Well, there’s some facts for you to sort out! Dare you to start it off like that, this Raymond Lawrence book you’re going to write! Anyway, I’ve been looking through the other questions you left me and I’ll have a go at them, I can’t guarantee anything but I’ll have a crack at them for you anyway. If you’re such a great sorter you can tidy me up the way I used to tidy him up the last five years! There you go—you asked how long I worked at the Raymond Lawrence residence, it was ten years. The first five I wasn’t living-in, I’d cycle over twice a day and sort him out when he wasn’t too bad, the last five I was his live-in semi-pro nurse and his body-servant as well—since he got worse, poor old bastard, that’s when I had to do more and more for him. Know what I mean, body-servant? The story is, see, I messed up my exams at uni and then I went off overseas, usual thing, know what I mean? And when I come back I need something to do, and Barry at the gym, he says to me, try Bailey’s, and it turns out a lot of the body and weights guys go there to get work lifting old people. Bailey’s Care they’re called. You don’t just lift and turn, you have to do a course first, you have to learn how to inject on oranges and that, and I tell you what, some of it got me a bit rattled—like, putting in rectal thermometers, you ever tried putting one of those in? You know what you can do with your rectal thermometer—just joking, guess you had to be there. Some of the stuff I was meant to learn, though, it just went right over my head first off, medication and that—tell you the truth, I didn’t even much like injecting the orange, first time round! But I got on top of it all in the end, no trouble.
Anyway, that’s how I met Mr Peter Orr, after I’d done the training course. Bailey’s give me his number—you know, your first potential client, don’t stuff it up—and I ring this Peter Orr, and he says to me, are you able to lift and turn? Sounds like a dance move, eh? But I’m like, no problem, bring it on. Then he says, what’re you studying? And I tell him the truth, I tell him I hadn’t really studied anything worth mentioning but the main subject I’d enrolled for was Geography. Geography? he says, even on the phone you could hear him wrinkling up his nose. You mean colouring-in? he says. Well, I think there’s a bit more to it than that, I told him, but really for all I know, that might’ve been all there actually was to GEOG 114 Environment and Resources, just colouring in different countries and trying not to shade over the border into Nicaragua, know what I mean? But I hadn’t been to any of the classes so there’s no way I could tell what GEOG 114 was really about, was there? All I knew was what one of my mates told me who was doing it, and that was orthographic lifting. Something to do with the weather, apparently, that’s what he reckoned. So there you go. Orthographic lifting.
And I told him that, Mr Orr, I said maybe I’d have done a bit better if I’d shown up even just the once. Oh, I see, you didn’t pass, he says. I didn’t realise. And then he says, we were looking for someone with literary interests, preferably a graduate. A graduate! I told him, I laughed out loud when he said that—I mean, me a graduate, did I look like a graduate to you the other day? I can lift and turn, I told him, but I’m not a graduate, I haven’t passed anything. Oh, and I can inject. I didn’t tell him I never even showed up for the exams. Why would you?
Anyway, he said he’d see me, and I can tell you what, he changed his mind about me when I turned up in his doorway, this Mr Peter Orr. He’s a funny weird skinny bent-over prick, by the way, quite tall—guess you know that—do you? I thought if the job involved lifting and turning I might as well wear just a singlet for the interview, singlet and jeans, know what I mean? What the hell, if he didn’t like it he didn’t like it and if he didn’t want me he didn’t want me. That was my position. I didn’t know the house he told me to come to was anything special. There was this woman there bent over working, you know, the way women do over flowers, and it turned out, that was Val Underwood. There was a team of them, all women, they kept an eye on the garden—you could see it’d had a hell of a lot of work put into it, you could see that, it’s a great garden—and Val was the youngest but not really young. So I call out, Mr Orr in? and she straightens up. She had pretty good tits. That was good, I like that. I’m Thom, I told her, and I spelled it out for her, T-H-O-M. You like a Bounty Bar? I had a spare one on me. So we stood there and we shared a Bounty Bar and that was how I met this really nice lady, which is what she is. Old Val.
I guess you don’t really want to know about this stuff but it’s what happened so there you go. The point is, she took me round the back of the house and up to the Chicken Coop, up behind the main house. They reckon they call it the Chicken Coop because there really was a chicken coop there once but they’ve built that second house on it now, know the one I mean? Looks out over the roof of the one where Mr Lawrence used to live? Curtains and a lav and bedrooms and so on. Up there’s where Mr Orr’s got his office. So I’m standing in front of this open door and he does this bullshit thing where people know you’re there and they go on scribbling just to let you know they’re Mr Big Shot and you don’t amount to Jack Shit pardon my French? Anyway, he looks up when he’s good and ready, and that’s when he does this big double take and he forgets he can even write! Mr Ham, he says to me, you could see him looking me over. All the time I hadn’t spent colouring-in at GEOG 114 I’d spent in the gym lifting weights, so there was definitely something for him to look at—well, you’ve seen it all so you know. I don’t make out I’ve got much else.
And so—big laugh—turns out I wasn’t wasting my time doing all those cycles after all, because he offers me the job on the spot! Forget the Geography, he says to me in that funny little flirty voice he’s got—know what I mean? Like he’s always walking away around a corner from you all the time, like he’s talking to you over his shoulder? Come on, I’d like to tell him sometimes, spit it out, say what you bloody well mean. No need to ask if you can lift and turn, he’s telling me, and I half thought he’d get me to lift him up and turn him round just to see! So, anyway, then he tells me who it actually is I’m supposed to be lifting and turning, and I just laugh out loud at him. Raymond Lawrence? I said to him, you’re kidding me! And I was, like, shaking my head—the Nobel Prize-winner, after all the stir when he won! Like I told Mr Orr, I’m not into books that much, but how could you get away from the racket when the news came out, d’you remember it?—can’t be anyone who doesn’t, you heard about it till you wanted a rest. Bloody Raymond Lawrence! Well, I’m not a reader like I say, but even I sat there and watched a couple of interviews on the box at the time, and I wondered what it’d be like, to become as famous as that, world-famous overnight, even if it was late in your life like it was for him, near the end, before he got really sick, I mean, and then of course I thought of the money side of things as well—I mean, you would, you would think of that, wouldn’t you? You would think of the money?
I’ll tell you what really made me think, though, it’s this, it’s how you start from nothing and end up with something, I mean something really big. What I mean is, he sits there for years making stuff up in his head, he just pulls it out his bum for all I know. And it gets printed and so on, it gets published and that, but it’s still not real—d’you see what I mean? But everyone wants to know him, that’s the thing, it’s like it’s magic dust or something. I’ll bet you not everyone who was after him like that’d even read the books, I’ll bet not half—less—all the same, everyone wants a bit of the action. I mean, you do, Patrick, you’re one of them, Christ, you’re paying me to spill the beans on him, you said you wanted every detail however small—that’s what you told me. You’re paying me to spill my guts, and what’re you going to do when I do?—you’re going to make it into another bloody book! A book about his books! Then I suppose someone’ll do a book on your book! And it’ll all have come out of nothing—know what I mean when I say that? What’s inside the book is still—you know—not real. That’s what I can’t get over. And all the time he’s just a poor old cocksucker, Mr Lawrence, I mean, at the bottom of it all he’s just what we all are,
ordinary, I’ve seen everything when I was training and he was, you know, average like the rest of us—except of course he was in worse shape, poor bastard, the way he’d switch off and on like he did, you’d never knew where you were with him, you never knew whether he was alive or dead sometimes. Switching and twitching, that’s what I’d call it, just one poor old bastard slowly winding down and never bloody still, it’d give me the tomtits sometimes watching him when he was asleep, twitch twitch twitch. This was later on, of course, right near the end, he wasn’t like that at the start—whoops! Shit—
An extraordinary entry in the Visitor Book this morning: A mausoleum to Art, a monument to Death.
Who could write such a terrible thing, who could even think it? I struggle with the signature, but it’s scribbled, compressed, crouched over, turned in on itself as are the eight words that precede it: their letters lie curved on the page like dead wasps. Who could it be?
The initials to the right show Julian to have been the tour guide, but when I ring him he has no explanation. A Japanese tour bus, he says. I don’t think they really knew where they were, they spent most of their time taking photos of each other out in the garden. But this isn’t what an Asian would write, I tell him. And I’m sure the signature’s deliberately disguised. But why would anyone go to the trouble? he asks. Well, then, how d’you explain it? I ask him back—but of course he can’t. Someone having a bad day? he suggests. That’s just silly, I tell him.
It stays with me, this message, as I turn to this week’s emails and letters. Someone is playing silly buggers—one of Raymond’s phrases. But who, who is it? And why?
In the envelopes today, just the usual stuff, some addressed to Raymond himself, as usual, and written as if he were still with us. Not everything that arrives here at Cannon Rise is bleak and dispiriting, of course: much of it is from scholars all over the world—almost as soon as the initial excitement about the award died down, the requests from the academics, as I’ve said, began.
For them, though, the Master had no more time than he had for literary folk in general. Piss off, he would actually write on the bottom of the letters that came requesting access to his manuscripts and for interviews, and often he’d post them back before I could intervene. On a request for a meeting with a view to a possible biography he wrote a dreadful limerick about a young girl from the Azores. One about a young man from Uppingham replied to an early request to make a documentary of his life. Whenever the phone rang near him he would almost always ignore it, but sometimes he’d lift the receiver and engage with the caller in what he called his cleft-palate voice. At other times he would feign idiocy or an obscure foreign accent. Hold the line, I’ll just get him, was another ruse, followed by the dangling of the receiver on its cord and, for the unfortunate caller, a long, fruitless silence till the penny dropped—or in fact didn’t.
Of course I used to remonstrate with him about this behaviour, but it was no use. These are the folk you write for, I’d tell him, these are the folk you write about. This is your readership, you’d be nothing without them. Cattle, he’d say back. Fuck’em.
Even when he was alive he was a fortress: that is what I’m trying to say. His concessions at the time of the Prize were reluctant concessions to say the least, nearly all of them coming to some kind of grief. Nothing I’ve done for his estate since he began his decline has been at odds with what I saw in him before it, but none of it has come anywhere near the rage that close encounters would bring about in him as he was dragged, reluctantly, into celebrity. If it’s true that possessiveness and control are what motivate me in my management of the Trust—Semple’s words—such things are no more than extensions of what I saw the old man driven by when it came to protecting his writing and his heritage—or even to the simple business of putting up with people, having folk come near him when he didn’t want them there. Fuck off! he’d yell through the hedge at sightseers when they tried to peer through it to the Residence. I’m not a performing fucking seal!
There’d been some interest in Raymond and his work before the Prize, naturally, albeit somewhat muted: no one seemed quite to know what to make of him at first, since the early novels were so outré and caused so much uproar when they appeared—Miss Furie’s Treasure Hunt, I mean, and the two Algerian novels that followed it, Frighten Me and Flatland. Beautifully written, yes, yes, they are: but all the same these are the works I have most trouble with myself, to be candid, with their excesses and the misjudgements of a writer slowly beginning to come to terms with his own genius. They certainly have some extraordinary moments.
The initial response to them, most of it in reviews, is meticulously kept in Raymond’s papers. I’ve winced my way through each of them long ago, and through the comments scrawled in the fading near-sepia of their margins—Amazing! Can’t read English! Stupid shit!—along with his underlinings and splattered exclamation marks. Some of his comments, alas, are even less publishable than these, far less so. He had a mouth on him, as I’m sure you’re beginning to gather.
The worse the review, though, the more delighted he seemed to be: and for the first three novels there was much to delight him, since the critics were nothing but negative, expressing shock, appalment, even outrage. The revulsion was almost unanimous. In those days, only his overseas publication by a heroic, masochistic boutique publisher in London kept him afloat. No recognition from anyone—not even a momentary acknowledgement—that for all his excesses he might have had a mission in those early works, a purpose in taking us with him into the abyss. What can we possibly gain from this perversion of a great European story, what does a giant child-eating beetle contribute to our understanding of the life we live in these islands?—novel number one. Once again children are being eaten, but this time by humans and with the added outrage of recipes as an appendix to the book (one hesitates to call it more than that)—novel number two. The torture scene at the centre of this work is outrageous and unforgivable, tinged as it is with a lingering sadism and even more questionable sexual tastes, which, if practised, would see the practitioner answering grave charges in court—novel number three. By now, we’re well in Algeria during its war of liberation (hence the titles of Frighten Me and Flatland). Or, some would say, we are well in Raymond’s strange, haunting, mythical, sado-masochistic version of that country.
Now and then—not often—I would find among these reviews a grudging acknowledgement that the young man could actually write (he is wasting his frequently evident talents as a writer of English on mere adolescent sensationalism), and I was always fascinated by the way his words could suborn a reader from the paths of righteousness. (The writing is seductive in both the best and the worst ways, and it is sometimes shocking to come to one’s own senses, so to speak, and realise that one has simply accepted without question what one has just read.)
Inevitably, at some point in all this, it began to occur to me to check out the reality behind what he wrote. One afternoon, when I knew he was away in Phyllis Button’s bed, I rummaged his passport out of his bedroom drawer. This was early on, at a time when I was refusing to believe a word of anything he told me, any word at all—in my rebellious years, such as they were, when I was sure he made up everything he said and did, and, the more he told his stories of North Africa, doubted the more that he’d ever stepped from his native soil in the first place. And, of course, he had: his passport, a British one at that stage, was almost falling apart from constant branding. I could hardly believe some of the countries whose names were stamped into it. Peru, for God’s sake!—what could he’ve been doing in Peru?
Marocq, the customs stamp stated for his most recent trip. That was his usual way into Algeria, through Tangier and then into Alger, as the next stamp read beneath the curl of the abjad: and then Marocq again on the way back out again to Tangier—Tangier, visited incredibly early in his travels, and then Algeria, revisited again and again until (as I remember it) a long spell in the late 1950s, when he was in his mid-twenties and had plenty of occa
sions to do all the things he claimed to have done, various and changing as they were.
Sometimes I’d ask people what they thought. Was he really caught up in the war of liberation back then? I’d ask them. In Algeria? Yes, of course, most of them replied, but when I pressed them the only evidence they had was the books themselves: they seemed plausible, so what was in them must surely be true? Only one or two pointed out the inconsistencies—the early stories written from the viewpoint of the colons, for example, where the indigenes are clearly, passionately the enemy, atrocities simply something that must be gone through and the Paras pouring into the country unambiguously heroes, and then the later writing from exactly the opposite point of view, set in this rebellious wilayat or that. His reminiscences switched sides like this and back again, too, any protest provoking a gaze that froze the heart.
Then, of course, it was rumoured he’d been posted to Sidi Bel Abbès after an unhappy love affair in Britain and had actually fought for the Foreign Legion!—something I tracked down to the man himself, who hauled out a book with a photo in it he insisted was of himself in the distinctive Legion uniform of the time, second from the left and three rows back with a date in 1954. I switched sides, he told me. But that’s nothing like you, I told him back: though the more I turned the magnifying glass on the image in the following weeks and months the more I became convinced that in fact it might very well be him—and, in the end, that, indeed, it actually was. Wasn’t it?
The Back of His Head Page 6