A Natural

by Ross Raisin

  She carried Tyler inside.

  “I’ve got your stuff,” she called up the stairs.

  He came down straightaway. He looked at the bag, taking in the tag on the handle.

  “Thank you,” he said and knelt down to open the bag and pull items from it: sweat top, wet top, vests, recovery skins, socks, underpants, and his playing shirts, which he held up, staring at the back of each of them, the number, before bundling everything once again into the bag. She thought about Boyn and Tom whispering about him, or her, and she wanted to go towards him, but she held back. He got gingerly to his feet, picked up the bag, and returned upstairs.

  Tyler was bawling at her. She gave him a bag of grapes and sat down on the sofa behind him while he ate them in front of a cartoon. The rest of the day, the evening, stretched ahead of her. She thought about calling Liam later, but then she imagined him with Tom, talking, kissing, touching.

  “More, Mummy, more, Mummy.” Tyler was climbing up her legs, pulling at her shorts. “More gape, Mummy. More—”

  “Oh, shut up, Tyler. Just fucking shut up.”

  Immediately feeling guilty, she reached to console him, but he did not cry or come to her for comfort. Instead he moved slowly, deliberately away to sit on the floor in front of the deranged beeping creatures on the television and put his thumb into his mouth. She got up from the sofa and knelt behind him, cuddling into his back.

  “I’m sorry, Ty.” She pressed her lips to his skull. “I’m sorry. Mummy’s not in a happy mood,” she said very quietly into his hair. “Mummy’s not very happy.”

  Chris came down later to eat dinner with her. They sat on the sofa together. At one point, leaning forward for his glass, he knocked the remote control onto the floor and she noticed, from his stomach, the definition of his arms, that he was not keeping to his program. Her mind went to the ex-pros that she had seen at functions and in the players’ lounge. Their bellies and jowls and painful locking knees; their faces, vaguely recognizable, puffy with inactivity. She wanted somehow to tell him that everything was going to be OK, but the idea of speaking to him so intimately was inconceivable. His body, his future, their future, sex, finances, all now were walled off.

  Increasingly she was worried about money. He was clearly not receiving any appearance bonuses, and there was a possibility his contract contained a clause in the club’s favor regarding injury. She had never seen his contract. She did not know if he had ever seen it. There was no way of knowing exactly how much money was left. Although the accounts that she had access to did have money in them it always confounded her there was not more. And as for how much the mess of stocks and investments that his advisers had set up for him was worth, she was fairly sure that he had little idea himself. What would he do, she asked herself on an impulse, if she left? Her blood quickened as she allowed herself to contemplate this. A spark of secret pleasure came and went. He would not cope; that much was clear. He was not coping now. She watched his cheeks working at a mouthful of chicken and sweet potato mash and she yearned for something that they could talk about, just to hear his voice and know that he was still there, that they were both still there.

  —

  The party traveling to Milan were all booked onto the same flight. Most of them took the same train connections to the airport but she went separately, meeting them at the check-in desk. They had all brought less luggage than her. She watched them for a few seconds from a short distance away, regretting her bulky suitcase, until Maria noticed her and waved her over.

  Maria sat next to her on the plane. The eleven others and their course tutor were paired up on the seats ahead of them, ordering glasses of wine, chatting.

  “You having one?” Maria asked when the steward approached their seat.

  “Best not.”

  Maria frowned. “Why? You’re on holiday.”

  The steward, listening to their exchange, leaned over and placed two glasses and two tiny bottles of white wine onto their seat trays. “Oops,” he said. When he departed, smiling to himself, Leah’s first thought was of Liam and Tom having sex.

  Maria’s boyfriend had recently been laid off, she told Leah. They were having difficulties with the rent, and she was worried she might have to leave the course before getting her diploma in order to go full-time at her job. “Or,” she said, “Nathan could get off his arse and look properly for one himself. Anyway. So, your husband end up looking after your little boy then?”

  “He can’t,” she lied. “His leg’s broken. Tyler’s with my mum.”

  “Oh, right. Hey, can I see a photo?”

  “You sure? It’s a pretty ugly break,” Leah said, giggling, realizing that she was pissed already.

  The hotel was close to the exhibition center. From the window of her room Leah could see its spiraling glass turrets, and in the distance the city—a dreamlike horizon of basilicas and towers and palaces, the cathedral, a castle, mountains. She stood for a while staring out at it, then showered, changed and went downstairs to meet the others in the lobby to go out for dinner. They ate near the hotel in a pizza restaurant full of television screens which, despite its proximity to the trade fair, was almost empty. Afterwards, the group was keen to go on. Leah left them to it, telling Maria that she was tired, slipping away for the hotel.

  She found out at breakfast that they had not gone very far. All of the places they had walked past had been quiet, or they had not been sure whether they were actually bars, so they had ended up returning to the hotel and drinking there.

  They went straight to the exhibition center after breakfast. Inside, everywhere was noise and activity. They clustered together, looking to the tutor, who simply smiled and said, “Go explore.”

  There was a very long central walkway through the exhibition space. They went down it, peering into the pavilions on either side, which were filled with colorful displays. Half an hour later, when they came to the end, they turned and walked back the other way. They found a cafe and sat down, ordering coffee and sparkling water. One of the students, Sarah, produced a plan of the fair and everybody leaned in to study it, discussing which pavilions and exhibitors to visit. Maria asked Leah if she would like to go with her to take a look around.

  They left the cafe together, Leah pointing them towards the knitwear pavilion. Smiling faces greeted them when they entered it. Spinners, knitters and machine-makers were lined up beside their displays, explaining and demonstrating to other visitors. Leah did not know where to begin. She followed Maria to a table draped with yards of material. Maria held up a length of intricately patterned organic wool. “This is beautiful.” She put it down and walked to another table, a Japanese-looking woman advancing to talk to her, while Leah stepped towards a wire tree hung with cardigans. She felt slightly light-headed, dazed by the abundance, her mind beginning to run with thoughts about the fabrics and what could be done with them as she walked around, examining, touching. “It’s just amazing,” Maria said when they came together in front of a woolen clock in the center of the pavilion. “We’re here surrounded by all this stuff that’s going to inform trends before designers even know what the trends are going to be. I can’t get my head round it.”

  They went to the leather pavilion, where a workshop demonstration was taking place. Maria purchased several samples from a very blond man in jodhpurs. At the next pavilion, silks, Leah bought a couple of samples of her own. They found a place to eat lunch and sat on stools at a counter, watching the crowds.

  “I’m going to finish the course,” Maria said.

  “You should.”

  “My head’s full of ideas.”

  “Mine too.” Leah took a bite of her mushroom pastry. “We should put some of them together, you know. When the course is over.”

  Maria looked round at her. “OK. Deal.”

  Leah turned away to the mass of people as she drank from her bottle of water, aware that she was blushing.

  They visited more pavilions, collecting samples and stumbling into a seminar o
n the 3-D printing market, which they stayed until the end of. By mid-afternoon they were exhausted. They met up with the others at the arranged time and place and returned to the hotel.

  In her room, after a short nap, she made a Skype call to her mum on Maria’s laptop. When the call went through Tyler’s face filled her screen. He was hitting the keyboard and did not at first notice her. She could hear her mum in the background: “It’s Mummy. Look, it’s Mummy.” Then Robert: “Lift him up, Donna. He can’t see.” Her mum pulled Tyler back and he sat on the floor waving his arms about, then lurched forward for the keyboard again.

  “Tyler,” Leah called. “Tyler.”

  He looked up. For a couple of seconds he was confused, but then a joyful smile broke out over his face. He flung himself at the screen. It filled with his nose, squashed up against it. Leah pressed her own nose to Maria’s laptop. She screwed her eyes closed, spoke his name again. When she pulled back, he was scampering away. Her mum’s face appeared, and Leah briefly turned the screen away from herself, not wanting Robert to see her wiping her eyes.

  “Hi, Mum. He giving you the runaround then?”

  There was laughter from her mum and from Robert. “You could say that, yes.”

  When she had said goodbye she sat for a while on the bed. Her fabric samples were piled on the table in front of her. Eventually, she went over to them, smoothing her hand over the top one. For the first time since leaving home she wondered what Chris would be doing at that moment. She could see him at the computer, the desk around it littered with coffee cups and the stained Tupperwares of the meals she had stacked up in the fridge for him. The thought of telling Chris about the conversation that afternoon with Maria, the admission that she sometimes had fantasies to do with designing, a career, the future, was unreal. He did not know about any of that. He did not even know who Maria was.

  The others were downstairs in the hotel bar. Maria beckoned her over to where she was talking to Sarah and a couple of the other women and Richard, the only man on the course.

  “I was just telling this lot what your husband does for a living.”

  “I can’t believe you never told us,” Richard said. “I love football.”

  “You a Town fan?” Leah asked.

  “No, don’t be daft, I support a proper team. But I love football.”

  Maria put a glass of wine into Leah’s hand and turned back to Richard. “Who’s your team, then?”

  “Arsenal.”

  “Get to see them much?”

  “Not as much as I’d like, no.”

  “When did you last go to a game?”

  Richard smiled. “Few years ago, maybe.”

  Maria put her hand on his forearm. “Shit, Rich, you really do love football.”

  Towards the end of the first year, once she had decided that Richard was not gay, Leah had begun to suspect that there was an attraction between him and Maria, and as she watched them together now, teasing and laughing, the shamelessness of it riled her—making her want, before it passed, to bring up Maria’s boyfriend, just as Maria had brought up Chris.

  “We’ve been given a tip,” Richard said to Leah. “Barman’s told us about a place we should go to. An actual bar this time, apparently. What do you reckon?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Sounds good.”

  The bar turned out to be one of the places that the others had passed the previous night. There was no sign on the outside. When they went in it was dimly lit, busy, full of Italians. Two large plates of cured meats sat on the marble bar counter. They bunched inside the doorway until an effortless young woman in a couture dress came towards them and without being prompted asked in English for the group to follow her. She led them into a second room, gesturing for them to take the area in one corner among the casual disarrangement of heavy leather sofas and glass tables. Leah headed with Sarah and Richard towards the far side by a window, then checked herself, thinking the seats would be filled before she reached them. She took one end of a sofa instead, next to Maria.

  “So,” Maria said once the kerfuffle of ordering drinks from the hostess was out of the way, “what do you think, then? Me and you putting our heads together when the course is finished?”

  “I’d like to.”

  “It could be small, you know, to start with. Get a little collection of things together. Set up an Internet operation, something like that. Do it from my flat—or yours, if you like.”

  Leah took a sip of her cocktail. From the far side of the group, Richard looked over. She pictured Maria arriving at her house, the surprise, embarrassment, on her face at the size of it.

  “There’d be no money in it, obviously,” Maria said. “Not at first. So Nathan would have to get off his arse.”

  “It might help him to, you never know.”

  “You never know.” Maria held up her glass. Leah touched her own against it, trying to ignore the apparition of Chris, the idea of asking him if she and Maria could use his office.

  “You know I’ve never done anything like this before, right?” Maria said. “I wouldn’t have a clue what I’m doing.”

  “That makes two of us.” Leah slid the gleaming cherry from her cocktail stick and put it into her mouth. “I wanted to open a shop once,” she said. “A salon or something. But then Chris got transferred, and I had Tyler, and I sort of forgot about it.”

  “Guess you have to go wherever he goes, do you?”

  Richard was looking over again.

  “In a way.”

  “Some commitment, that.”

  “It’s not for long, really, if you think about it. A footballer’s career doesn’t last long.”

  “No, I suppose it doesn’t,” Maria said, before changing the subject: “So, you enjoying being on holiday?”

  “Yeah.” Then, more quietly, “Different to my last holiday.”

  “Must be good having a break from being a mum.”

  She could see Tyler’s face on the laptop screen. “It’s just different with a kid. You’re kind of always on duty.” At once she felt guilty and stupid, for saying it—for the suggestion that it was Tyler she was having a break from—although Maria had turned her attention away to the group. There was a small burst of laughter, and as Sarah shared a joke with Maria across the tables, Leah’s mind turned to those days by the pool with Tyler, conscious of Chris up there on the balcony, watching them. The days spent with the Scottish couple, Andrea and John, whose little girl had befriended Tyler over a stone collection; their ease together, the unspoken teamwork of their parenting. Her own awkwardness, explaining to them that it was too hot, too cramped, too slippery around the pool for Chris’s leg when she knew, because she had seen him one afternoon when she had come back from the beach for Tyler’s sun cream, that he went down there and that Andrea and John had probably seen him too at some point.

  Leah had hidden behind the balcony railing that day while Tyler wailed at her from behind the sliding door, watching him eye up the girls on the other side of the pool. And what she had felt, at the same time as acknowledging to herself that there was definitely something wrong with her, as she saw his self-consciousness, his humiliation at his non-functioning body, was pity. Then anxiety, already foreseeing the time when the leg would be healed and he would return to football, to playing away matches, training trips.

  They stayed at the bar for a couple of hours until they became hungry and found out that the bar did not serve food, except for some confusing arrangement to do with the meats on the counter. So they returned to the hotel and ordered pizzas. Somebody—Richard, she thought—got the barman to bring over two bottles of Prosecco. She had come to realize, even before they arrived back at the hotel, that it was her, not Maria, that Richard had been looking at. He caught her eye again now, pouring one of the bottles of Prosecco, and as she met it she let herself smile back at him.

  She remained sitting at one end of their long table, next to Sarah and Maria, joining in occasionally with their conversation about the plan for th
e morning, every now and again giving a look over, knowing each time that he would return it. But the moment she admitted the electric possibility of it, here, in a hotel, away, she was at once consumed by guilt. She looked away, infuriated, knowing that she could never do it, cross the line. And the thought came to her again of Liam and Tom greedily fucking each other somewhere, unbothered by what they were doing, getting away with it.

  24

  Tom listened to most of Town’s first half against Plymouth in his car, until the transmission began to crackle at the limit of the station’s range. He drove the rest of his journey in silence, turning the radio back on only to tune in for the full-time results shortly before his arrival at the loan club. Town had won 3–1. He parked in the stadium car park, empty because his new team was playing away, and he was greeted by the chairman’s wife. She shook his hand, then hugged him. “We’re delighted to have you,” she said, uncomfortably close to his ear.

  She took him on a short tour of the ground. There was one main, wooden stand. The other sides had a makeshift appearance. Along the opposite touchline were strung three small huts of different sizes and construction materials. Behind one goal was a small terrace, and behind the other a grass bank, along the top of which a row of beer garden parasols had been planted. The chairman’s wife was amiable, full of conversation. Tom remembered that he had never sent the Daveys a gift or a card. He had intended to, but it was too late now. He was shown the dressing room, the players’ tunnel, and then, with a wide proud smile that stretched her thin eyebrows, the pitch.

  “We all think that this might be our year,” she said with grandmotherly chumminess before they parted.

  He drove to his hotel. He checked in, went up to his room and sank onto the bed, a peculiar sensation that he was in the same room, the same hotel, as a year ago seeping through him.

  The club, despite Wilko’s assertion that they were a well-run outfit on the rise, with a bit of money, playing the right kind of football, were an obvious two levels below Town. The training ground was a rented section of a boarding school’s sports fields. Pupils took games and PE lessons in the afternoons, so three pitches were available for the football club to use each morning at the far side of the school buildings, next to a railway line running along the top of a brightly littered ridge beyond a high barbed-wire fence. The grass was thick and healthy, too long for football. On Tom’s first morning he struggled initially to gauge the weight of his passes. Sprinting was difficult, heavy; his studs were too short for the turf and he twice went over on his ankle attempting sharp turns.