The Back of His Head (36 page)

It's taken me a long time to understand the full meaning of the things I've been telling you about here. It's taken me so much of my life to begin to understand how this strange, mad business works: writing, I mean. The pen on the page, the type on the paper, the cursor on the screen.
Anything can happen in the house of fiction
, Raymond used to tell us, over and over again, and because he was drunk many of the times he said that I took little notice of him when he did.

But Anir happened in that house, the boy he kept writing about, and the truth is that
he's still there
, and that he
needs still to be there
for all the other things to have taken place that were to come about. They make no sense without him. Of all the critics and reviewers only one seemed to understand that, and to help me understand it in turn:
always in the house of fiction
, this man wrote in some grave English literary magazine or other,
the sacrificial body
. And it's true. Nothing can happen without it. The Blue Room was built for him, I realised, for the boy and for the Medal. They belong together. He
must
be there—

There was more to come from Julian. Sometime after this episode, he rang and asked me to come to his studio again. Something rather disturbing, he said. Raymond himself was out of town at the time, and it occurred to me later that Julian had chosen his moment.

Take a look at this
, he said as soon as I got through the plastic fly-strips.
This
was a small clipping he was holding out to me: just a torn rag of brown-edged newsprint from some unknown newspaper and showing a headline and a brief telegraph from Singapore, dated in August 1952:

Mr I. Fairweather, the 60-year-old Scottish artist who recently crossed the Timor Sea on a small craft, today said that he set out from Darwin at the end of April to call on an old friend in Indonesian Timor. He built a triangular raft with three old aircraft fuel tanks which he found in a dump, and the minute sail was fashioned from three panels of an old parachute canopy.

There wasn't much more than these few words, and all of them quite straightforward: a report of an extraordinary journey this expatriate Scot had made in the early 1950s from Darwin north to one of the islands across the Timor Sea—several hundred miles through shark-filled waters, and the entire mad, terrifying journey done alone on a home-made raft. His name was completely unfamiliar to me—if he was an artist, he can't have been a particularly successful one. The connection, though, was obvious.

Kerr, I said. That's what Kerr does in
Kerr
.

Yes, Julian said. Worrying, isn't it?

It jolted me, seeing this. Julian had found it while working through Raymond's papers at his library. It was obvious why it was among them.
To call on an old friend:
exactly the fictional Kerr's laconic explanation of the fictional trip he makes in the novel, nearly two hundred miles, albeit through slightly friendlier waters, from Algiers to the Spanish island of Ibiza to the north.
Exactly
the same words.

And on exactly the same raft, too, it seems. After all, as I've said, Kerr's self-imposed task in the novel is to make his vessel from the relicts of the Mediterranean theatre of the Second World War—the 75-gallon drop tanks from Mustang fighter aircraft, the USAAF parachute, found tangled nearby, high in
the paradise of the Kabylia
, and picked by him, bit by bit, from a thorn bush, its three intact panels converted into his sail: those other, smaller details as well. All faithfully drawn from life: but whose?—for here they were, these things, owned in every detail by someone who, by the time Raymond began to write, had already made the journey.

What to say? I really didn't know how to think of this unexpected little scrap from an unknown, possibly Australian, newspaper.
Plagiarism
, I expect you'll all be thinking. Well, yes, plagiarism indeed, except that, legally speaking, we can't plagiarise something that's actually happened out there in the world. Whomever it's happened to, it seems that no one owns an experience: help yourself.

And help himself he had, my uncle. You can see his haughty possession of the things of the world, the imaginary Kerr bundled under one arm and the Scottish artist under the other—about whom he'd said not a word, nor of his home-made raft, nor of his wild trip on it across the Timor Sea. Instead, he'd told the story as his own, first to me and then to everyone in the world, told it as the fact that validated his fiction of it. I saw it straight away: he'd stolen his raft, he'd made his trip without touching the water. Ian Fairweather the eccentric Queensland-based Scottish artist no longer existed, because the fiction now lived in his place.

Raymond had devoured the historical man: he'd eaten him up, and the fact of the novel validated instead the authenticity of the man who had written it, and of his made-up home-made raft trip as well. Now it was real, now it had actually happened—it
must
have happened: he'd written a novel about it and there was the film of the book as well.
How real can something get to be?

What I felt about all this was made even more complicated when Julian appeared again—looking back, it seems like days later, as if he were on a mission, but I know that in fact it was not long after Raymond died, perhaps six months after the horror of that, and, thus, a few years after the episode above. We were tidying up his affairs, and Julian was about halfway through the business of cataloguing his papers.

He came into my office with a book in his hand and sat across the office from me watching me turning its pages, each of them with its many pencilled underlinings.

A tiny thing, this unexpected book, its spine long gone and its fewer-than-a-hundred-pages long pressed from years crammed on a shelf at the back of Raymond's garage: one of literature's many little freaks, a memoir in French which brought back—vividly, at times, at times astonishingly, in the verbal dabs and dashes of the amateur—the life of a particular time in French North Africa: its author one of the thousand and more curiosities of the late nineteenth century who tried to shrive themselves of Europe's colonial sins on a camel and in a burnous.

An astonishing piece of naïve writing, as I recall it, and I'm genuinely embarrassed not to be able to remember for you the name of this lost adventurer and writer, a young woman who had travelled as a man and soon died in North Africa, alas, and—of all things—in a flash flood. I truly regret I can't bring her back for you, that (in effect) the flood has washed her away.

Or, maybe the truth is that I don't want to.

For Raymond had silently stolen from
every one
of her ninety-or-so pages—a word here, a phrase there, a hundred tiny borrowings. All these moments were patiently identified by Julian with Post-it notes stuck into the text, so many of them that the book looked as if it had grown many-coloured feathers and was about to flap into the air and squawk out its uncomfortable truths to the world. A hundred little sins: more, a small, brave, many-coloured celebration of deceit.

And, it seemed as I pressed on with it, more than that. I read with my heart beating faster. There were whole paragraphs marked out by Julian's pencil, the first of them beginning like this:

It was the month of July. Not even a strip of green remained on the land's exasperated palette. The pines, the pistachio trees and the palmettos were like blackish rust against the red earth. The dried-up river beds with their banks that seemed to have been drawn with sanguine made long gaping wounds in the landscape, revealing the gray bones of rock inside, among the slowly dying oleanders. The harvested fields gave a lion-coloured tint to the hillsides. Little by little the colourless sky was killing everything.

I'm sure you recognise it, or a form of it—do you? The opening sentences of
Flatland
, before their transformation by the Master. A great improvement, his version, I think you'll agree, better than hers in all the obvious ways: the original text works so hard to present something—it works to please: Raymond's version simply
is
, like the world itself. The words just hang there, creating out of nothing. His mastery is undeniable.

Yet, just as undeniably, the original text is simply not his to improve on—none of it, none of the many bits and pieces, many of the same length as the above, to which (it seemed) he had helped himself in writing his Algerian fiction. As I compared passages from book to book I could see how crucial they were to what he wrote, how he both pared away the original and built around it, expanded it, reimagined it. I could see that: and, also, the exact opposite—the possibility that, without this source, these stolen words, he might not have been able to write anything at all.

My blood, as they say in novels, ran cold. What to make of all this?

At first, starting with the one above, I copied out a number of the passages he'd used, almost as if to begin a case against the old man. After a couple of hours of this, I stopped.
What
case? Wasn't I just trying to make myself feel better, less embarrassed, less ashamed? Wasn't I simply trying to take control of this disturbing new news? What would we do with it, anyway? The horror of Raymond's sudden death was still with us, remember, still raw—the manner of it, the number of young people killed in the blast along with him, the sense that his past had finally caught up and also that, at enormous cost, the truth of it had finally been confirmed.
Boof!

Terrorist Attack—Revenge For Early Years In North Africa—Middle Eastern Terror Strikes Home At Last:
I'm sure you'll remember the headlines, and who can forget the uproar at the time? It went on for a year, more, with diplomats conferring overseas and the trial, and then an enquiry lingering on after that. The media was at its worst—or its most typical—and I was struck by how many new works of fiction were made out of the death of this maker of fictions.

I was shocked—numbed: we all were—in the weeks that followed this obscenity, and barely able to function. All those children, gone—well, little more than children: the youngest student was seventeen. And Raymond, erased in a moment, like a word pencilled on a page, while Gradus survived as if he were ink: the wrongness of
that
disturbed me for weeks, I remember, months, until I began to see the whole thing in perspective. Death, after all, gives you a beginning, a middle and an end, like a character in a book. Gradus was too stupid, too meaningless, to be graced with that. He was an intruder in the house of fiction who didn't deserve a literary death.

Raymond had been proven right, that was the thing
. For me, as I slowly began to understand what it was that had happened, there was no doubt of that. As was stated at the time in some editorial or other, if saboteurs could blow up another nation's trawler as an act of vengeance, why could they not do the same to someone who'd talked too much about what really happened at the heart of the north African darkness? And didn't that prove that that particular someone really
had
known all along the truth of which he'd written? Yes, I knew the enquiry was noncommittal in the end and (in effect) the trial, too, and I knew there'd been all sorts of rumours going around—ridiculous inventions which Robert Semple was party to, amongst others, and I'm still not completely certain Marjorie wasn't whispering them about as well.

For me, Gradus's defence at the trial was an obscenity, despite all the supposed evidence brought forward on his behalf. I never wavered in thinking that, and I've always spoken up for the old man since.
The French foreign intelligence service
, I told people when they asked, even when the enquiry had come to its final, puzzled shrug.
Of course, of course
, they'd reply, and turn away. But nothing could take from my pride in him, in Raymond Thomas Lawrence. Nothing could take away my belief.

What a man! I often thought—what a
life
, drunk to the lees as it had been, and with several extra swigs at the end just to make sure he was done. I looked back and saw him plain, in the bright, fierce flare of one man's long existence, bursting out, intensifying, blazing: and then fading, going, almost gone—and extinguished. A life that was whole, ultimately, and complete, integrated, a life lived in a kind of truth. That was the way it seemed to me as I came to my slow terms with him in the months after he died. He really had been where he claimed he'd been, he really had done what he said he'd done, he really did have the courage to tell the truth about it and had paid the price for doing so.
He had written himself through, he had lived himself out
—

And, now, here was Julian again, bringing me yet more Post-it strips sticking out of yet more books.
More
, he said, crisply. I sank my face into my palms.
I don't want more
, I told him.