Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

All the same, if no one stopped them, the specialist players called ‘rollers’ could move from top to bottom with incredible speed, dropping through one hole, rolling sideways into the next, swinging beneath a net to the one after, dropping and rolling again…the ball all the while clutched under one arm, and the crowd roaring its delight or dismay. ‘Bouncers’, who specialised in upward dashes, used the nets as trampolines to move with almost the same breathtaking velocity as the rollers, even though they had to work against gravity instead of with it.

But of course neither bouncers nor rollers got a clear run. While these high-speed vertical dashes were taking place through the nets, other players were swarming up or down to positions ahead of the opposing team’s rollers or bouncers in order to block them off. Pitched battles took place at the various levels, with players bouncing from the nets under their feet to launch ferocious tackles, or swinging from the nets over their heads to deliver flying kicks. It was like football, but in three dimensions and without constraints. Eight players were taken off injured during the match.

“Do you play sky-ball at all, William?” I asked in the car on the way back.

William was about to answer when his mother broke in.

“I always insisted that he should be excused from the game,” she said, turning her head towards us with difficulty. “William never showed the slightest inclination towards it, and it seemed to me absurd that a sensitive child should be put through it.”

“Oh but my brothers loved it,” exclaimed Angelica. “Michael must have broken every bone in his body at one time or another, but it never put him off. He couldn’t wait to get back into the game.”

We turned into the drive of Angelica’s home. In front of her family’s large and comfortable farmhouse, William got out of the car to let her out and say goodbye. A short exchange took place between them which I couldn’t hear. I wasn’t sure if they were arranging an assignation or conducting a muted row.

“Do you know, William,” said Lady Henry, when he had rejoined us and we were heading back down the drive, “I’m beginning to have second thoughts about Angelica. I am not sure she is quite one of us, if you know what I mean. I can’t help feeling that Angelica the artist is really a very secondary part of her nature and that underneath is a pretty average country girl of the huntin’ and shootin’ variety. Don’t you agree?”

But the poet declined to answer.

“There are some fire horses for you, Clancy,” he merely said, as we passed a paddock with a couple of yearling beasts in it, feeding at a manger in the far corner.

“I gather boys in Flain are given baby fire horses to grow up with?” I said.

“It’s traditional, yes,” William said.

“And were you given one?”

We had left the estate of Angelica’s family and were back on the empty open road. William looked out of the window at the wide fields.

“Yes. My Uncle John gave me one when I was six.”

“Did you learn to ride? I’ve seen boys in the street with their small fire horses and they seem quite dangerous.”

“No, I never learned. And yes, they are dangerous. In fact Uncle John himself died in a riding accident only few years after he gave me the horse.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, Mr Clancy,” said William’s mother, once again straining to turn round and look at me. “Don’t be sorry at all. My brother was a foolish and immature young man who liked to show off with fire horses and fast cars because he wanted to impress a certain kind of silly young woman. The accident was entirely his own fault.”

I glanced at William. But he still looking out of the window and I couldn’t see his face.

“What would have been tragic, though,” went on Lady Henry, “would be if I had allowed my brother to persuade William to ride – and William had had an accident. After all William is now Flain’s foremost poet and it was obvious even at that age that he was quite exceptionally gifted. Imagine if all that had been thrown away because some stupid animal had flung him off its back and broke his neck?”

Some minutes later William, with an obvious effort, turned towards me.

“Ah here we are. Almost home. Do you know I think I must have nodded off a while there, I do apologise. A whisky Clancy perhaps, before we change for dinner?”

Two days before my departure from Flain, Lady Henry received some bad news about her northern estates. It had come to light somehow that her steward up there had been embezzling funds over many years. Lady Henry was in a state of distraction that night, torn between competing desires. For whatever reason, she seemed to hate the idea of leaving William and myself to our own devices, but she also found it intolerable not being at the helm to manage the crisis in the north. In the end it was the latter anxiety that won out. The following morning, after a great flurry of preparation that had every servant in the house running around like agitated ants, she set off in the car with Buttle.

William and I took our coffee out onto the stone terrace which overlooked the park and watched the car winding along the drive, out through the gate and on into the world beyond. It was a bright, fresh, softly gilded morning, on the cusp between summer and autumn.

William sighed contentedly.

“Peace!” he exclaimed.

I smiled.

“Mother has arranged for us to visit that sculptor’s workshop this morning,” he then said. “Do I take it you actually want to go?”

I laughed. “To be quite honest, no. Not in the slightest.”

“Well, thank God for that. I think I will scream if we have to traipse round many more of Mother’s artistic hangers-on.”

We poured more coffee and settled back comfortably in our chairs. A family of deer had emerged from the woods to the left to feed on the wide lawns along the drive and we watched them for some minutes in companionable silence. Then he suddenly turned the full blueness of his gaze upon me.

“Have you read many of my poems, Clancy?”

“Yes, all of them,” I told him quite truthfully. “All your published ones at least.”

I do my research. When I decided to accept the invitation from William’s mother to visit them, I had hunted down and looked through all six of William’s slim little collections, full of veiled agonised coded allusions to his mother’s catastrophic accident while pregnant with William, his father’s shotgun suicide a week before his birth. (Why do we feel the need to wear our wounds as badges?)

“And, tell me quite honestly,” William probed. “What did you think of them?”

I hesitated.

“You write very well,” I said. “And you also have things to say. I suppose what I sometimes felt, though, was that there was a big difference between what you really wanted to say and what you actually were able to express in those verses. I had the feeling of something – contained… something contained at an intolerably high pressure, but which you were only able to squeeze out through a tiny little hole.”

William laughed. “Constipated! That’s the word you’re looking for.”

On the contrary, it was precisely the word I was trying to avoid!

I laughed with him. “Well no, not exactly, but…”

“Constipated!” His laugh didn’t seem bitter. It appeared that he was genuinely entertained. “That is really very good, Clancy. Constipated is exactly right.”

Then, quite suddenly, he stood up.

“Do you fancy a short walk, Clancy? There’s something I’d very much like to show you.”

The place he took me to was on the outer edges of their park. The woods here had been neglected and were clogged up by creepers and by dead trees left to lie and rot where they had fallen. Here, in a damp little valley full of stinging nettles, stood a very large brick outbuilding which could have been a warehouse or a mill. There were big double doors at one end, bolted and padlocked, but William led me to an iron staircase like a fire escape to one side of the building. At a height equivalent to the second storey of a normal house, this staircase led through a small door into the dark interior. Cautioning me to be silent, William unlocked it.