Craig made a face. “You’ve said that the last three times I’ve invited you. What gives? I know you had a problem with Marla a while ago, but I thought you had gotten over all that stuff.”
“Mate, I’m just busy.” I didn’t want to tell Craig his wife was a complete slag. One of our few fights had been when I made a drunken mistake of calling her a slut right after they had gotten engaged. It had ended with him a black eye and me a split lip. I clasped his shoulder before turning to walk towards the dressing room.
“Yeah, well if you change your mind, give me a call,” he called after me.
Once alone, I enjoyed the few blissful moments of solitude before the rest of the team came to the showers. I didn’t get a lot of time to myself anymore.
My agent loved to tell me that my star was rising. That soon I’d be the most in demand player in English football. Manchester City and Liverpool had already made inquiries. I could set my price.
Blah, blah, fucking blah.
I didn’t play football for the fame. Sure the money was nice and could be a whole lot nicer, but everything else that went with it could fuck right off.
It was only three seasons ago that I was playing for my tiny hometown non-league team in Kent, working a dead end job in construction, living on a shit council estate and resigning myself to going nowhere fast.
I had done shitty in school, so university had never been in the cards. I needed to work, not waste time in classes. My mother needed my help to pay the bills. My little sister, Anna, needed a father figure, since ours had decided to up and leave when I was twelve.
I fell into the role of provider after leaving school at sixteen. And it had chaffed my ass.
I was an angry little cunt with too much responsibility and not enough maturity to handle it. So I got into trouble. Got into a few fights. Sold a few drugs. I was a complete punk.
The football pitch was the only place I didn’t mess up. In the game, I was focused. I was determined.
Kicking the ball was the only thing I had ever been good at and eventually it got noticed.
When I was eighteen, a scout for AFC Canterbury, a decent League Two team, liked what he saw on the pitch and offered me a contract to play for them.
I remember laughing in the guy’s face when he spoke to me after a match.
But the guy was serious. AFC Canterbury would pay me actual money to play for them. A lot more money than I had ever hoped to see in my life. They would give me £45K a year to do something I loved. That was a huge sum of money to a poor kid from a run down village.
I had never considered playing football as a career. It was something fun I did on the weekends to distract me from my crap life. Now it was a way to get Anna out of the council estate and to take some of the stress off my mother’s shoulders.
When I told Mum she didn’t believe me at first.
“You’re too old to be tricking people with lies, Lucas,” she had scolded tiredly when I had rushed through the door that evening.
I had shoved the paperwork into her hands and the look on her face as she read them was priceless.
“You’re serious?” she had asked, her voice breaking, her eyes tearing up.
I had nodded, putting my arm around her sunken shoulders. She looked a lot older than she was. She had been working too hard for too long.
“I’m gonna take care of you, Mum. You and Anna,” I had told her and then she started crying.
“I should be the one taking care of you, Lucas,” she had blubbered.
“I hope you don’t mind moving to Canterbury,” I said and we both laughed. And the tears had stopped.
Anna was a bit of pain when she was told we’d be moving. She was sixteen and wasn’t keen on leaving her crap friends behind. But she didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.
We followed the money.
It had been a whirlwind ever since. I spent only a year at AFC Canterbury where I beat their all time scoring record in my one season. I got signed on with my agent, Mo Sheppard, who then secured me a two year contract with the Guildford Rangers, a low level League One team making £72,000 a year.
I thought I had hit the big times. I had never dreamed of making that much money. I was flying high. I moved my mum and sister into a three bedroom semi-detached in a nice neighborhood in Surrey. I didn’t even balk at the rental price. I could afford it. I was doing pretty damn well for myself.
But old habits die hard and even though I was slowly making a name for myself, I was still the screwed up kid from Kent with a rap sheet and a bad reputation.
