A Week in December (44 page)

Dr Leftrook stood up. 'I have to admit, it hasn't been my profession's finest hour.'

Vanessa was silent.

'Shall I take you to see him now?'

Pushing back her chair, Vanessa said, 'Can I quickly telephone my husband first?'

'Of course. I'll wait in the lobby.'

Outside Wakeley, on the tarmac beneath the cedar tree, Vanessa rang the house in Holland Park. 'John? I've talked to the doctor and I'm going to go and see him now.'

'Great. What did they say?'

'It's a bit long-winded. Basically, on balance, they think he's going to be OK. But--'

'That's great news.'

'But they don't know yet because it's all a bit--'

'Darling, do you mind calling back a bit later? I'm expecting a call from Duffy in Zurich.'

'All right, John. Goodbye.'

* * *

Spike Borowski was also saying goodbye: to Olya, in their hotel suite. He told her he would not be back before 7.30, as he would need to spend time rehydrating, 'warming down' and stretching with the physiotherapy team for at least two hours after the match. They'd leave at eight for dinner with the politician-man he'd met when his team turned on some Christmas lights.

'Look beautiful,' he said.

'I try,' said Olya, shaking her black hair, then pushing it back from her face. 'I buy a new dress, yes?'

Spike drove his disappointingly small German car to the hotel where the team were assembling for an early carbohydrate lunch. Mehmet Kundak took him to one side over the fusilli with ham and cheese. 'You start today, Spike,' he said. 'Play good.'

This was the first time Spike had been asked to start a game and the first time he had played at home. The training ground with its offices and medical back-up was the players' base; the stadium was for show, and for the fans. At two, the team coach parked flush against the main building, with security guards appearing at either end of the vehicle, so the players had to run a gauntlet of only two or three paces before they were inside, away from any taunts or missiles of the visiting supporters.

Spike was accompanied by Archie Lawler, the first-team coach.

'Not there, laddie,' he said. 'That's for the away team.'

'It is nice,' said Spike.

'Aye. Used to be a shitehole. Tiny room with only two showers. The new sports psychologist reckoned it was giving the visitors a goal start. Now they have heating, air con, the lot. And we've lost at home only once this season.'

The home team dressing room was almost large enough for an eleven-a-side game. Russian death-metal music was pounding out of concealed speakers from Danny Bective's private collection. There were large chill cabinets with selections of sports drinks, and the extensive shower area was stuffed with shampoos, body lotions and conditioners of the same brand as those in Spike's five-star hotel bathroom. His own locker, hand-made in walnut and ash, had hanging space, a socket for his personal music player, a lockable 'bling box' for his jewellery and, unless his nostrils misled him, rose-scented air conditioning being blown gently from a grille in the rear panel. A new green and white shirt, number 39, hung on the outside with his surname curving over the number. Inside the locker were three new pairs of shorts and socks of slightly different sizes. Max the bootman had already laid out his preferred boots, with scarlet flashes, and had two reserve pairs in his bag.

Trying to look bored, as though all this was standard in Cracow, Spike did a few stretches and examined the studs of his boots. He waited till the others began to change, then put on his support shorts and cotton undervest beneath the man-made fabric of the club kit. This was the fourth professional club he had played for, but the thrill he experienced as he slid the green and white shirt over his head made him feel like a small boy: it was all he could do not to grin with glee. In tracksuits, they went out on to the pitch to warm up, and Spike went to the penalty area to hit some shots at Tomas Gunnarsson, the big blond goalkeeper, who caught them disdainfully in giant gloved paws.

At 2.40 they went back inside, where Mehmet Kundak came to join them. He pulled Danny Bective's music player out of the system and handed it back to him.

'We see the video yesterday,' he said. 'Now you play. Vlad and Spike, you get in those spaces I tell you. Stop the keeper rolling it out to those two guys. Yes? I want you, Sean, Danny, put a foot in straight off. Fucking let them know. OK? Any questions? You win. You fucking win. OK?'

It was not too technical for Spike. He'd been surprised at how much emphasis had been laid on his and Vlad's defensive duties - disrupting the other side's smooth distribution from the back. Almost nothing had been said about attack, but that, Archie had explained, was because all the teams from the Youths upwards used the same essential movements, so that any of them could slot in at any time in the event of injury. Most of the moves were diagonal, played off the two small English pivots, Bective and Mills, in midfield.

At 2.50, they gathered in a circle with their arms round one another while the club captain Gavin Rossall, a bloodthirsty central defender, offered his final encouragement. Then they fell into line to leave the dressing room, with Spike being elbowed by one player after another until he took the only position in the order - eighth - not of superstitious value to someone else. They were on a purple carpet in the hallway when the opposition emerged. There were some half-hearted handshakes as they went down-stairs, under the glass-roofed tunnel and up three rubberised asphalt steps into the 'technical area', still below ground. The marked camber of the pitch at eye level made it look narrow for a moment, but as they climbed the last step and ran out on to the grass, Spike saw that it had been an illusion. To dispel his nerves he sprinted hard towards the penalty area, riding on the enormous wave of sound. He felt the need to remind himself that everything was normal, that it was just a game with a leather ball. He trotted over and put his arm round Vlad's shoulder.

'Is OK?'

To his relief Vlad didn't tell him to fuck off, but patted him reciprocally on the back, and Spike could see that Vlad, too, had felt the effects of the noise.

The referee, a paunchy little man in a tight shirt, blew his whistle and waved his hand; Spike wondered if his stubby legs would allow him to keep up. He himself scuttled back and forth for eight minutes before he had a pass - a slightly short one from the full back he was happy to lay off without mishap. After twenty minutes or so, Spike, his shirt damp and his hair dripping, had received no useful pass despite having taken up positions at the far post, the near post, on the edge of the offside trap, in behind Vlad and, on two or three occasions, out wide. Bective and Mills seemed automatically to look to play the ball to one of the full backs on the overlap or to one of the wide players. The consolation for Spike was that Vlad had received an equally meagre service. Then, finally, as one of the full backs escaped his opposite number and hit a long ball across, Spike was able to get above the Croatian defender who was marking him and meet it firmly with his forehead. The keeper, perhaps unnecessarily, palmed it over the bar for a corner; but the crowd roared its approval and Spike felt he had arrived at last in the English Premier League. A pat on the back from Gavin Rossall as he came up from the corner confirmed him in his belief.

Shortly before half-time, the opposition, who had been content to defend and hit occasional long balls hopefully to their front players, had a piece of good fortune. Ali al-Asraf was undone by a high punted clearance which slid off the top of his head, allowing the opposing centre forward time to gather the ball, steady himself and guide it simply beneath the advancing Tomas Gunnarsson. Spike found the furious silence that greeted the goal more unnerving than the roar that had met the appearance of his own side.

At half-time, he asked the manager if it was all right for him to come further back to find the ball.

'Yes, is OK if Vlad stays up,' said Kundak, half tripping on the step going up to the pitch as his transitional lenses darkened.

The second half was a rerun of the first, with the home team increasingly frustrated by trying, at one end, to beat the offside trap and, at the other, to make sure the lone opposition striker didn't latch on to one of the many hopeful long-ball blasts from his beefy defenders. Spike sweated and panted. In his experience, the one thing that managers, coaches, commentators and supporters never understood was how extraordinarily draining a ninety-minute football match was for the players. He personally might cover 10,000 metres, with three quarters on the run and maybe a tenth at a sprint, as well as twisting, leaping, stretching and occasionally kicking the ball. In the second half he went deeper to find it, offering himself to the midfield when they were under pressure, and after an hour managed to work a ball through to Vlad, who was in space between the centre backs. As Spike took the return pass, he heard his name screeched by Danny Bective and pushed the ball into his path. Nothing he had seen in training had prepared him for the force of Bective's sidefooted shot inside the far post to make it 1-1.

The pace of the game became more frantic as they pushed on for the win. The visitors' Texan goalkeeper, however, seemed untroubled by the half-dozen shots they managed to get on target. After eighty-one minutes, Spike saw his number, 39, being held up at the side of the pitch and trotted off to make way for Xavier, an ageing Spaniard who had once been prolific in front of goal. Kundak patted him on the shoulder as he went off, and Kenny Hawtrey wrapped a thickly padded parka round his shoulders. He sat behind the manager and shouted for his team until the final whistle went for a 1-1 draw. It could have been worse.

At five o'clock, the football results were read out on the radio, but for once Finn didn't hear them. His own team had won, and the performance of the players in his fantasy eleven, including Spike's 'assist', had been good enough to move the team a place or two up the imaginary league in which they played; but Finn was asleep, alone in a four-bed dormitory, where he was to stay until a bed came free in Collingwood, the young people's block.

Rob, the charge nurse, put his head round the door. It was dark in the room where Glenys, the junior staff nurse, had drawn the curtains and switched off the lights when Finn had gone upstairs earlier. Only a night light glowed blue in the skirting board as Rob went over the lino and sat down on the edge of the bed. He could hear Finn's breathing, as he sucked in long draughts of peaceful air. The longer he slept, the better it would be, Rob knew. It was heartbreaking sometimes to see them wake - to lose unconsciousness, the only happiness they knew.

Rob searched for a pulse in the wrist and checked it against his watch. Then he lifted the eyelid of the sleeping boy. All was well. He would listen for him in the night and if necessary give him enough sedation to get him through till morning. Then they could begin to have a look and see what needed to be done.

Poor kid, Rob thought. What on earth had his parents been thinking?

At six o'clock, Olya returned from a shopping trip to Sloane Street and started to run a bath in her hotel suite. She poured in three bottles of free gel to let them foam beneath the pounding water and plugged her music player into the sound system, where it played the
Best of
Girls From Behind, her favourite band. She knew they were meant for younger kids, but she didn't care; and in any case, she was only just twenty herself.

Olya chucked her jeans and underwear on to the king-size bed and walked naked to the bathroom. It sometimes felt a little strange to take her clothes off without a photographer present. She instinctively felt herself flex and smile a little for the camera; she had put on three or four pounds since she'd been in London and thought it suited her. She would have liked to see how it might have looked in the hands of a good snapper - these slightly fuller hips and thighs. Olya had never understood why men wanted to photograph her. Her anatomy was no different from that of the other girls in her village, nor of those she'd met when she joined an agency. Everything was in the right place, and there was no extra fat on her, but more than that ... It was merely youth, she had eventually concluded; it was no more than the fact (not much prized by the eighteen-year-old she then was) that she had no lines, no looseness, and that the legs and breasts, so ordinary to her, were, in the eye of the photographer, teeming with some sort of priceless vigour. She felt disappointed by this understanding, as though she had been sold short; and it had made her a little vain, she had to admit, as now she tried to convince herself that she was not just young but truly beautiful.

The important thing, meanwhile, was to keep hold of 'Tad', as she called him. She had had lovers before him, but never a boyfriend. She had slept with her first boy when she was only fourteen and had later been persuaded it was necessary to oblige the head of the model agency and most of the photographers who had shot her. But Tadeusz Borowski was the first man who seemed to think it necessary to pursue her, as if she had the absolute power to reject him. They had met at a party in London, during the weekend he had been summoned from his French club for his medical; she was a hostess on behalf of the car company that was sponsoring the evening. He telephoned the next day, sent flowers and, when the club wanted to meet his wife/partner/girlfriend, he asked Olya if she would come along. Spike had thought the club wanted proof he wasn't gay; in fact, Mehmet Kundak just liked to check he was not taking on, through marriage, some prima donna like Sean Mills's endlessly tiresome Zherie.

Olya, unaware of either the gay or the bitch issue, thought Spike already loved her. She dressed in a new coat, chic and restrained, and made sure that Mr Kundak understood how devoted she was to her boyfriend. Her attitude, and Spike's enthusiastic gratitude after he had signed up, had kick-started their affair in passionate terms. Olya had not known that sex could be so enjoyable, or frequent. She had initially seen Tad as the next male rung in a longish ladder that would take her step by step from poverty in the Ukraine to some sort of comfortable life in a European capital. His gallantry confused her. She hardly knew what to do with his affection, or with the troublesome feelings it awakened in her.