The chairman came into the dressing room after a home draw against Accrington and told the team, while they continued eating lasagna from paper plates on their knees, that they would be spending three days at a country house hotel and golf resort before the second leg of the Paint area final against Charlton.
Tom got onto the coach on the Sunday morning and took his now usual seat, near the front, on the left. As the players shifted up the aisle and the air filled with the odor of them, Beverley swung in beside him. “Don’t mind, do you?”
Tom moved his bag off the seat so that Beverley could sit down.
“I’ve got bagels and Connect Four on the iPad.”
“Party time.”
For a full five minutes before the coach set off, Beverley arranged himself. This was the third time they had sat together, though still Tom did not expect it and did not mind—was pleased, even, for the company. There was no edge to Beverley. He was easygoing and, after the mutual silence of room-sharing with Easter, talkative. The others had taken to him too. He was already part of the dressing-room banter bubble, and Tom knew from the conversations he sometimes heard on a Monday morning that he had been to the Hut a couple of times. He was popping open a large Tupperware box. Inside were two cling-filmed rows of bagels.
“Tuck in, mate. Steak and cheese, bacon and avocado.”
They ate and played a couple of games of Connect Four, Beverley all the while half-involved in the meandering conversation going on behind them about spot betting and hair transplants. The bagels and their interest in the game had gone by the time they reached the motorway. Beverley put his headphones on. Tom stared out of the window, thoughts crowding in on him. Burning Liam’s number at the sink. The lift home from the Town-supporting policeman after spinning his car. He was pulled from them by Beverley nudging his arm. “You ever play at Wembley, Tommy?”
“No. You?”
“No. You didn’t play there with the England Unders?”
Tom shook his head. “I played in a final for the Under-17s, but that was at Burton.”
“You think we’ve a chance?”
“Maybe. We are winning.”
Beverley leaned his head back. He shook it slowly on the headrest. “Serious. If we do, I’m going to have twenty or thirty people down, going ape. Just amazing. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
Tom realized that he had not thought about it at all, not once. He pictured his dad telling his work colleagues, organizing the travel, buying Town shirts, sitting in the vast stadium with Rachel and his mum and Kenny and John, and he had to get up and shut himself in the toilet for fear that he would throw up his bagels.
The hotel was plush. Immaculate beaming staff greeted them on the gravel driveway. Once they had progressed through a reception area heavy with the aroma of immense pendulous flowers, the entire squad made immediately for the pool and spa area, where they aroused the unconcealed horror of a party of elderly golfing ladies taking tea at the poolside.
After changing and going up to see their room, Tom went with Beverley for a walk in the grounds. There was a landscaped pond. A ha-ha. A sparse orchard in which a well-built old man with a beard was making repairs with a length of twine while eyeing them through the branches. Before the evening meal the coaching staff sat everybody down in a large conference room to review the DVD of the first leg. The mood of the players was buoyant, frolicsome, their reaction to the goal on the recording every bit as joyous and physical as the celebration of the real event.
In the morning, following a training session at a nearby boarding-school facility, they were taken to the golf course. A rank of electric carts awaited them outside the clubhouse. They were split into groups of four, selected by Wilko. Tom was paired with Beverley, to play against Boyn and Daish. It was evident even by the time the foursome set off down the first fairway, the bouncing cart resounding to cheers as Boyn slipped the first four-pack out of his golf bag, that neither Tom nor Beverley had ever played golf before. They found Beverley’s ball directly behind a horse chestnut tree. Beverley stood over the ball for some time, pondering. He decided to knock it back onto the fairway, but the ball jounced off the knuckle of the club head and smacked the tree, almost hitting him in the face on the rebound. All four collapsed in laughter. Tom then produced a succession of air shots from inside a deep bunker. On his fifth attempt he struck the ball out, and climbed up to see that it had landed in another bunker. When eventually they completed the hole they heard the distant ironic cheers of the following party. Boyn and Daish studiously marked the scorecards: Beverley 13, Pearman 15. Another round of cans was handed out and the cart trundled on to the next hole.
“You two, seriously,” Boyn said, his voice wobbling as the cart traveled over a stretch of bumpy ground. “It’s like playing with those old women.” He was struggling to latch his finger onto the ring pull of his can. When he did, beer gushed all over him. “Crap.” It continued to spout onto his lap. “I’ve just creamed myself, lads.”
“Well, Boyney,” Daish said from the driver’s seat, “I’ve warned you before about your old-lady chat.”
Tom sank back into his seat. Here, in the cold clean air of the middle of nowhere, pissed already, he was enjoying himself. He closed his eyes, letting himself soar with the purr of the cart, the merriment of the others.
He and Beverley improved, slightly, on the next hole, but then Beverley sliced a clump of soil from the perfect fringe of the putting green. Tom, Boyn and Daish, from their position beside the cart, doubled over at the sight of him, hands on hips, staring down at the wedge of earth lying on the velvet surface of the green, thick and rich as a portion of sticky toffee pudding. After six misses he holed the putt. Raising his hands in the air he ran over to Tom and put his arms around him in a bear hug. They jumped up and down together, shouting Tom did not even know what. Over Beverley’s shoulder he could see Boyn and Daish watching them. He removed his arms from Beverley’s warm torso and stood back.
The joking and the drinking continued for the rest of the round, though Tom was careful to avoid getting too close to Beverley other than to high-five or to consult, pointlessly, over shot choices. In the restaurant at dinner their performances and final scorecards—along with the confrontation between Bobby and Steven halfway through their own round—were the source of much amusement. Tom found himself included in the conversation to an extent that he was not used to. He tried to look unfazed by it. He joined in and to his own surprise was able to give a description of Beverley’s attack on the second green which made both long tables shake with laughter. Boyn, sitting next to Tom, put an arm around his shoulder, and for a few floating seconds, clinched to Boyn’s chest, Tom was empowered by a vision of how he must have appeared: one of them, normal.
They were permitted a single drink in the hotel bar after the meal before they went up to their rooms. As Tom climbed the grand staircase with Beverley, who had somehow managed to keep drinking all day and was hammered, he caught his reflection in one of the gilded mirrors and, in an upswell of unexpected happiness, smiled broadly at himself.
In the darkness, however, as he lay in bed and Beverley straightaway began snoring on the other side of the room, the feeling left him. His mind raced. Insistent choking desire tore at him—the thought of Liam’s hands, his face, his body, the things they had done; the things which he blocked out over and over that he knew he wanted to do again.
With little to do at the hotel except swim, walk, go for a massage or play cards, the squad was restless by Tuesday, the day before the tie. After a short, sharp fitness session on the hotel’s hedge-lined croquet lawn, then lunch, they dispersed. Some went to the television lounge. Some to bed. A small party—Price, Hoyle, Richards, Bobby Hart—escaped the hotel grounds and quickly became lost in their search for a village pub, ending up stranded by a reservoir. When they arrived back at the hotel sometime later in a taxi, Wilko was waiting for them in reception. He fined them two hundred pounds apiece. They ate the evening meal, each, to the initial confusion of the waiting staff, at a table on their own, and were sent to bed early. Once upstairs, though, they convened in Bobby’s room and resumed a game of cards that had been running since the previous night.
All four were included in the starting lineup against Charlton. Tom was also selected. He deserved his chance, Wilko said at the breakfast meeting. And if they made it to Wembley, he pledged, those who had got them there would be the ones who played.
The Valley was by some margin the biggest ground that Town had ever played at. The team looked up in wonder at the stadium from the window of the coach when they pulled up outside it, and were then escorted inside.
During the warm-up, stretching for a ball, Beverley aggravated a groin strain that had been playing up over the past few weeks. He hobbled off the pitch, his inner thigh cramping, and Tom had to assist him up the few steps into the tunnel. Inside the dressing room he was helped onto a treatment table and the physio bent over him, syringing his groin, while Wilko delivered his team talk.
Even though the stadium was less than half full, the noise of the crowd flowed onto the pitch at kickoff. Charlton began positively, Town instinctively locking into rigid defensive lines, afraid to make a mistake or to venture forward other than by hauling long balls up towards Gundi. As a result they were at once under pressure. A Charlton midfielder loped forward and struck a powerful shot against the crossbar. Wilko’s urgent calls from his technical area were lost in the building expectation of the crowd, and from a swift simple corner routine Charlton scored. The previously exuberant block of Town fans was swallowed by noise. Ten minutes later Beverley went to take a throw-in from deep inside Town’s half. Nobody offered themselves for it, and Beverley, his arms tensing above his head, turned to launch the ball back to Hoyle—but an alert Charlton forward intercepted the throw and ran on to finish calmly through Hoyle’s legs.
The team knew they were going to lose. They closed in behind the ball, determined to keep the score down. Tom, even when he came infield, hardly touched the ball. He chased and wandered as if drifting in a fog, the match and the crowd far away from him. The waves of sound, although loud, were indistinct, remote. The stands were set back from the pitch, and in the rising mass of blurred bodies he could not pick out any solo shouts, could not see the veins of any particular throat or forehead. Only after the final whistle did the rows of people take on a defined shape, when Wilko ordered the side to walk over and applaud the Town supporters. Their disappointed white faces shone in the roof lighting, clapping the players in response, resigned to the 3–1 aggregate defeat.
Cars sped in the gaps through the trees. Just inside the touchline of the pitch the squad was stretching on, a fresh molehill had emerged. A couple of pitches further out, Liam was pacing up and down, examining the ground inside a square he had marked out using the same colorful grubby cones that the team used for drills. Tom moved onto his front, concealing his groin. He pulled his feet against the backs of his legs, one at a time, pressing with secret discomfort against the mat, trying to make it go away.
He took his time in the dressing room and the canteen. He sat and ate next to Beverley, who had not trained and was on a pair of crutches because of the pain it caused him every time he took a step. He had not slept, he told Tom. The pain had become so bad during the night that he had got out of bed to go and sit on his sofa, where he had watched a whole series of Only Fools and Horses. Tom left when everybody else did and drove to the stadium. People were moving about inside the windows of the club shop but when he entered the bowels of the main stand the place was almost deserted. There was the faint echo of voices somewhere down the tunnels. An ancient aroma of muscle rub. A dusty light breaking through the gloom where the players’ tunnel went out onto the pitch. He walked on to the dressing room, changed again, and once inside the empty gym pushed himself until his muscles failed.
Afterwards he returned to the training ground. He did not, though, turn his car onto the lane but pulled up on the side of the main road behind a van with a view of the opening in the hedge.
When the bonnet of Liam’s car nosed through the foliage, Tom lowered himself in his seat. For several seconds he looked up at the sky, where motionless banked clouds sat above the treetops. When he inched back up, the car was away down the road. He waited for one, then another vehicle to pass before he pulled out.
He was able to follow without difficulty. Liam drove at an even, steady pace, as if still on the tractor. At one point the van in front of Tom turned off towards the town center, leaving only one car between them. He slowed, increasing the gap, and was brought to a halt by a set of traffic lights that Liam had already passed through. As he waited, the squalid reality of what he was doing caught up with him, and for a split second he considered turning back, but then the lights changed and the momentum of traffic moved him on. Minutes later he was looping past the identical new houses of Liam’s cul-de-sac. He parked and watched from a careful distance as Liam unlocked his front door and went inside. After an hour and a half of no visible movement through the dark windows of the house and in need of the toilet, Tom left.
The following afternoon Liam took a detour from his route home. Tom, the blood vessels of his fingers beating on the gear stick, tracked him down unknown streets until they came to a retail park, in which Liam got out of his car and disappeared inside a B&Q. A wave of self-consciousness made Tom want hurriedly to leave. A large flustered woman, though, was in his rearview mirror, advancing on the car next to him, a toddler in the seat of her trolley full of lime-green cushions and spray cleaners. The woman was shouting at the boy. With the child still in the seat she opened her boot and began unloading into it. Tom felt the shunt of the trolley straying into the back of his car. He was almost tempted to pump his horn and scare them—to reverse sharply into the trolley and send the toddler spinning across the car park. They were still there, shouting at each other, when Liam came out of the store. He was carrying two large white tubs by their handles, forearms straining, his shoulders hunched and twisting. Tom waited interminably for the woman to wrestle her child into his car seat and reverse out, the trolley left where it was behind Tom’s car, by which time Liam was long gone.
He had intended to sleep in on his day off, but once he was awake could not just lie there, so he got up, put on a tracksuit and set off for the stadium gym.
A few other players were in: Daish and Fleming, both returning from injury, who came over to talk to him while he warmed up, and Gundi, huge and immersed in headphones, who remained in front of the free weights mirror the whole time Tom was there. It was still early when he finished and changed, not yet midday. He came out into the car park and sat inside his car. Before his mind could begin to churn, he forced himself to go to the cinema.
The auditorium was empty except for a couple of fidgety teenage girls and a bald man in a leather jacket who fell asleep during the trailers. The film was loud, stupid, and once he made up his mind halfway through that he would go straight home afterwards he was able to give himself over to it completely, aching pleasurably in his seat with what was left of his protein shake and his box of chicken nuggets.
He had done it before, following someone like this. Propelled then by the need to despise himself after the two incidents with Craig. The memory of them, so painstakingly purged for two years, returning again.
The first time, in the gloom of the common that they had known together for years as a place of three-and-in and penalties and pilfered cigarettes, was so unexpected that they had gawked at each other for some time in bemusement, then Craig had bent in to kiss him again and Tom had felt dizzyingly alive and had known, as they touched, that there was something deeply wrong with him. The second, final, time—a couple of weeks later in Craig’s bedroom while his parents were out at the pub—he could only recall fragments of, intensely: the taste of vodka, the Tim Cahill poster on the wall, the useless pot of Craig’s mum’s anti-wrinkle lotion.
They had avoided each other after that. Tom had kept to himself, shut away from his family, getting drunk on the alcohol that the older academy boys were only too happy to buy for him at a profit. One night he put a brick through the windscreen of a Ford Focus on a street near the common. And for a fortnight or more he had followed Craig, waiting in the cafe opposite Craig’s sixth-form college until he came through the revolving glass doors, burning each time that he was with somebody, boy or girl. Thinking about the afternoon that his mum came up to his room asking for “a chat about something” still made Tom weak with fear. She had sat next to him on his bed and said that she and his dad were worried because they knew he was drinking, and he had felt such relief wash through him that he had put his arms around her and promised he was going to put an end to it. He felt like such an idiot, he had told her; he would focus on his football and nothing else from that moment on.
He was about to drive off from the cul-de-sac when a car parked outside Liam’s house. A tall young man got out and went through the gate, producing a key and going inside. Even though Tom knew it must have been one of Liam’s housemates he stayed on for a whole hour longer, his eyes fixed on the windows.
It became normal very quickly, following somebody. The risk of being caught, and his reasons for doing it, were already pushed to the back of his mind. By the end of the week he was practiced enough to maintain a five- or six-car distance, the occasional glimpse of the Nissan’s green bodywork enough for him to keep track of it. There was not, however, much variation to Liam’s routine. He did not seem to have much of a life outside work. He set off early to whichever of the two grounds he was scheduled for, left nine hours later, sometimes went to DIY centers, and came home. Tom wondered as he sat in his car—conscious of the woman with her dog who had passed him earlier going in the other direction—what he did in there, on his own before his housemates came home. There were already several people in the cul-de-sac that Tom recognized. An Asian woman with a pram. A man who intermittently moved past a window in his dressing gown. The painter and decorator who owned the van in front of which Tom had today pulled up.
Liam was coming out of his front door. Tom, caught off guard, scooted below the dashboard. When he dared peep up Liam was getting into his car. He had changed into jeans and a sweatshirt. He drove off, and once he was at the junction of the main road Tom turned on his engine. Before long they were back at the retail park. Tom deliberated over whether or not to stay. He watched Liam walk away across the car park, moving past B&Q to go into a furniture store. Tom kept his sight on the entrance, waiting for his return, but seconds later Liam was visible through the glass wall of the upper level. He was walking past cafe tables, and Tom saw he was heading towards a woman, who was standing up to greet him. When the two figures hugged each other he saw with a jolt that it was Easter’s wife.
A small child was eating at the far side of the table. Liam bent forward to say something to him, touching his hair, then returned his attention to the mother. They spoke barely without pause. Easter’s wife turned sometimes to deal with the child but then instantly she was back, looking at Liam, both of them fully concentrated on what the other was saying. For a long time Tom did not take his eyes off them. The child finished his food, and Easter’s wife got up to lift him out of his high chair and place him on the floor. He immediately made towards the window. The apparition of a miniature Easter appeared, pounding his tiny fists on the glass, and the image came back to Tom of Easter on the evening of their first room-share, trying to get the hotel window open.
His mother was coming for him. She crouched down to pull him back from the window, and the boy wheeled about to fling his arms around her. They looked out together at the car park. Tom did not even think to hide. His own gaze was directed past the pair at Liam, the static side of his head looking down at his cup.
When she turned away Tom started his car. He drove out of the retail park, away down the darkening streets. He took a wrong turn and became briefly lost before finding the main road into town. He stopped at an off-license and bought a bottle of vodka. Back inside the car he opened it and took a long drink, then put it underneath the passenger seat and drove on.
The small shaved lawns of the cul-de-sac were bathed in the orange glow of streetlamps. In one of the upstairs windows of Liam’s house a light was on. Tom implored himself to leave, trying to drag himself out of the loud muddle of his thoughts, taking another pull from the vodka bottle.
Liam returned alone. When the Nissan’s sidelights went off Tom took a final hit of vodka and got out. Liam stopped on the pavement as soon as he saw him. He waited for Tom to walk up.
“Tom,” he said quietly.
Tom did not respond or look at him.
“You can’t come in, you know.”
“I know.”
“This isn’t like last time?”
“No.”
Liam was studying him. He looked over to his house. “You didn’t get in touch. I thought…I don’t know what I thought. Didn’t think I’d find you here again.”
“We could meet up somewhere.”
“Oh. Right.”
“We can’t be seen though.”
“No, I know.”
Tom stared at the road.
“You’ve got something in mind?” Liam asked.
“I’ve not thought about it.”
“Look, you’ve got my number.”
“I lost it.”
“Right. If you want, maybe I could contact you.”
“No, I’ll do it.”
Tom took out his phone. Liam glanced again at his house then gave his number.
Only when Tom was in his car and had taken another mouthful of vodka did he save it, under a made-up name, the only one that would come into his head: Gary.