500 Games of Summer

[jdoyle9293]

Rust has long since peeled the once yellow and blue paint from the metal barrier around Merchiston Wanderers’ pitch. The bracing Scottish wind unfurls the beige raincoat over shivering almost hairless legs behind the barrier. The young boy, possibly of drinking age but definitely still of school or university age, pats the raincoat back down under his thighs. He stretches his legs out under the barrier.

And takes a sip from his 500ml bottle of Lucozade.

The bitter, relentless rain batters the five or so uncovered inches of skin from lower thigh to upper shin that quivers in the torrential conditions. The teams of yellow and black with timber merchants or corner shop sponsorships on their shirts carry on about their business through squinted vision. The play reaches the backline of the yellow side’s defence. The boy tucks his legs in, anticipating a sweeping run from a fully tracksuited linesman on the touchline.

The linesman, probably a Dad or a pal of one of the players, stutters about twenty-five yards behind play, missing a clear offside as the team in black thread a ball down the far side’s wing. A jog to the byline is rendered futile: a goal. Two greying faces stood on the touchline, battered by rain, turn their hoods to the boy.

“James! On you come, son!” One of them barks.

Fast and short sprints somewhere vaguely near the touchline, knees hitting hands, half-arsed stretching of groins and thighs carries follows a drenched raincoated arm around his shoulder. The manager.

“Now, I’ll not stick you out wide. Their centre halves are flagging, find those spaces, you know. In between those lines. Be a nuisance.” His hands go a thousand miles per second faster than his slow, plodding pattern of speech.

“Ross!” The manager beckons a wide-man off the pitch. Ross and James interchange.

“Who’s this underage bufti?” One sub five-foot balding striker in black mutters as James passes the threshold onto the pitch.

James ignores him, clambering over his purposefully outstretched leg and half-hearted faux apology.

Two men double James’ age kick off in the centre circle and their first thought is backwards: to James. The team in yellow, Merchiston, flood forward. The defensive units of two centre halves and goalkeeper are the only ones left behind him. Three in black charge towards him. Rather than go dead straight, James opts for directly from back where he plodded onto the pitch. To that bald dwarf. The perceived intimidation given to James from that short man falls from his young, sagging shoulders and unprepared, shivering legs. He arrows ninety degrees to his right, meeting the bald man.

A drop of the shoulder infield.

A feint to go back the other way.

The roll of the ball through gaping black socked legs meets the approval of the two managers on the touchline. An embarrassed but about a century late clamping shut of the legs naturally follows. Those who had had a couple of drinks or a couple of lines too many the previous night are found out. Two more steamroll towards James and are immediately disposed of. A flick of the right foot throws the ball into the clogged penalty area. The ball squirts back out to the right and finds a yellow shirted teammate.

Four committed but lazy black shirts are rendered useless on halfway, the other six hug the edge of the penalty area. Acres. A simple cut back to James from wide. The rain flops James’ fringe in front of his eyes but, nonetheless, the pass is short anyway. He gallops to collect the ball thirty yards out. The goalkeeper is already vulnerable. He knows what’s coming. It’s obvious but another matter is stopping it. In one movement, James brings the ball more centrally and flicks the hair from his eyes.

A shift of the ball back onto his right.

His standing foot goes. It slides.

Further and further. His groin extends. His knee folds in half to compensate.

A loud POP.

James feels his mouth grow aghast as the black shirted defensive line’s eyes collectively light up. A ten metre sprint for the vacant ball and vacant patch of land. Muffled giggles from bald men closer in their age to their pension than to James’ age.

A curdling yelp from a statuesque James.

Before James can hit the turf like a sack of potatoes, the counter attack has begun. They gallop through soft grass through a stricken, prone James.

A punch of the turf. Shouting and shouting. The sound of a ball bursting a net followed by sporadic applause from those infield and those watching as well as a “get in there” from one touchlined woman.

“Bradley,” the manager frantically waves his arms about as the players re-take their positions. “Ref, rolling subs, yeah?”

 

…

 

Paint at the foot of the rickety bed literally dries as James adds a second pillow under his right knee. There is a window to his left but there’s not much of the world that is offered to James except the horrendously repetitious greying of clouds overlapping darker grey clouds. No skyline, no sun, no discernable colour. Reverting back to the unnatural light of the ceiling’s bright overhead tube is as close as you can get to exiting a dark cinema screen in the midst of the perfect summer’s cloudless day.

A door swings wide open. A pitiful but much welcomed and needed smile. Brown hair curls at its ends and peeks around a fur hood of a well-worn jacket. Brown hair that threatens to be auburn, maybe it turns auburn when it’s sunny but there’s not much sunny days to be had in this part of the British Isles.

“What you doing in here, you daft bastard, eh?” That voice. It was James’ weakness but at that point it strengthened him in the respect that the voice gave him absolute amnesia to the sheer pain of his knee.

“On a Sunday as well?” The split second serious face that James absolutely adored because he knew what often followed was a splutter of laughter and a smile. That sort of puffing out of the cheeks smile where she was fully aware of how she was smiling and tried to suppress it. She hid it, through fear of ridicule from James, with a swift kiss on the lips. Swift enough so that the incoming nurse wouldn’t interrupt but long enough for James to cotton onto the smoky aftertaste.

“It’s nothing to worry about, I—”, James’ timid voice is immediately quelled by her raised hands. She knew that he knew about the crafty cigarette on the taxi over. The cheeky ‘only a quick one, the wind of the taxi will blow away the smell and taste’ sort of cigarette.

“Ah, naw, I wasn’t worrying about you. It’s more—”

“Amber. You’ll ****ing ace the exam. Don’t worry.” James wraps his hands in hers.

“I know, I know—”

“You’re pretty much already in Uni.” Amber hushes him with a finger to his lips, as if to stop him jinxing it.

“Don’t. Just because you don’t have to try this year. I do,” The rattling of the ward’s door and sight of an overworked nurse at the foot of the bed silences Amber for a second, “they’ll probably give you a job here if you go through Uni, you’re here often enough anyway with your football.” The nurse politely smiles, waiting for the conversation’s end.

She hands a couple of forms to James on the bed and explains the schedules of appointments before quickly leaving.

“Ruptured,” James mouths, pointing at his knee, “a year minimum of physio before I can do anything, if all goes to plan.”

“Maybe you can get some advice on some physiotherapy courses at Uni, then.” Amber mutters with a futile wink.

“You know, I don’t want—”

“I know, I know.” Amber grips James’ hand disappointingly, crumbling to the bedside chair.

[CFuller]

It's been too long since we last saw you around these parts. 

No, really, it's great to have a new jdoyle story on FMS. If it's anything like your previous works, I can't wait to read more. (And is the title inspired by a certain movie, by any chance?)

[jdoyle9293]

13 minutes ago, CFuller said:

It's been too long since we last saw you around these parts. 

No, really, it's great to have a new jdoyle story on FMS. If it's anything like your previous works, I can't wait to read more. (And is the title inspired by a certain movie, by any chance?)

Haha, thanks. 

And yes it is, but only in its title. Just to give me a gimmick to make sure I don't leave it unfinished.

[jdoyle9293]

“Naw, they said I could do more physio if I was wanting to play back at Merchiston but professionally they said slim to no chances.” James ponders over the big unopened envelope in his grip.

“You dickhead, I was talking about your results, not the fitba!” A friend points at the envelope to an aghast James. No answer. His friend saunters off, presumably satisfied with his own results, not that James would know, his focus hadn’t been on his own results, why would he care about the results of a man who he was distant with at school, never mind when he’s spat out in some city like Manchester or Liverpool and he’s a couple of hundred miles away?

The burgundy of a Heart of Midlothian shirt James will never wear professionally clings to his back with sweat. The nervous rattling of that big envelope in his hands. He’d never given university much thought. His footballing ability would prevail in the end, it had to. ‘****ing UCAS points’, he mutters under his breath, testing the seal of the envelope with no real intention of opening it.

His head snaps back. A scan around the hall. Everyone is talking in some form or another but nobody is really saying anything, or rather, nobody is interested in what the other person is talking about. They’re all ******** themselves, regardless of their results, because they’re thinking about ‘what next?’ Whether it’s accommodation at some recently refurbished halls of residence or whether it’s being forced to put their hand in their pocket for rent at their parent’s place as they’ve exited education.

James couldn’t concentrate. Two hundred quivering students were in about a hundred metre radius of him. How was he to open up, what is literally in his future, amongst so many people who he disliked or had no care for? Even his excitement for Amber’s positive results was curbed by two things: her preferred university is in ****ing Southampton, it’s almost as if her personal statement simply read: ‘GET ME OUT OF SCOTLAND’, or she was just too spineless to break up with him face to face.

“Relationships always break up at university,” his brother had told him in a rare fit of misplaced philosophy, as if it was a tool to calm James down.

Another tempting peel of the envelope.

Another spy to make sure nobody dared to look at his results. James gives his hair another shake as a purpose, who knows, but for that micro-procrastination, for that distraction from allowing a slither of your future to be told to you by some Times New Roman font on a piece of not even nice printer paper.

And then he gives the envelope an: ‘ah, bollocks to it’, a shut your eyes and tear the paper. A fiddling with the paper inside follows the tear. Intermittent discovering of the paper headed by the sixth form college typically titled with ‘JAMES SUMMER’ and his student number. Mathematics is the first line inside fresh black font lower down the page. James’ eyes stutter across the page, never had he been so nervous to look at a letter of the alphabet.

E.

 

…

 

“All I’m saying, it’s that I know what we can call our first child,” James muffles into folded arms at a computer desk in the school’s library. “If it’s a boy.” Amber shuffles closer to him, knowing even less than she did before she stumbled across this conversation with her boyfriend.

“Is it Adam?” Amber throws up into the air.

James shoots to an upright position in the chair as if he’d given him a dig with a cattle prod. A completely bemused look on his face underscored with the frantic panting, sweating and bashing of keyboards from post-pubescent young adults around the library. They are tightrope walking underneath a future that has been advertised to them as swimming with sharks or swimming in gold. The library is never as busy as it is on results day afternoon when everyone remembers about the Clearing process – a second chance ‘at life’, one of James’ teachers called it.

As if University is everything.

“Adam. Tell me, how the **** would I get an ‘M’?” James’ raised voices offsets a softening in Amber’s face which in turn fuels an instant regret and another retreat into the crevices of his arms.

“I’m sorry—”

“No, it’s me. My fault, I mean.” A muffled voice struggles to escape James’ grip in the heart of his Hearts shirt.

“Just at least check Clearing. Look—”

Amber’s timid and caring voice drags James up for a simple glare at the cold light of the computer screen. A byline reads 499 courses in 87 universities. James jumps up to his feet and drops his tattered, unsuccessful envelope at the desk.

“I’ve gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow, or at least before you go to Southampton.”

Amber is strewn dishevelled across not one but two computer chairs. She logs out of the computer for James and slings her bag over her shoulder.

 

…

 

“Southampton?! That’s a joke, right?” A lankier, probably more confident version of James bellows with arms folded on the same yellow and blue skirted touchline of Merchiston Wanderers.

“No.”

“And what about—”, a crunching tackle is made about fifteen or twenty yards from a boy in yellow, “good tackle, Tommy, brilliant tackle. Let’s hit ‘em again, lads, ‘mon!” Like a switch, he reverts back to the decibel level that is owed to a normal face to face conversation, “I take it you didn’t get in?”

“Two D’s and an E.” James mutters under his breath.

“Well, you did better than me. You should be out on the lash drowning your sorrows, man, not here watching some under-14s stuff—” an obvious foul goes unpunished by the referee and the man sharing James’ conversation dives back into manager mode, “’mon referee that was diabolical, ****ing diabolical!”

“I want to do what you do, Kevin.” James mutters to the scoffs of who must be named Kevin next to him.

“Have you rung Mam about your results? She’ll be getting worried.” Kevin points to a car across the touchline as if to say ‘do it and get out of my sight’.

James is about to take him up on the offer when an extended arm grips at the SPL badge on the arm of his Hearts shirt.

“Don’t tell Mam or Dad... but if you actually want to do this, I’ll put towards for your courses.”

James leaves him with a reluctant smile.  

[jdoyle9293]

A monolith of endless albeit probably expensive opportunities towers over a shrinking James in a mock pathway absolutely crammed to the rafters with tourists and school wantaways in the middle of the day and workers and shops that you only see in train stations up north like The Pasty Shop or Upper Crust, designed for the filling up of carbohydrates.

James slides a bank card confidently into a monolith and a touch screen keyboard comes to the fore. James quivers over the ‘S’ but types ‘P’ instead. Followed by an ‘O’ and an ‘R’ – PORTSMOUTH selected.

FIND 17 CHEAP FARES FROM £498 OR MORE. Cheap fares, **** off.

James retrieves his bank card slightly more timidly with a look over his shoulder in the midst of Edinburgh Waverley train station’s concourse. A gaggle of suitcases with incessant wheeling of their deteriorating wheels are underscored by that belittling, wrenching and deafening sounds of the English. And what’s worse – English south of Newcastle.

Twenty plus platforms to choose from and with one solitary rucksack and thirty minutes until a train slides through Portsmouth.

 

…

 

‘No happy endings, unless fairytales come true’ James kills the iPod as the Uber rolls up to some pokey old building with a vague colour arrangement of yellow and blue.

“Here you are, pal, Basingstoke F.C. Enjoy!” The Uber driver, so desperately to improve his 3.8* star rating, so desperately to squeeze a 5* out of his latest customer, bids goodbye, speeding off in a tyre screeching J-turn. He adjusts his tracksuit, rubs his eyes and approaches some flimsy white door that wouldn’t look out of place in your gran’s conservatory or something.

Is a tracksuit suitable for what is essentially first contact at a new job? James pondered as a man trundled out from behind the less than pristine white door dressed in what has been described by people running work placement workshops as “Saturday Job Smart Casual”. James shook the thought of education from his head and accosted the man with a handshake.

 

…

 

“What we need to give you, and perhaps each other is an education,” ah ****, not this again, James’ thoughts trailed off towards the Southerner who was sat opposite, entirely grating on him. “Where are you staying in the mean time?”

“I’ve got a… Southampton, I’m in some hotel but looking for somewhere to rent soon.” Two pairs of we know better than you, we’re from the south eyebrows jump up the faces of the clean shaved, not a flicker of a wrinkle, ‘I moisturise daily’ faces across from James.

“That’s…”

“Some distance.” The pair finish of each other’s sentences. James quizzically glares back at them. He’s stuck of something to say, grasping at the thin smog of southern air.

“We’re doing a complete re-launch of the academy system and we’d like you to start immediately. We’ve got a pre-season game tomorrow, we’ll discuss more then. You’re our new assistant.” The man with the aptly tracksuited ‘TP’, was James’ new boss whilst the smart casual fella was an assistant to the main squad’s manager.

“James,” the assistant manager squeaked, “do we have a deal?” A smile followed by a couple of handshakes and the formalities were out of the way. One of James’ eyes was already nervously twitching about the trip back to Southampton.

 

…

 

University campuses gave James the creeps so the twiddling of thumbs mid-transit on the rickety train from Basingstoke to Southampton led to a re-location of the arranged meet into the city centre. If you can call it a city.

Eleven long, torturous months since they had previous met. James was slumped in some poor excuse for a bench just outside some church grounds purposefully an hour early so he could cobble together some form of words. The preparation, of course, would prove futile because as soon as Amber turned up, jeans tucked into boots, a long coat collar meeting her wispy hair which would be auburn in the sparkling July sunlight, he would melt underneath the heat.

Umpteen questions had crossed his mind. How much worse is England than Scotland? Do you miss Edinburgh? Do you miss everyone back home? Do you miss me? Have you met anyone new? How is university? Have you seriously met anyone new? What’s the best thing about drinking too much to handle and coasting off your inevitably flimsy student loans? Please, have you met someone new? Have you moved on?

Thoughts flew by, compressed by their speed of light, through the church bells as they struck four.

As predicted. The boots. The coat. The hair (in its auburn state). The big ****ing green eyes. She couldn’t sit on the bench quick enough. James had this idea in his head in that hour long brainstorming session that he was going to take things all cool and seriously and try not to give anything away, maybe even slip in a fact that he’d had a girlfriend, or two, probably just one because that might be too much of a stretch and he’d eventually be whittled down to the fact that he got off with someone in Milk shortly after their break up and then cried on her sofa when he couldn’t stop thinking about Amber.

“Hello—”

Yeah, that’s it, James, launch straight into the kiss. Let’s ditch Plan A almost immediately shall we? Not even any pleasantries or greeting, just a kiss. Is that how you greet everybody nowadays, she’ll be wondering. James thought, almost out loud such was the expulsion of his emotions upon seeing her again.

“I’ve missed you, too.” She spluttered into that cheek-flaring, unwavering grin that he’d missed.

 

…

 

An alarm clock. Unfamiliar curtains met with familiar green eyes next to him. ****.

“Basingstoke!” James jumps out of his skin and the bed that he had shared with Amber that even to the absolute hilarity discovered by Amber. “Pre-season, I’m due there in about two hours.”

“I’ll drive you, don’t worry,” Amber clambered out of bed, “wait. You’re playing again?”

“Coach. I also live down here too. In Southampton.”

Confused green eyes. James always thought they looked colour corrected by some omniscient VR machine or that she was perpetually wearing vivid contact lenses.

And with that puzzling thought in his head, he dressed himself over the threshold of a shared flat with half a dozen prying eyes on the hallway staring at him.