Easter remained silently among the group as they continued drinking. His wife, Leah, sat beside him, her hand occasionally on his knee, turning towards him whenever he made some noise or response to the conversation. Nobody brought up the incident with the number two. At one point, however, Yates and Febian Price did perform their impression of the number two fawning to the manager—a routine in which Price stood up and faced away from the audience, hands on his hips, shouting, “Oi, Two,” and Yates crawled around to kneel in front of him before thrusting his head forward so that his face appeared between Price’s legs. Then, in a low, pleading voice, Yates whispered, “He doesn’t mean it, really, he doesn’t mean it,” stopping, between repetitions, to arch his neck upwards and mouth kisses at Price’s bottom.
“We don’t have to stay, Chris.”
He turned to Leah for the first time in the last half-hour. “You want to go?”
“No. I just think we don’t need to stay if you’re not in the mood for it.”
“OK. Fine.”
He kept his attention out of the taxi window while they moved past the dark shapes of the players’ car park.
“What did he say to you?”
He did not answer. His eyes remained on the window. She could see the reflection of them in the glass, fixed, alert—and with a chill she sensed that he might be looking at her. She turned away and saw in the rearview mirror that the driver, somewhat less secretively, was looking directly at her. She rested her head against her window. Closed her eyes.
Once home, he went straight up to the bedroom. Leah poured herself a glass of water in the kitchen, loitering there a short while, and by the time she came upstairs he was already in bed. He was awake, though. She undressed and came over to his side. With one knee on the mattress she leaned over and gently ran her finger over a new cut on his temple. He reached out for the bedside lamp, presently on its dimmest setting, tapped it once, brighter, then brighter again—and for an instant she saw her exposed flesh flare luminously—until at the final tap the room fell to darkness, and she groped her way back around the bed to her own side.
When she woke in the morning she sat up and watched him for a while, still asleep, breathing lightly, peaceful. The cut on his temple had swollen overnight, and in the soft light from a gap in the curtains there was the petrol sheen of a perfect tiny bruise. She slid out of bed and got dressed quickly, quietly, leaving him there sleeping.
In the heat of her car she turned on the air-conditioning, then the radio for a little company, and set off for her mum’s.
She knew he had not slept for some time after they went to bed. That was normal, though, after a match. His body would continue to buzz with nervous energy, twitching, turning, reliving the game. If he had picked up an injury, even a small one, it would be all the more difficult for him to get to sleep. This, he said, was why he needed to drink after playing. He would regularly sleep in the spare room, as he did before matches, or she would, but last night he had come to their bed and she had not wanted to leave him on his own. She had wanted him to know, whatever it was that was bothering him, that she was there.
Her mum still lived in the flat that Leah had grown up in. Her parents had moved into it shortly after the damp, thinly attended morning of their marriage ceremony, and Leah had been born there the following year. The block she was approaching now had changed very little since then: the echoing stairwell with its smooth discolored banisters, the smell of bleach, the heavy brown door to her mum’s floor, the neighbors, whose hanging baskets creaked above a cheerful procession of welcome mats in the morning breeze of the balcony corridor.
The pram was outside her mum’s. There was still no lift in the building, so when her mum had Tyler she usually enlisted the help of the Dynocks next door to get the thing up and down the stairs, and quite often the Dynocks ended up accompanying them on their outings to the shops or the play park. Sometimes, if her mum was working or being taken away for the weekend, the Dynocks looked after him themselves, and Leah wondered, noticing the two cans of Mr. Dynock’s Shandy Bass in her mum’s recycling box, whether in fact her mum might have been on a date with her new man last night.
She knocked and let herself in. She came through the tight corridor, past the dozens of photographs that covered both walls: herself as a baby, a child, a teenager swamped in Chris’s debut first-team shirt, their wedding a couple of years later at the Cliff; Tyler on the facing wall in a Town romper suit, in the bath, at the Dynocks’, cackling at their dog. She wondered sometimes what her mum’s boyfriends made of this display—if they saw an over-the-top pride in it, loneliness, a warning.
Her mum was in the kitchen making tuna sandwiches. She finished spooning some filling onto a piece of bread and came over to kiss Leah.
“I’m making a packed lunch for me and Robert. We’re going out later. I’m doing a packet for Tyler as well. You want one?”
“No, thanks, Mum.” She looked over at the wall. “He asleep?”
“Went down about an hour ago.”
Her mum went back to the sandwiches. Leah walked through the kitchen and put on the kettle. The window was open and a familiar draft touched her shoulder when she reached into the cupboard for the mugs. For a couple of minutes there was only the sound of the kettle gaining force. Her mum chopping a cucumber. Leah made the tea then stood against the counter and watched her. She might as well have been putting together her school lunchbox: the brisk, efficient movement of her hands, the weathered red plastic chopping board, the same ancient Tupperware. All that was missing was the ominous presence of Leah’s dad.
“They drew yesterday.” Her mum did not look up from her sandwich-making.
“They were unlucky. They should’ve won.”
Her mum cut each of the sandwiches into four triangles, which she stacked and then cling-filmed. From the fridge, she took out a couple of yogurts, a pack of sausage rolls, a foil plate of quiche, a Kit Kat and, after a slight pause, another Kit Kat. He liked his food, Robert.
“How’s he getting on, Chris?”
“He’s OK.” Leah placed the mugs of tea onto the small table in the middle of the room and the two women sat down.
“Robert says he’s been playing well. Must be chalk and cheese after Middlesbrough.”
“Yes. He’s fine, Mum.”
A babbling noise came from the baby monitor on top of the microwave. Her mum started to get up.
“I’ll go,” Leah said.
Inside the room she switched on the light and went over to the cot. Tyler broke into a simple, delighted smile. She picked him up and for a minute just held him, pressing the warm, hefty little body into her own, the sour stink of his nappy overpowering the room’s faint cloying odor of her old perfumes.
When she had changed the nappy she carried him through to the kitchen, where her mum was still seated at the table in a rare moment of inactivity. Leah set Tyler on the floor and he started to crawl towards his grandmother.
“So what does your week look like?” her mum asked.
“Quite busy. College on Thursday, and there’s a few people I’ve said I might meet up with.”
“Oh, good.” Her mum bent down to where Tyler had reached her toned legs and waggled a sandal strap at him. Leah wondered if she was going to press her further, but just then her mum’s mobile vibrated on the table and she straightened up to read the message.
“Robert’s about here. He’ll be pleased he caught you,” she said and went off to the bathroom.
A few minutes later the front door was opened. Leah waited, then Robert appeared at the kitchen entrance: tall, chortling, about to hug her. As he came forward she took in the fleshy eyebrows, the beer belly and, like last time, the disconcerting thin patent-leather maroon belt.
“Leah.” He kissed her firmly on the cheek. Then he reached down to pick up Tyler from the floor and held him close to his face. “How’s this guy doing?” Tyler pawed at his eyebrows.
“He’s good, thank you.”
Robert made a series of squeezed faces at Tyler. He touched their noses together. Leah watched, at first amused but increasingly uncomfortable, as her mum came to stand beside her, at the thought of how much time Robert had obviously spent with Tyler in the couple of months that he’d been going out with her mum. She should have been pleased, she knew. He was clearly good with babies, and her mum seemed happier now than she had been with any other of the string of losers since the bleak past of her dad. They went to dance classes. He had his own business, a commercial insurance firm. He had money, hobbies, no significant skeletons in his closet other than an ex-wife, but she was completely out of the picture, according to Robert, having left him two years ago for a strangely tanned Yorkshireman. “And what about Chris? How is he doing?”
“He’s fine, thanks.” She wondered what her mum might have said to him.
“Good. They played well yesterday, tell him.”
Tyler was laughing uncontrollably now because Robert was balancing him on top of his belly. Her mum bent down to blow raspberries on Tyler’s tummy. For a few awful seconds, as she looked up at Robert’s contented face above her mum’s hair, she pictured her head moving down over him. The eager unbuckling of the lady belt. The fat eyebrows creasing, bunching with pleasure.
“OK. Thanks, Mum. Call you in the week.” She reached over for Tyler. “Have a good trip out, you two.”
She drove home in the sunshine, thinking about the afternoon ahead. In a rare flash of inspiration a few days ago, she had come up with an idea of doing something in the countryside together, and on the Internet she had come across a petting farm only half an hour away from the house. She had not yet told Chris, but she imagined the three of them together, showing Tyler the ducks and chickens, watching his reaction to the donkey. The long expanse of the upcoming week, however, crowded her thoughts. She would do the supermarket shop tomorrow. On Tuesday morning baby music group, and in the afternoon, if she could put out of her mind the other mothers’ furtive scrutiny of her figure, baby swimming. There was an away fixture that night, so Chris would be gone all day and not return until the early hours. Wednesday she would have to wait and see how he was—whether he wanted to be alone or to spend the day with them.
Thursday was the day that, privately, she looked forward to each week, guiltily anticipating the moment she would drop Tyler off at her mum’s and be on her own, on her way to college, a whole day of workshops and people and thinking for herself before the tense ritual of Friday started to weigh upon her.
Arriving home, she could see when she came up the stairs that he was out of the bedroom and the door to the office was closed. She called hello and returned downstairs.
She began to make lunch. Cheese omelettes. Chris was extremely specific about his diet. In the early days of the week he kept his carbohydrate intake low, gradually increasing it in the buildup to a match, which was why, or at least she told herself was why, they often ate separately in the evening. At Middlesbrough, certainly at first, he had followed closely the advice of the performance nutritionist. Since promotion Town too employed a sports scientist, and preparing Chris’s meals involved more planning than Tyler’s did.
Tyler shuffled between his toys on the stone floor. She had attached padding to the sharp edges of the kitchen island, and in the spare, clean rooms, which had not yet built up the clutter of a home, there was not much opportunity for him to hurt himself, so she could quite securely leave him while she got on with other things. He would be happily occupied for long periods here with his squeaky animals, or scamper through to the large living space that adjoined the kitchen to sprawl over a carpet as creamy and luxurious as a polar bear, then sit in front of the digital fire and play with the pebbles or follow the flames on the screen with his fingers. In her mum’s flat he was forever pulling at wires or fingering under the curled edges of the carpets. Here, though, everything was new, solid, bare.
They had moved in during the close season, soon after Town re-signed Chris. The club had approached him as early as May, the moment he was placed on Middlesbrough’s released list. Town’s interest had been at the chairman’s instigation, she knew. Everybody knew. Clarke had not wanted him. Despite the drop in wages and despite Leah’s reservations, Chris had refused to downsize and they had in haste bought this place, which was every bit as impressive as the house they had been renting near Middlesbrough. Why should he have to suffer, he had said, just because some monkey-faced nobhead wasn’t going to give him a chance? Unlike the Middlesbrough move, when she had argued him out of buying a stupidly big property, this time she had not argued. She had been relieved simply to be moving back. To put behind her the whole experience of the Middlesbrough transfer. From the outset she had struggled to cope there: heavily pregnant, unable to get comfortable in the hotel room while she waited for him to come back from training, and when finally they did move into the rented house she gave birth the following week—exhausted, mostly alone, returning from the hospital to rooms full of boxes and shrink-wrapped furniture.
And she had thought too that coming back would make everything return to normal. That she would be able to step straight into her old life. But they had been home for almost four months now and so far nothing was like it used to be. This house in the middle of nowhere. Her days spent drifting between it and her mum’s and the baby groups in town, where she sat at a remove from the impenetrable chatting clutches of mothers, readying herself for the next moment her isolation would be shown up by Tyler barging over one of their children.
She could hear Chris moving about upstairs. A door closing. The flush of the toilet. She turned on the hob and began whisking the eggs.
When he came down he was dressed and seemed to be in a good mood. He walked over and kissed her on the forehead before going to pick up Tyler, who was crying for her attention at her feet.
“Cheese, is it?”
“That all right?”
“Yeah, cheese is good.”
He stayed by the island, letting Tyler chew at the cords of his hoodie while she cooked and served the omelettes.
“How’s Donna?” he asked.
“Fine. Good, actually. She looks happy.”
Chris put Tyler into his high chair and they sat down at the kitchen table. “What’s his name again, the new bloke?”
“Robert. She’s into him. More than the last one, anyway.”
He snorted. “No shit.”
She looked at him across the table. “I found this place on the Internet I thought we could take Tyler this afternoon. This farm for kids, it’s not that far a drive.”
“A farm?”
“A petting farm. It’s not actually that far away.”
Tyler took apart his tuna sandwich and threw one of the pieces of bread to the floor. She bent to pick it up and put it on the table.
“No, let’s go into town,” Chris said. “There’s some things I need to get.”
Tyler was peering quizzically at his remaining triangle of bread. He revolved it a couple of times in his palm, then pushed the whole thing into his mouth.
Chris laughed. “Just some stuff that I need to finish off here before we go. He can sleep in the car, right?”
She knew, as she cleared away the plates and heard him going back up the stairs, the office door closing, that he would be some time. He was relaxed, though, she placated herself. That was enough.
Tyler fell asleep straightaway in the car. They decided to drive around for a while to let him nap, rather than head straight into town. They took the road towards the coast, and she began to hope that they might end up spending the afternoon there, in the sunshine, but Tyler woke up and started crying before they got that far, so they turned back for town.
She had an intuition, even before he spoke to the supporter in Foot Locker, the old man on the escalator, the group coming out of Burger King, that he would not avoid the fans today. During these conversations she stayed by the pram and waited, glad at least that she was invisible in public when he was with her. They always said the same things: how pleased they’d been when they heard he was coming back, that they weren’t convinced Clarke was up to it at this level, and could he maybe sign something for their dad, their brother, their little boy?
She watched from a short distance as he chatted to three teenagers, a boy and two girls, outside Burger King. The girls’ smiling faces never leaving his, Chris clearly ignoring the boy. After a few minutes she began to get embarrassed and moved further away, crouching to talk to Tyler inside the hood of his pram.
In the days that they used to go to clubs together, she had become used to this. There had been many times that she had stood beside him as brigades of girls came and talked to him, bought him drinks, touched his stomach, his bum, and she would grow unsure whether they were even aware of her there, holding his hand. Once, when she had left him to go to the toilet and come back to discover that he had moved from their table, she had searched the bar and the dance floor of the club until she found him in a passageway near the exit doors with a girl that she did not recognize. Their faces had been close together. She could not be certain if they were moving towards or away from each other, or if their hands had been touching. She had watched them for a few seconds, then left, afraid of being spotted, to go and join the other players in the chill-out room.
When he returned from Burger King he said that he wanted to buy her something. What would she like? Shoes? Something for her course? For Tyler?
He bought her a top, himself a phone upgrade. When they got home she tried on the new top and showed it to him. It looked good, he told her. They ate with Tyler and sat watching cartoons with him before she bathed and changed him and got him to bed.
In the living room, the television on in the background, they sat together on the sofa and she rested her head on his shoulder. He put his hand to her hair and began to stroke the side of her face with his thumb. She let her eyes close. Briefly, she thought she might go to sleep. He moved position, though, gently shifting her head from his shoulder and lowering himself until he was laid out on his front over the sofa. She got up and knelt down on the carpet. Starting at one end of his body she gave him a leg, back and shoulder massage, for a long time, until eventually he turned over and, to her tired relief, took hold of her hands, sliding them slowly across his stomach.