Page 38 of Linebacker
“Are we really going to do this?” he asks with a smirk on his face, patting the seat beside him. “Are you sure you don’t want to hop on up here with me so I can finger your pussy?”
“You promised, Marshall,” I reprimand, making sure I don’t use the name Mars, as it’s less official, and at this moment, I need to keep this professional. Although my body sure as hell isn’t getting with the program. Keeping my voice stern, I continue. “You need to take me seriously; we can’t avoid this any longer.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know,” he sighs out, rubbing his hands nervously over the fabric of his sweatpants. “I’m just not sure what it is that you want to know. You know me already, so…”
“Sure, I know a little about you when we were at the same school together. I have an idea of how your life progressed from then until now, but if you really think about it, I don’t know very much about you at all.”
“So, ask me a question,” he throws up his hands in defeat. “Anything at all?”
“Fair enough. Let’s start then,” I hesitate for a minute, before shooting the first question at him that will take him back to the very beginning, and hopefully giving me a true understanding of his life. “So, were you born in Yorkshire?”
* * *
Mars blows me away, because now I have him talking, he opens up quite freely about his childhood. How, up until he’d won his scholarship to move to the States, he’d never been out of Yorkshire. Which I immediately thought was strange because, as far as I can remember, Mars’ family wasn’t short of money, he always had use of a banging car and the most up-to-date, costly sports gear.
“Didn’t you ever go on trips, holidays abroad with your parents?”
With the mention of his parents his demeanour changes instantly. There’s a tightness in his jaw, furrowed brows, and a flushness to his skin. A storm rages in his eyes with an intensity that I’ve not seen before. Straightening up from what had been a relaxed pose on the couch, he sits forward, forearms resting on his thighs, fist clenched hard, knuckles white, as if imagining someone’s head is placed in his palm. His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat, telling me that he’s doing all he can to swallow down his emotions.
“My parents were a joke,” he hisses out between clenched teeth. “They didn’t have the ability to look after a goldfish, never mind a kid. You know who looked after me until I was thirteen?” He asks, poignantly. “A constant stream of nannies and au pairs, and even they left eventually.” No longer seated, Mars is up on his feet, pacing the floor behind the couch. “My parents didn’t give a toss about me. They thought their parental responsibility was leaving a bunch of cash on the kitchen counter before taking off again for another business trip.”
Wow. Oh Wow. Now we’re getting somewhere. Sure, I picked up on the fact that back when we were at school, Mars always seemed to be different to the other football lads he hung around with. Although part of the team, he had an air of independence about him. And come to think of it, when we’d spent that night in the hotel together, he had mentioned his parents were out of town and his older siblings were living in a different country.
“What you’re saying is that your parents weren’t around much during your childhood due to their work?”
“Work, if you call spending a couple of hours in meetings, then spending the rest of the week living the high-life in places like Monaco, Vegas or on some luxury yacht in the Bahamas.”
“Didn’t they ever take you with them?” I question, because surely, they must have spent some time with him. Was this just a key latch kids’ impression of what their childhood was like, or was this his reality?
“Jesus, Hope. They’d turn up out of nowhere, giving it the big, ‘Our boy, we’ve missed you so much’ playing the role they thought they needed to in front of the hired help. I’d ask, no beg for them to take me with them the next time. But every time they had a reason, an excuse to why they couldn’t. Every single one feeble. So, you see, the next time never came.” He drops back down on the couch, dropping his head into his hands, his shoulders sagged, and waves of mental exhaustion flow from him.
It’s unbelievable. While my childhood was stifled with an overly obsessive father, Mars was given next to no parental attention, and zero sense of love or stability.
I want to shout and scream out how utter pillocks his parents were, hold him tight and tell him how he was deserving of so much more, but instead I keep my anger under wraps. For now, anyway.
“So, I know this question might seems stupid to you, but can you describe what your day-to-day life was like back then.”
Mars, goes on to explain how it was a revolving door of nannies, and au pairs coming and going. It was their job to chauffeur him to and from school, and make sure he was clean, fed and got enough sleep on a night. Any of them he did strike up a bond with and became close to, it wasn’t long before they left too. When he got to fifteen, the au pairs were swapped for house keepers, who would make sure that everything in the house was in order but would leave by the end of the working day, leaving Mars alone by himself in the huge house.
“Football’s what got me though. That and the guys. Yes, I know you think Bell and the guys were total dickheads. What was it you called us? FUB’s,” he laughs, but it’s far from a happy one. “Fucking uneducated ballbags,” I clarify with an embarrassed grimace.
Shaking his head, he becomes all serious again. “But they stuck by me. The guys, Coach Blackmore and football were the only constant in my life, and exactly what I needed.”
I had no clue. I had no clue what had been going on in his life.
When he’d opened up to me in the hotel, I’d seen the real Vance Marshall. I’d seen a young man who, despite hiding behind a stoic expression and unexpressive actions, was kind, gentle, funny and caring. A man who cared for me, who had shown his feelings to me openly.
And what did I do?
I left him.
A man who struggled with abandonment issues and was deprived of love.
I drop his file on the table in front of me and get to my feet. In a matter of seconds, I’m sat on the couch beside him.
“Mars,” I whisper. “I had…”
“Hope,” Coach Scully’s voice boomed from the doorway as it flew open. As soon as he saw us both sitting on the couch, he halted in his tracks. “Oh, shit, I didn’t know you were in here, Marshall.”
