A Natural

by Ross Raisin

  Tom’s dad came down again. He drove them from the hotel and parked in the quiet turning by the side of the house, where they sat together in the car waiting for the club chairman to arrive and make the introductions. His dad kept looking up at the handsome old terrace or at the piece of paper that he had taken from his pocket and was squinting to read. The chairman’s Jaguar pulled in behind them, fifteen minutes late. They watched his pained bulk appear slowly from the car, and got out to meet him.

  “Ready?” the chairman said, already turning towards the house. They followed him through the gate and past the fat rhododendron which dominated a bushy green garden so unlike the neat lawn of Tom’s parents’ house, then up the few steps to the front door.

  Both Mr. and Mrs. Davey were at home. They moved busily about the large kitchen, making coffee and plating biscuits while Tom sat at one side of a long table, between his dad and the chairman.

  “How’s your foot doing?” Mr. Davey asked when the couple came over to sit down opposite them.

  “It’s fine now, thank you.”

  In his kitchen, jovial in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, it was difficult to twin Mr. Davey with the featureless suited figure Tom had seen a couple of times in the players’ lounge. He spoke to them at length as Mrs. Davey listened and smiled and got more biscuits. The chairman nodded occasionally, leaving the room at one point to take a phone call. Tom’s dad had quite a number of questions, which Mr. and Mrs. Davey answered between them: he would have to do his own washing, of his clothes and his bedding; yes, there was a curfew, on the nights before training and matches, but he would have his own key, and on Saturday and Tuesday nights the Daveys allowed the boys more leeway. They trusted their lodgers to respect the house and behave maturely. He could cook for himself when he wanted to, and there was a shelf in the fridge for him, but there would be a meal provided every evening, which they all sat down to eat together. Tom grew increasingly self-conscious, watching his dad scrupulously write down all the information on his piece of paper. These were his mum’s questions, he knew. He continued to sit there, like a child, saying nothing while everything was arranged for him.

  When there was a pause, he spoke up: “Is anyone else lodging with you?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Davey said. “Two Scots lads. Both seventeen. A scout up there brought them to the club’s attention earlier this summer and we had them down for a trial. Very impressive for their age group, played a few first-team games too for Partick, and now we’ve got them in with the second-year scholars. You wouldn’t guess they were that young. Well, until you start speaking to them.” He glanced at Mrs. Davey and they both smiled. “Shall we go up and show you your room?”

  Tom followed the chairman’s heavy buttocks up the narrow staircase. On the first floor he glimpsed through an open doorway of the first of two neighboring rooms—the walls gleaming darkly with posters of Celtic players, Parkhead, glamour models—before the party ascended the next flight of steps to the top floor.

  The room was small but immaculate. They crowded in, and the sound of the chairman’s breathing filled the space as they stood looking around: the bed, the small television on top of a chest of drawers, chair in one corner, full-length mirror in another; silently taking it all in as if they were imagining him inhabiting the room—sleeping, dressing, masturbating, combing his hair.

  “Great view from up here,” his dad said. They all turned to look out of the window set into the triangular far wall. The town spread out below the house. The cracked spines of terraced roofs fell away down a hillside. Satellite dishes blazed on the fronts of two towers bathed in sunshine half a mile away. Further on, the dirty boxed units of the central shopping area. Town’s training ground, just visible beyond the edge of the town. And, looming at one side of the window, the football stadium. Out of nowhere an unexpected longing pulled Tom towards it—towards the floodlights, bulbs twinkling in the sun above the crumbling brick walls of the old part of the ground, floating him over the houses that obscured the main stand and the large new tiered structure of the Kop, until he could see all the glittering ranks of red and green seats.

  “It’s good, yeah,” he said.

  They left the room. Tom was the last through the door and he noticed, as the others made their way back downstairs, a couple of books propped against the skirting board, a Post-it note stuck to one of the covers: RETURN TO RICHIE B.

  They sat again around the kitchen table. The chairman departed and Mrs. Davey offered another round of coffees. Tom expected his dad would want to be off, but he told her they would be happy to stop for another. Tom assumed he had more questions; however, instead, he started talking about Clarke’s tactics with Mr. Davey, the team’s chances of staying up. Mrs. Davey sat beside Tom and took the opportunity to ask him about his mum and his sister, what it had been like living in a hotel for all this time. “You must have felt like Alan Partridge,” she said, and Tom admitted that he did not know who that was. “Nor do I, really,” she said with a warm, complicit smile, “but Andrew, our eldest, used to be a big fan.”

  There was the sound of the front door opening and closing, then somebody moving about before a man appeared at the doorway.

  “Dad. Oh, sorry, I’ll get out of your way.”

  “No, don’t worry. This is Tom Pearman and his dad, Ray. Tom’s coming to lodge with us. Tom, Ray—this is our son, Liam.”

  Tom’s dad got up to shake hands as the burly young man stepped forward, so Tom stood up too. He recognized him, he thought. The wide pale face and short sandy hair, gingerish, unlike his parents’, both of whom obviously used to be dark. Tom wondered if he might be adopted. It seemed like that kind of family.

  “How’s the foot?” Liam asked. He smiled, noting Tom’s surprise. “I’m a supporter.”

  “It’s healed up.”

  “That’s good.” He turned to Mr. Davey as Tom sat back down. “Dad, I’m just after a plunger. Shower’s blocked again.”

  “Under the sink.”

  Liam hunkered down to look in the cupboard. The sun streaming through the kitchen window was on his back. His shirt clung damply to him, glued to his vertebrae. After a moment he pulled out an old plunger, the wooden handle blackened with mold spores, and Tom realized that he had seen him before, at the training ground, tending to the pitch.

  “I’ll give it a go.” Liam stood up. “Good to meet you, Tom, Mr. Pearman.”

  He left the room, inspecting the plunger, twisting it in his large hands as he walked through the doorway out of sight. When the front door closed Tom turned back to the conversation. His dad was observing him across the table. Tom looked sharply away and took a sip of his coffee. He kept his eyes on the other side of the room, on the sink, the window. There was what looked like a washing-up rota on the door of the fridge. A cluster of small framed photographs of players above the microwave, one of them Chris Gale, Town’s left back.

  “Well, Tom,” his dad said. “Sounds good to me. You OK with everything?”

  They were all looking at him now.

  “Yes.”

  —

  He drove his belongings over from the hotel the following morning, a day off, together with a few other bits and pieces that his dad had brought down in anticipation of the move. He kept to his new room for a long time, conscious of the other occupants of the house below him. He folded his clothes into the chest of drawers and put his dumbbells under the bed; then, listening to the voices of the other lodgers beneath the floorboards, he installed his cactus collection on the windowsill.

  He was introduced to Steven Barr and Bobby Hart at dinner. Both of them were big and excitable, boyish, Bobby a world apart from the subdued youth that Foley had made a show of in the showers. They sat next to each other at the table, laughing and shoving and exclaiming in accents broad enough to make Tom feel slightly intimidated, although they were extremely polite to the Daveys, and to Tom they were immediately respectful because he was in the first-team squad. At the training ground they b
arely spoke. Now, bantering with Mrs. Davey, leaning over one another for more chili, salad, garlic bread, they could not seem to keep quiet, or still. The noise and laughter, drawing all the focus onto the two boys, gradually relaxed Tom. He joined in with a conversation about parachute payments to relegated Premier League teams. He gave a funny account of his time at the hotel. After the meal everybody moved through to the living room to watch television, and only when Bobby and Steven went upstairs to play a computer game did Tom start to feel awkward, sitting next to the Daveys on their large sofa. He waited a reasonable amount of time, then excused himself to go up to his room.

  He began to settle at the house. The Daveys were kind, constantly good-natured. If he was quiet or over-polite, they never pointed it out. Mostly, they left him to himself. Since his recovery from the foot injury he had been working himself with relentless intensity, his dad’s words in the back of his mind: Roll your sleeves up; wait for your chance. He drove back each afternoon, knowing that Mrs. Davey would be at the hospice kitchen where she volunteered and that the Scottish boys would still be training or studying, wanting nothing more than to sit in a cold bath and let his burning muscles give in to the water.

  In the mornings he drove the boys in. They sat in the back of Tom’s Fiesta showing each other videos on their phones, or leaned forward with their meaty white forearms up against the headrests to ask him what it had been like at a Premier League club. If he had met this or that famous player. He described for them just as he used to for his old school friends the experience of the few occasions he had trained with the first team: their technical ability, the skills and tricks that you would never see in matches, and the times that he had spoken to them. There had been a tiny boot room next to the home dressing room, where the scholars used to sit and chat and listen through the wall. Quite often a senior player would come in to talk or joke with them. Tom could see the keen, impressed pairs of eyes in the rearview mirror as he told the boys this, even though he could not escape a sense that he was telling somebody else’s story. Some of the first-team players had spoken to Tom regularly. They knew he was a prospect, that he had played for England at his age-group level. He was one of the youths they had taken notice of in that leathery little room, a subtle respect which Tom thought he was never able properly to convey whenever he told people about his scholarship.

  On Mondays and Tuesdays Bobby and Steven, sometimes with one or two of the other scholars, came across the pitches to train with the first team. On these mornings Tom could feel their restless enthusiasm in the back of the car. Once onto the field they concentrated, ran, played, with all-out commitment. Tom saw the attention they gave to the senior players, especially Easter, entranced by everything that was said, clamoring to be near when it seemed that some joke or prank was about to happen. They stayed close together, always a pair. One of the forwards, Charlie Lewis, declared in the dressing room that they should be called Neeps and Tatties. At this his striking partner Yates slapped his thighs and laughed loudly at what he was about to say: “Settled then. Nips and Titties.”

  In the revelry that followed the two boys stood still, unsure where to look. They both turned towards Tom, who smiled at them, instinctively protective, jealous.

  Clarke rarely split them up. It was clear he approved of them. They were over six foot. Muscled. They told Tom one dinnertime that they both used to play as strikers. As a partnership they had broken school league scoring records. Now, though, Clarke had them playing as a central midfielder and a central defender, conversions to which they never offered a word of complaint, even to Tom in the safety of his car. They were grateful just to be there. Tom could understand that. He had been the best player at his own school, a striker too, like the majority of the exceptional school players he had come across. It was only when he progressed to county and club level that his various coaches decided he would be better placed on the wing, and he had stayed there ever since. Town had signed him as a winger. When he joined, Clarke spoke to him about the improvement he wanted his energy and crossing ability to bring to the team. The dovetailing relationship he could see developing between him and Fleming, the fullback behind him.

  “I’ve been watching you,” he had told Tom in the players’ lounge that day. “Did you know that?”

  Tom shook his head as the manager smiled at him disturbingly from the other end of the sofa. He was not exactly put at ease by this disclosure.

  “Watched all the DVDs. Watched them a few times. And you know what I thought?”

  Tom continued shaking his head.

  “I thought, that boy’s a player. A natural. And I’m going to turn him into a man.”

  There was nothing Tom could think to say to this.

  “And fair play to you as well, because you could have sat on your backside and played for the development side there, the Under-21s, whatever fancy bollocks setup they’ve got, but you didn’t, because you want to play.”

  “Yes,” Tom said simply, and when they got up from the sofa he wondered if the manager was somehow under the impression that he had been offered a contract and turned it down.

  —

  Tom walked from the Daveys’ to the stadium and made his way up to the players’ lounge to join the other members of the squad not involved in the Oxford fixture. He was the only one to watch the game. He stepped out of the lounge into the small sealed-off area at the top of the main stand and followed the play absently while the muffled sound of everybody else watching a televised Premier League match came through the glass behind him.

  The team achieved a 1–1 draw. Simon Finch-Evans, the right-winger Tom had been led to believe he’d been signed to take the place of, was one of Town’s better performers, instrumental in the buildup to the goal and applauded off the pitch when he was substituted near the end. Tom had been in the shower that morning when Clarke had left a message to say that he was not going to be one of the substitutes. Oxford liked to play three in the middle, the short mumbled recording explained, so if he needed to make a change it would probably be to pack the midfield. But Tom would have to come to the stadium regardless, Clarke reminded him; he wanted non-involveds present for all home games if they were fit, he finished, for morale.

  Tom came inside at the end of the match. He got himself a drink and looked for somewhere inconspicuous to sit. The players’ lounge had been done up as part of the main stand rebuild, the chairman had told him and his family during their tour of the ground. It was flatly lit, fitted out with the same carpet tiles and plasterboard walls as all the other suites and function rooms, which gave the inside of the whole stand the appearance of cheap office space. Tom found himself a seat in the corner underneath the television. On the wall to one side of him were several canvas prints of players celebrating. All of them were recent. The biggest showed last season’s promotion squad leaning deliriously from the upper deck of an open-top bus. Next to it was the FA Trophy triumph of the year before: Chris Easter being carried aloft by his teammates, looking up at the sky in a moment of invulnerable joy. Tom tried to calculate how long it must have been after the picture was taken that Easter made his transfer to Middlesbrough. A couple of weeks, maybe. Easter did not yet know, in that golden still, the disaster that his time at Middlesbrough would be; that he would be let go within a year and eventually return to Town.

  Suspense built in the lounge as they all waited for the first team to arrive from the dressing room. Tom was regretting the decision to seat himself under the television. In front of him a group of executive-box guests had gathered to stare above his head at the classified results, not speaking, swallowing their lager, encircling Tom with the bullfrog gulping of yellow flabby throats. His old team had won, he could hear, and for a moment Tom could see his dad leaving the ground with Uncle Kenny and John, the three of them talking happily among the swarm of the crowd as it poured down the narrow terraced streets and they made their way towards the pub, where, pint in hand, his dad would be waiting expectantly now for the L
eague Two scores to be displayed on the television.

  Some kind of altercation had started up over by the window onto the pitch. Outside, two teenagers in club replica shirts had climbed into the enclosed seating area. One of them was standing on a seat, pointing and chanting at Yates on the other side of the glass.

  “You’re shit, and you know you are” could just be heard above the sound of the television.

  Everybody in the room was now watching the boy—and Yates, who began mouthing “Penis” at him. The boy continued undeterred as his mate climbed up beside him and joined in with the chant. Yates stepped so close to the window that his nose almost touched it, then moved his hand towards his trousers. The room went completely still as, from one pocket, he pulled out his wallet. With horrible exaggeration he licked the pad of his thumb and began to slide out twenty-pound notes, pressing them, one at a time, against the glass. He had got to eighty pounds by the time a detachment of stewards removed the incensed teenagers from the stand and a director walked over to Yates for a quiet word.

  Tom went to the bar and bought another drink. He felt tired, a bit drunk. Lager went to his head; he was still not quite used to it. He remained by the bar, trying to decide how much longer he would need to stay before he could leave unnoticed. The double doors to the room opened. An unpleasant little official in a stained club tie entered, leading half a dozen women into the lounge. It took Tom a few seconds to register that these were the partners of some of the players. There were one or two small children with them, who ran ahead, and a baby in the arms of his mother. She was probably Price’s partner, or Richards’s, Tom presumed; her presence and that of the baby, the only black people in the room, heightening the oddness of the band of women. They followed the official to the far side of the bar—the powerful new smell of the group enveloping Tom as they passed him—where he left them and walked back out of the lounge with a wink for the men around the television.