Chapter Text
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i. fleet foxes - blue ridge mountains
The whistle falls, and Atlanta splits in two.
On one side of the world, a blue-and-white tidal wave : bodies erupting off the Argentine bench like a fistful of mad stars, Messi swallowed by a howling pack somewhere near the centre circle. On the other, English dismay. The language of mute things. A thunder-silence of thirty thousand people, a thing that doesn't exist down here on earth, so call it supernatural, this silence that has weight to it, a texture, something at once damp and immaculate, summer snow drifting down from the terraces and settling on the shoulders of the men in white.
In the middle of this end-of-the-world tableau, Jude stands.
It's all he can get from his body, really, and even that has to be negotiated inch by inch. His brothers-in-arms have fallen around him, Anderson face down, Konsa sitting back on his heels, Pickford motionless in his six-yard box with the look of a man who held back the sea for an eternity, only for the sea to find a way around him. But Jude faces the stands, noble and broken and panting, shirt riding up over a gleaming torso, chin stubbornly high, because something in him refuses to hand the cameras the image of a number ten on his knees.
The tears, though, don't ask permission.
They rise all at once, hot, spill over and drip onto the crest, and the Englishman lets them. He no longer has the strength to hold two fronts at the same time. The grass is strewn with collapsed boys and Jude gets every one of them and will not join them, because millions of people spent an hour and a half dreaming through him, far beyond the time zones. Staying upright is all he can do now. That much he swore to himself somewhere between Fernández's goal and Martínez's, in that end-of-match fog where you negotiate tiny, capital things with yourself : you can cry, you can bleed on the inside, but you do not buckle.
So it simply flows. Two warm tracks down his cheeks that he doesn't wipe away, no, understand him, wiping them would be admitting the tears exist, and it's still too soon for that.
His skin glitters under the floodlights, amber and chocolate bathed in that murderous beam. The media will find it splendid tomorrow. They'll freeze the frames, possibly write pieces on the beautiful face of English grief. Let them write.
Beneath the shirt, his left shoulder is flaring. The one the surgeons have already been into, where roses of sutures cross and overlap, the place he sometimes touches without thinking, and tonight it pulses dully under the fabric, ever since Romero wrapped it up at the fifty-first, Molina having hung off it twice, Otamendi having climbed all over it at every corner. Nineteen fouls in the first half alone, and now that the adrenaline is ebbing the pain surfaces the way drowned bodies surface, a storm splitting open a badly stitched seam, a debt capriciously deferred for...
For what, exactly? An ending like this?
Tomorrow the physio will pull a face, but how little Jude cares is vertiginious. The rest hurts far more. The other pain has nothing of the flesh about it.
Because there is this immense, shapeless thing crushing his sternum, this sense of having failed, not merely lost, failed, seventy million people first and then all the others. No hundred minutes of fatigue weighs a gram next to the sentence settling into his gut now, where it will float for years.
It's coming home.
Thirty years his country has been singing a joke so as not to weep. Whole generations promising the great return, and this year Jude had believed it for real. Believed it so hard that half the planet had learned his face by heart, specially for the occasion. France going out to Spain the night before had tipped entire continents in behind England, every orphan of the quarters and the semis the world had to offer, rallied under a single flag. He had seen Mexican colors blazing in the crowd, French shirts, scarves from ten different countries, crosses of St George painted on cheeks that had nothing English about them. And the internet had found its angel : him. The one who would knock out Argentina, avenge everybody, carry the cup back to Europe. Kids on every continent electing him their knight and holding out the sword, and Jude loved the altitude, that's the truth of it. He loved it. He loved it the way you love the sun when your wings are brand new, six goals in the tournament, three player-of-the-match awards, he was flying, truly flying.
But all anyone remembers of Icarus is the fall, and this one tastes of black cherry. Sweet to the point of sickness, and then. And then the stone.
They were leading. That's the strangest part. One-nil, the whole of their country existing in weightlessness, until ten minutes were enough to turn the dream inside out. Now Jude replays everything through drunken short films, layered one over another, in jolts and out of order. Gordon's goal. The idiotic, sublime certainty of being almost there, at last. And then the instruction arriving from the bench in the minutes that followed. Tuchel, both arms coming down, palms to the ground, we drop off, keep it and hold. Low block.
A low block against a bloodthirsty Argentina. Against machines who press the way animals bite and who ask for nothing more, hand them the ball and half a pitch, and Jude had screamed from midfield, thrown great sweeping gestures at the bench, shouted himself hoarse for them to push up ten metres, to go and get the second, because he felt it in his bones, you do not gift thirty-five minutes of possession to people who have Lionel Messi, you do not extend a hand to a monster like that and pray it tires.
The instruction was the instruction. So they dropped, and the Albiceleste became a tide that pulls back only to come in harder. Pickford multiplying miracles like a man bailing out a boat with his bare hands, and Jude in the middle of it all, churning. That is the exact word. Churning. Chasing blue ghosts, touching three balls in a quarter of an hour, getting roughed up on every run, grabbed, pulled, shoved, Argentine hands all over him like brambles, and feeling the match slide out of reach, breath by breath, without the right to go and fetch it back.
And it kills him. He played a World Cup semi-final as a luxury spectator, locked inside his own half, and that feeling, that punishment of running on the spot, that helplessness in boots, wounds him deeper than any tackle.
It's not coming home.
Jude and those four words and the entire nation they will wake tomorrow morning. The very taste of the beaten, bruised by their hopes, purplish and thick and crimson, a taste of nothingness and glory swallowed the wrong way.
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Hands find him, now.
Harry arrives first. A hundred and twenty-one caps, a wet glitter in his eyes, and, at nearly thirty-three, in all likelihood his last World Cup. He is the one doing the consoling, and it feels like the world has stopped turning right.
Kane takes him against his chest without a word, and Jude returns the embrace, arms around the back of his most faithful ally, palms flat, and that is exactly where he feels it, the sensation he will never forget : holding someone hurts. Physically, viscerally. Every embrace prises his ribcage apart the way fingers prise open a scar, the other man's sorrow pours into his own and the two collide, and Jude wants to comfort, it's stronger than he is, it's his nature, he's always been the one who notices the people nobody looks at and lays his jacket over the backs of the forgotten, but.
But.
Surrendering to his people is also what saves him a little, through all the successive layers of disappointment.
Rice rubs his head, voiceless. Burn engulfs him for a second in a first-born hug, a rampart of gentleness built in the middle of a war. Gordon, golden hair drenched in sweat, joins them heartbroken, and Jude takes his head in both hands and gives him the words he cannot give himself, that his goal had them all dreaming, that none of this, absolutely none of this is on him, and Anthony nods without believing it. Jude doesn't believe in anything either, they just lie to each other with tenderness the way one must among the ruins.
Spence next, who fought like a lion through all the tackles. Toney. Little O'Reilly, who can no longer catch his breath.
They try, every one of them, and he loves these guys with a love born from battle, Lord, he does, he really does. But nothing lands, there is a place in him tonight where no one gets in. You can console and be inconsolable, both fit inside the same body, Jude Bellingham is learning it tonight.
It's a story of being the lighthouse for others while the night swallows you whole, when you have nothing left and everything at once.
He eventually pulls away.
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Jude drifts toward the east stand, alone. His studs catch on grass littered with torn-up blades, and he wears his socks with holes cut into the backs of the calves to let his overfull legs breathe, a detail the cameras adore and which tonight isn't making anyone laugh.
In front of the red-and-white end he stops and tips his head back, breathes through his mouth, long and counted, an old trick of his mum's, you count until it comes back down, sweetheart. So he counts.
He comes down. Little by little, fists on his hips, spitting off into the grass further along because his saliva has gone thick and pasty in his mouth, and the victorious chant goes on saturating the closed arena, but he almost manages to turn it into background noise, almost, he is almost there.
Three metres away, the Argentine substitutes are celebrating with their starters. Three metres away, joy is happening.
Pockets of cerulean happiness, arm in arm. They sing their song, the one about Diego and Lionel, and Jude watches without seeing them, anaesthetised. He doesn't hold it against them. They won, it's their right, the delight of some has grown out of the heartbreak of others for as long as this sport has existed, and he would do the same, he sang his lungs out against Norway while someone he holds dear congratulated him instead of sulking in a corner. Victory almost always makes you deaf to the defeated, and perhaps that is one of nature's rare mercies.
There is a moment when one of his old Madrid teammates, an Argentine himself, makes a detour toward Jude before joining his own. A handshake from him, buen partido máquina, gracias tío, then a brotherly pat left on his back before he makes his way toward the Latin revelry. Jude receives the gesture with the same sobriety he has shown through everything else, without letting his pride find fault in it.
But that's when the kid comes running.
Small frame, a shock of orange hair vividly insolent beneath the stadium lights. Barco, the one they call Colo for his ginger locks, a benchwarmer who hasn't played a single minute and who spent the whole match taunting the English players from the sideline at every goal. Now here he comes, racing shamelessly to join the party, and as he draws level with Jude, without even slowing, in a throwaway comment meant to make his mates laugh, he lets something slip in his mother tongue.
Half a sentence. Slid under, not shouted. The kind of provocation you hiss when you're certain the other man won't understand.
Except Jude understands.
Three years he's been in Madrid. Three years of dressing rooms, streets, press conferences in Castilian. Jude understands Spanish and all its shadings, the sun-cured slang, the affectionate diminutives and the matchday insults, and that sentence, that venomous little sentence that would've grazed past him on an ordinary night, is not about football. The word in the middle of it is a zoo word. He has watched Vini take it full in the face on entire Sundays, and he swore, every single time, hand on his teammate's shoulder, that if anyone ever served it to him, face to face, at ear height...
The world becomes one long ringing.
It's physical. A tinnitus of pure anger, high-pitched, climbing up from the neck and filling the skull, and the stadium disappears and the iridescent lights go out and the sixty thousand people are erased, until even the pain in his shoulder is blotted out. All that remains is a red, feverish tunnel, and Jude, the other Jude, the one who hates losing with an intensity that sometimes worries the people who love him, crosses it in three strides.
His hand goes by itself.
A furious big-brother slap to the back of the red head, the gesture you save for contemptuous little brats of his sort. Barco stumbles a step, spins round in one piece, eyes round, mouth already full of protest, qué te pasa, qué te pasa, and he shoves Jude with both hands in the chest, the reflex of a small-time rascal caught in the act.
What follows exists in fragments, because adrenaline cuts time in spectacular fashion. The little bastard sputters something, half defiance half panic, and takes a step back, which is a serious mistake, because Jude takes two forward. Jude, with the jet-black eyes. Jude the predator, chin low and shoulders rolling, and he keeps coming, the slow heavy walk of bad intentions, index finger snapping at the air, fire burning all the way down in his molars, say it again, go on, dímelo a la cara now that I understand, and there's something in his Madrid-inflected voice that makes three Argentines drop their celebration at once. Paz is first, his old Real teammate, trying to separate them calmly, going as far as scolding the player on his own side, because he knows. He knows Barco has a big mouth and needs to shut it. But Jude wants none of it, so the circle detonates in a dirty-blue blast. Nico Paz across it all, then arms cutting in, tension rising, someone shouting pará, pará, pará to try to cool it down. Barco has flirted too long with the limits, and now he takes refuge behind Otamendi, sprung from nowhere to shove Jude back hard, full in the chest, a proper veteran's battering ram, and Jude reels backward and comes straight back in, a fighting fish, he wants through, he wants to cut through all that blue to the redhead hiding behind his elders. Eres un puto, me oyes, un puto, Jude snarls, and he's shouting things now, lashing out in both tongues, I know what you said, sé lo que dijiste, don't you fucking hide.
The white of the Three Lions flares up in its turn. Burn moving two Argentines aside with a single arm, Rogers slipping into the scrum, and their keeper Pickford, looming over the lot of them. For ten seconds it's a knot of bodies swaying in front of the stand, insults crossing in two languages, the Atlanta turf turned into a playground on the edge of disaster. Jude keeps straining against the hands of his brothers holding him back like a dog against its leash, heart at a hundred miles an hour, strangled by the conviction that the cameras are rolling and that tomorrow he will be the guilty one. The sore loser.
He feels someone take his arm. Someone steering him away. Quansah, maybe, he doesn't know. His studs plough the turf as he half resists, and there's a voice against his ear, walk, Jude, walk with me, it's nothing, he's worth nothing, it's over, and they walk him across the pitch the way you evacuate an injured man who's still on his feet.
But Jude doesn't want it to be over. That's the whole problem. That has been precisely the issue since the final whistle.
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And the silence comes back inside him, with a shudder. It's almost worse.
The disorienting thing about anger is what it leaves behind when it goes : it uncovers the grief underneath, superbly calm, and the grief is harder to swallow than before because it has grown richer along the way. His body aches everywhere. His lower lip, that full lip he's been biting through the entire second half, tastes of iron and dying summer. The sweat, beads of rain fallen on the warm country of his skin, has almost finished cooling, and Jude is nearly shivering, there, under a closed roof, in Georgia, on a languid, nightmarish July evening.
He thinks of something silly. Of a Viking who, a week ago, under that soft twilight glow, told him go and take your final, you absolute prince. In that moment Jude had burst out laughing with his whole soul, torn between euphoria and the haunted bitterness of having beaten his great, indelible Erling.
Now he does that thing where he smiles to himself, without it ever reaching his eyes.
He lowers his head. The grass shines under the sun, dusted with confetti that is not for them. There is no sun, though, so Jude tells himself it must be the stars, that tangle of sparks blinding him and devouring his pupils. But there are no stars either, and even less confetti on this side of the pitch.
Again. Here we go again.
Jude has no sad song left to make better. That's what he believes, anyway, head down, lonely on his corner of the earth.
But then. But then, the sea.
The sea before him clears its throat. It starts slow, the way true things are born and take root and come to mean something. A few hundred voices in the red-and-white block, rising up like fireflies flickering in the darkness, the ones who refused to leave, hoarse and off-key and utterly unconquered. And it takes Jude a moment to trust his own ears. The second time tonight. Except. Except these words couldn't be further from Barco's. This time it's a palm, silvered and huge, laid over the peninsula of Jude's hurts, shielding a sunburn an entire stand has taken upon itself to heal.
Hey Jude...
He lifts his head.
Thousands of people who crossed an ocean to watch them fall are singing his name into the Spanish-speaking evening. It isn't a coronation this time, but the visible arm of our galaxy, bent low, a hand laid on the back of the neck, don't make it bad, take a sad song and make it better, and the tears rise again, and he gets it now, it was tears all along, never stars nor confetti, and yet stars are falling right behind his eyes as he gazes up at all those faces, watercolor-soft, holding him from a distance. And he laughs. Jude laughs. One shaky, ridiculous, real laugh, right there in the middle of the storm.
So many of them didn't come just for the win, he realises then. They came—they came for us.
Don't worry. Trophies don't get their names sung to them like a lullaby before sleep. Sons do.
Jude wipes his face, this time. Once, properly, with the flat of his big hand, because the crying can finally be admitted. Then he raises one fist toward them, and the mourning lions roar back, and he is twenty-three years old, and four years is nothing, four years is a Tuesday, and the silence around a name, as it turns out, only lasts until somebody loves you enough to break it.