‘Has Ricky told you anything about England?’
‘He’s told me it’s all about sport. Day and night. He’s told me I’d hate it, but that’s bollocks! I adore sport. It’d be a dream come true. But he doesn’t like to talk about it.’
Dusty smiles. Ricky never liked it in England. The revelation ought to send Dusty reeling, but in this curious, melty land it registers as no more than the latest surprise. And is it because he’s here that Dusty now wonders if he ever liked it in England himself?
‘It’s a harsh environment,’ he says. ‘If you did make it as an elite, the weight of responsibility would be great. And, if you didn’t make it, trust me, you wouldn’t want to be there. What you have here is so much more…loving.’ Dusty surprises himself with his choice of word.
‘Oh! Do you think I could? Make it, I mean? How awesome would that be!’
‘It’s impossible to say for sure. But I think you have something I’ve never seen before. Whether that’s a good thing…I can run a test to check your cat score qualifies you for elite level, but, from what I’ve seen, I’m sure it will.’
‘Cat score?’
‘Coordination aptitude test.’
‘Shit. You measure coordination?’
‘Welcome to England.’
‘Bring it on! I love it!’
Ricky bursts into their conversation, swilling another glass of lager. Dee is with him, and, since Ricky reintroduced them earlier in the day, Dusty begins to remember her more clearly from their days in the Academy. She has aged better than Ricky. A poignant streak of grey runs through her black bob, but she is fresh and beautiful.
‘And what are you two talking about?’ he says, putting an arm round Ivon.
‘I was just speculating on what Ivon’s cat score would be.’
‘I can tell you what it was with a cricket bat when he was sixteen: six by four at eighty.’
‘What?’
‘I know.’
‘And that was when he was sixteen?’
‘Yup.’
‘What did you use?’
‘An old test bat from the Academy. Heat-sensitive technology. I’m sure you use something more accurate these days.’
‘But still. Those are the sort of figures the DGF batsmen are producing. For a bred athlete, that’s unheard of. I mean, he’s not even an athlete. No disrespect, Ivon. On the contrary. If those scores are correct. For a Welshman…’
‘I don’t know why you’re so fucking surprised. Don’t forget, Dee and I are both pure-breeds. If it hadn’t been for the personality defects, our procreation certificate would have been issued as a priority. Ivon would be batting for England by now.’
Ivon bursts out laughing. ‘Whoa! What you two on about?!’
‘This is perpetual talk,’ says Dee. Her voice, Dusty notices, is unaffected by the local inflexion. ‘The mean distance of your points of contact from the sweet spot of the test bat was 6mm with a standard deviation of 4 across 100 balls bowled at 80 miles an hour.’
Ivon laughs again. ‘Whoosh!’ he says, sweeping his hand over his head.
‘It means you’re very coordinated, dear.’
‘How do you know all this?’ Ivon asks Ricky.
‘You remember that old bat of mine you used to practise with? It had the sweet spot marked on it, and I told you to always try to hit the ball at the sweet spot. Well, it could measure how accurately and consistently you were doing it.’
‘So why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I did, but you weren’t interested. You just wanted to play. And you were right. This is the sort of shit that ruins a player.’
‘Ivon wants to come back to England with me.’
Dusty holds his breath. He’s not sure why he said that. Is something about Ricky’s manner offending him, the one who stayed in England and worked every day of his life to keep the turbines turning? Or is it just that he is falling for the Welsh way, with its accent on spontaneity and looseness?
Ricky removes his arm from round Ivon’s shoulders and stiffens. ‘You do not want to go to England,’ he says quietly.
‘Oh, come on, Dad. Let’s not do this.’
‘Let’s not do what?’
‘You know. “England’s no place for people like us. It sounds like heaven, but it’s a hell on earth. Sport isn’t everything. Blah, blah, blah.”’
The sun has not been kind to Ricky today. He glows red, particularly among the roots of his thinning hair. ‘Oh, so Big Shot knows best, does he?’ he says, his voice on the rise.
‘Ricky,’ says Dee.
‘You know what to expect, do you? England holds no fears for Ivon. Ivon is invincible! Ivon will prevail! I’ll tell you one thing, my lad: Ivon will get chewed up and spat out!’
‘Why, Dad? Look at Dusty! He’s lived in England all his life. He’s come out of it all right.’
‘Dusty Noble is the product of a system. Dusty Noble is a machine. You are a free spirit, Ivon. Here! Here! Nowhere else!’
‘But you heard what Dusty thinks about my…my…fucking…coordination results! He thinks I’ve got something!’
‘Fuck your cat scores, Ivon! And your reflex speed! Fuck it all! Which is what you’ll do if you go there! It’s your soul you want to worry about. They haven’t found a way to measure that, so they’ll break it, crush it, take it out of the game. You will never play again. You’ll train, you’ll compete. You’ll spend more time in sport than you ever thought possible. But. You. Will. Never. Play. Again. It’ll kill you.’
‘What? Like it killed you, Dad? Is that what this is about? It doesn’t have to kill you, though, does it? Look at Dusty.’
‘It does have to. It does. The love in your heart will die, and so will you. I know Dusty Noble looks a better man than I do. You probably look at him, then you look at me, and you’ve made your mind up about which way you want to go.’ Ricky laughs. ‘Fuck it. I can’t stop you. But what does Dusty Noble have now, is all I’ll say. Memories of a lot of runs, which he’s not supposed to think about. A home of his own and for him alone. A strong and efficient heart and smart clothing. And in, what, eleven years’ time, is it, Dusty, he’ll be switched off. Don’t do it, Ivon. It’ll kill you. And it’ll kill me.’
As if it were burning hot, Ricky looks for somewhere to put down his glass, and without a word he heads for the door. He crosses the room as if through his own trail across Dusty’s memory. Many years have passed since Dusty last watched that urgent, tortured gait, but how familiar it is! In their youth, Ricky walked away from countless partnerships in just such a way.
And now Dusty is arrested by the stirring of further memories. He is visited by the sense that Ricky and he share a special bond, over and above those distant hours they spent at the crease together. This one is important. He knows it is. But he is too new to remembering to have any chance of calling it to mind.
‘I’m sorry, Dusty,’ says Ivon sheepishly. He is flushed, too. His father’s words have shaken him. Dusty finds himself disinclined to take Ivon back to England now, however intriguing the notion.
‘Yes,’ agrees Dee, ‘yes, you shouldn’t have had to hear that.’
Dusty raises a hand to signal his evenness of temper, which is genuine.
‘But listen to your father, Ivon,’ continues Dee. ‘He is right about this. Don’t underestimate the joy of what you do out there. And not just out there. In here, as well. The camaraderie, your friends, your family.’
‘But I’ve done it, Mum. I want a new level. I want to see how far I can take it. I want to see how good I really am. Don’t you want to see it, after the way they threw you out?’
‘We will never see it. If you go to England, we will never see you again.’
‘Oh, come on!’
Ivon looks to Dusty in appeal. The mere glance triggers that strange nervousness in him again. ‘Elites are allowed to visit Wales,’ Dusty says.
‘And if he doesn’t make elite? It takes more than a high cat score.’
&nb
sp; ‘If he doesn’t make elite, I’ll bring him back.’
‘As simple as that?’
Dusty fears it may not be as simple as that, but the imperative to please Ivon is strong.
‘Ivon, your father and I were turned away from England because we didn’t fit in. No one knows why – we just didn’t see things the way everyone else did. But we do fit in here. And what goes for us will almost certainly go for you. Don’t go to England, please.’
To Dusty’s surprise, Ivon says nothing and hugs Dee.
‘Oh, my boy,’ she sighs.
‘I should go,’ says Dusty. ‘Ivon, I think Ricky and Dee are right. It is a very different place, England, and I can’t say with any honesty it’s the place for you.’
He turns to leave.
‘You’ll come and see us again, won’t you?’ says Ivon.
Dusty smiles. ‘Of course,’ he says. And with a heaviness in his heart he picks his way through the busy, laughing room and out into the evening air.
Back at the hostel, Dusty receives another message. It is anonymous again.
‘Bring the Welshman back with you. There will be a permit at the Fence.’
He closes the message down. His mind is fizzing. It occurs to him that he hasn’t once thought about Alanis. He checks his log. She’s been trying to reach him, but he had thought it best to block her comms while he was away. He leaves his room in search of her.
IV
He should have taken a number, an address. Something. How could he have let such an opportunity slip through his grasp?
If you find yourself on the back foot, play your way out of it, like Dad always says. So here he is, just off the M4, on his way to take his chances at the Swansea West Hostel for the English. If Dusty is staying anywhere it is probably here. His bag is slung over a shoulder, just as it was when he first pitched up at St Helen’s looking for a game all those years ago, and as it has been most weekends since. He’s wearing kit – in this case an English suit. Or a fancy-dress one anyway. His lift has headed back into town. He’s on his own. Time to perform.
The stakes are higher now. There’s more than just a game to win, there’s a life. And Mum and Dad don’t have his back for this one. He takes no support with him, not even a blessing.
Last night, he had been decided. He was staying. Gower is home, after all, where his big heart was sculpted, like an unfurling blob of molten glass, by those important to him, Mum and Dad, his friends. Cerys.
Oh, Cerys…
But in the small hours of the morning he awoke. The glow of the weekend’s wins had worn off. His stomach was a ferment of despair and hurt. Back in the room he’d grown up in, banished from her bed for the 125th night, her voice ringing through his head. ‘It’s too much!’ The hangers-on, the limelight, his love for her, his intensity – all too much. He’s too much.
It isn’t getting easier. The small hours. The slump from weekend to the foot of next week.
But now he can see a way out. He is on edge, as if the biggest game is yet to come. He hopes the note he left his parents on the sideboard will explain, but he hasn’t stopped to think since he resolved to leave, and the events of the past few hours – indeed, of his life to date – are just dimly discernible to him as outside his bubble. He has his game head on.
He strides into the foyer. It is clean, sterilised – like a hospital. There is a receptionist he notices out of the corner of his eye. She becomes agitated as he continues boldly on his way to the interior.
‘Hello?’ she calls, as he reaches a door. It begins to open, but a vicious little buzzer sounds, and it closes before it is even half across. He stands for a second, thwarted, his first delivery blocked by the English.
‘Can I help you?’
He turns and saunters over to the desk, where stands a petite English girl, neat in her figure-hugging suit. He motions to his own suit and leans on the counter. ‘Is it that obvious? That I’m not English. I thought I looked the part.’
‘You look very fit, sir.’
‘Well, thank you! I try my best. It’s fancy dress, see. We all have English suits in Wales. They’re not real ones, obviously, but everyone says I could be English, my costume looks so genuine. Woosnam’s in Swansea. They do them best. I don’t suppose you have Welsh parties in England, do you?’
The girl’s complexion remains immaculate. ‘Your chip.’
‘What?’
‘Your chip. You don’t have one.’
Of course. The English chip. He should have remembered that. It takes more than a convincing costume to pass as English. Identification protocol extends beneath the skin. There’s not much he can do about that. He changes tack.
‘I’m here for Dusty Noble. I’m his guide today.’
‘In which case, you would have a chip.’
‘Really? Guides have them?! Fuck! Can you give me one?’
‘What is your business with Mr Noble?’
‘So he is here! Brilliant!’
The receptionist’s nose twitches, and he senses a small victory.
‘Can you just tell him that Ivon is here to see him? Thanks a lot.’
He waits only a couple of minutes before the door that had slid shut in his face opens with a sigh to admit Dusty into the foyer.
‘Oh, Dusty! What a result! I’m so glad I’ve found you!’
‘What brings you here?’
‘It’s decided. I’m coming to England.’
He’s very difficult to read, Dusty. Ivon wants to throw himself at him. Here is his passport to England. It feels as if he’s known him for years, rather than a few hours. Dusty gives off an air of authority, and kindliness. And precisely nothing. He gives away nothing. His expression is steady throughout it all. Even as Dad was laying into him last night. The product of a system. A machine.
To be switched off.
Dusty studies Ivon. Or is he looking through him, to something further away?
‘Let me make a few comms.’
There was only ever one cure for her, and that is the one being administered now. Alanis is going home.
It has been a horrible trip. To witness those scenes on Saturday was appalling, and the hours spent trying to recover since have been torturous. The realisation that she was off the Grid left her feeling isolated and vulnerable. She could draw none of the usual comforts, even though all of them were laid on. Everything was superficial without the security of nexus with the commune. She was cast adrift, her heat signature an insignificant, lonely speck out here in the wilderness.
The hostel room was peaceful and smooth, but it was not home. Her sessions in the volleyball simulator became little more than exercises in time-killing. As for her visit to the Lapsed Era Experience – the viewing platform, high up in the air, had set her recovery back again. Those ill-planned buildings seemed even more grotesque when viewed through a pair of teleglasses, rearing up in her vision like monsters of the imagination. But take the glasses off and the grand vista was no less disturbing, infested with plumes of smoke that snaked up insidiously into the blameless air. She chose not to risk the Past simulators at all. Her alignment certificate is fully up to date, but she couldn’t face that level of exposure so soon after her real-life encounter with the Lapsed Era.
Now, though, she feels her recovery picking up as she leaves the room to meet Dusty in the aero park. All day yesterday there had been a block on his central chip when she’d tried to comm, adding to her sense of isolation. Had he imposed the block universally or just on her? Either way, he had returned last night and suggested a bout in one of the cots, a constitutional she agreed might do her some good. But they were off the Grid, and she had never known coitus for the sake of coitus. It didn’t feel right. Dirty, gratuitous, no better than the feral ejaculations of those savages in the stadium on Saturday. She isn’t sure it did her any good at all. And wasn’t there something different about Dusty during their bout? Something, she doesn’t know, something, something, well, yes, feral. Selfish. As if he were do
ing it for himself. As if he didn’t care about anything, let alone her prolactin levels. As if she were no more than equipment.
There he is now, and to her relief she is pleased to see him. A new and shocking side of Dusty has been revealed on this trip, but she hopes to consign her experience of it to where it belongs, in the Past, discarded and irrelevant, along with the Lapsed Era. He looks masterful again out there in the sunshine beside the aero. Neat and contained.
And who is that with him? A younger man with the brightest blond hair. Tall, taller than Dusty, but not so economical in his bearing. There is something effervescent about him. He keeps running his hand through that hair of his, pushing it to one side. Alanis cannot understand why he doesn’t just cut it. His arms are moving as he talks, his feet never still. As she steps out of the hostel to join them, she can see that the suit he wears is a parody, made of Lapsed Era fabrics. This is when she realises the man is Welsh.
She remains calm, and Dusty welcomes her. ‘A, I’d like you to meet Ivon,’ he says. ‘He was the fly-half from the match on Saturday. He’s coming to England with us. Ivon, this is Alanis.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ the young man says.
Awkwardly, he takes her hand and pulls it into his chest. His suit really is too funny, but his hand is strong. The man is fit. Alanis likes him. She does not remember him from Saturday, but that is a good thing. She wonders why he’s coming to London. She intends to make him feel welcome.
Dusty paces west, away from the Fence, from Ivon, Alanis and Border Control. He enjoys the feeling, however deceptive, that he is heading back to Wales. The pull of duty from the other side of the Fence will out, but for now he relishes being in the hinterland between two worlds. And, if he were free to choose, would he head east or west? He is surprised to find that he couldn’t say – surprised and uneasy.
He leans against the quaint metallic barriers on the side of the road and rubs his feet across the tarmacadam, waiting for his comm to be connected. A couple of lumps of grit lie loose, and he smiles as he kicks them, superfluous, into the water many feet below. He looks up and follows the line of the Fence as it runs south and round, hugging the coastline of England, cordoning off its tenants not only from the wild land to the west but from the timelessness of the great river that rolls between them out to sea.
IVON Page 6