The Back of His Head (10 page)

From this point, and increasingly, the future members of the Trust became his public face—or
I
did, the others would claim, and who am I to say no? As I've told you, I drank it up, the challenge, the responsibility, the importance of the role I'd found at last. I knew nothing like the moment of my first entry to the public eye in his place, and that particular magic has never gone away.
The nephew—the man who cares for him—his spokesman
: I still felt it, undiminished, when I came in here a few moments ago to open the School year as I always do, with some words about the Founder. The thrill of it, the excitement—the joy of simply
being Raymond
, of knowing that as I step into each reading or award ceremony or literary festival people are nudging each other and nodding their brows towards me:
that's Raymond Lawrence's son
—even, sometimes,
that's Raymond Lawrence
. The special, reverent hush as, spotlights dazzling my eyes, I step out onto the stage, the writer himself. The expectant, sacred moment
that now is mine alone
—

Today I'm early, and there's time to wile away in the campus bookshop. What do I find—here, immediately through its doors—but global publishing itself in the form of the world's latest writing sensation: or, in fact, his replica in cardboard, larger (unless he really
is
from another planet) than life. How many years is it since I last saw Raymond himself here in similar form, standing stiff and flat and proud behind piles of his own work, a two-dimensional Ozymandias beaming out at the world?

This young man has just won a big literary prize in Ireland and so is everywhere, his image replicated—so it seems—throughout the known universe. I see him on the news and the talk shows and the sides of buildings and buses, in lifestyle magazines and advertisements for clothes and toiletries and music and wine—or at least I
think
that's who it is each time, although sometimes his skin seems a little lighter and sometimes not, and sometimes he seems smaller and sometimes larger, and at others he seems no longer to be a male at all: instead, faun-like, an epicene girl-woman, frail and vulnerable.

Sometimes, too, he is a touch oriental in appearance—indeed, he seems truly international, even supranational: born in a Middle Eastern refugee camp and shrugged into the West without a word of English in him, but writing now a version of it all his own that everyone, it seems, wants to read, to bear witness to. Here it is in front of me: I gaze at the sprawl of words across its pages in the novel in my hands, their drift towards and away from meaning. I stare at his image on the back cover. He has something for me, I know that, even if what he has will always be four-fifths beyond my understanding. For
he
is what comes next.

I tried to explain something of this to the old man at one point—to explain it
back
to him, since it was he who first talked about the times we're going through.
This
is what writing's become, I tried to explain to him with some new young writer's latest first book in my hand. I knew that in some part of him and however much he raged he
did
understand what is happening around us now and that he himself was always going to be pushed aside and relegated to the dinosaurs. You have to try to understand, I'd urge him: you were the one who told us all this was coming.
Yes, but who'd know it'd be so fucking vapid once it arrived?
he'd ask me back.
It's such shit, all of it
. You're looking for the wrong things, I'd try to tell him.
Yes!
he'd shout back at me.
Content'd be nice! Be nice if they wrote
about
something now and then!
We just can't
see
the content yet, I'd tell him. It's us, not them. He'd refuse to believe me, though.
Be nice if they had some fucking
history
in them!
he'd bawl.
Christ
, it's hard work being out of date
—

It
is
, I always told him when he said this. That's the point, we have to work to understand what they write. And so on, quite without effect—he still went on saying terrible things.
It's not real anymore
, he'd say.
No one actually reads books anymore—they just review them and give them fucking prizes. Soon they won't even read the reviews. Then we really
will
have a virtual fucking literary culture
—

I, on the other hand, always insist on buying and reading these youngsters. Why?—to find the new Raymond Thomas Lawrence among them. Not yet, not so far, but I know he's waiting: or she, of course. This young Afghan citizen of the world, looming over me in cardboard? We'll see. I gaze at him, at his darkness, his otherness. In one sense he's Anir, of course, the boy who haunts the Master's writing, coming in and out of focus from novel to novel, dead one day and back on the page the next, insisted upon and insisting. Could he never see this, the old man, could he really never see that he'd made this young man himself and that the young man was writing back?

At the till here's Bevan, the manager, and from the workroom behind him the smell of coffee and the faint sound of classical muzak. He doesn't look up, just nudges another book at me along the counter with his elbow.
Flutter By
, it's called, with a sash that says
Riveting First Novel
: its cover blazes with bright bird-colours.

‘Read that,' he tells me. ‘She does it with another bird. The main character. And here's me thinking all they ever do is bite each other's beaks.'

Since the incident the Raymond Lawrence School of Creative Writing has been temporarily quartered in the English department buildings. I look into its larger tutorial room: two instructors, team-teaching. In the smaller room next door I find Cosmo Dye, the School's director, looking up at me from a class of two dozen: he nods and beckons as he talks. Twenty-four would-be Raymond Lawrences: can there
really
be so many of them here in front of me? I tiptoe in, and find a seat against the rear wall as Cosmo tells the class that if they aren't happy with their first draft, they shouldn't be afraid to write a second.

I look about myself, and wonder what I always wonder in classrooms like this:
which is the One?

Opposite me, over the students' heads and behind Cosmo, a whiteboard carries one bold statement:
FIND YOURSELF/ WRITE YOURSELF/ FIND YOURSELF AGAIN
. Above and beside this, posters: Salman Rushdie, with the slogan
1989: LEST WE FORGET
. Beside that, a simple, optimistic statement
sans
image,
WRITERS RULE THE WORLD
, and near it another, this time an image
sans
statement, of Edgar Allan Poe: always furtive, always unreliable. There's a poster of Mavis Carpenter peering earnestly at the camera whilst one of her fists supports all of her jowls, and another of Roy Sharp receiving the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.

And make sure you serve up a really
good
sentence every page or two, Cosmo tells the class. Keep the reader's interest up!

The largest poster by far is of the Master himself, a famously candid shot in greys and blues taken during his later middle years when he was slightly drunk, and showing much that was most attractive about him, as, surprised and momentarily disarmed, he turns to the lens. It was before he began regularly to wear glasses, and his eyes seem bared, and warmed and softened by the alcohol, his features loosened, particularly about his mouth: his entire expression is open, vulnerable, trusting: the man himself, and a Raymond I like to think I alone
really
knew. The slogan on this poster is the same as the slogan on the front of his T-shirt:
END POVERTY
. Combined with his demeanour in the photo it has an effect curiously if imprecisely optimistic, and in its time the image was everywhere. I'm delighted, of course, to see it again and being used in the School, although of course there are various framed photographs of him about the place, albeit in slightly less eloquent poses.
END POVERTY
: perhaps I alone remember the rest of the statement, on the back of the same T-shirt:
KILL THE POOR AND EAT THE BASTARDS
.

What does this new generation of children make of him, though, these golden lads and lasses gathered around me now? What, come to that, do they make of
me
? At one level, I know, Raymond's public shenanigans in later life, and particularly his disastrous performance at his final public outing, became part of his myth. These stunts gave him a certain
cachet
amongst the young in particular: Raymond was
cool
. There've long been urban legends involving things he never did at events he never attended, as well as things he certainly
did
do which have been embroidered into wild fantasy, all of this a nonsense that rivals some of his own tall tales about his earlier years. And the more we hid him away, in those days, the more the stories grew, as if breeding out of the fact that he was no longer there—as if his absence from public life had become a blank wall for the graffiti of rumour.

The garden gnomes were one thing, but it was another phenomenon that really disturbed me, something that began just after he'd left us and was quite different from the many cheap attempts there've been to slander him or cash in on his fame. It took me completely by surprise when I first saw it: a little mannequin left behind in the Residence after a tour party had gone through, a tiny, homemade, thumb-sized Raymond, just a few judicious twists and knots of string and—there he was, somehow, with miniature specs and boots and one end of the string making a little white beard—plus (this is what was extraordinary)
tiny wings
, made from a couple of white feathers stuck in his back.

At first we suspected Raymond Thomas Lawrence II, since the development had the hallmarks of his down-at-heels obsessiveness. But apparently he was still locked away somewhere making ugly things for the poor: and, besides, after a while these angelic midget Raymonds started appearing all over the place: thumb-sized feathered replicas you'd see pinned to people's clothing like a brooch or stuck to noticeboards and walls. They seemed to have acquired a particular meaning out there in the culture that didn't have anything to do with what he'd written or who he was. Just the idea of him, no more, passed to another generation and its unreachable lurch away from us, into that frightening void in which
they
are dancing on our graves and
we
lie in them, eyeless, inexistent, forgotten.

Raymond as an angel: as I'm sure you'll understand,
that
was a thought that never occurred to me while he was alive. But at one level it made sense, since there are angels in
Bisque
and there are angels in
Kerr
and there are angels elsewhere in his writing. Want to look like a great artist? he asked, as he was coming to the end of writing one or other of these—
Kerr
, I think it was, the raft-journey novel, his greatest novel, the one that was so memorably filmed with Bob Hoskins. Put a fucking angel in, Raymond said. Everyone'll think you've read Rilke so it
must
be great Art—they haven't read the mad fucker but they know about the angels!

Of course, he knew there was much more to it than that. As I've said, his writing began to mature in this early middle period, as some of the critics have called it, and
Bisque
was his first obviously substantial work—a firm second step, you might say, on the road to the Prize. Its title refers not to the seafood dish but to unglazed pottery, though you'll probably recall that you can read the book from one end to the other and not find the latter mentioned: instead, the word is a figure for the unfinished state of the young woman depicted in it (Julia, her name) as she enters the excitement of Ibiza in the Mediterranean. Bisque, in that sense.

In
Bisque
, you'll remember, this Julia is a would-be writer, and you'll also recall that after a run-in with an American conman she falls in with an older fellow who is a doctor and, it transpires, a Nazi sympathiser and
Franquista
as well: and you will remember, too, that, late in the novel, he takes her for a picnic on what turns out to be the site of an abandoned concentration camp. Anything but an angel, then, this doctor: no, instead, the angels are the young
pilluelo
Julia keeps running into around and about the island: street urchins. There's that extraordinary moment when she comes to believe, late in the novel, that these are the spirits of the children who have died in the deathcamps of Europe, and that they may not in fact exist in the normal sense at all.

Angels and death camps! Raymond said after the book was shortlisted for what was then the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Can't miss with that combo, must be an important writer if I'm writing about angels and fucking death camps as well!

But I knew not to believe what he said, not least because I'd caught him in tears the day he finished writing the book.
Blue
, he said, brokenly, and shoved the final pages at me as he wrestled a hankie against his snout. Turns out the whole fucking thing is about
that
after all! It just came up out of the writing, he told me—the colour he was to become more and more obsessed with, and which occurs in everything he wrote from that time on:
the colour in which we see the intangible becoming tangible
, he told me years later,
infinity becoming finite
. Not any old blue, he said.
Sky
blue. The colour of liquefaction. Of the Blue Flower.

All these thoughts, provoked by the sight of the string Raymond-brooches on two of the creative writing children sitting in the class. Nowadays, I get a jolt in the chest whenever I see these odd little gewgaws appear. Somehow—don't ask me to explain—they seem to touch on everything I've felt ever since Raymond left us, seven years ago now. On that, and on something more that I just don't understand.