You give up your life of athletic prowess and move somewhere without phone service? CALL ME BACK!reads the text from Maggie on Tuesday morning. His leg is much less swollen today, so Oliver had been planning to go to great lengths to re-create his precious free-day routine, as a treat. Now he thinks longingly of the butter croissant and flat white he’d planned on enjoying in a corner booth with his headphones in, mixing himself into anonymity with all the hungover punk rockers and bleary-eyed, jet-lagged tourists.
Did you give up on your life of artistic integrity and move somewhere without the internet?he snarks back.I’m wrecked. Tear in my hamstring, flying dutchman is making me spend recovery babysitting. Respect the mourning period.
It’s always something with you, Oliver. Please ring anyway.A moment passes, then the phone buzzes a second time.When you’re free and want to talk, I mean. Obviously.
He cracks a grin. In this world, few things are certain except hating Kilburn Rovers and adoring Margaret Corbyn. If he hurries, Oliver will still have time to get his breakfast after all, before he’s due at the Crossing.
After being put through his paces on stretches and then whathe thought was an hour of strain on the stationary bike, but, with the benefit of hindsight, might have in fact been closer to twenty minutes of light pedaling—his leg really does still hurt—Oliver’s turned loose once more for hydrotherapy. He loves the frigid bite of the first dip into the plunge pool, and he especially loves that it’s followed by a much longer stretch of luxuriating in what’s basically a huge, fancy hot tub.
He’s seen neither hide nor tail of Willem’s ward in the nearly three hours he’s been at the Crossing, so his guard is down when he lets himself into the unfortunately named Water Lounge. The shock of an ice bath is nothing compared to what he finds inside: Davies-Villanueva is there, all right, and he doesn’t resemble the spotty tween of Oliver’s memories. The young man standing in front of him, waist deep in the freezing water, is just that: a man. He’s slight but well-built, several inches shorter and shades darker than Oliver’s perma-fairness, dotted with freckles all over.
Davies-Villanueva looks up, gleaming white teeth chattering, at the sound of the changing room door.
“Hiya,” he says, waving and trotting toward the edge of the pool, pushing deep brown curls out of his face.Oh God,Oliver thinks, helplessly.He got fucking cute.
“Hey, Leo,” Oliver says, shooting for blasé and landing somewhere daft.
“It’s Leonardo. Lay-oh,” he enunciates; Oliver can hear Spanish sunshine peeking through the London accent.Leo,he remembers now. Spelled like Messi. Lucky him—his whole life, even if he’s rubbish, people are going to keep thinking he must be destined for something because he shares this proximity (bears a resemblance, even) to greatness.
“Sorry, mate—been a while.”
“Not a problem,” Leo laughs, hoisting himself up onto the deck and shaking himself off like a wet dog. “I was never brave enough to correct anyone, when we were younger.”
Oliver’s not sure what to say to that, so he gingerly hops into the water Leo just vacated and hopes that will be that. But even after he gets his bearings, Leo remains there, sitting cross-legged on the concrete and watching him shiver.
“Going to get warm?” he asks.
“I don’t mind the cold, actually,” Leo says. “Reminds me I’m home. I’ll wait for you.”
“The water’s shallow, I don’t need a lifeguard,” Oliver replies, snidely, immediately nasty before he can even think to be otherwise. “There’s a TV here, above the therma-pool. And another in the changing room, or in the canteen, or in the lounge. Take your pick.”
Leo looks bewildered, both at the tone and at the list of options. He nods in the direction of the heated pool and finally stands, moving out of Oliver’s line of sight. He doesn’t try to talk again throughout the length of the ice bath, seemingly solely focused on the echoey television audio, but when the fifteen minutes of cold are finished and Oliver joins him in the heat, Leo can’t resist.
He tears his eyes away from the pre-match coverage and says: “It’s weird to watch Camden play without you. I feel like you’ve started every match since I was, like, a kid.”
If he tries to bond with me,Oliver vows solemnly, thinking bitterly of the recent matches hehasn’tstarted,I will drown him.
He shrugs in response, even though Leo’s right: Oliver’s held down the midfield by himself for going on a decade. He feels unmoored when he can’t play, four of his limbs missing instead of just the one with an injury. He wishes, fervently, he could be there, running drills in the chilly mist, making Joe work for his warmup shots, trying to emulate Emmanuel’s pre-match Zen. All of those rituals make him who he is: competitive,superstitious, a lonely only child awed by the luck of spending his life with two dozen brothers.
Leo interprets his contemplation as companionable silence, which he ruins immediately.
“I was watching the match with my family last week,” he says. “My dad was, like…” Davies-Villanueva trails off anxiously and Oliver flinches when he realizes why.
Everyone knows the origin story of Camden’s boy wonder, wee Oliver Harris spotted by a scout in Regent’s Park playing kickabout with his grandfather, already wearing a little green kit. He’s just old enough to secure a tryout for Camden Football Club’s new academy the next week and never looks back until he’s the best player on the first team. A veritable English rose, firstborn son of Camden come alive at Regent Road. But, it’s said in whispers, he almost didn’t join the academy at all, after what happened with his father…and the rest is history, except for how it hasn’t ever ended.
Oliver Harris, Sr.: inexplicable Oxford graduate, bookseller, Camden native, beloved husband, local tragedy. He’d wasted away before everyone’s eyes, increasingly weak-limbed all over Camden Market, then dead six months after Nicola’s colleagues at the hospital discovered that his worsening fatigue had come from a tumor, already spread to his liver.
He was gone before Oliver really knew him or was really known by him, but he’s missed him fiercely every day, regardless. Sometimes he wonders if he should feel abandoned, or maybe angry, but even when he plumbs the most ungenerous parts of his soul, he’s only bereft and nostalgic. Dad hadn’t even liked football that much, too literary and introverted for team sports. He wanted Oliver to focus on school. He would have been disappointed that he didn’t, that his son had gone to live in the academy instead and barely made time to study between trainingsessions. Their first and only fight had been about whether he might go. But Oliver remembers long afternoons organizing stacks of books into tunnels to crawl through, conducting dubious baking experiments while Nicola was on night shifts, watching old movies in the hospital toward the end—his dad wasfun. He’d have been in the Camden box at every match, hollering himself hoarse, cheering for the younger Oliver.
He believes that, but he won’t ever know. If he’d been better at football a few years younger, had more time to prove himself, he might have found out, but he wasn’t and he didn’t. What Oliver does know is that his parents had loved Camden. No other place in the world could hold their attention; they only wanted to stay here. So, Oliver can’t leave—big clubs, people with money and titles, have asked—but his place is this one. This is the only place he’ll ever be at home. Injured, in sixth place, statistics plateauing, whispers that he’s lost a touch, inscrutable new manager, it doesn’t matter. Harris means Camden, through and through, from the shirt on his back to the rose sprig tattooed down his rib cage. His grandparents lost their business and their son on Camden High Street; Nicola became a widow there too. All Oliver has to do is kick the football and do it loyally.
None of this private agony is for Leo Davies-Villanueva to share in. Oliver barely understands it himself.
“It was a long time ago,” Oliver says. “I’m fine. People have dads, you know? I don’t mind hearing about them.”
Leo meets his eyes head-on—his are a Cadbury shade of brown, fringed by impossibly long, dark lashes.
“You’re brave about it. You always were. But I probably should have said a couple more sentences to you before I brought it up right away.”
