Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Hamish
The studio is a living thing.
The LED walls pulse with match graphics, the floor screen glows beneath my feet, and every person in this room—floor director, camera ops, sound engineers, the woman who does nothing but monitor the talkback channels—moves with purpose.
Controlled chaos. Like a pitch. Like the sixty seconds before kickoff, when the crowd is a wall of noise and your body is a coiled spring and the referee's whistle is the only thing between you and the match.
I was built to do this.
The match is forty minutes in. Exhibition game, Premier League legends versus an international all-stars XI, and it's meant to be a friendly but apparently nobody told the defenders that, because there's a crunching tackle in the box that draws a penalty and the crowd at Wembley surges.
"Now, that's a tackle ye write home about—if home is a disciplinary hearing," I say, and Roshani laughs. Malcolm says nothing in my ear, which means it survived the Malcolm filter, so I keep going.
"The angle on that penalty kick is deceptive. The striker's plant foot is pointin' left but his hips are square. Watch—there. See that? He's sold the keeper before the ball's left his boot. The best penalties are lies ye tell wi' yer whole body."
"You've scored a few of those yourself."
"Aye. And missed a few. The ones ye miss, ye remember longer. They keep ye honest."
I feel it—the flow. Different from the pitch, where flow was physical, muscular, my lungs and legs and grass under my boots, this flow lives in my brain.
I watch the match and I see it the way I used to see it from inside—the geometry, the space between players, the half-second decisions that separate a goal from a miss—but now I'm translating it, turning instinct into language, and the language comes out clean and sharp and right.
I'm a camera zooming out. I'm in the match and above it. I can see what the players can't because I've been where they are and I know what it costs and what it gives, and my mouth is a bridge between those two worlds.
The bridge holds.
Between the commentary I think about Amy.
Hell, during the commentary I think about her, a constant running thread of love and worry.
Three thousand miles away, thirty-six weeks pregnant, alone in our condo with a cursed plush and a disorganized spice rack.
Mum and Da are down the street on baby watch, Mum with her phone volume on maximum and her trainers by the door, ready to sprint at the first sign of a contraction.
And I'm touched by that. Deeply. Mum flew across an ocean and smuggled haggis through customs because she refuses to miss the birth of her first grandchild.
That kind of love—fierce, unsubtle, slightly terrifying—is the kind I grew up in.
The kind I married into, too, because Amy and Mum are the same species of stubborn. They just express it differently.
Mum with volume. Amy with spreadsheets.
"That counterattack," I say as the replay loops, "starts with the centre-back. Watch his first touch. He turns, finds the midfielder, and suddenly it's three on two and the whole shape of the match shifts in a heartbeat. That's intelligence. Ye canna teach that."
Malcolm's voice in my ear: "Good. Stay on the formation analysis. Less personality."
Less personality.
His greatest hits now include "less banter," "less personality," "less charm," and memorably, during last week's rehearsal, "less of whatever that was."
The ratings will decide who's right.
The whistle blows for halftime. Red light off.
A staffer from audience analytics approaches the pod with a tablet.
"Numbers are in for the first half. Overall viewership is tracking fourteen percent above projection."
"Good," Malcolm says through my earpiece.
"But the interesting part is the demographic split. Female viewers sixteen to thirty-four are up thirty-one percent. Women twenty-five to fifty-four are up forty-two percent." She pauses. "And women fifty-five-plus are up sixty-eight percent."
Even Malcolm goes quiet.
"Sixty-eight percent?" Roshani says.
"Unprecedented for a football broadcast. The fifty-five-plus female demographic typically tracks at about four percent for exhibition. Right now, they're at eleven."
"Ma mum must've told all her friends ta watch," I grin.
Gemma, who has materialized at the edge of the pod the way she keeps doing, leans against the desk. "Or all your former bedmates are tuning in."
"Aye, but that'd only cover the twenty-five ta thirty-four bracket, Gemma. The fifty-five-plus ladies are all ye."
Gemma's smile freezes. The analytics staffer looks at her tablet very intently. Roshani covers her mouth.
In my ear, Malcolm: "Less banter. Back in ninety."
I feel my phone buzz in my trouser pocket. Once. Twice. I can't look. We're about to go live.
The second half begins.
"You've been on both sides now," Roshani says. "On the pitch and in the studio. How does it feel, watching a match you'd have played in a year ago?"
I let the silence hold for one beat, a trick I learned from Roshani herself, who uses silence the way a striker uses space.
"The first time I watched a match from a studio instead of a changing room, I felt like a ghost hauntin' a house I used ta live in.
But now I see things I never saw from inside.
The patterns. The mistakes. The wee moments that decide a match that ye miss when yer lungs are burning and yer legs are screamin'. Still the game. And I still love it."
"And the viewers seem to love you."
"The viewers have excellent taste."
In my ear: "Less—"
"Aye, I ken."
The half runs. I commentate. I'm in the flow, reading the match, calling the plays, finding the rhythm between analysis and entertainment that Malcolm will never understand because Malcolm has never loved anything the way I love this game.
The whistle blows for a drinks break. Red light off.
"Ninety seconds," Malcolm says.
I pull out my phone.
Two texts from Amy.
The first: My water just broke. Come home now
The second: I need you. Please. Come home
The room goes silent. Not actually. The studio is still buzzing with production chatter and crowd noise piped through the monitors.
But in my head, every sound has dropped away.
Every frequency has gone dead. There is only my wife's voice in thirteen words on a screen, the distance between London and Boston, the fact that my daughter is coming now - and I am not there.
I stand up.
My hands are already moving. I pull the IFB from my ear.
Unclip the lapel mic. Start pulling the wire from under my jacket.
My body knows what to do before my brain finishes processing because my body has spent its entire life reacting to emergencies—a ball in the air, a defender closing, a knee bending the wrong way—and right now, the emergency is Amy. Every fiber of me screams GO.
"What are you doing?" Roshani asks.
"Ma wife's water broke. She's in labor. I need ta get home."
"What?"
"Malcolm, I need ta leave."
"LEAVE? We're in the middle of a fucking live broadcast, Hamish!"
"Ma wife needs me. Now."
"SIT DOWN."
Malcolm's voice erupts from the IFB I've just pulled out, loud enough that Roshani flinches. I put the earpiece back in because I can't hear him otherwise, and the next thirty seconds are conducted at a volume that makes a football stadium sound like a library.
"YOU DO NOT LEAVE THIS STUDIO. You are under CONTRACT.
You are LIVE in seventy seconds. If you walk out, you are in breach of a binding agreement with this network, and you will owe us—do you understand me?
—MILLIONS. Your career in broadcasting is OVER.
Not just here. Everywhere. No network will touch you.
You will be the footballer who walked off a live broadcast and you will NEVER sit in a studio chair again. I'll make sure of it."
Every staffer, every camera op, every person in this studio is staring at the back of Malcolm's head in the production gallery, and then at me.
A rage rises in me, hot and clean and familiar.
The pitch rage. It used to fuel me when a defender went in studs-up, when a referee missed a call, when the crowd turned and everything in me said fight.
My fists clench. My jaw locks. I am one sentence away from telling Malcolm Rees exactly where he can insert his contract and his clipboard and his joyless German railway of a production style.
Who the fuck does he think he is, telling me I can't leave to be with my wife, who is bringing our child into the world right this very moment?
My gut clenches with the pain of knowing Amy's at her most vulnerable and I'm letting her down.
I'm her husband. Her best friend. I'm supposed to be with her from first twinge to afterbirth, holding her hand and rubbing her back and lying when she asks "Did I poo on the table when I pushed? "
I need to go.
If I go, our finances are destroyed. All the people I support will be let down, unable to pay rent or school fees, because I walked away from my job in the middle of a live match.
But if I stay, I will crawl out of my own skin and smother myself in it, because how can a man claim to be a good da when he wasn't there for the birth of his daughter?
"Thirty seconds," the floor director says.
I sit down.
Not because Malcolm is right. Because Amy is in Boston and I am in London and even if I sprint to the door right now and grab the first flight out, I can't be there for eleven hours, and eleven hours from now, my daughter may already be born.
I straighten my tie. I smooth my hair. I put my hands on the desk. The red light blinks on, and the version of me the audience sees is calm, composed, and in complete control.
The version of me behind that version is a man on fire.
I say words. I don't remember a single one.
The segment ends. Red light off.
I grab my phone and call Amy. She answers on the first ring.