Fall by Colin McAdam Page A

be embarrassed. And I saw how he cheated. It was hard to spot, but the aftermath was obvious. One of the old men would shout
Who the fuck was that
and push a few of the St. Ebury boys. It happened a couple of times in the first half. Ant would always be at the back of the fallen scrum, having wriggled out, smirking and pretending to be innocent.
    The more we fell, the more I felt from the sidelines a gathering sense of injustice. We were young and should have been strong. I felt the comfort of being mad, of the soft green frame of that field that allowed us to be honest and infuriated. I never got to play thatday. In the second half, one of the forwards from the Irish emerged from the scrum holding Ant by the collar and punched him in the face with a fist as fat as a butcher’s. Everyone from both teams ran toward the fight. All of us from the sidelines. I had never punched a face before. I never forgot the feeling of how a nose gives way.
     
    “You should hear the songs sometimes,” Ant told me. “Everyone singing.” His forehead was swollen above the eye socket and all of us were drunk by five p.m.
    I had almost missed the party. I walked off the pitch alone, before everything had settled, and was back up in the Flats, showering. I wondered if the blood on my hand was my own, but when it was clean all I saw was a bruising knuckle.
    In the room I found Julius wearing his rugby shirt with jeans. He hadn’t showered. “You coming?” he said.
    The ritual was to gather at the Earl of Sussex Pub which was a cab ride from St. Ebury. The pubs required us to be nineteen, but the Earl would serve anyone who seemed convincingly mature.
    Normally both teams would gather, but since that game was called off after the fight it was only St. Ebury boys who met. Actually only four of us.
    “The songs are fuckin’ hilarious,” Ant said. He started to sing a rugby song but nobody joined him. Chuck stared at him and asked if he had washed his fingers. “What’s wrong with you?” Chuck said.
    “They’re animals. Those old guys just want to hurt us. So I humiliated one of them. A few of them.”
    I couldn’t help laughing. Not because I found Ant amusing. I was simply confused. Five pints of beer in me on a Saturday afternoon, sitting there with Julius and his friends, a game I never played but learned to love. There was a sense of new momentum, of pistons urging me forward.
    “Noel here got a piece of one of them,” Ant said. “You guys see that?”
    Chuck said yes and Julius shook his head, and I was holding the table, I remember.
    “Boom,” said Ant.
    “It was an ugly game,” said Julius.
    Ant said Julius always said that when he didn’t get the ball. “It was a battle,” he said.
    “I do want to know why you stick your finger up their asses,” Chuck said. “Can you confide in me, as a friend?”
    “It unsettles them,” I suggested.
    “Exactly,” Ant said.
    Chuck and Julius stared at us.
    I started to feel my head spinning and when I closed my eyes I saw that man’s head snap back after I smashed his nose. I looked at Chuck’s sideburns and found them annoying. They looked affected. I wanted to tell him he was only pretending to be a man.
    Out of the blue he announced that he wanted to be a journalist.
    Ant said, “That’s fucked.”
    And Chuck said, “Why?”
    Ant said, “I don’t know.”
    I kept being frightened that I was only eighteen, that the waiter would eventually turn to me and say, “You’re too young.” And then I felt angry. I wanted to declare that I was a man.
    Ant started touching my earlobes and said, “You’ve got thick earlobes. They’re soft but they’re thick, eh?”
    Julius had a streak of mud under one side of his jawbone. When he turned one way he looked gaunt. Haunted. He was my friend and I wanted to know what was wrong, but it was only mud.
    “Leave the man’s ears alone,” he said.
     
    I kept to myself that evening.

 
     
     
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