I would like to thank Peter Straus, primarily. I don’t know quite how he does it, but his instinct and his loyalty have enabled me to write uninhibited by anything for the past decade, and I greatly appreciate that.
On the books side of things, I am grateful to Michal Shavit, for her belief in this novel, to Ana Fletcher, Ellie Steel, Kat Ailes and, in advance, to Joe Pickering at Random House; to Ellah Allfrey, and to Mary Mount at Penguin, whose acumen and friendship I value very highly.
Also to Adam Brown, Sarah Boyall and Jonny Goldspink, for sharing their experiences with me, and to Adrian Hassell for lending me his workspace.
On the football side of things I would like to thank the following people for their insights and anecdotes: Riz Rehman and the Zesh Rehman Foundation, Megan Worthing Davies, the Justin Campaign, Rob Hassell, Trish Keppie, and Liam Davis. And especially Ian Darler and Max Rushden, both of whom gave me more stories than I knew how to handle.
Thanks too, for helping facilitate some of these conversations, to Alex Goodwin, Jason McKeown, and Sheena Hastings.
Finally, to BP and to JG, for giving me their time and knowledge. I would like to thank you more fully here, but am wary of the football world’s tendency to see things in simple terms, and I would not want a straight line to be drawn between some of the saltier episodes of this novel and yourselves, your clubs. The time that I spent with you both, though, was vital to my understanding of this world.
And thank you, always, to Tips.
God’s Own Country
Waterline
Ross Raisin was born in 1979 in West Yorkshire. His first novel, God’s Own Country, was published in 2008 and was shortlisted for nine literary awards, including the Guardian First Book Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2009 Ross Raisin was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. In 2013 he was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British writers. He lives in London.
Tom has always known exactly the person he is going to be. A successful footballer. A man others look up to. Now, though, the bright future he imagined for himself is threatened.
The Premier League academy of his boyhood has let him go. At nineteen, Tom finds himself playing for a tiny club in a town he has never heard of. But as he navigates his isolation and his desperate need for recognition, a sudden and thrilling encounter offers him the promise of an escape, and Tom is forced to question whether he can reconcile his supressed desires with his dreams of success.
Leah, the captain’s wife, has almost forgotten the dreams she once held, for her career, her marriage. Moving again, as her husband is transferred from club to club, she is lost, disillusioned with where life has taken her.
A Natural delves into the heart of a professional football club: the pressure, the loneliness, the threat of scandal, the fragility of the body and the struggle, on and off the pitch, with conforming to the person that everybody else expects you to be.
A few drivers had slowed to look up at the side of the coach as it circled the roundabout. Along one stretch of its window, near the back, three pairs of white buttocks were pressed to the glass like a row of supermarket chicken breasts. A car came past and the driver sounded his horn. The next driver repeated the action. When the coach lurched off the roundabout one of the pairs of buttocks momentarily disappeared, before returning emphatically to its place alongside the others.
Tom sat alone beside his kitbag, looking across the aisle at the hysterical gurning faces of the three mooners. The middle one had dropped his trousers to his ankles, his cock bobbing stupidly with the motion of the vehicle as it overtook a caravan onto the dual carriageway. Tom turned away, glad that the short journey was nearly over.
They were on their way to a hotel away from the town centre – a preseason policy enforced by the chairman in the aftermath of one eventful weekend the previous summer. Tom had not been at the club then, although he had heard the story. He’d arrived less than two months ago, shortly after being let go by his boyhood club at a brief and tearful meeting with the new manager. The memory of that afternoon was still difficult for him to think about. All of the second-year scholars lining up in the corridor among the new man’s cardboard boxes and whiteboards. The office and its stale stink of the old gaffer’s cigarettes. The sight of the new manager behind the desk, calling for him to take a seat.
‘You’re a good lad, from what I hear. Your parents should be proud of you. You’re going to be some player, when you grow into yourself. I’ve got no doubt that you’ll find another club.’
Tom found out afterwards that he’d spoken exactly the same words to all of them, except for the two he had awarded first-team contracts to. Thirteen lads who had progressed through each of the youth levels with Tom, all hoping now for another club to phone them while they thumbed the jobs pages or took on work from recruitment agencies, shopping centres, the multiplex, all waiting to grow into themselves. Unlike most of them, though, Tom did get approached. A small club down south. His agent called him one morning to say that their chairman had organised a hotel for the night so that he could come down and talk to them with a view to a one-year contract.
‘Who?’ his sister asked when he told his family. ‘What are they, non-league?’
‘No, they just got promoted from the Conference. My agent says they’ve got money behind them.’ He looked away, not wanting to see her reaction, and clocked his dad already at the computer, peering, slowly nodding at the screen.
The three backsides returned to their seats, laughing. The middle one, scanning around to see if anybody was still watching them, caught Tom’s eye, and Tom gave him a dumb grin before turning to the window. Cars moved past them in the other lane. Out of some, the blue and white scarf of that afternoon’s opposition flapped and spanked against rear windows. Inside a camper van, two young children were sticking their tongues out at him.
The match had begun promisingly. It was Tom’s first start of the preseason friendlies, and the sick cramping tension of the dressing room had left him the moment play started. During one early scrappy passage the ball spilled out to him on the wing and he ran automatically at the fullback who, stumbling, tripping, ballooned the ball away over their falling bodies for a corner. Adrenalin carried Tom towards the flag to demand the ball from the tiny ballboy. For the first time since he had left home he was liberated from thought, absorbed in the match. He struck the corner cleanly, and from the wrestling mass of the penalty area somebody headed the ball against the crossbar. In that instant Tom felt something inside him let go, an excitement, a lust, that left him almost dizzy as he turned and jogged back into position.
After that, though, most of the play switched to the other end of the pitch. A bungle between the central defenders, Boyn and Daish – who were sitting now on the seats in front of Tom watching a game show on a laptop – resulted in a goal for the home side. Confidence sank from the team. They lost 3–1. In the miserable sweaty fug of the dressing room afterwards Clarke, the manager, told them that they were a bunch of soft fucking fairies. When one of the younger players giggled, the manager stepped forward and kicked him in the leg.
The coach left the dual carriageway and joined the heavy traffic moving down a superstore-lined arterial road. By a set of traffic lights a group of home supporters stood on the pavement outside a pub, smoking. One of them noticed the coach and gawped at it for a moment until they all understood what was next to them and started into a frenzy of hand gestures. In front of Tom a few players turned to look at the group, but he pretended not to see them. At his old club even the reserve team coach had tinted windows. Now, outside the top flight, the supporters were an actual presence. They came up to him in the street and at the supermarket. Inside Town’s small, tight, windswept ground, where they stood in little grimacing clusters along the terracing, he could already identify individual voices and faces amid them. The lights changed. He gave a final glance at the group, now rhythmically fist-pumping in an ecstasy of abuse as the coach pulled away in the direction of the hotel.
He was rooming with Chris Easter, the captain – a situation that Easter seemed none too happy about as he dumped his bag on the bed by the window, turned on the television, then pounded at the windowpane for a couple of minutes before eventually accepting that it was not designed to open. He remained beside it for some time, staring out at the flat-roofed view of a neighbouring retail park, occasionally giving a small shake of his head.
Easter, Michael Yates and Frank Foley, the goalkeeper, were no longer allowed to room with one another, in any combination, and had all been paired with younger or newer members of the squad. Despite this, Clarke did not seem to have a problem with the three keeping company if there was a night out after one of the friendlies. They sat together that evening in the first of a convoy of people carriers, and they formed a small boisterous circle with a few of the other senior players by the bar of the first place the squad went into while everybody else piled into a large sticky red booth near the toilets.
There was nowhere left to sit when Tom got to the booth, so he stood behind the curved banquette alongside the other young players, most of whom had come through the youth team and stuck together, smiling and straining to hear above the music what was being said. Sitting immediately below him the right back, Marc Fleming, was telling a story. Tom could not hear a word of it. He kept his eyes on the top of Fleming’s head, trying, in case anybody should look up at him, to appear coolly amused. The raw greased scalp shone through Fleming’s hair. Whatever it was that he was saying, the seated players were gripped by it. At the end of the story Fleming bent forward and slapped both his palms onto the table. A wave of laughter coursed around the booth and Fleming pushed back, obviously unaware of Tom standing right behind him because his head bumped Tom’s stomach and he twisted to look up.
‘Christ, Tommy, that’s the closest any of our balls has got to each other all day, that is.’
In that moment Tom felt so grateful that he was almost moved to put his hand on Fleming’s shoulder and attempt something funny in reply. Somebody else began speaking. Tom departed for the toilet. On his way back, in order to avoid being bought another drink, he went to the bar to buy one for himself. He did not notice until he got served that he was wedged up against the back of Frank Foley. Foley was talking to a tall young woman with bare pale shoulders, and each time he leaned in to speak to her his large behind butted against Tom’s hip.
The woman was frowning. ‘What?’
There was another press of the behind. The woman looked briefly out at the room before turning back to Foley. ‘Sorry, mate, I’ve never heard of you.’ She reached to collect three slim glasses of dark liquid and squeezed out from the crush at the bar. Foley stayed put, one arm on the counter, eyeballing his pint. When Tom moved away he was still there, inert, a similar expression on his face to the one that two and a half thousand other people had already witnessed, three times, earlier that day.
Back at the hotel, in the cafe-bar, Tom stayed on the periphery of the crowd of players singing and tussling and drinking from the bottle of rum that somebody had taken from behind the wrenched-open shutters. He lingered for about half an hour before going up to bed, where he fell into a deep sleep, held under by the fog of a dream, a dim sense that something was not normal, that he had done something wrong and he was going to be found out. His face, his skin, beat against sheets that smelled unnatural, not his own – and he had a shooting realisation that he was in somebody else’s bed, they were coming into the room, about to find him there.
He woke, a seizing stiffness in both legs, his face damp. In the beam from a security light in the retail park he could see the bag still on top of the other, empty, bed. He stared at it for some time, his eyelids heavy, gummy with perspiration.
Gradually, unmistakably, he became sure of a faint sobbing noise out in the corridor. He closed his eyes and tried to shut it out. It did not go away, though, and eventually he was forced from his bed, pulling on tracksuit bottoms to go to the door.
He could see as soon as he came out of the room where the noise was coming from. At the end of the corridor, in a leggy heap against a wall and beside a fire extinguisher, a young girl was slumped forward with her forehead resting against her knees. He walked towards her. There was the smell of vomit. A dark tidemark on her shin and calf where it had run down her leg. She continued to cry quietly and did not look up at him as he knelt in front of her. She did not respond even as he positioned one arm under her armpits, the other underneath the tacky back of first one knee, then the other, and lifted her up. In the brightness of the corridor lighting, with her eye make-up bleeding and a small pink rash on one of her temples, she looked to him even younger than his sister.
‘It’s OK,’ he whispered. ‘It’s OK.’
He carried her into the room and kicked Easter’s bag off the bed, then laid her down and gently arranged the covers over her.
She was still asleep in the same position when, with sunlight filtering through the window, Easter came in. He leaned over Tom’s bed and playfully clapped him on the cheeks until he was fully awake. When Easter then left the room, looking from Tom to the girl and smirking, an unstoppable sensation of pride flared inside Tom. The feeling, and the uneasy doubtful one that it turned into, stayed with him as he got up, showered and woke the girl – who moved silently into the bathroom to wash her face and leg before letting herself out into the corridor.
When he joined the squad downstairs she was nowhere to be seen. He did not ask after her, and he did not say anything about what had happened to any of the others. He kept slightly apart while they filed out of the hotel to the mellow tinkling of lobby music and the weary peeved faces of the reception staff. As he went through the revolving doors he noticed the sap leaking from a yucca plant, broken and lolling now beside the entrance, where Boyn and Daish had been play-fighting when Tom went up to bed.
After a long, drowsy coach journey, several of the new players were dropped off at a different branch of the same hotel chain. By now the staff of this hotel had become familiar with Tom’s routine. They regarded him, because of his quiet, solitary way of going about the place, his separateness from the other players, with some intrigue. For almost two months they had observed his daily ritual: entering the breakfast room at five past nine for scrambled eggs, which he cut always into the same precise square inside the tray, toast, sometimes beans, orange juice, tea. He would sit down at the same table in the corner, partly secluded by a plastic tree and a life-sized cardboard chef holding up a plate of food unlike anything in the buffet trays, and finish his meal quickly before driving to training. He returned to the hotel in the early afternoon and generally kept to his room until the following morning; only when he came down to reception to receive his takeaway deliveries would there be any sign of him.
The hotel was a temporary arrangement while appropriate digs were organised for him, the chairman had told Tom, his agent and his parents when they came down to be shown around the club. They had sat in a wood-panelled room, at a large table with coffee and pastries, and the chairman had turned to his mum with a wet smile to say that when Town signed somebody as young as Tom, who had just turned nineteen, they made sure to do right by him. Unless it was agreed that he was mature enough to live in a place of his own, he had said, the club would find a good family for him to stay with in the meantime.
Tom had not spoken to the chairman, or any of the club staff, or his agent, about his accommodation since. But, as he explained to his dad every few days on the phone, now was not the right time, with the new season about to begin, to ask about digs. And living at the hotel had become normal now. He was vigilant of the other players and had learned how to pass through the public areas at different times to them. There were currently, including himself, four staying there. At various intervals there had been several others, all gone now to their own accommodation or to different clubs, or back onto the market. The remaining three car-pooled to training and back, and Tom had seen them in the restaurant together, where he sometimes peeked in at them talking and laughing and wondered if they knew each other from previous clubs.
Near the beginning of his time at the hotel there had been an older trialist staying there with his wife and two little girls. The man and his family were friendly to Tom. On a couple of occasions they had asked him to join them when they had seen him sitting alone in the breakfast room. After some initial discomfort he had enjoyed being around them, their easy conversation, the noisy distraction of the children, and a few times he and the player had car-pooled together. After a couple of weeks, however, the player was released, something that Tom did not find out until the following day when he was told by one of the receptionists.
For the final friendly fixture before the season opener Tom was a substitute. He sat on the bench, nervous energy tightening through his muscles, alert to every twitch of Clarke on the touchline in expectation that he might at any moment turn round and instruct Tom to strip off. He visualised himself coming onto the pitch, the tempo of the game changing as his teammates, the crowd, willed the ball towards him. The low urgent moan of anticipation from the terraces when it was at his feet – although in fact the ground was less than half full, and partly roofless – the scarce songs and shouts of the Riverside Stand floating up, disappearing into the hot bright sky.
They were up against a higher-division side, Coventry, and the mismatch was evident immediately. For the first twenty minutes Clarke did not turn round at all. When he did, with the team already two goals down, he looked dark and old with rage.
Tom was sent on for the second half. He did not receive the ball for some time and drifted infield from his position on the wing, eager to become involved. Coventry scored again before he had even touched the ball, and as his impatience grew he raced into an uncontrolled challenge on the opposition captain. He knew instantly, from the sharp pain in the arch of his foot, that he would have to come off. He lay there, an awareness of the manager, his teammates, his dad, knuckling his chest, pinning him to the grass.
In the treatment room after the match, Clarke’s voice resonating violently down the corridor, the foot was already bruising. The physio sponged it clean, dressed it and told him to get home and put it straight onto ice.
The hotel receptionist misunderstood him. She went away for a few minutes and came back with a steel champagne bucket rustling with ice and a folded white cloth.
‘It’s for my foot.’
‘Oh, I see, sorry.’ She smiled. ‘Do you need some more?’
‘No, thanks.’ And then, ‘I’ll get champagne if we ever win a match.’
She smiled again. ‘All right. I’ll remind you about that.’
He limped away with the bucket, grinning with unexpected elation.
‘That is a superb cock, mate.’
Foley stood, plainly assessing the scholar next to him in the showers. The boy, who had trained with the firsts that morning, angled his body marginally away and carried on washing himself, affecting not to have heard. Foley, though, stood motionless, water collecting on the large plateau of his head, looking down at him. ‘Hey, Yatesy,’ he shouted through to the dressing room. ‘You remember Davo’s cock?’
Yates, from the bench, looked up briefly from lacing his trainers. ‘I do.’
‘That was some cock.’
All around the dressing room the younger players waited cautiously for the right moment to laugh, but Foley and Yates continued to behave as though nothing out of the ordinary had just happened, showering, changing as normal, so the players turned automatically to the young boy hastening from the showers towards his space along the bench, wrapping a towel about his middle. Tom kept his eyes to the floor, anxious somebody might see him looking and bring the room’s attention on him.
Prohibited from running or kicking a ball for at least a week, he was nevertheless required to come in daily for training. Like the other injured players, he had to get there an hour early and leave after the rest of the squad had departed. There were two others – Fleming and Boyn – both with minor knocks and bruises. All were kept, deliberately it seemed to them, out of the final preparations for the first match of the season. If they were not in the treatment room, being entertained by the physio’s military fitness stories, they were travelling over to the stadium to use the gym for long sessions on the treadmills and weight machines to a constant backdrop of loud music and Sky Sports News. Or they were sitting on the bench against the wall of the clubhouse, looking across the field at the team going through their drills and shape preparations.
‘It’s a joke,’ Boyn said as the sound of Clarke shouting and clapping wafted across the pitches to them. ‘He thinks we’re going to contaminate them or something.’
‘No, Boyney,’ Fleming said, without moving his eyes from the squad. ‘It’s a warning. To the lot of us. Don’t get injured.’
Clarke came into the treatment room a couple of days before the game to tell all three that they would not be included in the party travelling to Cheltenham. They were to stay at home. Focus on their rehabilitation.
On the morning of the match Tom drove to the launderette. There was a laundry service at the hotel, he knew from his welcome folder, but he did not like the idea of somebody else handling his clothes, his underwear, so he returned each week to the same quiet place that he had found on the outskirts of town. He went inside and saw there were no other customers. Unhurriedly he bought some washing powder from the dispenser, loaded the machine, and went into the cafe next door to get some breakfast to eat in the car.
He put on the radio for the match build-ups. He sipped his tea, unwrapped the warm sweating paper from his bacon and egg roll, Saturday excitement rising and tugging at his gut as the coverage skipped from voice to voice, ground to ground, deflating when he looked down at his injured foot. Forty minutes later he went back into the launderette, hauled his sodden mound of clothes into one of the dryers – noticing as he did so one of his sister’s socks melded inside the sleeve of a sweater he rarely wore – and went out once more to his car.
When he re-entered at the end of the drying cycle there was another customer, a man in gym gear sitting on one of the benches. The man looked up as he walked past, but Tom did not acknowledge him and headed towards his dryer. Some of the clothes did not feel fully dry. He pulled them out anyway, bundling everything into his Ikea sack, aware, through the glass of the dryer door, of the man watching him. He concentrated on his task, blocking the man out, his senses beginning to pulse with the echoed scrabble of his fingers against the drum, the thump of a washing machine behind him, until his clothes were all in the sack and he made his way down the thin aisle, certain that the man was about to speak or stand up and face him.
When Tom stepped outside into the cool street his chest and lungs loosened, expelling the stifling air of the launderette in long even breaths as he made for his car.
It was obvious, sitting next to the steaming sack on the passenger seat, that his clothes were still more than a little damp. On getting back to his room he decided that he would drape them over the radiators, but after a short search he realised there were no radiators in the room, only a climate control vent in one of the walls, quite high up. He thought about phoning his mum, but straight away ruled it out. It would make her worry; make her believe that he was not coping. Besides which, he reasoned, she would be in a baby clinic, busy. He unthreaded the lace from a trainer and tied it to one handle of the Ikea sack. Then he pulled a chair over to the wall beneath the vent and stood on it to reach up and attach the lace to a bar of the grille so that the sack hung just below it. After tugging on it to see the lace held, he turned up the heating on the control panel and went to sit down on the bed with his back against the headboard.
He had fallen asleep in the warm smog of fuming clothes when his dad called at the regular time, ten minutes before Football Focus.
‘Feeling good?’
‘Fine, yeah, I suppose.’
His dad laughed. ‘No point getting down about it. You’re a footballer. Sometimes you’re going to be injured. It’s how you pick yourself back up that counts.’
‘I’m not in his plans.’
‘You’re not in his plans today.’
‘Maybe.’ There was the buzzing of a vacuum out in the corridor. ‘Yeah, maybe.’
‘Talking of plans, I want to come down and see you.’
‘It’s all right, Dad,’ Tom said as brightly as he could, annoyed with himself for sounding like a sulky child. ‘I’m doing fine. You’re right. Another week of rehab and I’ll be back training.’
‘I’ve spoken to the sorting office and they’ve said I can have the afternoon off to drive down on Friday.’
‘What, this Friday?’
‘Busy, are you?’ his dad said, tickled.
‘No, no, that’s fine, Dad,’ he said quickly. ‘That’s fine.’
He looked up at the bag of washing shackled to the vent and he had a powerful conviction that his dad knew what he had done. That he could see it all. The daft contraption of his mouldering clothes on the wall. Tom dozing on the bed. The man in the launderette. A flickering perception came to Tom of the boy that his dad probably brought to mind when he thought about him, which he suppressed, pulling himself upright on the bed.
‘I’ll come straight down after work Friday, then. Might as well book a room in your hotel, keep things simple. Go to the first home match next day. We could watch it together, if the foot’s still bad. Or would you need to be with the squad?’
‘No. He doesn’t like injured players in with the others.’
‘Right then. Sorted.’
After they said goodbye, Tom thought that he probably should have offered to book the room for him, and he wondered if his dad had been expecting him to.
He put on the television for Football Focus and pictured his dad at home, watching it too. On the sofa, tray on his lap. Mug of tea. Fry-up. His sister upstairs, keeping out of the way until John from the sorting office arrived to pick up their dad. The drive to Uncle Kenny’s, and the short chat in the kitchen with Jeanette before the three men went into the city to take up their positions at the bar in the pre-match pub. Everything normal, ongoing.
There was a knock on his door. The housekeeper, wanting to make up his room.
‘No, thank you,’ he called out.
He moved to the wall and took down his clothes. They were no drier than before. Wetter, somehow. He tipped them all into the bottom of his wardrobe to sort out later and brought the sack over to the desk to collect up his takeaway boxes.
He went for a walk around the car park. He dumped his rubbish into the bulk bins at the back of the kitchens, something that he had taken to doing rather than leave his cartons and boxes around the tiny pedal bin in his room. He felt a bit weird at the thought of the housekeepers seeing them, dealing with them, just as he felt weird about putting up his posters or his speakers; leaving out his dumb-bells, his cactus collection. He kept these things underneath the bed and when he returned each afternoon took them out, putting the cacti on the windowsill and a limited, alternating selection of his posters up on the walls until it was time to take them down again in the morning.
He followed the scores on his laptop while he watched the television. With a few minutes of their match remaining, Town were 2–1 down and Tom realised that he wanted them to lose. For his absence to be taken notice of, spoken about. When full time confirmed the defeat he refreshed the page, to be certain.
His dad arrived early in the evening. They went for a drink, then a meal in a pizza restaurant. He was doing well, his dad told him before the food arrived. Adapting, young as he was. He was proud of him. Tom did not know what to say. He looked across the table and saw his dad’s determination to say these words to him, that he had planned them. Tom avoided his gaze and looked down at the tough broken knuckles of his dad’s hands on the table, calculating how much this time off work would be costing him.
From the top of the main stand, with the high August sun on their faces, the formation and movement of the teams was starkly outlined. After half an hour Tom was too ashamed to watch. His view moved over the opposite stand towards the black flashing river and the plain of fields and houses and roads stretching away towards a range of hills – beyond which, although he had not seen it yet, was the sea. His dad, however, was watching the contest intently. He always watched football like this: hunched forward, elbows on his knees, studying the play. He spoke very little during the game, and Tom could not bring himself to look round and see his inevitable disappointment – at each broken-down move or misplaced pass, each booted clearance disappearing over the top of the Riverside Stand to the sarcastic cheers of the away supporters – that this, after all those years of outlay and sacrifice, was what Tom had amounted to.
After the defeat they went back to the hotel. Before his dad set off up north they sat in the cafe-bar and spoke about the match. His dad was not impressed with Clarke.
‘It’s big-man hoofball,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t suit your game.’
‘It’s League Two, Dad.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Football’s football. But a proper player will always shine through, even in a side like that.’
‘Not if he’s in the stand.’
‘Come on, Tom. Don’t be soft.’ He regarded Tom for a moment. ‘There’s no use feeling sorry for yourself, son. You’re at a bottom-division club. And you’re injured. It’s an education, is how to think about being here, on your way back up. There are plenty of others who’ve done it that route. You’ve just got to work that bit harder, is all.’ He looked past Tom towards the bar. ‘Tell you what, fancy a hot chocolate before I go?’
‘All right,’ Tom said, smiling, secretly comforted by the childishness of the suggestion. ‘Thanks.’
His dad got up to go to the bar, and Tom watched the Premier League results coming through on a television. His old club had lost, 2–0.
‘You just need to be patient,’ his dad said when he returned with the hot chocolates. ‘You’re only two matches in. Nine months of the season ahead of you. Plenty of time to crack on now the foot’s on the mend. Just roll your sleeves up. Wait for your chance.’
PLAYED 5 WON 0 DRAWN 1 LOST 4
DEFENCE = IMPROVE
ATTACK = IMPROVE
KEEPER = JOKE
RELEGATION. NON-LEAGUE. SCRAPHEAP.
was written on the whiteboard of the training ground dressing room, like an aide-memoire. Clarke stood directly in front of the board, his number two off to one side. He was confused. He didn’t know what the fuck their problem was. He was tearing his hair out. He was in at seven every morning, at his desk, wondering where their bollocks were. The number two remained silent throughout the whole of this speech. The players sat in a defeated semicircle, itching to get out onto the field. From them there was no noise either, except for the quiet grinding, like teeth, of their studs on the floor.
‘You are a disgrace, every single one of you.’
Those who had not played in the last game, or at any other point during the opening month, stared down at the floor with the rest.
‘What’s it going to take? Docking your wages? A bollocking?’ Here he moved forward so that he stood in the centre of them, and looked around from face to face.
As Clarke’s small demented eyes flicked closer to him, a charge of anger moved inside Tom’s chest. They had lied to him. To his dad. The manager, the chairman, they had both said that he was an important part of the club’s plans, but he had been match fit for a fortnight and had not yet played other than a brief substitute appearance. The eyes took him in for an instant, then moved on. Earlier that same year he had been tipped off by his academy coordinator that he was under consideration to be a sub for a Premier League match. It never came about, but Tom knew, his coaches knew. If they were to look now – if they looked at all – they would see where he was and they would be in no doubt that they had made the correct final judgement on him: that he had not quite been good enough.
‘You’ve got to talk to each other.’ He was back at the whiteboard. ‘Com-mu-ni-cate.’ With each syllable he beat the side of his fist against the board, smearing the writing.
‘Easter, what the fuck is wrong with you?’
Easter looked up in surprise.
‘You are the fucking captain of this shit heap. Why are you not shouting at them, organising them? You’re as quiet as a rapist out there.’
Easter’s heels lifted off the floor as his calf muscles clenched. He said nothing.
‘Go on, then. Get up, all of you. Get out there. I’m going to make you work.’
They emerged from the clubhouse into dazzling sunshine. On the warm grass they stretched in silence, guided by the number two, until Clarke came out, glaring at his watch.
‘Twelve-minute run. Go.’
The whole squad got to their feet and began sprinting around the nearest pitch. There was some bumping and hustling at the back, as no one wanted to be last. Tom, wary of getting trapped in the pack, kept to the outside. He ran hard, resolute that he would not be singled out. Already, these runs had become an accustomed part of Monday and Tuesday mornings. Any player who was seen to be running at less than full pace or who did not complete eight circuits of the pitch within the time would be made to go and train with the scholars. The side that ran alongside the clubhouse, where there was no relief from the sun and the touchline was baked hard, was the worst stretch, before the turn onto the goal line, past the taunting mist of the sprinkler watering the penalty area, and then the grateful turn onto the far touchline along the chain-link fence, shaded by the trees and scrubland that separated the four pitches from a thundering A road.
When they had finished they stood bent over with their hands on their knees, breathing, waiting to hear if he was satisfied.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now go again.’
By the end of the session, an hour and a half later, several of the players were nauseous with fatigue. As Clarke went ahead to the car park, still in his tracksuit, to go and attend to his van hire company, some put their arms around the strugglers’ waists or shouldered their armpits, helping them inside.
In the dressing room, where they sat in silence along the benches or undressed stiffly for the showers, Tom went into his bag for his towel and saw that he had a text message. It was from the club secretary, letting him know that his digs had been confirmed.
The Daveys lived in a tall thin end terrace about twenty minutes’ walk from the stadium. On match days Mr Davey, the owner of a steel-wire manufacturing company and an associate director at the club, would drive to and from the ground, but if he was required for some vote or function during the week he made the journey on foot, enjoying, as he passed through the streets of hushed pubs and takeaways and ethnic shops on his way home from the stadium, the gradual easing of traffic and people, the transition into quiet, wide streets, trees growing up out of the pavements, postboxes, plant-tangled fences and the familiar old buildings lived in by families he had known for most of his life, until he reached his own house.
When the last of their three children moved out, the Daveys had spent a difficult six months contemplating whether the house had become too big for them. But then, with Town progressing up the non-league pyramid and recruiting more young players from outside the area, the board had announced that they were looking for willing families to lodge these boys. Mr Davey put himself and his wife forward without hesitation. It was a decision that they almost never regretted. The dozen boys they welcomed over the intervening three years had provided the house with a continual flow of laughter and activity, tantrums, anecdotes, broken curfews, not to mention the ninety pounds a week bed and board that the club paid out for each of them. Some stayed for a month or two, others for a whole season. There were sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, joining the youth set-up, and there were older boys who had failed to get senior contracts at other clubs, or were out on loan gaining experience; boys from the north, from Scotland, Ireland, as well as one silent Hungarian who barely spoke a word of English and made cheese and cabbage scones in the middle of the night which he kept at the top of his wardrobe.
Tom’s dad came down again. He drove them from the hotel and parked in the quiet turning by the side of the house, where they sat together in the car waiting for the club chairman to arrive and make the introductions. His dad kept looking up at the handsome old terrace or at the piece of paper that he had taken from his pocket and was squinting to read. The chairman’s Jaguar pulled in behind them, fifteen minutes late. They watched his pained bulk appear slowly from the car, and got out to meet him.
‘Ready?’ the chairman said, already turning towards the house. They followed him through the gate and past the fat rhododendron which dominated a bushy green garden so unlike the neat lawn of Tom’s parents’ house, then up the few steps to the front door.
Both Mr and Mrs Davey were at home. They moved busily about the large kitchen, making coffee and plating biscuits while Tom sat at one side of a long table, between his dad and the chairman.
‘How’s your foot doing?’ Mr Davey asked when the couple came over to sit down opposite them.
‘It’s fine now, thank you.’
In his kitchen, jovial in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, it was difficult to twin Mr Davey with the featureless suited figure Tom had seen a couple of times in the players’ lounge. He spoke to them at length as Mrs Davey listened and smiled and got more biscuits. The chairman nodded occasionally, leaving the room at one point to take a phone call. Tom’s dad had quite a number of questions, which Mr and Mrs Davey answered between them: he would have to do his own washing, of his clothes and his bedding; yes, there was a curfew, on the nights before training and matches, but he would have his own key, and on Saturday and Tuesday nights the Daveys allowed the boys more leeway. They trusted their lodgers to respect the house and behave maturely. He could cook for himself when he wanted to, and there was a shelf in the fridge for him, but there would be a meal provided every evening, which they all sat down to eat together. Tom grew increasingly self-conscious, watching his dad scrupulously write down all the information on his piece of paper. These were his mum’s questions, he knew. He continued to sit there, like a child, saying nothing while everything was arranged for him.
When there was a pause, he spoke up: ‘Is anyone else lodging with you?’
‘Yes,’ Mr Davey said. ‘Two Scots lads. Both seventeen. A scout up there brought them to the club’s attention earlier this summer and we had them down for a trial. Very impressive for their age group, played a few first-team games too for Partick, and now we’ve got them in with the second-year scholars. You wouldn’t guess they were that young. Well, until you start speaking to them.’ He glanced at Mrs Davey and they both smiled. ‘Shall we go up and show you your room?’
Tom followed the chairman’s heavy buttocks up the narrow staircase. On the first floor he glimpsed through an open doorway of the first of two neighbouring rooms – the walls gleaming darkly with posters of Celtic players, Parkhead, glamour models – before the party ascended the next flight of steps to the top floor.
The room was small but immaculate. They crowded in, and the sound of the chairman’s breathing filled the space as they stood looking around: the bed, the small television on top of a chest of drawers, chair in one corner, full-length mirror in another; silently taking it all in as if they were imagining him inhabiting the room – sleeping, dressing, masturbating, combing his hair.
‘Great view from up here,’ his dad said. They all turned to look out of the window set into the triangular far wall. The town spread out below the house. The cracked spines of terraced roofs fell away down a hillside. Satellite dishes blazed on the fronts of two towers bathed in sunshine half a mile away. Further on, the dirty boxed units of the central shopping area. Town’s training ground, just visible beyond the edge of the town. And, looming at one side of the window, the football stadium. Out of nowhere an unexpected longing pulled Tom towards it – towards the floodlights, bulbs twinkling in the sun above the crumbling brick walls of the old part of the ground, floating him over the houses that obscured the main stand and the large new tiered structure of the Kop, until he could see all the glittering ranks of red and green seats.
‘It’s good, yeah,’ he said.
They left the room. Tom was the last through the door and he noticed, as the others made their way back downstairs, a couple of books propped against the skirting board, a Post-it note stuck to one of the covers: RETURN TO RICHIE B.
They sat again around the kitchen table. The chairman departed and Mrs Davey offered another round of coffees. Tom expected his dad would want to be off, but he told her they would be happy to stop for another. Tom assumed he had more questions; however, instead, he started talking about Clarke’s tactics with Mr Davey, the team’s chances of staying up. Mrs Davey sat beside Tom and took the opportunity to ask him about his mum and his sister, what it had been like living in a hotel for all this time. ‘You must have felt like Alan Partridge,’ she said, and Tom admitted that he did not know who that was. ‘Nor do I, really,’ she said with a warm, complicit smile, ‘but Andrew, our eldest, used to be a big fan.’
There was the sound of the front door opening and closing, then somebody moving about before a man appeared at the doorway.
‘Dad. Oh, sorry, I’ll get out of your way.’
‘No, don’t worry. This is Tom Pearman and his dad, Ray. Tom’s coming to lodge with us. Tom, Ray – this is our son, Liam.’
Tom’s dad got up to shake hands as the burly young man stepped forward, so Tom stood up too. He recognised him, he thought. The wide pale face and short sandy hair, gingerish, unlike his parents’, both of whom obviously used to be dark. Tom wondered if he might be adopted. It seemed like that kind of family.
‘How’s the foot?’ Liam asked. He smiled, noting Tom’s surprise. ‘I’m a supporter.’
‘It’s healed up.’
‘That’s good.’ He turned to Mr Davey as Tom sat back down. ‘Dad, I’m just after a plunger. Shower’s blocked again.’
‘Under the sink.’
Liam hunkered down to look in the cupboard. The sun streaming through the kitchen window was on his back. His shirt clung damply to him, glued to his vertebrae. After a moment he pulled out an old plunger, the wooden handle blackened with mould spores, and Tom realised that he had seen him before, at the training ground, tending to the pitch.
‘I’ll give it a go.’ Liam stood up. ‘Good to meet you, Tom, Mr Pearman.’
He left the room, inspecting the plunger, twisting it in his large hands as he walked through the doorway out of sight. When the front door closed Tom turned back to the conversation. His dad was observing him across the table. Tom looked sharply away and took a sip of his coffee. He kept his eyes on the other side of the room, on the sink, the window. There was what looked like a washing-up rota on the door of the fridge. A cluster of small framed photographs of players above the microwave, one of them Chris Gale, Town’s left back.
‘Well, Tom,’ his dad said. ‘Sounds good to me. You OK with everything?’
They were all looking at him now.
‘Yes.’
He drove his belongings over from the hotel the following morning, a day off, together with a few other bits and pieces that his dad had brought down in anticipation of the move. He kept to his new room for a long time, conscious of the other occupants of the house below him. He folded his clothes into the chest of drawers and put his dumb-bells under the bed; then, listening to the voices of the other lodgers beneath the floorboards, he installed his cactus collection on the windowsill.
He was introduced to Steven Barr and Bobby Hart at dinner. Both of them were big and excitable, boyish, Bobby a world apart from the subdued youth that Foley had made a show of in the showers. They sat next to each other at the table, laughing and shoving and exclaiming in accents broad enough to make Tom feel slightly intimidated, although they were extremely polite to the Daveys, and to Tom they were immediately respectful because he was in the first-team squad. At the training ground they barely spoke. Now, bantering with Mrs Davey, leaning over one another for more chilli, salad, garlic bread, they could not seem to keep quiet, or still. The noise and laughter, drawing all the focus on to the two boys, gradually relaxed Tom. He joined in with a conversation about parachute payments to relegated Premier League teams. He gave a funny account of his time at the hotel. After the meal everybody moved through to the living room to watch television, and only when Bobby and Steven went upstairs to play a computer game did Tom start to feel awkward, sitting next to the Daveys on their large sofa. He waited a reasonable amount of time, then excused himself to go up to his room.
He began to settle at the house. The Daveys were kind, constantly good-natured. If he was quiet or over-polite, they never pointed it out. Mostly, they left him to himself. Since his recovery from the foot injury he had been working himself with relentless intensity, his dad’s words in the back of his mind: Roll your sleeves up; wait for your chance. He drove back each afternoon, knowing that Mrs Davey would be at the hospice kitchen where she volunteered and that the Scottish boys would still be training or studying, wanting nothing more than to sit in a cold bath and let his burning muscles give in to the water.
In the mornings he drove the boys in. They sat in the back of Tom’s Fiesta showing each other videos on their phones, or leaned forward with their meaty white forearms up against the headrests to ask him what it had been like at a Premier League club. If he had met this or that famous player. He described for them just as he used to for his old school friends the experience of the few occasions he had trained with the first team: their technical ability, the skills and tricks that you would never see in matches, and the times that he had spoken to them. There had been a tiny boot room next to the home dressing room, where the scholars used to sit and chat and listen through the wall. Quite often a senior player would come in to talk or joke with them. Tom could see the keen, impressed pairs of eyes in the rear-view mirror as he told the boys this, even though he could not escape a sense that he was telling somebody else’s story. Some of the first-team players had spoken to Tom regularly. They knew he was a prospect, that he had played for England at his age-group level. He was one of the youths they had taken notice of in that leathery little room, a subtle respect which Tom thought he was never able properly to convey whenever he told people about his scholarship.