Page 25

Maeve doesn’t have pizza with the rest of the team to celebrate their win. Instead, she finds herself in Waitrose on the hunt for something to cook for dinner that her mother won’t turn her nose up at.

It’s a good thing, the right choice, she tells herself, studying the bags of pasta in too-fun shapes.

What with Maeve’s tiredness after the game, and having the captaincy taken away from her unexpectedly like that, she’s too worried she wouldn’t be able to hide her feelings if she had stayed around the team much longer and doesn’t want to put a downer on their good start to the season.

Perhaps now is exactly the time she should be a stoic captain figure, reminding the team of what she can be for them – but she’s simply feeling too sore.

She couldn’t even prove her prowess on the pitch, seeing as she had barely anything to do today.

Kira, Adriana, and the other forwards were playing a brilliant aggressive game, just as Coach wanted, which meant the Tigress’s goal never came under any serious threat.

She should be pleased, she knows. But in this atmosphere of competition between all of them, especially Kira and Maeve, she can hardly be pleased to have no chance to prove herself while Kira gets to be the hero who opened the scoring and set the tone of their win.

She wishes some of her teammates had pleaded with her to stay longer, but they’re used to Maeve bowing out early and without Adriana’s usual insistence that she join them, the others all just let her quietly slip away.

She had wondered if Kira would try to stop her at least, even if in a way that was coded between the two of them.

Try to corner her in a dark room… But no, Kira was way too high on scoring and having the rest of the team include her for the first time.

It was like their hookups a few days ago had never happened.

Maeve shakes her head, and, tries to make an executive decision about dinner. She fancies some comforting pasta, but the last time she made that for her mum she spent the entire night googling the calorific content and repeating her shock that the Tigress’s nutritionists don’t forbid carbs.

‘I bet the Lionesses don’t eat spaghetti,’ she’d said.

Adriana had used to recommend that Maeve go with Helena to a restaurant instead of cooking for her.

When they were teenagers training in the Academy they sometimes dined out together after matches with Adriana’s family.

It had been such a stark contrast, Adriana’s family all as loud and boisterous as she is, and having all grown up in Manchester they are all something like local celebrities – her mum a popular councillor for the Green party, her dad an estate agent who keeps in contact with all his clients (and had helped get Adriana and Maeve cheap deals on their flats), while her brother Felix is an actor who has been on TV, so there was nowhere they could go without being ‘spotted’.

Helena would never have explicitly said so, but she barely hid her disdain for the whole thing, as if she found the Summers’ popularity somehow tacky.

Maeve had found it so hard to navigate their differences, she’d started to make excuses on their behalf to avoid these meetings.

It was better to contain her to her own home.

Maeve ends up with the ingredients for a warm salad: fancy giant couscous, the plumpest chickpeas, a rainbow of vegetables, and a tahini and lemon dressing.

Her mother only drinks cold Chardonnay – by the bottles.

Maeve checks the list she’s surreptitiously made of the bottles in her mother’s house, so that she gets one she knows she likes. She feels pleased with herself.

She rushes home in time to have prepped and have the food in the oven when Helena arrives.

Helena doesn’t say hello or hug her daughter. It’s been drizzling a little this evening, and Helena makes a big show of being drenched – though she’d been in a taxi, and had an umbrella.

‘Ohhf,’ she shivers, drawing her cashmere cardigan closer around her boney shoulders. ‘Do you not have any heating in this flat? You’d think with how extortionate the rent is that you’re paying to these landlords that they’d at least provide working heating.’

Maeve hangs her mother’s coat carefully above the radiator.

‘Would you prefer a hot drink first, rather than wine, to warm up?’ she asks her.

‘Tea? With dinner? No, darling!’ Helena laughs like it’s the most bizarre thing Maeve could have said.

‘Well, dinner should be ready in just a few minutes,’ says Maeve, feeling she’s doing everything wrong.

‘Goodness, like a fast food diner! Trying to rush me out?’

Her mother looks round at the flat, wiping a finger over the top of a nearby bookcase, searching for dust. Maeve, having known her mother would do this, has pre-emptively dusted. When Helena can’t find any dust there, Maeve looks away hiding a smug satisfaction that Kira herself would be proud of.

Maeve’s chest aches suddenly at the thought of Kira, and a longing that she wishes she was here.

What a stupid thing to think – to have yet another person Maeve finds difficult having dinner with her?

Someone else to criticise everything Maeve does?

But Kira is so different to her mother. Kira is so obnoxiously upfront, so open with what she wants, her confidence in herself not being threatened by others.

However confused Maeve might be about her own complicated feelings to Kira, her certainty and chemistry make Maeve feel completely opposite to the doubt and coldness she feels around her mother.

‘You didn’t tell me that you’re no longer captain,’ Helena grumbles. Maeve closes her eyes by the fridge, having known this would come up. ‘Well, you can’t hide it anymore. How did you lose it? What did you do to mess it up?’

Maeve pours her mother’s wine, taking the opportunity to keep her face hidden.

‘It’s the new coach, mum. It wasn’t up to me. I didn’t know until today. I don’t know if it’s a permanent decision or not.’ She tries to keep her voice steady.

‘Gosh, there’s an awful lot you “don’t know” considering it’s your job. What do you know?’

Maeve hands her mother the wine, attempting to keep her face neutral. ‘They’re going to name the permanent captain by the end of the month,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell you what happens.’

‘Oh yes you will,’ says Helena. ‘You’ll tell me when you are confirmed as Captain.’

Maeve nods. ‘I’ll do my best.’

While Maeve plates up their food, Helena talks about all Maeve’s mistakes from the game, as if she is a professional coach.

Helena has been involved in Maeve’s football career enough to have picked up the basics, but she never really ‘got’ the game, so Maeve allows herself to ignore her mother’s relentless attempts to backseat coach.

They sit down to eat at Maeve’s small two-seater table.

‘Well, that’s quite enough work chat,’ says Helena, as if it was Maeve who was going on about it.

Helena pointedly holds up their wine glasses to toast. It’s one of the few times the two of them make eye contact. Maeve finds her mother’s light grey eyes a little uncanny. They’re so similar in colour to her own. It feels like one of the only things they share.

Helena asks after Adriana, and Maeve replies evasively.

It’s not that she thinks her mother would particularly care about her longest-standing friendship, unless it would impact Maeve’s stats, but more that Maeve thinks she might cry if she were to start talking about her.

The truth is that Maeve has been feeling more and more distant from her friend and the one good constant in her life, not understanding why this distance has crept in between them.

The secret she’s keeping about Kira must be poisoning their relationship far more than she’d ever want it to.

‘Did you know couscous is pasta?’ says Helena. She picks at the vegetables, carefully scraping the dots of couscous off. ‘They market it like it’s a health food, a grain or something, but no, it’s just pasta in blobs.’

Maeve puts her fork down, sips her small glass of wine in silence.

Her mother has always been like this. Perfectionist, brittle, always needing to be right.

It has clearly worked for her, in her career as a lawyer – though since Maeve moved to Manchester when she was a teenager, Helena became more of a freelance consultant, working with other legal firms to advise on how to cut costs and make redundancies.

‘Everyone is replaceable,’ was a common phrase Maeve would hear growing up.

It had gained added bitterness when Maeve’s father had left for another woman.

Helena forbid Maeve from staying in touch with him, though young Maeve had experienced this as her father not wanting to stay in touch with her anymore.

Replaceable. Now she tries not to think of him at all, as if even remembering him would be betraying her mum, and herself.

It’s hard though, especially as he was the person who introduced her to football.

It was her dad who first took her to a match. Sat on his shoulders, she had felt like she was flying on a cloud of cheers. She begged and begged to go back.

So then they used to watch the TV together when Helena was at work, Maeve cuddled up on her father’s lap, loving the way they could roar raucously with approval when a goal was scored, or that she would see him cry or shout when they lost. You were allowed to be emotional about football.

They would have kickabouts in their garden, and Maeve took to it. Her mother couldn’t understand why her daughter wanted to get dirty kicking a ball around like a boy.

When Maeve’s father left, Helena would probably have succeeded in squashing the football out of her too, if it hadn’t been for Maeve’s PE teachers.

She had been spotted practicing keepie-uppies at break-time, the ball like a magnet to her foot, drawing the attention and wonder of her classmates, who otherwise treated Maeve like she was invisible.

There wasn’t the option of football for girls at that school, but when it became obvious that Maeve was better than any of the boys her age, they’d made the team ‘mixed’ to help the school do better in local competitions.

Helena had found it scandalous at first, but had been persuaded when she had been told that Maeve was the best in her year group, and could soon be playing competitively for the county.

If she worked hard, she might be able to earn a sports scholarship to a top university.

This captured Helena’s imagination, and soon football, which had been Maeve’s escape outlet, and way to remember her father, became her daily exam in which she constantly had to prove herself.

‘You must work harder, Maeve,’ Helena reminds her now, out of nowhere and Maeve tenses up. ‘I didn’t sacrifice everything in order for you to be half-hearted about your commitments. I hate to see you neglecting your potential.’

As if Maeve hadn’t been trying! As if Maeve had asked to be stripped of the captaincy in such humiliating fashion in front of her teammates right before a game. Maeve pushes her own bowl away. She has no appetite.

Helena takes this as a sign to clear the table, taking their bowls somewhat passive aggressively, and then scraping Maeve’s still-warm food into the bin.

Helena collects her coat and swings it round her shoulders. She clasps Maeve’s shoulders and kisses her on the forehead.

‘I have every faith in you, darling. You can do it. Make me proud.’