This Sporting Life

by David Storey

  I went into the kitchen, she came after me and made my tea.

  ‘We’re doing quite well,’ I said. ‘You’ll be able to open a shop when I go.’

  ‘If you’ve only bought it to boast about you might as well take it back.’ She was smiling, and in a good mood.

  ‘I’ve a good mind to take you upstairs afore I go training,’ I said.

  ‘Oh have you. … And what makes you so sure I might go?’ She laid some plates down and began to margarine the bread.

  ‘I was thinking of the way you kissed me.’

  ‘It shows it can mean something, then. I was trying to show you I was grateful.’

  ‘And can you show me again?’

  She put down the knife and smiled cheekily. ‘I don’t know whether it’s worth two of what I gave you.’

  ‘But I say it is. And I should know. I bought it.’

  I got up and went round the table. She waited for me coming, her head bowed, her eyes on the plate with the knife. I bent down and put my arms round her, my hands over her small breasts. ‘Oh, now Arthur,’ she whispered.

  ‘Can’t I kiss you just once?’

  I put my cheek alongside hers, and felt her jaw move as she spoke. ‘I don’t suppose I could stop you if you tried hard.’

  ‘But won’t you give me one without fighting?’

  ‘I don’t think I should … what if Lynda came in?’

  ‘I bet she’d think I was making up to you.’

  I stroked her breast through her dress. She took my hand away and turned her head, her mouth open to say something. I pressed my lips against her mouth, and caught it open, and smoothed my tongue inside. I wanted to tell her how I felt. I ran my hands round her belly and waist and back. Then held her head, like a ball, pressed to mine.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say it?’ I said, when I pulled back.

  She looked weakened and lost, like a kid. ‘Say what?’ She only whispered when she tried to speak.

  ‘Say you’ve got some feeling for me … that you can feel something.’

  ‘Arthur … I can’t. Not yet’ She was hot and miserable. She pulled back, and turned to the table again. ‘I can’t let myself go like that. I’m not sure of you.’

  ‘But you know me.’ I tried to touch her, but she stiffened, and my hands fell off her. ‘You know how I’ve been to you.’

  ‘I can’t let my feelings go. Not again. Not to have them cut off like Eric … and everything gone, in one person, and dead. I want to be sure. You’ve to give me some time.’

  ‘But we’ve had all this time. Surely …’

  ‘I don’t know you mightn’t rush away—I don’t know what I feel.’

  ‘But Christ, be reasonable. I’d have gone now if I was going to. All that encouragement you’ve given me.’

  ‘I don’t know. You might just want to hear me say it—and see me feel something. Then you might feel that’s all you wanted, and go away. How do I know?’

  She looked pale and worn. Her good mood had gone quickly, like all her moods, and she was unsure again. Just when for once I’d got close to her, almost too close for her to let go. She picked up the knife, and that hardness came into her face. She’d almost given in, and she regretted it.

  ‘You’re always fighting against me,’ I said. ‘And you know I can’t be that bad. When’re you going to give us a bit of peace?’

  She didn’t answer. She went on stroking the fat on to the bread: the grease and the crumbly dough were dirt.

  ‘There mightn’t be any of us left by the time you’ve made up your mind,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t I go upstairs with you?’

  ‘But that’s not the same. I don’t feel you mean it. You make me feel I’m buying it off you. I’m just buying. And I’m not.’

  ‘Well, that’s me. That’s how I am. There’s nothing else left for me to do.’ She was the angry little woman again. She banged the knife handle on the table. ‘I wish you wouldn’t work me up like this. I’ve nothing to give you, Arthur.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  She stood up and rearranged the table absent-mindedly. ‘There you start again,’ she said. ‘Telling me how I should feel. What I should be like. If you’d only let me alone a bit. But you won’t. You’re so big. You’re so stupid. Arthur. You don’t give me a chance.’

  I sat with them a while and watched the set. When I went out early to training I already felt it had been the last chance, and I’d never see her happy. I couldn’t understand what she wanted from me. She’d never been so close before to saying what she felt, and I thought it was only too plain how I felt, how I wanted to help her out. What else did she want? It’d been her last chance. And it’d been mine. I felt like a big ape given something precious to hold, but only squashing it in my big, clumsy, useless hands. I couldn’t even apologize.

  I dropped off the bus, and decided I wouldn’t go to training. I got off half-way up the hill to Primstone, just when the lights were pricking the valley, making it bleed with its slow night glow. Quite a few people recognized me. They nudged and pointed. They were always doing that. I didn’t like Middleton talking about footballers strutting about town as if they owned it. It was the way they were treated that made them like that. The way people looked at me, spoke to me, handled my affairs generally whenever I wanted to buy a suit, a stick of chewing-gum, a gallon of petrol. They made me feel I owned the place. Course I strutted about. They expected it. I couldn’t help it. I walked in front of these people now, and I felt a hero. They wanted me to be a hero—and I wanted to be a hero. Why didn’t she see that? It wasn’t me who was always telling her how she should be, how I wanted her to look, it was she who was always on at me. Not so much by words. But in her real woman’s way. Keeping her feelings in. Keeping her stinking feelings back so that I felt it was me who was to blame and nobody else. I was always reproaching myself for her, always feeling in the wrong. Never her. She was the bloody martyr with two kids, let loose in the world with nobody to protect them.

  So I come along. And she starts to play me about. Was that how it’d been? All along I’d thought of myself as the gallant frog, going out Saturday afternoons to be knocked about, thumped, cut, and treated generally like a piece of mobile refuse, just so I could have that extra load of cash, and help her out. I even used to think of her when I was playing, as if I was playing for her, as if it was all worth it if only to make her happy—with a car, a fur coat, and now a TV.

  But I was wrong. She wasn’t like that. I knew she wasn’t like that because I knew that wasn’t the reason I played football, that wasn’t the reason I fought for ninety minutes every Saturday as if the world was coming to an end. I knew it wasn’t that—because even as I’d been thinking I’d gone on walking up the hill towards the stadium turrets, taking notice of how people noticed me, hooted car horns, and said, ‘Good night, Art’, even when I’d never seen them before. I was a hero. And I was crazy because she seemed the only person in the world who wouldn’t admit it.

  She knew that. She really did know that. Perhaps she even thought it was the one thing that held me to her. Because, whatever she said, she needed me. She couldn’t manage without me. And she wouldn’t admit it. She had her pride. Greater perhaps, because of Eric, than anybody else’s pride. She wasn’t going to show her need. She had the one hold over me because she knew; needed her to make me feel whole and wanted. I could see her fear now. If she gave me her love, just for a minute, an hour, I might never look at her again.

  I couldn’t make her feel that wasn’t true. I was the big ape again, known and feared for its strength, frightened of showing a bit of soft feeling in case it might be weakness. I might like all these nods and waves and nervous twitches that my passage along the road created, but they were always some distance away. People wouldn’t act like that if they were close. I wanted a bit more than a wave. I wanted to have some
thing there for good: I wasn’t going to be a footballer for ever. But I was an ape. Big, awe-inspiring, something interesting to see perform. No feelings. It’d always helped to have no feelings. So I had no feelings. I was paid not to have feelings. It paid me to have none. People looked at me as if I was an ape. Walking up the road like this they looked at me exactly as they’d look at an ape walking about without a cage. They liked to see me walking about like this, as if the fact I tried to act and behave like them added just the right touch the next time they saw me perform. ‘I saw Arthur Machin last week,’ they’d say, ‘walking along West Street.’ It was just what they needed when they next saw me run on to the field, just the thing to make them stare in awe, and wonder if after all I might be like them. I might be human.

  I felt I’d done a night’s training already by the time I reached Primstone. The floodlights had been turned on and the stadium bowl was filled with a blue-green glare. A few players ran round the perimeter of the pitch, talking and laughing in the night, filling the empty stands and terraces with their single voices. The people who’d come to watch training were gathered round the tunnel so they could see their particular favourites run out, and maybe catch a word or two of what they were saying, and get a nod or wave in answer to their shouts.

  It was cold. I put two jerseys under my track suit and did a couple of laps before Dai came out and started us on exercises in the middle of the pitch. The place was big and bare. We looked like midgets. We bent and strained, twisted and rolled, shadow-boxed in two rows, sprinted up and down the pitch again and again, slowing and spurting according to Dai’s whistle. We practised the set moves three times each, then played the ‘A’ team at touch-and-pass. All this time Maurice hadn’t spoken to me. And nobody had mentioned Judith.

  In fact nobody would have mentioned any of it hadn’t Mellor, when we were all stuffed together in the bath, started off a joke about a pregnant woman. We sat leg to leg, pressed up tight to each other, fighting for a bit of space to duck a head and rinse some hair. The water was its usual grey, with bits of grass floating on the top, but the froth of rinsed soap was slowly hiding the colour underneath. It was the usual smell of body and carbolic, dampened down with steam, broken up by joking bodies. ‘Lady,’ Mellor finished, ‘if I’d known you were in that condition I wouldn’t have asked you.’

  The bath overflowed with laughter. Mellor’s usually stiff face broke up into creases. One or two, who’d waited for the end of the joke, got out of the bath, and Dai, who’d stood by the bath side quietly listening with a ready toothy smile, picked up a towel and started rubbing them down.

  Tommy Clinton, who spent most of his life worrying hard how to enjoy it, came to the bath side and said, over everybody’s head, ‘Have you heard about Arthur, then?’

  They looked at him and me, and decided they hadn’t.

  ‘What’s that, Tommy lad?’

  Clinton laughed in preparation. ‘He’s barn a be a daddy. … Aren’t I right, Art? And the Mayor’s gunna be godfather.’

  I pulled a few funny faces, thought about pasting Tommy, and said, ‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it.’ I looked round for Maurice. He was sitting quietly at the end of the bath, smoking, looking at Clinton through his smoke as if he wasn’t sure he’d kill him then or later on outside.

  ‘Nay, Arthur, What about that time last Christmas? Me and the girl friend. …’ He turned round with a big gesture to everybody, his naked body flushed and trembling with so much laughing. ‘… We was working out, it mu’n’ve been last Christmas at Weaver’s little home from home. Old Art here and Judith were knocking it off in that front bedroom so hard the bloody tiles fell off the roof.’

  When the laughing had dropped down again I said, ‘You’re getting the names mixed up aren’t you, Tommy? That was Lionel Manners’ sample you’re talking about.’

  He stopped laughing to think a minute. ‘You know, Art, you might be right there. It’s surprising how you get things mixed up. Now you mention it I’ve got a faint reckoning of something like that. Perhaps we can let you off’n it this time. There’s alus Maurice to consider.’

  ‘Shut your bloody hole, Clinton,’ Maurice said from the far end. So seriously that Clinton almost did.

  ‘Christ. I was only having a joke, Maurice. As far as I’m concerned it’s anybody’s baby but mine. …’ Clinton risked another joke. ‘Even then, if you don’t wan’ it, Morry,’ he said, ‘I might tek it o’er.’

  Maurice threw his cig across the room, jumped up, and with bodies leaping out of his way in surprise he trampled through the bath. There was a huge swell and cascade of water, out of which Maurice lunged over the side at Clinton.

  The reserve had been too surprised himself to move. He thought maybe him and Maurice were going to do a joke together. Maurice caught him with a swinging fist. But they were both wet and badly placed, and Maurice, though he hit him again, didn’t hurt him. Dai and some others separated them. They found Clinton had broken the edge of a tooth when he slipped against the concrete bath side.

  ‘Nay, Maurice lad,’ Frank said, pushing his great belly against him and fastening him to the wall. ‘Just be fair. Clinton’s got a big hole. All right. But lay off.’

  Maurice told Frank something nobody could hear. He shrugged his huge shoulders, and turned his body away from Maurice. ‘Leave the lad alone, Maurice,’ he said. ‘He won’t say owt else about it.’

  I got out and dried myself, and put my teeth in.

  When Mrs Hammond got the news, as I knew she would, she got hold of the bad end of it, and bit hard. People were always telling her stories about me, on an average one a day. She knew more about me than I did myself, because some days she’d be told how I’d been seen in three different places—all ‘bad’ places—at the same time the night before. Though she couldn’t believe any of them she just took a general impression of what I was like outside. I couldn’t blame her doing this, and I couldn’t do anything about the impression being a bad one. I was supposed to be ‘a bit of a lad’ and ‘quite a rake on the quiet side’: nothing I said or did could alter this. People wanted me that way, and they got it. I suppose my father was treated the same way as Mrs Hammond.

  When I got home on Thursday night to change before training, she said, ‘I heard about Judith Parkes today.’

  ‘I didn’t know you knew her,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t. But I do now. She works at the Town Hall. Quite a lady, I was told. A very good reputation, and all that.’

  ‘You’ve heard about the kid she’s having? Taken some time to get this end of town, hasn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t sound bothered.’

  ‘Should I be? Where did you hear it?’

  ‘I heard it in a shop actually—they all seemed surprised you should be the father.’

  ‘So you’ve heard that one. You’re a bit behind the times. I’ve been dropped now. Maurice is daddy number two. Who told you about it anyway? I suppose by rights I should go knock their faces in.’

  ‘Does it honestly matter how I heard it?’

  ‘I suppose you believe everything people tell you about me. Like that time you were told I’d raped a little girl. Remember? The woman said she had certain proof.’

  ‘When everybody gets the same idea as this one, though—they can’t all be wrong. … They said you were seen arguing with her at the Mecca last Saturday night. That you made quite a scene, and they all watched her walking off the floor with you running after her.’

  ‘And you really believe all this pub talk?’

  ‘As I said, when everybody gets the same idea it’s not always wrong.’

  ‘No. And it’s usually not all right. I thought you’d got past listening to what people told you about me.’

  ‘I’m not saying I do believe it,’ she said primly. ‘But it’s funny that your name should have been connected. There’s no smoke without fire.’

/>   ‘You make me bloody sick,’ I told her. I put on my coat and went out. She shouted something after me, but I didn’t want to hear.

  This time I didn’t go training. I went up to Primstone, collected my pay, and tried to avoid seeing Maurice. I caught sight of him coming into the ground, and I waited in the tunnel till he’d gone by. I was blaming him—and no doubt he was blaming me and Saturday night far more. As I walked away, taking some trouble to avoid bumping into players going up to the ground, I wondered if I oughtn’t to go and see Weaver. What I should see him about I didn’t know. I felt all along I’d misjudged him, looked down on him because he wasn’t a strong pig like me, just one of those who watched me perform. Yet he was one of the few people who’d treated me as a person—as an oddity, perhaps, but still, an oddity with feelings. I caught a bus through town to Sandwood, and walked up the lane to his house.

  Mrs Weaver answered the door. She was completely surprised, almost stunned. I could tell from her look that she was in by herself. ‘Hello, Machin. What do you want at this time of day?’

  I asked her if Weaver was at home, and she shook her head. ‘No, he’s out,’ she said, and in such a way I felt cheap. She seemed to think I knew he was out and had come up purposely. ‘What did you want him for? Anything important?’

  ‘No. It doesn’t matter.’

  I started thinking we could start where we’d left off, that Wednesday a few months ago. The same idea might have been in her mind. It was dark and misty in the garden, and me standing there—it must have seemed I was offering an open invitation. If her face was anything to go by, she found the idea too sudden to be repulsive.

  When she said, ‘Do you want to come?’ in an unsure voice, I felt she would, after all, be some consolation. Like Weaver himself, she was free to give something without getting or expecting anything back. Maybe, like Weaver, she was getting tired of that role. The last time she’d treated me like an ape. Grabbing hold of an ape was, for some people, better than just watching it perform. She’d been crude, thinking I was crude, and I’d frightened away. This time she looked at me in surprise. She was tired. I must have looked sick, for she was staring at me as if I might be a person.