1
Three minutes of injury time remaining, two gone in a flash. One misplaced pass. It was the first slip up the opposition left winger had made all game. The weight of the pass had seen it stop short of their striker, who was as broad as Niamh was tall, and Loudon always said she was even bigger than he was at her age. She pounced like a lioness upon her prey. Fingertips like hooks slashed at the hip of her shirt from the midfield two but they could not dig in. Niamh zipped down the touchline. Fifty thousand eyes upon her, none dared blink. Camera flashes like lightning. The roar of the crowd, thunderous, baying for action. Niamh was swift, nimble, but not strong. Not enough. Not yet. The angle to get a clean cross into the box was shortening drastically. She glanced over her shoulder. Her teammates were too far back, long gone. Every. Second. Counts. The game, this opportunity, had long passed them by. But not for Niamh. She would have to go it alone. She was going to count down; three, two, one, then shoot, but had barely begun before the right fullback leaped forth. Her knee straight, foot lunged to the point of a spear. The ball or Niamh’s right ankle, the fullback was going through one of them if she did not act now. With the deftest of touches, she swapped the ball on to her left foot – weaker, less accurate – then shot high into the cloudless sky and followed its dip. The world fell silent and still.
If only for a moment.
‘Ooh-yah!’ the goalkeeper squealed as their ribs crunched on the jagged earth. The ball rippled the back of the net and curled neatly into the far corner.
‘Sore yin, that!’ Their voice was not familiar to the 5’9, athletic, brunette England goalkeeper Niamh had approached on her run up. ‘Luckily, I only need the one hip,’ her Uncle Loudon wheezed. Gravel, red as the dirt of Mars, clung to his cheek like glitter as he lay defeated between the sticks. He spat out a whole chunk of it with a raspy cough.
Buzzing supporters stands vanished as she jogged over to him, replaced by shuddering brown hedges and a well-stomped grass verge littered with pie wrappers and cardboard teacups. Her opposition disappeared too, back into thin air as swiftly as they were dreamt, and it was just Niamh and her Uncle on the pitch once more. Loudon rose unsteadily on puffy purple ankles to collect the ball and rolled it to her feet.
‘Can- I- go-,’ he gulped sharply, drinking in the last of the warm air for that summer, ‘and- get changed- now?’
‘You give in too easily,’ Niamh teased. Loudon’s shadow enveloped her in a cloak as the high afternoon sun peered over the arch of his slumped shoulder.
‘You’ll find your limitations one day,’ he assured her, as he ripped his glasses from their perch on the brim of his nose and felt blindly for one unmuddied patch on his shirt to wipe them clean. Niamh took them from him, flicked off the gravel, and huffed over each lens then rubbed the shine back into them with the hem of her shorts. She had not spent even a second in the mud. She held them out to him, but when her uncle reached his hand out to receive them, she pulled back slightly. He could see her clearly now, all five feet of her. Black boots, tarnished. White socks with baked in grass stains, one over and one sunken under each knee. Black shorts, but you could not see these for the shirt, an old one of his, so large on her it stopped millimetres above the socks. She would not wear any other. Dark navy all over, bar the white V neck which was blown out into a squiggly U. Sponsor logos over the shoulders and the lion rampant over her chest. It had been too small for Loudon in 1978 when the World Cup came around, but he wore it then as much as she did today. Her head tilted slightly up towards him to ask: just one more? Loudon laughed under his fading breath, perhaps those limitations would have to find her first.
As he limped off the pitch, Niamh stood in place by the goals and recalled tapping her watch by the door to the kitchen earlier that morning. Between a heaping spoonful of cereal and glug of jet-black coffee, a garbled admission from Loudon that he did not know where a win, loss, or draw would land Knightswood Thistle in the league table. She knew, and not only because they were anchored to the bottom. Nobody knew the slips and slides of the Lowland Region, West Glasgow Sunday League (sponsored by Archie’s Fishery: Fine Fried Foods since 1998) more intricately than her. Midweek nights were spent with the two of them separated by bowls of chocolate buttons and crisps, taking in the fancy footwork and sleekest skills of Europe’s elite. Saturdays were for the squashed front seats of supporter’s busses, where potholes were hit more often than a shot on target in the third division of Scottish Football. But on Sunday afternoons, Niamh could be found nowhere else on Earth other than on top of an empty ice cooler dug into the ash of a horrendously maintained community pitch, watching her Uncle twist and shout between the sticks. Nothing compared to a league where titles and cup finals were decided not by tactic, training, or tenacity on the field of play, but whether the bricklaying striker had a late one the previous night, or if his back four regularly enjoyed the player’s discount at their local branch of Archie’s. Loudon lay a firm slap of his glove on to the wooden scoreboard before sinking into silhouette down the grey canvas tunnel. Two plastic numbers on pegs flinched, 5 to the visitors of Bishopbriggs Boys and Men FC, 0 to the team for whom he was the last bastion of defence.
Niamh skipped the ball to the edge of the half-scratched box and positioned as felt right. With a laser focus upon the top right-hand corner of the net, she breathed out, then in, out again, then in one final time to fill her lungs like water to the brim of a jug. Finally, she stuck the laces of her boots through the ball and watched it glide, as high as an eagle and direct as a homing pigeon straight into the top right bin. She collected the ball and repositioned five paces back and shot straight down the middle. She never missed, and each time she gathered the ball from the net she stepped further back until hitting the wall of the centre circle. Sometimes she dribbled the ball five or ten paces first, expertly dodging imagined fullbacks once again. Her trademark celebration was a leap into the air with heels clicked, fists shaken up to the heavens, and a YAAAAASSSSSSSS!!!!! of such tremendous pitch that it set dogs barking hellfire in the gardens which backed on to the pitch. She could imagine a legion of supporters cheering too, but none were ever really there.
Until now.
‘That’s some right foot you’ve got!’ From no particular corner of the field, a stranger’s voice called out to her. Niamh placed her head on a swivel, but the man and his call were whispers in the wind.
‘Fancy trying that again?’ It called once more; a bodiless voice bathed in darkness followed by encroaching footsteps, it seemed, from the tunnel. The sun as a spotlight cast the shadow of a man long across jigsaw patches of grass and ash. Niamh held a rigid palm over her forehead and sharpened her eyes upon the man, but she did not recognise him. And he was heading straight for her.
A thin wipe of almost translucent grey hair combed forward into what almost passed for a fringe. His wrists, ankles, and neck seemed sewn on to the edges of a baggy tracksuit which was dark brown all over. He was coming over to speak with her, but she would have nothing to say. Loudon spoke to adults for her, she doubted very much he would bother with this one. But her uncle was not here. No matter how intensely she locked eyes on the tunnel mouth, through it and down to the left, into the changing rooms where Loudon would be swapping an all-polyester look for an all denim one. She would have to go it alone once again.
‘What else can you do with that thing?’ The man prodded the ball bundled up in her arms and pushed it back into her chest. Niamh’s feet fell backwards on the goal line. He mistook a twitch in her eye, as two unfamiliar bodies appeared from the tunnel, for interest. ‘You’ve got a gift,’ he said as he hunkered down on creaking knees. His face was shaved though red and harsh in craters under his chin. Cheeks were long and flabby and sagged into jowls which swung as punctuation to every syllable. Teeth were not white, but not yellow, and not always there. Wrinkles as thick as brushstrokes over the crevices of his lips lifted and bent as he whispered and smiled, ‘But, do you know what it’s worth?’
‘Excuse me!’ yelled Loudon, and he moved more quickly out of the tunnel than he had in the entire game. He split the hulking man and tiny girl down the middle. As he ushered Niamh back, she spied through the weld his stiff arm made onto his hip, the strange man’s entire complexion shifted sideways. Her Uncle summoned a tone she had thought reserved solely for texting van drivers and the squirrels who thieved from their bird feeder.
‘Is there a problem here, pal?’ Loudon asked, as if demanding one.
‘I am very sorry,’ the man said, though no inch of him seemed as such. A queasy look so forced it almost clicked audibly into place. His legs and arm straightened to meet Loudon. ‘Derek Purdon. My brother-in-law put one past you.’
Need to narrow that one down a bit, thought Niamh, but she dared not speak. She knew Loudon would be thinking this too, waiting for her to say it, to chide him. Loudon left Derek’s hand hanging.
‘It’s a funny thing, you don’t expect to come down to a bit of spare ground with a few benches on one end calling itself a stadium, on a Sunday afternoon and expect to see a second of good football,’ Derek let out a short chuckle, and his eyes widened as though his disbelief had been realised. ‘But that is exactly what I have just witnessed.’
From a wallet of shabby brown leather, thick in the middle of discoloured receipts and faded train tickets, Derek drew a leaflet which had been folded over several times and offered it to Loudon. He scrawled it open and paused for a moment to read it over, then with his eyes washed like a pair of pale moons, he handed it to Niamh:
KNIGHTSWOOD COMMUNITY BOYS FOOTBALL CLUB
Inspiring Excellence and Better Health
Currently seeking boys aged Under 8, Under 9, and Under 10
CHAMPIONS OF THE INTER-GLASGOW BOYS CLUB (UNDER 10’S) CUP FINAL 2007, 2008, & 2009
‘Going for four in a row, I think your daughter would be right at home with us,’ Derek’s head bobbed like a dashboard ornament in agreement with himself.
‘My niece,’ Loudon corrected. And finally he shook Derek’s rough and flaking paw. ‘This is Niamh.’ He cupped her shoulder, but she turned to the back of him. A dog was leading its man along a thin lead pulled tight like piano wire towards a grey cat sat atop the ruins of a half-hammered stone wall of the old playpark communal loos. She wanted so desperately to see the cat leap at the final second, but Loudon turned her around. She wanted to see anything else at all.
‘What do you think?’ Loudon asked her.
A chasm tore across Niamh’s stomach into which butterflies flew. She could not blink Derek or herself or her Uncle away from this moment. The reverse of the leaflet arranged images of boys in chess formations of attack and defence like scattered polaroids. Their lips were limp, mouths agape, and eyes scrunched as though they could move the ball not with their legs but by the power of their minds. Niamh could just imagine the drawstring pulling of their eyebrows and hook stretch of their nostrils as she tiptoed onto their domain wearing a shirt three sizes too large. She pulled on Loudon’s shirt sleeve to whisper.
‘Isn’t this just for-’
Derek’s stare bore upon her now like a firing blowtorch.
She spoke more softly, ‘Boys?’
‘Come on Wednesday night and prove them otherwise,’ Derek replied, he seemed the type to let nothing pass him by, whether it was intended for him or not. He nodded and smiled in a most self-satisfied manner to them both, before a car horn honked and he was called upon to retreat. Loudon turned around and rested once again on those wobbly calves to face his niece.
‘What do you think? Get to pick on someone your own size for a change,’ he smirked.
But they were not her size. They were just her age, and some older still. They would be the boys in her class, boys she had known for her entire life or at least as long as she could remember. Who had never paid her any kindness, to put it lightly. Tomboy. Freak. Weirdo. She had heard it all.
She had only ever played with her Uncle, in the back garden or on deserted grounds after a thorough drubbing for Knightswood Thistle. It was not true that she had never considered playing with the boys, she just knew they would not play fair, if they accepted her at all. They would be too soft, and her victories would be hollow (less likely); or too harsh, and they would set out to make an example out of her (most likely, and she knew it all too well.) She did not need any accommodations, or welcomes. All she needed was someone older than her, someone with authority, to tell the boys that if she was good enough she would play and that would be the end of it. Perhaps that is what Derek could be? Had she misjudged him? His cold approach and his praise; were they genuine? Was this what she had always been waiting for?
Loudon had always told her that she was good, brilliant, the best. He was never short of praise for Niamh in anything she did. He was her rock, and if he thought it was a good idea, that surely had to mean it was. But why did it not feel right? Why had the butterflies in her stomach still not settled?
Derek became diminished over Loudon’s shoulder, into the passenger door of the impatient, honking car and disappeared over the roundabout and onto the main road. She kept her lips zipped and let her gaze lose focus in the space he had invaded. Loudon lightly shook her from her trance.
‘Promise me you’ll think about it,’ he rubbed his hand over her shoulders. The tight musculature of Niamh’s shoulders and back unlocked only slightly.
It was the only thing she would think about.
