by David Storey
The smell of the earth, and grass—Arnie pulling me to my feet. A brown liquid running down my nose, over my lip, and seeping into my mouth. Arnie watched it with sickened fascination.
‘That’s great, Art! … great!’ Maurice was telling me. I leaned down in the scrum, watched the ball come in, go out. I stood up. The whistle went. Half-time.
The men sprawled and collapsed on to the massage table and the bench. Belching and groaning. There was no gas left. ‘Blind that bastard when he comes round the loose head. You go for his legs. Have you got that? Leave the frog’s head to me.’
‘Did you see how he belted Morgan?’
‘Nay, but bloody hell, fair’s fair.’
‘I got more money playing Union in Wales than I’ve ever done up here … and I tell you, if. …’
They calmed down. The warmth, the smell of the hot bath, and Dai’s single persistent voice guided the resentment. Frank brought over a bottle of water and rested his steaming carcass beside mine. He tipped the bottle to his lips, swilled his mouth, and spat. When I took the bottle from him I saw the blood oozing from his hair. It dried with the mud over his forehead, round his eyes, and over his swollen nose. ‘You all right?’ he said. ‘I’m stuffed. I’m an arse for wukking last night.’
The room was a stall of steaming cattle. Dai was going at it hard, telling how everything was going wrong. I crunched an ammonia phial in my fingers and shoved it up Frank’s nose. He shuddered, choked, and coughed to life.
We walked back on to the field slowly. A milder, impatient cheer met our second appearance, a tired trumpet. We stood and waited in the rain for the other team. With the weather thickening and the light fading early the crowd had thinned slightly either end of the ground. The better part of it was now stuffed in the main stand and in the covered stand opposite. Somewhere amongst the dark mass was my father. And Johnson. ‘We’re on the radio now,’ Maurice said as he ran by. ‘Keep your hair parted.’
‘See you.’
‘That’s it, kid.’
The game entered its long drag. With Frank half-dazed I ran about encouraging the side. Everybody wanted a good run with the ball to make sure their names went over the air on the Northern Service. In the scrum I leaned heavily against Arnie, feeling a bated reassurance in holding his back. I began to take advantage of planning the game by not taking part in it. When I actually held the ball and peered out, rain-blinded, at those dim circulating shapes I felt unsure and sent the ball away with a careful movement of the wrists. At one point I turned too slowly and unbalanced, and heard it credited with a noise from the crowd as a dark shape passed me, shooting up mud either side. A roar drew a curtain round the ground. We lined up behind the posts. Overhead, in the low cloud, an aircraft thundered.
‘Bad luck, Arthur,’ young Arnie said deliberately. I watched the placing of the ball carefully, the meticulous run of the kicker, the swing through of his leg, the small shape spinning silently through the rain and curving between the posts. A crisp eruption by the crowd.
I began to resent the activity around me. An old way of escape. I looked to the life that wasn’t absorbed in the futility of the game—to the tall chimney and the two flowering cylinders of the power station, half hidden by cloud, the tops of the buses passing the end of the ground, the lights turned on inside the upper decks, the people sitting uncommitted behind the windows. The houses were lit too, in their slow descent to the valley. I moved back to the centre, imitating the figures whose activity suddenly tired me. I was ashamed of being no longer young.
We were pressed back to our line. Maurice stole the ball and nicked it back to Frank. He stormed into the wall of men and was thrown down in a cloud of dirty steam and spray. Arnie was treated the same. They ran a yard, two yards, from the line and were thrown back as much. Frank tried again, pumping his huge body forward and concealing his grunt of pain as he was flung down. He had another go, and with a cry of frustration and rage, he was seized, lifted, and turned over before being dropped on his head and shoulders. He wheezed like a beaten machine as his skull drove into the earth.
The indignity brought a mixed cry of wonder and amusement from the crowd. I hoped Kenny wasn’t there. ‘There’s nothing on that field that can take punishment like Frank Miles,’ George often said to visiting chairmen. ‘And I’m including the ball as well.’
To my left the tiger captain watched the struggle of his forwards. ‘The ball! The ball!’ he was shouting. ‘Leave the man. … Get the bleeding ball!’ He beat himself with impatience.
The leather smacked into my outstretched hands. I ran straight at the man. ‘Go on Art! Go on Art!’ Maurice screamed behind me. I ran into him, over him. Trampled him and broke free into a gap. A pain thudded in my head in echo to my feet. An arm gripped my waist, slipped, caught again, and a fist sank into my neck. I carried him along. Then another caught me round the nose and eyes, the fingers explored for pain, forcing me to my knees. Arnie took the ball and with his boy’s shout of triumph threw himself into the confusion of mud and men, his body searching, like a tentacle, for an opening. He ran ten yards to a scream from the crowd, then fell into the sea of limbs.
I was still kneeling, absorbed in an odd resigned feeling. My back teeth chattered as I pulled myself up, my hands shook with cold, and I despised myself for not feeling hate for the man who’d torn my nostril. I was used to everything now. Ten years of this, ten years of the crowd—I could make one mistake, one slight mistake only, and the whole tragedy of living, of being alive, would come into the crowd’s throat and roar its pain like a maimed animal. The cry, the rage of the crowd echoed over and filled the valley—a shape came towards me in the gloom.
I glimpsed the fierce and brilliant whiteness of its eyes and clenched teeth through its mask of mud, flashing with a useless hostility. It avoided my preparations to delay it, veering past out of reach. I put my foot out, and as the man stumbled took a swing with my fist. I missed, and fell down with a huge sound from the crowd. The man recovered and went on running. He ran between the posts. Frank picked me up, the mud covering my tears. Where’s the bleeding full-back? I wanted to shout. But I could only stare unbelievingly at my legs which had betrayed me.
The water rose to my shoulders. It pressed on my chest and I fought for breath, coughing in the steam. Its heat brought my bruises to life. Over on my left Maurice chatted, just his head and a lighted cig above the water. Frank, drawing relief from his fag, turned his bull’s back to me. I rubbed the soap over his familiar stained skin. I knew it better than my own.
He submerged and left half the soap on the surface. When he brought his face up again he said, ‘Somebody’s pissing i’ the bath again.’ And after looking round with a vacant grin added, ‘It’ll be Arnie, thy can bet.’
‘Who me?’ The kid looked hurt and pointed to himself.
Frank lunged through the crowded bath at him. Maurice and me joined him, the others shot out. He screamed for help. We got hold of the wild animal and shoved his obscene head under the cold water tap. Maurice tickled his ribs. Water cascaded into the dressing-room. Everybody joined the shrieking. Arnie was tortured with his own laughter.
Then Dai cleared us out with the hose. We stood in front of the coke fire and were rubbed down. Maurice lay on the table, another cig in his mouth, having his knees dressed. The masseur bent over him, staining his body with orange liniment.
Frank, his belly relaxed and protruding, rubbed his head slowly with the towel, his biceps bunched like rocks. I had my ankles strapped, got dressed, and put my teeth in.
About the Author
David Storey was born in 1933 in Yorkshire, England, and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. His novels have won many prizes, including the Macmillan Fiction Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Man Booker Prize. He is also the author of fifteen plays and is a fellow of University College London. Storey lives in London
with his wife and four children.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1960 by David Storey
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
978-1-5040-1506-6
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10014
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