Chapter 5

The year lengthens like a slowly elongated band of elastic that refuses to snap – a finish line that never seems to emerge from beyond the horizon. As young people do in repeated exposure, she forms a small friendship circle with some classmates in her final year of study. More and more often they hang out after class until, after many twists and dips and turns, finals exams take shape out of the mist, as though nobody had quite expected them to, or been ready for, and begin to knock at the door of countless a distressed student.

Matilda graduates with decent scores, averaging 74 percent. Although she is invited to stay onboard for postgraduate study, it’s clear her gift is for the field, not for the theoretical side of physiotherapy, and certainly not for the endless writing about it. She says she actually lives it.

All five of Matilda’s buddies have gathered at a nearby bar after the day’s graduation ceremonies, and they all share celebratory drinks along with a meal.

‘So what’s ahead for you then, football star?’ asks Simon as he knocks his glass of beer down on the table. Simon is one of the classmates she’s developed a friendship with during her time as a student. His garage band is somewhat prolific, in a back-alley kind of way, for whom he plays guitar, and on weekends participates in social-league cricket every so often, mostly just for an excuse to get creative with insults on the open fields.

Symone, Simon’s Korean girlfriend, emerges from the noise and chaos of the crowd, bearing an ale in each hand. She slides one across to Matilda and shares the other with Simon. The pair make an adorable couple, regardless of the fact that they share an oddly synchronous pair of names. They could hardly be more disparate in characteristics… Simon’s eyes dart from one point of attention to the other in a range as eclectic as his music tastes and hobbies, collected over his life like odd bits and pieces your dad might store in his bomb-blast of a shed too full by now to even begin making it a tidy place. He is a confident joker, enjoys dunking on obscure local politicians either out of boredom or cynicism, and is easy to irritate by throwing details at him that he thinks aren’t relevant. Symone, on the other hand, is analytical to the point of being like a mole-rat that burrows so far into the fields of logic so deep that you lose sight of her until she pops out the other side, with no way to know what route she took to get from here to over there. Her gaze is steady and calm, and she can read people with the razor-clean perceptivity of a quiet psychologist.

‘I dunno what’s up ahead for me yet,’ Matilda answers Simon’s question. She lifts her gaze to the TV mounted from the ceiling beyond him, and wears a contemplative squint. The screen is showing a replay of a match from the 2017 Champions League. ‘The team’s been doing really well lately,’ she says absently, ‘so I think I’ll stick it out until the end. See what happens.’

‘The end being…?’ asks Hassani, a gloomily introspective Pakistani boy whose intensely dry demeanour is matched only by the intensity of his skills in competitive online gaming, in which he ranks surprisingly high. It’s probably inevitable he’ll end up being sponsored to compete in the competitive online leagues one day.

‘June of next year,’ Matilda shrugs, looking down into the amber glow of her beer. ‘If the season finals go well, we’ll make it up a division. Where we’ve never been. Who knows what’ll happen. But I can’t let the girls down, not now.’

‘What was your division again?’

‘State League, level two. If we go well in the tail end of the season, we could be promoted to State League level one.’

‘Oh shit,’ pipes Harriette Maryam, a short girl with a mousy mane who over the year has grown close with Matilda’s soul, becoming a companion among friends – reliable as a blue heeler, but capable of being aloof as a cat with her peaceful, observant brown eyes and smooth bronze hair. She’s a writer by nature, and Matilda cannot for the life of her figure out why Harriette hasn’t gotten to publish anything yet. Harriette leans forward to put her elbows on the table and plant her chin in her hands. ‘But once you’re in League One,’ she says, ‘isn’t the National League next, or something? I think I recall you telling me that, once.’

‘Yep.’ Matilda smiles ruefully. ‘The club’s really gonna try, then. Which will be interesting. I’m kinda scared to be honest. It’s a big deal. I remember being fifteen when I started playing for the club. It was just a… it was a “play-for-fun” type of thing. Competitive, sure. And skilled. But now we’re acting like we’re a real team.’

‘Hey, perhaps you are!’ Harriette suggests, nudging her glasses up her nose a little. ‘You’ve got talent in your team, correct? You told me once that you score, like, at least one goal per week, on average.’

Matilda tips her head in modest confirmation.

‘And didn’t someone in your team win an award last year? — what was her name — Tina?’

‘Oh! You mean Talina. Yeah. She’s our best defender, best by far.’

‘But then she got fat,’ Symone interjects, that idiosyncratic, dormant fatphobia of hers stabbing through in a brief slip of self-exposure.

Matilda’s relaxed facial expression flinches back into itself like a poked snail’s eye. ‘Pfft, what? Talina? No way. She didn’t get “fat”. She just…’

Symone hesitates, confronted by perplexity. ‘You said the medical staff told her she needed to lose weight…’

In the brief time she’s known Symone, it hasn’t taken long to sniff out her little attribute of fatphobia. From time to time it emerges, when it happens to come across the opportunity.

‘Talina didn’t get fat or anything,’ Matilda says by way of corrective explanation. ‘She just… I dunno… lost some definition? It was really no big deal anyway. It’s not like we’re Premier League players or anything amazing. Nothing is that serious. And she’s still an amazing player. And she lost it all now, anyway, so… Yuh…’

Matilda tries not to glance in Harriette’s direction, fighting the itch to see if Harriette has tagged onto the implications Symone just unwittingly made against their softer-looking friend. Thing is, unless Matilda’s own vision has fallen to prejudiced deceits, she can tell that Harriette has lately developed a shade of baby fat in her cheekbones that wasn’t there, or at least noticeable, before. And her jackets fit closer to her midsection, too, with a round-looking shape made by her hips when she bends to the side. You can get fat for the weirdest reasons, Jen’s words return to her out of the night’s hidden corners, haunting her mind’s ear.

‘You’ve got a killer team anyway, yeah?’ Simon puts in. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it. You guys should be good to go. Just smash it. Go hard, smash it, give them a spanking.’

Matilda nods and shrugs modestly. ‘There are other clubs just as good as us, though.’

‘Wait…’ Harriette squints at her. ‘How intensive would your season be – on the chance you got promoted? It sounds as if it could be quite tough. Would you consider taking a gap year? Will you at least get paid something? Sounds like its own job in itself, to me. A high load of responsibility.’

‘Yeah. Probably. Maybe. I don’t know. We’ll see.’ Matilda shrugs again and takes a sip of her beer. She twists her mouth to one side in thought, frowning down at her fingernails. ‘Not sure this is the best beer I’ve ever had.’ She takes another sip anyway, licking the bitterness from her lips. ‘Oh well. Maybe I’m just thirsty and tired.’

‘Awh jeez,’ Symone pouts, ‘but these are my favourite. You just have to hate my taste in beverage.’

Matilda chuckles. ‘Mm-hmm. You and your foreignness, too.’

Simon pulls his girlfriend close as if to protect her. ‘Right— I knew it, I knew soccer players were all racists deep down.’

They all laugh and share a moment of silence before Hassani brings conversation back onto the path of their plans for the future.

. . .

Thing is, it turns out to be a long and gruelling season of play. It seems as though everyone thinks they can win promotion, and so with that belief comes the labour to see it happen. Until their souls are exhausted, the girls of Purple Vale play until their legs cramp, their mouths hang dry and their feet form blisters the size of coins around the edges of their boots.

For Matilda’s twenty-first birthday, February 15th, they lose a match. Badly. 0 - 3 in the first half, one of those conceded goals which she allowed to happen by failing to track a runner who cut straight past her when she wasn’t paying attention. Then an own-goal from their defender in the second half, followed by two more conceded goals in the extra minutes of the game to close the accounts at a stinging loss of zero goals to six.

With that, her spirits dive head first with a spine-breaking crack into the ground. She finds herself comfort-eating all week long. Once she gets a grip on herself, she returns to training, doubling down and blasting away a sudden four whole pounds of fat, each of them having flown back onto her frame in the shape of a gentle softness across her abdominal muscles in no more than four days that she discovered creasing over her underwear one night before showering.

But week after week, the girls redefine their mentality, rebounding back from the humiliation of that loss, and all looks to be well once again. That is until the month of April, midway through the season.

Their best right-back, April Gouldbur, of all possible people, gets hit with an injury – in April, of all possible months. One night she had dribbled the ball so far up the field that the opponents were no longer willing to accept it, and a defender had zoomed in to throw their entire body into a sliding double-footed tackle, knocking her feet out from under her and twisting her right knee at a n unnatural angle. That was when her LCL strained. As she stumbled, trying to regain her standing, she’d stepped the wrong way and rolled her ankle straight over itself, causing a minor hairline fracture on top of the first injury. The second injury was a colossal punch to her confidence. Two injuries in as many milliseconds. April had been injured in the month of April. A triple-whammy. One of the coaches even decides, later on, to bestow upon her the nickname “April Whammy”.

Suddenly Matilda finds herself casting a curious eye in April’s direction, keeping a look out for any changes in her teammate as she begins her long recovery over a period of months. Matilda wants to see if anything happens with her mentality. They can’t lose one of their best defenders’ confidence.

But alongside all this, for a reason she cannot place so much as an atom of her fingernail upon, Matilda also keeps eyes on April’s figure. She has never felt this obsessive in her life. It’s an instinct. A compulsion. It projects out from her like an alien duplicate of herself she does not recognise. Ever since last year, she’s been unable to stop thinking about it… about the small handful of chub she’d cultivated on her own body… about the feeling of it between her fingers… the calmness that it released within her… the strange numbness it had brought down over her thoughts when she allowed herself to sink down into the sensory experience of it. There had been this subtle, entrancing aspect about those five or more pounds of fat once nestled on her body that – even a year after their departure – she cannot find the words to properly articulate the idea (no, the feeling) of. Ever since, she’s been looking for a way to express it to herself. A way to think about it. To relate to it. But the right words have not arrived. Only images, feelings, frustrating mental blockages have answered her call into the void of comprehension.

If her university studies in human movement and physiotherapy have taught her anything, it is that human bodies are nothing but an astonishingly, impossibly complex arrangement of organs, all interconnected at some level. They do many fascinating things in order to function as a whole, and not fall apart the moment the smallest thing goes slightly wrong. One of those fascinating functions is the ability to gain weight. More than an ability, though, it’s really a necessity. Without it, the human body would simply perish. The body requires a base level of stored energy held in reserve at any given time so that operations can persist in the absence of food and water for long periods of time. It happens without your consent. Whether you like it or not, your body stores what energy it doesn’t use as flesh. You can fight against it to stay thin, to maintain leanness. It’s do-able. The girls work so hard to stay in shape, sweating on the gym equipment each week, going red in the face with exertion. Yet the possibility of the unravelling of all that hard work stays close at your heels, like an ankle-biting dog you can never run fast enough to gain distance from. If you flunk out, even for a moment, you just… grow. Whether you like it or not. And then, something which can happen practically overnight might take months to undo. It’s a kind of paradox. For the life of her, she can’t figure out why the human body would naturally tend towards such an undesirable result. If it’s so natural, then why is it so unwanted? Death is also natural, and nobody wants to die. But fat isn’t like death. Fat is just… fat. Soft. Smooth. Weird to touch and feel.

As far as the absence in the team’s defensive structure is concerned, however, Rhianna Crossman from the second team steps up to fill in April’s spot. Matilda finds herself having to give an extra ten percent on the pitch without her usual right-lane partner. Accustomed to the dynamic they’ve developed together over the years, Matilda has to re-learn all her methods of communication again, positioning herself in new ways for Rhianna to find her. Rhianna is a good player… it’s just that April was so reliable and predictable. Rhianna is a single-minded gun who just wants to ping the ball forward all the time, and seems to panic when she has to make a quick pass.

As the season progresses, so does her communication with Rhianna. They figure out each other’s ideas, even though it takes many mistakes, disappointing concessions, coaching interventions, and a few near losses to get there.