by TW Gibbings
I CAN’T REMEMBER his name. I’m not even sure he’s still alive.
Steve? Stevie maybe? Perhaps neither; but that second chimes the loudest of Year 12’s fading peals.
We formed our bond — such as it was — in Evolution 1.01, where Stevie and I were unique in our rationalism. Our desks were surrounded by Christians. We were besieged by believers. Naomi (I can remember her name), the smartest, nicest, most righteous girl and editor of the school religious rag, Young Christian Creationist Weekly, sat next to me because she was in love with me but couldn’t give into sin.
Her trammelled desire might have been easier to dismiss did she not possess a figure to throw Richard Dawkins upon his knees, clamouring for the tonsure. She sat on one side of me; Stevie sat on the other. I talked with Stevie mostly, spinning to Naomi only for a reaction to another of my hilarious Homo erectus gags or when not looking at her became too much for my howling, virginal libido — say, every thirty-seven seconds.
But I digress.
Stevie’s was not a companionship I would have sought, necessarily. His awkwardness didn’t bolster my fragile schoolyard credibility. He wasn’t particularly tall, see, and the cut of his jib was not redolent of the heroism sung in songs. He was all angles and apexes — elbows, knees, chin and prominent, grey teeth. His hair was buzz-cut short and he was thin. Twig arms and stick legs, his clothes hung on him like slack sails. He was old — twenty — and hadn’t been at school for a couple of years, apparently.
But in Evolution, we cracked wise. And, to be fair, he was all right. He threw some solid chat. Apart from our shared appreciation for the science-explained wonders of the universe, Stevie also liked footy. Loved footy. We talked footy a lot.
Paying frankly imperfect attention to the blackboard we talked about the code, the teams, the stars (Carey, Hird, Lockett); we chatted about who we supported and why (him: Footscray and family, me: Fremantle and whim); we talked about our personal experiences in the game. As our quality banter went the journey I formed the distinct but anomalous impression, after a quiet line or two here and a shadowy hint there, that Stevie had tickets on himself. He was a gun, or had been, back in the day.
Bullshit, I thought. Must have been. I wasn’t then the expert armchair judge of a footballer I’ve become but, even so, I knew a gun needed more bullets than Stevie could stick in his bandolier. With a dismissiveness befitting a Soviet show trial, I receipted and filed him as a skinny try-hard.
Nonetheless, I did condescend to encourage him down to train with my footy team. He demurred initially, but in the last week of pre-season — just as it got really clear-night, star-bright, Canberra cold, when all you can think about is a chillihot shower and massive spag bol — he showed up shivering in trackie daks, a woollen Doggies jumper, gloves, and a beanie.
I was surprised that he rocked up, and not super happy about it. It was the self-styled reputation thing again. The point being, if I was going to bring someone to the club, I wanted to bring a weapon. A semi-automatic assault rifle with an unlimited magazine masquerading as a six-foot-five Victorian prodigy who’d emerged from the womb mouthguard on and boots laced. Not a stunted twenty-year-old with an age exemption, delusions of faded grandeur and the destructive threat of a water pistol.
Pretending I didn’t really know him, and putting myself in the drill he wasn’t in, meant I didn’t see how he trained, but he effervesced in class the next day. He was definitely coming to the next training sesh, and he reckoned he might even put his hand up to play when the season began that Saturday if the doctor was cool about it — who were we playing again?
‘Tuggeranong Bulldogs at Gordon,’ I said.
He shrank a little at that. Turned a bit greyer. ‘No shit,’ he said. Apparently they had been his junior club. He hadn’t been to Gordon Oval for five years, more than. Since before he got sick.
‘It’s still wind-burnt and’ — sotto voce — ‘fucking cold,’ I said, then tactfully, ‘You were sick then, were ya?’
‘Yeah,’ he’d murmured, licking the gums between his teeth and his top lip, ‘a bit.’ Then the teacher free-kicked me a question about the Cambrian explosion and I grasped the opportunity for a cheap goal at Naomi’s expense.
As I drove home, L-plates on and hyperventilating, I raised the subject with my old man, who taught at the same school. I was trying to be a good bloke so why would Stevie keep serving up bullshit and expecting me to eat it?
‘He keeps talking about how he was a jet and tore it up when he was a junior. I let it go, but it’s annoying and it’s sort of sad.’ I checked the mirrors.
‘He’s not taking the piss — a few years ago Stevie was a superstar.’
‘Wait, what?’ I stomped on the brakes reflexively. ‘What?’
Dad’s closed eyes flicked open, checked the road, skimmed to me and shut again. ‘It is sad, but not because he’s lying. He’s probably not told you how good he really was.’
Well, I flustered, how the bloody hell did he know that? Turns out that Dad taught Stevie physics (news to me) and he’d seen letters to the principal from Stevie’s club coach, the ACT representative team coach and the head of the ACT Junior AFL. To say they were solid references was a wilful understatement verging on criminal fraud.
‘So he was good then? He doesn’t look that good. He looks skinny.’
‘Yeah, mate, he was good. Blinker on. He would have killed you on the football ground. Has he ever mentioned he’s been sick?’
‘Orhh, yeah/no, sort of. Not really but. Did he get sick, did he? Is that why he hasn’t finished school?’ I was displaying the full suite of my forensic powers of deduction.
‘Yeah,’ my dad said, ‘he did get sick. Watch the road. Perhaps you should ask him.’
I agreed that perhaps I would, but got distracted in class by Naomi’s industrial yet conflicted flirting and didn’t get around to it until I saw him on Saturday morning.
Obviously, I didn’t ask him when we were getting changed, because you can’t cop a heavy question when all you’re wearing is lucky underpants. I didn’t ask him when we were warming up either, because it was so windy and so cold I was flat chat trying to warm anything. I finally pulled the trigger as we trotted back to the sheds for the coach’s last rocket. I floated to the back of the steaming pack and slowed down a bit, and Stevie, being all right, slowed to keep my company.
‘How’s it going, mate? You ready?’ I asked.
He yeah/no’ed and puffed. He’d be okay, he hoped. It’d been a while but. He was pretty unfit, a bit nervous.
‘You’ll be right, champ’ — as if I knew — ‘but, but how come you haven’t played for ages?’
Grey eyes peering up out of the corner of his grey face, Stevie said he’d got sick.
‘Yup, ya told me.’ Damn it — it was now or … well, Monday, come to think of it. No, bugger it: ‘How sick? What sort of sick?’
‘Pretty sick.’ Stevie sniffed and rubbed his nose. ‘Cancer sick.’
‘Huh,’ I said. ‘Right.’
Ice ages came and went.
‘Twice,’ he continued. I stopped. Stevie didn’t, but turned and jogged backwards. He said he’d got leukaemia at fourteen but didn’t die, and then he got non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma — the bad one — when he was seventeen, and still hadn’t died.
‘I’m basically just looking forward to playing.’ He grinned over his shoulder as he trotted into the sheds.
I followed and sat down furthest from the heater. I didn’t hear a word the coach said. There was a roar in my ears that wasn’t a crowd. Twice I looked across at Stevie and once he looked back at me with a tight smile and held out his hand, palm down. It shook a bit. He was so grey he was blending into the atmosphere — the concrete sheds, the steel clouds and the blade-like cold. The coach called his name, welcomed him to the team, shook his hand and said he was on the bench. I was on the half-forward flank.
I wasn’t playing the best game of my life but I’d had two shots at goal and no hard ball gets (person KPIs) by the time Stevie came on in the forward pocket near the end of the first quarter. Almost immediately, the ball flew over his head and Stevie turned to chase, high-kneeing in flapping headgear and our woollen green-and-gold jumper while three boys in blue closed rapidly. He got to the footy, grabbed it in an ungainly lunge, then stopped dead and in one smooth movement swerved into a crouch to face the chase. He jerked his head slightly and swayed his shoulders to let the first guy flash by, straightened and blurred around the second, before bending time and space by holding the footy out in his left hand then slowly drawing it back to his body as he sold some candy to the last kid. He wheeled onto his right boot and roosted the pill at the goal. He was feeling the game. It was moving with him, not past him.
The footy fell twenty metres short. Into my arms, all alone.
‘Great leg, Stevie boy!’ I hollered after slotting it, holding my hands up and clapping. Stevie gave me a tight, double thumbs-up. It wasn’t a pass. He’d looked, and I’m sure he’d felt, like the thing was going the journey.
‘Um, yeah,’ he said. ‘No worries.’
It doesn’t come back easily. By half-time, I’d had a couple more pings while he’d gone off, come back on, been dragged off and come back on again — having had that solitary effective disposal.
And not for want of trying. He ran and he chased, scuttling around the ground like a beserk daddy-longlegs in a banzai charge. He was braver than I, his head always over the ball diving into a pack, but he was tossed aside easily and three beats too slow when it was in his hands. It had been a long seven years.
It was a long season. There were a few more moments as it played out, but only a few. The last baubles from a stolen wealth of talent. He was making up the numbers, and he knew it. Still, he played the year with an extra jumper under his guernsey and a smile under his headgear.
As we walked off the field after losing our last game, which had been our first final, I suggested we make ourselves scarce in a pubwards direction to celebrate, well, everything really. He smiled and looked over my shoulder, where Naomi was waiting for him. ‘Nah, mate’ — he waggled his translucent eyebrows — ‘I gotta date.’
He held out his hand to shake mine and, as he walked away, he paused, turned and thanked me heaps for helping him with the footy — he’d loved it, every bit of it. I watched him clasp Naomi’s hand.
‘Um, yeah,’ I said. ‘No worries.’