Saturday morning football
By celticman
- 831 reads
I dreamt a giant gorilla was attacking me. It was shouting ‘Up. Up. Up.’
Ma pulled the bedclothes off me. My skin hit the empty air and I curled into a defenceless ball of arms and kicking legs like a crustacean without a shell.
‘Up,’ said Ma.
I could almost see the words hanging from the permafrost bedroom walls and dangling from her mouth like fag smoke
My brother’s blanketed and cowled head peeked out from the bed next to me. All I could see were his eyes twinkling and the two dots of his cheeky wee grin. He farted and laughed from underneath the blankets.
‘I’m going to kill him,’ I said, but looked over to check that my older brother wasn’t there before I said it.
He was at work. He was always at work.
My eldest brother’s bed was also empty. God knows where he was, because even Ma didn’t.
Ma had pulled the sheets from me and piled them up at the bottom of the bed. I lunged at them. But Ma was too old and experienced a campaigner for that ploy. She pulled them back towards her so that the bed was stripped and lay nude, with me in the middle of it. I needed to pee and had a hard-on, but wasn’t sure which was more important. I quickly curled back into a defensive ball in case Ma noticed.
‘But mum,’ I whined, ‘it’s Saturday. We’ve not got school today.’
‘There’s somebody at the door for you,’ she said.
Ma trudged up the hall and into the living room. I grabbed at the blankets and pulled them up around my head.
Bofort- that’s what I called my wee brother, because he didn’t like it-was laughing as if I’d told a joke. He was still grinning, when his head emerged from it’s blanket prison. Sometimes I wondered if he was an imbecile. He was watching me, in the way that wee brothers do, to see what I was going to do next, as if my whole life was a circus performance for his benefit.
‘Did you know that the earth is round and if it wasnae we’d all fall off,’ he said.
‘Shut it,’ I said.
I sat up in my bed and looked at the blanketed half-light that the Venetian blinds let through and tried to work out what time it was.
‘Did you?’ said Bofort, giggling, when he farted beneath his sheets again.
I gave up wondering what would be the best way to torture him so that no one would hear and got out of bed. I figured it must still be before 8 a.m. because when Bofort’s eyes opened so did his mouth and the only person that would listen to him that early was Ma.
I heard someone chapping at the door. It was just a brief bang on the letterbox as if the wind had rapped it, or the person doing the chapping was embarrassed to be chapping at that time. And so they fucking should be I thought. Whoever it was I was going to kill them.
‘I’ll get it,’ I shouted.
I tried to make my voice loud enough so that I didn’t wake anybody that wasn’t already awake. Loud enough so only my wee brother and me could hear. That way I had an alibi. My sisters in the next room wouldn’t have something else to moan about and Da wouldn’t kill me.
The door chapped again. One brief knock. I was torn between answering and going to the toilet. I couldn’t go to the door waving a mega morning hard-on, but I couldn’t let whoever was at the door chap again or everybody in the house would be up in next to no time.
‘Bofort get the door for me will you?’
It was more a command than a request and Bofort took it in that light.
‘NO,’ he said, sliding his head under the blankets and giggling away to himself as if he was in his own cave.
I whacked at his legs through the blanket, but that just made him giggle even more. I thought I heard the creak of Da’s bed in the room next door. I flung our bedroom door behind me like a clap of thunder and bolted up the hall, like ball lightning. I barely felt the cold linoleum on my bare feet in the bathroom. I needed to pee and I needed to shit, so I didn’t know whether to stand or sit.
The front door banged again.
I heard mum trudging down the hall and opening the front door again.
‘He’ll no be a minute son,’ I heard her say. ‘Do you want to come in?’
I didn’t hear the reply, but Ma’s slippers slapped wearily back up the hall and into the living room. I knew that she would have left the door half open and half shut, as an invite not to come in, but not to go away.
I’d a good scratch and wondered if I’d caught anything. I’d never had sex with anybody else, but the thought was exciting enough to forego celibacy and forget chastity. If onanism was a sin I figured there was only one way to find out. The slap of the front door nearly made me wet myself.
I rushed down the hall before Ma had even got out of her chair beside the bright orange blaze of the two bar electric fire. One of the twins Sammy Grant was bouncing up and down trying to keep warm. His hair was cockatoo purple this week and he’d on his usual ripped leather jacket and ripped tartan trousers, which was pretty cool, but it wasn’t the weather for being cool. It was the kind of weather for wearing deerstalkers and having tartan blankets draped over your shoulder and drinking medicinal glasses of whisky from thick cut glasses.
He didn’t need to say anything. I knew. I just knew. I’d gone from being ‘one can Dan’ to trying to prove that I could drink Eldorado mixed with the best Russian Vladistock vodka. I didn’t like the taste so I had a shot at lying down and pouring it up my nose. It hadn’t worked, but at least it had made Wendy laugh. I might have been in there, if she didn’t hate me and I hadn’t been sick all over the place, fallen asleep and thought I was going to die. The worst part, the very worst part was that I’d said I was a great football player and I would play for Sammy’s team in the Saturday morning league. I looked down at Sammy’s feet. The devil had a human form and the feet of a goat. Sammy Grant no longer wore the mandatory Doc Martin boots with 36 holes tied together with bright yellow football laces. He wore Adidas Samba with the three stripes, the same shape as the blue box they came in, only with a gigantic white toecap that could be seen from space. The devil in Sammy Grant had come to collect his dues.
‘You playing?’ he said.
His Samba bound foot feinted left and then right as if he was kicking an imaginary ball. I thought I was going to be sick, because I was. I pushed past him and tried to spew quietly down the back of our garden wall. I just hoped the seagulls were hungry.
‘No,’ I said, trooping back up and indoors, my bare feet frosty white, ‘my throat’s killing me’.
I sounded as if I’d a 50 a day habit and for once tried to look even more pathetic that I was. ‘And my back…’ I didn’t know what a person with a bad back did, so I started kinda hopping and rolling like Long John Silver.
‘Why did you not tell me that last night? Then I wouldnae have came in for you.’
Sammy sounded pissed off, but it was that kind of pissed off where I knew that he would be leaving so I shook my head and tried to look like I gave a toss.
‘Jesus,’ I said.
Da appeared at my back. ‘What was that noise?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. I thought I heard something so I went out to have a look. Did you hear anything Sammy?’ I said.
‘I didn’t hear anything Mr McGrorry,’ Sammy said, but with Da scrutinising him his Adam’s apple bobbled up and down and his voice went all choir boy funny. ‘Honest, I didn’t hear anything,’ he said again.
Da looked at him and then me. His thick woolly eyebrows and furrowed brow stretched into a Moses like incomprehension of our world. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’ he asked Sammy.
‘I came up for Kev,’ under Da’s frosted glared Sammy’s Sambas started dancing, from foot to foot. ‘I came up for Kevin.’ Da nodded, as if to go on and Sammy continued with his dance, ‘to play football.’ Da nodded again, as if finally, Sammy was beginning to make some kind of sense.
‘What time’s your game at?’ Da asked, almost like a normal person.
‘9 a.m. Mr McGrorry,’ said Sammy.
Da liked all that kind of thing. Football. Boxing. Wrestling Polar bears. He thought all that kind of stuff was good for you as long as it didn’t cost anything.
‘Well you better get a move on then,’ said Da, turning away to go up the hall.
‘Kevin said that he’s no’ going Mr McGrorry. That he’s not well,’ said Sammy.
Da stopped. His eyebrows shot up higher than Mount Sinai and his voice boomed out:
‘He’s going.’
Sammy Grant tried not to look too smug as we slid our way down the frosty pavements towards the short-cut that would take us to our fitba park.
- Log in to post comments
Comments
I love the way you describe
- Log in to post comments
'all that kind of stuff was
- Log in to post comments