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The physios sign Jan off for the day while the lads are still out on the training pitch pelting Paulo and Micha with free kicks, and he’s heartily sick of having electrodes strapped to his thigh or splashing idly in the pool or doing complex, dull exercises involving colourful elastic bands, so he heads for the hospital, armed with a chess board and an illicit bar of Green and Blacks.
*
Eric looks like shit, though Jan neglects to mention it. He’s grey, which is at least a shade better than the night before when he was an alarming, deathly white.
“Chocolate,” Jan says, tucking the contraband into Eric’s cabinet where Poch isn’t likely to spot it when he comes round later.
“Salted caramel?” Eric asks. His voice sounds like he’s been chewing gravel.
“Stop putting things in your chocolate,” Jan says. “Just…chocolate. No nonsense.”
Eric frowns – though it might be a grimace of pain. Or just his natural resting face. Jan pulls a plastic chair closer.
“How you feeling, brother?”
Eric shifts uncomfortably until he’s vaguely upright. “Keep coughing,” he says, motioning at his throat. “Feels like someone’s stabbing me every time I do.”
“That’s rough.”
“Your leg behaving?”
Jan rolls his eyes. “Let’s see how it looks tomorrow,” he mimics. “Getting too old for this shit, you know.”
“Looks like Skippy’s gonna be getting some minutes.”
“His mum’s given him a note for school,” Jan says. It’s not as much fun, when Oliver isn’t there to hear the you’re-a-kid jokes, but it still passes the time. Eric sniggers, and winces, his hand fluttering near his side.
“Show us your scar, then.”
Eric pulls the blankets protectively around his chest. “They did it lapero – lepros – they did it keyhole, didn’t they. It’s only little. Got a dressing on it, and they said I’m not allowed to touch it.”
Jan laughs. “You need to be told, Eric.”
“Shut up,” Eric says, scowling. “We playing or what?”
*
Jan tells himself he’s letting Eric win because he’s just had surgery, but really he’s losing badly. Eric’ll have him in a couple more moves.
The door to Eric’s room opens. Jan looks up from where he’s trying to save his bishop. Dele looks disproportionately surprised to see him sat at Eric’s bedside.
“Oh. Hey, man,” Dele says. His cheeks are slightly pink. “Just –” he holds up a bag of grapes. “You look like shit,” he tells Eric conversationally.
“Thanks, Delboy,” Eric says weakly, reaching out for the grapes.
“You been here long?”
“Didn’t have much else to do,” Jan says.
Dele snorts. “I can think of better things to do than hang out with this idiot.”
Jan, because he’s been trying to take the moral high ground recently, decides not to point out that Dele’s here, too, and that by the look and smell of him he didn’t bother to change out of his training gear before driving across the city. He holds out a hand for a grape.
“That the only chair?” Dele asks. Jan makes to get up, and Dele waves it away. “C’mon, you’re broken, mate. Budge up, Diet, I’ll perch on here.”
Eric winces as he shuffles across to make room for Dele next to his hip, and Jan starts to protest, but stops, because he’s also been trying to give the lads fewer excuses to call him a fuddy-duddy, and anyway, Dele looks comfy balanced on Eric’s hospital bed, an arm draped across the top of Eric’s pillows.
“Really, you look like shit, mate,” Dele says, commandeering the grapes. “That dress don’t suit you.” He plucks at the neck of Eric’s hospital gown.
Jan decides not to mention that Dele looked like he was going to throw up last night when they got back to the dressing room to the news that Eric was in the OR. Or that he definitely saw Ben take him to one side and put a steadying hand on his neck.
“Did you come here to insult me or to look after me?” Eric grumbles.
Dele bops him on the head gently. “Jan’s looking after you, isn’t he?”
Jan looks up from the chessboard. “Don’t look at me, I’m just here to brighten the place up a bit.”
Eric laughs, and it turns into a cough, dry and hacking, and the bed shakes with it. He goes red, and groans slightly as each persistent cough spikes his tender side. Jan looks about for some water, but before he can get to it, Dele springs up and grabs the jug from the top of the cabinet.
“You alright?” he asks quietly, his voice softening at once. Jan watches him put the paper cup in Eric’s hand and guide it to his mouth, touching Eric’s chin to hold him steady. Jan’s face goes hot, and he busies himself with the impending demise of his bishop.
“Got it all down you,” Dele says, brushing a hand over Eric’s chest fussily. The flimsy gown is speckled with water.
“Give over,” Eric says. “Can look after myself.”
“Yeah, I bet,” Dele says sarcastically, stuffing another handful of grapes in his mouth. By Jan’s calculation, he’s outstripping the patient’s grape consumption by a ratio of around seven to one. “You’re a professional athlete and you don’t know what an inflamed appendix feels like? Who even gets kept in overnight after having their appendix out?”
Eric folds his arms irately. “They said it was just precautionary. It was – it could have ruptured, you know.”
Jan knows that Dele knows that. He left Wembley quietly after the match, still white as a sheet, and didn’t say a word on the WhatsApp group. Jan saw him arrive at Hotspur Way that morning and make a beeline straight for where the medics were pretending to enjoy their porridge.
Jan gets to his feet. “I’m going to get coffee,” he announces decisively, because there’s no way they’re going to finish the game now Dele’s arrived in full centre-of-the-universe mode, and anyway, he might as well make the most of being injured to maximise his intake of illicit substances.
“Get me a Lucozade,” Dele says.
“What’s the magic word, Dele?” Jan asks. Dele sticks a finger up at him as he settles back on the bed next to Eric, completely ignoring the chair Jan’s just vacated.
*
It’s not that Jan’s stupid, or blind. It’s just that it’s easier not to think about it. They’re five points off City, and now they know it’s going to be Dortmund, and the Christmas schedule’s a punisher, and his fucking thigh is still being a twat, as Tripps would say, and he just hasn’t got space to think about it. All the moments he’s glimpsed, and the times he’s been with Eric and seen his phone light up, again and again, the same name every time. The smiles they reserve for each other. It’s just – if anyone acknowledges it, if anyone just has the guts to talk about it, it feels like it might do something funky to the time-space continuum.
He tried, once, with Chris, and Chris looked at him in that level, deadpan way of his, and said, “oh, for sure they are screwing, it’s obvious, no?” and Jan shrugged dumbly, when what he meant was what do we do with that information. They didn’t talk about it again.
And he can’t talk about it with Mousa. That’s just – a given. It’s like they mutually decided, years ago – decades ago, maybe – that there were some subjects that were out of bounds, some lines they just weren’t going to cross, and they’ve both been suffering for it ever since.
Jan jabs at the WHITE NO SUGAR button. There are two teenage boys sitting on the bank of chairs by the vending machine, goggling at him. Jan ignores them, and buys Dele a Lucozade – original flavour, just to annoy him.
It takes him longer to get back to Eric’s private room, because the vending machine was out of lids, so he’s carrying his horrible instant coffee carefully, walking like he’s shat himself so he doesn’t spill any.
He nudges the door open with his hip. Dele doesn’t move. He’s standing over the bed; Eric’s fallen asleep, with a little life back in his cheeks for once, looking like he might sleep for centuries, and Dele’s standing watch like a weird skinny tattooed angel, still in his stinky training gear.
Jan’s not stupid. It still makes his heart jump into his throat, though, watching Dele lean down a bit, far enough that he can run the back of his fingers softly across Eric’s cheek.
Jan’s trainer squeaks on the hospital lino, and Dele snatches his hand away as though he’s been scalded.
“He –” he starts jumpily. “He fell asleep.” He looks like he does after he’s taken a blatant dive – guilty as sin.
“Sorry,” Jan whispers. He waves the Lucozade at him. “Got you the wrong one. Just – I’ll just go and swap it.”
He backs out of the room. There’s a bench a few feet down the corridor. He sinks down onto it and leans against the wall. The corridor’s plastered with posters about MRSA and please do not intimidate our staff and support groups for newly-diagnosed diabetics, and Jan lets his eyes roam over them. He’s thinking about when it started – or if it has yet – if maybe Dele knows and Eric doesn’t, if maybe they’re still dancing around each other, if maybe they’ve had some sort of awful heart-to-heart about how they could do this, or how they shouldn’t, or how it might torpedo their careers. The sort of conversation he should have had, years ago, with –
Jan sips at the coffee and sighs. It’s rank. He feels overwhelmingly sad, all of a sudden. There are pathetic, thin fairy lights strung along the ceilings, and cheap foil decorations drooping from the light fittings. It’s Christmas, and the squad’s thin, and thinning further, and Dortmund aren’t a pushover, and Jan’s body’s failing him again, and Mousa’s the same, and Dele’s still in there standing over Eric, watching him sleep, watching his chest rise and fall, and pretending nothing else exists. Because nothing’s fair.
Jan closes his eyes and tips his head back against the wall.