A Natural

by Ross Raisin

  “Organized,” Beverley told them, brushing his teeth at one of the dressing-room sinks. “That thing about not having time for reputations is right enough. Drury will take you as he finds you. Which means if he decides you’re a prick, then you’re a prick.”

  Tom waited for everybody to leave. He was supposed to go and see the physio, he said to Beverley and Richards.

  He crossed the field, spotting Liam at the entrance to the ground-staff shed, disappearing inside. When Tom got there Liam was on the other side of a workbench, looking inside a toolbox. Tom went towards him. He moved around the bench, carried now by a momentum that seemed to be coming from outside him. He put his hand on Liam’s shoulder and drew it towards him, but Liam resisted. He took hold of the upper part of his arm instead and Liam put his hand over Tom’s to remove it. Their hands fleetingly locked and pulled against each other, and dark excitement moved inside Tom at the awareness of Liam’s strength.

  “I don’t want this, Tom.”

  In the trough of a wheel-transfer marker machine a thick rubbery skin had formed over the pool of paint. There was a writhing wood louse in the middle of it, stuck.

  “You can’t just come in here like this,” Liam said. “And what if somebody saw you?”

  But Tom was backing away, pushing between pieces of machinery, mumbling that he had to go. All the force of earlier had left him.

  “Fucking kidding? You’re running off?”

  There was a whiny note to his voice, Tom judged, his heart jumping at the fierce metallic screech of a mower on the concrete when he pushed past it, that he could not put from his mind even after he had retreated across the field and got away in his car.

  —

  Two days later, when Tom returned home and went straight through to the kitchen to get himself a drink, he was there, sitting at the table.

  “Thought this would be the least weird place in the house for you to find me,” Liam said.

  Tom walked around the table to the sink and made himself a glass of squash. He stayed there, drinking. “Why are you here?”

  “To talk to you. I knew they’d all be out.” His eyes were away from Tom, on the corkboard on the back of the door. He was shaking his head slightly, half smiling to himself. “I get it, you know,” he said. The washing machine, which had been quietly sucking and rumbling, jolted to life. The unexpectedness of it made them both start. For a while the spinning was too loud to speak over. When eventually it quietened Tom could feel the throb of it still, as if the reverberations had passed into his body.

  “Why are you here?” he asked again.

  Liam looked down at the table. Directly in front of him was one of Mrs. Davey’s farmyard table mats, a picture of a sheep with the word SHEEP underneath it. Tom registered the mat next to him—COCK—and wanted suddenly and bitterly to laugh.

  “You want to keep it separate,” Liam said. Tom wished there was some way to stop him talking. “This is all sort of new to me, you know,” he continued. Then, after a pause, “We could meet somewhere else.”

  Now Tom did laugh—quickly, sarcastically. “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Just for a drink.”

  “That’s worse.”

  “We don’t have to hold hands, mate. We can just talk about football.”

  Tom looked at him, horrified. The washing machine exploded into action again and Liam jumped noticeably. Again they waited, both watching the drum going round. Mrs. Davey would be back from the hospice soon, Tom kept thinking.

  Liam stood up. “I’ll give you my mobile number.” He tore a strip from the newspaper on the table and instinctively Tom was afraid that Mrs. Davey would understand why it was missing. Liam placed the strip on the table and wrote his number on it. “You can text me or something.”

  When he had gone Tom sat down at the table. He stared at the line of numbers. After doing nothing for some time he folded the paper over and over, until it was very small. He got up and put it in the pedal bin. He stood there, hovering by the bin, his foot still on the pedal, before reaching inside to retrieve the bit of paper from where it had stuck to the greasy wrapping of a slab of butter. He went to the shelves, picked up a lighter from one of them and set fire to it over the sink.

  The gray flakes swirled in the water from the tap, disappearing down the plughole until nothing remained but the creamy smoking smell of burned butter.

  —

  He met his family at their hotel before the Crawley match. They had set off from home very early to avoid the traffic, and he could tell immediately on entering the foyer just what his sister thought about the dawn start. She came over to greet him. As he hugged her, turning their bodies so that he was not facing his parents, a wave of desperation spread through him.

  “Decent place, this,” his dad said, shaking his hand. “Comfortable enough.”

  “Yes,” said his sister with a small motion of her head at reception. “They’ve got a dispensing machine that does toasted sandwiches.”

  His dad gave her a lighthearted flick on the arm. Tom looked about him. The hotel was a grade down from anywhere that he had stayed in for some time. There was no restaurant or bar, plants, windows. He followed them through a number of corridors to their rooms to fetch coats and bags. His sister split off for her own room and he walked with his parents to theirs, where he sat on the bed while his dad took his wallet from the safe and his mum occupied herself in the bathroom rinsing cups. There was something uncomfortably intimate about sitting in somebody else’s hotel room, even his parents’, whose bedside arrangements—the neat stack of pillboxes on one side, the heavy paperback and reading glasses and immortal travel alarm clock on the other—had not changed from the earliest memories of his childhood, and he was glad when his dad said that it was time to get going.

  Tom drove them all to the ground, conscious the whole journey of his dad inspecting his driving and, when they arrived, fearful of somehow bumping into Liam, even though he had already worked out that there was no way they could. They stopped for an age to admire the cars in the players’ car park. Price, getting out of his four-by-four, smiled over. Mr. Davey had offered an executive box but his dad had declined—“No special treatment”—even though Tom knew that he would have relished it. Tom then went to the main reception to collect their tickets and was thankful to take his leave for the dressing room.

  The game ended in a draw. Tom did not play. He met his family afterwards in the players’ lounge, where he found them chatting with Mr. Davey.

  “First out?” Mr. Davey stepped forward. Tom saw his dad watching as Mr. Davey put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Not like he needed a shower,” his sister said.

  “Drink, everybody?” his dad asked, intent on being the first at the bar.

  They all sat together and discussed the match. The result had put Town within two points of getting out of the relegation zone. His dad was impressed with the new manager’s playing style, and with Gundi, who had scored again. The other players started to come in. Tom noted his sister watching them. Automatically he was about to tease her, but he stopped himself, wary of what she might say in reply. The players dispersed around the room. Gradually they began to take notice of Rachel. Boyn caught Tom’s eye and winked at him, and Tom flushed with ludicrous delight.

  He only drank one pint, then drove his family to the restaurant that his dad had booked in the town center. Tom knew, from his dad’s comments when they were seated, that he had specifically requested a good table. They ate and talked and began to get quite pissed and at moments he relaxed—until the main courses were cleared and his mum started to cry, saying how proud she was of him, how much they missed him. He at once felt the acute need to comfort her but found himself unable to. He could not even look at her. He stared at the waitress’s hands removing the plates. “I know, Mum, I know.” His dad and his sister, however, to his profound relief, began ribbing her, and by the time the waitress returned with the pudding menus she was laughing again.


  When his dad, adamantly, had paid, they walked the short distance to the hotel. Tom said goodbye to his parents in the foyer and left with his sister for a drink.

  “Go on then.” She leaned across the soft black sofa towards him. “You can tell me now. Mr. Davey’s a dirty old pedo, isn’t he?”

  “He’s really nice. They both are,” Tom said, almost shouting. The bar was very busy, the music thumping. His sister’s choice. “They seem good, Mum and Dad,” he said.

  “They’ve been excited to see you. You know Dad will be going on about being in the players’ lounge for weeks. Kenny and John are never going to hear the end of it.” She smiled. “They’re going to help pay for me to go to uni, you know. We went out to the pub, and Dad got all serious and I thought he was about to tell me he was dying or something, but then he said that him and Mum had been talking about it and they’d decided it wouldn’t be fair if they didn’t give me the opportunities they’ve given you, so they’re going to help with my funding.”

  “Great,” Tom said, but not loudly enough that he could even hear it himself.

  “I’ll still be in a load of debt when I finish,” she said. “But fuck it.”

  A couple of young women came past. One of them glanced down at Tom; he looked away.

  “They think you’re a pedophile.”

  “Yeah, right. You look older than me,” he said, not joking. It had not been nine months since he left home, but she had changed. She was more at ease, more confident. He looked at her quick, attractive face and again felt gratified that people might see them together.

  “Are you seeing anyone, then?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She laughed. “It’s all right, I won’t tell Mum and Dad. I bet you’ve got girls coming on to you all the time.”

  “Not really. Sometimes.”

  “Don’t worry. You don’t have to tell me.”

  At her faithful smile shame penetrated him, alongside a deep but impossible need to confide in her. Once, two years ago, drunk in his bedroom, he almost had, but then immediately had clammed up in confused panic.

  “What about you?” he said. “Boyfriend?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Not at the moment?”

  “Not at the moment, no.” She said something else that he could not quite hear above the music. “Anyway, go get me another drink. And try not to get mauled by those two at the bar.”

  By the time they left they were both drunk and tired. He helped Rachel out onto the pavement, letting her lean into him. She almost fell over at a crossing, tripping on his foot, and he had to catch her to prevent her from falling into the road. She wanted to go to a club. “There must be somewhere,” she kept saying, “even here there must be somewhere.” He walked her back to the hotel.

  In the foyer, when they said goodbye, she would not let go of him. For a moment he thought that she had gone to sleep. He held her, progressively tighter, burying his face in her neck until she started to tip over.

  “See you, then,” he said.

  “Come home and see us more.”

  He watched her stumble away to her room. Only when she was long gone did he become aware of the receptionist watching him through the doorway of the back office.

  Leaving, he started back in the direction of where they had come from, carried onwards by a resolve that he was going to return to the bar and find the two women, but when he reached the entrance and saw the short numb queue outside, the bouncer, he could not make himself go through with it. He stood there on the pavement. Through the window he could make out one of the women at the bar. He eyed up her face, her legs, willing himself to feel something, to want to go inside and talk to her. But he was already turning away, walking off, hating himself, hating the bouncers and the bar and the town and its stupid horny coatless people.

  He found his car, got in and closed the door. He turned the engine on, the heating, and the warmth and stillness made him want to sleep. The smell of his parents, his sister, was still in the air. He should get out, he knew, find a taxi. Or sleep. There was nobody about, though. He put the car in gear, pressed the accelerator and took his foot off the clutch. The engine stalled, and he eventually worked out that he had left the handbrake on. He looked at himself in the rearview mirror. He looked normal, he was certain. He moved his eyes away to the dashboard, then back up again, trying to view his face as somebody else might, the women in the bar might.

  He started again. Once onto the road he felt sober, in control. There was not much traffic about—taxis mainly, which he steered around safely whenever they pulled up outside the bars in the town center and expelled their passengers. He braked alertly when a people carrier halted without warning in front of him. Swerving past it he fumbled for his indicator, but flicked on the windscreen wipers by mistake. For some reason, as he passed from the center into darker, tree-lined residential streets, they would not turn off. Eventually he gave up and let them be. Their rhythmic dry shrieking filled the car. He made himself focus on the road, the quiet black expanse of night above it, broken every few seconds by a streetlamp through the trees.

  His sister would be long asleep by now. Left to herself she would stay in bed until the afternoon if not for the inevitable knock at the door hours before that. There was something different about her and their dad, he had noticed. The way they were with each other now, the teasing, the teaming together, their difficulties of the past year seemingly forgotten.

  There was a loud noise outside. The car juddered, a hubcap, a tire, scraping against the curb. He felt the side of the car—with the weightlessness of a fairground ride—lift, and he gripped the steering wheel, powerless to stop the back of the vehicle swinging round, veering into the road.

  He thought he saw a house window brighten, but when he looked again the street appeared dark and dead. He did not recognize where he was. He tried to move the steering wheel but it was jammed, so he sat still, trying to work out whether or not he was injured, loud blood churning thickly through his head and the windscreen wipers continuing unabated, the ugly wrenching of them across the windscreen, back and forth, back and forth.

  13

  Leah arrived home with the shopping. The house was noiseless, but the kitchen light was on. She put Tyler down on the floor with the carrier bags. He pulled himself up on a cupboard handle and took a few heavy steps before dropping onto his bum. She began to put things into the fridge and the cupboards, and onto the growing pile on the island of miscellaneous requested items—sports magazines, DVDs, Rice Krispies Squares, ibuprofen—that would vanish almost as soon as she left them on the carpet outside one of Chris’s two rooms.

  He had spent every night of the past four weeks in the spare room. He needed the extra space to stretch out his leg, he said, with no risk that she might turn over onto it. He stayed upstairs for most of the day, as far as she knew, only coming out of the office to go to the toilet or come down for his enormous silent lunchtime sandwich.

  Briefly, as she continued putting things away, she paused to read a text from her mum: “Robert free any of those Sundays for lunch. Suggested meal out but told him you wanted us round to yours.” She did not reply and finished with the shopping. It had been her mum’s idea to have Sunday lunch, her mum’s idea too that it might be nice to have it at hers, to which Leah had made a small noise of agreement. The relationship with Robert was showing no sign of slowing and her mum wanted him involved in things, in her family. It would also be an opportunity, Leah was well aware, for her mum to get a sense of whether everything was OK with them. The thought of Robert there, in the kitchen, his big hands buttressed on the kitchen island, looking about the place, eager to talk to Chris, rattled her. She could not imagine Chris at the table eating with them, but equally she did not want to think about him upstairs, alone in the office while they sat downstairs, Robert and her mum making small talk and ignoring the fact that he was not coming down to join them.

  They had not once spoken about all the time
he was spending holed away in there. Sometimes she listened to him watching television programs, or football matches, often back to back, and she felt a stupid gratitude whenever she heard these sounds, safe in the temporary knowledge that he was not on the Internet. When all that had started, at Middlesbrough, she had asked him what it was he was doing for so long on the computer, teased him about it even, and at his increasingly evasive responses she had grown anxious about what, who, he might be looking at, communicating with. But by the end of that season it had become such an everyday thing that she was usually able to bury the thought, leaving him to himself, and since the injury she was mainly just glad that he was not in the living room.

  Early one morning, though, when he was still asleep, she had gone into the office to collect any plates and mugs that had accumulated and she had noticed that he hadn’t shut down the laptop. She had swiftly rebooted it. As it began to stir into life, instantaneous suspicion, fear, had moved through her as she braced herself for the image of a girl, a message, but when she had looked round to check the landing and returned her eyes to the screen she saw that it was some kind of fans’ forum. Without pausing to read it she had stepped away, her body relaxing, and carried away the dirty crockery.

  On only one occasion since the injury had she come home to find him downstairs. He had been on the sofa, watching a German second-division match, so lost in it that he did not at first notice her come into the room, and she had wondered later if he had been betting on the result. In the weeks since that afternoon, however, he had barely left the office. One Thursday, on leaving the house for college without for once making him his lunch, she had put a small stuffed rhinoceros against the bars of the gate at the top of the stairs. On her return, seven hours later, it had still been there in the same position.