The Back of His Head by Patrick Evans

him a smoky pale-blue gaze, even though I know that in the photos and the paintings the eyes are another colour, somewhat darker: and a moment of engagement quite unlike anything I had experienced before in my life, a clinch so intense it was almost paralysing. It seized me, it held me: and, then, a moment after that, a turning away, as if to say, I’ve got you , or, I’ve caught you now, you’re mine .
    A stirring in the forest—
    It was so odd, so disturbing, that I never told anyone about it: even my mother, whom I trusted at the time, although that was beginning to change in the usual way. Somehow, the man had uncovered me just by looking at me, had seemed to bare my eleven-year-old self to itself in some primitive way: and then had turned indifferently back to his autumn leaves and his funeral pyre.
    Back home I found Miss Furie again and began an attempt to read it properly and the process at whose far-distant end I’d read all of Raymond Lawrence’s books for the first time through to (perhaps) Bisque . At which point, I had a sense of having lost something about the man that was more important than anything I’d gained by reading him. I never quite got back that crisis of being known by him in that first meeting, of being possessed . Not quite. The man I first saw through the infernal smoke of his rubbish fire was an image I carried through everything that was to come, as if all his subsequent manifestations to me were just slightly diminished versions of that first, Mosaic apparition. I carried this image in my mind as you’d carry a photo in a wallet: the nearest you might get to the thing you were trying to remember, but never again quite the thing itself. A replica, and the more so each time you refer to it, the more so each time I saw him. But, as I came to know him more, always, always, Mephistopheles.

IV

    Hullo? Sorry about that, nearly dropped the recorder on the floor. Thom here again, Patrick—it’s not Thomas, by the way, I see you put Thomas on the cheque and I’ll have to get you to change that when we meet up Thursday, they’re not going to bank it the way it is and I need the dough! You can change it when I hand you this tape back—Thom Ham and that’s it, T-H-O-M new word, H-A-M. Wham-bam-Thom-Ham-thank-you-ma’am —
    Just played some of that back and I want to say, ordinary —you know I said that? The old man? He was just ordinary, average ? Well, he was, he was just a body like everyone else. But if you look at him another way, he wasn’t all that ordinary at all. Once met never forgotten, know what I mean? Get a bit confused when I think about him, it’s all mixed up and, Christ , he did some terrible things, he made people do some terrible things—me, he made me do some terrible things, look what he made me do. But he was this little old geezer at the same time, I’d get him up and I’d walk him—d’you want to know this sort of thing, d’you want to know what I’d do with him day to day? It’ll probably sort itself out for you, it’s not that interesting. Well, some of it is. The walking part is, that’s weird. I’ll tell you about it. There’d be times when he’d be okay, you just had to rub his legs a bit when you’d got him sitting up in the bed and after a while he’d do the rest by himself, I mean he could get himself up and walk. It took a bit but he could do it. You’d be surprised to see him when he got going. Then, other mornings, sometimes the very next morning, he’d be the opposite, you’d have to, like, take him over from himself because he couldn’t do a single thing, know what I mean? I’d have to get him by the armpits and lift him up and it’d be like he was nothing? Mr Orr’d say to me, are you sure you can manage him , and I’d tell him, there’s nothing to manage! I don’t think he believed me, he’d