trial (Football, Steven/Xabi)
trial
For Susan and Emerald
1.
You palm his throat, and for a slight second you are cheek to cheek, momentary in celebration. In that instant, a city is conquered, its walls a fortress of stone that cracks beneath the pressure of his awful smile, his awful chuckle, and the way his hand touches the small of your back in reassurance. A city is falling, and you look at him, and are happy.
Happiness is not uncommon to you. Happiness is sitting by the river as a child and knowing that your hometown has fifty thousand inhabitants, half of whom you do not know. On weekends you sat by strangers and skipped stones into water, heavy things bouncing on a million molecular pinpricks. This is enough evidence to show that you were brought up on miracles as a child, and that is why you are happy so easily, so frustratingly easily, from just a look or a glance or a touch on the back.
When you were seven years old you met a man, who was sitting with his legs dangling from an ancient bridge. He had wrinkles and hands like fossils, and he sat by you for an hour, the both of you looking at currents and ripples as quick as a fox, sly as a fox. The man turned to you and said, This is why happiness is so difficult to find in the world. It is quick, and we are blind, and when we are finally able to see, the happiness flits so quickly that we must run after it, run and run and run, in hope of finally finding it. He asks you if you will run, and you run.
You run home, and as you do you think of a hundred facts that will never change; your papa, your brothers, the sun and moon and stars. You think of the fifty thousand inhabitants of your hometown, and of how Tolosa is also the name of an asteroid somewhere far from earth; a lesser planet.
When you move from your lesser planet to the big towns of Spain you realise then that it does not just take several hours to make an orbit. The world is bigger than you think, like how your river water will one day become a sea, a boyhood town a fortress of your heart. How all the smallest of happiness will make up a big picture. You ran that time, and you run now. You pat his face once, the stadium lights a constant against your sudden and fast affection, and then you run back to position, to the beginning.
Start over.
2.
The beginning is easy. You are the sort of person who likes everyone you meet. You start off with a hundred percent that drops over time, and when you touch his hand you decide to give him two hundred instead of one. You respect him, and as you smile and give that coarse hand a firm shake, you think he does too.
After all, Steven is a respectful name. It makes you think of Englishmen in suits, declining cigars and wine, and you try to let him know in that instant where your tight smile is forced to belie a message. That is the policy of courtesy, though you are unsure of how he accepts it. Because Steven G. falls a little quiet for the rest of the day, and the three creases above his eyebrows look like excavations of certain injury. It is as though he tries to look angrier than usual. You think, that is a difficult task, and he scowls as though hearing you.
At night, there is a dinner, and for the first time you see them out of costume, a motley crew of beige and grey and brown, who could be a dozen odd men picked by chance from a street, put together in the solid colours of geology. That is, until you notice that Kewell has deigned to wear pink, and Steven white. They sit together, drinking, looking like a pair of ridiculous Valentine bunnies.
You think that is when you first speak to him, out of costume and out of play; suddenly, as one grown man speaking to another. It is the first thing you remember saying to him, and it is ridiculous, somehow, just why and how you did. In that second, you said, Steven, and you took his drink from his hand. You said, Steven, one of my eyebrows grows into the other, and it makes me look angry without trying.
You said, Don’t be angry if you don’t have to.
Then you toasted him with his own beer.
You remember Kewell laughing, and yourself almost wanting to walk away for stepping out of line. How your sudden bravery fell just as suddenly, flat.
He only said, Nobody here calls me Steven. The expression in his eyes scrawled, illegible.
And you thought of yourself running home that day in your childhood, thought of all the things that would never change, the asteroid taking ten hours to make a turn. Then, you added that angry face to the list, hoping that you were wrong.
3.
If it takes a piece of rock ten hours to orbit, man only needs an instant to craft a complete turnaround.
But unlike the number of days in a planet’s year, an instant is so quick that it can scarcely be predicted. Forty-one minutes is elation, but by the forty-second, jubilation is over. New passes, new tackles, making happiness turn into hope.
After the Arsenal match, you have won, and he corners you briefly in the tunnel to congratulate you.
Good job, he says.
No, no, you tell him. Thank you.
You are not even sure if you are thanking him for the assist, or thanking him for the compliment. Perhaps you are even thanking him for the way the right side of his mouth curls up into a smile, the forehead that flattens from anguished peaks into a plain. But in all seriousness you don’t yet know, so you can only repeat yourself, and clap him on the shoulder like a brother.
Later when you shower, you stand in front of a hot spray so warm you sometimes fear it may cook the flesh beneath your skin, and you rub your face, eyes closed and breathing through your mouth, just breathing steam. You feel a little like a statue beneath the sad tilt of a geyser rushing down, the water deflecting off your body like a shot. You are standing in a warm cloud and you don’t want to move, cannot move, for ever swiftly you are paralysed by the water, a million pinpricks suffocating a heavy thing. You don’t want to move. You can only to scrub your cheeks with the flat of your palms, for a moment feeling grimier than usual.
Your breath is stuck in your throat, and no speech avails you even if you wanted to shout from the top of a mountain that something strange is happening, a click of events that will make a star stop burning or grind an orbit to a halt. You don’t know it yourself; you don’t believe it yourself. If it takes any amount of time to come clean, it would take you infinity.
4.
You’re suddenly a ghost in black, click of the feet making your way into some brandless dimension. You learned about Röntgen radiation, but nothing prepares you for the way you look on the sheet of translucent paper, glossed over in white. This is what the dead must look like, and it feels that way; how an ankle, dead, would feel. It frightens you so much that you can hardly speak for a while.
It’s good that there’s a sound; you were about to bury yourself. You look up and for a moment your eyes can’t focus. The room is off-white, like a Merseyside rain, and Steven appears like a marsh monster. But he is too late; you have stopped being frightened. Instead, you tug between the two of you a thin line of silence.
You win. He speaks first.
He sits on the far side of the room, then gets up, as if needing a new destination. Sits down again, nearer, just slightly. From his mouth projects some loud, harsh noise, and he could be screaming for all you know, because all you see is the way his mouth moves quickly as if trying to find the right words to say. You wish he wouldn’t. After all, taking comfort from Steven Gerrard is a dastardly thing, like wasting a precious resource, like using up fossil fuels and water, like leaving a car burning its engine overnight. You did that once, when you were younger. Eighteen, maybe seventeen. Last year Spain fell into the worst drought in half a decade, and you felt guilty.
You thought, never again.
Bloody broken ankle, he says.
Well, yes, you say.
And it’s not to say that you feel good about it - injuries, bones, cracks, or letting your car produce enough carbon monoxide to kill a couple of farm animals. Frankly, it’s devastating. But you are not the kind of person to be scared for long.
Yes, you say again, and you are suddenly uncomfortable, as though you are some small insect caught in his mesh netting of words, words that are not pliant against his tone or inflections, that rush out too fast to make any sense. He’s fidgeting and twisting the corner of his shirt even as he’s smiling, trying to be encouraging, moving like he’s baiting the forced stillness of your posture, the straight back, the crushed leg. Still you see that mouth, the thin lips that sink toward each other in the middle, the small uneven teeth.
You’ll - you’ll do good. Good enough. Soon, he says, at the end, then blink of the eye and he’s gone, as a shadow when a room switches from light to pitch black, and his absence makes him unroll across your brain, into corners you will never be able to clean, so that you are left being baffled and irate all at once.
5.
While England supposedly has cool winters and warm summers, the beginning of the year is downright cold. You would like it perhaps if you were outside, catching flurries on your tongue when no one is around to look, but now you’re just stuck trying to open the window with the rust on its hinges that flake down when you push. It’s difficult to get leverage when you’re sitting, and you would rather bake in the heater than stand, so all you do is to watch the light snow come down like hardened rain. This is an activity a little depressing for the cold season, and because of this you cannot too quickly paste on a smile. But with February, you are getting better, and this long white room with the plush chairs look only like a temporary distress. You’re once again beginning to walk, swim, and move like you’re made of air. You will do your best, and that is what you tell yourself every day as you sit up in bed with a big wind whistling between the window panes.
The same wind whistles as you sit on the grey sofa with the Liverpool cushions; you blend like a chameleon, eyes buggy from watching too many replays. Winter has been all about watching, and for some absurd reason, you feel like a fan. Heart plunges and skyrockets like a moodswing; the television is your friend. Close-ups of all the people you know make them seem like strangers, and you notice the oddest things, like Finnan’s cheekbones, and Jamie’s hair. Steven’s stare. All immaculate onscreen, meticulously placed and tweaked by some skilled cameraman, the smooth commentary flattening out the imperfections.
It’s these details that keep haunting you, these things on the TV. You’re very practical about it by nature, and block them out otherwise, but they slip in when you stop thinking, and suddenly you are flooded with images of the field, never too small when you are on. The players, less of pint-sized than real, the feel of collision and smell of sweat. Tangible things. Your time in this asylum makes you prickle to run again, see and touch things. You can imagine yourself telling Finnan about the way he looks onscreen, cheeks sucked in and pink from cold, or how Jamie’s hair is short enough to stick on like a helmet. And the stare, the long lower lashes like spider legs trapping dust when he blinks. You remember the upturned mouth so clearly, and the impassive eyes pools the water spider skates over without drowning in. It must all revive.
And all this, you know, will happen. If you have an idea of what you want, all you need to do is to believe.
6.
In the end, it is not the end of your season. The Juventus game is a heartstopper, and you remember happiness being a blimp that announces your keenness for the world, the rush of gladness and irrepressible beam that makes you holler for half a minute on the pitch, the clamber of arms and legs and being crushed beneath bodies.
And later, finding space, the static on your cellphone, the number that you punch in wrongly four times because the buttons are shaking or your fingers are shaking and the happiness comes like a fifty foot wave. The line cuts off twice and you try to find better reception standing in different parts of your room, once even standing on your bed with the springs sinking your feet into sponge like a trap. The first time, you’re left shouting Hello? Hello? at the operator, who hangs up on you not knowing who you are, and thrice after that, facing the unbelievable dead buzz of a lost connection.
This is not the kind of fate to be met by someone who has qualified for the CL Semifinals, the moronically wonderful CL Semis with another eleven men and another referee, like any other friendly or league or another cup or another, but it is the Champion’s League and certainly the phone ought not malfunction when somebody is close to spontaneous combustion from the gladness building up inside.
And you think you might be angry but above all frustrated and relieved and pleased and the static clears as he says, Hello? as you say, Hello? and the both of you saying, Hello? Hello? together, different accents, same word, a hundred miscommunications.
Xabi, he says finally, and you cannot bring yourself to say his name.
You have probably heard, but we are in, you tell him. And that is such a good thing.
Very. Very great. Great, Steven says. There is a pause.
I watched it.
I know, you say, and it’s turning out to be one of those ridiculously awkward conversations, as bad as the one where the first girl you ever liked asked if you had wanted to attend a funeral. At that time, you had said, No, but now you are only saying Yes, yes, yes. Yes, good passing, strength, technical abilities, that is what made today. Yes, Cisse was fine; yes the atmosphere was excellent, yes, quite divine. All the while you wonder if, as he speaks, he blinks, if grey eyes close out a cloudy sky, if he’s alone in his vast living room with the clattering sounds and screams of the TV. Maybe he is sitting down with a coffee, though that is not something he would do. Maybe it’s a beer. Or two beers. You can’t ascertain. Instead, you fill up the silence with babble, and you can’t remember a thing you say.
What are you going to do now? he asks after a while.
Sleep, you say. Sleep and think. Try to think about many things, or a few things. Think about -
The next match, then? Steven says.
You stop. Those eyes shut and open in the amount of time you take to breathe.
Yes, you continue. I think I will think only about that.
You step off your bed, and the static blurs into his voice and yours.
7.
You remember ninety-eight things about Istanbul, filed and categorised neatly in your mind. The place itself is the only city that lazes across two continents, and its alternately narrow and wide streets have more than their fair share of schizophrenia, Egyptian bazaars against skyscrapers making jolting contrasts seem lovely. You remember turrets and fountains from the window of your private transport, and so many people all at once, encumbered in their daily lives. The motor ways, the traffic jams, the yellow lights at night. Just public roads alone take up more than ninety percent of everything you remember.
The other ten goes to Istanbul; Istanbul proper. Out of ten, there are three goals, three saves and one screaming people. You recall each incident in isolation, its backstory and its future: the pep talk, the fans, the furious concentration. The first goal, the Gerrard goal, the magnificent strike, how he stamped in half circles moving his arms up and down half-choked in a scream. Months later when you watch it on the television you feel a pang; it is almost funny. But not then, not there.
Second is a Smicer, and it re-establishes hope. When you think of Smicer’s goal, you think of Smicer, the way he runs, and how wide his eyes are. Some people called him Regal Nose. Smicer plays for the Girondins now, Mdm Roland and all. He plays for blue, plays for white, but is indefinitely tied to the small redness of memory. You wish him well.
You remember the third goal best. This is not one of your claims to modesty, but you try to hide the fact that you do. The clarity of it all, and the quickness. The way the ball hits the glove and then the net plays out in excruciating motion. You could calculate the physics of the motion, the mathematical probability that you could score and did. You wonder how you can be so clinical about it, when for weeks afterward, all you could dream of was the celebration, of a vaguely evident joy with your chin grazing the pitch, and you awoke night after night tangled in your bedsheets wanting to shout and watch that grin re-plastered over your own face.
Then the penalties. The line you make with your arms around each other. The tension, the praying. Someone wrings your neck with an arm as Jerzy makes starfish shapes in goal. You rest yours on little Luis, maybe shivering. Three saves, and then the crowd, their shouts a flood, tears a tidal wave.
The last three things you remember is really a half thing because it is the only memory that isn’t concrete. You have to piece it together later from what people tell you, and it forms your own silhouette in the chronology patterned on your mind. You see pictures later, and try to exact from them the exact way they can be sensed, but it is like groping the air for a feeling. You can draw them out like mutually exclusive variables on a Venn.
There is Jerzy’s hand on your shoulder, miracle hand, like Midas that turns you to gold.
There is Gerrard’s hand on the cup, the silverware of a captain.
Then, there is you settling for nothing, the tough sinews of his shoulder clamped down by your fist, the tortured stretch of his neck and yours, and beneath the line of thin lips, the feel of small, uneven teeth. There is only a glove and a small gasp of air between you, and for a second, a hundred camera flashes light up the shadows across his eyes.
You know why it is so special now. Champions League winners are winners indeed.
8.
When you return home, she’s smiling wide and putting her arms around your neck.
¿Feliz?
Sí. You waver, then kiss her. Sí.
But that old man said, you need to run to find happiness. Now, you find yourself running away from it, because how can you meet it each day? How can one make happiness a career without it catching up on you? So much of it is a little frightening. Like how Pepe kicks the base of his posts twice, you try to seal this gladness into the mouth of your own goal, protecting it fiercely, not wanting to let your clean sheets soil.
But they do, eventually, just when the sky turns less the colour of mould.
He knocks on your door even though there’s a doorbell, knocks as though he wants the splinters in his skin, and when you open and see that it is him, you cannot help but feel a little frantic. It is osmosis. His eyes are slightly wild, and everything you want to say or do sews itself within a seam inside you, bursting to the brim. For the first time in a while you are full of questions and less of answers. You want to ask if he wants a drink, or if he minds the way your den looks like a dump. Why? is another good question to ask, but you miss it altogether.
You cook paella, and you’re biting the citric acrid of your tongue for lack of what to say. You can feel the grip of his fingers leaving prints on the tabletop. You wonder if he will crack the delicate glass surface, a chip coming off in his repressed and crazy clutching. You’re a little concerned and bitter. You just went furniture shopping.
The table is new, you say when you serve him, and he emits a mumble of interest, lets go in the name of food. He eats like he’s starving, and doesn’t stop until he does. When he looks up, you may still be forking in your second mouthful. You’ve always been a slow eater, an eater meant for occasions, and when he looks up, you stop and let him.
You want to speak? Talk?
I. He stops.
Say something, you say. You jam your fork into the flatbed of rice.
I'm supposed to sign this week, he says, and there is a pause as you try to shut him up. It’s then when you kiss him, and when you kiss him you remember the details now like something vivid and spotless, like the cup before you got to touch it, the gold and silver before you reduced it to nothing. The white hospital of your corridor, the white shut expanse of your room like washed laundry, a dozen clean sheets, and the walls expressionless when you finally realise why you never became a keeper because you would let in too many goals to keep it sacred.
Winters cool, but summers warm. The colour of tanned skin against sheets looks remarkably out of place, and when you let open the window the breeze teases open the curtains like a heartache. He leans against the headboard and plays with the stack of post-it notes by your bed. Peels them off in layers and leaves them scattered like multi-coloured fruit skins, and forgets his socks on the way out.
When Steven leaves, the auto-lock shuts behind him, and you spend your time cleaning. Cleaning the counter, the table, the springboard of the bed, anything that could leave fingerprints or clues or smells. You get a little obsessive about it over the week, and you don’t eat paella for five weeks and a few days.
Months later, you find an orange post-it beneath the bed, blank and a little crumpled, in the middle of pristine sheets and shut windows. It stares at you for a moment, and you cannot bring yourself to throw it away.
9.
When you receive news that he is to leave, you feel like throwing things, making a wreck out of your house. The wind is high that day, and the leaves make their own hurricane, so much like yours, a mess on a crude scene of black and white. You in your monochrome sweatshirt, the room empty, the orange post-it in your back pocket. All you can do for a few hours is to look at air. Then you stand, and walk out, see the bright corridor and the sunlight making glittery flickers in your hair. The windy, fresh morning comes against you with open arms. The kitchen, the scrubbed counter, the glass-top table, the way you reach into the drawers and cupboards, trying to remember how to make paella again. You eat facing the refrigerator. The cooler makes funny quiet noises. It reminds you of two people waking up at the same time, shifting slowly beside each other in a state of half-consciousness, and yet pretending to be fast asleep, just simply wanting to have a longer time together. Now you have your stubbornly noisy fridge, and it has you. You eat your second mouthful of paella, and tell it, At least we have each other. Your voice makes strange loud echoes, and then dies. A bird outside screams. And then, like how waking up is a painful thing, you make yourself stop being angry.
You call your girlfriend and talk for five minutes. She asks if you’ve had lunch and you tell her what you made. Paella, you say, but now it tastes bad.
Forgot the peppers? Ran out of shrimp?
I added everything.
Even onions?
Especially the onions.
She stops, and you can hear her breathe casually down the phone. Then says, There are still other midfielders.
Yes, you say. Like me.
Like you.
After you hang up, you realise that life will go on. Tomorrow morning, you will train like a bitch, and you will look him in the eye like always. You will think up some clever explanation. And then maybe, just maybe, you will give him your greatest blessings for when you play against him this winter.
10.
Steven is doing that thing with his shirt again, where he wrings the corner with his fingers. When he looks up, you cannot read him. He says that he is stupid sometimes, and all you can say is, Yes, because how could you disagree? You want to shake some sense into him, tell him as politely as you can, Hello stupid, we all still miss you, although you are back. But Steven is messy in front of you, blabbering in too mumbling a fashion to properly listen.
You do not want to wear it now, but you were never before a coward, like this.
I’m not scared. He is defiant. I just - don’t know where to begin.
Everyone starts from the first square. You just need to start again from there. The club, the fans, will see you off. They will support you.
You, he says, and his mouth is drawn into a straight line. Square one? I can’t get to square one. I’m some double-scum ship-jumper. It’s twice this season that I’ve ridiculed the armband and now you’re asking me to make it three. I’m all right, and I say okay, make it bloody three, but there isn’t a way I’m going to find fucking square one.
Not now, you reply. But you will. You look at him direct, even though you don’t quite want to tell him that he looks terrifying looking angry. Steven. He can waver apprehension into the hearts of any opposition. You know that even the blindest of fans will one day embrace him for that, despite all the indecision, bad decisions and taking back those bad decisions.
You are a different kind of player, you say at long last. And there are many kinds of players. Some people are made to play good football. I think we are all part of that. But some people are made to be different. Captains are different. You are not the same.
You don’t know nuts -
I’m not a blind fan. I’ve seen you play more than once.
There is a moment where he stares at you, does that thing with his forehead that makes you slightly anxious.
Smart little fucker, aren’t you?
Steven, if you want to be left alone -
Yeah. A while, maybe.
You chair grinds backward as you try to stand, walk out quickly before you are tempted to speak some more.
Xabi.
You stop. Fold whatever words you have beneath your tongue.
He only says, very quietly, Nobody here calls me that.
Steven? you ask.
And for a moment before you turn, you think he may even be smiling.
11.
Japan is exciting. You nod enthusiastically when Nando says that all of you are Gullivers, because you are, normal people being Peter Crouch. Being in the streets makes your limbs feel suddenly dangly, oversized, amid the roil of a hundred pocket-sized students and women.
The first thing served at touchdown is the tea, drinking a hundred dead bugs, translucent leaves wings that catch on your teeth. Finnan is like, What the fuck? in private, and everyone laughs.
A lower temperature reads on the scale but it is strangely warmer than in good old Liverpool, and the air is clear. Everything seems small-scale, delicate, and twenty-two men storming the faint wood of their hotel seems a bit more than sacrilege. In the mornings, all of you run, making a small-scale Kyoto quake. Crouch sticks out a mile.
Now Japan will always be associated with the miniature and the temporary, how everything gushes by in a breeze. The winning, the loss. How a few nights before, you were trying on yukata and he poked his head in through the door, wearing sweatpants and an ugly T-shirt, telling you that the toilets were too bloody small.
Conversations with him are always brief, stunted, peppered with laughs, and you can’t help but, something choking in your throat, telling him that he can’t knock down a wall to make a bigger space.
And he comes in and sits on your bed, says, What will we do if we are not world champions? and you can only back into your dresser, sink down for a while, and reassure him that life will go on, no matter how much you are for a moment displaced, or frightened or hurt.
A loss is a loss, you say. You cannot take it back, no matter how much you want to. People will leave, there will be opportunities never taken, but there is always that next game.
You lose in Japan, but you dream otherwise, and if anything, that soothes the sting. At least there is the prospect of the long flight back, with the sadness compressed by distance into comfort.
12.
You will start again. The papers, the radio, the broadcast, spreadsheets, and yet the undeniable joy of one game flattened against the next. Everyone hailing Liverpool as the team, the Reds, an explosion on the pitch. The defense, midfield, and tipsy strikers make patterns on screens, a dozen regulars a fossil in macadam. Run, cross, strike, pass, half time. Routine.
They say, Gerrard makes tea for the team at half-time and the truth is that he does, throws them all in hot water and extracts their souls with piss-hot talk. Makes the tea at half time, more like makes the team at half time.
And when you look at him you find yourself awash with some strange sense of pride, telling yourself that this is how the season will be, the team and Stevie G, your captain and mine.
13.
You are proved right. Life goes on, and Steven is captain, everybody’s captain. Like the hinge of a window when you’re struggling for the next breath of air, he’ll let you open smoothly. He shapes the season, and you do your best to play the smaller part you have given yourself.
You know that is the truth.
It is how you wake up in the mornings and know where you are to go, where all the vectors converge to give no movement. Centre of the universe. You’ll wash your hair and shave, clean your face, mechanically noting the nick of a blade on your chin or the mole across your neck, and how they never seem to fade. The garage, the car, turning up the heater two out of five, bad music on the radio.
And when you get out of your car, you know for a while that your heart stops. Then recharge. And when you’re dressed proper you see in order the corridors, the lockers, the sign: This is Anfield.
This is Anfield.
This is where you begin, breaking out into a run, meeting the sharply damp air and bright green grass, yielding beneath your feet. Running feet meeting the pound in your head, thinking of a hundred facts that will never change; this team, this stadium, this wide, open, open space.
For Susan and Emerald
1.
You palm his throat, and for a slight second you are cheek to cheek, momentary in celebration. In that instant, a city is conquered, its walls a fortress of stone that cracks beneath the pressure of his awful smile, his awful chuckle, and the way his hand touches the small of your back in reassurance. A city is falling, and you look at him, and are happy.
Happiness is not uncommon to you. Happiness is sitting by the river as a child and knowing that your hometown has fifty thousand inhabitants, half of whom you do not know. On weekends you sat by strangers and skipped stones into water, heavy things bouncing on a million molecular pinpricks. This is enough evidence to show that you were brought up on miracles as a child, and that is why you are happy so easily, so frustratingly easily, from just a look or a glance or a touch on the back.
When you were seven years old you met a man, who was sitting with his legs dangling from an ancient bridge. He had wrinkles and hands like fossils, and he sat by you for an hour, the both of you looking at currents and ripples as quick as a fox, sly as a fox. The man turned to you and said, This is why happiness is so difficult to find in the world. It is quick, and we are blind, and when we are finally able to see, the happiness flits so quickly that we must run after it, run and run and run, in hope of finally finding it. He asks you if you will run, and you run.
You run home, and as you do you think of a hundred facts that will never change; your papa, your brothers, the sun and moon and stars. You think of the fifty thousand inhabitants of your hometown, and of how Tolosa is also the name of an asteroid somewhere far from earth; a lesser planet.
When you move from your lesser planet to the big towns of Spain you realise then that it does not just take several hours to make an orbit. The world is bigger than you think, like how your river water will one day become a sea, a boyhood town a fortress of your heart. How all the smallest of happiness will make up a big picture. You ran that time, and you run now. You pat his face once, the stadium lights a constant against your sudden and fast affection, and then you run back to position, to the beginning.
Start over.
2.
The beginning is easy. You are the sort of person who likes everyone you meet. You start off with a hundred percent that drops over time, and when you touch his hand you decide to give him two hundred instead of one. You respect him, and as you smile and give that coarse hand a firm shake, you think he does too.
After all, Steven is a respectful name. It makes you think of Englishmen in suits, declining cigars and wine, and you try to let him know in that instant where your tight smile is forced to belie a message. That is the policy of courtesy, though you are unsure of how he accepts it. Because Steven G. falls a little quiet for the rest of the day, and the three creases above his eyebrows look like excavations of certain injury. It is as though he tries to look angrier than usual. You think, that is a difficult task, and he scowls as though hearing you.
At night, there is a dinner, and for the first time you see them out of costume, a motley crew of beige and grey and brown, who could be a dozen odd men picked by chance from a street, put together in the solid colours of geology. That is, until you notice that Kewell has deigned to wear pink, and Steven white. They sit together, drinking, looking like a pair of ridiculous Valentine bunnies.
You think that is when you first speak to him, out of costume and out of play; suddenly, as one grown man speaking to another. It is the first thing you remember saying to him, and it is ridiculous, somehow, just why and how you did. In that second, you said, Steven, and you took his drink from his hand. You said, Steven, one of my eyebrows grows into the other, and it makes me look angry without trying.
You said, Don’t be angry if you don’t have to.
Then you toasted him with his own beer.
You remember Kewell laughing, and yourself almost wanting to walk away for stepping out of line. How your sudden bravery fell just as suddenly, flat.
He only said, Nobody here calls me Steven. The expression in his eyes scrawled, illegible.
And you thought of yourself running home that day in your childhood, thought of all the things that would never change, the asteroid taking ten hours to make a turn. Then, you added that angry face to the list, hoping that you were wrong.
3.
If it takes a piece of rock ten hours to orbit, man only needs an instant to craft a complete turnaround.
But unlike the number of days in a planet’s year, an instant is so quick that it can scarcely be predicted. Forty-one minutes is elation, but by the forty-second, jubilation is over. New passes, new tackles, making happiness turn into hope.
After the Arsenal match, you have won, and he corners you briefly in the tunnel to congratulate you.
Good job, he says.
No, no, you tell him. Thank you.
You are not even sure if you are thanking him for the assist, or thanking him for the compliment. Perhaps you are even thanking him for the way the right side of his mouth curls up into a smile, the forehead that flattens from anguished peaks into a plain. But in all seriousness you don’t yet know, so you can only repeat yourself, and clap him on the shoulder like a brother.
Later when you shower, you stand in front of a hot spray so warm you sometimes fear it may cook the flesh beneath your skin, and you rub your face, eyes closed and breathing through your mouth, just breathing steam. You feel a little like a statue beneath the sad tilt of a geyser rushing down, the water deflecting off your body like a shot. You are standing in a warm cloud and you don’t want to move, cannot move, for ever swiftly you are paralysed by the water, a million pinpricks suffocating a heavy thing. You don’t want to move. You can only to scrub your cheeks with the flat of your palms, for a moment feeling grimier than usual.
Your breath is stuck in your throat, and no speech avails you even if you wanted to shout from the top of a mountain that something strange is happening, a click of events that will make a star stop burning or grind an orbit to a halt. You don’t know it yourself; you don’t believe it yourself. If it takes any amount of time to come clean, it would take you infinity.
4.
You’re suddenly a ghost in black, click of the feet making your way into some brandless dimension. You learned about Röntgen radiation, but nothing prepares you for the way you look on the sheet of translucent paper, glossed over in white. This is what the dead must look like, and it feels that way; how an ankle, dead, would feel. It frightens you so much that you can hardly speak for a while.
It’s good that there’s a sound; you were about to bury yourself. You look up and for a moment your eyes can’t focus. The room is off-white, like a Merseyside rain, and Steven appears like a marsh monster. But he is too late; you have stopped being frightened. Instead, you tug between the two of you a thin line of silence.
You win. He speaks first.
He sits on the far side of the room, then gets up, as if needing a new destination. Sits down again, nearer, just slightly. From his mouth projects some loud, harsh noise, and he could be screaming for all you know, because all you see is the way his mouth moves quickly as if trying to find the right words to say. You wish he wouldn’t. After all, taking comfort from Steven Gerrard is a dastardly thing, like wasting a precious resource, like using up fossil fuels and water, like leaving a car burning its engine overnight. You did that once, when you were younger. Eighteen, maybe seventeen. Last year Spain fell into the worst drought in half a decade, and you felt guilty.
You thought, never again.
Bloody broken ankle, he says.
Well, yes, you say.
And it’s not to say that you feel good about it - injuries, bones, cracks, or letting your car produce enough carbon monoxide to kill a couple of farm animals. Frankly, it’s devastating. But you are not the kind of person to be scared for long.
Yes, you say again, and you are suddenly uncomfortable, as though you are some small insect caught in his mesh netting of words, words that are not pliant against his tone or inflections, that rush out too fast to make any sense. He’s fidgeting and twisting the corner of his shirt even as he’s smiling, trying to be encouraging, moving like he’s baiting the forced stillness of your posture, the straight back, the crushed leg. Still you see that mouth, the thin lips that sink toward each other in the middle, the small uneven teeth.
You’ll - you’ll do good. Good enough. Soon, he says, at the end, then blink of the eye and he’s gone, as a shadow when a room switches from light to pitch black, and his absence makes him unroll across your brain, into corners you will never be able to clean, so that you are left being baffled and irate all at once.
5.
While England supposedly has cool winters and warm summers, the beginning of the year is downright cold. You would like it perhaps if you were outside, catching flurries on your tongue when no one is around to look, but now you’re just stuck trying to open the window with the rust on its hinges that flake down when you push. It’s difficult to get leverage when you’re sitting, and you would rather bake in the heater than stand, so all you do is to watch the light snow come down like hardened rain. This is an activity a little depressing for the cold season, and because of this you cannot too quickly paste on a smile. But with February, you are getting better, and this long white room with the plush chairs look only like a temporary distress. You’re once again beginning to walk, swim, and move like you’re made of air. You will do your best, and that is what you tell yourself every day as you sit up in bed with a big wind whistling between the window panes.
The same wind whistles as you sit on the grey sofa with the Liverpool cushions; you blend like a chameleon, eyes buggy from watching too many replays. Winter has been all about watching, and for some absurd reason, you feel like a fan. Heart plunges and skyrockets like a moodswing; the television is your friend. Close-ups of all the people you know make them seem like strangers, and you notice the oddest things, like Finnan’s cheekbones, and Jamie’s hair. Steven’s stare. All immaculate onscreen, meticulously placed and tweaked by some skilled cameraman, the smooth commentary flattening out the imperfections.
It’s these details that keep haunting you, these things on the TV. You’re very practical about it by nature, and block them out otherwise, but they slip in when you stop thinking, and suddenly you are flooded with images of the field, never too small when you are on. The players, less of pint-sized than real, the feel of collision and smell of sweat. Tangible things. Your time in this asylum makes you prickle to run again, see and touch things. You can imagine yourself telling Finnan about the way he looks onscreen, cheeks sucked in and pink from cold, or how Jamie’s hair is short enough to stick on like a helmet. And the stare, the long lower lashes like spider legs trapping dust when he blinks. You remember the upturned mouth so clearly, and the impassive eyes pools the water spider skates over without drowning in. It must all revive.
And all this, you know, will happen. If you have an idea of what you want, all you need to do is to believe.
6.
In the end, it is not the end of your season. The Juventus game is a heartstopper, and you remember happiness being a blimp that announces your keenness for the world, the rush of gladness and irrepressible beam that makes you holler for half a minute on the pitch, the clamber of arms and legs and being crushed beneath bodies.
And later, finding space, the static on your cellphone, the number that you punch in wrongly four times because the buttons are shaking or your fingers are shaking and the happiness comes like a fifty foot wave. The line cuts off twice and you try to find better reception standing in different parts of your room, once even standing on your bed with the springs sinking your feet into sponge like a trap. The first time, you’re left shouting Hello? Hello? at the operator, who hangs up on you not knowing who you are, and thrice after that, facing the unbelievable dead buzz of a lost connection.
This is not the kind of fate to be met by someone who has qualified for the CL Semifinals, the moronically wonderful CL Semis with another eleven men and another referee, like any other friendly or league or another cup or another, but it is the Champion’s League and certainly the phone ought not malfunction when somebody is close to spontaneous combustion from the gladness building up inside.
And you think you might be angry but above all frustrated and relieved and pleased and the static clears as he says, Hello? as you say, Hello? and the both of you saying, Hello? Hello? together, different accents, same word, a hundred miscommunications.
Xabi, he says finally, and you cannot bring yourself to say his name.
You have probably heard, but we are in, you tell him. And that is such a good thing.
Very. Very great. Great, Steven says. There is a pause.
I watched it.
I know, you say, and it’s turning out to be one of those ridiculously awkward conversations, as bad as the one where the first girl you ever liked asked if you had wanted to attend a funeral. At that time, you had said, No, but now you are only saying Yes, yes, yes. Yes, good passing, strength, technical abilities, that is what made today. Yes, Cisse was fine; yes the atmosphere was excellent, yes, quite divine. All the while you wonder if, as he speaks, he blinks, if grey eyes close out a cloudy sky, if he’s alone in his vast living room with the clattering sounds and screams of the TV. Maybe he is sitting down with a coffee, though that is not something he would do. Maybe it’s a beer. Or two beers. You can’t ascertain. Instead, you fill up the silence with babble, and you can’t remember a thing you say.
What are you going to do now? he asks after a while.
Sleep, you say. Sleep and think. Try to think about many things, or a few things. Think about -
The next match, then? Steven says.
You stop. Those eyes shut and open in the amount of time you take to breathe.
Yes, you continue. I think I will think only about that.
You step off your bed, and the static blurs into his voice and yours.
7.
You remember ninety-eight things about Istanbul, filed and categorised neatly in your mind. The place itself is the only city that lazes across two continents, and its alternately narrow and wide streets have more than their fair share of schizophrenia, Egyptian bazaars against skyscrapers making jolting contrasts seem lovely. You remember turrets and fountains from the window of your private transport, and so many people all at once, encumbered in their daily lives. The motor ways, the traffic jams, the yellow lights at night. Just public roads alone take up more than ninety percent of everything you remember.
The other ten goes to Istanbul; Istanbul proper. Out of ten, there are three goals, three saves and one screaming people. You recall each incident in isolation, its backstory and its future: the pep talk, the fans, the furious concentration. The first goal, the Gerrard goal, the magnificent strike, how he stamped in half circles moving his arms up and down half-choked in a scream. Months later when you watch it on the television you feel a pang; it is almost funny. But not then, not there.
Second is a Smicer, and it re-establishes hope. When you think of Smicer’s goal, you think of Smicer, the way he runs, and how wide his eyes are. Some people called him Regal Nose. Smicer plays for the Girondins now, Mdm Roland and all. He plays for blue, plays for white, but is indefinitely tied to the small redness of memory. You wish him well.
You remember the third goal best. This is not one of your claims to modesty, but you try to hide the fact that you do. The clarity of it all, and the quickness. The way the ball hits the glove and then the net plays out in excruciating motion. You could calculate the physics of the motion, the mathematical probability that you could score and did. You wonder how you can be so clinical about it, when for weeks afterward, all you could dream of was the celebration, of a vaguely evident joy with your chin grazing the pitch, and you awoke night after night tangled in your bedsheets wanting to shout and watch that grin re-plastered over your own face.
Then the penalties. The line you make with your arms around each other. The tension, the praying. Someone wrings your neck with an arm as Jerzy makes starfish shapes in goal. You rest yours on little Luis, maybe shivering. Three saves, and then the crowd, their shouts a flood, tears a tidal wave.
The last three things you remember is really a half thing because it is the only memory that isn’t concrete. You have to piece it together later from what people tell you, and it forms your own silhouette in the chronology patterned on your mind. You see pictures later, and try to exact from them the exact way they can be sensed, but it is like groping the air for a feeling. You can draw them out like mutually exclusive variables on a Venn.
There is Jerzy’s hand on your shoulder, miracle hand, like Midas that turns you to gold.
There is Gerrard’s hand on the cup, the silverware of a captain.
Then, there is you settling for nothing, the tough sinews of his shoulder clamped down by your fist, the tortured stretch of his neck and yours, and beneath the line of thin lips, the feel of small, uneven teeth. There is only a glove and a small gasp of air between you, and for a second, a hundred camera flashes light up the shadows across his eyes.
You know why it is so special now. Champions League winners are winners indeed.
8.
When you return home, she’s smiling wide and putting her arms around your neck.
¿Feliz?
Sí. You waver, then kiss her. Sí.
But that old man said, you need to run to find happiness. Now, you find yourself running away from it, because how can you meet it each day? How can one make happiness a career without it catching up on you? So much of it is a little frightening. Like how Pepe kicks the base of his posts twice, you try to seal this gladness into the mouth of your own goal, protecting it fiercely, not wanting to let your clean sheets soil.
But they do, eventually, just when the sky turns less the colour of mould.
He knocks on your door even though there’s a doorbell, knocks as though he wants the splinters in his skin, and when you open and see that it is him, you cannot help but feel a little frantic. It is osmosis. His eyes are slightly wild, and everything you want to say or do sews itself within a seam inside you, bursting to the brim. For the first time in a while you are full of questions and less of answers. You want to ask if he wants a drink, or if he minds the way your den looks like a dump. Why? is another good question to ask, but you miss it altogether.
You cook paella, and you’re biting the citric acrid of your tongue for lack of what to say. You can feel the grip of his fingers leaving prints on the tabletop. You wonder if he will crack the delicate glass surface, a chip coming off in his repressed and crazy clutching. You’re a little concerned and bitter. You just went furniture shopping.
The table is new, you say when you serve him, and he emits a mumble of interest, lets go in the name of food. He eats like he’s starving, and doesn’t stop until he does. When he looks up, you may still be forking in your second mouthful. You’ve always been a slow eater, an eater meant for occasions, and when he looks up, you stop and let him.
You want to speak? Talk?
I. He stops.
Say something, you say. You jam your fork into the flatbed of rice.
I'm supposed to sign this week, he says, and there is a pause as you try to shut him up. It’s then when you kiss him, and when you kiss him you remember the details now like something vivid and spotless, like the cup before you got to touch it, the gold and silver before you reduced it to nothing. The white hospital of your corridor, the white shut expanse of your room like washed laundry, a dozen clean sheets, and the walls expressionless when you finally realise why you never became a keeper because you would let in too many goals to keep it sacred.
Winters cool, but summers warm. The colour of tanned skin against sheets looks remarkably out of place, and when you let open the window the breeze teases open the curtains like a heartache. He leans against the headboard and plays with the stack of post-it notes by your bed. Peels them off in layers and leaves them scattered like multi-coloured fruit skins, and forgets his socks on the way out.
When Steven leaves, the auto-lock shuts behind him, and you spend your time cleaning. Cleaning the counter, the table, the springboard of the bed, anything that could leave fingerprints or clues or smells. You get a little obsessive about it over the week, and you don’t eat paella for five weeks and a few days.
Months later, you find an orange post-it beneath the bed, blank and a little crumpled, in the middle of pristine sheets and shut windows. It stares at you for a moment, and you cannot bring yourself to throw it away.
9.
When you receive news that he is to leave, you feel like throwing things, making a wreck out of your house. The wind is high that day, and the leaves make their own hurricane, so much like yours, a mess on a crude scene of black and white. You in your monochrome sweatshirt, the room empty, the orange post-it in your back pocket. All you can do for a few hours is to look at air. Then you stand, and walk out, see the bright corridor and the sunlight making glittery flickers in your hair. The windy, fresh morning comes against you with open arms. The kitchen, the scrubbed counter, the glass-top table, the way you reach into the drawers and cupboards, trying to remember how to make paella again. You eat facing the refrigerator. The cooler makes funny quiet noises. It reminds you of two people waking up at the same time, shifting slowly beside each other in a state of half-consciousness, and yet pretending to be fast asleep, just simply wanting to have a longer time together. Now you have your stubbornly noisy fridge, and it has you. You eat your second mouthful of paella, and tell it, At least we have each other. Your voice makes strange loud echoes, and then dies. A bird outside screams. And then, like how waking up is a painful thing, you make yourself stop being angry.
You call your girlfriend and talk for five minutes. She asks if you’ve had lunch and you tell her what you made. Paella, you say, but now it tastes bad.
Forgot the peppers? Ran out of shrimp?
I added everything.
Even onions?
Especially the onions.
She stops, and you can hear her breathe casually down the phone. Then says, There are still other midfielders.
Yes, you say. Like me.
Like you.
After you hang up, you realise that life will go on. Tomorrow morning, you will train like a bitch, and you will look him in the eye like always. You will think up some clever explanation. And then maybe, just maybe, you will give him your greatest blessings for when you play against him this winter.
10.
Steven is doing that thing with his shirt again, where he wrings the corner with his fingers. When he looks up, you cannot read him. He says that he is stupid sometimes, and all you can say is, Yes, because how could you disagree? You want to shake some sense into him, tell him as politely as you can, Hello stupid, we all still miss you, although you are back. But Steven is messy in front of you, blabbering in too mumbling a fashion to properly listen.
You do not want to wear it now, but you were never before a coward, like this.
I’m not scared. He is defiant. I just - don’t know where to begin.
Everyone starts from the first square. You just need to start again from there. The club, the fans, will see you off. They will support you.
You, he says, and his mouth is drawn into a straight line. Square one? I can’t get to square one. I’m some double-scum ship-jumper. It’s twice this season that I’ve ridiculed the armband and now you’re asking me to make it three. I’m all right, and I say okay, make it bloody three, but there isn’t a way I’m going to find fucking square one.
Not now, you reply. But you will. You look at him direct, even though you don’t quite want to tell him that he looks terrifying looking angry. Steven. He can waver apprehension into the hearts of any opposition. You know that even the blindest of fans will one day embrace him for that, despite all the indecision, bad decisions and taking back those bad decisions.
You are a different kind of player, you say at long last. And there are many kinds of players. Some people are made to play good football. I think we are all part of that. But some people are made to be different. Captains are different. You are not the same.
You don’t know nuts -
I’m not a blind fan. I’ve seen you play more than once.
There is a moment where he stares at you, does that thing with his forehead that makes you slightly anxious.
Smart little fucker, aren’t you?
Steven, if you want to be left alone -
Yeah. A while, maybe.
You chair grinds backward as you try to stand, walk out quickly before you are tempted to speak some more.
Xabi.
You stop. Fold whatever words you have beneath your tongue.
He only says, very quietly, Nobody here calls me that.
Steven? you ask.
And for a moment before you turn, you think he may even be smiling.
11.
Japan is exciting. You nod enthusiastically when Nando says that all of you are Gullivers, because you are, normal people being Peter Crouch. Being in the streets makes your limbs feel suddenly dangly, oversized, amid the roil of a hundred pocket-sized students and women.
The first thing served at touchdown is the tea, drinking a hundred dead bugs, translucent leaves wings that catch on your teeth. Finnan is like, What the fuck? in private, and everyone laughs.
A lower temperature reads on the scale but it is strangely warmer than in good old Liverpool, and the air is clear. Everything seems small-scale, delicate, and twenty-two men storming the faint wood of their hotel seems a bit more than sacrilege. In the mornings, all of you run, making a small-scale Kyoto quake. Crouch sticks out a mile.
Now Japan will always be associated with the miniature and the temporary, how everything gushes by in a breeze. The winning, the loss. How a few nights before, you were trying on yukata and he poked his head in through the door, wearing sweatpants and an ugly T-shirt, telling you that the toilets were too bloody small.
Conversations with him are always brief, stunted, peppered with laughs, and you can’t help but, something choking in your throat, telling him that he can’t knock down a wall to make a bigger space.
And he comes in and sits on your bed, says, What will we do if we are not world champions? and you can only back into your dresser, sink down for a while, and reassure him that life will go on, no matter how much you are for a moment displaced, or frightened or hurt.
A loss is a loss, you say. You cannot take it back, no matter how much you want to. People will leave, there will be opportunities never taken, but there is always that next game.
You lose in Japan, but you dream otherwise, and if anything, that soothes the sting. At least there is the prospect of the long flight back, with the sadness compressed by distance into comfort.
12.
You will start again. The papers, the radio, the broadcast, spreadsheets, and yet the undeniable joy of one game flattened against the next. Everyone hailing Liverpool as the team, the Reds, an explosion on the pitch. The defense, midfield, and tipsy strikers make patterns on screens, a dozen regulars a fossil in macadam. Run, cross, strike, pass, half time. Routine.
They say, Gerrard makes tea for the team at half-time and the truth is that he does, throws them all in hot water and extracts their souls with piss-hot talk. Makes the tea at half time, more like makes the team at half time.
And when you look at him you find yourself awash with some strange sense of pride, telling yourself that this is how the season will be, the team and Stevie G, your captain and mine.
13.
You are proved right. Life goes on, and Steven is captain, everybody’s captain. Like the hinge of a window when you’re struggling for the next breath of air, he’ll let you open smoothly. He shapes the season, and you do your best to play the smaller part you have given yourself.
You know that is the truth.
It is how you wake up in the mornings and know where you are to go, where all the vectors converge to give no movement. Centre of the universe. You’ll wash your hair and shave, clean your face, mechanically noting the nick of a blade on your chin or the mole across your neck, and how they never seem to fade. The garage, the car, turning up the heater two out of five, bad music on the radio.
And when you get out of your car, you know for a while that your heart stops. Then recharge. And when you’re dressed proper you see in order the corridors, the lockers, the sign: This is Anfield.
This is Anfield.
This is where you begin, breaking out into a run, meeting the sharply damp air and bright green grass, yielding beneath your feet. Running feet meeting the pound in your head, thinking of a hundred facts that will never change; this team, this stadium, this wide, open, open space.