Chapter 76: Chapter 75: Egersund I
(Garcia POV)
Heathrow at six in the morning was mostly trolleys and yawns.
Jay stood by the check-in queue with one suitcase and a backpack, the strap already cutting a line across his shoulder. Garcia had one holdall, packed for three days, not thirty.
He was not staying for the month. Somebody had to run the rest of G11 from a bedroom in England, and that somebody was him.
They went through the documents once, at the counter, quiet and quick.
Passport. Invitation letter from Egersunds IK, the club crest stamped at the top. Accommodation confirmation. Insurance. Return flight booking, dated for Garcia, open-ended for Jay. The phone number of the club contact meeting them at the other end, already saved under EIK — Stavanger.
Garcia did not explain any of it twice. He had done this enough times with players who were not his to know which documents actually got asked for and which ones just sat in a folder looking official.
"Keep a full kit in the backpack," he said, while they waited for the bags to tag. "One pair of boots, one training set. If the suitcase gets delayed, you’re not stood in a car park with nothing to train in."
Jay unzipped the backpack without being asked twice and checked. Boots. Shorts. A top with the wrong club crest on it, which did not matter today.
"Good," Garcia said, and left it there.
The flight was direct, London to Stavanger, no stop in Oslo and no train across half the country afterward. Garcia had looked at the alternative route once and closed the tab within a minute.
They boarded early and sat two rows from the wing.
Garcia spent most of the flight with his laptop closed and a printed copy of the email chain open on the tray table instead, a pen working down the margin. Questions for tomorrow. Who signs off on injuries. Who Garcia’s actual point of contact would be once he flew home. Whether the club’s training schedule changed week to week or stayed fixed. He wrote each one small, in a column, the way he wrote everything that mattered.
Jay did not sleep, though he tried.
He put his head against the window twice and gave up both times, eyes open again within minutes. He checked his phone more than the flight allowed, thumb going to the screen and away from it in a loop that had nothing to do with anything on it. For a while he watched the little plane icon crawl across the map on the seatback screen instead, tracking the distance the way a man tracks something he cannot control any other way.
Somewhere over the North Sea, his phone lit up once.
Jay read it, and his jaw set. He turned the screen off, put the phone face-down on his knee, and looked out the window at nothing for a long moment.
Garcia saw it happen out of the corner of his eye and did not ask. Whatever his father had sent, Jay had decided to carry it alone for now, and that was Jay’s to decide, not Garcia’s to pry into.
Passport control at Stavanger was ordinary, which was the best thing it could have been.
The officer asked how long they were staying, what the purpose of the trip was, whether they had accommodation and funds for it. Garcia answered for the both of them, calm, unhurried, the documents ready before they were asked for. Ninety days visa-free for a UK passport on a trip like this, no visa needed, nothing that should have caused a problem, and nothing did.
The stamp went in. They walked through.
A man was waiting past the barrier with a small printed sign that just said COLE.
"Henrik," he said, shaking both their hands in turn. "Operations. I’ve got you both — bags first, then the car."
He was somewhere in his thirties, in a half-zip with the club badge on the chest, unhurried in a way that told Garcia this was not his first trialist pickup. He took one of Jay’s bags without being asked and led them toward the car park like a man who had done the walk a hundred times.
The drive south took the best part of an hour, and Garcia let most of it pass in silence.
The sky sat low and grey the whole way, October light with nothing warm left in it. Signs went by in a language neither of them read, the shapes of the words unfamiliar even where the numbers were not. Open land stretched out on both sides once they cleared the airport roads, flat and wide, broken by water that kept appearing and disappearing behind low hills.
Jay had his phone up in front of him for most of it, thumb barely moving, eyes going past the screen to the window every few seconds. He was not really looking at anything on it. He was looking at the country going past and pretending not to.
Garcia used the drive for the one thing that actually needed doing.
He confirmed the reporting time for the morning with Henrik, eight fifteen at Idrettsparken, and got the name of the recruitment contact he’d be sitting down with once Jay was in with the physio. Henrik gave it without checking anything, the kind of man who kept the whole week in his head instead of on a clipboard.
Egersund arrived quietly, a town built low and close to the water, nothing like the postcard version of Norway either of them might have pictured on the plane.
Jay’s accommodation was a small apartment block ten minutes from the training ground, the kind of place clubs kept for exactly this, trialists and loan signings and short-stay arrivals who did not need much beyond a bed and a working shower. One room, a kitchenette, a bathroom that had clearly seen a hundred players pass through it and would see a hundred more.
Garcia’s hotel was five minutes further on, plain and cheap, the sort of place a man booked when he was there to work and not to enjoy himself.
He walked Jay’s bags up with him and did the checks properly before he left him to it.
Food arrangements, confirmed, a card loaded for the week with a supermarket close enough to walk to. Wi-Fi password, taped inside the kitchen cupboard by whoever had stayed there last. Laundry, a shared machine down the corridor, coins in a jar by the door. Transport, a ten-minute walk to the ground or a lift arranged if the weather turned. The training schedule, printed and left on the counter. Emergency numbers, saved in both their phones under the same names.
He did not unpack Jay’s bag for him. He did not fuss over the room or tell him to get an early night like a father would have.
"You’ve got everything you need," Garcia said. "I’ll see you at half seven, we’ll walk over together."
Jay nodded, and Garcia left him there, the door clicking shut behind him.
From the corridor, through the thin wall, Garcia heard the low murmur of Jay’s voice starting a call.
He did not listen. He knew roughly what it would be, because he had heard the shape of that call from other players before. A safe landing reported. A question about his mother, asked carefully, like the answer might change depending on how it was asked. The whole flight and the whole day folded down into something smaller and easier than it had actually been, because that was the version a hospital bed could carry.
Garcia went back to his own room and did not think about it any further than that. It was not his conversation to have.
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