Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 105: Up II

Not even ten months ago, a man in no suit stood in a room and read this club its last rites. Minus ten points. Administration. A padlock on the gate in all but name.

In the life you haven’t read, this club dies, it gets wound up, the ground gets sold, and the marsh forgets it ever had a team.

Some of the people singing in the street this weekend would have spent this exact summer at a wake.

Instead they were promoted. Instead a town that was told to dig a grave threw a party in it.

You heard it before you saw it.

Three streets off, coming in past the refinery, you could hear it. A low unbroken roar that had not stopped in two days, car horns and a snatch of a song and somebody’s speaker in an upstairs window playing the same eight bars on a loop.

And under all of it, the sound of a place that cannot quite believe it still exists.

I have never seen Marsh Road like it and I never will again, because you only get the first one once.

They had hung bunting off everything that would take a nail.

Blue and white out of bedroom windows, blue and white on the lamp posts, a full kit pegged to a washing line across an alley like the man was drying the actual team.

Somebody had painted UP THE DOCKERS on a bedsheet and lashed it across the high street between the Greggs and the vape shop.

Somebody else, further down, had done a second one, WE NEARLY LOST IT ALL, and I had to stop the car for a second at that one, because whoever painted that knew exactly what this was.

There were kids in the road who’d been born after the club nearly died the first time and had no idea, running up and down in shirts three sizes too big, and there were old men on garden walls who knew precisely what it was and were crying into their tea, and both of them were right.

Murat had a sign in the kiosk window, FREE CHIPS, WE’RE UP, and he meant it, and it nearly finished him.

"Put your money AWAY," he kept shouting at anyone who tried to pay, waving the coins off, wet-eyed over his fryer. "We are in the FOOTBALL LEAGUE.

You do not pay Murat the day we go up. Chips are free until I am ruined."

A queue forty deep and not one of them getting charged, and Murat happier than I have ever seen a man lose money.

A woman I half knew grabbed both my hands outside the shop and could not get a word out, just shook them, up and down, laughing and crying at once, and finally got out, "Bill’s boy.

Oh, Bill’s boy." And let go and walked off shaking her head. That happened to me about nine times between the car and the pub. Bill’s boy. Bill’s boy.

As if the whole town had decided the only way to hold what had happened was to hand it back to a dead man.

The Anchor did not shut for two days. That is not a figure of speech.

Big Pete’s lot drank the cellar dry by the Sunday and started on the crates in the yard, and Raj drove people home for free until three in the morning two nights running, meter off, waving away every note, "not tonight, not this weekend, get in."

And in the middle of it all, on his stool by the window where he has sat for forty years, was Ted Cutler, with a pint he wasn’t drinking, letting the whole town come to him one at a time to shake his hand.

Because everyone knew. Everyone had seen it. Ted had waited sixty-one years for this, and it had come while he was still here.

"You seen it, Ted?" they kept saying, daft, all of them knowing full well he had. "Ted. You seen it?"

"I seen it," Ted said, every time, to every last one of them, like it was the first. "Sixty-one year. I seen it."

And every little while the whole pub would go up again for no reason at all, just because somebody somewhere started it. "UP THE DOCKERS, UP THE DOCKERS."

Bald Tony would climb onto a chair to conduct it with both arms like a man landing a plane, and Big Pete would ring the bell behind the bar, and it would roll round the room and out the door and down the street and set the next pub off, and then the one after that.

The whole marsh singing itself back to life one bar at a time.

Bald Tony told the story of the final about forty times and it grew every time.

By Sunday night Braithwaite had saved nine on the line and Bailey had beaten the whole Wimbledon team twice and the winner had gone in from the halfway line, and nobody corrected him, because that is what the story is for.

That is how a town keeps a thing. It tells it bigger until it can hold all the feeling that’s in it, and even Tony’s version wasn’t big enough, not really, not for this.

Dennis Coyle came and found me by the bar. Dennis, whose father’s ashes are under the penalty spot, whose family have watered that grass with three generations of themselves. He didn’t make a speech.

He just put his forehead against my shoulder for a second, this big hard man off the estate, and said, "My old man, Sam." And I said I know, Dennis.

And he nodded and went back to his pint, and that was the whole of it, and it was everything.

Danny Vine from the Gazette wrote the front page, the back page, and four in the middle, and told me it was the piece he’d wanted to write his whole life and he’d stopped being able to see the screen halfway down the second column.

A man rang from a national, one who never returned a single call all season, who never once came to the marsh when we were bottom and dying in the rain, and asked could he have twenty minutes with the chairman who dragged a club from minus ten into the Football League.

I told him he could ring Danny Vine.

Danny had been here in the rain.

And then, because I am who I am and my head will not switch off, I stood in the middle of all that joy on the Monday morning and did the cold sum, because somebody has to.

We are a Football League club now. And a Football League club needs a Football League squad and a Football League budget, and promotion does not hand you either. Promotion hands you a bigger fixture list and a lot of harder Saturdays and a wage bill you cannot yet pay.

The debt is still there. Two hundred and thirty-odd thousand pounds of it, sat on the club like a stone, no smaller this morning than it was before we won. You do not clear a debt with bunting.

And the team, my lovely, mad, hundred-point team, the one that just went up, cannot all come with us. I know it standing in the sun on a Monday and it half breaks me.

Sid’s knee will not do League Two.

Some of the old dockers who got us out of the fifth tier on heart alone will not get us any further, and the kindest thing and the cruellest thing are going to be the same conversation, and I am going to have to have it.

That is what nobody tells you about the top of the mountain. You get about a day and a half up there. And then you look at the next one.

But here is the thing they also don’t tell you.

I have a way up the next one. I have had it all along, sat in a wallet, doing nothing, waiting for a date.

There is a market, out in the world, that most of the country has not heard of yet, priced in American dollars on a screen almost nobody in England is watching, and the price of the thing has been climbing all spring.

And I know, the way I used to know everything and now know almost nothing, that in the first days of June it is going to climb higher than anybody sane would believe, past thirty dollars a coin.

And then it is going to stop. And then, on a day I could once have told you to the hour, it is going to burn.

I have thirty-six thousand of a thing I bought for beer money in a life nobody remembers.

And if I sell it into that climb, and get the money out before the fire, it is the best part of three quarters of a million pounds. Enough to kill the stone dead.

Enough to build a squad that belongs in the League. Enough to put a brick under the promise I made in a glass box in Manchester with the silver in my hands.

If.

Because the gift is dark now. I do not get the hour any more.

I have to sell a fortune I don’t understand into a rising market I can’t see the top of, blind, on nerve, against a clock that only I know is running, and get every pound of it out and into a British bank before a date in the middle of June that is coming whether I’m ready or not.

I watched the price tick past thirty dollars on the Monday night, on a laptop in a dark office over a promoted football club, with the town still singing three streets away.

Thirty dollars a coin, and thirty-six thousand coins, and a fortnight to turn one into the other before it all went up in smoke.

Watch the space, Dad. We’re not done.

I’ve got a fortnight to catch a fortune before it burns, blind, on my own, and I have never been so frightened of anything in two whole lives.