Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 109: Out II

Bald Tony came out of Murat’s kiosk at a speed no man of his construction should be able to reach, and he had, and I want to be precise about this, a piece of paper.

"Tony."

"Now. Before you say anything." He unfolded it. It was lined paper, torn out of a pad, and it had numbers down the side. "I’ve done you a list."

"You’ve done me a list."

"Of who we want." Rustle. "Right. Number one. Big lad up top. Proper big. Not Vardy big, actual big, because in League Two they’ve all got a centre-half like a bus shelter and Vardy’ll get eaten."

"Tony, I can’t"

"Number two, a left-back, because Aiden’s played left-back for eleven months and he’s a right-back and everyone’s too polite to say it."

Which, infuriatingly, was true.

"Number three." He paused for effect. "Sid stays."

"Tony."

"Sid stays, Sam." The paper came down. "I’ve put him at number three but he’s number one really, I just didn’t want to open with him."

Murat had come out of the kiosk behind him, wiping his hands on his apron, and now he leaned in with the air of a man passing on state secrets.

"I heard we are signing a Scottish boy."

"What?"

"From Scotland." He nodded, grave. "A midfielder. My cousin’s wife’s brother knows a man at Colchester and he says Tilbrook are signing a Scottish boy."

"Murat, we are not signing a Scottish boy."

"So there IS someone." He pointed at me, delighted. "You did not say there is nobody. You said not the Scottish boy."

"That is not what I"

"Chips? On the house."

"Everything’s on the house with you. You’ll be bankrupt by August."

"Then I will be bankrupt with a team in the Football League," said Murat, and shut the door.

And in the middle of all of it, on the bench outside the kiosk where he sits most afternoons now the weather’s turned, was Ted Cutler, who had not said a word.

He waited until Tony had got his list back in his pocket and run out of steam. Then he tapped the bench next to him with two fingers, and I sat down, because when a man who has followed your father’s club for sixty-one years taps a bench, you sit on it.

"They’re all asking me," Ted said.

"I know."

"Because they think I know things." He watched a bus go past. "I don’t know anything. But they come and ask me anyway, all week, is it true, are we keeping them, have we got any money." He turned and looked at me with those wet old eyes. "So. Have we?"

And there it was, from the one man in this town I would rather have died than lied to.

"Ask me Friday, Ted."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he patted my knee, twice, the way you’d gentle a dog that’s been out in the rain.

"Right you are, son," he said. "Friday."

And he went back to watching the road, and let me go, and did not ask again, and I walked home with my ears burning.

That night I did what I’d been doing every night, which was sit in my flat with the laptop and watch a lot of frightened people scream at each other on the internet.

[the big Bitcoin board · Wednesday] maria_btc: day 4. still down. still nothing. my life savings are behind that login screen throwaway_0x: it’s over. accept it. the whole thing’s over. it was never real anyway kraken_kev: they’re saying they’ll roll the trades back. how do you roll back a market lol oldcoin: if the site comes back at all i’ll eat my hat. this is what a bank run looks like when there’s no bank [MOD] halvsy: Statement incoming. Please stop the doom threads. throwaway_0x: "statement incoming" mate my coins are incoming, that’s what i want

And here is the strangest position I have ever been in.

I was the calmest man on that entire board.

Not because I’m brave. Because I knew, the way you know the ending of a film you’ve seen before. That exchange comes back inside a week, the crash trades get reversed, the price goes back where it was, and the man running it goes on the internet and proves he still has the coins.

I sat watching maria_btc post at three in the morning that her life savings were gone, knowing she was going to be all right, and there was no way in this world to tell her.

But none of that told me about my money.

Because in the life I’d already lived, Sam Mercer did not have three hundred thousand dollars strung across a bank wire and a frozen Japanese exchange in the third week of June 2011. There was no memory of it, because it never happened.

I had walked off the edge of my own map.

[SYSTEM] It is ten past four, Samuel. You have refreshed that page nine hundred times. I counted, because one of us had to do something useful.

Cheers. Very helpful.

They came back on the Sunday.

I know it was Sunday because I’d finally given in and gone to my mum’s for a roast, and I had my phone under the table like a fourteen-year-old, refreshing, and about halfway through the beef the page loaded.

Not a grey box. The actual site.

And a notice on the front of it, in the flat, over-polite English of a man translating his own apology: trading suspended during the incident, all trades made during the incident reversed, the price restored, accounts available.

And under that, my balance.

There. All of it. Every dollar I had left in that place, sat there like it had never been anywhere else, exactly as it had been on the Sunday before, because every mad one-cent trade that had happened while the world burned had been picked up and put back.

"Sam," my mum said. "Phone."

"Sorry. Sorry, Mum. Two seconds."

"You’ve been two seconds since the potatoes."

"I know."

"Is it the club?"

And I looked at my mother across a Sunday dinner, a woman who thinks her son’s money came out of a pension from the barge works.

"It’s going to be fine," I said. And I meant it for the first time in three weeks, and my voice did something on the way out that made her put her fork down.

"Samuel."

"It’s fine, Mum. I promise. It’s actually fine."

She looked at me the way she looked at me when I was nine and had clearly broken something.

"You’ll tell me one day," she said. "Whatever it is."

"One day."

"Eat your dinner."

It did not all come at once.

The withdrawals came back slower than before, tighter limits, a daily cap, a verification email for every transfer, which is exactly what a company does after it has been robbed and exactly what a man does not want when he has just learned what it feels like to have money he cannot touch.

So it came out in instalments. A bit on the Monday. A bit on the Wednesday. Each one a small ping in an inbox and a number in Lloyds coming up like a tide over a flat beach, an inch at a time, and me watching it and not quite trusting the sea.