The Fabulous Destiny of Marked Accordingly

It was an important game, as these things go, and, as these things often also go, a rubbish and scrappy one, a stupid, scrambling shot eventually bundled past me with all the style and grace of an orange being passed under peoples’ chins in a drunken party game eventually being equalised and then surmounted by two comparably awful goals of our own. It was dark, it was wet, there was nobody there, not even the man walking his dog or the squalling teenage girls, but it was the summer before Uni and it was football for Christ’s sake, or something like it! Compounding, or perhaps causing, the clumsy crapness was a large ginger-headed lad in the opposing team, of imprecise position and largely untested ability, except in the fields of intimidation and aggression and seeming to hear voiceless insults out of what had that morning been the clear blue sky, his propensity for whirling on his nearest opponent with a growl of “Who the FUCK said that?!” predictably enough provoking the more well-proportioned (and, let it be said, mischievous) of my teammates to bear-baiting of the most malicious kind, cries of “Ya ginger-heided KNOB!” settling immediately into eleven looks of the most perfect innocence. But now he was starting to get annoying, and my teammates were starting to get annoyed. Something ugly was looming; the clock clicked into its final minute. The only thing that makes games like that bearable is winning.

Having scarcely been involved since the start of the second half, my wavering attention had more or less attached itself exclusively to making ineffectual efforts to calm my friends down. The usual last-minute nerves in complete subsidence, even as we prepared to face a corner, I watched with concern as the lad jostled and barged around the penalty box. It was coming. And so was the corner, a decent one if with a little too much hangtime, curling back in towards goal but so slowly, with so far to fall, that I was under it all way, watching it lazily bend back to the near post and straight through my wet, complacent gloves.

I didn’t spin quickly enough to see the defender on the line punch it clear, and not until the red card had been flourished at his receding back did I realise what had happened. The redhead was already placing the ball on the spot. Somebody found it deep within themselves to say something encouraging; everybody else, I knew, could not have hated me more, the responsibility for all the unbearable, ginger-heided gloating that was coming our way subtly deflected from me to him. He stood with his hands on his hips, not a shimmer of anticipative joy or even suspense in his demeanour. I waited. A whistle blew, I think. He strode purposefully up.

It was a poor penalty, passed weakly towards the bottom-right corner of the goal, and even in midair I had time to be surprised, relieved that I had guessed right and was going to be behind the ball even in time to grasp it firmly, clasp it to my chest as I climbed first to one knee then to my feet, the roar of relief and tsunami of hair-rubbing, back-patting hands some counterbalance to the strange feeling of anticlimax, the realisation that through euphoric rose-tinted views of a one-time event no-one except me and Ginger would ever know or care that it was as woeful a penalty as had ever been struck, a trundler, slower and slower each time I remembered it, practically snagging to a halt in the long thick grass.

On my way back to the changing rooms I spotted the guy hanging disconsolately around the corridor, and as his eyes flashed up to meet mine I thought for a moment, just for a moment, I caught a glimpse of something like inner pain and hurt, confusion, the incomprehension of a wounded child. Elated still, relieved, magnanimous in victory, I curved the corners of my mouth into a smile of the most sincere sympathy and understanding, my right eyebrow simultaneously twitching upwards in wry acknowledgement of, nay, resignation to the ineluctable fickleness of the Fates and Football.

“Whit’s the smile fur.” he croaked, with a sullen menace which made all too clear the fact that I was being done a professional courtesy by having the appropriateness of my facial features queried rather than instantly and violently reconstructed there and then. Making the necessary adjustments, I hurried past and on into the rest of my life.

I am not very good at telling stories, and whenever I tell this one people automatically assume that the point of it is that the guy was a wanker. Well, so he was, but so what? Virtually everyone you ever meet is. As a matter of fact, the story is about how I am a wanker, a point not clear to anyone who doesn’t know me and can’t therefore envisage me striding down that changing room corridor, a smirk of the most transparent smugness and superiority plastered across my face, my eyes glittering with a scarcely concealed inner life of pirouetting down Paris streets and turning somersaults in San Diego, and you supposed to be consoled by it! Because the primary reason for my rubbishness as a person, I have always been convinced, is not that my feelings are less virtuous than anyone else’s but that I am much less adept at conveying feelings I do not have, and that it always goes so much the worse with me because I try to look sympathetic about things I do not, in fact, give a shit about. And so with everything. My attempts at practical jokes invariably undermined by my inability to conceal my delight at my impending delight, my sallies in lulling peoples’ suspicions interrupted by frequent bouts of random and staccato giggling.

So I have no poker face, for a start. I will also never be able to ghostwrite someone else’s autobiography, as what is always most striking about the by-the-numbers celebrity autobiographies which brandish our unglamour at us in shops through winter windows is not that their voices are false per se, not that they are delivered in a manner of self-expression wholly alien to our previous experiences of Posh Spice and David Beckham, but that they are not like any people we have ever met before, ever. Sports journalists routinely formalise the inarticulate grunts of athletes into semi-coherent platitudes, but ghost-written autobiographies are not usually just that kind of bland translation exercise, because it is never just the language that is wrong but also everything which ought to underpin it, our basic human assumptions, common sense, the very idea of a sentient being committing it to paper: it is as if some uncomprehending but basically sympathetic order of life form is writing a novel about what it is like to be a human, with about as much success and insight as Anna Sewell in conveying what it is like to be a horse. Take Amarillo Slim’s autobiography, for example. The fizzy, folksy, Wayne-Western language is, for all I know, exactly how Slim really speaks. But what lies behind it? Everywhere you poke the facade crumbles away like soil, like papier-mache, and the creepy conclusion is that, like Patrick Bateman, the real Amarillo Slim is simply not there. Perhaps he is not anywhere. Perhaps no-one is, and everybody everywhere is the same kind of static, fragile abstract of a once shared memory of mankind. For a boy whom Invasion of the Body Snatchers scared near to death, these are not welcome or comforting thoughts.