Now the players were running about in five-a-side games. Watching the players train, Tony knew he would miss the action after retirement. He knew he’d still wake up at the same time every morning, incapable of persuading himself that there was joy to be found tucked away somewhere under the linen sheets that called for prolonged periods of supine meditation. Perhaps he would take long morning walks, absent-mindedly wandering into parks, then pick-up games. He might stand under some willowing tree, lost in thought and reminiscing the good old days until Big Ben struck twelve. Just like that, he would have no clue what in God’s name he was doing in the park. His relentless cerebral armageddon would have transformed him into a salivating hunchback who needed much more than a ball of yarn to find his way back.
Irrespective of such scenarios, however, football was a chapter of his life that he had decided to close. In fact he should have closed it years ago, when Emma was troubled with demons in her head. The demons had been accumulating over the years, preying on even the tiniest of doubts and trepidations, bloating themselves into insurmountable sizes so that Emma could no longer keep calm and carry on. But Tony had. He had kept calm, carrying on with work as usual, getting up at six like clockwork and hitting the office by seven thirty. Training players, analysing teams, meeting the board, attending local events, addressing club issues. He ticked off all these items on a daily basis because he was finally getting somewhere. All those years of third-tier football were somehow culminating in a streak of good fortune and he simply had to be there, foot planted steadfastly on the doorsill, ready to walk the guard of honour when the door opened.
Even so, he did respect his conjugal vows - as much as his heart would allow. He took Emma to several therapists, put up with her increasingly untenable bouts of temper, and did all he could to hold her for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. But the initial oscillation between sickness and health slowly deteriorated into a thumping staccato succession of the myriad variations of sickness: silence, accusations, fantasy, insomnia, lethargy, masochism, sadism, tears, alcohol, insults, threats, kicking, screaming, harpooning, and one account of attempted defenestration. Oftentimes he wondered how it had all begun and leafed through Kodaks of the yesteryears in search of clues.
Curiously enough, the peaks and troughs of his managerial and marriage careers seemed exactly the opposite. As if shackled down to infinitely parallel tracks, there was never a time when his professional success coincided with domestic passion. When Tony was just starting out as a manager after hanging up his boots, he enjoyed quite a bit of beginner’s luck; referees blew their whistles his way, fixtures were kind, and he had a good core of tough, honest players who neither dissented nor despaired.
But coming home after a match or training was quite a damper, to use a euphemism. Emma was less than pleased at his overzealous commitment to work. ‘You quit bloody football only to pick it right back up,’ she had cried vitriolically, and demanded more time at home. Ironically this triggered the opposite response in Tony. The more time she demanded the less he wanted to give it to her. Instead he would grab a pint or two with the coaches and come home plastered, stumbling arse over tit to the loo and discharging the fermented broth he’d spent many a tenner on.
Then there was the time when he’d got the sack from Barnet following a string of unsavoury results. He remembered taking swig after swig of whisky in broad daylight, then being picked up at the pub and escorted home by Emma, who nursed him back to full health with the devotion of a regular Nightingale. They’d gone away to the South of France for a long overdue vacation and had returned after a fortnight, fully replenished in spirit and love.
Gradually though, Tony’s career picked up and he moved to bigger teams. He coached the youth teams of a few respectable teams including Liverpool before receiving the offer to coach London FC’s reserves. By the time they moved to London the relationship was irreparable. The realisation came years before, when he caught Emma masturbating. He had dosed off on the sofa and when he woke up the house was silent. Too silent, he thought. He got up and walked upstairs to their bedroom, raising his heels to walk on tiptoes. The bedroom door was ajar and as he approached stealthily he saw through the crack his wife, sprawled out naked on their bed and eagerly working a handheld battering ram to open up the gate to which Tony had been denied access for an eternity. The Ah minor from Emma and Z major of the battering ram combined for the soft eulogy that leaked into the corridor.
Tony couldn’t recall what happened in the following minutes, but he did remember curling up on the sofa and draping the quilt over his head. Maybe he fell asleep or maybe he didn’t. However he did pretend to be asleep when Emma entered the lounge much later and checked to see if he was awake. Then she left the house and didn’t return until Sunday.
It was true Tony had not been a good husband. But he was not the swashbuckling type and hid from confrontations. He saved his confrontations for the football pitch, hoping that one day life off the pitch would somehow return to normalcy.
And one day, Tony returned home to find Emma’s cold body lying on the floor.
In the months that followed, the flat became a mausoleum. Tony moved through it like a ghost, eating toast over the sink, sleeping on the sofa because the bedroom still smelled of her perfume. He might have rotted there entirely if not for the woman who moved in next door. He'd noticed the removal van one Saturday morning, and later that afternoon she'd knocked on his door holding a casserole dish and an apologetic smile about the noise. Something about her face stirred a distant chord — green eyes, auburn hair going silver at the temples — but he couldn't place it. It wasn't until she introduced herself as Elizabeth Boye that the chord resolved into a melody from another lifetime.
But that was a story for another day. Right now, Tony had a football club to manage.
Mateo struck the ball with typical precision and watched emotionlessly as it drew a perfect arch to fly into the top right-hand corner of goal. He signaled to Frank, the assistant manager, and dragged himself off the pitch. His body was burned out from a heavy season, but it was his mind that pleaded him to walk away. The events of yesterday were taking a toll on his body and he had lost his focus.
Tony watched on as his golden boy headed inside. After starting every game this season, the fatigue in him was visible, and Tony had sanctioned the switch to a more flexible training routine. He didn’t mind that Mateo trained less than the other players; he wanted a grand finale to his career, to walk one last guard of honour before he entered the lonely corridors of his care home, and Mateo held the key.
But Tony had been around long enough to recognise a distracted player when he saw one. Did he want a new contract? Was he contemplating a move elsewhere? Either way Tony had to tie him down before the press started printing ‘Mateo Moving to United?.’
As Mateo headed to the showers, Tony followed him at a distance. Why he had not called out and simply walked in with him, he did not know. In any case, it was far too late to call out and stop Mateo without giving away the fact that he had been creepily following him for a good several hundred metres. They were both inside the building now and Tony paused in his tracks as Mateo dropped his water bottle to punctuate the corridor’s silence with a reverberating clank. Mateo resumed walking and entered the dressing room. As he approached the dressing room, Tony heard the sound of water streams cascading onto Mateo’s body. The reflexive projection of that image inside his head caused Tony to turn his head away and look down in embarrassment. He was reminded of certain memories - memories that persistently hovered along the underworld of his mind.
His demons left him in peace soon enough, and Tony pulled himself together to march into the dressing room. He walked straight to the end and made a left turn, his shoes now crossing over from the charcoal rubber flooring to the white ceramic tiling of the shower room. And when he turned right, he saw beneath a steamy fog, at the far end stall that was exposed to his view, Mateo’s back turned toward him. His left arm was bent in a right angle, forming a triangle together with the left side of his waist. And his elbow served as the steady vortex of a vibrating triangle as Mateo’s forearm bobbed up and down frantically, undoubtedly attempting to force an end product of sorts on the other side.
Good Lord, thought Tony as he instinctively recoiled back into the dressing room. Bemused and intrigued, he tiptoed out of the dressing room and waited for Mateo to finish. Out in the hall, Tony nodded hullo to Jimmy the janitor and watched him swing his mop to and fro, an image that recalled the vibrating triangle of moments ago. Then, when his ears could no longer pick up the sounds of the showerhead yonder, he took a deep breath and marched in again.
‘Mateo my boy,’ Tony wondered if his voice betrayed anything.
‘Hey boss,’ muttered Mateo, drying his hair off with a towel.
‘Is there something you want to tell me son?’
Mateo lowered his towel and looked straight at him.
‘No, boss. Is there problem?’
Tony folded his arms across his chest and took a couple steps forward. ‘Listen, son I’m not trying to jump on you, you did nothing wrong. But we have a massive game coming up and I want to make sure your head is in the right place.’
‘Yes. I focus Sunday. I want the title, and I want supporters be happy.’
‘Ok,’ Tony nodded with his arms still folded. ‘And if we win this title, I promise you will be getting an improved contract.’
Mateo let out a small titter and walked up to Tony. ‘Boss, I don't care money. But thank you.’
As Mateo approached, Tony’s eyes incidentally wandered down to a gold lotus pendant dangling from Mateo’s neck. And shock arrested his body as he recognised his gift to Emma from decades ago. Although he hadn’t seen it for ages, he was certain that was the very pendant. No, it could not have been the only one of its kind, but the observer is never free from his history, and Tony sensed his mind being swept up by tides of the past.
‘Forgive me, but that is a fine necklace. Do you mind?’ And without waiting for an approval, Tony reached out and turned the lotus over. He scanned the surface and found the vestiges of an initial. The first was a half erased E or B. The second was an eroded P or R. Emma’s maiden name was Richards.
Tony’s cardiac pulsations were growing violent, but he chose to forego any irrational decisions and did not press more questions. But that was not to say he could forego answers. His frailty was strengthening by the day, and he did not want answers to arrive after dementia had devoured him.
‘Mateo, if there is anything you want to talk about at all - I mean anything, you let me know.’
‘Gracias. There is nothing, but thank you.’
‘Are you sure?’
Mateo shot him a quizzical look. ‘Yes. But if I have problem, you will help?’
'Yes, Mateo. I will indeed.'