Matchday 24 #4
Oliver is pleased enough to shrug good-naturedly in reply. He doesn’t sit back down, sliding his way out of the row and back toward the box so he can make his way down to the dressing room.
He’s surprised the whole stadium isn’t shaking from the cacophony downstairs, where the lads are having the time of their lives.
You should never take for granted how a win feels, even a narrow one.
Even one you didn’t play in. Oliver accepts the smelly hugs and fist bumps, gives Willem his best respectful nod, and weaves his way through the revelry over to Leo and claps him on the shoulder.
“Hey, big man,” he says. “Welcome home.”
“Hi” is all Leo says back, beaming ear to ear, sweaty and glowing.
“How’d it feel? Like you imagined?”
“It was uglier than I thought it would be. But it was perfect.”
“You just keep at it, you’ll get your wonder goal,” Oliver tells him. Before he can think better of it, he ruffles Leo’s hair, mussing the curls even further. Leo doesn’t shake him off, still smiling, warm and damp under the palm of his hand.
“Are we going out, then?” Georgie, the idiot, asks the room at large, which currently includes Willem. Oliver thinks it’s a sign of great maturity that he slips out before the bloodbath rather than hanging around to watch and laugh.
· · ·
The rest of the month is a strange blip in the league schedule, a listless ten days without matches.
Oliver always forgets how much time is structured around those ninety minutes until he feels lost in their absence.
He’s lost in something else, too, this strange hunger that gnaws in his gut every time he looks at Leo, an insatiable feeling he has no idea how to quiet.
There’s a clip on the club’s Instagram, filling in for the lack of match content with clips from training, the squad goofing off between drills.
Oliver was there when it was filmed, tossing medicine balls just a few yards over, but he can’t stop pulling up the video on his phone anyway, helplessly charmed by it.
On his phone’s screen, Leo sings into an orange plastic cone, the kind that Sebastian marks the practice with, acting like it’s a megaphone.
Every time one of their teammates takes their turn at shooting practice, Leo picks a tune for them and shrieks it terribly.
“Banshee! Harpy!” Georgie shouts from out of frame.
“He’s incorrigible,” Noah whispers to the camera, ducking his face in front of the viewfinder, on his way back to join the back of the line.
“Work work work work work work,” Leo trills, undeterred.
“Shoot your shot, Georgito!” The camera zooms, capturing the glint in Leo’s eyes and the bouncy, shining swoops of his hair.
Exertion looks good on him. The tired sheen of a difficult training session is missing, leaving only the sweet, heady endorphins showing on his face.
Oliver rewinds the clip over and over, watching Leo smile, watching him bop up and down to an inaudible beat, watching him in his element, teasing and laughing until it’s his turn to shoot, still smiling as he kicks the ball hard and high, sailing into the goal with such force it nearly takes off the ceiling of netting.
Maybe it’s the way he dances or the way he plays football or the way he looks like he belongs there—it’s certainly not his singing voice—but Oliver is intoxicated.
He watches one more time before bed, then dreams about it for good measure.
You’re expected at 8! Nina has texted buoyantly, the next morning. See you then!
He’s attended a hundred of these charity events in his young life, particularly photoshoot-y ones, smiling or displaying a practiced seriousness, dressed in Camden gear or designer jeans, never feeling anything less than just as handsome as he knows he is.
Oliver’s got no use for false modesty; it’s his job to believe that what his body is capable of is worth millions of pounds and infinite spectacle.
It’s when he’s supposed to bring in his personality that trouble arises, when people want something more from him than he can give on the pitch.
Harris the footballer isn’t meant to be shy, or anxious, or snappish, only charismatic and golden and for all of Camden to consume.
Sometimes the hunger other people have for him fills Oliver up, but mostly it’s like he can feel them gnawing at his bones.
There’s always the fear that if someone got a good enough bite, they might taste what’s underneath, a mouthful of everything he’s keeping secret.
Oliver keeps doing the hospital visits in spite of this, or maybe somehow because of it.
He used to have a complex about it, trading on his own pain and the tragedy of other people’s lives for money and for his image, but it really, truly isn’t about that—maybe for Nina, or for the charity, but not for him.
Those six months where everyone seemed to realize that his dad was dying but no one wanted to be the one to say it out loud were the longest, most awful period of his life.
He would sit at the foot of the hospital bed with his schoolwork and a football and think, over and over, Is this the last time?
Will we see each other again? He could feel them both, in a childlike way, trying to cram a whole relationship into those last weeks.
Dad could barely wheeze through conversations toward the end, but he was always talking to Oliver, listing all the things his son might need to know.
“Ollie, I know you love it,” he’d said while they were watching the last Camden match they would ever sit through together. “And you know how proud I am of you, right?”
He’d just been asked to board at the academy, which would mean training full-time and leaving his school.
Oliver was afraid of it, of missing Maggie, not living with his mum, no more afternoons in the bookstall, losing any time with his dad.
But he wanted it, desperately—he was just discovering how good he could be, where football could take him.
And no small part of him wanted to run, all down the length of the pitch, away from all the sadness in this room, the sterile, sick scent of the hospital and the worried glances from his grandparents at the empty till.
His life in Camden was slipping away from him, but Camden FC was looming larger and larger, in a way that made Oliver feel like he could keep everything, if only he got his name onto that team sheet.
“But?” he asked Dad, knowing there would be one.
“But my education was the greatest thing I’ve ever earned.
And the only thing I regret is not having more time to use it—to share it with you and Mum.
I want you to have that too. I don’t want you to have to choose between football and everything else.
” What else is there to choose? Oliver remembers thinking, so helplessly.
Everything else is lost. But even at nine years old, he’d known he couldn’t say that—speaking it aloud would surely break the last spell of life that Dad was carrying with him, and Oliver wasn’t ready to say goodbye, not yet, not ever. “Promise me you’ll think about it.”
“Why do I have to promise?” Oliver felt his voice shaking, tears leaking out the corners of his eyes. Promises were so final, and he was sick of everything being final, of everything ending. “You won’t even…”
And Dad had flinched, and another round of coughing had seized him, and a nurse appeared, and Nan had pulled Oliver from the room, and his father had never talked with him like that again, too weak for more than nods, and three days later he was gone.
Oliver isn’t sure if he believes in heaven—he’d like to imagine Dad can see him and Nicola, how well they’ve done, how much they miss him still—but he’s a little afraid of whether his father would think it was all worth it: what he gave to Camden compared to what he’s gotten in return.
“Ollie?” someone says, and his reverie is broken—he’s standing outside the double doors to the big building in Hampstead where the hospital’s family apartments are. Leo is standing there, too, looking concerned.
“Hi,” Oliver replies, voice full of cotton. “Good morning.”
“You okay?” Leo asks quietly, touching Oliver’s elbow, and even so soon out of his trance, the contact makes his heart leap.
“I’m okay,” he says, and finds it’s not a lie. “I’m glad you’re here. Let’s do this.”
Once they’re inside, the visit passes in a blur, like always, but Oliver holds on to snatches of it: The boy who has clearly been briefed on their arrival and is waiting for Oliver with a stack of Paddington books that’s taller than he is.
Leo drawing in exquisite detail, upon request from a previously sullen preteen, a snowman made out of footballs, who can also fly.
And Nina asking a little girl whose mother is in surgery if she likes football and her delicate little nod.
Who’s your favorite player? She whispers back, Oliver, like it’s a secret, and Leo, standing next to them, suddenly gives her a conspiratorial smile and ducks down to her level. Mine too.
It feels so good and right to be there, more than ever before, so much that Oliver braves the walk across the way, toward the main campus, much too close to where Dad died, to meet Nicola as her night shift lets off and offer her a ride home.
He manages to return her smile when she sees him; returning her embrace is as easy as anything.
“Do you want to go to lunch?” he asks. “To the market?”