Keeping Your Feet

by George Best, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

"You feel him touch you," said Mr Hamill, "and you go."

He showed them. He jogged at Owen Rafferty with the ball, not fast, and when Owen put a hand on his back Mr Hamill threw his arms up and went down on the frozen grass on his side, the way a man lies down on a sofa. He lay there a second. Then he got up, slowly, because he was fifty-two, and brushed the white off the knees of his tracksuit bottoms.

"The referee can't give what he doesn't see," he said. "Make him see it. Next."

It was a Tuesday in January, quarter to seven, the far pitch at Ballee under the one floodlight that worked. Mr Hamill ran a tyre place on the Larne Road and you could smell it off him, rubber and the hand stuff he used to get it off. He'd coached the Ballykeel Rangers under-thirteens for four years for nothing, and he'd bought the bibs, and the balls, and the cones, which were orange and had HAMILL TYRES on them in black marker in case anybody else's team tried to walk off with them. They were three points off the top. On Saturday it was the Junior Shield semi-final, at home, against a side from Limavady.

Kyle Moorhead was fifth in the line. He watched Daniel go, and Callum, and wee Peter Gault, who went down before Owen even got near him and rolled twice, and everybody laughed, and Mr Hamill said, "Too early, Peter, but I like the commitment." Then it was Kyle.

He went at Owen slow. Owen was bigger than him, most people were, and Owen came across and put his hand on Kyle's back and then his shoulder into him, harder than he'd done to anybody else, because it was Kyle.

Kyle's weight went out to the left. His left foot came across under it, the way it always did, and his right shoulder dropped into Owen's chest, and the ball was still there, a foot in front of him, because he'd taken the touch before the shoulder arrived. He was past. He was nearly at the goal before he heard Mr Hamill blow the whistle.

"Kyle."

He brought the ball back.

"What did I say?"

"Go down."

"Did you go down?"

"I tried."

Some of the others laughed. Mr Hamill didn't. He looked at Kyle the way he looked at a tyre somebody had brought in with a nail in the sidewall.

"Again," he said.

Kyle went again. This time Owen grabbed his shirt as well and pulled, and Kyle felt the neck of it go tight under his chin and his body leaned forward against the pull like a dog on a lead, and the ball went with him. He thought about falling. He actually thought it: fall now. But the thought arrived somewhere in his head, and his legs were not in his head. They were underneath him, doing what they did.

"Right," Mr Hamill said. "Go and get a drink."

---

The yard behind the flats on Dunclug was the width of four wheelie bins and the length of eleven. Kyle had counted it in strides when he was eight, and he'd been counting it in strides since, and it was still eleven, which meant either he wasn't growing or the yard was.

Aidan was in from the night shift at half seven in the morning. He worked at the plant out past Cullybackey, on the line where the boxes came off, and he came home smelling of cold, a cold that had a smell, and he didn't go to bed straight away because, he said, his body didn't know it was morning yet. So he stood in the yard in his work fleece, nineteen years old, fifteen stone, eating toast out of his hand, and he waited for Kyle to come down with the ball.

The game had no name. It had started when Kyle was eight and Aidan was fifteen and too big to play anything properly with him, so instead he'd just leaned on him. Kyle dribbled from the black bin to the green bin and back. Aidan leaned. A shoulder, a hip, a hand flat between his shoulder blades. Not a shove, at first. Just weight, the way a door is heavy.

If Kyle went down, if a knee or a hand or his backside touched the concrete, he owed Aidan a pound. If he got to the green bin and back on his feet with the ball, Aidan owed him a pound.

He was eight. He went down eleven times the first morning. It was the most money he had ever owed anybody.

There was a jam jar on top of the fridge with KYLE'S DEBT written on masking tape across the lid. For the first year it was all in Aidan's writing. Aidan kept a record on the back of a Chinese menu stuck to the side of the fridge with a magnet shaped like Lanzarote: two columns, a line for each morning, and the money came out of Kyle's birthday and his Christmas, and once out of a twenty that his granny sent, which their mum had said was a disgrace and taken half of back.

It was a long time before Kyle worked out that it wasn't about being strong. He was never going to be strong. He was the smallest in his class until the end of P6 and he was the second smallest now. It was about where the weight was. When Aidan leaned on him from the right, the stupid thing to do was lean back, because Aidan was fifteen stone and the leaning-back lost. What you did was let it move you. You let your top half go with it, and you put a foot out wide under where it was going, so that the push turned into a step. Aidan pushed you, and you used the push to go somewhere. And you had to have touched the ball already, before the push arrived, so that wherever the step went the ball was already there waiting.

He didn't know any of that in words. He'd never said it. It was just that after a while he stopped owing money.

Then he started being owed it. Aidan had kept the menu. In the second column, in Kyle's own writing now, it went down the side of the fridge onto a second menu, and then a third. Aidan paid. Every week, out of his wage, coins on the kitchen table, a pound for each line, never a word about it except "Robbing wee get," which he said fondly, the way he said everything at that time of the morning.

"Hamill wants me to fall over," Kyle said on the Wednesday. He was at the green bin. Aidan had his forearm across his chest.

"Does he."

"To win free kicks."

Aidan put his hip in. Kyle went with it, a half step to the side, and the ball was there, and he turned back for the black bin.

"Can you?"

"No."

"Try it now. Go on. I'll let you off the pound."

Kyle tried. He dribbled at the bin and Aidan leaned and Kyle told himself, fall, and he felt his ankle turn out and his foot go wide and plant itself on the concrete, and he was still up. He stood there with the ball between his feet, red in the face.

Aidan finished his toast. "That's a pound to you, then," he said, and went in to bed.

---

Saturday was hard and bright. The frost hadn't lifted off the shady end and the grass crunched there like cornflakes. The parents stood along the rail with flasks. Kyle's mum was at work, Saturdays, at the chemist's in Fairhill, and Aidan was asleep, so there was nobody for him, which he didn't mind because there was nobody to look at.

The Limavady side had a number five called Jordan. Kyle knew it was Jordan because Jordan's mother said it every time he touched the ball, "Go on, Jordan," as if he was a horse. He was a head taller than anybody on the pitch and he had a moustache, a real one, dark, and Callum said in the huddle that he was fifteen and they should get his birth certificate, and Mr Hamill said, "Wise up, Callum."

Mr Hamill took Kyle by the shoulder before kick-off.

"Out on the right," he said. "Get it, run at the big lad. He'll go for you, he's that sort. When he goes for you, you know what to do."

Kyle nodded.

"Kyle. I'm not asking you to cheat. The lad's going to foul you. All I'm asking is that you let the referee see it."

The first time, it was four minutes in. Kyle got it off Daniel near the touchline and Jordan came across, and Kyle slowed down. He didn't know why he did that, except that if you went at a big lad fast he'd just get his body in front of you and that was that, but if you went slow he had to decide what to do. Jordan decided. He came in with his shoulder and his studs both, and the studs caught Kyle on the outside of his left ankle, a hot little scrape, and the shoulder hit him on the arm.

Kyle went with the shoulder. Half a step to the right. The ball was already there.

Then he was past, and the grass was open and empty for twenty yards, with the cold on his face, and he took it ten yards and hit a cross that went straight over everybody into the parents.

"Kyle!" said Mr Hamill.

The second time was worse. Jordan had learned, or thought he had, and he didn't wait. He came through the back of Kyle as soon as the ball arrived, both legs, and Kyle felt it in his calf and his whole body pitched forward. His hands went out. His right hand touched the grass. Just the fingers, and he pushed off it, because his right foot was already coming through, and the ball was still at his left, and he got up off his fingers and kept going, and then a boy in yellow took the ball off him because by then he'd run out of balance and out of luck in the same moment.

The referee was a man in his sixties with a Tesco bag of spare balls behind his goal. He hadn't blown. He gave Kyle a look as he went past that might have been sympathy.

"Advantage," the referee said, to nobody.

"What advantage?" Mr Hamill said. "Ref. What advantage?"

There was a third time, just before the half, a trip from behind that Kyle hopped over, and he lost the ball two touches later anyway.

At half-time it was nil-nil and Mr Hamill didn't shout. He was the sort who went quiet. He handed round orange quarters out of a Tupperware box and then he crouched in front of Kyle, with his knees cracking, so their faces were level.

"That's three times," he said. "Three. On the edge of their box, Daniel's taking those. You know Daniel's free kicks."

Kyle did. Daniel had scored four this season.

"I'm not angry."

Kyle looked at the orange in his hand.

"I just want to understand it. Are you scared of getting a reputation? Is that it? Somebody say something?"

"No."

"Then what?"

Kyle opened his mouth. Then he didn't know what came next. There was nothing in his mouth to say. It was in the yard, in the eleven strides, in the debt jar. It was in his feet. You couldn't hand it to somebody like an orange.

"I just don't," he said.

Mr Hamill breathed out through his nose. He stood up. "Right," he said to all of them, "second half, we play it in to Stevie's feet and we go through the middle." Kyle understood that it meant: not to Kyle.

---

They went through the middle for twenty-five minutes and got nowhere. Limavady scored from a corner that wee Peter Gault, in goal, lost in the sun. One-nil. The parents along the rail stopped talking to each other.

With six minutes left Owen Rafferty won it in the middle and there was nobody else, so he gave it to Kyle.

Kyle was just outside the box on the right. Jordan was in front of him. Jordan had a yellow card by then, for something he'd done to Callum, and Kyle could see him thinking about it, and he could see that he didn't care.

Kyle went slow. He went so slow that Jordan's mother stopped shouting. He went at Jordan's right foot, his planted one, and he watched the hips. The hips were square. Then they weren't. Jordan's weight dropped onto the right side, ready to come across, and Kyle dropped his left shoulder like he was going to cut inside, and the hips went with the shoulder, and Kyle touched it with the outside of his right foot the other way.

Jordan knew he'd been done. Kyle could feel him know it. And because he knew, he did what big lads do, and he just hit him. Not the ball. Kyle. A forearm across the chest and a knee into the back of his thigh.

It was in the box. The whistle was already in the referee's mouth. Kyle could hear Mr Hamill's voice beginning, a big intake of breath, and the parents along the rail beginning, and he knew exactly what to do, he knew it the way you know the answer when the teacher's already looking at you.

His body leaned with the forearm. His left foot went out wide underneath, and planted, and held. He was still up.

The ball had run on a yard. He got to it. He had it on his left foot now, and the goal was there, and the keeper was coming out from his line, and the angle was bad. Behind the keeper, at the back post, Stevie Logan was standing on his own with his hands up, because nobody had bothered with Stevie for twenty-five minutes.

Kyle put it across with his left. The keeper went down at his feet for a shot that didn't come. The ball rolled past him, past everybody, along the hard grass at the frosty end, and Stevie, who couldn't miss it, nearly did, and then didn't.

The referee took the whistle out of his mouth and pointed back to the middle.

One-one. And then four minutes later Daniel scored a free kick that Owen won, by falling over, and Kyle was glad about that too.

---

In the car park afterwards there were frost marks on all the windscreens except Mr Hamill's, because Mr Hamill's van was parked by the clubhouse wall where the sun had got it. He was loading cones into the back in their stack, counting them.

"Moorhead."

Kyle stopped.

"That last one." Mr Hamill pushed the cones in and shut the door. "He had you. That was a penalty, that. He'd have been off, as well. Second yellow."

"I know."

"And then what you did was better." He said it as if it were the name of a tyre he hadn't heard of. "How do you do that? Stay up. I'm asking you. I want to show the others."

Kyle looked at him. He thought of the yard, and the toast, and the Lanzarote magnet. None of it was any use.

So he stepped in and put his shoulder against Mr Hamill's arm, and leaned. Just weight, the way a door is heavy. Mr Hamill leaned back against it, the way people do. Then Kyle took the weight away.

Mr Hamill stumbled a half step forward onto the frosty tarmac, caught himself on the van, and stood there with his hand flat on the cold metal, looking at Kyle.

"Do that again," he said.

---

George Best, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Georgiō Best per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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