21 DW: The scale only goes up to 4 (‘Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel’) though halfway up the scale, one is still in a great deal of pain (‘Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door’).
22 DW: My hands were cold.
23 Luke 11:7.
24 DW: The rotter keeps coming back. It’s on a mole and I could swear it grows faster than bamboo.
25 DW: Everybody talks as if Dan Brown’s success is an accident, when really it took a great deal of hard work, trial and error. First, as a musician, he made a cassette for children, then he tried releasing an adult album called Angels and Demons. When the music career didn’t take off, he wrote humour books, then thrillers. So his success was assured eventually.
26 DW: The French don’t say this, but Günter did, once or twice. Such are the perils of autodidactism.
27 DW: Günter seems to have used this word interchangeably with ‘constructions’.
28 DW: Günter always professed ignorance of conjugal matters until his move to London, but the occasional slip seems to suggest that he may, under the privacy of his own duvet, have begun to educate himself. Admittedly, one doesn’t necessarily tell the vicar about these things.
29 DW: It was ever thus. As an interesting historical aside, there was an unfortunate typographical error in the King James Bible of 1631, now referred to as ‘The Wicked Bible’, which caused Exodus 20:14 to be printed as, ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ King Charles I was not greatly amused and publicly ordered all copies to be destroyed, though if he had kept a private copy for his son, that would certainly explain a proliferation of Fitzes in the subsequent decades.
30 DW: Ecclesiastes 3 suggests that ‘to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.’ There’s even apparently a time to gather stones, presumably not regularly. But since God is omnipresent through time, from his perspective it’s all happening at once. Though our meeting seemed a coincidence from our perspective, I tried to imagine how it might have appeared to God: two sharp lines on an infinite sheet of white paper, angled infinitesimally towards one another, seeming to run parallel but eventually converging at a point predicted exactly by their vectors.
31 DW: I thought I’d been quite clear, but the subsequent news article in the Salisbury Plain Dealer seems to contradict this.
32 DW: It dates from 1386. Don’t listen to the Bishop of Beauvais if he tries to tell you otherwise: ours is the oldest. Beauvais couldn’t even finish building their cathedral.
33 ‘Miracle Worker’, Salisbury Plain Dealer, 15 May 2012.
34 DW: Following a slightly terse exchange about the relevance of this research detail, Max explained that he had received a ‘download confirmation’ email minutes after sending it – so Max was simply goading Günter here.
35 DW: One typically assigns a gesture to a new name, so that you don’t have to spell it out each time.
36 DW: He really would.
37 DW: I still don’t know exactly why Günter reacted quite so strongly against the service. Most people profess to enjoy the Choral Eucharist.
38 DW: Günter could not cook, according to Arthur. Shortly after Max moved out, Günter found a website that sold out-of-date airline food, which he bought in bulk and microwaved for the two of them.
39 DW: Satanism is the only truly contrarian belief system. Either Satan doesn’t exist, or he does and he is out to destroy you and everyone you love. There’s no use in trying to get on the good side of the embodiment of evil.
40 DW: The interrobang () is a tremendous typographical invention, used where a question is too loud or emphatic to expect that the speaker will listen to the answer.
41 DW: The Dalai Lama says that we are only one and indivisible with the universe at the moment of orgasm, and the moment of death. I know he’s on the wrong team, but he’s a lovely chap.
42 DW: On a personal note, I’m not sure how seriously one should take Freud. He was a cocaine addict who wrote papers with titles like ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ or ‘Dreams and Telepathy’, and only became a doctor so he could get married. He was, however, correct that ‘time spent with cats is never wasted’.
43 DW: Allan Pinkerton was a particular favourite: the detective who codified the first surveillance and undercover strategies, founded the US Secret Service and supposedly died of gangrene of the tongue.
44 DW: One of Günter’s shorter-lived obsessions, his collection ran to just a few dirty bronze coins, which he kept in a shoebox with some old (valueless) stamps and a surprisingly large number of novelty keyrings.
45 DW: As we have discovered, he sometimes knew more than he let on.
46 DW: The popular ‘missionary’ version of this position tends not to require a cushion, since missionaries are expected to travel light.
47 DW: Actually – if you’re interested – the best thing to do if one encounters a bear is to back slowly away, keeping one’s posture erect, preferably carrying pepper spray. Though I’m not sure this approach would have worked analogously with Lieve.
48 DW: If we’re being a stickler for the facts, the ‘pedestrians’ were some young boys with a slingshot (‘BFI Smashes “Glass Cancer” Riddle at Avery’s £20m IMAX,’ Architects’ Journal, 7 September 2000).
49 DW: It’s one of those oxymoronic phrases that has somehow made it into usage against all sense, like ‘devout atheist’ and ‘good grief’.
50 DW: Football fans pluralise.
51 DW: Sic.
52 DW: There is a story in the Bible (Judges 12:6) in which two tribes are at war. In one tribe, people pronounce a word ‘shibboleth’; in the other, ‘sibboleth’. They use this to identify the enemy, and to kill them, little realising the real tragedy that this is the sum total of their difference.
53 DW: Perhaps not in the East, where they rush to embrace impermanence as a pre-emptive strike. A nice chap the Dalai Lama may be, but he doesn’t have all the answers. He’s not winning the Game of Life so much as refusing to spin the wheel.
54 DW: The Reverend Malthus is credited with foreseeing the problem of overpopulation; he is less often credited with suggesting that the poor shouldn’t breed.
55 Sisyphus was a (non-Biblical) king who tried to cheat death and was punished by being made to exercise constantly; truly, a modern parable.
56 Murder in the Métro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France, by Gail K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite (Louisiana State University Press, 2010).
57 DW: Lit. ‘Star’
58 DW: A painter whose work has recently been singled out for unfavourable comparison on the internet with that of an elephant who is capable of self-portraiture. The young reverend showed me and I must admit I was swayed. In Pollock’s defence, the elephant really is very good.
59 DW: It’s a landline with a curly cord like a pig’s tail. We might be a cathedral, but we’re not made of money.
60 DW: I was quite the belle in my day, but I’m happy to say there’s only one man in my life. Well, two, if you count The Father. Note the capitals.
61 Hosea 9:14 – ‘Give them, O LORD: what wilt thou give? give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts.’
62 Matthew 15:11–20.
63 DW: It does, however, crop up in Leviticus 19:11. It is at such a moment that a thinking person might come to think that the fabric of society itself must fray and tear unless we are ultimately answerable for our private actions. How can we hold any belief in absolutes, without a God to justify them? Humanism may be a noble house, but it is destined to subside in the sands of its foundations.
64 DW: Fire is incredibly useful in the Bible, and turns up in all sorts of places: it is a warning; a punishment; a means of purification; fire is God Himself. Just as glass reigns over this volume, one might almost call the Bible Fire.
65 DW: Spinoza was one of the first to write all his philosophy using logic (or ‘geomet
ric reasoning’), so one couldn’t disagree with his conclusions unless one disagreed with his starting point. He was persecuted for preaching tolerance, and was killed by the dust from his day job grinding lenses to help others see clearly.
66 DW: It is no surprise that the biblical injunction to love thy neighbour takes priority over brotherly love. The kind of love expressed by most biblical siblings hardly acts as an exemplar.
67 DW: Bailiffs aren’t generally allowed to take your clothing, bedding, work vehicle or anything belonging to your child, so the best thing to do if you’re going bankrupt is to buy a nice car and expensive jewellery for your child.
68 DW: The London Bridge Tower, as it was called during its planning, was dismissed by Prince Charles as ‘an enormous salt cellar’ and outright condemned by English Heritage as a ‘shard of glass through the heart of historic London’. Unfortunately for them, that turned out to be a very arresting image, and the Mace group co-opted the name long before its completion.
69 DW: This was true at the time, of course. You, dear reader, know that the stadium still stands, proud and empty.
70 DW: Genesis 11: 4–9 gives us a troubling insight into God’s possible motivations. Though the conventional reading of this passage interprets man’s tower-building as an act of hubris, we see in the text that God destroys the tower for the same reason that he confounds our language: a united mankind is capable of achieving anything it can imagine. He seems almost to feel threatened by our collective potential.
‘And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.’
71 DW: Of course, Günter had, by now, read Murder in the Metro, but as far as we know he never saw how it fitted in.
72 DW: This is the particular monument whose name is Monument, dedicated to those who suffered in the Great Fire of London. From 1681 to 1830, the plaque blamed the incident on Catholics, claiming that ‘On the third day, when it had now altogether vanquished all human counsel and resource, at the bidding, as we may well believe, of heaven, the fatal fire stayed its course and everywhere died out. But Popish frenzy, which wrought such horrors, is not yet quenched.’ I suppose they felt they may as well put the tragedy to good use.
73 ‘There’s a window cleaner’s cradle swinging wildly.’ Call to London Fire Brigade (‘Shard Worker Struck on 72nd Floor’, BBC Magazine, 2 July 2012).
Afterword
On the day that he died, I drove as fast as I could towards London, not knowing how he had been injured, with 1 Corinthians 13 running through my mind: ‘For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’
Dean Angela Winterbottom, Salisbury, 14 September 2012
Acknowledgements
Firstly, I would like to thank anyone who has contributed to Wikipedia. It is the best answer we can give to profiteering, nay-saying, ignorance, Ludditism and the cult of the individual. You are Spartacus; you are Fuenteovejuna.
I must thank Jonny Pegg, literary agent and gentleman, who was Günter’s first champion, and who negotiated a publishing deal from the maternity ward of his first child.
At Serpent’s Tail, I’d like to thank those who worked to turn this from a Word doc into an actual book – particularly Nick Sheerin and my editor Hannah Westland who, I think we can all agree, did a fine job. It has been a pleasure to work with you.
Thanks to everyone at Conville & Walsh, for our years of conversations about books and what makes them tick; to the staff at the Ritzy in Brixton for allowing me to nurse small coffees for the hundreds of hours it took to write a novel; to Anthony Rowland, Bethan Williams, Cal Flyn, Cathy Thomas, David Wolf, Emad Akhtar, Hollie Tu, Jess Hammett, Luke Savva, Tom Campion and Tom Meltzer, who at different times have generously counselled me on writing when we should have been having fun. To Rebecca Meyer: one day I hope to justify your high esteem.
Lastly, thanks to my family. I am so happy that you are alive and functional. I’m doing all this to impress you.
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