Word for Word

by Bielsian Intensity, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The dossier ran to two hundred and twelve pages, and he had carried it up from the bus station in a Lidl bag, which he set down on the boardroom table between the plate of shortbread and the minute book as if it were the thing they had all come to discuss. It was. Douglas Ritchie, who owned two of the four chip shops in Portcairn and sixty-one per cent of Portcairn Victoria Football Club, looked at the bag and then at Uxía.

"Ask him does he want a tea first."

Uxía asked him. Hernán Ossandón said that he would like a tea very much, with nothing in it, and that if the gentlemen permitted he would begin while it was being made, because his bus back to Aberdeen was at a quarter past six and there was a great deal he was obliged to say.

Isla Forbes, the club secretary, had booked Uxía on the Wednesday. Isla's niece came to her Spanish class at the community centre on Monday nights. The club was paying forty pounds an hour, in advance, out of the petty cash, and Isla had asked for a receipt, which no one at the club had done before. Uxía's ordinary work was on the telephone at Cowie & Sons, fish merchants, on the harbour road, between old Sandy Cowie and the buyers in Vigo who took his monkfish and his hake, and what she was paid for, though nobody had ever put it in writing, was the three seconds after one man said something to another. In three seconds she could turn tell him if he wants it cheaper he can come and catch it himself into Mr Cowie feels the price reflects the quality, and the lorry would still leave on Thursday. She had done it for eleven years. On the harbour road they said she was good for the peace.

Ossandón had watched all thirty-four of Victoria's league games from last season and the nine played so far in this one, and the four cup ties, and the friendly against the Fraserburgh under-twenties, which nobody in the room remembered. He went through the squad player by player, and Uxía put it into English a paragraph at a time. The goalkeeper came off his line late for crosses from the left, but only from the left and only in second halves, and this was a matter of the low sun over the harbour end in autumn, and could be solved with a cap. The right-back passed inside nineteen times in every twenty, and the opposition knew it, because Ossandón had watched them know it. The two centre-backs were good when they were close to each other and poor when they were not, which was true of most marriages and could be trained.

"Duthie," he said, and opened the bag at a page with a yellow tab on it. "This one I will need. Is he for sale?"

Uxía put it into English. Ritchie laughed and laid both his hands flat on the table.

"Tell him Callum's not for sale. Not this season. He has my word on it."

She put that into Spanish exactly, because there was nothing in it that needed her, and wrote it in her notebook as she wrote all prices and promises. It was a habit from the harbour road, where no two men ever remembered a price the same way. C.D. not for sale. Not this season. My word.

Ossandón thanked the president. He said that the word of the president would be the floor on which he built everything, and that he would sign on Monday.

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On the Tuesday it rained sideways off the North Sea, and the floodlights at Braeside Park made the rain visible as it crossed them, a grey curtain going left to right that never finished going. Victoria trained on Tuesdays and Thursdays from seven, because the players were joiners and electricians and a postman and two lads still at the academy in Banff, and that was when they could come.

Before the session Ossandón had asked for the dressing room, and he spoke for forty minutes with his back to the door. He did not raise his voice. He addressed each man by his surname, with señor in front of it, and Uxía, after the first two, stopped translating the señor, and he stopped her with one finger and asked her to put it back. Mister Mair. Mister Gauld. The postman, Gauld, sat up when he heard it, as if somebody had read his name off a list he had not known he was on.

He told Mair, the captain, that in the forty-seventh minute at Rothie in March he had stopped running for four seconds and pointed, and that a captain who points instead of running teaches ten men to point. He told Gauld that he was the best header of a ball in the squad and that nobody had ever played a ball to his head in the opposition half, not once in forty-three matches. He told the goalkeeper about the cap.

Then he turned to Callum Duthie, who was seventeen and had scored four goals in nine games and sat at the end of the bench with his boots already on, picking at the tape round his socks.

"I am going to ask the others to work for you," Ossandón said, and Uxía said it after him. "I am going to ask you to work for them. Both things. A team of machines does not interest me: they are lost the moment they lose the script. A team that waits for one boy to be inspired does not interest me either, because there are days when God does not switch the boy on, and on those days the team has nothing. I want something between them. But I want to say this to you in front of everyone. I admire the dribble. When a player goes past two men, one after the other, it changes the match. Lo despeja, le da aire, lo hace más sano."

"It clears the match," said Uxía. "It lets it breathe."

Ossandón looked at her. He had some English. He had told Isla on the Friday that he had read a great deal of it and spoken almost none.

"Y más sano," he said.

"It makes it healthier," said Uxía.

He nodded and went on. Callum had stopped picking at the tape.

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The session was two hours. Uxía stood on the touchline in her husband's fishing jacket with the hood up and translated what she could hear over the wind, which was not all of it. Ossandón had brought cones in four colours and laid them out himself in the rain before anyone arrived, and the drills had names that were numbers. In drill six every outfield player had a man, and followed him, and one centre-back had nobody and was there to cover the spaces the others left behind them. Uxía did not know football. She knew that after twenty minutes of drill six the men had stopped laughing at it.

At half past eight Ossandón set up drill nine, which was a tackling drill, two against two in a box of cones, and called Callum into it, and Callum did not move.

"I've to stay out the tackles, boss."

Ossandón looked at Uxía. She told him.

"Why?" he asked, and she asked Callum why.

The boy looked at the ground and then at the floodlights, as if somebody up there might answer for him. "Mr Ritchie says. Till Friday. I'm away down the road Friday for my medical." He said the name of the club down the road, a Premiership club two hours south, and then he said, quickly, to Uxía, "Is he no meant to know? Mr Ritchie said he'd tell him."

Uxía stood with the rain running off the peak of the hood and the three seconds open in front of her. She knew what she could do with them. The boy has a small knock. He has been told to rest it until Friday. It was even true, in a way: the boy had been told to rest. It would get the session finished. The lorry would still leave on Thursday.

"He says he is going on Friday to have a medical at another club," she said in Spanish. "He says the president told him to stay out of the tackles. He asks whether you were not supposed to know already. The president said he would tell you."

Ossandón looked at Callum for some time. Then he said, in English, "Thank you, Mister Duthie," and moved Gauld into the box in his place, and blew the whistle for drill nine, and ran the rest of the session exactly as it was written, to the minute, until ten past nine.

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On the Wednesday morning, in the boardroom, there was no shortbread.

Ritchie had the club's accounts open in front of him, the real ones, which ran to four pages and which Uxía suspected nobody outside the room had ever seen. He was not a bad man, and he was not lying about the accounts. He went through them with his finger. The wage bill was eleven hundred pounds a week. The grandstand roof had failed its inspection in August. The bid for Callum was sixty thousand pounds, with another twenty if he played ten first-team games, and a sell-on clause, and it would see the club through to the summer and pay for the roof.

"And it's all above board," he said. "It doesnae go through till January. The league's been told. The boy's family are delighted. His dad came in and shook my hand. Tell him all that."

Uxía told him all that.

"I asked on Friday," said Ossandón, "whether he was for sale."

"And I told him we'd no plans to sell. Which on Friday we'd not. Not firm ones. It was an offer on the table. You don't turn down a man's job interview because there's an offer on a table." Ritchie turned to her. "Tell him that's what I said. No plans."

Ossandón did not wait for it to be translated. He had heard the words no plans, and he knew them, and he turned in his chair to Uxía, and spoke to her and not to the president, using usted, as he had used it with her since the Friday.

"Señora Lema. You were here. What did he say? Exactly."

Uxía's notebook was in her bag. She did not need it. She took it out anyway and opened it on the table, because a thing read from a page is a different thing from a thing remembered, and on the harbour road everyone knew it, and found the page with the shortbread crumb still in the fold.

Ritchie was looking at her. He had been kind to her on the Friday. He had asked after her husband's boat.

She read it in Spanish first, as it was written, because it was the Spanish that had been asked for. No está en venta. No esta temporada. Tiene mi palabra.

Ossandón said, "And now in English, please. For the president. In his own language, so that he hears what he said."

"Callum's not for sale," Uxía read. "Not this season. He has my word on it."

Nobody said anything. Outside, a lorry went down the harbour road in low gear, and the window in its old frame took the vibration and gave it back.

Ritchie closed the accounts. "So he's away, then," he said, to the table.

"Tell the president," said Ossandón, "that I am not angry with him. He has a roof that leaks and a club that needs money, and the sale is legal, and perhaps it is even good for the boy. The law allows it. But the law is one question and what is right is another question, and I took this job because of one sentence, and the sentence is not true. If I cannot work correctly here it is better that I do not work here. I do not want to be paid for Monday or Tuesday. I will pay my own hotel."

Uxía translated it. She did not shorten it. When she came to the sentence is not true she heard her own voice in the room saying it in English to a man who had asked after her husband's boat, and she let it stand, and went on to the hotel.

"There is one other thing," said Ossandón. "On Tuesday I told the players that on Thursday I would take the session. That was my promise, not his. I would like to keep it. Without payment, if he permits. Then I will take the last bus."

Ritchie looked at him for a long moment, and then, for the first time in all their dealings, he spoke to Ossandón directly and not to her.

"Aye," he said. "Fine. Take it."

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On Thursday it did not rain. The wind had gone round to the west and there was a moon over the stand, and the floodlights were hardly needed, and the men came early, all of them, which Isla said afterwards had not happened in the nine years she had been secretary.

Ossandón ran the session as he had written it on the Monday night, drill by drill, with the cones in their four colours. He did not make a speech. At the start he told them, through Uxía, that he would not be their coach after tonight and that the reason was between him and the president, and that he had prepared this session for them and it would be a pity to waste it. Then he blew the whistle. Mair ran. Somebody played a ball to Gauld's head in the opposition half, and Gauld scored with it, and stood in the goalmouth looking at the net as if it had been delivered to the wrong address.

Callum was still not allowed to tackle. For the last half-hour, while the others played eight against eight, Ossandón took him to the far end of the pitch, beyond the penalty box, where a single lamp lit a square of grass, and set out six cones, and stood in front of the boy with his hands behind his back, a man of fifty-eight in a tracksuit with Victoria sewn on it that he had paid for himself.

"Go past me," he said in English.

Callum went past him. Ossandón did not try very hard to stop him. He turned, and said something in Spanish, and Uxía, who had followed them up with her hood down, told Callum: "Again. The other side."

The boy went past him on the other side. Then twice in a row, the man and the cone, the man and the cone, with the ball on a string. Ossandón watched the boy's shoulders and said nothing for a long time, and the boy did it again, and again, and the sound of the eight against eight came to them up the pitch, men shouting each other's names.

At five to nine Ossandón took a sheaf of pages from the inside of his jacket, folded lengthways. It was the section of the dossier with the yellow tab, twenty-two pages, and Uxía could see that it was in Spanish, handwritten in places, with diagrams.

"These are yours," he said, and she said it after him. "Every time you went past a man this season and last season, and every time you did not, and why. It is in Spanish. Señora Lema has a class on Monday nights."

Callum took the pages and held them against his chest so the wind would not have them.

"Where you are going," said Ossandón, "they will try to make you into a machine, or they will leave you alone and wait for God. Don't let them do either. Two dribbles, one after the other. That is what you are for. It clears the match."

He looked at Uxía, and waited.

"It clears the match," she said to the boy, "and it lets it breathe, and it makes it healthier."

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On the Friday morning old Sandy Cowie stood behind her chair in the office on the harbour road with his coffee, while she had Vigo on the line about forty boxes of monkfish, and the man in Vigo said what the man in Vigo always said about the price.

"Tell him," said Sandy Cowie, "if he wants it cheaper he can come over and catch it himself."

Uxía looked out at the harbour, where the Bonnie Lass was coming in past the breakwater with the gulls over her. Then she told him.

There was a silence on the line from Vigo. Then she heard a chair scrape on a tiled floor a thousand miles away, the sound of a man pulling himself closer to his desk.

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THE END

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

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Bielsian Intensity Simulacrum, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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