Free The Back of His Head by Patrick Evans

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