by Ross Raisin
“Bodes well for next season. With you back in the side, new keeper, couple of wingers, bit more strength in depth, I’d say we could even be looking at a promotion charge.”
Chris did not move his eyes from his bowl. He slid his spoon from his lips and said quietly, “That’s what they’re saying.”
“He’s turned it round, Wilkinson. Breath of fresh air. Although what do I know? I’m just a supporter, and a fair-weather one at that, if I’m completely honest. What’s he like to play under?”
Her mum was looking visibly agitated, glaring across the table at her boyfriend, and Leah felt a cold pleasure in the fact that, for all their touching and flirtatious glances, she was unable to stop him. Her mum said flatly, “Robert, I’m not sure Chris wants to talk about football while he’s injured.”
“He’s better than Clarke,” Chris said, raising his face.
Robert became enthusiastic again. “Right. I can imagine. Clarke’s got his place in the history of the club, don’t get me wrong, but he’s a non-league manager. This guy Wilkinson knows what he’s doing.” A very slight smile appeared on Chris’s face but he said nothing.
“I’d think about renewing my season ticket for next season if it wasn’t for these dance classes.” Now Robert did turn his attention to Leah’s mum, and an expression of confusion came over his face when he saw the way she was looking at him.
“Leah,” her mum said, “how was college on Thursday?”
“Yes,” said Robert. “How’s the project coming on? Computer design, isn’t it?”
“CAD, yes.”
“How many garments have you done now?” her mum asked.
“Three.” She fixed her eyes directly on Chris, who looked down again at his empty bowl. “Me and Maria. There are going to be five pieces in total.”
Robert bunched his eyebrows. “Remind me—it’s jackets, yes?”
Leah did not take her attention off Chris. She sensed that he knew she was still looking at him, but he did not lift his face. “Yes. We’re 3-D weaving and draping a series of women’s jackets.”
Tyler threw his spoon to the floor and began battering his high-chair tray. Robert went to him but Tyler pushed against his hands.
“I’m going away too, actually,” Leah said.
“Are you?” Her mum looked over at Chris, who had not reacted.
“To Milan.”
“Oh, lovely. The two of you planning a weekend break?”
“No. On my own.”
He would not meet her gaze and did not allow his expression to alter, but she knew that he was listening.
“It’s a study trip at the start of my second year. I’m going to a trade fair.”
Tyler was crying, but she did not move her eyes from Chris, even as her mum went to Robert’s assistance and it was just the two of them left, opposite each other at the table.
17
The spring sunshine and continuing good form of the team ensured that three sides of the ground were bright with red and green before the kickoff of the penultimate home match, against Gillingham. The dull throb of a drum emanated from the back of the Riverside Stand, where half a dozen teenage boys had taken off their shirts in an energetic display of ribs and nipples and sparse clammy armpit hair. A one-minute silence was announced to mark the death of a former player. The drumming ceased. At the referee’s whistle there was perfect stillness. The slightest involuntary sound was audible everywhere inside the stadium. A sneeze in the Kop. The quacking of a duck behind the Riverside Stand. Even, for those sitting closer to pitchside, the breeze shivering through the tinsel pom-poms of the eight child cheerleaders ranged around the center circle, whose metallic hot pants and crop tops flashed in the brilliant sunlight. When the referee blew his whistle again, the voice of the crowd rose to the sky like an explosion.
Wilko came onto the pitch to be presented, by Easter, with the League Two Manager of the Month for March award. With only five games left, Town were up to twentieth, and another victory would put them seven points clear of the relegation zone. On completing his duties, Easter circled awkwardly to applaud each stand and immediately left the ground, while Wilko returned to the dressing room, where he held aloft his dumpy little trophy and, to the surprise and evident distress of the players, dropped it into the bin.
When Wilko led the team out onto the pitch the goalkeeping coach waited behind until the room was empty, to retrieve the trophy from where it had nestled at the bottom of the bin among used bandages and energy drink bottles, and by the end of the day it would be situated on the manager’s desk, between a photograph of his son and a similar award that he had won the previous season.
They won 3–1. Tom started the match and laid on the pass for Gundi’s first goal. After his second a chant went up in the area around the bare-chested teenagers: “He’s big, he’s brown, he bangs them in for Town—Crocodile Gundi, Crocodile Gundi…” It came again, louder, more confidently, on his hat-trick, and had spread to the Kop and the main stand by the time the supporters began to troop away into the tight littered streets and temporary car parks around the stadium.
By Monday afternoon all evidence of the match was gone. The terraces were swept, the toilets scrubbed and power-hosed, lost phones and scarves and season-ticket wallets collected into a cardboard box under the club secretary’s desk. The banqueting suites, executive boxes, lounges, dressing rooms, referee’s room, coaching offices, tunnels, were all cleared, vacuumed, sprayed, and at one side of the car park, piled against the skip by the ground-staff shed, seventy-four heavy-duty rubbish bags were twitching in the pleasant afternoon sunshine. Inside the unmanned control center at one end of the main stand, shifting CCTV images—the car park, the river footpath, the concrete bunker catering areas behind the terraces—showed no movement. Everywhere was quiet, unhurried. At rest.
Only in the match-day medical room, underneath the control center, was there any sign of life. On one of the two treatment beds, on top of which an elderly woman had lain with minor breathing difficulties for most of the second half against Gillingham, Tom was now sitting, his hands gripping the mattress, while the urgent bobbing head of Liam caused the wheels of the bed frame to yip and rattle below him.
Tom stayed on the bed as Liam undressed. The big rounded body was so unlike the bodies of the players—heavy and smooth, with wide raised shoulders and no trace of gym lines, no machined hardness. A goalkeeper’s body. Tom watched him take off his socks, his underpants, and move into the shower room.
Tom took off his own clothes and stepped into the gray hissing cubicle. Water dripped from Liam’s short thick fringe, from his nose, his ears. Tom moved to join him under the shower head. When the water began to run cold Tom turned it off, and the cubicle echoed only with the helpless ugly slapping of their bodies.
They dried off, dressed and returned the treatment room to order. Neither spoke; a building awareness of the locked door, the stairwell outside it, any passersby. They went over what they would say if anybody saw them together, prepared the fake note Tom would hand to Liam from Mr. Davey.
“You going to the gym?” Liam asked quietly, picking up the broom from beside the door.
“Yes. Won’t stop long, though. There won’t be many in.”
“You’ll be ripped soon, the way you’re going.”
Tom smiled back sarcastically, careful not to look camp. He spied through the keyhole into the empty stairwell, then signaled for Liam to begin sweeping the floor.
Outside no other people were visible. Tom walked along the touchline and through the fire door into the main stand.
The gym was empty. Very few of the players came in the day before a match. Although there was no need for him to stay, he decided to work out for a while. He peeled off his tracksuit top and stood in front of the mirror. His body was changing, his chest, his arms, noticeably bigger. His calves, when he flexed his ankles, two firm apples. He could feel it on the pitch, this change. Backing into the opposing fullback. Striking the ball. He
stood sometimes now before this mirror or the one in his bedroom, marveling at the body in the glass. A body that he recognized as his own but not his own, one that belonged also to somebody else, belonged, two or three times a week now, to the shut-away room beneath the stand with its faded stiff sheets and its old medical smell.
—
He was lying on his bed watching football after one of his increasingly short phone conversations with his parents when there was a knock on his door. It was unusual for anybody to come up to his room, and for a few dazed seconds he thought that Liam was there.
It was Bobby.
“All right, Tom? Sorry yeah.”
Tom was in tracksuit bottoms and no shirt. He noticed Bobby look at his chest, then at the windowsill.
“They cactuses?”
“Desert cacti.”
“You collect them?”
“Yes.”
Bobby kept looking at the windowsill. One hand was bunching repeatedly inside his pocket. “See, thing is, I’m after a favor if it’s all right.”
“OK. What is it?”
“Can you lend me some money? Until next month just.”
“How much?”
“Three hundred and fifty.”
“Bloody hell.”
Bobby was staring at him, his face all white attentiveness.
“It important?”
“I’d no ask otherwise.”
“You need it all now?”
“If you can.”
Tom wanted to ask what it was for but held back. “All right. I can give it you the day after tomorrow, at training. Best not do it in the house.”
Bobby was at once full of boyish elation. “Spot-on, pal. You’re a mate. Thanks.” He stepped forward to offer a handshake.
When Bobby had pounded back down the stairs Tom returned to watching the match, thinking about what had just happened. Both of the Scottish pair were on two hundred a week, which he knew because of how often they complained about it in the back of his car. Bobby was starting regularly for the first team now, although Tom doubted that his appearance bonus—if he was getting one at all—was very much. Even for Tom, three hundred and fifty was a considerable amount to lend, or would have been if his spending amounted to more than fitful trips to the cinema and renewing the vodka bottle in his underwear drawer.
Bobby was still on a ten o’clock curfew. Tom was sure, nevertheless, that he had been out with some of the others after a couple of games. He was becoming more a part of the squad than Tom was, yet Tom still felt protective of him, of both boys. Outside the house the pair had drifted towards different groups: Bobby to a small band of first- and second-year pros, especially James Willis, a forward recently returned from two loan spells; Steven, who was rarely selected for the first-team squad, to the scholars. The divergence was most obvious on match days. Bobby would be restless by breakfast time, especially before an away journey, during which he would stay with his group, joking noisily and playing cards on the coach. Steven, after the morning run-out with the other reserves, stayed at home with the Daveys and would usually be watching football or a film if he was still up when Bobby and Tom returned.
On the one occasion that Steven did train with the firsts for the whole session, he struggled to keep up and compete. Near the end of the session, his body visibly weakening, he attempted to head clear from the edge of his penalty area and did not see Jones leaping to attack the same ball. Jones won the header, striking Steven on the side of the head with his elbow as he went through him. Steven shouted out and stayed down, floored. Play continued, and as Foley kicked the ball upfield, Jones bent down to Steven and clapped his hands twice above his face. “Get up. On your feet, bitch.” Tom, jogging past, noticed Bobby move towards Steven, but when Jones came over and said something to him, Bobby turned and ran off in the direction of play.
—
Hidden from the wind and showers and infrequent fits of sunshine during the closing weeks of the season, Tom and Liam continued to meet in the medical room. Since the evening in the pub they had seen each other nowhere else. Sometimes they simply lay together on the bed, holding each other. The first time this happened Tom had brooded afterwards that Liam might be losing interest in him, although he told himself that if they were normal people, able to go about in public, then there would be plenty of occasions when they would not be physical together—and it was during these times, together without the refuge of sex, that he felt most strongly the huge volatile weight of his desire, swamping, consuming him.
They had not spoken about the end of the season. About the end of Tom’s contract and a summer in which, even if it was extended, there would be no reason for him to be at the stadium or in the town at all. If it was on Liam’s mind as well, he was keeping it from Tom just as Tom was from him.
A family of ducks appeared one morning at the training ground. They announced themselves noisily, filing out of the bushes next to the pitch that the scholars were using, to congregate a short distance from the touchline as if intending to watch the session. Three of the ducklings made a break for the pitch. The youth team, and the firsts, who were assembled for a team talk not far away, all stopped to look at one of the scholars, a tiny lad with a closely shaved head, track and grab each bird in turn before carrying them, to a round of applause from both squads, in a precarious cradle back to the mother.
Beverley came up to Tom as they watched the ducks toddle away into the undergrowth.
“You off to the stadium after lunch?”
Tom hesitated. “I don’t know. I might go home.”
“I was thinking I’d do some gym. Go on, come with me. Let’s drive over together.”
Tom could see him in his rearview mirror all the way to the stadium, and he was unable to shake off a steadily building resentment at the small silhouetted head, singing behind him. He wondered if it would be possible to lose him—to push through a set of lights as they were turning red and speed away—but all the lights were green and Beverley stayed close behind him, and Tom knew that the afternoon was lost.
The disruption to his routine set him on edge, a feeling that only increased when he arrived at the stadium and saw Liam mounting the steps of the main stand with a shotgun. Beverley had spotted him too, and hurried down the touchline. When he got level with him he called up to Liam, “Fuck, mate, is that a gun?”
Liam turned, smiling. “Pigeons.”
Beverley went up the gangway towards him. Liam did not appear to have noticed Tom.
“There’s a load of them that roost up in the roof.”
They looked up, then down at the fossilized waterfall of shit that clung to the back wall of the stand.
“We have to control them every month or so. Buggers keep coming back, though, here and the Kop. Pete takes them home and eats them or something.” He gave a quick look to Tom, but his attention was on Beverley, clearly enjoying his fascination.
“Can I have a go?” Beverley asked.
Liam laughed. “I’ve seen your shooting, mate. You can watch, though.”
Liam and Beverley went up the steps, squinting into the roof, where the scrambling movements of a pigeon could be seen above one of the rafters. Liam raised the shotgun. His Adam’s apple coursed once, slowly, up and down. Beverley flashed a look of childish excitement at Tom. There came the violent report of the gun, then a rash of clangs as the pellets ricocheted inside the corrugated roof. Two pigeons took flight. Liam aimed again and fired—one instantly plummeted, dropping heavily onto the plastic seats. He spun and fired once more, but the second pigeon was away, disappearing over the pitch as the shot echoed through the stand.
Liam looked first at Beverley.
“That’s mental,” Beverley cried. “You allowed to do that?”
Liam shrugged. “We’ve borrowed a hawk before. That’s something to see. Or if there’s heavy rain and the river rises, all the rats get in the bottom of the Riverside Stand. We’ve shot bagfuls of them before, me and Pete.” He continued looking
at Beverley, then turned to peer again into the rafters. There was no movement that Tom could see, but Liam lifted the shotgun again, his body set perfectly still, his cheek hardening as his eye contracted, and he fired another shell.
As the echoes died, Beverley ran down the few steps to Tom, putting an arm around his shoulders. “Come on, man, let’s work out. I’m fucking pumped.”
Tom turned, not looking at Liam, and went with him.
—
Most of the players, regardless of the best efforts of the coaching staff, were already winding down. The dressing room was full of chat about summer holidays. Those players with partners or young children talked about spending time with them. Fleming, whose wife had given birth to their first child during the Morecambe victory, was moving back up north to be with them for the whole summer.
Those who were not contracted for next season, conversely, were playing and training with fresh intensity, with the result that the last couple of matches were played out to a manic tempo of torpor and frenzy that threw teammates, opposing players and referees alike. There were a couple of spats at the training ground. A scuffle, hugely exaggerated on Twitter according to Wilko in his program notes, broke out one short damp session during a seven-a-side non-contact game. It was increasingly clear which players were most likely to be let go. Three were now frequently asked to join the scholars: a couple of first-year pros who had never started and Febian Price, whom Wilko refused to pick even when Jones or Bobby were injured because his next start would trigger a clause that automatically extended his contract. They could usually be seen together, stretching, standing in a knot, eating together at one unhappy end of a canteen table. The bomb squad. Finch-Evans was soon to join their number. Wilko brought the players together after a warm-up and said that he wanted to do some set plays with small groups of attack and defense. He called out the names for each group. Finch-Evans was the only one left out.
“Finchy,” he said, and everybody turned to look at the winger. “You’ve not had much game time of late, so you’ll be better off getting some fitness work in over there.”