Disunited: first chapter

Here’s the full, unedited text of the first chapter.

For more, see the book page for Disunited for all the links.

1. Dispatch

A short blond with a compensatory quiff and a vendetta against eyebrows leaned in, and up, and bellowed into my ear above the music: “Your trouser pocket just lit up. Have I turned you on?”

“You what?” I stopped jumping.

He tapped the pocket of my jeans and left the hand nearby, curling a finger around a belt loop. “Something just went off in your pocket. I have that effect.”

“It’s my phone, darlin’,” I shouted back. “I’d best…”

I unhooked myself, peeling away a clammy, reluctant hand, and weaved out of the dancing scrum surrounding me. I hadn’t noticed my phone vibrate. I was too busy whooping and bouncing, hypnotised by the tumbling lights playing over the thrashing sea of heads and by the thump-thump-thump of the dance track that massaged my organs and rattled my teeth. The wasp buzz of phone against thigh stood no chance: it was a tickle in a tackle, a whisper in a Wembley roar.

I dodged through the writhing masses and the wallflowers and bar-proppers. There was a cheer as, with his trademark beat-deafness, the DJ mixed into the summer’s breakout club anthem. Touch It, the track suggested, ambiguous unless you watched the video — heavy on flesh tones and light on focus. As if those guys had needed any encouragement. I’d hardly warmed up before they descended from orbit and had my t-shirt off and their hands on. The flag of St George tattooed on my right breast — don’t ask, and definitely don’t ask how old I was — had never had such a fingering.

I escaped to the secluded corner booth in which I’d hidden before the music called. It was unoccupied but with a table cityscape of half-dead drinks lit softly from below. One of the skyscrapers was mine, and it looked like there’d been some redevelopment work. I decided against a quick slurp.

I trembled, feeling my body glow with life, flow with power, as it cooled. A workout with groping: it didn’t get much better than that.

Sliding into the booth I detached my t-shirt from its anchor point down the back of my jeans just north of bumcrack. Sweat dripped and trickled and clung, not all of it mine. I used the shirt to towel my face and hair and torso roughly down, then draped it over my shoulder. Assuming my jacket hadn’t gone walkabout from the cloakroom, I had a spare for the stroll home.

It would be only a minute at most before the first guy approached bearing booze and vacant optimism. I fished out my phone. Very few people knew my number — it was one of my most closely guarded secrets. The screen scolded me about a couple of missed calls and three unread texts, all from Cherie.

First text: “Are you where I think you are? Pillock.” She loved me really.

Then: “You don’t pay me enough for this crap.” There was a photo attached that showed three heads, all male, all shiny with sweat, each streaked with purple and yellow light and dappled with laser green. Two of the heads were kissing. The third, eyes shut, was mine. I recognised the kissers: I’d been dancing with them earlier that night. I’d turned down a threesome, which had made a change from turning down twosomes.

“Ah, fuckmelons,” I said, and my shoulders drooped. Dammit. I’d been so careful: spotting and darting away from cameras, even asking for one photo to be deleted, pleading that I wasn’t out. People understood — they’d been there, some of them. But they didn’t truly understand. The “there” they’d all been to wasn’t my “there”. My situation was different. Nobody was out in football, not in Britain. And barely anyone anywhere else either. The last taboo, they called it.

I read the third text, fear building. “You’re trending. Get your tongue out of wherever it is and call me at your earliest bleeding convenience. xoxo”

It was always going to be a risk celebrating my transfer in that bar. Paulo had told me not to go and had refused to come along — and my new manager would never have allowed it, had he known, and had he known. I’d taken the risk, as I always did. If I’d never taken any risks I’d never have been spotted aged fourteen doing a Beckham with a long-range shot over the keeper’s swearing head and grasping hands. I’d never have attempted the defensive overhead kick on the edge of my own box that saw me marked out as one to watch in the sports pages and the chummy shirts and slacks of TV. I’d still be languishing with the if-onlys and might-have-beens of the Sunday leagues rather than joining the bling crowd at the Amex apex of football’s pyramid.

I was there because it was my local, almost, or used to be, and I missed the atmosphere. I missed the boys. Before my star rose too high I used to be a regular and had always felt safe there: happy not to be recognised by the glammed-up stick insects who’d scatter at the sight of a football unless it was covering a groin, and happy that those who knew the scores, knew the score. Two old boys in particular had watched me break into the first team at my last club and were quick with a muttered congratulation and a slap on the shoulder and a whiskey or two. And when once or twice I’d seen a huddle of whispers and pointing I’d strolled over and had a word, and that was that. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

Except now Vegas had been invaded by Twitter and by Facebook and by all the others. An innocent tap on a screen could broadcast your face beyond the casino walls to tens, hundreds, thousands, millions. Privacy was dead. For top footballers that had long been part of the game: you had to grow a thick skin, you had to take the paparazzi and the supporters and the other team’s supporters as the price of success. All I’d wanted was one last night as the old Danny. One last anonymous night.

And now I knew I had to escape, and escape quickly, before the lumbering beasts of Fleet Street latched onto the story.

I grabbed my jacket from the cloakroom and pulled on the dry t-shirt I found still safely folded in an inside pocket. I tried not to think of it as the last time. I added my infallible disguise — a San Francisco Giants cap — and bounced down the narrow staircase into the soft bite of the August night, nodding mutely at the bouncer with the tell-tale cheeks and the indiscreet eyes.

Safely out of earshot, I called my agent. At training pace I reckoned I could be home inside eight minutes. In the bad old days before I met Paulo it was more like twenty, usually with Smirnoff and crisps inside me and a random on my arm.

“About bleedin’ time,” Cherie said, picking up after no rings. “I’m on my third Come Dine and I’m about to kick the bleedin’ telly in. You are a full-on, weapons-grade pillock, Danny Prince.”

“How bad is it?”

“I’ve got Google alerts pinging like sonar on a bleedin’ U-boat. I’m stalling. Are you still prancing around with your nipples out? I can hear breathing.”

“I’m walking home as quick as. Look, I’m sorry. I just had to let off steam, you know?”

“What’s the matter, Paulo not putting out? Listen, I’ll give Max a tinkle first thing. Not a vicar’s knicker we can do, mind. Sue the bleedin’ internet?”

I crossed an empty junction, its traffic lights cycling dully at the wildlife, the city streets releasing their daytime heat to sodium-tinted skies. Suburbia switched off at midnight. It was a safe neighbourhood, even half-lit by alternate lamps to save the council money. Back when this was my usual Friday night I never encountered more than a few cats on routine patrol, plus the odd police car marking its territory. The police stopped me once because I had my kit bag swung over my shoulder — and at two in the morning, a bag and a cap as good as convicted me for burglary in their eyes. I gave the coppers my name and a wink and a story about a girl, and felt guilty for a week.

On the phone, I tried to be helpful. “What about one of those super-injunctions?”

A sigh like a blast of static filled my ear. “Too bleedin’ late for that, pickle. It’s like a fart in a vacuum on Twitter. There’s already a Danny Queen spoof account. It’s after midnight and even the poncing Americans are pratting about with it, and since when did they give a Stirling about football? By morning you’ll have a lolcat and a— and a rage face and I don’t even know what these bleedin’ things are.”

“Ah, pissboobs.”

“Ain’t it just. I’ll think of something. You were there accidentally, stumbled into some cocks, that sort of thing. Did you buy anyone a drink? Kiss and bleedin’ tell waiting to happen, that is.”

“Bought a couple. I was never alone with anyone. Nothing happened. I got groped dancing, that’s all.”

“Groping’s bleedin’ nothing now is it? If that counts as nothing, what counts as something? Don’t answer that. Jeez, I’d better wake Alfie up and tell him he’s got some catching up to do.”

My brain cartwheeled. It was a day that had begun with suits and flashbulbs and signatures and handshakes, with a jokey press conference, with my name on a shirt held high and proud as I stood on the virgin grass eager for the new season, the season I’d explode into top-flight football, and maybe even into the national team. And it ended with the question I least wanted to ask. Weakly, hesitantly, naïvely: “The contract. It’s solid, yeah? I’m not gonna…?”

Cherie gurgled. “This is football, love, not real life.”

I thought that would be the answer. It was going to be a long night.

“What do you think I should do?” I perched on a stool at my breakfast bar, wearing a fluffy white dressing gown with my initials sewn into the back, and spooned what I was convinced were wax copies of small pieces of fruit around a bowl of various pale juices that made my mouth throb. Opposite in the living room area of the apartment Paulo slouched low on the sofa, almost horizontal, his stubble resting on his tight white t-shirt, his hands clasped over his stomach. He hadn’t even had time to pour himself a cuppa after walking in the door before I blurted out the events of the previous night.

To avoid suspicion we owned separate apartments in the same gated housing complex. If anybody asked, we were mates. Close mates. Close mates who once neglected to pull the curtains as the night drew in and were lucky to get away with the excuse of a game of Strip Kinect, sponsored by Budweiser. Having two flats worked well for us: we had room to breathe, more wardrobe space, and wildly differing taste in furniture. Well, I had taste, he didn’t, and he said the same about me.

Paulo screwed up his nose and sighed. I never ceased to wonder how even his sighs sounded Scottish. “Short of conjuring up a secret twin and taking on a double life, and ruling out the yellow brick road the hell out of Narnia, you’d best invent yourself a wee time machine, scroll back to yesterday afternoon, and listen the fuck to me.”

“Cherie’s given me the hot ear, I don’t need it from you too, darlin’. I get it. I know I’ve bolloxed it all up and I feel like I’ve just spat on a ball boy. What can I do to fix it?”

Paulo eased himself upright, his scruffy jet-black fringe rearranging itself annoyingly. “What about Madame Cherie? Does she not have a dastardly plan?”

“She’s working the phones, diddling the contacts. Damage limitation. Calling in all the favours, the freebie lunches, the death squads, whatever.”

“Aye, right, that’ll work. Might as well make your debut in sequins doing the paso pissin’ doble. The tabloids’ll be on your tail, charging the gate. It’ll be a big gay Russian revolution down there.” He made a frustrated gesture towards the entrance to the complex, a few floors down.

“No, listen, she reckons the papers are all keeping their noses clean. They don’t fancy the libel courts, not right now. And the little big man has pockets you can lose a couple of palaces in, you know?” My new club’s owner, Vladimir Volkov: KGB, GBH, GHB, or so the rumours milled. From Kazakhstan, and small in stature but big in oil. He’d pounced on the club a year or so back when its new stadium proved an expansion too far and it teetered on the edge of administration. With him he’d brought a pile of cash and a willingness to shuffle aside and replace the stars whose light was rapidly fading. To nobody’s surprise the club soon also bought his ageing but reasonably talented younger brother, Yevgeny, who became ever-present in defence. It was nepotism, plain and simple, but the crowd was happy as long as he stuck his foot out when the ball was nearby.

Paulo stepped into the kitchen behind me to boil the kettle. I sensed his head starting to spin. “The trouble is, my wee cocksure Prince, you’re a hundred and ten percent banged to rights. Caught up and down red-handed, wiggling your fancy arse against orders and letting some rancid wee ned pap you and beam it to his hipster mates. It’s not libel if it’s true. I saw a piece in the Guardian—”

“Yeah, whatever. Cherie says she knows what she’s doing. Mainlining Red Bull is my guess.”

As the kettle hissed and stuttered Paulo hugged me from behind, resting his chin on the white fluff of my shoulder. He was silent and ticking for a few seconds as his warmth seeped through. I knew what was coming. I could feel it in the way he held me, the slight vibration, the keen unsureness of that first time.

“Just promise me.” His voice was hot velvet in my ear. “Don’t let the old girl talk you into… something you might regret.”

I dropped my spoon into the bowl. “God, I hate pineapple. I loathe it. A banana, that’s all I want. A banana and some fried egg and bacon, sausage, tomato, mushrooms, beans, a slice of fried bread, and a huge mug of builder’s tea, and a builder. This isn’t proper food. Who eats prunes? This is bin juice, this is.”

“We can’t always have what we want.”

“Did you get that from the Guardian too? They probably do special offers on bin juice. Free go on a dustman, as long as you keep—”

I forced my mouth shut, holding the air in my lungs, Paulo’s arms now shackles. The old football and chain. The old friction between us.

The kettle boiled.

He released his grip and made the tea in brooding silence, then returned to the sofa — a low, chocolate curly turd of leather, not my best purchasing decision, which seemed to suck the light from a room otherwise bright and hard-edged.

I tried to relax, desperate not to accuse him of running away. Finally, almost in a whisper, I said: “It might be OK, now, you know. It’s not like before. It’s happened in other sports.”

“Aye, right. You try telling that to my parents.”

“Does that mean I’m finally going to meet them?”

It was our usual argument — but quieter now, full of sorrow, and with the dread anticipation of a ten tonne truck labelled Change squealing around a blind bend on a collision course. We knew a transfer was inevitable, if not to this new club but to another, if not now then soon — and so we’d had time to adjust, to figure out how our lives would alter. Our relationship would either survive the transition — or it wouldn’t.

My new club was the rich neighbour of the old. Overflowing with Volkov’s dubiously gotten roubles, it had been harvesting new young players from much poorer clubs in the close season, and I was its latest acquisition. I was lucky that the new club was close enough for me to keep the apartment and the cosy arrangement with Paulo. But also it was close enough for the new and the old clubs to have forged a fierce and baseless rivalry, with a fractious lightning-bolt border between their two supporting tribes.

There’d be an obvious flashpoint, when the fixture list set me against my former colleagues. At least this was manageable: a solved problem. Transfers between close and bitter enemies were as old as the game, as old as war. It would be a common-or-garden derby match, nothing special, just with a twist. A dollop of extra plod.

The difference here was that Paulo, my boyfriend of two years, still played for the old team.

Friendships had been broken by transfers, and had survived. For all we knew relationships had too — although officially none had ever existed, since there’d only ever been one out footballer in the history of British football and that was long ago. We knew maintaining our relationship would be a strain regardless of the team I joined. It would be considerably trickier dealing with a derby match — and even worse if I was out. How could we play against each other with me suffering abuse from Paulo’s supporters, even Paulo’s teammates, my former colleagues, my friends?

It was hard to choose the more sinful act in football: being gay, or defecting to the enemy. But both?

My phone squawked and lurched on the bar beside my barely touched breakfast. The tension melted away. I gave Paulo a worried look and stared at the screen. “Ah, fapcrackers. ‘Mr Jarvis requests the pleasure of your company at the training ground. Bring flak jacket and tin hat.’ Someone in the press office thinks he’s a comedian.”

Paulo said, just over a whisper: “I just… it’s great now, us. Don’t break it. Don’t take any risks. Please.”

“Would I?” I abandoned the waxy fruit and slid off the stool, and rubbed my hands together. “Right. What do you reckon — pink hot pants and a feather boa?”