by Ross Raisin
When the players arrived the mood in the lounge became lively, bullish. The match had ended in a 3–3 draw, Jamie Atwell scoring two of Aldershot’s goals. He came into the room and shook the hands of the directors and backroom staff who had been at the club during his time there, and then turned to look with them at the monitor by the bar as it showed a replay of his first goal—which, in a self-conscious demonstration of respect towards the Town fans, he had responded to by picking the ball out of the back of the net and lowering his head to walk soberly back to the center circle, staggering under the weight of his teammates as they bounded on top of him.
Only later, in the privacy of the house, did he celebrate openly: loudly reenacting both of his goals amid the chrome and glass and brown leather furniture of Alek and Clare’s living room. Chris had not played. In the players’ lounge, when Leah had gone to the bar, she had seen him on the monitor, emerging from one end of the dugout to warm up with the game about to finish. From outside the window she had heard the muted strain of some supporters chanting his name; the scattered shouts too of those closer to the window, making him the object of their stock accusations: lazy, greedy, not fit to wear the shirt.
As they sat down to their starters he was alert to the others’ banter. He appeared relaxed, but Leah could see how aware he was of them. They ribbed him at length for being dropped. “I wouldn’t mind two and a half grand a week to sit on the bench,” Jamie proclaimed.
“It’s because he can’t afford my appearance bonus if he starts me.”
Leah felt a dart of pride at the comeback and the raucous reaction to it around the table. The conversation turned to the manager. Alek was of the opinion that he was an evil idiot. Clare, to cries of laughter, did an extremely accurate, confident impression of him. Leah could not think of anything to add that wouldn’t make her sound like a fool. She remained silent, smiled, drank. When eventually she had prepared something to say, about him being more interested in his van business, the conversation moved on. Alison Atwell began talking about her own boss. She had been a police constable when she met Jamie but had recently been promoted to sergeant; she could always be relied upon for a good story and, after she had got up to help Clare bring out the main course, she was persuaded by Jamie into a long comical tale about a Polish man who had attempted to hold up a pharmacy with a water pistol.
Leah was mindful of not speaking since the nibbles in the living room. The longer she did not contribute, the more she retreated into herself and took care not to do anything that might draw the group’s attention. She was missing a coaster. All the others had the same patterned fabric coasters that matched the tablemats, but hers had either been forgotten or had got lost beneath the assortment of breads and stuffed olives. As a result it was difficult to put down her icicle-stemmed wineglass without a loud clang on the glass table. She did not pick it up for long intervals and, when she did, took quick deep slugs, fully aware that she was getting too drunk to drive and that Clare and Alison must surely be making some judgment about her given that she had refused to drink with them in the players’ lounge.
They were back on Clarke. “He’ll be gone by Christmas if we’re still in the relegation zone,” Clare said, to which everybody agreed. “All those years, all that money it’s taken to get into the league, just to go down at the first time of asking—it’d be a fucking catastrophe. There’s no way the chairman would continue that level of investment. It’d be the end. Clarke’s got to go.”
“I almost had a fight with him on Monday,” Chris cut in. “Real one. He near as anything punched me.”
There were aghast expressions from the other women. Leah tried to act as though she already knew.
“If he had, I would have taken him out. Serious. I’d have knocked him cold.”
“I knew this lad,” Jamie said, “played for him a few years ago. Told me Clarke had a massive falling-out with the club’s owner and pinned the guy down on a weight bench right in front of the whole team.”
“I’m not joking, I’d smack his lights out if he tried anything on me.”
“Clarke’s just a cunt,” Alison said.
Leah felt a shock of heat at the word. She watched the others smiling and got up as soon as Clare did to help clear the plates. In the kitchen she told her that the food had been lovely.
“Thank you. Alek made most of it. He loves cooking, believe it or not.” She took a stack of bowls out of a cupboard. “How’s your course going? Remind me what it is again—fashion design?”
“Textile design, yes.”
“Are you enjoying it?”
“Yes. It’s nice to be creative for a change,” she said and straightaway hoped that this would not sound like an insult to Clare, who was a restaurant reservations manager.
“You must be very good at drawing.”
“Not really. We do most of that part on computer.”
Clare handed her a large bowl of pavlova. “Mind taking that through?”
Leah liked Clare. There were, in the past, several friendly talks that she could recall having with her, and she always asked about Tyler. In the players’ lounge earlier, when Alison went to the toilet, she had told Leah that she and Alek had been trying for a baby themselves but had decided now to put it off until next summer so that they could time the birth for the end of the following season.
When they brought the pudding to the table there were two different discussions in progress. Leah sat down, hoping that she and Clare might continue their own conversation, but Clare immediately joined in with Alek and Alison’s dialogue about how far the chairman’s money could take a club like Town. Leah listened, noticing too the intense private discourse on the other side of her, before she excused herself to go to the loo.
On the walls of the toilet corridor were numerous silver-framed photographs of Alek in action, each with a small engraved inscription: DEBUT FOR TOWN; FA CUP AGAINST READING; WINNER AGAINST LUTON. She felt a sudden sad tenderness at the proud little exhibition, the effort that must have gone into obtaining the photographs. She was pissed. She went in and sat on the toilet. She suspected that Chris felt ashamed of her. He had barely looked at her all through the meal, while the other women had joined in with the banter and impressions. She wanted to go home. She wanted to go to her mum’s and be with Tyler, to put him into her old bed with her and go to sleep. When she had peed she went to the sink and fumbled for the soap dispenser along a shelf of purple glass vials and jars, realizing at length that they were all decorative, and eventually washed her hands with what turned out to be a scented candle.
Outside the bathroom door she paused. She could hear the ebb and flow of conversation from the other end of the corridor. There was no knowing how long the night would last, and clearly she could not be the one to bring up the suggestion of going home—practically her first words of the evening: “Can we leave now?”
When she retook her seat, Alison was lifting up her top to show a tattoo above her hip.
“I know. What the fuck was I thinking?”
“What is it?” Leah asked.
“A phoenix. Rising from the flames. Aldershot. Not like he’s going to be there forever or anything, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I tell him it’s because I wanted to impress him,” she said, simpering at Jamie, and as they all looked over at him, Leah felt Chris’s hand press softly onto her own on top of her knee.
—
She tried not to dwell on her performance at the dinner party. She focused hard on her college assignment—finding natural images to mirror the appliqué designs she had been given—and Tyler. She spent concerted time with him, playing, reading, making him healthy, inventive meals, and she put considerable effort into regulating his sleeping patterns, determined that these at least were tasks at which she could prove herself capable. Tyler was usually a reliable sleeper, but for the last couple of weeks he had been struggling to drop off at his normal nap times and was waking up four or five times during the night. Teeth, her mum
thought. During one particularly wearing campaign to get Tyler down, she received a text from her friend Shona, saying that she and the others were going out on Friday; did she fancy coming?
Since the return from Middlesbrough she had not seen her old school friends as regularly as once she used to. Chris had been unwilling for her to, especially at first. “You can’t leave Tyler,” he had said, “waking up in a new house, finding out his mum’s gone missing.” She had been out with them a couple of times more recently, but it was still so uncommon to leave the house without Tyler or Chris that there was something slightly unreal about the thought of traveling into town on her own now, in a taxi, stepping into her old self. When she had mentioned Shona’s invitation to Chris she had said she could get her mum to take Tyler, but he had been surprisingly against that idea, affronted, even: he would be in anyway, having a quiet one, preparing for Saturday, so why should it be a problem?
Nonetheless a niggling worry beset her when she left the house—that Tyler would wake up and Chris would not know how to soothe him; that his pre-match routine would be disrupted and he would get frustrated, angry—and the thought was still with her when she got out of the taxi and walked up the steps into the bar.
They saw her come in and waved her over. All four were there already, smiling up at her as she approached their table in the middle of the noisy room.
“Lucky you.” Mark, wearing a designer T-shirt and a careful new beard, stood up. “You’re just in time for my round.”
When he had gone off to the bar, Leah sat down in the place they had saved for her beside Liam. “So,” she said. “How is everybody?”
There was some trace of the way she used to hold attention in the looks from around the table.
“Gem’s going to be fired and Mark is shagging a teenager,” said Shona, and the others fell into easy, familiar laughter. Shona went on to explain both pieces of news, with occasional objections from Gemma and loud, delighted laughter from Mark when he returned from the bar. They wanted to know how she was doing. What she was up to. Almost immediately she began an account of the dinner party. She told them about the phoenix tattoo. Washing her hands with a candle. They could not get enough of it, begging her for more. Ever since the summer she left school, when Liam had brought some of the Town youth teamers along to Katie Wheelwright’s end-of-GCSEs party and Chris Easter had kissed her in the downstairs toilet, they had reveled in her footballer stories. She knew they did not like Chris. It had been a surprise, even then, when she started going out with him, and even more of a surprise that they had stayed together, married, had a baby—all before the rest of them had even begun to consider settling down. They thought he was arrogant. In the early days, whenever she persuaded him to come to one of their houses or the shopping center, and he kept silently and impatiently to himself, she used to explain to them afterwards that he was shy, that he got nervous around new people.
They thought he cheated on her. The allegation had last come up a couple of years ago at a New Year’s Eve party. She had lost it then, telling them they could all go and fuck themselves, and leaving the party before midnight, getting home and in a fit of door-slamming waking Chris up, ruining his sleep the night before a big match. “Just because he’s a footballer doesn’t mean he’s a dickhead,” she had shouted at them. “There’s a lot you don’t know about him.”
Here, now, among her friends, she felt herself begin to relax. They got back on to the story of Mark and the teenager: how he had met her in the club one night and not twigged how old she was until after she had given him her number and met up with him the next day. How he had checked her Facebook profile to make sure that she was not even younger than she said she was. Leah told him he was a pervert—a pervert with a beard, she said, which made it worse. She was pulled, as they moved on to Shona’s new job, deeper into the conversation of the group, distracted, for a spell, from having to perform a mother, a footballer’s wife; from the constant fear of failing, in public, in private, to be that person.
When their drinks ran low she took the initiative to get a round in. Liam came to give her a hand.
“What’s it like then,” she said as they waited to be served, “turning out a league pitch?”
“Be better if it wasn’t on a non-league budget. Don’t suppose you’re down there much?”
“I don’t think he’d want me to be. Not at the moment.”
“No, bet not. What’s going on there? He fall out with Clarke or something?”
A reflex of loyalty made her hesitate. “Not that I know. Have you heard anything at the training ground?”
“Right. Yes. Me and Chris were chatting about it the other day when he came into the ground-staff shed for a cup of tea.” He looked pleased at his joke. “What do I know? I cut the grass, mate. I don’t talk to them. I’ve been at the stadium the last couple of weeks anyway. But no, I’ve not noticed anything. Apart from Clarke being a tosser, but that’s not exactly news.”
The barman came over. Liam reminded her what the others were drinking. When the barman went to pour the drinks Liam looked at her directly, his big open face taking her in. “Things been difficult?”
“No. Not really. Good as can be expected. This season isn’t exactly going like he wanted.”
“It’s not exactly going like anybody wanted.”
The barman was speaking to two customers further down the counter. Both men glanced round at her before the barman came back with the last couple of drinks and took her money.
“He’ll be fine soon enough,” she said. “You know what he gets like.”
They both smiled, recognizing together that Liam did not in fact know what he got like—not since they were teenagers, friends in the youth team together before a falling-out that had endured ever since—other than what he gleaned through club gossip, the Internet and the cautiously divulged information that Leah had shared over the years.
“There has been a bit of talk that Clarke’s looking to send him out on loan in January,” Liam said. She did not respond. Liam moved forward to cradle three of the drinks in his hands. “I heard that from Pete, though—you know, my assistant groundsman Pete—and this is the man that thought Noel Edmunds was buying into the club, so it’s obviously bullshit, unless you know better. Come on, let’s take these over.”
They stayed until closing. She promised that she would come out again soon and said goodbye, Liam’s words staying with her as she walked the short distance to the taxi office. She knew it was unlikely to be true. Town had only recently signed him back. The chairman would surely not agree to it. And yet the prospect of it—the upheaval, the confusion for Tyler, the incessant phone conversations with his brainless cocksure agent—was difficult to ignore.
The house, to her relief, was quiet when she let herself in. He had left the hall light on for her. She went upstairs and pushed open the door to Tyler’s room. For a minute or two she listened to the steady heave of his breathing until she had satisfied herself that everything was normal, then she went to peek into the spare room at the dark humped shape in the bed, before going through to the bedroom and falling promptly asleep.
Loud wailing woke her. She sat up and let her senses gather themselves. There was a run of wretched little sobs, then it stopped. She lay back down, listening. It was difficult to keep her eyes open, and soon she let them stay closed, sleep taking her, until the sobs came again. She dragged herself into an upright position, facing the wall that backed onto Tyler’s room, the muddled shape of the wardrobe becoming more defined in the gloom as his crying continued. She looked at the alarm clock. 02:26. She waited for one minute to pass. It was getting louder. She fixed her eyes on the clock and timed another minute. There was a desperate, hoarse note to the cry now, interspersed by short silences that she knew were jerking breaths of air, and then a dull rhythmic clatter as Tyler pulled himself up and shook the bars of the cot. She knew that she had to resist. She lay there convincing herself of it as a new wave of crying filled th
e room. It seemed louder, somehow, than if he was in there with her. 02:30. She was doing the right thing. She repeated the thought over and over. There had to be one thing, she kept telling herself, one single thing that she was any fucking good at.
She got out of bed and crept out until she was by the door of Tyler’s room. This close, the screaming was impossibly loud, monstrous. She could imagine his face, confused and contorted, his neck and the hem of his sleep suit becoming sodden. For a long period—she tried to time it, five minutes, ten, but lost track—she stayed where she was, her forehead thrust against the door, willing herself to remain firm, until finally the jolting of the cot ceased. He was still crying, but more quietly—a small drained whine, gradually diminishing.
Chris must surely be awake, it struck her as she was about to return to bed. A quick spiteful thrill that his sleep had been broken passed through her, but when she looked towards the spare room she noticed, with sudden cold trepidation, that there was a crack of light under the door of the office.
6
As the season entered October the bright, immaculate pitches of summer were already beginning to thicken and spoil. Goalmouths knotted with mud, and the lower-lying areas of many of the division’s slanted, undulating grounds were turning yellow with drowned grass. The non-league pitch on which Town played their reserve fixtures was even worse. During these matches Tom found it impossible to develop a settled rhythm. He would try to deceive himself into the actions that he had once done by instinct, conjuring the vision of belting down the smooth swathe of his academy-pitch wing, but whenever he tried to run with the ball now it would be up against his shins and knees, bobbling out of control.
The reserve starting eleven was as unpredictable as the pitch: a mixture of eager scholars like Steven and Bobby—who sometimes, to the annoyance of the older pros, captained the side—trialists and fringe players desperate to impress but at the same time reluctant to commit themselves for fear of getting injured. Tom, who was playing in most reserve games and also as a substitute for the first team, was sometimes involved in two encounters a week now, yet did not feel like he belonged to either side. He was determined not to be associated with the seconds but performed erratically. In four reserve matches he had drifted in and out but had still contributed the assists for two goals and scored once, a strike that he celebrated with the same muted animation as did the few dozen obsessives, scouts and parents in the crowd, who greeted each goal with cheerful seated applause, as if at a sports day.
