A Natural

by Ross Raisin

  Liam began eating hungrily. “Mum’s wrong. I think Les’s food is really good.”

  “I had chicken,” Tom said. Then, worried that he had just made himself sound like a thickhead, “It was good.”

  Liam kept his eyes on his plate, continuing to eat. “She gets a bit competitive. You’ve seen the effort she makes with the coach food. She doesn’t have to do that, you know. She loves helping out. You know she used to wash the kit?”

  “Mrs. Davey?”

  “Before we had a kit man. She used to hang it all out in the garden.”

  Tom looked about the room. The rest of the players had left.

  “I was in the youth team then,” Liam said. “Keeper. Bet you didn’t know that, either.”

  Tom regarded with intrigue the broad, flat face. Liam was finishing his food already. His hands, wrists, were smudged with soil.

  “Same time as Boyn and Easter. Chris was a cock back then too.” For a couple of seconds he observed Tom’s reaction. “He was good, though. To be fair. Made the rest of us look like park players. He got offered schoolboy terms at Tottenham, but he didn’t take them. Right move, probably. They just get lost, those kids.”

  Tom turned his face away, embarrassed.

  Liam started into his bowl of stewed fruit and custard. “You played for England Under-18s, didn’t you?”

  Tom gave a sniff of surprise.

  Liam smiled. “Google.”

  Tom wanted at that moment to tell him about Bobby. But he could not. A confusing barrier of shame held him back—an instinct as well that it was not for Liam to know, that what went on among the squad was not for people on the outside. Liam was getting up now anyway, wiping his mouth and picking up his tray.

  “Back to it then. See you around.”

  Tom watched him stack the tray on the tower by the door, saying a few words to the goalkeeping coach. Before Tom could look away, Liam glanced back in his direction, then left.

  The canteen was deserted. Through in the kitchen, Lesley was wiping the surfaces, humming to a song on the radio. For a few minutes Tom stayed where he was, one hand still around his glass on the table, then flinched as Lesley suddenly appeared smiling in front of him.

  “Come on then. You ready to let me go home?”

  The players’ car park was nearly empty. Only the injured players’ vehicles remained. A small paper notice rested on the window of Boyn’s silver Mercedes: £40 FINE—PLEASE PARK IN SQUAD NUMBERED BAY. Tom walked on until he reached his own car. Getting into it, he felt jittery, inexplicably in need of something to do with his hands. He took a CD from the glovebox and popped the disc out of its case, then back in again, out, in, out, the rhythm of the action focusing, soothing him, until the plastic inner of the CD snapped and flew off.

  Further down the lane he could see the minibus in the staff car park that would soon take the scholars into college for their BTEC, and he considered waiting for them to come out of the clubhouse, to see Bobby and Steven with the others, talking, being normal.

  He started the car and drove away. Before he had even reached the turning onto the main road, though, restive at the thought of going back to the house, to his room, he made a spur-of-the-moment decision to drive to the coast.

  He followed the signs until, through a windswept avenue of faded houses and hotel fronts, the sea became visible. He parked at a pay and display. When he got out, the air was fresh, inviting, and he made towards the seafront. Not many people were about: a woman on a bench beside a boy in a pram, both eating chips, an old couple sitting in their car, two young women in aprons and hairnets standing talking outside a fish and chip shop. He went towards an ice cream van near the seafront. When he got to the window it appeared at first that there was nobody in it, but then a girl his own age came out from behind a screened compartment.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Fag break. You caught me out. What would you like?”

  He studied the board behind her, aware of her eyes on him.

  “You got a choc ice?”

  “Sure.”

  She turned away towards a large chest freezer. As she reached into it her earrings, like tiny wind chimes, dangled against her cheeks.

  “Thanks,” Tom said when she handed the choc ice to him. There was a moment of stillness in which they looked at each other. He felt his veins thicken and knew that he was blushing. “Must get boring, days like this,” he said.

  “Hell, yes. I’ll be out my mind by four thirty.”

  “Yeah, I bet.”

  He gave her his money. She took his change from the till and smiled at him as she put it into his hand. For an instant he thought to say something about the earrings. He smiled back at her. “Thanks,” he said and walked away onto the promenade.

  A little way along, three teenage lads were sitting atop the backrest of a bench. At his approach they stopped their conversation to look up at him. He lowered his choc ice away from his mouth and continued past them. When he was a little way on he stopped, inciting himself to return to the ice cream van. Seagulls screamed above him. His heart began to race, and he turned—only to see that one of the boys was coming towards him. He changed direction again and hurried away.

  “Mate.” The boy was close behind. “Hey, mate.”

  There was no choice but to turn and face him. The boy advanced and stopped a couple of steps away. He looked around to his friends and when he turned back to Tom the remains of a smile were on his lips.

  “I know who you are.”

  Behind him, his mates were angled towards the scene, nudging at each other and laughing.

  “You’re Tom Pearman, aren’t you? Bet you’re pissed off, going from Premier League to here. Can’t even get in the team either, can you?”

  “I’ve been injured.”

  His choc ice was dripping onto the ground.

  “Things not going so well, are they?”

  “It’s going all right.”

  “Oh yeah, it’s going fucking great.”

  “I need to get on, sorry.”

  “Fine. See you then, mate.”

  When the boy spun round, his friends burst out laughing. Tom began the long loop back round to the car park. Behind him, a few seconds later, he heard one of them shout something, the words lost to the wind and the movement of the sea.

  —

  He was picked to start in the first round of a Johnstone’s Paint Trophy tie, at home against Stevenage. Clarke had taken Tom and a few of the other squad players aside a week earlier to tell them that he was planning to bring them in—he would have rested the whole first team but the rules did not allow him to, he said. It was their chance to impress, he drummed into them, especially as the game was to be shown live on Sky.

  As soon as Tom entered the dressing room and saw the rows of carefully arranged place settings, each shirt on its hanger above a neat pile of shorts and socks and folded underpants, two nestled bottles of water and a banana, he could not get out of his head the thought of his mum. He went into one of the toilet cubicles and locked the door. He sat down and gripped the sides of his head, concentrating on regulating his breathing. Nerves—burning, liquid—plummeted through him. He could see her, with the rest of his family, all gathered in Kenny and Jeanette’s living room, probably with a few neighbors, waiting for the match. He tried to remember when he had last spoken to her. Two weeks ago, on the phone. She had been in the middle of cooking tea and they had spoken for only a minute or two. He thought back for the time before that, but he could not bring it to mind.

  When he came out of the cubicle the dressing room was jumping with the sound of voices. Laughter. Spanked flesh. Loud chart music from one corner, some of the players singing along. Boyn dancing. The smell of Deep Heat. Tom walked to his kit and sat down on the bench. Directly in front of him, Daish was laid out on a massage table, getting a rub from the physio. Some of the players were sitting at their places, quiet and alone, headphones on or reading the program. The kit man was on a chair near the door, polis
hing footballs with a shammy. Tom watched him, the man’s face engrossed in the task, his eyebrows twitching with each turning of the ball. A couple of minutes later the kit man got up and went towards two large metal chests against a wall. He opened the lid of one and Tom was able to glimpse inside—a treasure trove of chocolate bars and cereals, chewing gum, Jelly Babies. He did not at first realize that Price, sitting on his left, was talking to him.

  “You all right, bud?”

  He was close enough for his knee to be touching Tom’s. On his top lip there was a slender mustache that Tom had not noticed before. “Fine, yeah.”

  “First start, isn’t it?”

  Tom nodded.

  “I still get nervous before matches, you know,” Price said. “Every time. Even Paint matches no one cares about. Always been the same. Gets five minutes to kickoff and I’m bricking it.” He gave Tom a light slap on the leg and stood up. “You’ll be fine, bud. You’ve got talent, you know. More than I have.” He walked off whistling, and disappeared into a toilet cubicle.

  When, after Clarke’s blunt unspecific team talk, the buzzer sounded on the wall above Tom’s head, he at once needed to go to the toilet again, but the other players were already getting to their feet so he filed out close behind Price, replicating his actions: shaking the hand of Clarke, the number two, the goalkeeping coach, then high-fiving along the line that had formed at the opened door, where the noise of the crowd was coming down the tunnel to mix with studs and shouts and the murmuring incantation of sixteen players telling each other, “All the best, all the best, all the best.”

  He knew straightaway that the small hesitant youth he was up against would not be able to cope with him. His teammates knew it too, and played him in at every opportunity. The boy panicked each time, clinging to Tom’s shirt, stabbing his child’s feet at the ball, missing. Tom controlled a long pass from Fleming, heard a quiet mewl of “Oh shit” behind him and turned to set upon the boy again.

  He began to play with a confidence that he had forgotten. He shouted for the ball. He took a shot from distance that was deflected marginally past the post and sprinted to take the corner himself—his senses alive to the urging of the crowd, to the blood throbbing through his limbs, to the rousing warm drift of onions and pies from the tea bar at the bottom corner of the stand.

  Town won 3–1. Tom almost scored a fourth in injury time, with a shot from just inside the penalty area that scudded off the top of the crossbar and into the closed-off stand behind the goal. For the thirty seconds that it took the clambering ballboy—tasked with standing alone on the terracing to wait for off-target shots—to retrieve the ball, Tom’s body felt so light with adrenaline and awareness of the crowd, the cameras, his family in Kenny’s living room, that he had to force the smile from his face.

  The euphoria of the win survived for several days. A new noise and energy surfaced. Tom was in the clubhouse lounge with Bobby and Steven one morning when some kind of festivity became audible outside, and they went with everybody else to find Boyn at the entrance to the clubhouse, wielding a five-foot-high rectangle of card that he was trying to get through the doorway. “What the hell’s he doing?” someone whispered. “What’s that?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “It’s a check.”

  “It’s what?”

  “It’s a check. Bank check. Look.”

  And as more of them herded into the reception area while Price took one end of the thing, helping Boyn maneuver it like a piece of furniture through the doorway, Tom could see that it was true.

  “Fuck’s that, Boyney? Community this afternoon?”

  Boyn smiled. “Nope.”

  Slowly he lifted it up for them to read. The check was for forty pounds, made payable to the club. At each corner was an image of Boyn, sitting on a chair in swimming shorts, spooning out a coconut.

  “It’s my fine. I got it done on the Internet. I’m going to give it him now.”

  There was a rash of gaiety; guarded silence from those who still did not understand.

  “He’ll go ape shit.”

  “Well,” Boyn said, starting through the crowd, “let’s see, shall we?”

  They streamed from reception, following the wibble-wobble noise of the great check quivering along the corridor. When they approached Clarke’s office everybody else held back, watching Boyn knock on the door, then, upon a dim shout, disappear.

  He came back out a few minutes later. Clarke’s arm was around his shoulders. Both men were grinning.

  “Brilliant banter,” Clarke said to the group. “Bloody brilliant banter.”

  They looked at Boyn, trying to discern whether this was some kind of trap, but Boyn looked almost beside himself with exultation. Clarke gave in to a new impulse of laughter, pulling Boyn into a constrictive embrace, mock-punching him in the stomach. “Fucking check cost him more than the fine,” he said, punching him again.

  Clarke was, however, careful to balance the mood of victory with a warning that nobody should get ahead of themselves: “It was only the Johnstone’s fucking Paint, remember. You’re still shit. You’ll be back in the reserves next week,” he told the cup team playfully, and although Tom was sure that he had played well enough to be excluded from this rebuke, he found out soon enough that he had only made the bench for Saturday.

  —

  He sat slumped in the dugout, willing the team to fail—and he experienced a sly satisfaction when they did. The match appeared to be heading for a draw, but a late miscommunication between Boyn and Foley allowed a Shrewsbury forward to nip in and head the ball into an unguarded net. The Town supporters turned on Foley, then Clarke—“You don’t know what you’re doing!”—and then the Shrewsbury manager when some fans in the main stand detected from a joke with his substitutes what they took to be mirth at Town’s situation. As he sent on the two very young subs for the remainder of injury time, he was subjected to a chant of “Sit down, you pedophile” until the referee blew the whistle and the stadium imploded with booing.

  Town went bottom of the division.

  Afterwards, as Tom left the ground to begin the walk back to the Daveys’, he saw a knot of half a dozen players in the car park. He pretended not to see them and walked on, but Richards caught sight of him and called him over.

  “We’re off to the Beach Hut, Tommy.” Richards looked to the stadium behind Tom. “Clarke’s not to know, right? Up for it?”

  It took him a couple of seconds to respond. “OK.”

  He got into one of the two cars and texted Mrs. Davey to let her know that he would be late back, angling his screen away from Boyn and Richards next to him on the backseat.

  The Beach Hut was the larger of the two clubs in town. The players went there infrequently. When they did socialize together, which was not often, they mostly traveled to one of the big city nightclubs an hour or so away. They were known at the Hut, which—although that presented its own attractions—meant that whatever they got up to there would be known too.

  The minute they entered the club, Tom already reeling from the lager and shots they had drunk quickly in the bar on the other side of the road, it was obvious they were being looked at. Tom stayed close to Richards, who bought him a drink. It was dark and loud. He felt bewildered, a little intoxicated, by it all. He had heard some of the players talk about Hut girls before, and had assumed that they were exaggerating. But he watched now as one girl, talking to Charlie Lewis, indicated with her finger for him to turn round, then squeezed his bum, an action that Lewis then repeated on her. There were several young women, and a few young men, around their group. One of the women looked at Tom and smiled. Richards, watching, gave him a thumbs-up. The woman came forward and said hello to Tom, but then Boyn stepped in to talk to her. Boyn led her towards the dance floor and the woman turned, gesturing with her head for Tom to come too. He smiled at her but hung back. The group of players had fragmented by now, and Tom found himself apart from the others. He moved back to the refuge of the bar. He c
ould not make sense of things, his head spinning. For a while he stared out at the heaving mob of bodies and remembered vividly the night that he had got together with Jenni Spoffarth. The huddle of his mates egging him on. His best friend Craig, before Craig puked up in the toilets, shoving him towards her and the strange, proud feeling as her tiny figure had pressed against him.

  He picked up his vodka and Red Bull from the bar counter, downed it and made for the dance floor.

  —

  By one o’clock the club was a sticky mess of legs and faces and spilt drinks. The area around the food kiosk was trodden with chips and burger droppings, mayonnaise skids. Two men had been thrown out after a fight started in the toilets when one of them made a joking threat to the young African student dispensing hand towels and aftershaves by the sinks and the other demanded that he apologize.

  Some of the Town players were standing in a circle just outside the railing around the dance floor, clapping and stamping at a young woman wearing a belt of brightly colored liquids in thin test tubes. A small posse of other women was gathered nearby, watching and cheering as the men drank down a round of tubes, then moving forward gamely when the players bought a second round for them.

  One teenage girl, during the distraction of the footballers laughing at each other, tried to pass her tube back to the shot sales rep, but Yates, who was making a joke of unbuttoning his shirt and encouraging the women to lick off the clammy substance he poured onto his stomach, spotted immediately what she was trying to do and started up a clap-chant with the other players: “Drink. Drink. Drink.” The girl held the tube aloft and to a loud cheer took it in a single gulp.

  In the hugging and jostling of everybody moving towards the dance floor, nobody noticed the momentary buckling of her legs. She gave a small retch, but nothing came up, and with one hand she held onto the lacquered railing while one of her friends supported her other arm. For a few seconds she dropped to her knees, the friend saying something into her ear and somebody else holding a plastic cup of water in front of her. On coming to, she drank the water, scrambled to her feet and pulled away from the hand on her arm to move out onto the dance floor.