The village of Kelk didn't show up on most maps. A scattering of fields, a single winding road, and a dozen aging homes sat tucked between Driffield and nowhere in particular. You could drive past it in the time it took to sneeze.
Nine-year-old Harry Brewer lived at the end of a gravel track in one of those homes — a stone cottage with crumbling walls, frostbitten gutters, and a leaning chimney that always looked like it might topple in the next strong gust.
His room was in the attic — a cramped box with a sloped ceiling, a mildewed window, and a bed that creaked louder than a barn door. There was no internet. No TV. No books apart from a few torn encyclopedias about horses. But there were chores: collecting eggs, mucking out the chickens, pulling weeds from the gravel — all before breakfast.
The cottage belonged to the Morleys — Janet and Keith — though you wouldn't catch Harry calling them Mum or Dad. They were foster parents in the technical sense. Harry was child number seven, or maybe eight. It didn't matter. He was a name on a file, a cheque in the post, a pair of hands to help on the farm. Not mistreated exactly, just… managed. Like livestock. Fed, housed, and expected to earn his keep.
"You don't need screens to sweep a yard," Janet Morley would grunt, tightening her dressing gown over her enormous slippers.
"Yes, Mrs. Morley," Harry would reply, always polite, always quiet.
The Morleys had fostered many children before Harry. Their previous charges had all grown up fast — fleeing the nest as soon as they turned sixteen. Strong work ethics were the one thing they all had in common, and they ended up in full-time jobs shortly after leaving. This was something the fostering agencies praised highly, a testament to the Morleys' tough but effective methods. Their philosophy was tried, tested, and true: discipline, hard work, and self-sufficiency above all else.
But there was a price. None of those children called the Morleys family anymore. They were distant, disconnected — appreciative of the roof over their heads and the food on the table, grateful for the life skills and the work ethic drilled into them, but strangers all the same. The Morleys' love was a hard shell, missing the soft center only a mother's warmth could give.
Harry was the latest "project," as he sometimes thought of himself. The only child in the house now, he was painfully aware of how alone he truly was. His foster brothers and sisters might as well have been ghosts, shadows of a family he never truly had. He wished the Morleys could see this — the quiet ache behind his polite, obedient face — but he doubted they ever would.
Harry was small for his age — just over 4'2", with a frame so light he looked like a stiff breeze might carry him off. His pale skin didn't tan, only burned. And then there was the hair: a bright ginger tangle that stood out in every crowd, even when he wished nothing more than to disappear. His appearance made him a walking target — not just visible, but impossible to miss.
At school, he hovered at the edge of everything — lunch tables, conversations, the football pitch. His quiet nature, combined with how he looked, made him the perfect target for jokes, sniggers, and cruel nicknames: Matchstick. Rusty. Carrot Legs.
He didn't retaliate. He didn't really talk much at all. Quiet was safer.
At break, the other boys would bolt onto the field and split into teams, shouting out player names like spells: "Saka!" "Grealish!" "Messi!"
Harry watched from the fence.
He loved football. Quietly, hopelessly — though he barely understood why. He had never sat in front of a TV to watch a match, didn't own a single football card or poster. His knowledge was piecemeal: a shouted name from passing kids, the briefest glimpse of a game at the barber's, or fragments of rules picked up like whispers on the wind. Yet something about the game — its rhythm, its colour, the way players moved with purpose and grace — stirred something deep inside him, something that made his chest tighten and his heart ache with longing.
He had one ball, a sorry thing: half-flat, torn at the seams, and scuffed beyond recognition. He'd found it discarded in a muddy ditch near the field, and it had become his most prized possession. Every evening, after the chores were done and the sun dipped low, Harry would sneak out to the paddock behind the cottage. He'd kick the battered ball around — awkwardly, hesitantly, alone.
He wasn't good. Not by a long shot. He stumbled, he fumbled, his footwork clumsy and uncertain. His legs tired quickly, and more than once the ball rolled away, too far for him to chase.
Still, he played.
Not to win.
Not to impress.
Not even to be seen.
He played simply to belong — to feel, even if only in those quiet moments with the ball at his feet, that he was part of something bigger. Something alive.
Something real.