The Back of His Head Read Online Free PDF Page B

we didn’t ask for anything at all for a long time and what do we ask for now? A voluntary contribution that hardly anyone actually makes.’
    A pause.
    â€˜True,’ says Marjorie. ‘We’ll have to start charging them to get in—’
    â€˜Then nobody’ll come,’ says Semple. ‘End of story.’
    â€˜But we’d have to charge a hundred dollars a visit to get anywhere near what we need.’ Julian turns to me. ‘What needs doing?’
    I look at my list. ‘We pay quarterly rating, the phone, electricity—’
    â€˜Well, fuck the phone for a start.’ Semple rocks from cheek to tender cheek. ‘Who needs a fucking phone when there’s no one here most of the time?’
    â€˜Robert, darls, don’t tilt back like that.’ Marjorie. ‘These chairs just won’t take it anymore.’ Then (to me): ‘Maybe they need replacing, too—the chairs?’
    Proposed Mr Semple, that the telephone be disconnected forthwith, seconded by Mr Yuile: carried nem con., Mr Orr to action .
    What else?
    â€˜The guttering needs replacing—’
    â€˜It needs placing , there isn’t any at all round the side—’
    I stick to my script. ‘The garden. We’re down to one gardening lady now. Val—’
    â€˜How many did we used to have—gardening ladies—?’
    â€˜Back then? Seven. But we didn’t pay them. Deciding to pay them was a mad idea. We were paying four at one stage—when those Austrians came and made that documentary we had four gardening ladies on the payroll—’
    â€˜Yes, but doesn’t it look spiffing, in the doco, I mean—the house and the garden—doesn’t it look spiffing —? Summertime, and all that—?’
    And now we sit for a moment, each of us, and think just how spiffing the Raymond Lawrence Memorial Residence really did look in the high summer of 2001–2, when an Austrian crew of astonishing seriousness came over and filmed Raymond pottering about among the lacecaps and the agapanthus. He refused to wear his partial upper denture for the actual interview and consequently looks like Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu , with just the two eyeteeth poking down on either side of his mouth. A section of this documentary opens the standard tour of the Raymond Lawrence Residence, which begins downstairs in the garden room with a closed-circuit showing after the signing of the Visitor Book, and then proceeds upstairs via the elevator: when the elevator is working, that is.
    â€˜Oh, and the elevator,’ I remind them. ‘Still not working.’
    â€˜It needs replacing,’ Julian says. ‘To tell the truth—doesn’t it? Isn’t that what’s wrong? The whole bloody shooting-box? It’s Apollo 11 technology, it’s another age, it doesn’t work anymore—’
    A pause. They look at each other, Marjorie at Semple, Semple at Julian, Julian at Marjorie.
    Suddenly Semple slams forward in his seat.
    â€˜Fuck it,’ he says. ‘Let’s just close the place down.’
    He holds the pose, looking around at us one by one, then pushes back truculently and waits with his arms folded. Julian looks at me, and I look at Marjorie. This time Marjorie looks at Semple.
    â€˜We can’t close it down,’ Marjorie says. ‘Can we—?’
    â€˜Got a better suggestion—?’
    â€˜Well, we just can’t —’
    â€˜For Christ’s sake!’ Semple slumps forward, his palms on the tabletop again. ‘It’s like what Jules just said, it’s another age—it’s not now we need to think of, it’s ten years’ time—twenty.’ He looks around. ‘Kids don’t read books anymore, they don’t read anything —what’s Raymond fucking Lawrence mean to them? The youngest people that come through the Residence are fifty-something. Readers are dying and