by Ross Raisin
“He’s brought in Andy Jones, to be fair,” Tom said.
“Yes. I remember Jones from when he was at Blackburn. Dirty player. Just the type Clarke likes.”
His mother and sister, with nothing to add to this conversation, began talking about the upcoming wedding of one of his mum’s colleagues, another health visitor alongside whom she had run a baby drop-in clinic for years. When there was a lull and he was sure his dad had finished his point, Tom turned towards them on the other sofa. “How’s A levels, Rach?”
“Hard. Coursework never stops. I shouldn’t even be down here now. You should feel honored.”
“You still planning on John Moores?”
There was a moment of silence. “I’m not sure yet.”
“Thought you were dead set?”
“Well, I was. Bloody Tories, though.”
They all looked at the television. Tom did not understand, but he said nothing more. He had always been proud of his sister’s cleverness, never threatened by it, because he had football. For as long as he could remember there had been an unspoken assumption in the house that they would both be successful. She wanted to do an events management degree, as far as he could recall, and he wondered now if he had got that wrong. But as he observed the look that passed between his parents, he thought that maybe he did understand; that it was about money.
He perused the small immaculate room while they listened to the half-time reports coming in. It was a world away from the busy clutter of the Daveys’. The pert, vacuumed sofas. The remote controls lined up on the television stand. His dad’s neatly organized plastic desk tucked into one corner of the room; wage slip, bank and utilities files boxed underneath it next to a pile of printed-out Town match reports that Tom had noticed the second he came in, which he knew his mum or sister must have shown him how to do. His dad was listening to the Bolton–Everton report. His plate and tray were on the floor by his feet. It struck Tom for the first time that he probably earned more than his dad. Barely playing, in League Two. He thought about the box upstairs, with all of his photographs and press cuttings and England age group caps. For years his dad had driven him to school matches, county matches, Centre of Excellence and academy matches, England matches, reserve matches. Taking time off work. Paying for kit. Overnight stops. Relocating the whole family. All while Rachel had never asked for anything, never been given anything.
His mum collected the trays from the floor. “You got plans for later, love?”
“Here, I’ll do that, Mum. No, I’ve not told anyone I’m up. Thought I’d stop in, watch Match of the Day. I’ll stick around tomorrow too, if that’s all right.”
He followed her into the kitchen to help her with the dishes. He had thought about texting some of his old friends but decided against it. The last time he came up he had gone out and it had been awkward. Not at first, when they came to the door to say hello to his parents, lingering for an appearance from his sister, and his dad had made them stop for a beer, but later, when they had exhausted all talk about football and what the other former scholars were up to. The conversation of the other three then was about the gym that they worked out in—they had all put on muscle—and girls. Tom wanted to entertain them by taking the piss out of Town, but they didn’t ask about his life playing football, and Tom did not feel that it was his place to bring the subject up.
He dried up the plates that his mum washed. He heard his sister going upstairs. In the other room his dad was on the phone.
“You can go out, you know, if you want,” his mum said.
“No, it’s fine. Don’t worry.”
“OK. But we won’t be put out if you change your mind.”
His dad came into the kitchen. “Just been speaking to John. There’s a guy off sick at the sorting office and he’s picking up the shift tomorrow. Says you’re welcome to his ticket if you want it.”
—
After Football Focus his dad drove them over to Uncle Kenny’s. Jeanette made coffee and they stood around in the kitchen, Jeanette and Kenny wanting to know all about his life down south, how he was getting on at his digs, what it was like playing senior football. Jeanette gave him a third cuddle as they were about to leave. “Oh, Tommy. My Tommy. You’re a man, look at you,” she said, and Tom looked down at the polished floor, feeling every inch a child.
Most of the familiar old faces were in the pub, his dad and Kenny’s crowd, though Tom was glad that none of their sons was there.
“You drinking, son?” Kenny asked him, turning from the bar. Tom looked instinctively at his dad.
“Yes, he’s drinking. Not playing this weekend, is he?”
Kenny waited to be served and Tom stood back from the group at the bar alongside his dad, hoping that they would move over to a quieter area of the pub where he would not have to speak to his dad’s friends and hear, in their questions and their joking, the unspoken pity behind their words at his failure to gain a contract.
“First match in a while, isn’t it?” his dad said.
“Since last season.”
His dad nodded. “Must feel a bit strange for you.” He nodded again. Tom did not say anything and they both turned to look at the television above the pool table. Outside, a small group of Arsenal fans was coming towards the pub, the bouncer smiling, shaking his head at them. Kenny was approaching from the bar. He had three pints of lager in a careful stranglehold.
“It’s all right, lads, don’t give me a hand or anything.” He smiled, offering Tom the first pint, and they moved away from the bar.
As soon as they left the pub, Tom felt the old excitement start to build. The routine of the walk to the ground automatically made his senses tingle with anticipation, heightening at each of the normally empty pubs now overflowing onto the pavements, the stalls crammed together on derelict scraps of land selling programs and badges and sweets, the tide of people thickening down the road, horse shit, police wagons, car horns, the tops of the floodlights appearing and the noise of the growing crowd riding on the air, soaring over the city. Throughout all the years no aspect of it had ever changed. The pre-match sausage roll from the tea bar. The queue to buy a program, which he would take home afterwards to pore over in his room. He followed Kenny and his dad into the toilets for the customary piss at the packed urinal, before hurrying out, up the steps and through the gangway for the sublime moment of seeing the pitch, the crowd.
They made their way to their row. The team was being announced on the Tannoy. There was the smell of pie fillings, Bovril, farts. Old men and women, families, were in the same positions they had sat in since Tom was little. All of this was deep inside him, ingrained yet altered now by the knowledge—shared by his dad, Kenny, all of the season-ticket holders they nodded past on the way to their seats—that Tom was not part of the club anymore. He was not going to play for it. He sat down in John’s seat. Kenny, beside him, held out a Yorkie bar for Tom to break off a block.
“We’re very proud of you, Tom, you know, me and Jeanette,” he said. “Very proud.” And he turned to the pitch, where the players were coming out of the tunnel to an escalation of noise. The Town players did not know what this was like. None of them would be able to handle it, Tom thought as he gave himself up to the mass of the crowd, becoming a part of it, the collective voice entering him, joining with the increased pumping of his heart and his lungs.
One of the scholars that Tom had played with was on the bench. Jamar Daley. At each break in play Tom looked over at him among the substitutes. He had been given a one-year deal. Inevitably, he would play only a handful of games, mainly in the cups, probably go out on loan and be released at the end of his year, but still the unfairness of it kept pulling Tom’s attention away from the game. Jamar had been good, a tidy midfielder, strong, competitive, but through all their academy years together he had never been as good as Tom. He was on five thousand a week now, according to one of the old scholars Tom had seen the last time he came up. If not for the couple of goals Jamar had scored i
n the FA Youth Cup semi-final he would probably not have got the attention, or the agent, that had followed, although it was Tom who had been given the man-of-the-match award for that game. Everything he had done that afternoon had come off. Every dribble, every through ball, every decision the right one because he had not hesitated or overthought any action, he had played purely on instinct—and it had been obvious, to the large crowd, to the agents waiting in the car park, his family, his teammates bouncing and shrieking in the dressing room, that he was the one, out of all of them, who was going to make it.
A quick throw-in caught the Arsenal left back by surprise, and Kenny, Tom’s dad, everyone around them, were all onto their feet as he slipped and handled the ball just inside the edge of the area. The referee straightaway indicated a penalty and a bellow went around the stadium. Tom remained standing, his stomach knotting. Kenny was making a low guttural sound as the crowd became quiet, waiting.
The ball went underneath the goalkeeper’s dive. All around Tom people were jumping about, doolally, released from themselves. Kenny was shaking his fist in the air. He turned to Tom and they put their arms around each other, bobbing up and down, fastened together, Kenny’s nose pressing into his cheek—“Yes, Tommy! Yes! Yes! Yes!”
—
The rain eventually gave way to a cold dry spell. Tom stood by his bedroom window and viewed through the night sky the glowing cigarette tips of the weekend’s rearranged bonfires on the hills. He drove Bobby and Steven to the stadium the following afternoon to look with the other players over the wasteland of the pitch. They walked up and down, shaking their heads, imagining injury. There was an atmosphere of abandonment everywhere. Small heaps of rubbish had accumulated on the grass and the terracing. Mildew flowered across the plastic roof of the dugout. Inside the bowels of the main stand the air in the dressing rooms and tunnels hung with damp. When they came past the referee’s room, a rat skittered across the floor just in front of Steven, who yelped and jumped back.
“You little fairy,” Boyn, following behind, shouted. “Look at the little bloody fairy, pissing herself.” And he got down on his hands and knees to give chase to Steven, pretending, it only dawned on Tom when Boyn was some way down the tunnel and he started sniffing at the concrete, to be a rat.
Tom sat in thermals then played for the last ten minutes of a heavy Tuesday-night defeat in Dagenham. The small flame of hope, ignited before the rain came, was put out by this loss to another relegation-threatened side—extinguished, if not by the first four goals, then by the fifth and the ensuing squabble between Daish and Gale as the teams left the pitch to the backdrop of “Girl fight, girl fight, girl fight” from the rapturous home support.
They stopped for takeaways on the way back, and the air of the coach became thick with the rich cheesy stink of two-for-one pizzas. Tom ate his slices slowly, looking out of the window at the hurtling dark while Clarke proceeded up the aisle, stopping at each seat to say, softly, “Cunt” to every player along the way.
The squad was ordered in on its day off. They gathered together outside the clubhouse and one or two players took shots at the crowd of seagulls that still loitered after the flood while they waited for Clarke to arrive. As soon as he appeared, gray and faintly unsteady, he made them start running.
The ground broke up like cake under their feet and a track began to blacken around the perimeter of the pitches. Two players collapsed and were removed to the clubhouse. Tom, however, had no difficulty coping and found himself wanting more, and it to be harder. He stayed at the front of the group, forcing the pace—past the clubhouse, the fencing, the hulking sycamore, the grass-wet mower outside the open doorway of the ground-staff shed—as if by running hard he might distance himself from the anxious mood that had settled on him since the visit home. He shut it out, focusing solely on the satisfying action of his heart, his blood, his limbs.
When the squad limped in to shower and change, Tom jogged over to the reserve goalkeeper, Hoyle, and asked if he would be up for staying behind to practice a few crosses and catches. Hoyle wavered a moment but agreed. A few of the others, near the back of the group, turned to look and exchanged words. They probably thought he was trying to impress the manager, Tom realized, regardless of the fact that Clarke had already left to drive to his van-company premises.
They practiced together for about twenty minutes, at which point Hoyle said that he was done.
“OK,” Tom said. “I might stay out a bit longer, though. Do a few drills.”
Hoyle laughed. “You’re not in the Premier League now, mate.”
When Hoyle had left, Tom spaced out half a dozen cones along the right-hand side of a pitch where the grass was still fairly smooth and emptied a bag of balls by the cone furthest from the goal. He repeated a shuttle: dribbling around each cone until he reached the dead-ball line, looked up and swung a cross in, aiming every time for the same spot at the near post. He did this until all of the balls were gone, scattered over the neighboring pitch, which he now saw that Liam was approaching. Liam stepped towards one of the balls and, when he reached it, booted it. Tom ran to apologize and collect them all up, but Liam jogged to kick another ball, then another, and as Tom got closer he could see that he was enjoying himself, firing each ball with deliberate aim towards the goal.
When all of the balls were returned, many of them into the net, Liam came over to where Tom stood watching at the side of the pitch. “Don’t want to try a few penalties against me, do you?” He was striding towards the goal before Tom even replied.
Tom struck his first attempt low towards one corner, but Liam was quickly down to stop it. The second he aimed for the same corner and this one went in, just, despite Liam sprawling to get a touch on it. Tom smiled to himself as he turned to get another ball. Liam was surprisingly agile, even in his heavy boots and canvas trousers. For five penalties Liam threw himself about, attempting to get one of the leathery palms of his groundskeeping gloves to the ball. He stopped three.
“You’re good, you know,” Tom said when they had finished.
Liam was sweating. He wiped a long muddy smear over his forehead with the back of a glove. “Too good for you lot.” He grinned and walked away. Tom watched him go, then collected the balls and the cones and returned to the clubhouse.
The other players, including Hoyle, had all left, so he took his time getting changed, enjoying the quiet echo of his studs on the floor and the still-steamy warmth of the shower room.
Afterwards, collecting his things, he began to feel a sluggishness descend through him, as if the strength was being sapped from his arms and legs. He sat down, staring ahead at the pool of shower water struggling around the drain. When he tried to get up, his kitbag was a lead weight. For some time he stayed there, watching the last of the water eddy and choke down the hole, before he forced himself to stand.
He went out onto the field. All he could hear was the noise of cars in the distance beyond the fencing and undergrowth. He started towards the breeze-block outbuilding at the far side of the pitches, trying to ignore the exposed, self-conscious sensation of walking across the expanse of reeking cut grass.
As he got closer he could see Liam through the doorway. He was pouring the last of one pot of white paint into another on top of a trestle table. He looked up in puzzlement and, Tom thought, amusement.
“What, more penalties?”
He looked down again to shake the last of the paint into the pot. Tom stood in the doorway. The roller shutters of the tractor entrance rattled momentarily beside him. He knew he should say something but he did not know what. Liam, however, did not seem perturbed by the interruption and carried on with his work. On the walls, among hanging rakes and shelves of canisters, paint, pallets, balls of string, there were old team posters and a dirty red and green scarf nailed to a ceiling joist. Somehow the sight of these things filled Tom with a distinct but unplaceable sadness. He watched as Liam pressed the lids onto the paint pots then took the empty one towards a dustbin by the
door.
Liam was about to open the dustbin when Tom reached forward to clasp his arm. Liam shifted his eyes to him. Tom let his hand fall to his side and gazed down at the paint pot still in Liam’s hand, his boots, at his own trainers, stained green. He was conscious of how fresh and clean he was, this close to Liam’s work clothes. A dim thrum came from the road. He could not bring himself to look up. Liam moved away and Tom watched him step back to the table, hearing then the unbearable clunk of the paint pot being put down.
Tom turned to stare, for a long time, out of the doorway at the wide abandoned field. He heard Liam’s boots on the concrete floor. Then he felt the warmth of his body behind him. A hand touched Tom’s side, pressing, gradually, against it. Tom pulled himself away. He twisted to look directly at the large face and he was charged with a sudden glorious sense of risk as the man stood there, inspecting him.
“I have to go,” Tom said.
He made for the clubhouse, not deviating to avoid the patches of mud. Above the road noise, the baying of seagulls, was the sound of blood in his ears. His vision was constricting, the sky, the world around him, closing in until all he could see was the door of the clubhouse ahead.
7
Bobby and Steven did not seem to notice how withdrawn Tom was the following morning. They largely ignored him, arguing excitedly in the back of his car about each other’s chances of being picked for the upcoming area quarter-final of the Johnstone’s Paint. The discussion had started over breakfast and was still going when Tom pulled off the road onto the training ground lane, which he drove down slowly, trying to not make obvious his glance over at the staff car park.
Inside the clubhouse, while Bobby and Steven helped the other scholars lay out the boxes of cereal and porridge beside the tea urn, Tom went to sit at the far end of the lounge, where Richards was on his own. Richards handed him the paper and he stared at the football stories without taking them in, fighting against the urge to look out of the French windows onto the field.