Glory Of The Football Manager System

I arrived home at nine-thirty. The apartment was warm. The lights were low in the hallway. Music was playing from the bedroom, something with a beat that I didn’t recognise, rhythmic and steady and entirely unlike the acoustic French playlists that Emma usually favoured.

I put my bag down. I walked into the living room.

Emma was on the floor.

She was on a yoga mat that I had never seen before, in the space between the sofa and the window where the coffee table usually sat (the coffee table had been pushed against the wall, which was a decision she had made without consulting me and which I supported entirely based on the evidence of what I was currently looking at).

She was mid-stretch, her body folded forward, her hands flat on the mat, her forehead touching her knee. She was wearing a black sports bra and dark grey yoga pants, the kind that fit like a second skin and did things to the human form that should have required a permit.

Her hair was up. Her skin was flushed. There was a water bottle beside the mat and a towel draped over the arm of the sofa and the faint, warm smell of exertion in the room, the particular, honest, entirely unselfconscious evidence of a woman who had spent the evening exercising while her boyfriend was at a football match in Rochdale.

She unfolded. She stood up. She turned.

"Hi," she said. Her face was pink. Her breathing was slightly elevated. The sports bra was damp at the collar. The yoga pants were doing what yoga pants did, which was everything.

I stood in the doorway and looked at her and forgot, briefly, entirely, comprehensively, that I was a professional football manager who had just won an FA Cup fifth-round match and who had a Europa League second leg in four days and a cup final in seven.

"Have you been working out?" I said. It was possibly the most unnecessary question I had ever asked. The evidence was standing in front of me, five foot seven, flushed, firm, the yoga mat beneath her feet, the sweat on her collarbone.

"There’s a gym in this building," she said.

"There’s a gym in this building?"

"A full commercial gym, Danny. Basement level. Past the concierge desk, through the double doors, down the stairs. Peloton bikes. Concept2 rowers. A full rack of free weights. Resistance machines. A stretching studio with mirrors and heated floors. A sauna." She paused for effect.

"Danny. There is a sauna in our building. We have been paying service charges for a few months that include access to a gym with a sauna and neither of us knew it existed because you leave at six in the morning and I leave at seven and we come home at nine and collapse."

"A sauna."

"A sauna. With eucalyptus towels."

"We’ve been living above a sauna for eight months."

"In Dulwich. Which is exactly the kind of thing that happens in Dulwich. Nobody tells you about the amenities. They just exist, quietly, expensively, behind a door you never opened."

She picked up her water bottle and drank. A long drink. Her head tilted back, her throat moving, a drop of water running from the corner of her mouth down her chin. She wiped it with the back of her hand. The gesture was not designed to be attractive. It was the gesture of a woman who was thirsty. It was devastating.

"You’re staring," she said.

"I’m observing."

"You’re staring at my arse, Danny. I can feel your eyes. They have weight."

"I’m appreciating."

"Staring and appreciating are the same thing when your mouth is open."

"My mouth is not open."

"Your mouth is slightly open. It’s been slightly open since you walked in. I’ve been watching you try to form a sentence for the last ninety seconds." She put the water bottle down.

"I can see you want to grab it. You have the look. The look you get when I bend over to pick something up or when I’m reaching for something on the top shelf. The look that says: I am a professional football manager who has just won an FA Cup match and I am currently unable to think about anything except my girlfriend’s arse."

"That is a very specific look."

"It’s a very specific arse."

I walked towards the kitchen. I did not walk towards the kitchen. I walked towards her, because the kitchen was behind her and the route to the kettle required passing within arm’s reach of the woman in the yoga pants, and the route was not accidental.

As I passed, I put my hand on her hip. She didn’t move. My hand slid across the small of her back, then lower, settling on the curve that the yoga pants had been advertising for the entire conversation. Firm and soft at the same time.

The particular combination of muscle and warmth that forty minutes of yoga and twenty-seven years of genetics had produced. The greatest her arse had ever been, and I was aware, standing in the living room of a Dulwich penthouse with my hand on my girlfriend’s backside, that this was not the kind of thought that appeared in coaching manuals.

"There it is," she said, not turning around. "I was timing you. Ninety seconds. That’s actually longer than I expected."

"I showed restraint."

"You showed ninety seconds of restraint. That’s not restraint. That’s a delay."

She turned. My hand stayed where it was. She looked up at me, her face close, her eyes bright, the flush from the workout still on her cheeks, a strand of hair that had escaped her bun falling across her forehead.

"How was Rochdale?" she asked, as though my hand was not where my hand was.

"Three-nil. Blake scored. Olise scored. Bojan scored."

"And you?"

"I sat on a bench in Greater Manchester and watched my second team win a football match. Then I sat on a bus for four hours thinking about Milan."

"And now you’re standing in our living room with your hand on my arse talking about football."

"I contain multitudes."

"You contain one multitude. And it’s currently south of my waistband." She kissed me. Quick. On the jaw. The kiss that said: I know what you want and you can have it but first you’re making tea.

"Kettle. Now. And then sofa. And you tell me about Blake’s goal and I tell you about the sauna and we have a normal Sunday evening."

"Normal people don’t have a Europa League second leg in four days."

"Normal people also don’t forget Valentine’s Day."

"You said you didn’t care about Valentine’s Day."

"I don’t. I’m just going to mention it periodically for the rest of your life. That’s how this works."

I made tea. She showered. She came out in the Cambridge sweatshirt she had stolen from me and shorts and wet hair and no makeup and the clean, warm, post-shower glow that made the living room brighter by her presence.

We sat on the sofa. Her legs across my lap. My hand on her calf, then her knee, then her thigh, the absent, familiar, entirely unremarkable physical contact of two people who had been touching each other for three years and who treated each other’s bodies the way they treated their own furniture: with casual ownership and constant use.

I told her about Blake’s run. The three-step diagonal. The coaching that had produced it. She told me about the gym. The Peloton bikes that were newer than their car. The sauna with eucalyptus towels that she intended to use every day for the rest of her tenancy.

The stretching studio with heated floors where she had done forty minutes of yoga beside a retired banker’s wife named Caroline who had told her, mid-downward-dog, that her husband had watched the Milan match and had used language that Caroline had not heard in thirty-one years of marriage.

Then she asked the question.

"What’s the week look like?"

"Chaos," I said. "Beautiful, structured, carefully managed chaos."

The week ahead was the most compressed period of the season. Milan on Thursday. City on Sunday. And in between, surrounding both matches, the machinery of promotion that the cup final had set in motion.

Jessica had sent the schedule while I was on the bus from Rochdale. I pulled up my phone and read it to Emma while she drank her tea and stroked the back of my hand with her thumb, the absent gesture of a woman who was listening and touching simultaneously because Emma did not believe in doing one thing at a time when she could do two.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the Massage Chair.