PANENKA E-Book

Ronan Hession

• Herausgeber: Bluemoose Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 259

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

His name was Joseph, but for years they had called him Panenka, a name that was his sadness and his story.

Das E-Book PANENKA wird angeboten von Bluemoose Books und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
Friendships, literary, lost, love, football

Leseprobe

Panenka

by

Rónán Hession

Imprint

Copyright © Rónán Hession 2021

First published in 2021 byBluemoose Books Ltd25 Sackville StreetHebden BridgeWest YorkshireHX7 7DJ

www.bluemoosebooks.com

All rights reservedUnauthorised duplication contravenes existing laws

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication dataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Hardback 978-1-910422-67-0

Printed and bound in the UK by Short Run Press

Dedication

This book is dedicated, with love, to my sons, Thomas and Jacob.

Panenka: In football, a penalty technique in which the taker chips the ball artfully into the centre of the goal, counting on the likelihood that the goalkeeper will have dived to either side.

Chapter 1: Panenka

His name was Joseph, but for years they had called him Panenka, a name that was his sadness and his story.

These past months, the pressure pain in his head had been coming almost every night, building like an Atlantic wave that roiled within his dreams until it broke and crashed through his sleep, shocking him awake. It manifested as a clamp on his face. Working at bone level, it would spread from the crease between his eyebrows, around the orbits of his pounding eyes and onwards to his jaw, which would stiffen and lock with tension. He called it his Iron Mask. With the palms of his hands pressed against his cheeks, he would run to the bathroom to compress his face against the cool, hard side of the bath, barely relieving the nerves that had mayday signals pulsing through them.

In its own time and on its own terms, the Iron Mask would eventually lift, allowing the last few ripples of pain to subside and returning Panenka to the unclaimed hours somewhere between late night and early morning. Exhausted, he would haul himself up, his legs all fizzy and useless, and limp back to bed, thinking hungrily about the few hours of sleep that remained. Pulling the duvet up as far as his cheek, which bore no bruises or scars, no evidence of the silent violence, he would catch a bubble of thought passing through his mind: was this time worse or the same as the last? Was the pain spreading or different? But he had learned to ignore these questions: the Iron Mask was unknowable in any real sense and beyond any bargaining. 

As Panenka lay there on his side, on one of those shipwrecked mornings he had become so used to, his grandson, Arthur, pushed open the bedroom door and climbed into the bed. His weight was not substantial enough to roll Panenka out of the hollow on his side of the mattress, so the child was able to settle himself back-to-back into a familiar arrangement based on body heat. He had often cited his grandfather’s indulgence of these visits as a defence against his mother’s objections to them – living in a house of adults will sharpen any seven-year-old’s advocacy skills to a precocious level.

On finding her son’s bed vacant and ruffled, Marie-Thérèse called into Panenka’s room without looking: ‘Arthur, five more minutes.’

‘I’m bored,’ said Arthur to the ceiling once his mother had gone downstairs and out of range. He turned to Panenka and woke him with a nudge to the kidneys. ‘Pop – can I wear a tracksuit today?’

‘Morning, my friend,’ replied Panenka without opening his eyes or moving.

‘Everyone’s wearing tracksuits. It makes no sense to force kids to wear uniforms with ties. It’s the wrong type of clothes.’

‘Tracksuits are Tuesday and Thursday.’

‘But you don’t get into trouble if you wear them other days.’ Arthur leaned up on his elbow and turned Panenka’s chin towards him.

‘Not getting into trouble is not the same as being good,’ said Panenka.

‘Do I have to wear a tie, then?’

‘No tie. I agree with you there. I can’t think of a single reason for you to wear a tie. It hardly makes sense for adults to wear them.’

‘Mama,’ roared Arthur. ‘I’m not wearing a tie. Pop says I’m allowed.’

‘Stop shouting!’ called Marie-Thérèse from downstairs, amid the sounds of spoons and bowls. ‘If you want to talk to me, come into the same room that I’m in.’

‘Hit the snooze,’ said Arthur.

Panenka pressed the top of his grandson’s head and they lay there for a few more minutes, Arthur falling back into the carefree rest of a child and Panenka sobering himself after the intensity of the past night.

He pulled the uniform from the wardrobe in Arthur’s room and threw the elastic tie back onto the shelf. Laying the clothes out on the bed, he closed all but the top two buttons of the school shirt, leaving those as practice for Arthur to dress himself, each successful effort getting a star on the chore chart.

Panenka gave Arthur a piggyback downstairs to the kitchen, where Marie-Thérèse was wearing the androgynous trouser suit she had just ironed. The name badge on her lapel had limited space and said ‘Trainee Manager: Marie.’ She had recently taken a promotion at the supermarket where she had worked for several years, going from cashier to a management role that she had been encouraged to apply for. It was a little bit more money but she lost shift allowances, overtime, and the friendship of the women she had worked with on the registers. And so far she was struggling to assert herself with the men in the stockroom. There was something subtly undermining in their frigid co-operation and she could sense their hostility like a draught on her shoulders whenever she swept through to look in on them. But she contained her anxiety and instead projected managerial competence through her perfectionism. She had been taught that ‘retail is detail’ and was meticulous in her standards, despite knowing that this was a sure way to get called a bitch behind her back. As she sometimes reminded herself, this was all part of getting ahead and taking her life back, even if the small patch of alopecia behind her left ear had begun to worry her. It was easy to hide it now, but if it became any bigger it would surely expose her lack of confidence, or worse, earn her a nickname.

‘Here you go Arthur, make sure you don’t get it on your uniform,’ she said handing him a bowl of porridge with honey in it. ‘We’ll have to go to school early today – I’m due in for the delivery shift.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Panenka. ‘I have a later start today, so I can drop him off at the gates before I go. He’s still waking up, I think.’

Arthur was sitting on a beanbag, staring at cartoons, his bowl balanced on his soft belly as he slouched. His hand rested on the remote, having nudged up the volume to drown out the adults’ chatter behind him.

‘How are you this morning?’ she asked, kissing her father on the top of his head. ‘I heard you up and about last night. Everything okay?’

‘It’s those migraines. I’ll get it seen to. I feel normal now, like it never happened. Have you had breakfast?’

‘I’ve a banana in my bag. I’d better run – I need to get in before the delivery is done, I have to check everything off.’

‘Can’t you get someone else to do it – one of the lads?’

‘I could, but if there’s a mistake it comes out of my pocket. See you later.’ Marie-Thérèse stooped down to kiss Arthur, who was engrossed in the screen. ‘Be good for Pop now, won’t you, buddy,’ she said. As she pulled away he caught the back of her neck and hooked her in for a kiss of his own. Arthur preferred dry kisses – wet ones got wiped off with his sleeve.

Panenka sat over his coffee and porridge, half watching the cartoons himself. His cheeks and forehead were clear; no lingering sensations. He had described it as a face migraine to his doctor, who had known him for years, ever since his footballing days had ended. He and the doctor were about the same age and Panenka was not the first man he had examined who had downplayed his health worries. As their families had grown up, they had often chatted informally during routine check-ups, enjoying the type of jokes that men share in private. The doctor was concerned about the headaches but would say little about the condition except that migraines shouldn’t feel like iron masks and that Panenka would need a scan. He could wait nine months or else go private, if he could afford it. Panenka had said that there was no big rush and that he didn’t mind waiting, embarrassed about declaring his financial situation to an old friend.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ the doctor said. ‘There’s a Doctor Wolf who’s doing a series of short residencies at the hospital. He’s a consultant neurosurgeon from Portugal who’s an expert in middle-aged men with headaches who follow underachieving football teams, so maybe I can see about getting you a session with him. It’s a teaching residency which means there’ll be a registrar there – a trainee surgeon who’s learning from him. Would that be a problem?’

‘Is that private or public?’

‘Neither. It’s sort of off-books. It’s a teaching consultation so there’s no cost, provided you’re comfortable with being part of the training process. To be honest, I’m only telling you about this because we’ve known each other a long time and I think it’s worth getting this checked out soon. I don’t want to worry you, but I think you need to be examined by someone experienced. It might be nothing, but a nothing from Doctor Wolf is worth more than a nothing from me. Deal?’ he asked.

‘Why not.’

He had been booked for a preliminary scan the following week, getting an afternoon off work to go on his own. It was all over in time for him to be home for dinner with Marie-Thérèse and Arthur at the usual hour. He had said nothing to them about the scan or the panic attack that he had when he was in the MRI scanner, nor about the long chat with the young radiographer about changing his mind, or the submissive resignation when he was delivered into the machine for a second time, feeling utterly powerless and alone. He had expected that they would print off the scan pictures like at a passport booth, and tell him the news one way or the other. But the pictures had to be referred to Doctor Wolf and Doctor Nunes, whoever he was, or, as it turned out, whoever she was. It had taken four weeks for Doctor Wolf’s office to call Panenka for that morning’s appointment.

Panenka shaped the last few lumps of porridge into a spoonful and finished it.

‘Time’s up, Arthur. Brush your teeth before it’s too late. We’re going in 300 seconds.’

‘That’s five minutes,’ said Arthur without shifting. He was used to his grandfather’s sly way of pushing arithmetic on him.

They walked through the part of town Panenka had lived in for many years, an area known as the Crucible, where a mix of strays, seasonal workers and outsider communities lived; people dependent on the local authorities, mostly. Over the years, much of the area had been scheduled for demolition – or urban regeneration as it was called – but there was always a new population of unwanted people who needed to be housed somewhere, anywhere, and the Crucible served a useful purpose as far as the town was concerned. It was a sort of spare room where all the problems were dumped with a view to sorting them out later, or forgetting about them altogether. It was where the pavements crumbled, where blown streetlamps went the longest without being fixed, where people used sheets as curtains, where grown men lived four to a room in bunk beds. For all its flaws, it was cheap and within walking distance of most places. Panenka had always liked the invisibility of living in the Crucible, it being full of people from elsewhere who were too busy with their own precarious lives to notice him.

They walked up to the school with Panenka shouldering Arthur’s bag, which was heavier than he had expected. In it was a Tupperware box packed with the ‘school bismuth,’ a futuristic silver-grey block from the science table that Arthur had been entrusted with over the weekend as a reward for coming second in a quiz. It had never left his bag.

‘Pop – what’s plastic surgery?’ asked Arthur, kicking a flattened Coke can into the road while they waited at a pedestrian crossing.

‘It’s when people get an operation on their skin to make them look younger. It flattens out their wrinkles.’

‘Oh.’

‘Why? What did you think it was?’

‘I don’t know. I thought it was like pretendsurgery.’

‘Come on, it’s a green man.’

‘Mama says that some people are addicted to plastic surgery.’

‘Let’s not talk crossing the road, my friend. Wait until we get to the other side. Remember, both ways.’

‘I’m doing it.’

‘Don’t be a lighthouse, moving your head from side to side. Pay attention.’

At the other kerb they joined the shoal of children holding hands with grown-ups, all going in the same direction.

‘Do footballers get plastic surgery?’

‘Not when I played. These days they look like pop stars, so maybe that’s changed. I was more worried about surgery on my knees or my ankles.’

‘Did you ever have an operation?’

‘A few times, unfortunately.’

‘What was the worst one?’

‘Once I broke my leg and then they had to break it again because it didn’t set properly.’

‘That’s disgusting.’

Arthur grabbed his bag when they reached the school gates and bolted to join a group of boys who were huddled and talking excitedly like Wall Street traders. He had quietly explained to Panenka a few weeks before that goodbye kisses were acceptable at home but not in public. Even hugs and high fives were being suspended pending a full review. Arthur was comparing heights with a boy that Panenka had seen before at one of the birthday parties. Arthur looked cleaner and newer standing next to him, with hair that was styled and not just short. His shoes didn’t have broken laces. His jumper was fitted without looking too small. The other boy looked a little unfinished beside him, not that either of them noticed or cared. It all came from Marie-Thérèse and her unappreciated attention to the little things. She kept it all in her head. All on top of her new job and the thousand-and-one other things a twenty-eight-year-old mother was supposed to fit into her life.

The school bell rang and the children ran screaming into their lines as the parents broke off their small talk and dispersed back to their cars: mostly mothers, a few dads and, least hassled of all, the grandparents helping out. At fifty, Panenka was a young grandfather and was good at it – that is to say, interested in it. There was a playful inversion involved in the grandfather/grandson relationship. It was child-led. Arthur chose the agenda and set the pace for their conversations, which always led back to him answering his own questions in his own way. He had such an innocent certainty, as though he were not so much figuring things out as recalling lost knowledge from a previous existence. Working methodically, he used yes/no questions to deconstruct the world’s inconsistencies and injustices. In all this Panenka was the sidekick – the ‘who’s there?’ in the knock-knock joke, as well as the clown, the tickler, the absurdist, the dumb bunny that Arthur explained things to. Nobody ever goes to counselling about their difficult grandparents. It is love without the stakes. If only Panenka’s other relationships had been like that. Perhaps they could have been. But it was too late for that thought. It was needed years ago, when he was failing as a father, a husband, a friend, and as a human. Too much of his life had involved making mistakes that carved deep grooves into the lives of those around him. Who was he to be wise now? He had always guessed that his bad choices would have to be accounted for eventually and that there would be a reckoning. So that was how he saw things, and that was how he saw the abjection of the night and the bathroom floor.

Chapter 2: Doctor Wolf

The appointment was in a part of the hospital that Panenka had never been to before – a sort of annexe-to-an-annexe, where he presumed the doctors received their training and where the famous administrative machinery of the health service was housed. There were no trolleys or people in pyjamas, and the feeling of sickness was missing from the corridors, but it still felt like a place where life-changing things happened. He found the waiting room by asking a porter and showing him the appointment letter, pointing like a tourist with no language skills. The porter swiped him through a series of double doors and brought him to a reception desk where the formalities were mercifully brief, the appointment letter doubling as a passport through the bureaucracy.

Looking around the waiting room at the other patients, he soon understood what it took to earn an appointment with Doctor Wolf. These were the hard cases. The extreme, the statistically improbable, the researchable, peer-reviewable, seen-once-in-your-career, educational-for-a-reason cases. A man with buck teeth and stubble sat reading a tabloid with a lump the size of a billiard ball at his temple. An undersized child – could even have been a teenager – sat punching his own head and trying to pull out tufts of hair, his mother beside him so used to this that she batted his hand down without even lifting her eyes from her phone. A blind woman in her forties sat with her husband, holding his hand, her speech sounding drunken and slow. A beautiful young woman, into punk by the looks of it, was locked into intermittent spasms that whiplashed her head backwards every few minutes, her dad keeping his hand behind her head to stop it cracking off the wall behind. And there sat Panenka among them, the only patient with nobody to accompany him.

He took his seat and started worrying properly. It was one thing to indulge the hope of denial about his own health, but to be grouped and classified in such company told him where the doctors’ weighted probabilities placed him. Panenka could hardly bear to look at them. Had his doctor called in a favour to get him an appointment, or had the Iron Mask got him there? Had the great Doctor Wolf pulled his file personally from a hundred others, a winner in the triage lottery because of the obscurity and desperation of his condition? Was he there to be helped, or was he beyond help and instead picked to donate his poor fortune to the advancement of medical understanding?

A young female doctor came out of the office and called the name of Jonathan somebody. The boy who had been pulling out his hair stood up and was guided by his mother into the office, his eyesight obviously affected by whatever condition he had. When they came out afterwards their faces were stony and unlit. Maybe there were some problems that even Doctor Wolf couldn’t take on. Each patient was invited in turn by the young doctor Panenka assumed was Doctor Nunes, and emerged a short time later to convey their own story to the waiting patients through little more than body language and eyes haunted with imminent crying.

Panenka was the only one left and had begun to wonder whether Doctor Wolf had run out of time or had perhaps already decided that the morning had provided enough grim education for any registrar. But eventually Doctor Nunes called him in, reading his name from the front of a manila file and offering a smile as he identified himself to her.

‘Thank you for your patience. I’m the registrar who’ll be sitting in on your consultation with Doctor Wolf. I’m sorry about the delay but we have to overbook, as a lot of patients drop out. It’s not ideal, but it means we can see and help as many people as possible.’

She was about the same age as Marie-Thérèse and had that same air of professionalism about her – another young person who had already assumed an unfair share of life’s responsibility. He didn’t know how people did it.

Panenka had had plenty of time to imagine what Doctor Wolf would be like. Initially he had assumed a mature, portly man who would be all professorial alpha masculinity. But the parade of broken souls that he had seen leaving the office had changed his mind: he now expected an officer’s side parting and the dead eyes of an overachieving careerist. In his days as a professional footballer with Seneca FC, he had always dealt with club doctors who treated the players with the kind of care and respect that any valuable company asset deserved. Several of them were obviously hired as part of the performance drugs culture that was prevalent in football back then. They travelled from club to club with the same coaches, achieving miraculous injury recovery times and passing the supposedly random tests required by the National Football Association. He had never got involved in that, not for moral reasons but because he had never been trusted enough by his club to be asked to cheat.

Panenka sat in the chair that Doctor Nunes gestured towards. Doctor Wolf was looking at the scan results on a computer and didn’t acknowledge his presence. He had a thin, veiny face, with grey bushy hair around his ears and a comb-over that gave up halfway across his scalp. Doctor Wolf asked his younger colleague a brief question in what Panenka recognised as Portuguese. Panenka had once partnered in midfield with a rangy Brazilian workhorse named Erasmo who bantered during games in street Portuguese, but he no longer had an ear for the language and had to read the doctors by their faces instead. As they discussed the file, Doctor Nunes seemed to be getting defensive – whatever Doctor Wolf had said, it had included a note of reprimand, which was now passed on to Panenka in turn.

‘Who did you bring with you?’ she asked.

‘How do you mean?’

‘The letter you got from the clinic, have you got it with you?’

‘Sure, here.’

‘No, don’t give it to me,’ she snapped, impatience leaking through her strained professionalism. ‘Tell me what it says at the bottom in bold and underlined text.’

‘Please ensure that you are accompanied by a partner, friend or family member. Okay, so?’

‘Okay, so,’ she said curtly. ‘Where is your partner, friend or family member?’

Panenka absorbed the provocation, unsure how to interpret it. Prickly humiliation surged inside him but hit a trip switch.

She released Panenka’s stolid stare and relayed the gist of things to Doctor Wolf, leading to a testy back and forth between them, the older doctor repeating a phrase in slow, patronising syllables, adding his own bold and underline by way of an index finger tapping at the screen. Doctor Nunes seemed accustomed to being spoken to that way.

‘This is important, all right?’ she said, turning back to Panenka, her tone softened, her manner regathered in preamble to seriousness.

Carefully, Doctor Wolf conveyed in single clauses, each of which was translated in turn by Doctor Nunes, information of a technical-sounding neutrality utterly at odds with its import. He spoke about a nut-sized tumour, whose novelty lay in its position, shape, intractability and the risks it posed, risks that the doctor could take but which were really Panenka’s to own; risks that could be for life, and other risks that did not admit the language of life. While the doctors spoke in turn, as if reciting wedding vows, Panenka strayed into a stunned reverie: a protective daydream populated with ghosts from a life past, barely present, and perhaps, now, never to come. He realised that all through those long nights under the Iron Mask, there had been a knowing – his body had been trying to make him understand that it was betraying him. There had begun a peeling away of identity. The Panenka in the mirror, in photographs, in football sticker albums, in match day programmes, and in others’ memories of him, was separating from itself. The bodily Panenka was being isolated, while some other, more subtle, Panenka looked on.

The doctors were exact in their use of words, words that passed through him, all about options that weren’t really options. In the end, it was a Hippocratic judgement that nothing could or should be done. A decision not to intervene was often the hardest, Doctor Wolf explained vicariously – perhaps more for his younger colleague’s benefit – and it takes many years of experience for a surgeon to learn when to make it.

It had been the briefest of exchanges about some of life’s most important truths, in which poetry and philosophy had given way to bald practicality. When asked whether he had understood everything, Panenka breathed a quiet ‘yes.’ He would not, after all, be visited by the luck he had gone so much of his life without.

‘I’m very sorry,’ said Doctor Wolf, addressing Panenka directly for the first time.

Panenka felt that counterfeit calm of bad news, the withdrawal of feeling before it crashes back in later with the full force of realisation. His shoes squeaked on the corridor afterwards as he stuffed the obsolete letter into his pocket, walking against the flow of other people, separated from them by what he now knew. The Iron Mask would eventually prevail, however long that took; his only question was how he should live until then.

Chapter 3: Marie-Thérèse

‘Say something encouraging,’ said Marie-Thérèse.

‘Like what?’ said Carla.

She had known Carla for years, and it was a testament to their friendship that it had even survived the end of Marie-Thérèse’s social life after she became a young parent. It was Carla’s job to keep Marie-Thérèse sane and grounded, a task to which her temperament and outlook were well suited.

‘Anything. Something that will make me feel less like one of the bad people in the world.’

‘You have nice skin – creamy.’

‘Not that sort of stuff.’

‘What’s the problem? So you got in trouble at work. I’ve had loads of “chats” with my boss. It’s actually an alternative to them being properly pissed off and having a go at you.’

‘Yeah, but for as long as I’ve known you you’ve always been in trouble: school, rows with your family and all that. Trouble is who you are.’

‘Even though it’s true, it doesn’t mean you have to say it out loud. It has to be helpful and the other person has to be ready to hear it.’

‘Very profound, Carla.’

‘It’s something they told us on a training course at work about how to give feedback to someone you’re planning to sack. Maybe I should collect all these things and write a book.’

‘Please don’t. I need people who stay with me on earth. Everyone I have to deal with these days is either a dreamer or a big thinker. What you have, Carla, never gets old.’

‘I can never tell whether you’re complimenting me. I mean, it sounds like a compliment, but there’s this little twist in it that makes me wonder.’

‘I hate the way that I do a thousand things right and end up getting hassle because of one mistake – it’s not even a mistake, more a miscalculation. A slight adjustment this way or that and it would have been fine.’

‘What happened exactly?’ asked Carla.

They were having this discussion late in the evening at the kitchen table, on the hard chairs. This was the forum for sorting things out. Idle, meandering conversations were held on the couch, but showdown discussions and all things problematic were brought to the table.

‘I had them facing off, you know, packing the shelves and straightening the produce on display, and they were all in and out to the stockroom like sparrows at a bird feeder. Instead of bringing out pallets and doing it properly, they were nipping in there and carrying boxes and armfuls, so I pulled one of them up on it and he stares at me and nods. Then it occurs to me that he’s got food in his mouth, so I call him back and ask him straight out: “Are you eating something?” And he gives me this facial reaction, like “Woah, what’s this?” so I repeat myself. He shakes his head. At this stage we both know he’s raided the stores and has a snack or something in his mouth. Then I do the whole, “I’m going to give you a chance to tell me the truth ...” but he walks off and ignores me calling him. I’m furious and go to look for another manager to act as witness, but next thing he’s back with this other guy, who is this prize, ugh, I won’t even go there. But as I was saying, this other guy, from the union, who thinks he’s Nelson Mandela, starts accusing me of instigating body searches, of demonising the staff, of making false criminal accusations, of intimidation, bullying et cetera. He wants to lodge a complaint, which he knows means going over my head to my manager, and that’s the bit that gets me. It’s not even about the complaint: it’s about how they contrive to exclude me so that they can straighten it out with my boss. It’s their way of showing that they can bypass me any time they like.’

‘What did your boss say to them?’

‘I’ve no idea. All he said was that it’s sorted and I shouldn’t worry – these things are all about process. But for all I know he said to them “Look lads, she’s new, she’s finding her feet. Give her a chance.” All that rubbish. Who knows how he might have sold me out?’

‘I thought you said he was all right? He more or less picked you for the job didn’t he?’

‘He sort of did, yeah. I’m not sure what to make of him. He said to me the other day, “Look, figure out how you want to run this shift, and I’ll back whatever