White Lines

by Mel Stein

  Barry stood back and admired his work for a second, a broad grin spreading across his open face. The Hertsmere supporters behind the goal were being actively restrained by stewards as they desperately tried to get near to him to show exactly how they felt. Barry suddenly remembered what he was, who he was and where he was. Instead of clenching his fists in triumph as a reaction to their adulation, he merely gave them a shy wave and trotted back to the centre circle, shrugging off with some embarrassment the embraces of his team-mates.

  From his lofty position, Mark’s co-commentator, Michael Burridge, had virtually lost his voice in the excitement of his description of the goal. Hoarsely, he handed across to Mark who was watching the action replay on his monitor in some disbelief.

  ‘I’m just trying to reassure myself that really happened. A great goal, one to stand alongside the Bests, the Laws, the Greaves. One, not just for Barry Reed’s scrapbook, but for everybody’s scrapbook. Forget who the opposition was. Just remember the genius of it.’

  The rest of the match was an anti-climax. Hertsmere added a couple more from Tommy Wallace and, with a six goal lead, the last few moments were pure exhibition. Mark heard the producer’s voice in his ear through the headphones as he continued his own commentary. He had become accustomed to these interruptions, able to concentrate on his own words while taking instructions as to what he was going to do next.

  ‘Mark, you know young Reed well. Get down off the gantry as soon as you can. We want you to interview him and then Kenny Cunningham who’s been here watching.’

  ‘No problem,’ Mark muttered as Burridge took over the last few moments of commentary on his own whilst sucking a throat lozenge.

  And it was no problem. That was how far he’d come now in broadcasting experience and confidence. He could handle two off-the-cuff interviews without a moment’s apprehension, when just a few months ago he’d have been struggling even with a prompt board. He just wished he was making such progress in the rest of his life.

  Somehow he seemed doomed never to be able to pull all the loose ends together. Professional, emotional, they were two sides to his existence and like little weather people only one was able to appear at a time.

  He caught Barry Reed at the edge of the tunnel. The relatively thin crowd seemed reluctant to disperse, reluctant to let go of the little piece of magic they had witnessed. A hard core group of supporters on what had been the old East Terrace were still chanting his name as Mark began the interview.

  ‘What’s it like to be a folk hero when you’re still in your teens?’

  ‘I’ll be twenty next month. Does that mean I have to stop being a hero?’ The reply and the question were given with a straight face and it took a moment for Mark to realise the player was winding him up. ‘Anyway,’ Barry continued, ‘I’m not sure my mam thinks I’m a hero.’

  ‘Your mother’s still up in Tyneside?’

  ‘Aye. I’d like to get her down here, but she don’t like the south. Says it’s a bit posh for the likes of her.’

  Again Mark was not sure if the comment was tongue-in-cheek or whether it was said in all innocence. It might well be that there was more to Barry Reed than met the eye. They all started off innocent though. They came from working class backgrounds, they had no academic qualifications, they made a bit of money and then what was there to spend it on? Early marriage, kids, a house, furnish the house, buy your parents a house and furnish that, get them a car because yours is sponsored and have an expensive holiday every year in the few weeks permitted between the end of one season and the rapid approach of the next. If you were wise then the rest went into your pension fund to be available at thirty-five which the Inland Revenue in their generosity accepted as the retirement age for a professional footballer. If you were foolish there was the booze, the horses, the women, the hangers-on. They’d hoover up your money faster than any vacuum cleaner and, once the pockets were empty, well, the booze had to become cheaper, the bottles of Dom Perignon a distant memory; money had to be borrowed for the horses, for that magic bonanza that somehow never came, and the women became older, lined, world-weary before they disappeared together with the hangers-on who no longer had anything on which to hang.

  ‘Bit of a goal that, Barry,’ Mark continued.

  ‘I’m sure you scored better, Mark,’ Barry replied, ‘and anyway, weren’t the defences better in your day?’

  Mark tried to steer him away from a mutual appreciation society that he did not think the viewers would appreciate. That was something else upon which he had become expert, the boredom threshold of his audience.

  ‘Did you know the England manager was watching tonight?’

  ‘Well, with respect to Denley, I think the opposition might be a tad tougher if I ever get chosen to play for England. I just went out there and did my best like I always do.’

  Off the air now, Barry took in a deep breath.

  ‘I don’t know as how you can do that all the time. Just thinking about the millions watching fair makes me come out in a cold sweat.’

  ‘You’re playing in front of the same millions, even more probably, because I reckon a load of them turn off as soon as the game’s finished. I did. I couldn’t believe the load of crap the so-called experts spoke.’

  Barry paused as if the thought of a television audience out there watching him play had just dawned upon him.

  ‘Yeah. I suppose I am. Only when you’re playing, you know, and not talking, it doesn’t feel like it. You’re playing for the team, for yourself, for my mam and the rest sort of fades into the background.’

  ‘You’re obviously very close to your mother,’ Mark said with a tinge of envy. He wished his own mother was still alive so that he could do the sort of things for her that Barry was obviously intending for his ‘mam’.

  ‘She means the world to me. All the more so since Dad left, although I thought at the time, good riddance to bad rubbish. I reckoned she’d be happier once he’d gone, all that drinking, and the knocking her about. But whatever he was, he did finally come home at night, and when he was sober I suppose he was someone to cuddle up to in bed.’

  He seemed more exhausted by the length of the speech than the effort he’d put into the previous ninety minutes.

  ‘Look, I’ve got to go and get changed. Day off tomorrow and I’m heading up to the north-east. Thanks for everything, Mark. I’ll never forget how you spoke to me after the Cup Final.’

  Mark Rossetti stood in the shadows and watched him disappear towards the dressing room. He could not say exactly why, but he feared for him. Feared for his innocence and the loss of it that he knew would certainly come. Feared for his talent and for those who would try to destroy it. Feared for the pressures that he knew would be imposed by the predators in the media, seeking to build him up and then knock him down. Yet, some sixth sense made him fear for him for no real reason at all. Something made Mark Rossetti believe that Barry Reed was the stuff of which victims rather than heroes were made. And it was that premonition that frightened him most of all.

  CHAPTER 6

  The worst phone calls always come in the middle of the night.

  Mohammed Halid had never forgotten how he had been woken at two in the morning to hear the news from a distant country of his father’s death. He relived that moment whenever the phone rang after midnight even though his business was of such a nature that nocturnal calls were far from unusual.

  He had not been sleeping well. The long hot summer showed no sign of the sharp decline into autumn that usually occurred in England and despite the relentless heat of his childhood, Halid still found sleep hard to achieve when the temperature at night rarely fell below seventy degrees.

  So he awoke with the first peal of the bedside phone. Beside him he felt and heard Susie stir in the darkness within her deep slumber, spent and satisfied by the hour of making love before she had finally closed her eyes.

  ‘Hello,’ Mohammed said softly, ready to move to his study as soon as he identified the calle
r.

  ‘Mr Halid?’ The voice was rough but official sounding, brusque, sufficiently trained to ensure that the formalities were properly accommodated.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he replied impatiently, ‘this is Mr Halid.’

  ‘Mr Mohammed Halid?’

  ‘Yes, this is he. Who is this? What do you want? Do you know what the time is?’

  By now Susie was awake, sitting up beside him, the sheet drawn up over her breasts in a poor imitation of modesty. She gripped her husband’s arm tightly, sensing something was wrong, even though he did not yet know the identity of the caller.

  ‘I do know what time it is, Mr Halid, and believe me I wouldn’t be disturbing you at this hour if it wasn’t urgent. My name’s Neil Taylor, Detective Sergeant at West Hampstead Police Station. We have a young lady here who says she belongs to you, claims to be your daughter, Dominique Halid.’

  ‘Claims? What do you mean claims?’

  ‘Well, sir,’ the calm voice at the other end of the line continued, ‘she has no identity on her as such and I’m afraid we’ve not been able to establish for ourselves with any great degree of certainty exactly who she is.’

  ‘Surely she can tell you?’ His voice was cold, his mind now expecting the worst. Yet, if she had been in an accident she would certainly have been in hospital not at some police station, the voice of reason whispered in his ear.

  ‘Well she can and she can’t. Let us just say she was not exactly compos mentis when we brought her in.’

  ‘You mean she was drunk?’ Halid asked, hoping the answer would be yes.

  ‘No, sir, she wasn’t drunk. She was very much under the influence of drugs. We’re not sure exactly what drugs they were as she had a fair assortment on her person. We offered her the chance to make a phone call, but quite frankly she was hardly in any condition. This is the fifth number we’ve tried from the combination she gave us and, believe me, I’ve received more verbal abuse from the four other individuals I’ve woken up than in all my years on the beat. So, anyway, do I assume that I’ve hit the jackpot and you do have a daughter called Dominique?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And do I also assume she’s not tucked up in bed in her Winnie the Pooh nightie?’

  ‘That’s correct, although I find your tone offensive.’

  ‘Do you, Mr Halid? Well, let me tell you what I find offensive. I find it offensive when somebody your daughter’s age is pushing pills to thirteen-year-olds. I find it offensive that she’s so high herself that she doesn’t know who she is or where she is, or even how much money she has upon her person from the same illegal pushing of pills to young kids who should be tucked up in bed.’

  ‘In their Winnie the Pooh nighties?’ Halid said, although he knew it was hardly the right response.

  ‘I don’t think this is a time for flippancy, not when your daughter is looking at quite a long stretch of jail time ahead of her.’

  ‘You have no proof she has committed any crimes,’ Mohammed said, suddenly defensive, although he had nothing to support his claim of her innocence.

  ‘Don’t I, Mr Halid? Don’t I indeed? Well, you’re in bed in your expensive house, and I’m down here in my nasty smelly police station, so why don’t you join me and we can discuss the little matter of proof. And if you want to bring your doubtless even more expensive lawyer he can join in this discussion as well.’

  Halid realised the conversation was at an end and replaced the receiver with a gentleness he did not feel. He did not know Detective Sergeant Neil Taylor and had no particular desire to change that situation. Indeed, if he had met him at that moment he believed he might well have been tempted to inflict sufficient damage on his person to ensure he found himself in a cell alongside his daughter.

  Dominique, his daughter, in a cell. It was not a pleasant thought, yet it was not an incredible one either. This was not the first time she had been in trouble, nor the first time that drugs had been involved. Yet, on other occasions they had been able to sort matters out, to gloss them over, to take her home leaving behind generous donations to charities or individuals and the promise that she would not be a naughty girl again. He did not think D.S. Taylor was going to be so easily satisfied. Mohammed could not understand it. She didn’t need the money, that was for sure. Whatever any petty cash from drugs could have bought her, Mohammed could have given her ten-fold, a hundred-fold, so what was the appeal, what was it that was driving her on to destruction? In her absence he still thought of her as a small child, so feminine, so vulnerable. She would run to him, fall over and cry and he would hold her tight, kiss the top of her head until it was all better even when it had not been so bad to start with. She had always been closer to him than to her mother. It had been the opposite with his son, Nabil, but that was another story, another problem. Right now he had to focus on Dominique, the Dominique of today not of yesterday, the woman, not the child. Yet was there really so much of a difference? She might well be eighteen but she persisted in behaving as if she were much younger. An adolescent who had never grown up, never grown out of that painful awkward age. For a while he had convinced himself that her behaviour was just a phase; but phases ended and hers never had. He looked at the bedside clock. Two a.m. Again that hour that brought with it such evil and malevolent spells. Quickly he told Susie what had happened. His previous marriage was just a memory and he knew he could never have spoken so openly to his first wife.

  ‘What are you going to do, Mo?’

  ‘Get dressed. Take the car and try and get her out.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean, no?’

  ‘I mean what I say. Leave her for the night. The police think you’ll come. If she’s capable of thought she thinks you’ll come. Disappoint them both and stay with me.’

  Halid was half out of bed, his legs on the ground, his buttocks still on the mattress, frozen into a tableau. Yes, he remembered his daughter as a child, yes he could almost feel her pain, but even more recent in his memory was the impression of his wife’s fresh young flesh on his skin, the feeling of exultation, of possession, of sheer gratitude as he’d come inside her.

  As if in time with his thoughts, her hand reached out to him again, circled his shoulders, his waist, then moved to between his legs.

  ‘Come on, Mo, let’s play the up-and-down game again,’ she said in their private, intimate language, ‘only with more of the up than the down.’

  It took him but a second to spring to life beneath her hand. She stroked him gently through the fine cotton of his shorts and as he turned to her she peeled away the material and took him in her mouth.

  He struggled for a moment, wondering how long the night would be for his daughter, but then as his wife sucked him fiercely, her teeth raking his sensitive skin with pleasurable pain, everything else was forgotten; and once he had come again with furious spasms he could do nothing else but go back to sleep and wait for the morning when everything would look different.

  CHAPTER 7

  Detective Sergeant Neil Taylor was surprised to find Dominique Halid still in the cells when he reported back for duty after a few hours snatched sleep. He had sensed her father was the sort of man who would not rest easy until his family were secure within whatever castle he called home.

  Neil Taylor didn’t live in a castle. He lived in a bedsit in Kilburn and had done ever since he’d returned to his semi-detached in Barnet and found his wife in bed with the decorator. From time to time he railed against the unfairness of the situation. She screwed around, he walked out, she kept the house and he was forced to live in conditions where the proverbial cat would be hard pushed to crouch let alone be swung. When the black mood took him that way then he, in turn, took it out on whoever was in his sights at the time.

  He’d hoped it would be Mohammed Halid who would come to negotiate for the release of the girl, but instead he had to settle for the son. He’d never met Mohammed but he knew he’d dislike him just from the conversation he’d had the night before. He had
now met Nabil Halid, the son, and he didn’t like him either. There was no good reason, but then he was in a position where he needed no reason at all, good or otherwise. That was one of the great advantages of being a copper, you didn’t need a reason to do anything. Seeing the father and the brother he was almost beginning to feel sorry for Dominique. Almost, but not quite. The boy didn’t want to be here, didn’t want to be his father’s messenger and certainly didn’t want to be dealing with the likes of Neil Taylor. That was tantamount to getting his hands dirty. All Nabil wanted was to see his sister, put her in the car and take her home. Only it wasn’t going to be that simple. Taylor was going to make sure of that.

  He could have released her in her own surety, that was within his powers. He knew now who she was, knew where she lived and was reasonably confident that she’d turn up in court in due course to face the charges; but he didn’t have to let her go and truth be told he was in no mood to expedite her release. In fact he was in a particularly sour mood. He’d thought he’d cracked it with the manageress of the local wine bar, but when he’d got home the message on his answerphone had left him in no doubt he was mistaken. He didn’t know how he could have forgotten that he’d agreed to pick her up at midnight to take her home. That was when he’d been sure that he’d be off duty. But that was also before they’d asked him to deal with Miss Halid, and a couple of hours dragging incoherent answers from her drugged-up lips in the presence of an impatient police doctor and a not unattractive WPC had been enough to drive Janie from his mind. The message suggested he was not to be given a second chance to recall her.

  ‘Constable, when can I take my sister out of this place?’ the young man asked, in a tone that suggested she might well catch some contagious disease if she stayed there a moment longer.

  Taylor looked up slowly. He was a large, heavy man who knew he needed to shed a couple of stone to get him down to his premarital break-up weight. Often people said that he looked like Brian Blessed in his Z-Cars days and he quite liked modelling himself on the role of Fancy Smith. He could bring an expression to his eyes of bovine indifference that made whoever was addressing him despair that the message was getting through. Then, as an alternative, there was an expression of barely controlled rage that made people doubt if they were dealing with a man who was playing with a full deck. He had not really mastered any emotion in between and had not actually had the need to do so. The latter emotion came to hand for the likes of teenagers who’d been caught stealing the poor box from the local church and that was the look he now turned upon Nabil Halid, causing him to glance around to see if there was anybody within sight who might be about to witness the assault on his person that this policeman was about to launch.