deconstruction (Football, Beckham/Casillas)

1

This is a prelude:

“The first time I saw you,” Iker says, “Was at that party they threw to welcome you. The Beckhams, the famous stars.”

“Really?”

“You know you’re famous. Feign it again and I’ll hit you.”

“Not that,” you say. You pause, trying to fight egotism, but lose. “It can’t be the first time you saw me. That was the first time you saw me?”

You can see the way Iker is trying to suppress a smile now, and for a moment you concede to narcissism. Beckham’s narcissistic hour; you deserve it, at the very least, for a while.

“Probably not, I saw you on the TV when I was small, but this is the first time I remembered it – you were at the buffet table and you were arranging the salad.”

“You’re shitting me –“

“No,” Iker says, “You were putting all the vegetables in a gradient in the bowl from dark to pale green, and I wanted badly to tell you to stop ignoring the carrots. You know, the carrots, the orange vegetables? They were left out cos they weren’t green. You didn’t arrange them at all, and it bugged me.”

“You’re as OCD as I am.”

“Fuck no, I just thought, why aren’t you arranging the carrots? If you’re as OCD as you think you are you would have done them, put them side by side in strips and made a sunset.”

“Carrots are the same colour, Iker.”

“I expected you would think otherwise. I mean, there I was. Okay, after a couple of sangrias, but thinking, the carrots must be lonely. It’s fucking superstar Beckham and all he cares about is the celery.”

“I hate celery,” you tell him, surprised. “But it’s just carrots, Iker, really. I’ll arrange your carrot for you if you want.”

Iker laughs, chokes then, and watches as you realise and flush.

“Pick a day,” Iker tells you. “Pick a day. My carrot will be ready for you, David fucking Beckham.”



2

You woke in the mornings to the sound of a tap leaking, your dad too enamoured with posher homes to fix your own. Now you sleep with the hinge of your designer faucet ajar, the drip-drip of water lulling you into slumber, her body pressed against yours as you love her, your mind pressed against his memory as you long. You make a list of all the things about him that you want to hold, warm when cold, fold into half to keep or fuck. Now it’s night, and you have a right to think of him, ponderously slow.

What it is about him you like you hardly know; the square head, the frumpy look, the sudden brightness of a smile when he deigns to be happy – perhaps. Perhaps all of these things and then none at all, an unclassifiable sort of desire, past categorising and sorting by alphabet or colour. For twenty-eight years of your life, you thought the only unevenness you could stand was the unpredictable fall of water onto sink, but then there was him, and now there is him, undulating and rough beneath your palms, uneven breathing snagging on your skin. Iker tongues your ear and bites your mouth and makes you swell, asymmetrical as a heart you want to shove so it divides right in the middle.

The thing is that Iker won’t give you an equal chance. He won’t be sorted, he moves out of your hands as you scrabble at his thigh, he won’t come back down and press himself against you like how you like it. Iker stands between nets but won’t be netted, you net goals but cannot net him, both of your reflections so dissimilar, so inappropriately disjointed. So when he thumbs down your lower lip so that you choke and come, you think you wake up screaming.

In truth, your breath only jerks once.

The tap drips.

Victoria shifts and her face collides into your chest, smelling strangely like waffles. You breathe her and your stomach gurgles. You think of Iker, you think of taking your boys out to breakfast. You think of Iker, you think of her kissing your cheek the weekend past. You think of Iker, you think of what you’re going to cook the next time Gary comes over.

There’s little guilt; you’re a man who classifies. There’s a sound difference between love and lust. You keep them separate. You make love, you fuck. You make love, you fuck. You think of Iker.



3

Surely, Iker won’t be caught, but he can be thought of, will be thought of, wills himself to be with his wrestling on-pitch and stupid, childish remarks such that you can’t help but recall. You humour him because you’re thirty-one and he’s just a little runt, but when he upsets you onto the grass for the sixth time this season you regress to five years old.

“Stupid,” you say as you drive your fingers into his sides, and he’s writhing so hard you think he’s going to break from the twist of suppressed laughter. His shoulder digs into your gut and you knee him in the crotch (but miss by a tad), and he crumples and kicks and smells faintly like grass and sweat. Like outdoors, you think, as you flick his nose with your finger, his laughter finally breaking against your elbow.

“It’s true,” says Iker, “You sound like a girl.”

“Don’t be stupid,” you say, more violently this time, wrenching yourself out of his grasp.

The two of you sit, grass-covered, dirty, grinning, tired, sky melting on your skin.

“I’m not stupid,” Iker says. “You really do sound like one, only butch. All manly, sultry, old-man butch.”

“Just the way you like it?”

“Just the way I like it,” Iker says.

“You’re not going to think of me all night, are you,” you say jokingly.

He looks at you, punches your shoulder. You try not to kiss his mouth.

Later, when you try to put a label to each fragment of the conversation, you will realise how that isn’t even a question. He won’t think of you all night and you know it, all he will do is look through you like a blur. Your hands will grip the wheel and your feet will make skid marks in the basement of his apartment and he’ll not think of you, only touch your hands, reach for your neck. You will meet in the middle and your head will knock against the rear-view mirror, but he’ll not think of you, only smell your post-shower dampness, mint and roses. You’ll draw back and try not to kiss his mouth, and he’ll not think of you, only hear your sharp intake of breath when you do.

“Fuck,” you say when you part, breathless and furious with yourself.

“Okay,” he says.



4

And where did you start out? You came here trying to please and succeeded, somewhat; enough, at least, such that the team cooed to your side within a month and Iker not long after, his hands shoved awkwardly into his pockets, complimenting your hair.

“Nice,” he said.

“Thanks,” you said.

Geniality was where it began, and now, even after a couple two-round fucks and a glass of Rioja, you can’t bring yourself to dislike him. This sort of familiarity should be outlawed, you know, even as you lie next to him with his hand propped against your belly, feeling content. He talks about the new chick he’s dating, with the long brown hair and Bambi eyes, her taut deer legs long and spindly wrapped around his waist. You listen, bored with affection. You don’t tell him about Vicks, and talk instead about the new charity scheme you’ve cooked up, or the new recipe you’ve found. It’s an unfair sort of trade, but it’s hard to equate one small talk with another.

Eventually he rolls away to take a shower, and you make the bed, smoothing out the creases and adding the fold of a hospital corner. You rearrange his desk so that everything is parallel or perpendicular to the edges. Iker’s wall is bare of pictures, his desk full of a man’s crap; penknives, cologne, a whole box of condoms, chucked beneath his gloves. You wonder how many people he sleeps with each week, or if he’s done any other teammate, you, Guti, Raúl in descending order of age. It fascinates more than repulses you, this possible order in fucking, the chronology. What are they like, you want to ask, and who tops?

“Who tops?” you ask as he comes out of the shower.

“You can the next time.” Iker combs through his hair with his fingers, upward, upward. You look at him, his eyes chocolatey and vain.

“No, who else?” you say. “Who else do you do?”

“Some girls and you,” Iker says. He picks up a towel, puts it down. He looks up. “Who else do you do?”

“My wife and you.”

There is a pause.

“What’s this, infidelity, you think?” you say, quietly.

“Nah,” Iker says. He comes over, stands in front of you. “Just sex.”

Then he presses a kiss to your cheek.



5

Just sex. Just sex, you think, because sex is supposed to be messy and one-off, no strings attached; someone is supposed to trump the other party with partial or entire sections of the male appendage as the lights are turned low, and all one is supposed to see is a ceiling and sections of blacked-out vision when his head keeps hitting the wall due to repeated, rhythmic fucking. Just sex: the whole thing from beginning to end: a condom and too much lube, the messy way a hand feels groping against skin, the way a mouth opens under pressure, back arched, trying not to come too fast, too hard to sound stupid.

This is the problem: you can’t explain the mornings after, if he stays. You think of you making him breakfast, the way you always do. Later, he eats, and later, always, the kissing against the sink, the water splashing up against the back of your jeans (because you flick on the tap in surprise, when he leans in), his fingers in your hair, against your neck, along your spine, playing across vertebrae. Once, you break a dish and you bite on his lip so hard he swears, loud above the sound of porcelain breaking. No one knows you keep the pieces, arranged in increasing size from left to right, in a row beneath your bed.

That is, until you cut your heel open on a shard somehow. You tape it up with a band-aid but it splits again during training. Your sock, wet with blood, is folded by your side.

“Nasty cut,” Iker tells you, walking by. His gloves are shoved into the elastic of his shorts. He smiles, roguishly as usual, and suddenly, you don’t know at all why you want to hold him.

The next day, you call in housekeeping before you leave for training.

When you get back, the pieces are gone.

The management sends you a bill for a damaged vacuum cleaner.



6

You’re with him once when you say, “I like sleeping with you.”

You say, after another pause, “You’re sexy.”

“I’m Spanish,” Iker says, self-explanatory.

Later, you sit on the sofa watching X-Men cartoon reruns with Iker’s feet propped up on your lap. He digs into a packet of chips that you don’t eat. It’s like your first Third Form date, with the TV and the sex, except this time the blowjob came first and Wolverine later, one an excuse for the other.

On hindsight, you should have sensed that something was fucked, with all the inversions to an orderly life, but you really don’t. You go home, and Vicks arrives a little later with shopping and the boys, chatting about sales and jetting to Milan the next week. She rests on the arm of your chair, light as a bird. There is a pause.

“Is the football all right?” she says.

“Sure,” you say.

“It’s the World Cup in a few months.”

“Yeah,” you say. “I’ll be looking forward to captaining the boys.”

“Is it odd, though?” she asks. “A captain playing somewhere else?”

“It’s only Spain. I’m near enough. Gary and I talk, and some of them back home and I are still chums. And the Spanish boys are all right, s’long as we don’t draw them, I guess. It won’t be weird.”

“I haven’t met many of these boys,” Victoria says. “Raúl, is it?”

“I’ve been hanging out with them.”

“You’ve been happy recently,” she says, affectionately. She runs her long nails against your scalp and it tickles.

“I’ve been happy,” you say, suddenly surprised.



7

How many months later is it when you realise?

You come off the flight feeling like throwing up but keep it in this time; watching the green of your puke suspended across the daily news should be capped at one – you roll your luggage across the bumpy tarmac, the smooth airport carpet, through the doors, through the screaming fangirls, through the entrance of the place you try to call home, through Victoria’s arms, walking through her like a ghost – “David,” she says, “Goldenballs, “ she says – you stare at yourself in the mirror, adjusting the way your collar looks after ripping off your tie, the sadness rippling through your arms, lungs, legs for the first time unmoving – “David,” she says – you look into the mirror and see a leggy skeleton with her eyes sunk into her face and her beautiful little cheekbones, the hair you remember from the past, how you used to kiss her and think she was the best woman in the world, how you still kiss her thinking she is the best woman in the world, thinking how did someone like me deserve her – your eyes switch back to the present, your wrinkles protruding skin from your face; every day, a newer one, not understanding what comes after, what comes after you, what comes after now, what comes after, after, after – future: David Beckham retires from football at the age of thirty-eight, thirty-seven, thirty-six, thirty-five, thirty-four, thirty-three (you think, fuck – fuck, not yet, not quite yet, you make this sudden nightmare stop) – you turn around, your back against the dresser, Victoria some distance from you, coming closer now, you smell breakfast on her skin, but the wrong sort, not the kind you make, the instant microwavable type, and just as she’s about to touch you you back up from the dresser and touch her shoulder – “David,” she says – “How about something to sup on now?” you say, kissing her forehead as you squeeze your eyes shut, “How about some salad, I make a mean salad.” – “David,” she says, putting her stick arms around your neck, gratingly close, comforting you, the England rain wheezing outside (it’s been so long since you’ve been home).

You come off the flight feeling like throwing up but keep it in this time; England’s in a hoo-hah over you and your rejection, but you’ll try to keep that within borders, here in this dark, foamy sort of afternoon with the sun low across your shoulders, you’ll try to breathe easy – you roll your luggage across the lounge area, the travellators, the glass baubles buried in the middle of the floor, through to your apartment where someone’s standing by your kitchen counter drawing his fingers against the blunt edges of your knives as if waiting, you stop by the kitchen and try to walk through him but cannot: he’s solid – “David,” he says, the accent on the first syllable, his tongue directed toward his lower set of teeth, mouth open in surprise – you stare at him, touch his collar and make the two ends rest against the elbow of his collarbones, and when you feel him inhaling quietly beneath your hands it feels a little like relief – “David,” he says – you touch his shoulders, run your hands over the broadness of them, glad for something familiar, something solid, something you can rely on when it feels like you are close to cracking from the legs up – you wonder if it’s the fact that it is him or the fact that he is young with his squat, Spanish face and unplucked eyebrows and smooth skin that makes you stop quivering and smile – it’s a little like a very tender dream – you turn around, your back against the counter, Iker up close, leaning into you, nipping at the skin beneath your ear, smelling faintly like cologne and the sweat of afternoons, the two of you touching everywhere, very silent save for the controlled hitches of your breathing – “David,” he says, low in his throat – and you have little else to say; you kiss his forehead as you squeeze your eyes shut, pretending it is not him you are readying yourself to sleep with – “David,” he says, persuasively, his arms around your waist, his hands up the back of your shirt, gratingly close, comforting you, and outside it is warm and inside you are hot (it’s been so long since you’ve been home).

And you catch yourself later; it’s not home, even as you feel at total ease watching him dress from your low angle on the floor, meticulous, buttoning from the collar down, studding his belt in the second-to-last hole, cuffing his jeans. It’s not home, it’ll never be home, but Iker turns to you and you look at him.

“See you,” you say as he leaves. Think it’s enough not to be home if it’s like this, always like this, always.