Playing for Keeps (Glasgow Lads Book 2) (3 page)

“Oh?” Dad finally looked at him. Behind his gold-rimmed glasses, his eyes were bloodshot, cradled by dark semi-circles. “Did they say yes?”

“The manager did, but the captain, he needs convincing. I give it a fifty-fifty chance.”

His father waved his hand. “Och, you underestimate your charm. So was he cute?”

“Dad…”

“What? If you were straight and just met a new lass, I’d ask if
she
was cute.”

It embarrassed John to discuss his social life with his parents, but he felt lucky to be accepted. Besides, he couldn’t hide his grin at the memory of that delicious footballer. “Aye, Fergus is cute. And an architect.”

The ends of Dad’s thick gray mustache turned down. “Fergus what?”

“Taylor.” John stuffed a pair of cold chips into his mouth, not needing to ask why the second name of someone as Irish-sounding as “Fergus” was important.

His father nodded in approval at the English surname. “An architect, you say?” He gave a bitter chuckle. “Maybe he can build us a new house. This one’s too big now.”

John’s heart sank. Was it only a year ago there were four people living here?

“When you finish uni one day, it’ll be just me.” Dad shifted the newspaper aside, revealing a smooth wooden box. “An old man, tottering about alone in a three-bedroom terrace house.”

“Dad, look at it this way—once I’m gone, you’ll be free to throw massive bashes. Loose women, the edgiest DJs, champagne fountains—this house’ll be Party Central.”

“John—”

“You could install a hot tub right there.” He pointed out the kitchen window to the weed-riddled rear garden. “Tear out Mum’s perennials. They’ve looked pure shite since she left.”

“Son.” His father crossed his arms on the table in front of him, hunching his shoulders. “Have I told you lately how proud I am of you?”

To John, the words sounded less like praise than a declaration of defeat. “You don’t need to say it.”

“I do. Because it’s true.” Putting his head in his hands, Dad drew his fingertips back and forth over the top of his scalp, as if searching for the hair that had once grown there. “Whatever else you are, John, you’re not stupid. Not like your brother.”

John took another bite of pie to stop himself replying. But he struggled to swallow the beef, his throat closing up in the rush of emotion.

Dad thought Keith’s worst sin was getting caught, letting witnesses hear him shout anti-Catholic slurs as he pummeled that lad in the green-and-white scarf. Slurs their father had taught them:

Tim.

Paddy.

Taig.

Papist.

Fenian.

“Right.” John picked up his leftovers, the polystyrene container squeaking in his grip. “Need to change my clothes. Cannae breathe in this tie.”

“Think I’ll do the same. Just one other thing?”

John paused at the kitchen threshold, almost free. “Yeah?”

“At the pub, the Brothers and I were talking about this year’s Orange Walk. The big one before the Twelfth.”

John’s jaw tightened. Dad didn’t need to specify the month. Among hardcore Protestants, there was only one Twelfth—in July, commemorating the day in 1696 when William of Orange’s defeat of King James liberated the British Isles from Catholic rule. Some of John’s earliest memories were of the Glasgow Orange Walks, parades culminating on the Saturday before the Twelfth. Parades that saw counter-protests from Catholics and hand-wringing from progressives who wished the city would leave its sectarianism in the past where it belonged.

John himself had marched in those parades for over a dozen years. With pride as a child. With shame as a teen.

But this year would be different. At university he’d met too many Catholics—
befriended
too many Catholics—to stomach another daylong Protestant gloatfest. No matter how proud it made his father.

“Dad, about the Walk—”

John stopped as he saw what was being pulled from the wooden box.

“This collarette was Keith’s.” Dad stood, holding up the V-shaped orange sash, hands trembling with emotion. “The Lodge wants you to carry its banner this year. Now that your brother’s gone away.”

Fucking hell.
John gripped his beer bottle so hard he thought it would shatter.

“I know you’ve got issues with the Order,” Dad continued, “but—”

“Issues?” he asked incredulously. John’s “issue” was that he’d come to hate everything the Orange Order stood for, aside from their charitable works.

“Issues like their opposition to independence.” His father shrugged, as if Scotland’s destiny were a minor thing. “But think of all they’ve done for you.”

John fell silent. It always came back to this, what he owed the Order for their protection. Brotherhood had its price.

“Just think about it, aye? It would mean a lot to me.” Dad’s voice was gentle as he draped the collarette around John’s neck. “You’re all I’ve got left.”

= = =

The moment he reached his bedroom, John ripped off the collarette and hurled it onto the floor of his wardrobe. Then he slammed the door shut so he wouldn’t have to look at the orange atrocity. Thanks to a loose hinge, the door bounced off the wardrobe frame, then opened again with a resentful creak.

John switched on his bedside radio, along with the small electric fan on his desk, then began to shed his clothes, dropping them in a sweaty pile on the scuffed hardwood floor.

In his boxers and undershirt, he sat on the bed to finish his beer, which was gone in a few swallows. He wished for another but wouldn’t have gone downstairs to face his dad again for all the lager in Lanarkshire.

On the radio,
Peter and Roughie’s Football Show
was wrapping up with another dire prediction for John’s favorite team, the once-glorious Glasgow Rangers.

“Gonnae no listen to them,” John murmured, offering a comforting caress to the faded Rangers fleece blanket covering his bed. As he traced the red lion at the center of the blue-and-white logo, he thought about his team’s rivalry with Celtic, a club created by and for Glasgow’s Irish-Catholic immigrants. Though Rangers hadn’t begun as a Protestant club, they soon became one, pressured by fans who were sick of new arrivals from Ireland competing for their jobs and refusing to associate with them.

Even now, more than a century later, merely taking a side in the “Old Firm” football rivalry was often enough to announce one’s religion (when John had explained it to his American friend Katie, she’d said it sounded like “the Yankees and Red Sox playing for the Gaza Strip”). Though sectarian chants at football matches were now banned in Scotland, and though Celtic and Rangers rarely met on the pitch anymore—thanks to Rangers’ humiliating financial collapse and relegation to the lowest division—on many streets, the fires of bigotry blazed hot as ever.

Early in every working-class Glaswegian’s life, lines were drawn, alliances declared: Love Rangers and hate Celtic, or vice versa. Love the Queen and hate Irish Catholics, or vice versa. Reenact every conflict from Northern Ireland right here in Glasgow, like some sordid shadow-puppet show. No matter who gets hurt.

Keith wasn’t “stupid” for what he did. He was
wrong
. That lad in the green-and-white scarf,
he
was the stupid one, for wearing Celtic colors and talking rubbish in a Rangers pub. He’d paid for his idiocy with spilled blood, broken bones, and a damaged brain. Keith would pay for his hate crime with seven years of his life—five for assault with grievous bodily harm and two for religious motivation.

As well he fucking should.

John regretted that thought as soon as it came, remembering the most innocent victim—his wee nephew, Harry, who would be twelve by the time his dad got out of prison. At least he’d been too young to attend today’s sentencing, to see Keith led away, his dark eyes dull with defiance.

Taped to John’s wardrobe door—the unbroken one—was a crayon drawing Harry had given him last week. It pictured a square-headed boy and man, their round bodies colored Rangers royal blue, their stick legs kicking seven different yellow footballs (six if the blob in the upper corner was meant to be the sun). The field at their feet was bright green, unlike their real-life playground pitch made of pitted gray asphalt.

Harry, is this man in the picture me or your dad?

It’s you, Uncle John. See, cos he’s smiling.

On the wall beside the wardrobe was a gold-framed photo in which he was definitely
not
smiling. Freshly initiated into the Orange Order, the eighteen-year-old John stared at the camera with a look of dull disbelief, like he’d just woken from a coma to discover his arm had been replaced with a lobster claw. He was flanked by Keith, their father, and the local lodge’s Worshipful Master, who stood with a protective, possessive hand on John’s shoulder. A hand that said,
Never fear. You belong to us now.

A lie, of course. John didn’t really belong anywhere.

Despite all the politics connecting religion to football, John still loved his Rangers. He couldn’t help it. “Gonnae no worry, lads,” he whispered to the blanket. “I may renounce the rest of this rubbish, but I’ll never renounce youse.”

He went to his desk, set down the empty bottle, then stood at the bedroom’s open window with the takeaway container, picking through the leftovers in search of the least soggy chips.

In the vacant lot beyond the rear garden, a rising wind sent bits of rubbish bouncing over the grass like children at the end of a school day. From an abandoned shopping trolley, a neon-yellow flyer swooped up, then flapped to the ground, tumbling end over end before escaping through a gap in the sparse hedgerow and returning the landscape to its usual gray-brown expanse.

Feeling restless, John unfolded his lifting bench in the middle of the floor, then retrieved the dumbbell set from beneath his bed. Though his abs desperately needed work, he’d just eaten, and besides, he needed cheering up. So Arm Day it was.

He began with flyes, then moved on to chest presses, triceps extensions, and finally his favorite, the biceps concentration curls.

Through it all he thought of Fergus and his spectacular legs. He imagined gliding his hands over those muscular calves, up those taut thighs, arriving at a perfectly toned arse (or so he assumed—the long shirt and shorts of the football kit left much to the imagination, arsewise).

Then he imagined Fergus touching him, fingertips tracing John’s arms, palms spreading over his pecs, hands clutching his shoulders as John slid deep inside—

Ding!

He dropped the dumbbell with a thunk, then launched himself off the bench toward his phone, which was still stuffed in his trouser pocket.

There was a message from an unfamiliar number:

Liam says he’s going to kill you.

For a moment John’s blood froze, until he remembered where he’d last heard that name.

Why?
he answered Fergus.

Because now whenever he looks at his best mate, he’ll see a smoking hot porno star.

John grinned at the erupting-volcano emoji Fergus had appended to the message.

John: Guess I’ll be needing a bodyguard.

I’ll see if I can find a volunteer.
Fergus answered.

While contemplating a cheeky comeback, John added Fergus to his contacts. Sadly, the label “Tall Ginger Starring in Tonight’s Wet Dream” was more characters than the directory would allow.

His phone dinged again.

Fergus: Also, Warriors’ll do the charity match, IF I can have a hand in planning.

“YAAAS!” John jumped onto his bed and thrust his fist at the ceiling in triumph.

Then he typed
You can have a hand in a lot more than that
before remembering Fergus’s current fragile state. To avoid coming on too strong, he deleted this and sent a gentler substitute.

John: Let’s start pronto. Over dinner Saturday?

F
ERGUS
WAS
IMPRESSED
. John had chosen one of Glasgow’s best-kept secrets as the location for their first…whatever this was (charity-match planning meeting? Date?). The bar restaurant’s unassuming robin-egg-blue facade, which literally overlooked the motorway, had no sign hanging upon it or so much as a menu in the window.

Inside, the place oozed a speakeasy-like mystery and moodiness. Fergus felt like he was in an old-fashioned gangster film, the sort with tommy guns and fedoras and women who could order your assassination with the tilt of an eyebrow. It set him on edge, but not entirely in a bad way.

They were shown to a cozy window snug, where the server plucked a handwritten
Reserved
sign off the wee table and replaced it with a pair of pearlesque slate-gray menus. Fergus sat next to the wall while John slid into the snug with his back to the window. Their table was separated from the rest of the bar by three stairs and a low wooden wall, providing intimacy amid the Saturday-night raucousness.

They ordered from the dizzying array of bourbons and somewhat less dizzying array of food. Then John asked, “Why are you called the Woodstoun Warriors when there’s no such place? You’re based in Woodside, right?”

“We are.” Fergus shifted his white paper napkin to align it with the edge of the table. “But there were already several Woodside Warriors round the world. A soccer team in Australia, a cricket club in Yorkshire, a lacrosse team in New York—”

“So?”

“So our founders thought those teams might be offended if they were confused with a gay football club.”

“Who cares if they’re offended?”

Fergus bristled. Clearly this man knew nothing of the sporting world’s rampant homophobia. “Also, Woodside Warriors domain names weren’t available.”

“Oh. Well, in that case,” John said with that wry smile that Fergus had already come to dread and crave. “So what made you decide to say yes to the charity match?”

“It’s a good cause, helping the asylum seekers.”
Plus I wanted to see you again, despite my better judgment.