A Week in December (23 page)

At first, Spike thought his bossy German satnav had brought him to the wrong place. This was not what he understood by training ground, which had always been a hectare of rough grass with iron railings and a single-storey building with an outside urinal. This was something else entirely. For a start, there were seven football pitches, one with stands for spectators and one, AstroTurf, under cover of a giant tent. The building was painted white over three floors with a pillared portico; it reminded him of the country club in Connecticut he'd seen in an American comedy film. However, the security man on the gate seemed to recognise him and nodded him through with a smile.

Inside the main building, on the first floor, was a canteen, where some of the first-team squad were eating a late breakfast. Spike had met a couple of them at the ground when he posed on the pitch after signing his papers and they nodded in his direction. One was eating toast with some sort of chocolate spread smeared on it, the other was spooning in cereal.

Spike took a tray and pushed it along in front of the servery. He took a cup of tea. He had already eaten eggs and rye bread in the hotel in Chelsea where he was staying till they'd found him a flat, and they were lying heavy on his stomach.

'Fancy a smoothie, love?' said the woman behind the counter.

'What?'

She picked up a bottle and showed him.

He shook his head and moved off. "'Fancy a smoothie, love?"' What did it all mean? The way these people spoke was not in the books; he was already aware of that, and had taken steps to understand them. Using the computer in the 'office suite' at his hotel, Spike had found a website called interbabel.com that linked into numerous thesauruses and colloquial translation engines. Interbabel.com certainly had the dope. It had so many possibilities, in fact, that he was spoilt for choice, over-informed. This didn't stop him pursuing all the links and meanings, all the definitions and re-translations: he'd graduated in politics and economics before taking up football professionally; he owed his degree to his willingness to study thoroughly, and he carried the habit through to all parts of life. 'Stubborn' ('
przymiotnik
') or 'dogged' ('
uparty
') were words the press in his own country applied to him.

After breakfast, Spike went down the corridor, past numerous carpeted offices with shimmering flat-screen computers, including the private lair of the Turkish manager, Mehmet Kundak, to the team room. In sweatshirts and shorts, sipping glucose drinks, the first team lolled on rows of padded luxury-leather recliners. Kundak came in from a side door and told Archie Lawler, the coach, to start the video, which showed film of the last time they had played that evening's opponents. Occasionally, Lawler would pause it and point out the shape of the opposing midfield, the triangles they played.

After about five minutes, Spike began to panic. Although the score had apparently been 1-1, his team had never won the ball. Had he joined them on false pretences? Were they really that inept? Wave after wave of opposition attacks came crashing down on them, but as they watched it the players looked unembarrassed and Lawler much less alarmed than he needed to be.

'Why we never have the ball?' Spike asked an African sitting next to him.

'We know how we play,' he said. 'The film just shows their moves. It's cut.'

Spike laughed. 'Is big relief.'

The African ignored him. After some brutal exhortation from Lawler about the evening game, Spike followed the other players downstairs through a huge carpeted vestibule and into a corridor from which led numerous treatment and changing rooms. He got ready, took one of the club tracksuits, size XL, crossed himself and trotted out on to the pitches.

The first-team squad numbered thirty-eight, but without the nine on loan and the chronically injured there were twenty-five at the training ground. Seven reserves went off to train with the youth teams, leaving the eighteen-man squad, including Spike, for the evening league game. They gathered by the side of one of the pitches and bent themselves into postures like figures in a mediaeval depiction of hell. They locked hands round their ankles; they pulled one foot up into the buttocks until they could bear it no longer; they reached for the sky and laid their hands flat on the ground while standing. Spike joined in, though not wholeheartedly. After forty minutes, when every muscle fibre had been tweaked, expanded, rested and stretched again, they were thought ready for some action.

'We're going to be working on set pieces,' said Archie Lawler. 'Spike, get on the far post.'

For half an hour, Spike found himself doing things he hadn't done since the youth team in Gdansk. He was marked by the reserve centre back, Charles Watiyah, a giant Liberian, who was keen to force his way into the first team. Every time Spike went to head the ball, he found himself pushed in the small of the back; it was nothing violent, just enough to unbalance him. On the occasions he became airborne, he found the Liberian's head in his mouth. The crosses were provided by little Danny Bective, one of the few English players in the squad, a midfielder with what Archie Lawler had described to a television interviewer as an 'unbelievable engine'. He kicked the ball over a wall of life-size plastic players in bright red shirts that Lawler had wheeled up and left only eight yards in front of him. There was no point in moving it back the mandatory ten, because that never happened in a professional game.

'All right, Vladimir, you get on the far post now,' said Archie. 'Spike, you take a blow.'

Vladimir Stoev was a Bulgarian who had been at the club for two seasons and had scored eighteen goals the year before. He had once been banned for three months when a drug test found traces of something he claimed had come from an anti-asthma medicine; this, and his origins, had got him the nickname Vlad the Inhaler. Spike watched how Vlad dealt with Charles Watiyah, by jumping up and down like an excited child, moving around so he was not in one place long enough to be fouled, then making sure he jumped early, as soon as Bective had begun his three-pace run-up to deliver the cross. Sometimes Vlad was already on the way down by the time the ball arrived, but he could often maintain his height by leaning on Watiyah's shoulder. Finally, he elbowed him in the face and managed to head the ball past the stand-in goalkeeper.

'The beautiful game,' said Spike to the Egyptian left back, Ali al-Asraf.

'Fuck off,' said al-Asraf.

Spike wondered whether he'd said the right thing. 'Is what Pele say,' he explained. But had something been lost in the translation from Portuguese to Polish to English? 'The beautiful game. The ... lovely play?' He felt the links of interbabel.com clicking uselessly in his head.

Al-Asraf spat at his feet and trotted off to run through some cones with Danny Bective and Sean Mills.

The next part of training was 'One-Touch-He'. The players assembled in a circle with one, a small African Spike didn't know, standing in the middle. When they were ready, Archie Lawler threw a ball to one of them and he hit it first time to another, who side-footed it first time to a third, who chipped it to Spike, who nodded it on towards Vladimir. At that moment, Vlad turned and moved away, so the African in the middle was able to nip in and take the ball.

All the players began laughing, and the one next to Spike came up to him and flicked his ear, hard, with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Then every player in the circle came up and did the same thing. Seventeen stinging flicks were administered by seventeen laughing millionaires, before the game resumed, with Spike as 'he'. He was sweating and panting before a slightly underhit pass enabled him to dispossess Sean Mills with an ugly lunge. When Mills had stopped swearing, Spike enjoyed flicking his ear along with the others.

After showering, Spike explored the ground-floor warren further. There was a resident doctor in a small office of his own and, opposite, was a glass-panelled door with the words 'Nutrition Team' stencilled in black. In the treatment room afterwards, Spike was offered a rub-down by Kenny Hawtrey, the chief physio. He saw that two of the other players were already stretched out on the green and white couches having their calf muscles worked over and thought it would be the right thing to do. On the table next to him was Danny Bective.

Spike tried to remember what the assistant manager had said about him on television. Yes. 'Archie say you have incredible motor,' said Spike.

'Yeah, it's a Sherman Pathfinder.'

'Er ... And you do much running.'

'Yeah. They like that.'

'What happens now?' said Spike.

'Normally we have dinner upstairs and go home. But because there's an evening match we'll have a big meal at teatime in the hotel near the ground.'

When they had had their showers and were in the car park, nineteen men climbing alone into nineteen large cars, Danny said, 'By the way, mate. Word of warning. Don't let Kenny Hawtrey rub you down.'

'Why?'

'Shirt-lifter.'

'What?'

'Iron hoof.'

'Sorry?'

'Fuckin' bummer, innit?'

'Aah ...'

Something about Danny's pose made Spike understand. As he was about to climb into his car, one of the press liaison people took his elbow.

'Tadeusz, do you mind giving a quick autograph? Young lad over there, he's bunked off school to come and see you.'

'Sure, I meet him.'

Standing by the exit from the car park was a youth of about sixteen, slightly built, with curly brown hair and a few pink spots on his chin. He wore a tee shirt, jeans off his hip and a blue hooded top.

'Hello. I am Spike Borowksi.' He held out his hand to the young man.

'Finbar Veals,' he said softly, looking down at his new white trainers.

None of the three syllables sounded like a name to Spike. English people didn't seem to be called John Robinson any more; but linguistically it had been a bad day all round.

'You want I sign your book?'

'Yeah, thanks.' Finn held out a battered school notebook.

'How long you support the team?' said Spike. 'Since you a kid?'

'No, I ... er, I don't. I ... support a different team.'

'What?' Spike laughed. 'Maybe you support Chelsea!'

'No, I ... It doesn't matter. I wanted to meet you because I'm thinking of signing you in my Dream Team eleven. Do you know that website?'

'No. You tell me.'

Finn blushed. 'The Buyers' Guide said you're like Carlton King with a first touch, or Gary Fowler with an IQ.'

Spike laughed. 'Is very rude. Your newspapers too. They say something like I play like Orlando if he stop being a girl. Is not kind to Orlando. Just because he wear earrings.'

'No, I think it's because he dives. Do you think you are going to score a lot of goals? Are you feeling confident?' The meeting was important to Finn, and he found his natural shyness ebbing.

'If I get picked by the boss I will score. But we have four strikers, so is not easy.'

'But he won't play Vladimir Stoev now you're here, will he? He hasn't scored for months.'

'Is strong player.' Spike was thinking of the elbow to Charles Watiyah's face.

'They say he only scores if there's a full moon,' said Finn.

Spike laughed. 'OK ... Finbar? That your name?'

'Finn.'

'OK. Finn. You also go to training ground of team you support?'

'No.'

'But here you come.'

'It was important for me to see you in the flesh.'

'For a place in your team which is not in flesh.'

'Yes,' said Finn. 'I know it sounds weird, but all the guys in my year have teams in Dream Team and I don't want to be relegated.'

Spike looked at him oddly. 'I think you live in dreamland. Like Disneyland, yeah?'

'Well, no, I think it's the real thing.'

'And who else in your special team?'

Finn went through his current eleven. There were two England international centre halves, a Congolese enforcer in front of them, a Brazilian show pony on the wing and a giant Dane in goal. They were his big-money signings. The rest had been squeezed out of the budget that remained to him; they included a psychopathic Guinean with a dyed white goatee, a Welshman on a short fuse and a one-sided Colombian. He had sold a French striker and needed a steady supply of goals.

'I see,' said Spike. 'You make some good choice and some bad ones, I think. Now you meet me, what you say? Think I can score goals on the Internet?'

'You have to score them on the pitch, then they can be counted on the--'

'I know, I understand,' said Spike. 'But did you think I was good enough in training? You watch?'

'Yes, I saw.' Finn felt suddenly shy again. How was he to tell this man he needed to watch out for Sean Mills and Danny Bective, how they'd shafted the prospects of the last expensive striker?

'I must go now,' said Finn. His encounter with reality had left him drained.

'You want I take you somewhere in the car?'

'No, no, thanks. I'm fine. Thank you for the autograph.'

Finn turned and jogged off, out of the car park and down the pavement by the suburban street.

Spike watched him go and frowned. Why wasn't the kid at school?

Finn was already in the back of a black taxi. It was useful that the training ground was in the right direction for his second point of call on his day out: a pet cemetery in Esher.

He'd set his alarm for 8.32 that morning and called the direct line to the school office while his voice was still sounding fogged by sleep. Registration was at 8.40 and the form teachers were in the classroom by 8.30 so he had every chance of getting Peggy, the friendly school secretary. His luck - or timing - was in, and it was easy to convince Peggy that he felt 'terrible'. He did: he always felt awful when he first woke up. His father had long since left the house, while his mother, he guessed, would be drinking milky coffee in one of the larcenously priced delis on Holland Park Avenue. Finn went downstairs in his tee shirt and pyjama bottoms and made himself some hot chocolate and a toasted bagel with crunchy chocolate spread. He nodded to Marla, the Brazilian cleaner, as she passed the fizzing iron over one of his father's shirts in the laundry room. Marla spoke hardly any English and never got to the end of the few words she did know. 'Good mor' was as far as she went in greeting; she thought Finn's mother was called 'Vaness'.