A Natural

by Ross Raisin

  “Bob. Bob, please, fuck off. Bob, please.”

  Tom watched the serious unsmiling concentration on Bobby’s face, his precision with the brush unaffected by the slippery chaos of skin, or the wet piercing cries that rang about the tiled room. You didn’t paint the wall this carefully, you cunt, Tom thought, forcing the foot harder to the floor, willing Spencer’s hot streaming pain to be his own.

  “He’s got a stiffy!” Beverley cried. “Look, he’s got a stiffy!”

  And it was true, almost. Bobby stopped stroking the brush up the underside of Spencer’s penis, which stood, for a second or two, before collapsing with a damp black kiss onto his pelvis. The noise in the room increased. People leaped back—Tom too, horrified. Spencer, however, gave no sign that he was at all conscious of his sorry erection. His reedy little rib cage pushed up against his whitened chest. One sideburn was matted with snot. From beneath him a rivulet of blood was trickling along the grouting of the floor tiles, quickening and thinning into the remnants of shower water shaken free from forty happy stamping feet.

  —

  The days that followed were bright and relaxed. With the Tottenham tie only a couple of weeks away and the spirit of the group high, the banter was relentless, undoubting. A kind of order had been restored with, at its foundation, Sam Spencer. He went by any number of names at first but, eventually, simply faggot. The joyful skip of the two syllables accompanied him everywhere he went and, because nobody other than Bobby had any real cause to say much else to him, the word pealed out on its own, racing past him on a sideline, echoing down a corridor. Bobby laughed along but did not join in. He started sitting with Spencer in the canteen before driving him home, and Tom wondered what they said to each other inside their flat, whether they spoke at all.

  Although Tom also did not take part in the banter, except for occasionally, tactically, the focus on Spencer was enabling him to behave more easily around the other players than he had in the near month and a half since his return to the club. He skulked less on the outside of phone huddles, joke huddles, coming at last into the thick of them. He stayed for longer in the canteen. One afternoon when he was among the last group to leave Beverley got up to go to the tea urn and brought a mug back for Tom with his own, and when Richards, then Lloyd-Day departed, the two of them were left alone in the canteen.

  “Mate, you know I don’t mean any of it, yeah?” Beverley said.

  Tom frowned, appearing confused, although he understood perfectly well and was already working out how to end the conversation.

  “All this bullshit with Spence. I don’t mean anything against you. It’s just a laugh. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I know.”

  “Probably half of them don’t really mean anything by it. They don’t know what they’re saying. They just know they’ve got to say it. If you see what I mean.”

  Lesley popped her head out of the kitchen to see if anybody was still in the canteen. Seeing them, she smiled over.

  “You doing all right, Tommy?” Beverley asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Sure, yeah?”

  Tom nodded.

  “All this faggot stuff,” Beverley continued more quietly, “it’s nothing. It’s just a word. You know that?”

  “I know. We don’t have to talk about it.”

  And he did understand. Whatever it did or did not mean, he was outside it. It had become so normal to hear the word being sung out that he had ceased almost to think anything of it, and if he did—a sudden image of the lacquered erection—it was with a quick virtuous contempt of Spencer, a sentiment which, although he did not wish to explore it, he knew was converging in his mind with Liam. In the vacuum of being apart, the two humiliations—Spencer’s, Liam’s—were coupled, a fact he was reminded of daily by the banter of the squad.

  Liam had not been at the training ground or the stadium pitch for over a week. The night before Spencer’s initiation Tom had received from him a flurry of missed calls, voicemail messages, then a couple more the next morning and none since. Still he would not listen to the messages. He sometimes allowed the desire to hear them to intensify, testing himself, and he felt renewed strength each time he succeeded in leaving them there, suppressed inside his phone.

  Spencer was not present for training the Friday before a home match. Tom knew that they would not see him again. During a break between drills he went over to Bobby to ask if he had heard anything.

  “Gone, mate.”

  “For good?”

  “That’s right. Wilko lined a club up for him someplace, non-league or something, but Spence said no. Thinks he’s done with football. They settled with him on his contract. Bet they screwed him too. Boy doesn’t even have an agent.”

  Senseless anger moved inside Tom at Bobby’s flippancy. He had an impulse to ask him about the money that he still owed, to embarrass him, shame him in front of the others. A ball rolled over from one of the pitches. Bobby trapped it with his sole, kicked it back.

  “Probably best thing for him,” Tom said.

  “Aye, probably.”

  The others, if they had noticed Spencer’s departure, were similarly unruffled. They were ready to move on, had already moved on, from Spencer and from the whole unnatural recent period. The world, too, they sensed, was no longer watching them. The media had abruptly lost interest, and although there had been something of a chant during the last match, it had mostly died by the time it reached the ears of the Town supporters. As far as the squad, the fans, the board were concerned, everything was again as it should be, unshakably normal.

  32

  Tom was woken by his phone downstairs. He had taken to leaving it in the living room, using instead the old alarm clock that he had kept from his academy days, and his reflex, coming to, was of indignation that his dad or Rachel had broken his ten hours. But when it went off a second time, a third, he trained his sight on the ceiling and locked his focus, breathing firmly, evenly, visualizing his actions on the field that evening. It stopped ringing after the fifth call. He collected himself, accepting that he would not be able to go back to sleep, and got out of bed.

  He made himself go into the kitchen without looking at the phone. He put together his breakfast: a small glass of goat’s milk with a two-egg goat’s cheese omelette and, on the side, a packet of pineapple pieces, a combination he had picked up from Beverley along with the necessity of eating as soon as he was awake. Through the doorway, as he ate standing up at the kitchen counter, he could see his phone on the living-room table. When he had finished his breakfast he went to the sink and filled his watering can, then, going through, he tested his cacti on the windowsill, pressing the soil of each with his thumb, measuring out different portions of water, one by one. He was just about to leave the room again when his phone rang once more, the sound cutting through his resolution. He walked across and saw that it was his dad.

  “Feeling good?”

  “Decent, yeah.”

  “Big night ahead.”

  “It is. Mum there?”

  “Not yet. She should be finishing up at the clinic about lunchtime. We’ll set off soon as we’ve eaten.”

  “Rachel there too?”

  “Oh yes. Your sister is very excited. She’s just on the stairs. She’s saying she’s looking forward to watching some players she’s actually heard of.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Sold out tonight?”

  “Capacity. Biggest gate in the club’s history. There’s people in the paper who’ve flown in from all round the world. This one guy’s come over from Australia.”

  His dad went quiet, and Tom wondered for a moment if he was taking these details down.

  “I thought your lot might have been on Focus at the weekend. Preview of the match or something. Nothing, though.” For a few seconds he was quiet again. “I’ve been thinking the last couple of months, actually, that Town might have been on it. Moment’s passed now, though, I suppose, with all that business.”

>   Tom’s arm tautened. He straightened it then brought the phone back to his ear. He had waited for this during each phone call since the newspaper article. Every time, he had cut the conversation short with some excuse before his dad might bring it up, saying that he was about to eat or Wilko wanted them in early or there were roadworks on the way to the stadium. This morning, though, he felt calm. He did not have to lie because there was nothing to say.

  “It has, I think.”

  “Strange period, eh?”

  “Was a bit.”

  “Spirit in the camp still good?”

  “Better than ever. Solid. Lot of fuss over nothing, really. We’ve just been concentrating on the football.”

  “That’s good. Smart manager, Wilkinson.”

  And with the concrete recognition that his dad was plainly not avoiding anything, a sharp clarity expanded inside Tom’s brain, pushing open a clean space in which he was able to see himself distinctly as the person that his dad, everyone else, was able to see.

  “Better keep winning, or some club might come in for him,” his dad said.

  “Wouldn’t it be his fault if we stopped winning?”

  His dad laughed. “See your point. See your point.”

  “I should go get ready, Dad.”

  “Right, yes. I should get lunch ready, anyway, for when your mum gets back.”

  “Tell her hello, will you?”

  “I will. We’ll see you after the match then. Good luck tonight. Love you, son.”

  “Bye, Dad.”

  His fingers curled around the phone.

  He looked at it in his hand. He took several strong breaths then selected voicemail, and cleared his messages.

  —

  “All right last night, wasn’t it?”

  “It was,” said Liam.

  “I felt like a teenager, getting back in, stumbling about in the dark trying not to wake Mum up.”

  She had got in a little after four, more drunk than she had been for years, groping for the kitchen light switch, then, when she could not find it, along the walls and the counter for the fridge and the fridge handle, knocking the list of invitees to the floor, happy, drunkenly unencumbered, even as she reached for the array of foreign cheese and remembered that Robert was here, in bed with her mum; Tyler was here, asleep in a cot in her old room. Although, when she eased open the door to her bedroom and tiptoed in, he wasn’t. Panic sobered her instantly, her eyes adjusting to the dark—but then she saw him, asleep on the bed, humped against her mum. She walked over and kissed them both, lifted Tyler into the cot and got in beside her mum. She did not stir. Leah found out later in the morning that Tyler had been up half the night.

  “Hut’s not changed, then,” she said.

  “Changed? You’re joking? There’s one of the mirrors in the gents that’s new. Old one got glassed or something. Headbutted. How you feeling today?”

  “Pretty rough. Hangover with a toddler, you should try it. What about you?”

  “You know. Keeping it together, just about.”

  Robert came into the kitchen, saw her sitting at the kitchen table and winked. He had been to the shop and bought her a large bottle of Diet Coke. She watched him go to the cupboard for a glass.

  “Your mum’s still at the play park with Tyler,” he said in an exaggerated whisper, pouring her a drink and bringing it over to the table.

  “Thanks, Robert.”

  He walked off to her mum’s bedroom, humming, and she wondered if this was what he would have been like if she was sixteen, bringing her Diet Coke to nurse her hangovers, or if he too would have shouted and backed her into the corner under the boiler until she cried and pleaded and threw up on the carpet.

  “I’d like to come over later, before you set off,” she said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to. Mum’s still with Tyler, and I should take him off her hands for the afternoon, but I could come round to see you off when I’ve got him in bed. Just for a bit—I won’t get in your way or anything.”

  “I’ll be at my parents’ by then. My dad’s driving up with me tonight.”

  “I’ll come to your parents’ then.”

  —

  The traffic became heavier as she made her way across town. She had forgotten about the cup match. She put on some music and continued her slow progress through the center. In front of her, long clean scarves drooped from the back windows of a four-by-four BMW that had joined from the coast road. She got a little closer and saw the heads of two children singing and clapping in the back. The vehicles crawled past a beer garden full of Tottenham supporters, drinking, laughing, calling out to one another under the golden sprawl of an uplit tree, and her mind turned to last night, the sweaty giggling tangle of it, how overjoyed they had all been when she told them. “So,” Mark had said, “let me get this right. This one’s suddenly gay and then two minutes later you’re leaving your husband, and you expect us to believe that the two of you aren’t having an affair?” Later, once they had bullied Liam into going to the club, Mark and Shona had given them a wink, passing them in the corridor on the way to the toilets, where she and Liam had stopped to talk for a moment away from the noise of the club. Liam had leaned into her, drunk. “How’s it feel then, telling that lot?”

  “All right. Thought it’d be weird or I’d feel guilty or something, but actually it’s fine. Just feels normal now, in a way.”

  “Because it’s the right thing.”

  “I know.”

  “Because he’s a cock.”

  She turned her face away. “Don’t, Liam.”

  A group of young women was coming down the corridor. Liam pushed against her to let them through. “Fair enough. Sorry. Why’ve you waited this long to tell them, anyway?”

  She shrugged. “Says you.”

  “Fair point.”

  “Waiting for the right chance, I suppose. It’s not like I speak to them on the phone much.”

  “What, mean you don’t call them up every five minutes to ask if they’ve remembered to eat their lunch and change their clothes and go to the toilet?”

  “Shut up,” she said, and when she looked up into his tired smiling face she thought for an instant that she was going to confess to him. She knew just as quickly, though, that it would be senseless, that it would wreck everything. And Mark and Shona were leaving the toilets anyway, coming towards them.

  “Hey, lovebirds,” Mark shouted, “stop loitering. Gemma’s at the bar. Black sambucas. If we’re having a send-off, then let’s do it fucking properly. Come on.”

  The BMW was turning off down a side street. When she came past she looked down it and she could see the stadium at the bottom, illuminated. The main stand dominating the houses. She could not halt the thought that Chris was in there. In her mind she could see him in the players’ lounge with the other non-involveds, smiling for the directors and sponsors. Putting a front on. Her resolve, so secure last night, weakened a crack. She needed to be stronger, she told herself. There was no point reassuring herself that he would be OK. It was just her own need for proof that she was right, that she was doing the right thing. Last week during a tantrum Tyler had started shouting for him: “Daddy. Where Daddy? Where Daddy?” When she had eventually managed to soothe him she had gone into her bedroom and cried, letting herself—with her mum out and Tyler in front of the television—weep for a few minutes, coming to understand that this was the only time since they had left that Tyler had noticed Chris was not around. And that he had shouted like that before—“Where Daddy? Where Daddy?”—when Chris had been in the house.

  —

  He was not at that moment in the players’ lounge, but in the dressing room. It was not Wilko’s way, separation. They were all in it together, as one: the firsts, the injured, the unfit, the banned. He was sitting underneath a peg that had not been hung with a shirt for nine months, watching. Many of those around him were quiet. Others were threaded with nervous energy, headphones on, a silent disco of
footballers bouncing inside their private universes.

  Wilko made a show of including him and Curtis by mentioning them during his team talk. Praising their commitment to the cause, their importance to the unit. Easter looked across at Jones and Bobby sitting tightly together, then around the room at the circle of faces, and he recognized the hunger, the belief, of a promotion team. He looked at Tom, who was listening intently to the manager. As if sensing the eyes on him, Tom glanced over, gave a cursory smile and turned away again. Easter’s hands squeezed his kneecaps as he kept staring at Tom, challenging him to look back. To look him in the eye with some sign of admission. But he was too wrapped up in Wilko’s words—to give everything they had, not to think about the occasion, to just go out there and enjoy themselves.

  Everybody was nodding. He was nodding, he realized. He could hear the Tottenham players coming out of their dressing room and he wondered whether Wilko knew that he could once have gone there. He had been given the opportunity, and he had chosen not to. He would never have met Leah if he had gone, it came to him for the first time, although he did not know if that meant he had made the right or the wrong choice. He tried to picture her. The girl he had met at the school party—giggling, wanting him, pulling him into Katie Wheelwright’s downstairs toilet—but however he tried to conjure the image of her as a girl, or now with Tyler, he could not get a proper fix on her, on the two of them together; he could only see her with the faggot groundsman.

  Wilko was on the other side of the room, giving instructions, encouragement, to Jones and Bobby. Jones clapped his hand on Bobby’s thigh. Easter closed his eyes. He was not a part of this. The unit. He was nothing here. He let his eyes remain closed as the specter of his own future appeared before him. The contract that would expire and release him at the end of the season, discard him to the market, a non-league club maybe coming in for him, near, or far from here, from Leah, from Tyler. They were gone now, either way. That was clear enough. There was no point fighting to get them back. It was too late even if he wanted to. He opened his eyes. Above Jones’s head was a motivational poster he had not noticed before—THE MAN ATOP THE MOUNTAIN DIDN’T FALL THERE—and through the haze of controlled breathing and Deep Heat he could see them all falling as one, arms and legs locked together, a circle of butt cheeks dropping through the clouds. But he was drifting away. He saw the others landing softly atop the mountain, high-fiving, their faces getting smaller while he continued to fall. Sneering down at him. Ignorant of the fact that it was him who had protected them, so far, protected the one opposite him refusing still to meet his eye.