+5
Five minutes. Kit stared up at the green dots and waited for the world to double, and it didn't.
SUBSTITUTE
WAITING
"I know I'm waiting," Kit said out loud.
The assistant referee glanced at him. "You all right, pal?"
"Fine."
He wasn't. Out on the plastic pitch, every player still had only one body. Brantholme's right-back had the ball by the corner flag with his foot on top of it, and if he'd had a ghost it would have been doing exactly what he was doing: nothing, slowly, for as long as it took.
Before ninety, Kit had told Terry, as if he knew. He hadn't known anything. He'd guessed that the board needed him out there when it started, and now it had started, and here he was on the painted line, while the only thing that might save Wetherfold Town hung above the pitch doing nothing at all.
Two Brantholme players were shielding the ball in the corner now, backsides out, like bouncers at a door. Jaylen went in to try to win it.
Everybody who had ever watched Jaylen Osei play football knew what would happen next, and it did. He went through the back of the full-back like a runaway shopping trolley. The full-back went down clutching his calf. The Brantholme bench leapt up as one. The referee blew his whistle and showed Jaylen a yellow card.
The ball was dead.
For once in his life, Jaylen's worst decision had been exactly the right one.
"Change!" called the assistant referee, and waved Kit on.
Kit stepped over the white line.
The ghosts came on the instant his boot touched the pitch, as though somebody had flicked a switch in a second, invisible stadium laid over the first. Twenty-one pale grey players leaned out ahead of their owners. The grey full-back got up off the ground two seconds before the real one did, miraculously cured.
Above the centre circle, the dots rearranged themselves.
WINDOW: 5.1 SEC
"There you are," Kit breathed, and ran.
◆ ◆ ◆
Brantholme took the free kick short. Of course they did. They had five minutes to kill and a whole pitch to kill them on, and they had no intention of giving the ball back.
Kit didn't go and stand up front. He dropped into midfield and watched the ghosts.
Brantholme's number six had the ball. His ghost was already passing it: a flat ten-yard ball inside to their number eight, the kind of pass they'd played all afternoon, the kind you could play in your sleep on a pitch this flat. Kit saw the grey ball leave the grey foot. He saw where it would go.
He was standing there when it arrived.
It hit his shin and bobbled in front of him, and for a second he was just a man in the middle of a football pitch with the ball at his feet and no idea what to do with it. Then he looked up.
Theo's ghost was already running.
The real Theo was standing on the edge of the Brantholme back line with his hands on his hips, getting his breath back. His grey self had taken off, sharp and diagonal, into the gap between the centre-half and the left-back. It was the kind of run academies spend ten years teaching. Theo just didn't know he was about to make it.
Kit hit the ball into the space in front of the ghost.
If you could only see the real world, it was a terrible pass. It went straight into empty grass, forty yards from anyone in maroon, and on the Wetherfold bench Wayne Firth put both hands over his face. Then Theo saw it, and his ghost and his body became the same thing, and he was sprinting, orange boots flashing on the green plastic, past the centre-half before the centre-half had turned round.
The Brantholme keeper came racing off his line.
In the grey world, Theo shot early and low, and the keeper spread himself and blocked it with his knees.
"ROUND HIM!" Kit roared. "THEO! GO ROUND!"
The grey Theo flickered and redrew. He dropped a shoulder, took it wide of the grey keeper, and walked the ball into an empty net.
The real Theo did exactly the same.
Two–two.
The away end came apart. The bedsheet flag went up and nearly took out a floodlight. Theo ran past his own celebration, past the fans, straight to Kit, and grabbed him by both shoulders so hard it hurt.
"How did you—" he gasped. "I hadn't even moved—"
"Get back," said Kit. "They're coming."
◆ ◆ ◆
They came.
Brantholme went straight down the other end and won a corner, and every one of them went up for it except the keeper, who stood on the halfway line shouting. Kit went back too. Strikers always defended corners at Wetherfold, because there were never enough tall people.
The ghost corner was already on its way: whipped and vicious toward the near post, where the grey Rourke peeled off Marcus, met it on the run, and flicked it into the net off the inside of the post. There should have been a defender on that post. There wasn't.
Kit went and stood on it.
The real corner came in. Rourke peeled away and met it. Kit was on the line exactly where the grey ball wanted to go, and it hit him on the side of the head so hard his ears rang all over again. The ball looped up. Aled came out, caught it, and fell on it like a man shielding a newborn from the rain.
Something warm ran from Kit's nose onto his lip. He wiped it on his wrist. The board still said +5. By his reckoning there was about a minute left.
Aled was up. He kicked it long, as he always did. The ball came down on the right, and Jaylen Osei, eighteen years old and full of yellow card and fury, took it on his chest and set off.
Kit ran with him. He had no business running. His legs had spent ninety minutes on a padded seat, his head was pounding, and the two layers of the world smeared together whenever he turned too fast. He ran anyway, down the middle, while Jaylen flew down the right touchline, past one man, past two.
The ghost Jaylen reached the byline first. The ghost Jaylen crossed it. Kit watched the grey ball sail over the grey keeper, over the grey Kit, over everybody, and land in the away end, where a grey Dennis caught it against his chest.
"JAYLEN!" Kit screamed. "CUT IT BACK! BACK! PENALTY SPOT!"
He didn't know whether Jaylen could hear him. He didn't know whether Jaylen had ever listened to anybody.
The ghost flickered.
The grey Jaylen stopped dead, dragged the ball back from the byline with the sole of his boot, and rolled it along the plastic grass toward the penalty spot.
Kit was already there.
He didn't need the ghost this time. He didn't need to change anything. He just watched the ball roll toward him, flat and simple, the easiest chance of his life, and did what he had failed to do a week ago in front of Dennis and the Lake.
He put his foot through it.
Three–two.
He didn't remember much of the next minute. He remembered Jaylen's arms round his neck and Jaylen screaming "I CUT IT BACK! I CUT IT BACK!" as though he'd invented the idea. He remembered the away end, a wall of maroon toppling forward. He remembered that at the front of it, Dennis punched the air once, very hard, then looked round, embarrassed, and folded his arms again.
He remembered three blasts of the whistle, and the Brantholme manager sitting down on the plastic grass in his gilet.
And he remembered the board.
FULL TIME
DECISIVE ACTIONS: 4
WINDOW: 5.1 → 5.3 SEC
NEXT: 45+
◆ ◆ ◆
The nosebleed didn't stop.
It began as the usual warm drip in the tunnel and became, on the heated floor of the away dressing room, something that went through three towels and most of a roll of paper. Kit sat with his head forward, the way Norman had taught him, and watched red spots bloom on the white tiles between his boots, while the Brantholme physio asked, from somewhere above him, "When did he take a knock? Did he take a knock?"
"He headed a ball," said Aled.
"That doesn't do this."
"He headed it really hard."
Norman crouched beside him, knees popping, and pressed a cold wet flannel to the back of his neck. He said nothing. His hand was shaking, very slightly.
Terry stood in the doorway with his clipboard hanging from one hand. He looked at Norman. He looked at Kit. For a long moment he seemed about to ask something, and then he didn't, and Kit had never been so grateful to anyone.
"Coach leaves in twenty minutes," Terry told the room, and his voice was rough. "Anyone not on it is walking back to Wetherfold. Well done. Well done, lads."
The bleeding stopped eventually. Kit got on the coach last, grey-faced, with cotton wool up one nostril, and was met by a roar that rattled the windows and a chant, to no tune anyone could identify, that went: Ninety, ninety, ninety-FIVE, Kit Rawley's still alive!
It was a terrible song. It was the best one he'd ever heard.
Theo was sitting in Kit's seat.
"Sorry," said Theo, taking his headphones off. "Can I—is this all right?" He moved Kit's bag onto his own lap without being asked.
Kit sat down next to him. The coach pulled out onto the dark road toward the motorway. The singing went on for a long time, and then it didn't, and people began falling asleep against the windows.
"You said 'round him'," Theo said quietly, somewhere around Sheffield. "Before the keeper came off his line. And you played that ball before I'd made the run. I hadn't even decided to make it."
"Guessed," said Kit.
"You guess a lot."
"I've had a lot of practice."
Theo studied him for a while in the orange wash of the motorway lights. Then he put his headphones back on and closed his eyes, and Kit couldn't tell whether he'd been believed.
Kit leaned his head against the cold glass. His nose ached. His whole face ached. Outside, the M1 ran on in a river of red tail lights. A big white lorry was trundling along the inside lane fifty yards ahead of them.
As Kit watched, the lorry indicated, pulled out into the middle lane, and slid over in front of the coach.
Except it didn't. The real lorry was still in the inside lane with its indicator off. What had pulled out was a pale grey copy of it, see-through as breath, gliding into the middle lane all on its own.
Five seconds later, the real one indicated and followed it.
Kit sat up so fast his head swam. He stared out through the windscreen, past the driver's shoulder, at the black sky above the motorway.
No board. No referee. It was twenty to eight on a Saturday night on the M1, and there was no such thing as stoppage time.
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