9

ATTENTION ALL SQUAD—LEAGUE TWO TABLE, 22 DECEMBER

“Christmas. Listen up.” Clarke looked away from the sheet of paper stuck to the whiteboard and folded his arms across his bosom. “We’ve got four matches coming up in the next ten days. Pitches are going to be frozen. Some of you are going to get injured. Some of you are going to have to play through injuries, and some of you who’ve been out of the team are going to get some minutes. All of you will train Christmas morning. And you better believe that if anyone so much as looks at a drink, I’ll know it. I don’t need telling what a hangover looks like.”

And as he moved away to the tea urn, his eyes yellow, his nose spidered with veins, it was a brave or unwise player who could doubt that this was true.

“Christmas party, gaffer,” Yates called out as the number two was about to take them through the upcoming schedule. “We’ve been holding off. When can we have it?”

Clarke stepped back in front of the number two.

“January. And that’s if you’ve improved what this bastard table looks like by then. And”—his lips stretched into a deformed jovial smile—“if you invite me.”

Later, in the dressing room, Yates slapped his legs and got up from the bench. “Right then. Party. Who’s sorting it?”

For a few seconds nobody said anything. Apart from Bobby and Steven and one or two other young players looking eagerly about the room, they all avoided beholding Easter, whose head was lowered, his hands compressed between his knees.

“Come on, boys,” Yates continued. “I know there’s sod-all time but it’s not that hard. Venue, girls, Jägers.”

Jones stood up. “I’m on it.”

There was some clapping, a few shouts.

“First thing’s money,” Jones said. “Fines need calling in, pronto. Who’s up for it?”

A few hands went up.

“Stevie Barr. Good boy. You need to write out the fines board and go round collecting. Any of these faggots give you any trouble, you come to me. All right? Done.”

Talk about the party soon dominated most conversations. The most sensible plan, it was decided, by Jones, was to have it well away from town. No chance of supporters, press, partners. They were playing Oxford on New Year’s Day. The party could be held there after the game. Jones, who had played for Oxford at one point, put in a call to a contact in the city and made a deal to hire a club for the night. Extras he negotiated separately, through other contacts.

Tom attempted to join in with the banter. He laughed at each new jibe at the manager. He made a cumbersome joke of his own one lunchtime about drinking games, which nobody seemed to hear. All the while, though, thoughts about the party hung over him. His fear—having been to the last Christmas party at his old club, when one of the other scholars was forced onto the stage and had ended the night sobbing and retching on a pavement—was that he would be singled out, brought into the spotlight. Living with the Scottish boys did not help. They spoke about little else. Steven had thrown himself into the role of kitty man. The money was stuffed into an old ale jug of Mr. Davey’s on the kitchen worktop. Mrs. Davey tried to ban the subject from the dinner table but the two boys were so unable to stop themselves that she relented.

Tom found out, with a stealthy peep at the noticeboard in the club office when he came in under the pretense of wanting some match-day programs for his family, that the staff would be holding their own party separately, at a pub in town.

In the fortnight or so since his attempt at contact in the car park, Liam had not tried again to speak to him alone. Tom had made sure to avoid any situations which might have given him the opportunity, keeping away from the car park and the canteen except at busy times, never training alone, staying out of the Daveys’ kitchen as much as he could. He was up in his room late one afternoon, though, when he was alerted to the sound of Liam’s voice downstairs. He went to his doorway to listen. Liam was talking to Mrs. Davey, although it was difficult to make out what they were saying. He came quietly down the staircase, checking that Bobby and Steven were not in their rooms, and stood against the wall of the bathroom, close to the first-floor landing.

“…just into town. Not a late one.”

“How’s he getting on, Mark?”

“Mark’s just Mark. Never changes, to be fair.”

“And what about Leah? You’re seeing more of her these days?”

“A bit. When she’s allowed. She’s out tonight, she says.”

There was a break in the conversation and Tom thought they were going into a different room. He moved back from the landing.

“Tom?” Mr. Davey was coming up the stairs. “Everything all right?”

Tom jumped. He looked towards Bobby’s and Steven’s rooms, then at his watch. “Just seeing if the boys were back. There’s a magazine I was coming to see if they’ve got.”

“Right-o.” Mr. Davey gave him what Tom was sure was a doubtful look on his way past him to the bathroom. Tom went to knock on both bedroom doors then back up to his room, where he lay on the floor, his eyes shut, trying to regain himself.

He was often irritable with the Daveys. It would not take much—the sight of them chuckling on the sofa, a jokey conversation with the Scottish pair over dinner—and he would become silent and go up to his room at the first opportunity. They had noticed the amount of time he was spending in his room. The silences. Mrs. Davey cornered him in the kitchen one icy morning, freezing fog pressing at the windows, while he was waiting for the toaster to pop. She sat down at the table and started leafing through the post.

“Will you come and sit with me while you eat your breakfast?” she said when he turned round with his plate.

He ate his first slice quickly, aware that she was looking at him.

“How are you getting on at the minute, Tom?”

He waited to finish his mouthful. “Not bad.”

“I’ve had enough boys through here to know how difficult it can be. Tom. Look up, please. Look at me a moment.”

He did as he was told. Her face, soft and lined under the kitchen light, made him suddenly furious.

“You know you can talk to us? We’ve seen it all before, believe me. It makes no difference if you’re nineteen or you’re twenty-nine, if you’re out of the team or you’re injured, that’s not easy for anybody. It doesn’t mean you’ve failed.”

“I don’t think I’ve failed.”

“No. You shouldn’t. Nobody else does. You’re a very talented boy. You can go as far as you want in the game, Tony thinks. So go easy on yourself, Tom. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” She reached across and held his hand. “Talk to your folks, sweetheart. Don’t bottle it all up.”

With that, she let go of his hand and left the table, smiling. One job down, he thought cruelly, now to the ironing.

As well as the party, for which the idea of going in costumes—as each other—had to Tom’s great relief been jettisoned, the other topic of discussion was the January transfer window. Every day there would be a new rumor on the Internet message boards or Twitter or in Pascoe’s column, which one or other of the players, usually Yates, would make sure to bring up. Easter, although nobody spoke about him if he was present, featured prominently in these rumors. So too did Clarke. To a lesser extent, Tom’s future was also under debate: he was going to be sent out on loan for first-team experience; Finch-Evans was going to Aldershot and Tom would be given a run in the team; a club in the Conference South had made an inquiry.

Tom read all of these rumors, worrying in his room, desperate to stop himself, to turn off the laptop. He occupied himself almost constantly in an effort to distract his thoughts, as he always had, with football. But it felt hollow. He was back in training, though he had long forgotten what it was like to play. To be worked up at the prospect of a match. For nothing else to matter except stepping onto a pitch with his instructions about the fullback’s weaknesses, expecting to beat him, knowing that his teammates expected him to. The muscular effort of riding a challenge. The release of sprinting, of striking the ball. He wanted to be able to close his eyes and remember all of that, to lose himself in it, but whenever he closed his eyes he felt lost, afraid, as though something was waiting for him in the dark.

He was already awake on Christmas morning when his parents called. The Daveys had set the heating to come on in the early hours and his room was uncomfortably warm. He stood by the window in his underpants with his forehead against the glass, looking out at the frosted town dotted here and there with busy windows smoldering through the mist, damaged frigid Santas, reindeer, hanging from the frames.

“You’re having lunch at the Daveys’, then?”

“After training. Then we’re off down to Torquay early tomorrow.”

“So no celebrating then?”

“No.”

“But you’ll have a drink tomorrow night, after the game?”

“Depends, Dad. I doubt we’ll be celebrating. We’ll probably have lost.”

“Hey, none of that. It’s Christmas.” There were voices in the background, laughter. “Your mum’s tipsy already.”

Tom listened to the muffled fuss of his mum protesting. She came to the phone and wished him happy Christmas, giggling at something his dad was doing next to her. She told him to have a good day and handed the phone back.

“Well, look at this,” his dad said. “It’s up. Your sister wants to speak to you, Tom. I think she’s still drunk from last night, looking at her. Here she is. Happy Christmas, mate. Chin up, eh?”

There was the crackling sound of the phone being passed.

“Hi, Tom. Make them stop, please.”

Tom smiled. He shifted his forehead on the glass. “Happy Christmas, Rach. You had a late one, then?”

“It was ugly. City center was a wreck. How are you? Happy Christmas. You got to stay off it today?”

“We’ve got training in an hour. Torquay tomorrow.”

“No Christmas pudding for you.” She paused. “Christ’s sake, it’s carnage here. Mum is actually pissed.” She was laughing, her mouth turned away from the phone. “Are you OK?” Down on the pavement, Tom could see two old men with dogs, shaking hands. “Tom? You still there?”

“Sorry, I thought you were talking to Mum. I’m fine, yes. You know. Christmas is crap being a footballer.”

She was quiet a moment, probably considering a remark. “It must be. Hang in there, though. OK, Tom, I should go. Happy Christmas. I hope you play tomorrow. I’m sorry you’re not here.”

He stayed by the window for a while. On noticing that some of his cacti were looking out of condition he moved the whole collection an inch further from the glass and, after putting on some tracksuit bottoms, waited at the top of his staircase with the elegant little copper watering can that his sister had given him a year ago until he was sure that there was nobody in the bathroom below.

Mrs. Davey made them pig-in-blanket baguettes. There was a single glass of Buck’s Fizz each. All along the kitchen worktop lay ordered piles and bowls of chopped vegetables. A turkey sat in a gigantic tray on top of the oven. Tom stared at the meal preparations while he drank the last of his Buck’s Fizz and the Scottish pair badgered Mrs. Davey for a second glass, going over in his mind once more his strategy for the day ahead.

Training was an hour early to give the players more time with their families in the afternoon. The number two brought in a box of Santa hats. They were worn by one of the teams during a seven-a-side but came off too easily and were soon discarded. Only the seniors were there. No scholars, no staff. Lesley had left plastic trays of Christmas dinners, like airplane meals, for those players who were not hurrying home after the session. This group, most of whose wives and girlfriends lived in other parts of the country, numbered only half a dozen, so the canteen was unusually quiet. There was some difficulty operating the microwave: Richards and Hoyle had gone ahead to warm up the meals, but when the other four arrived at the table they found in front of them a line of shrunken trays, the meat stained brown with evaporated gravy, sprouts withered and steaming, and cranberry sauce melded to the buckled plastic. Tom joined in the banter of the others, but he did not care and barely took notice of the food. Afterwards, the group was going to the house that three of them shared, for darts and computer games, and for a second Tom considered joining them, but then he thanked them for the offer and said he was going to go back for Christmas lunch at his landlords’.

“Don’t blame you,” Richards said, “after that circus.”

Tom drove the empty road to the coast. All of the shops and cafes were closed, something which he had not considered, so there was nowhere to buy a drink or a snack, but it suited him fine—the peaceful streets, the boatless sea. A week ago he had told the Daveys that Richards had invited him to Christmas lunch. They were disappointed, he knew, but at the same time it was obvious how pleased they were too, as if they were his own parents, at this sign that he was mixing with the other young players. He felt some guilt, deceiving them. This was overridden, though, walking onto the beach, by the knowledge of how out of the question was the alternative. He kept going down the coastline, over rocks and gullies, across wilds of sand whipped into a haze by the swerving wind, until he had to turn back before it got too dark to walk safely.

He sat in his car in the empty car park. Unbidden, crawling possibilities passed through his imagination. Liam’s big lumpish body pressing up against one of the Scottish pair. Some sordid little note waiting for him in his bedroom when he got back. But when he did return, after nine o’clock, the kitchen spotless, Bobby and Steven in their rooms, the Daveys asleep on the sofa with the television on and the remains of a board game on the carpet, there was no note or any other sign of Liam in Tom’s room or any other place that he searched.

—

The day after Town’s Boxing Day defeat in Torquay, Tom was sitting on the floor of his room wrapping up presents to give to his family that afternoon, when it began to snow. Lightly at first. He looked up at the tiny floating flakes, which turned to water the moment they touched the window. He imagined the warm car journey ahead of him. The unwrapping of presents on the living-room floor while his dad went around topping up drinks to the smell of the roasting turkey crown his mum had insisted they were having, despite his dad’s and his sister’s complaints that it would only be two days since their last one. But the snow started to come more thickly, falling over the town in soft heavy waves. Just before ten there was a knock on his door, and Mrs. Davey came in to tell him that there were severe weather warnings already, advising against motorway travel.

—

The snow continued to fall, on and off, into the next day. The sky had cleared by the morning of the home match on the 29th, but the subzero temperature prevented a thaw. At the ground, ice nested in lines along the stand roofs, and dense snow had settled on top of the pitchside rows of seating. A smooth compacted layer of it shone across the pitch. A message was put out that morning calling for volunteers to clear the playing surface. There would be a free ticket in it for anybody that came down. By nine o’clock some thirty or forty people, many with their own shovels, were dispersed over the pitch: fathers and sons, club staff, scholars, groups of teenagers, stiff laughing old men, couples—all working under the cheerful direction of the two groundsmen. They dug in teams, wheelbarrowing the snow to dump against the advertising hoardings. The referee, who had set off from his home at 4:30 that morning to brave the roads, watched and waited in his overcoat, preparing for his eleven o’clock pitch inspection. Cheers broke out each time a patch of grass was revealed. After an hour of clearing, the chairman and the club secretary appeared, to more cheers, with flasks of tea and large foil platters of bacon sandwiches.

Steven, on finishing his second breakfast, followed Bobby onto the pitch and threw a snowball that hit him on the back of the head. Bobby turned to return fire, at which all of the other scholars ran to join in. As the rest of the volunteers watched the escalating snowball fight, Liam walked over towards the boys. Once he got close to them they stopped, eyes to the ground, shamefaced.

“What do you think this is doing for the pitch, lads?”

“Sorry,” Steven said.

Liam pointed at Bobby. “You. Come and look at this.”

Bobby walked slowly to where Liam had knelt on the ground to scrape aside a little pile of snow, understanding only when Liam cupped the pile between his gloves and rose smiling that he had been hoodwinked. He sprang up and sprinted away. Liam gave chase, throwing his snowball, clipping Bobby’s arm.

“Hey,” Bobby called over his shoulder, laughing. He stumbled, almost falling, and Liam gained on him. “I’m going to do my ankle here,” Bobby shouted as Liam caught up and rugby-tackled him into the bank of snow at the side of the pitch.

By five to eleven, large areas—the center circle, the corners, both penalty boxes—had been cleared. Viewed from above, the field, with its shoveling figures moving at the edges of these dark patches, looked like an archaeological site. The referee stepped onto the pitch. He had changed into his match boots and, to the amusement of the hopeful huddled audience, his shorts. He walked slowly over the grass clearings, stooping here and there to prod at the ground or perform a sudden battery of stamps with the serious head-cocked scrutiny of a burrowing animal.

His decision was announced at midday: match postponed. Even though the snow, at the current rate, would be cleared in time for kickoff, the surface was dangerously hard. The volunteers departed, disheartened, but, after a minor quarrel with the chairman over the free ticket offer, reasonably content, moving carefully away from the stadium with their shovels over their shoulders and warm clouds of conversation about their heads.

—

The Daveys held a small party on New Year’s Eve for their friends the Whittells and the Beeneys, and their lodgers, who had to stay sober because of the match the next day. Tom spent most of the night near Bobby and Steven, and joined them in Bobby’s room at one stage to play on the Xbox. When they came back down Ray Beeney trapped him on the far side of the kitchen table. He thought Tom had ability, he said. Real ability. He hadn’t got to many games this season but he believed Tom had not been given a fair crack of the whip. “It’ll come, son. It’ll come.” He repeated this a number of times. “It’ll come.” Then he wandered off, knocking a bowl of bread-crumbed prawns onto the floor on his way out of the kitchen.

Tom rode out the long stretch to midnight, feeling as out of place as a child. Shortly after the clinks and hip-hoorays and a short boisterous “Auld Lang Syne” led by Bobby and Steven, he saw Mrs. Davey hold up her phone to show Mr. Davey before turning to Ray Beeney: “He’s in town with Mark and Shona and the rest of his crowd. He says happy new year to you all.”

“Good boy, good boy,” Ray Beeney said. “Happy new year, tell him.”

A few minutes later Tom left, unnoticed, to go up to his room.

He thrust his face into his pillow. When he brought it back up he was gasping for breath. He waited a moment before standing and reaching for the magazine at the bottom of his wardrobe. When he sat down on the bed his breathing was still irregular. Mark. Shona. The names held him captive, as alien and shocking as the staring faces and wet cramping tongues of the women in the magazine before him.

—

Clarke forbade any mention of the party until the final whistle at Oxford, but its unspoken proximity charged the atmosphere inside the dressing room, rippling through the squad’s preparations—from the increase in the number of non-starters requesting a rub from the physio to the quicker than usual emptying of the caffeine-tablet boxes going around the room.

The surface was difficult, the referee inconsistent. Oxford scored three late goals to win 4–1 and keep Town, at the halfway point in the season, bottom of the table. The defeat, however, did not dampen the excitement. After an initial period of silence during which the sound of the Oxford players celebrating bled through the wall, the mood soon swelled with energy and banter. Players queued at the mirrors and watched each other’s deft practiced movement of combs and fingers and hair dryers. When Clarke left, not to be seen for the rest of the night, Jones brought out a bottle of champagne and Yates performed a long thrusting dance on top of one of the benches. Tom watched and laughed with the others, swallowing deeply from the bottle when it came to him.

Back at their hotel, Easter spent a considerable amount of time in the bathroom while Tom sat on his bed and drank from the bottle of vodka that he had stuffed into a compartment of his bag, until the bathroom door started to open and he slipped the bottle back.

When Tom had finished in the bathroom himself, Easter was sitting on his own bed, looking at his phone, scrolling, Tom saw as he came past, through photos of his wife and son. Tom sat down opposite him. He put on his shoes and set to lacing them.

“Looking forward to this?” Easter asked without looking up from his phone.

“Yes.”

Easter began to rock very slowly on the edge of the bed. “Easy enough for you, I guess, isn’t it?”

Tom did not understand, or ask what he meant.

“Fair play, though. Fair play. I remember that.” He took up the sports jacket from beside him on the bed and slid it on. The top of his chest, above the collar of his T-shirt, was shining. He looked up at Tom. “You know I could have gone to Spurs? Got offered a place in the academy there.”

“I heard that somewhere. Why didn’t you?”

Easter shrugged and started rocking again. “Don’t know. Seemed clear enough at the time. All of it.”

It hit Tom, watching Easter’s eyes as he went back to the phone, that he was drunk. Music started up in the room next door: Richards and Hoyle.

“Here,” Easter said, letting the phone drop and crawling to the far side of his bed to reach for something on the floor. He lifted up an almost empty bottle of champagne. “Want some?”

“No, thanks,” Tom said and bent down for his vodka bottle. He held it up to knock against Easter’s.

“Cheers.”

—

Jones stood by the door of the first, then the second, of the minibuses conveying them to an Italian restaurant, ready with an encouraging word or a squeeze on the bum for each embarking passenger. When they arrived Tom hung about at the rear of the throng in the restaurant lobby, backed up against empty dust-covered wine bottles, so that he would not end up in the middle of the table or next to anybody who might resent sitting next to him. The high spirits increased during the meal. Champagne buckets were strung down the length of the table and the waiting staff given instructions to maintain a flow of bottles throughout the meal. Before the starters arrived, Tom, at one end with Bobby and Steven and the first-year pros, felt something hit his left cheek. He saw with panic that a gang at the other end was laughing in his direction. He had been struck by an olive. Automatically, he grinned back. Another olive flew towards him, but missed to the side of his face. Then another, which missed to the same side, and he realized with a rush of joy when Bobby was hit on the forehead that he was not the intended target.

“Come on, boys,” Price implored from behind them, ruffling the heads of all of the young players as he walked round the table, “get your banter up.”

—

A doorman welcomed them at the entrance to the club. They followed him in single file down some steps and along a passageway with the careful tread and close-guarded mental preparation of the walk down the pitch tunnel. The passage ended at a large dark room, empty apart from three staff behind the bar busily stocking fridges and, at one side of a bare stage, a DJ at a mixing console nodding to the music on his headphones. An arrangement of champagne buckets was balanced on the bar counter. There was a smell of bleach. The throb of music above their heads from the main part of the club. One of the barmen came over to speak to Jones. The players were still standing about in the middle of the space when the DJ set to work at his mixer and loud music issued from the speakers around the walls.

With nobody there but themselves, the players quickly grouped into familiar cliques. Tom stayed around the young players, his mouth pinching with champagne, taking in the faded black curtain behind the stage, a formation of small round tables in front of it, the chairs lined up on one side of them to face the stage.

There was a sharp change in Steven’s expression. The circle turned to see what he was looking at. Other people, young women, were entering the room. Jones, then Yates, moved across the floor to greet them. The pressing inescapability of the night closed around Tom. He went to the toilets and as he entered them imagined locking himself inside a cubicle, unnoticed, until it was over. When he came back into the room he saw that his group had gravitated towards the busy area around the bar. A woman with short side-parted dark hair was among them. She was talking to Steven as Tom rejoined the circle.

“Who’s your captain?”

Steven paused for a moment. “Depends.”

The woman smiled quizzically, thinking that he was being playful. “Depends on what?”

“Depends what you mean. Supposed to be him.” He pointed over to where Easter had isolated one of the women on the other side of the bar. Then he turned to point behind Tom. “See, these days really it’s that guy.” They all turned to look at Jones. “He’s the captain.”

“Sounds like a strange setup.”

“Oh, it’s a shambles, aye.”

They all laughed, including the woman. Several others nearby looked over and identified, by the expression of proud surprise on his face, that it was Steven who had made a joke. Another woman came to join them. She held up a bottle of champagne by the neck and topped up their glasses. She moved in beside the first woman and the Scottish boys, falling in with their conversation. Tom was drunk. His forehead ached with the heavy tender weight of his eyeballs. He could not understand who they were, these women—if they had been persuaded down from the club upstairs or if they had been invited, paid, to come here.

A low expectant clamor was growing around him. A thin, very white girl stood in the center of the stage. She was in a close-fitting green dress, her hands clasped together behind her back. Beyond her, a whorl of dust from the still-moving curtain was caught in the shaft of a spotlight. Tom tried to remember whether she had been one of those around the bar, who were now walking with the rest of the crowd to take seats at the tables in front of the stage, but she seemed new, younger.

Tom sat down near one end of the row. He looked down it briefly for Easter but could not find him. He turned his face to the stage. From his position, he could see the girl’s fingers struggling momentarily with the zip at the back of her dress before she guided it up over the protruding contours of her spine. She walked slowly to one edge of the stage, then the other, and back to the middle. Her face was flushed but expressionless. She let the dress collapse to the floor. A few shouts went up. Fists banged on the sturdy little tables. The girl removed her bra and dropped herself to the boards, where she lay front down with her hands positioned as though about to go into press-ups. Her neck tautened as she lifted her face, then her chest—her palms, stomach, thighs still flattened to the dirty black-painted wood of the stage.

A tray was being passed along the row. Tom watched it glinting in the stage lights with every exchange. He thought at first that there must be shots on the way, but as the tray got closer he saw that there was money on it, a pile of notes.

“Silver platter,” he heard from a few seats down. “Get in.”

By the time the tray reached him and he lifted the black and gold leatherette cocktail menu that weighted the notes down, there looked to be a few hundred pounds on it. He took out his wallet, confused because he thought that everything had been paid for already, and added a twenty. Another girl, shorter, slightly older, with a dyed red bob, came onto the stage. She danced, worming out of her clothes alongside the thin white girl. Fervid excitement was building along the row. The two girls switched positions. Tom noticed the blackened soles of the younger one’s feet as she moved away. His own body was shutting down, weak with pathetic complicity. Hoyle tapped his arm, urging him to look down the line to where first Bobby, then Steven, were being pushed, dragged, onto the stage. Somebody touched Tom’s shoulder. His hands tightened to the seat of his chair. “Amazing.” Price was behind him, moving down the line. “Fucking amazing.”

Yates leaped onto the stage to pair each boy with one of the girls. Following their new partners’ leads they began to dance—feet planted to the floor, both punching the air with uncontrolled nervous vigor. The audience, delighted by the two stern faces, started to clap in unison. Tom, delirious with relief, joined in. He laughed spontaneously with those around him at Steven, nearest to his own side with the younger girl. Steven did not know what to do with his arms: they fell prone by his sides one moment then all at once were fisting the air again whenever he looked across and copied Bobby at the other side of the stage.

The girls, moving to the front of them, set to unbuttoning their shirts. The two boys exchanged an unsmiling look over the girls’ heads: determined, together. There was a loud cheer when the shirts came off, revealing their glaring white bodies, hard new muscle packed over childlike frames. They stopped dancing. Their trousers were being unbelted, pulled down. In tandem they lifted one leg, then the other, so that their feet could be pulled free, like two brothers being undressed for bath time.

Their underpants—from the same shop, or pack—were lowered. Tom looked away. The line of faces, interspersed with those of the women from the bar and the obvious terror of the odd player, was transfixed, straining with a force of unbending will for this to happen, for it not to stop.

Penises. One erect, the other not. Steven, grinning manically, possibly crying, pumped his arms above his head in response to the shouts of insult and encouragement from the audience. Tom pressed a hand against his mouth as his stomach retched. He made himself look away again. Crumpled heaps of clothing lay scattered across the stage. A chant of “Bob-ee, Bob-ee, Bob-ee” was rising, the rhythmic thump of the word hammering inside Tom’s chest.

The younger girl got to her feet, embarrassed, and danced a little way apart from Steven. The other girl, though, was kneeling on the stage, hunched towards Bobby. The tag of her underwear was untucked, irritating a small red patch at the base of her spine, which was rolling fleshily up and down now in time with the slow sad rhythm of the back of her head. The only other movement of the two bodies, barely visible past her ear, was the faint tremor of Bobby’s left leg.

Nobody appeared to notice Tom get up from his seat. The doormen said nothing when he reached the top of the stairs and moved past them onto the street. He kept on walking, then ran, not stopping for some time, his nose streaming, until he had composed himself enough to squat against the wall on a pavement a short distance from the bustling crowd outside a fried chicken shop. He knew he could not return to the hotel. He wiped hiS face, realizing that he had left his jacket behind, and stood up to hail a passing taxi.

Numbness filled him the moment he sat down and closed the door. Only later, during the long disorienting journey, distantly aware of the sound of the radio and the suspicious glances of the driver, the steadily climbing unset fare—£200, £300, £400—did it start to turn to shame.

The driver parked to accompany him to the cashpoint. He stood close by, watching Tom withdraw a stack of notes with his bank card, then another with his credit card.

“You sure you know where you are?” the driver asked when the money was in his hand, but Tom ignored him and walked away. He proceeded down empty streets, past darkened shopfronts. Through the wasting light of an upstairs window he could make out the lagging end of a party. His head smarted. The desire to cause himself damage kept seething up from somewhere inside him. He imagined stepping into the path of a car, his ankle crushed by a tire, his pelvis shattering. But there were no cars, no people, nothing.

He let himself into the Daveys’ house very quietly. Inside, it was completely still. He sat down at the kitchen table, listening for any sound upstairs. After a few minutes he stood abruptly and began searching through the post on the kitchen table, then, his chest heaving with terrible excitement, a drawer under the kitchen counter.

He left the house as silently as he had entered it. Holding a piece of notepaper in one hand, he took out his keys and his phone and got into his car.

The cul-de-sac when he turned into it was lit but unstirring. He moved automatically, without pausing: out of his car, down the pavement, through the gate into a dark garden. He located a doorbell and rang it. There was a long wait, then the door opened.

“Tom? You OK?”

Tom remained on the doorstep. He was bewildered, unable to comprehend what was happening.

“Is it Mum and Dad?” Liam was wearing a blue dressing gown. His concerned face stared at Tom. “Jesus, you’re hammered, aren’t you?”

For an instant Tom thought he was about to take his hand, but instead Liam reached behind him for the door handle and motioned him inside. Tom followed him into a living area. “All right, what’s going on?” He looked round at the staircase then back at Tom. “You know what time it is?”

Tom lurched towards him. “Come on then, queer. Come on.” He latched a hand onto the back of Liam’s neck and tried to pull his face forward but Liam held him off easily. Tom’s strength gave. He stumbled and was caught. Lifted up.

“Jesus, Tom, don’t be a twat,” Liam said in a low voice, shooting another look at the staircase. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

Liam’s chin was on the top of Tom’s head. His Adam’s apple bore down on Tom’s temple. “You’re pissed, mate.” He clinched Tom’s arms tightly to his trunk, restricting any movement. The smell of him was overpowering. “You’re pissed, mate. You’re just pissed, that’s all.”

—

When Tom woke, aching and shivering on a sofa with a blanket over his legs, the curtainless room was filled with dim light. There was a tang of vomit. He turned over slowly and examined the cushion behind his head, his clothes, the small, peeling plastic sofa, but he could find nothing. He tried to sit up but was prevented by a wave of nausea.

It took some time, his eyes not leaving the staircase, before he was able to get up from the sofa. He moved himself to the kitchenette at one side of the room and got himself a glass of water. Three dirty plates were stacked in the sink. The counter was cluttered with pans and a sieve and several full shopping bags. In a large clip frame above the fridge there was a wide-angle photograph of a football pitch, taken from low down, which Tom recognized from the advertising hoardings as Town’s. He drank the water steadily, listening for any sound above his head. He checked his pocket for his car keys and stepped towards the door, then, after a short panicked fumbling with the lock, he let himself out.