A fox walks along the towpath in the same direction as Mark, nose up, a patch of grey-orange fur missing from its flank and its ribs sticking through, but shiny eyed and alert. Following him, Joey thinks, not just chance, trotting along there with his nose up, on to a scent. Joey tries not to believe in bad luck. They say there’s a curse on the ground. He missed that fucking penalty on purpose, for one thing, is what Joey thinks. The fox goes on its way into the gloom under the bridge. More thoughts of carrion.
…
They are not Portuguese. None of them are, even the young lad himself, Luis, who is from Cape Verde.
‘This is Liam Corwen, club captain,’ Ally says. Liam shakes hands with the two men who have stepped from the Mercedes. He sees himself and Ally reflected in their sunglasses. Another man sits in shadow in the rear of one of the cars, does not move. Liam turns to the young kid who stands next to them in his green tracksuit. His hand feels like a little boy’s. Liam thinks of Jari, thinks of his hand in his.
‘Liam, these are Luis’s representatives.’
‘I’m sure they are, gaffer.’
Ally gives him a look, but what to say?
Ally worked at Sporting Lisbon, coached there under Malcolm Allison, so this Portuguese bit at least sounds true. The rest is a mystery. One thing Liam is certain of is that only he and this slight boy he now leads down the corridor’s torn lino to the dressing room are not set to make something from this little pantomime. Steve Stringer’s absence only adds to Liam’s suspicion. The club secretary holds the place together, haunts it in his baggy, grey suits, invisible most of the time, filling out forms and talking on the phone in his office, which sits gloriously out of time, with stencilled lettering on frosted glass, inside the West Stand. The directors meet every now and again for some sausage rolls and a chat about the season. The club is owned by the last of the Greenfield family – Dorothea Greenfield-Carter – who lives out her old age in the Madeira sun. The last of the line, she refuses to invest, or sell, or do anything at all with her absolute control of the club.
Liam knows the look that comes from behind the glasses. Older men watch much younger ones and calculate what they might make from them. Reflected glory, reflected youth, cold, hard cash. Not that Luis’s representatives, as Ally calls them – Ally is good with the jargon – are that old. Liam is maybe even giving them a few years, smooth skinned men in expensive suits, the world shining in their glasses. They are of indeterminate ethnicity, a phrase Liam read in the paper, but then aren’t we all, he thought at the time. And the boy looks about fourteen. What must he make of this, on his route from Cape Verde to Lisbon to who knows where via the Anvil Yards? Liam ushers him towards a corner of the dressing room.
‘You know Eusébio?’
‘Eusébio?’ The kid has no idea what he is talking about.
Liam untucks his shirt and lifts it to show two men inked onto his right flank. Eusébio and Di Stéfano look at each other at a moment of passing, the 1962 European Cup Final, Benfica 5 Real Madrid 3. Eusébio has just scored.
‘Eusébio,’ Luis grins, says the name again but it sounds different this time.
‘He played here, you know. Trained here. Three times. For the Rest of the World, for Portugal in the World Cup, and with Benfica, before the cup final against United. Played here.’
‘Here?’
Luis looks around at the dressing room, widens his eyes. He is quick, Liam senses. He bets he can run like water.
‘Right here, yeah. You think I’m pulling yer leg.’
Liam smiles and so does the boy. The Eusébio stuff is all true. In the sixties the club was in the second division but the Greenfield family still had some say at the Football Association, told everyone that the Iron Towns were an easy drive to Wembley.
Liam points again at the picture.
‘Real Madrid,’ Luis says.
‘Yeah, Di Stéfano.’
‘And this one?’
The boy points to a dark-eyed figure, a glitter to his eyes and a toothpick clamped in the corner of his mouth, his gaze equal parts magic and menace.
‘Billy Meredith.’
‘And this one?’
The dark-eyed man looks at a pale-faced boy in an old-fashioned England shirt, his face open and innocent.
‘Steve Bloomer.’
For a while he and Tony had concentrated on pairs, on great players as they passed each other on the way up, on the way down. There’s one of Van Basten coming on as sub for Ajax, Cruyff coming off, holding his hand out to shake.
‘I don’t know this ones.’
‘Old players.’
‘You have Ronaldo?’
‘The old one, the Brazilian one. I’m not allowed players who are still playing.’
It is true, but Liam sets the rules himself. He feels good saying it, though, like this was some bigger thing than himself.
Liam unbuttons his shirt, takes it off, stretches his arms out to the sides and turns to show Luis the image of Ronaldo between his shoulder blades, arms outstretched too, as Christ the Redeemer above Rio. They copied it from a tyre advert but put him in his Barcelona shirt.
‘I like Ronaldo. This one. But Cristiano is better.’
‘You play like him?’
The boy laughs. ‘More like Messi, maybe.’ He grins.
Liam likes this lad. God knows what he is doing here.
…
The film is from a January morning. Alina has recorded so much now that she is months behind with what she watches. This one is possible, though. Although possible for what she is not sure, some exhibition that exists only in her head. When there was no cloud those winter mornings were good, better than the summer glare, something to do with the angle at which the sun comes over the hill at Burnt Village. To think she didn’t know the sun rose at different places, from different angles, until she’d started this work. Hardly work, really. She didn’t know what to call it, thinks instead of a word to describe the light and is left scratching her head. Sunrises, sunsets were not thought of as appropriate subject matter at art school, but still. The sunrise is not really the subject. We are flying through space on a giant rock.
There is a thin line of blue above the far hills. Yellow streetlights pattern the foreground, then there is the dark mass of the docks and the Anvil Yards. Venus shines bright above a black hill. The blue line broadens, lightens slowly. A red sun comes up into the blue band. Plane contrails form between what clouds there are. On the far hillside Burnt Village looks just that as the sun appears to swallow it. The outline of charred houses is silhouetted against the sun. Light and shade ripple across the valley, then the light evens, as the sun, golden now, rises behind clouds.
It’s fine. It’s OK. The light is good. The way it comes green down the hillsides might make you think of a time there were no towns here at all. But it’s not what she wants.
Then she has a thought, simply plays it backwards. The sun sinks back towards the middle of England. The light fades, slowly, slowly, then fast. The hills burn again, then that last band of blue takes ages to disappear. But time has reversed, run back on itself. And it is so very simple. She wonders now if this is too simple, too easy, no soundtrack, no other explanation, nothing. But that is exactly what she wants: time running backwards, time lapsing, folding in on itself.
…
‘Blisters, fucking blisters, but.’
The dressing room is hot and silent.
‘Blisters. Unbelievable. Professional footballers who cannot think to look after their feet.’
They sit and stare at the tiles. Julius Williams has a wet towel over his head. Steam rises from it. Kyran Blackstock, one of the kids who has come up from the youth team, grins and tries to catch someone’s eye to highlight this phenomenon. Liam gives him a look and he puts his head down, eyes to the floor. Kyran won’t last five minutes, Liam thinks.
They are not all professionals. Ally’s wrong on that score. They’re still playing triallists, got a couple of lads over f
rom Ireland, an attempt to get a few more warm bodies in before the season starts.
They are two nothing down to a team of part-timers. The pitch is a moonscape. Ally needs something on which to focus his anger. Liam watches him. The man is chewing, red faced, as if sick of the world and the injustice of it all, but Liam can tell he is trying to work himself into this anger, moving his false teeth up and down his gums. He’s had enough. This, with everything else, does not bode well for the season ahead. It’s as if Ally knows what he should do, knows how he should be feeling, knows the rage these players expect and deserve, as he looks from face to face, but the anger isn’t there. He’s finished, Liam thinks suddenly to himself. Ally breathes hard, looks at the wall, pulls at his shirt collar. He’s in his third spell as Irontown manager, is sixty-six now. One more season, he told himself, back in May, kidded himself if he could get a decent couple of players in they might be good for the play-offs, delusional. Finish with one last promotion. One last bit of pride. He is a man who believes he was destined for bigger things than this. He played on the fringe of the Lisbon Lions team, the Quality Street Gang after that, grew up in Finnieston, like Danny McGrain who always got picked before him, chased the ball on the cinders under the crane as a kid, a Protestant boy who played proudly at Celtic, like McGrain and Dalglish, like Jock Stein himself. He has half a team complaining about their feet.
‘Fucking blisters.’
This is how Liam comes to get on that afternoon, not that things improve much. They let in another goal ten minutes from the end after a scramble in the six yard box following a corner. Liam loses his man, their big striker, and he hopes Ally does not see it in the dust storm.
The kid barely gets a kick. Liam has almost forgotten about him in the humiliation, the day’s touch of glamour, this boy on his way into or out of Sporting Lisbon, as if, and somehow playing here en route. Then in the last minute Liam thumps a clearance from twenty yards inside his own half, more out of frustration than with any intent, and he is there, Luis, and sways into the ball, takes it on his right thigh, dead, swivels and flicks it with his left foot past the moving defender, takes a step, hits it on the volley, all in one movement, with his laces. The ball fizzes and dips twenty-five yards, as if it’s a different object from the one that has bobbled around for the previous ninety minutes, clips the outside of the post with a satisfying ping and rebounds back to the edge of the box off the advertising boards with a deep thud before their keeper has even moved.
It was Cruyff who claimed he used to sometimes try to hit the post on purpose. Cruyff is the pale Dutch ballboy. He tries to move like Eusébio, like Di Stéfano.
Half the crowd have already gone. From the ones who remain, many weren’t looking. There is a jolt from a few, and a handful of oohs and applause drifts across the pitch. Some of the young lads behind the goal begin to sing Sign him up. These are the boys who sometimes come to matches wearing a fez, a homage to an old newspaper headline ‘Ally Barr bars baa baas’, a reference to the time Ally tried to get the livestock market to close on Wednesday match days. That was in the days when Ally thought he could do anything, took the club from the bottom of the third division to that missed penalty kick in the play-off final away from the Premier League. He could do little wrong then. The market has gone for good now anyway. The boys laugh as they sing, because they know that there are bigger forces at work. This kid, listed as ‘A.N. Other’ on the programme, in a nice Edwardian touch, is not destined for the Anvil Yards.
Liam glances up at the grandstand. Spits out some of the dust. They don’t know what they’re looking at, most of them, the punters, he is convinced. If they see anything as good as that for the rest of the season they’ll be lucky. The ref blows for fulltime before they take the goal kick.
…
Di Stéfano traps the ball as it falls from the keeper’s kick, rolls his studs over it (over her, he writes in a book years later called, Thanks, Old Girl). He turns to his right, with his back to goal he is moving left, but he keeps turning, almost a complete circle, away from the Eintracht player, and now takes a couple of paces. Strange how his legs seem longer when he has the ball. He feints, sways as if to strike it wide for Canário, but stops, almost entirely still for a moment. His opponent runs from him and he moves forward now, builds momentum, pushes it to Vidal, gets it back, has to check his run, but from his heels springs forward, slides it towards Puskás with the outside of his boot, looks to sprint for the return, but as Puskás opens himself the defender has nicked it away. The defenders are not often so lucky.
It is like this all night, la furia, changes of pace, of direction, unrelenting. Like this, he moves through people’s dreams. When he gets the ball the blood quickens in the eighth of a million people inside the stadium. They have laid down their iron on the banks of the Clyde to come to see him in the European Cup Final, to see the great Real Madrid make it five in a row. He walks, he sprints, he stands still. Hampden is his time, his space, to do with as he wishes.
…
Liam sits on the bed in the room. He has lived at the hotel for three weeks now, since pre-season training began, since Greta and Jari went back, got a deal from the manager, Amir, an old school mate. He thinks he might never leave.
He stands for some time at the window, stretching his calf muscles, looks out across the Anvil Yards. A crow flies from the floodlight gantry to the East Stand roof. The gulls wheel over the empty dock water.
In a few minutes he’ll turn on the laptop. The bedside clock blinks and tells him it is still too early. She said seven o’clock, nine in Finland. Long blocks of shadow fill the view. He imagines the white Northern light filling rooms; the light across the lake fills the house, Greta and Jari move through the rooms. She is combing his hair while he stands in his pyjamas. Liam’s body aches. She lets Jari stay up when they’re at the lake house. He can feel the grooves of the pine jetty under his feet. He has a blister on his right heel. He can hear the sound of the water lap ping against the wood. You can’t open the windows here in the hotel. He wants some air, wants to hear the sound of the gulls, the sound of traffic, of cars going somewhere else; the sound of water on a thin beach and the silence of great forests beyond. He cannot see a single human movement across the whole of the Anvil Yards, Saturday teatime, no one there. He looks at the ruin of the old Assembly Rooms, where his own parents met the year of the World Cup, talked about Eusébio. They used to hold under-age club nights there before the dancefloor fell into a hole. He remembers queueing up to get in on a summer night, Dee Dee and Sonia in the line in front of him, and Sonia turning round and looking at him over her bare shoulder.
‘What a fucking mess,’ he says, and his words colour the glass.
A dirty St George’s flag that hangs from the corner of an old warehouse moves in a sudden breeze, pigeons rise and veer together across the old docks wall and away towards the Greenfield Ironworks. His face has caught the sun, his nose and cheeks have reddened. He enjoys the small burn of it. That pitch, a corner of which he can see here over the river and through the gates at the Greenfield End, is a desert. He pictures Laurel and Hardy in the Foreign Legion, going in circles. A helicopter comes down the line of the hills and river, angles in at the corner of the window, moves away to turn and head back up the valley towards Cowton or Oxton. He tries to make his mind as empty as the pitch, the dock, the long stretches of wasteland that radiate out from the old ironworks.
There is Greta on the screen. He can tell she’s made an effort, has done her hair, some make-up. That’s good, he thinks. Something has happened to the sound, so he watches them moving in the patterns of the water reflected from the lake. Jari refuses to stay in front of the camera, Greta reaches for him, her arms bare. Liam sobs, lets it out now, leans away so he is out of the picture. One time last year he started, couldn’t stop.
‘Daddy sad,’ Jari said.
‘Never do that again, never,’ Greta hissed down the phone a few days after that. It was when things had been ba
d, worse than now.
‘Daddy,’ Jari says. The boy’s face, his hair. He holds a blue plastic robot. It’s the one he chose on one of the last days of their visit when Liam’s mum and dad had driven them out to the ToysRus by the motorway.
The small amount of English that Jari had learned is fading. Greta says she uses it with him but Liam doesn’t believe her. He never learned Finnish. Greta speaks Finnish, Swedish, German, Russian. There’d been no need for him to learn, he picked up the odd phrase, he was always the Englishman, the big man, always set apart, in the corner of the dressing room, in the centre of the pitch. It had suited him, he thought. Now he looked at his son babbling away into the camera. They would not speak the same language.
‘Kaunis poika,’ he says, beautiful boy. He knows a few words, should get those tapes out again, god knows he’s got enough time on his hands. They say it’s one of the hardest languages to learn. Jari is a beautiful boy.
Then he is gone, there’s just that flickering light from the lake and Greta, distracted, a quick goodbye, neutral. Just stay, he wants to say, leave the camera on, go about your business, I’ll just sit and watch from here. They arrange to speak during the week.
He looks at the blue plastic bag on the table he’d meant to put in the bedside fridge. The cans of beer inside sweat, there are a couple of bottles of Lucozade and a packet of jaffa cakes next to the bag. He’ll run the beers off on the Heath tomorrow, dress the blister, take it easy and stretch himself out for Monday’s training. Archie Hill’s got him on a special programme. The aches are starting. He can feel his heel, his hip, his back, all start to go. He’ll watch the rest of the cricket highlights, read his book, about Real Madrid in the fifties. He can read about Di Stéfano, Puskás, Gento. He can do that. He can phone his dad to talk about the match if he wants to. He wonders about that boy, Luis. Ally’s car is still in the car park. The Mercedes have gone. He stands at the window and watches the blue evening fade.
Iron Towns Page 3
