The man in the story was a miner, a tinker, a docker, a puddler, a horse trader at the Stowe fair. Somehow the road would wind nearer and nearer, merge somehow with the real, like figures stepping out of a comic book. Mark’s great-granny lived at Merthyr Tydfil. They would go and see her at Easter and he would pull at his elasticated tie and look at cousins whose names he could never remember.
And there they’d be, beside the River Chain, the man would become his own dad, off to work at the Samson Foundry every morning at six, a small black shape against a raging fire, that was how Mark would see him on the few times he’d been down to the work gates, kicking his tennis ball against the kerbs on the way.
When he almost signed for Torino, the club had that money to spend after selling Lentini, the whole thing was cursed, they were going to take Liam with him, and he guessed Dee Dee might have come too, the lawyer in the beautiful suit, his fat head leaning forward behind his glasses across the contract like the emperor of the toads spoke to him.
‘Fala, a good name. Venetian, I think.’
Mark shrugged. ‘I’m not sure, I don’t think so.’
‘Spain? America? Ireland?’ His mum laughed whenever he asked her. ‘Your dad’s never been further than the donkey rides at Weston and you can only see the sea there when the tide’s in.’
…
We came when you enclosed our meadows and drowned our valleys. We came out from our little forges in the sun-dappled woods. We came from fields of dead potatoes and soldiers, from Clydeside tenements with the promise of work, we came no distance at all, our ways of life swallowed, harried off our land by your gamekeepers and lackeys. We are English, Welsh, Black Irish, Scottish. We were none of these things once upon a time, and we shall not be them again. We take many forms. Some of us once watched from ditches by the river, or from the higher peaks, waited for Roman soldiers to pick off one by one. We are patient as the stones.
…
The players are born within the sound of hammers. Whether a great boom across rivers and docks or the tap, tap, tap from backyard workshops, the sounds of metal and stone are always close by. The rattle of the railway and tram, the tapping of the nailyard, chainyard, pottery, the blasting of stone from quarries, the hacking of coal from deep underground, the roar of a furnace. They hold in them the energy of fire and dammed rivers. Di Stéfano and Billy Wright look out on their iron bridges, Beckenbauer’s dad delivers his post through the snow and ash of ruined Munich while Jack and Bobby Charlton’s father lies deep underground scraping coal. There are exceptions, sure. Pelé was born in a city of cows, where lanes filled with sacks of coffee hauled by mules, but he was soon off to the port.
In the end, they all come from iron towns.
…
‘Liam, Liam, will yer sign this?’
He looks into the enclosure. They’ve split it between rival fans tonight. There’s a Wolves flag hung over the wall, a line of people in wheelchairs behind it. He steps off the pitch and sees the hands holding an England shirt and a pen towards him, watches his step on the narrow gravel track in front of the stand. They are watering the pitch like crazy. It’s turned to a kind of grey soup on top and then is still rock hard underneath.
‘What they still watering for?’Julius mutters, struggling to trap a ball that skimmed off the surface.
‘Suit our slick passing game,’ Liam replies.
It’s true that Ally does get them to try to play, to pass it out, play through the fullbacks, press. They do not have the players for it. He wants them to go after the ball too far up the pitch for a man nearing forty to leave an acre of space behind him.
Liam is not starting again.
‘I’ve got a game in mind for you, son,’ Ally said yesterday as they did a warm-down on the training ground at the Heath, stretching and looking across a yellow field. Liam watched a ball, tiny against the sky, as it climbed and fell, missed the fifth green at the golf club.
That might mean he will start on Saturday in the league game, which is how it should be. Or it might mean that Ally has some vague notion of a fixture in November when he thinks he’ll need him. Anyhow, what’s certain is he won’t start against the Wolves, probably the last chance he’ll have to play against them. He tries not to let his face fall, wonders what is coming next. ‘When the pitches get heavy, that’s when your season starts,’ or something like that, he’s heard all sorts of crap before. The truth is, he’s still the best player at the club, no one will convince him otherwise. He should start alongside Devon at the back every opportunity, every time they’re both fit. They should just defend deeper. It’s their only hope of staying up this season.
‘I’ve got a game for you,’ Ally said, stretched, looked at the man hacking around the rough grass searching for his ball, turned to run back to the changing rooms.
Liam reaches for the pen with one hand, the shirt with the other. The pen is snatched back from his grasp.
‘What would I want your autograph for, yer prick?’
The words come hissed and sharp like a slap. Liam looks across the wall to see the face of a younger man leering back at him. There’s a chorus of laughter, jeers, from the seats around the man, the boy, who speaks to him. Faces crowd in, he sees knuckles whiten on a fist gripping the handle of a wheelchair. The bloke jerks back in his chair and tugs the shirt which Liam still has hold of. Liam leans across the wall, keeps his grip on it, knows he should let it go. ‘Prick,’ the bloke says again, his long face twisted in a grimace. The man brays like a donkey. Liam doesn’t know if he’s laughing or reviving an old taunt. Still he holds the shirt. He feels the mood of the crowd shift. Faces press forward now. Men stand three and four rows back.
‘Give him his shirt, mate.’
‘Give him his shirt, yer bully. Picking on a kid in a wheelchair, I ask yer.’
This last a woman’s voice, high and shrill. Heads turn, there is the clatter of seats flipping up as the people stand now in this corner of the ground. Liam sees an orange-coated steward walk towards him, another move down the steps. He should let go of the shirt. There are other hands gripping it now. The same white knuckles from the wheelchair handle. He feels the shirt begin to tear. The steward is next to him looking into the crowd. Liam leans forward slowly, uncoils his grip and the shirt rests on top of the wall. He holds his palms up to the faces in front of him, smiles. Someone spits past his ear. The steward has his arm round him, pulls him back, just as carefully, as gently, as he let go of the shirt.
‘What’s going on here, Liam, eh?’ the young man says softly, softly, he has a split lip pressed to Liam’s ear. Liam thinks he recognises the steward from Billy Ahmed’s gym, a good kid, Tyrone he thinks his name is, from the Pengwern. It is unusual to look at a man the same height, bigger under that padded jacket. He can still hear the woman’s voice but can’t make out what she says. The young man has turned him round. Liam faces the pitch now, starts a sprint to catch up with the others, who have almost reached the tunnel. He glances back once, thinks of Cantona, that moment when he crouched, cocked his ear and went charging into the crowd. Liam is surprised that it doesn’t happen more often. His blood is an outgoing tide now and he laughs as he sprints through the floodlit glare. He can hear Dee Dee singing.
…
The men in the good suits come, puffing on their cigars. Eusébio is to join Sporting Lisbon. There is an agreement, Sporting Lourenço Marques is tied by a colonial umbilical cord. That much is clear from the name alone. Di Stéfano will go to Barcelona and play with Kubala. An Argentinian and a Hungarian will shine for Catalan nationalism. The truth is that the players do not much care for flags. The men in good suits come. Samitier smokes his cigar, talks to Di Stéfano, parties, pours another brandy, although it’s not clear through the blue smoke whether Samitier really is for Barcelona, or maybe now for Madrid. Nothing is clear at all. Di Stéfano shrugs and looks at the papers. Europe will be an adventure, a grand stage. The shirt he wears won’t make that much difference. The game will
come to him. He is sure of his footing.
They take Eusébio to a house on the Algarve. He runs to the sound of the sea. He runs the same, whatever the continent, the hemisphere, his feet barely touch the ground. The sea sounds the same. He gets his haircut, talks to Guttmann. The men in good suits come.
Behind them, invisible, the men in uniform.
Eusébio signs for Benfica, Di Stéfano for Real Madrid.
…
They are three nothing down inside twenty minutes. Ally tells Liam to lead the subs in a warm-up. The usual spot is in front of the enclosure, right in front of the kid in the wheelchair. He takes them the other way instead, trots towards the Greenfield End.
‘Where’s our Liam off to?’ Eli says. The last communist of the Far Valley has lifted his football ban for the evening. He sits next to Joey.
‘Leading a breakout,’ a voice calls from behind them.
‘Come back,’ pipes up another, ‘you can’t get out of it that easy!’
There’s localised mirth and then a collective groan as the ball goes in the box again and almost falls to a Wolves forward.
Joey feels a tap on his shoulder.
‘Why ain’t Liam started, Joey, is he fit?’
Joey shrugs.
‘Keeping him for Saturday, I expect,’ says another voice and saves Joey having to invent an answer.
‘I should bloody hope so.’
Joey knows that these voices are kinder towards his boy when he’s not in the team, that he becomes several times the player when he is not out there. Plus, their voices soften when Eli is with him. If Liam makes a mistake when Joey is there alone it always seems to him that there will be some sense, in the silence or the comments around him, that he is at least in part to blame. He is responsible for delivering such an abject son to the football club. When Eli is there, it’s as if they do not want to hurt him, this old man, the grandad, who is tougher than them all, Joey has no doubt.
Liam continues the run towards the Greenfield End. Noise builds. He raises his arms above his head, signals to no one in particular, into the glare of the lights, for the fans to sing up, to lift them somehow. He is applauded. Iron Towns, Iron Towns, they sing. The Greenfield End have never dropped the s. They segue into One Liam Corwen, which was not Liam’s intention at all, and he knows he’ll get a bollocking from Ally later on. If not from Ally then from his dad.
‘What is he fucking about for?’ Joey asks the concrete and chocolate wrapper and puddle of tea between his feet. He fears his son has always craved the attention. Joey fears that his son enjoys the idea of being a footballer rather than playing football and that has been his downfall. He pushes this thought away. Then takes it up in another form, his old man enjoys the idea of being a human, rather than being human.
They stretch on the far touchline, with the silence of the closed East Stand at their back. Liam feels like he is being watched. Not by the thousands of eyes on the other three sides but from the darkness behind him. Irontown have a rare attack but the ball bobbles through to the keeper. The noise at the Greenfield End keeps going. Archie Hill waves and points at them from Ally’s shoulder. He makes a motion of dragging them back around the touchline. From this distance Archie looks like a man gesturing the installation of a noose. Liam glances up into the shadow and starts the half-lap back round the pitch.
…
This to win it, the cry of boys on darkening streets and scrubby fields all over, to be champions of Europe.
Panenka takes a run-up of eight, nine strides, as if he might try to blast the ball back to Prague, off the penalty spot, across the brilliant green pitch and over the concrete stands and Belgrade high-rises named for Partisans. He shapes to do so as well. The goalkeeper Maier moves before he makes contact, forward and to his left, sees how Panenka’s body remains slightly open. When his foot comes down on the ball Maier is off the ground. And Panenka doesn’t strike it, but digs his foot underneath the ball, stops it, so the ball springs up and floats in a gentle arc and everything slows down. The ball hangs a few feet above the turf. Everything stops, except Maier who accelerates, flies almost past his left-hand post, like one part of an experiment in advanced physics. As the ball slows, his momentum increases. Everything else is dead still.
There is all the paraphernalia of mid-seventies European football behind the goal, caught for that moment that the ball hangs in the Belgrade night. There is an orange running track in shadow, the crowd is miles away beyond it. Not that this huge bowl lacks atmosphere. They nickname it the Marakana when Red Star play at home. A line of photographers stands at an angle to the goal, there’s a wheelie bin, temporary advertising boards, some in Dutch (the Czechs had shocked Cruyff and his beautiful blue-eyed boys in the semi-final). There they are, time stopped still.
Panenka accelerates now, surges into a follow-through so he almost catches up with the ball. Maier raises his right arm, hits the ground. The ball floats into the middle of the goal. Maier is already standing, he looks back at the ball, shakes his head, and Panenka turns and continues his run with his arms aloft. There he is, still running.
…
Liam plays in an area ten yards square in front of Devon and this young lad McLaughlin. His job is to protect them, the kid anyway. Devon’s got his hands full dealing with the forwards and the crosses coming in and talking the boy through the match. He is not good enough, but neither is this midfield. Liam closes down, harries, runs short bursts, gets goal-side, barely even puts in a challenge, but stems the flow, stops them pouring straight through. There are no thoughts of a comeback. This is damage limitation. They defend off the edge of their own eighteen yard box, give no space behind them. When Liam gets the ball at his feet he kicks for territory like a rugby fullback. The intensity leaks from the game. The clock ticks down. They get through the second-half without humiliation.
‘I don’t know why he didn’t play our Liam from the start, I’m sure I don’t.’
‘Two games in a week, Dad. It’s tough the age he is. Anyway, that kid McLennon, he looked good in the reserves last week.’
‘Two bloody games in a week!?’ Eli leaves every other comment he could make hanging in the summer evening.
The game is drifting, the atmosphere of earlier has gone with it. People shuffle along the rows to get away. Eli changes tack. Both men have this conversation while keeping their eyes on their son and grandson who shuffles backwards a few yards to watch their right-winger, who steps inside to look for the scraps.
‘You went to the reserves last week?’
‘Yeah, they’re playing home games up at Cowton, trying to save this pitch a bit.’
‘You’ve got a wife to look after at home, you know.’
They stare at the pitch, their heads move in unison as the keeper kicks from his hands. Liam wins the header but it skews off his head and bounces out for a throw. Joey slumps. He feels heavier in his seat than a few minutes ago. A man stands up halfway towards the corner flag and begins an essay in bile aimed at no one and everything and the stewards move towards him.
‘Give it a rest,’ Joey says in the direction of the shouting man, quiet enough for him not to hear.
…
Panenka runs across Liam’s left shoulder. Liam cannot sleep, lies there on the bed with the curtains open. He sees the floodlights go out with the shadow on the hotel bedroom roof. He thinks of Panenka as he runs up to take the penalty, thinks of Mark Fala, out there, somewhere in the night. He read somewhere that Panenka knew before the match that this is what he’d do if he got the chance, no doubt in his mind.
The room is too dark with the floodlights at the ground switched off and Liam reaches across to turn the bedside light on. A plane blinks against the clouds over the hills. Getting to sleep after a night game has always been a problem, but these days it’s nearly impossible. He thinks of Panenka and Maier to ward off thoughts about Greta and Jari. Football will heal him. His body has started to ache. At least that means the adrenaline is fading and h
e might sleep soon. He should stop thinking. He tells himself that men who head footballs for a living should not think at all.
He turns the TV on again, flicks through the channels with the sound off, another cricket rerun, some tennis. One of the news channels plays a report from Australia. Aboriginal people have been thrown off their land for a giant open-cast mine, the usual story. He knows that he has seen all these pictures before. Drink cans scattered across the red earth, people with angry, bewildered looks on their faces. The young men wear vest tops with the names of Aussie beers scrawled across their chest, T-shirts with pictures of Michael Jackson and Ayrton Senna, and then he sees the faded chocolate football shirt, jolts upright. A long-limbed boy wears it, fifteen years old or so, he reckons, but a head taller than everyone else, the same shape Liam had once been himself. The shirt is long sleeved, and the sleeves only reach halfway down his forearms, but the body looks big on his thin frame. The shirt is dirty, smeared with red dust, the one with the name of the sponsors who went bankrupt, press studs at the collar, and he knows, a fraction before the boy turns in the searing desert light, that he will see in fading print on the back, the number 5 and the name Corwen. The boy’s eyes look at him from the screen, staring back over his shoulder, a can of beer in his hand, utterly lost. Liam’s heart thumps, scared to be part of the world.
…
When he came to the valley James Greenfield knew that this was the place. There’s a painting which hangs in the Hightown Town Council chamber, a copy you can buy as a postcard at the Heritage Museum, of this first James Greenfield stood at the head of the valley like Moses. He has walked up out of the Sheep Folds, leans a hand against ancient oak. The scene is deep English pastoral. The brass plaque beneath the painting reads 1722. The rivers meet, cows drink from the banks, sheep drift along the steep hillsides. The glade in which he stands is where now the last of the Cowton estate runs out, where they trampled that boy to death, a shepherd’s hut is just visible through the greenery. The shape of the Heath is clear in the distance where the valley opens out and beyond are the blue hills and the sky a lighter blue above that.
Iron Towns Page 5
