Page 23 of Oyster

“Yes!” Max cheered, his face animated and flushed with colour. “Three points in the bag!”

“Reckon so.” I high-fived him, thrilled, even if Éti hadn’t played a part. She joined her teammate in a bear hug as Dubois celebrated in front of the away fans. “They rarely lose once their noses are in front.”

“Putain, get over yourselves,” chuntered Florian. “It was a lucky pass against the run of play. Typical PSG. So lucky. So undeserved.”

All around us, PSG supporters whooped and hollered. Max scoffed. “Are you watching a different match, mate? Nantes have scarcely held possession for the last ten minutes!”

“My Nantes can always be relied on to give it one hundred and ten percent. We’ll come out fighting in the second half.”

“Nah, they’ve got no chance,” Max predicted. “PSG haven’t even woken up yet. I’m betting on three-nil. Look, they’ve dropped their heads already. They’ve not yet got the ball out of their own half. PSG are just too strong for everyone this season, especially when Salvador’s playing.”

“He’s hardly touched the ball!”

Max shrugged. “Doesn’t need to; just having him on the pitch scares the other teams. And it’s keeping him rested for the big one next week.”

“Bahoui, maybe,” conceded Florian.Big one?he mouthed to me, and I chuckled. My friend knew about as much about football as I knew about crochet.

In the second half, like all decent sides, Nantes dug deep and tried to revive their fortunes, attempting to exploit their superiority in the air. But, offering their usual stout resistance, the defensive line like a brick wall, PSG stopped the yellows from translating pressure into goals. Which meant, with the clock ticking down, Nantes had to take a few chances.

And when the opposition took chances and dropped their guard? Éti Salvador, le petit danseur, was deadly.

We had to wait until around the sixty-fourth minute until she turned up the burners, conjuring a brilliant pass out of thin air, splitting the home team’s defence. Like a mind reader, Ruiz was there, waiting on the end of her millimetre perfect cross to curve the shot home. A cracker of a counterattacking goal, worked from nothing. Even Florian was impressed.

“There it is! Oh yes!” crowed Max as he punched the air and jumped up and down next to me. “Two-nil. One more and you owe me a drink, Flor.”

The pure happiness spreading across my brother’s face was worth the trip alone. Éti had no idea the difference her little gift had made. Maybe I’d get to know her well enough to tell her one day.

“It’s all over now,” Florian agreed, resigned. “Tant pis. My boys in yellow have done everything right except put it in the back of the net.”

I couldn’t argue with that. And nor could PSG. With the flood gates flung wide, PSG’s third goal came three minutes later and had me on the edge of my seat and my heart in my throat, even though victory was virtually a given. Because for the last sixty minutes, I hadn’t been able to tear my eyes away from the woman known to everyone in the stadium, except me, as Étienne Salvador. And from the way that woman had loosened up her dancing feet, she was on the way to producing a slice of pure ballet. What the fuck had changed that all of a sudden made me find another person so fucking beguiling when I’d been happily single for years?

I swear the second hand on the clock wound down at a slower rate for Éti than for the other twenty-one mere mortals on the pitch. As if the laws of physics bent to her will, giving her more time to think and act. What other explanation was there? With the ball glued to her left foot—and she was no less proficient with it glued to her right—she waltzed through a thicket of Nantes defenders like cardboard cut-outs standing in the local tabac. As if two world-class players weren’t hot on her heels with another world-class goalkeeper bearing down on her. Fixed on the goalmouth, she lined up a shot.

My fingers gripped the cold plastic seat like I’d fall off the earth if I didn’t. While the whole time-space continuum stilled,I held my breath. God knew why I was so bloody nervous—Éti evidently wasn’t. She slotted the ball in the top right-hand corner of the goal net as effortlessly as if she was the sole player on the pitch. Almost as if doing nothing more arduous than toeing a rotten fir cone into a pale spring sky.

“Yessss!”

A roar of triumph echoed around the stadium. Loud enough to be heard back in Paris. Leaping up, Max pumped his fist. “Yesss!”

The government minister was out of his seat too. Even the dolly girls next to us screamed. This was what we’d all come to see—a slice of pure theatre, as pundits everywhere, Florian included, were fond of saying. La petite danseuse working her magic.

Swamped by her teammates, Éti disappeared under a pile of bodies. The crowds were still roaring when she scrambled away, straightening her shirt, the only person in the whole fucking place not beaming from ear to ear. Almost as if, at that moment, something on her mind was more important than the attacking masterclass she’d just delivered. Almost as if…

Serious soccer fans like me and Max believed we knew our players inside and out, when, in fact, we didn’t know them at all. Every one of our guys out there wanted to win, of course; that’s what made them amongst the best in the world. But ten-yard sprints, passes, and sharp tackles didn’t constitute a biography nor an internal dialogue. Nor did post-match interviews when every player insisted it had been a team effort and they couldn’t be prouder of the lads.

But when individual phenomenal goals, like the one we’d recently witnessed, were scored? We got a glimpse of the person behind the player. Because as much as they tried to hide it, soccer was the song of these talented humans, the kicking rhythm of their beating hearts. They could no more stop theemotions spilling into celebration than I could stop the island tides. And, believe me, some of those humans had patented all kinds of celebrations.

Max’s favourites were the boyish swan dives, long skids in the mud accompanied by a triumphant roar of youthful exuberance. He used to do them himself, playing for our village side, until recent circumstances extinguished hisjoie de vivre. Other guys stood over the corner flag, pointing at themselves and beating their chests, gorilla-like, a combination of movements shorthand for, ‘I have a massive, massive ego.’ A handful of goal scorers, the most agile, celebrated by stringing together six or seven impressive flick-flacks, to the delight of the watching crowds. (Florian’s favourites, as if I needed to ask, were the guys who tore off their tops to reveal a ladder of abs.)

Éti Salvador, however, had patented a much, much simpler style. And really, why bother showboating, when your skills on the ball did all the talking for you? Sometimes there was a tiny fist pump, but, more often than not, she did nothing more than jog away from the goal towards the home fans, then drop a modest kiss to the plain gold ring adorning her left middle finger. Understated, classy, and consistent. Much like Éti the soccer player herself.

Tonight, however, to everyone’s surprise, not least mine, she changed the narrative. Pushing through the congratulatory hugs of teammates, she sprinted to the players area of the stands, her gaze darting up. The big screen camera zoomed in on her, chest heaving, and the world watched as her grey eyes intently searched the crowd. Could she…? Was she…? Mon dieu.She was searching for me.

As our eyes met, the thousands of people around us vanished. My breath died in my throat.The intense mask of Étienne Salvador dropped; a smile like sunrise broke out across her face. With a rush of pleasure, I found myself grinning backso hard my cheeks ached. Grinning at playful Éti, a woman who couldn’t resist kicking stray pebbles and laughed as she dribbled lemon juice down her chin. A woman who’d occupied my thoughts all match. A woman I was taking on a date.

As the crowd roared, that woman masquerading as a man swept a hand across her front like a palace courtier and performed a flamboyant bow, before topping off the impromptu celebration by blowing a two-handed kiss.

And, as the people around me screamed and the cameras flashed, I wondered what kissing her back would feel like. And made up my mind to find out.

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