The Away End
The rain at Brunton Park was different from the rain at home. That was the first thing Marcus noticed. In London, rain was an inconvenience — something that made the Tube escalators slippery and turned the walk from the station into a negotiation with an umbrella. Here in Carlisle, two hundred and ninety miles north of anything he recognized, the rain was structural. It was part of the landscape, like the hills. You didn’t avoid it. You stood in it and became wet, and at some point the distinction between you and the weather stopped mattering.
The away end at Brunton Park held twelve hundred when full, which it almost never was. Today it held maybe ninety. Ninety people who had left London at six in the morning to watch Leyton Orient play Carlisle United in League Two on a Tuesday night in November. Marcus was one of them. He was not entirely sure why.
Six weeks ago, his wife had left. Not in the dramatic way — no thrown plates, no screaming on the doorstep. She’d planned it like a project manager. Boxes labeled by room. A shared spreadsheet for dividing the streaming subscriptions. She’d even left the better toaster. That’s how you know it’s over: when someone is kind about the small things because they’re already gone from the big ones.
His therapist had suggested “new activities.” His mate Dave had suggested the pub. Marcus had split the difference and bought a season ticket to Brisbane Road, Leyton Orient’s ground, because it was walkable from his flat and because he remembered his granddad taking him to football as a kid. That had been West Ham. This was League Two. But the essential transaction was the same: you paid money to stand in the cold and feel something that wasn’t about your own life for ninety minutes.
He’d fallen into it quickly. Three home matches and he was hooked — not on Orient, specifically, but on the rawness of lower-league football. The pitches were bad. The first touch was worse. Players earned less in a year than his old colleagues in the City earned in a quarter. But the ball was round and the goals were the same size and when the left winger beat his man and whipped in a cross that the big striker headed just over the bar, the sound that ninety people in an away end made was the same sound that ninety thousand would have made. It just echoed more.
The away trips had started as a dare to himself. Newcastle was first — an excuse to ride the train and eat a stottie. Then Mansfield, Colchester, Doncaster. Towns he’d never visited, wouldn’t have visited, places that existed for him only as names on the fixture list and then suddenly as streets, chip shops, turnstiles, accents. Each one a small education in a country he’d lived in for forty-three years without noticing.
He’d come to Carlisle alone. Dave couldn’t make the Tuesday, and the other lads from the Supporters’ Trust had families, which was a way of saying they had reasons not to spend fourteen hours on trains to watch a mid-table nothing match. Marcus had no reasons. He had a therapist, a rucksack, and a day return.
The boy appeared at his elbow during the warm-up.
He was maybe thirteen — that elastic age where the limbs haven’t agreed on proportions yet. Too-big coat, proper trainers (muddy), Orient scarf that looked older than he was, probably inherited. He had the slightly stunned expression of someone experiencing a thing for the first time.
“First away?” Marcus asked, because you do. The away end is the most democratic institution in English life. Everyone who’s made the journey has earned the right to talk to everyone else.
The boy nodded. “Mum dropped me at the station. She thinks I’m at Jack’s.” Then, quickly, as if he’d said too much: “Jack was supposed to come but he’s got flu.”
“Long way on your own.”
“I’ve done longer.” This was almost certainly untrue, but Marcus let it stand.
“Where are you?”
“Walthamstow.”
“I’m Leytonstone. Neighbors.”
The boy relaxed a fraction. In the geography of away ends, proximity was kinship. They were from the same part of London. They supported the same team. They were standing in the same rain. The social contract was signed.
His name was Aiden. He’d been coming to Brisbane Road since September, which meant he’d started exactly when Marcus had. He knew the players’ names, their positions, their transfer histories. He knew that the right-back had come up through Tottenham’s academy and that the goalkeeper had played six games for Millwall. He delivered this information with the rapid-fire authority of someone who’d memorized it from the internet and was waiting for a chance to use it.
“You reckon Taylor starts?” Aiden asked, peering at the warm-up.
“Should do. He’s been decent.”
“He’s been alright. His positioning’s off. Leaves too much space behind when he pushes up.”
Marcus looked at the boy properly. “You play?”
“Centre mid. Sometimes left wing. My coach says I need to track back more.” He paused. “I track back fine. He just doesn’t see it because he’s always watching the strikers.”
The match kicked off and Carlisle had the better of the first twenty minutes, which was expected. Home advantage in League Two wasn’t about the crowd — it was about not having spent five hours on a train. Orient’s midfield was sluggish. The ball kept coming back.
Aiden commentated. Not loudly — more a running murmur at Marcus’s shoulder, like a cricket scorer marking deliveries. “That’s his weak foot… should’ve played it wide… ref’s miles away, that’s a foul… oh, go on…”
On twenty-three minutes, Orient’s left winger collected the ball on the halfway line, turned, and ran. He beat one man with a drop of the shoulder, then another by simply being faster, and suddenly the landscape of the match changed — that chemical shift when the possibility of a goal becomes the probability of one. The winger reached the box and cut inside. The cross came low and hard. The striker got a touch. The ball deflected off a defender’s knee and looped, slowly, impossibly slowly, over the goalkeeper’s outstretched hand and into the net.
The away end exploded.
Marcus had read about this — the psychology of crowd dynamics, the way emotional responses synchronize in groups. But reading about it was nothing. Ninety people jumped and the sound was enormous, bigger than ninety people should be able to make, and Marcus was hugging Aiden and Aiden was hugging him back, and for three seconds nothing in the world mattered except that the ball had crossed the line.
When they separated, Aiden was grinning. The grin of someone who has discovered something fundamental about being alive.
“That’s why, isn’t it,” the boy said. It wasn’t a question.
“That’s why,” Marcus agreed.
Half-time came and they queued for tea. Brunton Park’s catering operated on the principle that hot liquid was hot liquid and distinctions beyond that were pretension. Marcus bought two cups and didn’t ask Aiden if he wanted one because you don’t ask — you just hand it over and the other person takes it and that’s the transaction.
“Your granddad Orient?” Marcus asked.
Aiden shook his head. “No one. Mum’s from Sheffield but she doesn’t follow it. Dad’s not—” He stopped. “I just picked them. Looked up who was local and went.”
“You picked well.”
“Could’ve been Dagenham.”
“You picked very well.”
The boy laughed. It was a good laugh — unselfconscious, sudden. The laugh of someone who hadn’t yet learned to filter himself in front of adults.
“My granddad used to take me to West Ham,” Marcus offered. “Upton Park, before they moved. He’d put me on his shoulders for corners.”
“Do you still go?”
“He died when I was fifteen. I stopped going after that. Only started again this season.”
“Why?”
The honest answer was: because my wife left and my therapist said I needed activities and the football happened to be the thing that stuck. But you don’t say that to a thirteen-year-old.
“Sometimes you need to come back to things,” Marcus said. “You forget why they mattered and then something reminds you.”
The second half was dire. Carlisle equalized on fifty-five minutes from a corner that the Orient defense watched like tourists. Then the game settled into the kind of attritional midfield battle that makes pundits talk about “game management” and fans talk about their feet hurting.
Aiden’s commentary became more urgent. “Push UP… that’s the problem, the midfield line’s too deep, they can’t get the ball to the forward… come ON, Taylor, that’s exactly what I mean about positioning…”
On seventy-eight minutes, Taylor — the right-back whose positioning Aiden had criticized — intercepted a Carlisle pass on the halfway line, looked up, and played a ball over the top that should not have worked. It was too far, hit too hard, aimed at a space where no Orient player was standing. But the striker had started his run a second before the pass was struck, and the ball and the player converged on the same point of grass at the same moment, and suddenly it was one-on-one with the goalkeeper.
The away end held its breath. Ninety people collectively stopped existing as individuals and became a single organism waiting for the same thing.
The striker placed it. Bottom corner. Clinical.
The noise was different from the first goal. The first had been surprise — the joy of the unexpected. This was release. The away end didn’t jump; it surged forward, bodies pressing against the low barrier, and Marcus had to put his arm across Aiden’s chest to keep the boy from tipping over the rail.
“2-1! 2-bloody-1!” Aiden was shouting, not at Marcus, not at anyone, just into the Carlisle night.
The last twelve minutes were agony in the way that only protecting a lead in an away match can be. Every Carlisle throw-in was a threat. Every cleared corner was a small victory. Aiden stopped talking entirely, his fingers wrapped around the railing, watching with the absolute focus of someone who has invested everything in an outcome they cannot control.
Four minutes of stoppage time. Carlisle lumped the ball forward. The Orient goalkeeper caught it — caught it, the most beautiful mundane act in football — and held on, and the whistle blew.
The away end sang. They sang the songs that ninety people sing when two hundred and ninety miles from home, which are mostly the same three songs in different orders but it doesn’t matter. What matters is the singing.
Walking out, Aiden was vibrating. Not metaphorically — actually vibrating, the way children do when they have more feeling than their body can process.
“When’s the next away?” he asked.
“Gillingham. Saturday week.”
“I can do that. That’s Kent, yeah? Kent’s easy.”
“Your mum going to know this time?”
The boy considered this. “Maybe. She’ll say no if I ask permission. She’ll be annoyed but not angry if I just go.” He had the strategic mind of someone used to navigating a single parent’s boundaries.
“Give her my number,” Marcus said, and then immediately thought about how that sounded, a forty-three-year-old man offering his number to a thirteen-year-old boy. But the away end was different. The away end was the place where the normal rules compressed into simpler ones: we’re here, we’re together, we look after our own. “For the trains,” he added. “In case she wants to know there’s an adult.”
Aiden typed the number into his phone without ceremony.
They walked to the station in the rain, which hadn’t stopped and showed no signs of stopping. The platform was almost empty — the next train south wasn’t for forty minutes. They sat on a metal bench that was wet on every surface.
“Marcus?”
“Yeah.”
“Does it always feel like that?”
“The football?”
“All of it. The train, and the ground, and not knowing if you’ll win, and then — ” He gestured, a broad sweep that seemed to encompass the goal, the noise, the rain, the night, Carlisle, everything.
Marcus thought about this. He thought about his granddad hoisting him onto his shoulders at Upton Park. He thought about Sarah packing her boxes with the calm efficiency of someone who’d already moved out in her mind weeks ago. He thought about the therapist’s office with its neutral paintings and the word “activities” deployed like it was a medical intervention.
“No,” he said. “But the times it does are the ones you remember.”
The train came. They found seats in an empty carriage that smelled of damp upholstery and old crisps. Aiden fell asleep before Penrith, his head against the window, Orient scarf bunched under his chin like a pillow.
Marcus watched the dark country slide past the window — shapes of hills, the occasional lit farmhouse, the reflections of the carriage superimposed on the night like a ghost train running alongside. He felt something he hadn’t felt in six weeks, or maybe six months, or maybe longer than that.
Not happiness, exactly. Something more structural. The feeling that the architecture of a life includes other people, and that the absence of one person doesn’t demolish the building. It just means there’s a room you don’t go into for a while.
The boy slept. The train moved south. The rain continued, indifferent to all of it.
At Euston, Aiden woke with the confused blinking of someone reassembling their surroundings. “We’re back?”
“We’re back.”
They stood on the concourse under the departure board, two people about to diverge to different Tube lines and different postcodes.
“Gillingham, then,” Aiden said.
“Gillingham,” Marcus confirmed.
The boy turned to go, then stopped. “Thanks for the tea.”
“Anytime.”
He watched Aiden walk toward the Victoria line entrance, hands in his pockets, Orient scarf trailing. The boy didn’t look back. He didn’t need to. He’d be at Gillingham. Marcus knew this the way you know certain things about people — not from what they say but from the way they stand in the rain for ninety minutes and call it good.
Marcus took the Central line home. His flat was dark and quiet and still held the ghost geometry of furniture that wasn’t there anymore — the bookshelf that had been hers, the empty rectangle on the wall where the print had hung. He put the kettle on. He checked the League Two table on his phone. Orient had moved up one place, to fourteenth.
He sent a text to Dave: 2-1 away win. You missed a belter.
Dave replied immediately: Course I did. Gillingham?
Obviously.
He drank his tea and went to bed. Outside, London rain — the thin, administrative kind — tapped against the window. He’d set his alarm for the morning. He’d go to work. He’d come home. And on Saturday week, he’d get on another train, and stand in another away end, and feel the thing that Aiden had felt for the first time and that he was feeling again after years of forgetting it was there.
The ball was round. The goals were the same size. And sometimes that was enough.