The Keeper lifted his face. I thought I caught two glints of light where his eyes should have been. 'Look at the sky,' he said. 'Just there' look. What do you see?'
   The sky was all one colour. something like bright metal. It was hard to look up into it. I narrowed my eyes and saw a hawk hovering, its wingtips spread, holding the air, striped tail tilted downwards. Tiny from where we stood.
   'Now,' the Keeper said, 'what does the hawk see?'
   I shaded my eyes with my hand, and as I did so I felt a kind of lurch, as if the space around me had shifted somehow. The Keeper repeated his question, but this time his voice seemed to come from somewhere inside my own head. 'What does the hawk see? Look!'
   And I saw through the eyes of the hawk. Far below me, the emerald-green regular shape of the clearing was like a mistake in the infinite forest. I looked down on it as if through a powerful telescope, a telescope focused on just a few centimetres of the grainy crossbar of the goal, which I saw in fantastic detail. And something moved into the focus of the hawk's eyes. A mouse of some sort. Or a rat. A little mammal with small flickering eyes, large ears, long tail. Scuttling along the crossbar, stopping now and then, sniffing the air anxiously. I felt its fear, and something else, too; there was a connection between the hunter and the victim. It was like a thread that tied them together, like the string of a kite attached to the hand of the child flying it. The instant I realized this, the hawk folded its wings into itself and followed the invisible thread downwards at relentless speed, spreading itself at the last possible moment, breaking its fall at the second its claws daggered into its prey. And then it was back in the air, the corpse hanging from its feet.
   I lowered my hand from my eyes and was back on the grass in the clearing with the Keeper.
   'Get in the goal,' he said, and walked the ball away from me. He was maybe twenty-five yards out when he stopped and turned to face me. I stood in the centre of the goal in a state of shock. The Keeper had shifted the limits of my world, or maybe simply rubbed them out. Now, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, he was preparing to take a free kick at me.
   It was a beautiful free kick. It went off to my left round a wall of imaginary players, then turned and dipped towards the top left-hand corner of the goal. But I knew it would go there. I could see the path it was on. It was as if the ball was flying along an invisible thread that was attached to my hand. I took off like a bird and reached out to it, and I palmed it over the bar. My legs were everywhere, and I landed in an ugly heap, almost crashing into the upright.
   When I got to my feet the Keeper was standing at the spot from which he had taken the kick.
   'Good,' he said. 'At least you can see.'