Kit Rawley missed the easiest chance of his life in the seventy-first minute, and three hundred and twelve people watched him do it.
The cross came in low from the left, skidding off the wet grass, and all he had to do was be there. He was there. Six yards out, the keeper on his backside, the goal as wide as a garage door. Kit swung his right foot, clipped the ankle of his standing leg instead of the ball, and watched it roll past the far post like a dropped orange across a kitchen floor. It came to rest in the puddle behind the goal line that the groundsman called the Lake.
For a moment the Pinfold was silent. Then the Wool Shed, the ground's one covered stand, found its voice.
"RAWLEY! You're a disgrace to that shirt! And that shirt's from a catalogue!"
Kit knew the voice. Everyone at Wetherfold Town knew the voice. It belonged to Dennis, a retired postman who had stood at the front of the Wool Shed, just behind the dugouts, since roughly the miners' strike, and who had not said a kind word to anybody in the two seasons Kit had been at the club. Kit found he didn't mind. There was something steadying about being hated by a man that consistent.
He jogged back toward halfway with his hands on his hips. His maroon shirt clung to him like wet newspaper, and the little gold ram on the badge was peeling at one horn. Rain came sideways off the moor, the thin September kind that didn't so much fall as hang about. The floodlights had come on at half past four, and they turned the whole pitch the colour of weak tea.
On the touchline, Terry Pollitt had both hands on top of his head. The back of his waxed jacket said POLLITT'S LEISURE HOMES β STATICS & TOURERS, because Terry sold caravans from Monday to Friday and managed Wetherfold Town for petrol money and heartache.
"Head up, Kit!" he shouted. "Next one, son!"
There probably wouldn't be a next one. Kit had scored once in eleven games this season. The one had gone in off his shin.
He glanced at the dugout, half expecting a substitute to be stripping off, but Terry had already made all his changes. That was the only reason Kit was still on the pitch. Everyone in the ground knew it, Kit included.
Nineteen minutes, he thought. Nineteen minutes, and then you never have to do this again.
The text was already written. It sat in the drafts folder of his phone, in the side pocket of his kit bag, on the peg under the dripping window of the home dressing room. He had typed it on Thursday night, deleted it, typed it again on Friday, and added the last word that morning while he waited for the kettle.
Terry, I'm done after today. Thanks for everything. Honestly.
The "honestly" had taken three days.
On Monday he would tell Craig at Whiteacre Linen that he'd take the supervisor's job. Transport supervisor: two thousand a year more than driving the van, a company Ε koda with only one dent in it, and weekends. Every Saturday, because Saturday was when the hotels changed their sheets. You could not oversee the delivery of four hundred king-size duvet covers and also play centre-forward in the Northern Premier League. Craig had been clear about that. "Saturdays are non-negotiable, mate," he'd said, with the sorrow of a man who had never been asked to negotiate anything in his life.
Kit was twenty-nine. That wasn't old, unless you were a striker in the seventh tier of English football with a right knee that clicked on stairs. Then twenty-nine was the ninetieth minute, and you were only still out there because nobody had got round to taking you off.
The game restarted. Ashgill Rangers, top of the league and wearing it like a new pair of trainers, passed the ball about with the ease of a team that had been winning all afternoon. They'd scored after half an hour, a header from a corner, and since then they had mostly been waiting for the final whistle and trying not to get muddy.
Their centre-half, Duggan, was built like a chest freezer and moved like one being carried upstairs. Just before half-time, at a Wetherfold corner, he had caught Kit behind the ear with an elbow that the referee had called "nothing" and Kit's left ear had called a fire alarm. The ringing had faded since. A headache had moved in behind his eyes instead and started putting up shelves.
Seventy-five minutes. Eighty. The rain got bored and stopped, then changed its mind.
Wetherfold's best player was an eighteen-year-old winger called Jaylen Osei, who was faster than anyone Kit had ever played with and made decisions like a supermarket trolley with one bad wheel. On eighty-three minutes Jaylen beat one man, then another, then a third, and crossed the ball over everybody and into the car park. Somewhere past the fence, a dog started barking.
"Jaylen," said Kit, as they ran back.
"I know."
"I was free."
"I know. I saw you. I justβ" Jaylen shook his head. "I know."
On eighty-seven minutes Kit won a header, which surprised him and Duggan equally. On eighty-nine he lost the ball on the halfway line and had to foul someone to get it back. The referee, who was young and very tanned, with calves like bowling pins, booked him with the delight of a child producing a drawing he'd been saving. He blew his whistle as if it owed him money.
Ninety minutes came up on the big digital clock the Pinfold didn't have. Kit knew it was ninety because Aled Pryce, the Wetherfold keeper, bellowed "NINETY, BOYS! NINETY!" from his penalty area in the voice of a man directing traffic round a flood.
At this level there was no fourth official. No electronic board, no man in a tracksuit holding up green numbers by the dugouts. The referee simply turned toward the benches and held up four fingers, the way you'd order a round across a crowded bar.
Four minutes.
Kit bent over with his hands on his knees. Four minutes. Then the handshakes, the walk past Dennis to the tunnel, and the text.
When he straightened up, there was a board above the halfway line.
It hung over the centre circle at about the height of a crossbar: a black rectangle with a thin silver rim, set with rows of tiny green lights, the blocky, dotted kind you saw on the front of buses. Some of the dots were lit.
+4
Kit stared at it.
Nobody else was staring at it. Duggan was pulling his socks up. Aled was wiping his gloves on his shorts. Terry was saying something furious to his assistant about zonal marking. A pigeon dropped out of the floodlight gantry, flew straight through the board, and carried on toward the allotments without noticing anything at all.
The dots rippled and rearranged themselves.
STOPPAGE TIME
Then:
WINDOW: 5.0 SEC
Concussion, Kit thought, quite calmly. His sister Becca was a nurse, and she had once given him a ten-minute lecture on the symptoms across a table in a carvery, counting them off on her fingers. Headache. Nausea. Blurred vision. Confusion. Seeing things that aren't there, Kit. Don't be a hero. Tell somebody.
He blinked hard. The board stayed where it was.
Then the rest of the world doubled.
It happened all at once, the way a picture snaps into focus when someone finally adjusts the projector. Every player on the pitch grew a second self, a pale, see-through copy, grey as breath on a cold morning, and each copy was slightly ahead of its owner. Ashgill's left-back was jogging back into position; his ghost was already there, turning to point at someone. Marcus Oyelaran, Wetherfold's captain, was walking toward the halfway line; his ghost had stopped and was shouting at Jaylen with both arms out.
And the ball, still in Aled's gloves on the edge of the six-yard box, was somewhere else as well. A faint grey ball was rising out of the ghost Aled's hands, climbing into the wind.
Kit watched it go. It wasn't a good kick. Aled never took a good kick. The ghost ball wobbled up into the floodlights and came down on the edge of the Ashgill penalty area, where the ghost of Duggan rose to meet it. The header wasn't clean. It skimmed off the top of his head, looped backwards, and dropped onto the soft turf about fifteen yards out, where it bounced once, twice, completely alone.
Nobody was near it. Kit could see that nobody was near it, because his own ghost was standing twenty yards away, exactly where he was standing now, mouth slightly open, watching the ball bounce like a man who has just missed his bus.
The real Aled took two steps and kicked.
Kit ran.
He ran before the ball reached the top of its arc, before Duggan had set his feet, before he had properly decided to. His ghost flickered like a bad signal and redrew itself beside him, sprinting now, a stride ahead all the way. The real ball went up into the rain. It came down exactly where the grey one had. Duggan rose exactly where his ghost had, and the ball skimmed off the top of his head and looped backwards and landed on the soft turf about fifteen yards out.
Kit was already there.
He let it bounce once. On the second bounce it sat up for him at knee height, perfect for a half-volley, and as he shaped to hit it across the keeper the grey world showed him how that would go: the ghost ball flying low to the keeper's left, the ghost keeper flinging out a hand, the ball spinning away off his glove for a corner.
So he didn't do that.
He opened his body very late and struck it with the inside of his right foot toward the near post instead. It wasn't clean. It was never clean. The ball came off the side of his boot, scuffed and spinning, and the ghost ball was already ahead of it, bending in off the inside of the post and dropping over the line.
He saw it go in before he hit it. Then he hit it, and it went in, the second time exactly like the first.
The net bulged. The Pinfold made a noise Kit hadn't heard from it in two years, like three hundred people falling down a staircase together. Jaylen reached him first, then Marcus, then somebody's knee hit his thigh and he went down in the mud under a heap of maroon shirts and hot, shouting breath.
"KIT RAWLEY!" Jaylen was yelling in his ear. "Where did you COME from?"
Kit didn't answer, because he didn't know. Over Jaylen's shoulder, the board still hung in the rain. Its green dots said +4, patiently, as if nothing had happened.
At the far end, Aled had sprinted to the edge of his area and was windmilling both arms and screaming something in Welsh that was probably unsuitable for the under-elevens sitting on the wall behind his goal.
Kit climbed out of the pile. In the Wool Shed, even Dennis had made a noise. It might have been a cough.
"Back! Get BACK!" Terry was roaring. "Two minutes! CONCENTRATE!"
Kit jogged toward the centre circle. His head was pounding now, properly pounding, and there was a taste of metal at the back of his throat. The ghosts were still there. Every player trailed his future self across the grass like a shadow thrown by some light up ahead. When Kit turned his head too fast the two layers smeared together, and he had to stand still until they came apart.
Ashgill kicked off. They had stopped waiting for the whistle.
They went long straight away, and the Wetherfold back four scrambled. Marcus headed it out, an Ashgill midfielder headed it back in, and suddenly the ball was pinging around the Wetherfold half with nobody in charge of it. Kit stayed up on the halfway line, where strikers were supposed to stay, and turned to watch.
Ashgill's number ten was a skinny lad in a white headband who had spent most of the afternoon falling over. The ball broke toward him on the edge of the Wetherfold box. He hadn't touched it yet. He was still two strides away.
His ghost wasn't.
Kit watched the grey number ten take one touch onto his right foot and shift his hips as if he meant to curl it into the far corner. Then, instead, he drilled it low toward the near one. Kit watched the grey Aled read the hips and dive the wrong way, full length, gloves out, magnificent and useless. He watched the grey ball skid across the wet turf and tuck itself into the bottom corner.
Around it, grey Ashgill players were already wheeling away with their arms up, toward the forty-odd fans who'd followed them over the Pennines.
The real ball was still rolling toward the real number ten. The real Aled was bouncing on his toes, set and ready and completely unaware.
Above the centre circle, the green dots burned on.
Seventy yards from his own goal, with no way on earth to get there in time, Kit understood, with a clarity he had never once felt on a football pitch, that in five seconds Wetherfold Town were going to lose.
Comments (0)