Tangerines

by Ancelottian Composure, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The phone sat in the cradle on the dashboard, and the clip was on its fourth playing before they reached the roundabout at Lavradio.

"There," her father said. "Stop it there. Look where you are."

Matilde looked. On the small screen a girl in a green shirt with the number eleven was standing in the middle of the pitch, between two girls in blue, with her hand up. The girl was her.

"Where should you be?"

"Wide."

"Wide. On the touchline. Their full-back comes inside, you've got the whole corridor, and you're standing in the middle like a lamp post." He touched the screen with one finger and the girl in green ran backwards out of the middle, and then forwards into it again. "Every time. Eleven times in the second half. I counted."

He had counted. He kept a notebook in the door pocket with the counts in it, a column for each match, and the columns went back to when she was nine.

She watched the chimneys go by. The old factory ones, tall and brick, that you could see from the ferry coming back from Lisbon, and that told you that you were home before anything else did. Her grandfather had worked under them for thirty-one years making sulphuric acid, and had the cough to prove it, and on Saturdays he still walked up to the ground in a jacket and sat on the wall behind the dugouts and did not say a word from kick-off to the final whistle.

"The man from Seixal is coming on Saturday," her father said. "Senhora Valente told me. On Saturday you play wide."

"The mister picks the team."

"The mister picks the team. You pick where you stand."

They had won four-one. She had scored one of the four. Neither of them had mentioned it.

---

Graça Valente taught physical education at the secondary school by the station, and for six seasons she had coached the under-seventeen girls of Grupo Desportivo Ribeirinho for nothing, because at the members' meeting where somebody was needed she had been the only person in the room not looking at the floor. She was fifty-eight. She had played centre-half for a team in Almada that no longer existed, and she ate tangerines all through training. She carried them in the left pocket of her tracksuit top, peeled them in one long spiral, and put the peel in the right pocket. By the end of a session the jacket smelled of them, and so did the bench, and so, if you sat beside her, did you.

The girls called her mister, as every team in Portugal called its coach, and she had long ago stopped correcting them.

On Tuesday she did not put the cones out.

They stood about under the floodlights on the synthetic pitch at the top of the hill by the railway line, sixteen girls and a bag of balls, waiting for the cones. A goods train went past full of containers, very slowly, the way they always went past, as if they had all night.

"Eight against eight," said Graça. "Lurdes, green bib. Sandra, green. Carolina, green." She went down the list from memory. "Matilde, green."

"Where am I playing, mister?"

"In green."

Then she rolled a ball to the halfway line, sat down on it, and began to peel.

For a quarter of an hour Matilde stayed on the left touchline, because that was where her legs took her without asking. The ball came to her twice. Both times she went down the line at the full-back, Rita, who had marked her in training for three years and knew everything she was going to do, and both times Rita knocked it out for a throw. Graça ate a tangerine. She ate a second. She said nothing at all, not even "good" to anybody, and the silence was strange, and after a while the girls stopped looking at the bench after every pass, because nothing was going to come from it.

Then the ball ran loose in the middle, in that space between the lines where nobody was supposed to be, and Matilde went in and got it, because it was there.

Lurdes Fragoso was the tallest girl in the squad and the slowest by a distance. She wore glasses at school, played without them, and had been put at centre-back years ago by some coach because it was the position where you ran least. She never seemed to be in a hurry, which at sixteen was rare enough that the others found it funny. Matilde played the ball back to her without thinking, turned, and went forward into the gap between two girls in yellow bibs. Lurdes did not look up. She did not need to. She struck it with the inside of her foot, a long way, nearly forty metres, and it came down out of the floodlights onto Matilde's instep as if somebody had lowered it there on a string.

Matilde took it past one girl, then put it through the legs of the second, and from the edge of the area hit the crossbar so hard that the frame rang.

The laugh came out of her before she could stop it. It was not a laugh at anything. It just came out.

On the halfway line Graça's eyebrows went up a little and came down again, and she finished the segment she was eating.

---

After forty minutes she blew the whistle and called them in, and turned over the attendance sheet on her clipboard and drew on the back of it with a pencil.

"Without the ball," she said, "this is where you are." Four crosses along the bottom. Three across the middle, with Lurdes in the centre of the three. Then two, closer together: Carolina, Matilde. Then one at the top: Sandra.

"I'm not at the back?" said Lurdes.

"You're not at the back."

"I can't run, mister."

"No," said Graça. "So you'll stand where you can see everything, and the others will run." She tapped the two crosses. "Carolina, Matilde. When we don't have the ball you come back to here and here. You close this, and this. When the ball goes wide, you two shift across together, the same distance apart, like you're holding a towel between you." She showed them with her hands, a towel held by two corners. "That's all. That's the work."

"And with the ball?" said Carolina Lobo.

Graça put the pencil behind her ear.

"With the ball I'll be on the bench eating."

Somebody laughed. Rita, upside down on the turf with her legs on the bag of balls, looked at the clipboard and said it was the shape of a Christmas tree.

"My husband says the same," said Graça. "My husband thinks offside was invented in 1990 to annoy him."

Matilde looked at the two crosses near the top for a long time. Then she looked at the left touchline, where she had stood for fifteen minutes and been knocked into touch twice by a girl who knew her.

"Mister. What if the space is wide?"

Graça looked at her. It was not a long look.

"Then it's wide," she said. "You're the one standing in it."

---

On Thursday her father came to training and stood at the fence.

He stood at it for the whole session, in his work jacket with the name of the logistics company over the pocket, holding his phone up and filming, and twice Matilde heard him say something, not loudly, the way you would talk to the television. He did not say anything to the bench. When it was over and the floodlights had gone off with a clunk, one bank after another, he was waiting by Graça's car.

Matilde was in the passenger seat of their own car, with the window down an inch.

"She's a winger," her father said. "Since she was nine. Everyone who has seen her says so. The man from Seixal—"

"Is coming on Saturday. Yes."

"He'll want to see her on the wing. That's where they pick them from. Wide players with pace. I've read the reports, I know what they look for."

He had, Matilde knew. He printed them out at work.

Graça took a tangerine out of her left pocket, peeled it in one spiral, divided it, and held out half. Her father looked at it the way he looked at a parking ticket. Then he took it.

"Senhor Baptista," she said. "I need a favour from you."

He had not expected that. Matilde could see he had not expected it from the way he stood.

"I've got nobody to film the matches," Graça said. "Nobody who knows what to film. You know what to film. On Saturday, go up to the top of the stand, the very top, where it's high enough to see the shape. Film the whole match from there and send it to me. I want to see what we look like without the ball. I can't see it from the bench. I'm too short."

Her father chewed. He swallowed.

"From the top," he said.

"From the top. You'll see better than me."

He said he would. He would have said it to anybody who asked him to do something properly. Graça put the peel in her right pocket and got into her car, and the car was very old and took three goes to start.

---

On Saturday the changing room smelled of liniment and of the bleach the cleaner put down on Fridays. The girls sat on the benches with their boots on and their faces closed, because the man from Seixal was outside in a grey fleece with a small notebook, standing by the corner flag where he could see both benches, and everybody had seen him and everybody was pretending not to have.

Graça came in late, with a carrier bag.

"Has anybody here," she said, "ever scored an own goal with a header from outside the area?"

Nobody had.

"Cup semi-final, 1989. Against Seixal, as it happens. A cross came over, I went up for it, best header I ever made in my life, the ball went past my own goalkeeper like a rocket. She never touched it. She didn't even move. Twenty metres. My mother still has the newspaper. It's framed in her corridor." She put the carrier bag down on the physio's table. "It's the only time I was ever in the newspaper."

"That's not true," said Carolina.

"Ask my mother. She shows it to the priest."

Somebody laughed, and then most of them did, and Lurdes, who laughed slowly the way she did everything, was still going when the others had stopped, which set them off again.

"Without the ball, where you were on Tuesday," said Graça. "With the ball, whatever you like." She took a tangerine out of the carrier bag and held it up. "I'll be busy."

---

For the first twenty minutes it did not work.

Juventude Operária played with two in the middle who pressed, and every time the ball reached Matilde in the space behind Sandra she had someone on her back before she could turn. She lost it three times. The third time she glanced across at the bench, out of old habit, waiting for the hand signal, the shout, the pointing. Graça was peeling. Her face was the same face she had in the corridors at school.

Matilde looked up, the other way, to the top of the stand. Her father was there, very small, against the sky over the river, holding his phone sideways in both hands. Behind the dugouts, on the wall, her grandfather sat in his jacket with his cap on.

At half-time it was nil-nil. Graça did not take the clipboard out. She went along the bench handing round tangerine segments, and when she got to Lurdes she said, "Can you see her?"

"Every time."

"Then see her earlier."

That was all she said to anyone.

Eight minutes into the second half the ball came back to Lurdes in the centre circle, and Matilde moved before it arrived, not after, two steps to her right into the shadow of their midfielder, and the midfielder turned her head the wrong way. Lurdes hit it low and hard, along the ground, between two blue shirts. Matilde let it run across her body and turned with it. In front of her the space opened, the whole middle of the pitch, and on her left their full-back had come inside to cover, and the touchline was empty all the way to the corner flag.

From the fence somebody shouted, "Abre! Abre!"

It was her father. He had come down from the top of the stand, all the way down the concrete steps, and he was at the fence with his phone in one hand and the other hand on the wire, and his mouth was still open to shout it again.

Matilde looked at him. Then, for no reason she could have given, she looked at the bench.

Graça was sitting with a tangerine half-peeled in her lap. She did not stand up. She did not point. She raised her eyebrows a centimetre, a question with no words in it, the look you give somebody who has stopped in the middle of a sentence.

Matilde turned back to the ball.

The full-back came at her. Sandra was making her run across the centre-half, and the centre-half was going with her, and there was nothing on, and then there was. Matilde ran straight at the full-back, dropped her shoulder as if she were going outside after all, and instead stepped over the ball and touched it backwards with her heel, blind, into the space she had just come out of. Carolina was arriving in it. Carolina hit it first time, and it went in off the inside of the post.

At the fence her father did not shout again. He had lifted the phone. On the wall her grandfather took his cap off, looked inside it, and put it back on.

Twice more in the second half Matilde went out to the touchline, when the space was there, and once she came back inside when it was not, and nobody on the bench or at the fence said a word about any of it. Juventude Operária scored from a corner and again from a penalty that nobody on the Ribeirinho side thought was a penalty, and Sandra equalised with four minutes left, from Lurdes, from forty metres, on a string.

At the final whistle the man from Seixal closed his notebook and walked round behind the goal to the bench, and stood next to Graça for a moment.

"Number eleven," he said. "Is she always in the middle?"

"No," said Graça, and offered him a segment.

He took it, and nodded, and went to his car.

---

The phone sat in the cradle on the dashboard, and it was dark on the screen. They went down the hill and along by the railway, and at the roundabout at Lavradio her father went round it once more than he needed to, and came off at the right exit, and did not say anything about it.

They had drawn two-two. Neither of them had mentioned it.

Matilde took the phone out of the cradle. He did not stop her. She found the match, one long file, and scrolled to near the end, where the picture went suddenly wrong: the whole pitch swinging, sky, concrete, sky, a pair of feet going down steps, and then the wire of the fence across the bottom of the frame and, through it, very small, a girl in green with her back to the camera running at a girl in blue.

She played it. On the little speaker there was a voice shouting, "Abre! Abre!", and then not shouting, and then the girl in green was not there any more and the ball was in the net and somebody near the phone, not the girl, made a sound like a laugh with the breath knocked out of it.

She played it again.

At the lights by the ferry terminal, where you could see the chimneys over the roofs, she turned the screen towards him and held it there.

He looked at it. The lights went green. Behind them somebody leaned on the horn, and went on leaning on it, and her father put out his hand for the phone.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum Nōnās Octōbrēs (4 October 2026), ā simulācrō Ancelottian Composure per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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Ancelottian Composure, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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