A Natural

by Ross Raisin

  The sound of the buzzer cut through his reverie. The electric bleat of it made him coil up, his muscles forgetting, for a second, that they were not needed.

  He hung back while they queued up at the door and the liturgy of blessings started: “All the best, all the best…” Then he got up and went down the line, each face a portrait of captured fear and excitement. Ashlee Richards, Bobby Hart serenely inside himself, an object of muscular calm, Tom Pearman—a union of young players brimming with form and self-assurance, all so certain of their bright futures. He paused in front of Tom, not releasing his hand straightaway, holding his gaze until the momentum of the line took him away. Easter followed them out into the dim tunnel, which a few seconds later was immersed by the noise of the crowd as the team filed onto the pitch. He stayed behind after Curtis and the other non-involveds had headed off for the players’ lounge, until there remained just himself, alone, watching the winking bullet hole at the end of the tunnel.

  —

  In the turning outside his parents’ house Liam stood at the side of Leah’s car, his face towards the stadium, listening to the distant weather of crowd noise rolling and rising above the thin prattle of the Tannoy. The team was being announced. It was not possible to decipher the names, yet he could not help straining to hear.

  Leah looked at him over the dusty roof. “You look knackered, mate.”

  He grinned. “Enjoyed myself, though.”

  He had not expected to. He had not wanted to go on to the Hut, but they had persuaded him. It was a double leaving celebration, they had implored, prancing about, jumping on Leah, pinching her bottom. And I’m the queer, he had thought, shaking his head but agreeing. He was afraid of being spotted, that from the thick of the drunken mob on the dance floor a chant might start up. Or that he would be beaten up. Or propositioned. For the first couple of hours until he began to relax, he had clung to Leah at the bar, believing, even though he knew it was impossible, that he had seen the flash of Tom’s face among the packed dancing crowd.

  “What now then?” he said.

  Leah gave a frown of confusion. “What, me?”

  “You, yes.”

  “I’m cooking dinner for Mum and Robert when I get back, then some wedding planning with them. Meeting Maria, my college friend, at some point tomorrow.”

  He flicked a dead leaf at her across the car roof. “Not what I meant, but fine. One match at a time then.” And the memory of Tom, breathing onto his neck, hit him so heavily that he had to put both hands onto the car roof to support himself.

  His dad was approaching through the garden, carrying two loaves of bread and a four-pinter of milk.

  “What’s this?” Liam asked.

  “Your mother.”

  His dad stepped onto the pavement and unlocked the boot of his car. “Are you sure you won’t stop for a cup of tea, Leah?”

  “I’m fine, thank you. I’ll be getting back in a minute.”

  “Fair enough. Don’t go without saying cheerio,” he said and went back to the house.

  Leah turned again to Liam. “Have you heard from him?”

  “No.”

  “Does he even know?”

  Liam shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know.”

  She reached across the roof and he let her take his hand. The shape of a hut, faintly visible on her own wrist, was still prominent on his.

  “I’m going to go in and say goodbye to your mum and dad.”

  He watched her go through the garden, then turned in the direction of the stadium. The four towering lights burned in the gloom. He listened closely and could make out the tendrils of a chant, a yellow fog of lungs and throats dissipating over the rooftops. From where he stood, a slice of the metal cladding on the Riverside Stand was visible. He could feel the exact texture of it. The smoothness of the panels. The cracks inside which a silt of dirt and skin and shredded paper had compacted. His hands ran down it—the blind intimacy of his fingertips over rivets and chewing-gum scabs; the protruding stanchion of the floodlight at the base of the wall, bursting through the ruptured brickwork like the root of a tree. The foot-worn concrete at the bottom of the terrace, brightened with trails of arrival and tea-bar visits, celebrations, slow disappointed exits.

  He closed his eyes, remembering, from nowhere, lying with Tom on a dune. He touched the grass of the pitch. His palms skimmed over the thick pelt of sward, anticipating every dip and curve, every change in moisture, intuiting the invisible line across the surface beyond which the grass weakened in the winter shadow of the Kop. There were scars everywhere, known only to him. The toughened sinews of perished tubing. Tender patches of new growth over old wounds. He could feel the aliveness, the intricate biology of it, and it was his, even as the pressure of his touch against it abated, lifting, it would only ever be his.

  Leah was coming around the car towards him. When she was at his side she reached up to cradle his face in her hands and leaned in, unhesitant, to kiss him on the mouth. In the press of her lips and the small alien nose against his, something inside him released. He put his arms around her, his cheek sliding against her face, and there were his parents, frozen beside the rhododendron. He broke into laughter. When Leah, turning round, saw them too, a pair of bewildered garden gnomes, so did she.

  From the stadium a throttled roar swept through the dark.

  “You’ll call me?” Leah said.

  He turned back to her. “Yes.”

  “Call me tomorrow.” His dad was coming out of the garden, laden with tea bags, coffee, biscuits, margarine, still more bread. “Set my mind at rest that you’ve got enough to eat.”

  His dad put the supplies into the boot and took from his mum, arriving behind him, a set of pots and pans.

  “What are you doing?” Liam said. “I’m not going camping.”

  “Essentials,” his mum said. “Until you get a chance to do your first shop.”

  “When are you leaving?” Leah asked.

  “Any time now. Probably a three-hour drive, so we won’t get in till late, but I’m not meeting the principal until eleven tomorrow. Dad’s going to come along, make the introductions.”

  His dad moved over to them. “I’ve told Ian I’ll have lunch with him afterwards, if that’s all right.”

  “Yeah, fine. You can set him at ease that I’m not going to molest any of his students,” Liam said and saw straightaway that his parents were not ready for that kind of humor.

  “We’ll just be telling each other old stories. Boring stuff. But I’m sure he’d be happy for you to join us, if you want, get to know him outside the college.”

  “Thanks, Dad. We’ll see.”

  “OK,” Leah said, “I’m going now.”

  She got into her car. Over the rooftops there was another roar, this one quieter, drowned by the sound of the starting engine. His parents stood beside him and they watched her drive away.

  “Right, shall we?” his dad said, opening the door of his own car. “No need for a convoy, is there?”

  “No, I’ll meet you in a service station somewhere for a quick coffee break. I’ll ring you.”

  Everything he had imagined saying to his mum was at once lost in the soft warm armful of her. He did not need to speak, understanding now each of those silent private moments that he had peeked in upon in the kitchen. Except when he parted from her he did not feel like one of those boys, lost, failed; he just wanted to get onto the motorway.

  He could sense beside him the sad stranded ghost in the passenger seat.

  “Fuck them, mate,” he said aloud and started his car, an unfamiliar anticipation permeating him as he mouthed goodbye to his mum on the pavement and pulled out to follow his dad’s car onto the road.

  —

  He was inside the match, joined bodily to the fast-blooded life of it, performing without thought—feints, tricks—actions that he would not normally attempt even in training. It had been his cross, a low cut back into the feet of Munro, that had created the goal, and since the To
ttenham equalizer it was Tom that the players, the crowd exhorting them to regain the lead, were putting their faith in. His name rang from three sides of the ground. When the referee blew for halftime he fought the instinct to look up at the little loyal row of his family in the main stand, his breath becoming uneven as impermissible caged thoughts threatened to escape and he walked towards the tunnel with his sight trained immediately in front of him, on Beverley, the top of his crescent tattoo.

  Inside the tunnel Beverley stopped and waited for him. “This is fucking unreal,” he whispered to Tom while the impassive celebrity faces of the Tottenham team moved past them. “It’s fucking unreal, man.”

  Tom went to his place inside the dressing room. He could not focus on Wilko’s talk. The space about him was fuzzy. He felt shut off from everything around him, trapped inside himself. Wilko was stepping up to him. “This boy. Get this boy on the ball.” He walked away to talk to the defense and Tom did not hear the rest. When he did glance up, Easter was staring at him from the non-involveds’ corner, so he put his head down again, waiting for the buzzer, desperate to get back out onto the field, to never have to leave it.

  They were put under heavy pressure early in the second half. Tottenham began with a new intensity, hitting the post after one long passing move which the Town players, some already flagging, chased uselessly. There was a lull in the noise of the home support; the Tottenham fans awoke. When another Spurs attempt on goal went narrowly wide, Bobby let out a bellow of encouragement to the regrouping Town players, then, turning and clenching his fists, to the Kop. The crowd responded. One of the Tottenham forwards, smirking to a teammate as he jogged back, was confronted, his route blocked, by Bobby’s face. The noise inside the stadium increased again. Play became scrappy, each Tottenham move broken down by a boot, a lunge, a furious tackle.

  Tom hovered on the fringes, waiting. He could hear his heart battering but he was in control of himself, he thought, composed, capable of blocking out everything: the disjointed match, the faces of his parents, his sister, the seats at the edge of the disabled supporters’ stall, the medical room, the grass.

  He spotted the opening a split second before his marker. He darted into the space, taking Gundi’s through ball in his stride—and in that moment, free, running in on goal, he was at school, he was on the common, the only thought in his mind the certainty of what he was going to do with the ball. He took the shot early, before the goalkeeper went to ground, and he did not even see the net move; he saw the red length of the keeper’s neck, the crowd swimming, a plastic bottle high in the air, twirling and catching the beam of a floodlight. From somewhere in the Kop there was a small explosion of shredded paper, like a shot bird. Amid the whirl of noise and movement he looked up at the black sky and let out a scream which he was unable to hear and which did not stop, but kept on coming, emitting from him until his throat burned and it became no more than a dry howl, tears running down his face as his teammates were upon his back and he crumpled to the earth.

  For Toes, Maggie and Vic

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank Peter Straus, primarily. I don’t know quite how he does it, but his instinct and his loyalty have enabled me to write uninhibited by anything for the past decade, and I greatly appreciate it.

  On the books side of things, I am grateful to Michal Shavit, for her belief in this novel; to Ana Fletcher, Ellie Steel, Kat Ailes and Joe Pickering at Random House in the U.K.; to Ellah Allfrey and Mary Mount; and for this U.S. edition of the book to Melanie Jackson and Sam Nicholson. I feel that the novel has found a very good home here.

  Also to Adam Brown, Sarah Boyall and Jonny Goldspink, for sharing their experiences with me, and to Adrian Hassell for lending me his workspace.

  On the football side of things I would like to thank the following people for their insights and anecdotes: Riz Rehman and the Zesh Rehman Foundation, Megan Worthing Davies, the Justin Campaign, Rob Hassell, Trish Keppie, and Liam Davis. And especially Ian Darler and Max Rushden, both of whom gave me more stories than I knew how to handle.

  Thanks too, for helping facilitate some of these conversations, to Alex Goodwin, Jason McKeown, and Sheena Hastings.

  Finally, to BP and to JG, for giving me their time and knowledge. I would like to thank you more fully here, but am wary of the football world’s tendency to see things in simple terms, and I would not want a straight line to be drawn between some of the saltier episodes of this novel and yourselves, your clubs. The time that I spent with you both, though, was vital to my understanding of this world.

  And thank you, always, to Tips.

  BY ROSS RAISIN

  A Natural

  God’s Own Country

  Waterline

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ROSS RAISIN was born in West Yorkshire. His first novel, God’s Own Country, published in 2008, was shortlisted for nine literary awards, including the Guardian First Book Award. In 2009, Ross Raisin was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. In 2013, he was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. He lives in London.

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