Free Web NovelChapter 44: MAY 2007
The bedsit was at the end of a row of bedsits behind the Co-op on West Ham Lane, the kind of building that had been a proper house once, three storeys and a family in it, and had been carved up some time in the seventies into six front doors with six bells and five of the bells not working.
Brrm of a bus pulling away from the stop on the corner as I came up. A bin bag had split on the front step and somebody had stepped over it rather than round it for long enough that it had become part of the step.
I checked the number against the front of the folder. Second floor.
The communal hall smelled of other people’s cooking and a carpet that had given up. The stairs creaked on the way up, one of them so badly I put my weight on the banister instead, and the banister moved.
On the first-floor landing a telly was going behind a door, a quiz show, the studio audience laughing at something on a loop. On the second-floor landing there was one door, half open, a strip of evening light coming through the gap and across the bare boards.
I knocked. Tap, tap.
A voice from inside, flat, not surprised, the voice of a man who is not expecting anyone good and has stopped expecting anyone at all. In, mate.
I went in.
Aiden Reece was sat on a single bed against the far wall in a vest and tracksuit bottoms, the curtains half drawn against the last of the light. A kettle on the side had just gone off the boil, hsss, steam still coming off the spout.
A packet of digestives next to it with three gone. A single mug. One chair at a small table under the window. A pair of boots by the door, good boots, properly cared for, dubbined and laced and set side by side, the one thing in the room a man had bothered with.
He was twenty-four years old. He looked thirty-five. His arms were a footballer’s arms gone thin, and on the inside of his left wrist, in plain capitals, a tattoo that said MAY 2007.
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Name: Aiden Reece
Age: 24
"Player": Released (West Ham academy 2009) CA: 73 / 200 PA: 132 / 200 A creative midfielder. Touch like silk. Drink. Mother lost, found again, lost again. A problem with a left foot.
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I sat down in the chair at the table. I put the folder on the bed next to him.
"Aiden."
"...Sam Mercer." He said it without looking up, then looked up. "I read about you. Beer mat fella. Ten points."
"Lenny rang you last night."
"He did. Told you where I lived, did he."
"He told me you used to be the best thing on the pitch at any age group West Ham had, and that you got let go in oh-nine, and that he didn’t know the rest and wasn’t going to guess. That’s all he told me."
"That’s more than most know." He reached over and poured the kettle into the one mug, and didn’t offer, not out of rudeness but because the offering of tea was a thing that lived in a part of him that wasn’t on duty tonight. "What’s in the folder."
"A contract. Tilbrook Town, August through May, fifty a week and a twenty match-day, training Tuesday and Thursday nights at Marsh Road. I’ve rung Stan. Stan will see you Wednesday morning for a medical, and a long talk about what you want and don’t want to be doing of an evening, and Stan is the right man for that talk because Stan does not judge a single living soul and never has. I have not told Lenny what I’m about to say to you next."
"...What are you about to say to me next."
I looked at the wrist before I looked at his face. You do not get to ask a man about the worst thing in his life as an opening move. But I knew what the date was, because the system had told me the shape of it and fourteen years of caring about lads exactly like this one had told me the rest, and I was not going to sit in this room and pretend I hadn’t seen it.
"That’s your mum," I said. Not a question.
He went very still.
"...What did you say."
"May 2007. That’s when you lost her. The second time. She’d come back, hadn’t she. Got herself right, came back, you had a couple of good years with her, and then May 2007 she went for good, and you were what, twenty-one, and three weeks off signing your scholarship, and the left foot that had been the thing she came to watch you do never quite did the thing again after that. And the drink came in where the football went out. And two years later West Ham let you go, and they were right to, and you’ve known they were right to every day since, and that’s the worst part, that you can’t even be angry at them, because you’d have let you go an’ all."
The room was dead quiet. The kettle ticked as it cooled, tk, tk. Somewhere below us the quiz show audience laughed.
Aiden Reece looked at me for a long, long second, and his eyes had gone bright and hard the way a man’s eyes go when you have walked into his room and put your hand on the one thing he keeps the curtains half drawn over.
"...Who told you that."
"Nobody told me that, Aiden. I just know the shape of it. I’ve known a lot of lads with your feet and your wrist. I know what does it. I’m not here to talk about your mum. I’m here to tell you what your mum knew, which is that there was a left foot on you that nobody else in this country had, and that it is still in there, under all of it, because a thing like that does not leave, it only gets buried, and I have come round on a Tuesday evening to do a bit of digging."
He wiped his face on the back of his arm, once, rough, and pretended he hadn’t.
"I haven’t had it back," he said. "The foot. Since oh-nine. I go and play Sunday parks and it’s not there. It’s like reaching for a light switch in a room you’ve moved out of."
"I know you haven’t had it back."
"Then why are you here. Honest. Don’t give me the beer mat patter. Why are you sat in my bedsit."
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees.
"Because I have watched you play, Aiden. More than you’d believe. And I am going to tell you exactly what happens to you in the next twelve months, because there are only two of them, and you get to pick.
"One. You sign this, and you come to Marsh Road on a Tuesday night, and for the first six weeks it’s not there, the foot, and you want to pack it in, and Stan talks you down, and one freezing Tuesday in October with the floodlights on and eleven hundred people in and a lad called Vardy making a run you can see before he makes it, your left foot does the thing it used to do, once, for one pass, and you remember. And it comes back by degrees after that, the way it left, and by Christmas you are the best player in this division on your day, and there are men in that crowd who drove past your bedsit for two years not knowing you were in it who now sing your name on a Saturday. That’s one.
"Two. You don’t sign this. You stay in this room. The drink wins, because the drink always wins the rooms where nobody’s digging. And eight years from now a man who worked the docks at Tilbrook the same as my dad reads a small column on page nine of the Recorder about a local lad, used to be on West Ham’s books, ever such a talent, terrible shame, and he puts the paper down on his kitchen table and he says nothing about it to anyone, because what is there to say. That’s two.
"I can’t make you pick one. I can only tell you I’ve got a Tuesday night with the floodlights on, and a number nine who needs feeding, and a left foot in this room that your mum came to watch. The rest is yours."
Aiden Reece sat with his mug going cold in both hands and the curtains half drawn and the tattoo on his wrist facing up where he’d stopped trying to hide it.
He put the mug down.
He picked the folder up. He opened it. He read the contract, properly, all of it, the way a man reads a thing he has decided to take seriously. He turned to the back page where the line was.
He picked the biro up off the table.
"Sam."
"Yes."
"If the foot’s not there by October."
"Then it’s not there by October, and you’ll have spent a season with eleven blokes who’d run through a wall for you, and that’s not nothing either. But it’ll be there, Aiden. I’ve seen it. That’s the one thing in this whole daft business I’m actually sure of."
He looked at the wrist. He looked at the boots by the door, the dubbined boots, the one thing he’d kept.
He signed.
Scratch of the biro, his name in a hand that still had something careful in it under everything, the hand of a lad who’d once signed autographs for kids at an academy open day and meant it.
"Wednesday morning," I said. "Stan. The medical, and the long talk. He’ll have the kettle on. Let him talk. He’s better at the talking than I am."
"...Wednesday morning, Aiden," he said, half to himself, trying the shape of being a man with somewhere to be on a Wednesday morning, and not hating it.
I put the folder under my arm. I stood up. At the door I stopped, with my hand on the frame.
"The boots," I said.
He looked at them.
"You dubbined your boots. In a room you’ve half given up on, you kept your boots right. That’s how I know the foot’s still in there, mate. A man whose foot was really gone wouldn’t bother with the boots." I opened the door. "See you Tuesday under the lights."
I went down the creaking stairs and out past the split bin bag into the evening, and the knot in my chest had gone a tiny bit smaller, the way it does when you have managed, for once, to put a thing into someone’s hand instead of just feeling sorry about it.
I walked to the West Ham Lane bus stop. The squad was at nineteen.
Brrm of a 25 pulling up.
I sat at the back and watched East London go past in the dark, and thought about a left foot under a floodlight in October, and a lad who’d kept his boots dubbined in a room with the curtains half drawn, and a date on a wrist that I hoped, by next May, would have a season of Tuesday nights stacked on top of it that weren’t about losing anybody at all.
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[SYSTEM] Nineteen, Samuel. And the best foot in the division back from the dead.
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"Back from the dead."
Bed.
***
Thank you to Jordan_97 for the gift.
