by Miriam Sved
Donny had gone back to Bendigo to stay with his people. Moira had said this casually, during one of her visits a few years before, and had never voiced any discontent with the situation, so Kate had come to think of it as a normal domestic arrangement. Perhaps it was the way they did things in Donny’s . . . mob. Now she saw herself being drawn into a new conversation; one about Moira. Starting this conversation was awkward when she had gone so far without having it – as if she had lived with someone for years without ever catching their name, and now it was too late to ask.
‘Donny . . .’ she said. ‘Could he . . . Can he come back up to see the boys? If you’re worried about Jake?’
Moira rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. ‘Yeah, he could, if I let him. But he’s forfeited that right.’
Kate waited.
‘When I met Donny I thought it was great, he was this proud black man, you know? My own family lost their history when my mum was taken, and it seemed like I was sort of giving that back to my kids, what was taken from us. But I forgot about all the other stuff that goes along with it. Donny never had it easy. He always struggled to get work. I could get work easier and that never sat right with him. So that’s why he tried to bring in money other ways. At least, at first that’s why. Then I guess he got addicted.’
She looked up at Kate, the crow’s feet around her eyes deep and tangled. Kate had never noticed before how tired she looked.
‘Jake’ll have the same stuff to go through,’ Moira went on. ‘Maybe worse, ’cos he’s so shy. And he’s got so much pressure on him: Donny’s dad hasn’t had much fight left in him the last few years but he watches Jake like he’s some kind of god, like Jake’s gonna fix it all. And Uncle Les, I’m so grateful he took us in when Donny got in trouble, but now he’s got everything tied up in Jake’s game too. And even Hugo – you know Huges has started training? He thinks I don’t know that he’s training on that oval with the footy every afternoon. I should probably be grateful he’s into the game rather than all the other stuff he could be getting up to, but what’s gonna happen when he realises he doesn’t have the same skills Jake does? Who’s gonna tell him he won’t make it? I think the man from the club put these ideas in his head ’cos he was sniffing around the school team, but when he talked to me he seemed mostly interested in Andy.’
‘Andy?’
‘I know, it’s crazy. He’s not even old enough for the under-12s. But that’s what it’s like once you’re in, every move being watched, all that pressure.’ She rubbed her eyes again, hard enough to deepen the crow’s feet. ‘You never wanna think your kids’ll have a harder time than you, do you?’
Kate was becoming peripherally aware of having a choice to make, although she couldn’t have articulated what the options were. She had a vision of her son, Mick, like one of those TV promos for football: gleaming in the uniform of the AFL club, handballing a Sherrin into the distance. And against this vision, the suddenly revealed chaos of Moira’s life. Mick was steady, responsible, he could handle the pressure. Moira had thrown in her lot with these people. This black mob. Kate didn’t mean to think that. Moira was her friend (her best friend?). She watched the silence stretch to its longest point and then opened her mouth to see what would come out.
‘I’m sure it’ll all be fine,’ she said. ‘Let’s just wait and see what happens.’
So bland and inadequate – a small part of her ran around in circles in her mind, looking for something real to give her friend, something of comfort. But Mick: jogging out onto the ground in his shining club colours. Herself watching on from up high, up in one of the club’s boxes.
The decision was already made. It was still bright outside, a bright spring day, but she said, ‘I think the light’s starting to fade. Maybe the boys are ready to finish up.’
*
The next week was the game in the city, at the draft combine. Kids from all over the country vying to be drafted, converging on a stadium in Melbourne.
Mick came home excited from the first day – there were big-name players and coaches in to talk to the contenders; he’d met one of his footy idols. The three of them were staying in a shabby hotel near the training grounds, no posh club accommodation this time; but still, Kate was happy. She’d bought a new outfit and caught up with a few people from uni. She was proud to tell her old friends why they were in town; her life no longer a monument to bad choices. She listened to Mick talk about the day, about all the people he’d met and the training they’d done, and felt her connection to him vibrate.
The next day there was to be a briefing in the morning and an exhibition game in the evening: a game pitching the kids against each other with all the important footy people watching on. The kids had a few hours off during the day. Kate was surprised to see Mick back at the hotel, surprised he hadn’t gone off with Jake to explore the city. Surprised too by how morose he seemed.
She suggested they go to a cafe on the street near the hotel, a hole-in-the-wall place that served all-day breakfast. When the three of them were seated around an uncomfortably small table on the footpath she asked Mick questions, starting from a distance and moving inwards towards the central issue. What number did he have for the game? (Number 7, good.) Would there be any training beforehand? (No.) What were the team structures like? Dan, on the other side of Mick, was more intensely silent than usual.
Mick said, ‘I’m in the midfield.’ Staring at the ground between his feet. ‘On-ball and pushing into half-forward.’
‘That’s good,’ Kate said. Would she have to come right out and ask?
‘Yeah,’ Mick said. ‘I guess so.’
A waitress came and Kate ordered fruit toast, a full breakfast for Dan and sausages for Mick. When she’d left, Kate said, ‘What about the rest of the teams? How are they lined up?’
Mick shrugged. ‘Dunno, really. Not by state, anyway.’
This was what they had all expected and hoped for: that the boys would be teamed for the exhibition game according to where they lived, Victorian players against the rest.
With a strong sense that she already knew the answer, Kate said, ‘And Jake? What about Jake?’
Mick looked up at her and raised his eyebrows.
She said, ‘They have you and Jake playing on each other.’
He nodded. She could tell from the set of his jaw that his teeth were clenched.
Kate said, ‘They want to see who comes out on top.’
He shrugged.
The waitress delivered their food.
Dan started to speak, an uncharacteristic flow of silence-filling. He said something about the team structures being unimportant, something about physical skill and speed and concentrating on his, Mick’s, own performance.
Kate cut him off. ‘It’s not about those things.’ She felt a dreamy sense of unreality as she picked up a piece of fruit toast and said, ‘It’s well known that Aboriginal players aren’t as tough as whites. They’re brilliant but they don’t have the same commitment.’
Mick’s face too was calm, almost remote, but there was a hardness around his eyes that she knew for a mask. She said, ‘You have to prove it to them.’ The powerful ones: the club recruiters, the coaches. ‘You have to prove that you’re better than him and that you’ll go further to get it.’ She could imagine what had happened, somewhere in a nice lofty boardroom: a group of suited men around a table, saying words like guts and hunger. Mick was still looking at her, his face locked down. She said, ‘It’s between the two of you. This is your chance.’
He looked down at his hands hanging between his knees. Long, strong fingers, ideal for wrapping the heft of a football. There had been a time when Kate thought her son’s hands might make him a pianist: she had insisted on having a piano shipped from the city. But Mick had never practised.
She took a bite of toast, and said with perfect calculation, ‘You have to decide how much you’r
e worth. Is your friendship with Jake more important than your own success?’
Moira now was nowhere, she didn’t exist. Tonight Kate and Dan would sit in the proper grandstand and watch Mick’s future unfurl. She looked into Mick’s face and said, ‘However you decide to play it, we’ll understand. Some people think it’s just a game.’ Knowing that he would know what she meant.
*
Watching the game that night, under the mythologising glow of the light towers, the moment that Mick went in for the tackle she knew even before the noise of it hit her. With an exhilarating rush of adrenalin she knew how bad it was for Jake.
It was a clean tackle: the leg stuck fast into the turf while the rest of Jake was taken down.
She was down on the grounds quickly although she couldn’t remember leaving her seat. Mick stood next to the body, speaking to no-one. (You alright, mate? You’ll be alright. Mate? Didn’t mean to go in so hard. You’re alright, yeah?) The angle of the lower leg, which was grotesque, surely indicated something long-term, a future hobbling behind her own son in the race. These thoughts came and went; she did nothing to stop them. Moira wasn’t there, she was home with her other boys, so it was Kate who followed Jake into the ambulance and made comforting noises to him as her mind shuffled through the future in the hopeful light of his long-term injury. He whimpered on the stretcher when a paramedic touched his leg.
At the hospital, in a harsh fluorescent corridor outside the door they’d wheeled Jake through, her mind started to come back under control. Moira surfaced from the background swamp. Moira who knew everything about Kate. She could never know this. A hospital administrator came to ask her questions about Jake – his age, his address, where his parents were. Kate was grateful for the distraction, to keep the cloud of her new reality at bay for a few minutes more. It was waiting for her in the sterile upper reaches of the hospital corridor. The knowledge that she would, as far as possible, never speak to Moira again. She would avoid her around the town, walk in the other direction if she saw her in the street.
The administrator left, and Kate closed her eyes and tried to focus on Mick, the shining image of her son in his football guernsey, his proud young face. But his face kept slipping away from her. She couldn’t pretend that what she had done, the choice she’d made, was for her son.
She had chosen the game, and her own peripheral role in it. The game had taken her, claimed her: another footy mum. It owned her.
*
Half an hour has gone by in the kitchen, Kate unmoving at the table with the magazine open in front of her. Small sounds disturb her vigil: the old wood of the house relaxing into its grooves, oblivious young magpies out the window. Like all waiting rooms – liminal places – the painful thing is not knowing exactly what she is going towards, or what is coming at her. She just hopes for something new. A break in the weather. The next thing.
Mick’s door opens and a second later Jake’s head appears around the kitchen door.
He focuses on her, gives her one of his half-smiles, which used to seem awkward and now seems charming. ‘Thanks, Mrs Reece,’ he says. ‘See you soon.’
That’s all; he is gone again.
See you soon. The normalcy of it expands in her chest. The room is still reverberating with Jake’s friendliness a minute later, when Mick comes out of his room.
Kate doesn’t break her pose at the kitchen table, her imitation of someone reading a magazine. She says nothing, follows him obliquely with her eyes. Mick doesn’t speak either; he has the two empty beer bottles in his hand, and he deposits them by the sink, goes to the pantry and gets a packet of chips.
Don’t ruin your dinner, Kate would say, if she was secure in this normal universe. She says nothing. At least he’s out of his room, and she can convince herself that there’s something conciliatory, something careful in his movements around the kitchen. He walks behind the table and opens the chips standing at the window, and it’s enough to make her feel readmitted. She feels like she exists.
Perhaps, after all, life can go on as if the last year never happened. Perhaps she can call Moira.
How’ve you been? She tries out new words in her head. Jake looks well.
They are unconvincing; too much space, too much dead air beneath them. Too much she still can’t confess. She wonders if Jake’s leg ever aches or twinges late at night.
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.
These words don’t work either. They have no shiver of belief.
Mick is still standing at the kitchen window, looking out onto the dry field behind the house, and now she lets her eyes follow his line of vision and lets her mind come to rest on the phantom scene. The arc of a football. Her husband and two small boys, the late-afternoon sun on the tops of the trees and the light around the ball as the boys run for it together from different directions. Unaware of each other and of the man who kicked the ball and of the woman watching from behind glass. Thinking only of this one thing: the ball, and whether they will get there in time.
Acknowledgements
Huge thanks to the following people and organisations, for providing valuable feedback on the manuscript or help with research: Marianne Frommer, Natalie Kon-yu, Koorie Heritage Trust, Maya Linden, Fiona Maguire, Shaun Ryan, Maggie Scott, John Sved, John Weldon and Gary Zimmerman. Thank you also to Kate Adams for tireless cheerleading.
Thank you to the fabulous team I lucked into at Pan Macmillan: Alex Craig, Emma Rafferty, Ali Lavau and Charlotte Ree, and Ingrid Ohlsson who made it happen. And thanks to the dedicated people behind the publications Overland, Meanjin and Best Australian Stories, where parts of this book initially got out into the world.
Eternal gratitude to Christie Nieman – ideal reader, editor-on-call – without whom I couldn’t have finished the thing. And to Jennie, my love and footy muse, without whom I wouldn’t have started it.
And thank you to my wonderful, ever-supportive family, especially Helen.
About Miriam Sved
Miriam Sved is a Melbourne-based writer whose short fiction has been published in various places, including Best Australian Stories and the anthology Just Between Us: Australian writers tell the truth about female friendship. Game Day is her first novel.
First published 2014 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000
Copyright © Miriam Sved 2014
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available
from the National Library of Australia
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au
EPUB format: 9781743518144
Typeset by Post Pre-press Group
Cover design by Design by Committee
Cover images: Josh Durham/bigstockphoto
The characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This project is supported by the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria.
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