A Natural

by Ross Raisin

  Mary B posted Sun at 2:32pm

  Plenty of rumours on here and on Twitter but anyone know if something concrete is about to happen? Heading for June already and we’ve not brought anyone in. Starting to get a bit worried.

  Jamesy1987 posted Sun at 2:49pm

  I have it on good authority that Sergio Agüero is about to sign for us on a 5-year deal. Only sticking point is we can’t guarantee him a starting place because Jacob Gundi’s just too ****ing good.

  TTID posted Sun at 3:16pm

  The 13th Oyster posted Sun at 3:19pm

  …and because Agüero’s failed his medical for being an Argie greaseball with fairy hamstrings.

  Lardass posted Sun at 3:47pm

  There’s no need to panic yet. No good business gets done when the players are on holiday. We’ve cleared out the dead wood, that’s the key thing. There are plenty of good players—League One and Championship—out of contract now who will be looking for new clubs or trials. Wilko knows what he’s doing. Keep the faith.

  Riversider posted Sun at 3:59pm

  My contact at the club tells me that we are about to sign Maurice Lloyd-Day from Ipswich. Same source as told me about Gundi and I was the first to break that news.

  Towncrier Ian posted Sun at 4:24pm

  He’s big, he’s brown, he bangs them in for Town, Crocodile Gundi! Crocodile Gundi!

  Voice of Reason posted Sun at 4:46pm

  Sorry to say it Gundilovers but there’s no chance in hell that he’ll still be at the club come August.

  Bald and Proud posted Sun at 4:53pm

  Peter Pascoe is saying the same thing about Lloyd-Day on Twitter. Says he was speaking to the chairman yesterday and MLD is the first of a number of new signings over the next few weeks.

  Tommo posted Sun at 5:01pm

  It’s true!! I was down at the club this morning and I saw Lloyd-Day in the car park.

  Road to Wembley 2010 posted Sun at 5:28pm

  Me too. He was having his medical. Didn’t expect to see him in a Hyundai. Ipswich couldn’t have been paying him much.

  The 13th Oyster posted Sun at 5:30pm

  What are you two doing hanging around the club car park? Season’s finished. Get a job you losers!

  Whizzer posted Sun at 5:44pm

  As it happens I was down at Andy Jones’s house this morning. Funny thing is, Riversider’s car was parked in the driveway

  Easter looked at the time and saw that it was past two in the morning. A short while ago there had been a bout of wailing from Tyler’s room. The sound had brought on a strange brief vision of going through to soothe him and be found doing so by Leah, but he had held back, knowing the boy would reject him. When he then heard Leah coming out into the corridor he had turned off the screen and waited in the total darkness for her to finish ministering to him.

  He read to the end of the thread. There was no longer any activity on the forum but there were still seven users online. He stayed up for another half-hour, then shut down and shuffled cautiously along the walls to his room.

  In the morning the usual routine: he got up late and went downstairs to the kitchen, where Leah had laid out breakfast and lunch for him, then through to the living room, the television, where he would stay until midday, when Leah would be on her way back to give Tyler his lunch.

  Nobody from the club had been in contact with him since the season ended. His last communication had been with the physio and the fitness coach, who had given him a joint program to follow during the summer. The private physio he was paying for himself had taken one look at it and laughed. “You’re a month or two off any of this, even without complications.” The only player to have been in touch since the alarming rash of texts a couple of days after the injury was Boyn, who had sent him a message before the final game of the season—“Hope all good with you mate. Better things to come next season. You’ll be back before you know it”—and another the day after the end-of-season awards night, taking the piss out of him for not coming and detailing the antics that had been got up to. He had replied simply, “Sounds like a laugh,” not mentioning that he had not received an invite.

  At twelve he heated his bowl of pasta in the microwave and went upstairs to the office. When he had positioned the red plastic toddler chair underneath the table and rested his cast on top of it, he ate, staring at the blank screen for a few minutes before turning it on.

  Where have the squad gone on holiday?

  Started by Towncrier Ian

  Replies:

  20

  28 May 2012 ≤ 1 2 ≥

  Views:

  56

  Towncrier Ian posted Mon at 8:14am

  Anybody know?

  The 13th Oyster posted Mon at 12:31pm

  Are you serious? Who cares?

  Steve Tomkins posted Mon at 12:39pm

  Tenerife.

  Dr. Feelgood posted Mon at 1:00pm

  Vegas.

  Jamesy1987 posted Mon at 5:03pm

  Chessington World of Adventures.

  Mozza posted Mon at 5:19pm

  The Isle of Lesbos.

  Towncrier Ian posted Mon at 5:22pm

  Explains a few of the performances last season.

  The 13th Oyster posted Mon at 5:50pm

  Gundi’s gone on safari with Jamesy1987.

  Mary B posted Mon at 5:58pm

  I heard that Richards, Hoyle and Beverley have gone to Tenerife together. Most go away with their partners and families obviously, but it can only be good for team spirit if some players go away together.

  Faz posted Mon at 6:12pm

  Good for the local brasshouse, I agree.

  TTID posted Mon at 6:35pm

  Apparently Chris Easter was in Majorca.

  Glory Hunter posted Mon at 6:50pm

  Apparently EastEnders is on tonight at eight o’clock.

  TTID posted Mon at 6:55pm

  He was. Him and his wife and kid (who looks so like him it’s freaky).

  Town Legend posted Mon at 7:23pm

  How do you know?

  TTID posted Mon at 7:50pm

  A mate saw them in the airport when he was on his way to Hamburg for a stag do.

  Mary B posted Mon at 8:23pm

  He still in a cast?

  TTID posted Mon at 8:48pm

  Yes.

  The holiday had been difficult. They had booked it before he got injured, and when it came around he had tried to persuade Leah to go on her own with Tyler, telling her that there would be no point in him being there. He would not be able to do anything; he would just be in the way. “You’ll be able to lie on the beach,” she had come back with, “which is all I’m planning on doing.” But when they got there the leg was intolerable in the heat and the sand. For the first couple of days Leah went to great lengths to try and make him comfortable, with cushions and cooler bags, snacks and beer, attempting to make conversation when she was not running about after Tyler, but by the third day he had retreated to the air-conditioned comfort of the hotel room.

  Each morning, after they had eaten breakfast together on the balcony, Leah and Tyler made the walk to the beach or went down to the hotel pool. He would sit on their seventh-floor balcony, battling the feeble Internet connection, with an eye on them down by the poolside with the Scottish family that she spent every evening going on about. He watched her chatting and laughing with the husband, trying to hear what he was saying to her. Twice she took a dip in the pool with him while the wife supervised Tyler and their little girl. They swam slowly up and down then drifted to one side, where they rested their folded arms on the lip of the pool, still talking, close enough that their elbows were nearly touching. He had taken a shine to Tyler too, the husband, chasing him and the little girl between the sunloungers, lifting him up into the air to put onto his shoulders and jiggling him about while Tyler pissed himself laughing.

  There were a couple of groups of young women who returned to the same spot by the pool at the same time each afternoon. For long spells he wat
ched them too, and when Leah was at the beach he took to coming down to the pool just before they arrived. Whenever he lay down, though, he felt instantly stupid and cumbersome with the ugly dollop of his leg stuck out in front of him, and when he saw one of the women look at him and snigger to her friend, he went back up to the room, not to visit the pool again.

  Bald and Proud posted Mon at 9:45pm

  Most of them will be back from holidays now. Preseason training starts in under five weeks. Time to get in shape for some hill running!

  Tommo posted Mon at 11:21pm

  If getting slaughtered in the Hut helps getting back in shape then Hart and Willis are going to have no problem.

  Town Legend posted Mon at 11:29pm

  Same pair were legless at the player of the season awards. Heard Hart fell off the stage when he went up to get his young player of the year award.

  Bald and Proud posted Tues at 8:06am

  Are we supposed to believe this just because you “heard” it, Town Legend? Can you tell us what reliable source it is that tells you these things? Did he fork out for the £50 ticket, or did he “hear” it from someone else?

  He paused, thinking that he had heard a noise downstairs. A couple of minutes later, hearing nothing more, he moved his hands to the keyboard.

  Town Legend posted Tues at 12:27pm

  Leah was home. He could hear her talking to Tyler. There was a screech of pleasure. Running. He had an impulse to get up and go down to see them, but it passed, the leg, his entire body, too heavy, immobile. There were times when he sat there and his body was just an object, a thing, as much related to him as the laptop or the swivel chair. At other times he wanted to do damage to it. More than once he had experienced the wild desire to ruin the leg for good. To take off the cast and jump down the stairs. To crunch his shin in a doorframe. In these moments he would go and lie down on the bed, shaking until whatever it was that had come over him had passed.

  He went downstairs when Leah called up to him. She was at the entrance to the kitchen, searching for something inside the pram bag. She did not see or hear him, and for a while he watched her from the bottom of the stairs. He was gripped by a longing to be near her, to touch her, but this was overtaken by the sudden understanding, as she raised her head and saw him, that he did not know her.

  —

  When he went upstairs to do his stretches, Leah gave Tyler a box of raisins so that she could dry up and put away the dishes. He finished them quickly and started whining at her legs for more, so she picked him up and carried him upstairs for his nap. Once he was settled she headed down the corridor and saw, through the slightly open door to the spare room, that Chris was asleep on the bed. For a second she contemplated lying down beside him, but her courage immediately vanished and she walked on.

  For the next hour and a half she lay on the sofa with her phone, browsing sites about Milan, most of which her mum and Maria had forwarded to her. She looked at photos of street art and boutiques and canalside cafes with a mounting excitement that felt, despite the fact that her mum had already volunteered to look after Tyler, illicit. At college last week she had asked Maria what she thought they would do there. Maria, next to her at the workbench, had given her a little nudge and said, “We’re going to have some fun, mate,” and Leah, though not quite certain what she had meant, had experienced a prickle of heat at her words. There was a creak from the floorboards upstairs. She tried not to let her thoughts shift to Chris, to work out when it was that he had last slept in their room. Ever since the injury she had been anxious for him not to think she was physically rejecting him, although any opportunity that she got she had spurned, at a loss, even more since the trial of the Majorca holiday, for how to get close to him.

  Chris was still in the spare room when Tyler woke. Quietly, she went upstairs to retrieve him from his cot and brought him back down to get ready for an outing to a nearby lake which she had only recently discovered, where they went most afternoons now. The lake was small and clean, man-made, with a well-kept grassy bank along one side which attracted only the odd runner or dog walker, and two men who every afternoon sat fishing twenty yards apart, never acknowledging each other.

  They fed the ducks, Tyler offering bread out of his fingers. When it dropped from his grasp the ducks stabbed around his feet and he ran back to Leah. “Hungy duck, Mummy! Hungy duck!” She laid a rug on the grass, assembled his toy farm and animal figurines, and sat down on a bench.

  This afternoon was her first meeting with Liam since he had returned from his holiday, and it bothered her that she was so eager to find out how it had gone. They had met up a few times since he first told her his secret and on each occasion he had revealed a bit more: that he and the player were meeting regularly—she presumed, but did not want to ask, for sex; that the player was nervous about his contract; that Liam was developing strong feelings for him. Each of these disclosures she received with a display of quiet understanding, concealing her unease at the actual thought of it, the two men’s bodies together, but always craving to find out more.

  Liam still had not told her who he was. The day that he came out to her she had gone home and searched for a photograph of the squad on the Town website. She scanned along the three rows, but with no result except to muddle herself. Before long they all looked gay to her. Now, though, she had her suspicions. Little things that Liam had said—about his contract, his youth, a suggestion that he had lived in the north—had enabled her to narrow it down to three or four. She never pushed him to tell her. She did not want to risk this renewed closeness, this company that she was so unused to, despite growing increasingly uncomfortable at what he was telling her. He was never detailed or graphic, but she knew that the relationship was sexual, passionate, even. Before he left he had jokingly referred to the holiday as a sex trip, to which she had smiled and retreated to the pram bag for a bag of wet wipes.

  Tyler was making a bolt for the lake. She jumped up and ran after him. She caught him well before the waterline and they had a short fight as she carried him back to the bench and he refused to give up a project to launch his duck and chicken on the water. She sat down, letting him sob into her stomach and stroking his hair for a long time until he calmed, his thumb in his mouth, the late afternoon sun perishing on the lake, radiating from the bald buttered crowns of the two anglers.

  When she got to the furniture store Liam was already sitting down with a coffee.

  “Weather was good, then.”

  “Oh yes,” he said, picking up Tyler.

  She went to the counter and came back as Liam was putting Tyler into a high chair. He told her about the holiday. The weather, the apartment, the resort, that they had enjoyed themselves. She fed Tyler a breadstick from a box in the pram bag, and they watched him suck and munch at it.

  “It was just…don’t know—normal.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was normal. Like your holiday. Like any two people going away and doing all that stuff—lying on the beach, drinking beer, going to a restaurant.”

  Tyler finished the last of his breadstick and started crying.

  “It’s his dinner time. Stay here with him a minute, will you, while I go and get him something to eat.”

  When she returned with a small plate of sausage and mash, Tyler was out of the high chair, sitting on Liam’s lap, snickering at some game to do with an object hidden underneath one of Liam’s hands. The sight of Tyler on Liam’s lap instinctively disturbed her. She put the plate down in front of the high chair and lifted him back into it. He clapped his hands in delight and grabbed for the pieces of sausage that she cut up for him.

  “I know this might sound nuts,” Liam said, “but I really am gay.”

  She stared at him, lost for something to say.

  He laughed. “I mean, I know it for sure. I never completely thought that word about myself before, but I do now.”

  “What about him?” was all she could think to say.

  “He’s gett
ing there.”

  Tyler dropped his fork on the floor. Liam bent down to retrieve it for him. The back of his neck was flaked and peeling. He wiped the fork clean and handed it back to Tyler, wiping his mouth as he did so. Watching them together, Leah was struck by the thought that she was shutting Chris out. That there was something wrong, unnatural, about allowing Liam this familiarity with Tyler.

  “How are you, anyway?” Liam asked.

  “Fine. The cast’s still on but they say it might come off in the next couple of weeks.” Liam was giving her an odd look. “Other than that we’re good. This guy loves his nursery. He found a frog in the garden this morning and didn’t want to leave when I came for him.”

  “I told him about you,” Liam said. “That I’d told you.”

  “Oh. What did he say?”

  “He’s fine about it. Pretty much. I was thinking that maybe you two could meet each other.”

  “With you?”

  “Yes, with me. What do you think?”

  “If you want to,” she said. And then swiftly, “So, what now, when the season starts again? Did he get a new deal?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’re going to carry on, then?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And keep it secret?”

  “We managed before.” He looked directly at her. “We can’t tell anybody else, obviously. He’d have the whole world on his doorstep. And no club would want him.”

  “And you?”

  He laughed. “They’d be rid of me in a second. Probably with my bollocks floating down the river.”

  —

  Liam texted her a couple of days later to ask if she fancied going out with him and the others that Friday. Through habit she was reluctant to bring it up with Chris. Since she had been seeing more of Liam, the full extent of which she had kept from Chris, she had been out several times with the group and she did not want him to get any kind of wrong idea about it. When she told him about the night out, however, he said that it was fine, and she got the impression that he was glad of the opportunity to be alone.