“Listen to this.”
Curtis walked across the room to where Easter was stretched out on a mat and lay down beside him.
“What am I listening to?”
“Here. Just listen.”
Curtis lifted a straightened leg into the air, then, slowly, bent it at the knee to lower his foot. The knee made a loud creaking sound, which continued until he placed his foot flat onto the mat.
Curtis turned his face to him. “Sounds like a bag of marbles, doesn’t it?”
“Sounds fucked, mate.”
They stayed there on the floor, arms pressed together, staring up at the crusted air-conditioning unit. “Oh yes,” Curtis said, “it’s fucked all right.”
Easter regarded Curtis’s knee. The lumpy leathered lines of old operations above and below it. A secret pleasure entered him at the point where his own leg—repaired, strong—rested against its neighbor.
“You’re starting ball work this week, though, yeah?”
“Yep,” Curtis replied. “Getting back out there. Best thing for it, they keep telling me. Until it bursts again.”
Easter rolled himself up into a sitting position. “Right. I’m due in for the fizz. See you in a bit.” His own rehab complete, he had been joining in with ball work, little by little, for a fortnight with no aggravation. Every day he had sensed a power, a control, returning. It increased with each painless warm-down or word of praise from Wilko, each piece of banter with the others. And now every time he saw the cowering faggot groundsman, emerging, disappearing back into his hiding hole. Whenever there was a sighting or some joke about him, he was ridden with an excitement that was almost uncontainable. It was in these moments that he felt the strength, the muscular, sexual capability of his body most intensely. He looked across the field and wanted to overpower him—somebody, anybody. To take a girl to her bed and hold her down. A couple of times, late at night on leaving the office urged by the thrill of gathering views, two thousand, five thousand, ten thousand in less than a week, he had gone into Leah’s room; watched with hot fascination the sudden startled fear on her face when she woke beneath him.
He ate lunch in the canteen with Curtis before the squad came in. His progress report, he told Curtis, was still all clear. He would be ready for competitive matches in a week or two. The manager, he went on, had already spoken to a couple of clubs about arranging a reserve fixture just for him to get in some game time. Curtis nodded without reply. They finished their fish fingers and fruit salads, and when the squad came past the window Easter saw in the distance the ground-staff shed shutters rolling up. He looked with a smirk across the table, but Curtis was away with himself, making shapes with his spoon in the pool of his fruit salad liquor.
Driving was a wonder. Even now, after almost a month of it, the motion of his feet and ankles caused a sleek ecstasy to travel up his leg, the same feeling as when he struck a ball, the nerve endings of his toes freshly routed through the once-thick black wall of snarled tissue. He had gone out on several long drives, down the coast, the motorway, just for the satisfaction, the control of it, the action of his body merging into the action of the car. He eased out of the car park, glancing out of the window across the field, and he was able to put everything else—the afternoon’s community visit, the spew of chat from Curtis in his passenger seat—out of his mind.
They arrived half an hour later at a one-story concrete school for excluded pupils, or spastics—something to do with the manager’s son—neither of them could quite remember. A pupil referral unit, they were informed by the deputy head, waiting in the car park to escort them in. They passed through a high galvanized fence and he was reminded, looking up at the gaudily painted spikes along the top of it, of the front of the Riverside Stand when he was very young, not even at school yet, his dad still alive—a memory of following the players’ movements through the red and green spears, the first stirrings of longing filling the whole of his little body.
“This to keep trouble in or out?” Curtis asked.
“Bit of both,” the deputy head replied and led them into the reception.
Signing the visitors’ book, he noticed a block of names that he did not recognize, all, according to the “From” column, representing Town, and it dawned on him that this must be the place he had heard the scholars complaining about, to which they were bused and shepherded into a separate building, then shepherded and bused away again without even getting to look at any girls, all in service of their BTECs, a qualification he’d known nothing about during his own time in the youths.
They were introduced to a PE teacher and a trio of unspeaking children, then taken outside through a gray landscape interrupted at random intervals by single-room prefab huts.
“Jesus,” Curtis whispered to him. “It’s like a fucking army base.”
“It’s like the old training ground,” Easter said and smiled at his joke, the speed of it.
They went into the further of two paired buildings, through corridors and into a bright hall thumping with children. He stepped closer to Curtis. “You’re going first, mate.”
“No shitting way.” But when the deputy head turned towards them Easter was already moving aside, indicating Curtis.
Curtis went up onto the low stage and waited for the deputy head’s efforts at lessening the din to have some result.
“So, that fence,” Curtis began when the room fell to a tolerable mumble, “that to keep you lot in, or them lot out?”
There was an uprising of laughter, and he had them. Easter forced his heels into the floor, bringing a cord of pain up his leg.
The arrangement was that Curtis would speak for a few minutes about the health choices of a professional sportsperson and then he would talk about the day-to-day life of a footballer. Unlike, as was becoming clear, Curtis, pacifying them with his jokes and his comedy Welsh accent, Easter had prepared nothing, and as he looked out at the crowd he began to hear his own breath moving in and out of his nostrils. When finally he walked onto the stage to the reverberation of Curtis’s applause, his leg was throbbing with the memory of sponsors’ functions, pitch presentations…
“I’ve been out injured the last eight months,” he began, reciting the words he had been repeating in his head for the last two minutes into the microphone, “so day-to-day life has pretty much been computer games and Internet porn for as long as I can remember. But they probably don’t want me to tell you about that.”
After that it was easy.
He slipped into a current of empty words, as if he was speaking to Pascoe or the club website drones or any other of the no-hopers they were obliged to perform for, and as the words took care of themselves he was heedful of his audience’s spellbound attention, the unquestioning awe with which they were gaping at him. He recognized the ambition of the boys, the same as the youth teamers’, to be like him; to be him. It had crossed his mind too, while Curtis was speaking, that some of them would be Town fans. They would have been on the message board. Everywhere, in the schools and pubs and construction sites and offices of the town, people were talking about it, what he had done, what he had revealed.
He had not known what to do with it at first, when she told him. She had come back from Milan acting strangely, avoiding him—a bitchy remark one day when they passed in the corridor that it would probably be more convenient for him, wouldn’t it, if he moved all of his clothes into his own room—and he had grown more and more suspicious that something had happened while she had been away. But when he came across her in the kitchen the next day, slumped against the island, just staring at the wall, he had gone to her out of instinct, putting his hand on her waist, asking her if everything was OK. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she had said.
He was instantly angry with her. Which made no sense, he knew as soon as he left the house and got into his car, going over her words, ending up driving to the coast. He had just not been expecting it. He had become so convinced that something had happened in Milan, had got himself ready to confront her even. But that night he went into her room while she was asleep and got into bed with her, apologizing, stroking her face, moving up against her. Then for days afterwards he had hesitated, deciding what to do. And it had come to him, as clear as anything, watching the hefty pervert calmly driving about on his tractor, that he was the one, just him, who needed to be exposed. If he let slip who the player was then from the off it would only be about Pearman, that would be all anybody would be interested in, and the faggot groundsman would get away with it. Because there had been another player too, Leah had said, who he had met online and had left the club, so who was to know how many others he might have preyed upon? And once he had made the decision, watching Liam for the rest of the morning strolling about the place as if nobody could touch him, he had felt the determination to punish him for what he had done, to make him pay, take hold.
He scanned the row of older pupils at the back. He held the gaze of one girl, who shied away, then another, who met his eye and gave a small nervous smile. For a few seconds he spoke directly to her, burning with the belief that she was completely in his power—helpless, surrendered to him.
There was loud applause when he finished, cheering, more than Curtis got. Then a long irritating period of standing about next to the PE teacher, during which he watched the children teem out of the hall, looking for the girl but not locating her through the mayhem of faces and hair and limbs.