by Miriam Sved
He jogs back onto the field feeling like he hardly has the energy to keep himself upright, let alone provide a viable tag for the kid. He lines up next to Reece and thumps him in the chest with his shoulder, needing to keep the aggression up, to keep himself in the contest.
The last quarter gets underway.
Reece’s leg speed and endurance is unreal, unfair. In the first few minutes Sam shadows him up and down the ground, always a second behind, feeling as though he’s playing on a pure whiff of fuel. He tries to motivate himself with anger at this skinny newbie, who’ll probably be a roadblock in Sam’s career. Sam will probably lose his spot in the team, which he’s worked so hard to secure – two years making a measly living as a rookie in the WAFL, never getting a game in the AFL. A flare of indignation and he manages to catch up to Reece and knock him hard over the line; but one of the umps has seen and now he’s jogging over, whistle out. Sam has given away another fifty, the kid gets a goal which takes them to a forty-something lead.
Sam comes up behind him for the bounce and whispers, ‘I’m gonna cut you up.’ Reece ignores him, but Sam goes on speaking, a stream of vitriol, son of a piss-weak bastard. Nothing. As though Reece exists in a different dimension and the buzz of Sam’s words, his anger, floats up into the air. He keeps going with it anyway, because what else is there left to do? They’re jogging around the outer field while the ball’s in defence and Sam wishes he could stop, go home, watch telly. He says ginger fag. He says weak as piss and skinny runt and fuck your mother on Brownlow night, and just as he feels the last props of anger wobble beneath him – as it occurs to him that it might not be too late to go back to Perth, throw himself at Chloe’s feet, take up the apprenticeship – Reece spins around, grabs Sam’s vest and in one fluid movement swings hard at his face. A fist of light that fractures the greens of the playing field into the moment of pure shock. Then umps running towards them, whistles. Sam has kept himself upright and his daze gives way to a blossoming elation. Reece is waving his arms around and explaining to no-one, saying he wouldn’t shut up, he made me, he wouldn’t just shut up, I fucken had to.
Sam’s team gets its first fifty of the game. Lozza, the full-forward, slots a beautiful driving ball through the sticks. It’s a token six points, nothing can head off the loss at this stage, but Sam jogs back towards the centre square buoyant. The kid will surely go up before the tribunal next week, he’ll be out of the running for the rising star award, he might miss the first games of the finals series. He might even miss the grand final if they make it that far. Sam lines up for the bounce pressed in close against Reece’s back, apprenticeship forgotten, prepared to love the last few minutes of the game.
Public relations
Round twenty-one
Hi Josh,
As discussed on the phone this morning, here’s my personal account of the Camperos mess. Never thought I’d get into the ‘tell-all’ business. At least you’re not paying me for it, stingy bastard. No going back now, je ne regrette, hey? Do what you want with it. You owe me a beer.
Ian
*
When I found out there was footage, actual footage of what Luke Camperos had done, I thought the game was up. The finals were in two weeks and we were one easy game away from a top-four berth, but we’d need Camperos down front once we got there. I’m good at my job but I’m no wizard, and if that three minutes of CCTV film found its way into public sight we’d need the dark arts to save Camperos without trashing the club’s reputation.
In our first stroke of luck, though, the footage was the property of Ray Costello, who owned a pub in the city which was the unofficial HQ of the team’s cheer squad. Half of Ray’s business came from the club; the last thing he wanted was to hurt us. He told me this loudly, repeatedly, over beers in his bar on the afternoon I first saw the footage. I’d watched it earlier that day at the office, slumped in despair with the president, Mackenzie, sitting across from me, but Ray had the film on his phone and he insisted on playing it for me again in the thankfully deserted bar. He held the little screen at arm’s length in front of us, framing it with his hands as if we were about to witness a thing of beauty, and as it started he was telling me about all his years of faithful club worship, and his father’s before him and his grandfather’s before his father’s, and all I could think was Jesus Christ, if the media gets hold of this . . .
I let Ray jabber on about his ancestral claim to Number-One Fan status while the blurry little publicity nightmare spooled out in front of me. Luke Camperos stumbling out of Ray’s bar last weekend, the woman walking alongside and partly propping him up; then the woman helping him into the passenger seat of her rather racy little Mazda. The minute of stillness – the car doesn’t start, there’s the suggestion of movement behind the windscreen but you can’t quite make it out (the police statement alleged that what was going on in the car now was unwanted physical advances of a sexual nature). After a minute the woman stumbles out of the driver’s-side seat, shouting at Camperos, who appears for a few seconds to have a hold of one of her legs, and hurries back into Ray’s bar. (The alleged victim left the vicinity of the vehicle containing the defendant, and returned directly to the bar to ask bar staff for assistance.) And then Camperos, half stumbling out of the low-rise car, having a brief retch in the gutter, climbing up onto the hood of the Mazda and fumbling at his belt. I put my hand over the little screen before we could get to Camperos depositing what the police statement described as a quantity of human faecal matter on the bonnet of the vehicle.
I took a swig of beer and turned my attention to giving the publican a thorough buttering-up. I told him how important he was to the team and the club, and to the whole game, which ran not on money but something much deeper – loyalty, and history, and how you couldn’t buy the kind of history that grinned down from the walls of Ray’s bar (Ray’s father standing next to the great Antony Ehlroy after the ’78 grand final; his grandfather, a young man in a dapper 1950s suit, with an arm draped around our most famous coach, Billy Redwyn). I felt grubby doing this – spinning a silky web of flattery out of his family’s history with the club, to cradle Ray’s loyalties and keep us from getting screwed. I had my own family history at my parents’ house – a whole room dedicated to years of signed guernseys and team action shots – which, when you got down to it, had been used against me just as effectively. The day I told my mum I’d be working for the club was one of the happiest of her life. The day I told Mackenzie about my mum’s happiness was one of my stupidest. Never let them know you’re a fan. They’ll suck you dry.
I asked Ray to email me the footage, and I kept spoon-feeding him flattery and belonging until, by the time I left his bar, I was confident that we had him sewn up. He would resist the temptation to go around showing that film to his customers, and he’d sworn on club colours that he wasn’t going near the cops with it. There were other things to be grateful for: that Camperos had dropped his daks and his faecal matter in a dimly lit laneway and there didn’t seem to have been other witnesses; that the cops, despite the freeze-dried earnestness of the police statement, didn’t seem to be treating the matter with much gravity – Mackenzie himself had called the station sergeant and had told me that the guy practically wet himself with reassurances, and wished Mac luck in the finals. Things could have been a lot worse. Mostly all we had to worry about was the media. There was a vague story floating around on the forums about Camperos, drunk and filthy on a Saturday night. The mainstream press hadn’t touched it yet but I already had a few emails in my inbox from footy journos. They needed comment from us – confirmation, or even denial; just some response from the club to give the thing form. And we needed not to give it to them.
My phone rang as I got into my car outside Ray’s bar; as though my psyche had some kind of direct line to the press I saw the name of a sports writer at one of the dailies: a writer called Joshua Cresswick whom I knew and liked – we’d worked together briefly as
cadets at a different, smaller newspaper; I’d been drunk with him and once been set up on a blind date by him. I dinked him, put my phone on vibrate and started the car. Before I was halfway back to the office it buzzed on the seat beside me. I glanced down at the name of a junior news editor at a different Melbourne daily. I tossed the phone onto the back seat of the car. This week, I already knew, would be an ordeal of avoidance.
When I pulled into the club forecourt I listened to the voicemails from Joshua and the news editor – both were determinedly casual (Ian, mate!), looking for a chat, a catch-up, a tic-tac-toe. Both made reference to a rumour about one of our players, something they’d read online, nothing major, just looking for a form response from the club so they could slot the story on page 23 beneath the social columns no-one ever read. I deleted both messages and went to my office, closed the door on my tiny space and sat down to think.
We couldn’t sit on the story indefinitely. Neither could we allow the unmediated glare of media scrutiny. Containment.
I picked up my phone and scrolled through the contacts list. There was a formal process for submitting stories to Four Quarters, starting with an email to some minion whose job it was to field requests, weeding out the crazy, obsolete or boring. We were none of those, but I wouldn’t risk getting lost in the mosh. I called a producer at the show who owed me a favour. I knew he’d be interested in what I had to offer.
*
The phone calls and emails came in a trickle that day – all of them vague, suggestive, with an undertone of acquisitive lust. As I was driving home (only 8.15 by the dashboard clock) I got a call from a senior news editor at the same network I’d dinked earlier. I kept driving.
Alison was already in bed when I got home, but Viv said I could go in and say goodnight, and read her one story if she wanted it. Unfortunately the kind of story Alison wanted had nothing to do with her collection of early-reader books. As soon as I looked around the door, the small protuberance of her head poking out from under her doona said, ‘Hi, Dad – what players did you speak to today?’
There was no more enthusiastic footy fan than my nine-year-old daughter. Her room was wallpapered in club memorabilia, including a large poster of Luke Camperos above her bed. I stepped into the room, careful not to look at that poster. ‘I just came in to say goodnight, sweetie. I didn’t speak to any players. Would you like me to read you a story?’
She shook her head impatiently and sat up. ‘You said you were gonna have a meeting with Henley.’ Accusatory. ‘Didn’t you say that yesterday?’
‘I did say that, but then some other things happened, and I had to take care of them instead.’
‘What things? Things about a player?’
I laughed and managed to make it into a cough. ‘Nothing you need to worry about. Lie back down now.’
‘I saw on the internet that Cob’s gonna use a different forward structure on Saturday, ’cos of Mick Reece being suspended.’
‘That’s interesting, sweetie.’ I was edging my way out of the room. ‘Goodnight now.’
‘We’ll see who he’s playing up front when we go to the game on Saturday, won’t we, Dad?’
Cunning: she knew we weren’t going to the game and knew I couldn’t leave the false premise hanging there.
‘We probably won’t go to the game this week, Al.’
‘But if we do will we be in the club box?’
‘We’ll watch the game on telly.’
‘Will Camperos still be up front?’
I stopped with one foot out the door. ‘What?’
‘Luke Camperos? With the new forward structure, will Cob still put him up front? I read that he might move Camperos to the midfield. Like in the pre-season.’
‘Oh.’ It was almost creepy how, in her effort to keep me in the room, she landed dead centre on the sore spot. ‘I don’t know if Camperos will still be up front, sweetie. Depends what Cob decides.’ And how well I do my job.
My conversation with the Four Quarters producer had gone well. He’d been willing enough to talk through the veil of euphemism that indicated sensitivity to the club’s predicament. Yes, he’d heard talk about an incident involving Luke Camperos; it was very unfortunate this close to finals for players to be distracted by media scrutiny. Yes, the show could step in as a voice of reason to help clarify things without sensationalising them. The plain-speak translation of this conversation was that we would give Four Quarters an exclusive with Camperos, on condition that they didn’t ambush him with anything he couldn’t answer. I would vet the questions beforehand and have right of veto.
As I was edging my way out of Alison’s room, deflecting questions about who would be dropped for the Saturday game, my phone rang again. I glanced at the screen: a higher-level news exec from the same network that had already called twice. I pressed decline and then inched my body sideways through Al’s doorway, aware that I was playing essentially the same game with my daughter and the press. They both wanted more from me than I could give.
‘Goodnight, sweetie.’
‘But, Dad, I just want to ask . . .’
I closed the door on her upward-inflected approach to a whine and stood in the hall studying my phone for a minute, the list of missed calls. This wouldn’t be the end of it.
*
We had three days until Camperos’ Four Quarters appearance, which wasn’t a moment too long; I’d need all the time I could get with him. In the morning I had a meeting with Mackenzie, in which we talked through the containment strategy – talked through meaning that I told him my plan and he reformulated it in a way that implied he’d come up with it himself. Then there was a phone hook-up with Cob, the coach, because I couldn’t get any face-to-face with him. Cob treated my role with a generationally specific mix of disdain and superstitious faith. Public relations. In his day you related to the public at the pub after a game, over beers and probably fists. But he was obviously reluctant to touch the Camperos matter with a barge pole, and happy for me to cast whatever spell would make the whole thing go away. To this end he promised to let the full-forward out of training from 2 to 3 pm that day, and then we’d see what more was needed. By the time I got off the phone there were two more missed calls from the press – a footy writer at the other major daily, and an entertainment reporter who dabbled heavily in sports-star scandals. There was also a gauntlet of emails in my inbox, ranging from the wheedling to the bullying, all dredging for information about the most recent incident involving Luke Camperos. One of them took a punt on a recurrent version of the rumour involving golden showers. All of them skirted around the serious business of Camperos’ record with women – politely termed disrespectful, having been pulled back twice by the club from the brink of prosecution. I created a new folder, labelled it Camp, dumped all the emails in there and deleted the most recent messages from my phone.
*
Camperos, as promised, was there at 2 pm, making me and my office feel pathetically small. Camperos was big. Of course, big was the first thing you noticed about most of the guys – you couldn’t get much of a foothold in the League if you were under six foot or ninety kegs, as I’d learned in my own abortive fling at the rookie lists a decade and a half before. But with Camperos you could tell he didn’t have to work at it. Big hands, big forearms; even his eyebrows were oversized, jutting towards me with a Neanderthal obnoxiousness. A few years ago, before he’d been involved in any of his well-publicised troubles with women, Camperos was voted Most Eligible Bachelor by some magazine, and was still widely touted as one of the team’s better aesthetic elements. It’s true he had regular features and a certain intensity to his deep-set eyes, but the overall effect, I thought, was Frankensteinian. Nevertheless, his looks seemed to be enough to score him a succession of B-list celebrity girlfriends, mostly of the lingerie-model variety. I had to assume it was his looks, because his personality wasn’t much of a draw card.
; He sat slumped in the little chair in my little office, radiating bored antagonism like a school kid in detention.
‘Luke,’ I said, crossing my hands in front of me. ‘I’m assuming you might be a bit . . . embarrassed by what happened at Ray’s last weekend?’
He stared blankly, the concept of embarrassment clearly beyond his emotional register.
‘The police must have been in touch with you,’ I said, wishing I could harness some of Cob’s bullish authority to get through this. ‘You must know what I’m talking about.’
‘Yeah, I got a call from a cop.’ He shrugged. ‘Don’t really remember much, to be honest, but if they say I did that . . .’ He broke off and gave a surprisingly high-pitched giggle.
‘You did it,’ I said, feeling heat rise into my face. ‘And frankly it was pretty disgusting.’
He seemed undisturbed, but thoughtful. ‘I do remember that girl, actually. She said she was a third-generation fan.’
I waited, thinking we might be about to have a teachable moment.
He said, ‘She was a real prick-tease.’
I had a mental flash of my daughter’s bedroom, the massive poster of this massive dickhead hanging above her bed.
I took a slow, deep breath. The fans, I reminded myself. This was for the fans. ‘Let’s not talk about what you did, let’s talk about practicalities. For all practical purposes,’ I spoke with exaggerated clarity, trying to hold his eyes, ‘you didn’t do anything.’