Page 83 of Almost Ours

October 26th 2015

Ruby:

The Saturday of the following week, Emma finds me by the fence about ten minutes before the match. She’s wearing an enormous khaki parka and carrying two paper cups of tea, her blonde hair sticking out beneath a white bobble hat and her Cindy-Lou nose pink from the cold as she makes her way across the grass towards me.

“He said you’d be out here freezing and pretending not to be,” she says, holding one of the cups towards me with a smile. “Apparently you’ve never missed one of his matches?”

A pang of guilt smacks into me as I take it. When we were kids, Mum used to drag me to Oscar’s matches whether I wanted to go or not, bundling me into coats and wellies while I complained the entire journey and then making me stand on some freezing touchline watching a game I didn’t care about. Eventually I stopped fighting it and football became part of having Oscar as a twin.

Except nobody made me come today.

I’m mostly here for Josh.

And that makes me feel like a disloyal bag of shit.

Helped only by the fact Josh looks so good out there. He moves like he knows exactly what he’s doing, all sharp turns and planted feet and sudden bursts of speed, the muscles in his thighs pulling hard beneath his shorts when he changes direction, his calves tightening when he pushes off the ground, his whole body working with this physical certainty I don’t normally get from him.

Off the pitch, Josh thinks about everything. I can pretty much watch him doing it sometimes, weighing up whether he should speak, whether he should touch me, whether whatever he wants to say is worth saying at all, but there’s none of that out there. He calls for the ball without hesitation, shoves another player away from it with his shoulder, turns and tears off in the opposite direction before the defender has recovered, and watching the same boy who turns bright red when I say anything remotely sexual use his body like he trusts it completely is doing filthy things to my concentration.

I can’t stop watching him at all.

“How’s everything?” Emma asks, watching Oscar with the same sort of focus I’m watching Josh.

“Busy,” I say, dragging my attention back towards her. “But good. What about you?”

“Yeah. Better. You know.” She gives me a knowing look and takes a sip of her tea. “Getting there.”

I don’t know everything that happened to Emma last year, only the tiny bits I got to see. I know that on Christmas Eve Oscar thought she was literally dead and completely lost his mind, then disappeared the next morning and came back after collecting her from the airport. I know her family had moved to Ireland, that she’d flown back to England alone, and that for months afterwards she barely seemed like herself.

She never told me what happened and I never asked.

On New Year’s Eve she saw the scars on my wrist when my sleeve rode up. There was no shock, or horror, or anything on her face that made me feel scared or defensive. She only moved her head to get a good look and then asked if I felt any better now. When I said yes, she nodded and carried on getting ready.

She never mentioned them again and maybe that’s why I’ve never asked her either.

“I’m sorry I haven’t popped around yet,” she brushes her shoulder with mine.

“That’s okay. I haven’t come over to yours once, and I probably should.”

“I know it was a bit of a sore point for Oscar, but I get why you didn’t move in with us.” We both wince when a De Montfort player almost scores. “How’s the new room?”

“Boring and beige.”

Emma laughs. “They’re all boring and beige.”

“Mine’s really, really awful. It makes me feel like I’m in prison.”

“Welcome to Lincoln, I guess.”

We fall quiet for a while after that, both of us watching the match settle into itself. Oscar spends most of his time shouting at everyone whether they need shouting at or not, Cam loses the ball trying to get around the same player twice and then looks wholeheartedly offended that the guy has had the audacity to take it from him, and Josh keeps popping up in different bits of the pitch with more grace than any of the other players.

“I really don’t know much about football,” Emma quietly admits, making sure the people around us can’t hear.

“You don’t have to know loads.” I nod towards Oscar. “Just watch him. He’ll tell you what’s happening because he doesn’t know how to shut up.”

As if summoned by the insult, Oscar throws both arms out and starts shouting at Cam, who responds by shouting something back and pointing furiously towards the referee.

Emma laughs into her tea. “I guess you’re right. Though it’s kind of boring when I don’t have a clue what’s going on.” She nods towards the team. “I suppose we should feel lucky that we’ve got something nice to look at.”