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He hadn’t meant to do any of this.
It had all just happened, and he’d tried to sort it.
Plus, he clearly massively regretted it all, anyway.
So she sighed, and let things fall into silence. And when she finally did say something, it wasn’t about the point. It was about the other thing he’d said, the ridiculous thing that he clearly had no understanding of at all: when you’re famous on socialmedia people will say completely irrelevant nonsense to you all the time.
Even if said nonsense isn’t fair in the slightest.
“Yeah, Pendleton really should have passed to you sooner,” she said.
And it worked, too. He dropped his hands, and as he sat back in his usual place—across from her, on the diagonal—he answered in a huffy but still obviously relieved to be talking about something else sort of way. “He sat on that fucking ball for half an hour, dithering fuck.”
“It was his whole problem, not being decisive enough.”
He made a derisive sound. “If you asked him if he needed the loo he’d saynot sure.”
“Which was probably why he pissed himself over them penalties.”
“Never seen anyone knock out a fan in the crowd before or since.”
He shook his head on the end of that. Clearly remembering, in a way that relaxed him even further. And it did something else, too. Because suddenly he seemed to be turning something over in his head. Then after he had, he gave her this long look. This assessing look, that said he’d figured something out.
Something she hadn’t meant to reveal.
But was obvious after all the specifics she’d just gone into.
“You like football, then,” he said, and okay, he wasn’t exactly right.
However, he wasn’t exactly wrong, either. “It was mostly just because of my dad,” she said, and when she did she thought about it. She thought about Euro ’96, screaming at the telly when Spain scored. ChantingWe Are Leedson the terraces; him telling her that Sheffield Wednesday were a set of bastards. Him drunk, her trying to drag him down Elland Road in the dark—and then after that not wanting to watch it anymore.Too good for it, are you now, he’d said to her.
Then she looked away from the past, and at Alfie Harding. Alfie Harding, who believed he was nothing but was actuallyeverything. Legendary center forward, one of the finest footballers in the game, a man her father had once grudgingly called all right for a fucking Mancunian.
And Alfie Harding said this:
“Yeah. Same.”
At which point, she knew.
She knew. But she couldn’t believe it enough not to ask.
“You only got into football because your dad made you?”
Then he nodded. He nodded. He actuallynodded.
Half amused, she thought, to see her shock.
But half something else at the same time.
Something that made his voice a little hoarse when he replied.
“He had to drag me to practice at one point. Gave me a clip if I said no.”
Fucking hell, she thought. Then couldn’t even rein it in for her response.
“That’s horrible. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Any worse than what you had to deal with?”
