So What If I Hog the Ball? Read online

  For Eudy Simelane (1977–2008), captain of the South African Women’s football team

  The Team

  Megan “Meggo” Fawcett GOAL

  Petra “Wardy” Ward DEFENCE

  Lucy “Goose” Skidmore DEFENCE

  Dylan “Dyl” or “Psycho 1” McNeil LEFT WING

  Holly “Hols” or “Wonder” Woolcock DEFENCE

  Veronika “Nika” Kozak MIDFIELD

  Jenny-Jane “JJ” or “Hoggy” Bayliss MIDFIELD

  Gemma “Hursty” or “Mod” Hurst MIDFIELD

  Eve “Akka” Akboh STRIKER

  Tabinda “Tabby” or “Tabs” Shah STRIKER/MIDFIELD

  Daisy “Dayz” or “Psycho 2” McNeil RIGHT WING

  Amy “Minto” or “Lil Posh” Minter VARIOUS

  Official name: Parrs Under 11s, also known as the Parsnips

  Ground: Lornton FC, Low Road, Lornton

  Capacity: 500

  Affiliated to: the Nettie Honeyball Women’s League junior division

  Sponsors: Sweet Peas Garden Centre, Mowborough

  Club colours: red and white; red shirts with white sleeves, white shorts, red socks with white trim

  Coach: Hannah Preston

  Assistant coach: Katie Regan

  Star Player

  Jenny-Jane “Hoggy” Bayliss

  Age: nearly 10

  Birthday: October — you don’t need to know when in October

  School: been to a few — which one do you want?

  Position in team: I’ll play anywhere, but I like playing out wide on the wings best

  Likes: footy, especially watching the Parrs senior team play from my bedroom window. Telly. Being left alone.

  Dislikes: my brothers, especially Billy when he’s in a mood and it all kicks off in our house. Teachers. People who boss you around. Anything pink.

  Supports: Parrs (seniors), England, Millwall FC (they’re like my family — nobody like us but we don’t care.)

  Favourite player(s) on team: Megan ’cos she let me on the team and she’s never judged me. Gemma for skill. And Nika’s all right too.

  Best football moment: when we win, of course

  Match preparation: I turn up early and practise with a tennis ball

  Have you got a lucky mascot or a ritual you have to do before or after a match? What for? You can go nuts doing that.

  What do you do in your spare time? Mind my own business

  Favourite book(s): Foul Play by Tom Palmer

  Favourite band(s): Aerosmith

  Favourite film: Transformers

  Favourite TV programme(s): Wayne Rooney’s Street Striker

  Pre-match Interview

  Wotcha. My name is Jenny-Jane Bayliss and I play in a girls’ football team called the Parrs Under 11s. It’s the greatest girls’ football team in the world, and if anyone says it isn’t they’ll get battered.

  I’ve got to tell you about the start of the second season. I’m not happy. There’s a lot of family stuff tied up in that part. Stuff I’d rather forget. But Megan says not to worry, to tell it like it happened and it’ll all be fine. I hope she’s right. If not, our Billy’s gonna kill me.

  Cheers,

  Jenny-Jane Bayliss

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Final Whistle

  1

  It was half-past eight and the taxi driver was outside the gate, piping his horn like crazy, making it very difficult to concentrate on the weather report.

  “Come on, ducky. You’ll be late,” Mam said, with that wheedling tone in her voice – it never works, so I don’t know why she uses it. I glanced away from the TV to find her standing with my backpack in her hands, her thin pencilled-on eyebrows furrowed like corrugated cardboard. “Please, Jenny-Jane!” she begged.

  She sounded desperate but I really, really didn’t want to go to prison today, so I returned to the weather. Temperatures were going to be average for the time of year.

  “I’ll give you five pounds,” Mam said.

  “Nope.”

  “Ten?”

  “Mam, you know you’re skint. Stop showing yourself up.”

  She sighed. “All right, Jenny-Jane. I give in. You can stay at home.”

  “Honest?” I asked, swivelling round to check if her face matched her words. I mean, it usually took a bit more work than that to make her crumble.

  She dumped my bag on the kitchen table and nodded. “Honest – if it means it stops that din out there. At this rate that idiot will wake everybody up.”

  By “everybody” she means Dad and my brothers, Billy and Brendan. None of them works – Dad’s on disability and my two brothers are bone-idle – so most mornings they lie in.

  “Thanks, Mam, you’re a star.” I jumped up, my heart soaring as I headed for the door so I could tell the driver to take a hike.

  “Mind you…” Mam said, just as I reached for the door handle.

  “‘Mind you’ what?”

  “I can’t guarantee what mood our Billy’ll be in when he wakes up and finds you here.”

  She had a point. Since he’d come out of the youth offenders’ centre, Billy’s moods were gruesome. He’d turned into a right psycho. On the other hand, the thought of spending the day with the psychos in Little Alcatraz didn’t exactly thrill me to bits, either. This was not a win-win situation.

  I looked at Mam, looked at the weather reader, looked at Mam again. Should I stay or should I go? My eye caught the day at the top of the weather chart. Tuesday. It was Tuesday, and Tuesday was football training. That was the clincher. I didn’t want to give Billy an excuse for keeping me from going to that. Apart from the match proper, training was the best part of my week. “I suppose I’ll go to the prison, then,” I grumbled, snatching my bag from the table. “But if I come home in a body bag, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Mam gave me a relieved smile and reached for the detergent bottle. “Have a nice day,” she called just before I slammed the door.

  2

  Half an hour later the taxi driver pulled up outside Mowborough Pupil Referral Unit. OK, I admit that it’s not a prison exactly, but it’s near enough. Like one teacher at King John’s, my last school, said, it’s a big step in that direction.

  To fool people into thinking it was a normal place for normal kids, the outside of the PRU looked like any school building. You know – flat roof, rows of windows, the few shrubs outside the main entrance trimmed with empty crisp packets. Inside wasn’t that bad either – better than King John’s, anyway. For starters there were only six in the class. Yep, six – me and five psycho boys. My dad reckoned the unit was better than private school, what with the teacher–pupil ratio and the free taxi ride. That’s because he doesn’t have to come here, I thought, as I spotted Mrs Kelly, the head warden, coming towards me, a chunky necklace swinging from her chunky neck, her bare arms full of folders.

  “Ah! Jenny-Jane,” she said. “Just the person I’d like to see. Come into my room for a minute, if you don’t mind.”

  I panicked, wondering if I had anything in my bag I shouldn’t have, like one of our nicked mobiles or something. What had I packed that morning? Sarnies for lunch, pencil tin and a tennis ball in case I got the chance to do a few keepy-uppies later. Nope. Everything in my bag was legit. I sighed and told myself not to be such a wimp. “Why, Miss? I’m not that late, am I?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry. It’s not about your punctuality.” She elbowed open the door to her office and I reluctantly followed he
r in.

  Mrs Kelly told me to sit down. She then took the top file from the pile she’d been carrying and opened it. It had a pink spine.

  I hate pink. It’s the vilest of all colours. Everyone knows red’s best, followed by blue, then white.

  “Is that about me?” I asked.

  “It is.”

  “Why’s it pink? Because I’m the only girl here?”

  “Coincidence,” she said, leaning forward so that her necklace collided with the folders. “So, Jenny-Jane, how are you settling in?”

  “All right, I suppose.” That was if you called sitting in the corner of a classroom watching two teachers trying to control five loopy boys all day “settling in”. Three weeks and two days I’d been there, excluding the summer holidays. It felt like three years.

  Mrs Kelly gazed at me in a soppy way, which worried me. I wasn’t used to being gazed at like that, especially by head teachers. “Look at you. You really shouldn’t be here at all, should you?”

  Amen to that, I thought.

  “We need to get you back into mainstream school as soon as possible, don’t we?”

  “Not King John’s,” I told her. “I wouldn’t go back there if you paid me.”

  “No, not King John’s,” she agreed instantly. “I don’t think there’s much danger of that.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “We’d be looking at one of the other Mowborough primary schools.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “But first you have to prove that you’re capable of being in a classroom environment without disrupting it – and that’s not always been easy for you, has it, Jenny-Jane?”

  I shrugged. There wasn’t much I could say. The evidence was in front of her, in black and white and triplicate.

  “So I’m setting you some targets based on what Mrs Law and Mr Upton have told me…”

  Targets? Feeble old targets? She must know I’d been set more of them in my time than Robin Hood. “Go on.” I sighed.

  Mrs Kelly picked up a loose piece of paper from the top of my file. “Your target this week will be to mix more,” she said. “Can you think of any ways in which you could do that?”

  “To be honest, mixing with nutters isn’t my thing, Miss,” I told her.

  The phone rang before she could reply. “You’re kidding,” she said to whoever was on the other end. “But he knows he’s on a final warning… Oh, send him to me straight away. Yes, yes, straight away…” She put the phone down, grunted, then closed my file. “I’m sorry, Jenny-Jane, I’m going to have to leave it there. Problems in the seniors.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I said. “They’re even bigger nutters up that end than down this end, from what I’ve seen.”

  She drew a breath, then decided not to waste it by denying what I’d said and gave me a full-beam-ahead smile instead. “So you’re going to have a think about mixing, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll think about it,” I agreed, “but I’m not making no promises.”

  I thought about it all day. I thought about it when this kid in an Arsenal shirt, Ronnie Parkin, did nothing but stare at me as he picked at the scab on his ear and ate the crust. I thought about it when two of the other nut-jobs kicked off after lunch and one of them, Clayton White, swept my stuff off my table with his arm as he passed on his way to the time-out room. I thought about it when Mrs Law gave me a book to read that I’d already read and said, “Read it again, then, dear,” like I was two or something. I thought about it and what I thought was this: targets are rubbish.

  3

  At home, I chucked my bag under the stairs and went into the kitchen. Dad, our Brendan and our Billy were sat round the table smoking and drinking tea. Mam was at the sink peeling spuds.

  “Ugh! It stinks in here,” I complained, wafting my hand in the air at all the smoke.

  “It does now you’re back,” our Billy said.

  “Ha, ha.”

  “Yeah, ha, ha, like the service round here. Mam, where’s that sugar I asked for ten minutes ago?” Billy demanded.

  Mam stopped peeling the potatoes and dashed to the cupboard about two inches from where Billy was sitting. “Sorry, duck, I forgot,” she said, handing him the bag of sugar and a spoon.

  “Should think so,” he muttered.

  “Now then, how was school, duck?” Dad asked me.

  “Keep telling you, it’s not a school, is it? It’s a unit.”

  “The unit, then, bossy breeches. How was the unit?”

  “What’s the opposite of awesome?”

  Dad frowned. “Um … I don’t know. Pants?”

  “Pants. Exactly,” I told him, moving his walking-stick so I could sit down. Between you and me, he doesn’t really need it. His broken leg healed yonks ago, but he keeps the stick handy in case anyone drops by from Social Services. Once a con artist, always a con artist.

  “Did anyone give you any grief?” our Brendan wanted to know. “I’ll see to them if they did.”

  Bren couldn’t fight his way out of a crèche, but I appreciated the sentiment. “Nah.”

  “You shouldn’t even be there,” Dad grunted, “a smart button like you. You’ve got more brains than the whole lot of us put together.”

  I felt the teapot to check how fresh it was and poured myself a brew. “Thanks, Dad, but, let’s face it, having more brains than you lot isn’t exactly a stretch, is it?”

  Dad yawned loudly, showing his gold crowns, then laughed. “True,” he said, “very true.” He called out to Mam to shove the kettle on. “Time for a top-up,” he told her.

  “All right, Mick, I’m on it,” she said, dropping the potato-peeler again and wiping her hands on her apron.

  Billy stuck his oar in then. I’d been wondering when he would. “Bright? Her? She’s not that bright or she wouldn’t have got excluded, would she?”

  “Shurrup,” I told him, but in a polite way so he wouldn’t start.

  “Getting caught nicking a teacher’s purse.”

  “It wasn’t just because of that,” I mumbled and felt my face burn. The purse had been what Mr Tattershall, my head teacher, called the Final Straw.

  “Rule number one: a Bayliss never gets caught.”

  “Huh! How come you and Bren have just spent nine months in a youth offenders’ centre, then?”

  “Watch it, or else,” he warned.

  I would normally have kept quiet, but the mention of the purse stung too much. I wouldn’t even have nicked it if Mam hadn’t been crying that morning because hardly any money was coming in. “Or else what, loser?” I retorted.

  Billy shot out of his chair as if he’d been zapped by lightning and smashed his hand down on the table, making everything on it bounce. The salt cellar toppled over, Mam dropped the kettle into the sink and I cursed, wishing I’d learn to keep my trap shut. “WHAT? What did you call me?” Billy bellowed at the top of his voice, spit flying in all directions.

  “Oi, oi, oi,” Dad said, using his stick as a barrier between us and motioning to Billy to sit down. “Calm yourself, son. She didn’t mean it.”

  I held my breath, wondering if Billy’d listen to Dad for once or just go for it and clatter me anyway. Eventually he sat, although his green-flecked eyes kept pinging daggers at me. “She needs to learn to show a bit of respect,” he muttered.

  “Yes, she does,” Mam agreed. “I’m always telling her that.”

  No you’re not, I thought. You’re always cleaning or cooking or watching rubbish on telly, that’s what you’re always doing.

  “What’s for tea?” I asked, thinking a change of subject might be a good idea.

  “Nothing for you, if you don’t do as Billy says and show some respect,” Mam said.

  “Nothing’s fine by me. I’ve got training, anyway.”

  Billy snorted. “Training! What a joke! She’s a right laddie-lass. She should call herself Jamie instead of Jenny.”

  Brendan laughed. “Jamie-Jane. Nice one.”

  Nice one. Yeah. Like the lev
er Billy operates to make your head go up and down, Brendan, you lame lemming.

  Dad leaned forward and patted my knee. “Take no notice of them, ducky. I know it’s just a phase you’re going through, this boys’ stuff. You’ll be around to look after me and your mam when we’re past it, like the good daughter you are.”

  “You’ve no chance,” Billy told him. “She’ll probably be manning an oil rig.”

  I hope I am, I thought. Being in the middle of a freezing cold ocean has to be better than being in this smelly kitchen with you lot. I didn’t say that, though. I wasn’t that stupid. Instead I grabbed a few Babybel cheeses from the fridge and an apple from the fruit bowl and legged it to my bedroom.

  “Yeah, off you go, laddie-lass,” Billy called out after me.

  Upstairs, I dashed straight to my bedroom window. It’s what I always do. Go straight to the window. Not that there’s anything wrong with my bedroom itself. I’ve got a state-of-the-art flat-screen TV, a Wii, an Xbox, a PlayStation 3 and stacks of other goodies that have “fallen” from the backs of many lorries over the years, but the window’s the thing that always calms me down the most.

  It’s bound to, seeing as I look out on the best view in the world. It is called Lornton Football Club and it is stunning.

  I knelt on the games console under the window, rested my elbows on the sill and gazed at it all. I let my eyes roam round the main pitch, with its pristine green turf and freshly painted white line markings, across to the clubhouse where Mandy, the ace club manageress, lives and works, then finally over to the fly-and-wasp-magnet bottle bank that butts up against the side of the club. Stunning. Every bit of it.

  Slowly I peeled away the red wax from the first cheese and took a bite. To think that in an hour’s time I’d be down there. Nothing else mattered. Being in a unit. Billy’s bad moods. Mam’s manic cleaning. Nothing. As long as I had Lornton FC and the Parrs, everything was hunky-dory.

  4

  In the end, I couldn’t wait even an hour. I bolted down my nosh, got changed, found my tennis ball and then slipped out of the house as quietly as I could, using the side door so no one would notice me and give me any more hassle.