When Freddy first arrived it was clear he needed to put on a few kilos in his upper body, otherwise the bigger and older men would be able, if and when they caught him, to muscle him off the ball; and maybe the extra weight would mean he lost a yard of speed. That had happened before with many other young footballers. But it didn’t with Freddy. Not that he put on the bulk; it turned out that he didn’t need it. His running style was so odd, so unpredictable and ungainly and elusive, it was as if it short-circuited something in defenders’ brains. He was like an eel. They just couldn’t get a proper hold on him. The manager was very reluctant to believe this, but he finally accepted the evidence of his eyes, gathered over many fractions of games, leading up to entire second halves. OK, he finally conceded. Freddy was ready. Or even if he wasn’t ready, he was still going to play.
Freddy, in his match-day strip and tracksuit, sat on the bench by his locker and did up his boots. On Mickey’s advice, they hadn’t yet signed a contract for the boots, so he was wearing a pair of Predators with the logos blacked out. If today went well, and there were other days
like today, his shoe contract would be worth many millions. Freddy couldn’t care less about that, because he already had all the money and all the stuff he would ever need, but it mattered to Mickey and to his father, so he did what he was told. The only thing that mattered for Freddy was football. Everything else was to some degree fake.
A pair of shiny brown shoes appeared in front of him. Freddy looked up. It was the manager with the owner of the club behind him. The owner did not often come to the dressing room and this was, in nine months at the club, only the fourth time Freddy had met him: the others were when he’d first arrived, at an end-of-season club event, and once in the dressing room when Freddy had come on with fifteen minutes to go against Blackburn, and scored the winning goal. The owner smiled down at Freddy in his uneasy way, his eyes moving about as they always did, his air as always that of a man who wished to be somewhere else. Freddy caught a look in the manager’s eyes, and stood up. The owner waved him back down again but Freddy stayed standing.
‘Good luck today,’ the owner said in his slow, clear English. ‘Be fast!’
‘Yes sir. Thank you. I will try my best.’
‘More than try!’ said the owner. ‘Do!’ He was laughing; this was a great joke. He turned to the manager. ‘Do!’ The manager joined in his employer’s laughter. Still laughing and nodding, the owner moved on. Freddy sat back down. Across the room he caught the eye of the club’s longest-serving player, a central defender who had come up through the club’s youth system nearly twenty years ago, and never left. He winked at Freddy.
Then they were into the pre-match ritual: the walk on the pitch, the stretch and warm-up, the last words from the manager, who said what he always said, a saying that was partly a good-luck charm, partly a mantra, and partly a piece of good advice: ‘We are better than they are. The only way they win is if they work harder than us. So if we work harder than them, we win. So that’s what we’ll do.’ And then they were in the tunnel, the noise level changing as the crowd sounds filtered back into the enclosed space, the other team there too, jogging on the spot, their shoes scratching loudly on the cement flooring, the
mascots in front holding hands with the captains, the referee looking back to check that they were all there, and then they were running out onto the pitch, the adrenaline and the exertion and the noise and the sudden emergence into daylight blending into each other so that they were all one thing. Freddy felt as excited and nervous as he could ever remember. He was carrying a ball: as he came onto the pitch he kicked it ahead of him, hard, and put on a burst to get to it, and the crowd shouted and gave the chant they had started to give for him: Fredd-y, Fredd-y. He pretended not to notice, not to be pleased, but his heart was glowing. Then he and the striker passed the ball between them. He flicked it up onto his head and nodded it off the pitch. He was ready. Freddy knew that his father was there, in the directors’ box, and knew also that he wouldn’t be able to see him if he looked for him – which was perfect.
He had his first touch within a minute of the kick-off. They knew he would be nervous so the holding midfielder, who was the player who made the team run – who covered and tackled, who got up and down the pitch, who broke up the opposition’s moves and did the short-passing to keep his own side in constant motion, who never seemed to do anything particularly noteworthy but never made a mistake and never had a bad game – knocked a short ball to him with his defender a couple of metres away. Freddy came to it, took it and turned in one move, and saw that the defender had dropped off him; he hadn’t tried to match Freddy’s speed to the ball. That meant he knew about him and was being careful. They were nervous of him: a good sign. He took two strides and knocked a pass at forty-five degrees to the striker, who tried to flick it back to him but was blocked by his close marker. The ball ricocheted back and went into touch off the striker.
They were playing well today. They had most of the ball but no chances in the first ten minutes. There were days with this club, these players, when the momentum felt irresistible. The opponents were just there because they had to be there, but they were only there to provide a game so that Freddy’s team could turn out the winners. This felt like one of those days. The home team were quicker, more fluid; it was as the manager had said, they were just plain better. Ten minutes into the
game, the central midfielder was carrying the ball forward, and Freddy decided to try something. His defender was going to hang off him if he could; he’d been warned not to get too close, where Freddy could turn-and-burn him. OK. Freddy had no theories about anything, as far as he was aware, but he had an instinctive understanding of one strategy in particular: do the thing your opponent doesn’t want. So Freddy, instead of looking for space away from the defender, drifted closer to him, forcing the man to back off even further – basically, he had to run away from him, back-pedalling, or he had to accept that he’d be caught in no-man’s-land, and step closer, exactly where he didn’t want to be. So the full-back stepped in to Freddy, just as the midfielder shaped his bandy right leg to pass him the ball. Perfect. Freddy took a half-pace towards the ball, then checked, and with the defender lunging towards him, switched his weight onto his left leg and as the pass got to him, dummied and pivoted his body in one movement, and that was it, he was gone. Just as he was thinking, I’ve beaten him, the big man, who had dived in late with his right leg fully extended and with all his mass behind his lunge, a slightly reckless tackle but without ill intent, connected with the place where the ball had been less than a tenth of a second before, a point that was now occupied by Freddy’s fully extended left leg. The defender’s leg hit Freddy’s ten inches above the ankle, and spectators sitting as far as fifteen rows back heard the bone crack. Even people who didn’t hear that could see Freddy screaming and rolling his upper body from side to side, and the fans right at the back who couldn’t hear could see that the lower part of his leg was bent back under his knee at an angle that was not possible.
O
n a warm morning in May, two weeks after his failed attempt to break up with Davina, Zbigniew went to the front door of 42 Pepys Road. He had heard on the street’s grapevine that the owner needed some redecoration work done, so had called to make an appointment and give a quote. Work, thank God for work. While he was at work he didn’t have to think about Davina and about the dead end, the impasse, the stuck-with-his-leg-in-a-bear-trap disaster he had made of his own life; he managed not to think about those things for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. They were a good ten or fifteen minutes, the best of his day.
Zbigniew assessed the house professionally as he stood there: he knew these buildings well. Decent condition, ugly but sound. A kind of job he’d done many times: make it less unfashionable, less out of date, fix up the wiring, bit of plumbing. A decent-size job. Quote in the high single figures.
The woman he’d spoken to over the phone opened the door; she looked tired and older than she had sounded. Mrs Mary Leatherby. She had the air of someone not giving the matter immediately in front of her her full attention. Zbigniew knew how that felt. It was fine with him. He had no interest in her either. She showed him round the downstairs. It was as he thought. Linoleum. Strip and repaint, take out the kitchen, put in a new one from a kit. Check the wiring. Zbigniew
guessed that it would be OK; it didn’t look as if the place was broken, just tired. The toilet under the stairs was horrible and she wanted to take it out. He’d have to get help with that, which wouldn’t be a problem. Quote in the low teens. He scribbled in his notebook.
The sitting room was also straightforward. From the choices she was making it was obvious that Mrs Leatherby wanted to sell the house. Everything was going to be neutral, cream and white. Modern fittings. No problem; Zbigniew knew how to do that. More scribbling. Quote heading toward the middle teens. They continued going around the house. There was a bathroom upstairs, in more or less the same condition as the one downstairs, except this was for renovation rather than removal. More work for subcontractors, no problem. New bath and shower and basin and cupboards and fittings, good margin on all that, subs would be happy. Quote in the middle teens.
‘There’s another bedroom but we can’t go in there,’ said Mrs Leatherby. She showed him into a little study bedroom where she had been sleeping on a sofa bed. There was an opened, unpacked suitcase on the table and a photograph of a man and three children beside it. They went upstairs. The linoleum here would be going also, maybe to be replaced by carpet. That was a specialist job he could not do but he wouldn’t tell her that yet, he could put something in the figures and outsource it later, besides she had so little idea of what she wanted it would be premature to be too clear. The client not sure of what they want – every builder’s nightmare, every builder’s dream. Upstairs, two more bedrooms, both dark and poky, a small bathroom, ditto, a loft which had not been converted. He went up there and took a look: it was the usual – unlagged, warm and humid, with low exposed wooden beams and a centimetre-thick layer of dust. He could get in a crew to do this but it would be a step bigger than any job he had taken on for himself.
‘We might do it up, or might leave it for the buyer. A rough quote is all we’re asking for. But then there’s the hassle, the permissions … the council …’
Mrs Leatherby seemed to fade in and out. She was not always listening to herself. Zbigniew wondered what it was … wondered about
the room he wasn’t supposed to be going into … wondered why it was she who was selling when it wasn’t her house. Then he got it. She was selling her mother’s house, and her mother was still alive. Not for long, obviously, or she wouldn’t be selling the house. But what it boiled down to, after all the rationalisations and justifications, was that she was getting builders’ quotations to renovate her mother’s house, in order to sell it after her mother’s death, while her mother was still in the house, dying. A feeling of wrongness grew in Zbigniew; a feeling that he was, by participating in this, doing something that he should not be doing.
‘I’m getting a few other people in,’ she said. ‘A few quotes. You were recommended … I told you that. Rough figures to start with then something more specific. I’ll have more idea later when … Well, anyway, thank you for coming. Look around a bit more if you like. I’ll be in the kitchen.’
Moving much quicker than before, she half-ran downstairs. Her heels made a skidding, skittering noise over the floor. It was too much for her, Zbigniew saw; she wasn’t a bad person doing a bad thing, she was just lost, didn’t know what to do.
As he thought: she doesn’t know what to do, Zbigniew came back from his holiday. It had been short but he had enjoyed it. Now he was thinking about Davina again; or not thinking about her, just remembering how it was. Her way of pretending that nothing had happened, while the fact of what had happened sat in the room between them like a rotting corpse. The complete lack of any way out, that he could see or imagine; her expression sometimes, when he caught her looking at him with a look that was like the look a dog gave its master, needy, abject, beaten, eager. The way all talk between them had taken on a falsity, so that even the smallest of small talk was like a perfumed fart.
Zbigniew, standing on the landing, heard Mrs Leatherby go all the way downstairs into the kitchen, then heard another door close. She had gone out into the garden. He was alone in the house, except for whatever or whoever was behind the bedroom door. It was like a horror film: the creature behind the door … And then for no reason he could name, Zbigniew went to the door and put his hand on
the handle. It was wood, and warm to the touch. Very slightly loose, too; not fitted quite correctly; another piece of work. He took out his notebook, made a note, and then folded the book shut and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He turned the door handle for the moment, telling himself that he was checking the condition of the handle, seeing how smooth it was, how well the door had been fitted, but knowing that what he would do next was what he actually did do, turn the handle past the point of release, and then gently push the door so that it moved, with a faint creak. The door swung open. There was a smell of alcohol-based disinfectant.
An old woman was lying in the bed. She was lying against the wall with the wooden bedstead against the window, looking towards him. He was on the point of apologising, and then he realised that although the woman’s eyes were open and she was apparently looking straight in his direction, she could not see him. It was as if he was invisible to her. Zbigniew had seen that look in the eyes of animals: a cow could look at you with a depth and intensity that was explained only by its absence of mind. That was the look in the old woman’s eyes. The power of presence combined with the power of absence. He realised that she must be Mrs Leatherby’s mother, and also that she must be dying.