A Natural

by Ross Raisin

  She dressed tastefully in black jeans and boots and a long-sleeved cream silk shirt. They ate together on the sofa, Chris resting the cast on the coffee table, angled so that they could see past it to the television. He seemed relaxed, she thought, although it was getting more and more difficult to know what was going on inside his head.

  The first month or two of Friday nights after the injury had been the most difficult times. He had been at his most agitated then—before the now customary detached silence—painfully aware of the emptiness of his routine but unwilling to alter it. Even tonight they were still eating chicken breasts with mashed sweet potato and spinach.

  She finished her food quickly, conscious of the squirt of perfume that she had put on. If he noticed, he did not mention it. He sat eating, watching the television, waiting for her to leave. There was a time when he used to be obsessive about her movements. The people she was with. Where. Why. They finished their meals. Chris started watching a film, and she got up with the plates. She prepared a bottle of milk, a couple of sterilized dummies and a parade of teddy bears, then she went to say goodbye and let him know that she would be back before midnight.

  —

  They were standing at the far end of the bar. She squirmed through the throng of tanned arms and legs, feeling, amid the noise and flesh, in her modest unrevealing clothes, old. When she reached her friends they hugged her in turn. Shona handed her a drink. Gemma asked if she was up for going to the Hut with them. The bar they were in was across the street from the club, and all of the young crowd around them would at a certain point pile en masse over the road towards the pair of cement Grecian pillars on the other pavement.

  “Not tonight,” she said. “Baby steps.” She turned her face from them to Liam at the burst of irritation she felt at Gemma’s gentle cajoling—“Go on”—as if she actually had a choice, as if their lives were in any way the same.

  Liam came to stand beside her. The conversation moved quickly and lightly from one thing to another, involving all five of them, but she could feel his presence next to her. None of the others knew, he had told her on Tuesday, only her, and this had revived something in her, this revelation of trust, even as a vague grievance was also forming that forcing her to be complicit in this was not right, not fair.

  A couple of drinks later, on her way back from the toilet, a man started talking to her. It was so long since anybody had come on to her that she was not prepared for it. He was short. Good-looking. He sounded Irish, she thought, or northern. He had a vain little beard. His circle of friends shifted away from them while he told her a long funny anecdote about a holiday that he had just returned from on which his bag was lost on the flight out. For the first half of the trip his mates had dressed him in clothes from a supermarket, giving him a different persona each day. A Frenchman the first day. Circus ringmaster the next. Finally, before the bag finally turned up at their hotel, a German lesbian.

  They moved to the bar and he bought her a drink. She was determined not to tell him who she was. Fortunately, he showed no sign of asking her about herself. A small table with two stools became free. He gestured towards them and she nodded. As they made for the table she glanced towards her friends. They were all watching her, smiling. Mark gave her a thumbs-up. Even though it was a joke, she knew that if she left with this man, slept with him, they would be pleased. She thought about the closed door of the office and pity wrenched at her. It was all right for them, she thought—Mark, still going out with the teenage girl; Liam secretly shagging a footballer and expecting her to cover for him, to keep it from her husband—they could do what the fuck they wanted, it seemed, without any comeuppance.

  The man was looking at her. “You coming?”

  “I should probably get back to my friends.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and gave her a mischievous disappointed smile.

  When she got back she laughed off their ribbing and stood next to Liam again.

  “Still got it, then?” he said.

  “Must have.”

  “Who was he?”

  “James. Works for the council. Surveyor or something. He was all right, actually.”

  She pressed up against him as a couple of men pushed past.

  “You tell him who you are?”

  “No. I used to do that. It was the only thing that would get rid of them. Unless they were egged on by it. Now it’s just embarrassing. They’d probably think, what—she’s with a footballer?”

  Liam shook his head. “Come on, let’s dance,” he said.

  Surprised, because he never danced, she followed his broad back to the half-dozen bobbing girls on a square of floor by the DJ. Liam went into the middle of them and started to dance with heavy, clomping movements. She joined him, bumping against him. At the end of the song he put his face towards her ear and for an instant she thought he was going to kiss her.

  “The guy, his name’s Tom Pearman.”

  She stayed where she was, near his face. She had guessed correctly, almost, yet still a tingle passed through her at the revelation. The others were snaking through the crowd towards them. Shona and Gemma put their arms on either side of her and the five formed into a tight circle, singing to the music, then wheeling round at speed, joyously oblivious to everybody around them.

  —

  She closed the front door behind her as quietly as she could, but dropped her keys on the floor. As she bent down for them she heard crying from upstairs. Loud, desperate, abnormal. Alarm girdled her—the thought that Tyler might have been left distressed and unattended, maybe for hours. She ran through the living room and up the stairs, and saw with relief that Chris was with him, sitting on the carpet outside Tyler’s room with his arms around the little body standing before him in giraffe pajamas.

  “What happened?”

  She hurried towards them, and it took her a few seconds to understand that the noise was coming not from Tyler but Chris. She stopped, afraid. He did not appear to have noticed her. The high, hoarse noise reverberated through the corridor. Chris’s face was obscured by Tyler’s head, on top of which one hand was pressed, its knuckles white over the soft motionless skull.

  “Chris,” she shouted. She fell to her knees. Tyler spun round and looked at her, frightened. He ran to her and began crying the moment he was in her arms.

  “Chris?”

  He had turned his face from her. He was no longer wailing, but there was a faint low whimper as he pulled himself with difficulty to his feet and, with one hand steadying himself against the wall, he shuffled away to his bedroom.

  21

  “You don’t think it looks right?”

  “It’s your place. You do what you want.”

  “But you don’t think it looks right?”

  “No. I think it looks like shit.”

  Tom looked at him disbelievingly. He leaned the mirror against the wall of the entrance hall.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s gold.”

  “So what?”

  “It’s gold and it’s enormous. You might as well get a full-size portrait of yourself to go opposite. A bust or something.”

  Tom ignored him and went through into the living room. Liam followed and they sat down on the floor to drink their mugs of tea. The previous family had lived in the house for a long time, with all their own furniture. Apart from the mirror and his dumbbells in one corner, his cactus collection carefully assembled along the window ledge, the living room was bare. In the kitchen there were a few pots and pans, a tray of stained cutlery. Upstairs, a mattress in one of the bedrooms. The small Victorian terraced house was everywhere warped and cracked. There was a below-stairs toilet that Tom had to hunch over to use, Liam, the one time he had been in there, to kneel. At the end of the kitchen was a back door that opened onto a thin wild garden. The granny flat, Liam had taken to calling it.

  The club had initially guided Tom towards an apartment in a modern block, and he was close to signing the rental agreemen
t when he discovered that several of the other players lived in the building. He rang the club secretary, then the unimpressed letting agent, to say that he had changed his mind, and two days later, through a different agency, found this house on the other side of town from the first apartment and the Daveys’ place.

  Liam finished his tea and stood up. “Mind if I have a crack at the garden?”

  “Go for it.”

  Minutes later Liam was outside wearing a pair of gloves that he must have had with him, ripping out thorns and weeds from the lawn borders. Tom sat on the back doorstep, where he was not visible to any of the neighbors.

  Liam paused, puffing. “Not going to give me a hand, then?”

  “Nope.”

  Liam shook his head and carried on. Tom took out his phone and idled on the Internet, every now and then looking up at Liam working his way around the garden.

  “Here, listen to this,” Tom said. “What do you think Sunderland made Stefan Schwarz put in his contract when he signed for them?”

  “No idea.”

  “That he’d never travel into space.”

  “That for real?”

  “Yep. I’m on this site with all these daft contract clauses players have had. Here. What did Sam Hammam put in Spencer Prior’s contract that he had to do when he signed for Cardiff?”

  “Don’t know. Only shag women.”

  Tom ignored the comment. “He made him eat something,” he said when Liam had stopped smiling. “What do you think it was?”

  “A leek?”

  “No.”

  “Daffodil?”

  “No. A sheep’s testicle.”

  “Fuck off. That’s insane.”

  Liam kept on at the garden while Tom browsed for more funny football stories, telling Liam the best ones. In another garden somewhere a dog started yapping. Liam stopped to listen, wiping his face with his upper arm, then getting on again with the borders. Tom remained on the step, hungry now but powerless to get up from where he was, tracing Liam’s every movement, absorbing into his own body each plunge of the garden fork, each sharp little exhalation at a yanked weed.

  A short while later there was a straggly yellow pile as high as Liam’s waist in the center of the lawn. “Done,” Liam said.

  “What am I going to do with all that?”

  “Burn it. It’s dry enough.”

  “Burn it? You nuts? Get the neighbors round, have a bonfire?”

  “I’m just saying, I’d burn it.”

  Liam knelt on the grass and picked up some soil, crumbling it through his fingers. He crawled around, occasionally poking a finger into the borders, and something moved inside Tom that made him want to step into the garden and take Liam’s face in his hands, heedless of everything: the neighbors, the yapping dog, the full frightening import of what he was feeling.

  However, he could not afford to be reckless, a fact that he was reminded of one morning when he arrived at the stadium and sat for a few minutes in his car, watching, through a gap between the stands, Liam ride the tractor slowly towards the away terrace. A large knitted steel mat was attached to the tractor, glinting in the sunlight. The pitch, which the day before had been loose, turned dirt, was now a plain of sand across its entire surface. Tom got out of his car and walked towards the fire exit of the main stand. He stopped by the door as Liam smoothly maneuvered the tractor to come back in the other direction. Tom let himself become as rapt by the sight of him as Liam was in his work. Liam’s eyes did not leave the imagined path in front of him—would not move, Tom knew, for minutes, hours, for as long as the job took.

  Tom did not notice that he was himself being observed. The club chaplain was approaching from the car park. Tom started when he appeared beside him.

  “Crackers, isn’t it?” the chaplain said, and Tom understood that he had not been found out.

  “Yes.”

  “You wouldn’t believe they’ll be playing football on there soon.”

  “No.”

  And for a time they stood there by the fire exit, the chaplain beginning to hum a low tune, luxuriating together in the sunshine.

  With preseason still a month away, the ground was quiet. Inside the bowels there was only ever the occasional player in for the gym, or Wilko and his coaching staff, who would show their faces at the door to say hello, clearly impressed that Tom was in so regularly. A couple of times Wilko’s son was with him, his father showing him the dugout, the dressing room, the St. John’s Ambulance cupboard, stopping anyone they passed to chat for a while, and Tom, transfixed by the disabled boy, could not stop himself looking over even though he knew it was wrong, although never for long enough for anybody to notice or to be at risk of Wilko introducing the boy to him.

  Liam was there every day, usually with one or both of the summer lads he had taken on. Often, after finishing in the gym, Tom went to find him. Sometimes he helped with some task or other. Now that Tom had his own house and there was no risk of them being found in their old seedy hiding place, they decided that it was natural enough to know each other, given Tom’s stay at the Daveys’. As long as they were not seen together too often, nobody would suspect anything, they believed. They did not look gay, they told themselves. They spoke normally, behaved normally. Appearing to be friends was a more sensible ploy than pretending not to know each other.

  There was the issue, however, of Liam’s two housemates. From a life of rarely socializing more than once a week he was now out most nights, often not returning until the morning, if at all. Unable to think of any other way round it, Liam told them that he had started seeing a girl. Polish. A care assistant. Before long of course, although Liam rarely mixed with them outside the house, they would begin asking questions, and at that point he would probably have to feign a breakup. He and Tom had not spoken about what they might do then, but Tom had the sense that both of them were daring to imagine that Liam might, eventually, move out.

  One evening, sharing a takeaway pizza on the tan leather sofa that they had earlier bumped and scraped into Tom’s house, Liam said, “I should tell you something.”

  Tom stopped eating but did not look away from the television.

  “On holiday, when I told you about Dan and all that, I should have said as well that I have had a thing with a player before. Once. I don’t mean the boy after the youth tournament. Something else, but it was nothing, really. I’d actually forgotten about it.”

  “You’ve just remembered?”

  “Pretty much. It really wasn’t anything. Happened by chance. I met him online but I didn’t know who he was because he gave a different name. Then when I got there it was one of the players who was with Town at the time. I’d just been promoted head groundsman and I was as spooked as he was, to be fair. We agreed we wouldn’t meet again and we didn’t.”

  Tom’s throat felt hot and stuck. The cold blue light of the television jumped like flames over the wallpaper. “Who was it?”

  “I won’t say, if that’s OK. I promised him.”

  “You serious?”

  “He’s not here anymore. He left ages ago,” Liam said and went back to his pizza.

  “Online?”

  “I didn’t do it much. Couple of times after Dan.”

  When Liam had finished his pizza he got up and cleared away the box, saying that he was going home for an early night.

  Tom sat staring at the television. He began to wonder whether Leah knew about this player. About Liam’s Internet meetings. The longer he sat there, his mind working it over and over, the more he was convinced that she did. She knew his own name now, Liam had told him a few nights ago, an admission that Tom had not reacted to well. Instant gaping fear had made him shout at Liam, “Fucking joking, you idiot!” then become silent and ignore Liam’s reasoning that it would only have been a matter of time anyway because Tom had agreed to meet her, and then, once Liam had gone home, kick the bathroom door so hard that he cut his toe and loosened the door hinge.

  The night was muggy, and he sle
pt poorly there on the sofa once he had taken his clothes off. His skin pulled against the leather, and pizza crumbs stuck to his face. Gradually the room turned orange from the streetlamp. In the morning the sun invaded the uncurtained window and he lay there stiff and uncomfortable, his plans for the day—buying furniture, helping Liam at the ground—seeming somehow pathetic.

  There was a short-lived heat wave. Tom moved his dumbbells out into the garden. When he saw a neighbor watching him from an upstairs window, he moved them back inside. He kept meticulously to his fitness program, most days exceeding it. He jogged in the cool of the early morning, again at twilight, and worked out relentlessly either at home or at the stadium gym.

  Following one hot breathless session, moving the fan in the gym as far as the cord would allow from one machine to the next, he went to get changed and see Liam. He found him in the forecourt of the ground-staff shed, lifting junk out of the skip and into the back of a van. He was sweating heavily. He saw Tom approaching and waved hello before turning back to his work.

  “Hot enough?” Tom said.

  Without looking, Liam pointed to the side of the shed, where a thermometer was nailed up by the entrance. It was thirty-three degrees.

  “Bloody hell,” Tom said.

  Nobody else was anywhere about. In one of the brick bays behind Liam flies moved restlessly above caked piles of drainage sand. In another, broken-up pieces of asphalt from the footpath behind the Riverside Stand were softening. The air choked with the stench of them.

  “What are you doing?” Tom asked.

  “Beer money.” He stopped and held up the drawer of a filing cabinet. “Probably sixty, seventy quid here. There’s been staff and players in every day dumping all their crap. Doing their houses out before preseason starts. Me and Pete pull out all the metal and take it down the scrapyard. Give me a hand? There’s a drink in it.”

  Tom got stuck in, ferrying the objects to the van that Liam hauled out of the skip: a radiator, two mangled garden chairs, a trampoline base, the tray of a wheelbarrow. A blackbird landed on the large, disused roller in one corner of the forecourt and inspected them silently, panting in the heat. Liam started whistling. When he handed down a rusted garden fork Tom could smell him through the smog of asphalt. Desire racked him, mixing, as he looked instinctively over his shoulder, with the certainty that it would always be like this—vigilant, precious, forbidden.