Jimmy was “doing”, as he put it, Politics. But there again, at least so far as practice and experience was concerned, he seemed to Gavin to be already complete. The stories Jimmy told were rifted with veins of indignant anger and passion. The customary rhetorical mode which might have been expected was undercut by anecdote, and the sly humour of which Jimmy was a master. From apprenticeship to section leader, from strikes to lay offs, from marches held in whichever cause was current to WEA classes held in worktime by union and management agreement, Jimmy placed himself at the centre of two decades of industrial strife. It was only actual political activity, conventional or maverick or both, which Jimmy had avoided. It was a “generational thing, butt”, he’d shrugged. “Not for me, see”, was his only explanation. It was as if the game of political activity and not the context was all that engaged him. Besides there was, he explained, “Only so much you can do with one body, know what I mean, butt, what with a few little dalliances and the soccer and all.” Jimmy claimed that his wife had understood even if “OK, they’d separated a bit, for a bit. Took the two girls to her mother’s, see butt, for a bit. While I do this course, see.” He’d long fancied “using his brain-box properly” and the grants available for mature age students were too good to turn down, alongside the redundancy package he’d taken. “Fresh start, butt, and why not?”
In the months that followed the beginning of the autumn term in which they’d met, Gavin helped with the essay assignments at which, though he did do the reading, Jimmy baulked. “Can’t seem to kick off, butt” he’d say, and Gavin worked on the structure, the sentence sense, the spelling, the general analytical focus from alpha to omega which Jimmy’s raft of assembled ideas lacked if it was ever to float. Gavin felt privileged to help, and though neither man quite expressed it as such it was, between them, an inverse image of what happened every Friday night. The tyro footballer was the controller on the page, and the crack player struggled with the fluidity of ideas transposed into the formality of the written word. But together, Gavin thought, together, it’s a team effort in the end. No difference.
The team which played together stayed together. That, Gavin could see, was the bargain to make and to keep. After the Christmas break they all came back together. Only Gavin had actually gone home for any length of time, and he decided, to parental surprise, to return early to the university. Needed to work at a few things, he’d told them. The team held practice sessions. They improved as a unit. When they started to play again they moved swiftly up the internal league of the scratch teams who met for friendly competition. Individual skills were sharpened. Gavin did one-to-ones with Jimmy on Tuesdays and Thursdays after essay-writing sessions. He learned how to cushion the ball. He learned how to trap and give the ball in one movement. He learned how to time a run to get into position. He learned how to wrap his foot around the ball to curl its intended path. He learned how to jump out of a tackle and still retain the ball. He learned how to shield the ball with his body. He learned how to bump an opponent to win the ball. He learned how to volley a ball on the rise. He learned how to shoot to keep the trajectory of the ball low. He learned how, in theory anyway, he might one day put the ball into the net to score. A goal.
In Jimmy’s shadow, he felt his ability grow even if he would never blossom into something beyond the mechanics of the process. Through sheer effort he became, with his lurching runs and youthful energy, a part, a real if lesser part of the whole of the team. Not the liability to avoid, the passenger along for the ride provided by others, but a proper helper, a team player, able to contribute. Now, if he still never looked likely to score, yet he never lost the ball easily either, and would always tussle for it, run back to retrieve it, look to spoil the play of any opponent who, Jimmy would say, “Robbed you naked there, butt. Got to get it back, then.” Gavin found his own voice, too. The tippy-tappy play-for-fun of most teams meant grunts and yells were rarely in order. Gavin discovered for himself the power of such intimidation, noise from nowhere, laced with the swearing and cursing Jimmy had taught him, even to the disruptive point of shoving and fouling. Not that Jimmy, elegant and powerful, ever resorted to that, but he vocally approved of his apprentice’s newly tempered steel, and swiftly intervened to protect him from those who did not like the aggression of “Gavin the clogger”, as Jimmy fondly christened him afterwards in the bar.
By the end of February the team were clear leaders. Top of their league’s ladder board. Jimmy spent more and more time, often on his own, burnishing the skills he’d first displayed when younger on the muddy recreation grounds of rival work teams and village clubs, to deploy them again in what was, for him, the child-like dimensions of a five-a-side knock-about. When Jimmy turned it on, they all said with glee, he just “scores when he wants”. And, as the university year passed, for his own satisfaction, he seemed to want to do that more and more.
It was in mid-March that Alfredo, an Argentinian medic, a trainee cardiologist in his early thirties, so just a few years younger than Jimmy, turned up. Ostensibly to watch. He had a studious air. He was bald. He wore round gold-rimmed glasses. He had on a pale blue and white striped Argentinian international shirt, buttoned to the neck, and black tracksuit bottoms above silver and blue training shoes. He was the first one ever who had come to watch them play. They could see him on the balcony above them where, as league leaders, they thrashed a rival, four nil, over two fifteen minute halves. Jimmy had scored all the goals.
At the end of the match, Alfredo came down to the hall and walked onto its sprung-floored pitch. He walked past Gavin who was still bent double, and gasping. He walked by Ed and Mac who were going off to shower. He walked over to the centre where Selçuk had draped an arm over Jimmy’s shoulder to congratulate him. It was only to Jimmy that Alfredo wished to speak. He spoke softly, insistently, fluently, to tell Jimmy that he, Alfredo, was the captain of the university’s five-a-side team, the best players from the various colleges, and that he had heard from others of Jimmy’s prowess, and that also he could say now that he had seen it for himself. He said that he, Alfredo, had played, once or twice, for Boca Juniors in Buenos Aires, and often for their second team as his medical studies took him away from the professional game. He said that his team needed to recruit a reliable goal scorer to complement them, and in particular Alfredo’s style of play, and that, from what he’d seen, he wanted Jimmy to play for the All Star university team, a team of true international quality. The All Stars had played other universities all across the country. All expenses were paid. They were about to enter the most important part of the season, a rolling series of play-offs to the domestic final, then a tournament in Paris, as a grand finale, and then possibly the European final itself. If he joined, Alfredo said, Jimmy would be playing with some players who were, like him, “Extra”. Then he finished, and put his hands on his hips waiting for Jimmy’s grateful acceptance. Instead, Jimmy told him, “Ta. But we’re doing all right as it is, butt”, that he was “enjoying himself, like”, but didn’t need “any extra aggro, what with essays and exams coming up, and stuff ”, so “thanks for asking, butt, but no thanks all the same.” Alfredo said no more. He walked away. Gavin asked what he’d wanted. Jimmy ran his fingers through the plastered tangle of his greying hair and clapped Gavin around his shoulders to guide him to the changing room, and out of there. “Nothing much, butt”, he said. “Latins, see. They all think they’re toffee.”
* * * * *
The following Friday when they trotted out of the changing room to play, it was Gavin who nudged Jimmy to look who was on the opposing team, one they’d beaten easily, but in a different guise, back in December. It was, dressed as before but without the gold-rimmed spectacles, the tall, willowy figure of Alfredo. Jimmy grinned widely. He went straight across to him and shook Alfredo’s outstretched hand, and Jimmy said, “Well, okay then, butt, we’ll see what you’ve got, eh?”
What followed was a masterclass. Whenever Alfredo had the ball – supported to his left and right
by two other imports to his makeshift team – it would be as if the pattern of play, especially any rush and thrust, would be suspended whilst he decided on one of any several options he might choose. A mazy dribble. A splitting pass to take out two flatfooted and slower-witted opponents. Usually Gavin and Selçuk. An outrageous back-pass when on the run. A speculative shot from distance that stung Mac’s hands. More often than not, a pivot from a central position to radiate the ball out and into the paths of his willing acolytes who Gavin, despairingly and futilely, chased and chased. Ed and Selçuk harried as best they could, the runners who were cued to bear down on Big Mac who saved and parried. Without any ball to use, Jimmy was the one to be by-passed, shut out of the game no matter how many times he snatched at the ball. But he never stopped grinning or talking. Mostly to Alfredo, who neither smiled nor replied back to him. The ball was sprayed imperiously from the feet of Alfredo, always playing with his head up to find that passage of play with which his control of the ball could do most harm. Before five minutes had gone Alfredo’s team had scored twice.
From the re-start after the second goal, Jimmy took the ball on himself and, for once in the contest, his speed off the mark took him past the watchful guards stationed for defensive duty by the game’s generalissimo, Alfredo. From the apex of his direct route to goal, Jimmy let fly. The ball arrowed into the top left hand corner of the net with such force that it ricocheted back out and into the goalscorer’s path. Jimmy picked up the ball and handed it to the maestro who had come to show him how the game should be played. But it was Jimmy who now decided to deliver another lesson. He no longer stood off Alfredo, he buzzed around him, with or without the ball in the Argentinian’s possession, and he cut off the avenues available for the passing game by jostling and darting at the pass-master. Alfredo tried to be even more commanding. Strategy against the merely tactical. He took up a deeper position, right in front of his goal, and instructed his runners to stand further away from him. This made it easier for Ed and Selçuk to stay back to man mark them. Gavin, in all this, scurried about, demented and irrelevant in this chess game of a football match. Whenever Jimmy managed to get on the ball after a move broke down, Alfredo’s team retreated as one. Whenever Alfredo had any time to dictate play his drilled team moved up in close formation. As a team they were clearly superior. It was only a matter of time, and Gavin could see that that time was nearly there, that Jimmy could not do this, could not win it, by himself.
The team turned around, without a break, for the second half of fifteen minutes to come. It was still only 2-1 but the impetus was all one way. Gavin, for the first time in his life, felt physically overwrought with frustration at his own inadequacy. He had been made lesser again, only able to watch, yet not motionless, as the heavy rubberised football pinged and bounced and swerved, and was blocked and checked by bodies running on sheer willpower. Then, as if a string had snapped, the football went loose, unexpectedly slicing off Alfredo’s silver and blue trainers and into the stride of an advancing Jimmy who swept past the tackle and shot on goal. It was almost too clean a hit. It went through the goalkeeper’s open hands only to smash itself against the junction point of crossbar and post. It went back into play without touching the ground, right to the feet of Alfredo who was facing his own goal. He trapped it instantly and spun away with it, guiding the ball before him, at speed, downfield to the half-way line before a visceral scream of pain from behind caused him to hesitate. Another instant. It was Gavin who barrelled in on the playmaker and stuck out an ungainly heel which dislodged the ball. The ball spun on its axis, no longer controlled, anymore than was the bulky figure of Gavin who rotated with it through almost 360o, stretched for it with his right leg as it squirmed beyond him, and smacked it, first time, with the distended top of his foot, hard and scuddingly low from the half-way line. The ball skidded just in front of the stooping keeper, and went into the net on the unstoppable arc of its late rise. Goal. 2-2.
“Bloody hell, Gav. You’ve bloody well scored! Goal!” It was Jimmy. Gavin heard him from the ground where he lay. He had not seen the ball enter the net. He knew the moment he had connected, however, that he would score. He had felt, for the only time, an exquisite unity between his intent and the outcome of the action he had taken. He felt, instantaneously, complete in a manner he’d never experienced until the moment he had over-extended his right leg to follow through with the shot he had truly lined up on goal. Goal! He’d scored. He’d mastered the ball. And now he was flat out on the floor. His right leg, his short, pumped-up right leg, was stuck out in front of him. He was in gnawing pain. A toothache of epic, recurring pain in his leg, at the back of the knee. He tried to get up. He was hurting. He could not shift. Jimmy pulled him to a sitting position and Gavin cried out “No. No”, in an agony he’d also never experienced, as if his body, not just his leg, had been torn apart. Someone tried to lift him by his armpits, but Alfredo said not to do so. He said, impassively and with the quiet accuracy of the certain, that it would be the hamstring. Stretched rather than snapped. Snapped would have been better, he said. Stretched would mean bed cure, rest with feet up, bouts of physio, for weeks and weeks. They picked him up as a foursome, holding his legs out and steady as Gavin gritted his teeth and moaned. They put him down, half sitting and half lolling on a bench at the side. Alfredo fetched some heavy duty painkillers and a glass of water. He patted Gavin solicitously on his arm. There would be need, shortly, to take him to A and E for examination but, first, to be calm. So to finish, why not, the game. He suggested that he and Jimmy play in a team of four against five. Jimmy asked Gavin if he could manage to hang on. Gavin nodded, and Gavin watched.
Alfredo and Jimmy played with brio, and in another spectrum of possibility. They did not so much find room to create, they created the room in which their talents could play. In that sense they were unplayable. They became not the expression of anything but the thing itself. This was physical literacy. It was graphic numeracy. It was instinctive. It was designed. It was a dance. It was telepathic in its movement and its dimensions. Jimmy would halt, stock still, then Jimmy would move like a fly eater’s tongue to pick up the ball which Alfredo would release at the split second no-one else could touch its flight. Nor would Jimmy have been able to snap it up unless he had not anticipated, without being told or had signalled, the precise bi-section of time and space energised by Alfredo. Or else, Jimmy would taunt with sublime ball trickery, from instep to instep, until an opponent stepped into his trap and Jimmy walked out of it by laying-off the ball, almost as a caress, into the lengthening stride of Alfredo who drove on and shot to score, or, more often, devised an outrageous wall-to-wall piece of play with his partner, before one or other of them would score.
Partners were indeed what they were – short-term acquaintances with lifelong attraction. Gavin saw it immediately. He felt a leaden thud in his chest that was a duller and more prolonged pain than the nerve-twanging agony throbbing in his right leg. His leg remained doubled up at the knee. He could not uncoil it. He held the back of his knee with his right hand and the saliva dried up in his mouth. On the floor Ed and Selçuk and two A.N.Others were being run ragged. Yet, for them, there was no fear of such competition. To be so out-classed was almost a joy for such true amateurs. In goal Big Mac could applaud the regularity with which he was being beaten. It was an exhibition of supreme individuality which left the concept of a team in its wake. Except for Gavin, for whom something more than the team was unravelling along with the team and that was an ethos, a togetherness, the making of a whole from its parts, from its lesser parts. Meaning, he knew, himself.
He knew, too, that it was undeniable that Jimmy was revelling in this bestowed pomp. He was refreshed. He was truly fulfilled. His ability was on full display at last, and orchestrated by Alfredo it was irresistible. The goals they scored were almost an afterthought. They were only using the occasion and the presence of others as a backdrop to the footballing congress, the inter relationship between nationals, which they
had found for themselves, and which was not available to others. When it was over, Alfredo finally smiled. Jimmy punched Alfredo on the upper arm. He was an All Star all right. It was clear that five-a-side on a Friday night was all over for Jimmy. And over, too, for Gavin who would not be able to play again anytime soon.
“It’ll take time, butt”, said Jimmy in the University Hospital’s A and E department where they’d taken Gavin, carried between them, and in and out of Alfredo’s car. A grumpy, elderly doctor had examined Gavin. Alfredo’s instant diagnosis was confirmed. He was to rest in bed, with painkillers, and no exercise for a few weeks, then on crutches, with intense physio to take his elasticated parts back into their more flexible mode. It would take time. But, first, he would need, said the senior doctor, to have a Robert Jones. This turned out to be a bandaging technique named after the Welsh orthopaedic surgeon who had devised it. The leg was swathed, above and below the knee, in layer upon layer of tightly wrapped bandages which served to keep the leg rigid in its semi-bent position. Robert Jones was credited with saving many lives in the First World War with this ingenious splint of a field dressing to allow wounds and fractures to heal, as it would Gavin’s lesser problem. It looked, he thought, propped up in bed, as ludicrous as that of any cartoon character he’d ever seen as a boy. He ate his grapes and read his books, and wondered about the efficacy of the Classics as a career in the late twentieth century world.
All That Lies Beneath Page 5
