A Natural

by Ross Raisin

  And she had thought too that coming back would make everything return to normal. That she would be able to step straight into her old life. But they had been home for almost four months now and so far nothing was like it used to be. This house in the middle of nowhere. Her days spent drifting between it and her mum’s and the baby groups in town, where she sat at a remove from the impenetrable chatting clutches of mothers, readying herself for the next moment her isolation would be shown up by Tyler barging over one of their children.

  She could hear Chris moving about upstairs. A door closing. The flush of the toilet. She turned on the hob and began whisking the eggs.

  When he came down he was dressed and seemed to be in a good mood. He walked over and kissed her on the forehead before going to pick up Tyler, who was crying for her attention at her feet.

  “Cheese, is it?”

  “That all right?”

  “Yeah, cheese is good.”

  He stayed by the island, letting Tyler chew at the cords of his hoodie while she cooked and served the omelettes.

  “How’s Donna?” he asked.

  “Fine. Good, actually. She looks happy.”

  Chris put Tyler into his high chair and they sat down at the kitchen table. “What’s his name again, the new bloke?”

  “Robert. She’s into him. More than the last one, anyway.”

  He snorted. “No shit.”

  She looked at him across the table. “I found this place on the Internet I thought we could take Tyler this afternoon. This farm for kids, it’s not that far a drive.”

  “A farm?”

  “A petting farm. It’s not actually that far away.”

  Tyler took apart his tuna sandwich and threw one of the pieces of bread to the floor. She bent to pick it up and put it on the table.

  “No, let’s go into town,” Chris said. “There’s some things I need to get.”

  Tyler was peering quizzically at his remaining triangle of bread. He revolved it a couple of times in his palm, then pushed the whole thing into his mouth.

  Chris laughed. “Just some stuff that I need to finish off here before we go. He can sleep in the car, right?”

  She knew, as she cleared away the plates and heard him going back up the stairs, the office door closing, that he would be some time. He was relaxed, though, she placated herself. That was enough.

  Tyler fell asleep straightaway in the car. They decided to drive around for a while to let him nap, rather than head straight into town. They took the road towards the coast, and she began to hope that they might end up spending the afternoon there, in the sunshine, but Tyler woke up and started crying before they got that far, so they turned back for town.

  She had an intuition, even before he spoke to the supporter in Foot Locker, the old man on the escalator, the group coming out of Burger King, that he would not avoid the fans today. During these conversations she stayed by the pram and waited, glad at least that she was invisible in public when he was with her. They always said the same things: how pleased they’d been when they heard he was coming back, that they weren’t convinced Clarke was up to it at this level, and could he maybe sign something for their dad, their brother, their little boy?

  She watched from a short distance as he chatted to three teenagers, a boy and two girls, outside Burger King. The girls’ smiling faces never leaving his, Chris clearly ignoring the boy. After a few minutes she began to get embarrassed and moved further away, crouching to talk to Tyler inside the hood of his pram.

  In the days that they used to go to clubs together, she had become used to this. There had been many times that she had stood beside him as brigades of girls came and talked to him, bought him drinks, touched his stomach, his bum, and she would grow unsure whether they were even aware of her there, holding his hand. Once, when she had left him to go to the toilet and come back to discover that he had moved from their table, she had searched the bar and the dance floor of the club until she found him in a passageway near the exit doors with a girl that she did not recognize. Their faces had been close together. She could not be certain if they were moving towards or away from each other, or if their hands had been touching. She had watched them for a few seconds, then left, afraid of being spotted, to go and join the other players in the chill-out room.

  When he returned from Burger King he said that he wanted to buy her something. What would she like? Shoes? Something for her course? For Tyler?

  He bought her a top, himself a phone upgrade. When they got home she tried on the new top and showed it to him. It looked good, he told her. They ate with Tyler and sat watching cartoons with him before she bathed and changed him and got him to bed.

  In the living room, the television on in the background, they sat together on the sofa and she rested her head on his shoulder. He put his hand to her hair and began to stroke the side of her face with his thumb. She let her eyes close. Briefly, she thought she might go to sleep. He moved position, though, gently shifting her head from his shoulder and lowering himself until he was laid out on his front over the sofa. She got up and knelt down on the carpet. Starting at one end of his body she gave him a leg, back and shoulder massage, for a long time, until eventually he turned over and, to her tired relief, took hold of her hands, sliding them slowly across his stomach.

  4

  In the gastroenterology unit of the district general hospital a consultant with a lazy eye was explaining to her small following party the nature of the work that her team performed. She had only been briefed by the ward manager at the start of her shift that three footballers would be visiting that afternoon, so had been required to cut short the daily review with her house officers and forgo lunch. Nonetheless, she managed without rush or irritation to show them around the department before passing them on to the sister who would lead them through some of the patients.

  This was Tom’s first community visit for the club. He, Yates and Ashlee Richards, the friendly young left-winger, had driven separately from training and met in the hospital car park.

  “Come on then,” Yates had said on the walk towards the entrance. “Let’s go see them before they die.” He was not enthusiastic about community visits. The previous season he had cost the club a considerable amount of unfavorable coverage, and complimentary tickets, when he told a pupil at a local secondary school that he kicked like he had a golf club up his arse.

  He was staring now with sullen boredom at the consultant and her peculiar eye, while Tom and Richards listened respectfully then followed her down the busy, bright corridors. When the consultant left them, the sister, a giggling middle-aged woman with long withered fingers, called Sabihah, led them into a large room. Exhausted-looking old men were sitting up in their beds. On the screen of a television on top of a wheeled cabinet by the wall, a teenage boy and girl were kissing in an empty classroom. Sabihah gave each player a different starting point and arranged a circuit for them around the room, as if they were at a sponsors’ function.

  Tom sat down at one after another of the low chairs by the beds, unsure what to say. With the first two it was not a problem, as they were happy simply to talk: they had supported Town all their lives, they missed going to the games, they wanted the toilet but they didn’t want to say so to the Asian nurse. But his next two just lay there, their eyes goggling at him or across the room. Yellow flagging chests gaped from the slits in their gowns. Spiny hands trembled on the sheets. One had no chair by his bed so Tom stood awkwardly beside him for the three minutes, filling with a grave urge to find something to speak about.

  The stubbly old boy on the next bed, though, chuckled when Tom handed him one of the signed match programs that he had been instructed to give to each patient.

  “I know. Sorry.”

  “No, no, not to worry. Not to worry. This will help pass the hours. Let’s see.”

  He opened the program with exaggerated fascination. Through his thin hair there was a dark cut, newly clotted. “ ‘View from the dugout,’ ” he read a
loud. “ ‘I’d like to take the opportunity to extend a warm welcome to today’s opponents, Exeter City, their manager and visiting supporters.’ ” Tom wondered if he was going to read out the whole piece. He stopped there, however, and read silently for a short time before speaking again: “ ‘I honestly believe we have the players in the building to get out of this difficult spell. Tonight’s cup tie gives us a great opportunity to pick ourselves back up and it’s all the more significant because this will be the first time of course this club has ever competed in the League Cup. But we all have to pull together. So let’s get behind the team tonight and hope that first win is just around the corner. Spectacular achievement is born of unity alone.’ ” The man looked up at Tom. “What happened in this game then? Spectacular achievement?”

  “We lost 4–1.”

  The man went back to the program. He flicked through until he got to the center pages.

  “Is that you?”

  It was a double-page picture of Easter, his head down, about to strike the ball.

  “No, the captain.”

  “Oh.” He appraised the picture. “What’s he like, then?”

  Tom looked over at Richards, sitting in animated conversation with one patient, and Yates, who had his chin in his hand, staring with his own man at the television.

  “Actually, he’s a dick.”

  The old man, and Tom, began to laugh—loudly enough for some of the patients to look over and Sabihah to smile from the doorway.

  “I don’t know anything about football,” the man said. “I never liked it.” He considered Tom calmly for a moment. “Don’t mean to be rude, but I’m not sure you look like a footballer to me.”

  Tom smiled. “What does a footballer look like?”

  The man turned his head to Yates, who was getting up from his chair and looking through the doorway at two nurses walking past. “That one. He looks like a footballer.”

  “Well,” Tom said, “I’m more of a substitute.”

  The man patted the bed in appreciation. Tom stood up. It was time to move on to the next patient but he felt reluctant to leave.

  “Do you enjoy it?” the man asked.

  Tom looked down at him. Through his nightshirt he could see his breasts rotting like old fruit.

  “It’s what I always wanted to be.”

  The man clucked admiringly. The sheeted mound of his body stirred at the shaking of his left leg. Tom suddenly imagined his dad lying there, old, dying. “There’s not many of us can say we’ve achieved that.” He patted the program. “Thank you for this. I’ll stash it away with my pornography.”

  —

  The official photograph of the visit was published in the local paper the following day: the three players standing together next to the bed of a baffled old man.

  “We’ll put it up, then?” Mrs. Davey said at breakfast.

  Tom shook his head but Mrs. Davey and the two boys protested, so the photograph was torn out and pinned to the large corkboard on the back of the kitchen door, alongside the youth and first-team fixture lists, the washing machine schedule and the tear-outs of bits and pieces that had taken anybody’s fancy. Mrs. Davey liked to put up recipes, hospice newsletters, articles that she had read in the Express or in the local paper, and Bobby and Steven liked to push their luck with her by displaying page three models, their nipples obscured by drawing pins.

  There was an atmosphere of unceasing noise and motion about the house. Tom enjoyed the mealtimes: weekday roasts, pies, fish and chips that Mrs. Davey made herself. When they finished eating, the household moved through to the living room to watch the television, and after a little while, depending what was on, the Scottish pair would go upstairs to play on Bobby’s Xbox. They usually asked Tom if he would like to join them, but mostly he declined, even though he always left the living room shortly after they did to go up to his own room.

  He went regularly to the cinema—most Wednesday afternoons and, a couple of times since his arrival at the Daveys’, after dinner with Bobby and Steven. One night he walked with them to a pub on a nearby street to play pool. He had been given firm instructions by the Daveys not to buy them drinks. Against the pair’s pleadings, he did not, and they drank several Cokes while he slowly finished a single pint of lager, conscious the whole time that one or two of the people in the pub had identified him. While they were at the pool table a man came up to speak to him. He was amiable and introduced Tom to his wife, but all the same it made Tom uneasy to think that people might know who he was, be looking at him as he went about in public. On one of his first trips to the cinema a group of boys not much younger than himself had spotted him in the foyer. He had tried to ignore them repeatedly looking over from the popcorn counter, and in his haste to get away he had slipped into an auditorium and sat down in front of a film that, despite the title, turned out to be foreign.

  Andrew, the Daveys’ other son, came to visit for an afternoon. He was very chatty with all of the lodgers, and made a joke of the fact that he knew nothing about football. Both he and the middle child, Sarah, had left town some years ago. Sarah was married, lived in London and had not visited since Christmas, something that was mentioned three times during Tom’s first couple of weeks in the house. Liam, though, lived somewhere nearby. He came over occasionally, never for long, usually to eat.

  He was at the house the Sunday after Tom’s hospital outing, when the whole household sat down to three roast chickens.

  “How was it?” he asked Tom during the meal, pointing at the newspaper cutting on the corkboard.

  “All right,” Tom said. “Bit stupid, giving them signed programs.”

  Liam kept looking at the newspaper. “How were Yates and Richards?”

  “Richards is all right.”

  “Yes,” Liam said. “I’ve seen what Yates is like.”

  Mr. Davey, at the head of the table, cleared his throat at this point. “Michael Yates is a class-A bighead.”

  The Scottish pair looked at each other and sniggered. Mrs. Davey caught her husband’s eye very briefly and raised her eyebrows.

  “He is,” Mr. Davey carried on. “He’s your typical loudmouth. Always giving it this and that and winding people up because he knows he’s not very good and he’s scared out of his tiny brain by it.”

  Tom noticed that Liam was watching his father with amusement during this speech. There was a twitch of his lips, pursing into a smile, which lingered even as he placed a forkful of chicken into his mouth and started, slowly, rhythmically, to chew it.

  “He couldn’t work the vending machine at the hospital,” Tom said to Liam. “I went to the toilet and he was trying to get something out of it, and when I came back he was just pressing all the buttons. I don’t think he knew you’ve got to put money in it.” He had made the last part up, but Liam laughed, the whole table laughed, and Tom looked down at his plate to hide the obvious pride on his face.

  The easiness of the house was in contrast to the fraught daily battle of training and match days. He pushed himself to impress. He competed with breathless application in practice games and aimed always to be one of the first or the fastest during fitness work. As a result he was left alone—his effort quietly respected by some, distrusted by others, and it seemed in the case of the manager both.

  For endeavor only Bobby and Steven could equal him. Like the other couple of scholars who sometimes joined first-team training, they were fitter than most of the seniors because the youth team’s sessions were longer, harder, geared towards endurance. It made them a target. A number of the older players routinely made sure to assert their physical and vocal superiority. Sometimes, after a heavy challenge or sudden abuse, Tom imagined speaking out to defend them, but did not. They were shouted at, elbowed, kneed in the back, all under the eyes of Clarke, who wanted them prepared for the same in real matches, and all just as Tom too had undergone as a scholar.

  One afternoon, behind the clubhouse, Bobby was given the boot polish treatment. Easter appeared
with the brush and tin and held the boy down on the grass himself while several others stripped him and pinned his frantic spatchcocked legs for Price to apply the polish to his genitals. Tom moved inside, into the corridor, from where he listened to the sound of shouting and hilarity coming through the fire exit. Moments later the group barreled inside, Bobby at the front of them, naked, grinning and pale. In the middle of his white body was the shocking sight of his black, oiled penis, his thighs blotchy with scarlet finger marks.

  After the squad had changed and gone to the canteen, Tom turned back to look into the dressing room. Steven was sitting on a bench, staring at his phone. Beyond him, Bobby was still in the showers, desperately sponging himself. There was nothing, Tom thought, that he could say. Their status would improve at a stroke, he could tell them that. But it was better to say nothing, he decided, and of course the incident could never be brought up at the Daveys’, so he left them to themselves.

  On the days that Bobby and Steven trained with the seniors they usually sat next to Tom in the canteen at the far end of a long bench by the milk fridge and the recovery shakes table, after queuing up patiently for their food and giving up their position every time a first-teamer joined the line. Today, though, they did not come in. Tom ate slowly, glad that this was not one of the afternoons that he drove them home, until eventually most of the squad had left and the backroom staff began arriving for their lunch. One of the last to come in was Liam. Tom wondered whether he had seen anything of the boot polish scene. He chose his food, chatting a while to Lesley the cook over the top of the glass counter before turning round and, on seeing Tom, hesitating momentarily before walking towards him.

  “You’re in late. Mind if I join you?”

  “Go ahead.” Tom scanned behind Liam to see if any of the few remaining players had noticed, knowing that it would look unusual.