Too Cold For Snow

Keiron play. He was excitement on legs. Their hearts raced at the mere sight of him. One of them had to clutch his chest cage, so severe was the thrill of one of his tries, catching a grubber kick from one of the centres and making a dummy pass before outflanking three men in a line by running the long way round them, leaving him with a good five clear yards between his touchdown and the nearest trailing opponent. He was a player with southern hemisphere skills: you couldn’t laud him with much greater praise. He was good enough to be selected by the All Blacks.
    Keiron was the embodiment of rugby skill, powered by huge heart and guts, guided by innate intuition, and blessed with an ability to instantly read a game like a Gareth, Barry or Shane. He easily matched any of the greats and, by now, even this early in his career he almost casually surpassed them. Keiron was wondrous. Keiron was a shift-changer, able to turn from corporeal rugby player to untackleable wraith in a magic breath. An alchemist, too, able to transmute the meatiness of a defence into a whisp of smoke. And he was surely going to be picked for a Welsh cap now that one of their scouts was in the crowd.
    Keiron had blazed in Newtown for almost a season but because he didn’t play for one of the big sides he was under the radar for a bit, a comet unreported until the local paper started to put him on the front page. Then a BBC reporter churned out a pretty ordinary piece of TV about rising rugby stars, which included some amateur footage of Keiron’s coruscatingly good second half try against Nantyffyllon, which despite the rain-which-should-have-stopped-play was a classic. Other badly framed shots recorded his crunching tackles, including upending a sixteen-stone forward and tossing him into the mud like a doll.
    His teammates carried him off the pitch at shoulder height. They enjoyed having him in the team. He made them enjoy the game more, gave them power, bestowed, well, virility; even if he himself was disarmingly effete. He’d slathered on all sorts of poncy unguents: patchouli oil content, jasmine scents and you might catch a glimpse of frilly underwear.
    Off the pitch he was disarmingly camp in his manner, as ‘camp as a row of pink sequin tents’ according to one piercing wag. At the start of his first season some of the grizzly old buzzards who’d been playing for the team for years and years took offence at Keiron’s lack of manliness. But he won them over on the pitch. As he ran tiny clumps of grass thrown up from his studs sprayed behind him as if he were sowing seeds of future greatness. He chinked. He wove. He was majestic.
    One Saturday he single-handedly racked up eighty one points during the course of a heatedly violent game, scoring one try that seemed to defy gravity as he floated over a Resolven player and drifted down like dandelion seed to score. Who else could invoke comparisons with dandelion seeds when he drifted in from the touchline? Or similes involving peregrine falcons when he flew in to make the hard yards? Or have staid commentators suggesting that he ran like a man able to outpace his own shadow. One fan gave him a boot with silver studs. Real silver. No kidding.
    There’s a drunken panoply of post-match rugby club beer, but among them Keiron was as unexpected as monkey fern orchid growing out of the centre spot. Keiron identified perfumes, singling out individual scents he picked out from the olfactory orgy that was the Saturday night crowd, when the players’ wives turned up for the disco. He would name them without shame and with unerring accuracy. Daisy by Marc Jacobs. White Jasmine and Mint Cologne by Jo Malone. Cristalle by Chanel. L’Air Du Temps by Nina Ricci. Stuff by Chloe, Madame X, he’d get it every time. Nail it. He could have made a living out of this ability, found a niche on TV somewhere, as he inhaled deeply and identified which celebrity perfume was on a girl’s skin. The players watched him, bemused and impressed as he named each woman’s perfume in turn. Mariah Carey, a saddo’s down-at-heel and frumpy smell; Christina Aguilera, a seductive little number which proved just how far the girl from Staten Island had come since the days when she appeared on TV on the New Mickey Mouse Club. Keiron knew the back story as well as the most avid reader of Hello .
    In the air tonight: Christina and Britney and Jennifer Lopez, Gwen Stefani, Paris Hilton and even Sarah Jessica Parker.
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