goal to the left. Somewhere.
Lennox looks at his watch. Sixty minutes now up. Two-thirds of the game gone. St Mirren folding like a broken deckchair in Paisley, but Hearts still in pole position. If we could only get to seventy minutes, he pleads to a higher power. Dundee are going for it. Hearts are starting to look sluggish, even downcast. Lennox fears that too many players don’t want to be out there. They’ve come close a couple of times on counters, but Dundee are pressing. Hearts have won only two out of eleven against their bogey team. In the media build-up, Archie Knox, Dundee’s combative manager, has taken great delight in making this point.
Knox sends on the mustachioed Albert Kidd, a dead ringer for comedian Bobby Ball from the Cannon and Ball duo, replacing Tosh McKinlay. Lennox breathes a little sigh of relief, as McKinlay is one of Dundee’s best players. But still the home side swarm forward. Then Henry Smith makes a brilliant save for Hearts, pushing aside a drive from Mennie that came through a wall of players. Lennox yells in relief and delight as he and a stranger next to him embrace. He scents destiny in that stop. He’s not the only one. The stadium lights up with the relishing chant of ‘here we go’, and the seventy-minute mark has been navigated. Then more nail-biting, and a terrible stillness descends on the crowd as we get to ten minutes between Hearts and the championship flag. Ray Lennox close to choking as he sees his cousin Billy first, then his uncle. His dad is to the left of them. He sidles up to John Lennox and touches his shoulder.
In the eighty-third minute, Robert Connor’s corner kick from the right is flicked on by Brown. Albert Kidd is unmarked and clips a right-foot shot past Smith from close in. It’s his first goal in the League championship this season. Lennox hears a series of gasps in the crowd and a curse coming from his father, the first time he’s heard the old man use that particular word. — Seven minutes left, his cousin Billy moans. Lennox thinks of 07.07.70. Across Britain, the Videoprinter results service on the BBC will erroneously designate the goal to Hearts and their captain, Walter Kidd.
Then:
Lennox feels the loss of the flag at that moment. The crowd bellow in defiant support, urging them on to get the equaliser, but the players look ready to succumb to exhaustion. Then John Lennox feels something tugging at his chest as his arm goes numb. He wants to tell the people around him, his son, brother and nephew, to stop jostling and give him room.
Ray Lennox sees his father easing himself down on to the terrace, as if he’s going to sleep. A few guys shout— What the fuck – but they make space for him.
— THAT’S MA FAITHER! Lennox screams at nobody in particular, hunkering down by John’s side. — Dad, ye okay? He looks to his Uncle Davie, to his cousin Billy and back to his father. John Lennox gives him a slow, enervated smile. — It’s awright, he says in patently shallow tones, seeing the man he was, carefree and strong, able to enjoy, or at least bear hearty witness to afternoons like this, spilling indelibly into the past.
Albert Kidd scores a wonderful solo second goal four minutes from time. He storms down the wing, passes several Hearts players, plays a one–two and smashes a volley past Smith. He is not to know that he’s reached his nadir as a professional sportsman; put on this Earth to torture Hearts and deny them this flag. These few minutes will be the longest in the lives of the players in the silver and maroon, who now just want to be anywhere but on the Park. Billy Lennox pushes through the crowd to summon trackside paramedics.
Some people head off. Many more stay, unsure of what to do. In tandem with the pain of defeat, a shared acknowledgement slowly ignites within the supporters. The sense of having lived through a significant event. The unarticulated but almost tangible realisation that this is far more crucial than the cliched rituals of glory hunters in Paisley, celebrating another League win in front of the cameras. There is a sense that this drama they are all implicated in at Dens Park is an approximation of the life that so many people follow sport to actually escape from. Reality has bitten them hard and they have to share this moment, but there is no way to express it. All they can do is stay on to cheer Hearts, praise the team for a valiancy they know in their souls the side has not shown; they are bottle merchants who’ve blown it on the last day. But what the crowd is really trying to express is a much deeper communion with nothing less than the beauty and terror of life itself. But Ray Lennox misses this. He is in an ambulance with his stricken father, and his uncle and cousin, heading for Ninewells Hospital.
A consoling touch on his arm by Ian Gellatly, Dundee FC’s chairman. Mercer nods in sober, dignified appreciation. With sadness, he thinks of team manager Alex MacDonald, whom he saw head dejectedly into the tunnel at the final whistle. Internally debates whether he should go down to the dressing room and be with the players, or give them a little space. Retreats somewhere briefly to reprogramme the smile. The businessman calculates the loss in economic terms, before re-emerging with a sparkling grace.
Ray Lennox rose on Sunday, having slept fitfully. His father had suffered a minor heart attack and was still in Dundee. He would be transferred tomorrow to the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. A new regime would be undertaken; diet change and medication, anticoagulants for the blood. There was a sense of revenge afflicting Ray Lennox. A need for justice. Emotions battled within him. He was determined to have it out with Les. To get clarification: friend or foe. He didn’t care which any more, he just wanted to know.
He got on the bus to Clermiston and ducked down the side lane to Les’s back door. But as he headed down the narrow paved passage that ran between the houses, Lennox was accosted by that stillness he now knew so well; the foreboding sense of something being not quite right. Then the calm was desecrated by urgent shrieks of terror filling the air. Ray Lennox could see a flash of fire, and it was hurtling towards him. Unable to avoid the burning projectile, he shut his eyes, giving thanks that it missed his face, though coming close enough for him to feel the sooted flesh in his throat, and the hair under his nose singe. He turned to watch it ricochet off the pebble-dashed wall of the house behind him, and fall on to the paving. The ball started dancing frantically and a terrorised eye in the flame begged for mercy as the stink of burning flesh and filthy feathers filled his nostrils.
Lennox backed away as the creature toppled, crumpling into silence. In the direction of the loft, Les Brodie’s eyes seemed as small and reasonless as the burning pigeon’s as he held another bemused bird at arm’s length and was dousing it with petrol from the spout of a small can. Lennox felt his skin burn under the heat of his gaze. Turning quickly, he fled back up the side lane and into the front street, his boyhood friend’s mocking laughter following him all the way.
Another squealing, flaming comet shot into the sky above him, clearing the rooftop of the house, before the ball of flame plummeted and bounced along the road. Lennox didn’t look back; he headed swiftly towards the bus stop as a maroon-and-white double-decker drew near. Les had given him the answer he needed.
20 Sales Conference
THE NIGHT HEAT swarms out of the mangrove swamps as Lennox takes the Interstate 75 east. He drives touching the 100 mph mark, the Volkswagen resonating dangerously as it bullets along the almost deserted Alligator Alley, heading for a hotel by Miami airport, and a training course.
He’s read about groups of guys, usually nerds, who get together in seminar settings, sharing techniques on how to pick up women. They draw on a mixed bag of behavioural and situational approaches: transactional analysis, neurolinguistic programming and pop and pseudo psychology. Most are simply wanting to increase their drawing power in the sexual marketplace; bright, obsessive losers, they are trying to circumvent their social unease with females. For others, the women are practically incidental; it is more about inter-male bonding and competition, the schoolyard boasting of sexual conquests – real or imagined – taken into adulthood.
For some of the more extreme members of these groups, the thrill of picking up women and sharing in techniques and triumphs soon becomes passe. Many are openly dysfunctional; obvious victims of abuse, with an embittered and displaced vengeful aspect to their character. They are chickenhawks who’ve flocked together and their
The seminar is a house of paedophiles, at least one of whom is a copper. Lennox had become a policeman because he hated bullies. Then he’d been disillusioned to find out that, like everywhere else, the police force had its share. Right across the world, men like Dearing, attracted to wielding power over others, would hide behind the
