He’s attended a hundred of these charity events in his young life, particularly photoshoot-y ones, smiling or displaying a practiced seriousness, dressed in Camden gear or designer jeans, never feeling anything less than just as handsome as heknowshe is. Oliver’s got no use for false modesty; it’s his job to believe that what his body is capable of is worth millions of pounds and infinite spectacle. It’s when he’s supposed to bring in his personality that trouble arises, when people want something more from him than he can give on the pitch. Harris the footballer isn’t meant to be shy, or anxious, or snappish, only charismatic andgolden and for all of Camden to consume. Sometimes the hunger other people have for him fills Oliver up, but mostly it’s like he can feel them gnawing at his bones. There’s always the fear that if someone got a good enough bite, they might taste what’s underneath, a mouthful of everything he’s keeping secret.
Oliver keeps doing the hospital visits in spite of this, or maybe somehow because of it. He used to have a complex about it, trading on his own pain and the tragedy of other people’s lives for money and for hisimage,but it really, truly isn’t about that—maybe for Nina, or for the charity, but not for him. Those six months where everyone seemed to realize that his dad was dying but no one wanted to be the one to say it out loud were the longest, most awful period of his life. He would sit at the foot of the hospital bed with his schoolwork and a football and think, over and over,Is this the last time? Will we see each other again?He could feel them both, in a childlike way, trying to cram a whole relationship into those last weeks. Dad could barely wheeze through conversations toward the end, but he was always talking to Oliver, listing all the things his son might need to know.
“Ollie, I know you love it,” he’d said while they were watching the last Camden match they would ever sit through together. “And you know how proud I am of you, right?”
He’d just been asked to board at the academy, which would mean training full-time and leaving his school. Oliver was afraid of it, of missing Maggie, not living with his mum, no more afternoons in the bookstall, losing any time with his dad. But he wanted it, desperately—he was just discovering how good he could be, where football could take him. And no small part of him wanted to run, all down the length of the pitch, away from all the sadness in this room, the sterile, sick scent of the hospital and the worried glances from his grandparents at the empty till. His life in Camden was slipping away from him, but Camden FC was looming larger and larger, in a way that made Oliver feel likehe could keep everything, if only he got his name onto that team sheet.
“But?” he asked Dad, knowing there would be one.
“But my education was the greatest thing I’ve ever earned. And the only thing I regret is not having more time to use it—to share it with you and Mum. I want you to have that too. I don’t want you to have to choose between football and everything else.”What else is there to choose?Oliver remembers thinking, so helplessly.Everything else is lost.But even at nine years old, he’d known he couldn’t say that—speaking it aloud would surely break the last spell of life that Dad was carrying with him, and Oliver wasn’t ready to say goodbye, not yet, not ever. “Promise me you’ll think about it.”
“Why do I have to promise?” Oliver felt his voice shaking, tears leaking out the corners of his eyes. Promises were so final, and he wassickof everything being final, of everything ending. “You won’t even…”
And Dad had flinched, and another round of coughing had seized him, and a nurse appeared, and Nan had pulled Oliver from the room, and his father had never talked with him like that again, too weak for more than nods, and three days later he was gone. Oliver isn’t sure if he believes in heaven—he’d like to imagine Dad can see him and Nicola, how well they’ve done, how much they miss him still—but he’s a little afraid of whether his father would think it was all worth it: what he gave to Camden compared to what he’s gotten in return.
“Ollie?” someone says, and his reverie is broken—he’s standing outside the double doors to the big building in Hampstead where the hospital’s family apartments are. Leo is standing there, too, looking concerned.
“Hi,” Oliver replies, voice full of cotton. “Good morning.”
“You okay?” Leo asks quietly, touching Oliver’s elbow, and even so soon out of his trance, the contact makes his heart leap.
“I’m okay,” he says, and finds it’s not a lie. “I’m glad you’re here. Let’s do this.”
Once they’re inside, the visit passes in a blur, like always, but Oliver holds on to snatches of it: The boy who has clearly been briefed on their arrival and is waiting for Oliver with a stack of Paddington books that’s taller than he is. Leo drawing in exquisite detail, upon request from a previously sullen preteen, a snowman made out of footballs, who can also fly. And Nina asking a little girl whose mother is in surgery if she likes football and her delicate little nod.Who’s your favorite player?She whispers back,Oliver,like it’s a secret, and Leo, standing next to them, suddenly gives her a conspiratorial smile and ducks down to her level.Mine too.
It feels so good and right to be there, more than ever before, so much that Oliver braves the walk across the way, toward the main campus, much too close to where Dad died, to meet Nicola as her night shift lets off and offer her a ride home. He manages to return her smile when she sees him; returning her embrace is as easy as anything.
“Do you want to go to lunch?” he asks. “To the market?”
The old bookstall sells vintage license plates now, which is incurably lame, but Camden Market is still the best place in the world to acquire both arepas and leather jackets, within ten feet of each other. The idea of crowding onto a picnic bench with Nicola and twelve other lunchgoers sounds like exactly what he wants to be doing. They’ll probably run into someone they know—someone theyreallyknow, who looks at Oliver and sees a kid from the neighborhood, not a press photo.
“I can’t think of anything better,” his mother tells him, and the warm sparkle in her eyes reflects back onto him like a perfect mirror.
• • •
The warmth in Oliver’s gut holds him over during the last few weeks of winter, until Camden plays Liverpool on the final day of February, a cold and sunny Tuesday at Anfield that he watches alone on his sofa.
Camden has a good showing; Oliver feels truly and vilely horny when Leo starts the match and then assists Emmanuel to open up the scoresheet not even ten minutes later. Leo is just sofit,running himself ragged in that Camden green. Oliver wants to serve him up a hundred perfect passes as a present and also bite him right on the jugular, to stake his claim. He’s drawn out of his slack-jawed imaginings by Liverpool scoring twice in quick succession, erasing the deficit and creating one of their own. The team is shocked, the wind knocked out of them, and though they shore up the defense and don’t concede again, they can’t quite manage to get one back. For all they started strong and hungry, coming off the win against Hull City, they’re right back in the trenches: zero points, sixth place. Oliver wishes he could kick something,anything,it wouldn’t even have to be a ball.
Then, four days later, he turns twenty-seven years old. It sneaks up on him like a mugger in a dark alley. He feels ancient. He’s not a breakout sensation anymore. He’s well and truly a man, in a new, uncharted era of his life and his career. The lads apparently convinced Conor Bishop to let them have full run of one of his cocktail emporiums for the evening, with an open bar and an exorbitant tip both paid in advance, but Oliver doesn’t much rate partying anymore; he’s more in the mood to stay home and cheat on his nutrition plan with ice cream.
When Saturday evening arrives, as he’s thinking about all the ways he could still bail his way out, the doorbell rings long and shrill. Joe is standing at the landing with a magnum of champagne in one hand and a horrible gold party hat in the other.
Oliver cracks the door just a sliver and sticks half of his face to the opening.
“I’m terribly sorry, but you have the wrong house.”
Joe wedges his foot in the doorframe and kicks it open. He looks despairingly at Oliver’s joggers, then thrusts the bottle at him.
“Don’t be a twit,” he says. “We planned you a whole party.”
“I’m getting melancholy in my old age, man. Don’t make me drink to it, I’m begging you.”
Joe pushes him toward the stairs and starts to crowd him up toward the second floor.
“For a handsome, rich professional athlete, mate, you are about the saddest sack I’ve ever met. If you don’t go put on a nice shirt and some real trousers, I will personally submit a transfer request in your name to Kilburn. Get moving.”
Oliver knows he’s beaten. He can’t explain what’s eating away at him to Joe, either. Camden’s been reliably dodgy, a chronic underperformer, the whole of his life. Injuries happen to the lot of them. There’s no world where he can say,Cheers, bruv, thanks for the party, it’s just that I’m gay, actually, and I can’t stop thinking about kissing the new lad. It’s all a bit much for me, so I’d like to stay in and have a weep about it. Hope you understand.He’s going to have to put on an outfit and go make an arse out of himself in public.
