The Jotter

by Ancelottian Composure, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The club paid eighteen pounds an hour, in cash, on Fridays, and gave Fiona Buchan a lanyard with INTERPRETER printed on it in capitals and her name written underneath in biro by the chairman's wife, who had spelt it with two n's. Fiona wore it the first Tuesday over her school fleece, on the edge of the artificial pitch behind the leisure centre, while the rain came in flat off the harbour and went through the floodlights like something being poured.

She taught Spanish at Inverlethy Academy, S1 to S6, two Higher candidates this year, both girls, both hoping for Aberdeen. Apart from at a conference in Stirling she had not spoken Spanish to anybody over sixteen since a summer in Salamanca in 2009.

Gordon Reid, the chairman, had explained the job to her in his office at the builders' merchant he owned on the industrial estate, under a calendar of tractors. The new manager had no English to speak of. Reid and the two other directors had met him at a coaching course in Oviedo the summer before, and there had been a dinner, and here he was. He had managed in the Spanish third division for nineteen years and been sacked from five clubs. Reid said this as though it were a qualification. "Five times sacked and never once relegated," he said. "Think about that." What Reid wanted was for the man's instructions to reach the players exactly as he gave them. "Word for word. The lads are used to being told."

Ignacio Llamedo was fifty-eight, short and broad, in a club rain jacket that came down over his knuckles. He shook her hand with both of his and told her, in Spanish, that she had a beautiful accent, from Castile, and that he was sorry, because he was from Gijón and would ruin it for her within a week.

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They met the squad in the home dressing room before the session. Twenty men on the benches, most of them straight from work; two still had their hi-vis vests on under their jackets. Fiona knew four of them by sight, from the town, and one of them properly. Ross Cowie, the left winger, had been in her S3 class for a year before he dropped Spanish, and he had sat at the back then too. He was twenty-two now and worked in the warehouse at the fish processor on the north quay. Alan Paterson, the last manager, had been sacked the Saturday before the October break with the team eighth of ten. Ross had started three games for him all season. Everybody in Inverlethy knew why: he would not track back.

Fiona had prepared. She had sat up on the Sunday night with two Spanish coaching websites and a notebook and found pressing, transition, compact, the half-space, which was el medio espacio or el carril interior depending on whom you read. Llamedo used none of them. He stood in the middle of the floor with his hands in his jacket pockets and spoke for less than a minute: his name; that he was happy to be here; that he did not know them yet. Then he turned to her.

"Pregúntales qué es lo que más les gusta hacer con el balón."

"He'd like to know," Fiona said, "what you most enjoy doing with the ball."

Nobody said anything. A phone buzzed in a kit bag. Grant Duthie, the captain, who was thirty-one and a joiner and had cling film wrapped round one forearm over a new tattoo, looked along the bench at the others and then up at Fiona.

"Winning it back," he said. "Paterson had us win it back inside six seconds."

She told Llamedo. He shook his head, smiling, and said something so fast that she had to ask him to say it again.

"No, no. Con el balón. Cuando ya lo tenéis."

"With it," she said. "When you've already got it."

The silence came back and stayed longer. At the back, Ross had his hood up and was looking at his boots. Fiona had once timed a silence in a classroom, and at forty seconds she had broken it herself. She felt the same thing begin now, the pressure in her own chest to say something, anything, for instance, does anyone like to dribble? Llamedo did not seem to feel it at all. He waited until it was plain that no one was going to answer. Then he nodded, as though someone had, and said, "Bueno. Vamos fuera."

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In the car park afterwards he knocked on her window while she was waiting for the windscreen to clear. He had a jotter, a red one from the Co-op with a lined cover and a space for NAME and SUBJECT, and he asked if she would write some things in it for him. In English. Questions.

He sat in her passenger seat with the jotter on his knee and the interior light on and his seat belt, for some reason, done up, and dictated. She wrote the Spanish down the left-hand side of the page and the English down the right.

¿Es demasiado? — Is it too much?

¿Qué ves? — What do you see?

¿Dónde quieres el balón? — Where do you want the ball?

¿Estás cansado? — Are you tired?

Then he asked for ¿Te lo pasas bien?, and she stopped. She wrote Are you having fun? and crossed it out, because no one in Inverlethy over the age of nine said that, and wrote Are you enjoying it?, and told him that there was another way, Are you having a laugh?, but that it meant something else, more or less the opposite, and that he must on no account use it. He wanted to know exactly how it meant the opposite, and she explained, and he laughed and laughed with his head against the window.

She offered him the others. She had them ready on the back page of her own notebook: Stay narrow. Track your runner. Don't dive in. Squeeze up. He read them carefully, moving his lips, and gave the notebook back.

"Esto lo hago con las manos," he said. That he could do with his hands.

Then he took her pen, and beside each line of English he wrote how it sounded, in Spanish spelling. Is it tu mach. Guat du iu si. Güer du iu guont de bol. Ar iu taiard. He read them aloud one after another, slowly, with great care, and the windscreen fogged up again.

"Muy mal," he said. "¿Verdad?"

"Very bad," she said.

He put the jotter in the inside pocket of the jacket, where it fitted exactly, and undid his seat belt.

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Training was Tuesday and Thursday, seven till nine. For the first hour Llamedo worked on what the team did without the ball, and he did it with his hands, as he had said. He took Duthie by the sleeve and walked him two yards left and held him there. He took the right-back by both shoulders and turned him, the way you would turn a wardrobe to get it through a door. He stood between the two central midfielders with an arm out to each, pushed them closer together, stepped back, looked, pushed them a little closer still. When somebody went to the wrong place he went and fetched him and brought him back. Fiona translated perhaps a dozen words a night, and most of them were now, not yet, closer and there.

For the second hour, when they had the ball, he said nothing at all. Eight against eight across the width of the pitch, two small goals, and Llamedo on the halfway line with his hands in his pockets. When the ball went out he threw another one in. When it was raining hard he threw it in sooner.

On the second Thursday, standing beside him with the water running off the end of her nose, she asked him in Spanish whether there was really nothing he wanted her to tell them.

He thought about it. "Sí," he said. "Dile a Ross que hoy no vuelva."

Tell Ross not to come back today. She asked: back where? Back to defend, he said, when we lose it. Today, he stays up there.

She called Ross over. He came slowly, the way he used to come up to her desk for a test paper, and stood with his hands on his hips while she told him.

"Not track back."

"Not today."

"Paterson dropped me for that."

"I know," she said. Everybody knew.

Ross looked past her at Llamedo. Llamedo had already gone; he was walking across to Duthie, and he took Duthie by the sleeve and led him over to the left, into the space behind where Ross would have been, and stood him there, and patted him twice on the chest. Duthie looked at the space, then at Ross, and shrugged. He was a joiner; he knew what a gap was for.

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In the third week Llamedo began to use the jotter.

He did it at the water break. He went up to Kyle Mearns, the smaller of the two central midfielders, a primary teacher at the school on Market Brae, and said, carefully, "Is it tu mach?"

Mearns did not understand. Llamedo said it again, slower, worse.

"He's asking is it too much, Kyle," Duthie said.

"What, the running?"

Llamedo looked at Fiona. Before she could open her mouth Duthie said, "Aye, the running. Is the running too much for you," and Mearns said no, the running was fine, it was the cold, his hands were done in, and Llamedo understood cold, because he had been cold for three weeks, and blew on his own hands and nodded, and the next Tuesday there was a box of gloves from Reid's builders' merchant on the bench, the thin grey ones with rubber palms that the yard men wore.

After that Fiona noticed it happening at every break. Llamedo would ask one of his questions in his terrible English, and somebody other than her would answer it. Somebody would explain to somebody else what he meant, then explain the answer back to him, with gestures. Half the time they got it wrong, and he would hold up a finger and try again, and they would all start over, and by the time anybody had understood anybody the break had gone on four minutes too long and the whole squad was standing round him in the rain, arguing about what he had said.

On the third Thursday he went up to Ross.

"Güer du iu guont de bol?"

Fiona saw Ross take a second to put it together. Then he laughed, out loud, the first time she had heard him laugh since he was fourteen.

"Feet," he said. "Feet, Mister."

Llamedo looked at Fiona.

"Al pie," she said.

"Feet," Llamedo said, and pointed at Ross's boots.

"Aye. No in the channel. I'm no quick enough for the channel, everyone thinks I am, I'm not. Feet. Then I'll go myself."

Fiona started to put this into Spanish. Llamedo had already turned round to Mearns. He pointed at Ross's feet, and then at Mearns's feet, and drew a line in the air between them with one finger, low, a pass along the ground. Mearns nodded. In the eight-against-eight, for the rest of the night, every ball to Ross went to his feet, and Ross took it and turned and went at whoever was in front of him, and three times out of five he got past them, and twice he got past them and lost the ball afterwards, and nobody said a word to him about it, least of all Llamedo, who threw in another ball.

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Reid kept Fiona away from match days for the first three weeks; for those Llamedo had a waiter from a tapas bar in Aberdeen who could get Saturday afternoons off. In the fourth week the waiter could not come, and Glenmuir Athletic were coming to Harbour Park on the Saturday at three, and Reid wanted Fiona in the technical area in a club coat in case of what he called complications. There were six hundred and forty people at Harbour Park, which was eighty more than usual, and a wind straight up the pitch from the sea end that took every goal kick and put it back in the penalty box.

Llamedo stood at the front of the technical area for forty-five minutes with his hands in his coat pockets. He did not shout. Twice he took a hand out to point to a space and then put it back. Fiona had nothing to translate. She stood a yard behind him and watched Ross get the ball to his feet eleven times in the first half — she counted — and lose it six, and watched Duthie walk across behind him into the gap each time and wait there. Glenmuir scored after half an hour, a header from a corner. The fourth official asked Fiona whether the manager wanted to make a change, slowly and loudly, as though she were the one who did not speak English.

At half-time she followed him into the dressing room ready for it at last: the speech, the tactics, the words she had looked up on the Sunday night. He stood in the middle of the floor. The players sat on the benches with their socks rolled down, breathing. He let them breathe for a while. Then he said:

"Guat du iu si?"

Duthie answered first. Their number six was dropping in between the centre-backs when Glenmuir had the ball, he said, and nobody was going with him, so he was turning and playing it long with all the time in the world. Mearns said he would go with him. The other midfielder said that if Kyle went then the space behind Kyle was open. Duthie said that he'd step into it, and the left-back said then who's on their nine. They argued about it for three minutes, standing up by the end, Duthie moving tea cups around the physio's table to show where everyone was. Llamedo watched. Fiona put the gist of it into Spanish in a low voice at his elbow, and he listened to her without taking his eyes off the cups. At the end he went to the table and moved one of them — the one that was the left-back — a foot to the right, and looked at Duthie, and Duthie looked at it and said, "Aye. Aye, that's better."

Then he said, "Ross."

Ross looked up.

Llamedo had not brought the jotter. Fiona saw him go looking for the words and find only one of them.

"Fun?"

"Aye," Ross said.

"Bueno."

That was the team talk.

They drew one-all. Ross made the goal in the seventieth minute: a ball into his feet from Mearns, a turn, a run inside on to his right foot past two men, and a shot that the Glenmuir keeper could only push out to the edge of the six-yard box, where Mearns, who had followed the run all the way from the halfway line, put it in. At the whistle Llamedo shook hands with the Glenmuir manager, the referee, both linesmen, the fourth official and the two ball boys, in that order. Then he went to find his players.

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In the sixth week Reid asked Fiona to look in at the builders' merchant on her way home from school. He gave her the envelope in his office under the tractors. There were two Fridays' money in it rather than one.

"He's picking it up," Reid said. "The lads understand him fine now. Better than they understood Alan, if I'm honest, and Alan was from Peterhead." He seemed to feel this needed something added. "We can't justify it. You understand. It's not a reflection."

She said she understood. She asked if she could come to the Thursday session anyway, to say cheerio, and Reid said of course, she was welcome any time, she was practically staff.

On the Thursday it was too wet even for the artificial pitch, and the team meeting was held in the Portakabin behind the main stand, where the club kept the kit and the tea urn and the board with the magnetic counters. Fiona stood at the back by the door. The players sat on plastic chairs. Llamedo stood at the board in his jacket, with the jotter open on the ledge under it, and spoke English.

"Saturday," he said. "Kirkhill. They play the long. Every time, the long." He made the shape of a long ball with his whole arm, from one end of the board to the other, and the counters rattled. "Grant. You are — you win the head."

There was a pause, and then most of the room laughed. Duthie put his hand up as if he were at school.

"Headers, Mister. You win the headers."

"Headers."

"Plural. Because there's a lot of them."

"Headers," Llamedo said again, and wrote it in the jotter, with the pen he kept on a string through the spiral. Fiona was close enough to see the page as he turned it to find a space. It was not her page any more, nor her handwriting. Half the jotter was full now, in five or six different hands: some English with the Spanish spelling beside it, heders, squiz up, gaun yersel; a drawing of a pitch with arrows; a phone number. And near the bottom of the page, in blue biro, in a slanted hand she had marked for a whole year and would have known anywhere, one line the other way round.

pass it to my feet = pasamelo al pie

There was no accent on the first a. It should have been pásamelo. She looked at it for a moment longer than she meant to.

Llamedo turned back to the board, and the players were already arguing about Kirkhill's centre-forward, how tall he was, whether the long ball came from the keeper or the centre-backs, and Mearns was up at the board moving counters, and nobody was looking at the door.

Fiona took the lanyard off over her head and hung it on the hook by the door, between two club jackets, and went out to her car.

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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