A Natural

by Ross Raisin

  Tom looked through the spyhole at him trying to be inconspicuous, his dark bulk stepping softly past the bins, head down, teasing open the gate, checking the street, and a surge of hopeless devotion bled through him, making him stay there, shaking against the door, long after Liam had got into his car and driven away.

  27

  On Monday morning the club secretary, shortly after sitting at her desk to begin going through the pile of squad photographs that each of the first-team players was supposed to have signed for a mental health charity, received a call from a tabloid journalist. He had been given a tip-off, he told her, that the head groundsman at the club had been involved in a homosexual affair with a player there. He had read the official message board thread. He intended to write a piece. He was ringing to ask if the club wished to comment, and if he could speak to the groundsman.

  Half an hour later, she phoned him back with a statement:

  We have a policy of tolerance and openness at this club. It does not matter the sexual orientation, color, or any other issue to do with our staff, whether that be a club employee or a player. Any employee, or fan, or anybody else connected to the football club who is found to act in a discriminatory way towards a person because of their difference would be promptly and severely dealt with. We are pleased and proud, however, to say that such a situation has never arisen here.

  And no, the groundsman would not be available for comment.

  They were satisfied enough with the statement, drawn up between the club secretary, the chairman and the operations manager in the sweaty leather interior of the chairman’s Jaguar, that they decided to put the same words on the club website and Facebook page, should any piece be published. The official message board was closed down by lunchtime. “No announcement, no noise,” the chairman instructed. “We should have bloody done it a week ago. Years ago.” The club secretary also suggested flying a discreet rainbow flag somewhere within the stadium—other clubs had done it, she pointed out—probably on top of the disabled supporters’ stall.

  The only remaining matter, for the time being, was the groundsman.

  —

  Liam sat in the quiet cool dark of the shed. Through the opening at the bottom of the roller shutters a line of sunlight irradiated the concrete. He let his eyes rest on it, listening for any sound coming through the slit.

  The squad were on the other side of the field, beginning a second circuit of the pitches. He got up and went to the fridge, where he took out the carrier bag containing his lunch—ham sandwich, sausage roll twin-pack—and returned to his position behind the tractor.

  The sandwich remained poised in his hands while he waited, forecasting the squad’s progress, past the clubhouse, the goal line of the far pitch, the long stretch along the road fencing, until he could hear the rumbling earth. His thumbs dug into the bread. They were alongside the shed. He counted the seconds, and for an instant he thought that they had passed until there came the violent clatter of palms on the shutters. The space filled with the roar of it. And then it was gone. A trail of laughter as they carried on down the side of the pitches. The sandwich lay squashed in his lap, both of his hands braced for some time longer against the smooth neck of the tractor.

  He ate what he could of his lunch, made himself a tea, slowly relaxing with the small familiar sounds of the fridge door, the kettle, the cars on the road dulled by the thick wall. In a few minutes the squad would begin their drills on the clubhouse pitch and he could get to work. He drank his tea, looking about the shed, putting his mind at ease with the steady ordering of his tasks: cutting down the branches overhanging the fence, patching the fox holes, changing the rotary mower’s blade.

  He had understood straightaway the reason for the operations manager’s phone call last week, asking if Pete might benefit from getting some match-day experience and take charge of the Yeovil game. To his surprise, it had come as a relief to have it taken out of his hands. There had been no mention of further home matches, but he knew that sooner or later he would have to be there. To sit in the stand. To go onto the pitch to replace the first-half divots. Pete had not called to debrief him after the match. They had hardly spoken at all in the past week, except for one short, tight conversation about sand bands that had left him drained with anxiety, certain that Pete was in the know.

  In one corner of the shed last season’s unrenewed billboards leaned, ready to use as bad-weather platforms for pitch repair work. He let his eyes rest on the top one: WILSON’S TYRES. Behind it, ABC SECURITY, THE YARD WINE WAREHOUSE, PEEL DAVIS LOCK AND KEY SOLUTIONS, CENTURION PLANT HIRE, a list of premises that he could no longer go into without an awareness that their staff, management, customers all knew, that they had been gossiping about him. About his dad. His gut caved at the thought of his parents, a few nights ago at their kitchen table, speaking gently and wanting to hug him, shushing him when he began pathetically to cry, like one of their released lodgers. His mum’s face against his own. “Why could you not tell us, Liam? We don’t understand why you couldn’t tell us.” His dad beside her. “It’ll blow over. Don’t worry. It’ll blow over, will this.”

  “The fuck it will,” he had muttered, unable to look at him.

  He got up and went to the door, opening it a little. The squad were grouped by the French windows, listening to the number two. At the back, partly obscured by the dense tanned head of Jones, he could make out Tom. Through the limbering necks and shoulders he was standing perfectly still, his eyes set on the number two. Liam continued to watch, craving some minute supple action of his body, but he did not move.

  Tom had not called last night. It was the first time they had not spoken since his return a week ago. Liam had stayed up debating whether or not to ring or text, but could think of nothing new to add to their previous conversations. They would tell each other that they were OK. That they could not meet again yet. It felt to him, even more since Tom’s coolness on Saturday, as though they were both waiting for something but that neither of them knew what it was.

  There had been a lot of banter in the dressing room on Tom’s first day back, he had said, but less the following day, and—even if Liam was not entirely able to believe him—there had been little obvious reaction directed towards himself other than the game of rattling the shutters and the occasional shout above the mower on that first morning when he was foolish enough to go out onto the grass while they were warming up. The forum thread, threads, had mostly fractured into myriad battlegrounds of jokes and abuse between posters, and in his thorough and constant searching of the Internet he had found no other reference anywhere. A hope was beginning to grow within him that maybe it would, indeed, eventually blow over. But then he thought about the crowd. Alone and exposed amid the eyes and noise. The breathing white wall of the terraces, surrounding his pitch.

  The squad were walking off towards one of the goal areas. He watched for a moment longer, seeking Tom, before his attention was broken by the sound of his phone.

  —

  His dad was already waiting for him at a table near the back of the cafe.

  “Liam.” He got up, smiling, and sat down again. “You’ve not had your lunch yet, have you?”

  “Sort of, but I’ll eat.”

  Although he had managed some of his sandwich and one of the sausage rolls, the prospect of a cooked meal was appealing. It was over a week since he had eaten in the canteen, and his evening meals had been reduced to delivered curries and Chinese, or pizzas pried from the gray fur of ice at the bottom of the Polish minimarket’s chest freezer. When his housemates were at home, he ate in his room. He listened to them from upstairs, coming and going to their jobs and girlfriends just as before, a little conversation around the kettle in the early morning, a little more in front of the television on the nights they were in together. If they knew anything about what was going on, they had not brought it up; neither was a Town fan.

  “What do you want to eat?” his dad asked.

  “Not sure…Lasagna. Ch
ips and salad. Cup of tea.”

  “Top man.” His dad went up to the counter and ordered the same for them both. When he returned he gave Liam a swift pat on the shoulder before sitting down.

  “So,” he said. “I spoke to the chairman earlier.”

  “Right.”

  “There’s been something of a development, and I’m not going to cushion it because I don’t think there’s much in it. OK?” An old woman near the door started coughing loudly, repeatedly. When she had finished, he continued. “There was a call this morning from a journalist. He’s heard something about what’s gone on, so he said, and he’s wanting to talk to you. But you’re best not to. And then there’s no story.”

  “There won’t be a story, then?”

  “There might be something, I don’t know, but without you I don’t see that there’s anywhere to go with it. Sounds to me like your typical opportunist hack, sniffing around. Just don’t speak to him, simple as that.”

  “I don’t want to speak to anybody.”

  “Good. Well, that’ll please the chairman.”

  “Sent you to stop me, then, did he?”

  “He did, if I’m being honest. But that’s not why I’m here. I wanted you to hear this from me, is all. The thing is, you’ve not technically done anything wrong, but if you spoke to the press then he’d probably call that bringing the club into disrepute, and then you could guess where he’d go from there.”

  “Technically.”

  “I’m thinking about it from the club’s perspective, son. You know that as far as I’m concerned, your mum’s concerned, you’ve done absolutely nothing wrong.”

  He tried to make eye contact but Liam turned away. Across the room, the old woman was gripping the arm of her chair and was then seized by another fit of coughing. Fine wandering clouds of spittle were lit up in the light from the glass door, chasing after one another in the sunshine.

  “What are they saying in the boardroom?”

  “I’ve not been involved until now. I’ll tell you this, though. If they try and do anything to you I will reveal every dirty little secret they’ve got. Referee sweeteners, illegal cameras, illegal payments to parents, attendance fiddling, the lot.”

  The man was coming with their lasagnas. Liam did not look up at him when he put them on the table. He was a Town fan, Liam knew. Sometimes, if he got a bacon sandwich here on his way in, they spoke about matches, players.

  “I don’t know how to talk about this with you, Liam.”

  “About what?”

  “Any of it. But you know that you can. I’d like to, if you would. To be honest we’re still trying to understand why you’ve never talked to us, any of us—Andrew, Sarah—”

  “You’ve told Andrew and Sarah?”

  “We’ve spoken, yes. Haven’t they called?”

  Liam plunged a fork into the middle of the microwaved lasagna and put it into his mouth, letting it burn at the smooth tight membrane of his palate, and without warning he was thinking about Tom—Tom’s tongue pushing between his lips, sliding into his mouth.

  “Is there anything that you want to talk about?”

  Liam shook his head.

  “Fair enough.”

  His dad reached across the table and placed his hand, palm down, alongside Liam’s plate. For a few seconds it stayed there, then he pulled it back. The old woman was getting up. She shuffled over to the table by the counter where the papers were. She leafed through them, finally picking one up and taking it back to her place. She began to read it and Liam could not take his eyes off her, until she grumbled to herself, “Last week’s,” and slapped it onto a neighboring table.

  His dad left him outside the cafe after making him agree to come over for dinner one day later in the week. From the moment he said yes, Liam’s mind was on their three new lodgers, angst building again as he thought about how far his disgrace might have spread through the intact beating organ of the football club, the town, the media, the unending veined possibilities of the Internet.

  He drove the few minutes to the training ground, calming down on the lane at the sight of his empty pitches, the patterns of shadow over them from the early autumn sun riddling through the trees. He tried to block the journalist from his mind. When he reached the shed he turned off his phone, putting it on the shelf of machinery keys, and pulled on his gloves.

  After each morning of high alertness, waiting for the players to leave, afternoons were a mercy. The smallest task took him out of his head and into a rhythmical green world of lines and calculations and chemicals, the instinctive nurturing of his land.

  He did not look at his phone when he picked it up at the end of the afternoon. Only when he got home, via the Polish minimarket, did he turn it back on again, in his room. There was a missed call from an unknown number. He lay down on his bed, fighting the compulsion to call Tom, knowing that he could not burden him.

  He phoned Leah, remembering, as her recorded voice kicked in, that she might be at college for one of her new module evenings. He left a message, asking if they could meet up, and went downstairs before his housemates came home, to cook his pizza.

  —

  The morning was still dark when he searched the Internet again. There was nothing. He checked again an hour later, and left the house early to drive across town to an Indian newsagent’s, where he inspected all the papers that did not put their full content online, as well as the ones that did, once more, in their printed versions. There was still nothing.

  By lunchtime the unknown number had called twice more. He switched his phone back on while he ate and immediately deleted the voicemails as well as a text which he tried not to look at but glimpsed the opening: “Sorry to contact out of…” Again his first thought was to speak to Tom, about anything, not even to mention the journalist, but again he talked himself out of it. Tom would be getting ready to board the coach to Bristol. This news would disrupt his concentration, the new focus he had found since coming into the manager’s favor. Besides which, it was possible there would not be a piece, so to involve Tom now would be selfish. Because it was not about Tom. Tom had not been exposed. As far as the forum rumor was concerned, it was about Liam. And a former player. It did not have anything to do with Tom, apparently, but instead with that one night years ago. The memory, so long buried alongside the other transgressions of his youth, kept resurfacing now, perfectly preserved, as palpable and alive as it had been in the moment he had followed the man into the darkened hotel room, watched him undress in the thin green light of the alarm clock, heard the catch of his breath at their first touch. And it was the very exposing of himself—the truth of it—that made him want to keep Tom on the outside. A quiet acceptance of shame that was embedding itself inside him, which was not theirs, but his, his alone.

  At home, in his room, he deleted the new voicemail from the unknown caller, then phoned and left another message for Leah. Tom texted late that night, when the coach got in: “Started tonight. Good draw on balance. Wilko pleased how I played.” Liam replied, “Good stuff, well done,” sent it and tried to go to sleep, realizing, as the murky presence of the journalist entered the room, that this was the first time a Town match had ended and he had not known the score.

  28

  Leah sat on the bench by the lake, beside the space on the grass that the pram would normally occupy. Liam had not wanted to meet at the furniture store or a pub, or anywhere else but here, her lake. And even in this secluded place, she thought, watching his approach underneath the line of trees, he appeared wary, looking every few strides at the two men fishing by the lakeside. They had not seen each other in the week and a half since the phone call when she had sat up in bed whispering weak reassurances to him, hoping that Chris was not listening through the wall.

  He sat down next to her. “Who are they?”

  “The fishermen?”

  “Yes, those two.”

  “They’re fishermen.”

  Liam looked from one to the other.

 
; “They’re always here,” she said.

  The man nearer them swung back his rod, then launched it at the water. A gentle ripple moved across the surface.

  “This is probably a cruising place, the way things are going.”

  She thought she should laugh or punch him on the arm, but caution held her back. “This isn’t a cruising place,” she said.

  He was unshaven. Hair that she had never seen before ran scraggily down his thick throat. He was wearing a dirty red and green T-shirt, a brown sports fleece over the top. Even now it still amazed her that he was gay.

  “The papers know,” he said.

  It took her a moment to fathom what he was talking about.

  “There’s something in the papers? What, about you?”

  “No, not yet. But there might be. There’s some journalist who’s been on to the club. He wants to speak to me.”

  She was about to ask if he was going to agree but caught herself, registering from his expression that it was the wrong question. “How does he know?”

  He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  When he first called, this had been the thing that he had been most worked up about. Who? Which fucking arsehole? Who? And after the dreadful pause of her realization, as he recited the post to her, all she had been able to say was, Maybe Tom told Beverley about the Internet thing?

  “What does Tom think?” she asked.

  Liam shook his head. She resisted asking him anything further. On the road a car beeped, and they both turned to see it speeding past a cyclist—the cyclist lifting a finger at the disappearing vehicle.

  “We’ve not spoken for a few days,” Liam said. “He’s getting starts. He’s doing well.”

  She struggled to find an appropriate thing to say. “It’ll all be forgotten in a week or two,” she said, and stared hard at the lake, hating herself.

  But after a silence he stood up and, to her surprise, kicked her foot playfully. “Thank you.”