unlocked, so Either-Or could've just walked in when I was like that. I left the door open! It's like I wanted Either-Or to come in and catch me, too—
Either-Or! Can you imagine that?

Heavy, eh? Anyway, Patrick, you'll never guess what I did next. I got a whole-body wax. You finished laughing? I'll give you a minute. Cost an arm and a leg but that's only part of what they were waxing anyway so I can't really growl about it, can I, got it cheap if you think about it like that. Even had a Brazilian down there, know what I mean? Bloody
mad
idea, can't believe I did it now! But I'd got to the stage where I'd been doing poses in the mirror in Mr Lawrence's bathroom—I mean, I'd be wandering around raw and I'd catch sight of myself like that and I'd do some of the poses the body-building boys did in the gym. So there's me, spreading my wings in the mirror like that, and I'm thinking,
I'm not bad, I ought to give this body-building thing a serious go
—next day I'm in a waxing boutique having every bloody hair taken off my body! And I'll tell you something for free, when they take the wax off, when it's set hard and three-two-one it comes off—well, you don't want to be doing that every day of your life, that's all I can say. I got myself home and slapped on the baby oil—you need a bucket of baby oil when you've been waxed, I can tell you—and then I took a look at myself in the mirror. I did a fair sort of spread, and I thought, Christ, look at that, I'm turning into another person! I took a look down my back and it was like I was looking at someone else, I was rippling my back muscles and I was shredded like a skinned rabbit. I looked that good I was near crying.

I remember thinking
he's got me now, now I'd do anything, if he asked me to kill someone I'd do it, that's what I'd do next
. I knew that. And I thought,
maybe that's what's next, maybe that's what he wants me to do?
I'm not kidding you. I don't mind telling you this, Patrick, because the point is, it wasn't me anymore. I was looking at myself like I was someone else—and I
was
, I
was
someone else. I wasn't the me that's talking to you now. I took some photos in the mirror, and I showed them to Mr Lawrence. I guess a part of me was testing the old man—you know, how'd he take it, what'd he do, how far'd he go? Well, work this out. He blew up. Explain that to me. He just flipped his lid, I was really scared for a minute and he's half my size, less than that. This little geezer yelling away at me and trying to get up out of the chair—
you fucking keep your nose out of it!
he's saying.
You think you can be him, you think you can go back there? What d'you think
you
are, part of that world? You belong to
this
one
, he tells me.
Believe me, you belong to
this
one, you fucking stupid piece of meat, that's all you're good for
. Then he looks up at me and he says,
what you are is, you're what's left over. Got that?

All the time he's raving on like this I'm trying to calm him down,
shush shush it's just a joke, didn't mean any harm
kind of thing, and he did calm down after a bit, he settled back in his chair and I tucked his blanket round his legs and I slipped out, I can tell you. He was sitting there looking at the photos, I remember that, he'd hung on to my phone and he was still looking at them. Jesus, I was all shook up when I got outside, though. I'm telling you this because I'm trying to say, that's where he took me, and now I know how it is people do those things you see on the news, there's something happens inside their heads and they just turn into different people. That's what I'm trying to say to you. You get yourself stolen away from you and I don't know how that works and I don't know how he does it, except, that's what he could do to me then. I'd wake in the middle of doing something and I'd think,
am I really doing this, is this really me
, and I'd say,
yes. No. Yes
—

Other-people
, my uncle meant, the novel he wrote after the business of the Prize had begun to die down a little—
Flatland
all over again, in effect, that
ur
-story of his, that
thing
it seemed he could never let go, that wound he was always scratching.
Flatland
reworked, but with its last layer of skin flayed off it—who knew there was still one left to flay?

Here was what he meant when he murmured that sentence to me at the civic reception. He'd had fame at last with
Kerr
and praise he must have dreamed of, and after that, the greatest Prize of all—and then it seemed he wanted to
push
all this away from himself, to bring about his own destruction with this frightening new book, to bring everything down at the height of his greatest success. This was the time he began to talk openly about having betrayed himself, this was when he said he'd taken the wrong path all those years ago, after
Flatland
, and cursed himself for starting to write for the critics, as he put it. But look at the Prizes! I told him. Look what you've achieved!
Fuck
the prizes, he shouted back at me.
The prizes are the problem!
He seemed all but mad at this stage, to tell the truth, and frightened, it seemed, almost, at what he had brought about—as if he was trying to disqualify himself after the fact, once and for all, with one last unforgivable gesture, one final, unimaginable indecency.

There's an order of fiction in the world that is just that, unforgivable, almost criminal: unreadable, but nevertheless read and reread. That Jerzy Kosinski novel—I can't even remember its title but I can remember every moment of the scene where a boy watches a man's eyes being gouged out with a spoon. The scene in which Major Marvy is castrated in
Gravity's Rainbow. The White Hotel
—magnificent, oh, yes: I can remember devouring it in a single sitting but also that final moment with the bayonet, when I threw the book across the room, appalled and never wanting to go near it again—just as I reacted to the last pages of
Flatland
. Unreadable, and every word of it read and read again. Thomas Bernhard, everything of his that I know in English—
The Lime Works
, with its terrible opening scene, all those people covered in excrement. There's a short story—I can't remember the title—in which a man eats part of his own prolapsed innards, slowly, and in detail. And then there's always
Naked Lunch
. So many more as well—and in all of them, genius and evil crouched together in the dung, conspiring, the one thing, inseparable. Hell itself.

Other-people
is one of these works.
Early senility
, someone wondered whom I met in the street shortly after it came out.
A sign of his illness?
said somebody else.
Immensely powerful, crudely written, badly judged:
the closest to the truth of it, in my own opinion, and whispered in my ear, and to my amazement, by Cosmo Dye. For me, it marked the point where Raymond really
had
got there at last. Everything that the Berber youth had meant to him, he whom he called Anir, was finally shown in this book. The conclusion was the conclusion of
Flatland
again but
Flatland
flensed of its last tiny layer of discretion. It is ugly, it is disgusting, it is unreadable. Who knows what might have happened had it appeared before the Prize?

None of this should have surprised me as it did. There had been a moment, as the Nobel celebrations began to die away a little, when I caught him, across a room from me and amidst the babble of others as so often before: gazing, gazing at me, unmoving like a killer that has marked its prey: his level, bezelled gaze never left me.

Anir was back
.

I knew straight away. I felt helpless, I remember. He'd mined me for his most successful novel, I knew that, I knew how things worked now, he'd colonised my emotional life more deeply than ever before. Oh, God, what was happening this time? How did it work? He was doing it all over again, I could feel it beginning to happen again. It was the moment of
Other-people
, I realised later, it was the start of the writing of it.

Immediately, in the days following, the voices starting up yet again in my head, the sudden wakenings in the night from dreams that really weren't dreams at all—
were
they?—and that old sense of possession about the house. Was it me, was it him? As he hammered this new work together and I hung around bedroom doors and woke in the night he seemed, bit by bit, to take me over, to own me. My day-work really began to fall away, I started to make silly mistakes, I forgot meetings and deadlines. He needled me about it, and I forgot more.

Then I saw the Amazigh at last.

Just a glimpse, a movement in the garden seen down the lawn from the window of the front room. I knew immediately who he was, I knew as soon as I saw him. He was real, he really was about the place.
I hadn't been wrong
—

The sight of him—what he was, how he looked to me, the fact of him—shook me, it shook me. I dashed out and into the garden: and there was Val Underwood, bent over amongst roses beneath a couple of our huge, leggy old rhododendrons.

Did you see him? I demanded. She was out there, she
must
have—

I remember her look as she straightened up for me. Who? she wanted to know, and I'd no idea what to say back to her. The albino boy, I said, before I had a chance to think it through. And it was true, and that is how I've always remembered him in that first moment: first and before anything: extraordinarily etiolated, bleached almost white. That is what I'd made of him in that glimpse.

Albino?
she said, and stood there gripping her
secateurs
and staring at me, hard.
You
know, I said. Pale. Pale hair—which was feeble, I knew that, because I remembered him on this first sighting not as pale but as almost transparent.
Transparent?
she said, when I let that slip a second later, and I was immediately sorry I had. What d'you mean—like a ghost? No no no, I said, but I realised that
yes yes yes
, that was probably what I
did
mean. It'll be one of the Kennedy kids next door, she told me, and bent back to her snipping. They're always over, looking for tennis balls. Kevin's blond. No, older than Kevin, I said. And younger than Blaise. I
think
it was a boy.

She gazed back at me over her shoulder, screwing her eyes up slightly as she looked. I'm quite sure she thought me more than a little mad. I can't blame her, I can't blame her at all, at that point.

But then, not much later, I saw him again. This moment was less fleeting. He really was outside my window this time,
that voice
promising to be fully incarnated for me at last: the moment I heard it I flung myself across the room to see him. There—
there
—down on the part of the lawn now lost beneath the Blue Room, and far more plausible than I remembered from my first shot of him—more detailed, more fully present. All this in fading light, I have to say, at about half past six on an autumn evening: a movement, a hand or an arm, perhaps, and loose clothing, swirling in the wind.

A jolt for me, seeing that last detail for the first time: a story beginning, a start, a past. Where had he come from, who was he, what was he doing here, this imaginary youth, this fictional boy who was real? Dissolving now into other things as I looked again and the light continued to fade, into those flecks and smuts and flying wisps of which the evening is made as they faint into darkness: the blowing scrap of paper, the cat's eye glimpsed in the shrubs, the work of small twigs low down, near the ground, as the wind
push-push-pushes
at them. The brief, jagged passage of a moth.

I've
seen
him, I told the old man, when he came back from wherever he'd been that particular day. But he simply walked past me. I've
seen
him, I called out to his back. Who? His voice, from the bedroom now.

The boy, I told him. Your Amazigh. Your Kabyle.

I stood in his bedroom door, looking in. He seemed preoccupied: books and papers flapped from his arms and bounced on the bedspread. Amazigh? he said, as if he'd never heard the word before in his life. He looked puzzled, foul-tempered—again, buffled. What d'you mean, you've seen him?