The Good Kid

Mick ‘Mossy’ Ó Súilleabháin glared down at me in the dressing room, surrounded by low, empty seats. “Why did ye lie to me?” His voice boomed in the concrete room.

“What do you want me to say?” I said. “I’ve already told you, it isn’t mine.”

“Well it didn’t just sprout legs and traipse into your gear bag, Canty.”

I laughed. Mossy didn’t.

“Are ye an athlete or an addict?” he asked.

I cast my eyes down. Which one was I? The vulcanised floor was strewn with football boots, their studs impaling pitch sod and muck. Intercounty jerseys were left on the ground as if their wearers had recently been deleted. Mossy had ordered everyone to leave except me, and so the lads had filed out awkwardly, some with no shirts on. All so Mossy could bollock me over this bag he’d found. It looked like a few grams of coke. Don’t ask me how I knew that.

“Take this seriously, Canty.” Mossy turned, fuming. “I mean, how careless can ye be, bringing drugs into this club, and then to leave it out in your gear bag for anyone walking in to see. It’s like ye wanted me to find it. Stupid. Is that it, did ye want me to find this?” Mossy was shouting, waving the little bag around the air. “Ye TOLD me you were sober! That ye’d NEVER get involved with this again!”

The dead horse of my sobriety had been well and truly flogged by this stage.

Mossy looked at me like a man betrayed. “Are ye high right now?”

“No, I’m not. You know this, Mossy.”

“Ye’ve lied before. Ye can hide it well when ye want to.”

His face was up close now, but he wasn’t looking at me; it felt as though he was sort of looking through me, at my pupils, checking for unusual dilation.

“I’m not high, Mossy,” I said, giving him a stern look.

“Och, ye’re a good kid, I know that. And ye work through your defeats - with grace. But if it’s the pressure, if we’re training too much, ye need to tell me, ye can’t take the edge off with this…stuff.”

How was I gonna wrestle out of Mossy’s conclusions? I pleaded back-and-forth, sickeningly, but it wasn’t getting me anywhere. Eventually, with his weight-of-the-world sigh, Mossy said he needed to step out of the room for a minute. “Wait here.”

He left me alone. I could hear him talking to members of security outside. Their muffled conversations reverberating, amassing volume behind the brickwork, then flatlining with disappointment. It gave me a minute to put my thoughts together. Who did this, and why?

Out of my teammates, only a few knew dealers. Fewer still would’ve brazenly dropped a fifty bag for a stunt like this. The fact it had turned up in my gear bag, of all places, made it impossible to believe it was random. Whoever did this must have known about my history with substances. The whole thing reeked higher than a dressing room at half-time.

When I was young, I was dropped off at A&E after scaring the bejaysus out of everyone. Crossfading on coke and whisky, stomach pumped. After my overnight spell in the ward, I knew I had to change. So I admitted myself to get cleaned up.

Cuan Mhuire, Mary’s Harbour, was a rehabilitation centre with forty acres of greenery, a tennis court, and relaxation gardens. Its tagline was “Restoring Hope”. Cuan Mhuire reintroduced me to grace. We had regular NA meetings and I met an older gentleman who became my sponsor. I recognised just how bad the problem had gotten and submitted myself to the Lord. I never thought I’d be one of those people. But God became my center, or the God I came to know.

The inevitable reintroduction to civil life I met with optimistic shakiness. Rehab finished twenty weeks after I’d started. I started coaching the U-12s hurling and playing with the local club. I got scouted the summer after rehab by Mossy. He attended a local club championship. He saw my talent.

I understand why Mossy couldn’t trust me. I wouldn’t trust me. That’s what black sheep endure, the constant distrust. And the worst part is you know they have a good reason. Instead, you learn who to invite into your inner circle. Of those on the team there was Jack Deasy, a midfielder, Paudie Fitzsimon, half-back, and Jerry ‘Scanners’ Scanlon, corner-back, the last certainly bering top brass for the most underhanded person I knew.

Scanners and I became usefully known to each other. We were celebrating after a match one time, and I noticed he would disappear to the bathroom and come back, different. He’d rejoin the party each time for a sip of his pint, his jaw swinging like a tavern door, before shooting off again a few minutes later.

Next time he got up, I followed.

“I was wondering when you were gonna ask for some,” Scanners asked. “You’ve been eyeing me all night.”

Call it paranoia because I didn’t think I was as hawk-eyed as he made out.

“You sure you can handle it?” he laughed. “After rehab?”

He offered me a line, companionably. I examined the workspace: the back of a toilet seat, a credit card, two white lines racked up like Mossy’s furrowed brow, and Scanners with a fiver rolled up in a tube. I locked the door behind us.

I know, I know. I’m sober. And I am. God forgive me.

But there was always another version of me, one that could take over without warning. It wasn't that I wanted to use. It was as if the person who had wanted sobriety simply stopped existing for a while. People talk about dementia as losing someone before they’re gone. Addiction can do something similar. The body is still there, but the person you know has stepped aside. Coke, especially, had that power over me. It erased me.

Some part of me still knew this wasn’t something I could kick. But cocaine had become so ordinary by then. It was in every village in Ireland. In the GAA, we treated it like a substitute for drink, another way to get through the nights.

There were plenty reasons to justify it. We were treated like dogshit in the team. Unless you won a championship, filled the display cabinet, lifted the cup, none of it seemed to matter. And those musky, sweat-ridden coach rides across the country from Galway to Cork to Roscommon…sometimes the urge would arrive without even realising it.

Why had I lied to myself?

Because that was just the kind of person I was.

I snatched the grubby little fiver straight out of Scanners’ hands, and my knees met the wet linoleum.

*

When I joined the senior county panel, they made us train six times a week. Unpaid, mind you (GAA players are technically “amateur” status, meanwhile we played for stadiums fit for 85,000 people). We travelled long hours by coach over potholed roads to matches. That was the part that really sucked: the cost-of-living crisis went on, while the club repaid us with the empty currency of loyalty to a team.

Well, that was all an illusion, as far as I was concerned. A man needed to get paid. That’s why landing a big brand endorsement was our only recourse to financial freedom. Like Centra supermarkets, or Batchelor’s Baked Beans, or Intersport Elverys. That was the goal. And everybody knew it.

But, if the media got one whiff of my drug days, then that’d be it. No brand would wanna associate with a poor role model for the upcoming GAA generation. I’d be back to square one, a pariah who’d have to give PSAs to primary schools on what not to do with your life.

I had lied my way out of every snag. But I always came back to God. Though, how can anyone be sure of one’s piety and faith? You can’t be. Not even my sponsor could be fully sure of what I was liable to do. All my furtive actions, sneaking out of the house, getting mysterious packages in the post from the dark web. All of this could start again.

I knew it had to be Scanners. The jealousy was obvious. He was second in the meeting with Batchelor's Baked Beans, and they offered me the contract. I’d be starring in a commercial. I’d walk into the sunlit kitchen to the young child who won’t eat his beans and say something predictably naff like “Eat your beans to grow up big and strong like me”. And I’d make enough money to do whatever I liked.

Scanners was the only player who was a bigger sesh moth than I was. I could keep my cool, he just couldn’t. He had a penchant for the white stuff. He must’ve planted this bag on me. It was the only explanation.

I couldn’t trust him, I couldn’t trust anybody. It’s shattering to think that about a dear friend. A teammate, for God’s sake (sorry God). But it’s true.

Mossy came back into the room. He slapped me with a leave of absence, and muttered something about a press release. “It’ll notify the media that you are injured and recovering at home for a few weeks.” I got escorted out of the building.

I sat in my car in the parking lot and put the key in the ignition, then stopped. I didn’t move.

I waited until it got dark.

A few lads dribbled out of the club, and amidst them I spotted Scanners. He got into his car, and reversed onto the gravel before driving off. I pursued with my lights cut. As he turned onto the main road, I tailed him at a distance. The night trees were inky. We passed signs for familiar places, then unfamiliar ones. Eventually we came to a roundabout, took an exit towards a suburb I’d never been to. The streets looked dingy, with pavement cracked in places. I turned a corner, and realised I’d lost sight of him. It must be down one of these cul-de-sacs, I thought. One house had a skip filled with rubble, a kitchen sink. Another had cardboard pasted over a window.

Then, I spotted him. He was getting out of his car with a brown paper bag and undoing the latch on a metalwork fence that led to one of the houses. I parked my car and watched him enter a house with an overgrown, weedy garden.

I got out and slinked over, crouching behind a dead bush. I crept forward for a better look. I looked in the yellow-lighted window of the living room, the naked bulb and bare walls. It was empty. The walls left something to be desired with smoke-stained wallpaper peeling in places, dry and old.

Then he appeared. He put his paper bag on the coffee table. From it he retrieved a number of items. A syringe, a little bag of white powder, and some bottled water. He poured the bottled water into a pot on the gas burner. While waiting for it to boil, he lit a cigarette on the ring, bringing his face close to the fire. Then he switched off the gas, brought the pot back to the coffee table, and flicked on the TV, an adult cartoon.

One episode later, the water was sufficiently sterilised and cooled down. He sat forward, and prepared a syringe with the powder solution. I watched him test his collapsed veins, eventually finding one in his toe. He was still and concentrating with the needle, and then he adopted a vacant expression. His eyelids fluttered, and his eyes started to roll back. He looked confused. His face tightened, his hands clawed at the arm of the sofa. His lips parted, and hung there, until I realised they were turning blue. I thought it was coke, but I was wrong. His body went into shallow convulsions. He was dying. I continued to stand outside. I didn’t know what to do. I remember thinking how desperately I wanted to go back to the car and pretend I wasn’t there. I waited.

*

I believe in God, I believe in a higher power. My rehab did work. That night with Scanners in the bathroom, that was just a little line. It wasn’t gonna hurt anyone. It was one night. Loads of people were doing it. It didn’t ruin their lives. Just look at Scanners. The best corner-back I’d ever seen. We’d hardly lose our minds over one night out. Like Mossy said, I was a good kid.

The next day, I was in a sunlit kitchen, lit by twenty-kilowatt panels, as I shovelled a heap of beans from a bowl, and said, “Keep it simple with Bachelor’s Baked Beans.”

“Cut!”

I put the spoon down. Someone rushed over with a cloth. “Mind if I–” they said, and wiped my crisp white shirt, which I only then noticed had a long red, tomato-coloured streak down the front.

“This isn’t coming out. We might need to get you a new shirt.”

A new shirt arrived. The same thing happened. Another bean dropped. Another stain. The director sighed.

“Is everything okay, Canty?” he asked.

I stammered, “Yes. Fine. Why?”

“Because you keep spilling beans all over yourself.” He gripped my arm. “And can you stop trembling?”

But I couldn’t. The trembling risked another ruined shirt, so eventually they dressed me in red and said they’d fix it in post. The stain disappeared for the cameras, but I knew it was still there. The shoot was already an hour over schedule. I just wanted to go home. I caught the hard looks from the director and producer. I assumed they were angry because I’d wasted their time.

Then the director approached me.

“Canty, have you heard the news about Jerry Scanlon?”

*

We all went to his funeral. It wasn’t entirely clear what had happened to him, but the public story marked it as suicide in his accommodation.

At the afters, I went into the shed with Jack and Paudie, a midfielder and a half-back. They were oohing and ahing and bemoaning the world that Scanners had ever been taken from us. Then Jack called us to order with his paraphernalia, sparking up a joint.

“It’s such a shame we’ve lost one of the most talented corner-backs the team ever saw,” Paudie said.

“Mmhm,” I said.

“And he was just about to land a sponsorship, I heard, with Centra,” Jack said.

I looked up.

“Shut up, was he?” Paudie said.

“God’s truth. He told me so a few days before he passed away. Obviously it doesn’t matter anymore. But if he had, he’d never have to worry about money. And as many free chicken fillet rolls as he wanted.”

“It just made me so regretful that we never had an opportunity to say goodbye, to see him,” I said.

“Canty, I had a confession to make,” Paudie said.

“Paudie…” Jack interrupted.

“No, let me say it. Because I need to. I saw you with Scanners. I saw the two of you disappearing. I knew what you were doing. And then you got the Bachelors deal and I don’t know…”

“What are you saying, Paudie?” I asked.

“It was me who planted that coke in your bag.”

Silence.

“I’m sorry I never told you. I just… I was jealous. Scanners’ death put everything into perspective for me. We were a team, right? I didn’t know what I was thinking. It ate me alive since all this happened. I’m sorry. Could you ever forgive me?”

My eyes were open but I could not see. Instead a blinding aura of light like a twenty-kilowatt panel took over my field of vision and reduced Paudie and Jack to pinpricks.

The next thing I knew, I was on top of Paudie, his face red and uncomfortable-looking, as if he were going into anaphylactic shock, and my hands were vicegrips on his throat.

Jack ripped me away and shunted me straight through the shed door. I lay on my back a minute in the garden, looking at stars being replaced by heads of worried GAA players, asking asking asking.

*

Autopsy results flooded the papers, revealing that Scanners had died from an apparent overdose rather than suicide. The media frenzy that followed allowed Mossy to let me return to training sooner than expected.

The next day was all a blur. Sport Ireland representatives arrived at the club grounds with An Garda Síochána. They were conducting random drug tests. I side-eyed Jack and Paudie, who gulped. The reps spoke with Mossy before making their selection.

They picked me.

I remembered the joint in the shed. They walked me to the changing room. I was back in the room with the jerseys, the turf sod, the studs embedded with muck from pitches across the country. I was thinking: how many days had it been? And marijuana could stay in the system for…

The maths didn’t help.

I stared at the little plastic cup with my name printed on the label.

William Canty.

Was that my name?

The GAA’s Recognition Protocol meant I had complete control over my personal brand. But what would my name become? The guy on the tin of baked beans? Or the one-time intercounty Full-Forward who was suspended on drug charges?

I let the plastic cup fall from my grip with a tinny, empty sound. It has resounded through my soul ever since. Not that my soul was around to hear it, my personhood was already far away.

I stared through the bathroom window above the toilet at the stretch of pitch beyond, thinking about Cuan Mhuire and its forty acres of greenery.

The window was conveniently left ajar.