Kit had never been a shouter.
Some strikers talked all game: to defenders, to referees, to their own reflections in the windows of the away dressing room. Kit had always kept his mouth shut and his head down, partly because the coaches at the academy had told him to, years ago, and partly because he had never been sure enough of anything on a football pitch to say it out loud.
He filled his lungs until his ribs creaked.
"ALED! LOW LEFT! LOW! LEFT!"
The wind took most of it. What was left travelled seventy yards across wet grass, over the heads of nineteen players and one outraged referee, and arrived in the Wetherfold penalty area sounding more like a seagull than a sentence.
But Aled's head twitched.
For half a heartbeat the grey world didn't change. Then the ghost of Aled Pryce stuttered, the same flicker Kit's own ghost had made when he'd started to run, and redrew itself. The grey number ten still dropped his hip toward the far corner. The grey ball still went low toward the near one. This time, though, the grey keeper didn't buy the hips. He held his feet a fraction longer, then went down to his left, long and low, and one grey glove got there.
Kit breathed out.
In the real world, the number ten took his touch, shifted his hips, and drilled it toward the near post. Aled went with it, all six foot four of him folding onto the turf like a deckchair, and the ball hit the tips of his fingers and spun off the outside of the post and behind.
Corner.
The Ashgill number ten put both hands on his headband and screamed at the sky. Aled bounced up, punched the post in celebration, clutched his hand, and roared about that instead. Behind the goal, the under-elevens went berserk.
Some referees let you take the corner. This one had clearly booked a table somewhere. He looked at his watch, put the whistle to his lips, and blew three times.
Wetherfold Town 1, Ashgill Rangers 1.
Above the centre circle, the green dots rippled.
FULL TIME
DECISIVE ACTIONS: 2
WINDOW: 5.0 → 5.1 SEC
NEXT: 45+
"Next what?" Kit said out loud.
"You what?" Duggan had appeared at his elbow with his hand out and a face like a slapped ham.
"Nothing. Well played."
Duggan shook his hand as if he were trying to wring water out of it. "Jammy," he said. "Jammy, jammy git." It sounded almost affectionate.
When Kit looked back at the centre circle, the board had gone. The ghosts went with it, all of them at once, as though someone had pulled a plug out of the back of the afternoon. The world was single again: one of every player, one ball, one Terry. It looked thinner than he remembered, like a photocopy of itself.
Then his nose started to bleed.
He felt it before he saw it, a slow warm run over his top lip. He wiped it with the back of his hand, and the hand came away red, so he wiped the hand on his shirt. That was the one advantage of playing in maroon.
He walked off with his head tipped back, which meant he couldn't see where he was going, which meant he nearly walked into Dennis, who was leaning over the rail by the tunnel with his arms folded.
Dennis considered him for a long moment.
"Better," Dennis said, and went home.
◆ ◆ ◆
The home dressing room at the Pinfold had one working shower, a radiator that only came on in May, and a smell that had soaked into the plaster over a hundred and thirty years: liniment, mud, cheap shower gel, and underneath it all something that was probably the drains. Kit sat on the bench under his peg with a wad of paper towel pressed to his nose while the rest of the squad yelled, flicked towels, and sang the club's only song, which was mostly the word "Fold" shouted at different pitches.
Norman Beck came round with the laundry sack. Norman was seventy-eight, wore a brown cardigan in all weathers, and had washed Wetherfold Town's kit since 1974. He held out his hand for Kit's shirt, then stopped. He looked at the paper towel. He looked at Kit's face a beat longer than he needed to.
"Forward," Norman said.
"What?"
"Tip your head forward, not back. Back's for amateurs. You'll swallow it and be sick on my floor."
Kit tipped his head forward. Norman took the shirt, and for a moment he seemed about to say something else. Instead he said, "Late one, that," and moved on down the bench, picking up socks.
The door banged open. Aled Pryce came in, still in his gloves, still dripping, and pointed at Kit with his good hand.
"Right," he said. "Kit Rawley. Explain."
The dressing room, sensing entertainment, went quiet.
"Explain what?"
"Don't 'explain what' me, mun. Two years you've been here. In two years you've said about eleven words to me, and four of them were 'my ball, Al'. And today, out of nowhere, you scream 'low left' across the whole of West Yorkshire—"
"It was a good save."
"It was a magnificent save, and I'll be telling my grandchildren about it, but that's not the point. You shouted it before he hit it." Aled turned to the room for support. "Before he'd touched it! He hadn't even got it yet!"
"I guessed," said Kit.
"You guessed."
"He always goes near post."
"He's played us once. He was injured for that one. He sat on the bench eating a Twix." Aled's eyes narrowed. "And you never said whose left. Mine or yours? Seventy yards away, facing the other way, and you just shout 'left' like it's obvious."
"You went the right way."
"I went my way," said Aled, "on the grounds that I'm the important one." He peeled off his gloves and went to fight Jaylen for the shower, and the room laughed and let it go.
Kit didn't laugh. He sat with the paper towel and the copper taste in his mouth and thought about green dots that weren't there anymore.
Terry came in last, as always, with his clipboard and a biro that said POLLITT'S – LIFE'S BETTER STATIC.
"Ashgill," he announced. "Top of the league. A point. I'd have sold my own nan for that at half-time, and she's a lovely woman. Training Tuesday. Don't eat rubbish." He stopped in front of Kit. "And you. Where've you been hiding that?"
"In the Lake, mostly."
Terry snorted. "Coming to the Fleece?"
"Not tonight."
"Suit yourself." Terry squeezed his shoulder and went to talk to Marcus about zonal marking.
Kit dug his phone out of his bag. One new message, from Craig at Whiteacre Linen: Need your answer by Weds re supervisor. Saturdays non negotiable mate. Then a thumbs-up, as though a thumbs-up made it negotiable after all.
Below it, in drafts, the other message was still waiting.
Terry, I'm done after today. Thanks for everything. Honestly.
Terry was ten feet away, cleaning his glasses on a towel that said PROPERTY OF WETHERFOLD TOWN AFC in faded letters. Kit's thumb hovered over the screen.
He put the phone back in the bag.
◆ ◆ ◆
Becca came round at eight with a bag of chips and her lanyard still round her neck, on her way to a night shift at the Royal.
"Sit," she said, before she'd taken her coat off. "Look at me. No, at the light."
She shone her phone torch into one of his eyes, then the other, with the brisk, bored competence of someone who'd done it four hundred times that month. She was three years younger than Kit and had been bossing him about since she could talk.
"What day is it?"
"Saturday."
"Who did you play?"
"Ashgill Rangers."
"Who's the manager of Wetherfold Town?"
"A man who sells caravans."
"Correct." She clicked the torch off. "Pupils are fine. Headache?"
"Bit."
"Sick?"
"No."
"Then you haven't got a concussion. You've got a centre-half." She dropped onto the sofa beside him and tore the chip paper open between them, and vinegar steam filled the flat. "Nadia put your goal up on the club page. Forty thousand views, Kit. For Wetherfold. Half the comments are about you shouting."
She showed him. Nadia Farooq was seventeen and filmed every home game from the top step of the Wool Shed on a phone gimbal she'd bought with her birthday money. In the clip you could see Aled's kick, Duggan's header, and Kit already running into space before the ball had even come down. Then the goal, and the pile-on, and a minute later a small maroon figure on the halfway line bending double and screaming something that the phone's microphone caught as "—OW LEFT!" A full two seconds before the Ashgill number ten touched the ball.
The top comment said: bro called it before the lad even had it??
The one under that said: and this is why i don't bet on non league
"So," said Becca. "Did you send it?"
She was the only person he'd told. She'd been there the night he decided, with a takeaway and a spreadsheet of what the supervisor's job paid.
"No."
"Why not?"
Kit picked up a chip, looked at it, and put it down.
"Becs," he said. "If somebody told you they'd seen something. Not blurry. Clear as that telly. Something that hadn't happened yet."
She looked at him for a long time. It was the same look she'd given him at eighteen, when he'd come home from Ravensmoor City with a letter that thanked him for his commitment to the academy programme, and tried to tell her he was fine.
"Then I'd say they'd taken an elbow to the head," she said slowly, "and they shouldn't drive a van full of hotel sheets down the M62 on Monday morning. Why?"
"No reason. It's a joke."
"It isn't."
"It's a bad joke."
She let it go, or let him think she had. At the door, zipping her coat, she said without turning round, "You looked happy. In the video, after the goal. I haven't seen you look like that since you were seventeen."
Then she went to work. Kit sat in the flat above the bookmaker's with the cold chips and the smell of vinegar and did not sleep much at all.
◆ ◆ ◆
On Sunday afternoon, Wetherfold Town Women played at the Pinfold.
Kit stood at the rail near the tunnel with his hood up, and nobody paid him any attention, which was normal. About sixty people had turned up. Somebody's toddler was eating a sausage roll on the wall. The women were playing Hebble Valley, and they were two–nil up, and they were better at keeping the ball than the men had been all season.
Kit didn't really watch. He watched the clock on his phone.
Eighty-nine. Ninety. The referee, a tall woman with a grey ponytail, turned to the benches and held up three fingers.
Kit looked at the centre circle.
Nothing.
No board. No green dots. No pale grey players running ahead of themselves across the grass. Just a football pitch in thin Sunday light, a crow on the crossbar, and the toddler, who had finished the sausage roll and started on the paper bag.
He waited out all three minutes. He waited through the final whistle and the handshakes and the players drifting off toward the tunnel with their arms round each other.
Nothing.
It should have been a relief. It meant he wasn't going mad. Or it meant he'd been concussed and was getting better, which was almost the same thing. It meant he could text Craig in the morning, send the draft to Terry, and hang his boots on the nail in the hall like any other twenty-nine-year-old. He stood there with his hands in his pockets and waited to feel relieved. Instead, something dropped inside him like a lift with the cable cut.
"Doesn't work from the stand, lad."
Kit turned round.
Norman Beck was sitting on a white plastic chair outside the kit room door with a flask of tea balanced on his knee. He wasn't looking at Kit. He was looking at the centre circle, at the empty air where the board had hung, as if he could still see the shape of it.
"Never did," said Norman.
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