‘I won’t stop you,’ Brick’s saying to Firetruck. ‘But I won’t protest.’
‘Why not, though?’ Firetruck says sharply. ‘It’s Pride Round. He’s been homophobic and hasn’t apologised. Shouldn’t we say something?’
‘First, I’m doing a physio placement with West Coast, so no, I’m not gonna protest my future employer,’ Brick says. ‘Second, there’ll be a proper club statement coming soon. And third, I think protesting gives him more power than he deserves.’
‘How d’you mean?’ Firetruck asks, folding his arms, unconvinced.
Brick squeezes the footy in his hand tight, until his knuckles are pale. ‘The whole point of this team was to create the space we never had: where you can be gay and still have the male bonding that comes with being in a footy club,’ he says. ‘I want every man in this team to be tough. I don’t mean straight or macho. I meantough. We all cop it in this world, every other day. After Hammer there’ll be another homophobe to be upset about, and another. If we get unravelled by every idiot, we aren’t going to last very long.’
‘So what, you give him a free pass to be a tool?’ Firetruck says. He spits a blue Gatorade–tinged glob onto the grass. ‘That lets him get away with it.’
‘Go protest if you want, Firetruck,’ Brick says. ‘I’m not telling you how to live your life. I’m telling you how I live mine. If you let every single bigot fill your life with rage – congrats, they won and you lost. You’re locked in an endless cycle of constant anger. They hurt you and they beat you. Or, instead, you do this.’
Brick squares up, facing the white goal posts, and drops the footy onto his boot with a resounding thump. The footy sails clean through the sticks for a goal. ‘You play footy anyway. You prove them wrong with your actions. That is how you beat people like Kade Hammersmith. You make yourself so happy they become irrelevant.’
I’ve never had something resonate with me as much as this.
‘Hear hear,’ Tommo says. ‘Let’s just play footy. Yeah the boys!’
‘Yeah the boys!’ we all echo back.
‘Yeah the fucken boys!’ Jack booms. ‘Lesssssgooo!’
Us boys jog back out onto the oval. Brick throws the footy up. I feel a narcotic injection of adrenaline in my skull for the second time tonight, even more palpable than the first. Fuck it. Fuck the fear, the anger, the bullies, the homophobes, the world.
Nobody can stop me playing footy if I want to.
The adrenaline does its job: I am not a mind anymore, but a body. Instead of running from the footy as I did in high school, I run towards the contest, trying to be useful, trying to help clear the ball to Brick.
Near the end of the game, I manage to mark the footy – clumsily, and hurting two fingers – but it’s paid. I go to kick it to Brick, but he yells at me to have a shot at goal myself.
I line up, put as much power in my leg as I can, and kick the footy hard.
It comes off my boot at a weird angle again, and I miss, the Sherrin skidding through as a behind.
But it’s the first time a kick of mine has made the distance.
11
DIAMOND ON A LANDMINE
CHARLIE
I have less than zero interest in sports, but all anyone’s talking about is Hammer’s refusal to wear the Pride Guernsey. It’s unavoidable online, at the bar, even at home.
On Sunday morning, it dominates Curtis and Ahmed’s wedding anniversary brunch. There’s too many guests for their dining table, so we spill outside. Rex’s smoking table on the wooden deck is replaced with a trestle table, surrounded by the courtyard’s ornate black-painted wrought iron balustrades and white pebbles and Ahmed’s rose garden and lemon tree and green ivy creepers on the outside of the house. The jewel in the crown of the courtyard is a Japanese-style karesansui garden with raked concentric circles in the white sand and big pewter-coloured stones and a verdant bonsai tree Curtis and Ahmed got from their friends Celeste and Kieran as a wedding gift.
The brunch is a smallish affair: the five of us who live here, Kayla and Tenille, Ahmed’s sister, Fatima, and her husband, Joel, two of Curtis’ gym bros. There are two extra guests – Reyna and Brayden, who crashed on our couches after a big Saturday night – but thankfully Curtis and Ahmed took a ‘the more the merrier’ approach. It helped that Curtis bought a Hectic Lettuce album on vinyl and is a legit fan of Reyna’s music, while Ahmed’s taken a shine to Brayden since they hung out at the Tool Shed opening night.
Somewhere between Curtis firing up the barbie and Ahmed popping the cork on a bottle of Moët, the subject of Hammer comes up. Everyone has an opinion, none of which I haven’t already seen shouted in a comment section on Insta or TikTok.
‘What’s so wrong with a Pride Guernsey?’ Kayla prods. ‘The AFL women’s division does it every year with no drama.’
‘And half the girls are Friends of Bunnings themselves,’ Tenille adds, smirking.
Reyna, who’s clearly never heard the euphemism, bursts out laughing.
‘Can’t footy just be about footy, but?’ Rex grunts.
