by Ross Raisin
She watched him walk back to his car, parked on the grass by the road, and wondered if she had given him what he had been in need of. If he had begun to suspect her. She would call him later, she decided. Suggest that she come round to his house one evening and cook them some dinner. It was darker now and getting cold, but she was unwilling to leave the bench. To drive home and change the sheets. Let him change his own fucking sheets, she thought with a gratifying sureness and stayed on the bench, feeling the pleasing solidity of it under her bum. But she had to pick up Tyler. She had almost forgotten; he was over at her mum’s so often since she had stepped up her college work.
Her mum would never say she was too busy for him of course, but it was plain enough that she could do without him under her feet at the moment. Two weekends ago Robert had proposed at an expensive restaurant in London, and the wedding planning was already in full swing. “Hardly front page” had been Chris’s response when she told him. Already, six months before the scheduled date, she felt jaded by the inevitability of having to worry about him being there, him not being there. Robert, in her mum’s kitchen, one sunburned paw on her arm, had told her very earnestly one morning that they had decided not to hold the wedding on a Saturday. “Nothing is more important than family,” he had said, giving her the strong impression that he was trying to communicate the fact that they were family now, the two of them, and she had thanked him and let him leave his hand on her arm, unexpectedly comforted by the thought.
She got up. Instead of going to her car, however, she started towards the lake.
From the shoreline she could see the ducks clumped in a soft brown heap on the bushy knob of land that protruded into the water on the other side. Without thinking, she took off her pumps. Her socks. She stepped into the lake. She stood with the water around her ankles, her handbag still over her shoulder, cool velvet stones beneath the soles of her feet, and she imagined diving in—the cold shock of it—swimming to the other side to cuddle in with the ducks.
It was paranoia, surely, this thing about the journalist. Liam was being dramatic. Even if the media were aware, she could not imagine that anyone would be interested, not without a footballer, without a name, without Tom. She considered that for a moment, the dark water lapping at her ankles. Liam hiding alone in his bedroom while Tom carried on with his life without any consequence of what he had done, still getting away with it. She had known, the moment the words had spilled from her mouth, that she should not have told Chris. There had been no relief in it. No closeness. And it was at once obvious to her that he would go after Liam, given the years of coldness towards him. Though she still did not understand why whoever it was that Chris had told had not outed Tom as well, unless out of some pathetic deluded loyalty to the team, to football. Chris’s first reaction had been to shout at her that she was lying, she was a stupid gossiping slut. Then he had stormed out of the house. The next time she had seen him he was on top of her, pulling down her pajama bottoms.
There was a cry. A yell, away to her right. One of the anglers was staggering, splashing, into the lake. She stepped out of the water and ran towards him, barefoot over the grass. She was halfway there before she grasped that he had caught a fish, yet she kept on, walking now, compelled by a strange new force that took her ever closer until she was almost beside him, watching him rooted in the shallows, staunchly reeling it in. The fish’s side broke the surface, then went under again. Somehow, despite seeing these men every time she had visited the lake, the now-visible fact that there were fish in there astounded her.
He had it in a net and was laboring to pull it out of the water, over the grass, onto a mat. It was enormous. As big as Tyler. The man straddled the fish on the mat, looking at its face, in shock at the miracle of it, as if at a child that he had not been expecting to deliver. Until now he had not appeared to notice her or the other angler closing in from the other side, but he looked up as she bent down to him now and his face shone with simple unburdened joy, euphoric. She was on her knees, her arms around his neck. “I got a bloody whopper,” he said quietly into her shoulder. “I bloody well got a whopper.”
When they released each other he seemed still too overcome to be even curious at the out-of-the-blue appearance of a woman running to hug him. They got to their feet and stood with the other man. Together they looked down at the massive beached fish slowly opening and closing its mouth.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Mirror carp,” the other man said. He glanced down at her bare feet. “Thirty pounds at least. Biggest I’ve ever seen.” He held out his hand to the catcher. “Congratulations. Incredible.”
The catcher went into his bag and took out a digital camera. He held it out to her. “Do you mind?”
With the assistance of the other man he lifted the creature up, supporting it under its belly, his arms shaking with the effort. When she had taken four shots he squatted down to rest the fish on top of his knees. “Do you want to take one for yourself?” he asked. “For your boy?”
She opened her mouth to refuse, but as she looked at him, gripping his fish against his legs, she got out her phone and swiftly took a photo.
He let the fish slump to the ground. “Right then. Best get her weighed.”
She watched the men struggle to maneuver the thing into a hammock, which they raised together using two bars. “Bang on thirty-eight,” the other angler said, and the two men exchanged a look that contained a world of meaning she was not party to before she went over to help them return the fish to the lake. As they began to shunt and slide it towards the water’s edge, flattening a slithered trail across the grass, a powerful notion came over her that it was Chris, the deadweight of his foul body, that they were moving.
When they got it into the shallows it did not move. They stood watching it, and she was sure that it was dead, but then it spasmed, flipped and was gone, away into the black lake.
Without the fish, the two anglers looked awkward.
“Well done,” she said and turned back to walk to the bench, picking up her socks and pumps from beside the water.
She sat down and pulled on her clinging socks. She looked up a final time at the men, both now silently, individually, packing up their bait boxes, their foldout stools. The catcher, when he was done, knelt for some time over his things. He was looking at the photographs, she realized, and as she stayed watching him, this stranger she had held in her arms, compassion pulled at her, followed, rushing, by a sudden decisive joy that rose from the core of her.
29
The piece was printed two days later. It was short, a small square of words in the top corner of a page above the betting tips and the next day’s fixture listings. The longest of the three paragraphs was an edited-down account of the club’s statement. There were no names. The “rumored affair between a former player and a member of the ground staff” did not feature any more prominently than the news that Town had shut down its official message board due to a series of homophobic and racist postings.
The players became aware of the story immediately. Boyn, sitting in the lounge eating a bowl of cereal, shouted, “Lads, look at this,” and they hurried to surround him. For several immobile seconds they read it together, waiting for somebody to react.
It was Easter who broke the spell. He snatched the paper from Boyn’s lap and rolled it up. He turned to Tom beside him and jabbed the paper into his stomach, then, beside Tom, into Beverley. “It’s you, you faggots,” he shouted, and chased them through the lounge, spanking them on their bottoms. “Come on, admit it, we all know it’s you.” The pair exploded into the same frenzied laughter as the rest of the squad, taking cover behind the breakfast table, and the tone for the rest of the morning—excitable, uncertain, watchful—had been established.
—
Easter woke early the next day and lay in bed for a few minutes, marveling at the tranquillity of his leg. Not aching, not doing anything, just there. He flexed it at the knee. Then again. He took in a deep br
eath, letting his lungs fill. Exhaled. The perfect machine of his body, functioning. He swung out of bed, wondering if it was early enough for Tyler to still be asleep and Leah alone in bed, but then he heard them together downstairs, Tyler whinging at her for something: milk, food, attention. He got dressed quickly and went downstairs, not looking through into the kitchen, let himself out of the house and drove away.
Powering through sleeping villages, fields, the vigor of yesterday was still with him—the way that the others had looked to him, needed his direction, his sureness. He would sit among them on the coach to Aldershot today. It did not matter that he was not yet ready to play. He was more relevant, more vital, than half of the ones who were. He pulled into a petrol station and saw on the forecourt the Saturday papers stacked in their plastic boxes. He went in and bought a copy of each one. When he got back into his car he resisted the temptation to look. He sat them in a pile on the passenger seat and set off again for home.
He installed himself at his desk and lined up the newspapers in front of the lifeless void of his laptop. The first couple had nothing. In the Sun a tiny item that was almost identical to the previous day’s. The next three papers, nothing. Then, in the Guardian, a half-page feature of interviews with gay members of staff at football clubs—a cook, a ticket office manager, a barman, a Congolese steward who had never, he said, received any abuse on the terraces, or at least not for being gay. He skimmed uninterestedly through their profiles—it wasn’t a thing; most of their colleagues were unaware of their sexuality; they just got on with their jobs—hunting out anything more than the one-sentence introduction at the top that mentioned Town. When he was sure there wasn’t anything, he moved on to the next paper. Although he was well aware that none would give details, anything specific, he continued to comb through, searching, on edge.
He flicked through the raft of sports pages inside the Express and tensed. The familiar few lines were there, then an interview with “the captain,” Jones: “To be honest it’s the first any of us have heard about it. It’s a lot of fuss over nothing, really. People’s private life is their own business. We just concentrate on the football. And if a player said he was gay, which isn’t what’s happened here, we’d probably just think, fair enough, so what? It’s got nothing to do with winning football matches.”
He could see Jones bantering with the journalist. The private preparation with the chairman before the interview. Heat rose to his face. Nowhere, in any of them, was there any mention of the original forum post. Below the desk, pain was slugging up his leg, though when he reached down to rub the length of his shin he could not be certain whether the pain was real or the phantom of his injury. He pushed the interview away from him and glowered at the inert laptop. Then, standing up, he gathered up the pile of newspapers and went downstairs.
In the kitchen he stuffed them all into the bin.
He had a sense that Leah was behind him, and when he turned she was there, in the doorway. She was looking at the swinging top of the bin but said nothing.
“Tyler asleep?” he asked.
“It’s ten o’clock. He’s playing in his room.”
She remained in the doorway. There was something odd about her that made him reluctant to walk around her to leave the room, so he went to the fridge. He had not had any breakfast, he realized, and he was hungry, thirsty. He opened the fridge door and took out a two-pinter of milk.
“I’ve decided to move into Mum’s, Chris.”
He unscrewed the top of the milk and took a long swallow. The bottle still in his hand, he scanned the shelves. There was a packet of ham. Prawns, defrosting. Two bags of grapes. A small bowl of last night’s leftover sweet potato mash. He closed the fridge door and looked at her. Something fierce, determined, passed over her face. Then she was just looking at him plainly.
“This about him?” he said.
“What? About who?”
“Your mate.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He took another slug of milk, watching her over the top of the bottle, and he could see she was telling the truth. He laughed quietly. She was as blind as the rest of them.
“That’s it? You’re laughing? Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. You never say anything.”
She was going to cry, he thought. To come to him and cry into his chest. But after he put the milk onto the kitchen counter and wiped his hand across his lips he turned back to the doorway and she was gone. He stood there, looking into the living room, being sucked upstairs to the laptop until his legs weakened, remembering, his strength unspooling from him at the thought that the forum was gone and she would probably be straight on the phone to him, the faggot groundsman, the useless fat goalkeeper, as he had once been. And now he could not hold it back. It was coming at him—breaking free. The journey home from the youth tournament, the ferry, standing on the deserted deck with the relentless brutal sea hemorrhaging in his ears as the big white face pressed against his own, lips, breath, fingers reaching, terrified, down for each other.
—
He turned the car round and reversed to the edge of the viewing point. There was nobody about. He got out and walked to the back of the car, where he stood before a mass of nettle bushes still stirring from the last of the exhaust fumes, and stared out at the sea. His chest was heaving. He looked for the ferry but could not see it. Anger built deep inside him as he searched, and then he saw it, a dot swelling on the horizon, advancing towards him.
He took in several deep, lunging breaths. “Pathetic,” he shouted. He listened to the echo of the word carry in the wind towards the sea and die. He brought the base of his fist down on the car roof. “Fucking pathetic,” he shouted again, the rhythm and force of the words helping to bring his chest slightly under control. There was a head. Two heads. Walkers, over on the cliff path, looking at him above the sea scrub, turning, hurrying away.
He watched them flee with their dog down the coastal path, fading to two tiny bright dots, disappearing.
30
There was an atmosphere on the coach to Aldershot that made Tom apprehensive. It was the mood of yesterday after they had seen the newspaper article, only quieter, solidified. He had not fully recovered or slept, and in the hush of the coach he was acutely sensitive to every movement and mumble around him. An unspoken togetherness breathed through the seats. It was partly the confidence of winning so frequently, being joint top of the table, but there was something new, a grave unity, a low bristling violence that wanted to prove itself, push against something.
He had not spoken to Liam about the article. It was a week now since their last conversation, when Liam had slipped out of his house into the night. After yesterday’s training Tom had driven straight for home and the Internet, and had spent the rest of the day, then the night, on or around the sofa in a state of wired agitation which gave way occasionally to fragmented intervals of half-sleep. He woke in the dark at one point from a vision of the three men from the fish and chip shop reading the newspaper that was so real he had to slap himself on the cheek before he was convinced that they were not in the room with him. By the morning, when Liam had still not been in contact, he was fluctuating between the uneasy possibility that Liam was waiting for him to call, and a wild hope that he did not know. He decided not to risk telling him. And there was a match to prepare for. A series of safe, repeated actions to perform, to slip into.
Beverley twisted towards Tom. “I used to play for these, once. I tell you that?”
“No. When?”
“Month loan a couple of seasons back, when I wasn’t getting near the team at Vale. Nice club. I was up for signing but they couldn’t offer anything secure.”
“When can they?” Tom said.
Beverley smiled, nestling back into his headrest. Somewhere behind them a murmuring that Tom had been conscious of for the last few minutes expanded into a spurt of laughter.
Then another.
“Bev, Tommy, come look at this,” Jones called over a couple of rows of heads, and despite the clotting terror in his chest, pride at being wanted invaded Tom.
There were too many grouped around the cramped table space for everyone to look together at the object of amusement. They queued up in the aisle, passing Bobby’s phone down the line. At each exchange there was an expression of delight. A thumped headrest. A jerk backwards. “Jesus, Bobby.” Most took a second or two to understand what it was they were looking at. Tom, though, when the phone came to him, knew instantly—as if it was exactly this that he had been expecting. On the screen was a photo of the ground-staff shed, its far wall a glaring flash of white against the black sky of the training ground. In big bright red lettering was painted, HOMO HUT. He passed the phone on to Beverley. Below them Bobby was recounting how he had done it, giggling anew at each high five and fist pump. There was a snort of laughter beside Tom, and he turned to see Beverley shaking his head in admiration.
None of the coaching staff came to find out what was going on, recognizing perhaps the value of the bonding. The group eventually filtered away, Tom following Easter, pausing to let him take his seat, noticing through his own stupor that Easter was talking to himself. Tom went back to his own place. He squeezed his eyes closed. For the rest of the journey everything around him was suspended, far away. Except for the sporadic gentle tremor of his seat, which he knew was Beverley chuckling.
He could not get into the match. He could not find the part of his brain that was just for football, and as he tried he found instead only the kaleidoscopic repeating image of the vandalized wall. He attempted to boil his actions down to the basics: control, touch, look for the strikers. As a tactic it was surprisingly effective. Gundi and Munro, in undisguised competition with each other, chased down everything. Tom spun one weedy lob into the corner, which an Aldershot defender attempted to shield out of play, but Gundi shouldered him off the pitch and pulled the ball back to Tom, who looked up, crossed simply for Munro, and it was 1–0. The flat continuous din of the Aldershot support continued undiminished, looping to the beat of a single military drum, drowning out any other crowd noise apart from the jubilant Town fans in the horseshoed paddock in one corner, singing about Munro, Gundi and even, briefly, Tom. They disappeared en masse two minutes before halftime for the food van in the car park, and after the restart when Tom went over to collect the ball from a supporter ecstatically clutching it above her head, he saw the rows of fans holding their hot dogs and pies. As he waited for the woman to toss the ball and everybody looked at him he was suddenly emboldened by the thought that none of them knew. Nobody knew it was him.