‘Coming to see whether I like it,’ I said, ‘rugby.’
‘Have you got gear with you?’
‘No.’
‘Next time bring your gear,’ he said.
He jogged out onto the field. The training started, they ran laps. Standing at the edge of the dome of light, I watched them. Plumes of white steam came from their mouths and nostrils. A halo of steam hung round the head of one older, bald player. When they started running through their set moves, I soon lost track. After a while, though, I realized that you had to throw the ball behind you, preferably to a player in motion. I discerned two groups: the gang of tall, heavy men who together formed the scrum, and the faster attackers, who spread out across the field. I entered into conversation with another spectator, a boy on crutches. He was captain of the seconds, he had broken his shin during a match. His name was Michael Leland, call me Mike. He explained the basics of rugby. It seemed to me to be a sport of the clenched fist and the open hand — the fist symbolizing the clenched power of the forwards, the open hand the speed and agility of the three-quarters. It looked interesting and hard, it seemed to me fitting for the assignment I had given myself: to become a man.
I bought boots with metal studs, socks and a rugby shirt in yellow and black, the team colors of the Alburgh Rugby Football Club. Was I planning to play rugby? the old saleswoman at Fraser’s warehouse asked. Then I would also need a mouth guard, and shin guards and sports tape.
At home I dropped the mouth guard into a pan of boiling water and, while it was still soft and screeching hot, pressed it around my upper teeth. It felt like the enamel was shattering.
My mother tried to talk me out of it, she was afraid I would break my fingers and no longer be able to play the piano, but the very next Wednesday I went back to the clubhouse. I changed uneasily in the presence of strangers, in that cold changing room with its rampant outbursts of fungus, the brown rings on the ceiling and the odd hole in the wall. The smell was unfamiliar to me, but countless changing rooms would follow, and all of them smelled the same.
What I remember of that first training: biting cold, and the moment I found myself facing the man who had asked me last time where I’d left my gear. The top of my head reached his chest, I realized I needed to tackle him, and that meant: hit his upper legs hard with my shoulder and throw him to the ground — which I failed to do. I sort of hung on to the hem of his shirt till he shook me off casually and continued on his way to the try-line.
Not long after that I played my first match with the juniors, at wing, a position where I couldn’t do much harm. I heard a gray-haired cynic on the sideline say that the winger was the only spectator allowed to get involved in the match. For the time being, I showed no special talent for any other position. On my team was a boy named Selwyn, a god-given athlete who scored three tries that first day. He was a fly-half and a joy to watch. His body contained power; when he went in hard and low you could hear the opponent’s suffering. His tries were almost ruined by my clumsiness along the line; I let my own man pass on two occasions. I was still afraid of the clash, of bodies running at me, and clawed halfheartedly at shirts and shorts.
‘Your man! Your man!’ the coach screamed.
But I was lying on the ground and my man was on his way to his try. The boy on crutches was standing on the sideline as well. I avoided his eyes. The second time I let my man go I was saved by Selwyn Loyd — who came roaring in from halfway across the field, grabbed the boy who had passed me from behind just before he reached the line, and smacked him to the ground.
The Wednesday after that I was given tackle training.
‘And eat more pork,’ the trainer said. ‘Or don’t you eat meat at home?’
Apparently I had the aura of a vegetarian.
‘We eat meat, Mr. Gorecki,’ I said.
‘Steve.’
He approached me, zigzagging.
‘Go all the way through with your tackle,’ he said.
After he stiff-armed me, I found myself lying on the grass, looking up at him.
‘You didn’t go all the way through. Hit him with your shoulder and finish it. Don’t let go till your man’s on the ground. Concentrate on the thighs, not the ball.’
Fleshy tree trunks, those thighs, pig’s bristles and mud. I could barely get my arms around them. Still, I succeeded in tackling him a few times. He wasn’t too enthusiastic about my technique, but my perseverance pleased him more.
The field, where I learned that I had a body, was beautifully located. It lay atop the rise beside Alburgh, the golf course began below it. Behind the eastern goalposts lay the sea, behind the clubhouse was the water tower in a rolling landscape of grass and gorse. The wind was almost always blowing hard.
That spring I noticed that my body had grown stronger, harder, and that I had started enjoying standing around in the canteen after training or matches and laughing stupidly with the people around me. I drank beer for the first time, because they always forgot to bring along Coke for me. From rudimentary kitchens came an endless flow of hot pork sandwiches on which we squeezed out rusty-brown HP sauce. I liked the stories and anecdotes told by the older players, men who seemed to me to have been not so much born but sprung full-blown from dragons’ teeth. I kept a keen eye on their matter-of-fact, alert manner, and imitated it. The windows of the canteen were always steamy, I remember the eternal rain and the sea in the distance. And that Mike Leland drank from a mug in the form of a tit, with a hole in the nipple from which he sucked his beer. After the match songs were sung beneath low ceilings; when I joined in my individual identity slowly grew fluid and passed into something communal, a place where things were light and easy.
Sometimes I thought about my father, about how I was being faithful to his assignment, and imagined that he could see me in the midst of that rugged, jovial crowd, and that he approved.
It’s almost four-thirty, an early Sunday morning in Suffolk, and I’ve just walked Linny Wallace to her room. Both exhausted, the bottle empty but for the last two fingers. The point of hesitation, the uneasy moment at which people sometimes become lovers, that first kiss, the hungry rustling of fingers over cloth, the magnetic card slipping into the lock and the door falling closed behind everything else that follows. I know that I have seen many such nights of hasty, aggressive sex, but at this moment I can’t remember any of them individually.
The cell phone is dead now. The screen lights up for a few seconds when I turn it on, then falls back into the yawning darkness of an empty battery. I stand there looking at the phone in my hand with a growing feeling of isolation; I am now beyond reach of the accusations of women and badmouthing hotel managers. Hate mail is also a form of attention.
I wake up with my clothes on. It’s already past ten. I drink three large glasses of water, take an ibuprofen and undress. Then I sleep on, until early in the afternoon. I have lunch in the restaurant: bread, bacon and eggs, two double espressos and big glass of orange juice.
As agreed, I meet Linny in the lobby at one-thirty. Her eyes are fresh and bright, not misted-over like mine. I’m glad we didn’t go to bed together, even though I’m accustomed to the uneasy contact that tends to follow that. I know the way. Questions remain hanging in the air, hints. Sometimes you feel like it, sometimes you don’t.