Chapter 101

This habit of glutting themselves on whatever Carlile makes only continues like some kind of automated response, even though the intention was always to make food for his friends and relatives. Just to replace whatever the two of them demolish, he has to prepare each meal a second time over from scratch, hogging the kitchen for days at a time with his culinary experiments for such prolonged periods of time that the rest of the household is starting to act itchy about it.

‘Mate, seriously,’ his dad says to him, on one of those rare occasions when he can be bothered to be in the same place at the same time as his son. ‘Mind letting us use the kitchen at some point? We have to cook dinner for ourselves, sometimes. Or if ya bloody let us have some instead of eating it all yourself.’

Or, on the even rarer occasion his brother happens to treat the house like a home, in one random night every thirty odd, there’ll be something along the lines of, ‘Can you get out this fucken kitchen, dude?’, or a, ‘Mind leaving some space for the rest of us and not be such a goddamn hog?’

And Carlile will just stand there, wordless, unable to retort, with spatula in hand and stomach looking like the front half a beer keg in his black apron.

. . .

‘We really need to move out,’ Carlile tells her one morning, looking out the window of the passenger seat as Matilda drives them down the expressway, absently singing along to tunes on the radio that neither of them are particularly enjoying.

‘Huh? Sorry, I was somewhere else… I think I was ruminating again.’ Matilda refocuses her gaze and adjusts her grip on the steering wheel.

‘Again?’

‘Yeah, I know. I know I shouldn’t be.’

‘It’s been, like, four months almost.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No, it’s okay, don’t be sorry.’ Carlile sighs, then touches his forehead, running his hand down his nose and mouth, pulling on his bottom lip. ‘I shouldn’t be so self-centred. Anyway– I was just saying we need to move out soon. Really need to. Mum and dad are getting annoyed with me being in the kitchen. Dad actually gave me a piece of his mind the other day. Oh, and Brad. Fucking Brad yesterday morning, he told me to go to the gym. He can talk out his ass.’

‘He can piss off,’ Matilda says.

‘He’s not in the best shape that he used to be, either– fucking prick.’

Matilda takes her eyes off the road to look at him multiple times, before saying, ‘Wow. You never get angry, not like that. Sounds like you really do need to get out of that place.’

. . .

That weekend, from the left side out of nowhere, a wave of malice strikes Matilda particularly hard in the heart, and she drags Carlile along with her to watch the Purple Vale Strikers play their opening match of the new year’s season against Riselda Cats, just to have a laugh. It’s a home match, but something about the grounds feels sickening and uninvitingly alien the moment she arrives. She never should have come here.

She wears big wrap-around sunglasses that make her look like a speed-dealer and encases herself in a spacious woollen hoodie pulled tight over her scalp, then crosses her arms as she sits in a seat to watch from the stands like some paparazzi-averse celebrity caught in the midst of tragedy. Before long, she has to wrap her arms around Carlile, who sits beside her. She feels his hips sink generously between her fingers. Looking down past her nose, she sees the bulge of his pot belly curling out in his lap, and lets her hand emerge from its oversized sleeve to lay against the irresistible, widening swell.

Her own swell is out of sight, out of mind. The size and thickness of the creases in her hoodie spares her from enduring the shock of confrontation with the girth of her own midsection, her heavy chest, her growing hips. But nobody will notice her. She knows from experience that the spattering of onlookers in the stands is a wall of noise, relegated safely to one side of the field that, sometimes, you simply ignore — except in moments of explosive triumph. Unlikely there’ll be any of that, tonight.

Even if anyone does happen to turn their head and look at her, she’s too out of shape, too dumpy to be anything but background imagery. For all anyone knows, she’s just some middle aged, beer-gutted man’s chubby daughter.

Matilda thinks of her father. Is that what he is? Fat? Beer-gutted? Until the last few months, she’s never really thought about it, but with her mother showing signs of growing in size, too, she starts to entertain a somewhat fatalistic idea that large figures might be a latent factor in the Nolasco bloodline, perhaps as unavoidable as some ancient, cosmic fate she would have to face sooner or later. Looks like it has to be the former.

She takes a hot chip from the cup in her hand and bites into it.

The squeal of the referee’s whistle drags her out of her reverie and back up to the surface of her awareness, heralding the emergence of the two teams as they jog out from the small tunnelway beneath the stands. A little less than a hundred spectators clap lazily — a collection of family members, friends, and locals with nothing better to do, and a dwindling belief in a team which has so drastically plummeted since the previous year. The dark violet shirts of the Purple Vale girls, and the black shirts of the Riselda Cats, emerge side by side from under the stands, jogging forth and spreading themselves out across the pitch into their individual positions.

The first thing she spots is the back of Elisha’s head, strutting out in her captain’s armband with stiff, self-aggrandising arrogance. Matilda scans the players one by one, finding that with each face she sees, the harmonising comfort of recognition that would otherwise fill her heart is… not there. The girls are in the familiar Purple Vale shirts, and they have the white shorts and white socks, but… their faces at first seem so blank, slowly taking form into new identities she can’t recall. Not a soul on the grassy pitch is there to be recognised. Except for Elisha Billidon, every single player on the Purple Vale Strikers team has a face as new to her as if she had been left stranded, and woken up, in a foreign city she doesn’t know the name of.

When Matilda spots Margery on the sidelines, watching, she sinks down into her seat so far she might melt through it. Shaking her head, she leans further into the comfort of Carlile’s body, and seriously considers asking him to take her home.

. . .

The high-stakes mania of hunting for a place to rent that isn’t just an overpriced shoebox is soul crushing in such a way that only good food can mend the damages done to the hopeful soul. A meal (or three) to close off the jagged cracks, to fill you back up, to bind the shattered pieces back together again once you’ve been stuffed to satisfaction. The thing is, though, for Matilda and Carlile, that limit of satisfaction has been stretched far beyond what it used to be. Habitual comfort-eating dates compound, week after week, surplus calories adding up like pocket money. Just under the skin of her conscious knowledge, Matilda’s already had a handful of pounds stealthily return home, undoing nearly all of the hard work she’d put into torturing herself with starvation these last months.

One evening in the food court of a local plaza, Carlile is making his way back to their table after putting in an order at the Sushi bar, when he gets a view from behind that makes him almost miss a step.

She’s sitting up on a stall, facing away from him, leaning on the table with her elbows and has her phone up to her eyes.

Thinking that she’s been losing significant weight and is about to lose even more, she’s been jumping the gun by a few beats and getting herself back into her clothes from a few sizes ago. The problem, Carlile sees, is that she’s brought some of the damage back – or maybe a lot of it – and now she’s sitting up on that stool in an apparent lack of awareness that her shirt, which is meant to be worn after a subtraction of more than five pounds, has slipped up at the back from where it’d been tucked in.

The back of her waistband, mid-rise, has separated from her shirt, showing the small of her back, soft and formless in the light. From either side of her waist, twin rolls of soft flesh lip over the waistband beneath her ribcage, looking like miniature lovehandles sitting above her actual lovehandles, which visibly fill the space available to them. Whether or not they look a bit fluffier, rounder, and more pronounced than in the last few weeks, is hard for him to tell without lifting her shirt up in public and copping an interrogative feel. He’ll have to wait until privacy is theirs again.

But she’s on her phone, and she doesn’t know the slightest bit about what she’s showing off, down there.

It isn’t much of a different story for Carlile, though, is it? He knows this.

As he hops up onto a stool beside her, he feels his stomach push against his waistband – and once it can’t stretch any further, he feels his belly forced to curl uncomfortably over his belt in a single chunk of lard that pulls his shirt tight around its round geometry. A burst of thrilled pleasure courses through him, and he slides his hand onto Matilda’s thigh, knowing it’s only going to get worse.

. . .

Not many people realise how considerable an effort of patient advocacy it is to convince someone to go anywhere near a path they have fled in shame, let alone fully return to, much less to do so without triggering all of the anxiety that made them flee in the first place. It has taken Carlile a long time to convince Matilda that coaching is a good idea – three entire months, in fact, starting with her success in winning her job at the clinic. He had to do most of the research, searching for answers online, poking around in his uncle’s business, asking what’s what and who’s who, until at last he could throw some sort of roadmap at her feet.

So, over the course of the next month, Matilda designates a few afternoons after work to do a five-day course in coaching, and comes out the other side with a shiny new Level 1 Coaching Licence printed on a laminated A4 sheet and a heart so full of pride it’s almost bursting. The next thing she does is a First Aid course, and then with an extra push from Carlile, she volunteers to coach at a school a short drive across town. Each Monday, at half-past three in the afternoon, she heads over to Glenbrook Primary to give an unorganised and directionless bunch of seven year olds clear instructions on how and where to run on the field, how and where and whom to kick the ball to, so that she can turn up each Sunday to watch their adorable, clueless little heads forget all semblance of a plan as every single one of them them charges at the ball like a flock of headless seagulls bent on nothing but ownership of the ball and proving to mum and dad that they’re the next Lionel Messi.

She watches as the little kids learn by trial and error what to do and what not to do, what works and what doesn’t, what feels good and what feels bad. Along the way, she learns for herself what it’s like to not take football so seriously, to be content just having some fun. This is all much to the chagrin of the surgically modified, bitch-faced soccer mums in expensive family vans standing at the side lines yelling at their already distressed children. One kid with particular talent in her short, nimble legs scuffs a shot by no fault of her own, and has her father proceed to yell at her from all the way over the other side of the field, singling her out by using her name and causing the poor girl’s shoulders to drop in shame for the next three weeks.

It doesn’t take Matilda long to learn that half the reason a coach is needed for a team is simply for “man-management” – keeping heads up, not down. Keeping spirits high and confidence strong. Keeping players focussed on their strengths, playing to those strengths, and chipping away at their weaknesses without feeling like a loser, and most importantly bringing all these things together on the game-day when it matters.

‘I’m sorry we don’t win much, guys,’ she apologises to the children openly at training the day after a match that the kids had buckled in a 0 - 3 loss at the last minute. They all sit in a circle in front of her in the grass, making her feel like a primary school teacher. ‘Even if we aren’t winning much at the moment, I still want you guys to have fun playing the sport.’

Declan Kodand, a lean, spikey-haired boy whose main ambition is to one day “be Neymar” plucks at the grass in front of his crossed legs and says, ‘Yeah… Dad isn’t pretty happy we don’t win a lot, but… At least I get to do cool stuff at training, so that makes him happy and keeps him off my back – like mum says anyway.’

‘Are you guys having fun?’ she asks them.

They all look up at her, a diverse gaggle of clueless children seven to twelve years old, large blue and brown pairs of eyes, and they all nod at her.

‘I wanna do a backflip kick into the goalie’s face!’ shouts Gabbie, the young and enthusiastic littlest one who thinks the crazier and more often you do fancy tricks all the time, the better you are at the game, and thus ends up tripping over herself every five minutes of play.

Matilda doesn’t know how to respond to her when she says that.

Despite the losses and the no-more-than-occasional wins, she can see the children are enjoying what she’s teaching them. They have no coordination, but they do have passion. Loads of it. And it begins to remind her of her own experiences as a child, playing the sport for the first time. Slowly, but surely, it gives back to her that special, peculiar chord of joy she thought she would never feel again after leaving her lifelong club.

. . .