A Natural

by Ross Raisin

  The squad was smaller than Town’s. There were only seventeen players, most of them young. Tom counted seven or eight who were probably recent youth-team graduates. They were, in the main, welcoming. When it was mentioned that he was a Premier League academy product some of the younger ones crowded around him, wanting to hear about the experience. He gave his spiel, recounting more the words he had spoken before than the actual memory, which now felt so distant it did not seem real. The senior players were watchful of him. The only one who approached him to talk was the newly signed forward, who had been on trial with Town in Ireland. He came across immediately to shake Tom’s hand and joke about how out of shape he had been on that tour. “I was in bits,” he said. “Proper fucking mess.”

  Tom went at the session with gusto, determined to prove that he was better than this, than them, that he used to play for a Premier League club, for England age group teams. Once he had adjusted to the grass he began to show a few neat touches, and it was obvious that he could pass the ball better than anybody else there. The manager, a large old man, breathless from the first minute of the session, stopped the practice match to point at Tom. “Watch him. See. Time. Head up. Pick your man.” Tom turned his eyes away, embarrassed, furtively proud. He worked even harder, raising his level further still. He immersed himself totally in the hustle of training, frantic not to slow down and let the sensation of being lost take over.

  Near the end of the warm-down he moved alongside the journeyman forward, who started a conversation about injuries. As they stretched, the manager moved between the players, placing a hand on or around their shoulders, speaking quietly to them, a fat grandad. Some of the young players meandered off to chat to the little groups of schoolgirls who had finished morning lessons and walked out across the grounds. A few boys looked on as well, but from further away, lounging and laughing on the grass, making fun of the squad from a distance.

  There were new, expensive gym and changing facilities at the school, but the squad based itself in an old circular wooden pavilion fitted out with a basic kitchen and one narrow table with benches down either side. During the practice match the injured players had gone in to put jacket potatoes into the oven. These three were now—while Tom lay on the grass turning and stretching his ankle, watching the players flirt with the schoolgirls—busy heating beans and grating cheese into a large bowl in the center of the table. The squad ate in two shifts, still in their kit. Noisy rebounding laughter filled the cramped space. At the end of the meal they drove, those with cars giving lifts to those without, to shower and change at the stadium.

  Tom returned to his hotel. He watched television and played a computer game on his laptop until Liam called him after work.

  “How did it go?” he asked.

  “Fine. They’re rubbish.”

  “It’s non-league, mate. Are you OK?”

  “Yes. Think so.” For a while they were quiet. “We’re at home Saturday,” Tom said. “I could drive back after the match. Spend the rest of the weekend.”

  —

  He sat each night in the restaurant of the hotel eating one of the three healthy choice options from the oversized menu. Liam occupied his thoughts constantly. Tom stewed over what he might be doing at any particular moment, trying to take comfort in the steady reliability of Liam’s routine. He ate through the watery limp meals, disbelieving what had happened. Nothing made any sense: that his career was in pieces and he was here, adrift in a place where nobody was aware he existed. Cold, shooting doubts came at him without warning, but the next moment he would want to laugh hysterically, a lunatic in the corner of the restaurant behind a clown menu. Nobody knew him. The anonymity of it was as shocking and weightless as an ice bath.

  After eating he went up to his room to go through a sequence of repeated actions: drawing the curtains, getting his kit for the next day ready on the chair by the desk, emptying, refilling the kettle. Everything in the room seemed fake, like stage props. He regretted leaving his cacti behind. The collection was something real. Safe. On top of which he was worried about them. Liam, for a groundsman, was surprisingly useless with houseplants.

  The players arrived at the ground only an hour before the kick-off of Tom’s first match. Some had traveled, already in their strip, on trains and buses with early fans on their way to the stadium bar. The manager read out a scouting report on the opposition, half a dozen printed-out pages, crumpled and stained, that Tom suspected had not been altered from previous seasons. The other team was dangerous at throw-ins and corners. Set pieces generally. There was a big black boy up front, all elbows. A veteran left back, a plodder.

  The manager looked at Tom. “Get at him. Get at him until his legs go.”

  In the opening exchanges Tom was able to beat his man without difficulty, regardless of his legs. Fifteen minutes in he delivered the cross for the first goal. He won a penalty, inducing the fullback into a clumsy challenge when Tom stepped outside, inside, outside him. The penalty was converted, and the hundred or so home supporters behind the goal sang his name: “Pearman’s too good for you, Pearman’s too good for you…” When the one-hut contingent of away fans responded with the same chant Tom experienced a moment of searing clarity, a split-second rapture in which he knew with absolute certainty that all of this, being here, was only temporary.

  At halftime the supporters behind the goal moved in a procession around the pitch to position themselves on the grass bank behind the other goal. From the restart the ball was played to Tom, who ran towards them, teasing the miserable hunching fullback, switching the ball from one foot to the other, relishing the stupefied anguish on his face, willing the chant, the catch in the supporters’ collected breath as it started up again.

  They won 3–0. Tom was named man of the match. He showered, changed and waited around in the tunnel until he was taken to the bar to pose for a photograph with a bottle of champagne and the owner of a car dealership.

  It was seven o’clock before he was able to leave, past nine when he got home. Liam met him at the front door. They kissed for a long time against the entrance hall wall.

  “You better not have killed my cacti, you fucker.”

  “Oh shit,” Liam said, grinning, “was I supposed to be looking after them?”

  There was a lineup of boots and a tin of wood stain on newspaper in the hall, a bunched fist of keys on the second step of the staircase.

  “Been making yourself at home, then?”

  “I have.”

  They went through to the living room. The cacti were healthy. In the kitchen a meal was waiting in the oven. Liam took it out and plated up: chili con carne. They drank the champagne, which was by now warm, and Tom told him about the match. Liam, to Tom’s disappointment, listened quietly, nodding, seeming more interested in his food than in Tom’s performance.

  In the morning Tom went out to a cafe and returned with bacon sandwiches and a paper. They sat on the sofa to eat. Town were playing very well, Liam told him. The new players, he said, were outstanding. Dom Curtis, if it wasn’t for the dodgy knee, would be in the Premier League. Tom, who already knew from the Internet how the new players were performing, could not help but detect the note of excitement in Liam’s voice. He had met up with Leah shortly after her return from Milan, he said. She had been a bit odd and distracted, and he had not seen her since, probably because her head was buzzing with ideas and plans from the trip, he thought. And his parents had spoken about Tom over lunch last Sunday, saying what a nice lad he was. There were three new boys now, Liam said, who had not spoken a word for almost the whole time that he was there.

  They read the sports pages, watched some of a touring car championship on the television and went upstairs a final time before Tom left.

  It started to rain while he was on the motorway. The traffic slowed. Through the wet film of his windscreen the red burst blossoms of taillights filled his vision. He began to feel drowsy, listless—brought to his senses by the booming horn of an articulated lorry i
n the lane beside him.

  —

  The training pitches were marshy and yielding. Tom presumed they would be considered unfit for ball work, but after a conversation between the manager and his number two a bag of balls was brought out and a few players were instructed to carry the two sets of goalposts from the pavilion to positions beneath the rugby posts. Even in his longest studs Tom found it difficult to keep his footing. Mindful of injury, he ran about at half pace. The number two, reading this as laziness, shouted at him during a give-and-go routine, “Come on, princess. One decent game doesn’t mean you’re special. Get moving.”

  Tom itched to turn and tell him to fuck off, the amateur idiot, but he kept quiet. He upped his work rate slightly, part of him hoping to go down injured just to prove himself right, superior to all this.

  In the stadium dressing room he kept to his usual corner to change after his shower. As he was putting his socks on, one of the defenders walked across, naked, and stood directly in front of him to talk to another player. Tom was intensely conscious of the penis in front of his face. The beads of water dripping from the end of it. He looked down, taking off his socks slowly, putting them back on again. He looked up when the man walked away, and watched his bright hairless bottom, testing, goading himself.

  A few nights previously an unfamiliar member of the hotel staff had waited on his table. Tom had formed the impression that he was gay. There was a moment when the man had looked at him pointedly, and the idea that he had made the same assumption about Tom had made his chicken and bacon salad churn in his stomach.

  Later, the knowledge that the man was possibly there in the hotel troubled him enough to keep him from sleeping. He was aware of a black shapeless fantasy that he could not allow to develop because he could not trust what it might mean, what he might be capable of.

  He played in an FA Cup qualifier against a team, a town, that he had never heard of. It rained heavily shortly after kickoff, and the supporters on two sides of the ground moved to shelter underneath the ash tree in one corner. Early in the game Tom scored the first goal and automatically sought out the away fans to celebrate, before becoming unsure if there were any.

  By the time he got back to his hotel the restaurant was closed. He opened the Bible drawer in his room, where he kept a small store of food: biscuits, cereals, peanuts, Nutri-Grain bars, energy drinks. He sat on the bed and ate handfuls of cereal straight from the box. On the bedside table his phone was flashing. There was a text message from Wilko: “Saw got goal today, well done, keep it up.” Apart from Beverley, who had texted before Tom’s first match to wish him luck, nobody had contacted him until now. Energized, he rang Liam. There was no answer. He considered calling him again, but when the short recording of Liam’s voice finished he left a message and stayed awake for a long time waiting for him to phone back.

  The other players liked him, he thought. He was easy for them to place: quiet, keeps to himself but not in an arrogant way. After a midweek draw against Weston-super-Mare Tom was again named man of the match. There were some joking complaints from the rest of the team about how they might as well give up any hope of champagne because Tom was obviously giving blow jobs to all the local businessmen. Although glad to be included in their banter, Tom knew that he had not in fact played well. With each game he was working less hard, seeking less the movement of the forwards. Instead of running the line and tracking back he would loiter, waiting for the ball to come to him—and when it did his first thought was usually to show up the fullback, or his own teammates, with flicks and dummies and unexpected one-twos. Or he would take the ball forward on his own, so disconnected from the match that even as he drove into the unprotected space his mind would be alternating between determination to prove himself and a quick self-pity that saw no point in trying.

  —

  It was over two months since he had seen his parents. He should have felt happy to be visiting them, or at least guilty that he did not. Instead, a resentful mood gripped him as he traveled up the motorway to spend a rare fixtureless weekend away from Liam. He arrived on the Friday evening in time for tea. After eating and the television, his mum went to bed and his dad got out a bottle of whisky which John had given him years ago as a fortieth-birthday present but had been lying on top of the kitchen cupboards ever since.

  They sat down in the living room, the television off, and his dad poured two glasses, handing one to Tom.

  “Oh, do you want ice?”

  Tom paused, wondering which was the correct way to drink it.

  “I’m fine, thanks, Dad.”

  “OK. Don’t think we have ice anyway.” He pushed back into his seat, sipping, frowning. Tom waited for him to speak but his dad remained quiet for some time. He looked tired—older, in the overhead light, than when Tom had seen him last.

  “Things are going well then,” his dad said.

  “Fine. I’m playing OK.”

  “Playing well, I’ve read.”

  Tom drank, trying not to wince when the liquid passed his lips. “And Town are monitoring my form, so they know, even though the level’s crap.”

  “The level’s not important, Tom. It doesn’t matter, the level. It’s how much fight you show to get back in.” He patted his chest. Tom swallowed, the whisky burning in his throat.

  They clinked glasses.

  His dad leaned back in his seat and took another sip, scowling. “Always bloody hated whisky,” he said.

  In the morning his parents were in lively spirits in anticipation of his sister arriving. She had moved out a couple of weeks ago, although her course was yet to start, and they were hoping that today she would bring her boyfriend home with her. Fergus. She had been dating him for a few months but they were yet to meet him.

  She arrived on her own. Their parents overcame the disappointment with a battery of questions—about her new accommodation, whether she could do the drive home in less than three-quarters of an hour, and about Fergus, joking that she was obviously ashamed of them to keep him away so long.

  That afternoon their dad drove them all to the good fish and chip place. Once they were seated Rachel explained again that Fergus was at his own parents’ house for the weekend. He said hello. He was looking forward to meeting them all. It occurred to Tom that she had been going out with Fergus since about the time that things had properly started with Liam—if the holiday marked the real beginning, and not the medical room, nor the early brutal passionate encounters in the shed.

  When the waitress came over to take their order he had an erection and missed the first thing she said. He forced his knuckles against the edge of the table. The waitress was a jolly type, his mum’s age, and whatever she had just said it had clearly been addressed to him. She continued smiling at him for a moment and his family laughed.

  “He’s in the clouds, this one.”

  Rachel gave an exaggerated nod.

  “I’ll bet you’ve broken some poor young girls’ hearts,” the waitress said. There was a curry sauce stain on her black apron. On top of her head her hair was piled into a lifeless swollen ball in a disposable cap, like a bag of grass cuttings.

  “He’s a footballer,” his sister said.

  “That right?” Tom waited for her to ask who he played for, but she turned towards his family. “Go on, then. Four cod and chips, is it?”

  When they returned home he saw that he had a missed call from Wilko, and he went up to his room to listen to the voicemail. It had been sent at half past five, asking him to ring back. Tom checked Town’s result on the Internet and saw that they had won again, 3–1.

  Wilko answered straightaway. “Tom, good, I wanted to speak to you. How are you getting on down there?”

  “Fine, thanks. No match today.”

  “I saw. I’m getting good reports on your form, Tom. You’re pleased with how you’re playing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’m low on bodies here, so I’m thinking of recalling you. Grant’s been out with a niggle
and Dom Curtis’s knee isn’t right. We’re managing him through games with injections at the moment, but it’s looking like we might need to send him to a specialist to sort the problem out. So I need to get bodies into the building. I could use the loan market, but I’ve got my own player here, in good form, and I know you can do a job for me.”

  “As cover?”

  “Shirt’s there to be won, Tommy. Always. Shirt’s there to be won.”

  The team were on the coach. In the background he could hear laughter—through it, distinctly, Beverley’s voice: “Oh, come off it, man.”

  “When do I need to be back?”

  “We’ve no midweek game so how about you sort your things out tomorrow, take Monday off to drive back, and I’ll see you first thing Tuesday.”

  Later that evening he went out for a drink with his sister. They walked to the pub down the road, their dad’s local. Rachel got the first drinks in. While he waited for her at a table he imagined how and when he would tell Liam about his return, becoming jittery with the need to share the news with him.

  Rachel stayed at the bar chatting a while to the barmaid, then the landlord, and Tom distracted himself by marveling at how at ease she was with everybody, his little sister, how unlike him she was. Now that they were away from their parents, he thought that she might be more likely to talk about Fergus. Their parents’ interest in him, he guessed, would feel over the top to her. He could understand that, though. When she was sixteen she had started seeing a man who was almost thirty, divorced, with a child. The three months that they were together had been hard on their parents. The man was manipulative. Deceitful. They blamed themselves, something that Tom had always been uncomfortable about, believing that they had provoked her into it. They hated the man. There had been an occasion, near the end, before he left her, when he had rung the house. Their dad had answered the phone and shouted, yelled, at the man, and cracked the Formica of the telephone table with his fist.