Here is the whole thing. It is a short story.
At eleven, an academy took him out of a school team in The Meadows, ten minutes' walk from where he was sitting.
At sixteen, Schalke 04 paid a fee and put him in a flat in Gelsenkirchen with a fridge he could not work out how to switch on.
Schalke were a Champions League club then. Sixty-two thousand in, and a wall of them behind the goal that made the seats hum through your feet.
At seventeen, he came on in the Bundesliga. At eighteen, he got seven goals and five assists in half a season, and a German paper printed his face beside the word Phänomen.
At nineteen, he landed badly on a training pitch that had frozen and thawed twice in a week, and he broke his ankle. Nobody near him. Five months out.
He came back, and the shirt was on somebody else, and the somebody else was scoring.
At twenty, there was the other thing.
He refused to think about the other thing, so he thought instead about the fact that the club had run out of the sock size he wanted, and he had trained in socks that were too big since July.
At twenty-one, he watched Schalke burn through five managers in a season and drop out of the Bundesliga after thirty years in it, and a lawyer he had never met ended his contract on a video call that lasted nine minutes.
Notts County signed him eleven days later, on a free, in January. There was a photograph of him holding a scarf on the club website with three paragraphs underneath it.
He could still see all of it, and that was the part he could not get round. He had sat up in those seats tonight and known two seconds early that Wootton would be free at the near post.
He had seen the pass through four bodies that nobody played. He knew the shape of every situation on a football pitch the second it started forming.
Then his legs went and did something an under-fourteen would apologise for.
"Pack it in, then," he said, out loud, to an empty room.
He listened to how that sounded.
"No," he said. "I am not doing that."
He stood up, and his tracksuit was still wet through from sitting in it, and if he drove home like that he would seize up like a gate, so he went for a shower.
Creak. The shower room door.
Drip. Drip. Drip. A head that had been dripping since March.
Hisssss.
The boiler had been off since five, and there was nothing left in it. He put his hands flat on the tiles and let the cold water hammer the back of his neck, and for about ninety seconds he thought about nothing.
Squeeak.
The pipe knocked twice and went quiet.
Clang-clang. And in the quiet he could hear the last of the crowd going over the bridge, and a car horn, and somebody shouting a name twice.
Under all that, closer, on the other side of the wall, somebody breathing.
Quick. Getting quicker. It was a kind of breathing you did not do carrying a laundry cart.
One of the lads has brought somebody in.
Loach had done exactly that in March and copped a two-week fine and a fortnight of being called a legend.
Except it was twenty past seven on a Saturday, and the players had been gone half an hour, and the only people left in this building were two stewards, whoever was locking up, and the kit staff.
This is a club discipline matter. I should have a look.
He knew what that thought was worth. He was twenty-two years old. That is the excuse your head hands you when you have already decided.
He picked the towel up off the rail and wrapped it round his waist, because he was going to look for four seconds and then be dressed and out.
He was five foot ten, long in the leg, narrow across the shoulders, still the shape of the seventeen-year-old who had left for Germany.
He had been hurt through the two years he was supposed to fill out in, and he had never got those two years back. On the inside of his left forearm there was a small tattoo that nobody at this football club had ever asked him about.
He went three steps across the wet tile and put one eye to the gap in the door.
Tap. Tap. Water off his hair onto the floor.
The strips were off.
The light in there came from the corridor and from the window at the far end, and through that window, over the roof of the stand and over the river, the floodlights at the City Ground were still burning off. Three hundred yards away.
Championship football. You could reach it with a decent goal kick.
There was nobody in the room with her.
She had her back against the bench under peg nine, one knee up. Small, blonde, hair coming out of a band that had given up hours ago, still in the club polo the matchday staff wore, with the crest over the heart.
He had seen her a hundred times. Kit room, corridor, pushing the big blue cart past the physio's door with the wonky wheel going rrrr-rrrr-rrrr the whole length of the building.
He had said alright to her maybe twenty times, and she had gone red maybe twenty times, and he had never wondered why. Not once.
She had a shirt held against her face.
Black and white. Long sleeves. Match worn, because the basket was sat next to her waiting to go in.
He looked at the number on the back, because the back was towards him.
Seven.
There was one of those in the building. They had printed three at the start of the season, and the shop had sold none, and he knew that because Kemp's assistant had mentioned it to him in a corridor in July.
She pressed the shirt harder against her face, and her shoulders shook once, and the sound that came through the door was small and cracked and completely private.
Ping.
He did not hear it in the room. He heard it somewhere behind his eyes, small and clean, like a lift arriving.
Blue light unfolded about forty centimetres in front of his face, hanging in the air over the door and the bench and the girl and the whole of the away changing room at Meadow Lane.
[NEW QUEST AVAILABLE]
[Check it? Y / N]
Angell did not move.
What is that.
He blinked hard, twice. It stayed exactly where it was, letter for letter, glowing.
What is that. That is in my eye. Something is in my eye.
He put his hand over his right eye. The words stayed. He covered the left. The words stayed.
He shut both and counted to three, and when he opened them the panel had not moved a millimetre, and the girl on the floor had not looked up, because there was nothing in that room to look up at.
Marcel.
Marcel Weiss was nineteen and in the same age group at Schalke, and he had started seeing lights at the edge of his vision in November, and by April he was in a bed in Essen with a shaved head and a line of staples in it. Angell had gone twice.
The second time, Marcel had said hello and asked him, politely, who he was.
His hands had gone cold. He could feel his own pulse in the side of his neck. Thud. Thud. Thud.
That is what this is. That is exactly what this is. You have a thing growing in your head, and it has started.
Rrrr-rrrr.
The wonky wheel, out in the corridor, two doors down and going away.
A steward said something, and somebody laughed, and a shutter came down with a clang, and the world carried on being completely normal in every direction except this one.
He read the two lines again. Check it? Y / N.
No. Because if I answer it, it is real, and if it is real, then it is in my head, and if it is in my head, then I am finished.
He stood there and did nothing for about eight seconds.
Then he thought: Marcel never got asked.
Marcel had seen lights. Lights do not ask you a question and then wait for you to answer.
Right.
Go on, then. Ask me something else.
He nodded.
Ping.
The rectangle unfolded again.
---
Get the kit girl to stop pretending it's about the laundry!
Content: She has been carrying that shirt about with her for 11 days
and telling herself it's a wash issue. You have been telling yourself
you're a footballer. One of you is closer to the truth than the other.
Conditions:
- Give her what she came in here for (0/1)
- Let her ask you for the second thing (0/1)
Reward: Bonus stat +5
Training Effect x3 (7 days)
Large favourability increase with 'Ellie'
---
He read it twice. He read the last line three times, and the last word of the last line was a name.
Ellie.
He did not know her name.
He had said alright to that girl twenty times in eight months and had never asked. She was not wearing a lanyard. There was nothing in that room with a name printed on it except a shirt with his own on the back of it.
A tumour does not know her name.
A tumour cannot know a thing I do not know.
His heart was going like he had done a set of forties. Thud-thud. Thud-thud.
So either I am ill and I have made her a name up, and it will be wrong, and I can check that in about four seconds by asking her.
Or.
And that was when Reece Angell noticed that his hand had come off the door frame at some point in the last twenty seconds, and that the door between the drying area and the away changing room at Meadow Lane had not sat properly in its frame since the summer they redid the floor.
Cre-e-eak.
It swung all the way, slowly, with a small squeal at the end, and went tap against the locker, and stopped.
The girl on the floor under peg nine looked up.
The towel was in his left hand. It had been in his left hand since the drying area. There were four metres of cold tile between them and a blue window that only one of them could see.
The shirt slid off her lap onto the floor, seven upwards.
"Scheisse."
It came out before he decided anything. It always came out in German when it came out fast, because German was where he had learned to swear like a man instead of a boy, and eight months at home had not shifted it.
She stared at him. Her mouth moved and nothing came out of it. Then, from the floor, in a very small voice:
"I don't know what that means."