The match had begun promisingly. It was his first start for the team, and the sick cramping feeling of the changing room soon left him as he became quickly involved in the game. In one early muscular exchange, as possession swapped repeatedly from one side to the other, the ball spilled out to him on the wing and he ran instantly at the fullback, who, stumbling, tripped, ballooning the ball out over their falling bodies for a corner. A short way into the half, however, a bungle between the two central defenders – who were sat now in the seats in front of Tom watching Total Wipeout on a laptop – resulted in a goal for the home side. After that the confidence went from the team. They lost 3-1. In the miserable sweaty fug of the changing room afterwards the manager called them a bunch of soft fucking faggots, and when one of the younger players giggled, the manager stepped forwards and kicked him in the leg.
The coach had left the dual carriageway and was now moving slowly down a superstore-lined arterial road, coming to a halt at traffic lights. A group of home supporters stood outside a pub, smoking. It took a moment for any of them to notice the coach, and when one of them did he seemed unsure what to do, watching it anxiously until a couple of the others followed his stare and started immediately into a frenzy of hand gestures. At his old club, the coach had tinted windows – even the reserve-team coach. In this league, though, the supporters were always in your face. They came up to you in the street and at the supermarket; and inside the small, tight, windswept grounds where they stood grimacing in huddles along the terracing, individual faces and voices were already recognisable to him. The lights changed, and he gave a final glance at the group, rhythmically fist-pumping now in an ecstasy of abuse as the coach began to pull away in the direction of the hotel.
He was rooming with Chris Balbriggan – a situation Balbriggan seemed none too happy with, judging by the way he threw his bag onto the bed by the window, turned the television on too loud and pounded gruntingly at the window for a couple of minutes before accepting finally that it was not designed to open. He stayed there staring out of it instead, occasionally giving a small shake of his head, at his misfortune, or at the flat-roofed view of the neighbouring retail estate. Balbriggan, Yates and Frank Foley, the goalkeeper, were no longer allowed to stay with one another, in any combination, and had all been paired with younger or newer members of the squad.
Although they were banned from room-sharing, the manager did not seem to mind those three keeping company on the nights out after matches. In fact, they were the players that the manager himself kept to, and they formed a boisterous circle near the bar counter of the first place the team went into, while the other players piled into a large sticky red booth or went in pairs around the floor jokingly strong-arming their way into groups of girls.
There was nowhere left to sit in the booth so Tom stood on the outside with the other young players – most of whom had come through the youth team and stuck together – smiling and gravely trying to hear what was being said above the music. Sat immediately below him, Gavin Easter, the right back, was telling a story. Tom kept his eyes on the top of his head, trying, in case anybody should glance at him, to look coolly amused. He could see the raw greased scalp through Easter’s stiff clumping hair. He couldn’t hear a word. When the story was finished, and the others laughed, Easter leaned back, obviously unaware of Tom stood right behind him because when his shoulder touched Tom’s thigh he twisted to look up, and smiled. In a voice that was quiet enough it was probably meant just for him, he said: ‘Christ, Tom, if I’d got that close to their lad today maybe we wouldn’t have got thumped so badly.’ In that moment, Tom felt so grateful that he was almost moved to grip him by the shoulder and say something funny in reply.
He went to the toilet instead. On his way back, in order to avoid being bought a drink, he moved to the bar to buy one for himself. He did not notice, until he got served, that he was wedged up against the back of Frank Foley. Foley was talking to a tall girl with smooth pale shoulders, stood beside him, and each time he leaned in to speak to her his large backside butted against Tom’s waist.
The girl was frowning.
‘What?’
There was another press of the backside and she nodded, looking out at the room briefly, before turning back to Foley.
‘Sorry, love, I’ve never heard of you.’
She moved to collect three tall glasses of dark liquid and jostled her way out from the bar. Foley stayed where he was, with one arm rested on the counter, looking at his pint. When Tom got out from the bar he was still there, unmoving, the same expression on his face as two thousand other people had already seen three times earlier that day.
Balbriggan did not come back to the room all night, as far as Tom was aware. Tom knew that Balbriggan had returned to the hotel, from the nightclub they’d ended up at, because he was among the mob in the cafe-bar singing and wrestling and drinking from the bottle of rum that somebody had taken from behind the mangled bar shutters.
Tom stayed for about half an hour before going up to bed. He fell asleep immediately, and deeply, before waking just after four with a stiffness in both legs and his face damp with sweat. From the flat glare of a security light outside the window he could see the kitbag still on top of the other bed. He stared at it for a while as he thought back on the day, the match, the night – and a familiar unease came over him that made him close his eyes. His eyelids felt heavy, gummy with perspiration. He became aware of a faint sobbing noise out in the corridor. He kept his eyes closed, trying to shut it out – the noise, the uneasy feeling, the security light.
What got him out of bed in the end was not so much care or curiosity but the creeping anxious thought that if he stayed there listening for much longer then he might begin to cry himself.
He saw immediately where the noise was coming from. At the end of the corridor, in a leggy heap against the wall, beside a fire extinguisher, a young girl was slumped forward with her forehead resting against her knee. He moved towards her. There was the smell of vomit, and a dark tidemark on her shin and calf where it had clung and spiralled down her leg like a chocolate fountain. She was still sobbing quietly but did not look up at him as he kneeled in front of her. She did not respond even as he positioned one arm under her armpits, the other under the tacky back of one knee, then the other, and lifted her up. In the brightness of the corridor lighting, with her eye make-up bleeding and a small pink rash on one of her temples, she looked to him very young, younger even than his sister.
‘It’s OK,’ he whispered. ‘It’s OK.’
He carried her into the room and kicked Balbriggan’s bag off the bed before laying her down and gently arranging the covers over her.
She was still asleep in the exact same position when Balbriggan came into the room when it was light outside. He leaned over Tom’s bed gigglingly and slapped him on the cheeks a few times until he was fully awake. As Balbriggan left the room, looking from Tom to the girl and smirking, an unstoppable sensation of pride flared briefly inside him, that turned almost immediately to guilt and stayed with him as he got up, showered and woke the girl – who moved silently into the bathroom to wash her face and leg before letting herself out into the corridor.
When he got to the ground floor to join the squad, she was nowhere to be seen. He didn’t ask after her, and he didn’t say anything about what had happened to any of the others. He kept to himself – as they filed out of the hotel to the mournful sound of lobby music and the tired, unhappy glances of reception staff – noticing, as he went through the doors, the milky sap in the yucca plant, bent and lolling next to the entrance where the two central defenders had struggled about on top of each other the night before.
The following Saturday he was on the bench. Late in the match, with the team 2–0 down, the manager sent him on, and in his eagerness to show his worth Tom raced into a tackle on the fullback that left him with a badly bruised foot. The injury kept him out of the next two matches.
By the time the foot had healed, the manager – with the team in the relegation zone two months into the season – had brought in three loan players, one of them an out-and-out rightwinger, the same side as Tom. On the afternoon of Tom’s return to training, the manager approached him during the warm-down to say that he would not be in the next away-match squad.
He spent the evening of the match in his digs, occasionally checking the score on his laptop. He watched television, spoke briefly on the phone to his family and ate a takeaway, a pizza. His dad wanted to come down and help him find a flat of his own to rent. It was getting silly now, his dad said. When Tom signed, the chairman told them that the club would help with finding a place for him, and in the meantime the chairman had one or two small flats of his own that new players could stay in until they got fixed up. As yet, nobody had spoken to him about moving and, as he told his dad on the phone, this didn’t feel like the right time to go to the manager asking for help. His dad came down the following week. He had arranged a couple of days off work. They went for a drink, and a meal, and the next day found a studio flat in a new apartment block near the town centre where, they agreed, he would be more in the thick of things. He was proud of him, his dad said. He was doing well, adjusting, considering his age.
They went to a match together, which ended in the first victory of the season. They sat in the main stand. Tom didn’t tell him that he had bought their tickets. His dad said that the way this manager liked to play didn’t suit his game; it was big-man hoofball and he would need to be patient, roll his sleeves up.
After his dad left, and until the new place was ready, he carried on as before: driving to the training ground in the morning, returning to his digs in the late afternoon. A few times after training and the canteen he went with the other players to the pub across the road where they filled the hours with pool and drinking games and the afternoon races; or sometimes he would drive the short distance to the coast, to one or other of the small resorts there, and walk along the seafronts and beaches. On one of these afternoons there were three boys of about his own age sitting on a bench along a promenade, who stopped their conversation to look up at him as he walked past. When he was a short way further on one of them shouted something, but it got lost in the wind and the movement of the ocean.
Following an especially cheerless defeat the manager called them all in for training the next morning, even though this would normally be a rest day. He was in an unusually threatening mood. In bitter silence they strained and hobbled for lap after lap around the pitches until he was done with them. As the squad began dragging back to the changing rooms, Tom asked the reserve goalkeeper, Hoyle, if he fancied staying behind to practise a few crosses. It wasn’t to impress the manager – even though that was of course what the other players would think – but because of the guilty, lonely feeling he had been left with since his dad left. Be patient. Roll your sleeves up. Besides which, the manager always strode away immediately on calling an end to the session, still in his tracksuit, to go and see to his van-hire company.
They practised crossing and catching together for about half an hour, until Hoyle said he was going in. Tom told him he might stay out a bit longer, practise a few drills. Hoyle laughed. ‘You’re not in the Premiership now, mate. That lot will be in the pub in ten minutes.’
He spaced out half a dozen cones along the right-hand side of the pitch and emptied a bag of balls by the cone furthest from the goal. Then he repeated a shuttle: dribbling around each cone until he reached the dead-ball line, looked up and swung a cross in, aiming each time for the same spot at the near post. He did this until all of the balls were scattered over the neighbouring pitch, where the groundsman had been driving up and down, mowing the grass.
This groundsman now got off his mower and started to jog about, fetching and kicking the balls back to him. Tom, embarrassed, ran to collect the balls himself, but as he got closer he saw that the groundsman was in fact enjoying himself, smiling, and kicking each ball with deliberate aim towards the goal. He was still at it when Tom reached the join of the two pitches, where he stood and watched him kick the rest of the balls. When they were all returned, many of them into the net, the man looked up at him.
‘Don’t suppose you want to try a few penalties against me, do you?’
He was the younger of the two groundsmen, probably in his early twenties – the older one was in charge of the stadium pitch – and as Tom fired balls at him from the penalty spot he began to wonder if he had been a footballer himself. He was agile, even in his heavy boots and canvas trousers, gleefully diving and saving three of the penalties with the leathery palms of his gardening gloves. Maybe he had been with the club’s youth team; one of those who didn’t make the cut.
When the balls were finished Tom walked towards him.
‘You’re good, you know.’
The man was sweating, and wiped a long muddy smear over his broad forehead with the back of a glove. ‘Obviously not been taking tips off you lot then, have I?’
He grinned, then started walking back to his mower, as Tom collected the balls and the cones and went to change.
The other players, including Hoyle, had all left, so he took his time showering and changing, enjoying the quiet echo of his studs on the concrete floor and the still-steamy warmth of the shower room, smiling occasionally at the thought of that impromptu penalty session. Afterwards, as he gathered his things, he stared ahead at the pool of shower water struggling around the drain. The thought of driving, of empty windswept beaches, of his bare room in the chairman’s flat – his kitbag suddenly felt like a heavy weight in his hand and he sat down, watching as the last of the water eddied and choked down the hole.
He came out onto the pitches and listened for the sound of the mower, but all he could hear was the noise of cars in the distance beyond the fencing and scrubland. On the other side of the four pitches from the road was the small graffitied outbuilding where the groundskeeping equipment was kept, and he made towards this now, trying to ignore the exposed, self-conscious sensation as he walked across the empty expanse of reeking cut grass.
He could see the man through the doorway, carefully pouring the last of one pot of white paint into another on top of a trestle table. Before Tom reached the building he looked round in surprise and, Tom thought, a little amusement.
‘What, more penalties?’
The man looked down again and shook the last of the paint into the pot. Tom stood in the doorway. He knew he should say something but he didn’t know what that should be. The man did not seem bothered that he was standing there in his doorway watching him work. On the walls, among mounted rakes and shelves of canisters and paint and sprinklers, there were old team posters and a long dirty club scarf that had been nailed up, flecked with paint. Somehow the sight of these things filled Tom with a faint sadness. He watched the man press lids onto the paint pots and move towards the dustbin by the door with the empty pot.
He was about to open the dustbin when Tom reached forward nervously to clasp him on the arm. The man looked at him. Tom let his hand fall to his side and looked down, ashamed, unsure what to say, at the paint pot still in the man’s hand, his heavy boots, and his own trainers, now stained with green. He was conscious of how clean he was this close up to the man’s work clothes, marked with mud, grass, paint. Tom dared not look up. He listened to the dim thrum of the road. After a few seconds the man turned and Tom watched his back as he moved away, hearing then the unbearable clunk of the paint pot being put down onto the table.
Tom turned to look out of the doorway at the wide abandoned field and he felt the warmth of the man against him. The slow, gradual press of his hands on Tom’s sides. Tom stepped forward, pulling himself gently away. Then he turned and looked right at him, at his large doleful face, and he was filled with a sudden glorious sense of risk as the man stood there, waiting for him.
The man was in some pain at first. To
m stopped, not knowing what to do. This had happened the other time, a couple of years ago – neither of them then had been sure how to go on and so they hadn’t, trying instead other things, frustrated.
After a moment though, of calmly guiding Tom’s hand and then moving it aside, the man indicated for him to continue.
Later, he would remember the smell of paint, and petrol, in the man’s hair; the grass cuttings caught there, gradually working themselves loose.
There was no training the next morning because of the weekend’s match, so he spent the day moving into his new flat. There was not a lot to move. By midday, he had driven all of his things over from the other place and put them in: his clothes, his stereo, his family’s old pots and pans, his posters of his boyhood club. He spent the afternoon arranging these things, with a growing sick jittery sense of how permanent it felt. The thought of the future filled him with anxiety as he moved about the small clean flat and folded his clothes into the wardrobe, sorted the television reception, tacked his posters onto the bedroom walls, then removed them and put them up in the corridor.
He needed to phone his dad and tell him he was in, but he couldn’t.
On the afternoon of Saturday’s match he went to the players’ bar with the other uninvolved members of the first-team squad. He was the only player to watch the match. He stepped out of the bar into the tiny walled-off area at the top of the main stand and sat drinking alone, following absently as the team laboured to a one-all draw, the muffled noise through the glass behind him of Chris Yates and Frank Foley arguing, on and off, all through the match.
The Best British Short Stories 2013 Page 4