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post to the other? How fast could you travel that distance? How far above your head is the bar? When you lift your arm straight up, how big is the gap between your fingertips and the bar? How far behind you is the net? Can you imagine the angle between your right post and the top left corner of the net? How would that angle change if you stepped one pace forward? Or two paces? If you looked at the goal from above, what shape would it be? If an opposing player were standing at the left corner of the penalty area, what would the goal look like to him?’
    He hammered these questions at me, and they stung me like wasps defending their nest. They were so aggressive that they brought hot tears to my eyes.
    ‘I don’t know,’ I shouted. ‘I don’t know!’
    Silence. And in that silence another flick of lightning and a grumble from the bruise-colored clouds.
    The Keeper did not react to my outburst or to the distress in the sky.
    He said, ‘If I had asked you such questions about the room you sleep in, would you have answered in the same way? Isn’t it true that you know exactly the space and shape of that room? Isn’t it true that you can find your way around that room in the dark as easily as in the light? Isn’t it a fact that you have a very clear picture of that space in your head? More than that — don’t you
feel
that space when you are in it?’
    I began to understand.
    ‘What were the first words I ever spoke to you?’ the Keeper asked me.
    I hadn’t forgotten. Those words had blown through my dreams for an entire night. ‘You said,
Your place. You belong there.
’
    He nodded. ‘And do you believe that now?’
    ‘I think so.’
    ‘Think?’ The word was hard-edged.
    ‘I believe it. Yes, I do,’ I said.
    ‘You are a keeper?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am a keeper.’ And although I was astonished to hear myself say it, I did, in fact and at last, believe it. I was filled with relief, the kind of relief you feel when you give in to some irresistible force. When you know that there are no other choices to make.
    The sky groaned. I looked up, and my eye was caught by a cobweb in the angle of the goalpost and the bar. It had not been there earlier. One of those flies that storms conjure up was struggling in the sticky threads of the web, and the spider was making her way swiftly toward it. Her legs were tiger-striped in bands of brown and ginger. I wondered whether I was the spider or the fly. I didn’t speak the thought aloud, so I was shocked when the Keeper said, ‘You are the spider. For you, the goal will not be a vulnerable place needing your protection. It will be a trap. It will be where you hunt.’
    Another blue flare in the sky. The storm was almost on top of us now.
    ‘I need to be sure that you understand me,’ the Keeper said. ‘Nothing is going to work if you do not own that space you are standing in. You must always be aware of how far,
exactly
how far, you are from either post. Without looking to check. You must know exactly what you have to do to get yourself into the unprotected parts of your goal. You have to understand how your body occupies the goalmouth. You must be able to imagine what your goal looks like to anyone who wants to attack it, from any direction. If you can make this goal, this web, your own, you can make any goal your own. They are all the same.’
    The Keeper turned his head slightly, and the sky was bleached by what might have been the flash of a vast camera. The lightning arced into the forest so close to us that I could taste the electric charge in the air. When the blue light faded, it was as if night had already fallen. The first sheet of rain swept through the clearing.
    Still the Keeper didn’t move. Perhaps he was waiting for me to say something, but I couldn’t think what that might be. At last he said, ‘I think the light is not good enough for practice today. I think you might as well go home.’
    By the time I got back to the house, I was drenched