The King of Lavender Square by Susan Ryan

Author:Susan Ryan [Ryan, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: contemporary, Romance, Child, adoption, Fiction, Literary, Love
ISBN: 9781781998441
Publisher: Poolbeg Press
Published: 2017-09-25T23:00:00+00:00

The team emerged from glorious obscurity, stepping into the limelight wearing a girly kit and, just like that, everyone knew about Lavender Square FC.

Shortly afterwards, Joe started to fall apart. He was suspicious of Richard Watts from the outset. The reporter attended every match, even when he wasn’t working. At first his articles had a minimal effect. Only a scattering of parents showed up at their matches. They weren’t interested in a wrinkly man with a collection of questionable tracksuits. But then word got around about the black kid with the magic touch and supporters started to make their way to matches, home and away. With them, came a small group of Africans. They peppered the crowd and were silent at first, but once settled regulars, they made themselves heard by humming a low drone that sounded all at once mesmerising and eerie. It was rumoured they were from the Congo. They attended every match and slipped away as quietly and as quickly as they arrived, not keen to linger. While recession had seen other immigrants pack up and leave, Africans had nowhere else to go and football, which was free to watch and played well by one of their own, even if it was a young kid, added a bit of colour to their lives. If the boy was accepted, then there was a chance they might be too.

It was this sort of fuss that made Joe nervous. He told Saskia that crowds or journalists or humming Africans had never been part of the deal. Patrick had pestered him into training the team and somewhere along the way it had got out of hand. He blamed himself for ever agreeing to get involved, and then shifted the blame to Pim Van Hartenstein, cursing the Dutchman for fanning the flame of football hysteria. Joe wasn’t interested in the born-again interest in football. He didn’t want attention of any sort and resented analysis, and with the League came analysis. Lavender Square FC was criticised for taking the game too seriously. The small-sided game was meant to be fun, a League secretary explained to Saskia, a way of preparing the children for the eleven-a-side game. There was no use forcing them onto a full-size pitch before their time or insisting on the offside rule when they didn’t need it yet. There was already enough trouble from fame-obsessed parents shouting abuse from the sidelines.

They failed to see that under Joe’s gruff exterior there was huge kindness, that for every bellow there was encouragement and for every bark there was praise and high hopes. He was a like a skilled doctor with no bedside manner, his spikiness an armour against a world he was still uncertain of. Shouting gave him strength and whistle-blowing the courage to go on because the truth was every training session was still a personal struggle and every match a cliff-face to be climbed. Saskia could see this; Patrick too.

Patrick told her that for days before a match Joe did not sleep.

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