Capital

million midfielder near the centre circle. He looked around and played a short ball to the holding midfielder, who hit a first-touch pass to Freddy. It was all happening very quickly, but Freddy expected that. He’d experienced this before. When a player in any sport goes up a level, the first, overwhelming impression he gets is that of increased speed. It’s not that they’re doing things he’s never seen before, it’s just that they’re doing them faster and better and more often.
    The opposition left-back, whose name Freddy didn’t know, was about two metres away. At home, there was a move Freddy had done so often that, playing a kick-about game in front of his house in Linguère, it no longer worked, because all his friends, everyone in Linguère, had seen it a million times. Nobody here had seen it though, and it was a closer thing to Freddy than his own reflection in the mirror, as easy as getting out of bed. He lunged towards the ball with his left foot, but then, dummying, let it roll past and took it on his right foot instead. His weight was transferred, his direction switched, all in a second, and he was off. It was a dummy, a jink, and a burst out of the starting blocks, all in the same movement.
    There had been rain that morning. The pitch was not completely dry; that probably had an effect. The left-back had no real idea who Freddy was. It was the ninetieth minute and his concentration was wavering. The result of Freddy’s move was that the defender sold himself to Freddy’s leftward jink and when he tried to adjust his balance to follow him, he lost his footing and slipped over on his backside, but slowly, windmilling his arms to try and keep himself upright as he went inexorably over. By the time he was actually on his behind, Freddy was ten metres away. One centre-back came over to close him down, Freddy hit a cross to the far post, the striker got above the other centre-back and headed it against the crossbar with a noise Freddy never forgot, a smack like an axe hitting wood. The goalie collected the rebound and booted it upfield, and then the referee blew for full time.
    By midnight that night, a clip called ‘Freddy’s first touch’ was one of the ten most-viewed items on YouTube.

30
     
     
    People sometimes said that stressful or dramatic or unusual circumstances caused time to ‘pass in a blur’. Roger wished that he had found that to be true. The forty-eight hours over Christmas were the most exhausting of his life. After the sofa was wrestled into position and signed for – he couldn’t face having it unwrapped, so it spent the day in its assigned corner of the larger drawing room, still reproachfully in its cardboard container – he made the mistake of turning on the television and letting the boys sit in front of it while they played with their new presents. They both had made spectacular hauls. Conrad had his robot, as well as huge boxes of Transformers, Bionicles, Lego, Action Men, and two lightsabers. Joshua did not understand Christmas yet so the sight of his colossal new Brio train set did not seem to exert much grip; it was as if he did not realise that it now belonged to him. Arabella had also bought him a giant bright orange teddy bear, almost five feet tall – too tall to drag around after him, though he might be able to sit on it. Joshua looked at it carefully, thoughtfully, for about thirty seconds, then burst into tears, and wouldn’t stop crying until the bear had been taken out of the room and hidden and Roger had promised that he would never ever ever see it again ever, not once.
    ‘Nevertobeseenagain,’ said Josh, when he had calmed down, repeating a phrase he liked from a story Pilar had read him.
    ‘Never to be seen again,’ agreed Roger. They were now sitting in front of the television watching a children’s programme with shouting presenters. Roger knew that there were scandals involving children’s TV presenters taking cocaine. To be that lively that early in the morning, it would in Roger’s view have been much more shocking if they hadn’t been taking cocaine. In fact, thinking about it, maybe coke could be the secret of a whole new parenting strategy . . .
    But the television was a terrible mistake. He used it up too soon. Roger didn’t know that his boys eventually tired of television, especially when they were allowed to watch it first thing in the morning; they became febrile and listless. In that condition it was as if they’d had too