A Natural

by Ross Raisin

  His agent took all of it down. One of his heels tapped on the floor. Inflamed skin gaped between the bottoms of his trousers and his Family Guy socks. On the folded-over page of his notepad Tom recognized the name of another player underlined amid the scrawl.

  “Couple of points,” his agent said. “One is terms; the other, are you bringing in anyone else in his position?”

  “I’m looking to strengthen in that area, yes. I’m looking to strengthen in all areas. I can’t guarantee anybody a place, but what I’m wanting from Tommy is for him to carry on where he left off—give me no choice but to pick him. The shirt’s his to lose.”

  Twenty minutes later Tom had been offered a rise of two hundred pounds on his weekly wage, his win and goal bonuses unchanged but his appearance bonus to increase to a hundred and fifty. He had thirty days from receiving the offer in writing to respond. They would be in touch, his agent told Wilko, and Tom followed him out of the room.

  Richards and Hoyle were in the car park. When his agent went off to talk on his phone, Tom walked over to chat with them. He could tell at once that something was amiss. Hoyle turned away as Tom approached, and Richards turned with him, speaking quietly into his ear, rubbing one hand over his back. Tom was too near now to steer away without it being obvious. “You two all right?” he said when he got to them.

  “Yeah,” Richards said. “I’m just telling him that he’s a quality fucking keeper. Couple of seasons and he’ll be playing at a higher level than any of us.”

  “For sure.” Tom said. “You’re a great keeper.”

  Hoyle, still facing the other way, muttered something that Tom could not make out.

  “It’ll work out for the best,” Richards said to him. “Serious. You need to be playing first-team football now, this stage of your career.”

  Hoyle turned. He did not appear to be crying, as Tom had presumed. “Who for, Ash? The Dog and Duck?”

  “Steady, mate. Don’t get too far ahead of yourself.”

  Hoyle gave a phlegmy laugh, then lunged forward to hug Richards. Tom looked away until they released each other.

  “What about you, Tommy?” Hoyle asked. “You get a contract?”

  “One year.”

  “Good for you. You deserve it. Not like this jammy fucker. He got two years, if you can believe what he says.”

  They spoke about the players who had come in the day before—Finch-Evans, Price, Yates—all of whom, as Tom already knew from the message boards, had been released. He heard his name being shouted. His agent had finished his phone conversation and was signaling him over. “Best be off, boys,” Tom said, hoping to avoid saying goodbye to Hoyle. He spun round with a quick salute to them both and made away across the car park to his agent.

  They drove in their own cars to a pub on the outskirts of town to discuss the contract offer over a swift greasy lunch.

  “We take it, yes? Or you want me to push for more? I’ll be honest. It’s a fair offer. You should take it.” He went back to his fish and chips. Tom did not know if he was expecting an answer. At that moment it felt a very long time since the afternoon of the FA Youth Cup semifinal, when a posse of agents had been waiting for him in the car park by his dad’s old Honda.

  “I want to take it.”

  “Good. I’ll straighten it out.” He looked up, sucking in a chip. The tip of his nose was pink and peeling. “You need them to help you find a flat?”

  Tom took a drink of his Coke. He had not allowed himself to think about that, about any of it, until now. “No. I’d rather do it myself.”

  He called Liam from the pub car park when his agent left.

  “That’s good news,” Liam said.

  Tom shifted the phone from his mouth, not wanting to give any indication that he was hurt by the unexcited reply.

  “Have you accepted it yet?”

  “It doesn’t work like that. I’ve got a month to respond. My agent’s on it.”

  “But you’re going to?”

  Tom paused a moment. “Yes.” There was another moment of silence. “I’m up for the holiday.”

  “Yes? Any thoughts where?”

  He was tempted to say, as a joke, nowhere gay, but he resisted. “I’m not fussed.”

  “Right. Leave it with me. I’ll think of some options.”

  —

  He decided against staying and drove straight home. That evening his mum cooked baked chicken burritos, the meal that for some reason had become acknowledged in the house to be his favorite. His family were overjoyed. They wanted to get Kenny round. His dad, getting more and more drunk, kept smiling over at Tom or clapping him on the shoulder.

  For the rest of the week he affected to join in with the convivial atmosphere of the house, suffering their good humor, waiting for each night when he could go upstairs and be released to the solitude of his room.

  19

  They flew, separately, to Portugal. Tom had been abroad half a dozen times before, either with the England Unders or with his family to Spain, as well as one long wet trip to Rotterdam, when he and his sister had been at each other’s throats the whole holiday. But now he sat looking out of the window as if on a plane for the first time. He felt a jittery excitement at the hills and forests and endless yellowed fields appearing beneath drifts of vapor, the outlines of towns and villages, traffic streaming in and out like ant trails. Halfway through the flight there was a short but intense spell of turbulence. The flight staff took to their seats near the toilets. The quiet old couple beside Tom joined hands on top of their shared armrest. Tom gripped tightly to both of his own, fixing his sight on the flaming ocean below, the flesh of his body already tearing open, defenseless.

  Liam was waiting for him in the arrivals hall. He appeared out of the milling crowd in shorts and a T-shirt, his shins somehow already a deep pink. They greeted each other with a firm hand clasp that lasted a few seconds, a midair arm wrestle.

  “Decent flight?” Liam asked.

  “Mostly. Yours?”

  “Good, yes. Easy. On time.”

  “It was hot as soon as I got out of the plane,” Tom said.

  “I know. Early heatwave, apparently.”

  They smiled at each other, recognizing, despite everything, the reassuring pull of the conventional.

  “I’ve picked up the car,” Liam said.

  It was on the far side of the car park, outside the baking concrete hutch of the hire company.

  “I didn’t bring the paper bit of my license,” Tom said when they reached the car. “Didn’t even think, sorry.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m all right doing it. Probably won’t do much driving anyway. Depends what the resort’s like.”

  Liam maneuvered out onto the road. Palm trees. Car horns. Peeling, sun-bleached advertisement billboards. The vents injected a gush of hot air into the car. He would not let himself be led through the holiday, Tom resolved. He would pay for drinks and meals, speak to foreign waiters, not shy away from tipping. The thought of Liam doing it all, expecting to, revolted him.

  Their apartment was one of twenty arranged around a small pool and a rock garden. Under the cool relief of a ceiling fan they looked the rooms over, constantly watchful of each other. They took off their shoes and socks, and the white-tiled floor was deliciously cold underfoot. There was one main room with a bed, table and chairs and tiny kitchenette, a wet room with a shower and toilet, and a narrow low-walled veranda set at the back of the apartment to screen it from the others. They got glasses of water and moved out onto it. Orchards and scrub sloped gently down in front of them. A mile or so away were the brightly colored rooftops and apartment towers of the town. Beyond, steep wooded hills sheltered a lagoon, the hills speckled with whitewashed houses and the concrete and steel frameworks of half-built or abandoned buildings. In the distance, further out past the lagoon, was the hot sea, shining in the afternoon sun like the skin of a fish.

  “What did you tell your family?” Liam asked when they had sat down on the scalding plast
ic chairs.

  “That I’m in Portugal with a few of the squad.”

  Liam nodded.

  Tom waited a moment, then said, “You?”

  “Same, pretty much. Except Mum and Dad know most of my friends. I told them I’m with some of the people I met on my groundskeeping course. I’m not actually much in contact with them these days, Facebook a bit, but they can be useful for something to tell Mum and Dad.”

  They were both sweating. Liam rolled his glass across his forehead, and Tom studied his face for any sign that the hint at his sexual past was deliberate. Tom got up and went inside to refill his glass. Moments later Liam came into the kitchenette and stood behind him. He passed Tom his own glass to fill and their arms brushed against each other, but Liam took his drink and moved away to begin unpacking his bag. Tom went to do the same. For the next few minutes they arranged their things: toiletries, sun creams, insect repellents, unnecessary phone chargers, shorts, T-shirts and swimming shorts, their combined belongings tidily stacked and shelved independently as if they were roommates. Liam finished and went to the toilet. While he was in there Tom changed out of his jeans into a pair of shorts, unaccountably self-conscious.

  They went for a stroll around the apartment complex. Birds sang from the bushes. A man was watering a bed of scorched flowers. Around the pool three English girls lay out on sunloungers pulled close to the edge, their feet dangling in the water. The afternoon was still hot. They walked for a quarter of an hour along a shadeless road into the town. When they got there it was pleasantly bustling. Cafes and bars fringed a narrow cobbled street, and there was a row of stalls displaying wooden trinkets and jewelry and decorative paper fans. A fish market at the beginning of a wide promenade of restaurants that smoked the air with grilling sardines and shellfish, leading to a long curving beach.

  They had not brought towels, so they settled down on the hot sand next to a roped-off sunlounger concession. Tired from the heat, they sat quietly, looking out at the lagoon, absorbing the hum of the people around them. There was the lulling tock-tock sound of a bat and ball game at the water’s edge. Liam was watching. Tom felt weak with a need to touch him. He did not understand why Liam had not yet come close to him. Tom stood up and told him he was going to get some drinks from a stand a short way down the beach.

  He bought them each a bottle of Coke, pleased with how he handled the exchange with the vendor. On the way back he noticed two men sitting on the same towel. One was whispering into the other’s ear, stroking his back. Tom hurried past. He returned to Liam and passed him a Coke, wondering if he too had seen the men, if he would have been perturbed by them if he had.

  The sun descended towards a hill on one side of the lagoon, and the afternoon began to cool. They walked to a beachside bar and sat at a table on the sand for a beer. They talked about close-season transfer dealings, first Town’s, then more generally, and had a second beer as the conversation turned to the upcoming European Championship, until the sun disappeared completely behind the hill and the temperature fell sharply.

  On the walk back, Liam took Tom’s hand. Tom squeezed it in response. At the approach of a shambling dirty truck they let go and moved onto the verge, and when it had passed Tom turned to kiss Liam, his body closing against him and neither of them pulling away at the loud, foreign honking of another passing vehicle.

  Once inside the apartment they did not hesitate much further than the door. Their clothes fell to the tiles with little showers of sand, and Tom was fired with an awareness that nobody was on the other side of the door. Nobody even knew that they were there. Liam’s hands were on his back, the pressure by degrees easing, drawing down his vertebrae, his tailbone. A few weeks ago, in the medical room, he had thought that he wanted this but at the last moment had not been ready, turning over and pulling Liam down onto the mattress. Now, though, he closed his eyes against the cool new sheets and heard Liam’s breathing quicken, his lips touching the back of Tom’s neck, whispering something imperceptible beneath the wild ringing of the crickets outside the apartment walls.

  Tom gave a small cry of pain. Liam kept his hands around Tom’s waist, slowing but not stopping, and gradually Tom let himself go, the unnatural sensation, heightened by the new sounds from Liam, convulsing through his body with an acute terrible pleasure that was almost unbearable.

  —

  The long bright days that followed belonged to a different life. The car remained under the palm trees by the entrance to the complex, untouched. They moved back and forth between the apartment and the beach, staying at one or the other for long, untroubled spells, not caring or noticing that dusk had fallen and they had slept through an afternoon. They would emerge from the apartment ravenous and devour a tableful of dishes at one of the colorful cheap restaurants along the beach or in the cobbled main street. They got drunk—Liam, to Tom’s surprise, became drunk almost as quickly as he did—and stumbled, laughing, onto the sand to walk beside the lapping water.

  In these moments, at night, on the beach, when few people were about, Tom was not uncomfortable with them touching or kissing. In the apartment he was becoming unreservedly intimate with Liam, but he was still uneasy at the idea of other people, even strangers, seeing them like that together. Liam teased him about it, sometimes pretending to attempt a kiss while they sunbathed on the beach. One evening while they were walking through the town he playfully called Tom a queer, and Tom fell into a silence that was only broken an hour later by Liam apologizing on the veranda and promising not to say it again. It did not help that they were made conspicuous by their, and especially Liam’s, fierce red patches of sunburn. Or that there were several blatantly gay couples around the resort. Quite often they passed the two men that Tom had seen that first day on the beach. He made sure each time to move a small distance apart from Liam, wary of the possibility that the pair might acknowledge them in some way. He noticed two other couples, as well as a group of five Germans whom he presumed to be gay from the way they play-fought and posed endlessly for photos on the beach, although he wondered if that might just be what Germans were like, and he did not discount either the fact that they could be footballers.

  One night near the end of the week, drinking cocktails in celebration of Tom’s birthday on a low hammock seat outside a beach bar, Tom asked Liam why he had chosen this resort.

  Liam shrugged. “Don’t know. Just what it said on TripAdvisor. Cheap, good weather, chilled out.”

  “You researched it then?”

  “Course I did. You didn’t bloody do anything, did you?”

  “Were there other places you looked at?”

  Liam gave him a skeptical look. “Mate, this isn’t a gay resort, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to one.”

  “You think I have?”

  Tom sipped his cocktail. “I don’t know.”

  Liam laughed. “Well, you’ll be glad to know that I haven’t. I did find out that this place was ‘tolerant,’ or ‘gay friendly,’ or whatever bollocks it said on the Internet. And I thought that would be about right because I knew you wouldn’t have wanted a more full-on place. Me neither. They look proper dodgy.”

  “You looked into it?”

  “Not for long.”

  They drank another cocktail. The group of English girls from the apartment complex passed on the beach and waved hello. Tom, tipsy now, pushed at the sand with his foot to swing the hammock. “So, you’ve not been anywhere like this before?” he said.

  “Like what—here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been to Portugal before. We came when I was about thirteen. With my sister, I think. Andrew had moved out.”

  “No, I mean, with anyone else.”

  Liam smirked at him. “A man, you mean?”

  Tom did not say anything.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  They were quiet for a long while, watching the dark shapes of the fishing boats moored in the lagoon.
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  “You gone out with anyone before?” Tom said.

  “Yes. Not many.” He checked to see if that was as much as Tom wanted but gathered from his attention that he needed to hear more. “My first relationship was with a girl I went out with when I was eighteen. Lisa. I thought I was in love. I thought I was going to marry her. But then there was this thing—didn’t go anywhere—with a boy after a youth tournament. That was a bit before I split up with Lisa. Why I split up with Lisa.”

  He looked across. Tom’s face, although his heart was beating hard, showed nothing.

  “Then it was all just confusing for a long time. I didn’t know what was going on with me. If I’m honest, that’s probably why I didn’t try getting a trial anywhere else when Town released me. It’s hard enough anyway. You’re on the scrap heap. And then you think, right, if I’m…if that’s what I am, then why am I going to put myself through a load of shit just to get a trial at some Isthmian League back-end-of-nowhere place?” He gave Tom a look that suggested he thought Tom might say something, but Tom kept quiet. “Anyway, about a year and a half after I left the club, I met this guy, Dan.”

  He stopped to drink the last of his cocktail and did not pick up the story, staring off instead through the palm trees to the looming mass of cliffs at one side of the lagoon. A band the color of rare meat covered his neck, although the white edge of his still strangely unburned chest was just visible above his shirt.

  “Who was he?”

  “Dan? Went out with him, on and off, about six months. He was in the year above me at school, but we didn’t know each other then. We met at a party. Facebooked for a while afterwards, and then he said we should meet up. I didn’t even know he was gay at first. It was difficult when we did start seeing each other. He was at university up in Lancaster, so we only saw each other when it wasn’t term time. All his friends up there knew he was gay but nobody at home knew, and nobody knew I was either, so we’d meet up in secret. I think in the end the choice between having to hide or being somewhere he could be himself, plus the long-distance thing…Well, not much of a choice, to be fair.”