Heartland (2 page)

Tom Catesby, Tommy Catesby, voices shouted. Rob felt his dad's grip on him get tighter, his arm across Rob's chest, his fingers digging into his shoulder, his other arm held out, shaking hands, fending people off. Then a song: Tommy, Tommy Catesby. Over and over. His dad's arm tighter and tighter across his chest, Rob wriggling around, not breathing properly.

Then the crowd opened up and the singing died down. They'd got to the wrong side of a crush barrier and found a bit of space and Rob could breathe again. His dad bent to check he was OK and his coat was done up properly. They were behind the goal, the newly painted posts gleaming. At the other end of the ground, beyond the glow of the lights, you could see the dark bulk of the hill and part of the castle, the same view from the end of their street but close-up here, dark against the reddish, light-bleached clouds.

His dad signed a few programmes and scraps of paper, didn't say much, didn't have to. Rob had known his dad had been a footballer before then, knew he'd played for the Wolves as a young man, knew he'd been injured and now went to work the same as everyone else's dad. It hadn't seemed very important to him until that night.

They left with a few minutes to go, more ruffled hair and slaps on the back, with the Wolves six-up. On the way out they'd bumped into Adnan and Zubair with their old man, coming out of another turnstile. They'd talked about it the next day at school. It was how they'd become friends.

The ground didn't last that much longer, of course. It slid away into the limestone workings not long after the Wolves game: subsidence, a falling away. The new floodlights rusted along with everything else. The Wolves themselves almost disappeared completely, relegation after relegation, bankruptcy. The Cinderheath works in the same state, finished, a brown chain slung between the iron gates. The gantry raining flakes of rust on the streets around it until they pulled it down.

There were the flashes of thousands of photographs all being taken at the same time,
diamond patterns across the screen. The flashes illuminated the clubhouse: a hundred or so burgers, cigarettes and pints half to mouths. Rob saw Rodney James, a bloke he'd played with here and at Stourbridge, wearing his postman's uniform. Rodney had been at Crewe, won a Jamaica cap as a kid. Rob tried to motion to him to come and sit down, didn't know if Rodney was ignoring him because of who he was sitting with or if he just hadn't seen him.

The flashes came like explosions through the room. The stadium crowd looked like they were sitting miles from the pitch. It was usually a baseball ground; had seen nothing like this, though.

They'm lovin it, ay they, the Japanese.

They'm purrin on a good show.

There were St George's flags everywhere, emblazoned, place names, Harlow, Lincoln, Kidderminster.

Slow seconds before the kick-off. Rob thought about his old man, his silence in the crowd's raucousness, his blue eyes in his drinker's face.

There were nights when Tom was drinking when the change in him came early.
That transformation into somebody else: a younger, better self. Sometimes it didn't come at night at all, but in the middle of the afternoon if he'd gone for a pint in the Lion's tiled bar or he'd had a couple of early cans with Kathleen gone out or even if he'd walked up the road and got the bus up into Dudley. The car – cars, decent ones too – gone years ago now, which was one of the things he might dwell on as he went over how things had turned out.

It never seemed to last, that feeling, no matter how much he wanted it to, and he did want it to, to be a good husband, father, man, whatever that meant these days. The one sure thing was that it didn't last. Sometimes it didn't come at all. Sometimes, depending on what he'd been drinking, how much, how quickly, it could last all night. Not very often, though. Usually it would be for the length of a swallow or a turn of the head. If Kathleen or Rob or the telly said the wrong thing – and you could never predict what the wrong thing might be – it was gone. His own moods were a mystery even to him, like the weather or a run of form.

When it did come, this feeling, Tom really was someone else. The glow of the television or the streetlights on the estate became the lights of stadiums and furnaces, illuminating the sky, and instead of his slippered feet, cut open these days to ease aching toes, ankles, knees, there were
lightweight boots, the sort he'd seen Kocsis, Czibor and Puskas wear on the mud and grass at Molineux, or there were work boots crunching the ice along Cinderheath Lane on the way to work. There was the roar of the crowd, the roar of a furnace. Then the long crunch of a knee disintegrating under the Molineux lights, the way his studs caught in the mud, the weight of his body twisting the wrong way. He knew it was bad straight away. Then the long factory-siren wail of a world disintegrating.

It's bad news, Thomas.

Yome finished, son.

Cinderheath works will close with immediate effect.

They've let me go, Dad. I just ay good enough.

All finished.

Come on England, Rob muttered into his pint.

Here we am, his dad said quietly.

England banged it down the middle and Heskey went up and won it easily, murdered Walter Samuel, and for a moment it looked like Owen was on to it.

Goo on! Strangled shouts.

It came to nothing but Heskey would win them all afternoon, especially with Ayala out. They'd be shit-scared of Heskey. Rob thought about the Munich game – Heskey battering German defenders out of the way – and everyone knew how scared of Owen Argentina were.

There was a story Rob wanted to tell. It was about lots of things, he thought, but mainly about how they were all a long way from being finished just yet. He'd start it with something like, I was born on 15th September 1973 at Wordseley Hospital, my dad a professional footballer turned foundry worker, my mom a cleaner. He'd start it with a man sat staring at the canal worrying about his job. He'd start it with the idea of just walking away from your life,
just leaving it all behind, of somehow starting anew. He'd go back and forth over things, the way your mind works, he thought, piecing things together, ideas of blood and fire, blood and rust. Silence. Absence.

Rob sat on an old PE bench he'd dragged outside and looked at the canal,
at a half-loaf of bread floating in the water, the pieces of bread spotted with mould and in a row like dominoes.

Iss too late now, he said into the phone.

It ay. Iss never too late, son, Jim replied. He never gave up, Rob would give him that.

I know what I'm doing.

I doh believe yer do.

Iss ower team.

It ay ower team no more, mate. It ay never bin yower team any road. Sunday football, for Christ's sake. Yome better than that, son.

Cinderheath Sunday Football Club were due to play Cinderheath Muslim Community FC in the last game of the North Dudley & Tipton Football League (Division 1) season. The winners would take the league title. This was hardly something that would usually get national media coverage, but with the terrorist arrests and the local elections, the tabloids had got hold of the story – while they were up here looking for the Taliban – and the next thing was that it was a ‘match that could spark a Black Country race war'.

When did the rivalry between the two sides begin, Mr Khan? the Radio 4 interviewer had asked Joey Khan, in that tone of voice reserved for exotic stories about life in the provinces.

Ooh, I should say abaht 1095.

There was a pause.

The first Crusade?

He'd meant it as a joke – a sideswipe at his son who'd stopped playing sport and started growing a beard, learning the Qur'an off by heart, travelling all across Dudley to go to that new ramshackle mosque – but nobody was laughing any more.

It is ower team, whether we like it or not. Any road, iss onny a game, Rob muttered into the phone.

Onny a game! We doh care who pays for we shirts. Now yer really do sahnd like one o them.

Look, I cor talk abaht it now, Uncle Jim. I'll pop rahnd later any road, see if yer want anything doing.

All right, son, I know yome onny tryin to do the right thing but –

Somebody nicked me flag off me car. Con yer believe it?

The front door's gooin. I'll atta move. More bad news, I bet yer. An doh talk to me abaht flags, mate. Wait till yer see em dahn here.

Rob shook his head, continued to worry about his job. The school had a new Head Teacher. She'd started after Christmas and it was becoming clear that she had different ideas to the last Head, Mr Cummings, who'd retired. Rob's position wasn't secure. No contract, just sessional rates, and a vague agreement about what he was meant to be doing. It had been something to tide him over, something he'd drifted into during a difficult time, when Karen had left and he'd stopped playing football. Well, football that paid. He'd written all of his clubs down for one of the kids he worked with the other day: Cinderheath Juniors; the Villa as a trainee; Wrexham (in digs for a season in the rain); Kidder Harriers; Hereford; Aberystwyth (in digs for three months in the rain); Moor Green; a pre-season at the Wolves, somehow; Stourbridge; Gornal; Tipton; Marconi; Cinderheath Firsts and now Cinderheath Sunday.
He'd spent twelve seasons making a long, steady slide into nonentity.

He was packing it all in now, though, he promised; the farce against the mosque team was going to be his last game of football.

He lit a cigarette to confirm his retirement. Rob was timetabled to support a Year 9 boy called Kelvin, which he enjoyed, but Kelvin hadn't been at school for the last two weeks since he was found sniffing paint thinner in the Technology stock cupboard and sent home for a couple of days until his mother came up to school. The problem was, there was no contacting his mother, phone numbers dead, no response to any letter. Rob had banged on their flat door a couple of times, but there was no sign of life. The neighbour had said she hadn't seen them for weeks and wasn't missing them either, with the dog barking and the music and the parade of different men. Rob had written an email about it to the Head of Year and Educational Welfare. Nobody seemed to be moving very swiftly. Kelvin had said his nan lived up Kates Hill. Rob thought he could check somehow.

When he'd been a kid at the school, Rob used to scramble over the fence just here, outside the fire escape next to the Sports Hall, and pull himself up the embankment with great big handfuls of grass to get to the pork sandwich shop or the chippie, exactly the same as the kids did now. They all used to do it – they'd have races up there. Adnan was always the quickest, of course, before he started getting on with his work instead of messing about like that, Rob at his heels, a pack of other kids behind them.

As if on cue, there was a scuffle from behind the fire-exit door and three lads came bursting out, blinking in the sunlight.

Shit! they shouted in unison, almost running straight
into Rob. They turned and ran back in, falling over each other, one of them sprawling across the shiny, just-polished corridor floor. The boy who fell was Rob's cousin, Michael.

Shit, did he see we? Michael giggled.

Course I did, Michael, arr, Rob shouted through the swinging door. He'd been weighing up what to say at home because Michael had been out of lessons too much lately but, after all, his uncle had enough on his plate with the election.

One of the boys dawdled in the corridor and turned back to stand in the doorway. It was Mohammed, cockier than the other two, than Michael certainly, who until recently had been happy to stay in his room tip-tapping on computer games. Michael and Mohammed had become mates lately. Mohammed was wearing a camouflage jacket from Bilston Market with ‘US Army' written on a panel on the front. All the kids were wearing them. Rob had heard Michael ask his Aunty Pauline for one. She'd said he had a perfectly good Nike jacket she'd bought for him at the Merry Hill and what did he want one off the market for? Mohammed had customized his with a green star and crescent drawn in permanent marker on the sleeve.

All right, Rob?

All right, Mo. What yow doin aht here?

Doh say nuthin, Rob.

I woh if yow goo back to yer lesson.

Let me goo to the shop?

No.

Giss a fag, Rob.

No.

Why?

Yow ay old enough an cigarettes am bad for yer.

I got me own.

Mohammed took a lighter from his pocket and flicked it on and off.

Yer doh need one o these, then.

Footballers shunt smoke.

I ay a footballer.

Yer was a footballer.

Was is different.

Am yer play in against the mosque?

I am.

Mosque's gonna beat yer, man.

Probly.

They got some sick players.

Good.

They'm gonna beat yer, man. You know Tayub?

Arr.

Yeah, you know him? He's a sick player, man.

He's quick. Me an his brother, Adnan, we used to play in the same team, we went all through school together. And his brother, Zubair. He's me mate. He's a good player. Too old now, though.

Rob grinned, thinking about Zubair. I've still got a season left in me, he'd said every summer for the last three or four years.

Adnan the mujahedin, Mohammed said.

What did yer say?

Nuthin. Yow shunt play for them racists, man.

I cor play for the mosque.

Yow should become a Muslim, Rob, play for Man United.

I'll think abaht it. Goo back to yer lesson.

Rob could've told him that he'd played against Man United once. He'd marked Ryan Giggs, not long after he changed his name from Wilson, not long before he got in the first team. Rob had played well, really well, one of those games, like he knew what was going to happen before it did, so he was always there, tackles, headers, interceptions. Just near the end he'd nicked it off Giggs's toes, hit a
pass out to Froggatt's feet. There'd been a round of applause from the few hundred on the sides. Everyone shook his hand and slapped him on the back at full-time. He thought he was making it then.