No Running From Me

6. First Team Warm-Up Area

❝I prefer to tell the truth but I'm not brave enough to lose what's already there. ❞

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"So you have two jobs?" Jack asks as I close the door to the away team's locker room. According to him, it was not interesting to visit the basic, gray-walled, non-air-conditioned place he has been to so many times before, so we skip this part of the tour.

We are on the way to the first team's warm-up area.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because if not, I can't pay the bills."

I really don't mind working in two places, I think I am one lucky son of a bitch. There are people who don't even have a job. But this kind of talk always leads me to one place: my mother, and I definitely don't want to talk about her now. Actually, I never want to talk about her.

"Is it that hard?"

"You wouldn't understand."

His naivety is irritating me a little, and Jack doesn't seem to notice, because he continues with his purposeless questions. Maybe he just wanted some reason to keep talking to me, but that is a very presumptuous thought.

"Try to make me understand."

"No," my voice comes out a little higher than I would like it to as I walk through the doors of the warm-up room. "Can we just stop talking about me?"

"Sure..." He looks a bit shocked when he looks at me and sees that I don't seem like the nicest person in the world, which must be why he decides to change the subject. "So, what is this place?"

It's a dumb question, I'm pretty sure he knows, maybe he said the first thing he thought of.

I don't want to sound so angry, but I don't like to talk about my life in a tearful way as if I intend to make people feel sorry for me. Especially those who are super rich like Jack.

How much fun it would be to tell him that in order to follow my dream, I have to scrape by in two different jobs and hope every year that the real estate speculation doesn't raise the price of my rent. I don't need anyone's pity.

"It is the warm-up room of the first team."

So that a silence does not make us uncomfortable, I start to provide fascinating insights into who uses each piece of equipment in the room, like the stationary bike used by Kyle Walker, Kevin De Bruyne's weight bench or the meditation corner that some players usually share.

The area is all equipped with exercise bikes, weights and treadmills for the players to stretch before the game starts, and the floor is all covered with a special synthetic grass.

I leave Jack free to check and play with the equipment, trying to imagine which corner will be his when he finally starts playing here. Every player has a favorite corner in this room. I remember walking by here several times before games and seeing Agüero meditating facing the wall where the poem "This is the Place" by Tony Walsh is painted. It was recorded there in honor of the victims of the Manchester bombing in 2017.

I walk to the wall because I always read the poem when I can. I also often quote it during the tour even if it gets in a morbid mood, I think the tribute is beautiful, as it is a defiant statement on why Manchester is great, and a call to action, telling Mancunians to rally round in support after the atrocity.

"Sorry." Jack says before I can read any of the 720 words of the poem. He is at my side, so close that I feel his chest hit the side of my left shoulder. His hand reaches up to my right shoulder and gives a gentle squeeze.