He looks at a column on the right-hand side of the page, sees the same picture he’d seen at Tony’s, cropped so you could see Luis’s face as he runs in the heat in front of some half-built stadium.
A tug of war between Europe’s top clubs is underway for football’s next big thing. Luis Fonseca Andrade, who hails from Cape Verde but is yet to represent the Blue Sharks at senior level, and who was apparently plucked from the relative obscurity of the Sporting Lisbon B team at the start of the season to sparkle for the nomadic central Asian club Petrosat Tajik Star, plaything of the mysterious gas tycoon Yusuf Khan. Petrosat are not recognised by FIFA or any Asian football federation and any move clubs make for the player will be complicated by this, and by the thorny issue of third party ownership. The player’s contracts are managed by Luisito Holdings, registered in the Cayman Islands with investors from three different continents, according to the company website.
None of this seems to be deterring scouts from the Premier League and La Liga heading for the central Asian states (Petrosat are trans-national, with no home ground, one of the many sticking points with FIFA) to watch the slight, tricky, left-footed number 10 (at least that is what he looks like in grainy internet footage) dubbed inevitably ‘the new Messi’. If, indeed, the player is actually real. In the virtual world of football gaming, he is already priced in the hundred million euros bracket and yet, ‘This player is a sprite, a ghost,’ a Sporting Lisbon source suggested yesterday, intimating that a player called Luis Fonseca Andrade had never appeared for any of the club’s teams.
As if the player’s background and the stories swirling around him were not exotic enough, he began the season, playing in a hastily arranged friendly for League 2 Irontown at their historic Anvil Yards ground, or at least someone with that name did. If even some of the rumours are true, he might be starting next season at Old Trafford or Camp Nou, unless, of course, the player’s existence is some sort of elaborate hoax.
The boy is real, that is all he can think. Imagine your whole existence being doubted. Liam thinks of the way he turned and hit the ball in the friendly, the way the boy moved across the defenders, not that any of the Irontown team were going to pick him out with a pass. The real thing, maybe. He pictures men leaving modest flats on the edge of iron towns the world over, and flying on planes to places they would never have believed existed, seekers of something, searching out boys to run through other men’s dreams, men looking for lost sons. Maybe that is what he will do when he has finished playing. Wander the earth in search of the one, he thinks. He’ll buy a ticket to Finland first.
His only training this morning is to be some stretching and a massage. Archie wants him fit for the weekend, wants him to stay fit, no question of whether he is in or out of the team now.
The woman sloshes soap suds across the tarmac, finishes the mopping. The two boys wait alongside her, and their lives he can well imagine, waiting for the early morning bus from Cowton or the Peng, their mums and grandads telling them they’re lucky to have any job at all, and them hating it, hating it, scraping the shit left by other people’s shoes, by fucking birds for god’s sake, and thinking there must be something else than this, knowing other lads who don’t work, fuck that, who get by. They drift back towards the building. They disappear into their headphones and computer games, dream of gold training shoes and Luis Fonseca Andrade. He is suddenly pleased that Jari is two thousand miles away, not here, far from here.
…
Because he was the eagle for a long time.
That run angled behind the fullback, the piece of a puzzle falling into place, and Eusébio knows what’s going to happen before it does, but then so does everyone by that point, the crowd hoarse now, hushed from cheering the North Koreans into a three-nil lead, these men who’ve come from nowhere.
And now the English crowds cheer him.
He whips his whole body around the ball, through it, so he hits it across the keeper, right footed, into the far corner, but he knows twenty yards or so before he gets there what will happen.
He moves flat footed almost, this way and that, but those feet barely touch the ground, they kiss it and keep moving, that’s the secret, part of it. Don’t stay in the same place for too long.
…
Liam watches the hooded figure out of the window for a while. He or she – he thinks that the slight frame inside the baggy sweatshirt suggests a thin girl. Something also in her movements, graceful in spite of her clothing, careful, that a man or boy would surely do more clumsily or with more self-conscious bravado – reaches high up the fence panel balancing against a wet trunk and branch, turns the screwdriver methodically. She reaches up and grips the mesh and lifts the panel to drop it against the fence’s lower half. She – he has convinced himself now and is already building the picture of a lonely girl living out her days somewhere in these last Anvil Yards streets, maybe a neighbour of Mark Fala himself – has a red scarf wrapped high up her face so just a strip of her eyes shows. He cannot see these from this distance. He remembers the phrase indeterminate ethnicity. There are some binoculars up at his mum and dad’s. He should get them, get a chair here at the window, stay in his room.
She jumps inside the fence, a spray can bounces at her hip, attached to her with coiled plastic. She lets it swing as she walks alongside the railway track into the Anvil Yards, looks up and down the track. There will be no train now, for sure, only that long, rumbling goods train that comes through some time after midnight, carrying god knows what to where.
He sees now where she is headed. The bridge that spans the canal and train track at the Greenfield End is not one of Victorian iron. It is poured concrete, and a blank wall reflects in the still water. You might get a glimpse from the road. From the top deck of the buses that rattle past Dee Dee’s front room you could get a good look. He feels the sensation of buses and lorries making the rooms above the pub rattle, wonders if he will ever see those rooms again.
She moves quickly, he does not know who she thinks will want to catch her, doesn’t know that anyone will care, takes the paint from her hip. He wants a fresco. Diego Rivera in the Anvil Yards. He wants to see some picture emerge that makes him think, yes, of course, this is what it all means, for his life to be changed by this moment. Instead, he gets a quickly scrawled hieroglyph. The girl loses all grace and care in the act, reaches too high up the concrete.
Bobo.
Bobo, of course, perhaps that is what it all means. Tag names mean nothing very much, he knows that, refer only to themselves. I am here, he thinks again. The girl is finished already, has put the cap on the can’s nozzle, returned it to her sweatshirt pocket, regained some sense of control. She hurries back along the track. He looks again at the way she moves, on tiptoe and alive, thinks she could’ve easily climbed the fence quicker than removing the panel. Maybe there is some ritual to it. It only counts with a set of rusting screws to hold like worry beads as you spray your imagined name. He wonders if the name has come to her from Bobby Ahmed. He used to hate it if you ever reminded him, even when he was still a young boy, missing teeth that would still grow back, a shadow across his face that used to seem comical, touching, then, ‘Bobby, he would say. Me name’s Bobby.’
Before he went to Finland, Liam had a spell of watching midweek Celtic games, if there was no Irontown match, at the supporters club in Cowton. He wasn’t a member but he’d been taken up there in years gone past with Mark by Mark’s dad, and they recognised him on the door anyway. The big man who looked after the place would nod to him and he’d follow the same ritual each time he went, sit on his own with his pint of Guinness, off to the side of the screen opposite the bar, on a plastic garden chair, under the green curtains. Not so close to the electric fire which they turned on full force on winter nights.
‘Well up, Bobo.’ The voices of the older men would come, those still with Glaswegian accents, fifty years in the south most of them, in their suit jackets with pullovers and ties underneath in muted browns and grey
s and greens that their wives picked for them from the stalls at the Lowtown Bull Ring.
Bobo Baldé was the Celtic centre back. Liam watched him, admired him, knew there was something shared in their movements. He had a faint hope in those days – receding by the game – that Celtic might come in for him. Not that he’d have said no to anyone by that point, was desperate to get out, the club in a shambles, could not really stomach making the break to go down the road to Hereford or somewhere like it. You’d think it might feel strange in the old men’s mouths, this name come from Guinea by way of Marseille, but it didn’t at all. And when he skewed a pass that year, stuck it high into the crowd when the ball was on, Larsson somewhere up ahead and spinning into a channel, and this was a weakness in Baldé’s game perhaps, and one Liam knew all too well, the old men would admonish him. ‘Oh, Bobo,’ and fill the syllables with daft affection, like for an errant grandson who knew no better and never would but would be loved always the same.
Liam loved that purred familiarity. He thought back then that it was what he heard himself on a Saturday. Maybe he did, back then.
‘That’s it, Liam, well up, Liam, go on, Liam, our kid, well in, son.’
When he lost concentration he could hear individual voices, ‘Oh Liam, what yer done that for?’ When he stuck it onto the roof of the East Stand, the Greenfield End gave an ironic cheer. Even in exasperation, there was a warmth that came through. Then that faded, or he listened in a different way, something, ‘That is fucking shite, Corwen’, ‘How did this bloke get an England cap? Jesus!’, the club on the slide again, ‘You ain’t fit to wear the shirt.’ But he wanted to say that even when he played badly he was better than them. That was why they were paying money to watch him. He tried his best, he told himself, even when he didn’t. They pay their money, they can say what they like, was what Ally Barr said, but Ally had already gone when Liam left for Finland, coaching in Dubai until they asked him back for a third spell when the club hit rock bottom. There was the year they had four managers, finished bottom of the league, relegated by Easter. Those last few matches, Liam tried to avoid the Main Stand touchline, would sprint as far away as he could to warm up, at least still get a few cheers from the Greenfield End, wouldn’t cover his fullback on that side, funny that none of them noticed, these experts who thought they knew it all because they’d paid for a seat. It got bad. He gave them the V-sign late that season when he scored a consolation after they’d booed him, getting a real mauling against Rotherham. His mum stopped going some time that season, couldn’t bear to hear it. ‘I should think about coaching, Liam, think about what you’ll do when you stop playing,’ she’d said, dishing out some carrots one Sunday afternoon. Everyone was an expert.
‘Finland?’ she said. ‘What’s in Finland? Do they even play football?’
So he did it, he left. That was the hard part, made easier by the angry chorus at the end, the boos in his ears, like he could’ve done anything about it, saved the club, saved the towns on his own. They still sung Mark Fala’s name. Still, today. They’d all had too much faith. It was the year Liam started to believe in the curse. And then he was out of there, free, told himself he was never coming back, and then what had he done?
Greta told him she wanted him out, no reason at all as far as he could see, a break she said, the same week as Ally Barr phoned him, asked him if he’d consider it. A whim, nothing more, she wanted him out, she wanted space, here was some space. ‘I need you here, son,’ Ally said and that was that. They all stood and clapped when he led them out that first day of the season, all sang his name. He felt vindicated, missed Greta and Jari, kidded himself they’d be with him soon, paced the rooms of his empty house.
…
Dee Dee lets the water rise so that the bubbles come up over the bath. Steam fills the room. She slips off her dressing gown and thinks of a lovely silk one that she will buy one day, that she could look for, mention to Alina for her birthday. The water is almost too hot to bear, just as she likes it, and she stretches out so the bubbles come up to her mouth almost, lets the back of her neck rest against the porcelain rim.
She closes her eyes and tries to think of good things, thinks of herself on a beach far from here, no one she knows within hundreds of miles, but her mind drifts towards it like it often does when she stops and tries to relax. She should have told Goldie when he was sat there stinking in the bar. Mali, they were thinking of calling the baby Mali for a while. Rearrange the letters, Goldie, she should’ve said. You work that out, although you were never the quickest on the uptake. You think about your knives and your anger and who that might be aimed at and you leave Alina alone because she’s nothing to do with you, you think about that, you think about what that might mean.
What else might she have said to him? It could have killed him to hear it. All those years she’d been scared he’d come back and then when she saw him, she pitied him, she really did. She knows she’ll see him again, come like Mark to the off sales hatch or like that morning to sit in the half-light with his knife in front of him, dressed in rags.
She thinks of Sonia’s face, when she said it, when Dee Dee asked her about names.
‘We’re thinking of Mali,’ she said, a kind of innocent look on her face, looking Dee Dee in the eye and smiling.
If she hadn’t died, Dee Dee thinks, one of them might have killed her anyway. She shuts her eyes, pushes it all away from her. Too late to stir all this up now. Alina walks past the bathroom door humming something out of tune. She seems happy. Tyrone seems a nice lad. Dee Dee sits and feels the water slowly cool, senses her daughter as she moves through the upstairs rooms.
…
When Liam tries to buy the ticket his bank card is refused. There was a message at reception that he phone Amir urgently. He knows it’s about the room bill, so he avoids him as best he can. If he asks him to leave he’ll have to sleep back at his mum and dad’s or ask if he can use Devon’s spare room, something. He is not sleeping in his own house ever again. He pictures it full of cobwebs and rats, the thing crumbling into the hillside, which he knows cannot be true as his mum still goes to clean every week, and his dad had been round to look at the damp-proofing. Maybe he could give it to them, to one of his sisters, another grand gesture before he goes. If he goes.
There’s a credit card in his wallet that he doesn’t have the pin number for, a flight from Heathrow the day after the end of the season. It might take another day to get to the lake house without his own car, doesn’t matter. He thinks of unshuttering the lake house, spiders’ webs in there to be cleaned out, and the golden light off the lake, the sun through the trees.
This week Greta sent him a video of Jari singing, performing something he has learned at nursery. He looks older, taller, strange words tumbling from his mouth and Liam feels him against him, the boy in his arms from this distance. He tells himself he will get this all over with and be a better man.
He gets a taxi to the car yard, cannot think of a bus that goes anywhere near, feels like he is running out of people to give him lifts. Lionel’s office is on the first floor above the showroom, there are cars parked in rows so that you can see them as you drive past. The giant cut-out, Liam twenty foot tall and arms folded, has disappeared since his driving ban. Liam wonders what Lionel has done with it, knows he won’t try to find out, scared Lionel has burned him in a back field.
‘That ban nearly finished, son? You in for another car.’ Lionel sits behind his desk, half-looking at his computer screen. Someone is talking about interest payments in the adjacent office, Liam can hear tools clanking downstairs.
‘Morning, Lionel,’ he says. ‘No, I’m off the road for a while yet.’
‘I was gonna say you could have your gaffer’s. He’d done a few miles in it, mind you.’
‘Ex-gaffer.’
‘Ex,’ Lionel says, motions for Liam to sit down, then stands up himself, ‘I’m surprised he brought that motor back. Gone to Portugal, has he?’ and doesn’t wait for a reply. ‘I
don’t know, they go to these places, Portugal, Spain, wherever, in the sun, think it’ll make them happy, solve their problems. Gracie keeps pestering me about a cruise, Barbados, Miami, Jesus. I say, it’s fine, a bit of sun, but you’ve still got yourself with you, you don’t leave yourself behind. All them problems am still the same in the sun. I told our Stan that. He had to leave, I know he did, but still, you can’t escape your own self, kid.’
Liam thinks he might be pissed, has second thoughts about talking to him for a moment. He turns in the chair to where Lionel now stands at the window, looking out over the rows of cars, the green hills beyond, small white clouds at the rusted edge of the Iron Towns and a field of four-by-fours and glittering cars worth more than houses in the space below them. These cars were like the sun, he thought, it was still you sitting inside them, they carried you and all your problems with you.
‘No, I haven’t come about a car,’ he says, straight in, he supposes, ‘it’s about Dee Dee, really. Goldie’s come back, went to the pub.’
Lionel turns from the window, goes and shuts the door and then sits back down at his desk. He doesn’t say anything for a while.
‘You know, I thought it was strange when she asked for them cameras to be fitted,’ he says, shakes his head and smiles, ‘you know what Dee Dee’s like, how stubborn she can be.’
Liam nods.
‘When?’
‘A good few weeks ago now. Christmas. I wasn’t sure what to do. He phoned her a while back, last summer, told her he was coming, threatening, you know.’
Iron Towns Page 19