I told Rebecca I would say it myself.
She turned the card back round, held it flat against her chest and went into the physio room. She left the door open the width of a hand.
The floor of that corridor is painted grey, and it was cold through my trousers before I had finished sitting down on it.
Kirby moved his wash bag along the wall to make room for me. His foot was out in front of him in its white dressing. He had pulled the lace all the way out of the boot in his lap and he was threading it back in, hole by hole, and getting it wrong.
"You are not playing on Wednesday," I said.
"I know, gaffer."
"I know you know. I want you to have heard it from me."
He nodded at the boot. He pushed the lace through the next hole and pulled it, and it came out on the wrong side, and he had missed 1.
"I went to my own doctor so she would not find out," he said. "So I could play Wednesday. And now I cannot play Wednesday because I went to my own doctor."
