by Miriam Sved
*
On game day the tattooed men are there long before the first siren. Martin can hear them: not the specifics of their spit-riddled shouting, but the muted roar from a general direction that lets him know the team’s hardcore cheer squad – his hate squad – are ready. It’s been a big lead-up, the stakes high on both sides; undoubtedly higher for his dad’s team, but if Jackie’s team lose they’ll go into the finals outside the top four, giving them a mountain to scale to reach the grand final. Yesterday, when he visited the home, Terry was vibrating at such a high pitch that Martin, worried for the old man’s health, made a futile attempt to persuade him not to watch the game.
Sitting in the pre-match briefing he pinches his own thigh to banish all thought of his dad and tunes back in to Rob up the front, who has been rehashing what a big-ticket game this is and how much scrutiny there’ll be on every decision.
‘I’m not telling you guys this to make you nervous,’ he says to the five umpires who’ll be on-ground today, ‘or because I doubt your ability to perform in these conditions.’ He shakes his head slowly, solemnly. ‘Quite the opposite, guys. I’m telling you this because it’s exactly why each . . . and . . . every . . . one of you has been chosen for this responsibility.’
Pete, a newish lad sitting next to Martin, straightens his spine. Martin has heard it all before, so many times. He can dimly remember the early days when Rob’s pep talks seemed exciting and weighty. Now the droning of the coach can’t compete with his dad’s voice, on loop in his head. The last thing Terry said as Martin was leaving his room yesterday: ‘This is the beginning of something, son. I can feel it.’ The old man’s excitement made him look older, more bowed and frail than ever; as though the force of his belief might at any moment overcome the limited capacities of his body. Martin smiled, nodded vaguely, for a moment tried to forget his own role in the upcoming game.
*
With the opening siren there is a flood of relief – this is just an ordinary game, just part of the job after all. No different, his winnowed football instincts tell him, to any of the hundreds of games that have gone before. He has the first bounce of the day, and it’s a beautiful straight driver that cuts the centre circle neatly down the middle. Then jogging back quickly out of the way and feeling his senses sharpen, the rest of the world receding as he watches the first desperate clash of bodies. It’s almost calming, almost sort of zen, this feeling he gets at the beginning of a game. He watches as if in slow motion a tackle off the ball – not even really registering the team colours – and blows his whistle for the first time.
The first half is all like this – frenetic but detached, a system of moving parts that he oversees confidently, calmly, never noticing the scoreboard, the noise of the crowd no more to do with him than the distant squawking of gulls.
Jogging off at half-time there is one moment of vertigo: emerging from the trance-like concentration of the game, he checks the scoreboard – it is tight, just four points in it – and he feels a physical lurch, the momentary colonisation of his adrenal system. He picks up his pace and shakes the sweat off his face. Good to have caught this moment, this wayward emotion, during the harmless lull of the break. Nothing he can’t handle.
At the beginning of the second half he is again sucked into the flowing oblivion of the game. Again the bounce helps – taking it seriously, focusing his all on trajectory and force, so that when the ball rebounds into the open air to bring the game alive he feels elevated by this first show of even-handed skill. Then sprinting down the boundary in line with the run of play, light on his feet, careful not to impede the ball-carriers or shepherds. This quarter the game picks up aggression, which always means more frees, but he leaves his whistle hanging wherever possible. After a few long seconds crouched beside a scrum the ball spills out on its own, his instincts correct. Decisions are coming naturally, as they should.
On his way down to the room at three-quarter time he doesn’t check the scoreboard: not interested; maybe knowing, too, that it’s safer this way. But standing around the drinks table, everyone holding their fluoro orange and yellow bottles, the new guy Pete says, ‘Gonna be a close one I reckon, right down to the wire.’ Nobody takes him up on this conversational sally and Martin probably isn’t the only one vaguely uncomfortable about it – it’s an unspoken rule that during the breaks they might discuss on-field issues, any black spots emerging on the umping map, but not the progress of the game itself or who will win. Each with their own paranoid internal footy journalist muttering darkly about underdog umping, sympathy calls. So the men’s conversation flows effortlessly over Pete’s newbie slip-up, but it’s too late for Martin not to know. Down to the wire. He wonders whether someone at the home has gone in to watch the game with Terry; a few of the staffers share his dad’s passion, and one guy in particular will often stop by his room to watch the games. He hopes this hasn’t happened today, he hopes that no-one is there with Terry; knowing how it oppresses his dad to have people around in times of stress and heightened emotion. Well-wishers, witnesses.
*
The fourth-quarter bounce does not go well – he overcompensates too heavily for a left-leaning bias in his bounce and the ball swings wildly right and has to be called back. The ball-up is fine, but he feels jangly. The spectral presence of Terry has not left him. (What if his heart gives out during the game? He mentally revises his wish to have the old man alone in his room.)
Sprinting to catch up with a quick ball turnover, for a minute the intensity of physical exercise helps him to forget everything else. But the first time the ball dribbles through the sticks for a score – just a point – he looks up at the scoreboard: 64 to his dad’s team, 70 to his wife’s.
Even thinking of the teams in these terms is a blaring danger siren. They are just the teams, a random pairing of different-coloured jumpers. But the colours on one set of jumpers – he sees a vivid mental snapshot of his teenage bedroom, which he’d insisted on painting in an ugly mish-mash of those colours. He smiles, and again loses the thread of the game. The play is close by, a whistle sounds, and Pete is galloping from the other side of the ground signalling high contact, gesturing for the ball to be brought back into the forward fifty. Martin shakes his head to dislodge the confusion. His wife’s forward fifty. Pete jogs by to monitor the free and gives him a funny look – it’s not like Martin to miss a call. Trying to snap himself out of it with action, Martin sprints towards the man on the mark and officiously lines him up. Pete falls back respectfully and the captain of his wife’s team takes the free – a beautiful, floating ball that splits the goal posts and lands in the second level of the grandstand. Two goals up now, Martin thinks. How much time to go?
With an effort he resists looking up at the scoreboard clock; he has to resist. Sometimes when his dad watches a live game he’ll time the stoppages, so he knows how much time is left. Marie used to tease him about it: crazy old bugger. Now Martin thinks, he probably has a better idea than me, and the thought makes him feel momentarily peaceful.
Again the blare of a whistle and the streak of yellow that should have been him – this time it’s Len, the other experienced man on-field today, jogging over to officiate an incorrect disposal. Like Pete, he gives Martin a suspicious look in passing, tinged with apology for moving in on his patch of the ground. Martin burns. No conscious memory of the last run of play, even though he was metres away with a good angle. This time he lets the other ump line up the kick, which takes the play back towards the centre square.
To refocus he thinks of Rob, at the whiteboard in next week’s review room, the monitor beside him panning slowly over the game, over Martin’s slow-witted humiliation. Martin prides himself on his clean record in reviews. Already this week’s running sheet will be a mess, might even jeopardise his job in the finals.
The ball spills out of bounds and he officiates the clearance, watches over a tight huddle and leaves just the right number of
beats for the ball to spill out on its own. He sprints with the run of play, managing for the moment to make himself colour-blind to the teams, to outrun the cloying spectre of his father.
Back down the Punt Road end the ball is caught in a long run of fumbling defence in front of goal. Surely not much time on the clock now. This is the end of play that he hates to watch on the review screen, because here – behind the goal posts, not ten metres from where he squats to follow the progress of the ball in a scrum – is the cheer squad. The anti-Martin brigade. Usually it’s no trouble blocking them out – often he’ll be surprised, in review, to see the many-headed hydra spewing hate at him, just metres from where he’s umping. Now they are behind him as he watches the huddle, and their noisy outrage presses down on him. He has a strong, inappropriate urge to turn around and shout back. Bring it on, he’d shout. Fuck you all too, you loony bloody bogans.
Why do you hate me?
Stay focused on the huddle, the fought-over ball.
He sneaks a look at the scoreboard: thirty-one minutes gone with three points in it; God help Terry, his boys three points from a history-making finals campaign.
With cold clarity the thought comes uninvited into Martin’s head: it won’t matter to the others, to Jackie’s team, if they lose this game. A finals berth just outside the top four, this is not a disaster.
At the same time the colours around him crystallise, two sets of colours falling into a pattern of signification understood deep within himself, a genetically encoded map of right and wrong. He wonders: is this what they always knew? Those crazy, hate-filled fans, maybe not so crazy after all. Maybe they saw it in him, what he himself couldn’t see: a pocket of diehard loyalty.
As if in slow motion he watches the captain, his dad’s captain, kick a desperate round-the-corner floater towards the top of the goal square. He watches as two players, the last two players in the world, stand ten metres from goal and jostle for space as the ball arcs towards them, knowing that who marks this will mean everything. It will mean life going on for Terry, all the possibility of a finals season – he remembers those Septembers of his youth more vividly than Christmases or birthdays; the fearful, open-ended hope of those short weeks. What is it worth for his dad to have this feeling at least one more time? And then he feels it himself – the rush of lightness, a world of possibilities opening in his future. He weighs up this world quite coolly as the ball comes down and touches one set of hands then another, as the siren rings out over the ground, as he registers with the clarity of proximity and a good angle which set of hands touched the ball first and knows that he will do it anyway: for Terry, and for himself. Whistle out before the ball is fully controlled, already kissing goodbye to his finals umping, to all of it, jogging over to line up the shot in front of goal.
And those fans – the shouting, waving mob behind the goal posts: they had a good view, they saw it too. He can’t resist looking up and catching the eye of one of them at random: a beefy, red-faced man with a ponytail, Martin knows his face well. Fucking maggot. The man’s eyes are popping out of a veiny forehead, his hands suspended in outraged gesticulation, face frozen as if paralysed by what he’s seeing. Martin smiles, just slightly, just for him, and lines up the mark for his man to kick from.
Go on, my son.
Cheer squad
Elimination final
Normally, a stranger at the squad’s end-of-season function would not have been welcome. Someone who hasn’t put in the hours: banner prep, fundraising. Someone who, as far as anyone knows, is not even a paid-up member.
It is the one night of the year when the dedicated members of the cheer squad expect to get something back. And if you have spent every Thursday night for the last four months in banner prep and every other Wednesday in squad admin, you might be looking forward to this – to getting something back. You might, like the woman perched on a bar stool near the bathrooms (an older woman, nondescript except for the overwhelming stamp of team colours on her loose-fitting pants and top), not be too keen on sharing the club’s function room with outsiders.
But tonight is different. Tonight is complicated. The woman crosses her legs with some difficulty: the stool is at an awkward height but provides an excellent overview of the room. She has been sipping from a glass of cider and watching the Aaron Peters situation play out.
Not that it began with Aaron – the night was already on a downwards trajectory before he started making everyone uncomfortable. If you are inclined to be offended (which she is not), you could take issue with the club’s choice of player reps. It is a big part of the tradition and the glamour of the night – the coach and president would usually make an appearance, perhaps a short speech, but the people you came to speak to were the players, who would actually be seated among the cheer-squad members, so that if you got lucky you might find yourself eating dinner elbow-to-elbow with one of the boys. (This has happened to her a couple of times, and stands out in her memory with a special televisual glow, making her feel like a part of the official history of the team.) So it was a bit of a shock to walk in tonight and scan the room for the telltale height and brawn, to see the small knot of players arranged near the bar and feel . . . not lifted, but confronted by some dire situational truth about the club.
As well as a couple of low-ranking fillers – VFL players mostly – the club has provided the full triumvirate of its recent disappointment and disaster. There is Luke Camperos, slumped at a table near the door (you avoided eye contact with him if you could – the sooner they delisted that sick puppy the better, even if he could kick four goals in a quarter). There is Mick Reece, nursing a soft drink at the bar. Poor lad – a bit of biffo is what the game is built on, and five weeks is a travesty; the tribunal must have lost their bloody minds. At least if the boys can get through the elimination final he’ll be back in to tear it up in the semi. The woman will go over and tell him that as soon as he isn’t sitting quite so close to Ranga McPhee.
Ranga is perhaps the hardest for the beleaguered cheer-squad members to encounter on this night, because of the cosmic thumping he’s taken this year. First the pre-season training incident with the ruckman, Kev Walker – hard to make out what actually happened but the net result was a club-imposed two-game suspension for Ranga. Then a lacklustre season that’s had the commentators circling like sharks with a whiff of blood, talking about his age and his weight and how lumbering he looks chasing small forwards around the ground. And now, in the final home-and-away game of the season, when Ranga had played well the whole four quarters, to be the victim of perhaps the worst umpiring error of the year – a decision in the dying seconds of the game that awarded a mark against Ranga and gave the other team the game, dislodging the club from the safety of its top-four finals berth. They are going into the finals in fifth place – no double chance and no recourse of appeal – and the woman, along with all the other cheer-squad members, is guiltily avoiding the pocket of air around Ranga McPhee, who seems struck with some kind of possibly infectious bad luck.
And then there is the unpleasant situation with Aaron Peters. Azza. An excellent bloke, they would all agree; passionate about the club to the point of obsession, he is high up in the unofficial hierarchy of the squad – even a sort of figurehead, having been around long enough and got himself on telly during enough games that he is instantly recognisable and linked to the club; arguably only slightly less so than Shuggie Williams himself. He is, moreover, sufficiently young and handsome (in a jowly, thick-skinned way) that the ladies in the cheer squad – many of them older ladies with grown-up kids of their own – take up a kind of proprietorial, respectfully flirty tone with him, as with an overindulged, irresistible only son. So it is awkward, the way things went with Azza at the Saturday game, and the way they are going tonight.
‘He looked directly at me,’ Azza is saying emphatically to Laurie Miller, the grandmother of the cheer squad who, between the Alzheimer’s and the one-sided
deafness, only ever takes in maybe a fifth of what anyone says to her. ‘Directly at me, I’m telling ya. I’ve sent the umpiring board an email and if I can just get hold of the goal-post camera everyone’ll see. That cunt–’ breaking off and waving his hand in apologetic dismissal of his own vulgarity, at which Laurie is nodding pleasantly ‘–that bloody umpire wasn’t just incompetent or blind or any of the other stuff the media’s saying. It was deliberate. He smiled at me.’ Gesticulating at his face with his beer bottle. ‘Looked directly into the cheer-squad seats and searched around – this had to be over five, maybe ten seconds – until he found the most, you know, recognisable face. The club’s number-one fan. And then he smiled, like this big F.U., yeah?’
Laurie nods complacently – it is doubtful, the woman thinks, that Laurie would ever have understood the meaning of F.U., even in her distant days of mental acuity, but she is the best person just now for Azza to be venting to, keeping him away from the rest of the squad. It is especially important that Azza be safely contained in the placatory field of Laurie’s senility when Shuggie Williams arrives, because Shuggie – older than Azza by a decade, tough in a whole different way, and everyone else’s pick for the club’s number-one fan – might give Azza a serve. Because Azza, though clearly, genuinely outraged by what happened to the club on Saturday, is nevertheless enjoying himself. Undoubtedly enjoying the drama a little too much – the drama with him at its epicentre; Azza, the face of the club, targeted by that shitty little umpire because, according to him, Azza is the club. And he won’t shut up about it. And eventually he will probably tire of Laurie’s uncomprehending complacency and take his rant back into circulation in the rest of the room. And so it is a relief to see a new, distracting face.
