Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 108: Out I

Six days.

Sit with that number the way I had to. Six days between the doors coming down on a Sunday and knowing whether I was a man with a war chest or a man with a story about one.

On the Tuesday of those six days, Maureen Tully took my office chair away.

Not moved it. Took it. I came up from the toilet and my chair was gone and Maureen was standing where it had been with her arms folded like a woman guarding a level crossing.

"Where’s my chair?"

"In my office."

"Maureen."

"You’ve sat in that chair for nine days," she said. "I’ve counted. You slept in it twice that I know of and probably four times that I don’t.

"You’ve eaten one sandwich, which I bought, and half of it went in the bin." She nodded at the laptop, still open, still showing the same dead grey page.

"That thing will do exactly what it’s going to do whether you sit here staring at it or not. So. You can have the chair back at four."

"I’ve work to do."

"You’ve got a page that won’t load, Sam. That’s not work, that’s a vigil." And then, because she is not cruel, only correct, she softened by about half a degree. "Go and walk round your own ground. Go and look at the thing you actually won. You’ve not been down there since Manchester."

She was right, which she nearly always is, and she’d also managed to give me an order without ever once asking me the question she’d been sitting on since the Sunday.

That is a particular kind of decency, and I noticed it, and I could not repay it, because the answer to her question was still: I gambled seven hundred thousand pounds of this club’s future on a website in Japan and I might have lost half of it.

So I went down to the ground instead.

Marsh Road on a Tuesday in late June is the quietest place in England. The bunting was still up from the promotion, gone limp and grey with rain.

Stan had the goal nets down and folded in a wheelbarrow.

The grass had that shaggy, unbothered look it gets in the close season. And out in the middle of it, on his own, in a pair of shorts and a Tilbrook shirt he definitely has not been given permission to keep, was Cal Murphy, doing keepie-uppies.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Nobody had called a session. There was no session. The players were officially on their holidays, and Cal Murphy was stood in the centre circle of an empty ground on a wet Tuesday keeping a ball up on his own.

"All right, Cal."

"Chairman." Tap. Tap. He didn’t stop. He can go about four hundred and he knows it. "You all right?"

"What are you doing here?"

"Nothing." Tap. "Bit of a touch."

"It’s your holidays."

"Yeah." Tap. Tap. And then he caught the ball, which was how I knew what was coming, because Cal Murphy does not stop a ball for small talk. He stood there holding it against his hip and looked at his own boots.

"There’s a fella from Crewe been ringing my mum’s house."

"I heard."

"Rung four times." He said it the way you’d report a leak in a roof. "She don’t know what to say to him. She keeps saying I’m out. I’m not out, am I. I’m here."

"Cal."

"I’m not being funny, Sam, but she’s seventy-one and she’s got a fella from Crewe ringing her at teatime about her son’s future and she has to say ’he’s not in’ because I’ve not got a phone and I’ve not got a contract and I don’t know what to tell her."

He bounced the ball once. Bump. "So I come down here. Because if I’m here I’m not sat in her front room while it rings."

And there it was.

That is what a contract is, at this level. It is not an agent and a fax machine and a percentage.

It is a thirty-year-old man who does the work of two men for the wage of about three-quarters of one, stood in an empty ground in the rain in his holidays, because his mother is frightened of a telephone.

"Give me till the end of the week," I said.

He looked up at that. He has a very open face, Cal, it has never learned to hide a single thing.

"Is that a good give me till the end of the week, or a bad one?"

"I honestly don’t know yet."

"Right." And, God help me, he nodded like that was fair. "Fair enough. Cheers, Sam." And he dropped the ball back onto his foot and started again. Tap. Tap. Tap.

I stood on the Bovril End and looked at the wonky white T on the gable end and thought about the fact that this small rusting place was now, officially, a Football League ground.

And that I could not afford it.

Craig Sadler found me there about twenty minutes later, which was not an accident, because Sadler does not go anywhere by accident.

"Maureen said you’d be down here."

"Course she did."

He came and stood next to me at the rail, hands in his pockets, and looked at the same grass I was looking at. Sadler is not a man who fills a silence. He let a good half minute go by.

"I need the number, Sam."

"I know."

"Contracts run out on the thirtieth. That’s Thursday week." He said it flat, no pressure in it, which is worse than pressure.

"Every out-of-contract player at this club is a free man on the first of July. Not one of them has anything to sign.

"I can’t offer a fiver to a fifteen-year-old until you tell me what there is."

"I know, Craig."

"Do you know how many other clubs know we’ve gone up?" he said. "All of them. You’ve just had Cal stood out there in his holidays, haven’t you. Did he tell you about Crewe?"

"He told me."

"Then you know."

"Give me a week," I said.

"I’ll give you whatever you want, you’re the chairman." He turned and leaned his back on the rail so he could look at me instead of the pitch.

"But you should know I’ve had to start telling lads I don’t know.

Braithwaite’s agent, if you can call a bloke’s uncle an agent, asked me on Friday whether we could match a Football League wage now we’re a Football League club, and I stood there in the car park and said I’d get back to him.

"About a keeper who’s just won us a play-off final."

"What did his uncle say?"

"He said, ’you’d better be quick, Craig.’" Sadler let that sit. "He’s not wrong."

I looked at the grass and said nothing, and Sadler watched me not saying it, and being a man who has spent thirty years reading people who won’t tell him things, he had a fair go at reading me.

"You’ve gone grey," he said. "Physically grey. If you’re ill, that’s your business, but if the club’s in trouble then it’s mine, so I’ll ask you once and then I’ll drop it. Is the club in trouble?"

And here was the thing. I could have lied. It would have been easy and it would have been kind and he’d have taken it.

"Ask me Friday," I said. "Friday I’ll tell you exactly what there is, and it’ll either be more than you’re hoping for or a lot less, and I’m not messing you about, Craig, I honestly do not know which."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Right," he said. And then, "Sid Hollis rang me."

Oh, God.

"He wanted to know if he’s got a contract.

"He’s thirty-eight and his knee’s held together with tape and he’s asking me if there’s a squad number for him in the Football League, because he’s played four hundred games for this club and never once been in it."

Sadler pushed off the rail. "I said I’d speak to the chairman. So that’s another one for Friday."

And he walked off up the touchline and left me on the Bovril End with the rain coming on.

I made it about ninety yards up Marsh Road before the town got me.

"CHAIRMAN!"