Another crisp, krnch.
"Read those books, by the way. I mean that bit. They’re good."
"What’s the point of them?" I said, and I said it to keep her talking. While she was on books she wasn’t posting anything in the family chat.
"Ooh. He’s interested."
"I’m making conversation. Which one’s better? The bow or the cat?"
"The cat. Obviously the cat. But you’ll like the bow one more, because he’s miserable at the start and then it turns out he’s elite at something. That’s you, that is."
"Aye. Dead miserable."
"You asked what the point is, though." Her voice changed. She wasn’t doing a voice now.
"The point is that real life never tells you how you’re doing, Matty. You go to work, you lift crates, you come home, nobody says well done, nobody says you’re getting worse. You just exist. In these, it tells you. Every day. Plus 1 to this. Level 12. You watch yourself get better, in numbers, and nobody can argue with a number. I’ve tested games 50 hours a week for 9 years and nothing has ever come up and told me I levelled up."
I sat there with that.
"Thanks, Rob."
"You’ll be fine tomorrow." She said it plainly, with nothing on the end of it.
"You were always the one telling everybody where to stand. At Nan’s, the Christmas you were 12, you had all 6 of us doing the washing-up in a formation. You had my mum on drying. Nobody has ever got my mum drying."
"I remember."
"She put everything away wet, mind." She laughed. "But she stood where you told her. People do, with you. They always have."
She let that rest.
"Night, Matty. Ring your mum properly tomorrow. Promise me."
"I promise."
"Night, main character."
Boop.
I set the phone flat on the table. The flat was quiet again apart from the fridge and the clock on the wall, tick, tick.
The doctor routine went out of my head. What stuck was the other thing she had said, about a system telling you where you stand, and the way she talked about her own job. Every screen has a button. Every button has a word on it, and the word is the same every time, or the machine doesn’t move.
I had been talking to it in my words. It had been printing its own all night.
After the game, over Lommo’s head, the line at the bottom of his card had said it for me. On the platform at Ellerby Bridge I had thought Attribute Menu at nothing, and nothing was what I got.
Access Attribute Menu.
Access. It had been sat in front of my face on the pitch.
The ache had come down to a thumbprint behind my right eye. I put my elbows on the table and shut my eyes and tried the sidebar from the game.
Squad.
Nothing.
Tactics.
Nothing.
Training.
Nothing.
I opened my eyes on the white line that had been in the top corner of my vision since the train.
Reputation: Local.
Then I put its word in front of mine.
Access Quests.
Click.
It went off behind my left ear, small and neat, the way a fuse box goes on.
A green window came open in the air between my face and the kitchen window, sliding out like a drawer pulled from a filing cabinet.
[Quests]
[Available: Complete a full training session]
Objective: Lead or assist in 1 full training session with an affiliated squad.
Reward: 25 EXP, Unlock Training Tab
[Ongoing: None]
"There," I said, out loud, to my own kitchen.
Upstairs, the fella with the leaking bath heard me and banged twice on his floorboards, thud, thud.
I kept my eyes on the window.
25 EXP. Half a level in 1 session. The first quest had paid 10 for getting a job at all, and this one paid 2 and a half times that for standing on a pitch for 90 minutes and being useful.
And the Training Tab. The first page of the sidebar I would get, and the one I had lived in for 7 years on a laptop, with its drills and its intensity sliders and its little green arrows.
I went through every word of it, the way the lad in the book she had sent me would have. No catch listed, no timer, and nothing about what happens if I fail.
Mill Lane at 6, then, and Dave Morley. At tier 7 his reputation would be Regional, or better, which meant his card would be shut to me the same as Lommo’s.
No numbers to lean on. I would have to read him the way I used to read a centre-forward in the tunnel at Beck Road, in the first 10 minutes, off his feet and his mouth.
I looked at the quest line one more time.
Accept.
Bzzt.
The window came apart into threads and folded away into the corner of my eye, and a new white line locked in under the first. Green came, green went, and it left nothing behind it. The red was the only one that had touched me.
[Ongoing: Complete a full training session (0/1)]
The phone buzzed on the table. A text from Robyn.
Doctor’s orders x
I didn’t answer it. I opened the first link she had sent, put the phone against my blue mug, and read Chapter 1 with my chin on my hand.
0/1.
1 training session. I could do 1 session.
I leaned back and looked out at the orange streetlights on the estate.
For 7 years I had believed my football finished in a room in Preston, the morning the FA integrity people slid the suspension notice across the table at me. 7 years of a cold warehouse, telling myself that ￡5,000 a corner was the end of it.
Tomorrow at 6 o’clock I was putting on an Ellerby Bridge tracksuit and walking onto the first-team pitch at Mill Lane, in front of a manager I had never met and a squad who would know my name before I opened my mouth.
The trial was over.
Tomorrow was work.