White Lies Read Online Free Page B

anything else today,’ I pleaded.
    Jimmy looked directly at me and I thought he was going to break the spell of this unexpectedly good morning.
    â€˜Why don’t you go down and meet OD?’ he said. ‘He’ll be at Super Snax.’
    Suddenly, I was close to telling him everything, but then he added, with a fierce but friendly urgency, ‘Nance, whatever’s bothering you, sort it out quick. Don’t let it wait. For God’s sake, don’t let it wait. This is what happens when you let it wait.’
    He was talking about how the house was before we cleaned it up; he was talking about himself.
    I went down to Super Snax to find OD and give him one last chance.

OD
    On that Monday morning after the St. Peter’s match I was wrecked. The thought of going back up to the town park and having another dose of Snipe Doyle would have been awful even without the hangover. Then there was the trouble with my knee.
    That must have been the third or fourth week I’d woken up the day after a game and felt those agonising darts of pain. I never felt anything during the game, except that sometimes when I turned too sharply the knee would seem a bit weak and then the sensation would pass. As the weeks went on, I knew I was getting more and more cagey about turning, and I was beginning to wonder if Tom Mahoney noticed.
    I guessed it must be cartilage trouble; I should have done something about it but, at the time, football was too important to me. I knew we could win the league and I had to be part of it. Even then, before the storm broke, I was trying to prove that at least in one way I was better than Seanie Moran, that the team needed me more than it needed him.
    Seanie was tall for a left winger, and he fancied himself as a cross between Lee Sharpe and Matt Le Tissier. Tricky, so casual he almost seemed lazy, but the laziness was a stunt to put the full back off his guard. The problem for me, at centre forward, was to guess when he was actually going to take on his man and put over the cross.
    Off the field he was deadly quiet, but not in the casual way he had when he played. He always seemed to be thinking, worrying and keeping it all to himself. I could never put the two sides of Seanie Moran together. I didn’t trust him. He didn’t talk to anyone, especially not to me, and I reckoned he thought he was too good for the likes of me, too well-off to be mixing with the son of a down-and-out.
    His father, Mick Moran, was a building contractor and developer and hired out heavy machinery. We used his stuff at the park, cement mixers and all that stuff. The Morans had two holidays in the sun every year. Seanie had a permanent tan.
    He’d been in my class all through school and a month never went by but some teacher would say, ‘Why can’t you be like Seanie?’ or ‘If you worked half as hard as Seanie you’d be top of the class.’ I needed that kind of talk like a hole in the head. Football was the only thing I was Number One at, but he was getting better and I knew I was slipping. The worst thing of all was that I depended on him so much. Most of my goals came from his crosses or through-balls. After a goal, we never even shook hands.
    Every time I got another dart in the knee I’d think of Seanie, and on that morning Seanie never left my mind. Going downstairs I had to hold on to the banister and in the hallway I limped along by the wall. Jimmy wasn’t in the kitchen when I got there, but I couldn’t help noticing that the table had been cleared. I’d never realised it was so grotty until then, but I thought nothing of it. My stomach wasn’t up to eating so I left for the park before he appeared from wherever he was hiding.
    All the way there I was in agony, using the walls and gates along the way as a crutch. Every hundred yards or so I had to stop for a breather – luckily there was no-one around to see me struggle. By the time I reached the