by Miriam Sved
Dad turns round to Azza and says, ‘What a dickhead, hey?’
Em is clenched with excitement – the adrenalin from thumping the barrier, and now to hear her dad call someone a dickhead right in front of her, as though she’s not little and a girl at all but one of them, one of the guys. She turns to see whether Azza is impressed but he’s not paying attention – his head is turned in the other direction, where the woman in the cold singlet is coming along the row, working her way past all the knees. He wasn’t even watching.
Em looks up at Dad, who is still facing Azza, and the heavy feeling is back in her stomach. It feels like needing to wee, and then she realises she does need to. She pulls on Dad’s arm and whispers it into his ear. He doesn’t keep his voice down when he says, ‘Now? Can’t you hold on? The game’s about to start.’
Em looks out to the field; the big banners the teams will run through have been hoisted up by people with ropes. The noise around her has picked up and is pressing down from behind, and suddenly she thinks that it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to be at home watching the game on telly with Mum. The whole night feels ruined. She needs to go to the toilet. She tries not to sound whiny when she says, ‘I really need to go.’ Dad is still watching Azza, who is watching the woman in the singlet, who has got to the end of the row of seats and out into the aisle.
Azza says, ‘I’ll take her.’
She stares at him, shy. He has taken off his jacket and more of his tattoo is visible: a knife surrounded by twirling vine leaves; a big cat, maybe a panther. The stubble across his chin looks rough and scratchy. Will he come in with her?
But Dad is saying, ‘Thanks, mate, thanks a lot – you don’t have to go in with her, just stand outside the door.’ Azza has already moved away down the aisle. ‘Thanks, mate,’ Dad says again, and gives Em a little nudge so she stands up. ‘You can get a chocolate bar,’ he tells her, and hands her a two-dollar coin. Her legs start moving her along, past some teenage boys and an old lady wearing two team scarves, past lots of knees – ’scuse me, ’scuse me – out into the aisle where Azza is already walking up the concrete stairs. For a moment she thinks she’ll lose him and have to go up by herself, but to her complicated relief he stops, turns back and holds out his hand to her. She takes it: dry and large and hard – scary in the same way as his stubble, but not as scary as navigating unmoored through the throng of the stadium.
Back up the steps, past the lady with the swinging tag, into the bright echoing corridor where the noise from outside is muffled.
Azza lets go of her hand, points to an opening in the wall with the Ladies sign above it. He is looking in the other direction. What if he’s gone when she gets out, will she ever find her way back to Dad? Em can’t see any alternative so she goes into the brightly lit toilet, into the first cubicle. She tries to wee quickly, careful not to lose the two dollars from her back pocket.
When she gets back out she plans to say, Alright? to Azza, brusque and businesslike the way she can imagine Pete saying it. But Azza isn’t there. A surge of panic; she looks around and sees him further along the corridor, talking to the lady in the clingy singlet. Azza has his phone out and is showing her something on the screen. Em walks towards them slowly, still a bit scared, wiping her wet hands on her pants, her arms prickling again with sympathy goosebumps at the sight of the woman’s bare skin. The woman has long blonde hair and she looks younger than Em thought – not much older than the high-school kids she sees at the shops. Azza is saying, ‘Cob and me at the Best and Fairest last year.’ He flicks at his phone screen. ‘Me and Campo at the Lizard Lounge. Me and Henley.’
Em stands on tiptoes but she can’t see the phone screen.
‘Me and Ranga. Me and Welly.’
‘Is that your kid?’ the woman says.
Azza looks down at Em like he’d forgotten she existed, and blows air out his nose. ‘Hi, amigo,’ he says. And to the woman, ‘I’m too young to have a bloody kid.’ Although he looks the same age as Em’s dad. He keeps flicking at his phone. ‘That’s when I had a kick-around with Mick Reece, in the pre-season. Gave him a few pointers.’
Desperate now, Em cranes to see the screen. She is about to crack and ask Azza if she can have a look, when the lady takes the phone off him. She taps something into it and says, ‘You can call me tonight if you want, when you’re out with the boys. My number’s in your contacts. Willow.’
‘Absolutely,’ Azza says, ‘we’re gonna go to this great new bar in the city . . .’
He trails off because Willow has turned and walked away: just like that, while he was still speaking. The rudeness of it is amazing; that she can be so rude to Azza. He continues to stare after her until she is all the way down the corridor, and before she turns out of sight he lets out a low whistle. Willow doesn’t look back. She wears tight jeans; the pants move busily like something is trapped in there trying to escape. Em watches Azza watching. He doesn’t look happy but like he is concentrating hard on a difficult maths problem. Concentrating on Willow.
Em does not ask to see the pictures on his phone.
When Willow is out of sight Azza turns and walks back towards their seats. Em follows at a small distance, feeling a strange weightlessness, as though she’s not quite in her body. She moves her hips experimentally from side to side. She has never before thought of what she has as hips. She doesn’t care about the chocolate bar she didn’t get.
They get back to their seats.
‘You two were gone a while,’ Dad says.
Azza doesn’t answer, he is scanning the crowd.
‘Always bloody big queues at the bar,’ Dad says.
‘You said it, Billy Boss,’ Azza says, without looking at him.
He does look older than Azza – he has droopy bits in his chin and flecks of grey in his hair. She feels a warm flush of something like embarrassment for her dad, who is not the boss here. That thought is so disloyal it makes her eyes prickle; it was an accident to think it. She has to protect him from her new knowledge: from Azza, and the tight scurry in Willow’s jeans. ‘Billy Boss,’ she says to him. He looks down at her and laughs, and she laughs too, to show him it is light and funny. She will save up her pocket money to buy a little singlet in team colours. She will be cold, but she can take it.
The game is just starting and Azza stands at the fence, shouts something at an umpire out on the ground. When Mickey Reece scores the first goal Dad leans over and thumps his hands on the metal barrier. Em stays in her seat and claps politely.
The eagle
Round seventeen
Hugo dreams of an eagle, his body a taut extension of wind and sky, his eyesight sharper than God.
He wakes when Uncle Les opens the bedroom door before the sun is up and whispers Jake’s name. Hugo sits up and swings his legs over the side of the bunk bed, and says, ‘I’m coming too.’ Uncle Les grunts and Jake, on the bottom bunk, swats at Hugo’s feet. The eagle in his dream had crested over a paddock of roughly cut spider grass. Hugo could feel the power in his dangerous talons, and could see in the long grass some small, desperately fleeing creature – something grey and temptingly furred. In the heavy-brained fug of 5 am, Hugo’s plans are hazy, but he knows he has to be at the footy field with his uncle and brother. The field behind the school, large and unkempt, badly mowed. Andy rolls over and snores as Hugo and Jake get their stuff together in the early-morning dark of the bedroom.
Jake got in yesterday morning, Uncle Les picking him up from the station, and the whole thing is weird. It’s weird at school, where everyone knows about Jake’s visit (everyone knows everything in this stinking town) but no-one has said anything, except for Ryan Taylor whispering in geography. Hugo cornered him in the corridor after class and showed Ryan where he could shove his lame abo rookie shit.
It’s weird after the jostling and shouting about Mick Reece’s visit a few weeks ago: all the stupid girls right from the younger g
rades up to the year twelves talking about how they were going to get with him and be his girlfriend and go to the Brownlow with him, and a cover story in the Valley Leader (Star Draft Pick Still Trains with Dad; a photo of Mick with Dan Reece, one foot each on a football, both looking like idiots). Last year, when Mick and Jake were going to the under-18s championship, both prepping for the draft, the Leader had run a story with the two of them on the cover – Local Boys Carry Hopes of a Town on Their Shoulders. That was before the draft combine and Jake’s leg and everything that happened after – Mick being picked up such a high draft while Jake just snuck in as a rookie; a lame rookie.
Things are even weirder at home, where Hugo’s family are acting like Jake really is the star first-year draft with brass bands playing when he arrives from the city: Mum cooking his favourite meal and buying energy drinks from the supermarket (she’d never buy expensive energy drinks for Hugo, even if she did know about his training); Uncle Les talking endlessly about Jake’s debut in the VFL next week. The house is so clean that Hugo can see what colour all the appliances are. And Grandpa, who never speaks, has been going around nodding like a maniac – nodding whenever anyone mentions Jake, and keeping on nodding to no-one in particular, as if he has a store of agreement to use up.
This fussing over Jake at home makes Hugo almost as angry as Ryan Taylor’s whispering in geography, with a different kind of heat in his chest – a low, toxic simmer rather than the clean explosive force. Angry at home, angry at school, and when Jake got in it hardly seemed worth the trouble; his brother was no lame rookie and no returning god, but just his brother – a bit bigger perhaps, a bit broader in his face and upper body, and without the chunky leg cast he’d had last time Hugo saw him. Hugo didn’t know what he’d expected – some kind of transformation from Jake’s months in the city; someone cooler, less awkward and silent.
In the ute’s dim light, bumping down the unpaved road to the footy field, Hugo tries to stay quiet. It seems to him that Jake’s quiet has always given him an advantage with the adults, making him seem older than he is, more serious, bigger. He is not, in fact, that much bigger than Hugo – a few centimetres. Hugo will probably outgrow him soon.
When they get to the field the sun is starting to rise behind the flat buildings of the school, and the line of surrounding scrub glows orange. Jake takes off around the oval, and Hugo has to sprint to catch up and then keep up, which is a shock. Hugo’s secret makes his breathing feel tighter: he has been in training, after school on this oval, every day for the last nine months, since the talent scout from the club showed up to watch him play last October. With his training and his brother’s injury he’d thought he might be able to keep up with Jake, maybe even beat him. Jake has only been out of the cast for a couple of months. It must be all those doctors and sports scientists at the club.
With a desperate burst of speed Hugo makes it back to Uncle Les a couple of paces behind Jake, but the difference in their breathing is probably obvious. Uncle Les pays no attention to the badly huffing Hugo. He doesn’t exactly seem thrilled with Jake’s run either, muttering, ‘Balls of your feet, mate, gotta get you running from here.’ He picks up Jake’s foot and slaps the front part of his sneaker. Uncle Les is old and fat and never made it into the League himself, playing his whole career in the Valley Ravens, but everyone seems to think he’s some kind of footy guru.
Hugo jogs gently on the spot – balls of his feet, trying out the feeling of bouncing high on the balls.
Anyway the morning is not really about running; it turns out to be mostly about kicking: Jake’s kicking style. Over the next hour and a half, Uncle Les lines Jake up around the fifty-metre mark and has him kick again and again, each time focusing on some small detail: the angle of Jake’s non-kicking foot, the tension in his thigh, the height of his ball-drop, until Hugo begins to lose the sense of words like kick and leg and ball, the whole thing becoming some jerky, uncoordinated machine. Uncle Les has brought three balls for Jake to train with; Hugo has one, which he has to run and fetch each time. And each time he boots it, a few seconds after his brother’s thumping kick, his ball arcs and then trickles out around the twenty-metre mark. Jake’s kicks always make the distance to the goal posts, or close enough. Somehow, during his solo training sessions, Hugo had convinced himself that his kicking range had improved a lot; to forty-five or maybe even fifty metres. His reckoning must have been dodgy – this stupid oval doesn’t have any markings. ‘Power in the lower leg,’ Uncle Les says to Jake, and Hugo’s lower leg starts to feel weak with the effort of trying to be powerful.
The sun is up now, illuminating the scrub and the ugly squat school building; kids start arriving for school, trudging around the grassy border of the oval, staring openly at the three Dooleys. Hugo will bash any of them who says a word about it, or about his formerly lame brother. Even though he hates Jake more with each thumping kick of the footy. Hugo’s ball ebbs onto the grass again, twenty metres short, and he conjures in his head that old front page of the Leader – Jake before the injury, with his best mate Mick, both of them bursting with pride and hope and unbroken futures. Hugo imagines this picture just so that for a moment he can feel a stab of pity for his brother, which leaves in its wake a delicate ripple of pleasure.
All this, he thinks sulkily, watching Jake line up for another kick – all this for a stupid VFL game.
The kick sails right to left and splits the central posts. ‘Better,’ Uncle Les says. ‘But you’re still letting your thigh do the work. ‘Down here.’ He leans down and slaps the socked section between Jake’s ankle and lower calf. ‘Gotta access your power there. It’s hard ’cos of the break.’
Hugo lines up with his own ball to follow Jake’s kick, but Uncle Les says, ‘Better get to school, Huges. We’ll see ya after.’
Hugo shrugs and gives his ball a violent kick that goes in the wrong direction.
He lumps his bag onto his back and walks up the steep verge of the oval, hearing the thwack of his brother’s kicking long after he’s out of earshot.
*
That night there is spaghetti bolognaise for tea – Jake’s favourite – with warmed-up crusty bread rolls. Hugo tries not to enjoy it too much, even though he loves warm bread rolls more than just about anything. Andy makes exaggerated slurping noises with his spaghetti and Jake leans over and bats their little brother playfully on the head. Jake has always been friendly with Andy.
Hugo has been keeping his cupful of poison close all day, taking little sips whenever the thwack of his brother’s fifty-metre kicks faded from his mind. Jake has always been the lucky one, the loved and supported one, even when he was injured and lame and useless. Hugo trains every day and nobody even notices. His mother probably thinks he hangs out with the after-school dross behind the newsagent, smoking and hassling kids for money, which actually is what he did today – skipping the after-school training and tagging along with Troy Harley and the other smokers. The trickle of adults on their way to the shops gave them a wide berth, and old Mrs Connor behind the counter eyed them suspiciously when they went in to buy Cokes. These injustices were somehow satisfying to Hugo, fortifying. He has been feeling a bruised outlaw persecution all week, since talk of Jake’s visit started; it was good to be treated like an actual outlaw. Until Troy Harley started asking questions about Jake and the club and the VFL game next weekend. Hugo had been prepared to bash anyone who gave him any shit about his lame rookie brother, but he couldn’t bash Troy for being interested in how Jake is going and where they’re going to play him next week and when he might get a game in the firsts. Hugo sulked and mumbled through Troy’s questions, unprepared for this kind of interest – no-one at school has shown any sign of it since Jake’s injury – until Troy said, What’s up your butt? with a stupid American accent. Hugo rode a wave of internal violence, picked up his bag and left. Troy shouted at his back, Hey! All I said was what’s up your butt. What is up your butt?
Hugo went home and kicked Andy off the PlayStation and murdered his way through three levels of God of War. Jake was out for a run, but Hugo couldn’t really get away from him because the adults were all home – Mum and Uncle Les and Grandpa – and he could hear them in the kitchen discussing the VFL game: where Jake would get played and how he could show his work rate and what the opposition would bring.
They’re still discussing the VFL game now, ruining the only good part of Jake’s visit, the spaghetti bolognaise. Uncle Les says, ‘They’ll play him up front ’cos of the leg.’ And to Jake, ‘They wanna get a look at your ball skills without running you ragged. It’s your chance to surprise ’em. Show ’em all the work you been putting in, everything you got stored ready in here.’ He taps Jake on the chest, as if Jake really does have a secret weapon, maybe an Uzi stashed under his T-shirt.
Mum says, ‘They’re starting him in a big game. Might be the difference between a prelim and a grannie, I reckon.’
A VFL grannie, Hugo thinks contemptuously. As if anyone will give a shit about that.
‘He’s got the stuff for it,’ Uncle Les says, with a rare grin at Jake, who raises his eyebrows and slurps up his spaghetti as they all talk about him, as if he’s a goldfish or royalty.
Suddenly, without any forethought, Hugo says, ‘How’s Mick Reece?’
He has directed the question to Jake, but the whole family freezes mid-chew and turns to stare at him. Jake gives no sign of having heard.
Hugo, a strange hollowness in his head, goes on, ‘D’you know what position they’re gonna play him – Mick, I mean – in the finals?’
Jake gives an almost imperceptible shake of his head, his mouth full of spaghetti.
