A voice note came in at 10 to 11.
Ding.
I was still at the formica table, looking at my trainers by the skirting board with the grey crumb off the 3G at St Wilfrid’s still stuck in the treads, working out where the gaps had been in the Ellerby Bridge back 4, when the screen lit up with a green bar.
I pressed play.
"Right, main character." Robyn, bright and fast, with the keyboard going behind her.
"I’ve been thinking about your condition. I’ve spoken to a specialist, which is me, and I’m putting you on books. I’ve got a bookmarks folder called LitRPG_Wishlist, 43 tabs deep, and that’s your treatment. Start with Primal Hunter. Office lad, hates his job, gets dragged into a tutorial with a load of his work lot, and it turns out he’s"
She had let go of the button. The next one came 2 seconds later.
Ding.
"brilliant with a bow. Levels, numbers, the lot. You’ll love it, you’re a numbers man. Then Dungeon Crawler Carl. A fella and his ex-girlfriend’s cat. The world ends, everybody left goes down into a dungeon, and aliens watch it on telly. The cat is the best character in anything I have ever read. I’ve sent you links. 3 Chapters of each, then report back to your doctor."
Ding.
A third one. She was doing a robot voice into her headset for this one.
"SYSTEM MESSAGE. MATT KERSHAW HAS LEVELLED UP. PLUS 1 TO BEING WEIRD ON THE PHONE. PLUS 2 TO NOT RINGING HIS MUM." Then her own voice again. "Also, and I say this with love, you’re 30, Matty. When I see stats over people’s heads, that’s a Tuesday. When you see them, that’s a scan."
2 links came through under the audio.
I put the phone face down on the table and found I was smiling at it, tired.
By the weekend this would be a story she told once at a barbecue in Salford and forgot. That was what I wanted. If she thought I was playing along with a daft running joke, the truth could stay where it was.
Unless she told it tonight. Robyn never saved a good joke for the weekend when there was a family group chat sat there waiting.
The phone went off against the formica, brrr, face down.
She was ringing. If I let it go, the routine would go straight into the family chat, and Mum would be on the phone by midnight asking whether I needed an ambulance.
I picked up.
"Doctor Robyn," she said. "Have you started your treatment?"
"Rob. I was joking."
"You were not joking. You had your serious voice on. You had the voice you did when you told Nan it was you that put the ball through her greenhouse in 2004."
"I’d had a pint on the train."
I hadn’t. I had sat on a 2-carriage Northern service with a line of white text in the corner of my eye, going through my own life like a fixture list.
There had been 4 of us in the carriage and a guard who came down it once, and not one of them had anything over their head. I checked. I kept checking all the way down the valley.
"1 pint and you’re in the Matrix. Lightweight." She was already laughing. "Martin! Martin, come here! Matty’s in a video game!"
A man’s voice, a long way off from the headset. "Is he."
"He can see stats over people’s heads! He says you’re a 12! Out of 200! For laying decking!"
"I never said that," I said.
I had my eyes shut before I finished saying it, and my free hand flat on the formica, waiting for the red.
"You’re a 12, love!" she shouted over her shoulder.
"Go to bed, Rob," Martin said, and a door closed, thud.
Nothing came. My eye stayed clear, the ache behind it sat where it had been sitting for an hour, and the fridge went on humming behind me while a man in a flat in Salford went up to bed knowing what I could do.
So it wasn’t ears. It was mouths, or it was mine. She could stand in her own hallway shouting it at her husband all night, and the thing would sit there and let her.
That was a guess. The only way to test it was to say it out loud to somebody else myself, and I had nothing left to test it with.
And there was nobody on this earth I could ask about any of it.
I let my breath out slow, away from the phone.
"Anyway," Robyn said, settling back into her chair. "How was it? The youth training up at Ellerby Bridge. Were you any good? Did you run?"
"I ran." I rubbed my kneecap through my jeans. "My knee’s got a plaster on it."
"Old man. Did you score?"
"A header."
"Course you did. From a corner?"
The line went quiet. The keyboard stopped.
Tak.
She had heard it come out of her own mouth. Even her game had gone silent.
"Matty. I didn’t mean"
"It’s alright, Rob. It was a corner. I headed it in. That’s all it was."
"It’s not alright. Sorry. That was horrible of me." She let a long breath out. "Was it a good header, though?"
"It was a bloody great header. Top corner."
"Good." She sounded like she meant that more than anything else she had said all night. "Good on you."
"Rob, listen. Don’t put the video game stuff in the family group."
"Why not? It’s the best thing that’s ever been in the family group. It beats Auntie Carol’s sunsets. She’s posted 14 sunsets this month, Matty. It’s the same sunset."
"Because Mum will think I’ve had a breakdown. She’ll ring the GP. Then she’ll ring Josh, and Josh will drive round here with another tub of quinoa salad."
That got her. A shout of laughter turned into a cough. "Fine. Fine. It stays with me and Martin and Biscuit. Biscuit doesn’t talk, and Martin wasn’t listening, he never is."
It was in her hands now, all of it. She would keep it, because she always had, and because she thought it was nothing. A crunch came down the line. Crisps.
"Go on, though, main character. Say Status."
"What?"
"Hand out. Say it with feeling."
"Put a sock in it, Robyn. I’m not saying anything, and I’m going to sleep."
"I know how your book goes, by the way." She was warming to it. "Chapter 1, you get the system. Chapter 2, nobody believes you. That’s me. I’m Chapter 2. Chapter 3, there’s a montage, and you get abs."
"I’m hanging up."
"Don’t you dare hang up on your doctor!" Her chair went squeak.
"Do you know what I did at work today? I walked into a wall for 6 hours. Same wall. 15 different angles. Because if you hit it at the wrong angle your character drops out of the world, and somebody has to find the collision bug, and it’s me. I wrote it up. 3 pages, with screenshots. The lead designer sent it back an hour ago, build 4471, with 2 words on it. Can’t reproduce."
"Can’t reproduce?"
"Can’t reproduce! I reproduced it 200 times! I sent them the video of me doing it 200 times with the sound on, me swearing at the screen 200 times. Martin’s brother sat on his phone all night arguing with strangers about City’s 115 charges and whether the verdict’s ever coming, and even he said my wall was better telly. Let them can’t-reproduce that."
Another crisp.
"Anyway. Your mum."
"I texted her. She was in bed."
"I know she was." Her voice came down.
"She rang me 10 minutes after you messaged her. She read your text out to me, Matty. Twice. She said Ellerby Bridge like you’d been called up for Wembley. The whole of Fleetwood will know by 9 o’clock in the morning. The woman on the till at the Co-op will know."
I didn’t answer that. I couldn’t have.
"And your dad asked about you," she said. "At Easter. In the kitchen, when he thought nobody was listening. He asked me if you were eating properly."
"What did you say?"
"I said toast. He said toast isn’t eating."
"He said that?"
"He did. Then he went out and sat in his car on the drive for 20 minutes. Your mum told everybody he was checking the tyre pressures."
She let it sit for a second, then changed gear.
"So. You’re meeting the Ellerby Bridge manager tomorrow night. You’re asking for proper money. Say it."
"I’m asking for money tomorrow."
"Louder."
"I’m asking for money tomorrow."
"Say a number. Pick it now, on the phone, so you don’t go soft in the room."
"I don’t know what they pay a non-league coach, Rob."
"Then find out what the last fella got. Always find out what the last fella got before you sign anything." Something beeped at her end. "What is the job, anyway? Defensive coach?"
"Aye. Lommo says the first team are shipping 2 a game from set pieces."
"Then you’re fixing their house. Charge them for it. Nobody knocks money off a plumber for being nice."
Another crisp, krnch.
***
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