The Ball Is at the Bins

by High Press Philosophy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The haddock came up the belt from the filleting machines at a speed the supervisor could alter with a dial, and on the early shift in November she kept it at the speed where nobody could talk. Shona Buchan stood at station six on the trimming line in white wellingtons, a hairnet, a blue apron and two pairs of gloves, the cotton pair under the rubber, and took each fillet as it reached her, turned it skin-side down, ran the knife either side of the pin bones in a V and flicked the strip into the gutter. Station five was Kirsty Duthie. Station seven was Agnieszka, who had come from Gdańsk eight years ago and played centre-half. Between each woman and the next there was a metre and a half of steel, a little less than an arm's span, and the water ran under all of them to the same drain.

The rota went up on Thursday on the board outside the canteen. It decided who played on Sunday.

There were nineteen women on the books of Balgarth Seafoods Women's Football Club, and the plant had paid for the kit, which was navy with a white haddock on the chest that the other teams called the fish finger. Fourteen of them worked at the plant. The rest were girlfriends and sisters and one woman who taught primary three in Mintlaw and had answered a notice in the paper. In a week with a big landing at Peterhead the plant ran three shifts, and nobody's Sunday was safe; in a quiet week it ran two and they could field a team. When the boats were in, the women who were rostered went to the plant, and the rest stood about on the pitch at Fraserburgh or Turriff in the wind, nine or ten of them, and lost.

They had lost to Strathbogie 6–0 in September with ten. They had lost to Kemnay 4–1 with nine, and Kemnay's coach had come over at the end and said, kindly, that if they wanted to call the next one off nobody would think the worse of them.

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Dod Cowie drove a fork truck in the cold store. He was sixty-one, wore a woollen hat with a bobble that had been washed until it was the size of a walnut, and had coached his granddaughter's under-elevens in Peterhead for three seasons, at which point she went to Aberdeen to the academy and he was left with a bag of cones and nothing to do on a Saturday. He had never played. He said this himself, the first night, before anybody could ask, and then he said nothing more about it.

The first night was the second Tuesday of October, at a quarter past ten, in the yard behind the cold store. The council pitch with lights was forty-eight pounds an hour and Dod had looked at the club's account. The yard was free. It was tarmac, a hundred metres long between the loading bays and the fence, and fifty wide between the cold store wall and the row of big green bins. There was one floodlamp high on the cold store, which made the near half of the yard white and left the bins in orange from the street lamps on the road. The back shift came off at ten, so eight of them were there, in jackets, their hair still flat from the nets.

He had no ball.

"Where's the ball, Dod," Kirsty said.

"I'll tell you where it is," he said.

He had brought cones, about thirty of the small flat ones from the under-elevens, yellow and orange, and he set out a pitch in the yard with them, roughly, pacing it. Then he stood the eight of them in a shape across the tarmac: four across the back, three in the middle, one up. He walked along the back four with his hands in his jacket pockets and moved Agnieszka a stride to the left, and he moved Shona at left-back two strides in, off the line of cones, until she was nearer to Agnieszka than to the side of the pitch.

"I'm a full-back," she said. "I'm meant to be wide."

"When we have it," he said. "We don't have it."

He went to the far end, by the loading bays, and stood there, small, in the light.

"Ball's with their right-back," he said, and pointed.

Nobody moved.

"Well, where would you be," he said.

They looked at each other. Shona took a step forward. Then, because she had, Agnieszka did, and Kirsty in the middle went across to the left without being told, because that was where the ball was. Dod let them stand like that for a while and then walked down the yard and took Laura Cardno, who was playing up front, by the elbow, and moved her four metres sideways, until she was standing on a line between the imaginary right-back and the imaginary centre-half.

"Now he can't give it inside," Dod said. "So he gives it down the line, or he gives it back."

"Who's he?" said Laura.

"Their right-back."

"It's women, Dod."

"She, then. Ball's down the line."

They moved. He stopped them and moved three of them, a stride each, and moved the whole back four up five metres, and then he said the ball was back with the goalkeeper, and the ball was out to the left, and the ball was in the middle, and the ball was at the bins.

At a quarter to eleven Kirsty said she had to get the bus, and he said fine, and they stopped. Nobody had touched a football. Laura said on the way out of the gate that it was the stupidest thing she had done since she was fourteen, and the next Tuesday she was there again, and so were nine others.

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What he made them learn was distance. He had a long tape measure, a builder's one, thirty metres in a yellow case, and in the second week he made Agnieszka hold the end of it on the back line and walked it out to Laura at the front.

"Thirty-eight," he said. "Too long."

"Too long for what?"

"Too long." He wound it in. "If we're longer than twenty-five you're too far apart to help each other, and there's a space in the middle that's theirs." He put the tape in his pocket. "Laura comes back or the back four go up. One of the two. I don't mind which, but it's together."

So the back four went up. That was the thing that frightened them. In the yard it did not matter, but they all knew what happened when you played high against a team with a quick striker; Strathbogie had a girl who was at Aberdeen's under-eighteens and had scored three of the six. Dod said that the line was not for standing behind; it was for stepping. When the ball was played backwards they went up together; when a player on the ball had her head up and time, they dropped together; and whoever was nearest the ball told them which. Mostly that was Agnieszka, who had a voice that went right across the yard and into the street, and who, after the third Tuesday, said only one word each time, up or down, in English, because two languages had been too slow.

When the ball was played back to the goalkeeper — when Dod said it was — they went. That was the other thing. All of them, not one. Laura onto the keeper, Kirsty onto the centre-half that the keeper would look for, the other two midfielders across to the near full-back, and the back four up to halfway, so that the yard behind them, the whole lit half by the loading bays, was empty.

"What if she just kicks it over us?" said the teacher from Mintlaw, whose name was Fiona and who played right-back.

"Then it's in the air a long time," said Dod, "and Agnieszka has a head."

At eleven, on the fourth Tuesday, when they were blowing and Jen had her hands on her knees by the bins, he called the ball back to the keeper again, and they went, slower, and he stopped them halfway.

"No," he said. "Not like that. If you've nothing left, you still go. You go like you mean it, and you don't get there." He walked out among them and showed them, three quick steps at the imaginary keeper with his arms out, the bobble on his hat jumping, and then a stop, and a walk back to his place, watching. "She sees you coming, she gives it short to the full-back. Short's fine. Short's no harm. And you've had your breath, and you're back where you were."

Jen tried it. Then the rest. It looked, in the orange light, like a row of women about to run for a bus and changing their minds.

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The rota was still the rota. In the last week of October there was a landing on the Monday and half the team went onto nights, and on the Tuesday there were five of them in the yard.

Dod had a bag over his shoulder, and when he set the pitch out he took six traffic cones out of it: the big red and white ones, a foot and a half high, from the stack by the weighbridge. He had written on each one with white marker on a strip of tape. DUTHIE. CARDNO. KOWALSKA, which was Agnieszka. He set them out in the shape where those women would have been and told the five who were there to play round them.

"I'm not having it," said Kirsty, the next week, when she was back and Shona was on nights. "A cone at left-back. With her name on."

"The cone's in the right place," Dod said. "More than she was in September."

That was true, and Shona heard about it, and laughed, and was annoyed for a day. After that, when she was on nights, she stood at the window of the cold store on her break at half ten, with her tea, and looked down at the yard. She could see the cone with BUCHAN on it under the lamp. When Dod called the ball out to the left, the cone did not move, and Fiona at right-back and Agnieszka and the girl playing beside Agnieszka all moved a stride towards it, so that the gap where Shona would have stepped in was shared out among them. Then the ball went back to the right and they all moved back, and the cone stood where it had been.

She watched them do it for ten minutes and then her break was over.

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The League Cup draw put them away to Strathbogie in the second round on the last Sunday of November. The ground was a council pitch at Huntly with a rail round it and a hut for changing, grass, and in the week before it rained every day.

On the Friday the Ocean Venture and another boat landed at Peterhead late, and the plant called in a Sunday morning shift. Kirsty was on it. So was a midfielder called Rachel Ritchie. Shona was not, and nor was Agnieszka, and the teacher was never on anything. At nine on Sunday morning Dod counted them in the car park at the plant: ten. Laura's boyfriend drove four in his van and Dod drove the rest in his car, which smelled of the cold store, and of diesel.

There was no cone for Kirsty on the grass at Huntly. Dod stood the ten of them in the hut in their navy shirts and drew the shape on the back of a team sheet with a biro: four, four, two. Then he crossed out one of the four in the middle and drew an arrow from each of the two that were left towards the space.

"Same as the yard," he said. "She's not there. Everybody's a step nearer where she would be."

"Which step," said Rachel's replacement, a girl called Megan who was seventeen and had come to two Tuesdays.

"Whichever one's nearest the ball," said Agnieszka.

The Strathbogie girl from the Aberdeen under-eighteens was playing. She was tall and had her hair in a high ponytail and she stood on the halfway line before kick-off, swinging her legs.

In the first ten minutes Strathbogie had the ball almost all the time, and the Seafoods did not chase it. They stood. Shona, at left-back, found herself two strides in from where she would have stood in September, with a whole channel of wet grass on her left with nobody in it, and every nerve of her wanting to go and stand in it, and Agnieszka beside her going down, down, and then up. Strathbogie's centre-half had the ball and looked for her midfield and Laura was standing on the line between them. The centre-half looked down the line instead, where the space was, and played it, and as it went Shona went, and Megan went, and Fiona came across from the other side of the pitch to the middle, and the Strathbogie winger took it on the touchline with three navy shirts in front of her and nowhere to go but backwards.

She went backwards.

The ball came back to the centre-half, and from the centre-half to the keeper.

"Go," said Agnieszka, very loudly.

They went. Laura onto the keeper; Megan onto the centre-half on the left, the other midfielder, Jen, on the right; and the back four ran up the wet pitch to halfway with Shona on the end of the line, level, watching Agnieszka out of the corner of her eye. The Strathbogie keeper took a touch and looked up and there was nobody to give it to who did not have a navy shirt a yard behind her, and she kicked it long and high, as Fiona had said she would.

It was in the air for a long time. Agnieszka headed it back the way it had come.

They did not score from that, nor from the seven or eight other times it happened in the first half. Twice, near the end of it, Laura went at the keeper for three strides with her arms out and stopped, and the keeper gave it short, and Laura walked back to her place with her hands on her hips. Strathbogie did not score either. The girl with the ponytail ran in behind them twice, and twice she was offside by a yard because Agnieszka had gone up a quarter of a second before the pass, and the linesman, who was Strathbogie's physio's husband, put his flag up both times with a look of pain. The third time she was not offside, and Shona turned and ran with her towards their own goal on the slippery grass, a stride behind and then two, and the girl was round the keeper, and the ball hit the base of the post and came back across the six-yard box and Fiona put her laces through it and it went out over the rail and into the car park. Somebody went to get it. Dod, on the touchline in his hat, did not move.

At half-time it was nothing each. They stood in a ring by the hut with oranges a woman from Strathbogie had brought round on a plate. Nobody said much. Shona's legs were shaking, and she found that she was watching the empty pitch, the white lines on it, and placing the ten of them on it in her head, and moving them.

They lost in the end. With twelve minutes left Megan went down with cramp in both calves and could not get up, and there were nine, and the space where two women would have been was too much to share out, and Strathbogie found it twice. 2–0. In the hut afterwards their coach came in, the same one who had won 6–0 in September, a man in a club fleece, and stood in the doorway.

"Who's been doing your shape?" he said.

Several of them looked at Dod. He was folding the team sheet into four and putting it in his inside pocket.

"Just Tuesdays," said Laura.

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On the Monday Shona was back on the early shift. The belt started at six. In the first hour there was a crate of whiting among the haddock, which was harder to cut, and the supervisor took the dial down a notch and then put it back up.

At about twenty past seven Kirsty, at station five, laid her knife on the steel and went to the toilet. The fillets kept coming down the belt to the empty place where she had stood, one, then another, and Shona did not look at them or think about them; she put her left foot half a stride towards station five and took the next fillet from the end of her own tray and the next from the end of Kirsty's, and turned them both skin-side down, and went on cutting. Along the line, Agnieszka at seven had moved half a stride towards Shona, and the woman at eight half a stride towards Agnieszka, so that the place at the end, near the drain, where there was nobody, was a metre wider than it had been. The water went on running under all of them.

Kirsty came back, and pulled her gloves on, and they all went back to their places.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum Nōnās Octōbrēs (4 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Philosophiae Pressūrae Altae per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

High Press Philosophy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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