Territorial

Tyler was awake at eleven in the morning, which had not happened since August, and he was sitting up.

He was on the edge of the bed by the window with his feet on the camp bed, which was still the whole of the floor, and on Jack’s legs, which were still on it, and he had the blind up four inches, which had never happened at all, and he was looking out through the four inches at the day with the face of a man who has been told he will be tested on it.

“It’s today,” said Tyler.

“The game?”

“Tucson.” Tyler said it the way people in films say the name of the man who killed their father. “I’ve played four hundred seasons as us. On the computer. I’ve beaten Tucson four hundred times.” He looked at the gap under the blind. “I’ve never seen it real.”

From the camp bed, from under the white hat, Jack said, “Four hundred?”

“About.”

“How long’s a season?”

“Like an evening,” said Tyler. “If you skip the cutscenes.” He put the headphones round his neck, not on, which was a measure of how serious it was. “Ruiz is the quarterback. He’s an eighty-nine overall. Throw power ninety-one. He’s bad under pressure.” He considered. “In the game, I mean. I don’t know about real.”

---

Jack could not wear the sweatshirt.

He had put it on, the faded red one with the sleeves pushed up, that he had worn behind the bar and on the wold and on the summit of Camelback holding on to a rock, and come back along the corridor in it with his hair wet, and Rhys, coming out of his own door, had stopped dead.

“You can’t wear that.”

“It’s my sweatshirt.”

“It’s red. Tucson’s red.” Rhys looked at Frederick for help. “He’d be the only red thing in the Furnace. They’d notice.”

“Notice what?”

“You,” said Rhys. “And then who you were standing next to.”

Rhys went back into his room and came out with a T-shirt in a plastic packet: gold, with FIRST YEAR across the back in maroon capitals a foot high.

“It’s out of the kit,” said Rhys.

Jack turned the packet over. He looked at Rhys, and at the door of Rhys’s room, and at Rhys again.

“What is in your kit?”

“Things,” said Rhys, and went pink, and went back in.

---

The Furnace was the north end, behind the goal, gold at the bottom where the first-years stood and maroon above them all the way up to the sky, and in the warm white afternoon of the Tucson game a good part of it had painted its arms.

It was the old Furnace thing, from fingertips to the elbow, in maroon, exactly to the elbow, with a hard line at the joint as though they had dipped them in a bucket. Kaylee Brandt-Ortiz had worn it on the wall in September. But it had spread since October, since a photograph, and now there were hundreds of them, holding their arms up at each other and at the field, and a girl at the end of a bench painting the arms of the boy beside her out of a tin with a brush, carefully, and not an inch further, because that was the rule.

Jack, in the FIRST YEAR shirt, which was too big, and the white hat, which was not negotiable, looked at the arms for a long time.

“They’re doing you,” said Jack.

“They did it before.”

“They’re doing the photograph.” Jack’s face was beginning to go. “There’s a thousand people here dressed up as you.”

“Kaylee did it in September.”

Jack stared at him.

“So you were doing them,” said Jack slowly. “In the photograph. You weren’t being the King with paint on. You were being a Furnace.” He put his hand over his mouth. “You were being normal, and they put it on the front of every paper in the world.”

Tyler, beside them, looked at the arms with mild interest. Then he held his own out to the girl with the tin, pale arms that had not been outside since August, and had them done, both, to the elbow, with the patience of a man having a tattoo; and Jack sat down on the bench with the hat over his face and made no sound for a long time, which with Jack was the most dangerous kind.

---

The kick-off was at two, the old hour, the one the law gave back when the thresholds were met; and the stadium was full, sixty-five thousand of it, and at the far end, the south, across the whole green length of the field, there was a wedge of red and blue that was Tucson.

Tucson had brought a banner. It went up as the teams came out, a long white sheet across the front of the red and blue with letters each as tall as a man:

EVEN THE KING TOOK THE BOOBY PRIZE

The noise the Furnace made at it was not anger. It was nearer joy.

On the wall at the front, in the gold wig, Kaylee Brandt-Ortiz lifted the megaphone.

“WHO ARE WE?”

“THE BOOBY PRIZE!” roared the Furnace, Tyler with it, and Rhys, and Sam, quietly, correctly, and Frederick too, out loud, as he had in the Wright in August, and meant it.

Jack had not been in the Wright in August.

He looked at the banner. He looked at the Furnace. He took it in, the words and the pointing and the tone, as a man who has stood behind a bar since he was fourteen takes in the temper of a room, and came to the only conclusion the evidence supported; and on the next WHO ARE WE? he got up on the bench in his grandfather’s hat and threw out his arm down the whole length of the field at the red and blue, and bellowed, in the voice that had called last orders across Berlin:

“THE BOOBY PRIZE!”

He was the only one in the Furnace pointing the other way.

A girl on the bench in front turned round.

“No,” she said kindly. “It’s us.”

“You’re the booby prize?”

“Yes!”

“And you’re proud of it?”

“Yes!”

Jack stood on the bench for a moment. Then he looked down at Frederick, under the brim of the hat, and Frederick saw him remember: the top of the Kreuzberg, in January, in the snow, and somebody saying I’ve been the first prize my whole life. I’d like to go somewhere that knows what the other thing is like.

“That’s what you said,” said Jack. “On the hill. Word for word.”

“I know.”

“I love this country,” said Jack, to the girl, and got down.

---

He got the rest of it wrong as well, steadily and with tremendous good will, the way he had once hit every ball at a baseball match as though it were a cricket ball, straight and along the ground, and been right.

When the Furnace put its forks up for the kick-off, two fingers crooked down like the prongs on the emblem, Jack put up two fingers straight, with the back of his hand to the south, in the gesture that in Gloucestershire cannot be made in front of a vicar; and Rhys reached across without a word and bent Jack’s two fingers down at the knuckle, as you would correct a child’s grip on a pencil.

When Tucson scored, in the second quarter, a long pass down the far sideline that the receiver took one-handed at full stretch and held as he fell, the Furnace began its three slow claps, BOO. BY. PRIZE., and Jack clapped too, at the wrong speed, warmly, the way people clap on the boundary at Coln Saint Aldwyns on a Sunday for a good piece of cricket whoever made it.

“Shot,” said Jack, between the claps. “Oh, shot. Lovely hands.”

Four rows of the Furnace turned round and looked at him.

“What? It was a good catch.”

“Dude,” said Tyler, with his maroon arms folded, in the voice of a man whose fire has been allowed to go out.

---

In a timeout in the third quarter the camera found them.

The screen hung at the far end, over the red and blue, a hundred and twenty feet of it, and in the timeouts it showed the crowd: a man proposing to a girl in the west stand, a baby in ear defenders, a dog in a gold jersey. Then it showed the Furnace. It showed a bench of six boys with their chests painted, a letter each, gold on maroon, N O R M A L, Tucson’s name for Tempe taken off them and worn on purpose; and the six saw themselves and roared and flexed. And the camera, holding on them, drifted a little, to the next bench up, where there was a tall fair young man with maroon at his collar and, beside him, a mushroom in a white hat.

The noise changed.

It came up from the whole stadium, from the long sides as well as the Furnace, and from somewhere in the middle of the red and blue too, a great rolling roar, much larger than the one for the letters, and longer: sixty-five thousand people seeing a thing they had read about and not believed.

On the screen the six boys flexed harder. They thought it was for them.

On the screen Frederick did the thing he did, which was to lift one hand a little, as you would to somebody across a street.

And on the screen the man in the white hat moved.

He did not go anywhere. He did not look up. He simply leaned, the way a man leans at a crowded bar to let somebody past, a foot to his right, so that his shoulder was no longer against Frederick’s and the hat went out of the edge of the frame; and he did it so quickly and smoothly, without looking, without being asked, that nobody in sixty-five thousand would have noticed it, except one.

Then the camera went back to the dog.

Frederick looked at Jack, who was a foot away, looking at the field with great interest, at nothing.

He had done it outside restaurants. He had done it at the gate of the New Inn and in the backs of cars. He had never once been asked to, and Frederick had never once thought about it until now, when he had watched it from the outside, a hundred and twenty feet high, in the half-second before the camera moved on: a man stepping out of the light so that the light would have only one person in it.

On his other side Tyler was watching the screen, where the replay had come, with his head on one side. He did not say anything. Tyler always watched the replay.

---

The last drive began with a minute and fifty-two seconds left and Tempe three points behind, twenty-seven to twenty-four, on its own twenty-five, in the last of the light.

The sun had gone down behind the west stand while nobody was looking. The sky over the buttes had gone from white to gold to a deep clear blue, and the floodlights had come on all at once with a sound like a long breath. It was cooler. Jack put the hat back on, against the cold, at seventy degrees.

“How long’s left?”

“A minute fifty-two.”

“Is that long?”

“It’s about nine minutes,” said Rhys.

“How?”

“The clock stops,” said Sam.

“Why does it stop?”

Sam considered this, in the roar, with his maroon arms folded and the score in his notebook, quarter by quarter, beside the cost of three hot dogs.

“Nobody knows,” said Sam.

Ruiz threw short. Ruiz threw short again. Ruiz ran, which in the game he never did, Tyler said, because his speed was only seventy-four, and got eleven yards and went out of bounds, and the clock stopped, and Jack said WHY to the sky. A Tucson man was penalised for something and the referee explained it into a microphone to sixty-five thousand people who all disagreed, and Jack cupped his hands round his mouth and shouted “HOWZAT!” at him, which was not a thing anybody in the March had ever heard; and the girl in front turned round and said “What does that mean?” and Jack said “It means is he out,” and she said “Out of what?” and there was not time to explain.

Fourth down and six on Tucson’s thirty-one, with forty seconds left.

The Furnace stopped making any noise at all. Twelve thousand people stood on the benches between the buttes and held on to each other, to the people they had come with and to strangers, with maroon arms. Tyler had hold of Frederick’s sleeve and had not noticed he had it. On his other side Jack had gone silent, the way he had gone silent on the rail section of Echo Canyon, with his eyes on the field, and had put his hand flat on the middle of Frederick’s back, where nobody could see it, and left it there.

Ruiz threw.

It went left, long, high, turning over slowly under the lights, and a boy in maroon came across the middle of the field at full stretch and took it, and was hit, and held on, and went out of bounds at the nine with four seconds left; and the noise that came out of the north end went up past the floodlights into the blue and Frederick felt it in his teeth.

“Is that it?” Jack was shouting. “Have we won?”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“Four seconds!”

“That’s NOTHING!”

Ruiz took the last snap and stood in the pocket while it fell in round him, and did not throw, and did not throw, bad under pressure, eighty-nine overall; and then threw, flat and hard and low, to the corner of the end zone right below them, twenty yards away, where a boy in maroon was turning, and turned, and it hit him in the chest, and he went down on it on his back, holding it against him with both arms like something alive.

The referee put both arms straight up.

---

Nobody heard the extra point. Jack would say afterwards that he had asked why they were kicking it when they had already won, and nobody had been able to tell him, which was true, because at that moment nobody in the north end could hear anything at all. Jack had hold of him. Tyler had hold of him. A girl he had never seen had hold of Rhys. Sam was on the bench with his arms in the air, maroon to the elbows, saying something that might have been a number. The whole Furnace was moving, bodily, downwards, in one slow landslide of gold and maroon towards the wall and the field beyond it, and Frederick felt himself begin to go with it, carried; and then a hand on his arm above the elbow, firm, not hard, the way a hand closes on a banister.

“Not this one,” said Rhys, in his ear. “Sorry. She’s in the press box.”

“I know.”

They stood against the stream on the bench and let it go past them down the steps and over the wall onto the green, round the boy in the corner who was still on his back with the ball; and somewhere down there, in the middle of it, out of sight, a plain silver bowl was being handed by somebody Frederick could not see from here to two university presidents who were required by tradition to stand in the same place for exactly as long as it took.

Tyler went over the wall in one movement, maroon arms first, with a yell, and was gone.

Jack had gone three steps down with the crowd.

He stopped. He turned round on the fourth step in the FIRST YEAR shirt and his grandfather’s hat, with the Furnace going past him on both sides like a river round a post, and looked up at Frederick on the bench with Rhys’s hand on his arm. Then he came back up, against all of it, three steps, shouldering, saying sorry, sorry, sorry, mate, until he was on the bench again where he had been.

“Go on,” said Frederick. “Go. It’s the field.”

“I’ve been on a field,” said Jack. “I’m from Gloucestershire. It’s all fields.” He looked down at the green under the lights. “I’ll stay here.”

He stood beside him on the bench, close, with his shoulder against Frederick’s shoulder, and Rhys took his hand away and turned a little and found something to look at in the west stand; and they watched the field together, the green and the gold all over it, and the six boys from the bench, who had found each other in the crowd and stood in a row again, in order, holding their arms up, spelling it out to the sky.

---

Tyler came back over the wall twenty minutes later with a strip of turf the size of a paperback and his maroon arms smeared to the shoulder.

He climbed the steps and held the turf out to Frederick, who took it, because it seemed to be his. Then Tyler stood in front of the two of them, in the floodlights, with the stadium emptying and the band still playing somewhere, and looked at them: at Frederick, and at Jack, and at the place where their shoulders were; with the same open, uncomplicated interest with which he had looked in August at a jumper knitted by a Queen.

“You two are together, right?” said Tyler.

Nobody said anything.

It was suddenly very quiet on the bench, in all that noise. Frederick could feel Jack beside him not move. Rhys, a little way off, looked at the west stand harder.

Nobody had ever asked. Three years, since a bonfire on a hill in Gloucestershire, and in fourteen countries nobody had once simply looked at the two of them and asked, out loud, the way you ask somebody the time; because everybody who knew had been told, and everybody who had not been told had not been able to see it, because they were looking at the King. And here was the first person in the world who had worked it out for himself, from a screen at the far end of a football ground, and he was the one person in the world who did not know who the King was.

“Yes,” said Frederick.

Tyler nodded.

“Cool,” he said. “He moved. On the screen. When it was on you guys.” He made a small movement with one maroon hand, sideways, a foot. “Like he’d done it before.” He looked at Jack with something like professional respect. “That was smooth, man.”

“Thanks,” said Jack, faintly.

“Cool,” said Tyler again, and turned round, and looked up at the screen at the far end, where they were showing the catch in the corner for the eleventh time, slowly, from above; and watched it with his arms folded, as though he had not been there.

“It’s better on the screen,” said Tyler.

Jack sat down on the bench, very slowly, the way his father’s old car settled when it was switched off, and put both hands flat on his knees, and looked at them.

“He asked,” said Jack.

“Yes.”

“He just asked. Three years, Hanover. Nobody’s ever just asked.”

“I know.”

“And you said yes.”

“He asked,” said Frederick.

Jack took off his grandfather’s hat and looked into it, as though there might be something written in the band, and put it back on.

“Christ,” said Jack, to the floodlights, and wiped his eyes once with the back of his wrist; and Frederick sat down beside him at the north end of Sun Devil Stadium with a strip of turf in his lap, under the lights, at seventy degrees, in the cold.