Work Text:
2012
Calvin had laced his left boot four times, and four times the tongue had folded under itself so that a hard seam bit into the top of his foot, and four times he had torn the laces loose and started again with his fingers gone thick and useless, belonging to somebody clumsier than he was. The boots were new. They had come in a box with tissue paper, black with the three white stripes he had asked for, and they smelled of rubber and glue, and he had decided some days ago that they were the most important objects he had ever owned, and that everything good that was going to happen would happen because of them.
"When it comes out to me on the wing," he said, "I'm going to do the drag-back, the one I've been practising, and then I'll cut inside, because a defender always follows your first move, everyone knows that, so you go the other way, and then—Dad. Dad, are you listening?—and then I bend it. Right into the top corner. The far one. Keepers always cheat to the near post, so you go far."
"Far post," said Fred, from somewhere inside the cupboard under the stairs. "Got it. Filed away in the good part of my brain, next to my own birthday and how your mother takes her tea."
"I told Grandad I'd get one."
"I know you did."
"I told him I'd get one and he could hear all about it. And I told the twins at training, and Priya, and I told them I'd get the far post, the proper one, and they said prove it, and I said I would." Calvin got the tongue straight on the fifth go and pulled the laces tight, then too tight, so that his toes bunched and went numb, and he had to loosen them and begin again, breathing hard through his nose. "So I've got to now. I've said it now. You can't say it and then not."
There was a crash from the cupboard, and a word Calvin was not supposed to know, and Fred reversed out of it on his knees holding something square and black in both hands as though it might bite him.
"You can, actually," Fred said, getting up and blowing the dust off it. "Say a thing and then have it go a completely different way. Happens to me all day long. Ask your mother." He turned the square black object over, and it was a camera, an old Muggle one. "Your grandad gave me this. Hasn't the first idea what it's doing. You press the top, wait about a hundred years, and a picture comes out the bottom looking like a ghost of itself. I'm going to take one of you scoring."
Calvin looked up from his boots. Something in his face must have moved, because Fred's own face changed as he looked back, the way water changes when a cloud goes over it, and the joke went quietly out of it and left something underneath that was paying very close attention.
"And if I don't," Calvin said, "then everyone will know I said I would and I didn't."
Fred set the camera down on the table. He came and crouched in front of Calvin's chair, so that they were level, and he took the left boot in both hands and, without being asked, got the tongue straight and the laces even in one clean pull, the way he did everything, easily, as though he had never in his life been frightened of anything at all.
"Then they'll know that," Fred said. "And the sun will still come up. And I'll still be your dad. Now eat your toast."
"I'm not hungry."
"I know you're not hungry. That's not what I asked. Eat it anyway. You'll learn the difference around thirty."
Calvin picked up a corner of toast and bit off a piece the size of a stamp and chewed it a very long time. It had gone cold and the butter had soaked in and it sat in his mouth like a flannel and would not go down. His shirt had been on since half past six, the red one that was a size too big because Mum said he would grow into it. He had stood in front of the long mirror on the landing before it was properly light and turned sideways in it, and pulled the number on the back straight with both hands, and practised the face the real players did coming out of the tunnel, the one that gave nothing away.
The ball lived by the back door. It was the ball Grandad Weasley had given him, a real one, white and black, that Grandad had produced from a bag one Sunday with the guilty, delighted look of a man who had spent a whole afternoon in a Muggle shop touching everything and asking the girl at the counter how each thing worked. Grandad had the television too, the one that only came on if you tapped it and swore at it, and the two of them would sit in front of it on a Saturday with the sound turned up while men in bright shirts ran up and down a green so green it hurt, and Grandad would say extraordinary every few minutes, and did you see that, Calvin, did you see what he did with his feet, as though feet were the most astonishing invention anyone had ever come up with.
The fireplace flared green while Calvin was pushing the toast round his plate, and Mum's head appeared in the middle of the flames, tilted sideways, her plait half undone and shadows under her eyes the colour of old bruises.
"Have I missed him?" she said. "Cal—there you are. Oh, look at you. Look at the state of you, you handsome thing."
"You've gone all green."
"I've gone all green because I'm at the hospital and I've borrowed thirty seconds of the staff fire, and if Healer Abernathy catches me it's bedpans until the summer. Come here. Let me see you."
Calvin got up and knelt on the hearthrug in front of the flames. Their heat wasn't real heat; it moved over his face like breath. His mother's eyes went over the shirt and the shin pads and the boots, and her tired face did something that made the thing in his stomach turn over, slowly, once.
"You'll be brilliant," she said.
"You don't know that."
"I don't need to know it. Listen. It doesn't matter to me if you score forty goals or if you spend the whole match doing up your laces. I mean that with my whole heart. I want to hear about every single second when I'm home, though, every one, so you have to remember it all for me. Will you do that? Every second." Her head turned to something Calvin couldn't see, and her mouth went flat. "I have to go, my love, there's been a bad one, they're bringing them in. Fred—take the picture. I want it on the fridge by tea."
"Already found it," said Fred, holding the dusty camera up into the green light. "Bit haunted. It'll do the job."
"Go and enjoy it, Cal. That's the whole instruction. That's the only one."
And she was gone, and the fire went orange and ordinary, and the kitchen was very quiet, and Calvin stayed kneeling on the rug for a moment looking at the place where her face had been, thinking about every single second, and about which second it might turn out to be.
"Right," said Fred, and clapped his hands once, too loudly. "Shin pads in, socks over the top, boots stay in the bag until we're there, I'm not having you turn your ankle on the road before you've kicked a thing. Bring the ball, obviously. And your gloves. It's brass out there."
The road to the playing fields ran downhill between hedges stiff with frost, and their breath went out ahead of them in clouds, and the puddles from yesterday's rain had a skin of white ice on them that Calvin cracked with his heel, one after another, not meaning to. He carried the ball under his arm and did not say much. Fred said a great deal, about nothing, about a man in the shop who had bought two hundred Fanged Frisbees and would not say why, about whether frost was only rain that had lost its nerve, about how Uncle George could sneeze in seven different keys, and Calvin heard about a third of it and answered about a fifth of that, and the thing in his stomach went round and round like a fish in a bowl too small for it.
Fred stopped talking once, at the postbox, and looked down at him.
"You've gone the colour of a Sunday roast," he said. "You don't have to score, you know. That's not what today is. Today is a lot of small children running at a ball. You do not owe anybody a goal."
"I said I would."
"I heard you." Fred was quiet a moment. "All right. If you've decided it matters, then it matters, and I'm not going to stand here telling you it doesn't." He put his hand briefly on the top of Calvin's cold head, and took it away, and started walking again. "I'll just be over there. Being embarrassingly proud of you. Whatever the ball does. That part's sorted."
At the bottom of the hill the hedges opened onto three flat green rectangles marked in fading white, and there were people there, a scatter of grown-ups in thick coats holding paper cups, and a knot of boys in yellow shirts kicking two balls about, and a man in a tracksuit dragging a small goal into place, a foot at a time, standing back, dragging it again. Calvin's team were the reds. Three of them stood apart from one another the way you stand when you don't yet know if you're allowed to be friends.
"There's your lot," said Fred. "Go on. Go and be red."
Calvin's feet, in his trainers, had grown roots into the frozen ground.
"You've done up your laces," Fred said, gently. "Nothing left to be frightened of. It's just the next bit now. You do the next bit, then the one after. That's all anyone ever does. Off you pop."
Calvin went. He walked across the frozen grass past the grown-ups, and a woman in a bobble hat smiled and said morning, love, and it was so unexpected that he forgot to answer and then it was too late. He reached the red shirts, and a boy with a round face and a gap in his teeth looked at him and said, "You new?"
"Calvin."
"I'm Tom. That's Priya, she's dead fast. Them's the twins, you can't tell which is which so just shout oi. Barnesy!" This last was bawled at the man in the tracksuit, who had got his goal into place at last. "Barnesy, there's a new one, he's called Calvin, he says he's gonna score!"
"Does he now," said the man, straightening up. He had a red nose and creased kind eyes and a whistle on a string round his neck. "Left foot or right, Calvin?"
"Right," said Calvin, and then, because it seemed important to be honest with a man who had asked, "but I can do a bit with my left."
"A bit with his left," the man said, to the goal, approving. "Grand. You'll go out on the right, then, out wide, and you stay wide, none of this everybody-chasing-the-ball-like-bees. Out. Wide. That's my whole philosophy. Warm up, the lot of you, before you seize solid."
Out wide. On the right. Where the drag-back lived, and the cut inside, and the far post. Calvin dropped his ball and put his foot on it and looked back once across the grass. Fred had found a spot along the line, a polite yard from the other parents, and he had the haunted camera up to one eye, pointing it the wrong way round, frowning into the end of it as though the picture were shy. A man beside him leaned over and turned it the right way, and Fred laughed the big laugh, the one that carried, and clapped the man on the shoulder, and the man looked slightly stunned, the way people often did after Fred had been kind to them at full volume.
The whistle went. One short blast into the cold. And everything Calvin had rehearsed in the landing mirror went straight out of his head.
Barnesy's philosophy lasted about nine seconds. The ball went into the middle and every red shirt and every yellow shirt on the pitch went after it at once, a single churning knot of legs and noise, and out on the right wing Calvin stood in acres of frosted grass with his hands cupped round his mouth calling here, I'm here, square it, square it, and the knot rolled away from him towards one goal and then rolled back towards the other and never came near him at all.
He jogged on the spot to keep the feeling in his feet. He clapped his gloved hands. He called until his voice went thin. The ball came out to him once and he took a touch that was too heavy and it ran away over the line for a throw, and the second time it came to him he trapped it dead, and then, with three yellow shirts bearing down and his heart suddenly enormous in his throat, he panicked and hoofed it as hard as he could straight out of play, and Barnesy called "no matter, keep it simple," which was worse than being shouted at, and somewhere behind him a father Calvin didn't know said something to another father Calvin didn't know, low, and they both laughed.
He says he's gonna score. He could feel the sentence sitting on the whole pitch, on the whole cold morning. Every time the ball didn't come to him it grew. Every time it came and went wrong it grew. His ears were hot inside his cold face and his shirt was too big and flapped when he ran and he was aware of it flapping, of being a small boy in a shirt that didn't fit, running about at the edge of things, having said he would score.
And then, once, near the end of the half, it came to him properly.
Priya won it in the middle and looked up and saw him alone and wide, and she rolled it out to him along the frozen ground, and it came clean to his right foot with space in front of him, real space, and the drag-back was suddenly there in his feet exactly the way it lived in his head. He pulled the ball back under his sole and the yellow boy went sliding past him into nothing, and along the touchline the grown-ups made a sound, an actual ooh, and Calvin cut inside with his heart going like a drum in his ears, and he looked up and the goal was there, small and far, and he leaned back and swung his right foot at the top corner with everything in him.
The ball rose. It rose and kept rising, a clear yard over the bar and away, over the boy fetching the yellows' second ball, into the long grass by the hedge, and the ooh collapsed into a groan, and out of the groan somewhere a boy's voice, high and clear and not unkind, only amazed, said "he missed," and Calvin stood in the middle of the pitch with his foot still hanging in the air where the goal should have been.
From the touchline, one voice, very clear.
"UNLUCKY, CAL! GREAT RUN! GREAT RUN, THAT!"
He did not look round. His face was on fire. He turned and jogged back out to the wing with his head down and did not look at the touchline for the rest of the half, because if he looked he would see Fred with the haunted camera, beaming, thinking that had been good, and it had not been good. It had been a yard over the bar in front of everybody who had heard him say he'd score. He got to the wing and stood in the space and put his hands on his knees and looked at the white frost and the churned studmarks in it, and did not call for the ball again.
The whistle went for half-time. They sat in a ragged circle on the freezing grass, and Barnesy went round with a plastic tub of orange segments, and Calvin took one and put it in his mouth and the sour of it made his eyes prickle, which was the orange, only the orange.
"Right, reds," Barnesy said, crouching in the middle of them with his red nose. "One–nil down. Which is nothing. Which is one goal. First half we chased the ball like it owed us money. Second half we pass it. We pass it to the boy in the space." He pointed a segment at Calvin, kindly, so kindly that Calvin wanted to sink through the earth and out the other side of the world. "And the boy in the space keeps doing that run. That lovely run. You keep taking them, son, and one goes in, I promise you, that's not a maybe, that's a promise. Now up, before you freeze to the ground."
Calvin did not want the promise. A promise was a thing you could break, and he had already broken one that morning in front of everyone, and he did not want to be handed another to carry about and drop. He got up and pulled his socks over his shin pads and did not look at Barnesy.
Across the pitch, on the line, Fred caught his eye at last and put both thumbs up and did a little mime, a swing of an imaginary boot and a look of huge pretend amazement following the imaginary ball up and up and up into the sky, and grinned. It was meant to be funny. It was meant to say never mind, eh, wasn't it a laugh. Calvin looked away and pulled his sleeves down over his cold hands, and the hard hot thing that had been sitting in his chest since the ball went in the hedge pressed harder, and it had his own name written on it, and nobody else's.
The second half was longer than the first. It had to be, though Calvin could not have said how he knew, except that the light had gone the stretched grey colour it went when time had stopped bothering to move. The reds passed it more. Twice it came out to him and twice he did the safe thing, a first-time ball inside to Tom, a throw won off a yellow shin, and each time nothing came of it, and the clock in Barnesy's head ticked on toward the end.
They had chances. Priya hit the post with a shot that cracked off the metal like a dropped plank and everyone's heart stopped and started. Tom headed one over. The yellow keeper, a huge boy in a green jumper, caught everything that came near him and booted it back with a grunt, and minute by frozen minute it began to feel to Calvin as though the ball had simply decided it did not want to go in, not today, not for them, and there was nothing anybody could do about a thing like that once it had made up its mind.
And then, with almost no time left, it happened.
It came from a scramble, the way the first goal had, everything Barnesy hated, a great knot of red and yellow shirts in front of the yellow goal all hacking at the ball at once. The huge keeper came off his line and dived into the legs and got a hand to it and it squirted loose, spinning, out of the crush, and it rolled — slowly, so slowly, turning over on the white frost — clear of every single player, into the open, and stopped, sitting up perfectly on a tuft of grass, six yards from a goal with nobody in it.
Nobody. The keeper was flat on the ground in the ruck. The two yellow defenders were tangled with red shirts. The net gaped, wide and white and empty, and the ball sat there waiting, and standing over it, alone, with all the time in the world, was Calvin.
The touchline drew its breath. Somewhere a voice began to rise, go on, go on, go on—
And in the half-second he had, which was all the time there had ever been, Calvin looked up at the goal, and he did not see an empty net six yards away that he had only to roll the ball into with the side of his boot. He saw the top corner. The far one. He saw the goal he had turned sideways for in the landing mirror at half past six that morning, the one that bent away from a keeper's fingers and kissed the underside of the bar and dropped, the goal he had promised Grandad, and the twins, and Priya, the goal that would make the whole touchline stand up and make the sentence stop sitting on the morning, he says he's gonna score, the goal that would turn out to be the second he told his mum about, the good second, the only one that mattered. He saw it more clearly than he saw the real goal in front of him, and he leaned back, and he opened up his body the way he had ten thousand times against the garden wall, and he struck it with the top of his foot for the top far corner with everything that was in him.
The ball rose.
It rose, and it kept rising, over the empty net, over the top of the goal, over the huge keeper who was only now scrambling up and turning to watch it go with his mouth open, and it cleared the bar by the height of a grown man and flew on into the hedge behind the goal and vanished into the frost-white brambles with a small, final rustle.
For a moment there was no sound at all.
Then the touchline let its breath out in one long groan, the loudest sound of the whole morning, a groan with a laugh buried inside it because it had been so open, so completely and impossibly open, and out of the groan a boy's voice rang clear across the frozen pitch, delighted, the way children are delighted by anything enormous, "he MISSED it, it was OPEN and he MISSED it," and other children laughed, high and helpless, the ordinary bright cruelty of children who mean nothing by it at all, and somewhere in it Calvin heard his own father's voice make a short strangled sound and then go carefully, kindly, terribly quiet, and that was the worst sound of the lot.
The whistle went. Three blasts. Full time.
One–nil.
Calvin stood in the middle of the pitch and did not move, and the laughter went on for a second or two longer and then stopped, the way children stop, all at once, bored, on to the next thing, and the grown-ups began talking again in their ordinary voices about nothing, and a dog barked, and the world simply carried on, which was somehow the most impossible part of all of it, that the world could see what he had done and carry on.
Afterwards Calvin could not have said how he got from the middle of the pitch to the edge of it. There was a part where the two teams made a line and went along it slapping hands and saying good game, good game, and he was in it, his hand meeting other hands, his mouth making the words, and he heard none of it and felt none of it, because there was a roaring in his ears like the sea in the big shell on the bathroom windowsill, and behind the roaring one thought went round and round, small and clear and terrible: it was open. It was open, and I missed it, and everyone saw.
The huge yellow keeper said "unlucky, mate, that woulda been unreal though," and meant it kindly. Priya said "you'll get the next one." Barnesy came and put a big warm hand on the back of his neck and said, "Now then. Best run of the match, that first-half run, and don't you forget it. And that second one, son—look at me—that second one you went for glory, and I love a boy who goes for glory, we'll just work on picking your spot, that's a coaching point, that's not a telling-off, all right?" And Calvin nodded, and his chin was doing a small hard trembling that he could not stop, and he pressed his teeth together to hold his whole face still and looked at the frozen ground and would not, would not look up.
Tom fell into step beside him as they came off, round-faced, honest, hands jammed in his shorts.
"How did you miss that," Tom said. Not nastily. Wonderingly. The way you'd ask about weather on the moon. "It was open. The goal was, like, right there. You could've walked it in. You said you'd score and then you missed the easiest one ever."
"I know," said Calvin.
"My little sister could've scored that. She's four."
"I know," said Calvin.
And then his dad was there, at the edge of the grass, crouched down to his height with the haunted camera hanging round his neck by its strap and his arms half open, and his face — Calvin saw it in one glance and then could not look at it any more — his face was so gentle, so entirely and completely on Calvin's side, that it was unbearable, worse than the groan, worse than Tom's four-year-old sister, because it was kindness and Calvin had nothing to give back to it but the ruin of the open goal.
"Hey," Fred said softly. "Hey. Come here, you."
"Don't."
The word came out strange and tight and hard.
"Cal—"
"Don't. Don't say it was unlucky. It wasn't unlucky. It was open." Calvin's voice climbed and cracked. "You saw it. You had the camera. You were going to take a picture and there's nothing to take a picture of because I missed it, I missed the easiest one, and you saw, why did you even come, why did you have to be watching—"
He stepped past his father's open arms, past the crouch, past the gentle unbearable face, and he kept walking, fast, up toward the gap in the hedge and the road home, his kit bag banging his knee, his boots still on his feet because nobody had reminded him to change them and he did not care, let him turn his ankle, let him, and behind him he heard his dad straighten up slowly and stay where he was for a moment, and not follow, and not call out, and let him go.
His dad caught him up at the postbox at the top of the hill, not hurrying, just there, suddenly, walking level, a steady grown-up presence a careful arm's length to his left. Calvin walked faster. Fred lengthened his stride without seeming to and stayed exactly level, which was the most infuriating thing anyone had ever done.
For a while Fred didn't say anything, which was so unlike him that the silence had a weight to it, a size. The frost was going off the tops of the hedges where the low sun had got at them, and the road glistened black and wet in patches, and a milk float whined past over the fields, and their four feet went on over the cold ground, two big and two small.
"You know," Fred said, at last, mildly, "when I was about your age, your Uncle George bet me I couldn't jump the stream at the bottom of Grandad's orchard, and I was so sure I could that I told everyone. Bill. Charlie. The gnomes. Big audience. And I got a run-up you could have timed with a calendar—"
"I don't want a story."
Fred stopped talking. He put his hands in his coat pockets. "Fair enough," he said. "No story."
A dog flung itself at a gate behind a fence and they went past it and it gave up. Calvin's throat kept doing the tight thing and he kept breathing hard through his nose to hold it down, and the two thoughts had become three now, keeping time with his feet: it was open. Everyone saw. And I'm rubbish, I'm actually rubbish, I only thought I wasn't.
"I'm never playing again," he said, to the road.
"Okay."
"I mean it. You can tell Barnesy. I'm not going back. Ever."
"Okay," Fred said again, in exactly the same even voice, and it was unbearable, it was worse than if he'd argued, because there was nothing to push against and Calvin needed something to push against, he needed it more than anything, and his dad just kept agreeing with him and walking level and being kind, and the kindness had nowhere to go and turned round in Calvin's chest and came out as something else.
"Stop being nice to me," he said, and his voice came out shaking. "You're only being nice because you have to. Because you're my dad. You have to say it was a great run and you have to say it doesn't matter, that's your job, that's just the thing dads have to say, it doesn't count. Barnesy only said it because he felt sorry for me and you're only saying it because you have to."
Fred was quiet for three steps. Then he said, "That's not true, but I can see why you'd think it, and I'm not going to argue with you about it on a cold road, because you wouldn't believe me and it'd just be noise. I'll prove it instead. Later. When you're ready."
"I'm not going to be ready. There's nothing to prove. I'm rubbish and that's the end of it and you can't prove I'm not because I am, you saw, everyone saw, so just—" Calvin's voice went entirely, and he stopped, in the middle of the road, because he could not walk and hold his face still at the same time any more.
He bent down, there in the middle of the road, and dragged at the laces of his left boot, the boot he had done up five times that morning, and got it loose, and wrenched it off his foot, sock and all half coming with it, and he stood up and threw it as hard as he could, harder than he had thrown anything all day, over the hedge and into the frozen ditch on the far side, where it landed somewhere out of sight in the brambles with a rustle exactly like the ball going into the hedge behind the goal, and the sound of it went through him like cold water.
"They're stupid," he said, and his chest was heaving. "I don't want them. They didn't even work. You can have the other one for the bin. And you can give the ball back to Grandad because I don't want it either, I don't want any of it, I'm not—I can't even—" He stood in one sock on the freezing road with his breath tearing in and out and the tears coming now whether he let them or not, hot and fast down his cold cheeks. "Everyone's good at something. Priya's fast and Tom's brave and the twins can do headers and I said I could do the far post and I can't, I can't do anything, I'm not good at one single thing and now everyone knows, and I've got to go to training on Tuesday and see all of them, and I've got to tell Grandad, and Mum said every second and I've got nothing to tell her except the hedge, and I wish—" He scrubbed at his face with the back of his glove. "I wish I'd never said I'd play. I wish I'd stayed home."
He didn't wait to see what his dad would do. He turned and ran, one boot on and one foot in a wet sock, up the last of the hill toward the house that had come into view at the top of the lane, low and crooked and familiar, smoke going straight up from the chimney because they'd banked the fire before they left, and he ran through the gate and round the side of the house and in at the back door and through the kitchen and up the stairs two at a time, and he went into his room and pushed the door shut behind him with both hands and got up onto his bed and into the corner where the two walls met, and pulled his knees up, and put his face down on them, and let it all come at last, alone, where nobody could see, the way you cry when you are seven and something has gone wrong in a way that feels, for that whole hour, exactly like the end of the world and the proof of the worst thing you had ever privately suspected about yourself.
Down in the lane, Fred stood for a moment where his son had left him. Then he walked to the gap in the hedge, and looked over it, and climbed down into the frozen ditch in his good coat, and felt about in the brambles until he found the boot, and worked it loose, and wiped the frost off it against his sleeve, and climbed back up. He picked the scuffed grey ball up off the road too, from where it had rolled against the verge. And he carried both of them home, the boot and the ball, and did not hurry, and let the boy have his door and his corner and his time, because Fred knew a great deal about the kind of morning where the only mercy anyone can do you is to not, for a little while, make you talk.
Calvin heard him come up the stairs. Not fast. The seventh step creaked the way it always did. He heard him stop outside the door, and he pulled himself tighter into the corner and held his breath and waited for the handle to turn, for the door to open, for come on now and let's have a look at you and it's not the end of the world, all the things grown-ups said that made it worse.
The handle didn't turn.
Instead there was a soft thump, low down, of someone sitting on the floor of the landing with his back against the door, and then Fred's voice came through the wood at about the height of the skirting board, easy, unhurried, as though the two of them were only carrying on a conversation they'd been having all along.
"I found your boot," Fred said. "In case you were wondering. It went a long way. Good distance on it, actually. Better contact than—well. We won't get into that." A pause. "I'm going to put it here on the landing. And the ball. They'll be out here whenever you want them, or never, that's fine too. Nobody's giving anything back to your grandad. Your grandad would be gutted. That ball's the pride of his life, that ball and the toaster he mended."
Calvin didn't answer. He pressed his mouth harder against his knees.
"You don't have to come out," Fred said, to the door. "You don't have to say anything, either. And I'm not going to tell you it doesn't matter, because it obviously does. I've got eyes." There was a shift, and the floor creaked. "I'm just going to sit here. It's a shocking floor, for the record. Something's having a proper go at me. But I'm not going anywhere. Your legs'll go dead long before mine do — I had a lot of practice on this landing when you were small and wouldn't sleep."
There was a silence, and in it Calvin's breathing hitched and slowed, and hitched again.
"I've got a whole collection of disasters, you know," Fred said. "Worse than yours. I could tell them to you through the door, like ghost stories, and you wouldn't even have to open it." He waited. Nothing came back. "No? All right. I'll sit, then. Take your time. There's nowhere I've got to be."
And he did sit. Calvin could hear him out there, the small sounds of a large man being still against a door, a shift, a sigh, the creak of the floor, and it went on, and the light in Calvin's room went slowly greyer, and the tears ran out at last the way they do, leaving him hollow and wrung and aching behind the eyes, and still his dad sat out there and didn't knock again and didn't ask again and didn't go.
It was that, in the end, that did it. Not a clever thing anybody said. Just that he didn't go.
Calvin uncurled, and got off the bed, and crossed the cold floor in one sock, and turned the handle, and opened the door.
Fred was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall where the door had been, his long legs stretched across the landing, the boot and the ball beside him. He didn't leap up. He didn't reach for Calvin or say there he is or do any of the things. He just looked up at his son in the doorway, at the blotched wrecked face and the one bare foot, and he moved the boot and the ball aside to make a space next to him on the floor, and patted it, once.
"Come and sit down," he said. "You don't have to talk. But your carpet's warmer than this landing, and I'm too old to be sitting on floorboards, and if you're going to make me do it you can at least come and do it with me."
Calvin came and sat down next to him, in the space, his back against the wall, his knees pulled up, close but not touching, and for a moment neither of them said anything, and the landing was quiet, and the house ticked around them.
And then it came out of him, all of it, the way water comes through a wall once the wall has given.
"It was open," Calvin said, and his voice was a ruin, thick and cracking. "It was open and I missed it. There wasn't even a keeper. There wasn't anybody. It was just sitting there and I—" His breath tore. "I told everyone I'd score. I told Grandad. I told the twins, and they all saw. Tom's sister's four and she could've done it. Everyone laughed. I heard them." He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. "And I've got to go on Tuesday and see all of them, and I can't. I can't."
His breath came out shuddering, and when the next of it came it came small and flat, which was worse.
"And it's not just today. I thought I could do it. I stood right in front and I couldn't. So I never could. I was just pretending and I didn't know it." He wasn't shouting any more. "Priya's fast and Tom's brave and I haven't got anything. I'm not good at one single thing. And now everyone knows, and I can't make them not know it. Not ever."
By the end he had gone almost silent, his fists jammed against his mouth, his shoulders going up and down, and Fred sat beside him and let him get all the way to the bottom of it, every word, and did not once interrupt to tell him he was wrong, because a boy in the middle of saying a thing like that can't hear that he's wrong, not yet, not until the whole of it is out and lying on the floor where the two of them can look at it together.
Fred waited until the worst of the shaking had gone out of him, until the sobs had spaced themselves apart into long wet hitching breaths. He had one hand resting flat and warm between Calvin's shoulder blades, not rubbing, not patting, just there, a steady weight, the way you rest a hand on something to let it know it isn't on its own. And when he spoke, it was quiet, and it was not what Calvin had braced for.
"Some of that's true," Fred said. "And some of it's rubbish. I'm not going to let you mix the two up. You'd carry the wrong one round for years."
Calvin took his hands away from his eyes. His face was hot and streaked and his nose was running and he wiped it on his sleeve and stared at the wall opposite, at the crack in the paint shaped like a river.
"The true part first," Fred said. "That goal was open. Nobody in it, nobody near it, you had all day. And you put it over the bar and into a hedge. It was a shocker, Cal. One of the worst I've seen." A beat. "And I've watched your Uncle Ron take a penalty."
A sound came out of Calvin that was almost, not quite, a laugh, and then wobbled and went wet again.
"I'm not going to pretend it was fine, either," Fred said. "It wasn't, and you'd know I was lying. You missed. People saw. Some kids laughed, because kids are savages. And it feels horrible, and you're allowed every bit of that. All of it's true."
Calvin nodded, staring at the river-crack, his chin going.
Fred turned his head and looked at the side of Calvin's wrecked face. "But then you said the other thing," he said. "That it means you're no good at anything. That you were pretending all along. That it's always going to be true." He shook his head, slowly. "No. That's just you kicking yourself while you're already down. And I'm not having it."
He was quiet a second.
"You want to know why you actually missed it?" he said. "I was right there on the line. I saw your face when the ball came out. You had a tap-in. Side of the boot, roll it in, one–all, nobody laughs. Easy. It was right there." He paused. "And you didn't want easy. You looked up and you went for the top corner. The far one. Off the garden wall. The one you've been hitting since you were four." A small huff, almost a laugh. "You've been after that goal your whole life, Cal. It was never going to let you just tap it in."
Calvin had gone still, watching his father's face now instead of the crack in the wall.
"That's not being no good," Fred said. "Anybody can tap one in. Nobody stands up for it." He reached over and pressed one finger to the middle of Calvin's chest, gently, on the hard hot place that had had Calvin's own name on it all morning. "You wanted the good one. That's in there." He took his hand back. "I wouldn't have it out of you for anything."
Calvin's face crumpled, but it was a different crumple than before, softer at the edges, and he didn't look away.
"Shall I tell you the worst one now?" Fred said. "The firework?" He shifted against the wall and stretched his legs out further. "When your Uncle George and I started the shop, we made a thing. Our masterpiece. A firework, an enormous one, that was going to go up over Diagon Alley and burst into a great dragon that breathed real fire across the whole sky. We were so sure. We told everyone. We put up posters. We got a crowd in on a Friday night, hundreds of them, to watch the grand unveiling, and we lit it, and I looked at George, and George looked at me—"
"What happened?"
"It went up about four feet," Fred said, "made a sort of damp fizzing noise, coughed out one sad little puff of green smoke shaped like a slug, and fell over. In front of everyone. Half of Diagon Alley. There was a silence you could have posted a letter in."
Calvin let out a wet, hiccuping laugh, the first real one, and clapped his glove over his mouth as if to catch it before it got away.
"Worst night of my life, at the time," Fred said. "I wanted to move away and change my name. And do you know what your Uncle George did? He put his arm round me, in front of the whole street, and said, very loud, that concludes tonight's demonstration of what a cheap fuse does, ladies and gentlemen." Fred snorted. "And they laughed. And about forty of them came in and bought things anyway. And we went home and lay on the floor of the flat till we couldn't breathe, and then we made another one." He nudged Calvin with his shoulder. "Shop's still there. You've eaten the free samples. Put a Nosebleed Nougat in your pocket when you thought I wasn't looking, and all."
Calvin wiped his face and half laughed and half didn't, and leaned the smallest amount toward the warmth of his father's side.
"Were you really sad?" he said. "About the firework? Really, though?"
"Really." Fred was quiet for a moment, looking at the crack in the wall, and something moved behind his face and then folded itself away, the way you fold a thing you don't want a child to see all of yet. "I'll tell you something. And then we'll find your other sock, because one of your feet's gone blue." He let a breath out. "I've had a worse morning than a hedge, Cal. A long time ago. Before you were born." He wasn't looking at Calvin now. "There was a morning in the war I was sure was going to be my last one. Really sure. And it wasn't. The morning ended. And I was still here. And everyone I loved was still here." Now he looked round at his son, and his eyes had gone bright at the rims, which Calvin had never seen, not once. "And a few years after that it turned into this. You. On the carpet. Driving me round the bend." A pause. "So I know what one of those mornings is like. The kind that feels like the end of the world. And I'm telling you it isn't one. Yours isn't either. You'll see, in a day or two."
And that undid the last knot of it. Calvin didn't decide to move; he only found that he had tipped sideways off the cold wall and into his father, into the rough wool of the coat he still had on, that smelled of woodsmoke and the shop and the frost and, faintly, of the dust from the cupboard under the stairs, and Fred's arm came round him at once and gathered him all the way in, and Calvin cried into his chest, and this time it did not feel like the end of the world. It felt like setting down something enormous he had been carrying a very long way up a very steep hill. His father held on, and did not stiffen, and did not sigh, and did not hold him out at arm's length to have a proper look at him, and did not once let go, and every hard thing Calvin had braced himself against since half past six that morning simply failed to come.
Fred put his chin on the top of Calvin's head and held him and didn't say anything for a while, and the two of them sat against the wall on the landing while the light in the house went from grey to bluish and the tears ran themselves dry.
"You know what's on that camera?" Fred said at last, into Calvin's hair. "Twelve pictures. I counted them on the walk. Twelve. And do you know how many of them are of a goal?"
Calvin shook his head against him.
"None," Fred said. "Not one. I didn't go to photograph a goal, you daft article. I went to photograph you." He was quiet a second. "I've got you out on the wing with your hands round your mouth, shouting for a ball nobody would give you. I've got the drag-back — the one that made them all go ooh. It'll come out a red smudge in a white field and I don't care, it's going on the fridge tonight." He drew back far enough to take Calvin by the shoulders and look at him, blotched and swollen and spent. "That's what I wanted this morning. Not a goal. You've been on that fridge since before you could walk, Cal. A miss doesn't get you off it. Nothing does."
Calvin nodded, and wiped his nose on his own wrist this time, and looked at his father.
"But I've still got to tell Grandad," he said, small. "And go on Tuesday."
"Ah. That." Fred pulled him in under his arm, and the two of them looked out at the blue landing and the boot and the ball on the floorboards. "Here's the deal. Tuesday's yours. Walk in, say nothing, just play, if that's what you want. Anyone gives you grief about the hedge, I'll have a quiet word — I'm terrifying to a seven-year-old, you'd be amazed." A beat. "Grandad, though. I'll tell him tonight, if you want it over with. Or—" He stopped. "I think you should tell him yourself. Tell him you missed the easy one because you went for the far post instead. And watch his face." Quieter. "He didn't give you that ball for tapping them in, Cal." He squeezed his shoulder. "Whatever you decide, I'll be right next to you. Or nowhere in sight. Whichever helps more."
And something enormous and grinding that had been sitting on Calvin's chest since half past six that morning got slowly up, at last, and moved off, and left him tired and hollow and wrung out and, underneath all of that, somewhere down at the bottom where the worst of it had been, strangely, quietly, all right.
Fred got him proper socks from the drawer, thick ones, and put the retrieved boot back on his foot and did the laces up himself, evenly, in one clean pull. Then he stood, groaning, holding his own back and complaining bitterly and at length about the state of a man's legs after an hour on a landing floor, about how nobody warned you when you were young that one day you would sit on some floorboards and never fully recover, and he held out his hand and hauled Calvin up off the carpet, and Calvin came up light and hollow and cried-out and cold.
"Right," Fred said, and there was a look coming up in his face that Calvin knew, the look that meant trouble was being manufactured on the premises. "Out."
"It's dark. And freezing."
"It's neither of those things yet, it's merely thinking about them, and I didn't ask. I made a statement of intent." Fred was already heading for the stairs. "Garden. You and me. That wall's a goal, and I'm going in it."
"I don't want to."
"Didn't ask that either."
The garden had gone blue and still, the frost coming back down over the grass so that it crunched underfoot, and the kitchen window threw a warm yellow square across the lawn as far as the bottom, where the old red wall stood higher than Calvin's head, with the bald grey patch worn into it at boot height, a wide smudge of a target from a thousand afternoons. It was the wall the far post had been born against. Fred shrugged off his coat and dropped it on the frozen grass, and pulled out his wand.
"Dad—"
"Muggle neighbours are two fields off and can't see a thing, and I'll not be lectured by a person who hasn't passed his own first magic yet, thank you very much." He flicked the wand at the two bean canes leaning by the shed, and they leapt across the lawn and planted themselves upright a goal's-width apart in front of the wall, and a second flick sent white netting stringing itself between them and down and back, pegging itself neat into the moss, and a third sent a soft ball of light drifting up to hang over the crossbar that wasn't there, throwing the whole thing into a pale glow, so that at the bottom of their own garden in the blue dark there stood a real goal, net and all, lit up like something out of the television, exactly the sort you dreamed at.
Calvin stared at it. Something lifted, small, in the flat hollow place in his chest.
"Now," said Fred, and planted himself in the mouth of it, and bent his knees, and spread his arms wide, and wiggled his bare fingers, and pulled a face of tremendous, ferocious concentration. "Show me. The far post. Best you've got. I warn you, I am a wall. I am a brick wall in the shape of a man. Nothing has ever got past me. I once kept out an entire—"
Calvin put the ball down, and took two steps, and side-footed it low and hard to Fred's right, and Fred flung himself the wrong way entirely, a great sprawling theatrical dive into empty air a full yard from the ball, and it hit the net with a soft lovely whump and the net swallowed it and swung.
There was a silence.
"That," said Fred, face down in the frozen moss, "was a fluke."
Calvin did not laugh. Not yet. He walked over and got the ball out of the net and walked back and put it down and looked at his father lying in the moss, and he wanted to laugh, he could feel it somewhere, but the morning was still too close, and it caught in his chest on the way up and stuck.
"Go on," Fred said, not moving, his voice muffled by the ground. "Again. Same corner. I dare you. I've read you now. You'll never get it past me twice."
Calvin put it in the same corner. Fred dived the wrong way again, even further, and lay still, and said into the moss, "outrageous," and this time the laugh got a little further up before it stuck, and the third time, when Fred saved one with his face and lay clutching his own nose calling weakly for a Healer, the laugh finally came all the way out of Calvin, high and cracked and helpless, and surprised him so much that he laughed harder at the surprise of it, standing over his dad in the lit-up frozen garden with his boots on.
They played until the garden was properly dark and there was only the ball of light over the goal and the yellow window up at the house, and their breath hung white in front of them, and the frost thickened on the grass. Fred kept goal like no keeper who had ever lived, hurling himself in wrong directions, saving the easy ones by sitting on them, letting the hard ones in with a look of noble suffering, and twice, when Calvin wasn't watching, a shot that should have gone in curved suddenly up and over, and Calvin rounded on him, and Fred was whistling and examining his own fingernails with his wand nowhere in sight and denying everything, and Calvin shouted that's cheating and Fred said prove it and Calvin laughed until he had to bend over with his hands on his knees.
And then, in the cold and the dark, with the flat hollow place in his chest filling slowly back up with something warm, Calvin put the ball down at his feet, and stepped back, and looked up at the goal, and there it was again, the way it had been that morning, small and far and waiting, only now there was no groaning touchline and no he says he's gonna score sitting on the air, only his dad standing in the mouth of a goal made out of bean canes and magic, arms wide, grinning in the glow.
Calvin took his touch, and it sat up, and he opened his body the way he had against this same wall ten thousand times—but this time he leaned in over the ball instead of back, the way you do when you actually mean it to stay down, the way his dad had shown him without ever saying a word about it, just by lying in the moss until Calvin worked it out for himself—and he struck it with the inside of his boot for the top corner, the far one.
It curled away from Fred's outstretched hand, up under where the bar would have been, and dipped, and kissed the inside of the net, and stayed.
The far post. The beautiful one. For real, this time, in the dark, with nobody watching but the one person in the world he would have wanted to watch.
For a second neither of them moved. Then Fred turned round slowly and looked at the ball sitting in the top corner of the net, and turned back, and his mouth was open, and this time it was not a performance and there was nothing manufactured in it at all.
"Calvin," he said.
And then he was scrambling up out of the goalmouth, shouting, diving for his coat on the frozen grass, coming up with the haunted camera and thrusting it toward his own face the wrong way round again in the dark—
"Don't move—don't you dare move—put your arms up—do the thing, do the celebration—"
Calvin threw both arms up over his head with his fists clenched and his whole wrecked, swollen, grinning face turned up to the ball of light, and somewhere in the blue dark the camera gave a heavy mechanical clunk, and a small grey square slid slowly out of the bottom of it, and Fred flapped it in the freezing air to bring it up, hopping from foot to foot, and it came up, faint and blurred and lopsided, a small dark boy in a shirt three sizes too big with his arms in the air in a glowing garden, half of him out of the frame.
"There," Fred breathed, holding it out so the two of them could look at it together in the last of the light. "There. That's the one. That is going on the fridge, and it is staying on the fridge until you are forty, and when your mum asks which goal it was, we are going to tell her the truth. We're going to tell her it was the one you scored in the pitch dark, against your rubbish old dad, after the worst miss of your entire life—because you never once stopped wanting the beautiful one. That's the picture. I told you I'd get it in the end."
A square of warm yellow light spilled suddenly farther across the frosted grass. The back door had opened, and Mum stood in it with her coat still on over her Healer's robes and her plait fully down around her shoulders now, her face grey with the long shift, looking down the dark garden at the pair of them, at the goal glowing at the bottom of the lawn, at her husband hopping about waving a photograph and her son with his arms still half in the air.
"I have been home," she said, "for a total of six minutes, and I have found no children, no husband, a stone-cold house, and what appears to be a full-sized lit goal in my flower bed. In the dark. In January."
"He scored the far post," Fred called up the garden, and his voice did something on the words. "The proper one. Top corner. You should have seen it, Lil."
"I should have seen it," Mum said, and something came up into her tired face and pushed the grey of it back. "I keep saying that. Come in, the pair of you, before you die of the cold, and one of you can tell me every single second while the other runs a bath."
And the strange thing, Calvin found, as he walked up the dark garden toward the light with the scuffed grey ball under his arm and his dad's hand coming to rest warm on his shoulder, was that he wanted to. That morning he had thought the second he'd have to tell her was the hedge, and that it would be the only one, and that it would be unbearable. It wasn't, now. There were better seconds. The drag-back that made the whole line go ooh. The far post in the dark. His dad face down in the moss saying it was a fluke, calling for a Healer. And the hedge was still in there, somewhere, but it had shrunk down among all the others until it was just a thing that had happened, one second out of a whole day of them, and not the shape of the entire world after all.
"Dad," he said, as they came up the path.
"Mm."
"You're not really throwing the boots in the bin."
"No," said Fred. "I don't suppose I am."
"Because I'll need them. Tuesday. And Saturday. Because Barnesy said if I keep taking them, one's going to go in, he promised, and now I know he's right, because one just did." Calvin's voice was picking up speed, the way it did, the way it hadn't since half past six that morning, running downhill now and gathering as it went. "And I'm going to tell Grandad myself, the way you said, about going for the far post instead of the easy one, and I'm going to watch his face. And next time it comes out to me on the wing I'm going to do the drag-back but I'll cut inside quicker, and I won't lean back, I'll lean in, like just now, and I'll put it right in the top corner, the far one, because keepers always cheat to the near post, so you go far—"
"Far post," said Fred, and the warm light was on both their faces now, and Mum was holding the door open wide, and the smell of home came out down the path to meet them. "Got it. Filed away. And I'll be there, with the haunted camera, and I'll take a hundred pictures, and not one of them will be of a goal."
"Are you even listening?"
"Calvin," said Fred, steering him gently up the last step and in out of the dark, into the light and the warmth and his mother's arms, "I am listening with my whole body. I always have been. Now go and tell your mum every single second. Don't leave one out."
***