Kit made up his mind not to look on Thursday morning, in the doctor's waiting room, sitting under a poster about blood pressure while a toddler emptied a rack of leaflets onto the carpet one at a time.
The doctor was brisk and kind and wore her glasses on a chain. She shone a light up his nose, took his blood pressure twice, asked whether he'd been under any stress lately, and nodded at his answer as if she'd heard it before. "Fragile vessel, probably," she said, writing. "You footballers take a lot of knocks. Use this cream twice a day, and come back if it happens again."
It would happen again. Kit knew that the way he knew when a kettle was about to click.
The leaks had slowed since Monday. One on Wednesday night, at the chippy: a grey hand reaching for the vinegar before its owner did. None at all on Thursday. It was as if the thing inside him were cooling down, now that he'd stopped feeding it.
Use it when it matters, Norman had said. Not every time it's there. So on the walk home, Kit did the sums. Saturday was Morland Colliery at home in the league: a middle-of-the-table side on a middle-of-October afternoon, three points that were worth having but not worth the grey lorries. The Saturday after that was Cleckfield in the Cup, with the Pinfold on the line. That one mattered more than anything had ever mattered.
So: rest it. Let it settle. Keep the tank full for the landlords.
It was good logic. He went over it every night that week, and by Saturday he almost believed it.
◆ ◆ ◆
Five hundred and forty people came to the Pinfold to watch Wetherfold play Morland Colliery, more than had come to a league game in three years. Nadia said it was the videos. Mags said it was the weather. Terry, who had sold caravans for thirty years and knew a crowd when he saw one, said nothing and looked quietly pleased.
Kit and Theo started up front together for the first time.
"Little and large," Terry said in the dressing room, though they were the same height, and nobody had the heart to tell him.
Dennis was back in his spot at the front of the Wool Shed. Behind the goal at the Lake end, where the under-elevens sat on the wall, a small boy in a bobble hat was holding up a piece of cardboard on which somebody had written, in felt-tip: WAIT FOR 90!!
Kit saw it in the warm-up and looked away.
The first half was scrappy and cold, and not much happened in it. Morland played two banks of four with the air of men who'd driven a long way and would like to drive home with something. Theo got kicked twice. Jaylen crossed to a teammate twice, which for Jaylen was a revolution. At forty-five minutes the referee held up one finger, and the board lit up over the centre circle.
+1
WINDOW: 5.3 SEC
The ghosts came.
Kit had wondered whether he could stop them. He couldn't. They arrived the way they always did, all at once, twenty-one pale shapes sliding out ahead of their owners. What he found, in that first long minute, was that he could choose where to put his eyes. If he fixed them on the real ball, and only the real ball, the grey world didn't disappear, but it faded, pushed out to the edges like smoke in the corners of a room.
It was like trying not to hear someone shouting your name. He managed it anyway. He watched the real ball bobble about in midfield and did not once look at where it was going.
Nothing happened. The whistle went.
HALF TIME
DECISIVE ACTIONS: 0
NEXT: 90+
His nose didn't bleed. His head didn't ache. He walked off feeling almost normal, and told himself that was the point.
◆ ◆ ◆
Theo scored on fifty-seven minutes, a header from a Jaylen cross that arrived exactly where it was supposed to. The Pinfold made its falling-down-the-stairs noise. The boy behind the goal waved his cardboard sign above his head.
On eighty-one minutes, Morland equalised from a scramble: a corner, a ricochet, a toe-poke through a forest of legs that Aled never saw. One–one.
Kit told himself that was fine. A point was a point. You can't eat a point, Terry liked to say, but you can live on one.
Ninety minutes came. The referee held up three fingers, and the green dots burned into being above the centre circle.
+3
Behind the goal, the boy with the sign climbed up onto the wall. Kit felt the ground change around him, the way a room changes when somebody important walks in. Five hundred and forty people had been watching the clock for ten minutes, and now every one of them was watching him.
He looked at his boots.
Then he looked at the real ball, only the real ball, and chased it about like any other striker in the ninety-second minute of a league game in October: honest, tired, a step behind. Morland kept it well. They weren't trying to score. They wanted their point and their long drive home.
He almost made it.
At about ninety-two and a half minutes, Morland broke down the left. Kit was near halfway, watching the real ball roll toward their winger, and it was only because the winger looked up that Kit looked up with him, into the grey world he'd spent three minutes ignoring.
The ghost ball was already in the net.
The grey winger had cut inside and curled it toward the far post. The grey Aled had dived and got nowhere near. The grey Morland players were already celebrating, arms up, piling on each other in front of the Wool Shed.
Kit filled his lungs.
"ALED—"
The real winger cut inside and curled it toward the far post, and Aled dived, and got nowhere near.
The real Morland players celebrated exactly as their ghosts had, in exactly the same place, in front of the Wool Shed.
Nobody else in the Pinfold made a sound.
The referee blew for full time thirty seconds after the restart. Above the centre circle, the dots rippled.
FULL TIME
DECISIVE ACTIONS: 0
WINDOW: 5.3 → 5.3 SEC
NEXT: 45+
His nose didn't bleed. His head didn't ache. He felt completely fine, and it was the worst he had felt in a long time.
Walking off, he passed the boy with the cardboard sign. The boy wasn't holding it up anymore. It hung face down from one hand, and the felt-tip had started to run in the drizzle.
At the tunnel, Dennis leaned over the rail with his arms folded. He looked at Kit for a long moment.
"Worse," said Dennis, and went home.
◆ ◆ ◆
In the dressing room, Aled sat with his gloves in his lap and his head down.
"My fault," he said, to nobody. "I went early. I should have stayed on my feet. I was expecting near post, and he's gone far, and I've just—" He shook his head. "My fault."
It wasn't. Kit knew exactly whose fault it was. He had seen it, in grey, a full second before it happened. One more second would have been enough. Four more would have been plenty.
He said nothing. It was the most cowardly thing he'd ever done, and he did it sitting down.
Wetherfold dropped to nineteenth, one place above the relegation zone.
On Sunday, nothing leaked. Kit walked to the shop for milk and bread and watched the whole world stay single and solid all the way there and all the way back: no grey pigeons, no grey cars, no mugs reached for before they were wanted. On Monday he drove the Leeds run and the Harrogate run without once pulling into a lay-by.
So Norman was right. Rest it, and it settled.
It had cost three points and a small boy's cardboard sign.
◆ ◆ ◆
Terry rang on Monday evening. "Come to the yard," he said, and hung up before Kit could ask why.
Pollitt's Leisure Homes sat on the bypass between a tyre place and a closed-down carpet warehouse, behind a fence strung with plastic bunting that flapped all night in the wind off the moor. Forty static caravans stood in rows under the floodlights, cream and grey and pale green, with names on their sides like Windermere and Ullswater and Grasmere, as if people might forget they were caravans if you named them after lakes.
Terry's office was one of them: a thirty-two-foot Windermere that nobody had bought since 2014, with a gas fire, a kettle, a desk where the dining table should have been, and a framed photo on the wall of Terry shaking hands with a man from a caravan magazine.
Terry sat on the built-in sofa with two mugs of tea and a folder of fixtures. He didn't open the folder.
"Eleven years I've been managing that club," he said, once Kit had sat down. "Do you know what I've learned? Nowt. Every Saturday I think I've learned something, and every Saturday I'm wrong." He passed Kit a mug. "But I watch. I watch everything. And I've watched you for two years."
Kit held the tea and waited.
"Ashgill. Brantholme. Every game this season that's gone past ninety. The referee holds up his fingers, and you stop, and you look up. Over the centre spot. At nothing." Terry's voice was very even. "Saturday, you didn't. Saturday, at ninety, you looked at your boots. And we lost."
"Coincidence."
"Is it." Terry looked at the gas fire for a while. "Boxing Day, 1971. I've told you. The wall behind the Lake end, my dad's big coat, a bag of pear drops. I remember all of it. And I remember that at ninety minutes, when the referee looked at his watch, Norman Beck stopped running and looked straight up at the sky over the centre spot. As if something was hanging there. I thought he was praying." He turned back to Kit. "Then he scored twice."
The gas fire ticked.
"I was seven," said Terry. "I've never told a soul, because who would you tell? But I've been watching football for fifty-five years, son, and I've only ever seen two men do that."
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and behind his glasses his eyes were not a caravan salesman's eyes at all.
"So I'm asking you," he said. "What's up there?"
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