His body woke before he did.
Something in his left calf decided it was morning at a quarter past six and pulled tight like a rope someone had yanked from the far end, and Armani came up out of sleep with his teeth clamped and his hand already reaching down the bed to grip the muscle and hold it until it let go. It took a while. He lay in the grey light with his fingers dug into the calf, breathing through his nose, waiting for it to decide it was finished with him.
Nicole didn't stir. She slept on her front with one arm hanging off the edge of the mattress, the way she always did, as though she had dozed off halfway through reaching for something on the floor.
When the cramp released he lay back against the pillow and went through the damage. Both calves. The right hip, which had been quiet for over a year and had chosen last night, somewhere around the hundredth minute, to remind him it was there. His lower back. A bruise on the front of his left shin the size of a bottle cap where a Barcelona centre back had caught him early in extra time, which he hadn't noticed until he was standing in the shower after the match and saw the water running over a dark purple shape he didn't recognise. And his feet. His feet were the worst of all of it. A hundred and twenty minutes on a pitch that had been watered heavy before kick off, and his feet felt like someone had taken them off in the night, used them for something else, and screwed them back on slightly wrong.
He had played extra time before. He had never played extra time and then won.
He didn't reach for his phone. He knew roughly what was waiting on it and none of it was going anywhere. He swung his legs out of bed, sat on the edge for a moment while the blood found its way down, and then stood up the way an old man stands up, one hand on the bedside table, testing the floor before he trusted it.
The barn was cold downstairs in the mornings even in April. The stone held the night in it until about ten o'clock, and then let it go all at once, so that by lunchtime the kitchen was warm and you forgot it had ever been otherwise. Armani filled the kettle and stood at the window while it boiled.
The apple tree had come into blossom while he wasn't paying attention. A week ago it had been bare branches with little hard knuckles of buds along them. Now it was white and pink and full, and some of the petals had already dropped onto the grass beneath it so that the lawn looked as though someone had started to throw confetti and then lost interest. Nicole had put a bench under it in the autumn. There was dew on the bench.
He made tea, put three sugars in it because nobody was watching, and took it outside barefoot. The grass was soaking and so cold it hurt, and the cold went up through the soles of his feet and into the ankles and calves, and after a few seconds the hurt became something closer to relief. He stood in the middle of the lawn with the mug held against his chest and let the cold do whatever it was doing.
The goal kept trying to replay itself. Not the finish. He didn't need to see the finish. What kept coming back was the half second before it, the ball dropping out of the floodlights over his shoulder, the strange quiet that happened inside him when he knew it was going to land exactly where he was going to be. He had felt that quiet before. In Orlando. On the hill when they were boys and Kofi used to hoof the ball as high as he could and shout at Armani to bring it down.
He let it play once and then made it stop. What stayed afterwards was the number.
Fourteen.
He drank the tea. A wood pigeon was making its noise somewhere in the field behind the garden, the same five notes over and over, as though it had forgotten the rest of the song. Inside, he could hear the boiler click on.
When he went back in he dried his feet on the mat and picked up the phone from the counter. Sixty seven messages across everything. He opened three.
His mother had written at what would have been half past four in the afternoon in Montego Bay, which meant she had watched the whole thing at the hotel laundry on the little television that hung above the folding tables, with the other women around her. Semi final. Eat something proper today. Not bread.
Beverly had written two minutes after the final whistle. Both of you. Again.
Callum's message was long enough that the preview cut off after the first line, which read ok so the 107th minute is going in the notebook as a full page and here is why. Armani smiled and saved it for later.
He put two slices of bread in the toaster and stood looking at them for a moment, and then took them back out and put them in the bin and got the eggs out of the fridge instead.
The training ground on the day after a big European night was a place where everybody walked like they were ninety.
Dave was in the kit room doorway when Armani came in, arms folded, watching the first team shuffle past him toward the recovery area. Dave had been at the club twenty three years and had seen every kind of morning there was.
"Look at this," he said, to nobody in particular. "Champions League semi finalists. Couldn't catch a bus between them."
"Morning, Dave."
"Morning. Your boots from last night are drying. If they're still muddy tomorrow it's because you didn't knock them off, not because I didn't clean them. I want that understood."
"Understood."
"Good lad."
The physio, a woman from Swansea called Rhian who said very little and noticed everything, had him on the table for twenty minutes. She worked her thumbs into the right hip and asked him to tell her when it was a six out of ten, and he told her at about a four because he didn't want her writing anything down, and she looked at him over the top of her glasses and pressed harder until he said six and meant it.
"It's tight," she said. "Not damaged. Tight. You'll feel it Monday if you don't do your work this weekend."
"I'll do my work."
"Everybody says that." She made a note anyway.
Afterwards he went into the cold tub with Bailey, who was already in it up to his chest with his eyes shut and his jaw locked. The water was nine degrees. Armani lowered himself in a centimetre at a time, and when it reached his stomach his breath went out of him in a noise he didn't recognise as his own.
"Don't make noise," Bailey said, without opening his eyes. "Noise lets the cold know where you are."
"That doesn't mean anything."
"My grandmother had a deep freezer in her yard in Kingston warmer than this. She kept fish in it. The fish would have complained about this."
Armani laughed, which was a mistake, because laughing meant breathing and breathing meant feeling the cold properly. They sat there for six minutes not saying anything else, two men from the same island submerged to the shoulders in a plastic tub in Warwickshire, while across the room Morgan Rogers lay on a foam roller groaning at the ceiling and John McGinn sang something under his breath that might once have been a song.
The manager came through at eleven. He went from player to player, one or two sentences each, nothing that would need remembering. When he got to the cold tub he stood over the two of them with his hands in the pockets of his training jacket.
"Today you do nothing," he said. "Tomorrow you do a little. Saturday we see. Doing nothing is your job today. Do it well."
"Yes, boss."
He moved on. Bailey opened one eye and watched him go.
"He's going to rest you Monday," Bailey said.
"He didn't say that."
"He didn't say he wasn't."
The other quarter final was that night, in Paris, and the winner of it would be who they played next.
Nicole had made a pot of something with chickpeas and spinach and too much garlic, which she claimed was a Trinidadian recipe and which Armani privately suspected she had invented, and they ate it from bowls on the green sofa with the television on. The green sofa had come from the flat in London. It didn't match anything in the barn, and Nicole had stood looking at it for a long time when the removal men carried it in, and then said that the barn would have to learn to live with it.
Paris Saint Germain against Bayern. The first leg had finished level. The Parc des Princes looked on the screen the way it always looked, like a concrete ring holding in something that wanted to get out, and the noise came through the television speakers as a wall with no gaps in it.
Armani didn't watch the ball. He realised after about twenty minutes that he hadn't been watching the ball at all. He had been watching Nuno Mendes, the PSG left back, who would be the man in front of him in a fortnight if the result went the way it was going. He watched where Mendes stood when PSG had the ball. Where he stood when they didn't. How quickly he turned. Which shoulder he dropped when a winger ran at him. How often he went forward in the first half and how often in the second, and whether anyone covered for him when he did.
Mendes went forward a lot. Mendes went forward the way some people breathed.
"You're not watching the match," Nicole said.
"I'm watching my match."
She looked at the screen, then at him, then back at the screen. "Which one is yours?"
"Number twenty five. Left side."
She watched him for a while. "He's fast."
"He's very fast."
"Faster than you?"
Armani thought about it honestly. "Maybe over ten metres. Not over forty."
"Then make it forty," she said, and went back to her chickpeas.
PSG scored twice in the second half. The second goal came from Mendes, overlapping on the left, cutting the ball back across the six yard box for Dembélé to finish. Bayern got one back late and then ran out of time. When the final whistle went the stadium in Paris made a sound that was almost like a scream, and the camera found Vitinha on his knees on the halfway line with his face in his hands.
Nicole muted the television.
"Paris," she said.
"Paris."
"I went once. With university. Second year. We were meant to be studying the Haussmann boulevards and we spent most of it in a bar near Gare du Nord because it was the only place that would sell us wine at student prices." She tucked her feet under her. "Lens is near there, isn't it?"
"About two hours north. Less on the fast train."
He thought about Philippe in the boulangerie with flour on his forearms, refusing to take his money. Sylvie behind the counter of the café telling him the history of the town one espresso at a time, getting as far as 2014 before he left. He wondered whether either of them would be watching. He thought they probably would.
"First leg's at Villa Park," he said. "Second in Paris."
"Then I'll book the hotel," Nicole said, as if that settled something, and maybe it did.
He didn't sleep on Wednesday night.
It wasn't the match. He had expected the match to keep him awake, the way big nights sometimes did, the adrenaline taking two or three days to finally drain out of the bloodstream. But when he lay down at eleven he went straight under, heavy and gone, and when he came up again it was ten past two and his mind had already gone somewhere without asking him.
It had gone to the school in Aston.
The classroom with the strip light that flickered. The smell of floor polish and cheap deodorant. The boy, Malik, fourteen, thin wrists, a Villa scarf around his neck even though it was indoors, waiting at the back until everybody else had gone and then coming up with the card held out in front of him like a ticket he wanted checked.
He said he was building a file on me.
Armani lay on his back in the dark and watched the beams across the ceiling, black lines on black.
He remembered the temperature change. That was what he remembered most clearly. Something cold arriving in his chest and spreading outwards to his hands. He remembered telling the boy that real scouts don't give business cards to fourteen year olds. He remembered telling him to throw it away. He remembered watching the boy cross the classroom and drop it in the grey plastic bin by the door, and feeling something like relief as it went in.
He hadn't read the name.
He turned onto his side. The card had been in the boy's hand and Armani had looked at it, and he could see it now, the shape of it, cream coloured, thick, the lettering raised so that you could probably feel it with your thumb. But he had not read the name. He had heard building a file and his body had changed temperature and everything after that was the boy's face and his own voice saying throw it away.
He had told a fourteen year old to throw away the only thing that could have told him anything.
Lots of cards were cream coloured. He knew that. Half the estate agents in Solihull had cream coloured cards. Lots of men in football said things like building a file. It was a phrase. People used phrases. That was what phrases were for.
He lay there and told himself that for about forty minutes, and then he got up, went downstairs, and sat at the kitchen table in the dark until the window started to go grey.
He called the school at half past eight on Thursday morning from the car park at Bodymoor Heath, with the engine running and the heater on.
The receptionist put him through to the head of PE, a man called Mr Adeyemi, who had been the one to organise the visit and who had shaken Armani's hand at the end of it for slightly too long, the way people did when they were trying to remember the moment.
"Mr Wilson. Good morning. Congratulations on Tuesday, honestly, the whole staff room was..."
"Thank you. I'm sorry to call so early. I wanted to ask about something from the visit."
"Of course."
"There was a boy. Malik. He showed me a card at the end, a business card, from a man who'd approached him. I told him to throw it in the bin in the classroom." Armani watched a groundsman crossing the far pitch with a line marker. "I don't suppose there's any chance it's still there."
There was a pause on the other end that told him the answer before Mr Adeyemi gave it.
"The bins go out every Tuesday. That was, what, five weeks ago? Six? I'm sorry. It'll be long gone."
"Yeah. I thought so."
"Is there something wrong?"
Armani looked at his own hands on the steering wheel. "I don't know. Probably not. Could you ask Malik something for me? Whether he remembers anything about the man. What he looked like. Where he met him. Anything."
"I can ask him at break. I'll call you back."
"Thank you."
He went into training. It was a light session, a rondo and some passing patterns and twenty minutes of stretching on the grass, and he went through it without really being there. Tielemans put a ball through his legs in the rondo and the whole circle cheered and Armani didn't even laugh, and Tielemans looked at him strangely and asked if he was alright, and Armani said he was tired, which was true.
Mr Adeyemi called back at twenty past twelve. Armani took it sitting on a bench outside the canteen.
"So I spoke to Malik," Adeyemi said. "He was a bit worried he was in trouble, so it took a minute. He doesn't remember the name. He's very apologetic about that. He says he only really looked at the words underneath the name, the bit about the agency, because that was the bit that made it sound real."
"What did the man look like?"
"Older. Malik said old, but Malik's fourteen, so that could mean anything over thirty five. Grey hair, cut very short. White. Well dressed, nice coat, nice watch. He said the man talked posh, but not proper posh. Those were his words. I asked him what that meant and he said, like someone who learned to talk posh."
Armani didn't say anything.
"He met him at a tournament. Under fifteens, Sunday league, at a ground in Small Heath. The man was standing on his own by the fence and came over afterwards. Said he'd been watching Malik for a few weeks." Adeyemi paused. "Malik said the man asked if his mum would be interested in having a conversation. About his future. And that he asked what boots Malik played in."
The canteen door opened behind Armani and two of the academy lads came out laughing about something, and walked past him, and the door swung shut again.
"Boots," Armani said.
"That's what he said. Mr Wilson, I have to ask, is there something I should be passing on? We have a safeguarding lead. If there's a concern."
Armani was looking at the grass. It had been cut that morning and the lines from the mower ran away from him in light and dark stripes toward the trees.
"If the man comes back," he said, "or contacts Malik again, or his mum, tell your safeguarding lead. Tell the boy's club. And if he ever asks for money, for anything, kit or travel or a registration fee or whatever he calls it, tell the police."
"You think he's..."
"I think real scouts don't do it like that." He took a breath. "Tell Malik he did the right thing showing me. Tell him he's not in trouble. Tell him I said that."
"I will."
When the call ended he sat on the bench for a long time. Somebody from the canteen came to the door and asked if he wanted lunch and he said he would come in a minute, and then he didn't go in, and eventually they stopped asking.
He was thinking about a pair of boots. Black and gold, stiff as cardboard, the leather so new it squeaked when he walked. He was thinking about the way they had felt on the pitch at Rusea's in the rain, how they wouldn't bend the way his feet needed them to, how he had planted his left foot to turn and the boot had held and his hip had not. He was thinking about his mother's purse on the kitchen table in Montego Bay, the clasp on it that didn't close properly, how he had opened it with his heart going so loud he was sure she would hear it from the next room.
He hadn't thought about those boots in years. He had trained himself not to.
Beverly called on Sunday at four o'clock, the way she always did.
He was in the garden when the phone went, sitting on the bench under the apple tree with his legs out in front of him, doing the stretches Rhian had given him for the hip. Blossom kept falling on him. He had stopped brushing it off.
"You looked tired on Tuesday," Beverly said, instead of hello. She always started in the middle of things. Kofi had done the same.
"I was tired. A hundred and twenty minutes."
"I counted. I was shouting at the television so much the woman next door came over to see if I was being murdered." He could hear the smile in her voice, and under it the other thing, the thing that was always there now. "I told her no. I told her my son's best friend is playing in the Champions League. She didn't know what that was. I had to explain."
"Did you get her to watch?"
"She stayed for extra time. She said it was too much stress for a Wednesday."
"It was a Tuesday."
"That's what I told her."
He laughed. Across the field a tractor was moving slowly along the far hedge, so far away it made no sound.
They talked about ordinary things for a while. Her knee, which was bad in the mornings. The weather in Cincinnati, which was still cold. A man at her church who kept bringing her soup she hadn't asked for and didn't like. Then she went quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice had changed.
"I'm going home," she said. "In June. I've told the landlord."
Armani stopped stretching.
"I kept saying I'd stay till the end of his lease. Then I said I'd stay till Christmas. Then I said till spring." She breathed out. "It's spring, Armani. His things are in boxes. I've been packing them for three months. Every time I tape one up I open it again to check something."
"You going back to the house in Mobay?"
"Your mother's been airing it out for me. She's been up there every Saturday. She didn't tell you?"
"She didn't tell me."
"She wouldn't." A pause. "I'm keeping his boots. The last pair. They're still muddy from training. I'm not cleaning them."
Armani looked down at his own feet in the grass. "Don't clean them."
"I won't."
There was a silence that was comfortable and not comfortable at the same time, and then Beverly said, almost lightly, "You have one more, don't you?"
He didn't understand at first. "One more what?"
"Goal. Fifteen. You've got fourteen."
He sat very still on the bench. He had told nobody about fifteen. Not the manager. Not the press, who had asked him in the mixed zone after Barcelona whether he had a target for the season and got a shrug. Not even Bailey, though Bailey probably knew somehow, the way Bailey knew most things. Only Nicole, and only once, late at night.
"How do you know about that?"
"He called me," Beverly said. "That summer. After the two of you were on the hill. He called me from the airport in Kingston before his flight, and he was so pleased with himself, Armani. He said, Mummy, I gave him a number. He said, fifteen, and he'll be vexed about it all season, and he'll get there, and when he gets there he'll pretend it was his idea."
Armani put his hand over his eyes.
"He said that?"
"Word for word. I remember because he laughed so much he nearly missed his boarding call."
He couldn't speak for a while. Beverly didn't try to make him. She just stayed on the line, the way his mother sometimes did, the way people do when they know that the silence is the conversation. Blossom landed on his knee. Somewhere in the house Nicole had put music on, and a bass line was coming faintly through the open kitchen window.
"It wasn't my idea," he said eventually, and his voice cracked in the middle of it.
"I know, baby," Beverly said. "I know it wasn't."
Bailey was wrong. The manager didn't rest him on Monday.
Everton away, Monday night, the new stadium on the docks at Bramley Moore. Armani had never played there. It rose up out of the waterfront in dark red brick, all steel and angles at the top and old warehouse at the bottom, with the Mersey running grey and wide right behind it so that the wind came off the water and in over the stand and you could taste salt in it on the pitch. The noise was different from Goodison, the older lads said. Tighter. It came straight down at you from the steep end and didn't let up.
He started on the right. Bailey on the left. Watkins through the middle. The manager's instructions in the dressing room were about shape and patience and not giving them anything early, because Everton at home on a Monday night with the crowd up would come at them for twenty minutes like a storm, and the job was to be standing when the storm finished.
It was exactly that. Everton came. Ndiaye on their left was everywhere, dropping short, running in behind, drifting inside, and Mykolenko kept overlapping on the outside of him, so that every time Everton went forward Armani had two men coming down his side and Matty Cash behind him shouting which one to take. He tracked back more in the first twenty minutes than he had in the whole of extra time against Barcelona. His legs felt like they belonged to somebody who had been at a wedding all weekend. The first time he tried to accelerate past Mykolenko the burst wasn't there, just a kind of heavy surge that got him half a yard and no more, and Mykolenko turned with him easily and nudged the ball out for a throw.
He knew what it was. Barcelona was still in his legs. Five days was not enough for a hundred and twenty minutes. He stopped trying to run past people and started trying to be in the right places instead.
Half time, nil nil. In the dressing room Kamara sat next to him and didn't say anything and handed him a gel, and Armani ate it, and that was the whole conversation.
The second half was slower. The storm had blown itself out, the way the manager said it would, and Everton sat a little deeper and the crowd got a little quieter and a little more anxious, and Villa started to have the ball for longer stretches. Armani got on it more. Nothing big. A one two with Cash on the touchline. A cross that Tarkowski headed away. A turn in midfield that took him away from Garner and let Tielemans switch the play. Small things. The legs were coming back a little, the way they sometimes did in the second half of a match when the body finally accepted what was being asked of it and stopped arguing.
In the seventy fourth minute Tielemans got the ball just inside the Everton half with his back to goal, turned, and looked up.
Armani was already going. He had seen Mykolenko take one step toward the middle a second earlier, drawn in by Rogers drifting into the pocket, and the space behind him had opened up like a door left ajar. Tielemans saw it at the same moment. The pass came over the top of Mykolenko, weighted perfectly, dropping into the channel ten yards from the corner of the box, and Armani took it on the run with the outside of his right foot and was in.
Everything slowed down the way it did.
He was in the box at an angle, coming in from the right, the ball out in front of him. Tarkowski was coming across from the middle, sliding, too late to get the ball but not too late to close the angle. Pickford was off his line, big and wide, arms out, coming fast. The near post was there. He could see it. A gap between Pickford's left hand and the post, the size of a ball and a little bit more, the kind of gap you could hit if you got it exactly right with the outside of the boot, hard and low.
He could see Watkins too. At the edge of his vision, on the far side, arriving. Nobody near him. Tarkowski had left him to come across. Watkins was running into the six yard box with his arm up and his mouth open, shouting something Armani couldn't hear.
It was fourteen. It was one more.
He didn't think about it. That was the thing he would remember afterwards, lying awake in the hotel. There was no moment of thinking. There was no voice in his head saying shoot or saying don't. His right foot had already rolled across the ball before any of that could happen, a short side footed pass across the face of the goal, under Pickford's arm as he came, past Tarkowski's outstretched boot, along the wet grass to the far post where Watkins met it with his left foot from two yards out and put it in the roof of the net.
One nil.
The away end exploded. It was in the corner to their left, three thousand of them crammed into the steep part of the stand, and the sound came out of it like something breaking. Watkins wheeled away toward them and then changed direction and came sprinting back across the box and jumped on Armani with both arms around his neck, shouting in his ear. Armani couldn't hear any of it. Rogers piled on, then Tielemans, then Bailey arriving from the far side out of breath, grabbing the back of Armani's head and pressing his forehead against his.
"Selfless," Bailey said. "You selfless idiot."
"He was free."
"I know he was free. Everybody in Liverpool knew he was free." Bailey shook his head, grinning. "Selfless idiot."
They held it for sixteen minutes plus five of stoppage. Everton threw everything forward at the end and Armani spent the last ten minutes back in his own half, blocking crosses, standing in front of Ndiaye, getting kicked on the same shin that Barcelona had bruised. When the final whistle went he bent over with his hands on his knees and stayed there a long while, looking at the grass, breathing.
One nil. Three points. Fourteen goals.
In the coach on the way back to the hotel he finally opened his phone. People online were already doing what people online did. There was a clip of the moment, the angle from behind the goal, and under it a hundred comments arguing about whether he should have shot. Some said he had to shoot. Some said Watkins was the better option. One said that a real number nine would have taken it and that Wilson was a winger and wingers were always looking for someone else to do the hard part. Somebody had replied to that one with a laughing face and the word Barcelona.
He closed it. He had a message from Nicole, a photograph of the television in the barn paused on the moment Watkins scored, with Armani's arm still out from the pass, and underneath it she had written forty metres, which made no sense to anyone but him.
He had a message from his mother. Good boy.
And at four minutes past eleven, while the coach was crawling along the M62 in the dark, a message from Callum.
ok first half was a 5. no burst at all. legs?
Barcelona, Armani wrote back.
thought so. second half 7. you made 11 defensive actions which is more than cash.
Don't tell him that.
already did. he follows me now.
Then, a minute later, a longer one.
the pass. you're going to get people saying you should have shot so I ran it. near post from that angle with pickford coming, I've got it at 0.29. the pass to ollie with nobody near him was 0.71 easy. you made the right decision by a mile. I know you know that but I'm saying it anyway because I know what number you're on.
Armani read it twice. He hadn't told Callum about fifteen either. He wondered for a moment how many people in his life knew things he had never said out loud, and decided it was probably all of them.
Thank you, he wrote.
you'll get it, Callum wrote back. you've got 14 goals and 12 assists in 41 games in all comps and there's at least 8 games left including 2 against PSG. the numbers say you get it. also mum says eat something that isn't bread.
He laughed out loud on the coach, and McGinn, in the seat in front, turned round to see what was funny, and Armani shook his head and said nothing, and McGinn shrugged and turned back.
The coach got back to Bodymoor Heath at half past one. He drove home along empty lanes with the window cracked open for the cold air, through Knowle with its one lit window above the chemist, up the narrow track to the barn. The security light came on when he pulled in. The apple tree stood white in it for a second and then went dark again.
Nicole was asleep. He could tell from the bottom of the stairs, from the particular quality of the quiet up there. He didn't go up.
He went instead into the long room at the back of the barn where the wall was.
He didn't turn the main light on. He turned on the lamp on the desk underneath, the old brass one Nicole had found at a market in Stratford, and in its low yellow light the things on the wall came up out of the dark one at a time. His grandfather's shirt, the yellow faded almost to cream, hanging on the old stone where Nicole had put it the first week they moved in. The Jamaica shirt from Costa Rica. The Wembley medal on its ribbon, which still made his stomach turn slightly every time he looked at it. The Lens shirt. The photograph from Orlando, the two of them in Jamaica yellow with their arms around each other in a stadium corridor, Kofi's mouth open mid laugh at something that had been funny once. Kofi's Cincinnati training top, folded the way Kofi used to fold things, which was badly.
And then the space. Stone with nothing on it. He had stopped noticing the space for a while. He noticed it now.
He sat down at the desk. He opened the top drawer and found what he was looking for, an envelope from the bank that had come the week before with a letter in it he had already read, and he took the letter out and put it to one side, and turned the envelope over to the blank back of it.
He found a pen.
He sat with the pen for a while. Outside, very faintly, the wood pigeon had started again, which meant it was later than he thought, or earlier.
Then he wrote, in small careful letters, the way his mother wrote shopping lists.
Older. Grey hair, short. White. Nice coat. Nice watch. Posh but not proper posh. Like someone who learned it.
Small Heath. Sunday league. Under 15s. Stood alone by the fence. Said he'd been watching for weeks.
Asked if his mum wanted a conversation.
Asked what boots he played in.
Building a file.
He looked at it for a long time. He thought about writing a name at the bottom, and his hand moved toward the paper, and then it stopped. He didn't know anything. He knew a phrase, and a colour of card, and a question about boots. That was all. That was nothing. Men asked boys about boots every day. It was a normal question.
He put the pen down.
He would tell Nicole. He knew he would tell her, because he told her everything eventually, and because she was the kind of person who would look at the back of an envelope and ask the one question he hadn't thought of. But not tonight. Not at two in the morning with Everton still in his legs and the house asleep around him. He didn't have the words for it yet, and he didn't want to say it out loud and hear how it sounded.
He folded the envelope once along the middle and put it in the drawer, underneath the bank letter, at the very back, and closed the drawer, and sat with his hand on the brass handle of it.
Then he turned the lamp off. The wall went dark, one thing at a time, his grandfather's shirt last of all, and he sat in the black for a minute longer listening to the pigeon and the old stone ticking as it gave up the last of the day's warmth.
When he finally went upstairs Nicole turned over in her sleep and reached out an arm and found his shoulder without waking, the way she did, and left her hand there, and he lay on his back with his eyes open and felt the weight of it until he slept.