The coach smelled of cheese-and-onion crisps and a pine-tree air freshener that had given up years ago. It belonged to Ainsley's Coaches of Wetherfold. On Saturdays it belonged to the club, and on Sundays, according to the stickers in the back window, it took pensioners to garden centres.
Kit sat halfway down on the left, where he always sat, with his kit bag on the seat beside him so nobody would ask to sit there. Nobody did. Across the aisle, Aled was reading questions from a pub-quiz book to Marcus and getting furious whenever Marcus knew the answer. Jaylen was asleep with his mouth open and his hood pulled over his eyes. Two rows ahead, Theo Ackroyd sat alone in a pair of white headphones the size of dessert bowls, watching clips of Brantholme Town on a tablet and making notes.
Kit watched the motorway go by and thought about three words.
NEXT: 45+
Brantholme was ninety minutes away, the far side of Sheffield: a small town with a football club that had spent a lot of money quite recently and wanted you to know. They were a division above Wetherfold. They trained four mornings a week. Their manager had played in the Championship and wore a gilet on the touchline. Kit had thought Mags was being unkind about them until the coach turned into the car park and he saw the ground.
Cinder Lane, which a sign over the turnstiles insisted was now the PENNANT GLAZING STADIUM, had a stand along each side and a roof over both ends. It had an electronic scoreboard in the corner that showed the time and the score and, in between, an advert for a carpet warehouse. It had a hospitality lounge with tinted windows. It had a plastic pitch, bright green and perfectly flat, full of tiny black rubber crumbs that got into your socks the moment you stepped on it and were still falling out of your trainers a week later.
The away dressing room had underfloor heating.
"Boys," said Aled, from the showers, in a voice of real emotion. "Boys. There are eight. And they're all hot."
"Get out of the showers, Aled," said Terry.
"I'm checking them. Somebody's got to check them." A tap squeaked. Another. "This one's got a massage setting."
"Aled."
Terry read the team out with his back to the tactics board, which was magnetic and had tiny plastic players on it, and which he was pretending not to be impressed by. Theo up front on his own. Jaylen on the right. Kit's name came near the end, after the word "subs", between Liam Dunn and Sonny Kaye, and Terry didn't look at him when he said it.
Kit had known. It still felt like a hand on his chest, pushing.
â—† â—† â—†
The Wetherfold fans had come on two coaches.
Nadia had put a post up on Tuesday asking who wanted to travel, and a hundred and eighty people had said yes, which was about a hundred and fifty more than usual. They filled a corner of the away end in maroon scarves and bobble hats, under an enormous flag with a ram on it that somebody had painted on a bedsheet. Jogging past them in the warm-up, Kit saw a familiar shape at the front with its arms folded.
Dennis had never been to an away game in his life. Everyone knew that. He said away games were for people with nothing better to do.
He was here.
He caught Kit looking and scowled, as if Kit had seen something private.
The dugouts were Perspex shelters with padded seats, like the bus stops of a much richer town. Kit sat at the far end, next to Norman and the kit skip. Norman had a blanket over his knees and spare laces in his cardigan pocket, and he didn't say anything, which Kit was grateful for.
The match went the way it was always going to go.
Brantholme were fitter and quicker and better, and they moved the ball on the plastic pitch as if it were on rails. Their centre-forward, a tall Irishman called Rourke, had the calm of someone who was paid to do nothing but play football. Theo spent twenty minutes chasing shadows on his own, and on the twenty-first he got the ball, turned his marker inside out, and was kicked so high into the air that his orange boots went above his head.
"Welcome to non-league, son," said the Brantholme centre-half, hauling him up by his shirt.
Wetherfold took the free kick, lost the ball within three passes, and watched Brantholme go the length of the pitch in four. Rourke finished it with a tap-in so casual he barely broke stride. On forty-one minutes their left-back hit a shot from thirty yards that clipped Marcus's knee and floated over Aled's fingers like a leaf coming off a tree, and it was two–nil.
Terry, at the edge of his technical area, took his glasses off and put them back on again, which was what he did instead of swearing.
On the scoreboard, the clock reached 45:00. The referee turned to the benches and held up two fingers.
Kit's heart began to hammer.
Above the centre circle of the bright green plastic pitch, fifty miles from the Pinfold, a black rectangle with a silver rim blinked into being. Its dots lit up.
+2
Relief went through him so hard his hands shook. Home or away, Norman had said. As long as the ram's on your chest. Kit was wearing a training top over his maroon shirt, with the badge underneath, and the board had come for him anyway.
He waited for the world to double.
It didn't. The dots rippled.
ON THE BENCH
Then:
WINDOW: 0.0 SEC
Out on the pitch, twenty-two players ran about in their ordinary single bodies, casting ordinary single shadows under the floodlights. No ghosts. No grey future sliding out ahead of them. Rourke got the ball on the edge of the Wetherfold box, and nobody, least of all Kit, knew what he would do with it.
He shot wide. Kit breathed out.
"Up, is it?" said Norman quietly. He didn't look round. He was rolling a pair of socks into a ball.
"It says I'm on the bench."
Norman considered this.
"Cheeky beggar," he said, and very nearly smiled.
When the referee blew for half-time, the dots changed again.
HALF TIME
NEXT: 90+
Then it was gone.
â—† â—† â—†
In the heated dressing room, Terry gave the speech he always gave at two–nil down, which involved the word "character" and a metaphor about static caravans in high winds that nobody could quite follow.
Kit caught him at the door afterwards.
"Put me on."
"I heard you on Thursday."
"I'm not saying now. Whenever you want. Just before—"
"Before ninety. I know. I've written it down." Terry tapped the clipboard. "Kit, I've got to manage the game in front of me, not the one in your head." He went out, and the door eased shut behind him on a hydraulic hinge, because even the doors at Brantholme were better than theirs.
On the hour, Terry sent Liam Dunn on for a tired midfielder. On seventy-two minutes, Theo won the ball on halfway, went past one man, then another, cut inside the centre-half who'd kicked him, and bent a shot into the top corner from twenty-five yards so cleanly that for a moment nobody in the away end made a sound. None of them had seen a Wetherfold player do anything like it.
Then they made all the sound at once.
Theo stood in front of them with his arms out. Halfway through the celebration he seemed to realise he didn't know whose badge to kiss, so he patted the ram twice, awkwardly, like a man patting a dog he's been told is friendly.
Two–one.
On eighty-three minutes, Sonny Kaye went on for a limping right-back. Two changes made. One left.
Kit had been warming up behind the goal since seventy minutes. He came back and stood in front of the dugout, stretching his hamstrings slowly and obviously, like a man trying to catch a waiter's eye.
The scoreboard said 88:04.
"Terry."
"Sit down, Kit."
"Terry, there's two minutes—"
"I know how long there is. I've got a clock." Terry didn't turn round. "I might need a defender. They'll throw everything at us."
"We're losing."
"Sit down, Kit."
Behind him, Kit heard the blanket fall.
Norman had got to his feet. It took him a moment, and his knees went off like a pair of starting pistols, and when he was up he walked the three steps to the edge of the technical area and stood beside Terry, who was a foot taller and sixteen years younger and suddenly looked a bit like a boy.
"Terence," said Norman.
Nobody called Terry Terence. Terry turned round.
"Boxing Day, 1971," said Norman. "You were sat on the wall behind the Lake end with your father and a bag of pear drops. How old were you?"
Terry stared at him. "Seven."
"And what did you see?"
A long pause. On the pitch, Rourke headed a corner over the bar, and the away end howled with relief.
"You scored twice," Terry said slowly. "After ninety. My dad said you must have done a deal with somebody." He swallowed. "They called you Late Norrie."
"Put the lad on, Terence," said Norman. "Before ninety. I'm only asking you the once."
Terry looked at Norman. Then at Kit. Then at the clock. 88:39.
"Kit," he said. "Top off. Now."
Kit's training top was off before Terry finished the word. Wayne Firth, Terry's assistant, dived into the kit skip for the numbered cards, dropped half of them, and came up holding a 9 and a 14. Kit sprinted to the halfway line, where the assistant referee was already lifting his flag to tell the referee there was a change coming.
All it needed now was for the ball to go out of play.
It didn't.
Brantholme had the ball, and Brantholme were not stupid. They had seen the maroon number nine bouncing on his toes at the white line. They took it into the corner in front of the Wetherfold fans and kept it there. They played it back to the centre-half, who played it to the keeper, who rolled it out to the full-back, who put his foot on it and looked at the sky.
"KICK IT OUT!" Kit shouted, at nobody in particular. "SOMEBODY KICK IT OUT!"
Nobody kicked it out. The Brantholme fans started to whistle.
89:30.
89:45.
Kit stood on the painted line with his heels on the wrong side of it and his heart going like a drum in a tin shed. Beside him, the assistant referee held his flag up patiently. Up in the away end, Dennis had unfolded his arms and was gripping the rail with both hands.
89:58.
89:59.
The numbers on the scoreboard clicked over to 90:00, and above the centre circle a board that only Kit could see lit up green.
He was still standing on the wrong side of the white line.
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