by Miriam Sved
‘Oh shit, sorry. Not that I think you’ll get dropped.’
The kid is looking down at his hands, at his big dry-looking palms, which are two shades lighter than the rest of him. ‘S’okay,’ he says. ‘I prob’ly will get dropped. Depends how it heals.’
So there it is: confirmation. He’s in the team.
‘Nah,’ I say, comforting. ‘No way, it doesn’t happen like that anymore. Not once they’ve invested in a player. And besides, the club culture’s changed heaps since those days.’
The kid just gives a little shrug.
Jesus, I think, he wouldn’t want to make it easy or anything. But still, there’s something about him that I like – even something about him being so shy with me. I used to be like that around the players. Like I couldn’t believe my luck that I was meeting these gods in the flesh. The kid’s shyness makes me feel kind of special. Plus, I’ve never had nookie with a black guy before.
‘I’m Bec,’ I say, holding out my hand.
He looks at the hand like he doesn’t know what to do with it, but I just keep it there and eventually he takes it and gives it a limp little shake.
‘Jacob,’ he mumbles, or I think that’s what he said.
‘So, Jacob–’ leaning over the table towards him ‘–did you come up in the last draft?’
‘Jake,’ he says.
‘Sorry?’
‘Not Jacob. Jake.’
‘Oh, sorry.’ Something clicks into place. ‘Hey, Jake, you didn’t come up in the draft, did you?’
He looks back down at his hands.
‘Nah, wait on, I think I know who you are.’
He looks up at me then, sudden and almost sort of pleading.
‘Is your name Jake Dooley?’
A little tremor goes through his cheek.
‘Hey, c’mon,’ I say. ‘You don’t need to be modest with me, I read all about you in the forums last year. They reckoned you were a top-ten pick for sure.’
‘Yeah, till this bloody . . .’ He picks up his leg, actually picks it up with both hands, and then lets it slip back to the ground, which must be painful. As if he’s that angry with his own leg.
‘Yeah, I read about that too. It was at the draft combine last year, yeah?’ I look at the leg in a different way, knowing what happened to it. ‘They reckoned, on the forums and that . . . a couple of people were saying the word from the doc was that you wouldn’t play again.’ Something about ligaments, something about bones knitting together. I dunno. But I know now that he got here against really bad odds – sitting here in team colours. His odds of getting even this far were maybe worse than mine.
‘Hey,’ I say, wanting to liven things up, because he’s just hunched there like this is the most depressing chat-up scenario anyone ever lived through. ‘Hey, didn’t you grow up playing with Mickey Reece?’
I say it like a question even though I know all about it – the two of them in some dirt-belt school team, both learning off Mickey’s dad from when they were in Little League. But even if I didn’t know all about it, the way he looks up at me is a total giveaway. He has a history with the new star half-forward. And not a very happy one.
‘What? Did you guys have a falling-out or something?’
Nothing. His eyes are still hard, face kind of shut down on itself.
‘Hey, sorry, Jake. I didn’t realise it was . . .’
His shoulders slump down. ‘S’okay,’ he says. ‘We don’t talk anymore, that’s all.’
‘That’s a shame. A game like this, you need friends. People who are there for you.’ I touch him on the leg when I say that, trying to make it seem casual, but he jerks his leg away like my hand is electric.
He does want me – I’m sure of it. It occurs to me maybe he’s a virgin.
Thinking what he needs is some Dutch courage, I head to the bar to get us a round, then another one. He’s on lager and he drinks slow, so I have to be careful with the Breezers, I don’t want to be fall-down drunk if he’s still upright. And he does start to open up a bit – tells me about training and the coaching staff, how they’ve got him on heavy upper-body work. He even says something kind of personal about how tough it is for him, watching all the others play. How tough it was today. He doesn’t say that it was tough watching Mickey Reece, his old friend he doesn’t speak to anymore – how tough it was watching Mickey turn into a star in his first game, taking that flying grab in front of goal with the crowd going nuts. He doesn’t say it, but I know all that is part of it, and I have the feeling about this kid. The feeling I had when I was here in ’01 and Bryce Lawdon got talking to me about the game. I wasn’t surprised at all when Bryce won his first Brownlow. Something my dad taught me, I figure. Something about passion for the game.
By now I’m halfway blind and I’ve worked up to a couple of touches on the leg (and he hasn’t jumped a mile), and I start thinking about how this should go tonight. I saw Shell go off with some bloke half an hour ago, not even a footy player (the tart). There are the new rules to think about, but the truth is I’m not sure where he fits in with them. If he’s a player then he gets a pash tonight and maybe a feel but nothing more – not even a hand-job and definitely not nookie – till he takes me out on a date. But is Jake a player? You could argue it either way, and meanwhile I’ve caught him checking out my cleavage and it gave me the kind of spine-tingle I haven’t had for ages. He almost makes me feel like I’m new to this.
In the end I decide it like this: technically he might be in the team, but he has none of the perks the others have. The guys at the next table, where the girls have been swarming all night, it’s those guys I made the rules for. They’re the ones you have to be careful with. I look at Jake Dooley – at his worried eyes which flick towards me; I look at his poor leg and think of the bee’s dick of a chance he’s got just to get a game in the seconds. And the rules seem stupid.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I say, standing up and straightening myself out and leaning against the table to give him a good look down my top. ‘Get out of the noise for a bit.’
He nods and reaches for the crutches, and then there’s the bump and shuffle of getting him moving, following me out of the main bar. For all anyone knows we could be heading to the courtyard for a smoke. Passing the table where the rest of the players are, I happen to glance over and I see Mickey Reece. He’s got a girl practically glued against him (little redhead tart, looks barely legal; I’ve seen her round trying to get in with the players before). But he’s looking at me and Jake. He looks away quick when I catch his eye, like he’s been caught out. I keep him in sight as we head towards the toilets at Jake’s gimpy pace and there it is again – he’s watching us. Interesting. I take Jake’s arm, like I’m helping him along.
The realisation that I’m in Mickey Reece’s sights makes me feel so good, and that feeling spreads outwards onto Jake, whose hard arm I can feel through his top. I stop him before we even get to the toilets – there’s a dark corridor leading away from the main bar where no-one can see us. I turn and size him up, angling my body so he has to lean back against the wall for balance. He’s half a head taller than me, so I gently take one of the crutches from under his arm and lean it against the wall, and he hunkers down for balance. With our bodies level and my hands on either side of his head I look into his face. It’s not a handsome face, but something about the fact that he’s looking at me, really looking, after all the sidelong glances – something about seeing his smooth, open face straight on like that really hits me in the chest. I’m not thinking about Mickey Reece anymore when I go in to kiss him.
His face sort of judders when I make contact but then his mouth relaxes, opens, he’s kissing me back; he tastes of beer and mint with an undertone of that sweet earthy tang – sweat. His tongue gets more adventurous by the second. I pull back and look into his face, and his face isn’t plain anymore; the wide flat angles are sort of
interesting, almost sort of beautiful. And I’m feeling the tightly packed muscles of his upper arms, thinking, this one’s mine. He leans in again to go on kissing, real enthusiastic – but sort of tender as well, with one of his hands coming up to find the back of my head, working his fingers through my hair.
Don’t get soppy, I think. If the years have taught me anything it’s that footy players, whatever they might say to you before nookie, are never interested in soppy. They’re high-adrenalin boys. And I’m sure this one with his shy, almost-adult body needs a bit of take-charge. A bit of sophistication. I change my technique to more of a teasing, in-out rhythm and he responds immediately, hungrily, chasing my tongue with his mouth, and I can feel a shifting weight against my leg.
‘Hello, cowboy,’ I purr.
He ducks his head, embarrassed. Goddamn, I could fall for this gimpy kid. To stop myself getting soppy I reach down and give his balls a playful squeeze.
‘Whoa, boy.’ I didn’t expect that much response – his whole body shuddering at the touch of my hand down there, so violent that he almost loses his balance against the wall and has to steady himself on my shoulder.
‘Does someone want to come out and play?’ I whisper, a bit embarrassed but trying not to lose the confidence. With him half leaning on me we kiss again, and I’m trying to get my tongue in there, trying to move things along, but his mouth which tastes so good keeps pulling away from mine, and he moves his hips to avoid my exploring hand.
‘C’mon, Jake,’ I say in his ear, ‘let’s get to know each other.’ And then I make my move – the move they all want eventually, the move I’m usually under direct physical pressure to make – down south. My hand working his belt buckle.
He makes a small noise. At first I think it’s pleasure but then I notice his body’s rigid against me; I look up and realise that without his crutches or me to lean on he’s teetering against the wall trying to keep his balance.
‘Shit, sorry.’ Still on my knees, I reach over and pull one of the crutches from where it fell and get up to reinsert it under his arm.
He looks away from me.
‘Hey, it’s okay, baby.’ Travelling back downwards, but there’s no hard bulge anymore, just a frightened, retreating animal.
‘Hey, hey, hey,’ I say softly, trying to coax it back out, but Jake’s body’s not cooperating. His hips twist away from me.
He says, ‘Just . . . Could we just.’
I’ve had my bad days in the past but this is ridiculous. If I can’t get it started with some teenage virgin who’d blow his top at the first puff of wind then I might as well give up on the team altogether, so I ignore him and keep stroking and cooing at his balls. He’s reaching down and trying to pull me up, or push me away, and eventually he manages to say, ‘Not here.’
‘Come on, Jake.’ Trying to sound sexy, trying not to sound offended. ‘Don’t you want it?’
Finally his hand finds my shoulder and he gives me a shove; I can feel some of that upper body strength they’re building in him. I stumble backwards on my haunches and put my hand down on the sticky floor so I won’t fall on my bum. It’s maybe even more humiliating than the thing with Luke. And it’s then, at that moment, that Mickey Reece walks by.
‘G’day, mate,’ he says over the top of my head. ‘Nice work if you can get it.’
I’m trying to stand up but my legs are trapped in my skirt and the heels make it harder. By the time I’m on my feet Mickey’s moved on.
Jake’s looking dark. As if I were the one who shoved him onto some filthy pub floor.
‘What’s the matter?’ I say, and I notice my words are slurring. ‘You Abos not into girls or something?’
He looks at me then, straight in the face, and it’s such a different look to all the sly ones he’s been throwing me all night. He looks at me like he’s finally got me worked out, like he’s got me pinned better than he could have done with his dick inside me. Like he knows me.
‘’Scuse me,’ is all he says, pushing off from the wall and gimping off towards the toilets.
Fuck him, I think.
And fuck the rules.
I go back into the bar to see if Mickey Reece is interested.
Victor
Round four
Walking into the tab for the first time in fifty-seven – no, fifty-eight – days is actually pretty comforting. The heavily brewed air feels like his own element, as though all the nights here have given him beer-gills instead of lungs. The sticky layer of contempt coating the world transforms into easy-breathing fatalism. If it wasn’t for the terrifying weight of hundred-dollar notes in his back pocket (twenty of them sliding out of the ATM had a slippery, living heft he’d been unprepared for), Vic might almost be able to relax. His counsellor, Sharni, would say, Breathe; she’d say, Check in with your body. But Sharni’s patchouli-smelling gifts have deserted him in the last few hours, since the street party and the fight with Carol.
He goes to the bar and orders a pint of dark, and looks up at the TV screen above the row of scotch bottles. Slowly registers the scene. Vindication. Carol would chuck a pink fit if she knew where he was and what he was about to do, but he could almost wish her here now, just to give her a taste of how wrong she was, how clueless and deluded when, less than an hour ago, she said to him – almost shouted at him: In case you haven’t noticed, the world has moved on. And when she said, Nobody even remembers you or Antony Ehlroy or any of the rest of it anymore.
On the flat-screen TV hanging above the bar, a bunch of AFL players are warming up for the Saturday-night game, kicking practice goals. In the lightning speed of neural-time his body has registered and reacted to the pattern of their guernseys: the colours that have goaded and eluded his dreams for thirty-two years, that make moisture spring up on the palms of his hands and bile rise in his gut. The bastards. But it is not just the bastards that make him wish Carol were here to appreciate her wrongness. Bouncing around on unaccountably skinny legs is a red-headed kid wearing Antony Ehlroy’s old number – the number emblazoned on the sensitive underside of Vic’s brain – while the commentators talk about this player, dropping the E bomb liberally into their patter.
‘He does have a hint of the old Ehlroy flair, doesn’t he?’ one of them is saying. ‘It’s such a different game nowadays, but there’s something about the way Reece plays, he’s a real little bulldog around the ball. Brett Cohen’s playing on him tonight and I expect he’ll have his hands full.’
‘Cob knew what he was doing bringing Ehlroy’s number back into play. It’s a vote of confidence, isn’t it? A good thing for a young guy at the beginning of his career.’
Like all gamblers, Vic is prone to bouts of magical thinking, but this particular bit of magic cannot be blamed on his ‘disease’. It is the universe giving him, Victor Borodin, the middle finger. He looks around, looking for someone to acknowledge the injustice of it – of the ginger kid wearing the worst number in the world; of Carol and her failure to understand; of the fact that he has to be back in the taxi in just over eight hours, driving some ponce to the airport to fly off into his successful and fulfilling life. There is nobody in the bar to grasp all this, only a scattering of uninterested drinkers and punters, the latter mostly glued to the bank of racing monitors up the other end of the room. He returns his attention to the TV.
Vic already has a strong sense of what he will do, but the universe underscores it through the commentators, who segue from the redheaded player in Ehlroy’s number to the whole team. ‘Good run of wins the last few weeks. They can’t get too complacent after the disaster in round one, but if the midfielders put in another strong performance and Camperos keeps marking down front we can expect a good game from them.’
And then, in case anything was unclear, they move on to the money. ‘It’s long odds on the interstate boys, as you’d expect: we’re looking at upwards of five dollars to one at this stage.’
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Even in his most foolhardy gambling streaks, Vic has usually steered clear of punting on AFL – too much emotional investment. But with the scene at the street party simmering at the edge of his consciousness and Carol’s name-calling fresh at the front (sad, self-obsessed old man) he goes to the Sportsbet monitor and brings up the odds for the game. As the commentators promised, $5.20 to $1.18. He moves deeper into the betting options – the interstate team to win by a margin of more than 39.5 points: $29.00. He keeps going; in a gesture of pure self-destructive spite he selects winning margin: 60+ points. The odds are $72.00. He taps in the betting amount with a slight shiver up the back of his neck. Two thousand dollars. Carol only gave him access to their savings account last week, as a gesture of faith in his ‘recovery’. She has been saving for a cruise.
He prints out the betting form and takes it to the cashier, a reassuringly apathetic middle-aged woman named Narelle. She doesn’t usually look up from her magazine even to dole out winnings, but tonight she raises one well-plucked eyebrow when Vic, who has not shown his face for fifty-eight days after ten years of almost nightly patronage, slides his form beneath her glass window and follows it up with twenty new hundred-dollar notes. He feels barely any sense of agency as Narelle counts out the money. This is the way it was always going to be; that dickhead at the party was just a conduit for the universe. As an afterthought he digs in his pocket and slaps another forty dollars on Brett Cohen for most possessions – his own middle finger raised in response to the universe, and his wife, himself, and the redheaded player in Antony Ehlroy’s number. Then he goes to the bar to begin the long night of staving off sobriety.
Ironically, now that he’s ditched his paddle on the way up shit creek, all the coping mechanisms that Sharni has given him swing back into place. With his fresh pint of dark he sits at the far corner of the bar – the only position without easy viewing access to a TV screen – and watches his emotions float by like clouds. A tendril of acrimony towards the guy at the party disperses into the beery air (the guy might not have known Vic’s history in the game, and if he did, if his comment about footballers retiring before they lost their speed and became a liability was directed at Vic – well, he clearly had his own issues). There is remorse, briefly clogging up the back of his throat, for his own behaviour at the party (‘When you say slow,’ he said to the guy, ‘do you mean slow compared to Usain Bolt, or compared to a fat middle-aged bloke with an old Volvo?’). He only knew about the Volvo because Carol had told him what she’d picked up about the guy – he’d just bought one of the flats in the block down the road – and the thought of Carol and her way of giving him bits of news and gossip from her chatty circulations around the neighbourhood adds a worrying density to the wad of remorse. But by stepping back and counting to ten, and then deciding how he will react to what he cannot control, Vic is able to watch the remorse recede on a gentle breeze of numbness. It is obvious to him that the price for deliverance from these wayward emotions is hopelessness – that hope is just as flimsy and windborne as anger and remorse and shame – but the deal seems worthwhile. He has always belonged here, the shape of his life carved out on a chilly Melbourne day thirty-two years ago, an upending of green turf and blue sky from which he never fully righted himself. His mistake over the last few weeks was to convince Carol and Sharni and even, alarmingly, himself that he was capable of change. Better to accept his role without hope, careful not to care; and in the end maybe this is what Sharni’s mumbo-jumbo comes down to: trying not to care about stuff. She could have just said that.