by Ross Raisin
Liam’s chin was on the top of Tom’s head. His Adam’s apple bore down on Tom’s temple. “You’re pissed, mate.” He clinched Tom’s arms tightly to his trunk, restricting any movement. The smell of him was overpowering. “You’re pissed, mate. You’re just pissed, that’s all.”
—
When Tom woke, aching and shivering on a sofa with a blanket over his legs, the curtainless room was filled with dim light. There was a tang of vomit. He turned over slowly and examined the cushion behind his head, his clothes, the small, peeling plastic sofa, but he could find nothing. He tried to sit up but was prevented by a wave of nausea.
It took some time, his eyes not leaving the staircase, before he was able to get up from the sofa. He moved himself to the kitchenette at one side of the room and got himself a glass of water. Three dirty plates were stacked in the sink. The counter was cluttered with pans and a sieve and several full shopping bags. In a large clip frame above the fridge there was a wide-angle photograph of a football pitch, taken from low down, which Tom recognized from the advertising hoardings as Town’s. He drank the water steadily, listening for any sound above his head. He checked his pocket for his car keys and stepped towards the door, then, after a short panicked fumbling with the lock, he let himself out.
10
Gale, on the expiration of his deal, was released. A couple of first-year pros who had never played were transported to the Scottish third division on three-month loans. Charlie Lewis, moments before a short assault on the filing cabinet in Clarke’s office, had his contract terminated “by mutual consent” and three days later signed part-time terms with Hendon.
There was no buildup to these departures. The four players were present for training one day and gone the next. The first that anybody knew about Gale leaving was in the lounge during breakfast when Richards spotted it on the rolling news at the bottom of the Sky Sports screen that played continuously in a corner. A nervy atmosphere crept into breakfast times over the coming days. The squad watched for every entrance into the room and followed the tiny gliding text above their heads, forever adding and looping, adding and looping.
They waited for new signings. The chairman declared in the paper that there would be three or four additions to the squad before the close of the January window. The existing players remained on guard for their arrival, increasingly anxious with each day that nothing happened. The mood lifted only occasionally. A surprise draw against Swindon. Reminiscences about the party, often in the form of already well-worn impersonations of Steven and Bobby dancing.
The two boys smiled at these moments but said nothing. An awkwardness had inserted itself between them. They could no longer always be found together, even in the house, which, as the Daveys pointed out to them with good-humored concern, had become blessedly quiet. Bobby was often among a small crew of young players, playing cards, in the gym, and had become more noticeable around the club, in part because of the new game that accompanied every training session and shower and coach journey—for which somebody would call out, “Sex face,” and everyone else would assume the same contorted expression—and in part because Steven kept more and more to himself. He moved from his usual position in the clubhouse dressing room. Quietly, without reaction, he removed the Viagra and the dead earthworms from his pigeonhole. When he got to Tom’s car one afternoon and saw the opened magazine pinned under the windscreen wipers he looked on impassively, barely registering the image of the wet, veined penis poised beside a man’s face, before Tom pulled the magazine out and flung it to the ground.
A full week went by with no more departures and still no new signings. The players were restless, distrustful. They eyed Clarke closely. During a practice match Yates pretended not to hear him call for a substitution, and when he shouted the instruction again Yates walked off the pitch so slowly that everyone turned to look at Clarke, who stared into the trees and appeared not even to notice.
That evening every player received a text message from the club secretary informing them that the board had, after careful deliberation, decided to relieve the manager of his duties.
—
The number two took training as normal the following morning. They watched him, and each other, with cagey excitement, not daring to utter a word about Clarke’s departure, as if for fear that he might at any moment appear from behind a tree or stride out of the French windows onto the playing fields. It only took a day or two, though, for him to be forgotten. In the cold, still air of their final preparations for Crewe away, the sound of seagulls overhead, the incessant murmur and little rainbows from the tractor sweeping dew off the pitches, whenever they paused for a break there were bursts of speculation about who the new man might be. It was as if the old manager had never existed. The memory of him lurked only in small hidden places, for those who knew where to look: the chipped crater in the wall of the dressing room, the unmoved magnetic counters on the tactics whiteboard. The folded pile, when they arrived one morning, of “PC” monogrammed tracksuits and waterproofs that the kit man had placed on a chair in the reception of the clubhouse.
The number two was placed in temporary charge. He contrived, either through design or loyalty to the departed manager’s methods, to alter nothing. He picked the same eleven for his first match as had played the last and achieved the same result: a 1–1 draw. They started calling him “gaffer.” It began as a joke but very quickly, with nothing else to call him, it felt perfectly normal. Day-to-day life carried on, but within the squad there was a deepening sense of uncertainty—over who the new man would be, whether he would take charge before the transfer window closed, how big a budget he would be given if he was. All of these questions were put to the temporary manager.
“Just keep on as you are,” he answered them. “That’s all you can do—keep doing what you’re doing.” Words that were reassuringly conventional enough to feel correct, in spite of the fact that they were still bottom of the table. “Messing everything about right before the new manager gets here isn’t going to do him or anyone else any favors.”
Boyn seized on these words: “So you know who it is, then?”
He shook his head. His eyes closed weakly. “No. Believe me, I’m the last one they’ll tell.”
He was wrong, as it turned out. Ten minutes before the kickoff against Bristol Rovers the chairman slipped unannounced into the dressing room. He stood beside the door while the room fell silent, the squad becoming aware of the fat suited man attempting to appear at ease among the half-dressed and naked bodies. His lips, purple from a pre-match meal at which he had just shared his news with a banqueting suite of sponsors and box holders, squeezed against each other with pleasure. “Boys,” he said, “I’ve come down here for two reasons. First is I wanted to wish you good luck tonight.” He looked about the room, at the battered hi-fi that Richards had just turned down, the signs on the walls: DESIRE…FOCUS…BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE. “The second is I wanted you to hear from me that we’ve made an appointment I think everybody is going to get behind.” He smiled again. “Aidy Wilkinson is in the stands tonight. From tomorrow morning, he will be your new manager.”
He stayed where he was, clearly expecting some reaction to his words, but when none came he gave a nod to the temporary manager and left.
Throughout the first half the team scanned the main stand for the face that would be looking down, judging them. Most, however, had never heard of him so could not locate it.
“Row in front of the chairman,” Fleming informed them at the interval. “Ginger. Young. Looks like a player. I played with him a few years ago. He’s different, you’ll see. He’ll want his own around him, that’s for sure.”
Wilkinson introduced himself the following day at breakfast. He walked into the lounge and stood in front of the tea urn while the temporary number two dithered, unsure whether to stand alongside him or with the squad, and Lesley peered in from the doorway to the canteen, clearly impressed by his confidence, his youthfulness.
�
�I’ll keep it simple. Steve is going to take training today as normal, and I’m just going to observe. No pressure. Just get on as usual. Right?”
They marked the bright mouth and alert watery gaze, the pullover and tie, the shiny black shoes, the thick plastic folder tucked under his armpit. Those who had googled him the night before tried to match him with the former defender who had played most of his career non-league, who had desired a “simple, on the ground style” from the team he had guided into the Conference Premier last season, and whose son, Ryan, had Down syndrome.
Out on the field he was always on the move—up and down the touchline as they went through their drills, walking over to the scholars’ pitch, inspecting a sprinkler—and talking, to everybody: the first-team coaches, the youth team coach, the groundsman, the physio. At the end of the session he spoke briefly to the temporary number two then departed for the clubhouse, his shoes caked with mud, specks of it up the back of his trousers.
He went to the stadium in the afternoon to conduct a series of one-to-ones with the players. Tom was among the first to see him. When he arrived at his office the new manager was ready at the door to greet him with a handshake. “Sit down, Tom.”
There was a sheet of paper on the desk that had a small photograph of Tom paper-clipped to the top. It was an old one: the website shot for his former club, as a second-year scholar. Wilkinson assessed it for a moment before looking up, perhaps trying to recognize something of the goofy, smiling boy in the photograph in the pallid watchful figure on the other side of his desk.
“How would you describe your first—what is it, eight months or so—at the club, Tom?”
“I don’t know. I’ve not played much.”
“Did you expect to? Is that what they told you when you signed? You must have. Look at your pedigree: FA Youth Cup final, England Under-16s, -17s, -18s. What happened?”
“Don’t know. Big-man hoofball.”
Wilkinson laughed. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing: big-man hoofball’s out the window. We start afresh. Everybody will get the chance to prove themselves. And from now on we’re going to be using the grass.”
Tom turned his eyes away. Under the desk a pair of muddy shoes was set to one side on top of a newspaper. On the other side, a cardboard box loaded with new laminated motivational posters.
“OK, then. Done.”
They both stood up. At the door he shook Tom’s hand again. “By the way, I don’t want you calling me gaffer. I don’t believe in all that bollocks.”
By Saturday’s trip to fellow strugglers Northampton the players had passed through an initial period of waiting to hear what anybody else would call him to calling him boss, and finally, at the manager’s own suggestion, Wilko. He sat at the front of the coach, working on an iPad. The number two sat across the aisle from him, staring out of the window at the countryside. Behind them card games were being played quietly. Some slept. Others listened to music. The physio moved down the aisle, gently rousing players to offer pink pills or blue pills in little plastic sacks, like party bags.
Tom leaned his head against the window. In the glass he could see the reflection of Richards’s headphones. He listened to the soft insistent pulse of music. Even in his increasing separation from the others there was never a moment that he could be alone, not on display; but at the same time there was always the disquieting inevitability of the return to his bedroom, of being unable to sleep, vulnerable to the dark. The image of himself at Liam’s door, ringing the bell, being let in. Drunk as he had been, he could remember exactly the words that he had spoken to Liam. Every time he went over them they shocked him. And he could remember too his unnatural excitement at the Adam’s apple against his temple, which he had to force himself, with other thoughts—racing to the byline to whip a cross in; his dad filing match reports at his plastic desk—to repel.
The team went in at halftime leading 1–0, and the new manager’s name rang out from the small freezing band of away supporters. The goal had come from a practiced delivery by Easter. He had started the game and was playing well—with energy and aggression, winning the ball and moving it on quickly.
“Our possession is good,” Wilko said in the dressing room, “but I want us to move it twenty yards up the pitch, where we can hurt them more. We can win this. Come tomorrow morning these will be looking over their shoulders at us.” His lips were plump, brownish, like minuscule kidneys. “And Chris Easter, that is exactly what I was asking for. More of the same from you, please.”
He instructed the substitutes to go out onto the pitch and warm up. Tom followed the other four out of the room and into the tunnel. From one habitual point to the next: pitch, dugout, dressing room, coach. It drugged them, this routine, was meant to drug them, Tom was sure, so that they did not have to think—the next instruction always ready to be called out, texted, written on a whiteboard. But as the noise of the crowd echoed down the tunnel he could feel his heart rate quickening and his legs turning to heavy jelly. Every face, every pair of eyes, he became more convinced with each step, would be able to see it in him. They would know what he had done.
Into the light, the sudden exposure to the crowd, he focused on one specific area of the pitch and made his body move towards it. The goalkeeping coach was untying a bag of balls. They spilled like guts over the grass. Bobby fetched one of the balls and pointed for Tom and Yates to form a wide triangle with him. Bobby tapped the ball four or five times into the air without letting it drop then lobbed it to Yates, who controlled it on his chest, let it fall to his right foot and kept it up for a long time, alternating his feet, before kicking it to Tom. The ball skewed off Tom’s foot onto the grass. The next time it came round to him he managed to control it and kept it up twice, but his cushioned volley to Bobby landed short. Yates made a noise of displeasure, audible to Tom despite the crowd. The game, one that he had played almost every day since he was a small boy in the garden, was now a trial. He could sense the eyes of the crowd on him. A couple of times Yates and Bobby reversed direction, passing between themselves, cutting him out.
“Going to do some shuttles,” Tom said and jogged towards the halfway line.
A raffle was being drawn. A Northampton player, injured and in a suit, drew numbered balls from a cloth bag and handed them to an enormous stoop-shouldered man with a microphone to read out over the Tannoy. Tom sprinted back and forth between two points. Even this, though, made him feel that everybody was looking at him. He glanced at the scoreboard. There were still six minutes until the second half. He lay down and stretched his back, his glutes, keeping his eyes away from the crowd and the other players. A schoolboy penalty competition was taking place in the other half. A dozen eight- and nine-year-olds in immaculate baggy shorts were shivering inside the center circle, waiting their turn to take the very long run towards the penalty spot. Each one set off determinedly, arms and twiggy legs flailing, looking as though they might at any moment fall over. Most of their shots went wide of the goal. A couple went in, slowly looping beyond the goalkeeper’s scurrying efforts. One shot failed to reach. Then a tall black boy who had his socks pulled above his knees ran in a wide arc towards the ball and struck it with surprising power into the very top corner of the goal. Tom’s final thought, before the blissful yell of the goalkeeping coach calling them in, was one of wonder at the boy’s pureness of concentration, and that he could not imagine striking the ball like that himself, so cleanly, so decisively.
Town continued to press. Richards scored a second goal. Tom, enclosed by the dugout, tried to follow the game, but his mind kept returning, inexorably, to the night at Liam’s house. Near the center of the pitch half a dozen players were gathering around somebody on the ground. More distant players from both teams began to run towards the scene. One of the Northampton defenders looked in and at once turned away, his hands going to his face. Jones shouted for the physio to get there quicker; he broke into a squat pumping sprint, and as the players parted to give him access Tom saw Easter on t
he ground. Two stretcher bearers ran onto the pitch. On the other side of the pack, Boyn was walking away. Jones came across to put an arm around his shoulders, talking closely into his ear.
After a long wait the stretcher was raised and began to move slowly towards one corner of the pitch. The procession moved past the dugout. The physio looked up at Wilko and gave a short distinct shake of his head. Then he turned his attention back to Easter, who was gaping up at the sky with one arm dangling down from the stretcher like a sunbather, seeming not to take in the constant soft stream of words from the physio walking alongside him, stroking his hair.
11
A team meeting was held on Monday. The room was hushed, everybody staring up at the television until the manager came in. He stood by the breakfast table and poured himself an orange juice. He had been to the hospital on Saturday night, he told them. He hadn’t stopped long because Easter’s wife was there but he had passed on the best wishes of the squad. The tibia and fibula of his left leg were fractured. He was sedated, although understandably emotional, and Wilko had reassured him that he would receive the full support of the club for however long his recovery took.
“How long do they think that’s going to be?”
Wilko shook his head. “Too early to say.”
There was silence as the same dark thoughts passed unspoken like a current through the room.
“Do we send him something?”
“Like what?”
There was another pause as they considered this.
“Or send his wife something?”
“One-way ticket somewhere?”
Nobody laughed. They decided, after a short discussion, to send her some flowers. As for Easter, Boyn had the idea, generally supported, that he would probably most appreciate messages of encouragement.
“Who’s got his number?”