Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 104: Up I

You want to know the first thing that happens after you win the biggest game in a hundred and three years?

Somebody can’t find the coach.

There we were, up, promoted, a Football League club, a stadium still ringing, and Stan, our kit man, sixty-odd years of this club in his hands, stood in a Premier League car park in the dark going through every pocket he owned for the coach keys.

A whole squad of grown men in medals took the mickey out of him, and that, more than the trophy, was when I knew we’d done it.

Because you only laugh like that when the thing is safe. When it’s real and it’s yours and nobody can take it back.

And I laughed with them, I did.

But I’ll be honest with you, because I’ve been honest with you all the way up: even then, even in that car park with a medal round my own neck, there was a clock going in the back of my head that none of them could hear.

A date in June. A price climbing on a screen in a currency nobody here was watching. Because winning the thing and keeping the thing are two different jobs, and I’d only done the first one.

I’ll get to that. Let me have the night first. Let me take you into the one room the four thousand never saw.

The away dressing room at Eastlands is bigger than our whole clubhouse. Marble, near enough. Underfloor heating. A physio table you could operate on.

And into it we put eleven filthy footballers, a manager, Stan and his kit skips, a 79-year-old man nobody had the heart to leave outside, and about nine crates of lager that Murat had somehow got past three levels of security, and we filled that beautiful expensive room with the sound of a marsh.

And I mean sound. It came off the marble walls and doubled. Somebody had a drum, God knows where from. Somebody else was banging a kit skip like a bass drum, dhoom, dhoom, dhoom, and over the top of it forty voices going at once:

"CHAM-PIONES. CHAM-PIONES. OLE. OLE. OLE!"

"WE ARE GOING UP. WE ARE GOING UP. AND NOW YOU’RE GONNA BELIEVE US!"

"GET THE GAFFER. WHERE’S THE GAFFER. GET HIM UP, GET HIM UP!"

They were singing the Cal Murphy song.

They have a song for Cal now, to the tune of something I’m too old to know, and the whole of it is his name and the words "he does the work of two."

And Cal sat in the corner with a medal round his neck and his boots still on and pretended he hated it, and did not hate it, not even slightly.

"Speech!" someone shouted. "SPEECH!"

And they all turned to me, and I stood up, and I had a thousand things in me and not one of them would come out, and I stood there like a fool with my mouth open.

And Sadler, from the far bench, not even looking up from where he sat with his tie finally off, said, "Don’t. Nobody wants a speech off the chairman. Sit down, Sam."

And the whole room came DOWN, a wall of it, OHHHHH and a hundred hands slapping the benches, and Vardy nearly went off the physio table laughing, and I sat down, and it was the kindest thing anyone did for me all night.

Because he was right. It wasn’t a night for me. I’d done my bit in a suit in a courtroom and a bank. This was theirs.

I watched them, is what I did. I sat with a warm lager I didn’t drink and I watched my football club be happy, and I want to give you the pieces of it, because I’ll not get this night back.

Sid Hollis, 38, knee like a bag of gravel, sat next to Tom Braithwaite, 21, and had the boy’s medal in his own hand, turning it over, reading the back of it.

Sid played four hundred games for this club and never got near a day like this, and the day it finally came he watched it from the bench because the boy next to him was better than him now.

And there was not one ounce of anything sour in him.

He just kept turning that medal over, and then he put it back round the boy’s neck himself, and patted it flat on his chest, and said something I couldn’t hear, and Braithwaite nodded and looked at the floor.

Lenny Marsh had the trophy. Everyone had the trophy at some point, it did the rounds, but Lenny had it longest, because Lenny is the captain and Lenny had earned it, and at one point he was just sat with it between his feet with both hands on it like a man warming himself on a fire.

And Vardy. Vardy, thirty-seven goals, the best player any of them will ever share a pitch with, stood on the physio table with a lager and told the room, deadpan, dead serious, that he wanted it on record that he’d have got forty if Bailey passed more.

And Bailey, seventeen years old, who scored the goal that put us up, went bright red and shouted back over the noise, "I SET YOU UP THIRTY TIMES, YOU GREEDY SOD!"

"OHHHHH!"

went the whole room, that noise a dressing room makes when somebody’s landed one. Lenny Marsh was pointing at Bailey and howling, Cal had his head back, Sid Hollis was wheezing.

And I laughed until it hurt, and if you have ever wondered what all of it is for, the deed and the debt and the bucket and the sleepless nights, it is for a room like that, with a sound like that in it.

[BLUE SQUARE BET PREMIER · FINAL · 2010/11] P46 · W30 · D10 · L6 · 100 points won · 90 after the deduction PLAY-OFF WINNERS · PROMOTED TO LEAGUE TWO

Season’s end: J. Vardy · 37 goals all comps (33 league) · a beer mat A. Bailey · 17 · the one that went up T. Braithwaite · 21 · three weeks a keeper, a medal C. Murphy · does the work of two L. Marsh (c) · 33 · the last ball, dead on his chest S. Hollis · 38 · four hundred games, home at last

[Foreknowledge: DARK.] No reading available. You watched it live. Same as everybody.

A hundred points. We won a hundred points of football on the grass this season, one at a time, in the rain, and then a man’s ten-point punishment was taken off the top and we still finished on ninety and we still went up.

That is the line I keep coming back to. A man built this club a hole to climb out of on purpose, with the stroke of a pen, ten points deep. And the answer the club gave him, in the end, was to win a hundred and let him keep his ten and go up anyway.

You cannot argue with that. Not even Ray Sully can argue with that.

I rang my mum from the coach, on the way home, somewhere south of nowhere with half the lads asleep.

She picked up on the first ring. She’d been sitting by the phone. She’d sat there all night, in a little terrace off the high street, on her own, to hear it from me even though she already knew, because she’d watched every minute of it on the telly.

"I saw it, love," she said, before I could get anything out. "I saw you go up them steps."

And then neither of us could speak for a bit, which is a thing that happens to us, and the coach hummed along in the dark, and eventually she said the thing.

"Your dad would’ve been useless tonight." She was half laughing, half not. "He’d not have said a word.

He’d have just sat in his chair with his hands on his knees, staring at the telly, and I’d have said Bill, Bill, they’ve done it, and he’d have just nodded. Like you’re doing now.

I can hear you doing it."

I was. I was just sitting there nodding at a phone in the dark.

"I’m taking you to Spain," I said, when I could. "Proper. Sun. Soon as the summer’s sorted."

"You’re not."

"I am."

She went quiet, and I heard her decide not to argue, which for my mum is a kind of yes, and then she said goodnight, love, and get some sleep, and go careful.

And I sat there in the dark a long time after with the phone still warm in my hand, thinking about a thing years off that no promotion and no fortune can buy me out of, a thing in a chest that a stubborn woman won’t bother a doctor with.

I put it away. You have to. But it doesn’t go far. It never goes far.

We came home to a town that had lost its mind, and I need you to understand why, because it is not the same as any old team winning promotion.