Exposed at the Back

by Arild Stavrum

  ‘So Fashanu’s suicide has scared off footballers from coming out?’

  ‘There’s certainly a fear of not being accepted. Maybe it’s easier to pretend nothing’s going on. I might be wrong, as I haven’t been keeping up with football that much, but I don’t think any really high-profile players have come out since Fashanu.’

  ‘Anton Hysén. It caused quite a fuss in Sweden. He’s famous.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him.’

  ‘He’s the son of Glenn Hysén, a former Liverpool player. His brother Tobias plays for Sweden.’

  ‘Which division does Anton play in though?’

  ‘I think it’s the Swedish Second or Third Division.’

  ‘So he’s famous because he comes from a well-known footballing family, not because of his own performance on the pitch.’

  ‘How would you have reacted if you’d found out you were playing with someone who was gay?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you have encouraged him to come out?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have any problem with having a gay teammate. Many players would have accepted it. It depends on the atmosphere in the team, and some teams would probably fall apart or force the player to leave. But in a strong team, with players who get on well with each other, it could work. Especially if there’s a good manager and a strong captain. The biggest problem would be the fans.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Playing away at Brann Stadion in Bergen, at Lerkendal in Trondheim or, perhaps worst of all for a well-known gay player with Vålerenga, in a derby match against Lillestrøm at Åråsen. It wouldn’t be good. The jeering would be too much. The taunting would go too far.’

  ‘What about the NFF? Wouldn’t they intervene?’

  ‘I’m sure they’d launch a campaign like the one in England. They’d take the opportunity while they were at it to boast about their years of work against racism, but there are still bad cases of racism in football, even in Norway, and it is a bit more common with players who are black than players who are gay.’

  ‘So you would’ve told him to keep quiet?’

  ‘At least to wait until his career’s over. It’s important that some people come out, but it’s hard to encourage somebody to be a martyr. Besides, even if it doesn’t have to mean the end of their career, it’s bound to be tough, so they’d have to be especially well-adjusted to carry on as usual.’

  ‘Would somebody’s status in the dressing room really be a reason to kill?’ asked Benedikte.

  ‘Definitely. The impression also seems to be that it’s young Muslim men who are the most homophobic, so maybe it’s even harder to come out in a diverse team like Vålerenga than one like Bodø/Glimt, which has far fewer Muslim players. It’s certainly possible that’s what Diesen was thinking, that he was terrified this would come out and what that would do to his position in the changing room hierarchy,’ said Steinar, looking out of the kitchen window again. He thought he’d heard something, but all he could see was the tree and the clouds, still menacing in the sky.

  ‘Imagine how much of their lives players spend in there,’ he continued. ‘They don’t talk to each other much on the training pitch. The changing rooms are the most important place to talk. Losing your status there might force you to move clubs, and some players never recover from that. I’ve got no doubt a gay footballer who doesn’t want to be outed might kill to keep it a secret.’

  Steinar felt annoyed with himself. He’d heard that it was Golden who’d set up Sabrina and Diesen, and he knew how much that meant for their respective images and careers. He should have thought that Sabrina and Diesen’s relationship might be fictitious. Steinar had read interviews with Diesen in which he’d said how important he thought self-development was, and that he often stayed at the end of training sessions to practise free kicks. Nobody would have seen him climbing into Golden’s office.

  More strange sounds. Had he heard somebody talking outside? He got up, went into the hallway. He opened the front door to check and was faced with a barrage of flashing cameras.

  Spin It

  Benedikte hid behind the curtains, peeking out at the journalists. Steinar had slammed the door shut when he saw them. They’d clearly had enough of Steinar repeatedly saying ‘no comment’ on the phone and were now laying siege to the house. Benedikte turned towards Steinar, who was pacing around the living room.

  ‘Well, we’ve been trying to look at the murder from different angles,’ she said, ‘but I really hadn’t thought about this. Gay sex.’ Then she put her hand to her mouth.

  Steinar picked up the plastic ball with Mickey Mouse on it and threw it across the living room, with plenty of backspin. The ball bounced right next to Junior and came to rest. Junior wasn’t paying any attention, his whole world was Angry Birds on Benedikte’s phone.

  ‘Good ball control,’ said Benedikte with a nod of approval. ‘But are we certain it’s Per Diesen?’ she said.

  ‘What’s certain is that these pictures would cause a scandal in the media, and if this was a crime of passion, there are only two people who could have done it.’

  ‘Diesen or Sabrina.’

  ‘And out of those two it must be Diesen, because I know what the murder weapon was, and it wasn’t this,’ said Steinar, lifting up a copy of VG, with its photo montage of Taribo and a morning star on the front page.

  ‘Oh?’ said Benedikte.

  ‘Golden had a fracture to the left side of his nose, which suggests he was punched. After that, he’s supposed to have been killed with a morning star, leaving wounds on the back of his head about a centimetre in depth. But why would the killer punch him first instead of using the morning star to start with, which would be more effective? It had to be something else that left those marks, and that something needed the victim to be lying down.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Name one of Norway’s great inventions.’

  ‘Golden was killed with a cheese slicer?’

  Steinar gave a wry smile, went down into the basement and came back up with a pair of black-and-white Adidas boots.

  ‘Are you seriously claiming that football boots were invented in Norway?’ asked Benedikte.

  Steinar turned the sole towards her.

  ‘No, but it was apparently a Norwegian who invented screw-in studs. They could leave marks a centimetre in depth. Diesen could have stamped on Golden’s neck, breaking it.’ He pointed at the studs. Benedikte ran her finger over the cold metal.

  ‘So Golden was struck down then stamped on?’

  ‘I think Ullevaal Stadion must also be one of the best places in Oslo to kill somebody.’

  ‘Because of all the DNA?’ asked Benedikte.

  ‘Vålerenga play 15 league matches there. Average attendance so far this year is 18,000. That makes 270,000 people. Then you’ve got three or four international matches with 20,000 spectators each, plus Norwegian Football Cup matches, Europa League matches, and concerts. Then there are all the people who work at these events. The police. It’s easily somewhere near 600,000 people a year. People sweating, coughing, spitting, not washing their hands when they go to the toilet, throwing away the odd sneaky cigarette. And that’s just outdoors. Inside there are also lots of people on guided tours, and right next to Golden’s office is UBC, one of Norway’s biggest conference centres.’

  ‘What about the DNA on his boots or other clothes?’

  ‘Diesen’s worn his boots again in training and at matches. I’m sure he’s changed his studs too. The kit man washes their kit every day, and he wouldn’t have been surprised to see blood on it. Some people even get annoyed if no blood’s been shed in a training session, that means it wasn’t tough enough.’

  ‘So what do we do? Do you think the police will arrest Diesen just because of our suspicions?’

  ‘The police have got their man. If we’re going to get them to reopen the investigation, we’ll need proof. We’ve got to get Diesen to make a mistake.’

  ‘W
hat kind of mistake?’

  ‘I’ve got some ideas. The most important thing is to psych him out, let him know we know about him and Golden, that we can take everything away from him.’

  ‘How do we do that?’

  ‘I’ve got a plan to threaten his position in the game. It’s their careers that footballers are most afraid of losing.’

  ‘And what about me?’

  ‘You’ve got to trick him into coming to the studio. Get him to believe that it’s a real TV programme. I’m imagining a hot studio with excessive lighting. An intro with Fashanu, Clough, Hysén, that rugby player and the Norwegian cases. And then over to him. You can press him on rumours, on his preferences.’

  ‘Can you go first?’

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  ‘All the same to me,’ said Benedikte, looking away.

  ‘Fine. Can you look after Junior for a few hours in the meantime?’

  ‘Of course. What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to start a media circus.’ Steinar took his football boots and headed out.

  Benedikte put her ear to the door and heard Steinar answering ‘no comment’ to yet another question about Taribo. Another journalist followed up by asking: ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘What I do best of all,’ said Steinar, as cameras clicked away. ‘I’m going to play football.’

  Playing in Black and White Boots

  ‘Are you fit enough?’ asked the Vålerenga coach, but Steinar knew the coach couldn’t turn him down. The journalists, the ones who’d followed him to the training ground at Valle and the usual sports reporters who were already there, would pour criticism on the coach if Steinar were turned down, he was far too big a name from football’s past. Besides, there was unquestionable curiosity in the manager’s eyes.

  ‘I’m in reasonable shape physically, but I haven’t been playing football.’

  ‘Not since you left Ullevaal that day? I was at the match. Nobody could work out what had happened when you didn’t come back out after half-time.’

  ‘No, I haven’t played since that match.’

  ‘We’ll be playing 11 against 11. It won’t really matter if we’ve got a couple of extra players there. Actually it could be quite good. Go and see Hjalmar to borrow some kit. And hey, good luck.’

  Steinar shook the manager’s hand and went to the kit room, next to the changing rooms. There, in a narrow room with shoes and other kit, was Vålerenga’s legendary kit man, Hjalmar Bakken. If you came from the East End of Oslo, you knew who he was.

  He was wearing a Vålerenga tracksuit from 1980, his skin grey. His fingers showed years of close contact with roll-your-own cigarette stubs. What was more surprising was that the right side of his face was also burnt, the skin missing in places. Half of his hair was like a silver fox, the other half reminiscent of those things you used to scrub pots and pans when they were very dirty. Steinar couldn’t help staring.

  ‘Explosion,’ said Bakken, combing the healthy part of his hair. Then he drew out a cough from the depths of his lungs.

  ‘Explosion?’

  ‘I’ve got chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and need to take oxygen. They said it would be dangerous to light up around it. They were right.’

  Bakken smiled at his own story, a smile only used by a certain generation from the East End.

  ‘What do you want, anyway?’ he said.

  ‘I’m going to train, I need some kit.’

  ‘Going to train?’ said Bakken, coughing again.

  ‘It’s been cleared with the manager.’

  ‘You need boots?’

  ‘I’ve got my own.’

  ‘Good. The worst thing’s when we’ve got try-out players who come along and borrow boots. Never get them back.’

  ‘I’ll be using these ones,’ said Steinar, holding up his Adidas World Cup boots.

  ‘Black-and-white football boots. Do they still make them? Everyone here wants neon colours. Neon boots, agents, models and all that stupid nonsense, that’s what they want.’

  Bakken picked out some socks, shorts, a training shirt and a lightweight rain jacket. The rain was lashing down outside.

  ‘Come on, I’ll take you to the changing rooms,’ said Bakken. He walked out and Steinar followed. They came to a waiting room with chairs, TVs and video game consoles, then went through a door into the large first-team dressing room.

  ‘This part’s Africa,’ said Bakken loudly. ‘From here halfway up that wall is where the blackies sit. There are also some from Kosovo or Jamaica or some place like that, but we call the whole mishmash Africa. The part from here on is Europe. This is where the white players sit. And that’s Switzerland.’

  He pointed at the physiotherapist and his bench, then laid Steinar’s kit down on a free space in the part he’d called Europe, as delicately as if it were porcelain. Steinar shook hands with Marius Bjartmann, Per Diesen, Hilmar Guðjónsson, an Icelandic player that nobody could believe Vålerenga had bought, John Duff, a Canadian keeper who’d been a great success, and the 36-year-old Danish centre-back Jim Elkjær, who was far too good for the Norwegian top division but who was now too old for the big clubs in the rest of Europe.

  Steinar put on the dark blue training shirt and shorts. The shirt was tighter than it used to be, and Steinar quickly reminded himself that all sports clothing was a tighter fit now, it was the fashion.

  Steinar took hold of the socks by the ends and stretched them behind his neck. He didn’t know why, but it was just a natural thing to do. He put on the socks and his Adidas boots, and did up the laces. The boots were a little too tight, to the extent that Steinar had to squeeze his feet inside. Football boots were supposed to be tight. He noticed that most of the others were wearing orange or fluorescent green boots.

  Kalid Jambo started arguing with Martin Hovdenakk. Hovdenakk was the only one from a Norwegian ethnic background who was allowed to sit in Africa.

  He was holding up his mobile phone and pointing at Jambo’s laptop.

  ‘Why won’t you let me borrow it?’ he said.

  ‘I told you, I haven’t got my adaptor. If you want to charge your fucking mobile on my computer, I need my adaptor. I don’t want the batteries to run out.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Kalid, the battery’s fully charged. I only need to charge my mobile a bit so it doesn’t die on the way home.’

  ‘Then buy yourself a charger for your car, you sponging bastard.’

  The language had got tougher and the dress code had changed. Steinar noticed that many of the foreign players, as well as the Norwegian ones from immigrant minority backgrounds, covered their genitals while they changed. It surprised him to see a couple of the youngest ethnically Norwegian players doing the same thing. The rest of them had shaved their hair down below.

  The manager came in and spoke about the training session. He welcomed Steinar as a guest player, and several of the ‘African’ players started whispering.

  The plan for that day was jogging followed by three 15-minute sessions playing eleven against eleven. The manager handed out bibs. It was going to be the first eleven versus the reserves. Steinar felt a twitch. Shit, he hadn’t been given a bib, he was on the lesser team. He hadn’t experienced that before, and it awoke the competitive spirit inside him. It wasn’t enough just to take part in the training session, he wanted to do well.

  They went over to the training pitch at Valle. Small puddles had formed on patches of the grass pitch they were going to train on, but it seemed as if the rain was about to stop.

  They jogged round at the edge of the pitch. Steinar’s thoughts went back to Ajax, where they always started with ball work. Galloping round the pitch like this had gone completely out of fashion in the Netherlands generations before Steinar arrived. He looked around at the facilities. Compared to here at Valle, Ajax had a competitive advantage in terms of its location too. On the Ajax training pitch, Steinar had always had the gigantic Amsterdam Arena in his field of view, where they a
ll wanted to play. If you kept it up, you could end up in the stadium playing football, not just selling hot dogs or watching. Some players thought the sight of the stadium was unnerving, that it stood out in the landscape like an impregnable fortress. Steinar thought it resembled a gigantic hamster cage, with its glass-covered escalators on the outside. When he’d been worn out during training, the sight of the stadium in the background gave him new energy, like a spin-crazy little rodent. Here all he could see were blocks of flats and Vallhall, the indoor arena.

  Thousands of thoughts were spinning through his head while the manager prepared to blow his whistle and start the game. Would he survive a training session like this? What if he sprained something and had to limp off after a minute?

  Steinar’s team was set up in a 4–4–1–1 formation, trying to mimic Vålerenga’s next opponents, Odd. This meant that Steinar would be used as an offensive midfielder, or a hanging forward as some people called it. That meant he’d be playing in close proximity to Diesen and could try to psych him out. Steinar looked over at Diesen, who was standing with his hands on his hips and eyes on the ground.

  The manager blew the whistle and the game began. Steinar’s body was poised in anticipation of what would happen next. He was also thinking about those four words Vlad Vidić had said. Had he really given all this up for nothing?

  Half a minute into the match Steinar found space. The ball came to him from a perfect pass, and he would have to stop it. It went through his body like an electric shock, he was so unused to being in contact with the ball. He got caught in the grass and stumbled. Kalid Jambo took the ball from him and moved upfield. It was as if Steinar had never played the game before.

  Things went better from then on. Steinar made a couple of good passes, but his team were 1–0 down when they took their first break. Otto Cana had knocked in a rebound. Steinar took a couple of sips of water and half-listened to the assistant coach, who wanted to adjust the team’s positions, but most of all he stared over at the first-team players. Partly to keep an eye on Diesen, but also because he couldn’t help feeling annoyed that he was on the wrong team.