by Miriam Sved
In the flurry of board meetings and coaching meetings and sponsor meetings around the draft, Cob met the boy whose career he was hunting down only twice, and he thought him a nice enough lad. A little bit up himself maybe, in the way that some of the new breed tended to be – articulate, aware of the workings of the machine he was entering, aware of things like media profiles and post-football careers. He was planning to go to uni part time while he played, earn a degree in sports science to give himself options after the game. The players Cob went through with didn’t think like this. There was the game, and that was all. They never gave a thought to what any of them might do if they missed out or their playing days got cut short. Drink, probably.
Now, standing in the brightness of Cob’s office staring at the floor, the star draft pick exudes none of that cocky self-directedness. He greeted Cob politely and shook the coach’s hand, but other than that it’s almost like having a conversation with Dooley.
‘Sit,’ Cob says, indicating the chair across from him.
Reece sits, crosses his legs, uncrosses them, experiments with a thigh spread and ends with his knees almost touching in a way that looks girlish.
Cob feels a wave of something dark for this ginger kid who cost him so many hours, phone calls, personal reassurances last November. He staked his all on those skinny knees. He feels contemptuous, and doesn’t try too hard to hide it when he says, ‘What the hell happened in the forward corridor last week, Mick?’
The kid looks up but his face is shut down, clamped – he could be defiant or determined or just miserable.
‘Every clearance,’ Cob goes on, ‘every single one, your collection is excellent but your decision-making . . . With your speed there’s no reason for you to be getting pinned, and that handball across the face of goal–’ Cob looks away as he says, ‘People are saying to me, that Reece,’ taking a deep breath as if he’s sharing a confidence, as if this is costing him something, ‘they’re saying, the kid can play but he’s not ready for the League. All well and good playing in the TAC, kicking with the kids, but some guys, you know, they can’t handle the pressure.’
This is really only Cob’s opening gambit, to see how the kid reacts, whether he can spur some fight out of him, but Reece’s expression doesn’t change, and Cob realises where he’s seen that particular look of lock-jawed blankness. On the field; the spray of insults in front of the lurking camera. He remembers thinking, the cocky little fucker won’t even nod – he didn’t nod once while he took the diatribe, but he held Cob’s gaze throughout the whole thing (maybe you should go back to playing with fucken schoolgirls; the way you disposed of that last handball was limp as a syphilitic dick). Cob is caught off guard; the memory of what he said out on the ground sends a surge of heat into his head. And still the kid maintains that unflinching, expressionless face. Is he thinking of what Cob said as well, and of the stalking, treacherous camera? He must be. Cob is guilty and defiant, and he almost thinks, fuck it – he’s on his way out the door of psychological oblivion, like he gets sometimes when Luce is goading him for a fight, when he knows he should take the high road, remain calm and walk away, but suddenly what he should do holds out no hope for the future, and the needs of his noisy blood outweigh any intangible promise of peace. He’s almost at the point, actually formulating the things he might say to the kid – a continuation of the on-camera spray, taking apart his decision-making, his delivery, even his running style – when he remembers the black kid, Dooley, standing in his office about where Reece is sitting, and the venom seeps quickly away.
Sometimes, when he’s about to launch a head-on campaign against Lucy, he conjures his wife’s face in the hope that Norma’s soft brown eyes, the vertical wrinkle up her forehead that he’s watched deepen over the years – the hope that his wife’s calm image will calm him and stop the spread of his inner self out to their daughter. It rarely works. But when he imagines Dooley the effect is immediate.
Selfish play.
He looks at the boy again and knows suddenly that the shuttered face, the unblinking gaze and hard jawline, have nothing to do with defiance. Knowing this – not knowing exactly what is going on in Reece’s ginger head, but knowing that it correlates in some revelatory way with Dooley’s words – Cob almost reels at the sudden knowledge of isolation; his own and the boy’s. The cruel, unbreachable bubble of self. In a football team there are times – moments or sometimes minutes together – when you might almost be able to overcome it: the whole team working together like some kind of hive brain, the seamlessness of decision-making and of emotion, knowing that you and the guy beside you are riding the exact same swell, whether it’s elation or despair. God, Cob misses his playing days.
He looks up at Reece and his voice, amazingly, comes out gentle. ‘There’s nothing selfish about being great at something, lad.’
The kid’s expression hardly changes but there’s a thickening of his gaze; he stares at the coach with even greater lock-jawed intensity.
Cob goes on, ‘I know how you can play. You’ve got the talent and the belief, and when you take control there’s nothing between you and those goals that can stop you. It’s not selfishness to run with it and forget about everything else.’
The kid’s eyes are suddenly shining, the hardness around them obvious for what it is – a dam to hold back emotion.
Cob finds he’s moved around the desk and is standing in front of Reece. He’s never hugged one of his players before except in the heat of victory – not into the touchy-feely shit, that’s Redhouse’s domain – but Reece is looking up at him. He seems to have passed the immediate crisis of tears but he’s looking up into the coach’s face with an expression almost imploring, almost pleading. Cob imagines himself touching Reece on the arm, a comforting gesture. Then he sees his daughter’s arm, Lucy’s delicate bones beneath the pale skin, resting on the dinner table at home. He sees the arm so clearly, like a sacred thing, brittle and illuminated. And his own bearish paw, whacking the table so close to it. Lucy used to sneak up on him when she was a little girl, wrap her skinny arms around his neck and demand to be piggy-backed.
He touches Reece on the arm and his hand stays there for two seconds, three. Reece’s face doesn’t register any change.
Cob goes back around to the proper side of his desk, trying to hold on to the feeling of Lucy’s ghostly little childhood limbs wrapped around his body. Without looking up at Reece, he says, ‘You’re not dropped. Yet. We’ll see how you go this weekend.’
He wonders: if they win this weekend will he, Cob, be vindicated or will Redhouse be? He bends to open one of the drawers of his desk and rifle through the contents, and when he looks up the kid has left, the office is empty.
Boss
Round twelve
The train ride with Dad to the MCG is unlike any other Em has been on, because almost everyone in their carriage belongs together. They all wear team colours, and people talk and shout to each other from one end of the train to the other.
‘Gonna be a belting.’
‘Unbelievable turnaround the last few weeks.’
‘Cob’s playing Mickey Reece up front, let him take a few hangers.’
She twists around to see the man who said that about Mickey Reece – an old man with a grimy team scarf. He smiles at her and gives her the thumbs-up, and she says to him, ‘Mickey Reece is a gun.’
He winks. ‘Bet you think he’s pretty handsome, huh?’
Em turns away from him in disgust. Mickey Reece isn’t handsome, he’s a gun. Last week he took six contested marks and had thirty-two possessions – she goes through his stats in her head but it’s no good, the man behind her has bruised the joy of the train ride by reminding her she’s a girl, which reminds her that next weekend it’ll be Pete going to the game with Dad, like he always gets to, and her stuck at home with Mum, who doesn’t know anything about footy. Dad knows everything about footy, but he mostly talk
s about it to Pete. She sinks down in her seat and stares out at the dusky sky.
Her sulk is disturbed when Azza gets on at Richmond. She knows it’s Azza because he sits in the seat in front of them, leans over the back of it and says to Dad, ‘Billy Boss!’
Pete has told her a lot about Azza: he’s the club’s number-one fan and knows lots of players.
He gives Dad a high five and says, ‘How ya doin’, boss?’
Em leans into her dad, proud.
Azza looks down at her. ‘Finally! Emmy Amigo.’
‘Hi,’ she says.
He has a ponytail and a big tattoo up his arm. Em can’t stop herself from staring at the tattoo: there is a spider’s web across his forearm and a snake slithering up into the sleeve of his jacket.
Dad starts talking about the game, and Azza nods and uh-huhs and yeahs, looking around the train carriage. He has a banner with him, a sign – it’s rolled up so Em can’t see what it says. It leans against the wall and fills her with a skittery excitement that bleeds into worry: why don’t she and Dad have a sign? They’ll be sitting with the cheer squad. Why hasn’t anyone thought of that?
She leans in to get his attention and whispers, ‘Why don’t we have a sign?’
‘What’s that?’ His hand on the back of her head, pulling her closer to his ear. He’s not looking at her, he’s looking at Azza.
‘A sign.’ Neediness creeping into her voice – she points to the one near Azza’s legs and leans in closer to Dad’s ear. ‘So everyone knows who we go for.’
Dad laughs and scrunches up the hair at the back of her head. ‘So everyone knows who we go for,’ he says to Azza.
‘Don’t worry, amigo,’ Azza says. ‘Everyone’ll know. You’re with me.’
*
The stadium is huge. Bigger than she could have imagined from the telly, and lit up like a giant spaceship in the night. Em would like to stand still and believe it slowly, and concentrate on not being scared, but Azza is ploughing through the crowds and her dad follows him; she is pulled along quickly by the hand. It seems like no-one else is surprised by any of it – the crowds, the hugeness of the stadium, the rush and noise and throb of it all. From somewhere there are trumpets, playing the team song. They go through the turnstiles, Dad working the ticket machine for her.
‘I’ll get us a beer, mate,’ Azza says when they’re inside, and he disappears into the crowd.
‘C’mon then.’ Dad pulls her along through a world of oncoming torsos. Em has to admit that Pete is brave, never to have said anything about this great heaving jostle. Dad gets the tickets out and shows them to a lady with a swinging tag around her neck, and they go down some stairs that take them outside, and the world shifts again into a whole new scale. It’s the side of the stadium that she sees on telly every week, but it’s nothing like it is on telly. Before this, the most people Em had ever seen in one place was at her school assembly.
Their seats are right down the front. She knew they would be; Pete has showed her on a map of the stadium, but that was before she understood words like stadium and crowd and cheer squad. Even pompom means something new here – there are people nearby with massive ones in team colours, flopping over towards the field. How badly she’d like to hold one and feel its writhing papery weight. Azza comes down with two beers and hands one to her dad. His seat is behind theirs, in the second row.
‘You reckon they’ll play to the city side if they win the toss?’ Dad says, twisting round to face Azza and taking a gulp of beer.
‘Yeah, prob’ly, but if bloody Cob has his way they’ll be on the defensive all night and we won’t see anything except Ranga’s big arse.’
There are many things to be shocked about in this. Bloody Cob. Em looks at her dad, expecting him to say, I don’t want to hear any of that media-driven negative crap; Cob is The Best Coach We’ve Ever Had. But he’s drinking his beer, bobbing his head up and down.
‘Cob is the best coach we’ve ever had,’ she says to Azza, who is looking down the row of seats towards a woman in a narrow little singlet. The singlet has club colours but not enough material to be a proper club top. The woman’s bare arms make Em’s own arms prickle with goosebumps.
Dad says, ‘I reckon Walker’s knee’s a beat-up. D’you reckon he’s in the team?’
Em knows this conversation – she was there when Dad and Pete had it at home. Kev Walker, the big ruckman, is supposed to be out with a knee injury, but Dad said this was just a trick of Cob’s to get the other team to change their structure.
She waits to see whether Azza has anything clever to say about this, but his eyes are roaming the rows of seats and he doesn’t answer Dad’s question. Maybe he didn’t hear it. Em knows about being ignored – the littlest person in a family says lots of things that slide below everyone’s notice. But Dad is the biggest; whatever he says drops down with the force of gravity.
Em says, ‘Walker will have recovered quicker ’cos of the hyper thing, that room the club has, right, Dad?’
He just glances at her and shrugs, and says to Azza, ‘You want another beer, mate?’ And then, because Azza isn’t paying attention – he’s watching the woman with the bare, prickling arms – he says again, ‘I might get another beer, you want a beer?’
‘I hate that woman’s top,’ Em says loudly, surprising herself. Azza and her dad both turn to look at her with blank faces, and for a moment she thinks she’s blown it, the panic rises; she’s been weird and immature and Dad will never take her to another game. But then Azza laughs, and leans over to tousle her hair and Dad does the same thing. Em says, ‘I mean, I don’t care what she wears, I just think it’s stupid.’
Azza says, ‘Don’t worry, amigo, you’ll be wearing stuff like that before you know it.’
Em looks up at him, caught between disgust and politeness. ‘Okay,’ she says. She will never wear anything except the kind of clothes Dad and Pete wear. The club has just released a cool new away jumper and she has asked to get it for her birthday.
There is no more time to think about the threat of the woman’s singlet, because without any warning the boys come out of the race and are right there, warming up in front of her. Pete Henley the captain and Luke Camperos with his socks pulled up and Mickey Reece with his red hair bouncing. And Kev Walker is there, kicking practice goals with the rest of them (‘You said he’d be playing, didn’t you say, Dad?’).
Azza shouts at the field, ‘Hey, umpire, how many goals you gonna rob us tonight?’
In the midfield the green-topped umpires are warming up, practising bounces. She knows which one Azza is shouting at. ‘Bloody Phelan,’ she says loudly.
Azza nods and Dad says, ‘Too right bloody Phelan.’
Happiness spreads across Em like warm water. Azza turns back towards the ground and makes his hands into a cone, and shouts with an earth-tremor volume that goes right through her, ‘Fucking maggot.’
She looks up at Dad, a confused idea that he might tell Azza off. Dad sips his beer.
‘How are you gonna ruin the game tonight, you fucken fag?’ Azza roars.
Em has a sudden impulse to hold Dad’s hand, to slip her small hand into his big one. She resists it, and ducks her head down because her face feels hot and tight.
A man sitting a couple of seats away says, ‘Simmer down, Aaron. Save it for the game.’
Em looks across at him, nervous and thankful – a big bald man she recognises from the telly: he gets interviewed all the time after games, and last year he was in an ad for beer.
‘G’day, Shuggie,’ her dad says, but the man has gone back to studying his footy record.
Azza shouts, ‘Fucking maggot,’ again, a bit quieter. Then he leans over the seats towards the field and bangs with both hands on the metal barrier between them and the players. ‘Give it a thump, boss,’ he says, and Dad leans over and thumps the barrier too.
; ‘That’s the way,’ Azza says, pulling his own hands back behind the fence.
Her dad thumps the barrier again, harder – it sounds like a huge hollow drum.
Em laughs, and feels better straight away. She leans over and thumps on the barrier as well – her own hands are too small to add much noise but Dad looks at her and laughs, and she laughs harder. For sheer surprised joy she shouts, ‘Go on, Walker, I knew you’d play.’ Thumping the barrier is a wonderful feeling, she and Dad could be happy doing it together all night, but when she looks up there’s a security guard dressed in yellow. He’s coming towards them around the boundary.
He stands in front of them with his hands crossed over his private parts, leans in close to Dad and says, ‘Please stop doing that, ahh, sir.’ His feet are spread wide on the ground. Em thinks he has a ratty face, with a pointy nose and sticking-out ears. Dad pulls his hands up, back behind the barrier, and Em does too.
As soon as the ratty security guard begins to move away, Azza says loudly, ‘Give it a thump, boss,’ and her dad leans over and thumps the barrier again.
Em copies him, laughing, although she doesn’t feel like it anymore. The security guard comes a little way back, and she gets the heavy feeling in her stomach like when she talked during assembly and got sent to the principal’s office – she wonders if the security guard could make them leave and miss the whole game. But he stops before he gets to them and stands a few feet away looking up at another stand, as if there might be people up there doing worse things than thumping on barriers. Dad laughs, and Em understands that he has beaten the security guard; the security guard wants them to stop but there’s nothing he can do. She thumps harder, joyously, and Dad does too until the security guard moves further away, still looking up into a different stand.
