by Miriam Sved
At this healthy distance from his emotional life, Vic finds he is not even interested in watching the game on which he has staked his wife’s happiness. He can see what’s happening if he cranes backwards on his chair to get a view of the screen above the door, but why would he want to? The sound on the TV is turned down low. He has railed about this in the past, when he used to give a shit: they keep the sound so low that the punters have to gather round the screens in a conspicuous externalisation of desperation. Tonight, though he cannot hear the game well enough to follow the commentary, he finds the disembodied hum of it sort of soothing. When the commentators pick up volume he catches random words and phrases, some of which have been hot-bladed triggers for him in the past: what a kick! and good strong tackling, things like that. He orders another pint, and devises a drinking game to while away the time until the game finishes and the next thing happens (which he supposes will be the thing with Carol, the thing that was always going to happen eventually): every time he hears the word kick or the word tackle he has to scull. The bartender, a young guy with the same level of care factor as Narelle, replenishes his pint without taking any money – they do that when you’re spending big on the punts – and his complete lack of interest in Vic’s psychological and financial welfare is wonderful. It’s like breathing out, after all the weeks of watchful concern from Carol and Sharni, and the spreading bruise of his own tentative optimism.
On his fourth pint, when the seat of his bar stool is starting to imprint itself on his internal organs, a disturbance in the atmosphere of the bar penetrates the fugue of Vic’s numbness and his drinking game. There has been some shouting, and some swearing, and a gathering intensity to the silences in between. Against the rules of the game, he starts straining to hear – a low-muttering stream of invective at the same register as the commentary, so that he is not sure whether he heard the word kick. He sculls just in case, then leans back on his stool to get a look at the monitor over the door. Sure enough, one of those clusters of desperate blokes has gathered around the TV, staring up in trance-like concentration, interrupted by someone shouting, Fucken man up! Vic slides sideways, keeping contact with his stool, and squints at the screen. The bastards are losing – he can see that because there are two digits in their score line to three in the opponents’. He leans closer: the score is 121 to . . . 89? The numbers blur in and out of focus, the 89 changing shape, momentarily taking on the contours of salvation, losing them again, and then, when Vic lurches towards the screen, solidifying into the unlikely absolution of 59. The bastards are being thumped by sixty-two points, with just under ten minutes on the clock.
Standing up has brought him to the sudden realisation of how drunk he is; he pitches sideways, and has a moment of confused terror when he can’t find the betting form in his pocket. But there it is scrunched in his other hand; he smooths it out in front of his face and peers at the tiny numbers: $72.00. Seventy times two thousand . . .
Vic closes his eyes. The swell of his wild hope and beery gut helps him to imagine the wonderful cruise he will take Carol on: no expense spared, the biggest ship he can find; every shop imaginable, spa treatments and dinner shows and dance classes he will not complain about going to. He will buy a formal suit and get her a balcony suite. In the last nine – no, eight – minutes of this unlikely game he can’t think of a more worthy and long-suffering cause to lay before the god of punters than his own wife, a realisation he bookmarks in some sober mental byway to come back to and consider later, when conditions are less fraught. Maybe on their cruise.
With a solid win on one side and no hope of a comeback on the other, the game is limping towards its end, the interstate boys chipping the ball round their back-half. Vic closes his eyes and concentrates on time, on willing it forward, bending it over itself in a smooth coil he might slide down to reach the other side of this game, where he will emerge a winner. The atmosphere around him is fetid with losing. The men who have not made such prescient, daring, genius bets wilt into their beers, gesticulating and spitting occasional instructions at the telly with an air of hopelessness (Kick it to Campo, Run you bastard!), as Vic feels himself coming alive. He waves his arms to indicate better marking options, his right foot jerks in reflex participation with the play. (He’d been a good kick before the day he failed to kick in time, and people used to say he read the play well.) Still sixty-two points in it with five minutes on the clock. The commentators, proving that they are just regular punters, sound dispirited and are barely trying to keep up with the play. None of them predicted this upset.
‘Could be a bit of a run here.’ They perk up as one of the bastards intercepts the ball at half-back and gallops it into the midfield, but there is a line of defenders and no-one steps up to take the kick; he is left floundering in the midfield until he is tackled. Three and a half minutes.
‘Disappointing,’ says the commentator. ‘Walker’s one of the oldest blokes in the team and you’d expect a few of the others to step up and support him.’
Bastards, Vic whispers to himself, even as he feels a twinge of something like fondness for his old enemies. All these years of feeling persecuted by the bastards, and by extension the game and the universe. In a swell of elated revelation, he thinks, They are just a bunch of boys. Just trying to make their way, the same as he was when he escaped the poverty of his immigrant parents’ house in Deer Park to play football. Some of them are probably escaping their own destinies. And they have brought him here, to the cusp of a new life. If he invests most of the money he might be able to give up the taxi. If it wasn’t for this game he probably wouldn’t have made it out of the western suburbs and would never have met Carol. Maybe, after he gets home and tells Carol about the cruise, he will shave off the beard he grew thirty years ago. No need to hide anymore. Maybe one day soon he’ll even figure out how to laugh at what happened in that game.
With forty seconds on the clock and the ball safely contained in the midfield, there is a whistle somewhere on the ground. The camera swings around to a little pocket of activity near the benches: two players hovering by the boundary, an umpire jogging towards them, arms waving. The ball is nowhere nearby. Another umpire approaches and they go into a huddle. Vic, not comprehending, is not yet afraid. The original umpire breaks free, raises his whistle to his lips and motions towards the bastards’ half, as though he is awarding a free. For what?
‘Looks like an interchange violation,’ the commentator says, uninterested.
Vic stares hard, trying to find a way around what is about to happen. The game seems to have gone into slow motion, lots of exaggerated movements which reel out with ponderous inevitability. An umpire gesturing towards the player – the bastard – who will take the free; the man with the ball looking around in confusion, unaware of what has happened on the interchange bench. The commentators do not interrupt their wrapping-up patter (‘I expect we’ll see a bit of soul-searching over the next week, wouldn’t want to be in that locker room with Cob after the game’) to follow what is happening now, which is the player with the ball finally catching on to the interchange-violation free, mouthing an expletive and pulling his arm back for a deliberately stylised misthrow, which sails over the umpire and player. The misthrow is like a punch in the gut, a knee in the balls – one of those bits of random violence that come at you unprepared on the field, even though you know they’re always nearby. The umpire – officious little prick, Vic hates him more for knowing what he will do – pulls out his whistle again and shouts, Fifty, waving his arms towards the bastards’ goal-square with unnecessary verve, and all the players trudge in that direction with no verve at all, as if this kick, which the bastard will take from no more than twenty metres in front of goal, doesn’t change anything. Which, of course, for everyone except Vic, it doesn’t. The commentators barely seem to notice it. Vic staggers towards the bar so he can put his head down and doesn’t have to watch as the bastard slots the goal. The siren sounds.
; He knows this is not random bad luck, that it is the cosmic middle finger raised directly at him, because the boy who kicked the goal is that redheaded bastard in Antony Ehlroy’s old number. Fuck you, Vic mouths at the screen.
‘Bit of a bump for Reece’s stats,’ the commentator says. ‘Overall, though, a really dismal performance.’
Good, Vic thinks, and one of the punters watching the telly echoes, ‘Fucking dismal.’ They have all started to disperse, the guys whose loserdom has not been shaken in the last few hours, shuffling off to look for a likely starter in tomorrow’s racing forms. Vic stays where he is, the world settling around him into its old familiar pattern, staring at the telly but barely registering the commentators’ post-game spiel, thinking, Watch your emotions drift by like clouds, and, Try not to fight what you cannot control. But Sharni’s wisdom was forfeited back in the fourth quarter when he decided against all the odds that he might be a winner, and decided to care. Now all he can think about is where Carol will go when she leaves him. Probably to her sister’s. It won’t be the first time but it will be the last. Without her there will be nothing to keep him buoyant, to keep the memory of the game at bay; he will drift to the bottom of the pond with all the other scum.
One of the commentators says something that pierces the fug of his loserdom: a name. He’s saying, ‘. . . the big surprise of the night, isn’t he?’
‘Yeah, indeed, we’ve never seen that kind of performance from Cohen before tonight. Nine contested marks, highest contested possessions, three goals. It’s been a real eye-opener after everyone expected Mick Reece to dominate that contest.’
Brett Cohen. With shaky hands and a ballooning fear in his chest, Vic gets his phone out and goes to his best footy app, scrolls through the list of game stats that have just been uploaded – first kicks, last kicks, highest goal tally. Most possessions: Brett Cohen. He clicks through to see the odds. $42.00. Not trusting his arithmetic, he goes to the little calculator and uses his last wisps of mental competence to enter the multiplication of his afterthought forty dollars. It comes to a smidgen under seventeen hundred dollars. Only three hundred short: he can scrape that together; he’ll pull a double in the taxi as soon as he sobers up. Carol never has to know. These calculations are going on in some highly practised area of his gambler’s brain; the rest of him feels like a giant hum, maintained at a steady, forced pitch so he doesn’t look down and fall into the chasm that has opened beneath his feet.
He takes his sweaty betting form to the cashier, who isn’t Narelle anymore, it’s one of the late-night ones: younger and more engaged with the world, she counts out his money with peppy little flicks of her long fake nails and says, ‘Not such a bad night, huh? You gonna stick around for another flutter?’ Vic grunts. The chasm is waiting; he has to get out of here to some place safe.
Stumbling outside, a nearby taxi rank; he slumps into the back seat, breathing hard but still fighting it. Not a winner: that is no great shock to the system, he’s lived with that knowledge for thirty-two years. But not a loser either. The thing that is threatening to suck him under into the abyss is nothing. There is probably some magical way to interpret his fortunes tonight – probably there are many interpretations that would normally present themselves to his feverish ego. But for once he sees clearly: these interpretations are bullshit. There is no cosmic contest with Antony Ehlroy; the game doesn’t care about him and neither does the universe. Not a winner or a loser, just nothing.
He throws a twenty at the driver and stumbles out at his house. Inside, through to the bedroom, where he doesn’t take his shoes off before crawling into bed behind Carol. He huddles close to her, warming himself on her back.
Selfish play
Round seven
More and more now, after training sessions and even after games, the coach, Cob, goes home telling himself: I am not a cruel man.
Yesterday’s on-field incident with Reece and today’s nonsense with the American, Redhouse, must have left their mark; he’s struggling to see the game strategically. Turning on to the freeway, twenty minutes from the leafy streets of Toorak and from Norma and Luce, Cob wants to think this stuff through and come out the other end with some kind of resolution.
His half-forwards can’t sustain delivery into the fifty for more than one quarter together. He knows if he turns the radio on to SEN now, chances are he’ll hear some semi-smutty gag about his boys and boundary hugging. The canker is eating backwards, so the rest of the team are playing defensively and giving away the structure, the back line becoming a desperate scramble for safety.
But instead of seeing the problem like a map, a pattern with missing links and dead-end avenues, Cob’s mind keeps offering up ‘cruelties’ he might have inflicted on various players; today, last week, last season.
He’s made men run round the boundary in direct sun till they spewed.
He calls anyone who’s over sixty in the skin-folds test fatty.
During the on-field incident, when words temporarily failed him in the face of Reece’s lock-jawed stare, he hurled a whiteboard marker at the ground like some homicidal toddler.
He’s taking his own coaching performance to pieces through the gaze of the American arsehole, Redhouse.
A forwards coach, imported from gridiron, where he resurrected the career of some fatally flawed punter, Redhouse is on staff to make men kick straight, but Cob has known for a while that he has bigger ideas about himself. He chucks around phrases such as psychological coaching and the mental game. Once, Cob found an article on his desk about consultative coaching. Consultative bloody coaching. Redhouse denied he put it there but the shit-eating grin on his face said otherwise. But none of the stunts Redhouse pulled before this have come close to his little talk in the gym this morning, which – the more Cob considers it the more he feels it in his gut – was downright mutinous.
He cuts around a P-plater, aware that he’s driving with his dick and not caring.
‘Management literature from America.’
The American’s bell-clear voice ringing out across the gym. Reece was on the closest bench and could certainly hear. Cob was painfully aware of the lad’s proximity, his skinny arms working a regular rhythm with his barbell. The rest of the guys were unusually quiet and none of them had met his eyes all morning.
Redhouse said something about fascistic power structures. He said, bullying tactics. He said, ‘Some players respond best with understanding. I guess you could say with kindness.’ The falsely self-effacing smirk on his clean-cut face.
And the added humiliation of Cob’s comeback, which he tried to deliver with calm condescension rather than bubbling fury. ‘When I need your help with my own players I’ll be sure . . .’
The American – bloody typical – didn’t pick up a trace of sarcasm. ‘Any time,’ he said, with a friendly slap on Cob’s shoulder, and Cob could have knocked him out clean then and there. But he’s copping enough heat about his temper.
I am not a cruel man.
In his defence, Cob can say this – he hadn’t known the camera was so close. He had a quarter-time rush of blood and let fly: at all his players but especially at Reece. He wouldn’t have done it if he’d known the camera was so close. Again, he thinks he’ll have to get the sponsors to lay heat on the network about it – it was unethical, outrageous. You always know the commentators might try to lip-read, there might be an expletive picked up here and there, but no-one should have been privy to a first-year player’s comprehensive humiliation. Not that Cob said anything unwarranted.
He cuts across two lanes of traffic to make his exit ramp.
It was the kid’s sixth game and his third played like a limping gazelle – no hard tackles, all long, unwieldy limbs and uncertain gaze, fumbling through a series of increasingly tricksy moves in the midfield rather than flying or just booting it. The rant was frustration on Cob’s part. Unfortunate. But game days are treacherou
s for a coach, the hardest part of the working week when things are going badly, when you’ve got your all invested in the floundering series of disasters out on the ground and you’re trapped up high in a small scrutinised fish tank. Sometimes, watching from the height of the coaching box, Cob could almost feel his body flying down the centre corridor. He sees so clearly what he would have done in his playing days with the lovely clear structure he’s set up for his boys: his heart rate increases as his body feels itself plucking the ball from the ruck’s competent tap-down, ducking out the midfield, straight through the square towards the forward fifty, selling a bit of candy and shimmying through the last of the defenders, and then booting it – the satisfying hollow thump of a well-kicked pigskin. The kind of play he knows the kid, Mick Reece, can do. And maybe alone in his car, in the aftermath of a disastrous training session, Cob can admit that some – not all but some – of his disappointment in how the kid is performing has to do with his, Cob’s, own game. Because he was a fast, skinny, in-and-under player as well, and he could fly like the kid can fly, and God help him if he’s fallen into the oldest and saddest fallacy of the washed-out player-coach: thinking he can clone himself.
