Page 60 of Oyster

“No way was that a penalty! He scarcely breathed on him, ref!”

Groans and boos from the PSG fans echoed around the stadium, clashing with the raucous cheers from the English supporters. Despite an angry cluster of PSG players circling him—Éti trying to calm a couple of the feistier young ones—the ref pointed to the spot. A second later, amid a chorus of boos, the video assist referee signalled his concordance with the decision.

“I don’t know what bloody game that referee’s watching,” grumbled my dad as the City captain stepped forward to take the penalty, “But it ain’t the same one as me. He needs his bloody eyes testing.”

In the goalmouth, Fabien stretched himself wide, doing everything in his power to put the player off his stride. But even the best goalkeepers in the world only had a ten to fifteen percent chance of saving a penalty kick from a topflight striker. He read the player and dived the right way, but the City striker coolly shot the ball past him and into the back of the net.

Still bitching, my dad slumped down.

“Plenty of time,” I reminded him. “The early goal might wake them up a bit.”

Unfortunately, it woke City up, too. For the next nail-biting twenty minutes, PSG couldn’t get the ball out of their own side. It took until the stroke of half time before Ruiz equalised, his lightning reflexes intercepting a loose back heel from one of the City defenders. Thank fuck. One apiece as the players trudged into the dressing room—PSG could easily have been three or four down.

“Salvador needs to pull his finger out,” commented my dad, cutting himself a wedge of Port Salut. Correcting the pronouns was on the tip of my tongue; I bit it back.

“Salvador’s up for it,” I said, smiling to myself. “Don’t worry about that.”

“Well, we need him to turn on the magic, and pretty fast,” he chuntered around a mouthful of cheese. “I don’t care if he’s got two defenders on his heels. I want to see those quick feet earning their money.”

Those quick feet had been cradled in my lap a week ago, having their priceless soles massaged while their owner ran through recordings of every single City game stretching back over the last six months, homing in on the defenders and the goalkeeper. If they had a weakness, a tell, a favoured move, then she’d memorised it. My lover would seize an opportunity when it presented itself.

She kept us on tenterhooks until the eighty-third minute, though. Until my dad was screaming profanities at the telly, the baguette on his plate reduced to a pile of crumbs. Until the commentors discussed extra time substitutions, mooting the possibility of the dreaded penalty shootout, and even debating whether PSG relied too heavily on my lover. Perhaps the time had come to bring in another, bigger, more aggressive centre forward alongside her.

But then came the goal. And what a goal. One that made all that pessimistic shit talk evaporate in the time it took the love of my life to spot her weary opposing defender’s minor error and exploit it. It defied logic. A sloppy diagonal ball from Dubois at an awkward angle was an innocuous start, but then Éti controlled it on her chest before she ran with it at full speed. The first defender was left in her wake like a tailor’s dummy; the second player she skipped around for fun. But, running out of pitch, if she took another step, the third defender would clearthe ball. Surely, she’d backed herself into a hole, hadn’t she? Because with a ball stuck on your left foot, how did you go back with that same leg and tap the ball in the air, to make sure the third guy could not touch it? And then maintain sufficient balance to hoof it into the back of the net?

Pundits would be asking themselves that question for many years to come. But only I would hear the answer. My lover would talk me through it with a slo-mo replay in the privacy of her own living room.

“Shit!” My dad leapt up. “Did you see that? Quick, let’s watch it again on the replay! Ah merde! Check out that City defender! He can’t fucking believe it!”

The famous chip-toothed grin beamed around the globe before Éti tore away from the goal, towards her teammates, fist pumping the air, swallowed up under a host of loose-limbed bodies. The crowd roared. As PSG and the fans celebrated, the telly cut to a replay and then another, slowed down from a different angle and with a famous ex-footballer explaining just how incredible the goal was, in case we somehow failed to notice the first time.

My dad shook his head, like rattling his brains around might help him make sense of it. “Salvador was going down! He fucking smashed it into the top corner while almost falling over! Fucking incredible! How the hell did he stay on his feet?”

The pile-on was nowhere near finished. I wanted to reach into the screen and pluck my girlfriend out from amongst those hefty men, crush her against my chest, bury my face in her curls, and scream to the world she was mine. And then tell my dad to stop getting her pronouns wrong.

Instead, I took a fortifying swig of beer and shrugged as casually as someone could when their heart threatened to burst.

“Practise, I guess.”With smooth grey pebbles and rotten pinecones, with her hand held tight in her boyfriend’s and herjoyous kisses on his lips. When all the world was put on pause, when she dribbled lemon juice down her chin and tilted her pretty face to the sun.

“He should have tripped! How the hell did he flick it from one foot to the other without landing flat on his face?”

“Salvador never falls, Dad. You should know that by now. Staggers maybe, but never falls.”

The goal celebration in front of the travelling PSG fans went on and on, so much that the referee issued Éti and Fabien a yellow card each, not that they gave a stuff. With no guardian angel watching in the crowd tonight, when Éti finally freed herself from the pile, she did the next best thing, blowing him kisses into the camera and making heart shapes with her hands. I was blushing from a thousand kilometres away, as if 400 million viewers sensed those were directed at me. As if, any second, my dad would turn around, see my red face, and put two and two together.

“Quick! See if you can spot Max,” he urged, as the camera panned to the rows of cheering fans lining the rows above the PSG dugout. “His tickets were for the third row back. And he’s wearing his PSG scarf.”

As we studied an ocean of blue-and-red scarves, I snorted with laughter. “That doesn’t narrow it down!”

“Is your girlfriend there tonight?”

“Um… yeah.”You’ve spent the last five minutes telling me how she’s so much better than Neymar. She would wholeheartedly concur.

“Lucky lady. Max is a lucky bugger too. What a night to remember.”

“Yes, they’ll both be enjoying it for sure.”

“Will you point her out if the cameras swing up to the area around the players dugout again?”

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