The Back of His Head (26 page)

Here, at this particular moment, though, I put his behaviour down to the illness, and the slight tinge of paranoia and grandiosity of the sort you can see in what I've just told you I attributed to the same thing: just an episode, a momentary flare-up. Oh, what a misjudgement that would prove to be, I can tell you, the decision to discount an open statement of intent like this. I had no idea then—how could I?—that Raymond was already planning his final chapter, his
dénouement
, his
Götterdämmerung
. And that (if you like) the Sorcerer had found his Apprentice.

First thing I did when I turned up, I sorted out his pills for him. He had to take them at different times each day and I'd mark it off on a chart every time I'd give him a dose. Then someone said, get those bubble packs, the chemist sorts the pills for you, you can see straight away when there's been a miss. One of his pills, though, if you miss it you have to phone the specialist straight off and tell him you've cocked it up. But I never cocked it up, ever, not once. The big change for me was when I moved into the Chicken Coop, and that'd be—I don't know, 1999? When he started falling out of bed and having nightmares? Jeez, the nightmares. What happened was, I was more or less living with Raewyn back then and me and her were in the sack and it's past midnight and the phone goes—Mrs Butt's ringing me, old Edna, Right Butt, and she's saying,
Mr Lawrence isn't well at all, he's talking to a chair, Mr Orr's not here and we don't know what to do
—

So next thing, I'm up at the Residence again, and there's the old boy sitting on his bed having a good old yack to someone who's not there! Part of me knows what's happening and part of me's got the tomtits big time because it was
that
weird—I mean, you could see he really thought there was someone sitting in front of him. Get an ambulance, I tell the Butts, they're just standing there, turns out they didn't want to because they didn't believe in ambulances!—ever heard anything like that before? They wanted me to get down and pray with them instead! So I go up to the old fellow and I say excuse me, and he says,
excuse me, I'm talking to this young lady here
, and he points to the chair in front of him. There's no one on it, I say to him—and he reaches across and smacks me across the side of the head!
Don't you be so bloody cheeky
, he says to me.
You black bastard
. So I thought, bugger you, and I wrestled him down on the bed. I can hear the Butts in the next room praying, and after a while the old bloke stops struggling and then he mutters
I've pissed myself
, and that was that. I tell Either-Or when he turns up later on, and he says,
Julia
? He was talking to
Julia
?

Anyway, that was split city for poor old Raewyn, she told me it was like I was running another woman except it was an old man, and if an old man turned me on more than what she did, then it was time I got a hold of myself. And next thing the trust people decided to shift the old boy out and up to the Coop and me with him. And he
did
change around then, there was the shakes and the nightmares but they were just seeing things from one of the pills he was on, it might've been the Clonazepam. The doctor told us that, he put Mr Lawrence on some new stuff and maybe that was why he seemed to become sort of—less human? I don't know. Just now and then, you'd look at him and it was like he'd switched off,
boom
—tell you what it was like, it was like he'd changed gear? There you go—he'd double-declutched himself! He'd driven off somewhere else and we didn't know where it was!

But I'll tell you when I first started to think,
there's something really weird going on here
. It was one time he took me up the hill with him to look for the dog. It was me that drove, I'd started to get on top of the double-declutch thing, sort of, anyway, but he'd yell at me if I tried to sneak a change without doing it. He was brought up on old jalopies out on the farm, he learned on an old Essex out at Springfield, he told me, and he could double-declutch a car in his sleep. Once we're up at the top he says,
we're back there
. What d'you mean, I ask him, and he says,
now, I mean now, we're back in 1948
. He waves out at the city.
See?
he says.
You wait, when the streetlights come on later you'll see, the city'll be that much smaller, it's a smaller city now it's 1948, it's only a few thousand people
. Then he turns on the radio in the dash—and it starts playing music from back then!
What'd I tell you!
he says,
we're back in 1948!
I got a hell of a shock, I can tell you, I'd had a go at it earlier on and it wouldn't even turn on when I tried, and now here it was, all these Yank stations and a woman singing
inju-u-ure yerself, it's later than you think
—what's that she's singing? I ask the old man—
injure
yourself? He's laughing and laughing at me and I don't know why.
Doris Day?
he's saying to me.
She couldn't injure a baby!

Then he says to me,
it's my new novel. This
, he says.
What we're doing now. It's my new novel. Living like this. It's what I'm writing now
. Like, you know, he was making it all happen himself?—him, me, the car, the wind off the sea—even, you know, the hill the car's standing on?
It's what I'm writing now
, he says. I'm writing all this. So I ask him, what's it called, then, this new book of yours?
What d'you think it's called
, he says.
I've told you, and it's not new, it's the book I've been writing all my life, it's called 1948
. Right, I tell him.
I'm going to stick it up Orwell's arse
, he says.
It's backwards that matters, not forwards, it's 1948 that matters, not 1984
. Then he's out the door and round the back and he's opening the boot, and here he is with a bloody shotgun!

Well, talk about fill my pants—I thought I was going to fill the car. But then he says,
come on, wheel your arse, we're going to get our dinner! Where's the stuff I told you to bring?
You didn't tell me to bring anything, I tell him—
so we're going to eat it raw?
he says back. I thought, Christ, he's going to shoot a sheep. I'll go back down and get the stuff, I told him, but what I really meant was, I'd go back down and ring the cops. And I went back down to the Residence and I sat there in the car under the bluegums and the pines, and what I found was, it felt different compared to the way it felt back up the hill. He seemed so happy, Mr Lawrence. It was fun, I've never spent that much time with an old bugger like that, my parents died fairly young and my grandparents, too. So I just helped myself to a few things around the house, you know, couple of mugs, couple of plates, couple of knives, couple of forks and a few other things, a skillet and so on, and I grabbed some fruit out of the fruit bowl to piss Right Butt off—apples, hand of bananas and that—I load all this in the Dodge and I dodge back up the hill with them.

Early evening by then, still light but not that warm, and there he is above the road, he's up on a bluff and he's waving to me with the gun!
Up!
he's saying—hardly hear him in the breeze.
Up!
So up I go with the stuff I'd got from the Residence, and he just can't wait to tell me.
Shot the bastard
, he calls out before I'm twenty foot away.
Wasn't easy but I shot him and dressed him and he's cooking
. Christ, I thought—he's shot a ram, that's going to be tough eating. He drags me down the other side of the hill and there's gorse and this little sheltered area there and he's got a fire going and the meat's on it, right in the fire.
Give us that skillet
, he says, and he grabs it off me.
It's burning the way it is, good thing it's so fatty
. I could see a tin of peas in the fire, too, and he had a bullet-hole through the side of it as well—you wouldn't believe it, he'd shot the tin of peas? Turns out he's got a lot of things stashed away up there.
This is where I'm going when it starts to happen
, he says to me.
You never know what it's going to be like when things really start to happen
.

When
what
happens, I ask him, but he doesn't say, he's got his head in the gorse and he's pulling out stuff he's hidden away all wrapped up in an old piece of waterproof jacket, I could see the pocket on it when he brought it out. There's a few tins of peas wrapped up and some dried stuff, and he pulls out a bottle as well.
Good thing no bastard's found that
, he says.
Catch!
And then he pulls a pouch out of the waterproof pocket!
And this
, he says, and he starts to roll one like he's done it a few times before. You're not meant to smoke, I tell him, and he gets really pissed off when I say that to him.
Might as well be back down there if you're going to talk to me like that
, he says.
Eating fucking walnuts with the rest of them
. All the time he's rolling the paper and licking it like he wanted to eat it up. He puts it in his mouth and ducks down into the fire for a second and then he comes back up and it's lit.
When I was fighting with Rabah Bitat
, he says,
we'd light up with a pistol shot
. Oh yeah, I said.
One silly fucker tried it with a rifle, took the end off his own bloody nose, the silly prick
. I never really listened when he was slinging me that sort of stuff. He's sitting back and he's sucking the smoke in like it's the best thing he's ever done in his life.
This is my world up here
, he says to me.
Now. 1948. Before it all started to go wrong
.

What d'you think he meant when he was talking like that, Patrick? Maybe he just meant,
this would all be in his book, this was what he had to do to get it going
. And all the time he's poking the fire and stirring the meat and turning it over, and it's starting to smell pretty good—and I have to tell you, Patrick, it wasn't that bad up there on the south-east side. It's out of the wind, we're wrapped up and there's the fire, plus you get the view across the harbour. I'd had a couple of shots out of his bottle, it looked like water and it tasted like liquorice and the good thing was, it did the trick. He's talking all the time I'm drinking and admiring the view, he's telling me about when he was a kid back on the family farm. Hamilton Downs it was called, and he reckoned he used to have a hideaway there like this one, and he'd shoot rabbits and possums there and dress them and cook them for his supper on an open fire the way he was doing in front of me while he was talking. He was always going on about the farm but he never went there except the once at the end, that I'll tell you about when I get there—Christ, I'll never forget
that
.

And now and then he'd poke at the meat in the skillet and then he'd lean back and smoke some more—he rolled three while I was counting. I can't remember what he said but I remember it was funny, Christ, he could be funny, he made me laugh all right and he made himself laugh a bit as well. I stopped taking notice of the weird things he'd said earlier on—like I told you, we had really good times together and that was one of them. I'll never forget the times we had like that. And all the time there was the meat, it was starting to smell good.
What we're really waiting for, we're waiting for the peas
, he said.
That can's going to be a bugger to open hot
. It was too when he got round to it, he swore a lot and he kept dropping it and flapping his hand and blowing on it but in the end he got the opener going and worked a hole could shake the peas out, half on each plate.
There you go!
he says. You could have done that at the start, I told him, when it was cold. Opened it with the opener.
Yes, I could
, he says,
but I wanted to put a bullet through it, then everything we're eating's been shot by me, see?

What about the bananas? I ask him, and he says,
bananas?
Stole some bananas for you, I said, and I showed him.
You silly prick
, he says,
they're wax bananas
, can't you tell the difference? And he marches off with them and puts them on a rock.
Target practice after supper
, he says. Then he's back and shoving a piece of meat into his mouth and gobbling at it.
Here
, he says, he's holding out a plate.
Wolf that down, the meat's falling off the bone. It's better than it looks, get that in you
. And I was that hungry I wolfed it down like he told me to. It was pinky-red like rabbit meat but fattier, quite greasy, first off I thought I was eating an old sheep, some full-mouth ewe he'd got from somewhere. But it wasn't fatty enough—to tell the truth though I was that bloody hungry I didn't really care what it tasted like. Him, too. There's the two of us kneeling on either side of the fire tearing at the meat even when the rest of it's still cooking!