by Tony White
Maybe after they’d eaten they could go to The Perseverance, and then walk back to his flat via Great Ormond Street, if Susan wasn’t sick to the back teeth of the place. He could tell her about his twin brother who had died at birth, strangled by Rex’s umbilicus.
‘What was his name?’ she would say. ‘Did he have—’
‘Oh, yes,’ Rex would say. ‘They used to baptise them and everything in those days. His name was Joseph King. Joseph Jonathan King.’
Then, once this was over; once tonight was over and Susan had gone back to York – not that he wished it over; he wanted to savour every minute of it – but once she’d gone home, he’d check what time the tide was going out and maybe walk down to the river, to Wapping or Woolwich or even further downstream. Yeah, that’s what he’d do. Once she was back in York, he’d take them from the freezer compartment and walk down by the river or over one of the bridges. He’d see the water rushing back out to sea, and he would throw them as far as he could. He’d chuck them into the middle of the river. Milo’s nose, whatever his name was, would sink immediately and disappear, but Trevor Tennyson’s inhaler wouldn’t. It would float on the surface, but it would just be one more tiny object amongst the millions of others that were churning in that turbulent and muddy water, with its freight of lumber, bottles and plastic bags, tree branches and traffic cones, of weeds and footballs and dead fish. And it would move fast, alright. It would be carried out to sea at a rate of knots. Churned and battered, its blue plastic casing would become brittle before eventually breaking apart and falling away, leaving just the tiny aerosol canister itself to be carried in and out by successive tides.
Rex reached for the door handle, pulled it open and stepped inside, enjoying the familiar sounds of cutlery and quiet conversation, the short scrape of wooden peels on the baking-deck floor; the warmth of the ovens, and the rich and savoury smells of yeasty dough and baking, of cooked tomatoes, herbs and toasting cheese.
Good call, he thought. He could murder a pizza.
The place was packed as always – the young couples, the work colleagues, the travellers, the birthday parties and the family treats, all tucking in – and for a second Rex couldn’t see Susan, but then he did. She was sitting by the window looking at her phone. He walked over, going on to pantomime tiptoes – ‘Excuse me, ladies’ – as he squeezed through the gap between two tables with a wink.
‘Hi, gorgeous. Sorry I’m late. Lollo, my boss. Don’t even ask!’
‘Hi, Rex,’ she said, smiling. ‘Don’t worry. I was just chatting to Ashley.’
‘Wow, you look amazing,’ he said, lightly touching her shoulder and leaning forward to kiss her upturned lips, to touch her cheek and stroke behind her ear. ‘Beautiful.’
Yeah, that’s what he’d do.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Some readers will have noted that the ‘Royal Palace Theatre’ depicted in this novel occupies roughly the same space and location as London’s famous Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, but they should also note that any similarity ends there. This Royal Palace Theatre is completely fictional, its name a crude translation of Théâtre du Palais-Royal, after successive Parisian theatres so called.
Similarly, the Holborn Police Station depicted herein shares some external features and its location on Lamb’s Conduit Street, London, with the real Holborn Police Station, but internal layouts, command structures, procedures and operations, cases, etc., are all entirely fictional.
Readers seeking information or support regarding deaths in custody are directed to the work of the UK charity INQUEST, which monitors deaths in custody and provides ‘a specialist, comprehensive advice service to bereaved people, lawyers, other advice and support agencies, the media, MPs and the wider public on contentious deaths and their investigation’.*
The Fountain in the Forest and the two novels that follow are mapped against a specific period in UK history: a brief interregnum of ninety days (or nine revolutionary weeks, according to Sylvain Maréchal’s decimal calendar) from the end of the UK Miners’ Strike on 3 March 1985 to the Battle of the Beanfield on 1 June. Each chapter is mapped against one day in 1985, converted into the French Revolutionary Calendar, but as well as being shot through with the daily symbols from the Revolutionary Calendar, The Fountain in the Forest also uses a ‘mandated vocabulary’, i.e. a predetermined list of words that must be incorporated into the text – namely, all of the solutions to the Guardian Quick Crossword from each of those same days in 1985.
Mandated vocabularies are of course one of several literary techniques or constraints that were proposed by Oulipo, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature, whose best-known exponent was the novelist Georges Perec (1936–82). Perec himself is perhaps most celebrated for a novel in which the constraint operates at the level of the individual letter rather than using a mandated vocabulary: his 1969 ‘lipogrammatic’ novel La Disparition, written entirely without using the letter ‘E’ (which is available in Gilbert Adair’s 1995 English-language translation, A Void). A less well-known work written using a mandated vocabulary is the late Oulipo member Harry Mathews’ short story ‘Their Words, for You’ (published in his 1977 collection Selected Declarations of Dependence), which uses only the words from forty-six proverbs.
While undertaking the research for The Fountain in the Forest (which included writing the stand-alone novella Dicky Star and the Garden Rule), I studied – among other sources – the Guardian newspapers of the period, which are held in the newspaper collections of the British Library. Sitting at the microfiche readers, first in Colindale and more recently in Euston Road, I found myself paying particular attention to the Guardian’s back pages, which is perhaps not so surprising since completion of the Quick Crossword had been a daily habit of mine in 1985–86. Remembering that, in the later years of his life, Georges Perec had composed a weekly crossword for the news magazine Le Point, and in order to reimmerse myself in the habits of the time, I redid now those same crosswords that I had first completed thirty years earlier. More than just an aide-memoire, I found that writing these words out again activated a kind of linguistic ‘muscle memory’, that this smattering of words was woven into the warp and weft of my experience of those days. Using the solutions as an Oulipian mandated vocabulary offers, then, a linguistic and historical ‘time capsule’ of the vocabulary of the period, as well as a pantheon of historical figures, from Hastings Banda and Walter Mondale to Spike Milligan. It also gives a meter and a measure to the prose, in counterpoint to the measure that is provided by the French Revolutionary Calendar and by the daily symbols of French rural life drawn from it. Thus chapters 1–6, 8–13, 15–20, 22–27, 29 and 30 are each written using all of the solutions to the Guardian Quick Crossword (adhering, with one or two exceptions, to hyphenations, etc., of the period) from the corresponding day in 1985 (Guardian days only, so excluding Sundays), and in order of their appearance in the text, as follows:
CHAPTER 1
henbane, cabinet, Emma, least, cavil, prosaic, indispensable, Gallup, reason, Tuesday, night-watchman, Banda, icicles, vinegar, spice, Mark Twain, Iliad, my type, aspect, wallpaper, thrill, ebb-tide, tea-shop, geyser, Eric, enemy (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,649, Guardian, Monday 4 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 2
old, crabby, bargain, riding, free and easy, assign, underwear, Nye, motor, bus, reredos, gaunt, apostle, often, duple, front runner, Newmarket, finger-print, forthcoming, tighten, indignant, war, banker, printable (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,650, Guardian, Tuesday 5 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 3
schedule, penny-farthing, ramp, sherry, she-bear, sinus, physiotherapy, discern, drudge, skyscraper, subjective, Erin, sediment, pond, bluff, had up, remorse, observe, torch, gravamen, acme, hara-kiri (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,651, Guardian, Wednesday 6 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 4
vicarage, song, symphony, negate, platypus, byword, slur, stop, ally, save, sprawl, laughter, playwright, mice, in-la
ws, old folks, dust, safari park, hard at work, cantilever, oblivion, first aid, Gertrude, Iris (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,652, Guardian, Thursday 7 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 5
Webster, coffee, Eton, plod, glorify, set-up, onus, pilot, powder puff, fever, fly-blown, permissible, Bolivia, alas, purple, lipstick, tutu, viol, promise, midge, Becky Sharp, penalise, innovate (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,653, Guardian, Friday 8 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 6
enormous, over, Hesperides, immune, match, horse, neat, hypodermic, husbandman, Vitus, Gurkha, yard-arm, book-shop, handicraft, anchor, inflate, Mafeking, fetlock, aged, editor, avid, crash, high tea, remarque (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,654, Guardian, Saturday 9 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 8
corn, Avengers, moult, music, member, occasionally, fiddler, mad-house, spiral, bismuth, release, prolific, okapi, loud applause, mime, sledge-hammer, pease-pudding, red-hot, clerihew, distend, stow, sofa, under, seraph (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,655, Guardian, Monday 11 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 9
wedge, heron, fowl, Tennyson, worth, oddity, evil, shed, spotless, valid, darbies, wafer, thin, light and shade, ruffian, farewell, with it, glower, my eye, loosened, Electra, timid, Galileo, sphere, pontoon bridge, Reich (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,656, Guardian, Tuesday 12 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 10
top drawer, execrate, black pudding, restaurateur, Picard, Aral, visa, sabre-rattler, Gandhi, walkie-talkie, training, parent, Exeter, Charles, Geraldine, rear, coronary, ill-bred, llama, duty, Lancelot, adieu (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,657, Guardian, Wednesday 13 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 11
leave, usual, policy, owing, overtly, crimson, dress, Macduff, witless, big deal, reading, not a lot, parade ground, grated, monstrous, colic, powwow, go-between, molar, inter, Elmer, recycle, hybrid, warble, deface (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,658, Guardian, Thursday 14 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 12
seascape, tom-tits, frost, convolvulus, coot, anode, kalends, Dame Fortune, balm, expeditious, cull, enshrine, starving, bigot, imam, forgive, offside, drama critic, croak, succinct (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,659, Guardian, Friday 15 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 13
beef, gulf, Ulster, Leinster, Armagh, Antrim, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Down, Derby Day, madame, mortgage, dynastic, virginals, spider, bass, hollander, stanza, trying, perpetual (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,660, Guardian, Saturday 16 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 15
dais, zinc, pellet, control, sac, pupae, kaleidoscopic, in toto, lazybones, pork, Mondale, pea soup, pip-squeak, iceman, quotient, vim, main verb, La Paz, vice-principal, colonial, Elsie, peat, beri-beri, ominous, happen, ousel (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,661, Guardian, Monday 18 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 16
orison, calico, jackdaw, cheek by jowl, tinge, rinse, pass by, Rhine, plastic, shingle, Larwood, Aire, book token, Edward, Rajah, infernal, toreador, ocarina, ticket, royal road, Hoffman, zircon, stag, kimono, hungry (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,662, Guardian, Tuesday 19 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 17
revel, brutal, alder, Norma, Venus, modesty, hyperactive, brain, answer, Heather, Orwell, wild-cat, upstart, Lollard, lingua franca, toddle, nadir, lament, vehicle, canal, ducat, ellipse, slot machine, ninepin, two-bit (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,663, Guardian, Wednesday 20 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 18
ruddy, mini-van, rust, snip, running, paraffin, monotony, notion, rates, anathema, spare time job, juice, cape, rhyming slang, Padstow, Rover, oral, tracing paper, confetti, pit-a-pat, bigwig, tyrant, Beggar’s Opera, animus (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,664, Guardian, Thursday 21 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 19
within, hemispherical, Ivan, whitebait, chinwag, errand, night, hero, iota, gunpowder plot, Baader-Meinhof, Hard Times, choir-boy, basic, sot, ethereal, Chirac, marrow, cog, Oslo, authoritarian, film star, trimaran, festoon (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,665, Guardian, Friday 22 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 20
fraternal, emphasise, facetious, knit, wreath, giant, over, kill, safe, cook, liquor, Anselm, avuncular, Juno, schooling, Walton, Trent, Mervyn, Morag, Ankara, my hat, chameleon, lick, Greek gift, rental, heehaw, sage, clockwork (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,666, Guardian, Saturday 23 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 22
limp rag, last, splash, almond, watching (brief), sincere, half-wit, cross purposes, respect, (watching) brief, least, twelve, star-gazer, incapable, hatch, hutch, Reeve, aunt, Zagreb, tractor, tarmac, air show, cherub, beseech, Mistral, Perth, hitch (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,667, Guardian, Monday 25 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 23
expectant, erect, gum, Lysol, arc, sponsorship, orator, infer, ingenious, Orlando, nightmare, intimations, immortality, spell, nun, Israeli, arable, adroit, pimple, pug, gentle touch, natural, flagrante delicto (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,668, Guardian, Tuesday 26 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 24
spud, mischief, anvil, Bohemia, impunity, term, cedilla, Newbury, high and mighty, along, pass, death-watch, vain, mason, ballroom, hedge, wiseacre, bodkin, sticky, in sequence, as large as life, go-ahead (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,669, Guardian, Wednesday 27 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 25
standard, away, attach, henceforth, scud, prepared, Beatrice, cow-house, voyeur, restricted, bridegroom, bachelor, Dortmund, bier, cicada, loaf, Bach, season, ride, ewer, a great help, skid, classics, Benedick (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,670, Guardian, Thursday 28 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 26
dusk, snag, profile, grandson, scruff, shut, mauve, generous, cottage pie, beer, Arras, stuck up, galley proof, pace, cenotaph, garnet, jonquil, stem, adjudicate, forgo, topic, red light, outcrop (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,671, Guardian, Friday 29 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 27
Tom (Bowling), bland, Revie, bubble bath, baby doll, bedstead, bawd, locket, wardroom, combat, creditable, arose, stabiliser, burst, blotto, bode, turn out, (Tom) Bowling, layman, tramway, hail, side-show, blab, balloon, cadaver (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,672, Guardian, Saturday 30 March 1985.)
CHAPTER 29
Susan, croc, doorman, riff-raff, straw, hospital ship, in debt, whey, air shot, seduce, stocks, purchase, group-captain, hooch, instep, fashion plate, canonise, rumba, cathode, fawn, honour bright, pose, apoplexy, rose-red (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,673, Guardian, Monday 1 April 1985.)
CHAPTER 30
bash, motif, Buckfast, ear-plug, prospect, itemise, Freud, unafraid, spree, Chelsea, motel, gored, needless, smudge, Hermia, taste, recognisances, chin, Spike Milligan, hoist, girdle, sugar, bend, ceramic, tide, lumber (solutions to Quick Crossword No. 4,674, Guardian, Tuesday 2 April 1985.)
* www.inquest.org.uk/about/home
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With special thanks to my incredible agent, Patrick Walsh, and assistant John Ash of PEW Literary; to my brilliant editor, Lee Brackstone; Ella Griffiths, Samantha Matthews and the rest of the great team at Faber & Faber; and to copyeditor Silvia Crompton, and proofreader Sarah Barlow.
Sincere thanks to Dr Sanja Perovic, Professor Patrick Ffrench and colleagues in the Department of French at King’s College London; the artists Stuart Brisley and Maya Balcioglu; Evelyn Wilson, Suzie Leighton, Jana Riedel, Noshin Sultan and the Creativeworks London team; Alastair Brotchie and Tanya Peixoto. I would also like to thank Judith Károlyi; Forma Arts and Media Ltd; Jane and Louise Wilson; Caroline Smith; Fiona McMorrough and Diane Gray-Smith; James C. White; the Such family; Rosy and Ian Horton; Chris Dorley-Brown; French and Mottershead; Domo Baal; the late Malcolm Bennett; and the people of the Département des Alpes-Maritimes, France.
Above all, I would like to thank my wife, Sarah Such.
As noted in the Preface, readers wishing to find out more about the French Revolutionary Calendar are directed to Sanja Perovic’s excellent The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Pol
itics (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
The traditional ‘Bedfordshire May Day Carol’ (which appears in Chapters 26 and 28) was collected by Sir Ernest Clarke for the English folksong collector and researcher Lucy E. Broadwood’s English Traditional Songs and Carols (Boosey & Co., 1908).
*
Tony White was creative entrepreneur in residence funded by Creativeworks London and a visiting research fellow in the Department of French at King’s College London, 2013–15.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tony White’s most recent work of fiction is the novella Dicky Star and the Garden Rule (Forma), specially commissioned to accompany a series of works by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson marking the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Tony is the author of novels including Foxy-T (Faber), the non-fiction work Another Fool in the Balkans (Cadogan) and editor and co-editor of short story collections including Croatian Nights (Serpent’s Tail), with numerous short stories published in journals, exhibition catalogues and collections including All Hail the New Puritans (4th Estate). Tony has been writer in residence at the Science Museum, London and Leverhulme Trust writer in residence at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Tony White collaborated with Blast Theory to write Ivy4evr, an SMS-based, interactive drama for young people broadcast by Channel 4 in October 2010 and nominated for a BIMA award in 2011 by the British Interactive Media Association. Tony White is currently chair of London’s award-winning arts radio station Resonance 104.4fm.