The Back of His Head (9 page)

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 stand there watching and he could see me wearing my lifter's belt, it looked all serious but it wasn't, I'm telling you the truth, it was like lifting nothing, it was like the old man'd already gone and I'm holding nothing up in the air, just the space where he used to be.

And one day I'm standing there holding him up like that from behind, and Mr Orr's there watching me, and I'm right up against the old boy like I'm doing the Heimlich maneuver on him—that's one of the things Baileys teaches you, the Heimlich maneuver, in case your client chokes on his rusk—and Mr Orr, he says to me, what's your secret? And I couldn't help it, I told him,
I've got him propped up on my dick
. I thought it was a hell of a funny, I'm laughing now, you can hear me, excuse me—excuse me—sorry—yeah. Jeez. Anyway, Mr Orr, he
definitely
didn't think it was funny, he just blew his stack at me, I thought he was going to sack me on the spot?
Shit
he was angry? This is Raymond Lawrence you're talking about, he tells me. He is a great man. You're literally holding his life in your hands. You're paid to care for him and that means what it says, you're not paid to disrespect him. He told me stuff like that. I tell him, keep your hair on, and he gives me this funny look. I'd often tell him that, to get under his skin.
Keep your hair on, Mr Orr
, I'd tell him.

Right, what was I saying? That's right, getting the old man walking. You see, there's times when he just couldn't move. I'd hold him up from behind, no problems, like I said. I'd hold him there and hold him there and you can tell he just couldn't get his legs going, he couldn't get his feet moving on the floor. So I'd give his left leg just a nudge from behind with my kneecap, then the right with the right, same thing, and then the left with the left again and so on. And he'd start to move. What it felt like when I was doing that is, it felt like I was putting him on like I was putting on his clothes. Now
that's
a weird feeling, I mean, becoming someone else. It's like he was getting his life out of me, sucking it out of me—can you see what I'm trying to say? Like when you give another car a shunt along the road with yours to get it started? Felt like that. Weird.

After a bit he'd start moving his feet on his own, as long as I was holding him up. Then after a bit more I could feel him pulling away from me and moving himself, and he was separated off, and—well, there he'd be, in front of me, he'd be moving away from me. It was like teaching a kid to ride a bike, you know, you run along behind and hold them steady for a while and then they're off, they don't need you anymore? It's like I'd made him, it's like I'd made him—
happen
. I said this to old Peter once—I'd never call him that to his face, by the way, all the rest of the Residence staff called him Mr Orr, so I was supposed to call him Mr Orr, too, but I tell you what I called him, I called him Either-Or—get it? Peter Orr, Either-Or? Just to myself. He called me Gradus and I called him that. Anyway, I say this to old Either-Or, I tell him,
when I get Mr Lawrence moving again like that it's like I've made him, know what I mean?
And he says to me,
you've been working here too long, you're starting to think like a literary person, Gradus, not a colouring-in person
. He does it in that smart-arsed smirky way that makes you want to hit him—like he's from somewhere special. And I knew he'd got that name from somewhere, Gradus, I knew it wasn't meant to be a compliment, I could tell that just from looking at his face, the way he said it—
d'you
know what he meant, by the way, Patrick? Gradus?

Anyway, doesn't matter, he was the same with everyone, it wasn't just me. No one liked him, not even the other writer people Mr Lawrence knew, Julian and all the others that still hung around him—d'you know Julian Yuile? He's not a bad guy but not exciting, definitely not exciting, none of them's exciting on the Trust. It's because he doesn't like himself, Val said—this is Mr Orr she's talking about, not Mr Yuile. It's because he doesn't like himself, she reckoned, that's why he's the way he is, and I thought about that for a while. It's because he's frightened of liking you, she told me, that's also in the mix. And because he's frightened you might like him back. Not much chance of that, I told her. She's a good woman, Val, sometimes I think it was a shame she was just a little bit outside my target area for taking old Jumbo for a walk.

But anyway, getting a bit off the topic here, aren't I? Telling you about old Either-Or trying to wind my clock, but after I'd thought about it for a while it seemed to me he was actually trying to say something else about me and this Thomas Hamilton, and what he was trying to say was the same thing I've been trying to say to you just now, when it seemed like I was putting Mr Lawrence on like clothes. I wouldn't mind talking to you about it sometime when you're free, because it's niggling at me. It's true, what old Either-Or says is true, you do start thinking different things when you get caught up with people like that, and I don't think it's always for the better. I don't think writers are all-that-happy people, to tell you the truth, not as far as I've seen, anyway. I don't know why they do it, writing I mean, it doesn't seem to make them any happier. Nothing personal, no offence intended. I don't

Wednesday afternoon, and here I am, limping my car over judder bars and into a little world of quadrangles and cloisters and tight-ribbed stone staircases. Years ago, when every other college of our local university departed to new accommodation in the north-western suburbs, the College of Arts remained here in the city, in charming mock-Gothic buildings first thrown up nearly a hundred years before. Its desks are still gouged with the names of young scholars long since rooted out of their tabernacles.

The English Department is in the old Physics building here in this second quadrangle, near a large Japanese gingko tree that flowers magnificently in spring and emits a terrible stench in autumn. You can imagine what Raymond made of something like
that
—his fiction is full of gingkos that drop their noisome seed at inopportune moments. The Raymond Lawrence School for the Creative Arts is next to the English department, in a building now almost completely repaired following the events of October 2007. It's scheduled to re-open next month.

Ah, yes, the Raymond Lawrence School of Creative Writing—focus of the greatest arguments Raymond and I ever had. Of course the others in the Trust were involved, too, even though that body had yet to be formally established at the time I'm talking about: we were his friends, in effect his family, even though not all of us especially liked one another—and most like a family in that, you might say.

But we were united in wanting to commemorate the great man tangibly: so that, when the Registrar of the University here contacted us a dozen years ago on behalf of the University's council to sound out the possibility of setting the School up in Raymond's name, we leapt, collectively, at the opportunity. What better thought? Even the suggestion that we might join the other funders of the project, a wealthy local law firm, seemed acceptable: at that stage Raymond's sales were at high tide and there was money elsewhere and of course from the Prize itself, though the family farm at Springfield was—and still is—tied up in a trust.

Money, at that stage at least, was never the problem:
Raymond
was the problem, and what turned out to be his extreme reluctance—nay, outright resistance—to the entire adventure made in his name.

Oh, thank you,
thank you
, do I get a say?
—his opening shot when first I put the proposal to him.
This seems to have got a long way behind my fucking back, do I not count for anything anymore? I'm sick in the head now, so you go around me, is that it?

Alas, moments like this were becoming familiar as his illness developed, and I'd learned to ignore them since, at this stage at any rate, they tended to disappear moments after they occurred. It was as if he was losing control of his emotions, or as if his self were breaking up into a number of different people, each one a possible and partial version of what he once had been or might have been. We seized one of these mini-Raymonds
en passant
and got its initial agreement, only to be overtaken by another such, a day and a half later.
This fucking creative writing school
, he mumbled at my bedside in the Chicken Coop after waking me in the middle of the night. Put your teeth in, I told him.
They
are
in
, he said, but he was lying.
I've changed my mind
, he said. Well, it's too late now, I told him.

And so on: in due course, after many more such changes of mind, he gave his final approval but with the quintessentially Raymond condition that the School be set up not in the English department building but in the toilet block next to it. He knew this block was being rebuilt—
repurposed
, as they put it nowadays—and that some other department was supposed to go in there, but as far as he was concerned there was no other place for the Raymond Lawrence School of Creative Writing. It would open in the former men's room or it wouldn't open at all.
Only place for it!
he said.
They should've kept the trough and the stalls
. And so, enclosed by walls bright and slick with paint and radiating hope and purpose, the writing classes began where once (I distantly remember from my student days) the urinal stood, wan beside the cubicles.

As the opening approached, Raymond was as cantankerous and wayward as he'd ever been before the ceremony at Stockholm. What's his problem? I asked Marjorie, the one to whom he seemed closest at the time. There's no
him
so there's no
his
, she replied, as succinctly as I've ever known her to speak. Sometimes he's the Ray I remember, she said, but mainly he just moves in and out of focus—it's like he thinks the Ray who won the Prize is someone else, it's like he wants to leave him behind. Watch out for his speech at the opening, she told me. He could say anything.

Well!—it wasn't what he
said
that was the problem at the opening, because he hardly said a thing. The problem was what he
did
. The audience was appalled—we all were appalled, we were shocked and embarrassed to the core. Even Semple was taken off guard:
he's gone and done it now
, he told me. I'm sure you recall the subsequent uproar in the media and among the public, and talk of the Prize being withdrawn from him: although there was no precedent for that and, as all things do, the hubbub eventually died away—though not quickly, as evident in the proliferation of those little plaster models of the old man as the Manneken-Pis.

Certainly, this shocking and regrettable indelicacy marked the end of the road as far as his public appearances were concerned: that was the point from which, in truth, we began progressively to hide him away. It was for his own sake as much as anything else, since the media were hovering as they do, eager in their usual dispassionate way to bring about any individual's public humiliation and destruction for their own passing advantage.