A Natural

by Ross Raisin

  The squad, and from the other pitch the little cluster of bombed-out players, watched him jog away across the field to where the scholars were listening to the youth coach organize a dead-ball routine.

  Tom did not allow himself to dwell on the season ending, his contract expiring. He concentrated on his performances. The old determination to succeed had reentered him like a drug. He approached the team sheet with the expectation of finding his name there, an electric spurt running through him each time he saw that it was. He was able to busy his mind, just as he used to, by visualizing himself on the field, dominant, unstoppable, these fantasies sometimes blending with images of real moments in which he had impressed. His pass to Gundi for the first goal against Gillingham. A charge up the touchline in the same match, past one, two players, the groan of delight from the crowd, his foot in perfect control of the ball for fifty yards, keeping it never further than a few toes’ distance from the white line.

  He was sure there was new respect for him among his teammates. Especially the strikers, who knew that he could create chances for them. He had learned to anticipate Gundi’s movement—where and when he would run into the box, which areas he wanted the ball delivered to. Gundi had developed a code for these deliveries known only to the two of them, which involved Gundi double-tapping on one or other of his formidable buttocks—right for a near-post cross, left for the far post—and it worked almost every time, simple as pressing a button.

  But there was already talk of Gundi leaving. His agent had been in contact with three or four League One clubs—so Gundi said—and one in the Championship. The chairman made known to the media that he was going nowhere. Next season was about an historic promotion. The playing budget was going to be increased to two million. The Riverside Stand, to a design and time frame that he neglected to specify, was going to be demolished and rebuilt.

  The final home encounter was televised because their opponents, Southend, were on the brink of going up. A crew arrived in the morning to erect a makeshift studio. They assembled it in one corner of the ground, above the disabled supporters’ stall, ugly and functional as a shipping container. Town had climbed to eighteenth, and the players were told by Wilko and then by the chairman, making a surprise, inebriated appearance while they were coming out of the dressing room, that going into the summer with a win in front of the home crowd would be the perfect springboard for a promotion campaign next season.

  Southend, however, charged into the game with a ferocity that the Town players were unready, or unwilling, to match. Steven and two other second-year scholars had been included in the starting lineup and were bamboozled by the onslaught. The noise of the Southend fans resonated about the stadium, largely because the chairman, keen not to pass up a financial opportunity, had in addition to the usual terrace given over several sections of the Riverside Stand to the away support, which had the effect of confusing one of the television pundits into believing, for most of the first half until a producer informed him otherwise, that he was in Southend.

  Tom, despite the 4–1 defeat, put in a decent performance. His dad called afterwards to tell him that he was one of the few, along with Gundi and Beverley, to put up any kind of a fight. He was proud of him, his dad said. Tom’s jaw tightened as he listened. He had turned his season round. You needed character to do that. Character and guts.

  —

  He lay on the bed. Liam’s back was against his chest, their bodies pulsing together with the rise and fall of their breath. There were several dark orange moles on Liam’s neck, standing from his skin like tiny nascent toadstools.

  “Can I ask something?” Liam said.

  “Nope.”

  But a few seconds later: “I’m wondering when we talk about next week.”

  “Next week, I suppose.”

  There was a pause. “Right. I get you. One match at a time, is it?”

  “That’s right.”

  —

  On the afternoon before the concluding fixture Tom left the medical room and walked across to the car park. He got into his car and put on his seatbelt. He stared at the door of the medical room, incapable of starting the engine, driving away. After a couple of minutes the door opened, and Liam appeared. At the sight of the stooping figure brushing out the doorway, the unspoken faithfulness to their strategy, Tom’s stomach hollowed. He got out of the car and stood beside it. Liam was immediately aware of him. He looked up, straight at Tom, who stayed where he was. Liam checked left and right, then rested the broom against a wall and came towards him.

  They stood together by the open car door. For a few exhilarating seconds Tom thought that they were going to kiss. There was a noise. They both turned to see the fire exit door to the main stand shutting and Boyn and Daish advancing towards the car park. They stepped apart. Boyn and Daish looked over at them, then angled away towards their cars.

  “I’ll text you,” Liam said and walked away.

  Air was hammering in Tom’s ears. He got into his car and sat, watching Boyn and Daish out of the corner of his eye. He tried to control the panic, still high in his chest, knowing that they had almost been discovered. The two players were talking to each other over their car roofs. They turned at the same time to look in the direction of Tom’s car, then, in unison, they got into their vehicles and drove off.

  18

  The season closed with a 0–0 draw at Hereford. Hereford, who had needed to win to have any chance of staying up, were relegated. The somber atmosphere in the stadium and the tunnel when they left the pitch was uncomfortable, and the Town squad showered and changed quietly, conscious the whole time of the private sorrow on the other side of the wall. They ate their sandwiches, tidied, without instruction, the mud and paper plates from their bench spaces and left.

  The second-year scholars’ futures were dealt with two days later. Tom gave Bobby and Steven a lift to the stadium and told them he would take them back to the Daveys’ once they had been informed. He sat in the main stand while the meetings took place. He remembered well what it was like, this day. He did not want to think about it. He surveyed the pitch instead, the avenues of battered turf along each wing, imagining them lush and smooth again, the roll of the ball on young grass. His attention, though, was drawn constantly to one side of the pitch, the door under the control center, and to thoughts about his own contract outcome.

  After forty-five minutes he got up and made his way to the players’ lounge. He knew right away, when he entered the room and one or two of the boys looked up at him, that the last thing they wanted at that moment was for one of the seniors to be there. It appeared that they had all been done already. Boys sat alone in all corners of the lounge. A few had their faces lowered to the floor; one was fixed on a piece of paper that looked like a certificate. Some turned away from him. Two that Tom recognized as the central defenders sat close together on a sofa, staring out of the window at the pitch. Tom dithered, wanting to say something to them but knowing that he could not. He went out of the room. Further down the corridor the small lad with the shaved scalp was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall and his head between his knees. It was like the scene of a disaster. He should not have come in here, intruding on their humiliation; he should have stayed in the car. Bobby and Steven, though, were not about, which he knew was probably a good sign.

  Wilko was leaving his office, coming towards him. Tom slowed, ready to say hello, but Wilko continued past without acknowledging him. Doubts began niggling at Tom before he was even out of the stadium—that the manager had ignored him on purpose, that it had something to do with his own meeting next week.

  Bobby and Steven were waiting next to the car. Tom walked up, unlocking the doors, and without a word the two boys climbed into the back. Tom got behind the wheel and they set off, but before the car park exit he slowed down and stopped. He turned to face them.

  “You two OK?”

  “He got a deal,” Steven said straightaway. “Him and Spence. No one else.” He looked
out of the window, even whiter, Tom thought, than normal.

  Bobby was unsure where, or how, to look, and was gazing into his crotch. “One year,” he said, lifting his face up, “option of a second in the club’s favor.”

  Tom could see that beneath the studied quietness he was bursting to talk about it.

  “Well done,” Tom said. And then to Steven, “Doesn’t mean you’re a bad player, you know. Plenty of other clubs out there.”

  He was aware, turning back round to drive them home, just how inadequate these words were. You’re going to be some player, he might as well have added, when you grow into yourself. It had not felt like it at the time, but he had been fortunate ending up at Town. Those eight boys had nowhere to drop to except for the sprawling expanse of the semipro, the amateur, the Sunday pitches, armed with a sports science BTEC and the realization that their dream was over. Three of the scholars that Tom had played with, he knew from his dad, had gone into the lower divisions of foreign leagues: Sweden, Denmark, Hong Kong. It was possible that one or two of the Town boys would try the same route and maybe even find their feet abroad, although his dad had told him more recently that only one of Tom’s academy team was still out there—in the Hong Kong second tier—the others already returned, disillusioned, homesick.

  Halfway into the journey, passing the leisure center, Steven put one freckled hand up to the side of his face. His chest was quivering in little shuddery movements. Tom turned up the radio. He wanted desperately to stop the car and get out to put an arm around him, to hold him and tell him that everything would work out, an impulse which as soon as he had it made him cling, sick and fearful, to the steering wheel even harder.

  Steven went back to Scotland the next day. After his short and subdued final dinner Tom had gone down to the toilet and heard the muted comforting efforts of both Mr. and Mrs. Davey coming from the ground floor. How many times, he wondered, must they have been through this over the years? They were kind people, patient, understanding. They would be the same with him, he knew, if he ended up in Steven’s position. And he thought then about the secret, through all these seasons of guidance and gentle consolation, which, Tom presumed, had been kept from them. Although that was another thing that had never come up between him and Liam—that had been tacitly left, like Tom’s contract decision, unvoiced.

  The day after Steven left the house so did Bobby, with a hangover, promising to return Tom’s loan on the first day of preseason. Tom let it go; he did not want to discuss with Bobby the possibility that he might not be offered terms for next season. Bobby had been told that his digs would be held for him for another year if he wanted them but that he could look for his own place if he preferred. He went up to Scotland for the summer to think about it.

  If Tom was awarded a new deal he would not, as a second-year pro, be coming back to the Daveys’. He set off an hour or so after Bobby with all of his belongings. The earnest faces and farewells of the Daveys stayed with him as he drove away into the sour humid afternoon. He was not looking forward to going home. The prospect of lying to his parents, his sister, for the five days before he had to drive back for his face-to-face with Wilko occupied him all the way up the motorway.

  —

  For the first couple of days his parents were incessantly around—followed him about the house, it felt to him at times—but he tried to put on a show of good humor. He became tense with the effort of it, counting the morning minutes before they left for work, Rachel for school.

  He did not speak to Liam, but a string of text messages, short, neutral, often about the play-offs or the Town pitch, built up between them each day until his family returned home, and he would tell them about his jog, or say that he had been into the city to catch up with a friend, even though the idea of meeting anybody that he knew from home was unthinkable. He spent the afternoons watching television or on long runs with his music turned up to block out the recurring thought of Tuesday’s meeting. After tea and often-curious looks from his sister across the table, then more television, he went up to his room and played on his Xbox as the exchange of text messages started up again. Each night before he went to sleep he deleted everything in his sent and received folders. He watched the messages tumbling away with a racing sensation that was like falling from a tall building.

  One evening he came downstairs to fetch his top from the living room and overheard his parents talking in the kitchen. They were clearing up, his mum washing the plates and cutlery, his dad drying.

  “He’ll sort himself out,” his mum was saying as Tom sat down on the sofa and observed them through the two doorways.

  “I know. I know.” His dad moved out of view briefly, putting away a plate, then came back to the drying rack, the pair of them quietly carrying on with clearing up. When the sink was empty of dishes and his mum let out the water she remained where she was, looking out of the window at the garden, her gloved hands resting on the sink top. Tom watched his dad move close beside her. She turned round, pulling off the gloves and setting them down. His dad placed both of his hands on her shoulders and they looked at each other for a moment in silence.

  His dad smiled. “You look knackered, Liz. You’re working too hard.”

  His mum shrugged and his dad’s arms shifted slightly up and down. “No one else to run this new clinic. And we could do with the hours.”

  His dad’s face moved towards hers and Tom looked away. When he glanced back his dad’s arms were around her. For a few seconds their foreheads touched, then came apart. Tom stood up. Stealthily he left the room and climbed the stairs, a strange undertow of shame staying with him at having witnessed this private moment of tenderness.

  His parents sensed his withdrawal from them. His mum was the first to bring it up, in the front doorway as Tom was coming back inside from taking the rubbish out.

  “It’s a horrible time, this waiting,” she said. “You don’t have to keep it all to yourself, though, love.”

  “I know.” He gave her a smile as he came past. “Perils of not having a proper job, Mum,” he said chirpily. “It’ll sort itself out.”

  Then his sister. He left the door to his room ajar one day after coming up from tea and she came straight in without knocking.

  “Fuckhead. Talk to me.”

  “About what?”

  “About why you’re being a fuckhead.”

  She was peering inquisitively about his room. “I’m not.”

  She glared at him, arching her eyebrows.

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” Tom said.

  “No, I don’t. I really don’t. You could be a bit nicer with Mum and Dad, though. And Dad says you’ve been getting starts,” she continued softly. “He says you’ve been playing well, and he should know because he checks out all the match reports every week. That means they’ll want to keep you, doesn’t it? Might offer you more money, even.”

  “Maybe. It’s football, though. It’s not like the real world.”

  She sat down next to him on the bed. “Somebody will, surely. Even if it’s not them. Maybe some club up this way will want you and you can move back up north.”

  She put a hand on his knee and he flinched; she moved it away.

  “There’s plenty of lads who would kill to get where you have, you know. I bumped into Sammy D not long ago—I didn’t tell you. He’s got nothing. No qualifications, no direction, nothing. He’d been put on this workfare thing—he’s been working at Homebase for six months for no pay and now it’s finished all he does is go to the gym. He’s bloody massive. At least you’re still playing. Wherever you end up. And remember, in the real world what you earn is shitloads.”

  He looked at her. “How do you know how much I earn?”

  “Oh, you know. The Internet.”

  On Sunday, the weather decent, the four of them went for a pub lunch a short drive away. Tom worked hard to put on a sociable front. They chatted—about Rachel’s university offers, about Internet shopping—and he could see how pleased hi
s parents were that he was not behaving strangely. He was becoming more adept at acting like himself. Splitting himself into two people: one that could be normal, a footballer, the other kept apart.

  That night Liam texted to ask if they could talk. Tom called him in the morning from the park after going out for a run.

  “I had a thought,” Liam said.

  “Go on.”

  “What time is it tomorrow, your meeting?”

  “Eleven o’clock. I’m driving down this afternoon.”

  “And then what, are you going back up north after?”

  “I don’t know. Mr. and Mrs. Davey said I can stay with them if I want. But I’ve not thought about it.” Whenever he spoke to Liam about them, which he tried not to do, he never referred to them as “your parents.”

  “The thing is, I’ve got leave from Wednesday. I can’t get started on the pitch renovation because they’re flogging all this Pro for a Day bollocks for another two weeks.”

  A jogger was advancing up the path beside Tom, checking her stopwatch.

  “I thought maybe we could go away together,” Liam said.

  Tom waited for the jogger to go past. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. Go somewhere for a few days.”

  “Where?”

  “Somewhere further than the Beefeater.”

  He wanted to carry on running but the blood in his legs had turned thick. “I don’t think that’s…I don’t think we can do that.”

  “Can you think about it? When the meeting’s out of the way. We can just wait until it’s out of the way.”

  —

  “I want to roll you on for another season,” Wilko said. “Same terms. Then we’ll see where we are this time next year.” Tom watched his agent write this down on a notepad. The air inside the office was rushing around his ears. “You’ve done well—I’ll just say my bit if I can, please, before either of you chip in. You’ve done reasonably well. You’ve pushed on physically, and that’s important at your age. You’ve pushed on mentally. Now we need to see you push on again, consistently, because next season is a big one for us and I don’t want any passengers.”