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Ant watched a referee’s convention on the otherwise empty track. In their black and white striped shirts they looked like a herd of zebras. On wheels. “What of it?”
“Well, first is she safe?”
“She says so.” The refs were all blokes. Some of the coaches too. He wondered why that was, given this was an all female league. He couldn’t think of a single male contact sport where female refs or coaches would be tolerated. He’d never noticed that before.
“How’d you go from spitting at each other to swapping spit?”
“She held my hand. She touched my face. I told her she was beautiful and she liked it.”
“The usual stuff, so why do you think you forced it?”
“She bolted.”
Dan went, “Hmm.” He knew immediately where Ant’s problem was. Chicks didn’t bolt. Apart from Fluke, and Fluke was clean a girl up and get her home safely, the boys were smart enough only to hit on chicks who knew the rules of the game. He’d thought Bree knew what she was doing. “And you don’t think it’s the whole work with each other thing?”
That was one of the many things Ant was unsure about. Maybe that was all it was. But if that’s what Bree was worried about, the speculation started the moment she took his hand and left the restaurant with him. They didn’t need to make out to raise the gossip stakes.
He shrugged. He felt the weight of not knowing hanging over him like an avalanche of water. “Could be.” He’d have said more but the gang was back.
Mitch handed him a coke and a burger and sat beside him. “When’s dinner?” From further down the line Fluke piped up, “Yeah, when is dinner?”
Next to Dan, Scott said, “I deserve to be in on this. I had to suffer your last bet.”
Ant groaned. There was no point even trying to fob them off. He might as well get it over with. “I lost, okay. Bree won. She wiped the floor with me.”
The amount of noise that came out of people he counted as friends rivalled anything any of the derby team’s cheers quads served up. People all over the stadium looked at them including the zebras still on the track.
“Making a new habit of losing bet’s, eh, Ant,” said Fluke, from safely out of arms reach of a backhander.
“Yeah, laugh it up, Fanta-pants.”
“We’ll get back to you with our availability, mate,” said Mitch. And the digs continued to roll in, but so two did the next two teams, Tricks and Housework Heroines.
The Heroines skated in waving toilet brushes and their cheer squad had them too, the sound system played Sadie the Cleaning Lady, one of those old joke songs. Bree had once mentioned it. Funny she’d know that song.
The Tricks were trying to encourage the non Heroine fans to boo and the biggest wag on the track was Toni. She made Ant forget about his issue with Bree and laugh while she hammed it up, at one point standing in front of a pack of Heroine fans and mocking them with a pantomime of sweeping, ironing and scrubbing. They threw toilet brushed at her. She caught them and threw them back.
But once the whistle blew to signal the start of the bout, all the fun and games were over. It was war on wheels. Toni was in the thick of it, just like the Toni who’d dared him to brand her with a tennis ball. She even sat on the Heroine’s jammer, in what the announcer describes as a booty block that stopped the skater going anywhere and cleared a path for the Tricks’ feisty little jammer with her helmet with its two stars looking too big for her head, to score again. She was the smallest person on the track, the fastest and the trickiest. Her roller girl name was Kitty Caruso.
Ant sat forward to study her. What made a little girl like that want to play in a rough and tough game like this? Scott had said earlier that like women’s cricket, roller derby was code for lesbian. Scott had been quick to say that was as stupid as suggesting all male dancers were gay, which made Dan grab Alex and bend her over Scott’s lap to kiss her stupid. Alex didn’t seem to mind. Scott squirmed and eye-rolled.
Ant watched as Toni sweat it out in the penalty box and wondered if there was something in it, and why all of a sudden sexual politics was following him around like a stray dog that could bite his hand off if he let it get too close.
He slurped his coke and focussed on Kitty Caruso again. She flounced into the penalty box, her skirt flipping up so the words Bite Me printed on her pants were visible for a second. She passed her star helmet cover to Toni as she was re-entered the track, her pants flashing Back Off. There wasn’t a shy bone in the bodies of these girls they were all show, all performance. They were gladiators as well as being incredible athletes.
Now the little roller doll was still he could see she had bruises on her thighs under her fishnets. She had her head down on her pink and black skates. He was fascinated by her. So gutsy. Come on baby, let me see your face. Nope, she kept her head down as if annoyed with herself for being sin-binned.
When the jam ended, with the point going to the Heroines, Kitty was back in the game. Now he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She avoided being taken out by
another player’s stumble by going down on her knees and spinning a full three-sixty degrees, she was back on her feet before he had time to wonder how she’d done it. Two seconds later, she’d scored by breezing past all the Heroine’s blockers as if they were standing still and called the jam off by putting her hands on her hips, ensuring the Tricks won the point.
As the two teams reassembled to start a new jam, she skated close by the edge of the track and looked up into the crowd, and that dog shadowing Ant bit him hard, that avalanche of water he’d felt above him came crashing down. Unless he needed glasses, under the padding and black war paint, Kitty Caruso was Bree Robinson. She was bruised because she was a roller derby jammer, and she bolted on him because like Toni, she liked girls.
12: Soul Crush
Toni didn’t tell her Ant and his gang had come to watch again, so when Bree thought she spotted him in the audience her concentration catapulted out of her brain. She turned to look back and check it really was him, and clipped the skate of a Heroine’s player behind her. It was a rookie, cherry popper thing no fresh meat graduate would’ve done. When she crashed to the track, she came off her knee and her hip went down so hard she bounced, sprawled on her hands and caromed straight into a group of Tuck Shop Ladies Arms fans in the suicide seats, knocking several of them over.
Oh fuck!
