There had been rain that morning. The pitch was not completely dry; that probably had an effect. The left-back had no real idea who Freddy was. It was the ninetieth minute and his concentration was wavering. The result of Freddy’s move was that the defender sold himself to Freddy’s leftward jink and when he tried to adjust his balance to follow him, he lost his footing and slipped over on his backside, but slowly, windmilling his arms to try and keep himself upright as he went inexorably over. By the time he was actually on his behind, Freddy was ten metres away. One centre-back came over to close him down, Freddy hit a cross to the far post, the striker got above the other centre-back and headed it against the crossbar with a noise Freddy never forgot, a smack like an axe hitting wood. The goalie collected the rebound and booted it upfield, and then the referee blew for full time.
By midnight that night, a clip called ‘Freddy’s first touch’ was one of the ten most-viewed items on YouTube.
30
People sometimes said that stressful or dramatic or unusual circumstances caused time to ‘pass in a blur’. Roger wished that he had found that to be true. The forty-eight hours over Christmas were the most exhausting of his life. After the sofa was wrestled into position and signed for – he couldn’t face having it unwrapped, so it spent the day in its assigned corner of the larger drawing room, still reproachfully in its cardboard container – he made the mistake of turning on the television and letting the boys sit in front of it while they played with their new presents. They both had made spectacular hauls. Conrad had his robot, as well as huge boxes of Transformers, Bionicles, Lego, Action Men, and two lightsabers. Joshua did not understand Christmas yet so the sight of his colossal new Brio train set did not seem to exert much grip; it was as if he did not realise that it now belonged to him. Arabella had also bought him a giant bright orange teddy bear, almost five feet tall – too tall to drag around after him, though he might be able to sit on it. Joshua looked at it carefully, thoughtfully, for about thirty seconds, then burst into tears, and wouldn’t stop crying until the bear had been taken out of the room and hidden and Roger had promised that he would never ever ever see it again ever, not once.
‘Nevertobeseenagain,’ said Josh, when he had calmed down, repeating a phrase he liked from a story Pilar had read him.
‘Never to be seen again,’ agreed Roger. They were now sitting in front of the television watching a children’s programme with shouting presenters. Roger knew that there were scandals involving children’s TV presenters taking cocaine. To be that lively that early in the morning, it would in Roger’s view have been much more shocking if they hadn’t been taking cocaine. In fact, thinking about it, maybe coke could be the secret of a whole new parenting strategy…
But the television was a terrible mistake. He used it up too soon. Roger didn’t know that his boys eventually tired of television, especially when they were allowed to watch it first thing in the morning; they became febrile and listless. In that condition it was as if they’d had too much sugar, and became unbiddable, unmalleable, prone to tantrums, both manic and exhausted at the same time. Roger should have used TV as a strategy of last resort. After no more than a couple of hours, he was knackered (also panicking, and full of rage, and self-pity); Joshua and Conrad were tired too, and bored, and bouncing on the old sofa, with each boy desperate for their father to play a strenuous game with him alone. With two sons and one father that was impossible, which made it all the more necessary, until Joshua trumped his older brother by flinging himself off the sofa-side table while Roger was distracted, and bumping his head, so Conrad retaliated by smashing his biggest new Transformer – Optimus Prime, his favourite – against a table leg, so hard that it didn’t just break-for-effect (he knew they came apart into pieces and could be reassembled, and this was the outcome he was looking for) but broke-for-real, at which point his tears and tantrum became real too: genuine, inconsolable grief.
At that point, with both his sons screaming and crying, Roger, feeling as tired as he could ever remember feeling – feeling weepy with tiredness, gritty-eyed, furious, heavy, as if lying down on the bed would make him sleep for a month – looked at his watch. As he did so, he framed a wish about what the time might be; half past eleven, perhaps, with Joshua’s nap, which he knew took place at some point in the afternoon, now in sight? Then he could stick Conrad in front of the telly, again, or lock him in his room, or something, and go back to bed himself for a little precious sleep. Sleep – he had never really valued it before. He had taken it for granted. That was not right, because you should not take sleep for granted, because sleep was the best thing in the world. By far. Much, much better than sex. Much. And he could be having some, soon, oh so very soon, if only the outcome when he looked at his watch was that the time was say eleven, which was likely, or eleven thirty, which was possible, or twelve, or, who knew? time could fly past – or even twelve fifteen?
It was ten. Roger felt his eyes fill with tears. His eyes lit on the card on the mantelpiece, the one which said somebody wanted what he had. Well, what he wanted at that moment, more than anything else, was a cyanide pill.
That established a pattern. A stretch of time would go past, and Roger would know that it was going past, while he, say, lay on the floor pretending to be a baddy Power Ranger, or pushed a train round the Brio track making chuffing noises, or ran very slowly away from the advancing Roboraptor pretending to be a plant-eating dinosaur in the grip of fear. He would do this for some time then expect that time had fulfilled its part of the bargain, and had, somehow, passed: that having been twenty past eleven the last time he looked at his watch it would now be significantly later. Instead it would be twenty-five past eleven.
Lunch was interesting. It was demanding to prepare – Conrad couldn’t remember which kind of eggs he liked, so Roger had to fry an egg and throw it away and boil an egg and throw it away and poach an egg and throw it away, before it was found by trial and error that scrambled eggs were the ones Conrad would eat. The confusion came about because he had said he liked the one which was eggy. Even allowing for that, Conrad was much less tricky than Joshua. He angrily refused everything Roger suggested before eventually deigning to eat a single narrow slice of crustless white bread with a thin smear of smooth peanut butter, and that was at the fourth attempt: the first slice was too thick, the second was defiled by the use of crunchy peanut butter, and the third by the use of too much peanut butter. Scraping the spread off and re-serving the slice with a thinner smear was by no means acceptable. There was something about the texture of Joshua’s tantrum, the way he thumped the table with his plastic plate while shouting ‘no! no Daddy no!’: the impersonal severity of his rage made it clear that this was a question of standards. A smear of peanut butter with some peanut butter taken off the top was not the same thing as a fresh smear of peanut butter.
For dinner they had the identical menu. This was two-thirds laziness, or exhaustion, on Roger’s part, and one-third practicality, since there wasn’t much else to cook: most of the fridge was occupied by a goose, bought by Arabella ‘to eat on Christmas Day’, and delivered on Christmas Eve. Her plan was obviously in place by the time she did this, so the whole goose thing was part of her strategy to first deceive her husband, then taunt him. It was one thing to be abandoned by your wife over Christmas, another to have the enormous American-style, almost walk-in fridge two-thirds-full of goose. Besides, as Arabella knew perfectly well, Roger hated goose. So for Christmas dinner he ate the boys’ leftover eggs and peanut butter, followed by a cheese sandwich, followed by two packets of crisps, and washed down with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame 1990, which was supposed to be the pre-Christmas-lunch aperitif. That, too, turned out to be a mistake, because Roger then had to cope with the last few hours of the day half-cut. Christmas Day spent alone with his children was, in Roger’s considered view, the longest, hardest, most boring day of his life. The one good thing was that the boys had only once or twice asked after Arabella. It was as if, in the general mayhem of Christmas, they had barely noticed she wasn’t there. Hah! Roger was very much looking forward to telling her that.