Game Day Read online

  He’s barely opened his mouth to say it; for a moment I think I imagined the words. But then he keeps going in a desperate mumble towards the floor. ‘Don’t pick me ’cos of this; they just think I need it more than him is why. I never played a better game than Mick in my life and he’s still got more to grow, more than me.’

  I stare at the kid who’s staring at the floor and by now half the hall is twisting round to stare at us. The sourness pushing up from my stomach might be that scotch I drank too quick, the contents of my guts resisting the grip of my pants. The echo in my head might be tiredness from last night’s too-soft hotel bed I couldn’t get comfy in, with other people’s toilets gurgling close to my ear (and not just that hotel but all of them, and all the long procession of tight-smiling dirt-coloured towns I’ve chased this chance through, the chance standing in front of me – he seems like a long way in front of me, this boy shifting from foot to foot and grinning stupidly down at his clenched fists as the noise in the room picks up and more and more people turn to stare at us). It might just be this, the rotting physical tiredness of it all that makes me goggle-eyed, reaching for the bar to support myself as Vicki’s face swims up from far away, sunken eyes deep into the months of not moving, willing the sack of cells to hold on inside. Down the long tunnel I see Reece coming towards us and hear a steady rhythm of clapping and then the hall’s on its feet as Reece drags Dooley away from me.

  My body comes back under control as the eyes in the room shift away, following Reece and Dooley up to the stage. The anger moves back in where the strange shakiness was. Dooley’s laughing now, although he still looks mortified, and I could almost spit; I could stand at the back of this hick country hall and spit and shout at all the people in it, and most of all the two clueless little fuckers getting up on stage: Reece prodding Dooley towards the mike and presenting him to the room, everyone cheering now and feet thumping, wolf-whistles. At that moment I decide that neither of them will ever make it, not in the League. They’ll always play in the dust. My old man would have said the two of them, the way they are together, is weird and unnatural. A dove and a crow. Reece is holding Dooley’s hand above his head and spurring the crowd on with his other hand, whipping up more and more applause so that probably no-one notices when I shove my way through the heavy door of the club and into the clean smokiness of night.

  Walking back to the hotel nothing’s in focus but I don’t care, I’m good to drive tonight. The Wesley game starts at ten tomorrow and although the club doesn’t realise it yet, what we need more than anything this coming season, what we need to be competitive in the modern game, is another tall forward.

  Matter

  Pre-season

  On the morning of the first fitness test, Ranga saw a bloke on a bike get hit by a car.

  They’d only just moved to the neighbourhood – moving in the wrong direction, from a suburb with trees and private schools into this inner-city place, a warehouse Lisa called funky, the streets a blur of colour and sound. Ranga heard the cyclist go down before he saw anything. A flat-bodied thud. On a footy field you get to know the sound of bodies colliding, and before long you can predict how serious it is from the noise they make – not in medical terms but in season terms. A three-week injury, a six-week one. Ranga heard the cyclist go down and thought, season ender.

  It was on the main road near their new place, a road with tram tracks. There’d been a tram going by just before it happened – probably had something to do with it, the hulking metal caterpillar blocking everyone’s vision. Ranga heard the thud and when he looked up the bike was still in motion, skidding towards the kerb a good ten metres from the man on the ground, the front wheel bent at a ridiculous angle. The man wasn’t wearing a helmet. He had brown corduroys, one leg rolled above the knee.

  Ranga was too close. Even though there were other people around – the guy in the car already out, creeping towards the cyclist with a weird bent-back posture; pedestrians half running from further down the road and people coming out of the post office, mobile phones ready – he couldn’t risk walking away. He wasn’t a top echelon player, but he’d been playing for eleven years so it was inevitable he sometimes got recognised, especially with the hair. It wouldn’t look good – Ranga McPhee, he was right there when it happened, never even stopped to help – so he hovered through the fractured bursts of movement (the guy who’d been in the car was running now, then skidding down on his knees by the cyclist; other people running from the shops; a frantic little glut on the arterial road). Ranga hovered, buggered if he knew what to do. There’d been a St John first aid course a few years ago where they’d been taught CPR and the recovery position and all that, but what was the point when the doc was on hand at every game and training session, and all you had to know for yourself were the overnight signs of concussion? Ranga doubted whether the guy on the ground wanted to know the signs of concussion. And then, although there was nothing to be done and the bloke from the car already there doing it, down on all fours beside the man (hello? mate? can you hear me? you all right, mate? didn’t see you), Ranga found he couldn’t move if he’d wanted to. He stared at the cyclist’s body, which wasn’t quite still anymore. One of the legs, the one with the pants rolled up, twitched on the slick concrete; the head made little juddering movements. Weak and meaningless like the last protests of a landed fish. Ranga watched it and the kit bag over his shoulder felt heavy.

  The ambulance came and he forced himself to move off.

  *

  It was January. The worst of the sting of last season’s last game had dulled, and the necessity and leeway to party were fading. They’d all had to sign off-season contracts, committing to what Cob called the bare minimum – basically that they wouldn’t kill themselves or anyone else or turn into fat bastards. That was a month ago, and a contract could only stand up so well against the drawn-out summer days, massage sessions that left you wilting in a tingling new skin, the euphoria of that first dehydrated pull of beer.

  In the old leafy suburb, Ranga and Lisa were just down the road from Kev – the team’s warhorse ruckman, famous on the field for the length of his reach and the stretches he could go without speaking, and off it for the amount he could drink without falling over. The four of them – Ranga, Lisa, Kev and his wife Linda – sitting out after Linda put Rochelle to bed, sweating it up on the patio, summer all around them like a warm bath, making it easy to forget about the last game and the pre-season to come. Kev chugged down one beer after another, Ranga tried to look like he wasn’t struggling to keep up, and Linda brought fruity alcoholic concoctions from the blender for Lisa and herself. Ranga remembers his first summer as a player. The smug feeling of time on the clock – two months that were basically your own, bankrolled by the club, sprinkled with a few media appearances. It was fun. The whole game, the whole thing was fun, but summer was like the childhood dream of grown-up freedom.

  Now Ranga gets to the grounds with ten minutes to spare and heads to the walloping room – a little space tacked on to the massive gym – where almost all the boys are already sitting in neat primary-school formation. They’re waiting for Cob to arrive. Kev’s there, with his freakishly long arms crossed at his chest. He gives a twitch of his head towards the seat beside him, Ranga’s seat, the one he’s sat in for pre- and post-session wallopings the last nine years, and for a moment Ranga thinks the whole day – the cyclist, the heavy gym bag and the betrayal of summer – is just an upsetting dream, one of those dreams where your past and present selves become confused. The kid sitting in Ranga’s seat is skinny and ginger and can’t be more than eighteen, the same age as Ranga when he started with the club. Then someone up the back of the room laughs and Ranga notices how quiet it is. They’ve all been waiting for him to get here and find the ginger mutt in his seat.

  With everyone watching on, Ranga can’t let the kid away with it, even though he’s thrown back to his own first training session – a different, smaller gym
, but they always seem to keep the ratio of chairs to guys a humiliating constant: forty men, thirty chairs and a terrible decision to make. All the boys are waiting to see what he’ll do, and the sense of expectation puts Ranga in mind of that moment when the ball’s trajectory gets you in its sights, and for that second before action the spectrum of possibilities is endless. Physical possibility is what he thinks about as he moves towards the kid in his chair – the possibility of, say, himself standing in the back line during a game and watching the ball float by like some graceful unpredictable insect, relative to the possibility of a cyclist dodging safely out of the path of a moving car. And at the same time he’s taking a closer look at the kid – skinny and unfortunate-looking, freckles to blot out the sun (at least Ranga escaped that red-headed genetic betrayal) – and, with his head back on straight, Ranga knows exactly who the kid is. The draft pick (Mike? Mick?), the one they scored partly because of Ranga’s screw-up in the last game. There’s been a lot of fuss about him in the footy press – supposedly the second coming of Ehlroy or something; he’ll even wear the great man’s number. You’d not think him a big-shot to look at him – the matchstick arms and legs, and something in his face that’s too eager for a number-two pick (you can generally tell a high draft pick from a rookie just by the way they carry themselves, a slight glow of entitlement around the older blokes). But the realisation still adds force to Ranga’s advancing buttocks. He sits down in his regular place, first row second seat from the wall, on top of a pair of skinny freckled thighs.

  The guys behind him laugh – Camperos and Buta the loudest, as usual – and he hears the boy laugh beneath him, a dry sliver of a laugh. Ranga shifts his weight to give the kid a chance; there’s a lot of mulchy flesh noises and he oozes out one leg at a time. With nowhere else to sit he hovers beside Ranga for a few seconds, then backs up slowly till he’s against the wall, and he leans back all casual like he’s waiting for a bus. His face is flaming. His posture puts Ranga in mind of a man he once saw waiting for an actual bus – a man who leaned back against what he thought was the solid wall of a bus shelter and kept going, shooting through the vacancy where there should have been glass. What struck Ranga as funny was the deliberate, devil-may-care casualness of the man falling through space – he’d looped one ankle over the other and folded his arms like some kind of case study: Man Waiting for Bus. The ginger kid’s stance is exactly the same, which is all Ranga needs; he didn’t mean to be cruel, but the stress of the morning, the cyclist’s twitching body on the road and the knowledge of what his own body’s about to be put through, all of it builds up inside him – tinder that the kid accidentally strikes a match to. He gets the laughing up-chucks, and by the time Cob walks in to punish them all with the fierce blaze of his belief and disappointment, by that time Camperos and Buta, and Kev beside him, and most of the guys behind him and most of all Ranga himself – all of them are in different poses of out-of-control. Ranga is bent double, his body shaking, and there’s the new kid blaring red while a sallow little smile maintains the fiction – for himself or the rest of them or the dour coach who just walked in – that he’s in on the joke. Ranga catches Cob’s eye mid laugh-spew and the coach raises one eyebrow in that way only he can – might almost be seductive on anyone else, but on Cob it’s pure distilled threat – and Ranga stops laughing, sits up straight and looks down at his big hands. The other guys stop laughing too.

  Now that it’s over, the kid by the wall looks suddenly pissed off, his crossed arms defensive and hurt.

  ‘Let’s get on with it then, shall we,’ says Cob, and nobody makes eye contact with anybody.

  *

  The kid’s a midfielder. Michael Reece. Cob says his name casually, along with two other new players, not like an introduction so much as a reminder to the more slow-witted guys who might have forgotten their own teammates. He says it towards the end of a longish speech about moving on from last season, about how the mark of a great team, an enduring team, is how they come back after defeat. The kid is put in the same training group as Ranga and Kev.

  This is Ranga’s fifth season in defence, he knows roughly what the fitness testing will involve, and as they warm up in the gym he reminds himself that he’s done it all before and that his body always comes through the pain of the first day. He remembers last year – the same stiffness and soreness carried over from the year before, with the new-skinned feeling of a month in the sun, too much beer, the gentle forgiving pain of a recent massage. All these sensations were just as present, just as urgent, then. And he’s been running, of course; he reminds himself that he’s never stopped running (knowing, though, that what he does on his own could barely be called running in the context of the game – really he’s just a jogger, chasing down the zone, huffing through the first few minutes for the sake of an hour’s calm water, his breathing dropping into a regular pattern and his muscles expanding and contracting with a regularity that feels like rest).

  He and Kev team up for the first circuit – mostly agility. Right and left dodging around the poles, knees up through the ladder then a series of sprints across a broadening pitch. They’re timed as a duo, the theory being that they’ll push their own limits for the sake of their mate, but maybe Ranga and Kev trust each other too much, maybe they know each other too well to care about a little betrayal on the fitness circuit, because Ranga huffs through the last sprint with he and Kev a good thirty seconds short of the pack. O’Brien, the fitness coach, who has none of the cruel finesse of Cob, shouts at them that they’re a couple of burnt-out fatties and they’d better get their bloody acts together before the skin-folds test or they’ll be out on their arses. Then he splits them up and they each get paired with one of the duo who came in first. Ranga is paired with the new kid.

  Mick? Mike?

  ‘Michaela!’ Ranga says, but it comes out less hearty than he’d like because the pain in his lungs is only just beginning to fade. The kid looks like he’s barely broken a sweat; what’s worse, he’s making an elaborate show of relacing his boots, clearly giving Ranga a chance to pull himself together.

  ‘Don’t gimme any of your newbie shit,’ Ranga says, breathing evenly with a drastic effort. ‘Just do like the man says and we’ll both get out of this alive.’

  The kid laughs feebly. Ranga remembers ’05, the preliminary final when he took a high contested mark dead centre in front of goal – commentators called it the mark of the year, although it didn’t win mark of the year. That was pressure. That was making the play when it mattered. Not many players could have taken that ball, whereas anyone could be eighteen with an infinite supply of oxygen.

  They start the first leg of the agility course. ‘Three around,’ O’Brien shouts, and Ranga tries to forget about the kid, to concentrate on willing his body forward.

  At the end of three circuits Ranga has given up every semblance of composure – bent double, huffing and spitting with his hands on his knees. The kid walks a little way off, breathing heavily, but Ranga can tell from the straightness of his posture that he’s pretending to be more puffed than he is. Ranga’s played in four finals series and doesn’t need some new kid’s charity, so he jogs up level with him, spits to the side, traps a bubble of oxygen deep in his chest and commits to breathing evenly as they make their way across the ground towards the rooms and towards O’Brien. ‘Where you from?’ he says out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Up north, little place near Shepparton.’ The kid speaks in a rush. ‘You probably wouldn’t know it.’

  Ranga grunts.

  ‘You must have been all over.’ He’s forgotten to keep up the heavy breathing. ‘With the team, lots of away games last year, yeah?’

  Another grunt.

  ‘I’ve been to Sydney for games, and the AIS week in Canberra. My mate went to Perth for the under-18 cup but I had an exam and my bloody mum made me stay home for it.’ He blushes at the mention of his mum.

  Jesus, Ranga thi
nks, this one’s for real.

  The others are spread out around the oval going through various circuits. He sees Kev doing a handpassing exercise and thinks longingly of silence – Kev’s comfortable silence on the field.

  ‘You must have been all over, yeah?’ the kid says again, and Ranga shrugs.

  They jog up to where O’Brien is standing outside the rooms and Ranga’s fantasy of being allowed past, down the ramp and into the cool sanctuary beneath with the drinks table already laid out, this beautiful vision collapses with a wave of O’Brien’s hand. He sends them off to the sprint course. An upsurge of pain and Ranga completely loses the recovering rhythm of his breathing – he hasn’t been concentrating hard enough on his breathing; he’s been concentrating on looking like he’s not concentrating on his breathing.

  They jog towards the witch’s hats around the goal square and the kid says, ‘That finals series, what was it, ’05? Man.’

  He’s talking about the last time they played Ranga up front. Six years into his career, body hardened and ready for the fight. He’d been able to relax into the game in a way that had eluded him in previous finals series. In ’05 he was confident. His body knew what it was there to do.

  ‘Man,’ the kid says again. ‘That mark you took, right in front of goal . . .?’

  Ranga says nothing. They’re approaching the first set of witch’s hats and the kid breaks into an easy canter. It doesn’t look easy – he has an awkward running style, arms too far out from his body, no rhythm to his stride – but Ranga can tell it’s easy because, unthinkably, when they reach the first witch’s hat and double back on themselves the kid is still speaking fluidly.

  ‘I was watching that game with my dad, you know, and he hated you guys.’ He laughs. ‘I was s’posed to as well but I never did, and then when you took that mark I forgot all about Dad and I’m jumpin’ around shouting at the telly along with what’s-his-name, that bloody commentator who always used to do the finals – you must have watched it, right? When you took the grab and what’s-his-name yells, Ranga McPhee saves the season! That was . . . man! You must have partied that night.’