When the game started, we were all silent. England had a lot of the ball but didn’t make many chances. Cameroon had the first good chance, when Omam was one-on-one with Peter Shilton, but Peter Shilton was a giant and Omam must have been terrified to be confronted with such might. He tried to shoot around Shilton, but it was impossible, and he saved the shot. Cameroon had a couple more good chances, but Shilton was massive and there was no way round him.
After about 25 minutes England finally had a run with the ball. It got crossed into the box and David Platt was there again. It was like he’d magically teleported into the box to arrive just in time to head the ball into the goal, and England were winning. Even Dad gave a little cheer. It was all going to be okay.
In the second half, Cameroon brought on Roger Milla, and I was worried. I looked at Will, and he was worried too. Milla had been amazing in the tournament so far, and there was every chance it was about to get tough. It was Milla who won the penalty. Gazza, of all people, brought him down in the box. I know he was only trying to get the ball back, but Dad doesn’t understand football, and he said, “Daft prick.”
I clenched my fists together tightly and hoped Cameroon would miss. At least Milla wasn’t taking it. I thought that maybe they were giving England a chance, but they weren’t. Shilton dived the wrong way and all of a sudden it was 1-1.
Everyone in the crowd was cheering on Cameroon, and England seemed to be weighed down by all of the cheering for their opponents. Roger Milla was practically dancing around the England players. It was like his feet had been enchanted, and I thought of the witch doctor and the spell he said he was putting on the team, and I could see it was true. Milla beat Gazza, he beat Wright, and he beat Platt to be through on goal. There was no way he could get it round Shilton though, and he knew that. Instead he passed the ball across the goal to another one of Cameroon’s substitutes who kicked the ball into the net, with Shilton nowhere near it. 2-1. The witch doctor knew.
When Cameroon had another chance, I knew they wouldn’t score from it. Milla was still magic, and he played Omam through on goal. Shilton might have put him off, but for me that meant nothing. The witch doctor had called 2-1 and it was going to end 2-1. Omam’s shot missed the goal entirely.
And when England got the ball up the other end and Wright slotted a perfect ball through to Lineker I knew he wouldn’t score. He didn’t even have the chance to, because one of Cameroon’s defenders slid in and took his legs away. The referee pointed to the spot, but it didn’t matter. England weren’t going to score. Lineker took the penalty himself. He was good, but he was going to miss this one. He ran up to the ball, and he kicked it high, and I knew it was going to go over the bar and sail off into orbit, but then the net bulged, and I didn’t understand what had happened. It was 2-2. “The witch doctor was wrong!” I cried out as I stood up.
Dad turned his head to look at me and frowned.
I sat back on the sofa, with my heart pounding. What did this mean? Was it more proof that magic wasn’t working? Or was there a stronger force working for England? I didn’t know what to think anymore, and suddenly the football became interesting again. It was no longer a foregone conclusion.
Cameroon had a couple of good chances, but Shilton wouldn’t let them by. Eventually England started to pass the ball better, and Gazza looked like magic again. He slid a perfect ball in to Lineker, but he never got to it because two of Cameroon’s players squished him like a piece of meat in a sandwich. Another penalty. Lineker must have been scared of missing this one, because instead of kicking it high up where the goalkeeper couldn’t reach it, he hit it hard right down the middle. The keeper dived to the side where he’s shot last time, and England were back in front. The Cameroon players looked exhausted. It was like the spell had worn off them, and they couldn’t get the ball back. England had won. We were in the semi-final of the world cup.
“You boys had better get to bed,” Dad said before they’d even cut away from the pitch and gone back to the studio. He stared directly at me. “You’ve got a big day tomorrow.”
Of course. John’s funeral. How had I forgotten about that?
NOW
When Mum comes down the stairs, I’m drinking tea with Granddad having a very safe conversation about how I’ve been over the last few years. I came in defenceless, but managed to put the barrier up in time to not let the sadness that hangs on his face get to me, though he did manage to recount my Dad’s steps in the years since I last saw him, so I know when he got out of prison, and the terrible condition that his lungs were in at the time. What he doesn’t tell me, is what caused it.
Charlie runs at Mum and hugs her around the midriff, and she nearly drops the tray of untouched food that she’s carrying. However hard I tried to keep them apart, there seemed to be a special bond between them. I get up and take the tray from her, allowing her to put her arms around Charlie and give him a proper hug. She looks older too. She’s aged significantly in the months since I saw her last. The skin is loose around her face, and her hair is thin and lacking colour.
“Let me make you a tea,” I say.
At first, she refuses and insists upon doing it herself, and I realise that, in this house, I never once made her a cup of tea.
Charlie manages to convince her by saying, “Dad makes nice tea,” and she sits with Charlie pulling his own chair close to hers.
“There’s cake in the pantry too if you want some.”
I head in there, unsurprised to find the layout as it ever was, and grab the half-eaten Victoria sponge cake from the shelf and take it back into the kitchen. The knives are still in the same place. Yesterday, had you asked me to draw this kitchen I doubt I would have been able to do so with any accuracy. Now, I could tell you the home of every utensil.
“I saw Liam outside,” I say.
“He’s done a great job keeping this place ticking over.”
“How’s Andy?”
“He’s not so good.”
“I figured. Liam just said he was the same.”
“He didn’t take his mum’s death too well.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about that?” I ask, and a pang of guilt hits me hard when I see Mum’s face strain to breaking point. “Sorry,” I say, hoping I’ve caught it before it’s too late. “That’s my fault. They were my stupid rules.”
“That boy can’t see sense no more,” says Granddad. “He’s thrown away the sense he had. Poor bugger.”
“Drugs,” says Mum.
It wouldn’t just have been his Mum’s death that damaged him. What I put him through would have hurt him too, and him being that little bit younger it must have left him badly scarred.
“Alan does his best,” says Mum.
Charlie finishes his cake and starts fishing around inside his mouth.
“Charlie,” I say, and give him the look.
“What you got going on in there?” Asks Granddad.
“Wobbly tooth.”
“Come here, and I’ll give it a yank.”
Charlie shakes his head, and Granddad laughs.
“If you don’t let it come out naturally, the tooth fairy won’t come,” says Mum.
“I don’t believe in the tooth fairy,” says Charlie.
“Then what happens to your teeth when they fall out?” asks Granddad.
“Dad throws them in the bin and gives me a pound.”
“Oh.”
Mum gives me a look, but I don’t feel guilty. Leading Charlie to believe in the tooth fairy would only lead to him finding out I was lying to him later on. What good could it possibly do?
Monday 2nd July 1990
The last time that I had a day off school and Will didn’t he had a bit of a tantrum and insisted that it wasn’t fair. Not this time. He was in his school uniform, which I suppose is quite smart, but he looked a bit of a scruff compared to me in my suit. He didn’t say anything, just put a hand on my shoulder before he left the house.
Mum was already in her dress, but Dad w
as nowhere to be seen.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked.
“He’s out tinkering with something. He’ll have work to do when he gets back.”
“But haven’t we got to get going?”
“We’ve got hours yet, love.”
“But we’ve got to get all of the way to Cambridge.”
John was being cremated. They were going to burn his body. I didn’t understand why.
“Your dad knows what he’s doing.”
“Why isn’t he being buried?”
“Well…” Mum came over and sat at the table beside me. “Some people prefer it that way. They don’t like the idea of burying the people they love in the ground. I imagine they want to spread his ashes somewhere special.”
“His what?”
“Ashes.”
“Where do they come from?”
“Oh, dear, I don’t want you to worry about this too much. After the body is burned, they collect the ashes and put them in an urn.”
“Why isn’t he being buried in a graveyard?”
“I don’t know, son. Maybe his mum and dad aren’t very religious? They might want to do it in their own way. Why don’t you sit and watch some telly until it’s time to go, hey?”
Dad didn’t come in for ages, and when he did, he was at the sink scrubbing away at his hands for so long. I was standing in the kitchen looking at my watch, but I daren’t say anything. When he stepped away from the sink, I could see that his hands still had dark smears on them in the creases. “Don’t worry, boy,” he said. “We’ve got plenty of time.” And he went up the stairs.
When he came down, he was in his smart suit. His hands were pink, with only slight spider-webs of grease still on them. His face was red, and though he hadn’t shaved for a number of days, he looked like he was supposed to have a beard, rather than just looking a mess. His suit was the same colour as mine. It was the smartest I’d ever seen him, apart from the picture of him and Mum on their wedding day. “Ready, boy?” he asked, and then he came over and adjusted my lapels. “Very smart,” he said.
I was waiting for the ‘but’, or for some kind of criticism, but it never came. Mum came down the stairs a second later. She glanced nervously at the clock, but neither of us said anything about how late we were running.
He drove like a loony. He was overtaking cars on the approach to bends, but he was lucky because nothing was coming the other way, apart from one time when the car flashed its lights at us and had to swerve into a layby. Mum was holding on to the door handle, and I could see beads of sweat on Dad’s forehead.
I kept looking at my watch. Dad must have seen me in the rear-view mirror.
“Take that bloody thing off,” he said, and turned around to glare at me.
Look at the road, I kept thinking, but he wouldn’t turn back. I pulled the watch off quickly, tearing the strap in the process. Once it was off, he turned back to the road, and then yanked at the steering wheel to pull us back into the right lane. The horn of the car we’d almost hit, without any of use even having seen it, blared.
“Spend a bloody fortune on a nice suit, and he’s wearing a cheap plastic watch.”
It wasn’t a cheap plastic watch. It was a Casio calculator watch. It was a birthday present from Mum and Dad. I doubt Dad had much to do with it. I’d torn the strap between two of the holes. I could probably still wear it, but it would either be too loose and fall off, or too tight and uncomfortable.
Where Dad had been sweating his hair at the front had darkened, and it was scruffy where he’d mopped at his brow. He started digging his fingers into his collar and breathing heavily.
As we pulled in the car park Mum turned to look at him. “Let me just sort you out,” she said, and reached towards him with her hankie.
Dad batted her hand away. “Leave it.”
When we got out of the car a group of people came towards us. Some were holding cameras. Among them was the man who had come to my door before, Joseph Price. “Thomas!” he said. “Have you got anything to say?”
Dad glared at him, and he stopped.
We went into the chapel. Soft music was playing, music that John wouldn’t have liked at all. We must have been quite late because most of the pews were already filled up and we had to sit near the back. There were a few people from the village I recognised, but most I didn’t who must have been John’s family. The dark wood of the pews and the old brick made the place look gloomy. At the front was a podium, which looked wonky because the wood on one side was bowed. There were small round stained-glass windows on either side, but they were just split into blocks of colour, red and yellow on one side, green and blue on the other. It wasn’t like the stained glass at church. There was no Jesus with his disciples or carrying his cross. There was no Jesus in the chapel at all. You could take a church being dark and dingy, because it was a church and it was hundreds of years old, but the newest and brightest thing in the chapel was the red curtain at the front, just behind the coffin.
I’d not really thought about the coffin. John was in there. My friend, John, who let me borrow his imported Gameboy before anyone else; who knew all of the words to John Barnes rap from ‘World in Motion’, and could sing it perfectly; who’d picked me first in the football on days when I was feeling down, even though I was crap, was inside that wooden box with that horrible red mark around his neck, with the hole in his head which got bigger, darker, and angrier every time I pictured it, and with his body twisted at that awkward angle. John was inside that coffin because something had killed him, and I hadn’t even gotten around to finding out what or why. Thinking about John, in that tiny box, I felt the roof of the chapel drop. The walls started to close in. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to get up and run, and Dad must have felt me fidgeting because he put a heavy hand on my leg and stared at me.
The sun must have come out from behind the clouds, because, as Dad was staring at me, his face went red. I looked up at the beam of light that seemed to be shining on only him through the red stained-glass panel. When I looked closer, I could see a slight yellow hint on the wall behind him, but it was nowhere near as prominent as the red on his face. It was getting hot in there, and my suit felt too tight and Dad’s hand felt like a claw digging into my leg.
My eyes darted around the room looking for an escape route. A man emerged from behind a pillar, perhaps having come from a back room, and took his place on the podium. He cleared his voice and all of a sudden all of the attention was on him. His words didn’t sink in, but I started to calm down. I watched John’s parents. His dad’s arm was around his mum, who dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. Occasionally I looked up at Dad, whose face was still illuminated in red light, giving him the look of a demon, and I had to look away.
When the man at the front stepped down, I realised I’d missed his whole speech. John wouldn’t have been able to sit through it either. Then he must have pushed a button or something, because the curtain opened, and two men helped guide the coffin through the hatch behind the curtain. I could imagine it opening up into a giant furnace which would swallow up the coffin whole and spit out the ashes. For some reason, when the coffin had gone through and the curtains closed the Mario death tune played in my head. But John can’t play on; he doesn’t have another life.
As soon as we got outside Joseph Price came up to us. “How do you feel, Tom, that whoever did this to your friend is still out there?”
I’ve never seen Dad move so fast. He had the front of Joseph’s shirt balled up in his fist, and he used it to pick him up off the ground. “I told you to leave my boy alone,” he said, and he threw Joseph to the ground. Dad then loosened his tie open, opened the top button of his shirt, and stomped off towards the car.
Dad diverted on the route home to stop by Uncle Rodney’s house in Greater Mosswick. He knocked on the door, and then a few seconds later he peered through the pane of glass beside the door. After that he went to the next window along (I think it was the living room; it had been a long
time since we’d been over to Uncle Rodney’s house) and peered in through there.
“Not home,” he said as he got back into the car. He drove off, and again stopped by the Merry Maidens.
While he went inside, I started at the pub’s sign. I’d never noticed that the three women dancing on the sign (presumably maidens) had their boobies out. I felt uncomfortable and looked away, so that when Dad opened the door, it made me jump.
“Well I don’t know where he is,” he said shaking his head. “It’s like he’s disappeared off the face of the Earth.”
Had the Underworld taken him too? He was an adult. He was tall, and strong. If it had grown powerful enough to take him, then it wouldn’t be long before it was too powerful to be stopped.
We were back in Little Mosswick before the end of the school day. Dad dropped me and Mum off outside the post office, and we were going to walk down to the school, then walk home with Will. We left the post office (armed with a Sherbet DibDab for me, and a Sherbet Fountain for Will) and started to walk towards the school. As we passed Downham Close spotted a couple of police cars outside Shaky Jake’s house. He had to be involved in what happened to John.
“My shoelace is untied,” I said to Mum, and crouched down, staring across the road the whole time. Had they discovered that he was possessed by a dead-eyed wanderer? Had they made connections with the Underworld? The front door opened, and two police officers came out. Shaky was standing at the door, looking shakier than ever.
“Come on,” Mum said, “Will’ll be out in a minute.”
“The other one needs re-tying too,” I said and watched the police get into their cars, leaving Jake at his door. He closed it quickly, and before the police had even started their engines, I could see his living room curtains twitch.
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