by Miriam Sved
‘It must be difficult for them to decide,’ Hugo says, feeling slightly dizzy, ‘’cos of how good he’s played both half-forward and midfield. I read a thing in the paper – the Leader’s always doing stories on him now – I read a thing that said this week he might get a tag. Sam Naughton, that really good tagger from WA. He might be on Mick ’cos Mick’s been playing so good.’
Uncle Les clears his throat; it comes out as a low growl. The hollow feeling in Hugo’s head has intensified into a sound, a rushing sound from somewhere in his brain. He feels shaky and reckless with the need to make Jake look up from his spaghetti. Everyone has been ignoring him his whole life, but maybe the worst ignorer is his big brother. Jake, who will play any old stupid game with Andy (the two of them tearing through the house with toy guns, or Jake tackling Andy to the ground, pinning him with a one-handed hold while he tickles him viciously), has always ignored Hugo with a steady intensity which, Hugo thinks now, is not really like ignoring at all – not like something missing, a simple lack of attention, but like an active, ill-meaning kind of silence meant to convey some dark truth about his middle brother. As if he has never bothered with Hugo because he, Jake, knows Hugo is no good. As if he sees something in him. Grandpa used to say Jake had the sight of the ancestors. Grandpa used to say shit like that all the time, spooky shit, before he went quiet. Now Grandpa is watching Hugo with an interested kind of horror. All of them except Jake are staring at him. Jake keeps looking down at his dinner and shoving forkfuls of spaghetti into his mouth, ignoring.
Suddenly Hugo feels clear-headed, the rushing dizziness gone, and his voice comes out steady when he says, ‘All the Reeces are big news now. Not just in the Leader; all the local papers have done stories about them, heaps of stories. When Mick came home for the weekend there were journalists at school asking kids about him, and I saw one of them go up to Reece’s mum in town, asking her questions. Even one of the Melbourne papers came up to do a whole big story on them, ’cos of how famous Mick is in the League. They took lots of photos of the Reeces’ house and the farm.’
There is a small noise on Hugo’s left and he turns to see that his mother is crying. Two big tears have rolled down her face and onto her plate. She stares at him with a kind of fixed, defiant sadness and sniffs, and Hugo swings quickly from a clawing fear at seeing his mother cry (he has only seen it twice before – after his dad left and when she dropped a brick on her foot) to anger. He wants to scream at her, What’s your fucking problem? Why is everyone in his family so weird?
Uncle Les is the one who breaks the silence. Gruffly, through a mouthful of spaghetti, he says, ‘That family’s no good, Huges. We don’t see ’em anymore. I’m still fixing the damage Dan Reece did to Jake’s kicking style.’
Hugo gapes, contempt prickling his scalp. He could almost laugh. As if Jake’s kicking style is the reason Mum is crying, the reason they don’t see the Reeces anymore. He could laugh like a maniac and throw his ruined dinner across the room.
Jake is finally looking directly at him, looking up from his spaghetti; and now, as if to fuck with Hugo even more, he gives a small, rueful half-smile.
*
Hugo stays in the kitchen after dinner, making a noisy show of doing the dishes while the others are watching telly in the lounge room. It’s his turn to wash up, but normally he would put it off and play computer games until his mum got mad and shouted at him. The truth is he doesn’t want to make his mum mad, not after seeing her cry like that. It’s probably menopause. She’s probably going psycho.
Only Grandpa is still in the kitchen, sitting humpbacked at the table behind Hugo. He clears his throat with a gurgling noise as if he’s about to say something, which seems unlikely – Grandpa barely ever says anything anymore. When the raspy voice starts speaking, Hugo turns to stare.
Grandpa says, ‘We gotta pray for your brother.’ His voice like barbed wire. ‘The whole family, yeah. For the game.’ He rests his hands on the table, and Hugo can tell by the way the old man stares at his hands that he is not done. ‘You gotta support your brother,’ he says. ‘Jake’s game is what we got now. Our people invented that game, you know that? Marn grook.’
Hugo starts edging towards the kitchen door, away from this slow creak of a lecture, when Grandpa says something amazing.
‘My old man woulda said Jake got the spirit of Bunjil with him.’ Looking across the kitchen. ‘Bunjil, he made our country.’ A little shake of his head. ‘You’d know if you remember the stories. But you were too little. I tried to tell ’em to you to keep the connections there but you were too young. Jake maybe remembers about the ancestor spirits. Maybe he takes ’em into that game.’ He sits up and looks straight at Hugo. ‘You gotta pray for him the same as I do.’
Bunjil, the eagle. Hugo’s grandfather is wrong, Hugo does remember. Bunjil, their totem, who made the country that is their blood and bones and spirit. Hugo doesn’t remember Grandpa telling those stories but somewhere he must, because they are there in his body like the wisps of a dream, an earlier dream: the deep, scratchy voice telling stories at night, pictures forming in the air. His body remembers this dream the same way it remembers the more recent one: warm feathers rushing in the wind. Both dreams have stayed lodged somewhere inside him, waiting to come together to show him who he is. He knows about the eagle.
He thanks his grandfather and says he will pray for Jake. Thinking: tomorrow he will go back to training at the oval after school. He will sweat and swoop and glide with the ball, and one day soon he will show them all.
Sledge
Round eighteen
The ruckmen face off over the centre circle and for a moment everything is frozen possibility: players, umpire, the ball suspended overhead, the softly clouded sky. Everything except the fans, a circus beyond the stillness. Then the ball swings down and cracks it all open, and the ruckmen hurl themselves in and up, knees knocking together with a bone-juddering force that makes Sam hungry for violence.
He has his instructions. There’s been speculation in the footy press that Mick Reece, the first-year star, will be targeted and shut down, and Sam prickles with the knowledge that his movements now are being watched and analysed. Who will he go to? It’s rare for a new player to draw a tag. Sam hangs back and keeps Reece in sight during the first scuffle: this is his anchor in the game, Reece’s mop of flying ginger that he’ll follow for four quarters, always aware of the kid’s position and ready to shut him down. Secretly he thinks of himself like one of those terminators, machines from the future – tireless, unstoppable. Come with me if you want to die. Sam loves being a tagger, whatever anyone says about it.
Reece is right in the thick of it, in and under – Sam knows from his research that the kid will always do this, he’s a player who likes to have his head in front of as many boots as possible – and then he’s out of the pack, ball clamped in his armpit. For a minute Sam thinks he might pass it off, but instead he dodges around the big ruckman and he’s running. Sam’s cue.
This first chase down the centre corridor both blurs the world and sharpens it: the shock of adrenalin to his legs; Sam becomes aware of the sound of his breathing – full, even breaths blowing out every two footfalls. The kid’s back twists in front of him and he makes up a pace or two when Reece takes a bounce. Pressure. The crowd in his peripheral vision is like a swarm of bees – urgent, ordered chaos. Chloe once asked him what he thinks about when he’s chasing some bastard around the ground, and he said nothing, that he thinks of nothing except the game and the chase, but that’s not true. He thinks of weird things. He saw a real swarm of bees once, a huge hive spilling out of a hollow gum tree. Five more paces and he could catch up.
The kid takes another bounce and Sam lunges at his hips, bringing them both down. No whistle, it’s a clean tackle. The shot of elation is like a drug, better than anything he’s ever tried, better than coke. Better than Chloe.
He lines up and punts the
ball long, back into the attacking forward – he’s not paid for his kicking skills but Thommo says he has a decent right leg. Then he jogs after Reece and comes up level with him. ‘Too slow, Mickey.’ He shoulders his way in front, setting the kid’s pace, the kid whose face is flaming. Fury or embarrassment or both. Maybe he’s never been pinned with the ball in his whole short playing career. He’s never been tagged by someone as good as Sam. Terminator tag. Sam bumps the kid with his shoulder while they run, using the momentum to knock him off course. Some days you know the game is on your side.
The run of play from Sam’s kick gets fumbled through for a point, and then the ball is back through the centre corridor. Reece dodges left, trying to dummy clear, but Sam stays on him and locks him down. It’s obvious Reece has no answer. For ten minutes he follows the play with his eyes and keeps eddying towards it, as if he could ignore the tag away. Sam keeps him contained a few metres from where the ball is being fought over, and he nips him in the upper thigh. ‘Faggot,’ he says into the kid’s ear. ‘You’re fucken weak,’ as the ball skitters away towards the forward fifty and a goal up. From a distance it would be hard to know which of the two players was shadowing the other, unless you knew where to look for the covert violence – Sam’s nipping hands and bumping shoulders. It’s a good feeling tagging someone smaller. Usually he has to imprint himself on a heavier player, a monkey on some big bastard’s back.
A few minutes before quarter-time there’s a two-goal lead – Sam looks at the scoreboard and loses concentration for a moment. Reece makes a break for it, almost gets clear, but luckily the play changes direction and Sam catches up. He knocks the kid off his run, anger bubbling up. ‘Where you goin’, Mickey?’ he says, checking that none of the umps are within range, and then he pulls Reece in by his jumper and gives him a sly, hard fist in the ribs. Reece doubles over; anyone watching would just think he was winded. Weak. Sam jogs away as the quarter-time siren goes, and Lethlean, the captain, catches up and jogs alongside him to the huddle, slaps him on the bum. Reece only had two possessions the whole quarter. Sam is a giant. He is invincible. He runs into the huddle and other guys wrap sweaty arms around his neck. He wonders if this game is going live in Perth, and if Chloe is watching. Fuck you, he thinks. You and your apprenticeship.
Their lead isn’t big and the stakes are high – if they win this game there’s a good shot at the finals, for the first time in four years. Thommo is coiled and tense, barking instructions at the defenders and the midfielders, but before they run back out he says, ‘Nice work on the young lad, Naughton – just keep doin’ what you’re doin’.’
*
The first few minutes of the second quarter are just as good. A few times the kid almost gets a break, but Sam has come to recognise the dummy he uses – left then quick-step right. He’s on it. He keeps talking to the kid, and giving him nips in the thighs and arms. ‘Bit of a fucken runt, aren’t ya? Bit of a fucken ranga, too. That’s a shame, a runt and a ranga. Bet you copped it bad at school. Human nature, mate – everyone hates a runty ranga.’ The look on Reece’s face makes him laugh – all distant like he can’t hear any of it, cheeks stiff and controlled but flaming. The ball sails by a few metres away and Sam gets himself in front of Reece, a human shield, feeling the frustration in the way the kid tries to get through him, reaching for the ball like a baby after his dummy. Sometimes the game is so sweet, all you can do is wonder at it. He gets a sharp elbow into Reece’s ribs.
Halfway through the quarter Reece gets pulled onto the bench, and then Sam gets the interchange signal. He sprints off the ground, adrenalin pounding, and everyone on the benches is buzzing with it too – they can already smell a win. It’s rare for a tagger to get as many slaps on the back and bum as Sam does now. Usually taggers are invisible, at best, but today everyone can see the impact he’s having. Reece is still on two possessions, and it almost seems like the flow-on from losing their wonder boy is making the opposition bottom out; the lead is four clean goals, and while Sam’s on the bench it stretches to five. Other things that happen while he’s on the bench: he’s given a new electrolyte drink before the old one is finished, he gets priority for a leg massage, and Thommo phones down from the box just to give him pats. He gets on the bike and rides out the rest of the time, keeping himself warm, burning to be back out there in the kid’s space.
When he gets the signal and jogs back onto the ground, for the first time ever he hears the crowd respond to him, just him. The opposition has made up one of the goals, and he hears magic in the heightening noise around him, the magic he’s been waiting for these two years – it means all those people think he’s needed for things to go right. He puts his head down and sprints to the centre bounce. Without Sam there to shut him down, Reece has got himself into the scrum of hands and boots around the ball. Sam stalks around the space like he did at the start of the game, following the flash of ginger, waiting. Come with me if you want to die. Reece finds the ball, finds the impossible pocket of space and fights his way through it, out into Sam’s waiting arms. Then things start to go wrong.
The kid feints right rather than left, and gallops through the space opened up by Sam’s automatically left-leaning body. Sam gives chase, and he keeps up well and even makes up ground as Reece zigzags through the midfield, but the skinny runt manages to get a well-placed kick into his forward fifty, and Sam knows, with some hateful intuition, that they’ll get a goal from this run of play. He watches the ball sail through the middle sticks like a bad omen.
To stop himself thinking like that he runs up to Reece on approach to the centre bounce and gives him a juddering shoulder bump – it hurts Sam probably as much as Reece, but he needs it to calm himself down. The noise of the crowd might not have changed at all, but it doesn’t sound friendly anymore. The opposition have more supporters here than Sam’s team does.
In the very next run of play a wildly unfair bounce gives them another run into their fifty. And although Reece isn’t directly involved he is starting to make himself useful in other ways, laying a surprisingly effective tackle and shepherding for the ball-carriers. He’s not on-ball so Sam can’t get too physical to stop him. He tries to see this as a victory – Reece is playing a defensive game, which means he’s been knocked out of his usual role. But the kid doesn’t look beaten. Sam shadows him while Reece picks up speed in line with another run of play, makes a hard defensive bump, breaks up a line at half-forward. He looks hungry. And worse than that, Sam’s starting to struggle to keep up. Certain comments on certain early fitness assessments are coming back to haunt him from that awful first year he missed out on the draft. They said his speed was excellent but endurance and conditioning let him down. He thought, train me then! But it seemed like those teams knew something about him – some structural defect that kept him out of contention. The second year he missed out was when Chloe started talking about the apprenticeship in her dad’s construction company. Just as a fallback. Sam shakes a curtain of sweat from his eyes and lunges at the kid’s back, momentarily forgetting the off-ball rule. The opposition gets a free and uses it to pull away by another goal.
Sam throws his head back and shouts at the sky, wordlessly.
At half-time Thommo has some sharp words with him, but Sam’s not the only one copping it.
After the coach’s spray, Lethy, the captain, tries to gee them all up. ‘We are not a team that gets stuff handed to us,’ he shouts. ‘Wins aren’t handed to us on a fucken silver platter!’ Unlike the opposition, whose club has enough money to buy a bloody premiership. Lethy shouts: ‘We are fighters!’ He pauses. ‘What are we?’
All the boys shout back as one, and Sam is one of the loudest. Fighters!
It will taste sweeter in the end. They jog back onto the ground, and Sam tries not to think of what Thommo said. ‘If you can’t keep up with the kid you let me know, ’cos there are men fucken lining up out there to take your place.’
*
; Sam glues himself to Reece’s side before the bounce, and beneath the roar of the crowd and shouting of the umps he whispers into the kid’s ear, ‘Your coach was right about you. You’re weak as a syphilitic dick.’
Reece shrugs him off. He’s jumping around on the spot, warming himself up before the ball comes down, and Sam feels prepared for the burst of speed. But it turns out he’s not.
The kid wins the ball from the tap and gets a clean run down the corridor, and Sam has time while he’s watching Reece’s back – so close but infinitely far away – to think that the crowd isn’t like a swarm of bees at all, it’s like a snarling pit of wild animals; and time to hope the game isn’t screened live in Perth, which makes him think of Chloe again – the apprenticeship application she left on the bed and then all the shouting – and it’s that thought more than any realistic plan to take the kid down that makes him lunge. The kid’s already lining up to kick, and Sam knows it’s too late. It might have been different if he’d been picked up by one of the other, better clubs. One of the clubs with proper fitness staff. He knows about the treatment Reece and his teammates get: professional post-game massages and a dietician for every player. Sam came close – one of the wealthy clubs showed heaps of interest when he was up for the draft second time around. Maybe as close as he is to a legitimate tackle, lunging at Reece’s legs a second after the thumping kick of the ball. Reece gets a fifty, of course, and the opposition pulls ahead by four goals.
With this win under their belts they’ll have a clear run into the top four, and in the stands the celebrating has already begun. How could Sam have thought this game, this crowd, was on his side? Three-quarter time comes after an eternity of barely staved-off humiliation. They’ve pulled away by six goals but it could have been more, could have been a landslide if not for some desperate defending.
There is no bollocking in the break. Thommo has gone maudlin, monosyllabic, as he sometimes does; shrugging through a short ramble about damage limitation. Sam is glad not to have been shouted at, but he feels a space opening up around him, a few centimetres of poisonous air that the other guys edge around with embarrassed eyes. The worst of it is that he’s not quick enough to stop the thought – which is not even a thought so much as a physical longing, momentarily twisting up his guts – that he’d like to go home now to Chloe.