Nutmeg

SH Ong

In a tournament like this, a third-place match like this, the stakes are only in name. I turn the television on, off, on again, irritated by the flicker. I decide that I’ll clear my backlog of emails and watch the match at the same time, it will make both things more bearable. There’s so much clutter in this bloody flat, wires crisscrossing on the feathery rug that the table has slanted and rumpled. The uncharged vacuum cleaner sits pretty at my feet, the fat glass cabinet is stuffed unevenly with files and medicine and god-knows-what. I’m not good enough at being an adult to do more than chuck things in compartments.

I regret not forking over the extra fifty pounds a week for a bigger place. I have a chronic overconfidence in myself; it compels me to make decisions I’m not very good at living with.

I pick up my phone, open WhatsApp. I breathe in, toggle to Jodie’s name. The interface is blank save for the app’s update in a little blue box at the center:

You blocked this contact six months ago.

You unblocked this contact a week ago.

I want to make it go away, because I don’t need that fucking information, but it doesn’t let me. I look at the number, it is there. I press the little phone icon. It’s a mechanical impulse that I refuse to be connected to.

It rings. It rings and rings. 

Hi – what – Emma? My god. Hi.

Now I am doing three things. Fuck.

 I ask if she is watching. She is. For the money she bills to fuck over civilians, she really shouldn’t have time to watch a seven p.m. match. Eight p.m. even, since the Swedes are an hour behind us. I don’t say that. I yap on about Fran Kirby running right at the Swedes down the middle, a bold start from England. She says it’s fitting that England is my team. Kirby is pressed into the right flank and nothing happens. Now I agree with her.

She says she still watches football, with the guys at work. I don’t, not really. Nobody in my life cares about football. It’s fitting that she gets to keep the beautiful game, even though our university coaches used to say that I was the co-captain with the real football brain.

So, I read about your show, she says. It’s on Monday, right? It is. I smirk, but the feeling is dampened by how readily, how sincerely, she puts out that knowledge. It’s my first fashion week. Every day, I will curl my hair and put on mascara, make myself look like she used to. Unfortunately, I am not the newcomer charging with ideas about the future of the industry or that kind of fuckshit. Quite the opposite—our theme is sustainability, of all things, and I fucking hate it. It’s insipid, derivative, a fucking cliché. I detest clichés, most of all my own. Meanwhile, the England keeper’s dallying on the ball almost costs us. It’s a waste of time, really.

There’s a lovely Swedish cross by the byline, flat and low and firm. Jodie always shot with such wrenching precision. Her first hat trick came just days after she sat slumped in the bathroom of her student accommodation, bleeding out clumps the size of lemons, her nails chipped from scratching the crummy peeling wall. The boy was a pudgy fellow who smelled like fried chicken and reminded me of a hamster with acne. He thought he was going to be the next Ed Sheeran. She didn’t tell him. I was the only one who knew, bringing her warm bottles and timing her painkillers. The night before our match she asked to hear about my own scares, my own stupid boys. Then she folded around and into me, and we took care of each other the way only women could. When she annihilated everyone, I knew that I meant something.  

There was always a hazy, almost pornographic sheen that papered over my memory of that night, and I always felt that it indicated something depraved about me. And now, rising from the fog of my mind, is a gap in the English defense. They look disarmed, disoriented, down to ten as their captain limps about the sidelines waiting for the okay to come back on. The attempt at clearance is awful. From ten yards, the Swedish number nine slots her shot into the bottom right of the net. She’s the kind of technical, box-to-box midfielder that you don’t see much of nowadays, the kind of playmaker I was such a sucker for because I played the thankless game at the back. She draws defenders to her. And I’ve seen her in “World’s Sexiest Female Footballers” lists, with her large dark almond-shaped eyes, those cut-glass cheekbones. She talks to fashion magazines about where she does her hair. Which is all to say, she reminds me way too much of Jodie.

How’s the fashion world treating you? A platitude, phrased like one. I can hear the smiley face in her voice. I don’t understand why Jodie is trying to have a normal conversation, though as the instigator of this shitshow, it falls on me to set the parameters, which I haven’t done. You look so different, fuck, you look a bit like me, she goes on. It’s a self-indulgent thing to say. She’s never needed to realize that everything is different when you’re like Alex Morgan instead of Abby Wambach. That my parents are now pelting thanks on a deity they don’t quite believe exists. Me, football, me playing football, for them it was just heartburn, heartburn, heartburn. That what were just fun little after-school scrimmages for her saved me from itself, from myself. That away games were home, browsing ESPN and scout reports of our favorite players’ statistics, beds pushed together, post-match spiced-rum and buffalo wings, she and I. 

The Swedes look lethal down the right, and a long pass misses the net by inches. I need to turn this conversation my way, so I say, laughing but a little accusingly, Honey, I could ask the same of you. I remind her of the time she was high out of her mind and trying to roll up a staircase while making a speech about getting a job that would reform all that was wrong with the system, make a difference, you know. I didn’t know, not at all. I’d managed to get myself booted from a school society for sending everyone memes that, quote-unquote, failed to uphold the right values. But she really seemed to. And now here I am, coercing poplin, latex, and lurex into wearable art and slapping them with politically correct headlines, begrudging stars in my eyes.

She doesn’t say anything. We lapse into silence as England strings together a series of last-ditch defending. The crosses are vicious, if imprecise.

And then it’s two for Sweden. It was bound to happen, but fuck me. The Swedes are sly with their off-ball work, ruthless in moving between the English lines. When our old classmates speak about Jodie, a certain look comes over their eyes, the kind that befalls artists when they recall oil titans or hedge fund heavyweights that they knew in childhood. Because of her job, people bring Jodie up often. Each time I sit there, glossed over and stone-faced, pretending that a bottle of old ketchup is intricate and fascinating, pretending to rise over the whole thing like a ghost. We are not equal, Jodie and I. We never were, and will never be.

The English right-back has her shot tipped over the bar. There’s a cooling break, and the silence throbs, bulbous and gnashed up, black and spotty red. Jodie can make conversation, I don’t care.

The line crackles with static, tingly like a small electric shock. As if on cue, she says something about her ex-girlfriend loving the Arsenal midfielder on the English bench. And there it is. It is—was—whatever, a PhD student she met at a café two blocks from her firm. A month into the job, which means five-and-a-half months after we stopped speaking.

Different places in life, which means fuck-all. That’s not the why I mean. I search this chick up on Instagram, Facebook, fucking LinkedIn. I stare at the picture she’s decided is good—the recessed jawline, the too-large smile, uneven front teeth. Am I looking right? The audacity oozing through that zigzagged, center-parted, flat, oily hair. I want to scream.

The players take their positions. Why are we even bothering at this point?

Emma, she says. There’s something I’d like to say.

No. No. No. There’s a Swedish player crying. I can’t tell what the injury is. Someone else comes on, with the same perfect biceps and strawberry-blonde dyke hair. I press my neck so hard that for a moment I’m afraid that something will burst.

Watch the match, I say. I’m glad she can’t see me; I’m warm and sticky everywhere. The ball is in the Swedish box, but nobody knows who should shoot. The flag goes up. It’s all very operatic and convoluted.

From almost nothing at all, the Chelsea midfielder slices in from the right and curls a shot straight into the left of the net. They call her mini-Messi. A sharp breath catches in my throat, charged with a frisson of energy that I haven’t felt in a long time. England are back in it; two-one is a world away from two-nil. Or that’s what I tell myself. I tell myself very many things. I tell myself a botched version of a Pierre Bourdieu quote and decide that my job affords me something that justifies being paid fuck-all, that Jodie and I should—can—speak to each other the way we did in school. I told myself too many things the nights Jodie and I spent together across a screen, little green circles besides our names, the night she told me she believed we become atoms after we die, scattered to the sea and stars to glimmer faint against midnight breeze for small children and beautiful people in sundresses and half-done shirts.

England gets a second! Within four minutes! The Swedish left-back spins around and perches on the grass in disbelief. It is surreal, a fever dream. My stomach flips, but not in a good way. Right then the shrill whistle goes and the camera cuts to the officials in the tiny video room. A minute later, the referee runs out, making a big cross with her arms. Handball. Inevitable handball, but handball nonetheless. Of course. I have a knack for these things. It’s no different from all the times I’d hear about some distant acquaintance getting smitten with Jodie, schoolboy crushes of the dull and untroubled variety, and I’d feel tides of pity bulging in my gut and hurtling up toward my throat. Pure, liquid pity for the nights I knew they would spend calling women awful names, smashing things and emptying their guts out under graffiti walls until she was bleached from their minds.

It’s almost half-time, and the Jodie lookalike takes a kick in the shin. I think about how I used to point out men on the street to Jodie, sometimes because they vaguely seemed like her type, but mostly as a joke. Tangled up in my own manic web of hilarity I never really thought about whether it was a halfway decent thing to do. Once, along rush-hour Tottenham Court Road, I spotted a skinny kid scurrying out of Primark with a potted plant and said, Oh look, you could date him! She smiled, or smirked, enigmatically, and said, You sure? It ruffled me, so I said, Yes, clearly I’m trying to get you jailed for statutory rape. Then I said she was a funny girl and she said I was funnier. Not in a bad way, she followed up almost immediately, in an inflection that I allowed myself to believe.

 Frankly England should get a yellow, but it’s just a free kick. The ball pings back and forth.

Time passes. And there’s the half-time whistle.

Such a frustrating run for both teams, Jodie says. One of them almost made history.

I tell her I didn’t think the Swedes were going to go past Germany in the quarters. She rattles off some statistic about them coming from behind. It’s true, we watch football for the fairytale. But then she says that’s the kind of emotion that can really change the trajectory for a team, and it feels just like the time someone dropped a kettlebell on my ankle that had barely healed. She doesn’t get it, will probably never.

Fuck emotion, I say without a beat. My voice is crisp and flat, like I’m a receptionist telling her that her appointment is delayed, postponed, vanished into the ether of some ancient booking system. If their finishing isn’t there, it isn’t there.

But football is made in moments. Christ. She wants to argue about this.

What the fuck does that actually mean? She’s always been fond of trotting out truisms like that, pithy little statements that should come with glitter and a big fat bow. I wonder what kind of person enjoys, ever enjoyed, hearing them. We have nothing in common.

It means that moments mean something to people, even if doesn’t end in a medal, Emma. She is unfazed. I have never had the power to rattle her.

I bumped into coach two weeks back, I tell her. At Shoreditch. Under one of those grimey bridges.

How was she?

 Extremely baked.

Classic. I can hear her smile, her eyes going small. I remember the times she’d nutmeg me after practice, her childlike, nose-crinkling beam that meant I couldn’t even try to pretend to be mad. For a moment, it feels easy. Easy, essay-length text messages back-and-forth for three hours at once till your thumbs are sore sort of easy. By now I have realized that it is easy to replicate that sense of ease; it’s the other bit that’s hard. I don’t blame myself. Nobody would hurt a child for confusing nice for kind, beautiful for good.

Do you miss playing? I genuinely want to know. I miss it badly, the sliding tackles, mimicking the trash talk we saw on television. Sometimes I miss my choppy crew cut, the military blue rucksack I used to haul around. There was an ease there too.  

Of course, she replies, quietly. Her voice is small, dense like a stone. Of course I do. Terribly, for a while.

Something has bounced off something else, inflected at a wrong angle, and the air in front of me stops moving again.

If a match is on now my friends just want either team to score so it’ll end in ninety minutes.

I guessed as much, she says in that same voice.

The players jog out. Jodie’s lookalike has been subbed off. Head injury, apparently.

England’s passing looks sharp, and I have to remind myself that we’re still trailing. We finally look free of the scattered focus all these weeks in France, even if the brain cramp has sizzled away a little too late. Brain cramp—I feel nineteen again, waiting for Jodie every day after class in our university’s new all-glass skyscraper with the funny angles and perfectly trimmed balconies. That was the semester after her abortion. I would play with my phone, scrolling through memes about the stock market, one mud-stained sneaker against the wall. I was aware, so aware, of everything about every part of me—how my eyes darted from corner to corner, the numb in my fingers, my neck white-hot with stupendous gratitude for the invisibility among a horde of international students in coats with big labels. Every sensation is etched deep into the soft parts of my body. It flares up now and then to ache like a bone bruise.

I’m both hot and cold. The fucking radiator isn’t working, and I slam the plug of my small tableside heaters into the kitchen wall. 

The Swedes get a free kick, and yellow shirts cram into the England box.

If I was frightful in those days, my secrets like mice hiding in an alleyway, I got by. Whenever Jodie would emerge in her bright red parka, my mind would narrow, and then there’d be only our footsteps and the busy intersection by our school. Her arm slipped through mine, we’d head to buzzy Italian diners and hop onto the velvety swivel seats, rating men from one to ten over prosciutto and pink wine. We never agreed on which men were attractive, hump-and-dumps, or whether hairstyle indicated viability for going steady with in another lifetime. What a pantomime, in hindsight.

The ball flies through to the center of the field, and the pressure fizzles out. When the Swedes charge back up, it just winds up in a goal kick. England is not dominating the run of play. But their defending is smooth. Classy, even.

An England header sails well over the bar.

What’s-her-name, your ex, I say. Your first girl?

Yea. I hear her exhale.

What, she made you realize…? I can’t finish the question.

No, but—she pauses, with an upward inflection, like it’s a fucking question—the first one it was strong enough with to be worth it.

I dig my toenail so vigorously into my rug that it chips, sending a small ripple of pain up my shin.

Kirby attempts a shot, but it’s offside by a mile. I close my eyes, replaying something for what I suspect will be the last time. In our last semester, as we’d head our separate ways after training, I’d stop a third of the way on the bridge that took me home and watch Jodie’s pink headband and matching cleats bobble off round the bend till she was engulfed by theatergoers, drag queens and sports cars. I’d stand completely still, transfixed by a force equal parts kind and malignant. Often the wind was especially strong, and it accosted me with a sick, heightened madness that made me feel alive. Someday my body will forget the feeling.

Mm, I go with. It comes out like a snort.

The realizing, she says, that happened a bit before.

The Swedish keeper comes out of her box and safely clears a long pass.

Mm.

Are you seeing anyone?

I am. Not anyone, someones. If this goes to over-time I can’t stay; I have to put on a felt blazer and have drinks with people who like me. England are pinging the ball back and forth. They have possession, but it’s awkward and aimless.

I don’t answer her question. Instead I ask, in spite of myself, What made it strong? 

I’ve wondered, a lot, actually. I don’t really know. A chemical thing, maybe. On paper we made no sense. But with her everything was brighter, with softer edges—everything, a sushi chain, an eight-hour bus ride. I was in a clinic for my headaches and some bizarre soft-core twerking music video was playing and it was freezing but I couldn’t stop smiling, Em, I was so full.

I know she’s right. And I know that it’s real, even if it’s a play I can’t read, a formation I’d never fit into. Nobody carves their heart out for the drills, the sun-scorched preseasons. As children we really only saw the cheer set against the cramping crouching heartbreak, and that kept us going, until we realized we were girls and shrunk our dreams before being told to. It’s all rather sad, but only in the quiet way that old people get sad about youth being wasted on the young.

Yea, I say, lighting a cigarette. The smoke sashays and shimmers out of the balcony, taking my flicker of kindness with it.

England piles forward. I feel the urge to hang up on her, but I don’t.

The Swedes make a stunning clearance, and the field is ablaze, the center-back sliding to the ground with her brilliant yellow mohawk. A week ago, I found an article about her wife and new baby. Motherhood and sport, or something.

The clock is running down. I can’t look away.

Em, Jodie says quietly, do you remember our last match?

Not as well as I should. I can’t even recall the score-line, the weather. I know that my legs were heavy, that my distribution was subpar. It was the last time Jodie and I shared a hotel room. We took an age to order pizza, and went out at midnight for fruit cider of a whimsical flavor, maybe honeydew. Mostly I remember the film of stretchy languor over the pre-dawn hours, how we fought sleep for nothing in particular.

I remember that when Jodie went to take a shower and left her phone unlocked, I wanted so badly to lean over and peer at it, suddenly very aware that she was a person whose life only vaguely intersected with mine, replete with people and experiences I had no access to, no awareness of. I didn’t do it, physically couldn’t. There was a forcefield of something batting me back. Only after she finally dozed off and I tried to sleep did I realize how much tension had built up in my neck and shoulders. It hurt till the next morning.

The ball sails into the crowd, ending what looks like England’s last chance. Out of nowhere a memory that I’ve forgotten I’ve even had rams into me with full force: Just after Jodie got her frilly fancy job, I applied to the House of Dagmar, a Swedish knitwear brand, for a role I’ve completely forgotten. I didn’t get the job. I’ve never told Jodie, or anyone else.

You know, she says, I don’t know if you remember, we were sitting on the floor, by the bed. I wanted to kiss you. I really wanted to. But then the pizza came.

That is not a normal thing to say. There is no readily available response in the space of codified social lubricants that I can borrow to make my life easy. My face suggests that I resort to not responding at all.

A real full-bodied kiss, she continues, the kind that lives on its own terms. That births every other kind of kiss. I thought I’d explode.

My mind narrows to the splotches of grease on that pizza. Deep-dish, extra-large pepperoni, stuffed crust. Curly fries. Red hot chili flakes.

Okay, I say.

After my brush with collegiate sports ended, I sometimes wondered what it would have been like to win a trophy, to have sports be a viable career, among other things. Wondered, really, if I didn’t try hard enough. But I had, of course I had. I’d tried, in the twilight moments as we went to our cars, where the sky was pink and earnest. I’d tried, in the silences that lapsed in flowery coffeeshops where we’d gossip about our teammates against the bubblegum pop like 1950s housewives. I’d tried, as the number of team dinners dwindled and became countable on one hand. And now it is clear that none of it, the trophies or jobs or the coarser things, depended on me trying. 

The whistle blows.

Yellow shirts pile into a human pyramid in the center of the field. I watch my team crumble to the green all at once, the one slow-motion heartbreak scene in a forgotten direct-to-video slasher flick. Karen Carney is limping about, consoling everyone, looking slightly stunned, and I remember that she’s retiring. I imagine her in grainy paparazzi shots outside private clubs, staggeringly drunk in Porsches with twenty-year-old lingerie models, and I laugh for the first time all week. 

I find Carney’s Guardian interview. I’m comfortable, she told them. I have food, clothes on my back, and my family. For me, I’ll never be bitter.

Suddenly I become very aware that I’m clutching the side of my table so tightly that my knuckles are turning white, little threads of purple straining out. My spine is tingling like a sparkler, like I’m getting ready to be swallowed whole by something. God, the girls who do this, they adore it so much. That’s all there is. They do it through blue-collar second jobs and hand-me-down men’s jerseys that don’t fit and back-of-the-plane economy seats rank with cigarette smoke; they do it till they have nothing more in their legs and hearts, knowing it will never love them back enough to make rape allegations go away with one week’s salary.

I’m sorry you lost, Jodie says, tentatively. I’ve almost forgotten that she’s still on the line. I want to light a cigarette, run a steaming bath with lavender oil and stew in it well into the hours where nobody expects anything from me. I don’t want Jodie to be sorry. I don’t want her to try and make me feel okay, to have the gall to even think she can.

Don’t be. Anyway, good game. I have to go.

Wait, Em.

Yeah?

Are we talking again? I really –

No, I’m sorry. Bye, Jodie. I surprise myself with how easily that slips out, how lightly, how cleanly. It would've been so easy to say yes and change my mind, to say maybe, to say something else, anything else, do something else.

I hang up before she can say anything. Briefly I wonder if she’ll call me back, but I know she won’t. There’s a warmth brewing deep in my bones, rising up and spreading like medicine. It’s nothing mysterious, just the adrenaline. But it makes me feel powerful.

My Apple Watch says my heart rate is down. Have you stopped running? I turn back to the television. Some pundit is babbling on about women’s football being a less cynical game, with far less of the diving and dirty tackles. It is noise, badly disguised condescension. Football has always been, as much if not more, the moments where it behaves badly.  

The post-match interviews are starting. Phil Neville is on the record saying that it’s a nonsense game. It’s classless, bitter, nasty—which means it’s not true, except it also kind of is—how much do you even get paid if you win the whole thing? And anyway, in three days, under the ruthless Parc Olympique Lyonnais heatwave, the cocksure Americans will probably win the whole thing again. Everything is so excruciatingly, toe-curlingly predictable. Stereotypes, clichés, assumptions, they all exist for perfectly good reasons. Realities are just the pretty little details that coalesce around them.

I try to imagine myself on the pitch again, the sweat and soil and shin guards with nothing to show for. It is two-and-a-half lifetimes away. Tomorrow I will be photographed on the sidelines of a runaway pearly-white, almost silver. My heels will be ruby-studded and five-inches high, my hair configured into velvety chestnut curls. Tomorrow I will beam at the people from Saks and Bloomingdales and act like I care, the way Jodie pretended to give a fuck about economic endogeneity or hydromagnetic fields when our friends yapped on about them. Tomorrow I will be Jodie, and I will make a fucking killing for it. Easy. We eke lessons out of each other, we pick our conformities. We sit back and marinade in our exhaustion, watch as rewards and punishments are doled out accordingly.

I open my computer, finally get to my emails. There is so much to do, so much work created by people who cling to their jobs at weird hours of the night to believe they’re doing something with their lives. I tell people to do things, fiddle with a logo on a PowerPoint presentation, and try on my heels. The match, the phone call, are no more than wisps of a hollow hallucination that’s collapsed into itself.

I take out the trash in a big black bag—it’s surreal how quickly shit accumulates, dust and rotting food, cans sneaking heavy metals into our blood. Perishables, perishing. I wipe the countertop down, wring the checkered washcloth and hang it up. I put on my coat, an oversized maroon wool-cashmere blend from Max Mara that I could never afford if it a client hadn’t gifted it to me. Jodie could buy something like that every month, she probably does. But it’s not my cross to bear.  

It’s dark outside. I’ve completely missed the sunset. Instagram says it was quite a sight. It’s almost silly, how every now and then a permutation of pink and orange sets something off in people, something so primal. I open my velvet clutch, touch the cold flat metal strip on my credit card, press my thumb against the edge of my slightly rusty key till it hurts just a little. Real textures, of real objects I have. Something of a real life.

Once upon a time, I had football instead. Football isn’t like other things, precisely because within the touchlines, the same wretched stories stay golden. Beyond the oil and state money, the scandals and bigotry and violence, the same chances always live. An underdog snapping a big game losing streak, a fallen figure’s stoppage time redemption goal, finally being on the right side of a penalty shootout’s fine margins—love, love, love. Football would come home someday, even if only long after us little people unmoored our lives and disappeared into far-flung worlds, having finally conceded the shallow depths of our own agency. In football there will always be hope, and hope will always be good.

SH Ong is a new writer from Singapore and based in London. Her debut short story appeared in Issue 24 of The Manchester Review earlier this year and her poetry is forthcoming in the January edition of Cathexis Northwest Press. She is a recent graduate of the London School of Economics and works in finance by day.