by Miriam Sved
While the woman, Linda, sits gaping at these horrible revelations, Cob has finished introducing Patricia, and now he says, ‘Next week’s game isn’t gonna be easy. Nothing in the next few weeks is gonna be easy, and if we approach this mountain as individuals we’ve already lost. The boys from the team who are here tonight will recognise this as something I’ve been hammering into them all year. Everyone has his role to play. No-one’s role is all-important. We haven’t got any heroes here; we’ve got a team of individuals who all know what role they need to play. Same as all you here tonight who come along every week to support us and bring the banners and do the fundraising and so many other things for this team. Everyone’s got their role, and as sure as no-one can do it alone is the fact we can’t do it without everyone on board. That’s why we keep turning up: because as a team we’re all stronger, we’re all better, and I know we can bloody win this thing.’
The room is silent for a second, two seconds before the applause starts, and then everyone is on their feet, and the woman is standing along with the rest of them, cheering, remembering the first game she ever went to with her grandfather in 1962. Joe Leister kicked the winning goal on the siren and the team ran at him, merging with a stream of supporters that poured from the stands. She and her grandfather watched the massive organism of the team and its fans from up high in the stalls, and she knew where she wanted to be. No longer watching from up high, she is down in it, the poisonous revelations seeping away through the mesh of Cob’s belief: just a faint aftertaste of dread like the memory of a bad dream.
Cob says, ‘I hope all of you enjoy the night, and make sure you get a chance to welcome Patricia to the club.’
Behind her the woman hears a snort; Azza. She turns to where he and Mick Reece are still sitting, staring up at Patricia and the coach as they descend from the stage.
‘Fucken women, hey?’ Azza says.
When Mick doesn’t respond, he goes on, ‘Can I get you a drink, mate? We could get out of here, I know this awesome bar around the corner, owner’s a mate of mine. He’ll have your scotch for sure.’ His crooked smile back in place. The woman looks at Mick Reece and thinks, He is not so much younger than my Dave. A lot uglier though. She feels a wave of pride for Dave, who is making such a go of things at the golf shop, even though he has never been very good at the game – never very sporty at all, can’t even catch a ball.
Patricia and Cob are both making their way through the room, greeting people as they go, and the woman thinks she should speak to Patricia and invite her along to a banner-prep session. She’s always thought someone in the media should do a profile about the team’s cheer squad.
The father–son rule
Semi-final to preliminary final
Cooling down in the locker room after the preliminary final of the VFL season, Ant can’t shake the feeling that something is missing.
It is nothing to do with the game, which had gone brilliantly: a surgical dismantling of last year’s VFL premiers. It is nothing easily nameable, and he doesn’t try to communicate it to any of the guys unstrapping their limbs or stretching their hammies on the floor. It is . . . a perspectival loss. Some dimensional shadow absent from his peripheral vision.
Scotty Riesling, his fellow backman stretched out on the floor nearby, has just said something about this run of strength being good for the drafted rookies. Addressing these rookies, who tend to stick together and are cooling down in a corner of the room, Scotty says, ‘Shame none of youse got elevated this year or you’d be a shoo-in for the AFL home stretch.’ Ant thinks, AFL home stretch?
Something is wrong. Any other year he would have known in intimate detail how the AFL team was travelling, and would have been nursing bitter, ludicrous fantasies about getting his own call-up into the AFL backline. This year he hadn’t even realised they were in the home stretch. Hadn’t they faltered towards the end of the home-and-away season? Hadn’t everyone said they would crash out?
He sits on the hard bench, back pressed against the wall, and takes stock. He has been aware of some background drama filtering down from the AFL club. He saw Cob, the firsts’ coach, on the news a while ago, making a rare public statement about bad umpiring. And there was some kind of scandal. A sex scandal – it must have been a sex scandal because it involved that dickhead Luke Camperos and the kids at school were sniggering about it a couple of weeks ago, but Ant missed the salient details. All the details from the firsts’ season – the colour and texture of it – are hazy to him. And when his dad, the first Antony Ehlroy, called last week and blathered on about the famous finals campaigns of his own playing days – ’74 and ’75, and the triumphant ’78 – Ant had not particularly minded. He had not taken his dad’s self-aggrandisement as a slight on his own career, or a gauntlet thrown or anything like that, even though he was aware in some hypothetical way that these interpretations were open to him. He simply didn’t care enough to care.
Ant has always felt chosen. Elevated above the normal run of play by the blazing path of his genetic AFL history. He stalled in a second-tier team, passed over for some years because of a few things that went wrong – a run of injuries, slight loss of leg speed, one year a defensive structure he couldn’t quite get the hang of – but still, those flares of greatness laid down by his dad led so clearly to Ant’s life, his future. His destiny.
Now Scotty shouts across the sweat-filled room, ‘Who’s for the pub?’ And Ant looks at his mate from the backline, Scotty Riesling, who has been in this second-tier team almost as long as Ant himself, and who will probably get a bit drunk tonight even though he has to get up tomorrow, Monday morning, to go to his office job. Ant looks at Scotty properly, and looks at all the other blokes in the room – a combination of VFL lifers, mostly older, and AFL rookies, mostly kids. The two sub-groups are unmistakable, and not just because of the age gap. Almost all the VFL boys have day jobs; maybe that’s what it is. Scotty Riesling and Simon Cleuster and Lachie Jones and all the rest of them: they look like guys approaching their thirties in good shape, especially in the afterglow of exercise and winning. But there is something about them – they do not look like footballers. Not like the guys in the AFL team, or even the smattering of rookie drafts in the locker room – Tom Elgin, the young ruckman they’ve drafted to eventually fill Kev Walker’s big shoes, who is not very skilled but has six foot nine of pure, unharnessed strength going for him. Even a little guy like Jake Dooley, the young indigenous boy who’s performing so well just weeks after coming back from a bad leg break – performing so well that word is he’ll be trained with the AFL group in the pre-season, a sure thing for the early rounds next year. Those boys look like footballers, and Ant notices that they are both discreetly collecting their things for the trek home, ignoring Scotty’s call to celebrate the win at the pub. The rest of them, the VFL lifers, look like . . . a nice term for it would be grown-ups. Pretty good for their age, but not that different from the rest of the people who’ll be drinking at the local tonight; a bunch of guys who’ve just had a kick-around and are celebrating their youthful vigour, but who couldn’t be mistaken for professional athletes. It must be the day jobs: anchoring them all to the normal, piss-ant world; the extra layer of flab and fat – even a slight layer – that comes of cakes in the staffroom and eight hours a day of mostly sedentary labour, and of worrying about mortgages and superannuation. Ant’s dad, low-key drunk that he’s become since his playing days, never had to worry about that stuff. AFL players go from hardened slabs of physical power to pot-bellied diabetics when they stop playing, sometimes almost overnight, but no-one could confuse them with that shameful parody that Ant suddenly recognises in his VFL teammates. Grown-ups.
Scotty slaps him on the arm and says, ‘You in, softcock?’
He shoulders his bag and heads for the locker-room door.
‘That girlfriend’s got you by the balls,’ Scotty says to his back, and Ant raises his middle finger over his shou
lder.
Walking down the race to meet Mallory, he starts trying to unpick the tendrils of loyalty and distraction that have been holding him back.
No more pub.
No more fooling around with his destiny.
No more day job.
He scores out that last one – he has to keep his day job. But no more . . . distracting enthusiasm for it. Just last week his year ten group won a gruelling rugby match-up against a rough school from over the river, and he cracked his head against the low-rise bleachers during his victory dance. This is not the stuff of legends.
There is a particular piece of footage of his dad from the ’78 final – in the scratchy muted colours of seventies Australiana, his old man pounding down a badly maintained MCG in pursuit of Vic Borodin, his career nemesis whom he stalks to a low-tackled skid around the fifty-metre mark as the full-time siren rings out over the field. The important, historically notable part of the footage starts here: a wall of supporters going nuts in the background as the great Antony Ehlroy lines up for that mythical, career-defining, life-defining moment – the after-the-hooter kick to win the premiership. Antony, his rat’s tail flapping in a light Melbourne breeze, won the premiership, and captured his life’s meaning in a transportable bubble of glory. Ant imbibed that story with his mother’s milk, but walking slowly down the echoing chill of the race, he decides he has never taken the right meaning from that thirty seconds of regularly screened footage. He has watched the kick over and over again, the concentration and belief on his father’s face, the moment before boot connects with ball and the moment after, the fluid, unwavering follow-through. But it is not this kick that matters. It is the chase. Antony wasn’t handed the ball, presented with his destiny like a gift; he chased it down. Ant has got distracted and hasn’t been chasing hard enough.
He comes out of the race and Mallory jumps him from behind, wrapping her long arms around his neck. ‘Hey, champ.’
‘You’ll get all my sweat,’ he says.
‘I want all your sweat.’ But she disengages and holds up her hand, palm out.
Ant feels self-conscious as he gives her the high-five. It’s the first thing they do whenever either of them has a win, sometimes spinning it into a whole series of multi-level hand slaps, but it occurs to him now that high-fiving your girlfriend for every mediocre win (it was only a VFL game) is not the mark of a winner, an after-the-siren goal-kicking champion. He wonders whether any of the AFL players get high-fived after games by their trophy wives.
It is something Mal – all gangly five foot eleven of her – has joked about: how badly Ant chose his WAG. Wives And Girlfriends: the idea being that footballers’ women exist as attractive accessories, their main goal in life to cast a pleasant glow around the off-field hours. Ant’s own mother, now enjoying her well-deserved divorce in a resort town in Queensland, was a runway model with impeccable deportment and a catalogue of recipes for ready-to-inhale meals. Mal can’t cook, and regularly compares herself to some famous netballer who’s a spokesperson for microwave dinners. She is long and lean and angular, with a striking and slightly horsey kind of beauty that Ant loves, but she’s right, she wouldn’t fit at all as a WAG. Aside from her fashion choices (jeans, hoodies) and lack of culinary ability, there is the matter of her own sporting career. Ant is pretty sure none of the AFL wives and girlfriends are more successful in national codes than their footy-playing husbands.
Mal has her own game coming up – the semi-final of the women’s hockey league against the strong New South Wales team. Mal’s girls are the underdogs, but they’ve had a good season and are going in with a chance, and Mal herself will almost certainly get picked for the national team. She might go to the Olympics in two years.
In the car on the way home, when Ant shows no inclination to talk about his game, Mal starts talking about her training schedule for the week ahead, and about work – she will have to get out of a parent–teacher night on Wednesday – and some rumour going around the hockey networks about the interstate team’s goalie, and Ant can only half listen through a rising internal buzz. He remembers this voice in his head – the guilty burn of it – from the early years with his girlfriend, when he still ached every waking hour to get drafted and fulfil his destiny. The running commentary of competitive resentment against Mallory. They get into the house and Ant puts a frozen lasagne in the microwave, an imaginary WAG chorus pursing their cherry-red lips at his sporty partner. The WAGs whisper that Mal might not want him to make the League. If he got picked up by an interstate team they would have to move. He might have less time for her, come home knackered, get attention from other women, from footy groupies. He might be better than her.
They eat their microwave dinner in the living room, in front of the TV. Mal has stopped talking about her game and keeps turning her head from the screen to look at him. Eventually she asks if he’s pulled up sore. Ant shrugs, resentful and clamped down with the guilt of how unfair and disloyal he’s being. She looks at him for a long moment.
‘You really were brilliant in the game,’ she says.
‘Thanks.’
Her fixed gaze is a bit unnerving.
‘McFadden might see it,’ she goes on. ‘Maybe even Cob.’
She has read him so well that Ant feels a swell of angry embarrassment wash over him. It is exactly what he has been hoping: that the AFL team’s head recruitment scout, or even the coach, might be paying enough attention to the VFL finals to get him noticed. He picks up their plates from the coffee table and takes them to the kitchen.
‘They might,’ Mallory calls after him. The thought that she is humouring him sets off another set of twitchy resentments firing through his skull. She probably feels sorry for him.
‘They’ve got better things to do,’ he shouts back from the kitchen; but he is thinking about a flying defensive mark he took in the third quarter, against Jordan Crawley, a big AFL name playing out the VFL finals because his team didn’t make the top eight. The VFL games are sometimes televised on the ABC. The coach or the talent scout might have it recorded. They might be watching it now. He could have just spoiled that ball over Crawley’s shoulder, but he knew he had the measure of it, and when his hands closed around the ball he felt a thrill of invincibility. Maybe that was the moment his destiny reared up to claim him.
He goes to the bedroom and switches on the telly, sits on the bed and scans through the sports channels, hoping to find the game on repeat. But it is all AFL: on one of the channels they are replaying yesterday’s semi-final, which got the firsts into next week’s prelim, and on another they are discussing that game. He pauses on this discussion, half hoping that one of the two commentators might segue from the AFL team’s unexpected triumph to today’s VFL win.
‘I hate to say I told you so, but I called it, didn’t I call it?’ one of them – a small man with prominent eyebrows and a ferrety chin – is saying. ‘It’s the young boys. These raw kids, they’ve seen their opportunity to make a difference in a great team and they’ve stepped up. McAvoy, Wellard, Reece – these kids really changed the momentum of the game yesterday.’
The other commentator, balding and porcine, murmurs thoughtfully and says, ‘You can’t take anything away from the older blokes though. Ranga McPhee alone is such a great story: three goals in the semi, eight contested marks. The guy hasn’t played down front for what, five or six years?’
‘I’m telling you,’ the ferrety one says, ‘Cob’s game plan throughout the year has been vindicated. Versatility and toughness, everyone playing attacking footy – that’s why McPhee could step into the forward line.’
‘I totally agree, mate.’
‘I mean, look what he’s done with Mick Reece – first-year player, had a rocky start to the season, Cob copped a lot of flak about putting so much on him in the mid-forward. And then for that kid to come out of a five-week suspension and play like that . . .’ He sits back and sighs li
ke someone who’s just finished a big, satisfying meal. ‘He and McPhee made it look like they never needed Luke Camperos, like there was no hole in the forward line at all.’
‘You gotta wonder whether the Camperos nightmare is a blessing in disguise for this club–’
Ant flicks it off in disgust. This is the stuff that Cob and McFadden will be watching. No-one will pay any attention to the VFL while the senior team is riding so high. He reaches again for the elation of that third-quarter mark against Crawley but he can’t quite feel it anymore, the moment when the ball thwacked against his outstretched palms. He is harassed by a badly placed handpass he made in the dying minutes of the game, and by the thought that he would have had a better shot if the AFL team had crashed out of the finals the way everyone expected them to. When things go badly: that is when people – Cob, McFadden, footy commentators – start talking about regeneration, changing the line-up. Instead, the AFL team has found some reserve of strength and determination – the team has depth – and now they’re into the prelim, which will be held the day after the VFL grannie, meaning no-one who matters will pay any attention to Ant’s game. He punches himself on the thigh and then lies down on the bed, suddenly drained. Would his famous dad have thought like this in his own playing days, putting his personal destiny ahead of the team’s chances? Ant thinks yes, probably yes: Antony Ehlroy senior was (still is) a selfish bastard the way all champions are at heart. He would have wanted to shine at any cost.
*
The next day starts with unexpected good news from Ant’s coach, Larkin, who texts that the AFL senior coach wants Ant to sit in on a meeting on Wednesday night. Cob. He wants to discuss the VFL’s defensive structure for the big game, the grand final this coming weekend. Ant has met the great man only a handful of times at club events; he’s never been in a meeting with him. He tries to keep his pulse in check: it is probably just some routine demand that will fuck up their game plan for the grannie. But he can feel his destiny filling the cracks of his mind, vibrating with a new reality.