Off the Line

Prologue

When Phoebe was eight, she told her mother with some certainty that she would drive in Formula One and her mother laughed. When Phoebe was twelve, she started receiving sponsorships from businesses so she could keep driving and her mother smoothed a hand through her hair. When Phoebe was sixteen, she crashed the Formula 3 car she was driving and her mother thought she was dead for seven minutes.

The incredible thing about being a trailblazer is the absolute lack of path - the world is open for the taking, any door open, all the spoils laid bare. There had never been anyone telling Phoebe how to do things, because there was no-one ahead of her to copy. It seemed like everyone else she ever got on the track with seemed to all be mimics of drivers she watched on a Sunday afternoon, like they were all trying on different race helmets to see which one stuck. And that probably wasn't fair to the other drivers around her, both girls and boys. In the world they occupied, there was always the same names thrown about, always references to Senna or Schumaker or Hamilton. Never a female name, but Phoebe knew that. God, wasn't that made clear to her over the years.

"You're so talented, Phoebe." The for a girl would always just go unsaid. Her mother would tell her to keep her head, and before the accident that was no issue. Before the accident, she was always able to smile it away. It was strange though, because people didn't seem to call her talented after the crash. That was probably a good thing, given the fact the crash seemed to have robbed her for any tolerance she'd had.

When Lukas was ten, he signed for a team in the 2. Bundesliga and his father told everyone his son would play for Germany one day. When Lukas was seventeen, he became the youngest goal scorer in the Bundesliga and his father cried. When Lukas was twenty, he left Germany to play in England and his father didn't take him to the airport.

Everyone that Lukas had grown up with had wanted to play football as a grown up, but not like he did. Everyone wanted to be Muller or Ronaldo or Messi. Lukas just wanted to play football, not play at the different goal celebrations that went along with the names on the shirts of his friends. But then as he grew taller and taller, suddenly no-one wanted to play with him. He'd been playing football since he was four, every weekend drudging out to the muddy pitches his grandfather seemed to preside over. Every other boy he played opposite seemed to know exactly where to stand on the pitch - seemed to know exactly what spot they wanted, what it meant to stand on a certain place in the grass and why they wanted to be there. His grandfather seemed to like that Lukas didn't have that though, that he refused to just be static in one spot near the opposition goal. Instead, his grandfather would let him be all over the other half, running the pitch into that thick mud his mother would complain about.

Mud wasn't the same in the U.K., it wasn't the same to wash off your boots when you sat at the top of the Premier League half way through the season and the jeers followed you even when you slept. No, this was the sort of mud that stained and never quite came out of his boots - sitting there, impossible to notice unless you knew it was there and could feel its shadow.