Silent Striker (18 page)

Marcus couldn’t have put it better himself.

‘We need you back in the team.’

‘You could still win the final,’ Marcus said.

Horse scowled. ‘It’s all down to the players, right? I’m not dissing Leonard, but he’s not you. Whatever the coach says, he’s the chorus line, not the ballerina.’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Marcus dreamily. The sun was on his face and he closed his eyes. His mind drifted to the hearing test in the gloomy grey booth, and he shivered, remembering it.

Horse poked him on his shoulder. Marcus opened his eyes again.

‘You saw it in training. When we need the bullets, when we need the fat lady to come on and sing, close the ballet down, that’s you, not Leonard. You can’t have three takes to do something in a real match. It’s got to be – bang – first time.’

‘I’m the fat lady?’

‘Yeh.’

‘The ballerina?’

‘Yeh.’

‘The
fat
ballerina?’

They laughed.

‘You know what I mean. What I’m saying is —’

‘I get you,’ said Marcus. ‘But Leonard’s okay. He does a job.’

‘Yeh, well “okay” won’t be good enough.’

Marcus went back to practising left-right switches. Horse was suddenly busy on his phone.

Marcus tried flip-turn-pass, first left foot, then right. He noticed when he did the move on the tarmac, it made an exact pattern of sounds. He was about to move on to drag-backs when he spotted Jamil walking up, swinging his kit bag. Then Ira arrived, together with Leonard, both also in their football kit. The three of them ran over to him, Ira and Jamil grinning ear to ear.

‘What’s going on?’ Marcus called out to Horse. It had to be Horse.

Horse fessed up. ‘I rang them. Team meeting!’

Everyone sat on the wall. Horse stood directly in front of Marcus and explained it all. ‘You’ve got to come back to school, Marcus, we need you. Training is rubbish without you.’

‘And there’s no way we’re ever going to win that final without your skills,’ chipped in Ira.

‘You add something,’ said Leonard, ‘it’s true.’

‘I don’t want to go back,’ said Marcus, though the flip of heart he just felt told him otherwise. He’d missed his friends more than anything.

‘It’s that stuff about your ears, right?’ said Horse.

Marcus nodded.

‘But that’s sorted now, ain’t it?’ said Ira. ‘So come back!’ Ira shook his waxy black, shoulder length hair in emphasis. He was a general on the field, like Horse, though Ira was in charge of the defence.

‘I don’t want to go to school wearing these hearing aids,’ Marcus said. He felt stupid even as he said it. But it was what he felt.

‘You mean you’re wearing them now?’ asked Horse.

Marcus nodded again.

‘Anybody notice that?’ Horse asked.

Everybody shook their heads.

Horse leaned over and looked closely at Marcus. ‘Okay,
now
I can just about see them. Just. So what’s the big deal? C’mon, Marcus. We need you on the team if we’re gonna win this Cup. That means you’ve got to go to school. That’s the start, you know how it works. If you got to wear those to school, then fine. Tell you what, we’ll all wear them. Where did you get them? We’ll all wear them, right?’

Everyone nodded again. Even Leonard.

Marcus laughed. ‘It’s not that simple. You can’t just get them like that. You’ve got to be a bit deaf.’

‘We can fake it,’ said Jamil. ‘What? What? What? I beg pardon?’ he said, swivelling his head. Everyone laughed. They were laughing with Marcus, not at him this time. He laughed along.

‘Look Marky,’ said Horse, ‘we’ll stand with you, man. We need you. C’mon.’

They were all around him now, tugging at him, pleading.

‘What do you say?’ said Horse. ‘Do it for us.’ Horse started messing with his hair. It always got to him, that, it was like being tickled, and Horse knew it.

‘Alright, alright,’ Marcus said, fending Horse off his hair and finally relenting.

‘Yes!’ whooped Jamil. He did his crazy jig across the pitch. Everyone else broke out into high-fives and hugs.

Nobody seemed to care that although he was agreeing to go back to school, he was still banned from the team. But what did he know? Marcus thought. Maybe they were right. Maybe there was a way back into the team.

‘Let’s train then,’ said Marcus. ‘We’re gonna have to be sharp to win!’

They practiced tackling. Leonard and Marcus played on the same side and won all three rounds. They high-fived at the end of it, the first time the two of them had ever done that. Marcus liked the crisp, deep,
smack
sound their high-five made, when their hands closed together perfectly. It was a weird feeling for Marcus, working with Leonard, but good. They did heading exercises and some other stuff, all organised by Leonard. They only stopped when the light faded so badly they were running into one another. Dragging his tired legs home, Marcus thought, sometimes, try as hard as you did, you couldn’t escape your friends. And even though you didn’t know it at the time, sometimes you needed them.

N
ext morning, Marcus told his mum he was prepared to go back to school. His mum blushed with excitement and cooked him rice pudding even though he never ate rice pudding for breakfast and didn’t want it.

‘There is more good news,’ his dad said, slurping coffee. ‘We wrote to the history teacher, whatsherface about the football. I told her I’m not letting her stop my hugely talented, amazingly gifted son lose his biggest chance in life over some snot-nosed teacher’s idea of please and thank you’s.’

‘Geography teacher,’ Marcus corrected him.

‘Same difference,’ said Dad.

For once Marcus was impressed. His dad never wrote down anything but lyrics. ‘You wrote the school an email? I’m surprised you didn’t sing it down the phone, Dad.’

‘Something like that,’ said Dad.

‘Nothing like that,’ said Mum. ‘I wrote the email. And I phoned her too.’

‘But we talked about it together,’ said Dad. ‘I advised. And the school will un-ban you from the football team or my name’s not Johnny Kudos,’ Dad declared. ‘All you’ve got to do is turn up.’

‘Your name
isn’t
Johnny Kudos. Your
real
name’s not Johnny Kudos,’ Mum said.

Marcus could see they were about to get into it again. ‘I thought this was about me?’ he said.

‘It
is
about you, son. Your mother got distracted.’

‘I spoke to the Head, and she’s personally guaranteed that if you go back, they will un-ban you,’ Mum said, ‘And I’ll go into school with you if you want, and sort this troublesome geography teacher out.’

‘No, Mum, please don’t.’ A clash between Miss Podborsky and his mum would be a supernova event, creating a million light years of embarrassment for him.

‘Just say the word,’ his mum said, fired up still.

That night, Marcus was scared, but happy. He texted Adele.

Marcus didn’t know how to reply to Adele’s last text. It was a kiss race. He sent her a pic of a dog with hearts spinning around it instead.

I
n form class, Marcus sat with Jamil in his old seat at the back of the class. Everyone was chatting away. Marcus loved the noisy depth of conversations he now heard, from all round the room, but he found it confusing sometimes, sorting out from which direction voices were coming. Nobody yet seemed to have noticed his hearing aids. He messed with his phone, going through messages and trying at the same time to get used to how loudly the chairs scraped the floor in the classroom. Then his form teacher was suddenly on his shoulder. He was reading a text Adele had sent him the morning after he had run off from her place. The teacher saw it and before he could hide the phone, read it out loud enough for Jamil to hear.

‘“
U r my morning sunshine. Thanks 4 last nites kiss
.” Very sweet. I wish someone was my morning sunshine!’

Marcus blushed. Jamil guffawed and poked Marcus in the ribs with his pen.

At the front of the class, the teacher started explaining the new rules about dining room times. Someone interrupted her. ‘Excuse me, Miss, can you say that again for thicko Marcus back there, please?’

It was Evan.

‘He may not have heard you,’ Evan continued, ‘have you got your hearing aids switched on, Marcus, eh, eh, eh?’

There were sniggers. The whole class turned to look at Marcus.

Marcus could feel his tear ducts swelling. Everyone in class was watching him. He thought of his dad’s words. ‘Don’t let them rile you.’

‘I can hear Miss fine,’ Marcus replied to Evan, nonchalantly, ‘and thanks for the “thicko” compliment, Evan. From someone who gets D’s in everything, that really means something!’

The whole class erupted, but this time laughing at Evan. The form teacher let it settle then resumed her drone about new dining room rules.

In the corridor after form class, Jamil tripped over a school-bag and accidentally punched Evan in the face as he fell. That was Jamil’s story and he was sticking to it. Everyone in the class who had seen it backed Jamil up. Marcus told Jamil he didn’t need protecting from Evan’s cowardly mouth. Still, Marcus liked what Jamil had done. Evan deserved it. He would have done it himself only he was trying to stay un-banned so he could play in the final. After all the effort he’d made, nothing was going to get in his way on that.

The next lesson was maths. It was then that Jamil told Marcus his eye had been hurting him ever since he got punched in the last game and sometimes he couldn’t see the writing on his textbook because the page started swimming away. Marcus told Jamil he had to get to the doctors fast, but by the end of maths, Jamil was saying he was okay again.

The coach welcomed him with wind-milling arms at training that afternoon. ‘Marky, we’ve missed you massive!’ He took him to one side. ‘I know you’ve had problems with your ears,’ he said. ‘But the problem’s with your ears, right, not your feet. I know you can’t wear your hearing aids for the football and I’ve worked something out. We’re going to practice it today. When the ref blows his whistle tomorrow, in the final – you’ve not forgotten it’s the final, right? When the whistle blows, everyone’s gonna raise their hands, so you know the whistle’s gone, okay? We’ve practised it, everyone knows. Get it?’

‘Yeh,’ said Marcus. ‘And thanks, Mr Davies.’

‘Don’t be soft, lad. Now you’re back, we’ve got one hand on the Cup already. I’m working on my victory speech for next assembly!’

Marcus laughed. Even Mr Davies knew he did bad assembly speeches. They walked over together to the football pitch. ‘Alright, boys, box work, let’s go,’ said the coach. ‘Accuracy. Show them, Marcus.’ They did box-to-box pass exercises, twists and turns and throw-in drills. Then Mr Davies called them all together. ‘Defence, midfield, tomorrow don’t give Bowker the space to play. Press up and attack the ball. Got it? Let’s practice that. Leonard set the cones up.’

Leonard was playing tomorrow in place of Rocket who had the flu. The coach said it would make the midfield more solid anyway. Given a choice, Marcus would have opted for Rocket in the team, but there was no choice.

They worked till the defence got the hang of how to force play further and further up the field. Then the light faded to nothing. The coach blew his whistle. Automatically everyone put their hand up. Marcus smiled. He’d heard the whistle that time anyway, but it still helped.

‘Right lads … last run.’

Everyone groaned.

‘Get on with it!’ Mr Davies yelled. ‘No pain, no gain! It’s … quick and the dead! When the going gets tough …’

Groaning even more at the coach’s clichés, everyone did one last sprint up and down the dark field.

In the dressing room, Horse approached Mr Davies. ‘Have you read this, Sir?’ he asked. It was an article from the Bowker Vale website that Horse had printed out. Everyone knew about it. Mr Davies looked it over then read it aloud to them all:

There was silence.

‘There you go, lads,’ Mr Davies said, ‘“A weak, one player team”. That’s what they think of you.’ He screwed the article up and kicked it into the showers. ‘Tomorrow’s chip paper. Don’t be fooled. It’s just mind games. We’ll do our talking on the pitch tomorrow! Right? I can’t hear you. Right?’

‘Yeeeaaaaah! Yeeeaaaaah!’ Everyone left the changing room with their tonsils sore from yelling, ‘YEAH!’

That evening, when he got home, Marcus rushed upstairs and plugged in his phone to recharge it. In twelve hours’ time he would be playing in the Cup final. Maybe he would even become the Manchester United apprentice. He imagined rubbing shoulders with Wayne Rooney in the Man United dressing room, Ryan Giggs wandering by and showing him a better way to tie his boots, maybe a friendly pat on the shoulder from Rio Ferdinand. He dreamed about playing five-a-side with them in quick passing games. His charger light changed from red to blue. Marcus switched the phone on. He saw a text from Dwayne, the Bowker Vale striker: