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TAKE IT EASY, LAD, IT’S NOT THAT DEEP
MARCH 11TH 2001
JOEY
You knowthe saying about idle hands being the devil’s workshop?
Yeah, I thought that might be true.
Sunday was the one day of the week that I didn’t have work, school, or training. Aside from the occasional match, I was a free agent.
Problem was, doing nothing didn’t come easy to me.
I was neverlessin control than when I found myself at a loose end.
With my hands hanging, and nothing to occupy my racing mind, I went looking for trouble, and found it in the form of sharing a few lines of coke with Shane and the lads.
The temporary high was fantastic.
I felt on top of the world.
I felt like I could run a marathon andwinit.
I felt like there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do.
The only snag to an otherwise perfectly planned out Sunday was that I forgot about the match I had to play.
And now, several hours later, after crashing hard, I felt like shit.
Throughout the entire game, my heart continued to race violently, thundering so loud and hard against my chest bone, that I could hear it in my ears.
Distracted and on edge, I messed up all over the pitch, either pucking the sliotar too long or not being in the right position for defense and had only managed to score two measly points in the whole sixty minutes.
There was an underage county selector for Cork in the stand, and I’d blown it.
Knowing that my father was also somewhere in the stands, watching my piss-poor performance, and plotting my punishment for disappointing him, only made me feel ten times worse than I already did.
Thoroughly depressed and thoroughly fucking stressed, I whipped my helmet off the minute the referee blew the final whistle and stalked off in the direction of the changing rooms, ignoring several claps on the shoulder from my teammates.
Tossing my hurley and helmet on top of my gear bag, I reached a hand behind my head and whipped my jersey off, ignoring all of the chatter around me.
Burning the fuck up from running around a pitch for the past hour, I blew out a harsh breath and snatched up my water bottle.
“Mighty stuff, lads,” Eddie, our club trainer, declared with a clap, when he walked into the changing room a few minutes later. “That was a solid win. Those lads from St. Pats are a hard bunch. They were never going to go down without a fight, so be proud of yourselves for a hard-earned victory.”
Unscrewing the cap on my bottle, I poured the contents over my face and neck, feeling immediate relief when the water began to cool my overheated skin.
“Good game,” a familiar voice said, and I turned my head just enough to see none other than Molloy’s boyfriend, Paul Rice. He was taking up perch on the bench beside me, freshly showered, and with a towel slung around his waist. “I thought you were in for that goal in the second half.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, tossing my bottle back into my bag, and reaching for a towel. “Me too.” The ball I’d put narrowly wide would come back to bite me when I got home, no doubt.
“You had a good game, though,” Ricey offered, as he got dressed. “Nice shot at the end. I thought at one stage, they were going to run away with it—“
“I played poorly,” I cut him off by saying. “Don’t try to dress it up as anything else.”
“What’s your problem?” he demanded, running a hand through his dark hair. “We won, didn’t we?”
“You’re my problem,” I came right out with, bristling with tension. “I thought I made that clear last year?”
