Chapter Five of Hampton from the Halfway Line

5


Maidenhead, Berkshire

Well, here I am, back where I started. Who was it, Harry Chapin, who sang, “All My Life’s a Circle”? I’m back to where the food’s not as good, nor the rock music, nor the films. But it’s brilliant for not getting mugged – except maybe in Kidwells Park or in front of the McDonald’s on High Street. Or the ... all right, maybe it’s not brilliant for not getting mugged. People tend to walk around in comfortable clothes, though, in places like Maidenhead, as opposed to London where one has to worry about constantly looking smart. More boring than, say, Camden Town? Well, sure.
I’m way bloody out here, even further away from London than the now-famous Slough Trading Estate just off the M4. I knew Slough before it was … Slough. We’d, none of us, any idea of the romance of the place.
But, as they say in Maidenhead and its villages, “Not everyone can get to Slough. So isn’t it time we fixed them sidewalks?”
But, er, return of the native, eh? And would Ben Hampton have come back to his roots, as it were, had he not made something of himself; had he not become a name figure? Would I have shown my face back in the hood without something to show for my life so far? Dunno.
I’d like to apologize just now for that appalling and pretentious bit of ‘third person’ there. I promise it won’t happen again. That is not me, seriously.
Luckily for my privacy, since my friends will agree that I am debilitatingly modest, the Spice Girls themselves are widely known to have holed up in Maidenhead prior to their blitzkrieg on the globe. So their tidal wave of fame easily drowns me out, wouldn’t you say? Perhaps “holed” is not the word I might have used here.
No, lots of celebrities out here. Lots of important, high-achieving types, you know, success stories, kickin’ back. A bit Tory and all that, but the riverside is irresistible. Near to LegoLand. Say what you want; I’m fifty, mate. Twenty-five plus years of North London, more or less; I’d say I put my hip, urban time in. I now understand the whole commuter thing, the whole Silicon Valley moniker. Someone once said about the Maidenhead area, but they could have been referring to hundreds of similar burgs and hamlets in the south, “Close enough to London for a decent Friday night, but just far enough away to survive the worst of a nuclear bomb.” A rather coarse, post-post-imperialist sentiment, I admit.
Time was, I couldn’t wait to move out of the Home Counties and into Finsbury Park. Eventually, I was more than keen to do the reverse. I still keep an office in London to escape to, however.
When we were house hunting here not long ago, my wife and I popped into the quite pleasant and civilized Stag and Hounds, in Pinkneys Green actually, and I was pleased to see that they were pulling Arkell’s Kingsdown Ale from the cask. This beer has a special, terrible place in my heart, as it was first brewed in commemoration of Swindon Town’s League Cup triumph over my Arsenal in 1969 when I was twelve years old and really crushed by the whole experience. I’d like to think I’ve matured. Cheers, darling. It was there in the cozy saloon bar that we had the pleasure of confronting one of the chatty locals for which Maidenhead is famous. (Something I would have been had I never moved away. Chatty local, that is. I am famous.)
“Of all the places I've lived in this country,” he said, over his glass of Archibald Beckett, “Maidenhead is clearly, unutterably the worst. It's a real shame actually, because its river situation offers the potential to be a nice, well-located town, y’see. Instead it just seems to be populated by barely-literate, violent degenerates – a.k.a. ‘chavs’ – little wankers whose only pleasure in life is to dress up in sportswear, pawn all their neighbor’s electric goods down the local Cash Converters, get mashed on various cheap beverages and class B drugs, sit on a wall eating out of a KFC family bucket, and then smash up people's property for fun. And then have a fight with someone just for good measure. Thinking of buying here, eh? Just bought a flat myself in this dismal little suicide-hole. Tragic town, tragic life.”
And that was the MP.
I won’t go as far as to say ‘the burbs are back.’ One problem with that would be to ask, “Were they ever here at any time previously?” But, er, I get it. You’ve got your edgy and vibrant urban world, and you’ve got what people have referred to as your rural idyll. So what, if anything, lies between? Does it fall to relatively creative individuals such as myself to put places like Maidenhead on the must-visit literary tour map? Or just a celebrity map; doesn’t have to be writers. You know, Howard Jones lived in Maidenhead. Say no more. Rolf Harris, of course. “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport.” Freddie Star -- great. The drummer from Supergrass. Too many to name. Kid Galahad. Take that, Clerkenwell. It’s a veritable Left Bank Salon round these parts.
And tell me there’s not a colorful street life. Charlie the Drunk? Come on. The one and only.
As many know from reading “Out in the Cold” – thanks, by the way – I spent the first segment of my adult life in London trying hard to fit in, or, rather, as though I had always been from there. I wanted to be from there, a cockney from the Avenell Road, because that’s where I believed all the Arsenal supporters lived, for one thing – within walking distance of the ground. Can’t really blame an adolescent for that. Course I was still an adolescent well into my twenties. My first wife would probably go further. You don’t think I plucked my laddish, blinkered, male protagonists out of thin air, do you?
North London, though. I didn’t belong, really. So I made myself belong. And now I’m back. “Back where I belong?” That could be the title of my first solo album. I’d only be the five hundredth person to use it.
There were times, to be honest, when I thought that my attempts at being a writer living in London were just a sham. I had a fantasy of the writerly life and all that it constituted; but, during my innumerable low points I often resigned myself to the strong possibility that it was just that … a fantasy. I’d sit with mates having a fag and a pint and talking about football and where we’d seen The Clash and quite often wishing, pretending that I’d already written the bestselling novel or the pithy literary criticism or the clever radio play without actually having had to sit down and do it.
But that’s the thing. I knew that I could do it. You know, Oscar Wilde or Kingsley Amis in a cheap leather jacket and trainers. By the same token, I seriously feared that I couldn’t. This is the point where millions of people like me, if they’re not vigilant, find themselves having to slug it out with Monsieur Depresser. Or as a highly-respected, former chat show host might say, I was “clinically fed up.” Course I never drove to Dundee in my bare feet.
I tried the obvious remedies: therapy, medication, nutrition, five-a-side, sex. Hm, five-a-side sex -- never thought of that. Blimey, once I even stopped drinking coffee on the advice of some know-it-all. A couple of weeks later, feeling no positive effects from my fast, I was in a coffee bar with a mate and everyone’s having, you know, espresso drinks, high-powered java, caramel latte, café mocha, the usual.
When I told him I’d stopped having caffeine because it counteracted my Prozac, he said, “Why don’t you just top yourself and be done with it?”
Best advice I’ve ever gotten.
I stood up, walked to the bar, and in my best Anglo-Italian accent, said, “Un cafe doppio, per favore.”
Little plastic spoonful of raw sugar, and I’ve been enjoying the modern, cappuccino life ever since. Never felt better.
I’m fine, really. Fifty, but fine. No, fifty’s great. I’d reckon fifty could take thirty in a fight eight times out of ten. Unless thirty does nothing but scrap every Saturday night behind The Jack of Both Sides.
Physically and mentally I feel just as sharp as I did twenty years ago. I still have the energy to do the things I want to do and need to do.
Well, there’s the small talk done.
So, OK, several months back, August of last year it was, I get this phone call from a friend of my wife who asks if I could please ring up a friend of hers immediately about a business matter having to do with ‘me.’ I’m easy going, so I call the number. Rosalie McMahon is the friend of the friend in question, a literary agent who wants to set up a meeting to talk about a book project having to do with a “fascinating” ex-footballer.
She’s laughing, from the word ‘go,’ in this strangely infectious way, like we’ve been mates since childhood and telling me about herself and her children and Île de Ré and her husband the Arsenal supporter and the Clock End and how my name came up last weekend with two other couples at The Havelock Tavern and she thinks we were at Cambridge at the same time or else her sister was there when I was there and Maggy somebody is good friends with Ellen Monroe, who edited “Revolutions Per Minute” with me … and blah-blah.
But she soon gets me to talking without my even realizing it, and suddenly I’m telling her about the breakup of my first marriage and how I was in therapy (She knows my therapist. Great!) and where I met my current wife and which playgrounds we take our children in central London and my favorite place to eat on Brick Lane and why I think ‘Maggie May’ is such a classic song. Then when my head is spinning properly to suit her, she eases back into the “fascinating” mysterious ex-footballer.
At first she won’t tell me who but just goes into this riff about how there’s a buzz out there about this being a potential “Out in the Cold II” sort of blockbuster. The time is ripe for you, she feels, to comment in a big way about where football has come since the early 90s. Legitimate literary fodder, she called it. Who better than you to bring the narrative forward? And she’s got this subject lined up to work with me, if I’m interested, to help “bring it all together.” His story, his personality in the hands of a proven critical and commercial master of the genre (She actually said ‘master of the genre’ like ‘Masters of the Universe’ or ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’) … well, I agreed to meet with her. Her energy was a joy and it caught me up.
I should mention, there’s a word in the industry for what she was doing, of course, in relation to the very act of this conversation. It’s the same word used for criminals who sneak onto South African game reserves and shoot elephants. Still, she sounded genuinely fun. So much of work life isn’t, you know. To be honest, at that time, I feared even picking up the phone when I saw it was my agency calling. Absolute chaos over there, it was; the person who looked after me was right in the middle of it. Very ugly. Whenever the subject crawls into my mind, I’m quite put off by it. Contract renewal time for me was nigh, but that was never going to happen. Frankly, I had come to find this particular firm (recommended to my solicitor and me several years ago by someone at BBC Films) to be something less than the sum of its parts. I’d never felt a real connection with their self-importance and their posing as American ‘players’ and their pseudo-hip air of global-ness. Not that I have a problem with the globe. I just think if you’ve got attitudes and beliefs, then they should be genuine as opposed to being a pretense for the sake of doing business. I’m a writer, not a corporate thing, not an asset.
I would meet Rosalie McMahon, ball of delight, if she would at least reveal the name of the larger-than-life focal point of this potentially earth-shifting page turner. I’m thinking ‘Eric Cantona or maybe Ian Wright. Of course, if she says David Beckham I’m slamming the phone down and getting a different unlisted number.’
“Julius Novak.”
Apparently I just did a fast blink and didn’t speak for several moments because I heard Rosalie’s voice again.
“Hello?”
“Yes, I’m here,” I said. “I’m sorry. You caught me off guard, there. Er … I’ll have to … uh …”
“How does tomorrow work for you?” she asked.
“Tomorrow? I’m sorry. What for?”
“To talk about the Julius Novak project. You said if I told you …”
“Oh, right. Er … yeah. Julius Novak? Are you sure?”
“I’ll explain tomorrow,” Rosalie said. “But if you think about it yourself for a few minutes, then I believe you’ll naturally come to the same conclusion I have. There’s a massive story here, Ben. Almost a morality play.”
She was speaking my language.
I laughed. “Congratulations, Rosalie. I’m officially intrigued. Intrigued enough to have lunch anyway.”
“I’m so pleased.”
“Lemme see. Tomorrow is Wednesday? OK. Where are you then? Oh, yeah. Brook Green. How about this? I have an office near Euston Station. We could meet up there and walk to get a bite.”
“Fabulous, Ben. I could fall in love with you, you know. This is going to be so amazing. You won’t be sorry. Oh, wait a minute. I’m afraid I’d need my husband to help me get to Euston Station. I’m quite hopeless alone on the trains. I only know going straight to Russell Square and walking to Coram Street. How far are you from there?”
“Walking? I don’t know. Ten minutes? Do you know the Euston Road underpass?” I asked. “That makes it easier. If you just … ”
“Darling, do I sound like someone who does underpasses?” She bit her lower lip.
“Right,” I said. “I suppose I can get on the District Line at Ealing Broadway and just come straight round to Hammersmith. Not a problem from Slough. How’s that?”
“Much better, thank you, Ben,” she sounded relieved. “You are so sweet. Besides, endless lunch possibilities in my leafy little triangle.”
I’ve worn myself out replaying that first conversation. Rosalie took some getting used to. But as my wife points out, I must have been poised for something like Rosalie McMahon in my life because I was immediately attracted to the idea of working with her and becoming her friend and she mine.
So I’ll tell you about Novak. But I can’t tell you about Novak without telling you about Marianne as well. The Novak story quickly became more for me than just a book about football culture. I know; believe me, I know that I signed on to write a Hampton-esque football biography – a ‘can’t miss’ proposition according to those who purport to know about such things. Interestingly, word has leaked out about what I’m supposed to be up to. I attended a book event in Düsseldorf a couple of weeks ago, and as I was giving an interview to a woman for German TV, I could have sworn I heard some people across the room utter the words, “Oudt in ze Koldt 2.” They were looking at me.
I’ve even received phone calls that have caused me to be somewhat suspicious about the secure nature of my professional doings.
A booker for Jonathan Ross (how did she get my number?) called and said, “We understand you’re writing a book about Julius Novak, the ex-Arsenal player and tying it into where you feel football culture has come since the mid-90s in kind of an ‘Out in the Cold II’ sort of thing. Any interest in promoting it any time soon … say, Friday?”
It’s enough to make one move to the Faeroes and open a Puffin-egg omelette hut. Excuse me while I pop into the kitchen for a jolt with my rather high-end espresso machine. I have one. Yes, lots of people have a kitchen. I meant the cappuccino maker. Honestly, I’m not joking, I don’t believe I really lived until the moment I made my own froth. It was a Sunday morning – a birthday brunch. I lined up several steaming cappuccinos for my nieces and nephews to show off my new gift. I was old enough to know that nothing tastes right if you prepare it whilst familiarizing yourself with the instruction leaflet.
Still everyone was like, you know, “Make a cappuccino, Uncle Ben.”
Tasted just like you’d imagine an ashtray in a work and pensions center. Nearly got me smoking again.
So I’ve gotten to know this couple quite well in the last few months. Interesting wouldn’t begin to cover it. It’s best, when one is a writer, if one’s subjects have a certain captivating energy or allure. Well, suffice to say, I’ve been rendered captive. Marianne, I should tell you, is quite well regarded in her own right as a sculptor. I’m not an aficionado, still I’m blown away by her work, which, at some point for those of you who are unfamiliar with the art of Marianne Papineau, I’ll attempt to describe. Philistines.
Looking at a picture of a sculpture, however, or any work of art really, and actually being physically next to it, are two different experiences entirely. Try standing in the Botticelli room in the Uffizi in Florence and not be transported back to the Renaissance. Or any of the chapels or government buildings or guildhalls or private residences containing frescoes or portraits or statues. I once stood – and sat – for two hours going back and forth between the Venus and the Primavera. Utterly transfixed. I’m aware that presuming to comment on two of the most popular and widely-viewed paintings in the world does not make me a connoisseur. I’m just saying you can’t appreciate Marianne’s sculpture by looking at a snap on the Internet.
Can I mention that, on a different trip to the city of Michaelangelo (September 1999, Champions League first group match v. Fiorentina, 0-0), in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine, I actually got a stiff neck from craning up at the Masaccio frescoes for who knows how long.
My mates were like, “Ben, will you come on?” Luckily, we found a pub round the corner and everything was soon fine again with my neck.
Most of the supporting characters in the paintings, the faces comprising the crowds in the background, are actual people from the artists’ time – fellow Italians known to the artist. They come alive for us again anytime we want to pop in for a viewing. But you already know this. Now I’m Sister Wendy all of a sudden.
Anyway. Marianne. Not as well known as Novak in some circles, it must be said. Then again, he’s most likely, largely, if not completely, unknown in her circles – or should I say her curve of the earth. I think I’ll keep that.
I’ve only just met her for the first time. I was fortunate enough to be invited to her parents’ place in the Vermont hills just after the holidays. They call them mountains there, but they’re not terribly high up. Yes, I know I live in the Thames Valley; what do I know? But I’ve seen the Alps and I’ve been to Park City, Utah. High enough to ski though and very beautiful, the Green Mountains. Understated, maybe. Pastoral, you know, Robert Frost.
That visit was one of the more serene yet fecund (as Henry Miller would say) experiences of my life. I was able to schedule it in the midst of a book tour for my last work – the novel for young readers, “Fit But You Know It.”
So far I’ve answered the question, “This is a real departure for you, isn’t it?” about, oh, two hundred times.
Overall, though, the reception has been positive, and I’m glad about the book and proud and sick of talking about it. Next time to New England definitely I’m bringing my family. It was great. Sleigh rides. Star gazing. Fresh milk and eggs. Maple syrup. Roaring fires. Frosty night air. Tacky sweaters.
I need to say a couple of things straightaway. First, that Julius and Marianne are – and I’ve given this a fair amount of thought – my all-time favorite couple that I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. Sheer delight. Great people. Fun. Funny. Smart. Genuine. Sensitive but with irony. Accomplished. Comfortable with themselves and one another.
The other small matter is that they broke up for good in 1988.
Yeah, just say it. Not much of a couple really. No sex for almost twenty years for one thing. I asked. Well, if you could see them together, you know, I thought maybe once or twice, right, a couple of margaritas, Christmas Eve, a little Billie Holiday in the background. A light snow outside. Their little girl put to bed. I don’t know. What would it hurt -- a shag? Or, maybe, when someone close to one of them has died, like a mum or someone. There’s the comforting; one thing leads to another; and Bob’s yer uncle. It happens.
The daughter. Yes, their love created a baby, as it will. She’s nineteen now actually. Sparkling young woman. Very sharp. Brought up in Paris. Off to university in New England. A famous women’s college. The world at her feet, I’d reckon. They seem to have managed, all of them. She looks as though she loves them both dearly. I suppose there’s been some sadness that the three of them have never lived all together in the same place as a family – for more than a few weeks at a time anyway. You know, special occasions, holidays and that. Surely there must be. But you’d scarcely detect any ill effects of the separation on Isabel.
In some ways, it’s not all that different from a family in which the dad’s career dictates that he’s away from home far more than he’s at home. A mum would never do that. Even if she were Secretary-General of the United Nations or something. She would be with the children a good three quarters of the time. Most mums. I’m sure there are a couple of shits out there somewhere in their power suits or on movie sets or saving the planet snubbing their tots. Generally, I have a high opinion of mothers. Mine’s a peach.
I still think it’s sad; because as I’ve watched them, I can’t help imagining all the missed moments they’ve … missed. They’ll tell you they’ve compensated along the way, and that they had the money and the lifestyle to be able to patch over the cracks. Granted.
I won’t bore you with my own story, but I can relate to the despair of a divorce involving a child. And as you know me to be a sensitive, levelheaded bloke, you can only wonder at the intensity of my broken heart over the whole demise of my first marriage. Shattering. We both moved on after a bit, but it’s still there – the pain mixed with the joy (and different pain) that came before. Nothing intrinsically wrong with pain though.
I’m not a psychologist, but, for example, Novak. In conversation, when he gets round to Marianne and Isabel, his eyes begin to change. Maybe I’m projecting my own feelings or imagining because I know where the story comes to at present. Perhaps the novelist in me desires a plot where there is none. But I don’t think so. I’m not blind, and in my opinion you’d have to be not to see it.
In his eyes, there is that flicker of acknowledgement or resignation that he has missed out on his raison d’etre -- the crucial bits of a relationship and of family, the zig-zaggy bits that round off the linear bits. That is, to say, all the shit. All the heartsickness and the actual sickness with vomiting and rubbing foul-smelling creams all over one another and emergency rooms at three a.m., both false alarms and the real thing. Your wife’s slacker nephew living with you for a month and drinking all your Worthington White Shield (even dousing a barbeque fire with it) and then you don’t talk to the brother and sister-in-law anymore and there’s a big row or a chilly silence or what did your mum mean when she said that snippy thing about how your wife lets your daughter question the Virgin Birth or any number of ordinary tragedies that end up making the lovely moments that much more joyous and extraordinary.
All the bloodlettings and all the things you said that were merely the worst things you could think of at the time when nothing less will quite do. Throwing her expensive linens in a tree or, God forbid, a love affair. Cancer’s bad. Not to mention petty jealousies, childishness, midlife crises, menopause, and the genuine emotional or utilitarian transformation of one to the detriment or abhorrence of the other. She changes. You hate it. You won’t change. She’d like to kill you.
Yep. Julius Novak missed it.
Tongue in cheek there. No, the crises and tears and stomach upset are among the many threads of fabric that knit us couples together. Not every strand is pretty and perfect. But the ugly patches help make the glittery strips more sublime. The great stuff really pops when you hold them up next to some horrendous low point. And there are countless of those simply because you spend so much time together. Marriage can be an excruciating terror ride and quite uncomfortable.
Without having had a pewter candlestick hurled at your head, though, you might not remember the weekday evening, just at the cusp of a long-awaited springtime when the three of you sat in the backyard after dinner on the edge of the sandbox you just had your handyman put in. The four-year-old playing in the sand, the dogs sitting next to you to be stroked, the light from the sky fading away, the scent of new flowers wafting along. It’s your first house, small but precious and sweet. A tiny garden. Your wife’s bare feet. The dishes still to be put away. Not much privacy; you can hear the neighbors on both sides. You’re still in your office clothes, but you’ve taken your tie off. Everyone is digging with fingers in the sand because the cat’s not shit in it yet. You talk about other improvements you’d like to make out here in the yard. Something in that shady corner where the grass won’t grow. A tree house; a swing. Some lavender. That’s her, not you.
Your life together is under way, and so much is before you. So you’ve taken these moments, maybe fifteen minutes, to stop and talk and think and gaze at one another and your baby and allow your mind to enjoy what you’ve both accomplished to get to this humble but quietly satisfying point. The moment may not be much, but it’s yours. It belongs to your young family and to no one else. No one took a photograph, so you return to it every so often to keep the memory treading water.
Over the years, these treasures of the heart multiply, and what you’re left with is a profound and consequential love. Or just … love. What else can you call it? You don’t say “perfect square.” It either is one, or it isn’t.
Looking at Julius Novak and Marianne Papineau up close, I sense a shape with missing segments – not even half perfect. I’ll spare you further top-shelf metaphors if any occur to me. I do keep things to myself on occasion. Meeting them, though, allowing the experience of them to seep into my consciousness, has got me thinking, I have to say. Don’t know about what exactly.
Well, I don’t and I do. But is this really what I want to be playing at? Thinking about the deeper, more relevant aspects of love and trying to pull it all into some kind of shape and making it sound interesting enough for … you know, Rosalie McMahon and the publisher Jonathan James.
They did say to ‘go where the story takes you.’ Of course in the same breath, they allude longingly to “Out in the Cold.”
But what am I doing? I feel like Novak at the Parc des Princes in ’95. I’ve dozens of safer, more satisfying lanes to travel. Low-hanging fruit, if you will. Lots of writing projects now, much of which I could do with my eyes closed. It’s mad. No one, including myself, who knew me twenty years ago, can believe it at all. My professional life is everything I’d dreamed and more, obviously. In the last ten years I’ve been fortunate to be able to branch off in whatever direction I fancy -- plays, film, reviews, contribution, editing, songwriting, young adult, more novels. And I figure I’ve got a few good years left, eh?
I do have my ear to the ground, you might say. Journalists, colleagues, other people in the book business, friends and family ask me. Le monde stop me on the street. That’s right, the street -- the constantly upgraded sidewalks of Berkshire.
“When you gonna do another football book, they say. Sure loved “Out in the Cold,” mate. Lots of football books out there, for sure, but if you did one …Look how great ‘Out in the Cold’ was, and you weren’t even a real writer yet, eh? Here we are, fifteen years on; you’ve got, what, a sackful of novels and all this other stuff. Write about Arsenal now, mate. Write a book about football. You’ll sell a billion of ‘em. Or what about Maidenhead United? There’s a book. We’ve just got that bloke who scored for Havant and Waterlooville in the FA Cup at Anfield. Go on, Ben.”
I’ve resisted. Wouldn’t it be somewhat trite, I asked of Rosalie? I never ask such a thing of le monde. I would not use a word like “trite” when speaking to le monde. Cliché. There’s a word I could use with le monde. Wouldn’t it be all cliché for me to do a whole book about our national game? I mean, an article is one thing or a Web posting or a clever aside on a chat show. A column in The Guardian or some other daily only takes a person five minutes to read. But can I truly, with my dignity intact, ask a total stranger to pay and then spend a further week or more – depending on one’s reading speed – sloughing through yet another in an endless lava flow of books about fucking football (the game I love)?
Aren’t we sick of football yet? Or at least aren’t we sick of twats getting rich off of our game by our having paid a king’s ransom to watch it?
Ben Hampton has written an enthralling book about football and his feelings for same. Please make your check out for £10 please to Ben Hampton for a revealing book about … football. It’s not a cheap holiday rip-off. Honestly, we think you’ll enjoy it.
Could I live with myself? My bestselling-novel, yet humble and down to earth self? My award-winning, taken-seriously, middlebrow, mid-list author, groundbreaking screenplay-writing self? Well, I could rather; if the subject of the football book were about something novel. You know, novel?

Chapter Two of Hampton from the Halfway Line

I know; Foyles is not in Hammersmith. But later in the chapter, Rosalie finds herself in the Charing Cross Road looking in Foyles' window.

2

Hammersmith, London


Two parties on Rosalie McMahon’s cell phone held as she negotiated with the student financial services office of her son’s college, while adjusting her vision to a new pair of prescription sunglasses only just picked up at Specsavers in the King’s Mall. Rosalie McMahon could routinely juggle five or six, sometimes seven critical balls at a time. She spoke as she flowed among the late-morning pedestrians and unwrapped a small corner of her warm, avocado and bacon sarnie from Doorsteps, as she prepared to cross Beadon Road on her way to the Hammersmith tube. Rosalie’s destination was the office, the ground floor of a Coram Street flat. Or she may take a cab to Westbourne Grove for some shopping, depending on the outcome of the other phone calls. Perhaps one of those adorable, cotton Canali shirts with buttons of horn for her husband, Peter. Or pop round to peek at that giant, amethyst, lambskin Balenciaga city bag at Matches.

Rosalie didn’t really need to go the office, the tiny, ridiculously expensive and utterly superfluous space she shared with two other independent book people near Russell Square. In truth, she didn’t need to waste time in clothes shops because she bought much of her business and leisure apparel online from her two very favorite women’s wear outfitters. She discovered Eileen Fisher via the Sahara shop on the King’s Road in Chelsea. The whole, clothes for the oft-neglected real woman, sort of thing. Plus, the ethically responsible fair trade stuff. Rosalie liked that. Along arrived some junk mail from Eleganza Clothing. The UK distributor carried Sahara, as well as Eileen Fisher, in their online boutique. Since visiting the American designer’s location in New York’s Soho, she has begged them to open a London store. Somewhere around Notting Hill or Kensington would suit her. On one of those mad adventures, walking with Peter down West Broadway, Eileen Fisher bags in tow, and hanging a left on Grand, she ran smack into heaven-on-earth number two, CP Shades. Oh, the California look for those who happen not to be runway models.

Once, at an obligatory dinner party with Peter McMahon’s City partners and their spouses, the women in attendance were discussing the details of their various workout regimes. Rosalie, who could never be mistaken for a Rockette or those well-oiled actors who claim to be part of the Bowflex revolution, was uncharacteristically silent. When one of the slender, Butterfield Bank executive wives sought Rosalie’s opinion on exercise, the self-assured spouse and mother of three, after a glass of wine too far, responded, “Well, I’d have to say it’s a toss-up between shopping and rolling around with Peter.” She and her husband had discovered lovemaking to be outrageously satisfying in middle age.

Whenever she could steal away to New York for business, shopping and dining, Rosalie would spend an entire morning downtown literally floating amid the stores’ generous racks and dressing rooms with deliciously-slimming mirrors. The palette of these perfectly sophisticated boutiques, reflective of nature itself, lay somewhere between crunchy granola and cutting edge. The smells and the feel of the natural fibers and the bearing of the other casually chic browsers were beyond pleasure.

Rosalie chose simplicity and comfort over style or anything else. Once she found the right designers that provided a reliable fit, when she began concentrating on making money in an industry she loved, London’s cagier of middling literary agents mixed and matched billowy linens and layered in strangely seductive ways suitable to her sensual feminine whimsy. Camis, scarves, wraps, skirts, tanks, tunics and jackets. Breezy she was, a woman for every season – except winter. Then she would deign to add a dark leotard and a Rannoch wool cape.

She didn’t love the tube, but she conceded its efficacy in time and cost. Fortunately, given her near-complete lack of spatial intelligence, the Piccadilly Line took her straight through to her Russell Square stop in the heart of bookish Bloomsbury. She recoiled at being so far underground, and she was made particularly uneasy whenever rough sleepers would scream at the top of their lungs for people to give them money.

Her husband had helped her become acclimated. Coram Street sat about two-thirds of the way, on the same line, to Highbury. When she first rented the flat, she rode with her husband on Arsenal match day Saturdays. He would get off with her at Russell Square, walk her round the corner to the flat, get her all settled, then continue his journey to the stadium with the other middle-class Gooners from his part of London and points west. Rosalie would spend the afternoon getting comfortable in the office and around the neighborhood. After the match, Peter, usually jubilant (these were heady days for his team), would arrive back at Coram Street, and they would return home together. On certain days, Peter would comment disparagingly on the Chelsea supporters disembarking pre-match and embarking post-match at Earl’s Court.

“Look at those self-satisfied, bandwagon-hopping lemmings. Did they even know football existed five years ago?”

Between two incomes, the couple and their three children were able to live in relative, if frantic comfort. Rosalie would periodically sell a book to a publisher in whose hands it might perform half-decently. With her contacts and friendships in the retail bookstore and wholesale sectors, she could often give her books that necessary, extra leg up. Like any industry, there are tricks to getting product into the hands of consumers. On the days she worked, Rosalie likened her particular style of operation to the slapdash stacking of a house of cards.

The two parties holding on her phone represented a three-storied Georgian flat and a twelve-flight apartment building, respectively.

Her last book sold was to the UK’s second-largest publisher of sport-related books – not her milieu, but it doesn’t matter. A sale is a sale. Peter’s boss had completed a marathon after having been nearly killed at Edgware Road in the 7/7 tube bombings. He ramped up his running as emotional therapy and wrote a book about competing in the London Marathon and his recovery from the tragedy. Rosalie was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the writing, over the moon to make the sale and completely floored when the book sold 250,000 copies.

Cause for celebration in June of 2007; but that was two months ago, she’s sold nothing at all since and for the past little while naturally has been feeling some professional chagrin. Rosalie McMahon, however, is no quitter. She is forever blowing on cinders, cajoling would-be writers, searching for leads, straining for possibilities – no matter how farfetched. She starts with a few cards and, with a steady hand, tries to urge them into standing on their own in the shape of a four-sided structure.

Peter always reminds her, “Foundation first, dear; mullioned windows later.”

At the break of day on this Tuesday morning in late August, strongly considering spending the day in her silky cotton, pale peach jammies, Rosalie came across a human interest feature in the Life & Style section of The Independent about a couple of men in the Cotswolds who have been operating a non-profit masonry business specializing in traditional, dry stone walls and mortared walls. The goal of the organization, in addition to extending the beauty of the rural Gloucestershire landscape, is to provide practical work experience in a coveted service for young men and women from the local towns and villages. One of the comments often made about the Cotswolds, she read as she sipped her coffee, is that it seems as though mostly pensioners live there – hardly any young people. In fact, thirty percent of Cotswolds residents are over the age of sixty-five, compared to about twelve percent in London and about nineteen percent in the rest of the country. Just as alarming to know, the percentage of residents between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five is one of the lowest in Britain.

So these men employ young locals with little or no experience, train them to be licensed, professional stonemasons and see that they are taught the ins and outs of running a small business. The hope is that more young people will stay on to earn a good living and raise families in the area instead of leaving for Birmingham, Swindon, Bristol, London or elsewhere. What they do for legal entertainment is for others to ponder.

Rosalie reads on to the end because she loves the Cotswolds. She and Peter have been frequent renters of a cottage in Brockhampton over the years. She also adores those sturdy and rambling, yellow limestone walls, suggestive of the English countryside as hedgerows. Who doesn’t?

In the article’s final paragraph, the writer mentions that one of the men who co-founded the altruistic company is Julius Novak, a former professional footballer now living outside of Chipping Campden. Oddly inspired, she decided to get dressed and pull herself together.

As she stood in the queue a few minutes earlier in the takeaway on Hammersmith Grove, Rosalie noticed just behind her an Englishman of about her age, as sturdy as those country walls, wearing a spiffy Arsenal training top.

“Pardon me,” she said. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but I was wondering – I notice you fancy football, there – have you, by any chance, ever heard of Julius Novak?”

“Julius Novak?” he answered politely and eagerly. “I do, yes, he … uh … played for the Arsenal there for a bit, as a matter of fact. Mostly in the George Graham years, I think.”

“Oh,” Rosalie was surprised. “My husband supports Arsenal. Wonder why I don’t recall the name?”

“Wasn’t a bad player, I suppose,” the man said, running his tongue along the inside of his lower teeth as he pondered the legion of Gunners come and gone. “Not exactly popular. Real tryer, though. Yank, originally.”

“Oh, really. Well, he was in the paper this morning. That’s why I ask. It seems he’s started a quite helpful business in the countryside. Well, thanks very much.”

“My pleasure,” he said with a smile. “Cheers.”

When Rosalie arrived at her office, she immediately pulled her laptop out of her briefcase and did a Google search of “Julius Novak.” She was astonished by what she found: Age forty-four. Born in the USA indeed. There it is. Member of Arsenal Football Club 1990-1995. League champion, 1991 ...

‘I thought it was 1989,’ she thought. ‘Was there another one?’

… F.A. Cup; League Cup; blah-blah-blah, etc. Position: Midfield. Currently teaches courses with the Europaeum? at Oxford?? Taught Modern European Languages? at Cambridge?? Writes books, including novels (that no one seems to purchase or read). Played in a World Cup. German Bundesliga Wüppertal, 1983-1990; League champion, 1989; UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup champion, 1988 (Wüppertal), 1994 (Arsenal); UEFA Cup runners-up, 1989 (Wüppertal); UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup runners-up, 1987 (Wüppertal) and 1995 (Arsenal); and UEFA Champions League winner, 1996 (Valencia). BSC Bardejov, Slovakia Division 2, 1996-1997. Non-league Stevenage Borough 1997-98. Fluent in several languages. Once dated Emma Thompson?? And would appear to be quite stunningly handsome.

“Bloody hell,” she muttered.

Why has she never heard of this man? How could a footballer, not to mention an Arsenal one, be an Oxbridge don as well? The Europaeum? Is this one of those Wikipedia hoaxes?

Then, ever thinking of advancing the cause of literacy and the likelihood of a second home on the Île de Ré, ‘Could this be a book? This could be a book. Perhaps it’s already been a book, and I’m the one person in British publishing who doesn’t know. Damn those two years in a row when I couldn’t afford to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair but had to pretend I went.’ She phoned Peter.

“Tell me dear. Julius Novak. What do you know about him?”

“Wanker,” Peter said, with distracted venom.

“How could you possibly think that?” Rosalie said. “Emma Thompson? Do you know the first thing about him?”

“We are talking about the footballer, right?”

“Yes, we are.”

“I know George Graham was committed to him for some reason. I always figured Novak had something on the boss like an old bung deal that brought him here.”

“He had secret financial information that could blackmail the manager,” Rosalie clucked, incredulously. “You are a very sad man, Peter.”

“Well, maybe,” Peter conceded with a chuckle. “Novak, though, he strutted in with this outsized reputation, I recall, and he was absolute bollocks. I know some at the club were very protective of him, and they let him run off teaching school instead of training properly and doing the things professionals should do, in my opinion. Tried to come off working class hero when he was just a posh git. Never spoke to the press. Special treatment, it seemed to the punters. And, not to mention that League Cup-tie away to …”

“Alright, calm down sweetheart.” She had stopped listening at ‘bollocks,’ Peter’s description of the great majority of Arsenal players for most of the years they’d been together.

“Why are you asking about football?”

“It’s probably nothing, darling. Talk to you later.”

Rosalie spent the next two hours pitching a Julius Novak book idea to several of her contacts in publishing -- friends and otherwise. As usual, she put no pre-thought or planning into her sales pitch. She made it up as she went along, and with each successive phone call the story angle took shape. In her mind, if not in the eyes of the editors with whom she spoke, the narrative possibilities began to seem more obvious with each new rendition. She would have to give it a bigger think, however, because she was flatly striking out. No interest.

As the afternoon waned Rosalie stepped out for a tea, brought along her cell phone and continued to speed dial publishers as she rambled through Russell Square, past the British Museum, and finally tucking into a touristy-looking pub. After her tea, she stayed on and had a few sips of a half pint of strong ale in frustration at her inability to wheedle anyone who mattered into sharing her newfound passion for Julius Novak: Sportsman. Intellectual.

She stepped outside, asked a man to point her toward Oxford Street and continued her walk, still talking on her mobile.

As she turned, absentmindedly, onto Charing Cross Road (did she plan on hoofing it all the way back to Brook Green?), finally, a bite. Jonathan James of JJI Sports Reform Press, asked several inviting questions before pushing back.

“Now, in the hands of a really talented writer, Rosalie, maybe a big name, we might have something to work with. Do you have someone in mind?”

Rosalie stopped walking and stood, the energetic sounds of central London pealing around her, pedestrians avoiding her still presence from both directions. She was standing directly in front of Foyles, only London’s most venerable bookshop and recently modernized for the first time since the Edwardian era. There, displayed in the window, was a large photo of Ben Hampton, British literary treasure and standard-bearer of the modern pop novel.

It’s here! Ben Hampton’s New Novel for Young Readers, “Fit But You Know It.”

His latest work, about a suburban hip-hop teen performer who idolizes Dizzee Rascal, was a departure in some ways from Hampton’s million-selling adult fiction titles, most of which had been made into films, West End musicals, and stage or radio productions. Alongside “Fit” were displays of his other books, household names all, in their most recent editions. Even the shock tour de force that first made his name – “Out in the Cold,” a vastly entertaining and groundbreaking narrative of his life as an Arsenal fan. The media phenomenon that single-handedly legitimized the sport of football for the educated and literary classes, spoke to and for a generation of post-Thatcher British and heralded the arrival of football as an unstoppable money-spinning and fashionable cultural entity – nevermore a slum sport for slum people.

In the sexy world of books, Ben Hampton equals ‘commercial dynamite.’ Ben Hampton’s name on a book cover translates into big business for the lucky publisher, practically all retail bookstores in the world and every subsidiary market connected with bookselling. Ben Hampton, a small-scale version of the Olympian, Harry Potter creator, J.K. Rowling, is simply golden for the world economy. He’s self-effacing. He’s a regular bloke. In short, there is virtually nothing bad and everything good about Ben Hampton.

“Ben Hampton … actually, Jonathan,” Rosalie answered, stunned motionless at the baldness of her own cheek, eyes transfixed on the Foyles window display.

“Excuse me?” James said. Could he have possibly heard right?

“I’ve been working with Ben on this one. We … we were at Cambridge together and … my sister and his brother are very close … and uh … he’s very excited about doing a football book just now. He’s actually been looking into a possible Julius Novak project for some time, but, you know, he’s so busy and so in demand and, well … I’ll tell you what. You think about it, and …”

“No, no, no,” James cleared his throat and pounced. “I’m excited. God. Well. Rosalie. Let me put you through to my assistant, and we’ll set up a lunch meeting for this week. Let’s do this, Rosalie. Let’s make a book. This is … very exciting.”

“Fantastic,” she said. “All right. I’m excited too. I’ll be seeing you then. Goodbye.”

After working out the meeting details for Friday lunch, Rosalie popped her cell phone into her purse and stared at Ben Hampton’s eminently-likeable, grinning face in the famous Foyles window. She stood up straight and held her right hand out for a firm handshake and smiled back.

“Hello, Ben. I’m Rosalie McMahon.”

Chapter One of Hampton from the Halfway Line

Do you get the tone here? Sure, Paris. But the Eiffel Tower, arguably the city's symbol, nearly inconsequential in the background. And right beneath us, dominating our vision -- a football ground, looking as incongruous as anything imaginable.

1

Paris

“Financially, yes, it makes sense to rent out the Bloomsbury flat while I’m living abroad,” Novak thought to himself. Ten minutes left in the championship match and he's thinking about his budget? A couple of tackles, maybe a hard fall to the ground and a short pass or two away from the end of his football career, and he’s imagining a phone call to his movers or to his real estate agent?

“But that’s where most of my bulky items are. Shall I stuff everything into the Thaxted cottage? Wouldn’t it please Ginevra to live there while I’m away? Terribly convenient for her. But how would that look? And would she then not take it all the wrong way? And what would Marianne say? Isabel tells me you’ve got that hot little grad assistant of yours moved into your flat. Seriously, you need help.”

Not deviant thoughts, as you see, just that certain notions, impertinent to what he was supposed to be doing, would stir and distract him. But after a certain point, he lacked his customary, decent grip on what exactly that was – the doing. In Britain, we call that ‘losing the plot.’ He struggled, not for the first time, with the vexing question, “What exactly is expected of me?”

Why? Did he not believe he’d conducted himself properly? By any sane measure, he had pushed his abilities and his questionable talent past what was thought conceivable.

Novak thought about his daughter, little Isabel who was six at the time, and how she would jump into his arms, talking a mile a minute, as he entered her grandparents’ apartment on Square Delambre within a stone’s throw of the Montparnasse Cemetery. He imagined how, by the next day, they would be splitting a steaming plate of paella de marisco on a sunny veranda on the Costa Azahar, debating the identity of the colorful seafood. Squid? Langoustine? They would enjoy dance shows on the beach, street theatre in the squares. They would dive into the surf, race to the garden of floating orange trees and try to guess where the sea ends and the sky begins.

He thought again about Ginnie Carlisle and where that was going. For some unknown reason, he thought of an oil painting Marianne’s mother had done up for him featuring Scottish Highlander cows in her Vermont field. He thought about the kit man and how he’d never see him again.

As a gibbous moon shone faintly through a haze of clouds creeping over the 16^th arrondissement, the opposing goalkeeper gathered the ball and unhurriedly lofted it toward Novak’s half of the pitch. Novak watched resignedly the flight of the ball as it dropped, beyond his position, from the sky. A clash of heads helped it forward. One of his teammates, a defender, steeled his jaw and put his noggin to it, clearing the ball half-heartedly, screwing it toward the touchline near the team benches. From the corner of his eye Novak saw a player, wearing the shirt of the other team, running onto it.

I should tell you, there will be no peaceful doves and pure white lilies in this story. Every character will be avant-garde … except me. Disturbingly, I’ve opted to exploit the tragic farce that was Paris, to have it act as a malleable linchpin for my main character or maybe a sort of hinge. I don’t know; I’m not mechanical. My dad didn’t have a workshop; he took me to football. What’s the correct word for novelists to use? Not that this is going to be another novel. It’s just, you know, Paris as literary device. We’ll always have Paris – in this case, grotesquely. I’m obviously mad.

Many of you already will have realized, by the nauseating advance publicity and perhaps by that first bit, that I have succumbed to a vast array of irritating pressures and accepted the task of writing a sport biography. Once immersed, I’m afraid I’ve rendered the whole exercise rather more barbed than a work of fiction. The reality of my situation is in its dawn; that is, either I get this right, or the mild celebrity I’ve created of my life will become nothing more than pantomime. But now that I’ve put myself in it up to my replica Liam Brady, I can either allow the “hero” and his story to swallow me; or I can grab onto a corner flag, lay it flat and try to balance myself while regulating my breathing until I can sort of shimmy over to the grassy bank and safety. I saw that maneuver illustrated in a general survival guide for getting out of quicksand.

Mind you, I didn’t read the whole book. I was in a Waterstone’s checkout line, browsing the table of contents and saw “How to Escape Quicksand.” Even though I’ve lived in or around London my entire life, I’ve always been terrified of stepping onto quicksand and slowly suffocating in what looks to be room-temperature oatmeal with weeds and bugs. I blame Hollywood: The Hound of the Baskervilles; Lawrence of Arabia; Tarzan; Flash Gordon.

So, the City of Lights. My use of Paris here, I suppose, is rather as abstraction, where the artist renders the familiar in an unfamiliar way. For, as the final curtain fell, my subject had become one of them, one of the bumbling, distrait eleven. Novak blended into the scenery like Parisians in a café or laborers on the docks. Neither he nor I could tell you the exact moment it happened, probably a slow, five-year drip. Novak had always fancied himself a person of great fortitude -- or something quite like it. You know, guts without the blood. The mettle, at least, that puts bread on the table and petrol in the Senator. But he’d thrust himself into a rather unnatural sort of world, a celestial firestorm of light, movement and sound, a location on the map of life where the man of action is unmasked and undone. Always before, huffing and puffing had been enough. Well, of course, there had been a soupçon of thought put into it as well, sort of like these days with his dry stonewalls or his students at Wolfson, the little buggers. It looks much easier now, without his having to endure the absurd bits of life – getting kicked and that.

Why did he carry on doing it, he wondered as he strained through the marsh of his chosen profession? Why didn’t he pack it in? What was it for? Admittedly, not the sort of thoughts that should course through one’s mind in the last minute of extra time in a cup final in front of 50,000 spectators, particularly if one is among the twenty-two direct participants. By that point in the terrible evening, a horror show that only could only be compared to some sort of natural disaster or, more aptly, to the mania of a shopping mall on Christmas Eve, Novak only mildly cared if his side won or lost. Though he was actually looking forward to ramming home a penalty, if only to release a large dose of pent-up frustration and anger. When called upon, he never missed. He was one of those types who considered that singular skill to be compulsory, elementary, like conjugating a verb in any number of languages. Besides, he’d been shown how to do it in West Germany.

If he were completely honest, which I have to doubt he’s capable of being, I would wager that he indeed wanted to win. But his motivation, as far as that goes, was impure. I suspect he only wanted to win because so many people wanted his club, my club, to lose. Sort of the contrarian in him. This team was used to being the people’s second choice out of two. They, like their supporters, had developed a rather requisite scar tissue. Even tonight, a microcosm of this dreadful season, Novak played as if he felt a real, existing persona that had to be lived up to. But it was waning, the mask slipping.

More than anything, he was angry. Angry at the majority of his teammates for their increasingly uninspired play. Angry at the manager for having gotten the sack. Angry at himself for not retiring years ago and quite a long list of other personal flaws detrimental to those close to him. Rather than being merely an important cog in a mighty machine, which he had at first been, he now found himself one of only a small handful of professionals in the squad who actually gave two shits about preparing properly and giving ninety-plus minutes of maximum effort every time. Where was the pride? The club was in tatters, and its performance on this night exemplified the chaos. It was a sad state of affairs, infuriating for their paying supporters. Yet here we were, cup holders -- in with a shout of keeping it. In the previous season’s competition, we were somewhat the upstarts. Tonight, at the opening whistle anyway, we were shaky favorites.

So, we were mere moments from penalties, a crapshoot made slightly more comfortable by the fact that we had England’s “Number One” minding the net. A second unlikely championship on one of the continent’s grand stages meant that my mates and I could once again mischievously shove it up the bum of our many detractors.

As I watched the match with friends at my flat, never suspecting I would now be writing about it a dozen years later, Novak was running around the pitch in both physical and existential distress. I, on the other hand, had just completed my first novel and was feeling understandably celebratory as the publication date drew near. We weren’t to know the red and white number fourteen was immersed in a private drama. On the outside, dressed up in the suit of our heroes, he was covering his usual twenty-plus kilometers, masterfully disturbing the opponent’s attack and attempting (in vain) to gee up his teammates. On the inside, he was badgering himself. The nail-biting faithful could only have been horrified to know that Novak, when he should have been otherwise engaged, was preoccupied with Virgilian supplications to Jupiter to restore him his bygone years.

Well, wasn’t it a bit late for that now? Not to mention ghastly and inappropriate? Extra time? Cup final? Turns out he and others had been so beseeching the gods for years – the whole time in West Germany and now the whole time in England. For a football supporter, it is hard to grasp just how someone could perceive extra time in a cup final, especially one who is in it, as having a suffocating banality. But we’re all different.

Tonight at the Parc des Princes, all of Novak’s doubts, all of his turmoil had, with the ingredient spices of the gathered soup of Europeans, Africans and Middle Easterners, cooked into a psychic dish of profound angst. If this match were a painting, from Novak’s perspective it would be a Jacek Malczewski – a joyous nightmare of Slavic melancholy.

Up until recently, and particularly during these last five seasons, cruelly would Novak blame himself every time the opponent scored. He always believed he could have done just that little bit more, at some point leading up to the goal, to have prevented it. Yes, when a goal is scored it is scored against all eleven men – not just the keeper, not just the last defender. That’s the crap your youth coach tells you. And it’s true up to a point. Perhaps he could have nipped in or something, earlier in the match, to obstruct the opponent’s temperamental, but fabulously in-form striker from wheeling round and leaving the keeper for dead from outside the penalty arc. He might have gotten a boot in as he’d done so many thousands of times before.

The value he added on a regular basis went for the most part unnoticed. Not the sort of thing the TV cameras picked up back then. The manager knew. His teammates knew. A few savvy supporters. Did it matter to him? On the contrary, he appeared to thrive on the relative anonymity and to feed on the clear respect felt by opponents.

Recurring, nagging pain flared in his ankles and knees while the spectators sang, swore and groaned in cacophonous preparation for the delicious agony of penalty kicks. Novak had initially strained a few rather vital joints and ligaments in 1986 when his previous club, Wüppertal had brought in new players from around the Bundesliga to keep its squad of pretenders in the first division and to advance on various European fronts. The uncertain young midfielder had felt compelled to redouble his efforts then to keep his place in the team.

All the stimuli he had come to know in twelve seasons of professional football were flashing and swirling around him on this familiar Paris ground. The rumble of the stadium, before always a motivator, tonight was getting on his nerves. The feel of his studs grabbing the cushioned sod, the impact of English shoulder on Spanish shoulder like Orwell and his International Brigade comrades in a Catalonian foxhole after a fascist explosion, made him nauseous. What he recognized as the last reserve of air in his lungs was fast nearing unmanageably low levels. It wasn’t exactly ‘Rocky in the fifteenth round’ stuff. He wasn’t out on his feet or anything, a punch-drunk contender from the wrong side of Hoboken. But when you can’t breathe properly you tend toward poor decision making, not to mention laziness and like you just want it to be over.

The evening’s exertions had all been rather typical for Novak in the sense of getting stuck in, knocking players about, causing as much mayhem as possible and constantly risking new injuries, exacerbating old ones. He had developed what looked to several respected commentators, when he was on-song, a cool-headed aggression. Now, though, because so much of the team had unraveled around him during the past year, he found himself forced into unfamiliar quadrants of the pitch – such as the opponent’s penalty area with the ball ludicrously at his feet. It was not unusual to hear someone bellowing, growling or merely sniping from the crowd, “What does he think he’s doing, the prat?” Football fans are not known for their motivational or sympathetic tendencies.

He knew himself. He knew his body. He knew his responsibilities. He thought he knew his place. Novak could have run for maybe ten additional minutes but no more. He’d already over-exerted himself for two solid hours with a fifteen-minute break at halftime and a five-minute breather before the commencement of extra time. His adrenalin was gone.

Self-centered thoughts and images flashed and crept through Novak’s mind as the seconds ticked irretrievably into the Parisian night. One of the many small parts of him wished one of his forwards would just latch onto the ball and somehow stuff it into the opponent’s net. It didn’t have to be a thing of beauty, museum quality. Even an own goal would suffice. Novak was ready for the end.

In a perfect world, his captain would lead the team up the triumphant staircase and hold the championship trophy aloft. Then Novak would trot off, change clothes, make his way a couple of miles east to the 14^th arrondissement, pick up his little girl and head for Benicassim where they would await the arrival of the girl’s mother and other friends and relatives. In the real end to come momentarily, he would settle for a second-place-winner’s medal to go along with the ignominy of a comic and humiliating end to a turbulent five years in London. Actually one of the most talked-about humiliating ends in the history of European football.

Novak felt a sort of Gallic quiétude, then a bubble of concern as a player from the other team, a Spanish-Moroccan well known to him, took the headed ball in his stride and chested it onward as he squared his fireplug body. What on earth? After one bounce, the opposing player cracked the ball cheekily goalward from fifty yards away and watched with swiftly rising glee and unprecedented self-worth as it sailed majestically and dipped under the bar past the outstretched fingertips of the flailing, horrified goalkeeper.

Novak was free.

In the space of a few seconds, his life had returned to the way he liked it -- gloriously unrestrained. He would carry on, a rampant individual, until a time about six months ago when a woman, a stranger comprehensively adept in the art of persuasion, contacted both of us on the same day.