It was hot on the beach and Alan was almost asleep when he heard the shouts. He opened one eye and looked up. A group of teenage boys were playing football on the wet sand. They passed the ball rapidly to each other, earning some angry looks from sunbathers near the water’s edge.
Alan sat up and watched them with interest. They only looked about sixteen and yet they passed the ball with remarkable skill. One boy stopped and controlled the ball using only his chest muscles, before letting it roll down his body to his left foot and then hammering it to another player.
This brilliant performance was accompanied by a lot of shouting and bad language and a space soon cleared around the players, as people moved their towels and pulled small children to safety. Alan smiled to himself. He’d played in the local team himself years ago.
Alan watched admiringly as the boys finished their warm-up and started some serious training. One of them went out into the water up to his waist to be the goalie and six or seven of them stood in a tight group in the shallows. The last boy went a little way down the beach and, after dribbling the ball expertly around the sunbathers, he sent it rocketing into the middle of the group. They rose into the air in perfect unison and tried to head the ball past the goalie. One after another they sent it flying over the surface of the sea like a missile. Whenever the goalie missed, he had to swim out a long way to get it back.
The space around the footballers grew larger. By now they had taken over most of the beach and the shallow water, and people were looking at them angrily. Not Alan. He knew team practice when he saw it. These lads were obviously training for an important match. Thirty years ago he often did the same thing himself. In fact, he could probably teach them a few moves.
He stood up and watched them intently, moving his body in an involuntary imitation of the players’ movements. Every time the boy on the beach kicked the ball, Alan’s own foot shot forwards. Every time one of them headed it, Alan moved his own head quickly to one side. He couldn’t help it! Football was in his blood, even after all this time.
At one point, while the goalie was fetching the ball, a skinny man with short hair and covered in tattoos came over to speak to the group. “Listen,” he said angrily. “I’m only going to say this once. If that ball touches one of my kids – so, that boy over there, that girl, and my little two-year-old over here – I’m going to rip your heads off!”
Alan thought this was very unlikely. The skinny tattooed dad looked like an undernourished flamingo confronting a pride of young lions. Alan expected a fight, but the boys just told the man to calm down and continued their game. Other people were nodding in agreement. None of them wanted the footballers to carry on, but Alan cheered loudly as one of the lads kicked the ball high into the air. It was beautiful to watch.
Suddenly Alan couldn’t contain himself any longer. He ran over the sand and went to join the group in the shallows, indicating his own head with both thumbs and shouting, “To me! To me!” The boy dribbling the ball on the beach hesitated a moment, then kicked the ball hard. It flew towards Alan and smacked him on the nose.
Alan’s nose exploded in a shower of bone and blood and the ball bounced off straight towards skinny dad’s two-year old daughter. For a few seconds Alan knew nothing, then he found himself under water and sat up quickly, only to discover that he couldn’t breathe. Skinny dad’s arm was round his neck.
Alan had a brief vision of the man’s two-year-old screaming with a big red mark on her cheek, before everything went black.
He spent the afternoon in the hospital, but when the police questioned him about the incident, his memory was very vague. He seemed to remember the boys pulling skinny dad off him and helping Alan up the beach. Then he remembered the ambulance arriving. He was sure that at some point, one of the boys had said, “Sit down here, granddad.” But that couldn’t possibly be right!
