The pitch in the dark was a big grey nothing with the stands going up black on four sides, nineteen and a half thousand seats with not one person in any of them, and there was a fox standing on the halfway line that did not move until he was twenty yards away from it.
Its paws went patter-patter on the running track as it went under the barrier, and then it was gone.
He set the timing gates up on the grass by the far touchline, the same forty metres he had run in July, each of them clicking into place, click, click, and then he did twelve minutes of warm-up that he did not want to do, because he was twenty-two and not stupid.
Halfway through the second set of leg swings, the memory arrived again, uninvited and in high definition: her, flat on her back on the tile with her knees open, looking straight up at him.
Not now. I am about to run. Not now.
It went away. It came back forty seconds later.
Then he stood on the line in the dark with his hands on his knees, and he listened to his own breathing going huh, huh, huh, which was the loudest thing in the whole ground.
Right. Go.
He went.
His studs went tk-tk-tk-tk as they bit into the grass.
Three steps in, he knew.
It was not a feeling, and it was not fireworks.
It was that on the third step his foot was already down where it should have been landing on the fourth, and the ground was arriving faster than his body had agreed to, and by twenty metres he was ahead of himself in a way he had not been since he was eighteen years old in a training bib in Gelsenkirchen, with a man in a puffa coat shouting at him in German.
The second gate went beep as he crossed it, and he kept running because he could not stop, all the way to the corner flag, and then he turned round and walked back to the little grey box with his heart going thud-thud, thud-thud, like a wing mirror in the wind.
He crouched down and turned the screen towards the light coming from the corridor.
4.97.
Reece Angell sat down on the grass at Meadow Lane at twenty-two minutes past ten on a Saturday night in August with a timing gate in his hands, and he did not move for a while.
It was not a big number, and that was the part he wished somebody could understand.
It was fourteen hundredths of a second. It was nothing. You could lose fourteen hundredths on a bad night's sleep.
But he had been trying to get under five seconds since he was seventeen, and he had just done it in the dark, in a wet tracksuit, on a pitch with a fox on it, with nobody watching except a steward in a hut who was not watching.
He got his phone out and the torch came on with a click, and he got the black notebook out of his bag, the pages going ffft under his thumb, and he wrote 4.97 under the 5.11, the pen going scratch-scratch, and he wrote the date next to it, and he looked at the two numbers sitting together for a long time.
And then he did the thing that told him more about his own life than any panel had. He opened his phone to tell somebody.
He sat there on the grass with the torch still on and went through it in his head.
His dad loved him and would have said "that is great, son," and then he would have asked whether the manager had said anything, and the answer was no, and his dad would have gone quiet, and they would both have had to sit inside that quiet.
Sean had stopped picking up in April. Marcel would have been delighted for him, and then, two minutes later, he would have politely forgotten who Angell was.
There was nobody else after that. He had been at the club for eight months, and there was exactly one girl who knew he existed, and she had gone home to her mum's with his come still inside her, and he did not have her number.
He put the phone away. Nobody got told. The best thing that had happened to him in three years had happened twenty minutes ago in an empty stadium, and it stayed in the notebook, because there was nowhere else for it to go.
Then he opened the panel again, and it came up with a ping.
[Bonus stat: 4]
Come on. Four more of them, straight into the leg. Do it.
His thumb was actually hovering over it.
No. He did not know where they came from.
He made himself say it out loud, because it was the sort of thing he would talk himself out of otherwise.
"I don't know how I got five," he said, to the fox, which had come back onto the halfway line. "I don't know if I will ever get another one. So they are staying where they are until I do."
The fox's paws went patter-patter across the halfway line, and it left.
The other reward was still sitting there under Items.
[WOULD YOU LIKE TO USE "TRAINING EFFECT X3 (7 DAYS)"? Y/N]
Tripled. That meant one session would count as three. And seven days from tonight took him to next Saturday.
He nodded, and the panel accepted it with a blip.
[ACCEPTED]
[YOUR TRAINING EFFECT IS TRIPLED FOR 7 DAYS FROM TODAY]
Nothing happened again.
He stood in the middle of a dark pitch waiting to feel like Iron Man, and he felt like a twenty-two-year-old in a wet tracksuit who had been up since seven in the morning.
And then, arriving quietly from somewhere behind his own ribs, without any warning at all, it came.
I want to train.
He stopped where he was.
He had hated training since he was about twelve.
He had also done it every single day of his life since he was about twelve, and there was no contradiction in that, and anybody who had ever been good at anything knew there was not.
He did it because it was the price. He had never once, in ten years, actually wanted to.
I want to train.
Now. Tonight.
He wanted to go and do the shuttles and then the box work and then the shuttles again, and he wanted to keep going until he could not stand up. It was not a mood, and it was not the panel pushing him.
It sat in him like a fixture on a wall chart, something that had always been there, except it had been so long since he had felt it that he had forgotten what it was called.
"Alright," Angell said.
The padlock on the shed went clunk, and he put the timing gates back in their box and went and got the balls out with a key he was not supposed to have, the bag going down on the grass with a thud.
Nev came down at half past eleven and stood on the touchline with his flask, which went glug every few minutes, and watched him do forty minutes of finishing on his own in the dark, and said nothing, and went back to the hut.
Ball after ball went thump, thump, thump into the empty net with a swish. One of them came back off the post with a clang, and he put the next one in off the same post, because the post had annoyed him.
He was still out there at one in the morning.
He got home at twenty to two, the stairs going creak-creak under him, and he drank a pint of water standing at the sink, glug-glug.
Tomorrow was Sunday, and the day after that was Monday, and at half twelve on Monday a girl with blue eyes was going to be standing at the back of the gym, watching.
He had a number to beat and a hundred and fourteen points to find, and for the first time since he was nineteen years old, tomorrow was a thing he wanted.
He was asleep before his head had finished landing on the pillow.