She wants to leave, but Dusty is not responding to her appeals. When she cried out to him in her distress just then, he did not come to her aid. He had, by her best assessment, become a wild animal, indistinguishable from the savages surrounding them, his face contorted in a rictus of the most violent aspect, his arms – oh, those masterful, most coordinated arms – shaking the air without method or reason. His face was red, a vein proud in his neck, and he screamed – how he screamed! That model of focused energy had quite unwound, spewing himself uselessly into the general incontinence.
She tries to whisper to him but feels weak and, anyway, does not want to draw attention to herself, now that a terrifying silence has so suddenly descended. The faces of these people are bound up in tension. Some stare intently at the pitch, others can only look away. Alanis is sick, that’s what she is, she’s sick! She feels oh so keenly the potential energy in the natives and knows it will not amount to anything worthwhile.
There is a thud from the direction of the pitch, a gasp rises up from somewhere, and then it happens. It starts behind the goal to her left, but soon the hopeless stadium is consumed by it. The energy, oh, the energy! Rushing skywards in a torrent, never to be put to use. She cries out to Dusty again, but it is to no avail. She can’t possibly be heard above the chaos. People pump their fists against nothing and leap up and down on an unyielding platform that will never impart movement to a turbine. They throw their arms round each other, squeezing no more than the air from their chests. Dusty is among them. He has been seized by a bear of a man and returns his attentions in kind.
Alanis is swooning now amid the indiscriminate release of energy. But, just before she loses consciousness, the surge morphs into something with a kind of structure at least, a discernible coherence. The formless din coalesces into a chant that rises around the stadium:
‘Ivon! Ivon! Ivon!’
III
Alanis hovers on the threshold of the women’s quarters of the Swansea West Hostel for the English. ‘I need to be at home,’ she says. ‘But, as we’re beyond the Fence and you won’t take me back, a hostel room will have to do.’
‘I’m sorry, A. I’m just… I’m not ready to leave yet. Who knows if we’ll get a chance to come here again. There’s more I want to see.’
‘Oh, joules! I hope I never have to come here again! What a horrible place!’
‘You’re sure you don’t want a bout in one of the cots? Think of the prolactin release.’
‘What’s the point? We’re off the Grid.’
‘That doesn’t matter. Coitus isn’t just for the good of society. It has personal benefits as well.’
‘Oh, Dusty, I’m not in the mood.’
He doesn’t push it. Dusty and Alanis need some time apart. He leaves the hostel and steps into the aero, while she retires to her room.
He feels bad that Alanis has suffered such a severe reaction to being in Wales, but the truth is he needs some time alone himself. Wales is having a profound effect on him too. He has to return to Gower, and it is better that he does so unencumbered. Indeed, it would be intolerable not to.
Although he did not faint like Alanis, he stepped into that crude arena earlier in the day as if into a kink in his consciousness. When he emerged, supporting Alanis, who quivered in recovery from her turn, it was with an enlivened soul. Enlivened yet unfulfilled, for now he can perceive the vast shadow in his head of a lost personality, just as he fizzes with excitement at its discovery. His brush with Lapsed Era sport feels like the consummation of those little overthrows of discipline that have swept through him since decommission. It’s confirmation that he is a new man. Did he, in fact, lose consciousness for just a split second when Ivon won the match for the team in white? He cannot be sure. The intensity of the moment, and the communality of it, transformed him. How could he, after the life he has led, be so suddenly surprised by sport?
A beep in his head signals the arrival of a pulse. But this one has been sent anonymously. He lowers his elbow from the open window. An anonymous pulse. The sender would appear to have something to hide – and, more interestingly, the authority to hide it. ‘The white rose mumbles,’ the message reads. Dusty is confounded. What can it mean? Who can mean it?
Just as he is trying to remember where he has seen the word ‘mumbles’ lately, there it appears again – on a road sign. It’s a town. Mumbles is a town. And Dusty is heading towards it, towards the very place an anonymous sender has just directed him. He lifts his foot from the pedal. The agency of forces beyond his control has felt powerful since he passed through the Fence. But this is why he did it. The unknown. He presses his foot down again.
The stadium appears again to his right. He dares not stop this time. He will return, but for now he must take what it has given and press on – to Mumbles.
It is warm, and Dusty revels again in the freedom to have his window down while in motion. He lowers the passenger window too and gasps in the rushing air. Soon he is surrounded by grass, from which, intermittently, sprout goalposts, rugby and football, side by side, seemingly interchangeable times. He sees a new beauty in their isolation, and a purity, lifted clear from infrastructure and duty, as if the sports needed no purpose. And, all the while, to the eastern yonder, the waters of Swansea Bay sit serenely, here and there revealing themselves in an undulation of the grassy downs.
A sign announces that he is entering Mumbles at last. The road hugs the coast, and Dusty parks his aero in a space overlooking the bay. He steps out and stretches, taking in the view, warmed by the early-evening sun behind him. Mumbles awaits to the south, heavy with brick and concrete, but honest and tantalising, so hopelessly inefficient and endearing. Dusty longs to be accepted by the town, yet feels too far outside for that to be possible.
A building of brick and wood dominates at the first corner of town. Dusty slows as he walks past, and then stops. That feeling of powerlessness again, headlong inevitability. There, high on the wall, sits a large sign that reads, ‘The White Rose’. He has been delivered.
People are sitting outside in postures of repose, as if in recovery but without lying down.
‘Dusty?’ murmurs one of them in a voice that, impossibly, is familiar to him. And then, more stridently: ‘Dusty Noble! It is you! Fuckin’ hell!’
Chilled, Dusty turns to his right to see a weather-beaten man sitting at a table. He knows immediately that he knows him, but how does he? How could he?
Before he can untangle the strands of his memory, the man continues: ‘You don’t have a fucking clue who I am, do you?’
He recognises the face, he recognises the voice, but they are not as he remembers. The face is scored and leathery and the hair long, which means this man has not been on Dusty’s side of the Fence for years, and the voice is inflected with a sing-song lilt, like those of the natives who came to Alanis’s aid at the rugby match that afternoon.
‘It’s Ricky,’ says the man. ‘Ricky Tribute. Remember?’
Dusty is dumb. Ricky Tribute. The name is dropped, and after the voice and sight of the man a cascade of memories follows, not called to mind in…well, he doesn’t know how long. It is him. But how?
Ricky gets to his feet and holds out his hand at an unusual angle, low and tilting straight at him. Dusty instinctively raises his hand in a higher gesture, angling upwards, then hesitates.
‘Sorry,’ says Ricky and corrects the alignment of his arm, so that their hands meet above their elbows in the Perpetual way. ‘We shake differently over here.’
As Ricky pulls Dusty’s hand to his breast, he brings round his left arm and squeezes him in a firm hold. Dusty stands stock still with his old comrade’s breath warm in his ear.
Ricky lets out a kind of growl, as he shakes him gently. ‘It’s good to see you, butt!’ he says. ‘Come on, sit down! Let me get you a drink! What you doing here? Surely, they haven’t exiled the great Dusty Noble?’
Slowly, as if beginning to thaw, Dusty takes a seat at the metal table. The chair is met
al, too, and he wonders how long he will be sitting in it. Ricky resumes position in the chair opposite. He seems to have no other business here but to sit. It doesn’t look as if he has anything else in mind for Dusty, either. Mesmerised, Dusty stares at him and begins to pick out from the disintegration of old age a face he knew well.
‘Ricky,’ he mutters in a trance. ‘They… Where have you been?’
Ricky laughs. ‘Told you I’d departed, did they? Never did like that phrase, “premature departure”. In Wales, death is death, no matter how old you are. Defect of the heart was the reason given out. Which I suppose was true in a way. I fell in love!’
Gazing into Ricky’s face brings to mind for the first time their days at London Cricket, the neglected memories juddering up off the floor as if stiff and made of iron. They’d come through the Academy together, the most precocious of the year’s batch of London batsmen. But Ricky had always had discipline problems, liable to lose concentration, and sometimes even his temper. Dusty remembers one match at Trafford against the North West. When would that have been? They were young men. Ricky was given out, an edge to the keeper. Dusty watched from the other end of the wicket as Ricky tore off his helmet and raged at the arena, his face burning, his mouth pulsing in a paroxysm of fury, like a fish gasping in air, powerless against the thunder of the stadium. They all knew he was in trouble then. He genuinely seemed to believe that he was right and the computer wrong. Sometimes an edge can be so slight that the batsman himself cannot feel it, but to deny the verdict of the very hardware designed to measure it was chronic Misalignment.
Was that the last time he’d seen him? It may well be that the news of his premature departure came through about then. Defect of the heart, was it? No one thought too much of it at the time. What startles Dusty now is that Ricky was evidently not shut down.
‘What happened to you?’ he whispers in bewilderment.
Ricky reaches out for the glass of golden liquid in front of him, the same stuff as the natives drank at St Helen’s. It is probably not isotonic, Dusty tells himself. He’s heard about Alcohol, the Welsh drink.
‘First let’s get you a pint.’
Ricky calls out to a woman standing at a nearby table. ‘Brenda! Can we have two lagers here, please, lovely!’ He winks at Dusty. ‘You’ll love it!
‘What happened to me?’ he continues, drinking again from his glass. ‘Shit. Last time I’d a seen you would be twenty-six years ago, is it? You remember Dee Januarie?’ Dusty nods vaguely. ‘She was at the Academy with us, 2095 batch, like we were. Short black hair. A little fire-cracker. Middle-order batsman, like us. You must remember! Fuck, she was fit! Still is, mind!’ And he tails off for a moment into guttural laughter.
‘Anyway, she was left-handed, middle order; I was left-handed, middle order; both elite. So, we applied for a procreation certificate. She qualified for a sabbatical to have the baby. Sorry, infant. It was a no-brainer. They had to go for it. It never even crossed our minds they wouldn’t. But did they? Did they fuck! The bastards turned us down! “Introversively inclined”, that’s how they classified our relationship. It was irregular. Turned out they’d had us under surveillance for a while. They knew about us before we even did. Because, I tell you what, it was only when they denied us that we realised. We hadn’t applied for it so we could improve the gene pool, or contribute another infant batsman to the crèches. We’d applied because we wanted to come together and create a new person. Can you see the difference, Dusty? It’s subtle. So subtle we hadn’t realised. The thing is, it had to be Dee, and it had to be me. Not because of our genes or our pedigree or anything, but because we just wanted to…with each other. Oh, fuck. I’m not explaining this very well, am I? It wasn’t a tactical thing, put it that way. We were in love. We know that now. We knew it the minute we got here. But things are different on the other side of the Fence, aren’t they? In England, we were just confused.’
‘They’ve done away with procreation now,’ says Dusty, simply to ground himself in a conversation he feels he might float away from at any moment. ‘It’s all done in a lab these days. Deliberate Genetic Fusion they call it. DGF. Taken it out of our hands altogether.’
‘Doesn’t surprise me. They were always waiting for technology to fix that. Artificial uterus, is it?’
‘Partly. Autosome splicing. Gamete cultivation. You can have four or five parents and none of them ever touches another.’
‘Neat.’
‘I know. Too neat, don’t you think?’
‘I’m glad you said that, Dusty, as an Englishman. To me, it’s fuckin’ horrific. Not the Welsh way at all.’
Brenda appears bearing a tray of lagers. She places two of them on the table.
‘Who’s your friend, Ricky?’ she says. ‘Or is he your son?’
‘Cheeky cow! He’s the same age as me, he is! Brenda, this is Dusty. He’s from England.’
‘I know! I just love those outfits of theirs! So sexy! I’ll put these on your tab, is it?’
She picks up the glass Ricky had been drinking from, which is now empty, takes up her tray and moves on to another table.
‘Anyway,’ says Ricky, ‘cheers! Good to see you, mun! What the fuck you doin’ here?’
Dusty stares in wonder at his old comrade, as Ricky lifts the latest glass to his lips. They really are going to sit here for no other reason than to talk. And drink. He looks anxiously at the glass Brenda has placed in front of him. It is almost certainly Alcohol. He is troubled by the little bubbles that pulse through it, as if the drink were alive.
‘This is lager,’ says Ricky. ‘Have you had some?’
‘No. Why the bubbles?’
Ricky laughs. ‘You’ve obviously never been this side of the Fence before! The bubbles are harmless. Carbon dioxide, mainly. They can mess with your stomach a bit, which is why you’d never find fizzy drinks in your world, but, hey, they taste good, so what the fuck, eh?’
Almost as an affront to his world, Dusty takes up the glass and drinks. It is bitter, cold and explosive. The bubbles protest in his mouth, but the temperature is even more surprising, so far below the ambient that he can feel the progress of the lager even into his stomach. He doesn’t like it, but it’s new and at odds with his world. And, in that respect, it is perfectly in tune with his constitution now. Isotonic indeed.
‘So, you and Dee were denied…’
‘Yeah,’ sighs Ricky, ‘so not only did they deny us the procreation certificate, they put a restraining order on us. Every time we came within a hundred metres of each other, the fucking alarm would go off and some agency cunt would pitch up within a minute. Oh, it killed me! You know I wasn’t the most balanced of citizens at the best of times, but I lost the plot then. They took me in, and I was expecting the works – Assimilation and all that, maybe even shutdown. And they did put forward shutdown as an option. But they also offered me deportation to Wales. I kept asking them about Dee, and one day they said they were offering her deportation too. So that was it. We took exile.’
‘They deported you? But that’s incredible!’
‘I know. I didn’t stop to ask.’
‘You were an elite. One of the best. They wouldn’t just send you away for a personality flaw. Assimilation would fix that.’
Ricky shrugs. ‘This was twenty-five years ago, remember. Assimilation was a bit hit and miss back then. But, yeah, you’d a thought they’d try. What can I say? They didn’t. And here I am to prove it. So’s Dee, by the way. We’re still together. Best fucking decision of our lives, to take exile. This is the greatest country on Earth.’
Dusty drinks again and holds his face in the vessel for a moment, its bubbles and swirls mirroring the giddiness of his brain. Here he is, indulging in conversation for its own sake, looking backwards without revulsion into the verboten Past. But this is why he came, to sample a new way of life. The more he gives in to it, the easier and more satisfying it becomes.
‘You haven’t told me why you’re here,’ says Ricky. �
��If they shouldn’t a let me go, they sure as fuck weren’t going to let you. You must have been decommissioned by now.’
Dusty nods. ‘I’m here on holiday. I was awarded a load of travel credits at the end of my service, and I had this urge to come to Wales.’
‘I’m impressed. Not many do. And we hardly ever see any Perpetuals here without a guide. Where’s yours?’
‘Didn’t want one.’
‘Cool.’
‘But I did get some guidance. A message came through a little while ago saying, “The White Rose, Mumbles”. That can’t have been from you, can it?’
Ricky shrugs and shakes his head. ‘Did you get a number?’
‘It was anonymous.’
‘I hate that.’
Dusty takes another swig and draws in a breath, slow and full. He is free here. Until Monday night, he has no business with England. He can speak his mind to Ricky. ‘I’ve been struggling,’ he says. ‘Since decommission, I’ve not been sure about anything. I keep having strange dreams.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘One in particular comes back again and again. It’s as if I’m flying, with the air rushing past my head. Defying authority somehow.’
‘I’ve had that dream,’ says Ricky.
‘What?’
‘It’s a biplane.’
‘A what?’
‘A biplane. It’s an old-fashioned aeroplane from hundreds of years ago. The first planes ever built, I think. They have a propeller at the front, two wings on either side, a couple of open-air seats, one behind the other.’
‘That’s it!’ Dusty gasps. He hadn’t known what it was, or even what it looked like, but now that Ricky’s described it he can see it clearly.
‘You sometimes see them being flown round here.’
‘And you dream about them, too?’
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