The Back of His Head Read Online Free PDF Page A

atrocities, and for authenticity .
    And here, at this evening’s meeting, the perennial impasse, presenting itself yet again. Semple starts the show:
    â€˜Every single problem on this’—he taps his agenda—‘would be solved if we cashed the place up.’
    â€˜There’s no motion on the table.’
    â€˜If we cashed up, it wouldn’t matter what they nicked, they’d be nicking crap anyway, we’d just replace the crap with more crap. If they gouge it we’d, you know, use wood-filler? If they keep on gouging it we’d replace the whole item from a junkshop. It’d all be crap.’
    â€˜I have only one thing to say about this.’ A pause, as I look around the table. ‘Mabel Carpenter.’
    â€˜Oh, fucking Mabel Carpenter. Not her again. Christ , she was dreary.’
    â€˜Yes.’ Julian. ‘Some of her stuff’s unreadable.’
    â€˜ All of it’s unreadable.’
    â€˜She was a great writer, though,’ Marjorie says.
    â€˜Oh—no doubt about that, she was a great writer all right.’
    â€˜No doubt about that at all.’
    â€˜Her Memorial Residence is a disaster ,’ I remind them. ‘We all know that.’
    And it’s true, both that the Residence of the late Mabel Carpenter—she whose fiction brought Dargaville to the world—is a joke, and that we all know is so. When it was first opened we had a look at the place, Julian and I, driving north after a conference in Auckland at which the pair of us represented the Master late in his life, when he was too ill to travel. Naturally, given his condition then, we had thoughts of what might soon—and now, alas, has—come to pass: I mean how a writer’s home might most properly be turned into a memorial residence once he has (as Raymond used to put it) passed on to the great whisky decanter in the sky .
    Not like that! the pair of us chortled happily as we drove away from Mabel’s Residence afterwards. It was her house all right, I mean it was one that she had lived in: but for years after her death it had been rented by civilians (as Raymond used to call the inartistic), and there was not a thing she’d actually owned in it once her memorial trust decided it was time to commemorate her, nor anything very much to guide them in their sad little reconstruction.
    A desk very similar to one Mabel might have written on is a line I remember—with laughter—on a notice tacked to the wall above a very ordinary table that had been sanded down to nothing, no past in it, no life. A bed typical of beds of the period was another. The pièce de résistance —the nearest they could manage to the real thing, the nearest to achieving, for the literary tourist, the true and authentic moment—was a clothes-wringer in the outside laundry, certified to be authentic on a nearby placard, though described as a mangle all the same. Mabel’s mangle , we came to call it, and we were quite clear that, when the time came, the Raymond Lawrence Memorial Residence would do better, far better, than that.
    Naturally, I remind the meeting of all this. We mustn’t get caught in Mabel’s Mangle is my concluding line—rather a good one, I can’t help thinking.
    There is a pause, and then Marjorie continues as if I haven’t even spoken!
    â€˜It’d have to be good-looking crap,’ she’s telling Semple. ‘It’d have to look almost the same as the stuff we’re talking about selling.’
    â€˜It’s not stuff and we’re not talking about selling it,’ I remind her. ‘There’s no motion on the table.’
    â€˜You mean if there was, you’d discuss it—?’
    â€˜If it had a seconder.’ I look across at Julian. ‘Then I’d have no choice.’
    â€˜All right.’ Semple. ‘I move we sell the Steinway.’
    â€˜Oh, not the baby grand,’ Marjorie