Running in, directly in front of the goal mouth, Graham walloped it from twenty metres. Their keeper hesitated for a fraction of time. Caught out! Graham put every ounce of energy into the shot. And scored! By the time the keeper turns, Graham’s ball is travelling through that nano-second of time. Past his head. Into the back of the net.
Goal! Goal! Goal!
Graham’s heart exploded. He leaped two metres into the air. He punched his fist to the sky.
Goal! Goal! Goal!
The ref blew the whistle. It was the first competitive game they’d played. And they’d won!
Goal! Goal! Goal!
Graham fell to his knees on the turf.
Goal! Goal! Goal!
He thought he was actually going to cry.
Then he scrambled to his feet.
Everyone danced around him. Slapping him on the back. Thumping his shoulders.
Afterwards, in the showers, Graham saw that he’d more bruises from his team-mates punching him than from the game itself.
And in the dressing room the fair-haired boy congratulated him with the rest. ‘That was a great shot.’
Graham stood back. ‘You set it up,’ he said.
The boy nodded. ‘Playing blind, I was, like. But I just knew you’d be there.’
‘Me too,’ laughed Graham. ‘Pure instinct. That’s what took me to it. Ready for you delivering.’
The boy held out his hand. ‘Joe,’ he said. ‘Joseph Flaherty.’
Graham blinked. He must be the boy from St Veronica’s. The Catholic school. The Roman Catholic school. The people his Granda Reid didn’t like him to have close contact with. He took the other boy’s hand. Shook it. ‘Graham,’ he replied. ‘Graham Anderson.’ Then all the rest were crowding round him in the dressing room. Just before he left, Graham heard Jack Burns, the coach, say it was a terrific finish.
But now Graham’s night looked like finishing in ruins. Nearly mugged himself, witness to a knifing, wobbly and scared, he hunkered down beside the wounded boy feeling useless that he couldn’t do more to help him. The bleeding seemed to have eased off, but maybe he should put a hanky or something against the boy’s chest? Graham inched closer and then lifted his head. A siren sounded in the distance. The ambulance he had called was on its way!
‘I need to go before the paramedics arrive,’ he whispered. ‘Otherwise my parents will find out I was here. Then I’ll be in a lot of trouble.’
The boy’s eyes opened. He tightened his hold on Graham. ‘We are brothers then,’ he said. ‘I also am in trouble.’
‘OK.’ Graham patted the boy’s hand. ‘You’ll be OK.’
‘Please.’ The boy spoke again. ‘Please don’t leave me. I do not want to die alone.’
‘You’re not going to die.’
‘I need something.’
‘You need an ambulance, and it’s on its way.’
‘No – something else.’
‘What?’
‘I need you to return that phone to someone for me. A girl.’
‘What?’ said Graham again. He glanced at the boy’s mobile, still grasped in his hand.
‘And let her know where I am.’
‘I can’t do that,’ said Graham. ‘I’ve got to get home.’
‘Please, I beg you. Listen. I had arranged to meet a girl. She won’t know what has happened to me. All I want you to do is to give her back her phone and tell her I was attacked. Go to her house tomorrow and do this.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I’m dying. It is my last request. You should honour a dying person’s wish.’
Graham looked at the boy in fright. Was he really going to die?
‘Do you have paper and pencil? I will write her address. Hurry,’ the boy urged Graham. ‘Please. There’s not much time.’
Graham got one of his school notebooks and a pencil from his bag. He had to support the boy’s arm as he wrote.
‘The girl is Leanne,’ the boy said. ‘She lives in High Street. A big house with a garden. We love each other but her parents would not want us to be together.’
‘But—’ Graham began.
‘Look, see. I’ve written here asking her to give you fifty pounds if you deliver her phone and this message.’
‘Fifty pounds!’ said Graham. ‘No way! It’s drugs, isn’t it? I don’t want anything to do with this.’
‘I swear it is nothing to do with drugs. I love the girl. She loves me. We meet secretly. I am on my way to see her. These boys follow me. They attack me. I have done nothing wrong. Please tell Leanne why I did not meet her tonight. If you don’t she will have no way of knowing where I am.’
‘You could get someone in the hospital to phone her,’ said Graham.
‘I will tell them nothing in the hospital. Not even my name.’
‘What is your name?’
The boy looked at Graham from half-shut lids. ‘Between us only?’
Graham nodded and bent closer.
‘Kyoul. My name is Kyoul.’
At that moment an ambulance, blue light flashing, turned off the main road into Reglan Street.
Chapter 4
‘It’ll be pure murder in here next Friday,’ said Joe’s Aunt Kathleen.
‘Why specially next Friday?’ said Joe, as he followed his aunt around the hairdresser’s shop helping her collect in hand mirrors and treatment bottles.
‘There’s an Orange Walk going past here next Saturday.’
‘Of course,’ said Joe, ‘it’s May now. They’ve started already, haven’t they?’
‘Oh aye,’ said Kathleen. ‘They like to get all their wee marches done before the big one in July.’
‘We got a note through,’ said Joe’s granny, ‘from the polis. This march, some local one, is a week tomorrow.’
‘All the shopkeepers on the route have been told. Most of them’ll close up for an hour or two,’ said Kathleen.
‘I told our Saturday regulars,’ said Joe’s granny, who was counting out his money onto the counter. ‘And a lot of them have changed their appointments. We’ll be jam packed next Friday evening. So try and get here as quick as you can, son.’
‘Aye,’ explained Kathleen, ‘some of them, especially the old buddies, won’t come out on a Saturday if there’s a march on.’ She placed the things she had gathered behind the desk and went to put on her coat. ‘Don’t forget the towels, Joe, will you?’
‘I won’t forget,’ Joe said.
He was still thinking about this evening’s football as he stuffed the wet towels into the washing machine at the back of the shop. Fabulous game! He’d been well pleased to be picked out for the trials when the coach had visited his school all those months ago. He’d take any opportunity to play football . . . or watch it. He didn’t really know what made football different from other sports. Last term one of his teachers asked the class to write an essay on their favourite sport. She said it wasn’t enough to merely write of their experiences as a player or spectator. You’d to go deeper than that. Find the why, she’d told them.
The why. Joe had puzzled over it for ages. What was the appeal of football over everything else? He knew people called it ‘the beautiful game’. But why? Joe ended up having a big long discussion with his dad. His dad had followed Celtic since he was a young boy. Knew the teams, the games, the years they’d won and lost. Could rhyme off the names of the players who had brought the European Cup back to Glasgow from Lisbon. They’d talked for hours about all the various aspects of the game. What made it special? Sometimes there was an exceptional player, like Henrik Larsson. He was special. You watched him, followed him, and he made you feel special too. The game was individual, it was team. It was single, it was crowd. It was physical, but you needed to use your brain. It was skill. It was instinctive. Joe had got an A for that essay.
Instinctive. In the game earlier tonight both he and the other boy’s play had been instinctive. Joe went over the moves again as he began to sweep up the floor. Wondering how he had known, without
looking up, without thinking, that the taller boy would go racing up the park. When he’d first taken possession of the ball Joe thought to try to make the run and the shot himself, but knew that the team’s best chance was for him to pass to someone in a better position. Jack Burns, the coach, gave them a talk on this every training night. This new youth team he was building, Glasgow City, would be great, he said – as a team. They had to play as a unit. It had been good of Graham, the goal scorer, to give him some credit though. Decent of him to acknowledge that Joe had set it up.
But . . . Joe recalled how the other boy had hesitated just for a second before shaking his hand. And he knew why.
They talked about it in his family. The way some people reacted as soon as they heard your name, or the name of the school that you went to. You might as well be wearing a label. CATHOLIC. Branded on your forehead. You saw them clock it. And then the look as they slotted you into a box inside their head. And what they thought of you depended on the dimensions of that box.
‘It really gets to me the way some people feel free to make remarks about the size of your family and actually believe that you might sympathize with child-murdering terrorists,’ Joe had heard his Aunt Kathleen ranting on to his father one day. ‘In the shop even, by my own customers, I’m told what my opinion is on certain things. Every time Celtic has a win I get: “You’ll have been celebrating the other night, eh?” I can’t stand football, and my Tommy supports Partick Thistle. Many’s the time I’ve felt like letting the hot tongs slip against a bare neck.’
‘Let them say what they like,’ Joe’s granny chipped in. ‘It’s what they used to do that was worse. Open discrimination. It’s not so long ago that building sites had signs up: NO IRISH NEED APPLY. The London Times carried adverts for maids that said: NO CATHOLICS.’
‘Those days are gone, Mother,’ Joe had heard his dad say. ‘We shouldn’t live in the past.’
‘It’s all very well for you to say that, Joseph. Remember, it wasn’t my past. It was my present.’
‘It’s the past now,’ his dad insisted.
‘Is it?’ his mother asked.
When Joe’s granny’s family had parties or family get-togethers they often told stories. Lots were funny family stories, like his granny’s first encounter with certain attitudes in Glasgow. When she’d come over from Ireland as a young married woman she’d lived in a tenement in the Tollcross area. She’d been hanging out her washing one day and saw, across the back court, another woman from the next close doing the same thing. Joe’s granny told the story of how she thought she’d be friendly and went over and introduced herself.
‘“I’m Brigid Flaherty,” I said.
‘“Hah!” this woman cried at once. “I knew it! You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?”
‘I laughed and said, “I suppose it’s my name and the Irish accent.”
‘“Och,” she said, “I could tell you were a Pape before you even opened your mouth.”
‘“How did you manage that?” I asked her.
‘“I was standing here watching you hinging your washing out, hen. You Irish Catholics peg the trousers up a different way from us Prods.”’
Joe’s granny wiped tears of laughter from her eyes. ‘Would you believe that?’ she said. ‘In Scotland there’s a Catholic and a Protestant way to hang up your drawers. Mind you,’ she added, ‘her and I became good friends. She was the first one knocking on my door to help out when I was having my bairns.’
Other times, at Joe’s family get-togethers, it was old, old history that was taken out and relived. The Famine – when millions of Irish died or were forced to emigrate. The suppression and slaughter of the Irish people – like the massacre at Drogheda. Cromwell was responsible for that. Oliver Cromwell. He’d dispossessed them, driven them from their own fertile land, out to the wild wastes of the western province of Ireland. He’d ordered them to make their choice. ‘To Hell or Connaught.’ No choice. They’d been banished to that part of Ireland that could support neither man nor beast. And they’d to smash boulders to try to farm the poor soil. ‘Sure the very sheep broke their teeth on the rocks,’ Joe heard his granny say on one occasion.
He had been quite small at the time, playing at the feet of the adults in his granny’s house. A picture had instantly formed in his head. A sheep with false teeth. Joe laughed. Because he could see it right there, standing in a field. A goofy-looking sheep, grinning, with great big false teeth. He laughed again. Suddenly he knew that he was very loud. The adults had fallen silent. He looked up. He saw that he was the only one laughing.
No one else joined in.
Joe had been very very young when he realized that, in his family, stories like that were not funny.
Chapter 5
‘This yin’s in a bad way.’
The first paramedic out of the ambulance in Reglan Street waved her arm to the driver. ‘Back up. Get the stretcher. Let’s move!’
‘What happened?’ she asked Graham.
‘A gang of boys jumped him. One of them had a knife.’
‘He can’t be more than eighteen,’ the woman said as she examined him. ‘Just a kid.’
‘I’ll go,’ said Graham. He tried to disentangle himself from Kyoul’s grasp.
‘Naw, son. You keep a hold of his hand there. It might be the only thing connecting him to us.’
Graham looked down to where Kyoul was holding his hand. He saw that blood from the older boy’s wound had seeped onto the sleeve of his school sweatshirt.
As they neared the hospital Kyoul drifted into consciousness. His eyes opened, recognized Graham. He smiled sadly. ‘Thank you for staying with me.’
There was a doctor and two nurses waiting as the ambulance pulled up, siren screaming, at the City Hospital Accident and Emergency. The driver jumped out of the cab to help transfer Kyoul to the waiting trolley. When the stretcher was safely out of the ambulance the paramedic inside spoke to Graham.
‘Your friend needs to go to theatre immediately.’ She picked up Graham’s bag. ‘Come on,’ she said kindly. ‘I’ll show you where you can wait while he’s being taken care of.’
QUIET WAITING ROOM.
Graham read the sign. There was a woman sitting in the room already. She sat straight-backed, staring ahead. Tears streaked her face. When Graham came in she patted her eyes with a tissue and tried to smile at him.
Graham slumped into a chair near the door. This was a disaster. Why had he stupidly said to the paramedic that he’d seen the gang of boys? She’d mentioned before she left him that someone would come and speak to him soon. They would ask questions, telephone his parents. He would have to explain why he was going via Reglan Street instead of leaving the sports grounds the proper way and going home via the main road. It wouldn’t take his parents long to work out he’d taken a dodgy short cut so that he could spend most of his bus fare on chips and chocolate. How was it that half an hour ago things had been going fine, and now he was in more bother than he could handle? If his mum and dad had to come and collect him from the hospital it would cause the most tremendous amount of trouble. He was always complaining that they were overprotective and it was only recently that he’d been allowed to go places on his own. If they discovered he hadn’t been totally straight with them then they might not let him visit his Granda Reid tomorrow, like he did every Saturday, to go with him to Ibrox Park to watch Rangers play. If they found out he’d taken that short cut every week they wouldn’t allow him to compete in the rest of the football trials. There would be no more football matches of any description – not to play in, not to watch, not to talk about even. No football whatever. He was doomed.
Graham glanced at his watch. He had less than thirty minutes to get home before they would start to worry. He checked his watch again. If – if he could get away right now . . . Graham reckoned he had enough time to get home without being too late. This hospital was closer to his side of the city so the ambulance had actually taken him a good bit of the way home already. He couldn
’t help Kyoul by staying here. In fact it would only make things worse. Whoever came to speak to him might look in his bag and find Kyoul’s phone. They’d read the note in his notebook with Kyoul’s girlfriend’s address, contact her, and then her parents would find out. Or supposing it was the police? They’d call his parents or they might even take him home in a police car! If only he could slip out unnoticed . . .
Graham stood up.
The woman with the tear-streaked face spoke to him. ‘Are you all right, son? My man’s had a heart attack. The waiting’s terrible, isn’t it? Is nobody with you?’
‘Yes,’ said Graham quickly, ‘my mum’s on her way. But I – I . . .’
‘The toilet? D’you need the toilet?’
‘No. Yes.’ Graham nodded.
The woman went to the door with him. ‘See how you came in through the main waiting area? Go that way and it’s the door in front of you.’
Graham hung back.
‘You don’t want to go through Accident and Emergency? Don’t blame you. It’s getting like a zoo out there. I don’t know how the staff put up with it. There’s a toilet in the main part of the hospital. Go to the end of this corridor, turn left, and you’ll see the sign.’
Graham went into the corridor leading away from A&E towards the main exit. Evening visiting was finishing. Eyes on the ground, he mingled with the crowd and walked out through the front doors of the hospital.
Once outside the gate he pulled off his bloodied sweatshirt, rolled it up and stuffed it to the bottom of his rucksack.
Chapter 6
When Joe had finished clearing up in his granny’s hairdressing shop he caught a bus that would take him to his part of the city.
Getting off at the stop before his own, he ran up the path of his granny’s house and put the shop keys through her letter box. After he’d done that he walked the short distance to his home. He wondered what state his dad would be in tonight. Before he’d gone to school that morning Joe had written out a number of things for his dad to do. ‘Keep him busy’ – that was the advice everyone gave. Sometimes his dad managed all the tasks on the list – get dressed, wash dishes, tidy up, etc. More usually half the stuff got done half well.
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