A WAG Abroad

‘I’m coming to the club too, I’m coming too,’ I squeal.

Dean spins round, alarm springing from every pore. ‘Don’t you want to spend the day doing your nails or shopping or something?’ he says, spraying bits of bread around as he speaks. I duck, dodge and dive to avoid them. If that carbohydrate so much as touches my skin, I’ll be three stone heavier tomorrow.

‘I can do all that later,’ I tell Dean. ‘Right now I’d rather be with you and Pask.’

I know that if I go I’ll get to see Jamie again, and further develop our relationship, and I’ll also be able to make a better case for the club employing him which will keep him on my radar. Dean’s rubbish at doing things like that. He’s too understated about things. This needs an approach that is unsullied by subtlety. In short, it needs the Tracie touch.

2 p.m.

We’re here. This is it – LA City Raiders. It’s an impressive-looking, ultra-modern, shiny grey building, with a big sign outside and a long track leading up to the offices at the front. The pitch looks perfect, according to Dean and Pask.

‘Come on, love,’ I say. ‘Let’s go and find a bar for a quick one before we meet up with the geezer in charge.’

‘Yeah,’ says Deany, rubbing his hands together at the thought. His earrings shine brightly in the sun. Bless ’im. We’re like peas in a pod, we two are. We just love doing the same things. Not so my daughter.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Don’t get drunk. Please. For once, let’s not go straight to the bar. Please can we just go in there and introduce ourselves to the chairman and say hi to people?’

‘I guess,’ says Dean as we arrive in the club’s entrance hall, but by the look on his face he thinks it’s as weird an idea as I do. ‘I can’t even remember the guy’s name, can you?’

‘I know his wife’s name is Sian Doyle. The kids are called Maia, Morgan and Hana. How about that for a memory?’

‘Blimey,’ says Dean. ‘Is that the first time you’ve remembered anything useful?’

‘No,’ I say defensively, but he might be right. Memory for anything but shoes and clothing is not my strong point. We walk up to the reception desk.

‘Chuck,’ says Dean all of a sudden.

‘Go to the loos quickly then,’ I say. ‘You don’t want to go puking all over reception on your first day in the club.’

‘No, the chairman’s name is Chuck,’ says Dean.

‘Oh, I see.’

We smile at the pretty, wide-eyed receptionist and introduce ourselves.

‘Welcome,’ she says with a sugary smile and a flash of her unfeasibly large blue eyes. ‘We’re glad you’re here. Would you like to go up to the main clubroom? Follow the signs. I’ll tell Chuck you’re here.’

I can’t believe how squeaky clean it all is. It’s like the club has just been built, as if the world of football is just arriving in this place, and my Dean will be there at the start of it. He’ll be there to lead these men as they battle to make it in this special sport that produces such joy, passion and fabulously dressed women. The stadium apparently seats 25,000 people which isn’t exactly Wembley but, as Dean says, ‘It’s more than big enough.’ They usually only get around 6,000 watching.

‘Oh my, oh my,’ Paskia-Rose keeps saying as she peers out of the window. ‘I think I’m going to completely die of excitement. Just look at those pitches down there, Mum. Imagine! Me! Out! There!’

‘Mmmm, lovely,’ I hear myself saying, because it’s not lovely, is it? Pask is twelve, for God’s sake. She’s nearly a teenager. How many twelve-year-old girls do you know who think they’re going to die of excitement at the sight of bloody grass?

‘Hello there,’ says a man with a loud voice and an even louder shirt. He is swaggering towards us sporting a pair of horrible, slightly too tight, old-fashioned tennis shorts with a moss-green shirt covered in large red flowers on top. The shirt hangs loosely over the shorts, almost covering them. He’s wearing naff aviator sunglasses and has on lace-up black shoes and black ankle socks that would be better paired with a nylon suit, by a man going to work in the regional branch of an estate agent. He’s striding through the clubhouse towards us.

‘You guys!’ he exclaims, going for a high five, then realizing that Dean is standing there with his hand out, so he jumps back a little, makes a ridiculous face, then eventually he puts his own hand out.

‘Nice to meet you. I’m Dean Martin,’ says my husband, but instead of actually shaking hands Chuck pulls it away at the last minute, pokes his tongue out, puts his thumb on his nose and waggles his fingers like a ten year old.

‘Give us a song!’ he says. ‘Come on, Dean Martin, you big crooner you. Give us one of the old ones.’

There’s a small silence before the man collapses with mirth at his own joke. ‘Only joking. Sorry, I’m a bit mad, I am. A bit crazy. You’ll get used to me. I’m Chuck.’

Oh Lord.

Dean and Chuck eventually shake hands and slap each others backs in a manly fashion, with Chuck making several hilarious jokes about Dean’s name. ‘Not brought the Rat Pack with you then? Ha ha ha … sorry – I did warn you. I’m the funny guy in this place. Now then, what have we here?’ he says, looking me up and down, and adopting a style of eyebrow-raising rarely seen outside a Carry On film or an episode of Benny Hill. ‘Tracie, Tracie. As fresh and lovely as a summer rose. What is someone as gorgeous and, may I say, sexy as you doing with this rascal Dean, then?’

‘Oh, I’m just using him for sex,’ I say, and I’m pleased to say that it floors Chuck completely.

He looks from my stunning orange face to Dean’s shocking red face, and then over at my daughter’s pale freckly one.

‘Well, hello there,’ he says, and off go the eyebrows again.

‘I’m Paskia-Rose. It’s nice to meet you,’ she says firmly, shaking his hand with a vigour that he’s clearly not used to. He clutches his hand to his chest in mock pain, then starts laughing again, slapping his thigh.

‘Fooled ya!’ he says, pointing at Pask.

Oh God. How much time will we have to spend in this man’s company? He’s driving me nuts already. All three of us are standing there, looking from one to the other. I know that Dean, Pask and I are all thinking ‘What a complete knob.’ I have no idea what he’s thinking, though, except that he’s staring unashamedly at my baps. I feel as if I ought to say something to break the tension seeping out of the silence.

‘I’ve got a whole dressing area for my clothes, you know. Not a wardrobe, but this whole area …’

‘Maybe you could show us round,’ interrupts Dean, cutting me off in my prime. Dean does that a lot, as you’ll see.

‘OK,’ says a slightly bewildered-looking Chuck. ‘Let’s all head on outside and have a look at the pitches. Dean, perhaps you could sing as we go. Ha ha ha! I did warn you. I did, didn’t I?’

OK, so I have three immediate problems to deal with – first, Chuck’s unbearable. Second – no sign of Jamie anywhere. Third problem … outside … pitches? How the hell am I supposed to walk across grassy pitches in these clothes? I’m wearing a lime-green knitted mini-dress with a huge white belt that’s pulled so tight it’s stretched the wool and made the whole thing see-through. Happily I predicted this outcome, so to avoid unsightly underwear show-through I have worn nothing underneath. I have on massively high white patent boots, and am sporting more gold round my neck than Jimmy Saville.

We walk outside and the men stride ahead of me, with Paskia-Rose skipping behind. She’s wearing her Arsenal shirt now and it strikes me that she’s always clad in nylon. Can that be healthy? One day she’s going to rub her legs together, cause a spark and whoosh – she’ll spontaneously combust. There’ll be nothing left behind bar smoke and a puddle of liquid nylon in the Arsenal club colours. As she walks, Paskia swings her foot to launch an imaginary ball across the beautiful lush green pitches in front of us. I teeter along behind them all on tippy-toes, hoping that I don’t fall over but being self-aware enough to realize that it will be a miracle if I don’t.

‘Over there is the baseball pitch,’ explains Chuck with an accompanying swing of his arm which narrowly misses Paskia’s head, while Dean nods and looks around, and I try to do faster tippy-toe running to catch up with them. ‘You guys ever heard of baseball?’ he asks. ‘It’s different from your damned cricket. They manage to finish on the same day as they started, and they never blame the weather! Ha ha.’

‘And what’s that?’ I ask when I arrive next to them, elated that I’m still upright. I’m pointing to a large concrete outhouse tucked in behind the row of trees that separate the baseball and soccer areas.

‘This was part of the old club, before we had the major renovation installation completion,’ explains Chuck, opening the unlocked outer door and taking a key from a small hook near a shelf on the right. He opens the white inner door and leads us inside. The place is set out like a small office with an old-fashioned typewriter on an ancient wooden desk. ‘Ah,’ he says, wistfully. ‘This is how things were.’

Paskia hovers in the doorway, still looking longingly at the football pitches while Chuck walks round, mumbling to himself. ‘There is simply no point working to a launch and then finding a house of cards, is there?’ he says.

‘No, no point at all,’ says Dean, out of politeness more than agreement.

We walk back to the main building and Chuck starts telling Dean how he made his fortune in the canned food business.

‘Once I’d got all my ducks in a row it was fairly smooth running to my first mill,’ he’s saying. ‘I’m not claiming it was easy – there were some major cows on the line which could have derailed the whole project, but I did it. I mean, if anyone can put a pig in a dress and call it grandma, I can!’

What the fuck is he on about? I’m listening to his talk of how he had to do a lot of blue-sky thinking, while picking my way through the mud, feeling a lot like Margo out of The Good Life (Dean loves that programme) only better-dressed, obviously.

‘So what do you actually do, Chuck?’ Dean asks. ‘Is it the cans you make, or the food that goes in them?’

‘That’s right,’ says Chuck. ‘Bang on.’