IVON

by Michael Aylwin

  Dusty’s enthusiasm is checked. These dreams mean nothing to him, but he presses on. ‘There’s the dream where my prowess with the bat belongs to me. You know, it’s something to be cherished and I have the right to be proud of it, not the commune!’

  Dee laughs and claps her hands. ‘Oh, yes, of course! I have that one all the time. Although I can’t say whether it started before or after Wales. It’s a perfectly normal thing to feel here. Then there’s the sinking-car dream, of course.’

  Dusty stops pacing abruptly. ‘I had that one just the other night! Ivon sank with it.’ He winces at his own insensitivity, but he must sustain the conversation’s momentum. ‘And then there’s Ivon. I know it’s not the same as it must be for you, but I feel, I feel something for him. I’m not alone in this, it’s true. There have been a number of strange displays of intense feeling for him among the populace recently. But the moment I heard his name chanted at St Helen’s that first time, it moved me so powerfully.’

  ‘That was another thing,’ rejoins Dee. ‘His name. It’s quite unusual, but I remember feeling strongly that we should call him Ivon, with an “o”. And Ricky swears blind he felt the same way, independently of me.’

  As if a thought has occurred to her, Dee raises a hand, sliding her chair into a corner of the room. ‘Let’s just see if there is some connection with all this.’ She positions herself in front of a Lapsed Era monitor, which springs into life when she touches a key. ‘Right. Let’s try Gower and Ivon.’ She types at the keyboard and waits for the results. ‘No, it’s no good. All that’s coming up is articles about Ivon, the boy from Gower.’ She thinks again.

  ‘Try putting in “flying machine”,’ suggests Dusty.

  ‘I’ll try “biplane”.’

  She hits the search button. A second later, she manoeuvres a device by her hand, and a second after that she gasps.

  ‘What is it?’ asks Dusty.

  Dee does not respond. Dusty walks round to look at the screen over her shoulder.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ he murmurs to himself.

  Dee looks up at him, and he down at her. She is wide-eyed, as if she has just glanced into the deepest recesses of her soul. He knows he must look the same.

  There, on the screen, in a two-dimensional photograph that makes Dusty’s heart ache, is the flying machine, and from out of it, his arm resting casually on the fuselage, a man smiles at the camera with a languid mischievousness that makes Dusty’s heart want to break. Another picture, softer of focus but ancient too of provenance, depicts the same man, bare-headed and in the loose white garments of the time, frozen in the flourish of a cover drive, the bat in his hands like a wand. His hair is golden and curly, luxuriant and untamed. And on his face, even at the point of execution, he retains a hint of that same mischief, that same smile, that joy. ‘David Ivon Gower was a former English cricketer who became captain of the England cricket team during the 1980s. Described as one of the most stylish left-handed batsmen of the era, Gower played 117 tests…’

  Dusty stumbles away from the screen, into the middle of the room, into the middle of his being, which opens up now to claim him. A thousand blinding lights go off in his head, memories he never knew he had. And yet none will yield to registration. It is a personal history he cannot apprehend, a life he will never be able to call his own, residing, though it may, in the firmament of his brain.

  His skill host. This man is his skill host. Their skill host. He feels something inside him give way and a gentle turbulence muster at his eyelids.

  For the first time in his adult life, there are tears, soft and warm, in the eyes of Dusty Noble.

  XI

  Ivon stops.

  What the fuck was that?

  ‘That wasn’t me!’ he mumbles to himself, stunned.

  The ball that he has just kicked spirals away to the touchline on halfway.

  ‘That wasn’t me!’ he says again, louder this time, to one of the purposeful forwards striding past him in the direction of the line-out. He is ignored.

  ‘I didn’t mean to do that!’ he says to Brandon, the full-back.

  ‘Yes you did,’ Brandon replies matter-of-factly, as he runs past as well.

  His teammates and the droids adopt formation for a line-out on halfway, the silence eerie under the Twickenham roof, some 200 feet above them.

  ‘Ivon. Assume position,’ says a voice in his head.

  ‘What was that?’ Ivon says, shaking his head. ‘I didn’t… I was going to throw a miss pass to 13 then. And…and…something made me kick for touch. It was like someone else controlled me for a second.’

  ‘This has been explained to you, Ivon. This is ProzoneX, the most advanced Strategy and Direction software in use today. If you get on the field on Friday, you will find it directing the team. If you want to get on the field on Friday you will follow those directions. It is essential that you do. Everybody else will be. And our opposition will be following theirs. There is no room for delinquency.’

  Ivon stares at a blade of fibre-grass on the Twickenham turf. It is white. The one next to it is green. Neither has been painted. They just are those colours. He has been told about ProzoneX, but he wasn’t listening. He’s heard talk of impulse manipulation software, but never paused to consider it. He thinks of taking a knife to the back of his neck. Cut out that central chip. Back home, there is grass. You paint on it, and then you play on it. Players and grass, alive and distinct from each other. Here, his teammates are as much a part of the pitch as the lifeless green and white, like those droids that line up opposite them and formation glide across the turf.

  They want him to become a part of it. They want him to give up his separateness.

  ‘Ivon.’

  He twitches his head, irritably. ‘So we no longer count. The players…the athletes. It’s a clash between computers.’

  ‘Of course you do. You kicked the ball, not the computer. Assume position.’

  The rise and fall of Ivon’s breast increases. He wrestles with the urge to scream. And, as he does, the same strange impulse that made him kick just then inclines him to start jogging towards the line-out. After a couple of paces, he overcomes the instinct and digs his feet in, the way he did as a boy.

  ‘Ivon.’

  He grits his teeth against the voice in his head. Don’t look up at them, he thinks to himself, in case you race up there and smash to fuck the computers and the coaches.

  After a pause to make clear that it is of his own accord, he walks towards the line-out. His teammates are in position, some of them crouched, others poised with feet in perfect alignment, ready for the signal. Not one of them looks in his direction, even though they wait for him.

  ‘Put this on and KEEP IT ON. Leave the counterpoint on your bed. There’ll be an aero outside at 18.00. Get in it.’

  It is signed by the ‘Fellowship of Dig’ again. Ivon recognises the handwriting from the note that had been slipped under his day suit in the changing room the week before. This message is written on a piece of paper, too.

  Someone’s been in his lodging. He thought that was against the rules, even if he’d invited anyone in to visit, which he hasn’t. There is what looks like a white glove lying on his bed, but when he picks it up he can see that this item has that Perpetual Era quality of seeming more alive than some of the humans. It obviously does something. He pulls it over his left hand. When it’s on, a small white disc on his bed, like a gambling chip, starts to glow, as if it too were alive. This must be the counterpoint.

  Ivon checks the time: 17.53. He is excited suddenly – that light, uplifting sort of excited that he knew when he was young. It’s only a piece of paper and a glove, but Ivon knows that in this environment these represent subversion. In this mysterious intervention he senses an opportunity for relief from the drudgery, the monitoring, the formulas, the mind control.

  He paces through the house. It’s more of a bungalow, really, his new elite lodging, or ‘home’ as they keep calling it. But it’s much like the la
st place, only bigger, with a patch of fake grass out the back and his own in-home simulator, next to the bathroom. Rather than walk to the communal simulators at URL, and sometimes queue, he can step into his own, as he does now, and let off some steam whenever he feels on edge. For kicking practice, he doesn’t even need to set anything up. He grabs the training ball and fires off a quick three punts into the vortex of his simu-wall. The second is measured at 65 metres.

  At 17.58, he steps outside the front door. As always, the streets are quiet, the same in Richmond as they were in White City. Bang on 18.00, one of those weird floaty cars ghosts round the corner and pulls up outside his house. The rear door nearest him opens silently. Ivon climbs inside.

  The interior is decked out just like the Bentleys that Reesy sold on his forecourt on Carmarthen Road – when he could source them. Pale leather seats and walnut-veneer trimmings. And a chauffeur with a hat on.

  The chauffeur says nothing as the car pulls away and drifts through the streets of London.

  ‘Where we going?’ asks Ivon, after a good five minutes’ staring out of the window at the neat, hypnotic sameness of residential London.

  ‘Canterbury, sir.’

  ‘You called me sir?’ Ivon laughs. He likes it.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘So, are you from this Dig lot, then?’

  ‘I am just the driver, sir.’

  ‘And what’s this?’ says Ivon, waving his left hand in the air.

  The driver half-turns to see the glove on Ivon’s hand, which is when Ivon notices that he, too, is wearing one.

  ‘It’s a deflector, sir.’

  ‘And what does it do?’

  ‘It allows you to travel without detection. There should be a counterpoint.’

  ‘Yep. Left it on my bed.’

  ‘That’s where you will show up on the Grid.’

  Ivon nods approvingly. ‘Can I keep it?’

  ‘Regrettably, sir, you are to return it to me this evening. Officially, such things do not exist.’

  Once the streets of south London have been negotiated, the car flies out into the countryside and the commune of the South East, along the M2, says the driver, past the cities of Gillingham, Maidstone and Ashford, and the dead towns of Sittingbourne and Faversham.

  Canterbury is dead, too, maintained only for the visit of tourists to the Lapsed Era. Ivon feels at home immediately, as they ease past houses of substance and antiquity, colour and irregularity, past an old church on a corner. Then, round that corner looms a magnificent gatehouse of two turreted towers that puts him in mind of Cardiff Castle. They pass beneath its arch and on down narrow streets, oozing history and personality, until he is dropped off outside another gatehouse, smaller but more ornate.

  ‘You will find the meeting through there, sir,’ says the driver.

  Ivon thanks him and climbs out of the aero. Already he can see the corner of a greater building beyond the gate. When he walks through it, he is confronted by the grandest cathedral he has ever set eyes on. To think the English hide treasures such as this! If this were Wales, an entire city would be thriving around it. In England, it stands in silence.

  There is an iron gate set into the nearest tower, surrounded by elaborate carvings, and beyond that a door, both of them open. Ivon follows where they beckon.

  Once inside, he stands in front of the cathedral’s long sweep and gasps. The English might tell him that the vault of Twickenham is higher than this when measured scientifically, but Ivon tilts his head at the steepling arches in the ceiling and thinks they might mark the very frontier with God.

  He becomes aware of a voice, deeper in the cathedral, through an arch some 50 metres away at the top of a wide flight of steps. He presses purposefully on towards the sound. Sceptred dignitaries watch his progress from the walls, as he bounds up the steps, shiny and uneven from the centuries. Through the arch, the cathedral opens up again into another breathtaking stretch of columns and arches, as long as the first. Ivon sees rows of dark brown pews, peopled by men and women in clothes he might expect to find back home.

  They are listening to a man standing at a pulpit, framed by the billowing splendour of the arches and vaulted ceiling behind him, where the polished stone rises up further steps to its height at the altar beyond. Not only is this speaker dressed similarly to the others, he is notable for his age. Ivon finds it reassuring to come across a man of advanced years in England. He is fit and commanding and delivers his speech with animation and movement, but his presence is a reminder that old age is not tolerated in this country. Ivon sees him and feels comforted, as if he were at home. He stands in the archway and listens to the man speak.

  ‘Thomas Carlyle, the nineteenth-century philosopher, wrote of the Vikings: “What we now lecture of as science, they wondered at and fell down in awe before as religion.” He was a man who railed against the passing of a more magical, more unknowable time, when stories and heroes were enshrined in the workings of the natural world, which was explained by those legends. What heroes are there left to us now? What magic, what legend? Long after Carlyle passed, sport – our precious sport – began to succumb as well to the creeping tentacles of science, hauled down from its lofty perch, where it had shone as something sacred and unknowable, magical and beautiful. It had been a source of joy and colour. A story. A drama, whose contestants knew of a life beyond the games and loved those games the more for it.

  ‘But soon it became a thing to unpick, to dissect, rationalise and explain, like a rat stretched out on the laboratory table. No corner of it remains unexplored. We know sport and its workings so intimately now that indifference towards it is universal, even if it powers the world we live in. And those few of us who care to dig deep in search of our souls must languish in this monochrome prison, seeking to undermine it whenever we can.

  ‘We are alone, my friends! For which of our people can conceive of sport today as a thing to be savoured, where winning is not a solemn duty, but a happy fillip to the higher spirit of fun, style and excellence? Why, that spirit was once so strong that our ancestors from the Lapsed Era used to turn up in their thousands to the games, not to pump boards, but to watch, purely and simply! No scientists they – just men, women and juveniles marvelling at the feats of free spirits. Yet their equivalents today, whether elite or primary, cannot so much as move from here to there but that it fits in with the relevant programme.

  ‘And what if we were relieved of our duties to pump at the matches we attend? Would we even want to focus on events on the field, as our ancestors once did for joy, when we would have nothing more to watch than athletes following the vectors and algorithms laid down by higher intelligences, all personality, independence and freedom cut out of them like a dangerous disease?’

  Ivon is emboldened to take a step or two forward, emerging from out of the arch into the choir. The speaker notices him but continues.

  ‘Ours is a struggle without end. Early in the twentieth century, the German sociologist, Max Weber, described the rationalising process of science and technology, which was well under way by then, as “Die Entzauberung der Welt”, the demystifying of the world, or Disenchantment. It took longer for it to take hold of sport, but, insofar as there ever was a struggle between the forces of Disenchantment and the cavalier spirit of the Corinthian age, that struggle has long since been lost, the latter swept away by its ruthless, indiscriminate nemesis. But I urge you to remember that the Fellowship of Dig pre-dates the Perpetual Era, for all that we must exist underground as the last bastion of that Corinthian ideal. We have done no more than to look deep enough within ourselves to find the last flickering of a romantic soul. Our mission is to coax it back to life in others, to re-enchant the world.’

  His manner changes as he looks for the first time directly at Ivon, across the ancient stone. He ushers him nearer.

  ‘Finally, I present to you Ivon…’

  Before he has a chance to continue, a spontaneous round of applause breaks out. Ivon looks round at the
faces, a few hundred of them, and sees glove after glove, like the one he wears, one per pair of clapping hands.

  ‘We shall call him The Emissary,’ the speaker continues when the applause has died down, ‘for he comes from Gower.’

  There are gasps and murmurings among the congregation, but Ivon notices a smile on the face of the speaker, as he raises his hands for calm. ‘Gower, in this instance, is a region of South Wales. As far as we know, there is no connection. But it should be obvious that the spirit is strong in him!’

  The old man comes out from behind his lectern and approaches Ivon with an arm extended, enfolding him in his gown. Ivon is happy to be led.

  ‘Before we repair to Ye Olde Beverlie for our libations,’ he says loudly, ‘I invite you, Ivon, to be the first today to touch the Relic and thus confirm yourself as one of us.’

  ‘Sweet,’ says Ivon.

  ‘That’s a yes!’ cries the old man with a rich peel of laughter, and the congregation rise to their feet with a cheer.

  Ivon looks across at his guide and begins to appreciate in profile a remarkable hooked nose. ‘Who are you?’ he says in gentle bewilderment, as they begin the walk to the high altar.

  The old man turns to him with a smile and offers his hand in the Welsh way, which Ivon shakes. ‘I am Syracuse Garbo. It’s an honour to meet you. You are everything we hold to be true made flesh. A triumph of Nature, as a thing wholly miraculous, stupendous and divine, over the forces of Disenchantment.’

  ‘Nice to meet you.’

  ‘When we reach the Relic,’ he says more quietly, ‘you might give the others a chance to gather round. Then our ritual is simple. Touch the Relic and declare the words, “Fun, style and excellence”.’

  ‘I can do that.’

  They climb the steps towards the high altar, past a stone throne of great substance and incalculable age, then on through the tombs of ancient English kings and queens. When they reach the altar, Garbo turns to wait for the congregation, which is filing up to join them. At the appropriate moment, he nods encouragingly at Ivon, who approaches the Relic. It is mounted on a simple wooden stand and is, as far as Ivon can tell, an old cricket ball. The stitching is neat but aged and the leather worn. And on its surface are inscribed, with the flourish of a human hand, the letters ‘DIG’.