Dean Hates Football!!
“Nobody in this house will ever like football.
No—never.
I’ve told you—no!
Don’t you call here again!”
Mrs.
Mason hung up the phone.
She stood there for a moment with hand still on the receiver.
At the breakfast table, Ethan elbowed Dean and whispered, “That was David again.
You really won’t come play for Everton?
I’d go in a heartbeat, but David doesn’t want me.”
Dean shot him a hard look.
“Don’t talk about that in this house.
Grandma Mason will be upset.
Eat your toast.”
Ethan shrank down in his seat and shot a quick glance at his brother, but couldn’t help sneaking another look toward the living room.
Then he shoved another honey-smeared piece of bread into his mouth.
Dean looked over at Grandma Mason too.
Her grey hair was pulled back into a tight bun.
Beneath her faded navy cardigan, her shoulders were slightly stooped.
This seventy-year-old woman had never, in seventeen years, managed to walk free of that catastrophe.
April 15th, 1989.
Hillsborough.
Every time those two words were surfaced; the terrible images came flooding back.
They weren’t Dean’s own memories.
They were the fragments Grandma Mason had cried out in her nightmares countless times, the scenes she had described to Dean and Ethan over and over.
The crushing crowd on the terraces.
The twisted mesh of the fencing.
Countless arms reaching up.
Despair.
Suffocation.
Screaming.
Death.
That day, in Sheffield.
Mason had lost her husband, both her sons, and a five-year-old grandson.
The whole family was torn out by the roots.
Mason herself had escaped because she’d stayed home to care for her younger son, who was ill.
Grandma always said she could still hear her two sons saying, “Mum, I can’t breathe.”
And her eldest grandson saying, “Grandma, my bones are being crushed.”
For a woman in her fifties, what kind of blow was that?
If she hadn’t still had her younger son, perhaps Grandma Mason would have chosen to follow the rest of her family.
But that younger son, John, died five years later in a car accident, along with his wife, leaving behind only Ethan, still an infant in the cradle.
As for Dean—he was an infant, abandoned at the church door, another grandson Grandma Mason had taken in.
“I’m going out for a bit, to St.
Mary’s to pray with Marina and the others.” Her eyes swept over Dean and Ethan, lingering a moment on Dean’s face.
“When you’re done eating, clear the table, then stay home like good boys.
Understood?”
“Understood, Grandma,” Dean said, setting down his fork.
Ethan kept his head lowered and muttered under his breath, “Got it.”
Not until Grandma Mason had disappeared into the morning fog over West Derby did Ethan let out a cheer.
His face lit up with an excitement he could no longer suppress, all trace of his earlier good behaviour was gone.
“Dean, did you hear that?
David called again!
Everton!
Do you know what that means?!
This is a chance to play in the Premier League!
The Premier League!
Tens of thousands of pounds a week!
My God, this is my dream!”
Dean ignored him.
He finished eating, stood, and carried his own plate into the kitchen.
Water rushed from the tap.
He scrubbed the plate hard.
His thoughts churned.
Football!
Football again!
This city.
This street.
Even the school they attended—Bishop John Catholic School, where a photo of Steven Gerrard’s Champions League triumph hung in the hallway.
Football fever hung over everything, everywhere.
Red and blue, Everton and Liverpool, like two rivers no one could escape, sweeping up everyone in Merseyside.
Everyone except the Mason household.
Grandma Mason would not allow a single thing related to football in the house, not even a newspaper.
That catastrophe had been devastating for this family.
Ethan and Dean had grown up under her strict rule.
Dean had taken it to heart.
Ethan, as if he carried on some inherited bloodline, was wildly obsessed with football.
He was always sneaking off to play.
“Dean,” Ethan said, following him to the kitchen doorway and leaning against the frame, “there’s a small match down at the community pitch later.
They’re short a player.
Just for a bit—will you come?
I promise we’ll be back before lunch.
Grandma won’t know.”
Dean turned off the tap and shook the water from his hands.
He turned to face his brother.
“No.” Dean’s refusal was flat and final.
He walked past Ethan, heading straight for his own room to change.
“Not telling Grandma about your football is already proof enough of how much I love my brother.
That’s as far as it goes.
I’m going for a run.”
“Hey, Dean!” Ethan sounded a little helpless.
“Of course you can’t say anything—you’ve played too, haven’t you?”
Dean didn’t answer.
He changed into running shorts and trainers, then pushed open the door.
The morning air held a brittle chill.
He breathed it into his lungs, and it felt like nothing else could.
He hated football.
He hated everything it had brought with it.
But he was addicted to running.
The moment he stepped outside, he broke into a jog.
As the warm-up eased into a steady rhythm, he picked up his pace, faster and faster, until he settled into an even pace.
The wind slid past his ears, lifting his short brownish-black hair.
His muscles stretched and loosened.
His heart rate climbed.
Blood surged through his veins.
Slowly, the three transparent beads appeared before his eyes again.
Dean was used to it by now.
Of the three beads, the middle one was gradually filling with red—almost three-quarters full now.
The bead on the left held the faintest trace of blue.
The one on the right remained completely clear.
Dean didn’t know what these beads did, but he knew that as long as he kept running, the red in the middle one would keep creeping up, bit by bit.
At first, all three beads had been completely clear.
And the more red filled the middle bead, the better his body seemed to get—running, at the very least, no longer left him winded.
And when he got into fights with those thugs from Bishop John Catholic School, they were the ones who ended up begging for mercy.
At first he couldn’t win at all.
Then he could beat any one of them one-on-one.
Later still, even bleeding himself, he could leave them covered in blood, crying for their mothers.
After that, no one dared cross him easily anymore.
But word had spread through the whole school that Dean was a lunatic.
A freak.
Most people gave him a wide berth—a orphaned kid was bad enough on its own, and if on top of that he was crazy, well, God help them all.
Someone had even reported him to the school, demanding he be expelled.
Grandma Mason and the friends she prayed with had smoothed it all over.
But the word that Dean was a lunatic had already gotten out.
There was no taking it back.
Dean didn’t care about his reputation, didn’t care about being called crazy.
He looked at the beads.
This was what made him different.
Running made the red in the middle one grow.
But no matter what he tried, he couldn’t get the other two beads to change colour, and he had no idea where that thread of blue on the left one had come from.
Dean wasn’t sure.
Because that trace of blue seemed to have appeared right after he’d gone with Ethan to play football at the community pitch for a while.
Dean kept turning over what had happened, a week ago.
What had it been?
He seemed to remember he’d only passed the ball a few times; the rest of the time he’d just been running with the others, defending.
Could it be the passing?
He didn’t know.
But he remembered that feeling—the sense that the entire pitch was under his command, held whole in his mind, and the instinct, when passing, that let him find the space, find the lane, without even thinking.
It had given him a kind of thrill, like he’d broken through some forbidden line.
But football?
No.
He hated football.
He should have stopped Ethan.
He had to stop him.
This was forbidden.
This was Grandma’s nightmare.
This was the wellspring of pain this family could never bear to touch again.