other, rolling on the broad pavement outside the Rocket while a crowd bayed them on. Propped inside a telephone box close by the railway bridge, a man stared out frozen-eyed, a hypodermic needle sticking out of the scabbed flesh of his bare leg. Who needs theatre, Kiley asked himself?
*
His evenings free, Kiley was at liberty to take his usual seat in the Lord Nelson, a couple of pints of Marston’s Pedigree before closing, then a slow stroll home through the back-doubles to his second-floor flat in a shabby terraced house amongst other shabby houses, too far from a decent primary school for the upwardly mobile middle-class professionals to have appropriated in any numbers.
Days, he sat and waited for the telephone to ring, the fax machine to chatter into life; the floor was dotted with books he’d started to read and would never finish, pages from yesterday’s paper were spread out haphazardly across the table. Afternoons, if he wasn’t watching a film at the local Odeon, he’d follow the racing on TV — Kempton, Doncaster, Haydock Park. ‘Investigations’, read the ad in the local press, ‘Private and Confidential. All kinds of security work undertaken. Ex-Metropolitan Police.’ Kiley was never certain whether that last put off as many potential clients as it impressed.
Seven years in the Met, two seasons in professional soccer and then freelance: Kiley’s CV so far.
The last paid work he’d done had been for Adrian Costain, a sports agent and PR consultant Kiley knew from one of his earlier lives. Kiley’s task: babysitting an irascible yet charming American movie actor in London on a brief promotional visit. After several years of mayhem and marriages to Meg or Jennifer or Julia, he was rebuilding his career as a serious performer with a yearning to play Chekhov or Shakespeare.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Costain had said, ‘keep him away from the cocaine and out of the tabloids.’
It was fine until the last evening, a celebrity binge at a members-only watering hole in Soho. What exactly went down in the small men’s toilet between the second and third floors was difficult to ascertain, but the resulting black eye and bloodied lip were front-page juice to every picture editor between Wapping and Faringdon. Today the UK, tomorrow the world.
Costain was incandescent.
‘What did you expect me to do?’ Kiley asked. ‘Go in there and hold his dick?’
‘If necessary, yes.’
‘You’re not paying me enough, Adrian.’
He thought it would be a while before Costain put work his way again.
He put through a call to Margaret Hamblin, a solicitor in Kentish Town for whom he sometimes did a little investigating, either straining his eyes at the local land registry or long hours hunkered down behind the wheel of his car, waiting for evidence of some small near-lethal indiscretion.
But Margaret was in court and her secretary dismissed him with a cold promise to tell her he’d called. The connection was broken almost before the words were out of her mouth. Kiley pulled on his coat and went out on to the street; for early December it was almost mild, the sky opaque and indecipherable. There was a route he took when he wanted to put some distance beneath his feet: north up Highgate Hill, past the spot where Dick Whittington was supposed to have turned again, and through Waterlow Park, down alongside the cemetery and into the Heath, striking out past the ponds to Kenwood House, a loop then that took him round the side of Parliament Hill and down towards the tennis courts, the streets that would eventually bring him home.
Tommy Duggan was waiting for him, sitting on the low wall outside the house, checking off winners in the Racing Post.
‘How are you, Tommy?’
‘Pretty fine.’
Duggan, deceptively slight and sandy-haired, had been one of the best midfielders Kiley had ever encountered in his footballing days, Kiley on his way up through the semi-pro ranks when Duggan was slipping down. During Kiley’s brace of years with Charlton Athletic, Duggan had come and gone within the space of two months. Bought in and sold on.
‘Still like a flutter,’ Kiley said, eyeing the paper at Duggan’s side.
‘Academic interest only nowadays,’ Duggan smiled. ‘Isn’t that what they say?’
The addictions of some soccer players are well documented, the addiction and the cure. Paul Merson. Tony Adams. Stories of others running wild claim their moment in the news then fade. But any manager worth his salt will know the peccadilloes of those he might sign: drugs, drink, gambling, having at least one of his teammates watch as he snorts a line of cocaine from between the buttocks of a four-hundred-pounds-an-hour whore. You look at your need, your place in the table, assess the talent, weigh up the risk.
When Tommy Duggan came to Charlton he was several thousand in debt to three different bookmakers and spent more time with his cell phone than he did on the training ground. Rumour had it, his share of his signing-on fee was lost on the back of a spavined three-year-old almost before the ink had dried on the page.
Duggan went and Kiley stayed: but not for long.
‘Come on inside,’ Kiley said.
Duggan shrugged off his leather coat and chose the one easy chair.
‘Tea?’
‘Thanks, two sugars, aye.’
What the hell, Kiley was wondering, does Tommy Duggan want with me?
‘You’re not playing any more, Tom?’ Kiley asked, coming back into the room.
‘What do you think?’
Watching Sky Sport in the pub, Kiley had sometimes glimpsed Duggan’s face, jostling for space amongst the other pundits ranged across the screen.
‘I had a season with Margate,’ Duggan said. ‘After I come back this last time from the States. Bastard’d shove me on for the last twenty minutes — “Get amongst ’em, Tommy, work the magic. Turn it round.”’ Duggan laughed. ‘Every time the ball ran near, there’d be some donkey anxious to kick the fuck out of me. All I could do to stay on my feet, never mind turn bloody round.’
He drank some tea.
‘Nearest I get to a game nowadays is coaching a bunch of kids over Whittington Park. Couple of evenings a week. That’s what I come round to see you about. Thought you might like to lend a hand. Close an’ all.’
‘Coaching?’
‘Why not? More than a dozen of them now. More than I can handle.’
‘How old?’
‘Thirteen, fourteen. Best of them play in this local league. Six-a-side. What d’you think? ’Less your evenings are all spoken for, of course.’
Kiley shook his head. ‘Can’t remember the last time I kicked a ball.’
‘It’ll come back to you,’ Duggan said. ‘Like falling off a bike.’
Kiley wasn’t sure if that was what he meant or not.
There were eleven of them the first evening Kiley went along, all shapes and sizes. Two sets of dreadlocks and one turban. One of the black kids, round-faced, slightly pudgy in her Arsenal strip, was a girl. Esther.
‘I ain’t no mascot, you know,’ she said, after Duggan had introduced them. ‘I can run rings round this lot.’
‘My dad says he saw you play once,’ said a lad whose mum had ironed his David Beckham shirt straight from the wash. ‘He says you were crap.’
‘Your dad’d know crap right enough, wouldn’t he, Dean,’ Duggan said. ‘Living with you.’
The rest laughed and Dean said, ‘Fuck off,’ but he was careful to say it under his breath.
‘Okay, let’s get started,’ Tommy Duggan said. ‘Let’s get warmed up.’
After a few stretching exercises and a couple of circuits of the pitch, Duggan split them up into twos and threes practising basic ball skills, himself and Kiley moving between them, watching, offering advice.
No more than twenty minutes or so of that and their faces were bright with sweat under the floodlights.
‘Now,’ Duggan said, ‘let’s do a little work on corners, attacking, defending, staying alert. Jack, why don’t you send a few over, give us the benefit of that sweet right foot.’
Kiley was sweating like the rest, feeling his forty years. Either his tracksuit had shrunk or he’d put on more weight than he’d thought. The first corner was struck too hard and sailed over everyone’s heads, but after that he
