Free The Back of His Head by Patrick Evans Page A

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