mechanism of mass suicide will be the glucose drink Lucozade.
“Because of the longitudinal and experimental nature of this artwork, the location of this mass suicide cannot yet be specified.
“Whatever the degree of its success, I will make the nature of this conceptual experiment known to the BBC on or around 23 February 2000. For the reasons mentioned above, the location of this conference cannot yet be specified.”’
Singh folded the statement and replaced it in his pocket.
‘The affidavit of which this is a copy is co-signed and witnessed by myself and my partner, Richard Joseph Parsons. The original may be viewed by appointment at the London office of Parsons Singh Associates.’
On a quiet news day, the report was fourth lead on that evening’s six o’clock news on the BBC. The BBC agreed to share the footage with all other terrestrial and satellite networks in time for their evening broadcasts.
Editorially, the decision was taken to leave uncut the five seconds of silence which followed Singh’s completion of Dryden’s statement, indicating the interview might now proceed.
When the reporter speaks, off camera, it is in an excited half-whisper.
‘Mr Dryden,’ he says, ‘are we to understand that your so-called Temple of Light was a practical joke ?’
Dryden cannot quite maintain his calm. Momentarily, he seems agitated with the triumphant hilarity of it. He shifts in his seat and looks to the floor. When he looks at the camera, his face splits into a half-melon grin, cropped out with teeth for seeds.
‘A work of art , Martin,’ he corrects the reporter. ‘But (and let me quote Horace): “what is to stop us telling the truth with a smile?”’
The next day, for the first time, the Sun chose to repeat one of its own front-page headlines.
Over a slightly pixilated, over-colourized close-up of Dryden’s grin, lifted straight from videotape of the previous evening’s news, it printed in eighty-point type a single word:
Gotcha !
6
I
Holloway dreamed he was a tattered crow at the window of Andrew Winston Taylor’s house.
He flapped his blue-black wings and became a tendril of ectoplasm that rippled through tiny cracks in damp limestone.
He was a flickering, a dry rustle in the corners of that gloomy building. He was the tick of capillary on optic nerve. He was a discarnate longing that lurked over that deserted and fatherless family, a sentinel to watch over them until the sorrow slipped away and he woke to discover he had been weeping.
That day, Joanne Grayling disappeared.
II
Holloway was the son of Charles and Elizabeth. Charles spent his life in the British army. Elizabeth Fowler, a Halifax tobacconist’s daughter, was a Catholic twenty years his junior. Their first child, Sarah, was born with a hole in her heart and did not live. William was conceived unexpectedly several years later. His first sense memories were of military bases in hot territories.
His mother died when he was four, of anaphylactic shock brought on by a wasp sting. His maternal great-aunt acceded to his guardianship. William was shipped off to live with her in Halifax. Perhaps because Grace was old before William was of school age, they formed a strange and tender friendship of abandoned equals.
He never saw his father again.
When he was seventeen, Will joined the Royal Engineers, which took him away from England. He was tattooed in Berlin and Singapore. He left the army at twenty-one to live in Leeds, part of an England whose name he had tattooed above his heart but hardly knew.
Now that tattoo had bled out to an indistinct, blue scroll. A new century was beginning and he lived alone in another city: Bristol, built on the traffic of slaves. His new life seemed in every way disconnected from what had gone before. This was another England, a place where he flicked through discoloured snapshots, his heart hollow for their fading. His mental depth of field had shifted. Leeds, that boy, that decade seemed to
“Because of the longitudinal and experimental nature of this artwork, the location of this mass suicide cannot yet be specified.
“Whatever the degree of its success, I will make the nature of this conceptual experiment known to the BBC on or around 23 February 2000. For the reasons mentioned above, the location of this conference cannot yet be specified.”’
Singh folded the statement and replaced it in his pocket.
‘The affidavit of which this is a copy is co-signed and witnessed by myself and my partner, Richard Joseph Parsons. The original may be viewed by appointment at the London office of Parsons Singh Associates.’
On a quiet news day, the report was fourth lead on that evening’s six o’clock news on the BBC. The BBC agreed to share the footage with all other terrestrial and satellite networks in time for their evening broadcasts.
Editorially, the decision was taken to leave uncut the five seconds of silence which followed Singh’s completion of Dryden’s statement, indicating the interview might now proceed.
When the reporter speaks, off camera, it is in an excited half-whisper.
‘Mr Dryden,’ he says, ‘are we to understand that your so-called Temple of Light was a practical joke ?’
Dryden cannot quite maintain his calm. Momentarily, he seems agitated with the triumphant hilarity of it. He shifts in his seat and looks to the floor. When he looks at the camera, his face splits into a half-melon grin, cropped out with teeth for seeds.
‘A work of art , Martin,’ he corrects the reporter. ‘But (and let me quote Horace): “what is to stop us telling the truth with a smile?”’
The next day, for the first time, the Sun chose to repeat one of its own front-page headlines.
Over a slightly pixilated, over-colourized close-up of Dryden’s grin, lifted straight from videotape of the previous evening’s news, it printed in eighty-point type a single word:
Gotcha !
6
I
Holloway dreamed he was a tattered crow at the window of Andrew Winston Taylor’s house.
He flapped his blue-black wings and became a tendril of ectoplasm that rippled through tiny cracks in damp limestone.
He was a flickering, a dry rustle in the corners of that gloomy building. He was the tick of capillary on optic nerve. He was a discarnate longing that lurked over that deserted and fatherless family, a sentinel to watch over them until the sorrow slipped away and he woke to discover he had been weeping.
That day, Joanne Grayling disappeared.
II
Holloway was the son of Charles and Elizabeth. Charles spent his life in the British army. Elizabeth Fowler, a Halifax tobacconist’s daughter, was a Catholic twenty years his junior. Their first child, Sarah, was born with a hole in her heart and did not live. William was conceived unexpectedly several years later. His first sense memories were of military bases in hot territories.
His mother died when he was four, of anaphylactic shock brought on by a wasp sting. His maternal great-aunt acceded to his guardianship. William was shipped off to live with her in Halifax. Perhaps because Grace was old before William was of school age, they formed a strange and tender friendship of abandoned equals.
He never saw his father again.
When he was seventeen, Will joined the Royal Engineers, which took him away from England. He was tattooed in Berlin and Singapore. He left the army at twenty-one to live in Leeds, part of an England whose name he had tattooed above his heart but hardly knew.
Now that tattoo had bled out to an indistinct, blue scroll. A new century was beginning and he lived alone in another city: Bristol, built on the traffic of slaves. His new life seemed in every way disconnected from what had gone before. This was another England, a place where he flicked through discoloured snapshots, his heart hollow for their fading. His mental depth of field had shifted. Leeds, that boy, that decade seemed to
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