by Alison Bond
Left, right, left, right.
It was starting to get dark and he knew that soon his nan would call him in for dinner and then his dad would get back from work and his precious football time would be over. Dad liked to have a kick-about in the garden, but that was always the same: he stood in goal and let Joe score. It was fun, and he particularly liked making his dad laugh with elaborate scoring celebrations, but it wasn’t making him a better player. If he wanted to play for Arsenal one day then he needed serious practice, not silly games.
And Dad never took anything seriously.
Thwack went the ball against the brick wall. Thwack. Thwack.
He heard the back gate of the house next door open and heard footsteps in their garden. Then a little blonde girl that looked pretty enough to be on the telly sprang through a hole in the hedge, surprising him and making him miss, kicking out at nothing and almost falling over.
She walked to the stray ball, picked it up and walked away with it under her arm without saying a word.
‘Hey!’ said Joe. ‘Hey, that’s my ball.’ It was a recent gift from his dad, the exact same style of ball that was being used in the World Cup qualifiers, a ball too big and too expensive for any regular seven-year-old, and Joe loved it dearly. ‘Hey!’
But the little girl didn’t even turn round. So Joe did what any seven-year-old would do. He ran inside and told his nan.
His lip quivered as he told the tale of the terrible thief next door and the loss of his beloved ball, so she marched next door with her grandson and rang the front doorbell.
The little blonde girl answered, her nose high in the air. ‘May I help you?’ she said.
‘That’s her,’ said Joe, nudging his nan with his elbow and glaring at the girl. ‘That’s the robber.’
‘Hello, Layla,’ said his nan, who had known the little girl since the day she came home from the hospital as a pink newborn. ‘What’s all this about you stealing my grandson’s football?’
‘I didn’t steal it,’ said Layla. ‘I confiscated it.’
‘What does “confiscate” mean?’ said Joe.
‘Who are you and why do you talk funny?’ said Layla.
‘This is my grandson, Josef,’ said his nan. ‘He lives in Poland. Joe, “confiscate” is just a big word that means taking something away. So why did you confiscate his football, Layla?’
The little girl took his nan’s hand and led her through the house to the back garden. Joe followed, convinced that this girl was evil incarnate.
‘See there?’ said Layla, pointing at the big brick wall he had been practising against, the perfect wall, big and flat with a smooth, even lawn in front of it. ‘That’s where he was kicking.’
‘That’s my wall,’ said Joe.
‘No,’ said Layla, ‘it’s mine.’
She took them back inside and Joe realized that actually she was right; his wall belonged to her house and he had been aiming the ball roughly at the place where the television was. ‘Bang, bang, bang,’ she said. ‘It was too noisy.’
‘Oh,’ said Joe. He could see how it might be.
‘You can have your ball back when Grange Hill has finished and the news is on,’ she said. ‘Okay?’
‘What’s Grange Hill?’
Layla’s eyes widened in alarm. How could anyone not know what Grange Hill was?
‘You can watch it with me if you like,’ she said generously. ‘I’ve got Quavers.’
He didn’t know what Quavers were either. He looked at his nan, who nodded and smiled. ‘Would you like that, Joe?’
How was he supposed to know?
By the end of the short children’s television programme Joe had decided that he loved English television, he loved English crisps, but mostly he loved the girl called Layla who lived next door to his grandmother.
The courage to tell her had eluded him for the last ten years.
His nan still lived in the same place, and though he had by now seen and stayed at his dad’s place in Leyton (and his dad had by now moved to a two-bedroom place, which he had briefly and disastrously tried to share with a raunchy black woman called Maureen), Joe much preferred spending his English weekends in West Sussex. Simon came down as soon as he finished work on Friday and they spent the next two days as a relatively happy family.
Joe was sharing a cup of tea and a biscuit with his nan while they watched one of her favourite daytime quiz shows when he heard the tell-tale crunch of the gravel in next door’s driveway. He looked up immediately, like a deer hearing a twig snap in the woods and his nan smiled affectionately. ‘Go on,’ she said.
It had been almost a month since he’d last seen Layla. Weekend fixtures had kept him away. He wondered whether she had thought about him in that time. It was stupid to think that she might have thought about him as much as he thought about her, but it might be nice if he had entered her head once or twice.
Joe thought about Layla pretty much all the time.
He wondered what she was doing, who she was spending her time with, what she thought about things that were in the news, whether she liked records he heard or was interested in the English books he started to read just in case she might read them too. He thought about the shape of her face, the angles of her smile, the sweet curves of her body. Mostly he thought about what she would say when he told her that he loved her, and how he would ever find the courage to say it at all. Because Joe truly loved Layla intensely, like the lyrics of a love song, but he was convinced that she could never love him back, so he kept silent.
One day he thought the perfect moment would arise. In his most frequent daydreams about that moment he didn’t have to say anything at all; she realized that he was her soulmate, and they just sort of fell into each other naturally and made plans for the rest of their lives.
He watched her now as she parked her new Fiat Uno in the driveway and spent a few moments gathering her things before getting out of the car. He stayed hidden in the alleyway, finding intimacy in the simple act of observing her and knowing that she was being entirely herself, unaware that she was being watched. The way she lifted her thick blonde fringe from her eyes almost killed him.
Maybe the perfect moment would be tonight.
She climbed out of her car, one shapely denim-clad leg at a time, wearing boots he hadn’t seen before, but carrying the same handbag she’d had last time, and he stepped out so that she would see him.
‘Joe!’
Her grey-green eyes flared with an easy smile and he felt his heart lurch sideways as it always did when Layla smiled.
‘Nobody told me you were coming,’ she said. ‘It feels like ages.’ She threw her arm round his shoulder in half a hug.
‘Four weeks,’ he said, and then immediately wondered if that sounded weird, like he’d been counting.
She released her grip on him then and his soul gave a little sigh of disappointment, already wondering when next he might touch her.
‘Come inside,’ she said. ‘Shall we have a drink? Do you have time before your dinner? I’ve so much to tell you.’
‘Me too,’ he said. He wanted to tell her about signing with Samantha Sharp, about playing in the UEFA Cup, about edging one step closer to his dreams. He wanted her to be proud.
Joe had been looking forward to telling his dad about the UEFA Cup almost as much as telling Layla. Telling Dad lasted less than thirty seconds, then he sat on his own and watched telly while his dad told everyone else. He knew that he should have been pleased by the way his dad leapt up to phone all his mates, but he felt a bit hollow. It was clear that his dad was proud, but Joe would have liked some of that pride to be reflected onto him instead of immediately thrown out to the wider world. Instead of ‘well done, son,’ it was more a case of ‘hasn’t my son done well?’
When he told Layla she reacted exactly the way he would have wanted her to.
‘Ohmigod! That’s amazing!’ she said, and she flung her arms around him again, pressing her chest up against his so that he was
scared she would ask him why his heart was racing, thereby presenting him with the perfect moment to tell her that for years now she had been the measure of his dreams. He wanted to tell her how he felt about her, but nothing terrified him more.
‘I was wondering,’ he said nervously – for what he wanted to say now was not a declaration of love, but it was still scary – ‘I was wondering if maybe you fancied coming over for the match?’
‘To Krakow?’
She’d never been, and he thought this was an opportunity. He would play the best game of his life, score a hat-trick, be named man of the match. She couldn’t fail to be impressed. His mind had played out a thousand times what it would be like to show her his home town, where he could take her to the hidden romantic spots where one thing might lead to another and kissing her on the lips would be as easy and natural as breathing. Or maybe if that didn’t work then getting her drunk on Polish vodka instead.
She liked drinking, Layla, and the last time they were drunk together, New Year’s Day, she’d been totally blotto on Nan’s lethal punch and he had thought at one point that if he’d snogged her she would have been up for it. She might not have remembered it, but she would have snogged him back all the same. But his nerve had failed him that night. In Krakow, fresh from a triumphant football match, on his turf, maybe (surely?) things would be different.
‘When is it exactly?’ she said, and he gave her the date, trying not to sound like her answer meant everything to him.
‘Oh shit,’ she said, ‘I think we have plans. I can see if I can get out of it.’
He felt dizzy and saw spots in front of his eyes. We? We? Who the fuck was ‘we’?
‘We?’ he said faintly.
‘Me and Daniel. Ohmigod! I haven’t told you about Daniel?’
And so Joe sat there for twenty minutes, without question the longest, most painful twenty minutes of his life, feeling like someone was scraping out his heart with an old teaspoon while Layla, his soulmate, the only girl he had ever loved, described exactly when and how she had fallen in love with someone else.
20
Samantha felt like crying. ‘No, no, you’re not listening to me! We’ve been through this already. Why don’t you listen? There has to be a way we can make this work.’ The will to live drained out of her and her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘There has to be.’
‘I’m sorry Ms Sharp, but there are no direct flights between Georgia and Croatia. The only way you can be back in Krakow for the seventeenth is to drop one of the destinations on your itinerary, or leave a day earlier and take a connecting flight to Frankfurt.’
Her mobile phone started to ring, the shrill sound making it even harder to concentrate. How could it be so difficult to book a few flights?
‘Just forget it,’ she said. ‘Forget the whole thing.’ She slammed down the phone and picked up her mobile. ‘Hello?’
‘Samantha? This is Natalya. I wait for you in the square but you do not come?’
Shit. She checked the time. She was over an hour late for her second Russian lesson. How could she have forgotten about it? ‘I’ll come now,’ she said. ‘I’ll come right now.’
‘I’m sorry. But I have another student. I will see you next week?’
‘Next week I’m away, two weeks, okay? I’m so sorry, Natalya.’
At this rate it would take her for ever to learn a few words of Russian. She thought back to learning languages at evening classes and from tapes a decade ago, how quickly her callow brain had picked up the new skills. It seemed harder these days.
When she told Liam that she was moving abroad for a while she admired the way he had been able to pretend that it didn’t bother him.
‘It’s a good idea,’ he said. ‘Running away works, I don’t care what they say.’
‘Is that what you think I’m doing?’
‘Aren’t you? I’m serious. It works. You can’t get out of trouble by sticking around. You think I wouldn’t have run if I’d had the chance? I lie in bed sometimes thinking about exactly how I would have pulled it off if only I’d had the forethought.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’d have run away from that accident as fast as I could have. My legs were still working, weren’t they? I’d have gone to Uruguay I think. Today it’s Uruguay, last week it was New Zealand and for a long time it was Tahiti. Imagine what kind of adventures I might have had, eh?’
Samantha couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. She experienced a stab of something that felt suspiciously like indignation. She knew it was silly and selfish but … he’d have run away, would he? What about her?
‘Just daydreams,’ he said, ‘just killing time. I have plenty of that. No adventures, just time. Tell me about Poland.’
‘Not just Poland,’ she said. ‘Most of Central Europe, and certainly Eastern Europe is currently underexploited. There’s a few big clubs getting the scouts’ attention, but there are plenty of smaller leagues too and I’m convinced they’ll have some kids worth knowing about. It’ll be hard, but …’
‘If anyone can do it,’ he said, ‘you can.’
She twisted a piece of paper between her fingers, a flyer she hadn’t even looked at yet. ‘I’ll try to get back whenever I can,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know if it will be every week.’
Liam shrugged. ‘When was it ever every week?’
‘I’m sorry. You know I look forward to seeing you so much.’
‘It’s all right, Sammy, really. My next parole hearing is just round the corner. It’s almost over.’
Hope leapt in her belly, but she had been disappointed in the past and allowed herself just a modest amount of cautious optimism. ‘Great,’ she said. ‘That’s great news.’
‘Maybe. Let’s wait and see.’
‘I’ll miss you.’
He didn’t say that he’d miss her too. She was sure that he would; she was the only person in his life, after all. But, still, it might have been nice to hear. She was secretly nervous as hell about her new project. It was brave and bold and ambitious, all the things that she saw as her greatest assets. But perhaps, just perhaps, she might be aiming for something impossible. Each day that passed in Krakow presented a new challenge. Nothing had been easy.
The phone beeped with a call waiting. It was a representative of the football club in Georgia she had hoped to visit, wanting to know if she would need a hotel.
‘I’ll have to call you back.’
Hang on. If she was an hour late for her lesson with Natalya then that meant that any minute now …
There was a knock at the door. ‘Miss Sharp? We were unable to reach you on the phone. There is a gentleman waiting for you in reception?’
‘Thank you. If you tell him I’ll just be a minute?’ She had to find her shoes and her jacket; her day had started before she was quite ready. ‘Five minutes!’ she added, remembering the Polish tendency towards literalism.
She finished getting dressed and located the paperwork for this meeting under a bunch of unpaid invoices she’d had from the freelance translators she’d hired to set up initial introductions to the top clubs. Through them she had been able to speak to coaches and garner invitations to training sessions. Now they all needed to be paid. She was happy enough to use her own money to set up. She would pay herself back after the transfer window, but the time necessary to open a Polish current account and write some cheques was eluding her.
Much as she hated to admit it, things were getting on top of her. And, thinking again of Aleksandr, unfortunately not the right things.
She made it downstairs just a few minutes late, in time to meet and greet the coach of the top club in Warsaw, in town with his squad for a match with one of Krakow’s other teams. He had said that he spoke English, but once they got talking it was clear he’d had somebody else write the emails they’d exchanged. The language barrier was insurmountable and the entire meeting was a waste of time.
She was disappointed with his lack of English.
&
nbsp; He was disgusted that she was a woman.
Breakfast, she decided. Maybe with some food inside her she would feel more positive, and it would stop looking as though she had taken on too big a challenge. Why had she decided to set up here where she knew no one and the damn language was a constant frustration? Why not England?
You know why. In England she was tainted with scandal, had resigned in mysterious circumstances, was fired by her biggest clients. And she’d immediately left the country so she must be guilty. Perhaps she had played this all wrong. Perhaps her tactics were fatally flawed. If she didn’t get it together out here then what?
Would she have to admit that she was a failure?
The restaurant had stopped serving so she went to the sports bar on the ground floor where she’d be able to get some eggs.
At least in the Sheraton you never had to worry about the language barrier. It was well known that they paid the highest wages in town, but you had to have at least three languages, one of them English, to even be seen for a job. And be beautiful. But beauty came as standard in this part of the world.
‘Orange juice and coffee, please,’ she said while she perused the menu.
Maybe if everything fell apart she would get a job here. And who could say that she wouldn’t be happy as a waitress? Noticing the little things instead of her manic focus on the bigger picture. Where had being this career woman taken her exactly, except all alone?
A familiar voice was the perfect salve for her crisis of confidence. ‘Mixing your drinks, Sam? At this hour?’
Leanne was perched on a bar stool slurping a mint-chocolate milkshake.
Samantha jumped up and hugged her former assistant.
Leanne pulled back in disgust. ‘A hug?’ she said. ‘You’ve never done that before. Things must be worse than I thought.’
‘How did you know I was here?’
