Rest in peace, Frankie

I recognised the new player who sauntered into the locker room. He still wore an afro and smelled of pickled onions. Only this time, he was old enough to be sporting a goatee, which darkened his creamy face. It was Ricardo, the bully from my primary school years. We called him Cardo. Apparently his full name didn’t deserve our full breath.

He didn’t touch me back then but he found it entertaining to kick the shit out of the smaller guys in class. I hadn’t seen him since I moved schools in the seventh grade.

Apparently, he got really good at football. Even Coach was excited to have the town’s best young striker on the team. “With Cardo on the team, we’re going to win lots of trophies, boys,” he said to us.

Cardo walked in, all confident and proud as if he had already won top goalscorer of the year. He stripped down to his Y-briefs and sort of pranced around a bit — showing off his physique. The fucker had muscles in places I didn’t know existed.

Cardo looked on the floor and spotted our mascot — Frankie Four Fingers — a very confident rooster that probably had his share of hens in the past. He was named after a character from the film Snatch and also because he had four toes on each foot.

So Cardo spotted Frankie walking around, bobbing his head and clucking at us like Coach does. And Cardo must have felt intimidated by the rooster’s sureness — two massive egos can’t fill a room — because he ran up to the rooster in his undies and with one swing of the leg, sent the rooster into orbit. He hit the wall — thud — cracked his neck and fell to the floor. Then blood started seeping from his beak.

Cardo’s wiry shriek for a giggle didn’t match his alpha-maleness. It sounded like an automatic meat-cutter slicing through bone. That’s what came out of his mouth when he saw Frankie drop.

“I hope you kick a ball as well as you kicked that rooster,” I said.

He looked at me, straight-faced and waved me off as if swatting a fly. He threw on the team jersey, slipped into shorts and jumped into his boots. He was ready to hit the field, pickled onions and all.

I didn’t know this before kick-off but there was a scout in the stands. Of course, only Cardo knew this — the scout came to watch him. The guys were bummed that their mascot was offed. So by half-time, we were two-one down. But Cardo was having the game of his life, having scored our solitary goal. And, my God, he was gunning for another, running the length and breadth of the field non-stop as if he was on acid.

About midway through the second half, we got a corner. Against Coach’s instruction, I went up for it. What’s that saying? “Football is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans.” I never truly understood it until that moment.

The ball swerved in high and the others must have lost sight of it in the sun. The ball, though, wasn’t my target. I ran in with my studs aimed for Cardo’s ribs. And when I connected, I could feel them turn to jelly underfoot. And he fell so sweetly, so much like Marten Ryckaert’s painting of Icarus, that when he landed, it sounded like a shotgun had gone off.

We lied on the floor, our legs crisscrossed like broken lovers. He cried and clutched his stomach. I thought I’d give him one last kiss. I stood up with all of my seventy-two kilograms on his ankle. He screamed and yanked his foot away. I walked away from the scene, unscathed. I got this warm feeling in my stomach, proud of a job well done.

Since he was my teammate, I didn’t get a yellow card. The referee put it down to an error in judgement from my end. Coach took Cardo to the hospital and left us to salvage the game. I forgot what the result was. I didn’t care. I’d quit the game for good after the final whistle.

The scout left the field and didn’t even visit Cardo in the hospital. He forgot about the town’s best young striker and went onto the next one — as fickle as the game itself.

I later heard Cardo’s ribs wouldn’t fully heal for two months and his ankle was broken in three places. I’d only hoped to twist it but it seemed I got more out of the deal. But that shotgun sound was his Achilles tendon. It snapped. His football career was done for good that afternoon.

Rest in peace, Frankie.