The Fountain in the Forest

by Tony White

  Rex was a long-time fan of Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of this later Starship Enterprise. Not that he was a ‘Trekkie’ by any means, but if nothing else he did at least retain a kind of semi-nostalgic loyalty to the show. When TNG had first come out, watching it every week had been a feature of student life, so he practically knew the early episodes off by heart. Captain Picard’s commanding catchphrase (and corresponding Royal Shakespeare Company pronunciation) had become a phrase of general utility among Rex and his fellow student housemates, to the extent that almost any question – ‘Cup of tea?’ – would almost inevitably bring the answer ‘Make it so.’

  If only managing the moods of Eddie Webster were so easy. Today’s paranoid outburst being a particular case in point. Of course this was a strange investigation, and Rex’s declared ‘interest’ in it – his friendship with Terry Hobbs – complicated that further, but what exactly did Webster have to be fucked off with him about, let alone to justify what had come close to an outright accusation of corruption, or to think that Rex might be out to undermine him?

  Obviously they had had their differences, and how, but for the purposes of getting on and getting on with the job, Detective Sergeants Rex King and Eddie Webster had until now built a fairly effective ‘Chinese wall’ between the personal and the professional parts of their lives. Yet for some reason Webster had come close to breaking right through that today. Perhaps a wall was not the right metaphor here, and it would be more accurate to say that, by studious omission and a process of incremental avoidance, they had tacitly created a metaphorical no-man’s-land, like some bleak Aral basin, a vast and inhospitable region to which they tacitly agreed not to go, boldly or otherwise. Until today, that is, when Webster had practically turned up at the border with his visa stamped, demanding entry. So what on earth had changed Webster’s mind, turned him into some sort of delayed-action sabre-rattler?

  For a long time it had been Rex who felt justifiably aggrieved at his colleague, not the other way around. But he had decided to make like Gandhi and pursue a strategy of non-violence as far as Webster was concerned. He certainly hadn’t let it interfere with his or the department’s work. And besides, this had all been yonks ago, back in the early noughties.

  Rex and Eddie had been good mates at the time, or so Rex had thought, anyway. They had been in the middle of an afternoon’s walkie-talkie training – so that dated it – when his friend and colleague had received a phone call from the hospital to say that his father had died, Webster being next of kin and the only surviving relative. The death of a parent is tough enough news for anyone to receive at the best of times, and people respond to grief in strange ways, but God only knew why Eddie Webster, supposedly Rex’s mate, had then gone and used it as an excuse to behave the way that he did.

  It certainly wasn’t as if Rex had been unsympathetic. Having lost both of his parents as a teenager, back when he’d still lived in Exeter, Rex had at least been through some of this before, albeit at an earlier age than most. Charles and Geraldine King had rear-ended an articulated lorry at speed on the M5 near Taunton following his father’s suffering a coronary at the wheel. Mercifully, they had at least been killed instantly.

  Having thus some inkling of what his then mate might be going through, Rex had actually gone and spoken with the trainer – and with Lollo – so that Webster was able to go home and deal with whatever funeral and estate stuff needed doing. Little had Rex known how his mate would repay him for this small kindness, but he soon found out: with all the gratitude and finesse of an ill-bred llama.

  A few days after the death, Webster, who was still on compassionate leave, had come round to visit, ostensibly to see Rex. That was the story, anyway, but in fact he would have known that Rex was on duty. They were still on the same two-two-twos at the time, so his later protestations hadn’t really washed. Oblivious to any of this, Rex had got home around 6 o’clock in the morning and found Helen already up and doing the washing up, and moreover seemingly furious with him.

  Understandably confused by this reception, Rex had asked Helen what he had done. He had not been in the least bit prepared for her response, which was – broadly – that she was in love with someone else and was leaving him. Where the fuck had that come from? At first, Helen wouldn’t say who it was that she was now in love with, but once Webster had been revealed as Lancelot to her Guinevere, King had felt no choice but to bid adieu to the friendship with his fellow officer.

  Within a week, Helen had gone too. It transpired that Webster had not only turned to her for sympathy and a shoulder to cry on – and oh, how he had cried – but that he had used the excuse of the parental death to make a ‘life’s too short’-style declaration of his love for Helen. And as if all of that hadn’t been bad enough, she had bought it. The fact that he’d done all this on Rex’s own fucking sofa – and in the process knocked off the best part of a bottle of his whisky to boot – had only rubbed it in.

  11: COCHLÉARIA (SCURVY GRASS)

  It had got worse too. By the time Webster had returned from the two weeks of compassionate leave that he’d arranged – with Rex’s help! – he’d not only buried his father but become engaged to Helen, who for her part had not cut Rex off cold; not completely. At least, not until she’d broken the news that she and Eddie were getting married. Before that particular bombshell there’d been a farewell fuck or two, preceded and followed by the usual long and emotionally draining ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ conversations, but Rex had quickly sensed that these were following a certain script. It had been as if she were looking for new and ever more convincing ways to illustrate a policy decision that had already been made. He had quickly become convinced that the conversations were pointless. It was obvious that they would by definition never have a good outcome for him, owing primarily to the fact that it really wasn’t him, after all. It was her. And Helen’s mind had clearly been made up. To make matters even worse, the change had suited Hel, and overtly so. She’d had a bit of a makeover and swapped her familiar ‘Rachel’ haircut for a short bob, and she looked great in a new crimson floral-print dress. For a few darker days, Rex had entertained Macduff-like fantasies of confronting the witless Webster, but in reality he’d decided to just leave them to it. Big deal though this was, Rex had quickly sobered up and, reading between the lines, faced up to the fact that, whether he liked it or not, there was not a lot he could do about it.

  Beside this life-changing romantic shock, the lesser adjustment in Rex’s new reality had been that a good friendship and one forged on the Hendon parade ground was now also fucked. Personal history and camaraderie were supposed to mean something in the force, but still it wasn’t that which had really grated, but rather the monstrous way his former pal had gone about it, scurvy knave that he was. It was more complicated than that, obviously, but for Webster now – after all these years – to have the nerve to get shirty with Rex, lashing out like a horse with colic, was surely some kind of joke.

  Before the Shiraz sent him to sleep, Rex wondered whether Webbo had got it all out of his system for now. He hoped he had, because the kind of performance he had had to put up with earlier on, and in front of colleagues, was totally out of order. It had better have been the last of it, otherwise – God forbid – Rex might need to have a word with Lollo. If that didn’t work, he wondered if he might not need to have some kind of powwow with Helen, use her as a go-between to find out what was really going on.

  Rex did not sleep well that night.

  Perhaps this was because of the sodium and carbohydrate rush from his unusually unhealthy later supper, or because of the old emotions that had been stirred up by Webster’s lashing out. Or maybe it was just the pressure of work, in an occupation where bad dreams seemed to be par for the course.

  King had read a bit of Freud in his college days, so he was familiar with the idea that dreams are a form of work through which the thoughts of the unconscious are made manifest to the conscious mind. Although he was also aware of the ways in
which such ideas were widely misunderstood. He could remember Helen once saying, in all seriousness, that to dream about teeth – whether of a single loose molar, or of all the teeth falling out – was an expression of sexual anxiety, while any cheap dream dictionary might equally and authoritatively state that a dream about flying could be seen as illustrating inter alia a personal sense of power and accomplishment in real life, as if you have literally ‘risen above’ a situation.

  Rex King’s dreams were nothing like this. They contained no clichéd symbolism, although there was one familiar, recurring nightmare.

  It was, of course, a recurring dream about work. Just as a CEO might dream of her company, a postman of sorting mail, or – in some Merrie Melodies cartoon – Bugs Bunny of being chased by Elmer Fudd, so the dreams of a policeman or -woman might well focus on the finer points of police procedure. Certainly, Rex’s unconscious seemed always to recycle the same content.

  The nightmare always started with dream-Rex running to the cells. The overhead fluorescent lights are flickering, as if there were a persistent electrical fault, before going off altogether; not a fault, then, but a power cut. In the dream he is running because he has found out by chance that no IS91R was issued to a detainee brought in by an Immigration Officer, or IO. Every policeman knew that migrants contravening UK immigration law were first detained using the IS81, granting authority to hold for examination or further examination, but as soon as the ‘passenger’ (or the ‘81’, as they were sometimes known) was handed over to another body – whether that was the police, Prison Service personnel or an escorting or removal-agency contractor – then an IS91 ‘full authority to detain’ had to be issued by the IO within four hours. This form then accompanied the passenger for an indefinite period of detention, irrespective of holding agency or transfer from one agency to another, until the point of deportation itself. The IS91 was meant to be accompanied by an IS91R, which had to be issued to the detainee him-or herself within the same time frame.

  The IS91R was called different things by different people. No one had asked what the detainees called them, but IOs often referred to them as the ‘Reasons’, since it was easier to say than ‘IS91R’ and that is what it enumerated: the reasons for deportation. ‘Have you given him his Reasons?’ the detaining officer might be asked.

  Dream-Rex hands over the Reasons, but as he does so he realises that there is no interpreter present, so he is not able to ensure that the detainee understands the contents of the form. This is an omission that may make the detaining agency vulnerable to a successful legal challenge under Article 5(2) of the Human Rights Act, namely, ‘Everyone who is arrested shall be informed promptly, in a language which he understands, of the reasons for his arrest and of any charge against him.’

  Even within the logic and experience of the dream-state, dream-Rex knew this stuff. He also knew that the detention of migrants in police custody was a joke, not least because it created in effect a hybrid institution that had to be run on two different regimes, and to address the needs of differing client and user groups. Where previously it had answered merely to various Home Office directorates, in recent years this had come to mean working to the sometimes conflicting directives of two entirely separate government departments, namely the new Ministry of Justice and the slimmed-down Home Office that the hiving-off of the former had created. It was not surprising – indeed it was sometimes understandable (although not justifiable) – that Immigration Service paperwork might occasionally not be administered correctly.

  Such was the stuff of Rex’s dreams, and in this case dream-Rex appears to have been left holding the ball, as it were.

  What always happened next in this particular nightmare was that, at the very moment dream-Rex realises he has no interpreter, he is distracted by a commotion around the corner in the corridor. Going to investigate, he is surprised to see a pair of splayed legs emerging from beneath a pile of four officers. Later they will say that they were merely administering first aid, but it reminds dream-Rex of nothing so much as the scrum in a game of rugby.

  His attention is drawn to odd details: the brown corduroy fabric of the trousers, say, or the fact that the man at the base of the heap of people is only wearing a shoe on his left foot, and that there is a hole on the underside of the navy-blue sock that he is wearing on his right.

  In dream after dream, noticing his approach, the officers dismount, as it were, and dream-Rex is always surprised to see that the man being thus administered to – a black man of around thirty, smartly dressed in corduroy trousers and what looks from the back like a grey long-sleeved Fred Perry – is not lying back or leaning back against the wall, as dream-Rex had expected to see, but instead is doubled over so that his head is lolling above his knees. There is a pool of vomit or saliva on the carpet between his legs.

  ‘Fucker resisted, didn’t he,’ one of the officers says. ‘Said he was having an asthma attack. Strong guy. Took all of us to hold him down.’

  ‘Didn’t you know he had asthma?’ dream-Rex asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s been booked, I take it. Gnat’s Piss, the lot?’

  The officer nods.

  ‘Did he mention it then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where’s he headed?’

  ‘In there,’ one of the officers says, nodding at the open cell.

  ‘Well, get him bloody well in there, and put him in the recovery position now,’ dream-Rex says. ‘Do what you can to bring him around. And for Christ’s sake call an ambulance.’

  Then he finds himself driving home, and even though the dream-home appears to have more in common with the family home in Exeter that he grew up in than the flat in Falcon where he actually lives, the overwhelming sensation is one of being flooded with elation and relief. Next thing, he is being woken up by the warble of his mobile phone alarm.

  This time, however, there was a slight, topical variation from the usual. In the moments before he woke up, just as dream-Rex was pulling up outside his childhood home, he saw that someone had chosen to deface the front wall of the house. In this new version of the dream, next to the front door was a large, spray-painted cartoon of a bald man with a big nose looking over a wall.

  Kilroy was here.

  12: PQUERETTE (DAISY)

  Just before he opened his eyes, Rex felt slightly disorientated to remember that he was in his bedroom on the sixth floor at Falcon, and not in the back bedroom of the 1930s red-brick semi on the Burnthouse Lane Estate that he had grown up in.

  When he thought of it, Rex recalled his childhood fondly. It seemed idyllic now, as if it were the product of another age, but perhaps that was merely because it had all ended so abruptly. If he thought of those years now, it might be the Devon seascape that his mind would turn to – the view from a train window travelling south to Torquay by Dawlish – or memories closer to his former family home, such as walking to the Dolphin Fish & Chip Shop, watching tom-tits on the bird feeder, or the smell of the ground after a frost. Convolvulus flowers hanging from their slender summer vines. A coot nesting in the reeds down by the river beyond the Priory Girls’ School playing fields. Drawing diagrams of an anode or a diode in O-level chemistry lessons at Hele’s School – the local comprehensive – or the whole class walking en masse over the footbridge to the annexe. He could remember the Latin teacher trying and failing to explain the differences between the Gregorian and the Roman Calendars. The latter supposedly relied at least partly on some kind of backwards calculation of the kalends, which were not only the first days of each month – pinch, punch-style – but also stood for something utterly unfathomable to do with the number of days remaining at the close of a month, plus two, which he had not understood at all, though he had been fascinated by the etymological lesson that it imparted. There had even been a mnemonic rhyme on the subject that they learned by rote, a Latin equivalent of ‘Thirty days hath September’, but Rex had long since forgotten it. These were innocent pleasures all, and memories that he
supposed were not so different from those of many other people of his age and background.

  All of that had changed, of course, and childhood been brought to an abrupt end, once Dame Fortune had come knocking on the door at Spenser Avenue in the shape of an unknown policeman with a concerned expression and some terrible news. Peaked cap tucked under his arm out of respect, while his colleague was sat in the patrol car eating a Twix.

  In certain circles, the death of your parents might lead to a family home being sold, or an inheritance. Small consolation for such a great loss, but a balm of sorts. For the young King, an only child, it meant having to effect an expeditious cull of his parents’ possessions. There had been two small life insurance payments due, of which he was the beneficiary, and which he would somehow manage to parlay into a deposit when it came to buying the flat in Falcon a few years later. Of his parents’ things, King managed to save only a few papers – their marriage certificate and the like – some talismanic photographs, his mother’s wedding ring and his father’s best watch, an inexpensive gold Seiko with a black strap, and these he would enshrine with the other treasures that he kept in a small charity-shop-bought suitcase of his most valued possessions, along with his passport, O-level certificates, and sundry official documents.