The piece was printed two days later. It was short, a small square of words in the top corner of a page above the betting tips and the next day’s fixture listings. The longest of the three paragraphs was an edited-down account of the club’s statement. There were no names. The “rumored affair between a former player and a member of the ground staff” did not feature any more prominently than the news that Town had shut down its official message board due to a series of homophobic and racist postings.
The players became aware of the story immediately. Boyn, sitting in the lounge eating a bowl of cereal, shouted, “Lads, look at this,” and they hurried to surround him. For several immobile seconds they read it together, waiting for somebody to react.
It was Easter who broke the spell. He snatched the paper from Boyn’s lap and rolled it up. He turned to Tom beside him and jabbed the paper into his stomach, then, beside Tom, into Beverley. “It’s you, you faggots,” he shouted, and chased them through the lounge, spanking them on their bottoms. “Come on, admit it, we all know it’s you.” The pair exploded into the same frenzied laughter as the rest of the squad, taking cover behind the breakfast table, and the tone for the rest of the morning—excitable, uncertain, watchful—had been established.
Easter woke early the next day and lay in bed for a few minutes, marveling at the tranquillity of his leg. Not aching, not doing anything, just there. He flexed it at the knee. Then again. He took in a deep breath, letting his lungs fill. Exhaled. The perfect machine of his body, functioning. He swung out of bed, wondering if it was early enough for Tyler to still be asleep and Leah alone in bed, but then he heard them together downstairs, Tyler whinging at her for something: milk, food, attention. He got dressed quickly and went downstairs, not looking through into the kitchen, let himself out of the house and drove away.
Powering through sleeping villages, fields, the vigor of yesterday was still with him—the way that the others had looked to him, needed his direction, his sureness. He would sit among them on the coach to Aldershot today. It did not matter that he was not yet ready to play. He was more relevant, more vital, than half of the ones who were. He pulled into a petrol station and saw on the forecourt the Saturday papers stacked in their plastic boxes. He went in and bought a copy of each one. When he got back into his car he resisted the temptation to look. He sat them in a pile on the passenger seat and set off again for home.
He installed himself at his desk and lined up the newspapers in front of the lifeless void of his laptop. The first couple had nothing. In the Sun a tiny item that was almost identical to the previous day’s. The next three papers, nothing. Then, in the Guardian, a half-page feature of interviews with gay members of staff at football clubs—a cook, a ticket office manager, a barman, a Congolese steward who had never, he said, received any abuse on the terraces, or at least not for being gay. He skimmed uninterestedly through their profiles—it wasn’t a thing; most of their colleagues were unaware of their sexuality; they just got on with their jobs—hunting out anything more than the one-sentence introduction at the top that mentioned Town. When he was sure there wasn’t anything, he moved on to the next paper. Although he was well aware that none would give details, anything specific, he continued to comb through, searching, on edge.
He flicked through the raft of sports pages inside the Express and tensed. The familiar few lines were there, then an interview with “the captain,” Jones: “To be honest it’s the first any of us have heard about it. It’s a lot of fuss over nothing, really. People’s private life is their own business. We just concentrate on the football. And if a player said he was gay, which isn’t what’s happened here, we’d probably just think, fair enough, so what? It’s got nothing to do with winning football matches.”
He could see Jones bantering with the journalist. The private preparation with the chairman before the interview. Heat rose to his face. Nowhere, in any of them, was there any mention of the original forum post. Below the desk, pain was slugging up his leg, though when he reached down to rub the length of his shin he could not be certain whether the pain was real or the phantom of his injury. He pushed the interview away from him and glowered at the inert laptop. Then, standing up, he gathered up the pile of newspapers and went downstairs.
In the kitchen he stuffed them all into the bin.
He had a sense that Leah was behind him, and when he turned she was there, in the doorway. She was looking at the swinging top of the bin but said nothing.
“Tyler asleep?” he asked.
“It’s ten o’clock. He’s playing in his room.”
She remained in the doorway. There was something odd about her that made him reluctant to walk around her to leave the room, so he went to the fridge. He had not had any breakfast, he realized, and he was hungry, thirsty. He opened the fridge door and took out a two-pinter of milk.
“I’ve decided to move into Mum’s, Chris.”
He unscrewed the top of the milk and took a long swallow. The bottle still in his hand, he scanned the shelves. There was a packet of ham. Prawns, defrosting. Two bags of grapes. A small bowl of last night’s leftover sweet potato mash. He closed the fridge door and looked at her. Something fierce, determined, passed over her face. Then she was just looking at him plainly.
“This about him?” he said.
“What? About who?”
“Your mate.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He took another slug of milk, watching her over the top of the bottle, and he could see she was telling the truth. He laughed quietly. She was as blind as the rest of them.
“That’s it? You’re laughing? Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. You never say anything.”
She was going to cry, he thought. To come to him and cry into his chest. But after he put the milk onto the kitchen counter and wiped his hand across his lips he turned back to the doorway and she was gone. He stood there, looking into the living room, being sucked upstairs to the laptop until his legs weakened, remembering, his strength unspooling from him at the thought that the forum was gone and she would probably be straight on the phone to him, the faggot groundsman, the useless fat goalkeeper, as he had once been. And now he could not hold it back. It was coming at him—breaking free. The journey home from the youth tournament, the ferry, standing on the deserted deck with the relentless brutal sea hemorrhaging in his ears as the big white face pressed against his own, lips, breath, fingers reaching, terrified, down for each other.
He turned the car round and reversed to the edge of the viewing point. There was nobody about. He got out and walked to the back of the car, where he stood before a mass of nettle bushes still stirring from the last of the exhaust fumes, and stared out at the sea. His chest was heaving. He looked for the ferry but could not see it. Anger built deep inside him as he searched, and then he saw it, a dot swelling on the horizon, advancing towards him.
He took in several deep, lunging breaths. “Pathetic,” he shouted. He listened to the echo of the word carry in the wind towards the sea and die. He brought the base of his fist down on the car roof. “Fucking pathetic,” he shouted again, the rhythm and force of the words helping to bring his chest slightly under control. There was a head. Two heads. Walkers, over on the cliff path, looking at him above the sea scrub, turning, hurrying away.
He watched them flee with their dog down the coastal path, fading to two tiny bright dots, disappearing.