A Natural

by Ross Raisin

  Riversider posted Mon at 8:41pm

  Dead right, Mary B. Jones covers every blade on the pitch and it’s obvious that the other players look up to him. Him and Easter playing together just shows the gulf between them. Just because Easter’s had one mediocre game doesn’t mean he’s back to the player he used to be.

  Jamesy1987 posted Mon at 9:12pm

  Road to Wembley 2010 wrote:

  Easter is contracted until the end of next season so this topic is redundant.

  Doesn’t mean that nobody will buy him Road to Wembley (unlikely), or take him on loan (more likely).

  Onetoomany posted Mon at 9:18pm

  Jones. We all know Easter is only here for the pay packet.

  Town Legend posted Mon at 9:40pm

  …and what do you think Jones is here for then?

  Dr Feelgood posted Mon at 10:08pm

  In my eyes, this is what the team should be—

  Yates Lewis

  Richards Jones Hart Pearman

  Easter Price Finch Evans

  Gale Daish Boyn Fleming

  Hoyle

  Foley

  Jamesy1987 posted Mon at 10:11pm

  Er…your team’s only got eight players in it.

  Tommo posted Mon at 10:40pm

  I was on Maygate the other day and I saw Easter out with his kid and his wife (who’s seen better days…remember what she used to look like when CE first broke into the team?! ) I was a few tables away from them in Costa…and is it me or is he heavier now than when he left?? Definitely looked to be carrying a few pounds.

  Voice of Reason posted Mon at 10:51pm

  Get shut. Never should have signed him back.

  Towncrier Ian posted Mon at 10:58pm

  Chant for Plymouth match tomorrow: “He’s fat, he’s round, he’s on two and a half thousand pounds!”

  He could not get a foothold in the game. The ball seemed always to go to Jones, who, even when Easter was standing free, in space, turned away from him every time as if he were an obstacle in the way of the right pass.

  “Free. I’m fucking free,” he shouted as Jones zigzagged, chased by two opponents, towards a dead end. Jones ignored him and dispatched the ball high into the air, to no one.

  Preoccupied with forcing himself into the game, Easter abandoned all tactical discipline. He failed to track his opposite number’s runs into the box and eventually watched from the eighteen-yard line as the talentless little meathead scored, unmarked, with a header into the corner.

  He was on the other side of the pitch when the board was held up with his number on it. Before he even reached the center circle his legs felt as though they might cave under him. He walked the final stretch, picking out the odd abusive shout from the main stand until a wave of booing and sparse clapping and the new chant—“He’s fat, he’s round…”—increasing in vehemence, engulfed him.

  Any shred of form he had started lately to hope that he could piece together, since his surprising reinstatement in the team, now vanished. He was substituted at halftime two games in a row, and as Christmas approached he was again out of the starting eleven, his place taken by Bobby Hart. Even in training the others sensed his indecision. Targeted him. Scholars who would not long ago have stood off now wrestled him for the ball, unafraid to go in with their slight shoulders and hips or pull at his shirt, his shorts.

  He was summoned by text to the stadium, to Clarke’s office.

  “You’ve not been in the team much the last few games.”

  “I noticed.”

  There was a pause during which he wondered if he had made a wrong move.

  “You want to play football, yes?”

  He did not know how to respond. He cast his eyes over the mass of papers on the desk and the floor, the unshaven Adam’s apple scraping at the collar of Clarke’s faded polo shirt, and wondered if the question was tactical.

  “Of course you do. You want to play football. Well, I’ll tell you one thing: you’re not fucking going to do it here.”

  Easter relaxed a little in his chair.

  “I’ll tell you how it’s going to go. Put in a transfer request, and I’ll give you some games, get you in the shop window, then we’ll—”

  “No.”

  They looked at each other.

  “You’d rather sit on your arse not playing?”

  “There’s a year and a half left on my contract. If I put in a transfer request, you don’t have to pay it up.” He dared a smile.

  “So you’d rather sit on your arse for a year and a half. Then what? Who’s going to want you then? That’ll be three seasons and counting since you were any good.”

  Easter thought for a moment. “My agent needs to be here for this. I don’t know why you got me in here without my agent.”

  “Because your agent is a penis.”

  Both men went quiet. Easter scanned the few photographs on the walls. The new stands under construction. Wembley—the FA Trophy final, one neat segment of the stadium awash with red and green. The arrival of the subsequent victory parade at the town hall, before the meeting with the mayor and the incident with a waiter on the fire escape. He had got drunk in this office that night. The same man who was now eyeballing him across the desk had cradled his head in both hands and brought their faces together to tell him that the two of them were the beating heart of this club, that together they would take it into the league and they weren’t fucking going to stop there.

  “How much do you want?”

  Easter stared, at a loss.

  “Severance. How much? Fifty grand? I’ll write you a check for fifty right now.”

  “I need to talk to my agent.”

  “What about Leah? She wouldn’t be happy with fifty grand?” Clarke opened a drawer in the desk. Easter’s heart accelerated. Clarke took out a tube of Polos. He wiggled one loose to put into his mouth. A passing thought came to Easter of telling Leah that he had stood up to Clarke, put him in his place. Demanded fifty thousand from him.

  “I’ll talk to my agent,” he said.

  “Fine.”

  Clarke sucked on the mint. He rolled it around the insides of his cheeks. His lips briefly parted and the tip of his tongue appeared, protruding through the hole like the moist inquisitive nose of a rodent.

  “Paint area semi in a couple of days. Leyton Orient. I’m putting you back in. Way I see it, if somebody doesn’t take you this transfer window then that’s you finished.”

  —

  He knew, as soon as he sprinted for the first loose pass, that he was nowhere near match fit. After only five minutes, when the ball cleared the wooden-gabled roof of one stand, he knelt to retie the lace of his boot and lowered his face to hide his labored breathing. But when a new ball was obtained and the throw-in taken, the Orient player who ended up with it blundered into his rising figure, the ball rolling free in front of him. Easter advanced and clipped a pass into the path of Bobby Hart, who ran unchallenged all the way to the edge of the box and scored with a long wrinkling shot that bounced over the goalkeeper’s outstretched arm. Bobby, as surprised as anyone, froze—then bounded towards the stand behind the goal and spreadeagled himself on the grass. It took him several seconds, lying prone while his teammates rushed towards him, to become aware that the Town fans were in fact in a different part of the stadium, and the provocation of the Orient supporters ensured that the rest of the half was played out in a new atmosphere of noise and tension.

  The team entered the dressing room revitalized. Clarke, moving around as he read out his key performance notes, stopped in front of Easter. “Keep it up, son,” he said and winked.

  The second half, however, did not continue like the first. A few minutes in, Easter attempted a long diagonal pass back to Hoyle that was not hard enough and was intercepted by an Orient striker, who flashed a shot into the roof of the net. That was all it took. His confidence was sucked from him. For the remaining forty minutes and then the never-ending half-hour of extra time, he ached for each respite o
f the ball going out of play. He no longer seemed to be in control of his body. Every time he received the ball, what should have been automatic—trapping, looking up, passing—was now complicated by thought: which part of the foot to use, which part of the ball to touch. By the time he had command of it he would look upfield and see only a blur of bodies and an opponent would be harrying him for the ball.

  When the final whistle sounded, the teams lined up along the halfway line, arms linked around each other’s waists, for penalties. They watched the first Orient taker walk up to the spot. A cheer echoed around the stadium when he scored, then low taunting suspense as the crowd waited for a Town player to move. Fingers dug into his flank. There was no planned sequence. Whoever is man enough to step up, Clarke had said during the exhausted coming-together after the final whistle. Boyn came forward. His strike went in off the crossbar. Easter knew that if he had not been supported by the hot, damp sides of Bobby and Lewis he would not have been able to stand. He remained rooted to his position as Richards, then, following seconds of stillness in the line, Yates and Daish went up and scored.

  With the score level, the final Orient taker drove his penalty down the middle, high into the nearly empty family stand behind the goal to cannon against the corrugated back wall.

  Easter sensed his body refusing, shriveling into the earth. Bobby, though, was pulling free of his arm, stepping out from the line. Relief, shame, flooded him. He felt weak with a need to be away from there, to be at home, in his office. Bobby bent to place the ball. Retreating in preparation for his run-up, he glanced at his teammates, his face white, hard to read. He spun and trotted up to the ball then sent a low curling shot beyond the reach of the goalkeeper. It was all Easter could do, while the team sprinted to Bobby and clambered on top of him, to stay on his feet and not vomit onto the pitch.

  —

  Leah was still up when he got home at just gone half past one.

  “I’ve made you a sandwich,” she said when he came into the living room.

  “A sandwich?” He looked through into the kitchen to where it was cling-filmed on a plate on the island. “Mind if I don’t have it now? Stomach’s in bits.”

  “Course. You OK? You won.”

  He poured himself some wine into her glass and sat down next to her. “Yes, we won. Penalties.”

  “He didn’t pull you off, then?”

  “Nope. Played the full hundred and twenty and I had a fucking shocker.”

  “It can’t have been that bad or he’d have taken you off.”

  He put his head back against the sofa and closed his eyes.

  “Want a massage?”

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes still closed. “Thank you.”

  She waited for him to pull off his top and tracksuit bottoms. She could tell from the way he removed the clothes and lowered himself onto his front that he was in some discomfort. She knelt down beside the sofa. He had put on a bit of weight, she noticed. She wondered when that had started.

  She began at his feet, pulling at his toes so that they clicked, then worked her way up, kneading and sliding, over his calves, hamstrings, buttocks; his back, which, the moment she pressed on it, caused him to let out a small desperate sigh. It had always been a miracle to her, this body. When they had first got together she used to find herself staring at it while he got changed or walked naked across her bedroom, every supple part stirring with design and purpose, like the body of an animal. Sometimes he would notice her looking and grin, and she would smile back or look away in embarrassment. It was the same body, even now. Only a little thicker. A few increasing signs of wear: the broken capillaries that threaded the backs of his legs, the twists and lumps of calloused skin and scar tissue, unexpected knots in his back that gristled beneath her hands. They comforted her, these parts of him. There was a solace in her intimate knowledge of them, an assurance that they were aging together.

  She came to the top of his body, circling her thumbs into the nape of his neck and behind his ears. “Are you going to sleep in the spare room?” she asked.

  “No. I’ll stay with you.”

  When she had put the sandwich in the fridge, brushed her teeth and joined him in bed, he tapped the light out and moved on top of her.

  She watched the dark outline of his face going up and down. She exhaled audibly in answer to his own short, rhythmic moans, until she realized that he was making the sounds because some region of his body was in pain. Gently, she took hold of his sides and whispered for him to stop. He let her turn him, carefully, so that he was lying on the bed. She kissed his forehead, stroking his hair off it, and repositioned herself over him.

  In the morning he was dead to the world. He lay flat on his back, legs apart, arms by his sides under the covers. She ran her hand down his torso and touched the waistband of something that felt unnervingly like a pair of her tights, but then it occurred to her that he must have put on his recovery skins at some point during the night. An unexpected spur of playfulness made her sit upright. She took her glass from the bedside table and dipped her fingers in the water. She held them above his face, letting a couple of drops fall onto his nose. When he did not rouse she dipped again and let more drops fall, then again, until his cheeks were wet and his nose crinkled at a droplet of water that hung, quivering, inside a nostril. She examined the motionless face. His mouth. The thin purple skin of his eyelids. She put her lips to his forehead, then resettled the covers over him and left the room, quietly closing the door.

  Four hours later, once it was clear that her plan to go to a soft play center would have to be aborted, she decided against going alone with Tyler and instead got him ready for a trip to the supermarket.

  —

  Leah manhandled Tyler into the foldout seat of a trolley and went inside to find the place was heaving. She considered turning straight back round—they barely needed anything anyway; she had come two days previously—but she was nonetheless sucked in, past the plastic Christmas tree and the fat festive newspaper bundles into the maw of the entrance hall and its Tannoy dream of Christmas music. Tyler was twisting to get down from his wire throne. She seized hold of him, straightening him up. There were tears in his eyes and a scowl on his face. He was looking up at her with such accusatory hostility that it must have appeared, as she moved into the fruit and vegetables, that she had been harming him.

  “Sorry, Ty.” She pinched a glob of snot from his nose with a wet wipe. “You’re just going to have to deal with it. We won’t be long.”

  She waited behind the dithering horde selecting from a landslide of easy peelers, and grabbed two bags as soon as a space appeared. She ripped open the netting, peeled and offered one to Tyler, but he batted it away, so she pressed on into the cold meats aisle. At a carton of Peperamis she stopped, took one, opened it there and then in the aisle and handed it to Tyler. He shut up at once, and she carried on, trying to think of things that Chris might need while Tyler sucked away at his meat stick. In the frozen section she heard an older woman openly tut to her husband at the sight of Tyler with his Peperami. Fuck you, she thought, but even in her head she could not compose a better comeback. Tyler’s mouth and chin were discolored. She pulled out another wet wipe and rubbed him hard. He squealed in discomfort.

  “Do you want me to take it away?” She brought her face level with his. “Do you? Mummy take it away from you?”

  A teenage boy and girl were up ahead of her, in front of a DVD stand. The girl was sliding her hand inside the boy’s front jeans pocket. She pulled out a chocolate bar, all the while looking into his eyes, smiling. She opened it and took a bite, then held the bar up to the boy’s mouth, touching his lips with it. Leah stood by a line of chest freezers, halted by the scene. Shoppers shunted past her on either side, but she continued staring over the head of her son at the young couple. She was not more than four or five years older than them. The thought of behaving like that with Chris in public was unimaginable, and yet they must have done—they did, once. Kissing on the da
nce floor of the Hut. Whole days at the coast messing about in amusement arcades. In her bedroom while her mum was at work; in his bedroom before his mum moved abroad and the club put him in digs. But even as she reached for these memories she could not avoid others, things that had so often followed the good times. The fights he had got into, in those same arcades, in the Hut. The argument with the youth coach in a car park that got him suspended for a month and resulted in the same period of silent grievance which she had not known how to coax him out of. The falling-out with Liam during their final year in the youths, which to this day had not healed over.

  But she could also remember the fight with her dad, on the weekend that her mum finally left him. How Chris had pushed him to the floor in reaction to some snide comment he had made about Leah, then stamped on his hand—Who’s the big man, now, yeah? Who’s the big man now?—and told him that if he ever spoke like that to Leah again he’d break all his fingers. The weeks afterwards were the happiest she could remember of their time together. He had not wanted to be apart from her. He had told her, drunk, at the Hut, that he loved her, he didn’t give a shit about anyone else, he loved her and the rest of the world could go fuck themselves.

  But again she could not hold on to the memory. She started to push the trolley again, coming closer to the teenagers. The girl was chewing, looking up with a playful smile at the boy’s face, and as Leah went past them it was not the memory of herself behaving like that with Chris that she could recall, but the thought of other girls doing it.

  Two men were looking at her, smirking across the freezers. She moved away, ignoring Tyler’s anguish that his Peperami was gone, dropped somewhere. She got to the end of the freezers and turned the corner, coming back the other way along the next aisle, pulling random items from shelves—olives, brandy butter, a Christmas cheese board with a miniature bottle of port squeezed into its heart—but Tyler was thrashing now, screaming, and she had to stop and get him out of his seat. She held his head against her chest, shushing him. The men were there again, at the far end of the aisle, watching her. One of them said something to the other, which made them both laugh. With one arm around Tyler, the other on the bar of her trolley, she turned and walked away. Half a minute later, when she looked round again, she saw they were following her. She sped up, her heart beating harder, but it was difficult to manage the trolley and Tyler together, so she abandoned the trolley, people looking at her, judging her. She hastened on past them, past the shelves full of relaxed competent mothers on the sides of nappy packs, and as her anger mounted she wanted to stop and scream—at the shoppers, at the men, at Tyler—but she knew what would happen if she did. It would be Chris who would be punished for it. An Internet telltale. A chant on the Kop.