“Go on,” Shankly says. “Tell me what you think is wrong with you, then. You’ve got five minutes. Emlyn’s knees are my priority this morning.”
He does not say this to the Boy. He says it to the Man, who is already standing half-turned, already arranging the sentence so it will arrive intact and carry, with it, the faint prestige of having been properly considered. The Boy is off to one side at first, watching. Shankly notices him immediately and nods, almost imperceptibly, as one might acknowledge a lad who can play and has not yet started talking nonsense. It is the Man he distrusts on sight.
“If I can name it properly,” the Man begins, “if I can get the pattern clear…”
“Aye,” says Shankly. “And while you’re naming it, what are you doing?”
The Man pauses. It is an honest pause, which does not help him.
“Thinking,” he says.
“Stalling,” Shankly replies. “You’re not in the game. You’re up in the stand, telling yourself you understand it.”
The Boy laughs. Shankly comes and stands beside him now, shoulder to shoulder, both of them facing the Man, who glances left and right as though expecting Lacan to appear from behind a tree and rescue him with a sentence about desire. He should be here today, the Man thinks. This is his sort of thing. But Lacan is absent, conspicuously so, which is perhaps just as well.
The Man keeps thinking that if he names it properly it will stop.
“It’s a loop,” he says, recovering a little. “It presents as intelligence, as clarity, as..”
“What are ye on about, son,” says Shankly, and checks his watch.
Keegan’s hamstring is on his mind. The European Cup matters. Team shape matters. Inside this little man’s little bonce does not.
Still, the Man presses on. “By the time I have found the language, the thing has already happened. In the body first. In the night opening under the ribs. In the old plea – stupid, repetitive, loyal – that changes its clothes but not its aim: don’t leave me, come back, explain this, stay where I can feel you. Lacan told me…”
“And you’ve already lost the ball,” Shankly finishes.
The Man, in his Lacanian self, can write it cleanly now, and that is part of the problem. He looks at Shankly and says, with a seriousness that almost embarrasses even him: “It was serious.”
Shankly ignores this. “Get to the point,” he says. “What did you want from her?”
The Man hesitates, assembling something he recognises only as he builds it.
“It wasn’t her,” he says finally. “It was the repair. The scene. But the grief was too large, the waiting too painful. She became an object. Not the first. Just the one that held longest because she did not arrive as fantasy. She arrived as permission.”
And because the Boy and Shankly are now standing together, looking at him with a kind of merciless patience, the point becomes clearer than the Man would like. The problem is not that he was mistaken. The problem is that he was not mistaken enough to stop.
“There’s work,” Shankly says. “Or there isn’t. You don’t build a team on stories.”
The Man wants to say this began at 17 Grange Road. He can feel the scene rising in him already, ready to be offered up – the shut doors, the frightened child, the note, the bags, have by now become not only memory but a kind of private credential.
Shankly cuts him off sharply.
“You think that’s the hard bit?” he says. “You think that’s where it starts?”
Then, unexpectedly, he stops talking to the Man altogether and turns to the Boy.
“I had nae shoes,” he says. “Walked to school barefoot half the year. Ayrshire. Hard place, beautiful in its way. A lie underground could get somebody killed. Boys I knew went down the pit and didn’t come back up. You learn quick what matters there. A man’s word. His work. Who he stands with. You look after the man beside you because there’s no game at all otherwise.”
The Boy listens in awe. The Man does too.
Then Shankly looks back at him.
“You had a house,” he says. “Rooms. Doors. Notes on tables. You think that’s depth?”
The Man says nothing, because the answer is both yes and no, and both are humiliating.
He wants to say: Please don’t follow me. The note on the table.
Pat chasing his father through the old Lewes streets in a green Saab.
“All very clever,” Shankly says. “But so what?”
The Man tries again, almost pleading now, half to Shankly, half to the absent Lacan. “We had to climb through the window,” he says. “The cat was gone. The red bag by the door.”
“Tell it properly then,” says the Boy.
So he does.
There was a door, he says. A locked door.
“Then the window, and this part matters because it is not symbolic: the body finding another way in, climbing through,” the man goes on. Where is Lacan when you need him most, he thinks. He’s far better at this.
The angry mother.
The car.
My awful childhood, he almost says, and even in the middle of the thought he hears how weak it sounds.
“Awful?” says Shankly. “Or just confusing?”
The Man flinches, because he knows the distinction matters.
“Angry mother,” Shankly says. “Door shut. You climbing through a window to stay in the game.”
He shrugs.
“That’s not tragedy. That’s training.”
Looking around again for Lacan as support, the Man tries once more to make it coherent.
Then a road appears.
“A road,” the Boy says.
“I can drive into the sea,” his mother says.
Shankly turns fully to him for the first time in several pages.
“Now that,” he says, “is serious.”
The Editor finally steps into the scene. “And this is the correction this chapter needs,” he says.
“What you think is serious often isn’t. What you think is depth is just sadness. The road by the cliff, the car, the immediate knowledge of annihilation has weight because it exposes the point at which words are no longer running the thing.”
“Who’s this?” Shanks says, turning to face the Editor.
The Editor assumes the role of the absent Lacan. “Words arrive too late, and the body must organise itself without them.”
“Fucking right,” the Boy says.
“Wash your mouth out, wee man,” Shankly says. The Boy steps away.
“That’s your position on the field,” Shankly says. “And you’ve kept it.”
“This,” Shankly adds, and now finally addresses the Man again, “is why your understanding changes nothing.”
The Man notices the Lacanian in Shankly and pipes in again.
“There is a letter too. Typed. Brutal enough to sting. Impersonal enough to last. Then denied. And the denial matters more than the words.”
“From my dad,” the Man adds.
Shankly snorts.
“Your dad’s a tosser,” he says. “Let someone else take the hit.”
“No responsibility. English tosser.”
And there it is, suddenly, the alignment made plain. The Boy and Shankly stand there together, looking at the Man, who stumbles through his lines and keeps glancing into the wings for Lacan.
But he isn’t there. Because perhaps even Lacan knows when the Boy has a better line.
“And you?” says Shankly.
The Man says nothing.
Because he knows.
“You like it,” Shankly says. “Being outside. Means you don’t have to commit. Means you can still say the game’s wrong, the team’s wrong, the ref’s wrong.”
Then he turns back to the Boy, softer now.
“You can play son,” he says. “You’ve got honesty. Why didn’t you come up to Anfield when I was there?”
The Boy stares at him.
“Because I was six,” he says quietly.
A pause.
“Bad timing,” says Shankly.
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