“Du An doesn’t like football!”
“No one in our family likes football… no, will ever have any interest in it… I said no! Please don’t call here again!”
Mason hung up. She didn’t put the phone down, though. She just stood there.
At the table, Ethan nudged Du An secretly with his elbow. “That David called again. Are you really not going to Everton to play? I want to go, but David doesn’t think I’m good enough.”
Du An glared sharply at Ethan and lowered his voice. “Don’t talk about that at home! Grandma Mason will be upset! Eat your bread!”
Ethan ducked his head, shot a quick glance at his older brother, but couldn’t help looking toward the living room.
Then he stuffed a slice of bread smeared with honey sauce into his mouth.
Du An also looked at Mason.
Her salt-and-pepper hair was pulled into an immaculate bun; her slightly stooped shoulders could no longer quite fill out her faded navy cardigan.
This 70-year-old woman had spent seventeen years unable to move past that tragedy.
April 15, 1989.
Hillsborough.
Every time those two keywords came to mind, the horrifying images kept surging up.
These were not Du An’s own memories.
They were fragments Grandma Mason had cried out in nightmares countless times, images she had described again and again to Du An and Ethan.
Crowded stands, twisted wire fences, countless arms reaching upward…
Despair, suffocation, cries, death.
That day in Sheffield.
Mason had lost her husband, her two sons, and her eleven-year-old grandson.
The entire family had been torn up by the roots.
Mason had escaped because she was caring for her sick youngest son.
Grandma always said she could hear her two sons saying, “Mom, I can’t breathe.”
She could also hear her grandson saying, “Grandma, my bones are being crushed.”
What kind of blow was that for a woman in her fifties?
If she had not still had her youngest son, Mason might have chosen to follow her family in death.
But her youngest son, John, and his wife died unexpectedly in a car accident five years later, leaving behind only Ethan, who was still in swaddling clothes.
As for Du An.
This Asian baby had been abandoned at the church door; he was another grandson Grandma Mason had picked up and brought home.
“I’m going out for a bit—to St. Mary’s Church to pray with Marina and the others. You two—” Her gaze swept over Du An and Ethan, lingering on Du An’s face. “When you’ve finished eating, clear away the dishes, then stay quietly at home. Understood?”
“Yes, Grandma,” Du An answered, putting down his fork.
Ethan lowered his head and muttered, “Got it.”
Only after Grandma Mason had walked into the morning mist of West Derby did Ethan let out a cheer.
His face was full of uncontainable excitement; all his earlier obedience had vanished. “Du An, did you hear that? David called again! That’s Everton! Do you know what that means?! This is a chance to play in the Premier League! The Premier League! Wages of tens of thousands of pounds a week! My God, this is my dream!”
Du An ignored him. After finishing his meal, he carried his plate into the kitchen.
Water rushed from the tap as he scrubbed the dishes hard.
His thoughts churned.
Football!
Football again!
This city, this neighborhood, even the place where they went to school, Bishop John Catholic School—the place where a photo of Steven Gerrard’s Champions League victory hung in the hallway.
Everywhere was steeped in that obsessive fervor for football.
Everton’s blue and Liverpool’s red were like two inescapable rivers, sweeping up everyone in Merseyside.
Except the Mason household.
Grandma Mason would not allow any football-related objects in the house, including newspapers.
That disaster had been devastating to this family.
Ethan and Du An had been raised that way from childhood.
Du An had taken it to heart.
Ethan, however, seemed to have inherited the bloodline of his elders; he was madly obsessed with football.
He was always sneaking off to play.
“Du An,” Ethan followed him to the kitchen doorway and leaned against the frame. “There’s a small match at the community pitch later. They’re one player short. Just for a bit—will you go? I promise I’ll be back before lunch. Grandma won’t know.”
Du An turned off the faucet and shook the water from his hands.
He turned around and looked at his younger brother.
“No.” Du An refused without hesitation. He stepped around Ethan and headed toward his room to change. “Not telling Grandma that you play already shows how deep our brotherly bond is, but that’s as far as it goes. I’m going for a run.”
“Hey, Du An!” Ethan said helplessly. “Of course you can’t tell. You’ve played once too, haven’t you?”
Du An ignored him.
He changed into sweatpants and running shoes, then pushed open the door.
The morning air was cool; drawing it into his lungs made him feel utterly free.
He hated football, and all the pain it had brought.
But he loved running.
Once outside, he began jogging. As his warm-up gradually ended, he grew faster and faster, then settled into a steady pace.
The wind brushed past his ears and lifted his short black hair.
His muscles stretched, his heartbeat quickened, and his blood surged through his veins.
Slowly, the three transparent beads appeared before his eyes again.
Du An was no longer surprised by them.
Among the three transparent beads, the middle one was slowly filled with red, taking up nearly three quarters.
There was a trace of blue in the left bead.
As for the right bead, it was completely transparent.
Du An did not know what purpose these three beads served, but he knew that as long as he kept running, the middle bead’s red would increase bit by bit.
At first, all three beads had been transparent.
The more the middle bead’s red increased, the better his body became—at least, running did not tire him.
And when he fought those bastards at Bishop John Catholic School, they would beg for mercy.
At first he could not win; later, he could beat them one-on-one.
Later still, even while he himself was drenched in blood, he could beat them until they were covered in blood and crying for their mothers.
After that, though no one dared provoke him easily, those boys seemed sick in the head—even when they could not beat him, they still came looking for trouble.
And the whole of Bishop John Catholic School was saying that Du An was a madman.
A freak.
This caused many people to keep their distance from him. A yellow-skinned guy was already hateful enough; if he was also a madman, oh God, the sky would fall.
Some even reported him to the school and demanded that Du An be expelled.
But Grandma Mason and the friends she prayed with smoothed everything over.
But the words “Du An is a madman” had already spread and could not be taken back.
Du An did not care about reputation, nor did he care about being called a madman.
He looked at the beads.
This was what made him different.
Running could increase the middle bead’s red.
But no matter what he did, he could not make the other two beads change color, and he did not know where the trace of blue in the left bead had come from.
Du An was not sure.
Because that trace of blue in the left bead seemed to have appeared after he and Ethan had played football at the community pitch for a while.
Du An kept going over what had happened a week earlier.
What had happened?
It seemed he had only made a few passes; the rest of the time, he had been following people around, defending.
Could it have been because of the passes?
He did not know.
But that sense of control, with the entire pitch laid out in his mind, and that instinctive feeling of finding space and passing routes when he passed, had given him the thrill of breaking a taboo.
But football?
No. He hated football. He should stop Ethan.
He had to stop him.
It was a taboo, Grandma’s nightmare, the source of pain this family could not bear.