Free Metroland by Julian Barnes

plugging away, School.’
    ‘Hard and low, man, hard and low.’
    ‘Drive, School, drive. On, on, on. Feet, feet, feet. Oh, tough luck, School. Now’s your chance to get one back.’
    ‘Only thirty points, School. Wind in your backs second half!’
    ‘Fall, fall. Die with it!’
    This last was the meanest cry available. Whenever the ball went loose, and a frail, tentative inside centre was pretending to wait for it to stop bouncing, but was really keeping a wary eye on the advancing posse of enemy forwards, we would let rip. If the man didn’t fall on the ball, he was manifestly a coward. If he picked it up and booted for touch before the enemy scragged him, he was still manifestly a coward. If he fell on it, the chances were that the primitive techniques of rucking which obtained in schools rugby would leave him quite satisfactorily maimed. Best of all was to get him to fall unnecessarily early, watch him lie there until fully trampled, and then have the ref award a penalty for failing to release the ball on the ground.
    As the match wore on, as the following wind made all School’s passes drift forward, the enemy lazily doubled their lead. Toni and I reflected on the pity that School didn’t have anyone of the calibre of Camus or Henri de in their pack. Gradually, we noticed that our men were beginning to play to the other touchline. Kicks, even from our side of the pitch, were invariably directed to the more difficult touch; passing movements went that way too. Once, when a rare piece of blind-side action took place close to where we stood, the School scrum half (Fisher, N. J. – not a person of cultivation) chose to ignore an overlap and booted the ball at Toni and me from a few feet away; it passed between us at ruination-level and carried on for thirty yards or so. Toni and I somehow didn’t offer to run and collect it; instead we stood there, five yards from the steaming line-out, offering vigorous and well-thought-out advice.
    ‘Run it, School.’
    ‘No point kicking at this stage.’
    ‘Time to really put on the pressure.’
    ‘Final rally. Full eighty minutes, School.’
    ‘Jump!’
    ‘Bad luck, School. Now hard in there, hard .’
    ‘Now make this yours .’
    ‘Hard and low, hard and low.’
    ‘Fall, fall, fall. Die with it.’
    Wisely, we thought we’d probably seen the best of the match when there were still five minutes to go; with a final ‘On, on, School’, we scrammed. It would be two days before we saw any of that lot again.
    As we bicycled home, the evening thickened enthusiastically; bits of fog began to loiter hopefully by the laurel hedges. Along the Rickmansworth Road, every third street-lamp flickered and flashed into life. Passing through each patch of orange light, we avoided looking at each other; it was bad enough seeing your own brown fingers on the handlebars.
    ‘Do you think,’ Toni mused, ‘we could call that an é;pat?’
    ‘Well, they were certainly all dead bourgeois, that’s for sure. Do you think they knew we were fugging around with them, though?’
    ‘I think they might have done.’
    ‘Yeah, me too.’ I was always keen to claim as many épats as possible. Toni, on the other hand, tended to be a bit pernickety.
    ‘But I think it might be presuming a bit much to think that they’ll reflect for very long on what we were trying to teach them about the games ethic.’
    ‘Isn’t it still an épat even if they don’t hoist it in?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Nor do I.’
    We cycled on; now, two in every three lamps were casting their unreal light.
    ‘What will become of them all?’
    ‘Poor fuggers. Bank managers, I suppose.’
    ‘They can’t all become bank managers.’
    ‘I don’t know about that. There’s nothing to say they can’t.’
    ‘No; true.’ Toni became quite excited. ‘Hey, what about that? What about if the whole school , apart from us, became bank managers. Wouldn’t that be great?’
    It would be terrific. It would be