Words for their own sake, is what she thinks. Lionel’s right about the spoiling. Bobby needed help and he got fancy trainers. But Bobby’s not her problem, thank god. If he turns up here again and asks for a drink she’ll let him have one. It was like digging at a scab, mentioning him to Lionel at all, like she wanted to hear the worst, his hypocrisy and blame. Maybe he was just being honest. They had spoiled him and now he wanted to forget about him. But just because Lionel’s practised the words doesn’t make them less true. He sold used cars for years, for god’s sake, can’t sound genuine even when he is being, charmed the magistrates and the tax man, has kept his detached house on Heathside, with stone lions and cameras at the entrance to the drive, after all. She wonders whoever said crime didn’t pay.
The boy Tyrone is still smiling, looks daft in the sunlit doorway, his eyes following Alina hidden somewhere back in the kitchen. Dee Dee cannot begin to imagine what they are saying to each other, but doesn’t need to, she supposes. She wonders whether to mention him to Alina later, decides not to. She’s never teased her like that, never pried, tried not to show how much she worries, how much she has put in to being the girl’s mother, this lovely, lonely girl, and sometimes thinks there is more than one way of spoiling a child, and for the briefest moment as the light shifts in the room and they hear a cheer from the Anvil Yards carried on the wind, that she has more in common with Lionel and Gracie than she would like to admit, and so maybe perhaps should not be so hard on them.
…
Dave ‘Iron’ Willis: Such has been Irontown’s form in the season’s first few weeks that to get to half-time goalless is some achievement. They’ve certainly tightened up since the League Cup mauling by Wolves, helped in good measure by the return to the back four of veteran skipper Liam Corwen. Dominant as ever in the air, he has even nipped in front of the Scunthorpe strikers a couple of times for clever interceptions and the odd foray into midfield. He has been ably supported by Devon Samuels. No spring chickens, though, these two, and in this heat – it’s like a furnace out there on the pitch for both sets of Irons – the worry for the home team, without much threat going forward, must be whether they might wilt in the second half…
…
The sun has come through the frosted windows of the gents’ and there’s a hot, thick smell of pissed beer. The porcelain still radiates cool, though, and Joey is enjoying this moment, the relief for one thing, he cannot make it through a game any more without needing to go, and Liam’s performance out there, and he reads ‘Dudley’ over again in light blue lettering tattooed into the white urinal slab, even thinks of Liam’s tattoos without shuddering, when he hears the groans from above his head and knows that they’ve let one in.
He does not know what had made him feel so cheerful in the first place, pisses down his leg and onto his shoe in trying to finish, not knowing he hadn’t finished, and wanting to get to the clamour upstairs. He struggles out the door, the sounds of anguish coming louder, and there’s the sound of a few thousand people all saying no at the same time and the square of blue sky at the top of the steps. He walks up into the light to the sound of another collective howl and sees the ball sitting there in the Irontown net and their winger, the quick one, running away to the corner and their supporters. The keeper lies outstretched and looks at the ball. Liam walks back towards the goal, twenty yards from it. Devon Samuels is just behind him with his hands on his knees.
He’s missed goals before, Joey, of course, having a piss or waiting for a pint. He cannot remember ever missing two in the same trip. His dad’s seat is empty. Les Martin leans across to him as Joey slumps down. He smells of extra strong mints. He is one of those blokes who takes a perverse delight in the team’s failings. If Liam is at fault in some way, he never quite comes out and says it, just has that glint in his eye. He owns a tool hire place in Lowtown, lives in Heathside somewhere, is worth a bob or two.
‘First from a corner, free header, back post, one of their centre halves up, nobody near him. Keeper should’ve come but never. Next, we kick-off, give the ball back to them, ball over the top, we’ve pushed up too far, kid runs after it, linesman don’t put his flag up, but he was probably on, two-nothing. Two in, what, thirty seconds?’
‘Took it well,’ a voice comes from behind.
Les turns, ‘He did, he did, I’ll give him that.’
‘I’ve seen it all now,’ Joey says.
‘Well, except yer never did.’
‘What?’
‘See it.’
Joey looks down at Liam. He thinks for a moment that he will gladly never watch another game of football in his life if Liam packs it in. For Joey, there is something about Liam’s size that has always made him vulnerable. He remembers watching him in the playground, blond hair bouncing head and shoulders above the other kids. Liam claps his hands and says something to Kyran, the young kid they’ve got at fullback.
He looks across the low barrier into the director’s box, no one sitting there except Steve Stringer, who must live in this stand, scurrying in and out of his little office next to the toilets, trying to make ends meet, helping Ally get players in, players out, and Ally treating him like he treats everyone else, like he’s there to serve the great Ally Barr. Steve had been a ballboy with Liam, but never in any of the youth teams, just a kid who hung around the ground doing odd jobs, taking the post and the like. His old man used to work at Greenfields, used to drink in the Salamander. Joey used to enjoy having a pint with him. That was before he had to stop going in the pub after the mess with Dee Dee and the girl. Liam was a stupid boy, giving her up. He raises his hand and Steve waves back, the worry etched permanently on his face. Joey reminds himself to ask him how his dad is at full-time. Probably not good news, not here, the whole place is cursed, Joey thinks.
‘Surprised you’re here, Les, not off on another cruise or whatever,’ he says and keeps his eyes on Liam as he gets up to head the ball, thinks of how many hours throwing balls up for him to attack just like that.
‘What, and miss all this?’
…
Goldie holds the knife at a shallow angle to the steel. He loves the sound that the sharpening makes, builds a rhythm with it, sees his shape in the canal’s green water. The sound comes back off the factory walls that form the opposite bank. The wall bulges where the water must have got in and Goldie wonders how safe it is, when the wall will come down. Tree branches grow from it, long rust streaks pattern the brick. But he feels good all the same, away from anyone, time a bit to think, no one will have followed him here. He sharpens the blade with a flourish and it glints in the sun. He hears a murmur and then a shout from the ground, a ripple of applause. He would hear a chant in his cell sometimes, from the Villa or West Brom, depending on who was at home and which way the wind was blowing. Sometimes just a great shout, voices all mixed together as one, some roar of joy or anguished moan. It’s strange that he used to like to hear it, it made him feel less alone, that and the sounds of traffic outside or of work going on, like the clang of scaffolding poles, to make him think of a world outside. But then when he was out, like when he’d lay awake and look at the fuzzy yellow light outside the blind when he lived with Nadine, he’d listen out for those sounds and think of his cell and almost feel better and able to sleep. Maybe he should head over to the ground, he thinks, when he’s done his knives. He is a free man, he can do whatever he likes, and he smiles as he thinks this, something about it not quite right, a thought in his head asking, when are you ever free of anything? He is bare-chested. When he thinks the carving knife is sharp enough he pauses for a moment, holds the blade to his skin until there’s the shallowest cut and a neat line of blood, touches his fingers to it and then puts them to his lips. There is another shout from the Anvil Yards. The thought hardens in his mind, sharp and clean like the cut. When are we ever free of anything?
…
The ball takes a crazy bounce on the baked pitch, loops over Kyran’s head, and he’s too far upfield anyway, try
ing to force it, nothing doing. Liam is across to it. It’s the last minute and he’s beating their forwards to the ball, he wants people to see this. Wins it. Sticks it high up into the empty East Stand.
There’s no time for the throw-in. He hears the whistle for fulltime, the cheers from the away end and a smattering of boos from elsewhere, lets his run wind down in the direction of the ball and kicks out at the old wooden advertising board. The clatter of it echoes back across the pitch. Something moves in the cool shade at the back of the stand. Liam stares for a moment. The linesman, assistant, whatever he’s called these days, walks towards him to shake his hand. Liam’s seen cats up there, leap suddenly through the missing panels at the back, or slink down the crumbling steps, a fox once. They used to get kids sneaking in, but that seems to have died off.
‘Played Liam.’
‘Yeah, some use, eh?’
He begins to limp back across the pitch, then he turns and looks back once more. It was a man, the shape of a man running away. Liam shakes his head. If the bloke paid nothing, he’s still been robbed.
…
Tony lays out photocopies of paintings by Zurbarán, proud faces in dark shade.
‘It’s their faces, their faces you want,’ he says.
And it is, but it’s something else as well.
Zidane slices it on purpose, hits it with fade like a golf shot. This is the World Cup final. Buffon, the best goalkeeper in the world stands in front of him. People crowd around televisions in Papeete and Tripoli, Basse-Terre and Dire Dawa, Mamoudzou and Asmara. Millions of people watch one man. Seen from above the earth must throb with the glare of those millions of television screens. Liam thought he’d mis-hit it, in the moment, leaping forwards from his chair by the side of a Finnish lake. Then something in Zidane’s face as he turned away made him realise. He was in utter control. Millions of people. He’d even made the ball clip the bar on purpose, Liam reckoned, just for the lovely drama of it as it fell those inches behind the line and bounced back out of the goal again. If you had power like that you would go nuts. Perhaps that’s what happened later when he flattened Materazzi. Maybe. And Liam wants that too, feels both acts, the penalty and head-butt, to be the same thing. Or maybe the shape Zidane’s body forms as he volleys the goal at Hampden Park, another Hampden night, Di Stéfano there in the crowd, looking on. Zidane will take some thought. Zidane you could think about for ever. His face on that wall in Marseilles.
‘Chiaroscuro,’ Tony says. ‘Light and shade.’
‘Yeah, you’re right about the faces, and maybe do that on another one. Pirlo’s got a beard now and we can’t do him till he stops playing, anyway.’
‘Zidane though.’
‘Yeah, but what I really want from this is that moment when everything stops, you know?’
What he wants is that stillness, the ball in mid-air, following a gentle arc, the keeper the only thing moving, tumbling away from it. That still moment of grace, that’s what he wants.
There was a split-second in the play-off final, nothing more than a split-second, when Mark Fala stopped his foot and stunned the ball softly above the thick Wembley grass, when Liam thought they had that moment. His stomach flips over. The keeper flinches and doesn’t move. Time does not stand still. The ball arcs into the keeper’s hands. He catches it. Catches the pen alty, and he is already moving, and so is Liam, or trying to, turning one last time on this thick, spongy surface, and his legs won’t work properly. And the keeper has already taken his strides and launches a kick – he’s alongside Mark who just stands there, a yard or two past the penalty spot, could even then have stood in front of the keeper and stopped him kicking it. And the ball meets its own shadow yards into the Irontown half and bounces once and then a second time, in that channel that Geoff Hurst ran down for the last goal in the World Cup final. They think it’s all over, again and again. That kid, he’s thinking of him as a kid because he’s slight and fast but he’s older than Liam, is on to it and even though he’s running with the ball at his feet now, Liam is going backwards, the kid is running away from him, and is into the box and now he’s sliding it past Big Al in goal, who never plays again either, same as Mark Fala, retires back to his pub in Carrickfergus, a man who is too old and slow to fall on this one last shot and the ball is there in the net. They were 3-1 up what seems like hours ago now, have lost 4-3. The ref blows the whistle. Liam hears it through the roar. He can see he’s blowing for the goal and he’s blowing up for time. No more time. It’s over. They have lost. Mark Fala stands just past the penalty spot. Liam hits the ground. He cannot get up. He tells himself he will never get up again. But even in this feeling he knows there will be more games, more seasons. He is young and the days stretch out in front of him.
Fal – Liam never called him that, always Mark, the older lads called it him – has already started to walk off, separate from the others, shrugs off Big Al’s arm as he tries to console him.
‘Head up, son, eh?’
He walks round the pitch on the pale gravel, Mark walks like a young man at the end of a long journey.
…
You cannot understate the fact that it is Germany, of course. When the men Panenka grew up listening to said ‘the war’ they meant the second one. The ball that floats through the air, a conjuring trick, a joke, is an act of the deepest resistance. Resistance against what? A lack of imagination, perhaps, against too great a seriousness, an absence of humour? Is it a last defiant act of the Prague Spring? If there is a message in it, it must be not to take life too seriously. We realise it does not matter whether the penalty goes in or not. It is the gesture, the joke that matters. But thinking about it all is part of the joke, because it is to take it seriously, far too seriously, grown men playing games, chasing a ball, other men looking on. The joke is either on the penalty taker or on the goalkeeper, or on us all, but the joke is there. The joke is in the way the ball pops up, floats lightly in the air, the way a child’s balloon might drift in front of a tank.
It did not just appear in Panenka’s head, just like that, fully formed, even if he was the first to do it. It came from somewhere, not just from Prague, from the memories of the old Empire, buried deep in the minds of coaches like Jezˇek and Venglosˇ, back to Béla Guttmann, in the movements of players like Masopust and Puskás and Sindelar, layer upon layer, back and back, on pitches in Prague and Ostrava and Budapest and Vienna, in countries which no longer even exist. Panenka’s kick as a dream of Mitteleuropa, a stray idea from another vanished world.
…
Autumn in the Iron Towns, rust coloured, a slow drip-drip from a cracked pipe. The place leans in on itself, subsides, walls fall slowly and roofs sag, a slow motion catastrophe, a slow motion coup. Had it happened overnight, not across forty years, there would be soldiers on the streets, helicopters to drop relief packages all the way up the valley. Instead, it is quiet, moss and rust grow on factory gates. There is a long slow drift into silence.
One day, perhaps not so long in coming, the human world will be elsewhere. A few mossed over stones will remain, strange metal relics, chemical traces through the ground. There will be the myth of great ruined cities in the north and west of the islands, like the rumour of the giant spider, explorers will hack their way up narrow rivers, searching for a few lost tribes.
…
And these are men of great joy too. Do not forget that.
England v. Rest of the World, 23 October, 1963. A celebration. They play Eusébio and Denis Law as inside-forwards. Di Stéfano gets the number 9 shirt, the captaincy too, even at thirty-eight.
The only forty-five minutes Eusébio and Di Stéfano play as teammates is goalless. Eusébio comes off at half-time for Puskás, a gentleman’s agreement. There is a chance when Eusébio runs a diagonal, left-to-right, outside-in, and takes the ball on his right foot, fifteen yards out, turns the defender, but drives it with his left into Gordon Banks. Di Stéfano tries to get up alongside him before he shoots, can’t make the distance, but then it
is his dropping deep that has made the space for Eusébio.
He is the master of time and space, people move to his will, even now, this late in the day.
…
Liam cannot move. He lies on the bed. He has spoken to Jari, to Greta, sat and watched Jari playing with a set of wooden trains on the laptop screen. He lies still. He holds that picture of Jari in his head, Greta stands at the door and looks out at the lake. The light is falling now. He imagines the bed to be there at the lodge. He has that sense of sleeping close to water. He feels the flicker of light off the lake, believes he can smell pine woods. In a moment he will get up, walk into the living room, join Greta for a glass of wine and look at the water.
He buys two pricey bottles of Sauvignon Blanc from the Heath Vintners, the posh off-licence. George Best drank white wine near the end, that’s what he’s thinking as he chooses it. He is not near the end. His dad gave him a lift back to the house.
‘Well played, son,’ he said, when Liam struggled out, already stiffening up, ‘see you tomorrow.’ Liam groaned inside. Both his sisters and their families are here tomorrow. They are having Sunday roast at his parents’. He will be expected to kick a ball about with his nephews and nieces.
He will never sleep in his house again, of that he is certain. When he is sure that his dad’s car has turned the corner towards Black Park he walks to the row of shops at Heathside and then takes the long way back to the hotel. He considers buying a can to drink on the way but it is Saturday, early evening, there are people around. Someone sounds a car horn and he hears laughter from within as it goes past him too fast. A man walking hand-in-hand with his wife nods to him. They look happy, off to a meal at the Italian here. Liam wants to hide, could’ve called a cab, he thinks, too late, halfway to Meeting House Lane already. The pedestrians thin out as he comes down the hill, there’s the occasional roar of a car that booms through the empty streets. The helicopter is up somewhere.
Iron Towns Page 7
