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Teo sounds disbelieving. “Really? Just from heading a ball?”
“Really,” Mitch booms. “The science has proven that without doubt now, which is why heading is being phased out of kids’ matches. Banned—to cut down on needless trauma.”
Banned?
I must have headed balls thousands of times in training. I even stood in an academy goal with my hands tied behind my back and made save after save with only my noggin. Then I’d done it again, just as soon as I stopped puking.
I haven’t thought about that for years. Now my head thuds at remembering those batterings, and Kirsty’s voice buzzes. “Hayden? You still there?”
“Yeah, I’m still here.”
Mitch isn’t. He must have left while I was locked into a different kind of booming than his voice. This remembered pounding relates to a life I’ve left behind, and, in hindsight, to coaches that Dad would have lost his shit with if he’d seen their training methods.
“Hayden?” Kirsty asks again, but now someone else is my reason for being distracted.
Rae stands in a spot that used to be mine on football pitches, and Teo runs up to take a shot directly at him.
“Fuck sake.”
That slips out as I stand up to see Teo slam the ball into the back of the net, and Rae cackles as though almost getting concussed is a fun way to start his morning.
“What did you say, love?”
Kirsty tells someone in the background to be quiet. Good luck with that if all three girls are in the kitchen with her. That room is tiny compared to the one where I’d shovel down carbs before matches and where I’d walk in on her and Dad hugging after failed IVF cycles.
I baked a cake for her in that kitchen when she told me I was going to be a big brother. Now she says, “Hush, I’m talking to Hayden,” to that cause for celebration. I have to hold my phone away from my ear at the screeching that comes in triplicate, but I must smile at the girls all begging for her to put the call on speaker; across the grass, Rae grins too.
At me.
That could prove fatal. Teo has a powerful right foot, so I bellow even louder than Mitch did. “Keep your eye on the ball!”
That screeching on my phone silences abruptly. So abruptly that I check the screen, assuming we’ve been cut off. Instead, Kirsty asks a careful question. “You’re playing again, love?”
“Footy? No, I…” At some point, I’ve left Rowan’s outdoor classroom and drifted closer to the pitch. Now my toes are only inches from the touchline, and all I can do is swallow.
She guesses again. “You’re coaching?” she asks, sounding…
Hopeful.
Fuck knows what that does to my face. I grit out, “No,” and Rae jogs over, his smile gone.
“Hey, you okay?”
Three voices shriek, “Who’s that?” Which isn’t how I intended to introduce the girls to someone I’m not entirely sure how to label, but I switch to a video call that ends with Rae cackling again at my sisters’ inquisition. I can’t be too mad about them fighting over who gets to hold the phone or about their intrusive questions, not when he answers and I get to find out more about him.
“Why do I sound like this?” His eyes laugh at me as he hams up his accent. “Because I’m a London boy, innit.” He shares which part of the city he grew up in, and they shout back the name of the neighbourhood of a northern city where Dad rented a house after I was scouted.
Ava is the smallest and fiercest of my sisters. “We’re right by the academy. Only boys get to play there, which is sexist.”
Emma is equally indignant. “Itissexist. That’s why Dad painted our front door pink, because girls rule.”
There’s no way she remembers that door being painted. I do, because it was me who slapped on that pink coat of paint when I was fifteen. I only copied what Dad showed me. He’d painted the front door of our old house to make Kirsty smile when she brought the girls home for the first time.
Smile?
She’d cried her eyes out, and so did the girls, which is how I got a crash course in rocking babies. So yeah, it was me who painted the door pink where they live now, but I did it for theexact same reason. Girls do rule, and fuck anyone who says different.
My sister Isla is easygoing, like always. “Girls can play footy if they want to. But mostly, I just like pink. What’s your favourite colour?”
