by Ross Raisin
—
His parents were eager to come down and see his new place. They arranged to visit for a weekend shortly before the commencement of preseason. The day prior to their arrival Tom went over the house for any evidence of Liam. There was a shirt in the bedroom, which he hid in a suitcase. A pair of mammoth walking socks. In the garden he scattered a calculated array of stones and broken bricks to distract from the immaculate loamy borders that Liam was continuing to work on. The lettered coasters on his new living-room table, which he had bought with barely a thought—joy, friendship, unwind, cheers!—suddenly looked outrageously gay, and he went through both floors again, questioning his decor choices: the tan sofa, the purple cushions, the gold mirror, the patterned shower curtain, the glaring lack of girl posters.
His parents, though, were more perplexed at the house itself than his choices inside it. His mum thought that it was too out of the way. She was concerned that the club had advised him badly. His dad, running his hands over floorboards and cupboard panels, fingering window jambs, wanted to get straight to work on the place. He had brought his toolbox.
They spent most of the damp weekend doing the house up. Tom and his dad hammered, glued, pulled out rotted wood and idiot-job workmanship, while his mum cleaned or went into town for cookware and home furnishings. The busyness of it was enjoyable. Working at his dad’s side, fixing things, making intermittent conversation, felt reassuringly conventional, even if a sly discomfort did come over him when they were in the bedroom or downstairs putting a shelving unit into an alcove of bubbled wallpaper that Tom could still vividly recall the texture of against his palms and his chest.
On the Saturday night they ate a curry at the new table and drank lager from the off-license round the corner. Tom tried not to think about how much he missed them, how normal it felt to be in their company. They told him about their holiday in Ireland and the bed-and-breakfast owner whose son played for Chelmsford City. Tom gave them a carefully prepared version of his own holiday. Later, they moved on to his sister’s upcoming first term at university, her new boyfriend and football. His dad believed that Tom could make thirty-plus starts this season. He expected that, he exclaimed, rapping the table. Thirty. As a minimum. A bare minimum.
—
Liam arranged an evening for Tom to meet Leah. Tom reluctantly agreed to a drink, and after some back-and-forth Liam suggested the three of them go to the Beefeater. Tom and Liam arrived together, early, and sat opposite each other on a bench at the back of the beer garden beside a collection of parasols heaped like corpses against the metal fence.
When Leah arrived Liam stood up but did not kiss her. She moved in next to Liam on the other side of the table and held out her hand for Tom to shake as they said hello. Liam asked her how her weekend had been. She said it had been fine: she had gone round to her mum’s, and her mum’s boyfriend had done a barbecue on the balcony with the neighbors. It occurred to Tom, with an unexpected flicker of jealousy, that she and Liam were in more regular contact than he had realized. He got up and asked Leah what she would like to drink. Her teeth, when she thanked him, looked as though they had been whitened. Her face was heavily made up, and she was wearing tight jeans, gold sandals and a low top that showed off a deep tan which Tom presumed to be fake.
Liam had entrusted their secret, their life, to this person, Tom kept thinking as he walked to the bar and ordered the drinks. He looked over at the two of them talking, more casually now that he was away from the table. He imagined again the little group of old school friends, Liam among them, chatting, laughing, gossiping.
“Your drinks, mate.”
He took a note from his wallet. When the barman turned away to the till Tom shut his eyes for a few seconds, resisting the hot rushing panic descending through him that everything was changing and that he would not be able to stay in control of where it was all going.
When he returned, Liam was asking about Leah’s son.
“He’s not been sleeping that well recently. He’s at my mum’s tonight.”
“How’s Easter?” Tom said after a pause.
“He’s fine. The cast’s close to coming off. They discovered one or two complications, but at least it’s not far off now.” She took a drink of her wine, and there was silence again, which Liam did not attempt to fill.
“Good news about your contract,” Leah said.
“Thanks.”
“Could be an interesting season.”
“The manager thinks we should be pushing for promotion.”
“Think you will?”
“Yes…well, I don’t know. Depends who he signs.”
They slipped easily enough into a discussion about Town. Tom was surprised by how much she knew—about the players, tactics, the old manager, the new manager. He wondered if it was all second nature to her or if she had prepared. The conversation moved on to the European Championship. She had put money on Germany to win it. “No chance,” Liam said. “Spain look quality so far. No one’s going to stop them.” She challenged him to a bet. They settled on twenty pounds and sealed it with a handshake that seemed to Tom flirtatious. It was unclear whether or not the subject—the reason they were all there—was going to be brought up. Tom was not going to do it; it did not seem as though she was either, and it was difficult to know what Liam was thinking, his eyes flitting from one to the other of them as if amazed to see them in the same place.
On returning from the bar with a second round of drinks, however, Leah said to Tom, “I hear the holiday was good.”
“We were lucky with the weather.”
“Me and Chris went to the Algarve once. It was lovely.”
And with that they switched to the unpredictable summer they were having. Liam talked about the effect of it on the pitch renovation. The importance of a good irrigation program, of arriving early in the morning before it was hot to give the pitch a good drink. The four sprinkler heads, at eighty-five quid apiece, that Pete had gone over with the aerator. The topic of Tom and Liam did not come up again, although Liam appeared pleased when they got up to say goodbye. He kissed Leah on the cheek, and Leah, after a moment’s hesitation, shook Tom’s hand again, this time squeezing it for a second before she let go. She too looked pleased—or relieved—that the evening had gone well, or that it was over, or that he wasn’t too gay.
They waited for her to drive away before getting into Tom’s car. Liam leaned across to kiss him.
“You see?” he said.
—
Work around the stadium stepped up as preseason neared. Tom continued to help out occasionally, an hour here and there, never more so as not to raise any suspicions. Liam’s days became longer. He often went back to his own house or did not get to Tom’s until nightfall. Under his supervision, he and Pete, the two summer lads and, from time to time, a few of the scholars got through an enormous amount of work. The gangways of the stands were repainted. Cracked and faded seats were replaced. The new season billboards were put up around the perimeter, and a company was hired to asphalt the river footpath. The drooping, torn netting above the Riverside Stand that prevented balls from flying into the river was taken down, resewn, tautened. A whole afternoon was spent killing the weeds that had grown up through the terracing, the car park, the club-shop roof. Tom and Liam spent one happy Sunday morning kitted up in large yellow backpack sprayers, moving down the teeming borders of the new footpath as ponderously as a pair of astronauts.
All of this activity took place to a continuous backdrop of Liam grumbling about the changeable weather. He was forever staring over the pitch, making adjustments, fretting about irrigation and disease and root growth.
“You sound like a farmer,” Tom told him.
“I am a fucking farmer,” came the immediate response.
Tom took quiet pleasure in watching him work: his understanding of the pitch, both scientific and sensual. The gentleness with which he touched the grass or tested the firmness of the soil. Liam had known this stadium, this gro
und, his entire life, and it moved Tom to think that no other person knew it as intimately as he did.
Tom found him one morning after the pitch had been watered, sitting on a step of the away terrace. Tom sat beside him, and Liam pointed to where a fox cub was darting in and out of the glistening sward.
“Worms,” said Liam.
The pitch—scarified, sanded, photo-documented, cored by two million miniature drainage channels, fertilized, scrupulously watered—had been growing half an inch a night since the overseeding program. Almost a month on, it resembled a meadow. The wind gusting between the stands caused glossy waves to course down its length. Butterflies were drawn to one section, where a cluster of wildflowers had migrated from the banks of the river. According to Liam, adamant despite Tom’s skepticism, there was a visiting deer.
A thrilling tension was suspended over this time together at the ground—not touching, wary of how they spoke to each other, looked at each other. By sundown, when they could be alone, an intensity would have built up between them that neither could fully control.
The night before the grass was due to be cut, Liam phoned just as Tom was about to go to bed.
“Can you come to the stadium?”
“What? It’s half eleven. Are you still there?”
“Just come. Park on the road.”
Tom left his car a short distance from the stadium. He walked behind the dark block of the main stand. Liam was standing at the edge of the pitch. No lights were on anywhere and his face was in shadow.
“Is everything OK?” Tom asked.
“Come with me.”
He led Tom down the touchline as far as the dugout, where he motioned for Tom to follow him onto the field. The grass reached almost to their knees. They waded through it, adrenaline surging into Tom’s bloodstream. When they were somewhere near the middle Liam stopped and waited for Tom to reach him. He took hold of Tom’s shoulders and pushed him down into the grass. There was the smell of diesel and dried sweat on him, the huge shadowy forms of the floodlights above his face as it descended towards Tom.
Afterwards, they went up to the control center. On one of the CCTV screens Liam rewound and played back the footage. Tom was unable to make anything out at first until Liam pointed to the two tiny figures moving across the grainy image, a scene from a horror film. Once they stopped walking they were barely visible, the only sign of them, moments later, a slight silvery pulsing amid the gray, as minute and regular as the winking heart of a fetus.
“Porn, mate.”
But Tom was too paralyzed by the evidence on the monitor in front of him to find it funny. The ghost of his own body having sex with another man, on a football pitch—the act made real, recorded, until Liam pressed a button to delete it and Tom, as Liam gestured for them to leave, made him check the device again to make sure.
In the morning the stadium was busy. Preseason was less than a week away so there were players about, using the gym, picking up their new season recovery skins, paperwork, kit. When Tom arrived a small audience of players and club staff was sitting in the main stand, watching the cutting of the grass. Tom stood at the bottom of the stand for a minute, then went up to join them.
A strip ten yards wide had been mown down the pitch, smooth and enticing as a freshly shaved head. Behind the whining black mower Liam advanced steadily, exactly, his gaze locked ahead. A fountain of chopped grass sprayed from the rotary blade. The two summer lads followed a short distance further back, raking and gathering the crop into the big cardboard boxes that Liam had collected over the last month from the town’s three supermarkets. Secret pride climbed inside Tom at the sight of all these onlookers captivated by the spectacle. A loud cheer went up when a startled bird flapped out of the grass. The summer lads turned to grin at the little crowd, but Liam did not flinch.
The mower proceeded slowly, a black sparkling beetle, moving up, down the pitch. Some of the staff got up and left. The players, though, all remained. For minutes at a time none of them spoke, held like Tom to their seats as more of the pristine surface was unveiled and the sharp green smell of it carried through the air.
22
The first morning of training was cool and overcast. Wilko assembled the squad in the lounge twenty-five minutes before he intended to address them, to allow the players to catch up and joke and eat the croissants and Danish pastries stacked on the breakfast trolley. The coaching staff regarded them with satisfaction from one side of the room. They appeared in good shape. It was obvious that the majority had followed their fitness programs. Only Foley had noticeably gained weight.
“I’m not going to make you run up and down every hill in the county,” Wilko said once he had them sitting down. “Some of them. But not all.”
There was an audible release of breath. All those who had been present a year ago had undergone a full fortnight of hard running—overtraining, the old manager had called it—before any playing resumed, by which point they were aching for the appearance of a football. Wilko wanted to get onto the pitch right from the off, he told them. To get into a rhythm. To acclimatize the new players to Town’s style of play. There would be signings within the next week, he said. As it stood, there was only one: a lithe, beautiful Jamaican international defender, Maurice Lloyd-Day, let go by Ipswich, who had so far eaten four Danish pastries and spoken to nobody.
Five friendly fixtures had been arranged. Three of them were to be played in Ireland, where the whole squad was going to spend almost a week building match practice and team spirit.
For the rest of the morning they ran. Firstly around the pitches, then, in batches, between two lines of cones, sprinting to an escalating barrage of bleeps while the fitness coach noted down their times on a clipboard and the waiting groups stretched and swapped stories about their families and their holiday exploits.
By the second day it was evident that Bobby, Willis and Tom were considerably fitter than anybody else. Bobby and Willis reveled in the situation. They jostled each other for front position during runs. When they finished, sprinting the final yards to try and be first, they stood and waited for the rest of the squad, venturing tentative banter at them as they labored in. On the third morning, when the balls came out for a game of two-touch keep-ball, Bobby was knocked to the ground three times and Willis’s foot was stood upon with enough pressure that the bruising ruled him out of the Ireland trip.
They departed under a sky of ragged thunder and sudden heavy downpours. Their base, Wilko told them on the first steaming coach, taking a break from leafing through dossiers of released players, was a college campus in the west of the country. On arriving it became clear that, with the students away, they had the place to themselves, and they were soon getting lost, or drunk, in the labyrinth of stale corridors and nondescript, disinfected bedrooms.
The first practice session was taken indoors, the outside pitches judged to be too boggy. Two trialists were in their number, both recently let go by their clubs: an eighteen-year-old former Premier League academy fullback, and a journeyman forward who had been sent off in January playing against Town and subsequently fined for offensive language and gestures towards the Town supporters. To begin with, this twosome stuck together. The young fullback was up to the speed of the fittest, but the forward had clearly not exercised for months. He heaved and sweated against walls, or toiled behind the jogging pack alongside Foley. At the end of a bleep test he disappeared into the toilets to throw up a stream of orange juice and honey nut cornflakes, and in the afternoon, when they went outside into the pale blanket of sunshine to use the playable half of one pitch, the other trialist moved stealthily away from him.
Most of the players had been put into single rooms, but a few, including Tom and Beverley, were in larger twins with en suite bathrooms. Tom had not foreseen how pleased he would be to see his roommate again. There was a kind of relief in how predictable, how normal, it was. They talked without effort for much of the coach and plane journeys and on the first night shared most of a
bottle of Jack Daniel’s, along with a selection of foreign cheeses and salami balls that Beverley produced from freezer bags. They spoke about the European Championship final, transfers, Beverley’s holidays. Beverley showed him, anxious for his opinion, a neat new tattoo at the base of his neck—a tiny crescent. He and his girlfriend had got one each, he said, at an expensive parlor in the West End on one of their weekends in London. Tom wondered if the girlfriend was recent, and if Beverley would think that he was being rude or odd not to ask about her.
The Irish league was in mid-season. The first opposition side was quicker and more competitive than Town. Their physical approach caused the Town players to step out of several unrestrained challenges, and early in the game there was an angry exchange between the two managers on the touchline. Tom was up against a brawny left back who pinched his triceps twice in the opening minutes. When he tried to do it a third time Tom swung out an arm, hitting the man in the chest, and the referee galloped over to tell him to calm down. The supporters standing nearby chanted for him to be sent off. He turned round for the referee to make a note of his shirt number, booking him, and caught the left back smiling, giving a wink to the crowd as he jogged back into position. Egged on by the fans, his challenges became even rougher. After one heavy tackle Tom fell to the pitch and the defender looked down at him, stooping to bring his face close to Tom’s.
“English poofter.”
Tom lay on the grass, his heart pounding with terror. When he got up and play resumed he veered infield, distancing himself from the player and the enlivened crowd, until the man crashed into Fleming and Tom heard him say the same words to him as he went to ground.
At the final whistle—eight goals, ten Town substitutions, two further flare-ups between the managers—the players left the field exhausted. Wilko told them it was a good workout, and they retreated to the campus for massages and a long, deep sleep.
