A Natural

by Ross Raisin

  Steven, on finishing his second breakfast, followed Bobby onto the pitch and threw a snowball that hit him on the back of the head. Bobby turned to return fire, at which all of the other scholars ran to join in. As the rest of the volunteers watched the escalating snowball fight, Liam walked over towards the boys. Once he got close to them they stopped, eyes to the ground, shamefaced.

  “What do you think this is doing for the pitch, lads?”

  “Sorry,” Steven said.

  Liam pointed at Bobby. “You. Come and look at this.”

  Bobby walked slowly to where Liam had knelt on the ground to scrape aside a little pile of snow, understanding only when Liam cupped the pile between his gloves and rose smiling that he had been hoodwinked. He sprang up and sprinted away. Liam gave chase, throwing his snowball, clipping Bobby’s arm.

  “Hey,” Bobby called over his shoulder, laughing. He stumbled, almost falling, and Liam gained on him. “I’m going to do my ankle here,” Bobby shouted as Liam caught up and rugby-tackled him into the bank of snow at the side of the pitch.

  By five to eleven, large areas—the center circle, the corners, both penalty boxes—had been cleared. Viewed from above, the field, with its shoveling figures moving at the edges of these dark patches, looked like an archaeological site. The referee stepped onto the pitch. He had changed into his match boots and, to the amusement of the hopeful huddled audience, his shorts. He walked slowly over the grass clearings, stooping here and there to prod at the ground or perform a sudden battery of stamps with the serious head-cocked scrutiny of a burrowing animal.

  His decision was announced at midday: match postponed. Even though the snow, at the current rate, would be cleared in time for kickoff, the surface was dangerously hard. The volunteers departed, disheartened, but, after a minor quarrel with the chairman over the free ticket offer, reasonably content, moving carefully away from the stadium with their shovels over their shoulders and warm clouds of conversation about their heads.

  —

  The Daveys held a small party on New Year’s Eve for their friends the Whittells and the Beeneys, and their lodgers, who had to stay sober because of the match the next day. Tom spent most of the night near Bobby and Steven, and joined them in Bobby’s room at one stage to play on the Xbox. When they came back down Ray Beeney trapped him on the far side of the kitchen table. He thought Tom had ability, he said. Real ability. He hadn’t got to many games this season but he believed Tom had not been given a fair crack of the whip. “It’ll come, son. It’ll come.” He repeated this a number of times. “It’ll come.” Then he wandered off, knocking a bowl of bread-crumbed prawns onto the floor on his way out of the kitchen.

  Tom rode out the long stretch to midnight, feeling as out of place as a child. Shortly after the clinks and hip-hoorays and a short boisterous “Auld Lang Syne” led by Bobby and Steven, he saw Mrs. Davey hold up her phone to show Mr. Davey before turning to Ray Beeney: “He’s in town with Mark and Shona and the rest of his crowd. He says happy new year to you all.”

  “Good boy, good boy,” Ray Beeney said. “Happy new year, tell him.”

  A few minutes later Tom left, unnoticed, to go up to his room.

  He thrust his face into his pillow. When he brought it back up he was gasping for breath. He waited a moment before standing and reaching for the magazine at the bottom of his wardrobe. When he sat down on the bed his breathing was still irregular. Mark. Shona. The names held him captive, as alien and shocking as the staring faces and wet cramping tongues of the women in the magazine before him.

  —

  Clarke forbade any mention of the party until the final whistle at Oxford, but its unspoken proximity charged the atmosphere inside the dressing room, rippling through the squad’s preparations—from the increase in the number of non-starters requesting a rub from the physio to the quicker than usual emptying of the caffeine-tablet boxes going around the room.

  The surface was difficult, the referee inconsistent. Oxford scored three late goals to win 4–1 and keep Town, at the halfway point in the season, bottom of the table. The defeat, however, did not dampen the excitement. After an initial period of silence during which the sound of the Oxford players celebrating bled through the wall, the mood soon swelled with energy and banter. Players queued at the mirrors and watched each other’s deft practiced movement of combs and fingers and hair dryers. When Clarke left, not to be seen for the rest of the night, Jones brought out a bottle of champagne and Yates performed a long thrusting dance on top of one of the benches. Tom watched and laughed with the others, swallowing deeply from the bottle when it came to him.

  Back at their hotel, Easter spent a considerable amount of time in the bathroom while Tom sat on his bed and drank from the bottle of vodka that he had stuffed into a compartment of his bag, until the bathroom door started to open and he slipped the bottle back.

  When Tom had finished in the bathroom himself, Easter was sitting on his own bed, looking at his phone, scrolling, Tom saw as he came past, through photos of his wife and son. Tom sat down opposite him. He put on his shoes and set to lacing them.

  “Looking forward to this?” Easter asked without looking up from his phone.

  “Yes.”

  Easter began to rock very slowly on the edge of the bed. “Easy enough for you, I guess, isn’t it?”

  Tom did not understand, or ask what he meant.

  “Fair play, though. Fair play. I remember that.” He took up the sports jacket from beside him on the bed and slid it on. The top of his chest, above the collar of his T-shirt, was shining. He looked up at Tom. “You know I could have gone to Spurs? Got offered a place in the academy there.”

  “I heard that somewhere. Why didn’t you?”

  Easter shrugged and started rocking again. “Don’t know. Seemed clear enough at the time. All of it.”

  It hit Tom, watching Easter’s eyes as he went back to the phone, that he was drunk. Music started up in the room next door: Richards and Hoyle.

  “Here,” Easter said, letting the phone drop and crawling to the far side of his bed to reach for something on the floor. He lifted up an almost empty bottle of champagne. “Want some?”

  “No, thanks,” Tom said and bent down for his vodka bottle. He held it up to knock against Easter’s.

  “Cheers.”

  —

  Jones stood by the door of the first, then the second, of the minibuses conveying them to an Italian restaurant, ready with an encouraging word or a squeeze on the bum for each embarking passenger. When they arrived Tom hung about at the rear of the throng in the restaurant lobby, backed up against empty dust-covered wine bottles, so that he would not end up in the middle of the table or next to anybody who might resent sitting next to him. The high spirits increased during the meal. Champagne buckets were strung down the length of the table and the waiting staff given instructions to maintain a flow of bottles throughout the meal. Before the starters arrived, Tom, at one end with Bobby and Steven and the first-year pros, felt something hit his left cheek. He saw with panic that a gang at the other end was laughing in his direction. He had been struck by an olive. Automatically, he grinned back. Another olive flew towards him, but missed to the side of his face. Then another, which missed to the same side, and he realized with a rush of joy when Bobby was hit on the forehead that he was not the intended target.

  “Come on, boys,” Price implored from behind them, ruffling the heads of all of the young players as he walked round the table, “get your banter up.”

  —

  A doorman welcomed them at the entrance to the club. They followed him in single file down some steps and along a passageway with the careful tread and close-guarded mental preparation of the walk down the pitch tunnel. The passage ended at a large dark room, empty apart from three staff behind the bar busily stocking fridges and, at one side of a bare stage, a DJ at a mixing console nodding to the music on his headphones. An arrangement of champagne buckets was balanced on the bar counter. There
was a smell of bleach. The throb of music above their heads from the main part of the club. One of the barmen came over to speak to Jones. The players were still standing about in the middle of the space when the DJ set to work at his mixer and loud music issued from the speakers around the walls.

  With nobody there but themselves, the players quickly grouped into familiar cliques. Tom stayed around the young players, his mouth pinching with champagne, taking in the faded black curtain behind the stage, a formation of small round tables in front of it, the chairs lined up on one side of them to face the stage.

  There was a sharp change in Steven’s expression. The circle turned to see what he was looking at. Other people, young women, were entering the room. Jones, then Yates, moved across the floor to greet them. The pressing inescapability of the night closed around Tom. He went to the toilets and as he entered them imagined locking himself inside a cubicle, unnoticed, until it was over. When he came back into the room he saw that his group had gravitated towards the busy area around the bar. A woman with short side-parted dark hair was among them. She was talking to Steven as Tom rejoined the circle.

  “Who’s your captain?”

  Steven paused for a moment. “Depends.”

  The woman smiled quizzically, thinking that he was being playful. “Depends on what?”

  “Depends what you mean. Supposed to be him.” He pointed over to where Easter had isolated one of the women on the other side of the bar. Then he turned to point behind Tom. “See, these days really it’s that guy.” They all turned to look at Jones. “He’s the captain.”

  “Sounds like a strange setup.”

  “Oh, it’s a shambles, aye.”

  They all laughed, including the woman. Several others nearby looked over and identified, by the expression of proud surprise on his face, that it was Steven who had made a joke. Another woman came to join them. She held up a bottle of champagne by the neck and topped up their glasses. She moved in beside the first woman and the Scottish boys, falling in with their conversation. Tom was drunk. His forehead ached with the heavy tender weight of his eyeballs. He could not understand who they were, these women—if they had been persuaded down from the club upstairs or if they had been invited, paid, to come here.

  A low expectant clamor was growing around him. A thin, very white girl stood in the center of the stage. She was in a close-fitting green dress, her hands clasped together behind her back. Beyond her, a whorl of dust from the still-moving curtain was caught in the shaft of a spotlight. Tom tried to remember whether she had been one of those around the bar, who were now walking with the rest of the crowd to take seats at the tables in front of the stage, but she seemed new, younger.

  Tom sat down near one end of the row. He looked down it briefly for Easter but could not find him. He turned his face to the stage. From his position, he could see the girl’s fingers struggling momentarily with the zip at the back of her dress before she guided it up over the protruding contours of her spine. She walked slowly to one edge of the stage, then the other, and back to the middle. Her face was flushed but expressionless. She let the dress collapse to the floor. A few shouts went up. Fists banged on the sturdy little tables. The girl removed her bra and dropped herself to the boards, where she lay front down with her hands positioned as though about to go into press-ups. Her neck tautened as she lifted her face, then her chest—her palms, stomach, thighs still flattened to the dirty black-painted wood of the stage.

  A tray was being passed along the row. Tom watched it glinting in the stage lights with every exchange. He thought at first that there must be shots on the way, but as the tray got closer he saw that there was money on it, a pile of notes.

  “Silver platter,” he heard from a few seats down. “Get in.”

  By the time the tray reached him and he lifted the black and gold leatherette cocktail menu that weighted the notes down, there looked to be a few hundred pounds on it. He took out his wallet, confused because he thought that everything had been paid for already, and added a twenty. Another girl, shorter, slightly older, with a dyed red bob, came onto the stage. She danced, worming out of her clothes alongside the thin white girl. Fervid excitement was building along the row. The two girls switched positions. Tom noticed the blackened soles of the younger one’s feet as she moved away. His own body was shutting down, weak with pathetic complicity. Hoyle tapped his arm, urging him to look down the line to where first Bobby, then Steven, were being pushed, dragged, onto the stage. Somebody touched Tom’s shoulder. His hands tightened to the seat of his chair. “Amazing.” Price was behind him, moving down the line. “Fucking amazing.”

  Yates leaped onto the stage to pair each boy with one of the girls. Following their new partners’ leads they began to dance—feet planted to the floor, both punching the air with uncontrolled nervous vigor. The audience, delighted by the two stern faces, started to clap in unison. Tom, delirious with relief, joined in. He laughed spontaneously with those around him at Steven, nearest to his own side with the younger girl. Steven did not know what to do with his arms: they fell prone by his sides one moment then all at once were fisting the air again whenever he looked across and copied Bobby at the other side of the stage.

  The girls, moving to the front of them, set to unbuttoning their shirts. The two boys exchanged an unsmiling look over the girls’ heads: determined, together. There was a loud cheer when the shirts came off, revealing their glaring white bodies, hard new muscle packed over childlike frames. They stopped dancing. Their trousers were being unbelted, pulled down. In tandem they lifted one leg, then the other, so that their feet could be pulled free, like two brothers being undressed for bath time.

  Their underpants—from the same shop, or pack—were lowered. Tom looked away. The line of faces, interspersed with those of the women from the bar and the obvious terror of the odd player, was transfixed, straining with a force of unbending will for this to happen, for it not to stop.

  Penises. One erect, the other not. Steven, grinning manically, possibly crying, pumped his arms above his head in response to the shouts of insult and encouragement from the audience. Tom pressed a hand against his mouth as his stomach retched. He made himself look away again. Crumpled heaps of clothing lay scattered across the stage. A chant of “Bob-ee, Bob-ee, Bob-ee” was rising, the rhythmic thump of the word hammering inside Tom’s chest.

  The younger girl got to her feet, embarrassed, and danced a little way apart from Steven. The other girl, though, was kneeling on the stage, hunched towards Bobby. The tag of her underwear was untucked, irritating a small red patch at the base of her spine, which was rolling fleshily up and down now in time with the slow sad rhythm of the back of her head. The only other movement of the two bodies, barely visible past her ear, was the faint tremor of Bobby’s left leg.

  Nobody appeared to notice Tom get up from his seat. The doormen said nothing when he reached the top of the stairs and moved past them onto the street. He kept on walking, then ran, not stopping for some time, his nose streaming, until he had composed himself enough to squat against the wall on a pavement a short distance from the bustling crowd outside a fried chicken shop. He knew he could not return to the hotel. He wiped hiS face, realizing that he had left his jacket behind, and stood up to hail a passing taxi.

  Numbness filled him the moment he sat down and closed the door. Only later, during the long disorienting journey, distantly aware of the sound of the radio and the suspicious glances of the driver, the steadily climbing unset fare—£200, £300, £400—did it start to turn to shame.

  The driver parked to accompany him to the cashpoint. He stood close by, watching Tom withdraw a stack of notes with his bank card, then another with his credit card.

  “You sure you know where you are?” the driver asked when the money was in his hand, but Tom ignored him and walked away. He proceeded down empty streets, past darkened shopfronts. Through the wasting light of an upstairs window he could make out the lagging end of a party. His head smarted.
The desire to cause himself damage kept seething up from somewhere inside him. He imagined stepping into the path of a car, his ankle crushed by a tire, his pelvis shattering. But there were no cars, no people, nothing.

  He let himself into the Daveys’ house very quietly. Inside, it was completely still. He sat down at the kitchen table, listening for any sound upstairs. After a few minutes he stood abruptly and began searching through the post on the kitchen table, then, his chest heaving with terrible excitement, a drawer under the kitchen counter.

  He left the house as silently as he had entered it. Holding a piece of notepaper in one hand, he took out his keys and his phone and got into his car.

  The cul-de-sac when he turned into it was lit but unstirring. He moved automatically, without pausing: out of his car, down the pavement, through the gate into a dark garden. He located a doorbell and rang it. There was a long wait, then the door opened.

  “Tom? You OK?”

  Tom remained on the doorstep. He was bewildered, unable to comprehend what was happening.

  “Is it Mum and Dad?” Liam was wearing a blue dressing gown. His concerned face stared at Tom. “Jesus, you’re hammered, aren’t you?”

  For an instant Tom thought he was about to take his hand, but instead Liam reached behind him for the door handle and motioned him inside. Tom followed him into a living area. “All right, what’s going on?” He looked round at the staircase then back at Tom. “You know what time it is?”

  Tom lurched towards him. “Come on then, queer. Come on.” He latched a hand onto the back of Liam’s neck and tried to pull his face forward but Liam held him off easily. Tom’s strength gave. He stumbled and was caught. Lifted up.

  “Jesus, Tom, don’t be a twat,” Liam said in a low voice, shooting another look at the staircase. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”