Page 39 of Offside

“Night, Marek.”

He goes. Not fast, not slow. The lift opens and takes him. The corridor is just a corridor again, and I’m standing in my doorway with my heart going like a race horse, and the photograph develops and develops and never resolves.

Inside, door locked, I sit on the end of the bed and wait to feel the relief.

It doesn’t come.

I check for it the way you check a hamstring, probing, expecting the flood of it, we got away with it, nothing seen or nothing understood, the wall held. The relief isn’t there. In its place there’s something with a completely different shape.

Loss.

For a brief moment in that doorway, the thing decided itself. The corridor was going to do what five years of my silence couldn’t, and there was a version of tomorrow where it was simply known, done, out, no ask required, no bravery bill to pay, and some traitor department of me stood in the light with my hand on his neck and wanted it. Wanted to be caught. Wanted the deciding taken out of my hands, the way I have never once in my life wanted anything taken out of my hands.

The audit is still where I left it. It means everything. Say nothing, change nothing, guard it harder.

Guard it harder. But I wanted the wall to fall on us. Both true. File that.

The phone starts at twelve fifteen. Two texts, four minutes apart. The code with its collar up.

no film until after. schedule’s full

good near post today. nothing before the match

Doubled protocols, in dressing-room-readable code. No film means no rooms, and no rooms means the routes are burned, the stairs most of all. Nothing before the match means don’t even think about it, and it’s signed with a corner compliment the way you’d bandage a thing you just cut.

I typewe play tomorrow, that’s all this week is,and delete it fast, because it’s a lie, and we don’t lie on this channel. We just say less.

I send one word.

noted

And I hate it. I hate obeying it. I hate that he’s right to send it, that the corridor was my fault, my hand, my door drifting. I hate that the man builds walls the way I build schedules, instantly, competently, in love with neither. I lie on top of the covers in my kit like a junior and hate all of it at a fully professional level.

Sleep doesn’t come. One o’clock comes instead.

Here’s what I know at one o’clock on the eve of a World Cup semifinal. Tomorrow, ninety minutes will decide years of some things and nothing about the one specific thing. The corridor is burned. The wall got reinforced at twelve fifteen by its original architects.

But eve of match is eve of match. Older than the washbag, older than film. I’m dressed before the clause finishes making its case.

I take the burned stairs. Two men who play tomorrow don’t sit in separate rooms. That’s roster management. My heart is doing the pressed-horn thing again and I let it, because at least a horn is honest.

His floor. His door. Damián asleep behind it. I raise my hand to knock soft, once, captain’s business, eve of match, the oldest excuse the arrangement owns, both of us pretending that’s what it is, and I already know he’ll answer.

The door opens before my knuckles land.

He’s dressed. Washbag under his arm.

“Eve of match,” he says.

“Eve of match,” I say.

Neither of us calls it what it is. Neither of us mentions the washbag, or the protocols, or the architects breaking their own walls.

We turn for the burned stairs together, and the hotel hums, and tomorrow is already leaning on the door of tonight, and nobody is pretending anything at all.

?

Chapter 13: Šíma