Cunningham

It is Alba who suggests football. Her father has offered her two tickets for the game at the weekend. Los Blancos. She asks Rob if he wants to go with her. Give them a chance to get to know each other socially like he requested. It’s perfect, thinks Rob, wonders why he didn’t suggest it, but then realises the idea had to come from her, from Alba. He doesn’t want it to feel forced when they meet.  

*

That happens by the blue parasols outside the Birra Club opposite the official stadium shop two hours before kick-off, a November night, Sunday 7pm, jacket required but only because of the temperature. She is wearing one, a jacket, and a scarf tied loosely around her neck, and they stand on the street drinking beer. The scarf is mainly white but with REAL MADRID spelled out in blue, although it’s not possible to see all of the letters, and at the end, the club crest, colourful with its blue and gold just above the tassels that hang limply down towards her jeans, light denim, faded and frayed, distressed as they say, tight but not as tight as some, finishing an inch, no, a centimetre, and therefore showing a slither of brown skin, caramel skin, good enough to eat skin, above white Nike tennis shoes that look bright and spotless, so clean they might be brand new. Rob thinks she is probably a young woman who keeps things looking new, unlike those men, himself, for instance, who scuff shoes like those very quickly and, in fact, seem to prefer them like that, scuffed, worn, but not Alba, she is bright and shiny. Her hair, slicked back tonight, looks lighter, more blonde than it did on screen when they met online, so now he wonders if it is dyed or highlighted but he can’t tell. He thinks a woman would be able to tell. But he can tell she’s wary of him because she hasn’t smiled yet—and it’s her smile he remembers most after their call—while her eyes, dark blobs that glisten under the street lighting don’t hold his gaze for long, often glancing away to check the growing crowd outside the stadium, bustling, milling around the bars, and in front of the food stalls. So they talk of this and that, getting to know you things, how often she comes to the games, if she normally comes with her father, sometimes, depends, but she gives nothing else away, she’s been coming since she was five, she has white blood she says, pride in her voice, and smiles for the first time since they met, and he thinks, that’s good, he has many questions he wants to ask but not here, not on their first meeting, take it easy, nothing personal, gain her confidence, he doesn’t mention her novel, the novel he has been assigned to translate, a task for which, according to her, he is too old, when he is sixty-one and she is twenty-six. And he thinks she may be right. Their seats are in the top tier, fourth tier, and there are heaters in the roof right above them, so after the climb up the stairs—he refused the lift—he is too hot and has to remove his jacket, and then his jumper, and sits there watching a football match at 9pm on a November night in just a t-shirt, which makes him think of England, as Alba loosens her scarf and unzips her jacket. She doesn’t take it off, but he sees she is wearing a club shirt underneath.            

*

After the game, Alba suggests a drink in a bar she knows at the other end of the stadium. It is busy inside and she slips her jacket off while searching for a spare table. That’s when he sees the name printed across the back of her shirt. In keeping with its retro style, it’s not the name of one of the current players, it does not say RONALDO, or RAMOS, or any of the others they have just watched ease to victory on the pitch, but spells out instead, the name CUNNINGHAM in bright blue letters.

‘Laurie Cunningham,’ he says, half question, half statement. 

She looks back over her shoulder.

‘Yes, Cunningham.’ 

He notices how she emphasises the ‘h’ in ‘ham’ like an American might. ‘Played for Los Blancos. You know him?’  

‘I do. But how do you know of him?’

‘From my father. He was a great favourite of my father.’

‘Real signed him from my team,’ Rob says.

‘You mean West Bromwich Albion?’

He nods his head, surprised she pronounces it correctly. 

‘You saw him play?’  

‘Many times,’ he says. ‘He played on a magic carpet.’

She laughs. 

‘I like that,’ she says. ‘I have seen clips of him. You’re right.’ 

She takes a sip of Coke. 

‘I’d like to write about him,’ she says. ‘Not a biography but a piece of fiction based on him. Imagine the barriers he faced back then. A black man. An Englishman. He was a marked man. It’s no wonder his peak was so brief.’ 

‘I have a lot of memorabilia from that time. There’s bound to be some stuff on Cunningham. I’ll dig some out for you.’

‘That would be great,’ she says, and Rob realises she is genuinely interested.

She picks up her glass then puts it down again.

‘Do you still go to watch West Bromwich?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘In fact, I’m going to the next game.’ 

‘You must take me.’ 

Rob wonders at this change. Two weeks ago, she had wanted to do everything online. Now, here she is, suggesting a weekend away. He checks himself. He is sixty-one. She is twenty-six. 

‘Is it a deal?’ she asks.

‘Yes,’ says Rob. ‘Yes, of course, if you want to,’ hardly believing he will have the company of this young woman for a whole weekend. 

That night, he reads her novel again. He thinks he is falling in love with her protagonist.  

*

On the plane, she asks, he answers, she asks about life in the 1970s, he talks about the photos from that time, everything looks so bleak, even the colour ones, but it didn’t feel like that, not when you were drinking and having a good time, going to gigs, meeting girls, watching football, it was great, there was punk, there was reggae, there was Cunningham and Regis and Batson, the Three Degrees they called them, after the pop group, a girl band they were, not that you would know about them, he says to Alba, there’s a statue of them in West Brom, the players not the pop group, he says he will take her to see the statue, and she says, Franco died in 1975, and he thinks, that’s amazing, and not only because Franco died just two years before Cunningham signed for the Albion, it’s amazing because he clearly remembers Cunningham and yet he has no recollection of Franco from that time, living or dying, although he has encountered the Generalissimo a lot since he came to Madrid and it was only then he realised it was Franco’s image on those Spanish stamps in his childhood collection, each denomination a different colour but with the same face, but it seems Franco didn’t register, something that seismic just passed him by, so he tells her he doesn’t even remember it, and he can see she doesn’t believe him, says her parents never want to talk about it either, so she asks him when he first visited Spain, it was 1978, Benidorm with some friends, and she laughs and says, how typically English, and she asks what it was like, and he recalls descending the steps onto the tarmac at Alicante, his first time on a plane, and the heat, and the girls, the San Miguel and sangria, and the police had guns, and he wonders why he remembers those certain moments and nothing else, and she says, just as Spain became a democracy, it must have been a time of great change, and again he thinks he was oblivious to all that but, before he tells her this, visions of old women come back to him, dressed all in black as they shuffled by from the old world, crossing paths with the tourists from a different one, and the young locals, all male, gathered on street corners, threatening, quite different to the young men he sees now in Madrid, and the young women, unseen and unheard, hidden away with their beauty, churches still full on Sundays, things must have changed very slowly to begin with, he says, yes, yes of course they did, she says and then goes quiet. She was born in 1991. 

*

They stay in his parents’ old house in Smethwick. It’s Alba who chooses this arrangement rather than the city centre hotel that Rob suggests. She says it will make the trip more authentic. They spend Friday afternoon searching through his mementos from the late seventies, looking for material on Cunningham. By the evening, she has quite a pile. 

‘You can take those home,’ he says.

He notes the surprise in her eyes. 

‘But these are your memories.’

‘They’re only gathering dust here.’ 

Alba goes to her travel bag and takes out a small package wrapped in brown paper. 

‘I bought you a present,’ she says. ‘To say thank you for bringing me.’

It’s a book. El fútbol a sol y sombra. ‘Eduardo Galeano,’ he says. 

‘Someone else I inherited from my father.’

‘I haven’t heard of him.’ 

‘A Uruguayan. A journalist and a writer. The book is quite old now, but I still like it. A football book. A history and a commentary. It’s a Latin American view, a different world view. Quite different to the Spanish one, and even more different to the English, I think.’

Rob checks when the book was written. 1995. He smiles.

‘Not so old,’ he says.

Alba laughs. ‘Maybe not for you.’ 

He opens the book where Alba has inserted a bookmark. 

‘Read it,’ she says and waits. 

‘So, why don’t contemporary history texts include football?’ she asks when he looks up again. 

‘I suppose the writers think it’s not important.’

‘Those are the voices that are always lost.’

‘But we have piles of documentation on football,’ he says, pointing to the stack that Alba has put aside. 

‘In a hundred years, none of this will be left. But you can bet there’ll be plenty of information on films and literature and theatre.’

‘Not if you have anything to do with it,’ he says and is pleased to have something that Alba has given him, just as she will have some things of his, although he recognises the danger in all of this, but doesn’t want to admit it, when he has only known her for such a short time, when he is sixty-one and she is twenty-six, but knows it is the truth. What makes Alba happy makes him happy too.

So, he tries to make her happy. They go to see the statue. He helps her clamber up onto the plinth. She takes a white, blue, and gold scarf from her bag and wraps it around the neck of Cunningham’s effigy. He takes a photo as she does so. They watch the game. 

‘This team have known better days,’ she says, as they leave. 

They catch the tram into Birmingham. He takes her to a pub he uses. It’s packed as usual. Amongst the hubbub, they find a table, tucked away. She buys, then he buys. She asks about the pub, with its oak panelling and long polished, wooden bar, its beer pumps standing to attention and decorated mirrors. He tells her he has been going there for years, on and off, since he was a young man, and they talk again about those long-gone times and then she says, as if something has just brought it to mind, that she would like to talk about the novel.    

*

He asks, she answers. So, you’re the Spanish Sally Rooney, he says, and she rolls her eyes, and tells him she doesn’t understand it, she’s young, you’re young, she’s female, you’re female, but that’s about as far as it goes, says Alba, and Rob agrees they are completely different, that your eyes skim through Rooney’s work while Alba’s text is dense and lacks punctuation, and she tells him it’s unnecessary to compare, that she’s not an imitation, she is Alba, and he likes that she refers to herself simply as Alba, it seems accessible, and that’s what translation does, makes her writing accessible, so he asks what she expects from him, and she shrugs and says she’s never been translated before, that Rob is her first, with a smile, at which he feels a tiny thrill, then tells her it’s about style and tone and adaptation, and she asks what he intends to adapt and he says, phrases that won’t work in English, at which she nods her okay, and making the dialogue more Rooneyesque, and watches for her response, which takes a moment, followed by a look of horror and a very loud, no, no way, and then the realisation, you’re joking, right, and they’re both laughing and she puts her hand on his arm, and feeling its warmth through the cotton sleeve of his top, he seizes the chance to ask the question that’s been bugging him, obsessing him, although it has no bearing on the translation, is it fiction or autofiction, and she picks up her empty bottle and asks, 

Shall we have another drink? 

When she returns, she is speaking before she sits down.

‘Never confuse the writer with her characters. You should know better.’

‘What about Carla’s affair with García?’

‘Many young women have older lovers.’

‘So how much of Alba is in Carla?’

He doesn’t know why he’s asking this. 

‘Does it matter?’

‘Carla does some pretty outrageous things.’

‘Like?’

‘Like when she first meets García in the nightclub.’

‘When she tells him she wants to give him una mamada, you mean?’ 

Rob likes that she switches to Spanish to say it, the coyness of it, but her eyes are fixed on him, at once black yet sparkling.

‘Yes, that,’ he says. He can’t meet her punch for punch. ‘Would any young woman really say that?’

Alba smiles and takes a drink. 

‘People don’t want to read about what they do,’ she says. ‘They want to read about what they think they might do.’     

*

It is 6:30 on Sunday morning. Rob hasn’t seen Alba for two weeks, not since the trip to England. She hasn’t been answering his messages although he knows she has opened them. The text says she is outside. 

‘How did you know I’d be up?’ 

‘You’re a writer, aren’t you? And don’t forget I’ve spent the weekend with you.’

Her comment is not accompanied by a smile.

‘Where are we going?’ 

‘We’re paying homage.’

Her eyes are fixed on the road. It is unsurprisingly quiet.

‘We’re going to see where he died,’ she says. ‘I thought we should.’ 

They head northwest out of the city. At the interchange for the La Coruna highway, the curve seems to go on and on. In the central, grassed area stands a huge, arched, grey-stone gateway. 

‘It’s called Puerta del Hierro,’ she says. ‘It was here, somewhere on this bend, where the accident happened.’

Rob can’t see any other memorial to Cunningham, so it seems fitting the monument is there. 

‘This is where it ended,’ says Alba. ‘Thirty-three years old, his wife and young son left behind, along with the memories.’ 

A Wednesday night in Valencia. November 22, 1978. The ball comes across from the right. Along the ground. In the centre of the penalty area, the goalkeeper slides out to collect but, from the left, a player flashes into view, just in front of a defender. It is Cunningham. He is first to the ball and the ball flies into the net. All three players are left in a heap on the floor. Until Cunningham pirouettes upwards into a handstand. Like a gymnast. An acrobat. It is the photograph that Rob remembers. In the local paper the next evening. The instant of that handstand. An iconic moment. The moment that sealed Cunningham’s transfer to Real Madrid. The moment that sealed his fate.      

There’s nowhere to stop, the gate can only be reached by footpath. Alba simply loops around and takes the exit back towards Madrid.

‘His time at the very top was so short,’ she says. ‘The defenders in those days respected no boundaries. They destroyed him. That’s why I’m in such a rush. I want to get to the top and stay there for as long as possible. Translation will be a big part of that. Especially the English translation.’

He senses there is more to come. 

‘And?’  

She is looking straight ahead, concentrating on the road. The traffic is busier than when they set off. 

‘I was expecting to work with a woman. A young one, at that.’

‘Translation is an intimate process,’ he says.

‘I’m ready for that. Are you?’

‘Meaning?’

‘Can you respect the boundaries?’

‘Yes, of course. I’m sixty-one.’

‘And I’m twenty-six. But you were dangerously close to overstepping the mark in the pub in Birmingham.’

They travel in silence after that. He has no defence. Finally, she pulls up outside his apartment. 

He knows he has to speak now. 

‘I have the first twenty pages ready for you,’ he says.

Alba looks at him. He thinks it's been a long time since she did that.

‘Does it flow well in English?’ she asks.

‘Almost as good as Cunningham.’

She laughs. 

‘Only almost?’

‘He set a high bar,’ says Rob.

In memory of Laurie Cunningham 1956–1989

P.W. LEWIS is currently working on a collection of interconnected short stories set in Spanish-speaking locations, three of which have been published by La Piccioletta Barca, Toasted Cheese, and Punk Noir Magazine. His fiction has previously appeared in Shooter, Firewords and other literary magazines. He lives in Birmingham, UK. More at X: @pwlewis007  Blue Sky: @pwlewis007 E-mail: pwl_writing@hotmail.co.uk