The Credit Draper Episode 26

All of Avram’s team bar the goalkeeper came to jostle for position in their opponent’s penalty area. Begg was behind the goal, pointing feverishly here and there at his black-andwhite shirted players.

Avram flinched from the pain that snapped across his bruised ribs as he bent to place the ball on the corner arc.

He felt like David, the young shepherd boy, selecting the round, smooth pebbles that would fly the fastest and the most accurate towards their target.

But, instead of pebbles, he had a mudcaked soggy leather ball, split and torn in places along the seams so that he could see the taut pinkness of the blown-up pig’s bladder within.

He tried to pick out his centre-forward, Big Tam, who was racing back and forth across the goal signalling frantically at his cropped head.

It was a head as tarnished and nobbled as any soldier’s helmet. It was a head worthy of any Goliath.

But as soon as his foot swept through the ball, Avram knew he had hit the angle all wrong.

Instead of his intended straight cross to Big Tam hovering around the penalty spot, he had put too much curl on his kick.

Soared

Yet, somehow, he sensed that his own wrongness had diverted the leather sphere on to its true path. At first, the ball soared on a trajectory that looped high towards the goalmouth.

It soared too high for Big Tam, too high for the goalkeeper who had come off his line to check Big Tam’s run, too high for Ginger Dodds and a defender across the face of the goal who both leaped to head the cross but missed.

Then, just as the ball should have faded away on a curl beyond the far-post, it seemed to stop and hang in mid-air as though waiting for its fate to be decided. The wind dropped and the rain ceased.

A sheet of newspaper floated down into a puddle. The ugly vapours from the power station stacks lining the horizon sagged down into the grey sky. A skinny dog ran on to the pitch in pursuit of a mis-thrown stick.

The players stood stonecast in their positions, set into their tableau with limbs akimbo, heads back and eyes wide-open. Waiting. Waiting for the ball to continue. Waiting for the curl.

And when the ball did continue, when the curl did come, the ball didn’t drift off behind the bye-line or over the bar as everyone had expected.

Instead, it dipped and slipped into the goal just inside the far-post.

Roy Begg stood behind the goalmouth, staring blankly at the match ball which had bounced into his arms. The other players remained transfixed in their positions.

The referee’s whistle ripped through the stillness. A mass of black-and-white shirted players came to life and rushed towards Avram.

“Patsy,” Big Tam shouted.

“Yer a bloody genius.”

“I didn’t mean it.”

Avram looked at his feet, clad in their cinder-stained leather boots. The same feet that at 11 years old had once walked him from the docks at Clydebank to the Kahn’s flat as if they had a mind of their own.

“I don’t know what happened. But I didn’t mean it.”

“Disnae matter,” Big Tam shouted, spluttering with excitement.

“Disnae matter you didnae mean it. Ten more minutes and we’re in the bloody final. We just need to hang on.”

And hang on he did. Ten long minutes. With his chest aching from the bruising but blown up with pride.

Encroachment

On his journey home from the recreation park, Avram saw the lamplighter doing his rounds.

He was a man as tall and thin as the pole he carried, clad in a dark Corporation uniform that merged with the encroachment of the night.

The endless routine had honed the man’s task to a minimum of skilled effort that made Avram stop and watch. First came the simple claw back of the lamp’s glass door with the pole’s hook.

Then there was the neat flick on the switch with a twist of the same device. Finally, the smooth insertion of the flame through the glass entrance to ignite the gas jet. A whoosh and there was light, first blue, then softening into a yellow glow which melted the darkness like a warm bath on a cold night.

“Did ye win, lad?” the lamplighter said with a glance to the boots hanging around his shoulders.

“Yes, we won.”

“Looks like ye took a battering in the process.”

Avram nodded. “The light on the pole? How does it stay on all the time?”

“A drop of water on the mineral. Some kind of chemical reaction I do not rightly know how to explain that gives off its own gas.

“Strike a light and ye’ve got a lasting flame. Same stuff for the lamp on a bicycle. Carbide, it’s called.”

“I don’t have a bicycle.”

“Maybe ye’ll get one for Christmas.” “I don’t celebrate Christmas.”

Puzzlement

The lamplighter cocked his head to the side in puzzlement. Then a look up and down the street seemed to bring him his answer.

“I see. This is the Jew neighbourhood, isn’t it?”

Avram shrugged, always a bit fearful when his religion was separated out from the Protestant and Catholic faiths dominating the city.

But the lamplighter seemed friendly enough and it was hard to avoid the facts staring him in the face.

There was the synagogue on the corner, the kosher butcher with its Star of David painted on the window pane, the greengrocers further up with its sign in English and Hebrew lettering. Then came Papa Kahn’s tailoring shop. Most of the neighbours he knew were Jewish.

“I suppose it is,” he said.

“The lads at the depot call this place ‘Jerusalem’.”

More tomorrow.

Just as the ball should have faded on a curl beyond the far-post, it seemed to hang in mid-air as though waiting for its fate

The Credit Draper is the first in a trilogy by J. David Simons. He has written five novels and is published by Saraband. His work can be purchased at saraband.net