Page 21 of After the Siren

Chapter Eleven

Theo was spotting for Drips when Dex came into the gym.

Drips was on her last rep, straining to re-rack the bar, and Theo was focused on staying ready to grab it if he had to (but not grabbing it too soon, which would be almost as grievous an offence as leaving it too late).

They’d started chatting between sets a few days earlier.

He’d asked about the tattoos stamped down her arms, and she’d started asking him to spot if none of the AFLW players were around.

She didn’t like encouragement, just a pair of hands and someone paying attention.

He’d asked about her nickname, and she’d explained that that Ya?mur meant ‘rain’ in Turkish. ‘It’s better than “YaYa”,’ she’d said.

He’d worked out, from their conversations – mainly conducted in intervals of one to three minutes – that her conservative Turkish father hadn’t been impressed by the tattoos, or footy, or the fact she had a girlfriend.

It made Theo feel an odd blend of kinship and guilt.

He understood chafing against parental expectations, but he had it much better than Drips.

It felt petty to gripe about his parents when he’d never really had to worry.

If anything, sometimes he wondered if he and his parents would be better off if they’d learned to shout at one another, let it all out, and then move on.

Dex walked purposefully towards them as the bar thudded into place and Drips sat up, breathing hard and grinning.

‘Nice job,’ Theo told her. Encouragement was prohibited, praise was not.

She blew out a breath and reached for her water. ‘Thanks for the spot.’

‘Any time.’

He hadn’t been dropped for the second pre-season game, and even his anxious brain had to concede that he’d played well.

The wing suited him, and he’d banged in a goal from the fifty-metre arc.

He knew he wasn’t going to be in the best 23 at the beginning of the season – he hadn’t needed the managing expectations chat Kat had given him – but she’d also made it clear that if he maintained his form in the VFL, he’d get a run sooner or later.

Dex stopped beside them, hands on hips. ‘Good, two of you. Jaze is teaching me some of his tricky shit and we need more bodies. You done? Jaze said he specifically needs you, Stavs.’

‘Does he?’ The prospect was disconcerting.

‘We’re done,’ Drips said. It was clear that resistance would be futile.

He followed Drips and Dex down to the oval, and he felt his heart rate kick a little as they headed towards the group gathered in front of the goals.

He still wasn’t enjoying anything involving goal-kicking.

He could hit a target on the run, but as soon as he was kicking for goal he felt like a baby giraffe on uncertain legs.

Jake, Paddy, Xen and Gabby were gathered by one of the point posts, handballing a footy around while they chatted.

‘Good,’ Jake said when they arrived. He tossed the ball to Xen. ‘Xen’s gonna kick it to the two of you in a contest’ – he pointed at Gabby, then Theo – ‘and you’ll knock it down for us.’

‘Be gentle,’ Dex told Gabby. ‘Don’t break him.’

Gabby showed some teeth. ‘No promises.’

Theo wasn’t stupid enough to underestimate Gabby. She was only a couple of inches shorter than he was, and while he might have had a few kilos on her, he suspected she had about a tonne of raw determination on him. She’d also definitely deck him if he didn’t go as hard as he would with a dude.

He crushed his chivalrous urges as the ball came off Xen’s boot ( Chivalry is just polite patriarchy , Priya said in his head) and went hard for the ball, the same way he would with any of the boys.

He could tell Gabby was loving it, relishing the opportunity to use all her physicality.

They knocked it down, again and again, as Jake showed Dex how he liked to run through defenders (Paddy and Drips) at stoppages, how he angled his body to the goal, how to knock the ball forward and run on to it.

The kind of stuff he’d been practising since he was six years old.

Dex had played soccer before they’d switched to AFL, and Theo could see they were still trying to drill in the sort of skills you only learned through playing, hour after hour, until your body knew what to do before your brain caught up.

Theo enjoyed watching Jake when he wasn’t the one in charge of stopping him. He read the ball so well; he thrived on the chaos of a ground ball. Knew when to pick it up and when to tap it on.

He was a surprisingly good teacher as well.

Theo knew a lot of people who couldn’t explain things they were good at.

But Jake didn’t try to explain what he did so much as what he saw – what to look for, what cued each movement.

He’d call ‘Stop!’ every now and again, and Drips and Paddy would freeze in place so Jake could show Dex what they needed to look for.

The drill devolved into chaos in the end. Dex started it with a solid tackle on Jake that Xen called as holding the ball, and then they were all playing an ad hoc game that was mostly keepings-off, switching teams and positions as they played.

‘Stavs!’ Gabby yelled, and then the ball was in Theo’s hands. He had his back to the goals, but he got it on his boot and snapped it over his head without thinking. He just knew where the goal posts were, in a way he hadn’t for months. He didn’t have to look to know it had gone through.

Jake wolf-whistled and Gabby ran over for a fist bump.

After that, he couldn’t miss. It felt like for months he’d had to tell himself to take every breath, and now he was doing everything on autopilot again.

Something inside him that had been knocked awry had clicked back into place.

It was easy, the way it had been when he was seventeen, the coach working with him on his set-up, on his ball drop, on his follow-through, until one day it just happened .

They took shots from weird angles, and Theo argued with Jake for a solid five minutes about how far was too far to kick round the corner (Theo was declared the winner after Jake missed two in a row).

Gabby called time and they all flopped down to stretch. Or, in Jake’s case, to roll on the grass.

‘Hey, Jaze, I didn’t know your mum was a fucking legend ,’ Dex said, sprawled on their back. ‘There are a stack of pictures of her up in the exhibition about the women’s game at the National Gallery.’

‘What?’ Drips asked.

‘Jaze’s mum is Debbie Cunningham,’ Dex explained. ‘She won five premierships with the Woolamai Tiger Sharks and then coached them to another three. She’s, like, a pioneer of the game. She still runs clinics for girls who want to play.’

‘She’s pretty cool,’ Jake agreed.

‘What happened to you?’ Gabby asked, nudging Jake with her shin. He stuck his tongue out.

‘Here,’ Dex said, and handed their phone around.

Debbie must have been in her twenties in the picture, dressed in muddy game gear and holding a trophy.

There was a striking resemblance between her and Jake: same wavy blonde hair, same strong jaw and stubborn chin, something similar in the way they stood.

She had more tattoos than Jake: a big piece on each thigh and a full sleeve on one arm in addition to the pin-up on her other bicep.

‘Wow,’ Drips said. ‘She’s hot. ’

‘She should come in and talk to us,’ Dex suggested. ‘That’d be sick. She could do a pre-game address, if she’d be down for it.’

‘Oh, she would be,’ Jake said. Theo saw him hesitate. ‘She has to come down to Melbourne every couple of weeks for chemo, so we could maybe work around that.’

There was a beat of silence.

‘Shit, bro, I’m sorry,’ Dex said. ‘That’s rough.’

‘Thanks.’

‘How’s it going?’ Gabby asked. ‘Unless you don’t want to talk about it, in which case, no stress.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ Jake said, leaning his elbows on his knees and propping his chin in his hands. ‘She had uterine cancer a few years ago. It was in remission, but ... yeah. It’s back. It’s too early to know if the chemo is working.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ Gabby said. Drips and Dex murmured agreement. ‘Let us know if there’s anything we can do.’

‘Thanks,’ Jake said.

Jake hadn’t said much about the chemo, at least not to Theo.

Maybe he was talking to Paddy and Xen about it, but Theo doubted it.

He stuck to the facts when he did talk about it: Mum’s feeling shitty today, Lydia says Mum’s off her tucker, Mum’s pissed she fell asleep and missed the last quarter.

He spoke about it with a matter-of-factness that might have been convincing if Theo hadn’t seen him so distraught in the locker room that morning before their second extra.

‘If she did want to come and chat to us, we’d love that,’ Gabby added. ‘It doesn’t have to be a formal thing. She could just come and hang out. I want to make sure we don’t forget our history, you know?’

‘She’ll be keen.’ Jake grinned. ‘Good luck getting her to stop talking.’

‘It’s hereditary, then,’ Theo said.

He wasn’t sure whether Jake tackled him due to the provocation or to end the conversation.

‘Stavs will be playing his first real game as a Falcon.’

Stavs froze for a second before he started to stand.

Jake stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled as loud as he could.

Stavs looked surprised – he must have been the only one in the small auditorium who was.

Jake had known it was a sure thing as soon as Rigger hobbled out of training early with hamstring awareness.

Stavs had been playing well in the VFL. Really well.

He’d relaxed, too, now that he’d remembered where the goals were.

Jake had seen him smile during a goal-kicking drill.

He’d laughed in a game when he went for a hanger, missed it, and did a full somersault on the way down.

Jake was going to take at least some of the credit.

If it hadn’t been the beach, it had been the fucking around with the footy until Stavs had forgotten to be stressed about it.