Free Jacquot and the Waterman by Martin O'Brien

bound for the orphanage. An anarchist bomb, lobbed from a passing car, while his mother painted a shop-window backdrop, insulated from the blast by nothing more than a sheet of plate glass.
He'd read about the attack in the newspaper, searched for some mention of his mother. But there'd been nothing. Just one of the fifteen bodies recovered from the wreckage. For Jacquot, three months after his father had been lost at sea, those rough wood panels hammered into place over the shattered display windows meant that things would never be the same again.
And that included the Chats de Nuit. At the orphanage in Borel, curfew was ten. The Chats never met before eleven.
Jacquot wasn't the only one thinking of the past.
'And then that try!' continued Doisneau, looking up at the ceiling and smiling gleefully. 'That was the next we heard of you. Oh boy, when we saw you make that run . . . ooufff - from nowhere!' he said, skimming one hand off the other to indicate the speed of it. 'And you were always the slowest, remember?' Doisneau chuckled. 'How many times you nearly got nicked . .. But that day, against Les Rosbifs, you had wings, man, wings on your boots.'
Jacquot remembered it too.
A low steely sky and sheets of rain pelting down. Twickenham. Outside London. A sodden pitch, mud as thick and sticky as fridged honey. Seventy thousand crowd. A merciless game. No quarter given. Brutal.
Jesus, thought Jacquot, he'd die if he tried it now.
And right from the start all the luck going the English way. Every try, every kick going to the English, somehow clawed back by the French until, in the closing minutes, the English captain, stood deep for the purpose, dropped the ball to turf and toe and sent it spinning like a Catherine wheel between the posts.
Two points up. Minutes to go. It was surely over. French supporters groaned like an upset stomach, the band from Dax started packing its instruments and people began making for the exits.
Out on the pitch, as fast as they could, desperate now, the French had kicked from their twenty-two. Horrifyingly, one of the English pack caught it cleanly and ran like an old bull, dragging half the French scrum with him, barging on only to be mauled down a few metres from the French line.
Around the pitch, that moment, you could have heard a cat walk on concrete, it was so silent. As the French coach said afterwards, seventy thousand scrotums squeezed tight as walnuts.
So the referee calls a scrum five metres from the French line. And, unbelievably, gives the put-in to the English. Only a splinter of injury time left to play and La France two points down. In goes the ball, a solid grunting from the pack, and the English hooker gets it, heels it back to the Number Eight who tiptoes round it until the scrum-half sees his chance and reaches for it.
That was the moment it all went wrong. The tiptoeing fazed him, made his hands skitter. He didn't get the grip he needed and fumbled it on the turn, juggling the ball like it was hot.
A second, maybe two, that was all. But it was enough. Jacquot, debut flanker, brought on with twelve minutes to go, took his right shoulder off Souze's arse, slid free of Mageot and Pelerain in the second row and came out fast, like a runner from the blocks, from the blind side. He scooped the ball from the man's cradling arms, shouldered him aside and set the hell off.
What Doisneau meant by 'ooufff - from nowhere!'
But someone had seen him coming, the English wing - Courtney he was called. Except Courtney, like the rest of the English line, was wrong-footed. By the time he spun round, Jacquot, not the fastest runner in the world, was pumping arms and legs and eight metres clear.
The thing Jacquot always remembered was the view. The distant posts, the mud-churned field of play, the rain slanting through the floodlights. So far to go. So empty. The sideline inches from his left boot, the stands a blur of faces, scarves, hats, umbrellas, flags.
All he had to do was run.
And, somewhere