I went back over that row the way you go back over a letter from the council. Games give you 3 of these and a running total in the corner. This one had given me 1, and I had already had it.
1 more and it goes, and I go back to being a warehouse lad with a good eye and 7 years of rust.
Nobody else, then, with my own face looking back at me out of the glass. Not Josh, not Mum, not Lommo, and not Dave Morley at Mill Lane tomorrow night.
The minute one person in the real world takes it seriously, I am finished in football before I have started. Now there was a second reason on top of that one, and the second one didn’t care what anybody thought of me.
It wasn’t a promise. A promise is a thing you make at a sink and break in a bad week. This was the terms, and I had spent the only mistake in them on a sentence I hadn’t meant to say out loud.
"Hang on," Robyn said, and her voice dropped into the flat register she used when she was about to ruin somebody’s evening.
"I’m in a ranked match with a 12-year-old from Ohio and he’s just called me a word I’m not repeating to my elders." Her fingers went again, tak-tak-tak. "He’s about to find out why I’m banned from 3 regional Discord servers."
Something happened in her game while she was saying it. She made a noise like a dog with a slipper, then a smaller, satisfied one.
"He’s gone," she said. "He’s typing. Let him type."
"I’ll let you get back to it."
"Don’t hang up yet, main character. Send me your stats. I want a full character sheet by the morning. Height, weight, special abilities, the lot."
"Night, Rob."
"And a portrait. They all have a portrait."
"Aye," I said.
"Night, Matty. Don’t let the final boss get you."
The line went dead.
I put the phone down on the counter. The steam off the kettle had gone. Cold air was coming through the crack in the window frame above the sink.
The light had been off in there since I came in, because the fella upstairs had the bath running and the strip light buzzes when his pump goes, and I hadn’t wanted to hear anything except her. I left it off.
3 missed calls from Mum, from between 7 and 8, while I was on the pitch. She would be in the front room of the bungalow with the radio on low, sat by the landline while Dad read his paper.
I didn’t ring back. I typed instead.
Sorry I missed you, Mum. Went up to Ellerby Bridge tonight, watching a youth session with Lommo. Josh’ll tell you. I’m alright. Matt x
I read it through once without breathing. Then I sent it before I could start editing it.
Above Mum in my contacts was a name I hadn’t pressed in 7 years.
Dad.
My dad still keeps a phonebook.
He has had it since before I was born. A little pocket address book, red cover gone soft and furred at the corners, the paper yellow at the edges, names in 3 different colours of biro, crossed out and written in again as the years went.
When I was a kid on Cotton Street he sat at the formica table with it every Sunday morning. Reading glasses on a black cord round his neck, a heavy blue mug of builder’s tea going cold at his elbow, turning the pages with a big flat thumb, fff, fff, like a man reading the paper.
"Might give Frank a ring," he would say, to himself more than to anybody.
Or Mick. Or Barry from the shipyard. He would find the number, run his thumb along the faded line of ink, and sit there for 10 seconds without saying anything. Then he would nod once, like touching the page had done the job, and close the book.
He almost never rang any of them. He had hands like a bricklayer and a voice he kept for the phone, higher than his real one, and I used to listen to him use it on Frank and think that was what being a man was.
The last thing in my phone from him was from my birthday in January. Happy birthday son. Dad. I never answered it.
When they moved to the bungalow in Fleetwood, after he finished at the council, the red book went onto the side table in the front room next to the brass lamp. Half the names in it belong to men who have been dead 10 years. He knows that. He still opens it on a Sunday.
I had been thinking about that book on the way home from the station.
Hallowfield station had been dead at 9 o’clock on a Sunday. The taxi rank outside was empty apart from a black cab under the railway bridge with its engine running, pushing white clouds out of its exhaust into the dark.
I walked the 6 blocks back to the Moorside estate. My trainers were soaked through, size 13 and heavy with it, squelching on the wet pavement, and every step put a dull ache through my right knee where the coffee table had caught it.
Dennis at number 14 had his front room light on and the blue flicker of a television bouncing off his net curtains, turned up loud enough for the close to follow the plot.
The estate smelled of somebody’s bacon and wet gravel, and there was a ball somewhere behind the garages, 2 kids out too late, the sound of it coming off a door.
I had stood on that path for a minute before I went in. I don’t know what I was waiting for.
Now I stood in my kitchen with my thumb over Dad’s name. I wasn’t pressing it tonight, and I was never going to press it.
What would I say? Hi Dad. I know I broke your heart 7 years ago and put the Kershaw name on the back page. A tin of Stella killed my laptop on Saturday, and now I can see green boxes over people’s heads.
Robyn had laughed at it. Robyn, who kept the car and the wall for 14 years, who has never once looked at me like I was a mistake, heard me say it and laughed until she dropped her headset.
She laughed because she likes me. Take the liking out and it is the same sentence.
And that was the friendliest ear I own.
Dad wouldn’t laugh. He would hear his son, 30 years old, banned, on his own in a rented flat on the Moorside, talking about what he can see that nobody else can.
I was already the one who sold corners. This would make me the one who sold corners and went funny in a dark kitchen on a Sunday night. A bum with a story.
He wouldn’t shout, either. That was the trouble with him. He would go quiet, the way he went quiet the night the story broke, and say something short, and put the phone down. Then he would tell Mum I was tired.
I scrolled past him.
Robyn was the first person I ever told. She was going to be the last.
The names went past. I knew every one of them. Lads from the Hallowfield dressing room who stopped speaking to me the morning the suspension envelope came through the door.
2 managers who took my number out of their phones. A physio who strapped my ankle every Friday for 4 seasons. A kit man called Whippet who used to leave a spare pair of laces in my boot bag without being asked. An agent who blocked my calls the week of the hearing in Preston.
A sports reporter from the Advertiser who used to buy me a pint of bitter in the Crown, and who put my face across the back page under THE ￡5,000 CORNER.
I changed my number 7 years ago and moved every one of those contacts onto the new phone. I never rang a single one of them.
42 names in there from the life I destroyed, and not 1 of them I could ring. Josh was in the same phone, 3 up from the physio, and Josh was the only number in it I had used since Preston. My own brother.
When the ban came I did 2 years on the shelves at the Co-op on the ring road, head down, answering "Not really" when a shopper asked if I used to play a bit.
Then the distribution warehouse on the industrial estate, wooden crates and pallets, 12 hours at a go.
Nobody talked much in there and the radio played the same 20 songs. It was easy to hide. I never gave my surname if I could get away with it, because Hallowfield is a small town and people here remember back pages for a long time.
There wasn’t a name in that phone I could tell. Tell a football person that I was seeing numbers over players’ heads and it would be on the back page by Tuesday.
So it was me.
Brain tumour, breakdown, or whatever unregistered thing had come down the wire into my head on Saturday night, I was carrying it on my own and I was carrying it quiet.