by Femi Fadugba
When I told my foster sister, Olivia, all this, she thought I was nonsense-ing her. But the next morning in class she crouched to grab her stylus off the floor and noticed something curious: everyone’s feet were aimed at the door. She said it was like their shoes were compass needles pointing to where they all secretly wanted to be. Then, on her walk home, she saw a police officer questioning some yute on Rye Lane, and realized the officer was standing with the same outstretched feet that feds always stand with … which must be, she realized, how all feds stand, even plain-clothes ones. Not the worst knowledge to have on ends. And to really drive it home, before bed that same night, a rerun of Who Wants to Be a Billionaire was on and, according to Olivia, whenever a contestant got a question right, they got Happy Feet. Not Dancing Feet, mind you (you have to think to dance), but Happy Feet: the messy kicks that come out of you without your permission.
‘Twenty seconds, Rhia!’ Coach Gibbsy shouted, her violet whistle hanging limp on her lip.
The Arctic wind blew rain flat across the pitch, each drop stinging as it hit. Like most training sessions, the stands were empty, but the pitch itself was overflowing with anticipation. Everyone was staring at me, wondering if I’d screw it up, hoping I would.
I was used to playing competitive games in training; just not to them mattering. In a few short weeks, I’d know if I made the squad for the knockout stages of the Academy Cup or not, which turned every remaining second of training into a chance to either impress or implode. And the free kick I was lining up to take? Possibly the difference between redemption and rotting with the reserves.
The spot was just outside the box, but at a horrid angle out to the left. ‘Heat map,’ I said, scanning the graphics that popped up on my contact lenses. Visual analytics were a massive part of our training. Cantor’s (the company that invented 3D-printed chicken then somehow got a monopoly on the entire consumer landscape) made the best AR simulators around and had just released a 32K update, which was looking scarily crisp. But the only area of the goal that the simulator had coloured green was a speck in the top-left corner. With the wind stalking and ready to veer the ball off course, my strike would have to be beyond perfect. The lenses gave me so much more to analyse: the keeper’s save percentages, wind vectors, strike gradients. But I knew they could only tell me so much.
‘Ten seconds left,’ Gibbsy said. She was in charge of both the girls’ and boys’ academy teams. She managed every training drill, dictated every play, ruled over every blade of grass. Most importantly, she alone would make the call on which five out of us twenty-five girls would enter the kingdom of SE Donnettes Seniors at the end of the year. Just thinking about the day I’d get to peel open a signed letter with DONS FC printed at the top – and the salary figure written below – was enough for me to grow another foot. A full-time contract meant not having to worry about uni, or exam results, or my extra weekly tutorials, the first one of which was happening in half an hour.
‘Play me a precedent shot,’ I commanded. ‘Triple speed.’
A video of a tall blonde with KENNEDY on her jersey scrolled across my contact lenses. The footage was from an American league match a couple decades back and showed her taking a kick from the same spot as me. Watching her slot the goal that smoothly was comforting; the computer having to dig that far back in the archives to find an example – less so.
‘Five seconds.’
I knew what the team psychologist would be whispering in my ear right now if she could – some version of the self-help-faux-ga bollocks she always spouted: ‘Forget the pitch, Rhia. Forget the grass, the ball, everything. The bullseye is inside of you – if you manage to hit that, the ball has no other choice but to follow.’
Bun dat, I thought. I needed to know exactly what was around me. Then strip it all apart and use it to my advantage. I took a last look at the defensive line.
‘Three!’
The floodlights were suddenly blinding, my heart thumping so hard I swore I could hear the swoosh of blood from the vessels inside my ears. This could be my last free kick, I realized. The last time Gibbsy ever plays me. My last week in this club. My attention split across the thousand futures where this kick went wrong and everything came falling down. If I missed this shot, would my foster dad, Tony, keep me around? What about Poppy? Would she fight for me? Or, like everyone else, would they just –
‘Two.’
In went a deep breath. I dipped my head, moulded my concentration round the ball. I could see the sweet spot and knew hitting it could change everything.
‘One.’
I took the first step forward and then let myself roll into a jog before lowering to strike. An instant later, my toe kissed the ball, and I watched it sail away.
Judging from how all six defenders swivelled their heads, they’d clearly prepared for a power kick. But the ball whipped left, floating inches above the ponytail of our captain, Maria Marciel. It hit the joint where the post meets the crossbar before deflecting to the back of the net with a swoosh.
Goal.
Top bins.
‘You fucking beauty,’ I whispered to myself. The keeper was still watching, wide-legged. As predicted, she hadn’t even got a chance to move.
Gibbsy blew the melodic whistle for full time, breaking the silence on the pitch. ‘Two–one. Great day at the office, ladies,’ she added. And I couldn’t have agreed more.
What the raas was up with the silence on the pitch, though? Even the girls on my own team, the ones who were meant to be going nuts after our late comeback, had barely reacted – well, assuming I didn’t count the shoulder shrugs and eye rolls.
I thought back to last year when I’d been playing for my old school team, before the school got shut down and I got shipped to a ‘better’ school with no sports programme for girls and had to look for local clubs. Back then, if I’d scored a goal half this good, I’d have been buried under a pile of girls celebrating. But, as everyone kept reminding me, SE Dons was a ‘professional academy’, not a school team. Here, only vets like Maria were meant to take free kicks, let alone score them.
Not the girl who joined a couple months ago and had never played club footie before in her life.
Gibbsy, at least, tipped her beanie at me on her way to the sideline – the closest thing to approval I’d ever seen from the woman. I nodded back, with a keen smile, and as the field emptied I collected the few limp hand slaps I got with grace. I had no time to gloat or moan. There was a busy night ahead.
The rain had that annoying texture where you couldn’t tell if it was dying down or might continue drizzling forever. I flicked my hood up and wiped a dry streak into the pitchside bench before sitting on it. One girl after the next exited the changing rooms and joined the huddle gathered in the car park. Everyone was heading to tonight’s weekly social – a sold-out concert that we’d be watching from a wedding hall in Deptford, using the same contact lenses that had just helped me score a goal.
I hadn’t been to a social since the very first one. That night, I’d stayed a safe distance behind the mini mosh pit on the dance floor, and managed to have a few decent one-on-one convos with the girls who weren’t high on neon. But groups were where my awkwardness shone brightest, and where those same friendly girls turned into monsters. Another law of nature: wherever two or more youths gathered in the name of competitive sport, astonishing levels of sweat and cruelty gathered with them.
I’d skipped every social since, which earned me the reputation of ‘not being a team player’. After two months of that, I noticed the midfielders were passing to me that little bit less …
So I started scoring that little bit less too.
Once the goals dried up, the coaches stopped playing me. And, just like that, despite initially leading the squad in goals, I was dropped to the reserve team. Even the rare match-winner I scored tonight just added one more reason for everyone to hope I stayed there.
Clearly I had to fix it, so I was enthusiastically attending tonight’
s social. In fact, I’d signed up to help set up the event. I just had an hour-long maths-and-physics tutorial to get through first.
But when the last floodlight had dimmed to black, twenty minutes into our scheduled lesson time, my new tutor was still nowhere in sight.
Just as I reached for my phone, ready to share my million and one frustrations with Olivia, Maria jogged in, already changed. I’d heard that she and the girls were planning to hang out on the grounds till they were ready to leave for the social, and it wouldn’t be long till they started making their way out.
‘Hey, some guy’s at the gate waiting for you.’ She pointed at a figure in the distance.
‘Finally,’ I muttered.
If my tutor had arrived on time, I’d have been rushed, but I’d have probably got to the social just as it was starting. My new calculations put me a whole half hour behind.
‘Oh, and, by the way,’ I said, biting my nail. It was smarter to let Maria know now rather than after. ‘I’m gonna be a teeny bit late tonight.’
‘Oh,’ she said, a little off balance. ‘I mean, no worries at all. I get it. It’s completely your call.’ She’d started walking off when she turned back with a bright look suddenly on her face. ‘But obviously if you think you’re gonna be more than fifteen minutes late, lemme know so I can replace you.’
It was hard to miss the extra emphasis on the word ‘replace’. Go play in traffic, was what I wanted to tell her. But instead I served a smile, and replied: ‘I won’t be. Thanks, though.’
My walk to the gate was a vexed one. I wasn’t angry about my foster mum, Poppy, signing me up for extra tutoring; we fosties were used to having catch-up lessons forced down our throats. Plus, failing my GCSEs would mean losing my chance at an SE Dons contract, and probably a whole lot more. But of course my new tutor had to show up late today. For our very first lesson. Even after I’d written 7 p.m. SHARP in my message to him. I’d meant it!
I took a second to steady myself. My social worker had told me my new tutor was blind. I’d assured her that I was ready to be very grown-up about it, and that ‘I don’t see blindness’ … which was a pretty tasteless comment in hindsight.
He had a fresh cut and boyish smile; early- to mid-thirties was my guess. His jacket had AVIREX slapped across the front in the same black patent leather as his retro Air Max trainers. I could picture the moment (probably a decade prior) when he’d got a compliment on the outfit, and had decided to keep rocking it since. He turned to me as my steps got noisier.
‘Hi,’ I said, waiting till I was closer before finally adding: ‘I’m Rhia.’
It wasn’t till I shut up that I noticed them: his feet … looking all sorts of dodgy.
Olivia reckoned my whole ‘feet don’t lie’ thing went back to the photo of Mum in my sock drawer. My real mum, that is. In it, Mum looked around my age and was sitting alone on a park bench, smiling at the camera in a pretty dress. But it was everything happening below her knees that I’d spent so long trying to decode. Her right heel was off the ground and blurry, as if she’d been mid-tap when the shutter closed. And her toes, which you could see poking out her white slip-ons, were pointing as far away from the lens as possible. I’d spent ages staring at the bottom of that photo, wondering what she’d been so anxious about. I’d looked through every public park in London, hoping to spot that green cross-hatched bench. And after a paid darknet search confirmed that she was gone forever, like everyone had warned – swiped from the earth a month after she’d given birth to me – I was closer than ever to giving up on learning more about her.
As my new tutor stood frozen and focused on me, a growing group of girls were giggling with Maria in the car park as they watched us. Even from there, they could taste the awkwardness.
As much as I was suspicious of the man myself, I also felt kinda bad for him. Somewhere between foster homes seven and nine, I’d got acquainted with the fear that came with a first impression. I knew how it hijacked the body. And how being laughed at generally didn’t help.
I turned my full attention back to him. ‘And you must be …’ I asked in my gentlest voice.
‘My bad,’ he said, extending his hand with a smile. ‘It’s nice to meet you, Rhia. You can call me Dr Esso.’
CHAPTER 3
Esso · Now
THURSDAY (ONE DAY AGO)
With my shirt cuff covering my thumb, I pressed the ‘4’ on the elevator panel, then spent the journey up blocking out the smells and the groans the wiring made as it pulled me up. A blue door and the number ‘469’ came into view after the short walk across the fourth-floor landing. I sighed, almost drowning in my own relief. The only thing greeting me this evening was the gingery scent of Mum’s tilapia. Not the mandem or the stress of having to think about them.
D hadn’t turned up for school, but the silence of his absence had only turned up the volume on the questions swirling in my head.
Had Bloodshed recognized me? Or was I overthinking that half second of eye contact between us? Surely they’d know it was Spark’s boys who’d done the g-checking and not me. He’ll give me the benefit of the doubt. Right?
Or maybe the T.A.S. boys had spent all of last night plotting when and how they were gonna rush me. It was only a slap and a couple punches, I’d been reminding myself all morning and afternoon. But I knew as well as anyone how sensitive a roadman’s ego was, and that if any footage made it online, social media would make that ego a million times tenderer.
I’d also resorted to reminding myself that me and D had always been cool; our mums even went church together when we were young. His family lived on Rio Ferdinand’s old estate, and I remembered visiting D’s flat and always being shocked at how much of a pushover his mum was. Whether D got caught picking on his little brother or in a full-blown fight downstairs, she’d take one look at his baby picture hanging above the TV and go back to hugging and kissing him like he was the thirteenth apostle.
When I first met D he was thirteen, and the only dangerous thing on him was his mouth. You’d see him in the hallway between classes telling hood stories about how some Brixton yutes robbed a grown man at knifepoint at the bus stop, or how a clash near his house involving all kinds of weapons got broken up by police. He gossiped about ‘Liam the Yardy’ getting stabbed. Rachel getting stabbed. His cousin getting stabbed. How some other kid down the road got stabbed, died and then shat himself right there on the street. Hearing that story was the first time I learnt that people shit themselves when they die. And D laughed after every punchline, as if the more violence he saw, the funnier it got. So it goes.
Rob’s theory was that something savage happened to D one summer, because when he came back to Penny Hill that September, all the joking and smiling had stopped. So had the hood-chronicling. He’d somehow gone from telling those stories to living them. And since then pretty much every freestyle video coming out his ends had him and Bloodshed in it: D posted up in the background, throwing up gang signs behind smoke; Bloodshed, ad-libbing the outro with, ‘Free Tugz, Free Bounce, Free Maxxy’ and name-dropping a dozen other yutes locked up in Feltham. Guys whose names still rang bells on the roads and maybe didn’t have to be freed just yet. All the driller stuff never seemed to fit as well on D as it had on Bloodshed, though. It was like D had been dropped into it, and, instead of trying to swim to shore, he’d just stopped struggling and let himself drift further out.
I ruffled my key out my pocket, and just as I slid the tip into the keyhole the door swung back on its own, almost taking my arm with it. On the other side was Mum, looking more furious than I’d seen her in months.
I straightened up. Whatever she was about to say or do would not be good. In fact, it would almost definitely be terrible. I looked down and saw in one hand she held a letter with Penny Hill’s crest on it. I guessed they could afford first-class stamps after all.
‘Dear Mrs Angelique Adenon,’ she read out loud. ‘This note is to inform you of your child’s recurring misconduct, having earned
his second demerit this week …’
She repeated the two key words in the paragraph – ‘second demerit’ – rolling the ‘r’ for extra sting. My nan would have turned in her grave if she could’ve seen how bad an impression Mum was doing of her. Whenever Mum cussed me, she went from South London girl to African tyrant, but never quite nailed it. It didn’t help that the French influence in her birth country of Bénin meant that words like ‘the’ and ‘this’ came out as ‘zee’ and ‘zis’ and had also given her the habit of shrugging before each sentence – hard to take seriously.
‘Esso Adenon, I’m only asking you this once: where’ve you been hiding my letters?’
She stood her ground, refusing to let me inside. I was going to take this bollocking standing in the cold – her way of letting me know my residency wasn’t guaranteed. I stared down at the faux-wood floor on her side of the doorway, focusing on a grain of broken rice by her slipper. Mum’s eyes were too experienced, too knowing – just looking at them meant some kind of information would leak. How was I meant to explain what I’d done in a way that meant I got to keep my innocence, and she kept her temper?
Instead I kept my mouth shut and head bowed, hoping shyness would save me.
‘I’m going to smack you if you don’t speak up.’ Her apron rocked side to side from the force of each word. I’d outgrown that run-around a few years ago; now, at sixteen, I had a solid foot on her. She continued anyway. ‘You think you’re so grown, don’t you? I swear I’ll put you on a plane to Cotonou first flight tomorrow morning. By the time the council remembers to check on you, you’ll be at your uncle’s house in the village, sweeping the floor.’
