A Reluctant Cinderella

by Alison Bond

  Maybe if he scored now, maybe if he scored, then everyone – Joe, Sam, the fans, his wife – might think he was worth something after all.

  The opposition goalkeeper bounced the ball a few times in preparation for his goal kick. He walked out towards the edge of his area, shouting at his team mates to try to organize them.

  Samantha watched closely. The goalkeeper wasn’t paying attention, clearly he had been rattled by the closeness of Joe’s attempt on goal. He was about to step out of his box where he would no longer be able to carry the ball. White Stars would get a free kick in an incredibly powerful position.

  She tensed.

  At the very last second the goalkeeper looked down, dropped the ball with inches to spare and in his haste to correct his near-mistake he totally miskicked, sending the ball spinning half-heartedly to nobody and nowhere.

  Joe and Gabe both had their backs to the ball and spun round when they heard the reaction of the crowd.

  They both ran for the stray ball.

  One of them would have to give way otherwise there would be an almighty collision.

  Neither of them stopped.

  Joe felt his legs swiped from under him as Gabe used his superior body weight to gain control of the ball and shoot at goal.

  He missed.

  But Joe hardly noticed. His knee screamed in pain as his leg buckled beneath him and he sank to the cold, wet ground in agony.

  Samantha jumped to her feet in panic.

  No.

  Not Joe, not now.

  Around her everyone was bewildered. Who ever saw such a thing? Two players from the same team involved in a nasty tackle like that. It might be funny if the team was not a goal down. Then the crowd noticed that their most promising young player was still to get to his feet.

  And, like Samantha, they were scared.

  She ran down into the stadium, her feet gathering pace as she took the stairs down to the touchline. She stood beside the players’ dugout, watching with mounting horror as a stretcher was run out to the middle of the pitch where Joe lay on his back, his hands covering his face.

  He looked like a child.

  The referee and Gabe hovered over him, the other players looked on at a distance. When the team physio reached him Joe pulled himself up to a sitting position with some difficulty and then tried to stand. But he fell against the physio and was swiftly persuaded onto the stretcher.

  It did not look good; it looked awful and it made her feel sick.

  She watched him being carried off the pitch, wishing that she could close her ears to the crowd’s applause for the returning Moras when he was substituted for Joe.

  This can’t be happening; this can’t be over.

  The game continued. She couldn’t get close enough to speak to Joe as he was carried down the tunnel and away from the pitch. But she was close enough to tell that he was crying.

  Gabe knew exactly what he had done as soon as his foot connected with Joe’s leg. Up until that point he had been in a kind of daze but when he saw the trauma pass across his friend’s face and his legs fold underneath him, it shocked him back into reality and, like watching a slow motion replay, he watched Joe’s knee bend the way a knee wasn’t supposed to bend and then saw him fall to the floor.

  He knew what he had done.

  And he knew why.

  He didn’t go for the ball with the intention of hurting Joe – he was genuinely after the ball, but he hadn’t wanted Joe to have it. He wanted to take it from him, to take the goal from him and deprive him of the glory. He had years of glory ahead of him. So Gabe ran for the ball with every ounce of speed and strength that he had in him and a single-mindedness that possessed him. And in those final seconds when he still had time to pull up, to stop running, to let the better player take the ball, he wasn’t thinking of Joe – he was hardly thinking at all. He wanted to score.

  But he hadn’t even managed to do that right.

  And when he saw Joe fall and when he saw that he didn’t get up and they brought out the stretcher for him all he could think, all he could think for hours after, was – What have I done?

  He was not a man who prayed, but he prayed for Joe.

  They took him to hospital for a series of X-rays. He had nineteen days before the England game.

  ‘I’m his agent,’ she insisted, when she got there. ‘I should be with him.’

  The hospital’s busy casualty unit didn’t care.

  The smells and sounds of the medical environment were exactly the same as they were the world over and she flinched as she watched Joe being wheeled behind swinging plastic doors and out of sight. She thought of the gleaming private health care afforded to players in the UK, the medical facilities on hand at the stadiums, and she yearned to go home. They wouldn’t tell her anything and instead pointed her towards a bleak waiting room where she sat with Joe’s mother, Ana.

  ‘I’m his mother,’ said Ana, ‘I should be with him.’

  But they wouldn’t listen to her either.

  Sam was reminded again how very young Joe was. This wasn’t his last chance, she told herself, preparing for the worst-case scenario: a torn ligament, a shattered kneecap, surgery and months of recuperation, a year or more on the sidelines.

  ‘Was he in bad pain?’ said Ana.

  It was impossible to tell if Joe had been crying because of the injury, or because of what it meant, but she just said ‘no’ anyway, ‘not too bad’, and hoped that Ana wouldn’t be able to tell that she was lying. One way or another Joe was hurting.

  It wasn’t his last chance. But perhaps he had been hers. Was it selfish to think of the jewel of her list being damaged?

  Yes.

  But she thought about it all the same.

  An hour passed by before anyone came to tell them what was going on, and then it was only to say that Joe’s knee was being scanned so that they could compare the results of the X-ray.

  ‘The other player,’ said Ana. ‘Gabe? He is Joe’s friend?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Samantha.

  ‘So why did he do that?’

  Finally they were allowed in to see Joe. A nurse led them through the plastic swinging doors to a ward of curtained bays. He was in a bed wearing a hospital gown looking grim.

  His mum ran to him and muttered a few words in Polish as she fussed with his pillows and wiped his hair off his face. He still had mud from the football pitch on his cheek.

  ‘Have they told you anything?’ he asked.

  The two women shook their heads and then stiffened as the doctor appeared behind the curtain.

  They spoke in Polish, a three-way conversation between Joe, the doctor and his mum. Samantha waited as patiently as she could until Joe translated.

  ‘They don’t know,’ he said. ‘An hour of X-rays, half a dozen scans and they don’t know. They won’t know until the swelling goes down.’

  ‘They must have some idea?’ she said.

  ‘They don’t.’

  ‘The English FA is sending over one of their doctors,’ said Samantha.

  ‘Seriously?’ said Joe.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘You see any other England players here?’

  ‘Blimey.’

  His mum and the doctor continued to talk in Polish and it became clear that they were making arrangements for Joe to go home. Forms were signed, a wheelchair was produced and Samantha walked with them out to the car park and watched while Joe gingerly hopped into the front seat of his mum’s car, his bad knee bound in thick elastic bandages. She thought of all that bone and cartilage rubbing against itself and prayed that he wasn’t doing any more damage as she waved him off.

  She would have to ensure that a translator was available for the doctor from the FA. There was too much at stake for anything to be left to chance or ambiguity.

  Not just for Joe, but for her too.

  Damn it.

  She finally allowed in the selfish thought that had been whispering around th
e back of her mind since she saw him being taken away on the stretcher. She would not be able to sell him while his long-term fitness was in question. Unless Joe was given a clean bill of health before the transfer window closed, all the hard work she was doing getting the big clubs talking about him and making speculative approaches would come to nothing.

  Without a big deal for Joe all the medium deals on Slovenians and Ukrainians would not be enough.

  Her business would in effect be over before it began.

  And yet even as she thought this she didn’t care. She just wanted him to be well. He was a kid. A kid with an amazing future. To her surprise she realized that she wanted to see him well, even if it took far longer than the time the transfer window allowed. She wanted to see him healed more than she wanted to sell him.

  A voice reached her from the shadows. ‘What’s the prognosis?’

  Gabe stepped out from behind an ambulance, his face ashen. At first she thought that his breath was misted from the cold and then she realized with a degree of dismay that he was smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Is he going to be okay?’ he said. ‘Will he be able to play?’

  ‘They don’t know,’ said Samantha. She paused. ‘You’re smoking now?’

  He shrugged and looked down at the cigarette in his hand then dropped it to the floor and ground out the stub with his heel. ‘It would seem so, yeah.’

  ‘What happened out there, Gabe?’ she said.

  ‘I wish I could tell you.’ Tears glittered in his eyes. ‘I fucked up, Sam. What can I do? How can I make it right?’

  ‘I don’t think you can, Gabe.’

  It was cold and getting dark. She wanted to get back and make arrangements for the England team doctor. She wanted to call Joe and make sure that he didn’t put any weight on his knee, none at all, and tell him to apply an ice pack for the swelling. She wanted to take Gabe by the shoulders and shake him with every muscle in her body and demand to know why he had done what he did. But she knew that he wouldn’t be able to answer her.

  ‘I’m worried about you, Gabe,’ she said.

  He raised his face to the sky and took a deep breath. ‘We drew the match,’ he said. ‘One all.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘I scored.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  He gave a bitter snort of laughter that caught in his throat. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’m going to go now, Gabe,’ she said. ‘I’ll be at my hotel if you want to talk later …’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘maybe.’ But he had absolutely no intention of calling her. He didn’t even know why he had come. He had showered and changed in record time and been waiting outside the hospital for what felt like hours, long enough to buy this pack of cigarettes anyway.

  ‘I know you didn’t mean to hurt him,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty sure Joe knows that too.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ he said.

  A taxi rolled by and she waved it down. ‘You want to share a cab back to town?’

  ‘You’re okay,’ he said. ‘I want to walk.’

  ‘Go home,’ she said. ‘Go home and we’ll talk later.’

  He nodded and waited until she had driven around the corner out of sight before lighting another cigarette.

  She fell into bed when she got back to her hotel, but sleep eluded her for several hours, and she didn’t wake up until late the following morning, disorientated and still exhausted. There was a pile of messages growing for her at the front desk, a flurry of calls from the FA back in England, plenty from the British press.

  She was about to go upstairs when the receptionist stopped her. ‘Ms Sharp? Mr Lubin is waiting for you in the bar,’ he said.

  He was sitting with his back to her, watching English Premier League football highlights on one of the many televisions that were scattered around the popular sports bar at the Sheraton.

  She glanced up. Chelsea was playing. Both the Welstead boys were on the team and she watched as they played with one mind, and scored a goal in West London that was conceived somewhere in Yorkshire many years ago with the kind of instinctive teamwork that perhaps only brothers could hope for.

  He saw her. ‘Those boys are incredible.’

  ‘Monty and Ferris Welstead,’ she said. ‘I know. They used to be mine.’

  ‘I hope you made them a good deal.’

  ‘The tenth biggest in the world,’ she said. ‘Ever.’

  Had life ever really been that easy? Picking a multi-million pound deal out of several that had been on offer.

  ‘How is Joe?’ he asked.

  ‘It was too soon to say. I’ll call the hospital in a little while.’

  ‘You are worried about him.’

  ‘You’re going to tell me I shouldn’t get personally involved,’ she guessed. She beckoned the barmaid and ordered herself coffee and juice.

  ‘If I told you that would it stop you?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t help it. Perhaps it’s because I’m a woman. They’re my boys, all of them.’

  And something suddenly became clear.

  She looked around to make sure that they weren’t being overheard. ‘I won’t do it,’ she said. ‘The Russian deal, I can’t.’

  He took his eyes off the television and fixed her with a penetrating stare. ‘No?’

  ‘If I need to cheat to win then my victory will always feel hollow,’ she said. ‘If it comes to that then my career is balanced on lies. People need to trust you. That’s what’s important.’

  The stress of the last twenty-four hours was hanging heavy on her. She longed to crawl back into bed and sleep, but also she could see a bright clarity to her life that had been lacking for months. ‘So, thank you for the offer, Alek, but I won’t play the game that way. I’d rather not play at all.’

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Good. There was never any offer, Samantha. I wanted to know your true character before I helped you.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘There was no Russian offer for Gabe. I lied to you. Everyone keeps telling me you are corrupt and I needed to know for sure.’

  ‘You were testing me?’

  He nodded.

  ‘You know something,’ she said. ‘What is it? Tell me. Please, tell me.’

  ‘You lied to me, Samantha. You told me you were never married.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘Then who is Liam Sharp?’

  ‘Where did you find that name?’

  ‘At the end of a very long money trail. The three hundred thousand? It led to Liam Sharp. Who is he and why is he trying to ruin your life?’

  32

  Funny the things you take for granted until they are gone. Joe had never fully appreciated his two functioning knees before. Now one of them had gone and he missed it more than he missed his own father or Layla Petherick. He would give just about anything to have it back again.

  The fateful moment replayed in his mind relentlessly. Gabe bearing down on him, the certainty that he would stop because Joe was closer to the ball and would reach it first. But Gabe didn’t stop and the look on his face when he mowed Joe down was what Joe remembered most. For in that moment he saw hate. Pure hate. And he didn’t know what he had done.

  Samantha had been to see him, bringing along the doctor from the FA who unhelpfully reiterated the Polish doctor’s opinion that they would have a better idea how to proceed once the swelling in his knee had gone down. It should take about two days. And there were seventeen days left until the England match. Seventeen days and four hours, the doctor had said, with a precision which gave Joe the shivers.

  After the doctor left he called his dad who told him with great excitement about all the positive press coverage he was getting, and how the English people (while not to the extent that they once prayed for David Beckham’s broken metatarsal) were emphatically behind him.

  ‘Everyone knows who you are now,’ he said, as if that might make up for missing out
on England duty. What he didn’t mention was that the bizarre circumstances of the injury, a tackle from a team mate, had driven most of the headlines. Like a comic ‘and finally’ story on the news.

  Joe had never hated the view from his bedroom window, he had hardly even noticed it, but he thought that if he had to look for much longer at the same square of the grey communist-built building opposite, and the straggly tree branch that did nothing to improve its looks, he might end up throwing himself from the third-floor window in frustration.

  Except that would be a really stupid thing to do because then he’d end up with a fractured leg on top of his dodgy knee.

  So he couldn’t even do that.

  ‘Joe?’

  His mum again, bringing more food probably, like scrambled eggs and zurek that might make his swelling go down faster.

  ‘You’ve got a visitor,’ she said, stepping aside.

  His heart quickened because he was both thrilled and dismayed, and oh so slightly panicked. Layla Petherick walked into his bedroom. She looked like an angel.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he said, wishing that he wasn’t wearing pyjamas in the middle of the afternoon, wishing that his mum hadn’t brought her in here but instead had let him hop into the front room so that he mightn’t look quite as pathetic as he did right now.

  Layla, of course, looked sensational, dressed in some sort of trendy voluminous coat in a vibrant pink that picked out the sweetheart curve of her lips and swung from side to side when she walked.

  She smiled softly, which gave him a pain in his gut to match the one in his leg.

  ‘How’s the knee?’ she said. ‘It’s awful bad luck, Joe, but on the news they said you might be okay, so fingers crossed, right?’

  ‘On the news?’

  Layla Petherick was in his bedroom taking off her coat.

  She nodded and grinned. ‘I know! How mad is that?’

  It was mad all right. He couldn’t quite conceive of himself on the news, spoken about within the same space as prime ministers and world events. But it didn’t really cheer him up. You don’t want to be on telly for having a gammy knee, being a bloody invalid; you want to be on telly for scoring a goal and winning a match. That was supposed to be the next part of the Joe Wonder story.