I followed and sat down furthest from the heater. I didn’t hear a word the coach said. There was a roar in my ears that wasn’t a crowd. Twice I looked across at Stevie and once he looked back at me with a tight smile and held out his hand, palm down. It shook a bit. He was so grey he was blending into the atmosphere — the concrete sheds, the steel clouds and the blade-like cold. The coach called his name, welcomed him to the team, shook his hand and said he was on the bench. I was on the half-forward flank.
I wasn’t playing the best game of my life but I’d had two shots at goal by the time Stevie came on in the forward pocket near the end of the first quarter. Almost immediately, the ball flew over his head and Stevie turned to chase, high-kneeing in flapping headgear and our woollen green and gold jumper while three boys in blue closed rapidly. He got to the footy, grabbed it in an ungainly lunge, then stopped dead and in one smooth movement swerved into a crouch to face the chase. He jerked his head slightly and swayed his shoulders to let the first guy flash by, straightened and blurred around the second, before bending time and space by holding the footy out in his left hand then slowly drawing it back to his body as he sold some candy to the last kid. He wheeled onto his right boot and roosted the pill at the goal. He was feeling the game. It was moving with him, not past him.
The footy fell twenty metres short. Into my arms, all alone. “Great leg, Stevie boy!” I hollered after slotting it, holding my hands up and clapping. Stevie gave me a tight, double thumbs-up. It wasn’t a pass. He’d looked, and I’m sure he'd felt, like the thing was going the journey.
“Um, yeah,” he said. “No worries.”
It doesn’t come back easily. By half-time, I’d had a couple more pings while he’d gone off, come back on, been dragged and come back on again — having had that solitary effective disposal. And not for want of trying. He ran and he chased, scuttling around the ground like a berserk daddy long-legs in a banzai charge. He was braver than I, his head always over the ball diving into a pack, but he was tossed aside easily and three beats too slow when it was in his hands. It had been a long seven years.
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