Abruptly and without warning, Parker swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. This was the other side of his comatose sleeping, and it was something Daisy had never got used to, even though she must have seen it a thousand times: when Parker woke, he immediately came to full consciousness and began to be physically active. There was no transition period; it was as if he had an off/on switch. He stood up stark naked, stretched his arms over his head, and headed for the en suite loo. Already, merely seconds after getting up, his body language was slouchy and downbeat and depressed. His trim, narrow-shouldered, compact body didn’t look like its usual self. Daisy felt rays of gloom emanating off him. Oh, yes, that was another thing Parker was good at: projecting his negative moods.
Daisy, as she had done many times before, listened to the noise of Parker’s extraordinarily powerful and lavish weeing – that was another part of his skill set, he had a bladder like a carthorse – and then to the noise of his electric toothbrush. When he came back into the room she had sat up slightly in bed with the top sheet pulled up just over her tits, in the faint hope that this might give him ideas.
‘What shall we do today?’ she asked.
But Parker was still doing Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen. He shrugged.
‘Don’t mind.’
‘We could go and walk to that village with that church that has the dirty statue you told me about. The pagan one where she’s opening her legs and showing her vulva, the old pre-Christian artefact. What’s it called, a Sheela-na-gig?’ This, Daisy knew, was right up Parker’s street: he had spoken about it before, more than once. Her idea was the equivalent of offering a child an ice cream.
‘Could do,’ he said. And these two words were almost a declaration of war. Parker and Daisy had both grown up in Norfolk, where the most boring people she had ever known would use this phrase as a way of sucking the oxygen out of any conversation, discussion or plan. ‘Could do’: it was, as it was intended to be, an intellectual passion-killer. Parker knew how much she hated it, and knew how it summed up the safe, stale, provincial childhood world they’d both tried so hard to get away from. ‘Could do’: right.
‘Look,’ said Daisy, pulling more covers up over her. ‘I’m sorry you lost your job, I really am. It’s not fair. I’m sure you did everything you were asked to very well. But there are other things which aren’t fair too, and one of them is acting as if I’ve done something wrong, when I’m trying to be nice to you and get you out of yourself and give us a nice time for a weekend. That’s all I’m trying to do – something nice. You don’t have to treat me as if I’m your aunt forcing you to do the washing-up.’
Parker sat on the bed. There was a merciful, welcome glimpse of him turning back into normal, non-convulsed-by-grief Parker.
‘Sorry. I don’t mean to be such a downer.’
Daisy immediately felt herself melt.
‘Oh baby, I know, and you’re not a downer, you’re never a downer.’
‘No, I am, I have been, I know. It’s that I didn’t see it coming, you know? I wasn’t braced for it. Out of nowhere. One minute it’s all, you know, London’ – and this was an important word for both of them, a code for Escape, for the World, for the Big Life and the open road and the possibilities of things that were larger than home – ‘and the next it’s just, I don’t know, it’s like I’m suddenly on the rubbish heap. I’m nobody. I’m back to being nobody again.’
‘You’re not nobody to me.’
‘No, I know,’ said Parker, and for the first time in a few days gave a version of his real smile, a small but cheeky smile which was one of the things Daisy did genuinely love about him. ‘I’m not nobody to you. I’m not nobody. He can’t take that away from me.’
Daisy patted the bed. Parker, still in his birthday suit, sat beside her and took her hand.
‘Unreachable and blank with misery,’ she said, ‘not good. Able to talk about it, much better.’
‘I just don’t want to get boring, and there’s loads I can’t say.’
‘I know. But this other way of doing it is much, much more boring.’
‘OK. I’ll do my best,’ said Parker, giving her hand a squeeze of the type which was a form of farewell, so that he could let it go and cross the room and start putting his clothes on.
‘Come on, fatso, I want to get some of this breakfast that we’ve paid for.’
Daisy pulled down the covers and got out of bed.
‘You seem much jollier all of a sudden,’ she said.
‘Yeah, I am,’ said Parker, pulling on his jeans. She had noticed the night before that he was the only man in the hotel wearing jeans, but never mind. ‘When I was in the loo I remembered an idea I had in the night.’
‘An idea?’
‘Well, more like a plan, really. A sort of plan. Anyway, let’s go and get some breakfast and then go and see that old bint’s tumpsy.’
Daisy threw a pillow at him. She missed.
F
reddy Kamo had been told on the Wednesday that he would be playing in the first team on Saturday. It was going to be his first start. He had wanted this moment, longed for it, pined for it, dreamed about it, and been angry that it hadn’t come yet. He was ready. Patrick, who had always tried to take a calm, philosophical long view about when Freddy’s first full game would come, found himself just as excited as his son. He’s going to play a whole game! In the Premiership! My little boy! Help!
To Freddy, Patrick said, ‘I am pleased for you. You will make us all very proud.’
Patrick sometimes resented Mickey’s relationship with his son. He knew perfectly well that Mickey was indispensable, and that he genuinely cared about Freddy; but he was only human, and couldn’t help feeling, however faintly, displaced by him. It was a little as if Freddy had acquired another father. Today though, with the news, he knew there was only one person in the world who would be as giddy as he was, and that was Mickey, so once Freddy came back from training, and headed up to the games room to play with one of his consoles, Patrick was straight on the phone to the fixer.
‘Do you think he’s ready? Really ready?’ asked Patrick. That morning they had had another one of the cards which he disliked so much, the ones which said people wanted what they had. Normally they made
him feel full of apprehension, but today was different. Patrick knew that plain envy was an appropriate thing to feel about what was going to happen to Freddy.
‘He’s going to eat them alive,’ said Mickey. He was even more excited than the two Kamo men: he couldn’t stop smiling, his legs were jiggling at twice their usual rate, and he kept making little jerking movements with his head, as if he were competing for the ball in the air in an imaginary game of football. Tucking one in at the near post, or flicking the ball on for his striking partner. ‘He’s more than ready. He’s super-ready. He’s not just ready, he’s red-hot.’ As if he now owned the idea of Freddy’s readiness, and was trying to sell it back to Patrick.
With some reluctance, Patrick said, ‘I don’t worry about his body, but about his mind.’ He didn’t much want to share this confidence, but he had no one else to say it to. He didn’t like to let Mickey in to his feelings, and this was the first real time he had ever done so; and Mickey, who was a delicate man under his noisiness, recognised this, and took what Patrick said completely seriously.
‘If I thought he knew what a big deal it is, I’d be worried too,’ said Mickey. ‘But he’s seventeen. He can’t know. For him it’s just another game – a big game, the biggest he’s ever had, but just another game. We’re the ones it’s hard on. He’s going to be fine. In ten years’ time, he’ll look back on it and be amazed at how he just took it as the natural next thing.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Patrick. But for all that, Freddy seemed excited all week – he hadn’t slept properly or been able to sit still since he heard the news. He was bouncing around, terrified, thrilled, nervous. It was hard not to catch both his happiness and his nerves, and by Saturday morning at the hotel the team stayed in for home games, Patrick felt as ragged and stressed as he could remember. When Freddy went down for the post-breakfast team meeting, he lay on his double bed changing channels and playing with the minibar’s bottle opener. He made the electrically operated curtains close and then open again. He turned on the radio, which was tuned to a sports phone-in programme, and then turned it off again. He looked to see if the room had a Bible, but couldn’t find it. He hadn’t been able to eat.
Freddy seemed calmer after the team meeting. Patrick noticed and resisted the temptation to ask him what had been said. They pottered around a bit, then headed downstairs to get in the coach. Because Freddy was the team’s only legal minor, Patrick was the only relative to travel to games with the team on match days; this often felt like a privilege, but today it was a form of torture. One or two of the older players made a point of coming over and saying hello, asking him if he was all right. The £20 million midfielder put his arm on Patrick’s back and said, ‘It’s a bit like having a baby. When my wife went into labour, you know what the midwife said? She said, “Don’t look so nervous, when it comes to husbands, we haven’t lost one yet.” ’
It was kindly meant, but Patrick had a sudden memory of Freddy’s mother, and of how she wasn’t here, or was here only through Freddy, since his gawky grace had been hers too; and all the things she had missed pressed on him for a moment. The midfielder squeezed his shoulder.
‘He’ll be all right, big fella,’ he said. He squeezed harder and then let go and moved on. Patrick felt a prick of tears, not from the shoulder-squeeze; he had to pull himself together. He couldn’t possibly be carried onto the coach crying his eyes out on the day of Freddy’s full-game debut. At just that moment, with perfect timing, the man in charge of the kitbags, who always made a tremendous fuss about everything, even on home games when the kit was already at the stadium, came past shouting, ‘Anyone seen the Adidas bags? Anyone seen the Adidas bags? I need the Adidas bags!’ – which was the perfect opportunity for everyone to look at each other, roll their eyes, and let go of some of their nervousness. Patrick saw Freddy nudging one of his teammates in the ribs, and his weepy moment passed. There was only the present to think about. Let the dead bury their dead. Even the dearest of them.
The coach ride to home games was always strange. Coach travel in general is slow, not comfortable, anonymous, and takes place over distances which always feel too long. But the team coach felt more spacious than the Kamos’ home back in Linguère, and certainly had better facilities, with on-board entertainment, a lavishly stocked fridge,
and personalised climate control. The engine felt muted and distant. And their travel was the opposite of anonymous. As soon as the coach left the hotel, people began to wave at it, honk their horns, brandish their team scarves, or – because this was a match day, which meant there were always plenty of opposing fans around – shout abuse, flick V-signs, call out player-specific insults (poof, black bastard, arse bandit, sheep-shagger, fat yid, paedo goatfucker, shit-eating towelhead, Catholic nonce, French poof, black French queer bastard, etc. etc.) and, once, take down their trousers and moon the coach. Patrick had heard stories of wilder days in the past, when angry fans would rush the coach and begin to rock it on its wheels, a genuinely frightening thing. But this wasn’t frightening. The hate was real, and disconcerting, but it was theatrical too. Patrick understood it without being able to explain it, even to himself. It was real but not-real.
Mickey almost never came on the coach – on match days he had usually gone ahead to the ground, if there wasn’t some specific problem that needed his attention. Today, though, he came with them, sitting in the seat behind Patrick and Freddy, leaning into the gap between their seats, rubbing his hands with nerves and excitement.
‘Feeling all right?’ he asked Freddy for the tenth time, as they pulled into the road in front of a group of fans who were bowing in unison and doing a ‘we are not worthy’ thing. Freddy, for the tenth time, nodded. ‘Hope the traffic’s not too bad. All-time worst for this journey, barely a mile, guess what? An hour and a half. Last year that was. Burst water main, two roads closed, gridlock. Would have been quicker to crawl there blindfold. Bloody nearly late for kick-off, imagine that for a home game. Gets worse every year. Government needs to sort it out. Will they, though? Bollocks. No intention, too anti-car for that.’
This, by Mickey’s standards, was nervous wittering. He was barely listening to himself, and anyway, as if in ironic counterpoint, the traffic today was moving with complete fluidity. The lights were green, other vehicles let them change lanes, pedestrians stood back from zebra crossings until there was a natural gap in the traffic. Patrick looked across the aisle. The team captain was chewing gum and staring
straight in front of him; three seats in front the manager was talking to the coach and holding his hands apart in a cat’s-cradle shape and then moving them sideways. And then they were turning off the road, the club’s main iron gates were opening, and they were at the ground. Freddy’s first start! This was it!
T
hey separated after getting off the coach. Patrick went upstairs to the directors’ box with Mickey. Freddy was pleased to see them go. On match day, in the last hour or two before games, he liked to get ready inside his own head, and that was harder with his two paternal figures in attendance. The manager was good about things like that. All the preparation was done in advance. Freddy had been briefed on what to do and there would be no last-minute surprises, no rousing speech in the changing room. Everyone was there to do a job, and everyone knew his job. Before they went out on the pitch for the pre-game warm-up and stretch there was a little time. Some liked to sit and think, some walked around, some listened to music. Freddy liked to change as soon as he could, and then just be quiet. Freddy had heard that at some clubs they had rituals, listened to loud music, had specific lucky songs they sang along to. It wasn’t like that here. This was man’s work.
Freddy sat and thought about what he had to do today. Essentially, he had forced his way into the team. The manager liked to play a narrow formation up front, with one striker advanced and one lying behind him, making late runs, connecting with midfield, giving the central defenders a difficult choice between tracking him one-on-one, and therefore being pulled out of position all round the pitch, or leaving him to roam free with all the space and time he needed. It was a
formation with which the manager had won national championships in three countries, as well as the European title. But Freddy was a born winger, a young man made to skin defenders on the outside; to suck them in to tackles and skip past them and then cross the ball; to cut inside and shoot; to lay the ball back for a midfielder coming forward at pace; and then do it all again and again, full of running and full of trouble, and gifted with the one thing which every defender in the world most hates to play against: startling, authentic speed. The speed meant that for an opponent there was no chance to recover from a mistake, and no forgiveness for a lapse of concentration. Blink, and Freddy was gone. His ungainliness, his deceptive air of being about to trip over his own feet, helped too. He would run towards a defender, looking as if the ball were about to get away from him at any moment, and simply kick the ball past. It would, to the defender, be completely obvious that the ball was now his: no way Freddy could get there first. He would turn and chase – and then Freddy would be beside him, past him, his leg would flick out, and he’d be gone. Once he was half a metre past, it was over.