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whiteboard covered in a mess of instructions about percentages and marking contests, clearance rates and hard ball gets. “Think about your decisions and choices,” instructed Laurie, drawing an arrow between teamwork and execution, praising them for pulling together to close down the opposition’s space, building momentum, not letting the home side play their game.
    Johnno flung Harry another handful of snakes, the sweet candy smell briefly disarming, a pleasing juxtaposition of innocence met with experience, like the scent of baby powder on his crotch. “Be hungry, not greedy,” his teammate said, the two of them sitting towards the back as Laurie crapped on about the importance of finishing, the hardest part of the game, holding their nerve all the way to the end, sucking the sugary reptiles in and out, the sticky tails brushing their chins, competing to see who could cram in the most sweets in one go.
    It could be like that when they were winning. The cracks papered over. Fun.
    The more Harry presses himself forward the more enmeshed he feels in the past, a highlight reel of marks and interceptions, improbable goals and missed opportunities, scenes playing themselves back to him at random, thrown up from a personal catalogue that he pauses and rewinds, examining for something he might have overlooked, a useful detail, a clue, a way of fitting all his newly accented pieces together.
    Playing pool, Dean breaking the rack, a crisp clean shot that scatters the triangle clean across the table. Harry seeing that he doesn’t need everything to be perfect. He just wants a clear run at it for once, at whatever it is that he’s pursuing. To be able to have a bash without all the annotations. But maybe that’s all anybody wants; the secret to happiness, to be free of all the guff.
    At the petrol station, on his way inside to pay he is twice stopped by women asking for autographs, smiling and giggling in their tight jeans, the types his mother calls baby home-wreckers, saying pretty please, we’re big fans . The usual bunk. On and on until he gives them what they want. His name in Sharpie pen on the back of their t-shirts. He doesn’t like it, is much happier talking to them when they don’t know who he is (though when was the last time that happened?), the girls following him from the drinks fridge to the register, then back outside again. “He’ll give you one too,” he says, indicating his friend scratching his balls by the cage of gas bottles. The girls laugh again, double entendre, as Dean happily steps forward and takes up the pen.
    Where do they come from, these so-called fans? What is the point of this kind of devotion? During the season, female supporters gather around the gates after the matches hoping to catch the eyes of their favourite players as they exit the field. Harry has had more than one pair of underpants thrown in his direction. His brother could open a lingerie store.
    Dean doesn’t understand why it hasn’t all gone to his head, the money and the women. “You have the best life. Tell me, how can you resist? All that desperate pussy.” But it has never been something that Harry has really focussed on, it has never felt like an end in itself, taking it all in stride – the one benefit of being in the family business, knowing it comes with the territory, like sprained fingers and blackened toe nails. And sycophantic fans who don’t know when to back off. Though Dean doesn’t know the half of it, not really, the lengths they’ll go to in exchange for his conspicuous inarticulate company. “It’s more like it’s gone to your head,” Harry says, deflecting the question. “Your sick, twisted, fucked-up little head.” Thinking of his father again and that fateful evening, wondering if there had been music playing in his car, cocaine snorted right off the back of his hand, the sweet smell of too much Brut, and