Phil Kurthausen - Sudden Death

‘You take that seat,’ said Ted from behind him, pushing him towards the furthest and most central seat. ‘It’s the best seat in the ground.’ He bared white teeth that would have looked more appropriate on a twenty-five-year-old. ‘It’s my seat.’

Erasmus let himself fall into the seat and Ted sat down next to him. The seats were wider than those he had left but still Ted’s wide thighs strained against the top of Erasmus’s legs.

As they took the seats a chorus of boos rang out from the stand opposite.

Ted smiled, his unnaturally white teeth flashing in the tungsten glare of floodlights, and raised his hand in acknowledgement.

‘Arsenal fans?’ asked Erasmus.

‘Nope,’ said Ted through a fixed smile, ‘just some fucking ingrates who call themselves fans of this club.’

The boos were almost immediately replaced by a communal howling as a player in red scythed down a player in a blue shirt. It was the noise of a million disappointments and the cry of a hungry beast looking for meat.

Ted was so close that his cologne, so heavy and thick it seemed to surround him like a planetary atmosphere, lodged in Erasmus’s throat like a sticky sweet.

‘Do you like football, Erasmus?’

Erasmus had never been a good liar and now was not the time to start. He coughed, clearing his throat.

‘I don’t see the point. There are so many books to read, places to visit, women to know so why would I want to spend any of that time on watching a bunch of men chase an inflated pigs bladder around a muddy field.’

Ted placed his right hand over Erasmus’s left wrist and leaned in close bringing Erasmus closer into the smell of musk that hung over him. It reminded Erasmus of his long dead Uncle Charlie who had washed with coal soap and worn lashings of what his dad called ‘Christmas perfume’; cheap, heavy and sweet. He had an idea that Ted’s cologne wasn’t cheap.

‘See over there,’ he nodded towards the opposite stand, ‘down near the pitch, that small standing area?’

Erasmus saw a part of the stand was fenced off and even from here he could see that this part of the stand was full of teenagers.

‘That’s the kid’s pen. I used to stand there, forty years ago now, watching the greats: Ball, Kendall, Harvey. I have been in the theatre business all this time, and I’ve seen and met them all. Queens, princes, the rich, the poor, the brilliant and the best this world has to offer. And do you know what? I learnt everything about life, loss and love in the first seventeen years of my life, standing over there.’

Erasmus noticed that Ted’s eyes had become moist. He remembered that Ted had, before making his millions in the theatre world, once been a TV actor in a soap opera.

‘Dads would bring their sons, it was a rite of passage. All that life has to offer can be found in this game and, more importantly, in this club. This club is my life, and the life of forty thousand others in this ground. It is everything to the working man: his theatre, his palace, his place of dreams and fantasy.’

Erasmus studied Ted, trying to make out whether any of this was an act, but the tears and the grip on his arm told him that they were not, or that Ted Wright, former actor and theatre impresario, was a master in his line of work.

‘Why are they booing you, your fans?’ asked Erasmus.

Ted leant back in his seat and laughed.

‘We win they cheer me, we lose they boo me and send me excrement, and worse mind, through my letterbox. It’s just the way it is.’

‘Doesn’t sound like much fun?’ said Erasmus.

‘Fun? What the hell has fun got to do with it? I do it because I have to. I’m the guardian of this club! It was here before I was and it will be here after I’m gone and that’s a fact. Tell me, when you were hunting Taliban, was it fun?’

Erasmus said nothing.

‘I know about you, Mr Jones. I make it my business to find out about who I’m going to be working with. Drummed out of the Military Legal Service for picking up a weapon, leaving base and killing two Taliban who had maimed a class of little girls. A rather unusual legal practice and frankly just the type of person who does things because they need to be done, and not because they are fun. Am I right?’

Erasmus breathed in long and hard. Finally, he let the air out. He felt some, but by no means all, of the tension go with it.

‘Pete told me you wanted to speak to me about something?’

There was another roar from the crowd. Ted’s head snapped round towards the pitch.

One of the Everton players had slipped through the mass of red defenders and was bringing his left foot back to strike the ball. A pulse of excitement shot around the ground, transmitting itself through the people around them and suddenly everyone jumped to their feet.

To Erasmus’s amazement he found that he too was standing. Never underestimate crowd dynamics, he thought.

‘Go on, Wayne!’ screamed Ted.

A furiously loud shout of ‘penalty’ broke and crashed all around him as one of the Arsenal defenders kicked the Everton player’s standing foot away from him.

The referee blew his whistle and pointed to the penalty spot. More cheers.

Ted turned to Erasmus.

‘Wayne Jennings, the best player this club has ever produced. You don’t follow football but I presume you have heard of him?’

Erasmus just shrugged but even Erasmus, a sports hater, had found it difficult to avoid the existence of Wayne Jennings, the Premierships youngest ever goalscorer and England’s new hope for glory. He wasn’t going to let Ted know this though. He wondered at the reasons for his own contrariness, maybe it was a reaction to the fact that he had jumped up with the rest of the fans seated around him, an assertion of grumpy individuality. He knew any number of his ex-girlfriends and colleagues would say he was just being a twat.

Ted shook his head.

‘Score this goal and we’ll win and then be off the bottom. Come on, Wayne.’

An almost funereal hush had gripped the fans, men held each other in ways they would consider cause for a fight and shame outside of the ground. The tension was palpable as the young striker, Wayne Jennings, picked the ball up and placed it on the penalty spot.

The opposition goalkeeper moved from side to side and bent his legs at his knees in an effort to distract Wayne. He seemed to ignore the keeper, looking at the ground beneath his feet, until the last second before he looked up briefly and then began to run towards the ball.

There was the crackling sound of forty thousand breaths being held in the cold, November air.

‘Come on, Wayne,’ whispered Ted.

Two things happened at once. First, Erasmus noticed that although the crowd were all looking at Wayne running up to take the penalty, there was one face to his right, maybe twenty yards away, that was turned away from the goal, and the action on the field, and was looking directly at him. It was a man, maybe late forties, jet-black hair greased back and a lined face that spoke of an upbringing nearer to the equator than Bootle. The second was Wayne Jennings lifting his left foot to strike the ball, seemed to freeze in mid air, his foot extended back to almost a horizontal plane, and then wobbling as his right foot collapsed under him, before he fell crashing to the ground, his weaker right foot catching the ball by accident and knocking it forward no more than twelve inches.

The groans were deafening as the opposition keeper raced out and picked up the ball.

Erasmus looked back from the action and towards the man who had undoubtedly been staring at him. He was gone, his seat now empty.

‘Jesus!’ cried Ted.

He bent over and held his right palm to his forehead. An unhealthy looking flush had appeared on his face breaking through the tan.