There's Only One Danny Garvey, page 9
A door opens. The last house on the left. An old woman walks slowly to the end of a path that’s surrounded by wild overgrown weeds.
‘Oh hullo, there,’ she says as she peers across the street through milk-bottle glasses. ‘Any post today?’
‘Ah’m no’ the postman, missus,’ I reply, smiling. I walk over to her.
‘Up awfy early then.’
‘Ach. Aye … ah’m just…’ Then it dawns on me. Like a dense fog lifting. I’m back there. It’s like the sudden, stinging sharpness of a leather belt coming down on my tiny outstretched hands.
Aul’ Jock Reid … he’s no’ right in the heid. His wife’s a hoor, an’ his daughter’s deid.
The house. The one on the news when I was a child. The one she was taken from. The woods over the fence where her mother was found hanged. This is Jock Reid’s house. This is Jock Reid’s wife.
‘Ye couldn’t pick the milk up for me, son?’ she asks. ‘Just since yer passin’.’
‘Eh … aye. Of course.’ Suddenly I’m trembling. I bend down and pick up the bottles.
She turns and walks towards her house rather than take them from me. I have no choice but to follow her through the unkempt, thigh-high landscape to her front door.
‘Thanks son,’ she says. A warm smile follows.
My hands shake as I hand her the bottles one by one. I worry she can see it. Probably not. Can she sense it? Is she aware of my heart pounding?
‘If I had a few caramels, I’d give ye them,’ she says. ‘A wee reward, ye know?’
‘It’s fine, missus…’ I leave this open. She doesn’t fill in the ending. Reid is etched into the rusty metal plate. It’s her. There’s no doubt.
I tell her I must go. She says ‘thanks’, and ‘yer a nice lad’. I look back at the house from the top of her road. And suddenly, recollections come rushing into my head like I’ve just been injected with a hallucinatory drug. I recall the vans and the diggers and the white tents in the garden. And then there’s Higgy and Deek Henderson standing in front of me in the road. They both believed she was there, convinced she was buried in the ground around the house. The definition is becoming sharper. More focused. She was in my class, little Louise. Little Louise-Anne. There were only thirteen of us. Her name was after mine in the register and I remember our teacher reading mine out and I put my hand up and then that terrible silence and she looked up and remembered and she burst into tears and we were all sent home because no-one else was there to look after us.
It could’ve been me. It should’ve been me.
Aul’ Jock Reid … he’s no’ right in the heid. His wife’s a hoor, an’ his daughter’s deid.
Poor Jock Reid. Poor Danny fucking Garvey…
Just a fortnight before the end of the 1983 league season, Barshaw Bridge had their biggest game in a decade. An Ayrshire Cup semi-final draw at home against Auchinleck Talbot. I was sixteen and in the midst of my exams. I’d been training with the Bridge that whole season. Turning down offers and requests from various professional clubs Raymond had deemed unworthy. We were – in his words – waiting for the right opportunity to knock.
Deek Henderson, Barshaw’s manager, had given me my debut a month or so earlier. A week prior to this, he called me to his office where – drunk – he locked the door, dropped his pants and asked me to wank him off.
I did. I liked Deek. He wasn’t a shouter; not at me at least. He’d been patient with me in training. He encouraged me. Told me I was very special. A special talent. I wanted to play for Barshaw Bridge. To make Raymond and Higgy proud. To make my manager happy. I just wanted to play. It seemed like a fair swap; a hand job for a first-team jersey. I masturbated twice daily at that age. I was good at it. One more wouldn’t matter. I just assumed the whole team had gone through this initiation. This one-off show of personal commitment and determination.
Deek Henderson cried when I’d finished. I felt sorry for him and then disgusted by him. Sitting there on the edge of his desk. Tracksuit bottoms at his ankles. Tears running down his face. His own spunk all over his thighs. He pleaded with me to keep it between us. That others wouldn’t understand.
But I told Raymond.
Then I blocked it out. I just wanted to play. I figured Raymond would know what to do for the best.
I played in seven games before the semi-final; six in the league. I did well. We won four of those matches. I scored a hat-trick in one game; from midfield. I started against the mighty Talbot. Almost one thousand supporters jammed themselves into our tiny ground that Saturday in May 1983. We struggled in the first half, but kept the score to zero, and limited them to a handful of chances. In the second half though, Talbot had a man sent off for raking his studs down my left leg, having been booked for an almost identical challenge on Scotty Sellars in the first half. We would never have a better chance of reaching a final. With fifteen minutes left, and me on the verge of cramp, the ball spilled out from a corner. I was on the edge of the Talbot box. I could hear Deek Henderson shouting, ‘Shoot, Danny. Fucken shoot, son!’ but I didn’t. I weaved around the first two defenders, put the ball through the legs of a third, and then casually lifted it over their keeper.
Barshaw Bridge FC 1 – 0 Auchinleck Talbot
(Garvey, 77)
That night, Raymond took me to six pubs. I was drunk by the time we’d left the second. We didn’t go home. I woke up in a remote, smelly house on the edge of Cumnock. I had a blinding headache. I had been sick all over myself. I looked for Raymond. He was in a back room in bed with a red-haired woman old enough to be our mother.
He got up, and we left without the woman waking. Raymond took the keys to an old Mini that was parked along the dark lane. I don’t know who the car belonged to. It wasn’t yet six o’clock on that Sunday morning and there was not a sound to be heard.
‘Here, you drive, superstar,’ Raymond said.
‘Fuck off,’ I said, shivering.
‘Ah’m serious,’ he said. ‘C’mon. Nae cunt’s about. Ye deserve it. Plus, ah’ve been on the Charlie.’
‘Aye, an’ ah’m no’ even seventeen,’ I protested.
‘Who’s gonnae see ye out here? The fucken scarecrows? Ya wee chicken, ye. Get in an’ drive!’
‘Naw. Bugger off.’
‘Dae it,’ his tone shifting to anger. ‘Or ah’ll tell every cunt ye wanked off Deek fucken Henderson tae get intae the first team.’
Louise-Anne Macdonald was all anyone could talk about when I was a child. The local speculation about what had happened to her. Higgy and Deek Henderson and their total conviction that her grampa was responsible. And I was jealous of her; of the attention she got. Everybody feeling sorry for her, when the possibility remained that she was in a better place. That whoever had her now cared for her more than he had. Even if he hadn’t done away with her, he’d fucking let her go. He’d let her out of his sight. He’d been too fucking wrapped up in his own selfish thoughts. Too bothered about his papers, or whatever was on the telly. Or playing that stupid fucking piano. These were the things that preoccupied me for years, when I wasn’t playing football. Right up to the night of the Talbot semi-final.
Two days after that last match for Barshaw Bridge, I was on my way to Aberdeen.
My earlier optimism has evaporated. The chance meeting with the old woman has shaken me, forcing me to remember the reasons I came back here. She has no idea who I am. I barely know, myself. A dull ache in my head is building.
Higgy has gone out. His traditional prematch pint and fry-up at The King’s being touted as his superstition. His house is quiet. Last-minute preparations before I go and pick up the boy. I come out of the bathroom and an insistent noise breaks the silence.
The club’s mobile phone is ringing. I didn’t recognise its tone since it’s the first time I’ve heard it ring. It takes me a while to locate. I put it in a drawer the night it was given to me.
‘Hullo?’ I answer timidly, as if I was the recipient of the first-ever telephone call.
‘Gaffer,’ a deep voice replies.
‘Who’s this?’
‘It’s me, boss … Jaz.’ It takes me a while. ‘Jaz Sinclair,’ says Jaz, perhaps acknowledging we haven’t spoken much since preseason training resumed a month ago.
‘What’s up?’ I ask, knowing something is.
‘Ah’m out for the game. The day, ah mean.’ I leave a space for him to fill. Partly because I’m uncomfortable speaking on the tiny grey thing in my hand. Partly because the brief conversation with Jock Reid’s widow is still distracting me. And partly because I despise it when players call off matches on the day of the game.
‘Ah’ve got the skitters,’ says Jaz. Hard to tell if he’s trying to avoid the detail. ‘Been up aw night. Fuck all left in me.’ He sounds desperate. ‘Ma arse has been pumpin’ out thick filthy water … s’been like drainin’ the oil fae a fucken car’s engine.’
As he pleads, I glance at my notes. He knew he wasn’t starting anyway. I picked the team at Thursday’s training. Higgy thought it was a mistake to tell them. He might’ve been right.
‘Fine. Are ye comin’ though … tae support the team?’ I ask.
He hesitates.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Double trainin’ sessions next week then.’
Jaz Sinclair seems to take this as a win, albeit one he’s had to work for. It’s highly unlikely he wouldn’t be able to play, but a severe hangover is more likely to be the prompt for the call. He wishes us luck and hangs up, as I search for the button that would’ve allowed me to end the call first.
I hear the ringing sound again, but I’m heading out the front door, and the phone remains in the drawer it was returned to.
‘Afternoon … is Damian ready?’
‘Are you Danny? Raymond’s brother?’
‘Yeah, I … em, is Nancy about?’
‘Naw. She’s at work.’
‘Oh. Aw’right then.’
The woman folds her arms.
‘Did she mention me takin’ the wee man tae the fitba?’
‘She did.’
She’s sizing me up. I guess this is Nancy’s mother. It’s less the physical resemblance, more the impenetrable suspicion. She looks me up and down. The emphasis placed on my brother’s name betrays her opinion of him. She’ll assume I’m cut from the same cloth.
‘Damo!’ she yells, without turning to direct her voice into the house, where the boy must be. We stand watching each other for what feels like ten wordless minutes before the boy appears. He is wearing the spaceman’s helmet. The visor is open.
—Mum told me my new uncle was coming. She told me he was a nice man. That he wouldn’t have a beard on. And that he would take me to watch football.
‘Aw’right, pal?’ I ask him. He nudges his way past the older woman. He doesn’t look at me at all.
—I don’t like talking to people I don’t know.
‘Bye, Gran,’ he whispers, confirming my suspicion.
‘Bye, son,’ she replies, her eyes never leaving mine. ‘You do what yer uncle tells ye, okay?’ The boy nods. I put out my hand to take his. He ignores it.
—I don’t like people I don’t know touching me.
‘He doesn’t like to be touched,’ his gran informs me.
‘Ah … right. Okay,’ I say.
‘Damian … Damo. Ah got ye somethin’. Want tae see it?’ I ask him.
He nods. I hand him a small package, wrapped in a tissue. He looks at his gran, who raises an eyebrow. Damo takes it, unwraps the tissue. He doesn’t speak, smile or look at me. He reaches into his jacket and pulls out a small plastic bag. He puts the tiny figure of Paul Gascoigne that I’ve just given him into the bag.
‘Paul Gascoigne. Ye know him?’ I ask. He nods again.
—Laudrup, Ravanelli, Shearer, Juninho, McManaman, Redknapp, Schmeichel, Beckham, Gullit, Zola, Vialli … Gascoigne.
‘Get him back here five o’clock latest, right? He has tae have his tea at five.’
‘Ah will. An’ thanks,’ I say. She watches us until we are out of sight.
Damo walks purposefully. All my attempts to talk to him fall on his apparently deaf ears. I ask him if he’s excited about today’s match against Lugar Boswell Thistle. If he’s looking forward to going to a new school. If he likes music. I look down and into the visor. His lips are moving in silent chant.
—Laudrup, Ravanelli, Shearer, Juninho, McManaman, Redknapp, Schmeichel, Beckham, Gascoigne, Gullit, Zola, Vialli.
‘Aw’right, wee man?’ Higgy greets us at the gate. ‘Didnae think his ma would let him.’
‘Why no’?’ I say.
‘Ach, just … y’know?’
‘Actually, ah don’t.’ It’s a small step for the boy in the space helmet, but apparently a giant leap for the band of damaged adults around him. We leave it at that.
‘’Mon, son,’ says Higgy. ‘Want a sausage roll?’
Damo nods and follows Higgy over to the rusting van with the steam billowing out of its bolted-on metal flue.
—I like sausage. I like rolls. Mum brings me rolls home from work. Sometimes they’re still hot. I want to watch football. I’m good at watching football.
The match-day programmes are in the box at the makeshift turnstiles. I paid for them myself to be given out freely on this opening day of the season. It’s an hour before kick-off. The players from both teams are appearing in gangs from cars parked up like the start of a rally. The nets are up. The referee is already out inspecting a pitch that I doubt will have looked much better. The sun is shining, and a shiver runs down my spine.
I watch my players head for their pegs and hang their jackets up. There’s no allocation but even though we are now using last season’s away dressing room, a natural order emerges. Forwards and midfielders together nearest the door. Defenders and the keeper grouped over to the left. The bench runs around three sides, interrupted only by the route into the toilet and the showers. I stand at the blank wall, acknowledging the mumbled ‘Boss’, that comes from the majority.
I count them. Forty-five minutes to go and I have thirteen. Harry Doyle is out pacing the car park. There will be hell to pay for the three who remain AWOL. I go outside and call him back to take the warm-up drills. I hear him ushering those already stripped out onto the pitch. A car splutters through the open gate and stops next to me.
‘Sorry, gaffer,’ says Stevie Smith, the driver. ‘Fucken puncture, man!’ I look down at the thin replacement wheel.
‘Fair enough,’ I say. ‘Get a shift on though.’ The defender and his passengers, Fraser Boland and Luke Lorimer, all sprint into the cabin.
‘Right, everybody ready?’
‘Fucken bang on,’ says the captain.
I’ve handed over the team lines. My team’s studs have been inspected. We’re ready.
‘Everybody know their positions?’ They nod collectively. ‘Win the one-on-ones, keep it tight at the back … don’t get dragged out ae position if they start movin’ about.’ It seems like the list of trudged-out clichés every coach from Boys’ Brigade teams to international-level exhorts in the minutes before kick-off. The minutes when players aren’t really listening. Those seconds when they are in their own space, anticipating the game ahead. The match going their way. A match-winning performance. All the training-ground routines coming together and coalescing around a formation that fits each player perfectly. Eradicating any thoughts of loss or fears of serious injury.
‘Who’s yer favourite player, Damo?’ I hear Higgy ask the boy from over my left shoulder.
—Laudrup, Ravanelli, Shearer, Juninho, McManaman, Redknapp, Schmeichel, Beckham, Gascoigne, Gullit, Zola, Vialli.
‘Gascoigne,’ he whispers.
The crowd – I’ve counted fifty-seven heads – seems impressed by our positive start. Only one negative shout so far – ‘McIntosh, yer a fat cunt!’ – which received a ‘Tell yer ma tae stop feedin’ me buttered scones when ah’m ridin’ her up the arse then,’ from the keeper. Apart from that, quiet encouragement.
Predictably, this changes when we concede. Ten minutes from half-time, our discipline slips. A nothing ball over the top from the opposing left back. Their striker easily outpaces Gilhooly and slots it under Tony McIntosh.
—One-nil to Lugar. McIntosh, yer a fat cunt!
‘Maybe a change, Boss?’ says Harry Doyle. I don’t answer, and he automatically sends the subs up the line to warm up.
Strawhorn is hauled down on the edge of the box. He gets the free kick, but not before a deserved yellow for head-butting his Lugar marker. A yellow that would’ve been a red had the ref been closer to the play. My players fight over who’s taking it. Strawhorn grabs it. Gilhooly grabs him. The ref threatens more cards. ‘Fucken state ae these jokers,’ says my opposite number, just loud enough for me to hear; laughing at us.
—Strawhorn has never scored a goal in a first half.
‘Aw’right, Damo? Ye want some crisps or somethin’, son?’ Higgy’s voice distracts me from the action. I’d almost forgotten the boy was here.
‘Hey, Damian. Everythin’ okay?’ I ask. I go over to him during the break in play as the referee takes more of our names.
‘Strawhorn has never scored a free kick,’ he says quietly, through the open visor. I smirk at the boy’s prescience. This statistic isn’t about to change.
‘A first time for everythin’,’ says a hopeful Barshaw punter.
His optimism will be misplaced. I don’t need the conviction of a ten-year-old in a space helmet. Strawhorn is raging. There will be no composure. No skilful, subtle bending of the ball around Lugar’s substantial wall.
A fifteen-yard run-up for a shot that’s only twenty yards from goal. With a six-man wall of their heftiest lined up eight yards away at most. Predictably, my striker tries to bludgeon the ball, presumably hoping to take a defender’s head off in the process. It sails high over the bar. The ball is still rising as the ref signals for half-time.
