If he had not fallen for Veronica, a beautiful young trainee English teacher from a similar council estate background to his own who possessed both a sense of humour and an enduring tolerance of sport, Andy occasionally wondered what kind of squalid gutter he might have ended up in, eking out his beastly days. For Andy, now in his seventieth year, had once come to love the beast with all his heart. The ways of the beast had been exhilarating. Had nourished him with vitality which in turn had given birth to tremendous feelings of joy and preeminence. He thought nostalgically about that today in his living room with the sound muted, waiting for the pundits to cease their interminable yapping and the football match to start properly. Nostalgia and habit are the inseparable companions of the retired, he reflected wistfully as the refereeing officials walked out on the pitch, followed by the players.

“If you do the supermarket shopping on Saturday,” Veronica had proposed earlier that week, “and cook the meal in the evening, I’ll make Sunday dinner and let you watch the early kick off game. Do we have a deal?” She had pounced on his hesitation like a hawk. “Is this what you need to help you decide?” she asked, handing him the newspaper media supplement. He quickly checked the Super Sunday schedule and acquiesced when he saw it would be a top of the table London derby. “You’ll find our shopping list in the usual place,” she added with a smile. “Under a magnet on the fridge.”

Of course there had never been a beast in the literal sense. That was the name he had concocted for the only environment in which he had ever really thrived. Since he had played in a minor provincial league Andy came across the beast perhaps only three or four times each season but he always enjoyed its febrile presence. Several of the grounds did not even have seating installed let alone terraces or covered stands. You might find yourself running around inside a makeshift paddock or roped off farmer’s field, getting changed in a ramshackle barn devoid of showers and hygienic latrines. It made him smile now just to think about it.

Those so-called minor league clubs made a virtue of parsimony, he recalled. They were owned by window cleaners or second hand car dealers or, in one particular case, by a wrestler who also doubled as player manager when he did not have a bout on the professional circuit. The proprietors, or more correctly the moneybrokers, had nicknames like Tommy Scram and Orrible Orig. If they twigged through a newspaper or a local radio report that some young upstart had talent, which Andy did, they offered him a few quid per match to jump ship and sign for them. The actual amount was never written into anything as grand as a contract. The deal existed as a nod and a wink agreement. Off the books. In other words the terms of the arrangement could be ignored, altered and cancelled at the paymaster’s whim.

In truth this footballing fandango had amused Andy. He did not care too much about the money side of things either – which was just as well. In those far flung monochrome days of pounds, shillings and pence nobody ever offered him more than a fiver tops. Most often he found an envelope pinned to his kit containing two or three grubby singleton notes. The actual disbursement depended on the anticipated gate money taken at a match. This in turn depended on the weather amongst half a dozen other seasonal factors. One of his clubs after a couple of games took to rewarding him in scratch cards instead of spondulix so he gave them the heave ho. When Andy complained, the manager’s dogsbody had grinned, “What’s the problem, Andy? You might find yourself scratching open a twenty quid prize!” Yeah and you might find yourself without a guaranteed goal a game striker, he had sneered back.

Andy took pride in his ability. Some people hinted he was a bit too impressed with himself. Dwelt too long on the ball. Such snide remarks only served to help him identify life’s habitual losers when he met them. You either have confidence or you don’t. Self-belief was not a commodity you could purchase like snake oil. As for the readies, he did not mind being shortchanged occasionally either, that was the way of the market place after all, but he refused to be outright chiselled. The money he earned from football lubricated his social life. A pound purchased ten pints of beer back in the glory days. Best bitter mind you, forget rotgut and scrumpy. Not that he ever drank too much of an evening out. The cash simply kept the wolf from the door. Enabled him to date the girls he fancied without asking them to go Dutch. It was money for old rope really. All he had to do was turn up with his boots on a Saturday afternoon half an hour before kick off. No training session nonsense during the week. Naturally players were expected to keep themselves fit. And he did. Well, mostly.

When the televised game eventually began that fateful Sunday it developed quickly into a perfunctory pattern. Two notably adventurous attacking teams, mentally fatigued by midweek games in Europe, going mechanically through the motions. Too many square passes, mistimed tackles and unproductive sprints forward. Three yellow cards in the first fifteen minutes. Andy especially had sympathy for the strikers when they made brilliantly timed diagonal runs to split the opponent’s defence but the midfielder failed to find them with the ball. By the end of a goalless first half it struck him that most of the players had just been waiting passively for something to happen, a red card or a fluke deflection, rather than taking the initiative individually themselves and forcing the deadlock open. The beast had bayed discontentedly in ever increasing frustration. He switched the box off and put his brogues on. Veronica popped her head round the kitchen door, wanting to know where he was going. He didn’t yet know. “If you’re so easily bored, why don’t we cancel the sports channels?” she mocked. “I reckon with the money we’d save in a year we could afford ten days abroad in the sun.” Andy tried not to roll his eyes. “Dinner will be ready at four,” she reminded him. “Can you bring back a bottle of red?”

Spectating football was very much a third tier activity compared to playing it, Andy considered as he strolled in an easterly direction towards limpid late February sunshine. Nowadays the bijou metropolitan clubs made their fans pay sixty quid or more for a seat. Admission prices had become extortionate. It must be at least three decades since he had last deigned to visit a major league stadium. QPR had been playing United on their synthetic pitch and the Old Bill had been assembled in force to funnel the rival spectators away from each other, waving truncheons as if manhandling a national miner’s strike. Football supporters had always fascinated him since he had first been taken to Old Trafford as a young schoolboy to watch the Busby Babes. Ten old pence he had paid to stand on the terrace near the halfway line, the succulent smells of hot dogs and burgers rising up from the peripheral trackway, packed sardine tight, craning between whatever gaps opened up in the constantly swaying morass of giant bodies, the sublimated anticipation gradually swelling like a crimson head on a carbuncle as kick off approached. The messianic sensation of belonging had both seduced and terrified him. To be simultaneously so thoroughly incorporated and dehumanised. How could that be?

The term “beautiful game” had long since fallen into common parlance to describe the sport of sports. Who first coined the term nobody quite knew. Some argued it had been popularised by Pele, the great Brazilian striker (jogo bonito), others that the English words had first been uttered by a Lancastrian radio broadcaster, much later imprisoned for sex offences against young women. Certainly the phrase had nothing remotely to do with the Australian tycoon who eventually materialised with his satellite television company and transformed the aesthetic of the game so radically that within a generation virtually every globalised corporate enterprise and aspiring huckster were fighting each other to grab a junk of the lucrative action. TV technology created a wealth generating monster that needed nothing more than its own insatiable innards to nourish it. The beast had been digitised.

Andy had long since hung up his boots by then. Those encounters with the beast in his adult playing days may have been irregular but they had rarely proved less than memorable. In the same way a hard sclerotic tissue wraps organically around the eyeball to protect it, so the beast seemed to encircle the football matches in which he played, an acoustic as well as physical entity that orchestrated every movement of the game like a leitmotif, murmuring, groaning, cheering, screaming, howling by turns. If he thought about the beast later in the afterglow of a game, it reminded him of the legendary Cyclops, a single-eyed monster but with a thousand voices that blended inexorably together – unless you ran the touchline, that was, and got too close to it. On those occasions the impassioned din of the beast sometimes separated into its constituent parts – curses, instructions, death threats and taunts. How these elemental noises became so mellifluously accumulated into a collective harmonious whole remained to him both a mystery and a miracle. On one occasion the beast decided to single him out after he committed a foul on its favourite home player. Suddenly he heard his name being chanted in a choral anthem – “Andy Prosser is a dirty tosser!” Again and again it resounded and he felt his heart pound with pride. He had actually managed to touch the beast in its softest, most private parts! The meaning fell a long way short of his self-esteem. That he was watched so vigilantly, that he engendered such passionate vituperation was what really mattered. The stridency of the beast galvanised his muscles and sinews. It electrified his nerves. It adrenalised his will power and drove him ever onwards into a transcendental state of ecstasy.. Under its spell Andy had become a godlike, infinitely capable and alive in his endeavours. The football attracted to his feet as an iron pinball to a magnet, the scoring of goals divinely inevitable. At least so it had seemed way back then.

As he turned a sharp corner into Cleveland Road, he almost collided with a long time friend he had first met at a Labour Party meeting. It jerked him out of the reverie. “Hullo Andy!” she greeted him with her habitual rugged cheerfulness. “Where are you headed for?”

“I’m escaping from the tyranny of the television set,” he replied and she laughed spontaneously, wanting to know what he had been watching.

“I hate sport,” she carelessly replied when he told her. “If you ask me, football is just a gang of stupid men aimlessly chasing an inflated piece of leather around a field.”

He didn’t argue. Let her pour cold water. What was the point of contradicting such flippant ignorance? And anyway Meg’s opinion of football was certainly no more reductive than that of the dour Liverpool FC manager who had once solemnly remarked, “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. But they are wrong. It’s much more important than that.” Scousers had loved that man because he validated their most deep rooted tribal addiction.

By the time he reached the park this onset of nostalgia had returned and was touching a high water mark. He ruminated about how the decades had transformed his love-hate relationship with the beast. The beast could provide a safe hiding place for bigots and cowards. It was one thing to be an anonymous cell in its superstructure but quite another to be the object of the beast’s scrutiny and judgement. Laws in relation to segregation, seating, obscenities and anti-social behaviour had all been passed in response to acts of thuggery and organisational incompetence. Nobody anymore in the 21st century could attend a match and hope to get away unpunished if they hurled missiles, chanted racist slogans or trespassed onto the playing surface to pay homage to their heroes. But so far as Andy could tell from his long time viewing position on the sofa, the basic instinct of the beast remained essentially untamed. To the diehard supporters, football was a war of attrition, fought by other means rather than deadly weapons. It divided the closest knit families and communities.

He heard the shouts of exhortation, the expletives, even before he entered the park. A match in frantic progress on one of the pitches. Red and white vertical stripes versus royal blue and white squares. A handful of relatives and friends straggled along one of the touchlines. Andy advanced towards them, his feet sinking into the long verdant grass. He loved the spongy give of the turf, the emerald green stage slicing the panorama into segments. No primary colour excited his imagination quite like green. He had known no better incitement to action than a crisply mown field. The way its latent energy suffused the soles of his boots, priming his feet and ankles and calf muscles by turn, flooding ever upwards until the force of nature pervaded his entire body. Instinctively his keen eyes picked out the salient patterns of the conflict. The stripes appeared to be under the cosh. A double phalanx of defenders frantically chasing and blocking the blue shirts who feverishly surged in and around their penalty area. But suddenly a desperate clearing punt up towards the halfway line, an inept attempt to head the ball and the red number nine sprinting into a one on one counter attack. How did that happen? A floundering yellow streak of goalkeeper and the joyful centre forward wheeling away to celebrate his goal.

“Jesus wept!” cursed a tracksuited spectator close to Andy, kicking his kit bag in frustration.

“Is that the first goal they’ve conceded?” Andy asked, deducing from the varied reactions of the gathering where team allegiances lay. The paunchy man who could have been a trainer or a substitute, it was impossible to tell which, muttered a few more oaths in abject disappointment.

“The first?” he expostulated with venom. “We’re seven nil down! To think I could have stayed at home to watch the Chelsea match instead of coming here to witness this load of crap!”

Andy found the revelation hard to credit. “But you were all over them just now?” he objected.

The tracksuit didn’t disagree. “We can’t defend for toffee,” he complained. “They all want to gallop forward like the household cavalry. We’ve got ten fantasy Harry Kanes with one paraplegic goalie bringing up the rear.”

Andy considered that a bit hard on the keeper whose forlorn demeanour hovered now on the edge of tears.. “If it’s any consolation you’ve missed nothing on the box to shout about,” he remarked. “Lack lustre’s an understatement. When I left the score was – ”

“Don’t tell me the bloody score!” the man cut him off irately. “I’m recording the match for later.”

As Andy meandered off, the memory of an equally ignominious defeat came back to him. Ten goals conceded away to Wrexham reserves. It still left a bitter taste. A part of him had never recovered. He could feel the humiliation wriggling somewhere deep in his guts like an undying worm. Shame. Rage. And most of all self-disgust. After the sixth goal had gone in he had psychologically capitulated. Switched off. Went missing. Choose your own cliche. It had never happened to him before. How the home beast must have whooped and mocked! “The real beauty of the game is that it always gives you a second chance,” one of the team had quipped in the coach journeying home. How they had fallen about laughing! So much more productive to believe that myth than to collapse under the burden of reality.

To Andy the player, as opposed to the spectator, football had represented an almost perfect displacement activity. Whatever existential pain or insecurity he carried around in his psyche became instantly vanquished as soon as the referee’s whistle blew for the kick-off. He became transported into a protective cocoon where only athleticism and ball control mattered in the process of self-expression. Nothing else concerned this team of eleven competitors but to take possession of the ball and find a way to manipulate, caress and finally to manoeuvre it into the net at the far end of the ground. A total unequivocal commitment to a cause. For ninety minutes the external universe ceased to be. The vast and complex network of realities that so weightily impinge on the human mind – the geopolitical, the familial, the ideological, the physiological and whatever else – all withdrew to an invisible dimension outside space-time.

He sat down on a bench now outside the old stables, years ago converted into an arts workshop. Occasional glimpses of children cavorting around in a playground popped up like islands in the mainstream of his consciousness. Why had he travelled back here? he wondered. Why had this chapter of his life suddenly come calling on him? A woman appeared, dragging a black labrador behind her. It pricked up its nose and skewed them both sideways towards a lamppost where it sniffed for a few seconds before emitting a long stream of piddle.

Andy felt amused by the absurdity of this tableau. Instinct is all, he found himself thinking. At some depleted stage of his adolescence football had crudely veered him off course in the same way that post had veered the dog. Football had liberated some desperate incontinence from within his body. Football had both created and voided him. And now all that was left of football was the long twilight of shadows it cast somewhere behind him. Beast and man. Alive and rapidly decaying. The neural itch of a habit he could not help but scratch.

On the way home he made a short detour towards a small independent victualler’s shop he knew. The route took him past a rundown sink estate. Two high rise blocks divided from each other by a narrow precinct. ‘Ganga Ginnel’ he had heard it called. Or occasionally ‘Crack Corner’. A certain class of person gave the estate a wide berth. Others, like his eldest son, whenever he came back to the smoke, bought his puff there. A double decker bus drew up at a shelter and Andy noticed the faces of the passengers all peering through the windows in the same direction, transfixed by something above and to the left of their heads. An elderly couple alighted and as the vehicle moved off they stood stock still, open-mouthed, staring at the dwindling orb of the sun. Except it wasn’t anything in the sky that held them spellbound. Andy followed their gaze to a balcony on the seventh floor of one of the tower blocks. A young woman appeared to be straddling the balcony railing, rocking backwards and forwards rhythmically as if riding a horse. A cluster of people stood around the precinct beneath her and an urgent conversation was in progress, the precise nature of which he couldn’t quite determine. “She’s going to kill herself,” Andy heard one of the senior citizens suddenly say. “And look, she’s wearing a Chelsea shirt,” observed the other – at which precise moment the rider just fell, very languidly with arms outstretched like an olympic diver about to embrace the water below.

Andy did not look beyond that or try to make sense of the instant commotion that ensued. As he continued numbly on his way, a single anguished voice penetrated his senses. “She never wanted for nothing that girl! She was so beautiful.”

The wine shop stood deserted apart from the lugubrious, overweight owner who sat with his hunched back to the counter, staring at a TV screen. “Any goals to report, Sam?” Andy heard himself mutter by way of a greeting.

Sam half turned in acknowledgement, shaking his head. “Nah, mate. It’s bin like waitin’ fer a damp squib to come to life. Thank God, it’s close to the final whistle,” he said. The logo on the screen indicated five of the seven minutes of injury time had been played. “Aint seen you for a while,” he added. “On the wagon?”

Andy found himself blustering an apology. “We cut down a lot after receiving a lecture from our doctor,” he explained, patting his midriff. “Blood sugar levels and all that. So now we stay dry til the weekend. Those Xmas cases you sold us only ran out last week. Have you got any of the Argentinian merlot left?”

“Sure have. It’s over there in the South American corner,” the shopkeeper pointed without much sales enthusiasm. “Get up, you cheating twat! Oh no, the ref’s given a pen! For fuck’s sake he dived, you dozy pillock! He dived! Put him in the book!” The two men gawped at the slo mos as VAR ground laboriously into action. Eventually the referee trotted over to the touchline to consult the video. Andy could hear the beast becoming restless. It knew what this meant. The beast was well ahead of the game. As the adjudicator turned around and waved his arms to cancel the original ruling, a great roar of derision emerged from the speakers. “How many do you want?” asked Sam, reverting to the main task with a grunt of relief.

“Just the one,” replied Andy. Suddenly he experienced it again like an involuntary spasm of the mind, the woman plummeting and the muted shriek of the crowd “On further reflection, make that two,” he amended.

By the time Sam had returned with the bottles to the counter and announced the damage to his customer’s wallet, the players were shaking hands. “You still got the sports channels, Andy?” he bantered affably. “Don’t come cheap, do they? And the trouble is you feel you gotta keep watching all the dross they put out just to get your money’s worth. Cash or card?”

How often will I have to relive it? Andy thought to himself as he left the shop. How long before the blood of the trauma dries up in my memory?

It came as a surprise to find his wife in front of the screen listening to the pundits in full throat, vultures picking the bones of the cadaver clean, a fatuous ritual he knew would take at least another half hour. “We’re all good to go,” she announced. “You decant and I’ll serve up.” He felt ravenously hungry. Wasn’t your appetite supposed to desert you in the aftermath of a shock? he pondered.

Shoulder of lamb with roast spuds and all the lashings. Veronica in a convivial mood. No way was he going to risk fracturing her peace of mind. The high rise disaster would have to be withheld until another day. “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” he remarked as they tucked in. “Maybe we should cancel the subscription to the sports channels after all. Put the money into our holiday fund. What do you reckon?”

“Oh? Is that a joke or has a road to Damascus conversion taken place?” she asked in surprise. He scratched his head as if unsure. “Won’t you miss the live football?”

“Yeah, quite possibly, but it’ll wear off soon enough,” he answered eventually. “Just like the weekday craving for alcohol did. Besides it would be nice to adventure a bit more into the hidden corners of the world before the great referee in the sky blows for full time. Maybe finish up in some remote romantic place where satellite television and Super Sundays don’t exist?”

“I don’t fancy the South Pole,” she retorted ironically. “A bit too chilly. I’ll drink to travel adventure though. But what’s brought this on all of a sudden?

“The past’s been catching up with me today,” he shrugged. ‘’It kind of collided with the present.”

“They say the past is another country, don’t they?” she remarked, passing the roasties. “People do things differently there apparently.”

“I certainly did,” confessed Andy. “Sometimes I wonder what you ever saw in me?”

“Well, for one thing you were the first man I ever dated who didn’t expect me to go Dutch,” she replied. “Give me five minutes and I might think of a second thing.”

Andy knew better than to reply in kind. He refilled their glasses almost to the brim. “Here’s to travel and adventure!” he toasted as they clinked together.