Twenty #3
“Always. Although, if I play like I did in practice today it won’t matter,” he said, and turned his head on the pillow to look at me, his hair tickling my arm. “What did Leo say to you?”
“Oh. He, uh, just didn’t appreciate us giving you advice.”
He gave me a look. “I saw your face. Just tell me what he said.”
It had eaten at me in the hours since. Not because it had hurt to hear, but because of what it suggested about Miles’s life. I sighed. “He said you didn’t need advice from people like us.”
Miles stilled, eyes not shifting from my face.
“And when asked to clarify his meaning,” I went on. “He called us fairies. And said we needed Macca because Tomas and I were too nancy to stand up for ourselves.”
With his own sigh, Miles turned to look up at the ceiling.
“You need a new coach, Miles,” I said, the echo of his own words about Danny loud between us.
“Yeah, I’ve known that for a while. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.
He came out of retirement because my parents paid him a fuck tonne of money just for the prestige of having Leo Mannering, like his name alone would turn me into a world number one.
Dad and Leo between them hired every member of my team.
They pay them. They brief them, not me.”
“Does he ever say things like that to you?”
His gaze snapped to me with sudden horror. “No! God no, I’m not such a pushover that I would put up with him if he did. It’s just the hard taskmaster stuff. Another reason I’m sure they chose him. Someone who could straighten me out. Stop me being lazy.”
Straighten me out. Words whose alternate definition felt hauntingly accurate, yet I said, “You aren’t lazy. I’ve watched you practise. And no one gets to where you are if they’re lazy.”
“They do if they have someone to whip them into shape.”
Straighten me out. Seemed more like Leo Mannering had twisted him up, and I wanted to gently take hold of those snarled coils and unwind them, wanted to ease the sharp points from where they dug into his skin.
“I don’t believe that,” I said. “And I don’t think that’s why he does it.”
Miles frowned at me, the glow from the bedside lamp limning his hair but leaving his expression in shadow. “What do you mean?”
“So, Leo Mannering is a hard taskmaster, sure, but do you think Olivier Penders would have kept him on for so many years if he spoke to him the way he speaks to you? Do you think Vasilyev, who wasn’t exactly known for his calm temperament, would have put up with him talking like that?”
When Miles didn’t answer, I added, “There’s taskmaster and there’s sadistic cunt, and I know which bucket I would put Leo Mannering in. Especially after he made it clear how little he thinks of people like us. I assume he knows.”
“Yeah.”
For a long, drawn-out minute, Miles gnawed on his lip in silence before he squeezed his eyes shut. “God, you must think me an idiot.”
“No! Miles, no, not even a little. When things just become normal it’s impossible to see them for what they really are unless someone shows you. I would never have realised I was getting in my own way if not for you.”
He sighed again, rolling to stretch like he just needed to move. “After New York perhaps. It’s too disruptive to make changes now, especially since . . .”
Since his parents seemed to control everything, I thought, filling in his unfinished sentence.
On the bedside table, my phone buzzed. Once. Twice. A third time. Not close enough together to be a call, but I reached over to be sure. Three messages from Tomas.
Macca got into a fight in the bar with Callahan’s damn trainer.
The hotel staff are pissed, Tarelli needs stitches and Leo Mannering just showed up.
If he’s with you, please get him down here.
“Shit, we have to go,” I said, climbing over Miles only for my hand to slip on the edge of the bed, sending me face first into the floor in what had to be the least graceful exit from a bed in the history of clandestine sexual encounters.
“What the fuck? Are you okay?”
“Yeah, ow. I’m fine. Here.” I tossed him my phone as I snatched up my hastily abandoned clothes.
A beat of silence while Miles read the messages, then he was off the bed with a groan of, “Oh my god.”
We pulled ourselves together as fast as we could, and reached the hotel bar to find a section had been cordoned off, its floor glittering with broken glass. Amid a general babble of excitement, necks craned and fingers pointed and I wanted to sink into the tiles.
A harried manager stood waiting. “Mr Callahan and Mr Russo?” she asked, and given the circumstances it was ridiculous that I liked the sound of our names spoken together so much that I wanted to ask her to say them again.
“Yeah,” Miles said, far more sensible. “What happened?”
The woman pursed her lips, and either unwilling or unable to explain, led us instead into an empty side passage.
Shouting emanated from a closed door at the end, a sound that swelled as we approached until it covered even the chatter from the bar.
Without pause, Miles pushed open the door and strode in, causing the symphony of harried voices to stutter into silence.
The room was a small function space, and there beneath the white fluorescents, Macca sat perched on a table with an ice pack pressed to his face, Tomas scowling like a thundercloud beside him.
On the other side of the anaemic room, a paramedic was cleaning a nasty gash on Tarelli’s eyebrow.
He also had a split lip and blood on his shirt and Leo Mannering firmly in his corner.
The rest of Miles’s team were gathered around him – his assistant coach, his strength and conditioning coach, his physio, and Tina, biting her lip and trying to make herself as small as possible.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Miles demanded, walking in with all the authority of being the tallest, angriest man in the room. For a moment, even Leo Mannering’s jaw snapped shut.
Only for a moment. “What’s going on here,” he said, his sneer full of moral superiority, “is that we’re laying assault charges.”
“No, we are not,” Tina said. “This will be hard enough to smooth over—”
She’d hardly managed three words before everyone was shouting again, voices growing louder and louder until Miles snapped, “Quit it! One at a time.” He turned to his bleeding trainer. “What happened?”
“He just came at me,” Tarelli said, pointing at Macca. “I had to defend myself.”
“Oh, like you did nothing to deserve it, you cunt,” Macca spat back, still nestling the ice pack against his freckled cheek.
Tarelli gestured like this statement was all the evidence one needed, but Miles ignored this to ask, “Well, what does he think you did?”
“I don’t know. We were just talking and he—”
“Bullshit.” Macca dropped his ice pack and rose, Tomas’s hand on his arm all that kept him from striding across the floor for another bout. “Tell him what you said. Go on. Word for word.”
My already deep sense of foreboding plummeted. This was going to be bad.
“Call off your dog, Russo,” Leo Mannering snapped at me. “You might want to vet your staff more carefully. Unless you like travelling with violent—”
Miles spun on him. “Shut. Up.” He held up a peremptory finger. “No one else says another word until Tarelli tells me what started this.”
“We were just joking around and then he went for me!” Tarelli said.
“Joking around,” Miles repeated, nodding slowly. “All right.” He turned to Macca. “What did he say?”
For half a second everyone held their breath, but if Tarelli had hoped to escape without his remarks being repeated, he had reckoned without the great Australian bluntness – a general tendency that, in Macca, had been fine-tuned to a staggering degree.
“Well, he started by asking ‘which one of our pillow biters do you think takes it up the arse’,” Macca said. “And when I told him to shut up, he did not. How much more do you want to hear?”
“I was just joking!” Tarelli cried.
Just joking. Pillow biters. Such pathetic words. I wanted to hear no more, but Miles stood his ground in the centre of the room, all molten fury as he lifted a warning finger to his trainer. “Unless you’re going to tell me the rest, Tarelli, don’t interrupt.”
“There isn’t any more! That was it, and I’m sorry, it was just meant to be a bit of fun.”
“No more?” Macca laughed. “What about when you said ‘Russo’s got to be a screamer, right?’ or ‘we’ve all seen the pictures Callahan bought when he got snapped sucking cock in Miami, looks like he swallows damn good,’ or ‘I’m no queer, but I’d let him suck my cock if he wants it so bad’.
That, for reference, is when I punched him. ”
Long before he’d finished, Miles’s team had erupted into denials, Leo Mannering leading with, “They’re just making things up.” While Tarelli cried that he would never say such a thing because he wasn’t gay.
It was a trainwreck. An actual, honest-to-god trainwreck and there was nothing I could do because this wasn’t about Macca at all. It wasn’t even about me. We were merely the catalyst for something that had been brewing for a long time.
For a full minute, Miles stood silent in the eye of the storm before he pointed to the door. “Out,” he said, the word not loud but so vehement it resounded through the small function room with its sea of plastic chairs. “You’re all fired. I want every one of you gone by morning.”
“You can’t fire my team,” Mannering said like he was explaining something simple to a child. “I need them to—”
“No, you don’t, because ‘all’ included you. We’re done, Leo.”
Mannering dared a step closer in the sudden silence. “Now, don’t be a fool, Miles. Your parents hired me to make you the best player you could be. Don’t throw away your chance at being world number one on something as foolish as a few poorly chosen words.”
“Oh, you mean words like fairy? Or nancy?” Miles asked, the question deceptively quiet. “Is that what you think about ‘people like us’?”