Nicholas Royle (Ed.)

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Biographical note:  Nicholas Royle was born in Manchester in 1963. He is the author of five novels — Counterparts, Saxophone Dreams, The Matter of the Heart, The Director’s Cut and Antwerp — and one short story collection, Mortality. He has edited thirteen anthologies including A Book of Two Halves (Phoenix), The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers’ Dreams (Serpent’s Tail), The Time Out Book of New York Short Stories (Penguin), and Dreams Never End (Tindal Street Press). He lives in Manchester with his wife and two children, and teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714810
ISBN:  9781844714810
Author:  Nicholas Royle
Title:  ’68
Series:  Anthologies
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FND
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Apr-08
Extent:  176pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  17 mm
Weight:  264 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 18.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  ’68: New Stories From Children of the Revolution broadly addresses the theme of revolution, utopia, dystopia and change, and is published to coincide with All Power to the Imagination, a major season of events taking place in London in April/May 2008 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the student uprisings in Paris of May 1968, and other protest movements worldwide that were inspired by them.

The ten writers gathered here, all born in 1968, explore the subject of revolution in brand-new specially written short stories. Governments are overthrown, the people are revolting. A utopia here, a dystopia there. From the skulduggery of Elizabethan London to the futuristic visions of science fiction, taking in undergraduate drug abuse, disaffected French youth, psychopathic desperate housewives and democratic cannibals along the way.

Table of contents:
Nicholas Royle
Introduction
Toby Litt
History!
Justina Robson
1968: A ShortSpan Snackfood. Valid for Year 7 Student Use. Calories: 231
Marc Villemain
This Was My Flesh
Tricia Sullivan
Plan C
Frank I Swannack
The Lovesick Womb
Christopher Kenworthy
Young
James Flint
Carl
Rhonda Carrier
Nine Cubed
Marc Werner
Someone Take These Dreams Away
Kerry Watson
The Sorry Years
Biographical Notes

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Toby Litt
History!

They met in the thickest part of the woods; also, the furthest from the edge. To get there, they had to hack through thick brambles, use compasses, check their synchronised watches and remember the routes of their country girlhoods. Radio silence was maintained, however. It was twilight, clement because late summer. This den within a copse had been their place of recourse, when the adults had made it plain they were becoming too alive to be tolerated — too alive meaning too fast, too loud, too vivid in thought and question.

All of them, all three, had had both original parents to respond to; since then, all three had lost one or the other. Later, it was speculated that this might have had something to do with their actions. Information was initially hard to come by, and what there was seemed contradictory.

First to arrive at the meeting point was Margaret — her usual distinguishing feature, an aureole of chestnut ringlets, now squashed beneath a black balaclava. Her eyes, if one had been able to see them, were underlined with brown semi-circles. Margaret had given birth five years previously to triplet boys, two of whom were hyperactive; the third was given to feigning death behind the sofa for no apparent reason. Margaret, who of course herself dies before the night is out, left behind a written statement saying she did what she did for them. The consensus among the villagers was, she was a bad mother, knew it, and took the coward’s way out.

‘Hello,’ said a low voice from the cover immediately behind Margaret. ‘I wondered whether I’d be able to sneak up on you.’

Margaret had at first given a real jump; the voice interrupted thoughts of whether she could trust the teenage babysitter with John, Jack and James. Her husband had funny business at the Lodge.

‘Well, then, you succeeded,’ said Margaret.

Out from behind the thick trunk of a tree stepped Beatrice known as Bee, who also dies. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, ‘No-one else is going to be out here.’

‘This isn’t a game.’

‘To be entirely serious is to play into their hands,’ said Bee, who was theoretically minded in her opposition. ‘I am maintaining an element of joy.’

Margaret smiled a sad smile, almost as if she knew they were going to die. ‘It’s good to see you,’ she said, and the two women hugged. Both were aware of the crackling sounds of the woods around them — were they being crept up on?

‘How are the boys?’ asked Bee.

‘They are very well,’ said Margaret, willing herself not to cry. ‘It’s still all battles in our house, though. War-war-war.’

‘Any sign of Liz?’

‘Not yet,’ replied Margaret.

The two women sat on the loamy earth of the woods. It was nice for once not to have to worry about dirt — tonight was a time for being deliberately dirty. ‘She’s late,’ said Bee, who had turned thirty the week before.

‘She’ll be here,’ said Margaret.

‘What if she doesn’t come?’

‘She’ll come.’

There was a moment.

‘I like your hair like that,’ said Margaret.

‘Thank you,’ said Bee.

Bee’s hair was usually done in a neat black bob, but she had shaved this off earlier in the evening — down to a Number 1. Some have taken this as a sign that she was all along intending martyrdom. She had been anorexic for years, which was also taken as explanation — hatred of the self and of the world. But although she probably did not know it, at the time of her death she was three weeks pregnant. Despite DNA testing, the father has to this day not been found.

‘Do we go ahead anyway, if she doesn’t come?’ Bee asked.

‘I think I hear her now,’ said Margaret. If she heard something, it wasn’t Liz; perhaps a fox or a badger. After this, though, they waited in a listening silence.

Eventually, quarter of an hour later, Liz crashed out of the undergrowth and fell against them. It took her two minutes to regain her breath — during which time, both the others wanted to tell her to keep quiet but didn’t feel it possible.

‘I was followed,’ was the first thing she said that they understood.

‘Calm down,’ said Margaret, who wasn’t the leader — they didn’t have a leader; hierarchies being part of what they wanted to destroy — but who often was first to introduce ideas into their circle: she had suggested tonight; the others had not been slow to agree. ‘Tell us whenever you’re ready.’

Liz — who dies — sat with her head between her legs, gasping less and less. At twenty-nine, she was the youngest of them. (Margaret was thirty one, Bee — as mentioned before — thirty.) ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she said.

‘We have plenty of time,’ said Margaret, but checked her watch anyway.

‘Who followed you?’ asked Bee.

‘A policeman,’ Liz said, her breath a little more even. ‘He was dressed in civilian clothes, but I could still tell he was a policeman.’

‘How?’ asked Margaret.

‘Because I hated him so much,’ Liz said, then sniggered. ‘And he walked as if he’d been taught how to march — you know what I mean.’

‘Do you think they know anything?’ Bee asked.

‘No,’ said Margaret. ‘How could they?’

‘I’m not so sure,’ said Liz. ‘He seemed to want to follow me — for no reason.’

‘You managed to lose him, didn’t you?’ asked Margaret.

‘Of course,’ said Liz, sitting up straight. ‘Or else I wouldn’t be here.’

‘How?’ asked Bee.

‘Well …’ said Liz, and took a long breath.

It turned out she had gone to the house of a sympathetic female friend, knocked on the door, been invited inside and then, after a brief explanation (seedy man loitering, fear of rape), had climbed over the back fence and into the concreted area behind the cricket pavilion. From here, she had been able to make her way to the woods without breaking cover more than once — to cross the main road near the stables.

All three women kept horses there, and this was later the cause of much speculation. Perhaps it was a sign of sexual frustration — unhappiness in marriage. The husbands of Margaret and Liz denied this as libel. Singleton Bee was discovered (by the tabloids) to have been gratifyingly promiscuous. In the end, more than seven men came forward to testify to her total lack of frigidity. ‘She was very intense,’ one of them said. ‘Almost too intense. I didn’t like it.’ Nymphomania became the favoured diagnosis.

Margaret coughed quietly. ‘All set?’ she asked.

Unpublished endorsement :  A book for everyone interested in the world now. Some pairings can be relied on — literature and life, Steptoe and Son, Lennon and McCartney, Nicholas Royle and a good anthology. 1968 is the year that made so much of what we are. Readers who wish to follow the traces of idealism and war, freedom and sex, should put down their newspapers and read these stories instead.

Andrew O’Hagan