Fiction #1, the football novel
It's finished. Here's the first chapter...
Very pleased to share the opening of my new novel, which goes out on submission shortly. This means editors at publishing houses will be reading soon… I hope they like it. It’s based on my first season in the women’s & non-binary football team Judas F.C. and it’s called Remontada.
Football… The note in my calendar gives off scents. Body odour, lynx, lust, cut grass, watching from the sidelines, and something forbidden. I dream about it, in the night. Dream about being watched, like the boys were, by gaggles of girls in blazers, long hair whipping in the wind. Dream about being subject, action figure, captain. Thighs turning and revealed as shorts slip high. Not teenage boys’ thighs, like we used to watch. Women’s thighs. Are they muscular? Are they slender? Are they hairless? Thick? Warm? What? My sleeping mind can’t find an image of a woman in the right shorts, the right silky, collared shirt.
Lycra? It offers me. Hiking trousers? Yoga pants?
Suddenly, the bitchy netballers from school—the last time I played a team sport—are in my head, looking at me like I’m weird. Football? they sniff. Gay.
The alarm goes off. I startle, coughing, shocked. The alarm hasn’t gone off for months. I forgot it was that loud. I reach for it, knock the phone to the ground, grab at it, silence it, and then lie on my back, panting, a pained expression on my face. You would think I wouldn’t need it. The game is at noon. I live ten minutes away. But…
I sleep all day at the moment.
As much as possible.
I am hibernating.
I want to sleep until I am bear-like, strong and soft.
I am the opposite—weak and brittle.
Nowadays, I fall back down so easily. Down…
Down into the pillow. I mean asleep, asleep into the pillow, but I want to say down, because it always feels like falling do
w
n somewhere
very black, very
deep, very…
final.
“BAH!” I wake up, check my phone. Pant more. Thirty minutes have passed. Have to get up. “Goddddd.” I set my phone to play ‘Emily, I’m Sorry’ by boygenius, grab my towel, and mooch into the bathroom. Stand underneath the showerhead. Catch the dribble. Stare at the mold between the tiles. Wonder: is mold that is black, always black mold? Stick my hand out the water. Draw the red line back on Youtube so the song plays again. I don’t have Spotify. Don’t have an income. Can’t afford subscriptions and the ads drive me bonkers.
Squeak of the faucet. Me in the mirror. Above shoulder-length hair. Dark roots, blonde dye, a chemical yellow-orange. Haunted eyes. A young face that wrinkles like an old face. Damp towel grabbed from hook. Damp feet on ripped lino. Back in my room, I pull on the clothes I bought last week.
Leila came shopping with me. My bestie from school. Why was she there? Maybe she had flown in for work? I don’t think we had lunch. I don’t think we did anything apart from walk around and go sportswear shopping. A side effect of constant sleeping is that waking life feels blurrier. Did I see her or did I dream her?
She brushes her dark, curly hair off her bare shoulders and tells me about life with her husband in New York. Leila is half Tunisian and likes to boss me about, “… costs five thousand dollars a month, but we need the square footage for the twins and the nanny’s room and it’s such a pain in the bum to buy. He’s making a lot of money in Edtech. Of course, not as much as I’m making in Fintech, but I think it would be a good fit for you.”
“I don’t know.”
“I know you don’t know what you should do next. I’m saying, I know. Me.” She pulls me onto her lap and strokes my hair. “That’s why I’m telling you.”
“Lei, I have to try these football shoes on.”
“Babe, I think they call them boots.”
I have a weird chest incident in the shop. I bend over to tie the laces on a pair of boots and it happens. This horrible, super painful, mechanical, popping feeling of something slipping somewhere it shouldn’t, as if a hard knot in the top of my stomach is coming up through my diaphragm into my oesophagus.
“What? What?” Leila leans over me.
I raise my arms above my head. “I don’t know what it is. Since I was—I have to hold my arms up and try to be calm and it goes down.” Please go down, I beg it silently, please don’t let Leila, with her glamorous, dream of a life, get annoyed with me being the constantly broke, dumped, awkward, clumsy, between-houses, sick, feckless friend who draws attention to themselves in sports shops that smell of boys, that neither of us want to be in.
The lump slips back down.
“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have bent over like that.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“That there’s nothing on an X-Ray or an ultrasound.”
“But they can’t say what it is?”
“No,” I grump, lifting my leg gingerly, tying the laces with my foot perched on the seat. I didn’t pursue it with the doctor because I get tired of pursuing things. Have been pursuing things for the last three years. Often, they don’t write back. Appointments get canceled. Follow ups are needed, but I have to follow up with a different department. I don’t know the number. I’m on hold for an hour. Pursuing things comes to nothing.
“Useless fucks,” she murmurs supportively, rubbing my back, going on to complain about the Tory gutting of the NHS, the state of things, how shit the world is, how what’s the point of anything, as if it’s easy to say, easy to leave here, on this bench, when we’re done buying football boots.
In my single room in Ga’s flat, the breeze buffets against my black t-shirt. I pull on the Adidas shorts I bought at Sports Direct. Well, Leila bought them. “A birthday present,” she said, taking the navy shorts I had picked out from my hands. “But you look better in black. Let’s switch them.”
I pad over the carpet and pull out a long mirror from down the side of the closet, just to check I don’t look stupid. Through a layer of dust, I squint at my reflection, turning this way and that. Five foot three. Small, compact body. The stats are the same but I don’t recognise this person. There’s something alien about her. Other, but familiar somehow. Like a friend of a friend. She looks young. Uncertain. Sporty. I’m not sporty. I’m arty. I’m bookish. I haven’t played a team sport since I gave up netball aged eleven.
When we were fifteen, Leila and I began a campaign directed at the male P.E. teachers in our state school to get them to let us play football. It was a rough school and initially they laughed at us and said we just wanted to kiss the boy players. For three solid years, Leila and I begged. The teachers said we’d get hurt. They said they weren’t insured. They said Leila’s nails were too long. In our final summer, Mr Forbes, who clearly fancied Leila, let us play cricket.
Urgh. Cricket. We couldn’t think of a more boring sport. Football had prestige. Footballers tore down the pitch. Footballers screamed. Cricket was a polite cough and a silly jog. But, so that we didn’t leave our school without a girl ever having played a ‘boy’s sport’ there, we acquired long cream trousers and baggy cream shirts and tried to make it cute, with cream hair bobbles around teddy bear buns. All summer, we stared miserably over at the rounders pitch, where the other girls were having actual fun.
After that, I forgot about football. For me, it was like something that happened through a window that didn’t open. If I looked the way of a football pitch, my eyes glazed over and I turned away blankly, without really seeing. I didn’t even watch the 2022 women’s football world cup, in which England came second. I wasn’t aware of it.
Football was in a list in my head titled ‘Things Not Meant For Me’.
I slip the boots we picked out into my backpack. White leather with black stripes. Cute and cheap. I clip wrist-weights on. I haven’t been able to run recently, because the ligaments in my hips are loose and aching and keep getting strained. I did manage to see an NHS physio who said the weights will help me get fitter, while I can’t run. A problem: I will have to run in football. But I don’t want to not go. I need a social activity where I don’t really have to socialise. Just something to get me out, help with fitness, help me have tiny chats with people. In the past six months, I’ve tried picking up the hobbies I used to like. But in craft workshops people expect me to talk and I can’t. I’m barely awake. Sometimes I struggle to form words. Struggle not to cry. I am hoping this might be different. More doing, less chatting.
Plus, I need something regular. The yoga teacher I liked had to move to a cheaper town. The knitting group lost the funding for their space. The rounders I played over summer was often cancelled. The watercolour teacher retired to Spain. Nothing has been reliable, and reliable is what I desperately need. I am hoping, in England, football will be reliable. People play football in the rain, don’t they? In the winter? They won’t cancel it, will they? It will be there, every week?
I blush, even though I’m alone. Sink down onto the bed, ready to go. Sit there for ten, twenty minutes. I feel sorry for her, this person who tries and tries again.
Get back in bed, I try to tell her. Don’t try. It’s not worth it.
Doesn’t she know every game is a losing game? Hasn’t she learnt anything?
What do you think — Remontada or The Comeback? Comment below.
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Great opening, really captures the atmosphere, and so relatable too!