by Miriam Sved
Cob is just pulling up to the house, and he notices with a rush of irritation that Lucy’s car is out of the garage, which means she’s been driving, which means she ignored his ‘request’ to stay off the road until he’d had a chance to check a leak in the gasket. He can see when he drives past a dark stain creeping out from under the Audi’s front wheel. It was a mistake to trust her with such a beautiful first car.
He parks in the basement garage and makes his way up into the house, calling out to Norma in the kitchen, determined to shake off the day’s frustrations. The cheeky bloody press are always asking him whether he takes his work home and how his family copes with such a high-strung guy. He shucks off his coat onto the bed and goes through to see what Norma’s cooking and whether she’s spoken to Luce about the car.
*
Luce is nineteen now, and Cob can hardly look at her without a dangerous rush of sentiment behind his eyes. Norma was a good-looking woman in her day, but he has no idea how the two of them made someone so beautiful.
Luce has ideas. This is what Cob tells anyone who asks how she’s going with her uni degree – a question Cob interprets as: when is she going to settle down and learn something useful? Cob was alright with the idea of her doing an arts degree, mostly because he knew his own father would chuck a pink fit over it, and the old guy could bitch to his heart’s content now. Cob enjoyed listening when he visited the home – listening with a reasonable smile on his face, nodding occasionally and then getting the hell out of there to savour his freedom and ignore every word of impotent old-man advice the bastard had to give. Because of his father he’d been relatively gracious about Luce ignoring his opinion that she should do a business degree, and he’d stood by quietly while she pissed her first year away on a lot of useless politics subjects – American Imperialism in the New World, Postcolonial Theory. But at the time he hadn’t known what these subjects would mean to him while he was having dinner, trying to forget about a hard day’s bullshit at the club and enjoy his lamb casserole.
Luce is sulking in the fancy new way she has. She’s barely spoken to him since she sat down and started picking around the meat in her casserole with an offended delicacy that makes Cob want to shove her face into a bowl of the gristly soup of his childhood. Luce told them a few weeks ago that she’d decided to turn vegetarian, and it wasn’t the lecture she gave them so much as the way she gave it – wearily, with short words and raised eyebrows as if she already knew they wouldn’t be able to grasp the nuances of what she was telling them – that made Cob’s blood rise, and made him sound angrier than he’d meant to when he told her that while she was in their home, eating her mother’s cooking, she’d bloody well make do with what was put in front of her, and she could leave the environmentally damaging meat on her plate and go hungry if she wanted.
Now he watches her crinkle her nose – her perfect, lightly freckled nose – just slightly as she separates the safety of a baby carrot from the tendrils of lamb. Cob breathes, and says, ‘How were your classes today, Luce?’
She looks up. ‘They were alright.’ Then, with a sly, inward smile, ‘Actually I had this women’s studies tute that was kind of fucking amazing. But trust me, you don’t want to know about that.’
‘Don’t swear at the dinner table,’ Norma says, and his wife’s intercession is more humiliating than his daughter’s contempt.
He smooths out his voice and says, ‘Why wouldn’t I want to know about a fucking amazing tute?’
These small betrayals are never part of the marriage game-plan. Sometimes you have to improvise a new structure in response to conditions on the day.
Luce looks at him as if she’s weighing up the very stuff of his being, and at first when she answers he thinks she might be trying to level with him. Her world to his. She says, ‘I guess what she was talking about, this tutor, is kind of like how things work in your game.’
‘How’s that then?’ He doesn’t even mind the subtle return of the nose crinkle when she says game.
‘Well, there’s the dominant paradigm, which is how everything works at the moment, right?’ She waves her fork in front of her face in illustration of a triangular paradigm. ‘And the paradigm is capitalism, because that’s what suits the patriarchy, because men have control of all the money. So as long as we’re in a capitalist society it’s the men who have the power. And everything’s, like, a hierarchy, with white men at the top and everyone else having to suck up to them. So it’s like your game,’ she says, ‘your club, because at the club you’re, like, the big boss, right, you’ve got all the power.’
She looks a bit flushed – young and excited – and it occurs to Cob that the air of offended maturity she’s managed to convey for the past few months has been maintained mostly through silence; and at the same time a dangerous miasma is creeping over her image.
‘And the other coaches and the players and that, they probably want some of the power but they can’t, they don’t have the, um, means of production? And actually I said this in class and Anne, that’s the tutor, Anne totally agreed with me, that where you work is, like, the most male place on the planet, and so a football club is like a dictatorship. A fascist state is what Anne called it; she said it was a really interesting idea. I might do my final essay on it.’
The miasma, which is emanating either from Cob or from his daughter – definitely not from Norma, who has a half-smile of a mouth and a glazed look around the eyes, like someone who’s been in this desert before and recognises the vegetable landmarks and is almost amused by their inability to find their way out – the miasma seems to be transforming Cob’s beautiful yellow-haired daughter into the greasy American cunt. Luce is becoming Redhouse before his eyes.
‘So if everyone at your club decides to stop being oppressed, what they need to do is, like, riot and overthrow the dictatorship. And then they can set up a different sort of power structure which is non-hierarchical and everyone’s on the same level and there’s, like, cooperative–’
Cob’s hand hits the table nanoseconds before – he’s sure of this – his brain has sent the message to thump. Luce jumps in her seat and removes her own forearm from the table. Norma doesn’t seem to have registered anything at all; she turns to Cob with the same half-smile, as if she might have missed something routine, some request that she pass the salt or the bread. The table thump replays in Cob’s mind almost as soon as it’s done and he sees on the replay that his daughter’s arm was too close, too close, but he’s already up and shouting.
‘I’ve had just about enough of this.’ Not quite in the direction of the now blank-faced Luce. ‘Your mother and I aren’t paying for these bullshit artists to fill your head with this bullshit. You think you can go out into the world spouting shit about cooperative power structures and anyone’s gonna give you the time of day?’ Thinking, since he’s broken the no-swearing-at-the-dinner-table rule, he should have gone in with something better than three shits in one sentence.
‘Let me tell you something, Luce . . .’ Calming down, his breathing coming under control. ‘I’ll tell you this for free: once you go out there and see how the world works and see how an actual organisation works,’ trying hard now to soften his tone, to pull them all back from the table thump, ‘when that happens you’re gonna understand why your cooperative government and your non-hierarchies and all that just aren’t realistic, because you’ve got to get things done, and if nobody’s in charge then nobody else will work that hard and productivity is going to suffer – which actually is what happened in most of those eastern bloc countries.’ And now he’s just talking so he doesn’t have to uncover the silence promised by Lucy’s blank face and Norma’s silly grin. ‘So you see there’s a big difference between this fascist state your teacher’s going on about and a proper, well-organised, functioning organisation, where everyone’s well managed so they know what to do and they just bloody do their jobs, no fuss, no drama.’
&
nbsp; Then what’s wrong with the kid, huh?
Luce’s hurt silence and Norma’s failure to smooth over the jagged surface of this meal leave Cob staring down the barrel of the question that’s dogged him for three weeks. He tries not to bring his work home. He really fucking tries.
‘Can I please be excused?’ Luce says, in a small voice directed to her mother.
‘You’ve hardly touched your tea.’
Norma looks concerned rather than angry, but Cob says, ‘Oh, let her go.’ The acoustics of palm on table are still fracturing the air. His daughter gets up and leaves the table with her shoulders hunched, as though it’s physically tiring for her to trudge through the air Cob has changed.
*
Next day, at the club, the atmosphere hasn’t improved. Cob is hit by it as soon as he enters the walloping room – the guys as usual ranged on the too-few chairs or leaning against the walls, a few squatting on the floor. The kid, Reece, stands by the door, looking down at the ground.
Cob keeps the pre-session talk even shorter than usual. He says, ‘You know what you have to do now. Or you should. Go do it.’
Redhouse is up the back, standing with one of the midfield coaches, and the knowledge that Cob is acting exactly like the surly dictator Redhouse takes him for makes the American’s smug face all the more intolerable.
The boys go off for their drills and Cob goes to his office. He calls in Henley, the captain, for a short consult and speaks to one of the fitness coaches. Then he begins checking his neglected emails. He tells himself that staying out of the way is the best thing for morale now – not adding any fuel to the resentment still radiating off his guys. But sitting behind his desk in the big, temperature-controlled office, he can’t shake the feeling that what he’s really doing is having a sulk.
He sits at his desk and creeps through his inbox, pecking out replies with his index fingers, feeling rather than noticing changes in the light coming through his city-view window. The offices at this training ground are salubrious compared to the shit-pit they moved out of three years ago, but Cob has never felt comfortable with all the high-ceilinged space. He feels as if there could be a presence in the room, something watching him from one of the high corners. The feeling increases and it becomes a test of willpower – to deny the presence, resist his weak, animistic instincts; until suddenly the sense of being watched becomes overpowering and he looks up with an embarrassing jerk.
It’s just a kid. A black kid at the door, leaning on crutches. Cob blinks and stands up.
‘Dooley?’ he says.
Jake Dooley, a rookie pick-up from last season. Cob remembers him – vaguely – as a painfully shy lad who came down from the same dust-bowl town as Mick Reece.
The boy says nothing.
‘Jake?’ Cob says, unsure now. Truth is he barely recognises the kid – even though he watched Dooley perform a handful of times in the under-18s and lobbied the club to pick him up, debilitating leg injury and all. He’s bulked up, and his face is less smooth, more formed. And of course he hasn’t been around that much – not taking part in on-field training, confined to a dull round of gym sessions. Cob hopes the kid isn’t here with some depressive teenage angst about his new half-life in the city. He doesn’t feel one bit equipped to help.
But Dooley shifts uncomfortably on his cast (he must be able to bear weight now, that’s good), and says, or rather whispers, ‘I wanna talk, there’s something I wanna talk about, about Mick.’
It takes Cob a few seconds to catch up. ‘Mick Reece?’
‘Yeah.’ The kid won’t meet his eyes.
‘Come on in then.’ Trying to sound welcoming. ‘You wanna take a load off that peg?’
Dooley shuffles towards the chair across from Cob but doesn’t sit. One side of his face twitches convulsively. His eyes are on the floor. Cob realises he’s terrified. To help the kid out he sits back down at his desk and shuffles papers, random papers that were probably in order, his secretary will probably give him shit for it later, but at least when he looks up Dooley’s stopped twitching. He’s still looking at his feet. One shiny trainer, one sock poking out from the white chrysalis of his cast.
Cob says, ‘You and Reece played together as juniors, didn’t you?’
Dooley nods slightly.
‘Know each other pretty well I guess?’
A shrug, a visible gulp. Dooley says, ‘I dunno.’
Cob puts his hands down flat on his desk, takes two deep breaths, lowers his shoulders with an effort. He has a meeting with Mick Reece tomorrow, to tell the kid he’ll be dropped to the VFL side this week. He also has a meeting with the board, and a media slot, and he has to get back to active training. He thinks of a fight he had with Norma (a year ago? five years?) when she begged him to see a therapist – she said he was only like he was because he took too much on, carried everything on his own shoulders. He said, ‘I’m only like what? Like what?’
Dooley makes a small cracking noise from the back of his throat. The sight of the boy’s cast, and the awkward way he holds his body to compensate for it, is tiring.
Cob says, ‘What is it, Dooley? What’s the bloody problem?’
Again the convulsive cheek twitch, but Dooley doesn’t shy away. He stands his ground and, at God only knows what personal cost, meets the coach’s eyes.
‘Selfish play,’ he says.
Cob stares at him, waiting for more. There doesn’t seem to be any more. ‘Selfish play?’
The kid nods.
Cob sits back in his seat, suddenly a little bit afraid. Something you have to know with the indigenous boys: you have to be careful not to mythologise them and get spooked – that’s the piece of the whole cultural-sensitivity puzzle that no-one’ll come out and tell you. A kid comes down from some dirt-poor back-of-beyond town to train with the club, probably never seen a rock painting in his life, not to mention barely had an education, and if you don’t watch yourself you’ll be looking to him like he’s some kind of mystic, some kind of fucking guru. At least the ones like Dooley – the ones who keep themselves nice.
Cob shakes himself out of it and, harsher than he means to, says, ‘Come on out with it, Dooley – what are you on about?’
The kid looks away, breaking his marathon run of eye contact; his lips open and close like a fish, and he whispers at the floor, ‘Mick, the reason he’s playing like he does. He’s worried about being selfish with the play. So he won’t take runs any more or go for the big grabs. Or make tackles.’ He looks up, then down again. ‘He thinks he plays selfish.’
The word Cob thinks of is dumbstruck. Struck dumb. Dooley’s lips keep moving slightly, as though his mouth doesn’t know its job is done. If Cob had thought about this kid before – and he hasn’t for many months – he’d have said Dooley was skilful, fast, an intuitive player in the special way that (he doesn’t care what anyone says) only the indigenous boys can be. And a bit dumb. He’s never heard the kid put two words together before.
He tallies up what Dooley has just said with what he’s seen of Reece’s game over the last three weeks. It fits. Reece has played like a boy with his own set of rules that have nothing to do with the rules of the game – handballing into trouble when his speed could get him three bounces down the boundary, kicking to contested marks when there’s a free shot on goal. It wouldn’t have occurred to Cob himself, but what Dooley just told him fits perfectly. Selfish play.
‘Thank you, Jake.’ He’s aware of the power dynamics in the room going skew-whiff. ‘Thanks for coming and seeing me.’
Dooley nods, does an awkward three-point turn and hobbles out.
Cob sits for a long time, bracing his hands on the desk and staring at a paperweight that his daughter gave him, years ago, for Father’s Day or his birthday or Christmas. The paperweight is a snow globe – a scene with snowmen on an island, standing in front of a turreted castle and a little white
moon. The snowmen look unaccountably happy. Cob has never really looked at it before.
*
At home that night, his wife and daughter seem muted. At the dinner table Norma asks him polite questions about his day, and Luce answers his questions about her day politely. She’s secreted her pork chop beneath a badly constructed hut of lettuce. She doesn’t quite meet his eyes but she says she had a good day at uni. When she asks to leave the table she picks up her chair so it doesn’t scrape along the floor. Norma smiles at him.
After dinner he hears them in the kitchen, chatting while Norma loads the dishwasher. Luce laughs at something her mother says. He turns the television news up and tries to prepare himself for all he has to do.
*
The next day, before the board meeting and the training session and the media slot, there is the meeting with Reece.
Cob has not spent as much time with Reece as he usually does with the new guys. The draft where they picked him up was hectic and highly political and Cob came out of it almost resenting this skinny kid, for whom he had to burn a bridge or two with his chief talent scout, who’d taken against the lad. Cob had wanted Reece since this same scout showed him footage of the kid taking a high grab and running down the boundary. His record in the TAC and his fitness results were outstanding. He was small, yes – would be lucky to reach six foot – but he played from the depth of himself. The same things could also be said for Reece’s friend, the wiry Aboriginal boy Dooley, but he got himself a bad leg break during the draft combine so that was that. It had to be Reece, and Cob pursued his draft prize like a man who’d recognised his future.