A Natural

by Ross Raisin

  “Give us a bite,” he shouted.

  They all heard him, laughed, sang his name again. For a few seconds he was cocooned in relief.

  It was so near the end when the Aldershot winger was sent off that some supporters were already leaving. As he walked off the pitch, shaking his head, griping to himself, he looked back and said, “Bunch of queers,” loudly enough for half a dozen Town players to sprint towards him. Within seconds there was a melee. Foreheads, eyeballs, captains separating the antagonists then squaring up to each other above the little scrambling referee.

  Wilko banned any mention of the incident during the journey back. “Three points. Job done. We go home, we concentrate on the positives, we go again.” But Tom could sense them dwelling on it, their anger chuntering beneath the surface in the soft yellow light of the coach.

  —

  He stayed inside his car for some time, watching the dusky movement of traffic leaving the stadium, the kit man hauling metal crates from the belly of the coach, the driver sitting at the top of the steps, having a smoke. He was the last person remaining in the car park when Liam called. The blue light of his phone strobed the inside of his car as he stared at it, ringing, ringing, then silent.

  Once home he went straight to the under-stairs cupboard and pulled out the cardboard box of DIY odds and ends that his dad had left there. He emptied his kitbag onto the floor and repacked it with items from the box, then went into the kitchen to get more things from under the sink.

  In the long pauses between the sound of cars from the road there was a dead stillness to the training ground. The graffiti was written on the back wall of the shed, out of sight from the clubhouse and the entrance, and Tom wanted to know, drawing nearer, just who exactly the stupid lumping twat had thought would read it. Or if it was solely for Liam. Or—the quick chilling thought passed through his mind—for them both. He rounded the shed, halted by the sight of the words. They had been sprayed on, he saw now. Bobby must have planned this: shopped for a canister, deliberated over the wording. Tom could not pull his eyes away; they bored into the slogan, the wall, and slowly he grew sure that Liam was in there. He stepped up to the wall and put his ear against it. He could hear nothing inside, but he remained in that position, his skin gradually becoming indistinguishable from the brick, from Liam’s body pressing up on the other side, pulsating at his ear. The rush of something big on the road beyond the trees, a lorry, a coach, jogged him.

  He lifted his face from the wall. He walked around the shed, his cheek tingling, and called through the shutters: “Liam.” And again, louder, “Liam.”

  When there was no answer he returned to the far wall and set to his task.

  The letters shrank at the first touch of the spirit, and he thought that he was going to get it all off, that Liam would arrive on Monday and would see nothing but the bare wall. However, after his initial success it was soon obvious that it was not going to be erased completely and that a muted layer would remain, smeared at the edges, like a halo, the words as blatant as the fact that somebody had tried to remove them. He scrubbed harder, working for minutes at a single letter, his breathing becoming ragged—and as the thin pink dribble of spirit slid down the wall, he was once again scouring at himself in the Daveys’ shower, bleeding, desperate for it all to go away.

  31

  One week and one victory on, when a fourth goal went in and the Town following were again rejoicing, a low complaint started to spread through Barnet’s stadium. Some supporters in the main stand were on their feet for the first time in the match, their mouths tightened into small puckered circles, like a thousand blown kisses.

  A distraught middle-aged man wearing the Barnet team shirt, his own name glued across his shoulders, reached into his pocket and yanked out his season ticket. The teenage boy in the next seat looked up to see him wagging the yellow plastic wallet high above his head. There was a flapping sound as the pages came together, then, with a grunt and a momentary loss of balance on the narrow step, the man threw it at the pitch. It arced and fluttered and fell short of the grass. He looked about him. With the exception of his son, who was steadfastly ignoring him, nobody seemed to have noticed.

  “What do they think?” the man said to no one in particular. “We want to pay to watch this rubbish every week? Watch ourselves get hammered by a team of gay boys?” He did not sit down. He shook his head, gazing at the season ticket lying on the runoff track. Behind him annoyance was building. “Sit down, pal,” someone shouted, and he did.

  One of the Barnet substitutes, warming up, spotted the season ticket and bent to pick it up. He looked at the jowly bespectacled face inside the sleeve and raised his head to peer into the crowd. There were a few outbursts of banter, token insults, before he walked down the track to hand it to a steward. The man watched all of this. He sat quietly until halftime when, having changed his mind or unable to think of anything better to do with his Saturday afternoons, he approached the steward for the return of his season ticket.

  He was up again, though, when Town scored a fifth goal. Richards, who had been heckled throughout the first half by two boys in the next block, poked the ball into the net and ran across the pitch to celebrate in front of his detractors. The man, observing this, leaped up and screamed, “Does your boyfriend know you’re here?” and began laughing, looking round at his son, who was scowling at his own feet. The two boys heard the refrain. They stood up, conferred and began to chant, “Down with your groundsman, we’re going down with your groundsman…” The tune was picked up by some of the home supporters behind the goal, and for a short merry interlude it bounced happily about the seven sheds. The Town supporters, once they had picked out the words, clapped ironically and could think of nothing in reply.

  Tom did not know whether Liam was aware of the chanting. There had been some in midweek too, at home, but Tom had presumed from the presence of the assistant groundsman with the divot-forking scholars at the edge of the disabled supporters’ stall that he had not been at the game.

  He had not listened to any of Liam’s voicemails. Occasionally there was a text simply asking him to call, which he deleted, but the voicemails were all still there, a store of them building, secreted in a buried compartment of his phone.

  He told his sister, when she called him, that Liam had not been in contact for a little while. They were keeping at a safe distance, he said each of the three times she phoned in the week that she found out what was happening. She did not say how she had heard, and he did not ask, fearful—although it had not come up during Tom’s few very short conversations with him—that it was from their dad. She was thinking about coming down to see him, she said.

  “You don’t need to. Everything’s OK.”

  “How can it be OK?”

  “It is. Things are actually going pretty well at the moment. I’m starting every match.”

  “I saw the forum, Tom. It was ugly. Fergus managed to pull it up, somehow, after it got closed down.” Into the silence that followed, she added, “He doesn’t know that it’s you, by the way. I didn’t tell him.”

  But Tom was cold with alarm that another person knew, a person he had never met, who was mentally ill. He was angry at himself again for ever having told her, for telling anybody. It had been a mistake, he could see now.

  “Seriously, Rach, I’m fine.”

  “What about Liam?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Really? He’s been hung out to dry. He’s getting slaughtered. Not like I’m the right person to give anybody relationship advice, but surely he needs you now, Tom. He’s your boyfriend.”

  Even when she had gone, the word lingered unhappily, causing him to slightly recoil every time he heard it.

  —

  A penis appeared one morning, shaved into the grass, as spontaneous and impeccable as a crop circle. Nobody noticed it at first, during breakfast and the squad meeting, because the outline could not be made out from ground level through the French windows, so it was o
nly discovered when Easter and Curtis were sent up to the storage room above the canteen for new stretching mats. A few minutes later everybody was cramming into the little room, striving for a view out of the single cracked window. On the clubhouse pitch a detailed set of genitals had been mown very exactly into one of the halves, contoured all the way around—head, shaft, neat globular testicles—by a painted white line.

  Amid the excitement they turned to Bobby.

  “Don’t look at me. Serious. It’s pure class but it’s no me.”

  They looked at one another, anxious to hail the prankster, but nobody came forward. It was a mystery. They charged from the room and out of the building for a closer inspection.

  The coaching staff, taking advantage of the find, made them warm up by running around it, and turned a blind eye to the ceremony, initiated by Jones, of each man kissing the tip on completion of a circuit, so that by the end of the run a small damp patch had developed where the phallus neighbored the far touchline.

  Several players, still in the canteen at the end of lunch, stayed to watch Liam repair the pitch. They stood by the window as, for the first time that day, he came out of the ground-staff shed and walked the mower towards the butchered grass. Nobody spoke, so entranced, moved even, were they by the spectacle. And after the earlier shock of the giant intruding cock, the strangeness and upheaval of the past few weeks, there was something about the sight of the groundsman slowly tending to the pitch, trimming the grass to the same level, spraying and massaging a substance into the white line, which was also, perhaps, reassuringly normal.

  There was plentiful conjecture about who it had been. It was a supporter. It was a rival supporter. It was an ex-player, the ex-player, or the groundsman himself, some believed, because who else could have done it so well? The assistant groundsman. And there followed a theory that there was a feud between the two groundsmen. That they were both gay.

  They awaited more practical jokes, but none came, so they engineered some of their own, usually reverting to the easy bets of old banter: rattling the shed shutters, hiding somebody’s clothes while he was showering, gay pornography on the groundsman’s windscreen, on each other’s windscreens. Each joke, each windup, bound them, protected them. The inescapable feeling that they were being laughed at in the stands, on the Internet, in dressing rooms—and they knew from former teammates that this was the case—brought the group closer, at the same time as it made them restive with a need to react. The bond between team and fans too had grown tighter, their defiance stoked by the remarkable run of winning, winning, winning, three points clear by early October.

  The supporters, following a short threatening summit between the board, Peter Pascoe and the local paper’s sports editor, were praised for their vociferous support of the team, credited by the chairman, manager and carefully selected players with being able to win matches on their own. The national press, however, were refused any more contact. A new fans’ forum, mediated by the club, was heralded. The rainbow flag above the disabled supporters’ stall was, without fanfare, taken down.

  Any initial disappointment at failing to draw a big-name opponent in the third round of the League Cup was outweighed by winning the tie with an outstanding victory at Colchester. Tom headed the final, fourth goal of a match in which Bobby scored his first senior hattrick. At the final whistle Bobby was so overawed—shaking the hands of Colchester players, hugging Wilko and all the coaching staff, fist-pumping the Town support—that he ran off the pitch forgetting to collect the match ball. When, ten minutes later, the referee came into the dressing room to deliver it to him, Bobby stepped through the almost hushed space to receive it, ignoring the giggles, with all the gobsmacked reverence of a child getting a visit from Father Christmas. The ball remained tucked under his arm throughout the post-match sandwiches and, despite various teasing attempts to steal it, stayed on his lap for the whole of the coach journey home.

  The chairman invited the whole squad to watch the fourth-round draw together on a screen in the players’ lounge the following evening. He laid on a free bar. A curry takeaway. They gathered around the television and, at the release of the sixteen numbered balls into a dark glass dome, the players, the chairman and the coaching staff put their arms around each other’s shoulders. On the screen there was some banter between the two ex-pros appointed to draw the numbers when it turned out one of them had left a ball in the bag. The balls were jostled. The first hand went in. Town were the first team out. They were at home to Tottenham Hotspur. Still knotted together, the semicircle began to bounce up and down, bawling out joyous exclamations that soon coalesced into a chant: “Bring on the Tottenham! Bring on the Tottenham!”

  A vague residue of the line was still bouncing around the room a few minutes later with most of the squad on their phones, calling, texting. Tom already had messages from his dad and Kenny and John, and another from an old academy friend: “Back in the big time, buddy!” He moved over to the pitch window. He replied to his dad, and waited with his phone in his hand for a moment after pressing Send.

  When he returned to the ruckus by the bar, Beverley ran up to him. He put his arms around Tom. “I’m fucking buzzing, man. I’ve never played against a top-flight team, Tommy. I didn’t think that would ever happen for me.”

  Beyond Beverley’s ear, Easter, standing apart from the main group, was talking to the barman: “…for their academy if I’d wanted to.” Tom watched the barman nod and move away to pass out bottles of beer to the rabble at the counter, while Easter walked off, heading for the door. Beverley released Tom to go and high-five Richards. Tom took out his phone again, checking the screen. As he was putting it back into his pocket, Boyn hoisted Bobby onto his shoulders. They started a jig around the room. Boyn, tittering so much that he nearly dropped Bobby onto a table, was singing something that was difficult to hear until Bobby picked up the words and sang it out himself, loud, unabashed. “Oh I’d rather be a faggot than a Yid. Oh I’d rather be a faggot than a Yid…” Beverley dashed over to join them, and the chant flared up briefly before the operations manager hurried across to tell them to stop, having realized that some of the other players had started filming.

  —

  Bobby scored again in the next league match, and on the same day was shortlisted for divisional player of the month. Ever more he was emerging—on the pitch, in the dressing room—as a leader. He was a full inch taller than when he joined the club. And stronger. He had been in the gym every day of the close season and was now one of the most well-built players in the squad. This new strength had bred in him a confidence. He wanted the ball, hunted it, screeched for it even when Jones was near, because it was Bobby, they all recognized, who had become the driving force of the team. Scouts had started to come and watch him, including one from the Scotland Under-19s who had been at each of the last two matches. His sugar daddies, Bobby joked before anyone else thought of it.

  With Yates gone and Easter largely ignored, the others looked increasingly to Bobby as the jester, and because Bobby was developing into a player of real potential who would likely not be playing for Town beyond the season, he started to walk about the place as respected and untouchable as a captain, regardless of the fact that he now owed considerable amounts of money to several of the squad.

  The other player promoted from the youth team, Sam Spencer, stayed as close to Bobby’s side as he was able. He said very little, but in the mornings after they had traveled together in Bobby’s car from their shared flat, they could usually be seen talking in the lounge before the rest of the squad arrived, and on the rare occasions that Spencer was in the traveling party for an away match, he would sometimes be let into Bobby’s clique of cardplayers gambling up and down the motorways. The rest of the time Spencer was mostly on his own. One day, though, when Bobby had stayed on the field at the end of the session to talk to Wilko, Spencer looked up in surprise, gratitude, at Bobby coming through the dressing room straight towards him.

  “All right?”<
br />
  “All right.”

  Bobby stood smiling before him. Slowly, from behind his back, he produced a brush and a tin of boot polish.

  “Pin him down.”

  The nearest four or five men pounced upon the boy and pulled him to the floor. When he was fully restrained, pinned down on his front, a scorched red line was visible curving down his back where it had scraped the bench. His pants were tugged free. A hand, Beverley’s, offered itself through the fray to press his head against the tiles to prevent it from rearing up.

  Tom found himself with the left ankle. He helped turn Spencer onto his back and pushed down with both hands on the foot, mirroring Easter on the other side. Easter looked across at him, an expression of devilish collusion in his eyes that Tom did not meet. There was a bout of renewed thrashing that made it difficult to keep hold, so he shifted his full weight onto the arch of the foot, and from within the shrieking and sobbing there was a yelp of fresh pain, at which Tom eased off a little. Bobby knelt over his flatmate and instructed Tom and Easter to pull his legs wider apart. With one hand he took hold of Spencer’s penis and, with a deftness that made Tom’s innards contract, moved it aside so that he could apply the polish to his testicles.