Keeper by Mal Peet Read Free Book Online

Gato said. “When you’re defending a one-goal lead against a frantically attacking side, two minutes of added time can last an hour. And in the clearing with the Keeper, time didn’t seem to work in the same way as it did elsewhere. It was as if we were in a glass box where the ordinary ticking of the world didn’t reach us. I often came out of the forest and was surprised to find that it was an hour, perhaps more, later or earlier than I had thought, that I was out of step with the outside world. This sense I had of being in another time zone came from the Keeper, I think. He was
constant.
He didn’t age or change. He’d disconnected himself, somehow. He’d escaped time. Often I felt this same freedom myself, the freedom of living untouched by the hands of the clock. Of the months marching past me, not dragging me with them. It was an illusion, of course. Looking back now, my time with the Keeper passed incredibly quickly.
    By the time I was fourteen and a half, I hardly resembled the skinny kid who had crept wide-eyed into the clearing eighteen months before. At school I was still Cigüeña, the Stork, of course. In places like that, names stick. In the café, old men called each other by nicknames they had been given half a century earlier. But there was nothing stork-like about me anymore. I was taller and bigger and stronger than my father. On Saturday evenings, if he had enjoyed a couple of beers, he liked to get me to give him piggyback rides. He’d ride me around the outside of the house, whooping like a rodeo rider, until my mother appeared, laughing and scolding at the same time, to herd us inside.
    And, after eighteen months, the Keeper was showing some signs of satisfaction with my progress. I remember the first time he used the words ‘keepers like us.’ Like
us
! I could almost feel my heart getting bigger. Usually, though, a nod of approval was the richest reward I would receive. He would force me to make a sequence of very difficult reaction saves from close range, and if I blocked every one, he would say something like ‘That was almost good.’ The ‘almost’ would sting me like a whip at first, but I got used to it. I think now that it was part of the training, denying me praise. I remember making a particularly difficult save in my second game for Unita, getting my left foot to a deflected shot, and when I watched the video, the commentator called it a ‘lucky stop.’ Goalies get that all the time, and I’ve known some who let it eat into them. The Keeper taught me to expect it, and survive it.
    During our second year, he spent a great deal of time teaching me the skills of an attacking player. He himself was very good. He had somehow, somewhere, mastered the art of the free kick. I have since come up against players who were better than him at using the ball to deceive a keeper, but not many. He made me see, through the eyes of a forward, how the goalmouth looked from different angles and how those angles might tempt one kind of shot or another. You know those clear plastic protractors you use at school to mark and measure angles? Whenever I had to lay one on a sheet of paper, I saw a goalmouth from above. While the other pupils measured the angle between one line and another, I was thinking about how a player would use his foot to send the ball along that angle. As a result, I always did badly in the geometry tests. But I learned to measure, and calculate, and anticipate with my eyes.
    We worked, the Keeper and I, on penalty kicks, over and over. I never beat him. No — I did beat him once, but only because I slipped on the grass and miscued the ball on a day when it was raining heavily.
    At home, my notebooks took up more and more space on the shelves, crowding the little exhibits I had gathered on my journeys in and out of the forest. By now there were thirteen of these books. The earliest ones were filled with random, higgledy-piggledy notes, drawings, and little bits of information