A Natural

by Ross Raisin

  —

  She put Tyler down for his nap, and over her lunch she tried to think of how she would fill the five hours before she had to take Chris to the stadium for a sponsors’ function. There were no baby groups on, and Tyler was not at nursery until tomorrow. He had started going two mornings and one full day a week. These sessions broke up her own days. She woke on each nursery morning already disoriented at the prospect of being without him but at the same time guilty about making the choice to be so, the pressure of how she should better be using her time pursuing her during the drive to drop him off, in the shops, the gym.

  She would have liked to go to the gym this afternoon, but her mum was away for the day with Robert and she could not leave Tyler with Chris, especially when he was preoccupied by the sponsors’ function. Twice over the past fortnight they had gone to the gym together. Both times she had found it difficult to exercise, so conscious had she been of him in the weights room beyond the opaque glass wall, overworking the upper parts of his body, his cast jutting into the gangway for afternoon bodybuilders and pensioners to step respectfully around.

  She knew that he did not like being reliant on her for lifts. On both gym visits, and the appointments at the hospital and the club, he had sat staring out of the car window, his seat pushed right back to accommodate the stretched-out leg, any possibility of talking to him made all the harder by the fact that she could not see his face. He rarely left the house. He dressed every day in the same pair of shorts, or in the giant tracksuit bottoms she had bought for him in the hope that he could get the cast inside, but which he had ended up having to cut off at one knee anyway, the final result so ridiculous that in the past they would probably have laughed at it.

  There was nowhere, he had told her in a single moment of openness soon after he was discharged from the hospital, that he didn’t feel useless. And the club, she sensed, was where he wanted to be the least. She would have liked, as she once had been able, to tell him to stop feeling sorry for himself and get his act together. It felt like so long since she had been able to talk to him like that—as she had the summer his mum moved abroad and he went into digs, or the difficult final year in the youths—that it was hard even to remember the person she had been then. Now, she was constantly mindful of keeping her own act together. Only sometimes, as she drove to college, leaving behind her the weight of her duties, did she let herself pretend that there was no one else to think about; that this was her life, the one that faintly she could remember wanting.

  Amid the busy colorful world of the studio she was transported—dyeing, bonding, felting, alert to the gunning of the sewing machines, the heat and stink of irons and glue and solder, the strange thrill of using her hands for something other than cooking and nappies and massaging her husband’s backside.

  Because Chris had been loath for her to take up the full-time course option that she had once intended, before Middlesbrough and Tyler, it had not been easy at first. Only coming in on Thursdays, she had felt nervous around the other students. Most of them were younger than her. They knew each other; they lived and went out together. It had taken her a few months to become comfortable enough among them to join in the conversations around the large worktables, or to talk in more than snippets to Maria, with whom she had been paired to work on a computer-aided design project. Instead of eating her packed lunch on a bench in the entrance hall she now regularly went to the canteen with four or five of the others, who talked enthusiastically about designers and career plans, and about the trip, scheduled for the beginning of the second year, to a trade fair in Milan.

  When they asked her one lunchtime if she was going to come on it she told them yes, probably, if she could arrange childcare, though the possibility of her actually going was so remote that she had not in fact given it any thought. She nearly told them then, as talk moved on to their ambitions for the second year, about a daydream she sometimes indulged in—of developing her own designs, of starting up a small business from home—but she did not in the end mention it, feeling, in the hub of their eagerness and confidence, a fraud. Back inside the studio, Maria had opened a packet of biscuits in the workspace the two of them shared and pushed it towards her. “You’ve got to come, you know. Milan. It’s going to be amazing.”

  “No, I want to. Just it won’t be easy with my little boy and everything.”

  “There’s no one can look after him for a few days?” Maria was looking at her, munching a biscuit.

  “Not really. I’ve not left him that long before.”

  “I don’t want to be rude, but what about your husband? Couldn’t he look after him?”

  “Oh, he could, of course he could. It’s just that he’s a footballer and there’ll probably be a match while I’m gone.”

  “He’s a footballer?” Even though she had avoided saying much about Chris before, she could not arrest the jab of pride at how obviously impressed Maria was by this information. “He professional?”

  And as she went on to tell Maria about him being captain, about him having played in the Championship, she realized that she was not going to tell her that he was injured, that he would not have to go to any match while she was away—and the unspokenness of it only made the reality of the situation more stark: the many months that he would remain at home, torturing himself, shut away in his rooms, the only solace for her the pathetic consolation that she at least knew where he was.

  —

  He came downstairs ready for the sponsors’ function at half past five, while she was still giving Tyler his dinner. She laughed without thinking when she saw him. He was wearing the giant tracksuit bottoms with a smart black shirt, ironed, and a sports jacket. On his right foot was a brown leather shoe.

  “You look like a manager.”

  He smiled. “Sharp, eh?”

  She wiped Tyler’s mouth and set him down on the floor. He tottered immediately towards the cast and flung his arms around it. “Lif, lif, Dadda.” He gripped delightedly to the monstrous ski boot as Chris raised his leg up and down a couple of times.

  “You about ready to take me?”

  “Yes. I’ll just get him in his pajamas. He’ll probably fall asleep on the way back.”

  In the car Chris was withdrawn again, breaking from his trance only to shush Tyler, who was fussing in his car seat.

  “You don’t need any food doing?”

  “No. It’s a sit-down. Thanks.”

  “Who’s it for?”

  “Fuck knows.”

  Tyler started crying. He was getting tired. By the time she got back it would be past his bedtime.

  “Shall I text you when it looks like I’ll be able to leave?”

  She turned instinctively to where his face would normally be. “I can’t pick you up, Chris.”

  “Oh, right. Why not?”

  “Tyler.”

  After a moment he said, “Can’t you get your mum round?”

  Tyler was still crying. The cast in the footwell twitched as he stretched to find where the dummy had fallen.

  “You’ll have to get a taxi, sorry.”

  They stopped outside the reception entrance of the main stand. Leah got out to fetch his crutches from the boot and waited for him to get unsteadily out of the car.

  “See you later, then,” he said.

  She watched him swing-plonk away, and some old part of her went with him—reaching to be at his side, helping, joking, united, as he negotiated the heavy glass doors of the entrance.

  There was a squeal behind her. She turned to get back into the car, saw briefly to Tyler and set off on the journey home.

  —

  A boy he vaguely recognized hurried towards him from behind the reception desk.

  “It’s all right,” Easter told him. Then, looking up the flight of stairs, he said, “You can carry this,” and gave him one of the crutches.

  The boy followed patiently a few steps behind. The muffled din of the function swarmed towards them from beyond the stairhead. At the top
he took the crutch back and, when the boy had gone, paused outside the swing doors to the Williams Suite.

  He entered to a rush of noise. Suited men filled the room. They stood in the gaps between the large round tables, lined the walls, curdled thickly around the bar. The retractable divider between the two banqueting suites had been pushed back to make one open space, the semicircles of the drinks service areas now joined into a round at its center, like a beach bar. There was the smell of meat. Gravy. It was too crowded for him to pass through—there must have been a hundred and fifty, two hundred people there—so he stayed by the door, unsure what to do, claustrophobia rising as he failed to make a decision. A sea of men. One woman, deep within the crowd in a vivid red dress, showing through the dark mass like a wound.

  The operations manager was coming towards him.

  “Chris.” He inspected the tracksuit bottoms. “Come with me.”

  Big men squashed against chairs and tables to let him through. Some of them clapped him on the shoulder. He heard his name a few times.

  “Here we are. Enjoy your night.”

  Ten or so men were standing around the table, all with pints of beer or lager in their hands, evaluating him. PEEL DAVIS LOCK AND KEY SOLUTIONS was typed on a square of card clipped to a stand at the center of the table. The tall, ill-looking man beside him offered his hand. When he smiled his mouth opened to angry, withered gums. “Terry. MD. Meet the lads, Chris.”

  The men moved around the table, shaking his hand in turn, until they were all back in their original positions.

  “So, how’s the leg?” Terry lowered his eyes, and the rest of them looked down together at the injured limb.

  “Improving. They gave me a plastic cast walker, so I’ll be able to take it on and off to start my physio soon.”

  The men nodded approvingly. On another table he could see Jones. Further out, Fleming. Pearman. Terry started saying something to him but was cut short by the loud crackling voice of the chairman on a microphone.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, your seats please.”

  The room sat down to the sound of cutlery shuddering on black cloth over folded-out plywood tables. The chairman, on a small stage that had been erected at the far side of the room, outlined the order of the evening. Easter zoned out until, in the details of the prize raffle, it was announced that he would be drawing the ticket numbers. His table were all looking at him. He avoided their gaze, keeping his eyes on the stage, trying to conceal his quickened breathing, his fists clenching beneath the table. The chairman finished speaking and moved tentatively off the platform. There was no step up to it, as far as Easter could make out. He imagined himself up there, revealed, the absurd leg on display like a beacon.

  But when he turned back to face Peel Davis Lock and Key Solutions a bolt of pleasure passed through him, viewing the other players, none of whom had been chosen.

  Creamed salmon tartlets came out. Terry asked him various questions about the injury, the team, the new manager. At each of his responses the circle of grinding pink mouths confronted him. He tried to be interesting, to make it sound as though he was passing them privileged information, but he heard himself telling them much the same as he had told Peter Pascoe in a short strained phone interview the previous week. They made noises of appreciation and fingered stray flakes of pastry back into their mouths. He was conscious of the fact that, technically at least, he was hosting their table. They had paid for him. There would have been a choice, maybe even a price list, as if he was an escort or a dinner magician.

  By the time the roast beef was served they were having conversations among themselves. Terry, though, had no end of small talk for him. He asked if he had seen the win on Saturday. No, Easter told him, he had been at home, and when Terry found out that he had a son, he thought of a new wave of questions to ask about Tyler, many of which, to Easter’s disguised humiliation, he did not know the answer to.

  After the beef the booming mustached football-in-the-community officer gave a lengthy account of two Christmas holiday soccer camps, and the catering staff came round with raffle tickets. Easter visualized the long walk across the room. The hundreds of eyes upon him when he hesitated in front of the stage. His stomach dropped. For a second he imagined that Leah was there with him, the room empty, nobody but them. Sudden hooting laughter made him turn to look over at another table, where sponsors were rocking and clutching at themselves because of something that Jones, erect and leering, had said, and when he turned back round Terry had begun talking to the man on his other side.

  He tilted his head back and let out a long breath. There had been a time, before the injury, before Middlesbrough, when he used to look forward at these bullshit events to telling Leah about them afterwards. But when he considered what he might say about tonight all he could think was how pathetic it would sound. That he had not been man enough to go up unafraid onto the stage. That he did not know where his son went to nursery.

  Directly above him one of the ceiling panels was missing. Empty black space gaped beyond it, rising past foil-wrapped pipes and dustballs and the cold rusting girders of the main stand. A fantasy that he used to have came into his head again: Tyler coming onto the pitch, the last game of the season, toddling towards him across the grass for him to pick up and kiss and put onto his shoulders to parade in front of the crowd.

  Dessert was quieter than the other courses. Terry found less to speak about, and he was able to sit unnoticed for long spells, drinking, laboring at his treacle tart, before the chairman came onto the stage again.

  “Gentlemen. I’m delighted, absolutely delighted, to introduce for you now our guest of honor for this evening. What can I say about him? Twenty years of management experience across the top four divisions. Respected pundit. Unafraid of controversy. Successful businessman. Ladies and gentlemen, Doug King.”

  There was applause as Doug King toiled onto the stage.

  “Fuck me,” he said when he had got there and taken the microphone. “That’s not done my hernia any favors.”

  The room was at once alive with laughter. The tea and coffee carts clattered between tables, and the sponsors adjusted their trousers, eased back into their seats.

  “Do you know what wins you trophies?” He paused, resting the microphone on his gut to survey his audience.

  “Money,” somebody shouted to a burst of cheering from his table.

  “Money? Fuck money. Spirit. That’s what wins you trophies. Spirit.”

  There was general concurrence. They commended this, even if many were surprised by the implication that Doug King had won trophies.

  “Every club I’ve been at, we’ve had this tradition. Laziest trainer. You know that one? Laziest trainer? What we do, end of a session, we take a vote on who’s trained worst—not got stuck in and all that—and the lad that gets voted has to wear the laziest trainer top for the whole of the next session. That top was pink, and the boys could write any abuse they liked on it, and it never, ever got washed. By the end of a season it could pretty much stand up by itself, and I’m not bloody joking.”

  The room was captivated. He went on to speak frankly about the winning mentality, relegation, the death of his father, the damaging effect of foreign players. When he finished he received such a long and clamorous ovation that a waiter had to be called to one sodden table which had been slapped overenthusistically by a sponsor, and he was still on the stage when the operations manager came up to announce the drawing of the raffle.

  Easter bent for his crutches under the table. He stood up and set out towards the other side of the room. There was a hubbub around him, outbreaks of laughter. Legs reluctantly drawn back. He came past a couple of the other player tables and inadvertently caught the eye of Tom, who nodded slightly then looked away.

  By the time he had picked his way around the tables, careful to avoid the trailing wires gaffer-taped to the floor in front of the stage, the noise was dying and all he could hear while everybody watched and waited for him to get th
ere was the thudding of his cast on the thin burgundy carpet.

  When he reached the stage, Doug King, still on it, was quick to figure out that he would not be able to get up. He took the microphone from the operations manager and passed it down, pausing briefly as he did so to speak into it himself: “You’re better doing it from there, son. You look like you’ve been gang-raped by a herd of elephants.”

  The ensuing laughter was still going when he read out the first of the numbers, and resurfaced, every now and again, throughout the draw and the handing out of the costly unremarkable prizes.

  He headed away the second he was done. In an alcove outside the kitchen, beside towers of dirty plates, he called for a taxi. He was told that he would have to wait forty minutes. A waiter, clearly not recognizing him, came out of the kitchen and told him that he could not stand where he was, so he moved out from the safety of the stacked plates to the edge of the mingling crowd, imagining Leah seeing him there, irrelevant.

  He turned to see Tom hovering close by. “All right, mate?” He gave Tom a wink. “Fucking hate these things.”

  Tom looked at a line of nearby men with their backs to them, then stepped towards him. He had a half-empty pint glass in his hand. He seemed drunk. “You got a drink?” Tom asked.

  “Left it on the table.”

  “Here.” Tom proffered the remains of his lager.

  Easter laughed, pulling a face at the glass, but took it. “Fuck it,” he said and downed what was left. “Cheers. What was your table, then?”

  “I can’t remember. Something to do with windmills.”

  “Windmills?”

  “Yeah, windmills. Something Windmills. Or Windmill something, maybe.” He pointed at the cast. “How’s it doing?”

  “Uncomfortable as hell.”

  “It was horrible,” Tom said. “Seeing it happen.”

  “You were on the bench, weren’t you?” The line of men had spotted them. “What did he do—Wilko? When it happened.”