A few drivers had slowed to look up at the side of the coach as it circled the roundabout. Along one stretch of its window, near the back, three pairs of white buttocks were pressed to the glass like a row of supermarket chicken breasts. A car came past and the driver sounded his horn. The next driver repeated the action. When the coach lurched off the roundabout one of the pairs of buttocks momentarily disappeared, before returning emphatically to its place alongside the others.
Tom sat alone beside his kitbag, looking across the aisle at the hysterical gurning faces of the three mooners. The middle one had dropped his trousers to his ankles, his cock bobbing stupidly with the motion of the vehicle as it overtook a caravan onto the dual carriageway. Tom turned away, glad that the short journey was nearly over.
They were on their way to a hotel away from the town center—a preseason policy enforced by the chairman in the aftermath of one eventful weekend the previous summer. Tom had not been at the club then, although he had heard the story. He’d arrived less than two months ago, shortly after being let go by his boyhood club at a brief and tearful meeting with the new manager. The memory of that afternoon was still difficult for him to think about. All of the second-year scholars lining up in the corridor among the new man’s cardboard boxes and whiteboards. The office and its stale stink of the old gaffer’s cigarettes. The sight of the new manager behind the desk, calling for him to take a seat. “You’re a good lad, from what I hear. Your parents should be proud of you. You’re going to be some player, when you grow into yourself. I’ve got no doubt that you’ll find another club.” Tom found out afterwards that he’d spoken exactly the same words to all of them, except for the two he had awarded first-team contracts to. Thirteen lads who had progressed through each of the youth levels with Tom, all hoping now for another club to phone them while they thumbed the jobs pages or took on work from recruitment agencies, shopping centers, the multiplex, all waiting to grow into themselves. Unlike most of them, though, Tom did get approached. A small club down south. His agent called him one morning to say that their chairman had organized a hotel for the night so that he could come down and talk to them with a view to a one-year contract. “Who?” his sister asked when he told his family. “What are they, non-league?” “No, they just got promoted from the Conference. My agent says they’ve got money behind them.” He looked away, not wanting to see her reaction, and clocked his dad already at the computer, peering, slowly nodding at the screen. The three backsides returned to their seats, laughing. The middle one, scanning around to see if anybody was still watching them, caught Tom’s eye, and Tom gave him a dumb grin before turning to the window. Cars moved past them in the other lane. Out of some, the blue and white scarf of that afternoon’s opposition flapped and spanked against rear windows. Inside a camper van, two young children were sticking their tongues out at him. The match had begun promisingly: It was Tom’s first start of the preseason friendlies, and the sick cramping tension of the dressing room had left him the moment play started. During one early scrappy passage the ball spilled out to him on the wing and he ran automatically at the fullback who, stumbling, tripping, ballooned the ball away over their falling bodies for a corner.