There was an atmosphere on the coach to Aldershot that made Tom apprehensive. It was the mood of yesterday after they had seen the newspaper article, only quieter, solidified. He had not fully recovered or slept, and in the hush of the coach he was acutely sensitive to every movement and mumble around him. An unspoken togetherness breathed through the seats. It was partly the confidence of winning so frequently, being joint top of the table, but there was something new, a grave unity, a low bristling violence that wanted to prove itself, push against something.
He had not spoken to Liam about the article. It was a week now since their last conversation, when Liam had slipped out of his house into the night. After yesterday’s training Tom had driven straight for home and the Internet, and had spent the rest of the day, then the night, on or around the sofa in a state of wired agitation which gave way occasionally to fragmented intervals of half-sleep. He woke in the dark at one point from a vision of the three men from the fish and chip shop reading the newspaper that was so real he had to slap himself on the cheek before he was convinced that they were not in the room with him. By the morning, when Liam had still not been in contact, he was fluctuating between the uneasy possibility that Liam was waiting for him to call, and a wild hope that he did not know. He decided not to risk telling him. And there was a match to prepare for. A series of safe, repeated actions to perform, to slip into.
Beverley twisted towards Tom. “I used to play for these, once. I tell you that?”
“No. When?”
“Month loan a couple of seasons back, when I wasn’t getting near the team at Vale. Nice club. I was up for signing but they couldn’t offer anything secure.”
“When can they?” Tom said.
Beverley smiled, nestling back into his headrest. Somewhere behind them a murmuring that Tom had been conscious of for the last few minutes expanded into a spurt of laughter. Then another.
“Bev, Tommy, come look at this,” Jones called over a couple of rows of heads, and despite the clotting terror in his chest, pride at being wanted invaded Tom.
There were too many grouped around the cramped table space for everyone to look together at the object of amusement. They queued up in the aisle, passing Bobby’s phone down the line. At each exchange there was an expression of delight. A thumped headrest. A jerk backwards. “Jesus, Bobby.” Most took a second or two to understand what it was they were looking at. Tom, though, when the phone came to him, knew instantly—as if it was exactly this that he had been expecting. On the screen was a photo of the ground-staff shed, its far wall a glaring flash of white against the black sky of the training ground. In big bright red lettering was painted, HOMO HUT. He passed the phone on to Beverley. Below them Bobby was recounting how he had done it, giggling anew at each high five and fist pump. There was a snort of laughter beside Tom, and he turned to see Beverley shaking his head in admiration.
None of the coaching staff came to find out what was going on, recognizing perhaps the value of the bonding. The group eventually filtered away, Tom following Easter, pausing to let him take his seat, noticing through his own stupor that Easter was talking to himself. Tom went back to his own place. He squeezed his eyes closed. For the rest of the journey everything around him was suspended, far away. Except for the sporadic gentle tremor of his seat, which he knew was Beverley chuckling.
He could not get into the match. He could not find the part of his brain that was just for football, and as he tried he found instead only the kaleidoscopic repeating image of the vandalized wall. He attempted to boil his actions down to the basics: control, touch, look for the strikers. As a tactic it was surprisingly effective. Gundi and Munro, in undisguised competition with each other, chased down everything. Tom spun one weedy lob into the corner, which an Aldershot defender attempted to shield out of play, but Gundi shouldered him off the pitch and pulled the ball back to Tom, who looked up, crossed simply for Munro, and it was 1–0. The flat continuous din of the Aldershot support continued undiminished, looping to the beat of a single military drum, drowning out any other crowd noise apart from the jubilant Town fans in the horseshoed paddock in one corner, singing about Munro, Gundi and even, briefly, Tom. They disappeared en masse two minutes before halftime for the food van in the car park, and after the restart when Tom went over to collect the ball from a supporter ecstatically clutching it above her head, he saw the rows of fans holding their hot dogs and pies. As he waited for the woman to toss the ball and everybody looked at him he was suddenly emboldened by the thought that none of them knew. Nobody knew it was him.
“Give us a bite,” he shouted.
They all heard him, laughed, sang his name again. For a few seconds he was cocooned in relief.
It was so near the end when the Aldershot winger was sent off that some supporters were already leaving. As he walked off the pitch, shaking his head, griping to himself, he looked back and said, “Bunch of queers,” loudly enough for half a dozen Town players to sprint towards him. Within seconds there was a melee. Foreheads, eyeballs, captains separating the antagonists then squaring up to each other above the little scrambling referee.
Wilko banned any mention of the incident during the journey back. “Three points. Job done. We go home, we concentrate on the positives, we go again.” But Tom could sense them dwelling on it, their anger chuntering beneath the surface in the soft yellow light of the coach.
He stayed inside his car for some time, watching the dusky movement of traffic leaving the stadium, the kit man hauling metal crates from the belly of the coach, the driver sitting at the top of the steps, having a smoke. He was the last person remaining in the car park when Liam called. The blue light of his phone strobed the inside of his car as he stared at it, ringing, ringing, then silent.
Once home he went straight to the under-stairs cupboard and pulled out the cardboard box of DIY odds and ends that his dad had left there. He emptied his kitbag onto the floor and repacked it with items from the box, then went into the kitchen to get more things from under the sink.
In the long pauses between the sound of cars from the road there was a dead stillness to the training ground. The graffiti was written on the back wall of the shed, out of sight from the clubhouse and the entrance, and Tom wanted to know, drawing nearer, just who exactly the stupid lumping twat had thought would read it. Or if it was solely for Liam. Or—the quick chilling thought passed through his mind—for them both. He rounded the shed, halted by the sight of the words. They had been sprayed on, he saw now. Bobby must have planned this: shopped for a canister, deliberated over the wording. Tom could not pull his eyes away; they bored into the slogan, the wall, and slowly he grew sure that Liam was in there. He stepped up to the wall and put his ear against it. He could hear nothing inside, but he remained in that position, his skin gradually becoming indistinguishable from the brick, from Liam’s body pressing up on the other side, pulsating at his ear. The rush of something big on the road beyond the trees, a lorry, a coach, jogged him.
He lifted his face from the wall. He walked around the shed, his cheek tingling, and called through the shutters: “Liam.” And again, louder, “Liam.”
When there was no answer he returned to the far wall and set to his task.
The letters shrank at the first touch of the spirit, and he thought that he was going to get it all off, that Liam would arrive on Monday and would see nothing but the bare wall. However, after his initial success it was soon obvious that it was not going to be erased completely and that a muted layer would remain, smeared at the edges, like a halo, the words as blatant as the fact that somebody had tried to remove them. He scrubbed harder, working for minutes at a single letter, his breathing becoming ragged—and as the thin pink dribble of spirit slid down the wall, he was once again scouring at himself in the Daveys’ shower, bleeding, desperate for it all to go away.