Chapter 11: Easy Money II
The Crown made a noise.
I cannot, in good conscience, describe this noise to you. It was the noise a tribe makes when a meteor hits its village. AAARGHHHH and NOOOO and YERR HAVIN A LARRRF, REF all welded together into one long horrible cry that you could probably have heard from the moon.
Raj was on his feet pointing at the screen, vibrating, hands in his hair. "Sam. Sam. The ball is in. The ball is in, Sam, you can clearly see, the ball, is, in."
"I know, Raj."
"Why is it not given."
"Because, mate, it is the twenty-seventh of June 2010, we happen to live in a time that does not yet have goal-line technology, and is also enjoying the chance to have a laugh at us. Sit down. Drink your lager."
"BUT THE BALL IS IN, SAM."
"I know."
By the end of the match it was four-one and Bald Tony was on his fifth pint and Raj was inconsolable and the country, very briefly, was the saddest country in Europe.
I, meanwhile, had two days earlier walked into the Coral and put twenty boring quid on Germany to win by two clear goals at decent odds, and that twenty had come back as a hundred and sixty, and I had added it to the bag.
By close of play that Sunday I had the better part of two and a half grand on me.
Bald Tony cornered me by the gents in the Crown three pints later. He grabbed my arm.
"Sam. Sam, I’m sorry, mate. About the Switzerland thing. I was a knob. I called you. I was wrong, I see that now." His eyes were the pink of a man whose country has just been killed by a linesman from Montevideo. "Sam. Tell me the next one. I’ve got two hundred quid in the building society and an ex-wife who is, trust me on this, not getting any of it."
Now this was the moment, and I had thought about it. Because Bald Tony was a good man and his pension wasn’t great and a single quiet word would have cleared his debts for him.
But Bald Tony was also a man who could not, under any circumstances whatsoever, shut up after three lagers, and the second I handed him a winner that big he was going to be ringing his cousin in Romford, and his cousin in Romford was going to ring his cousin in Romford, and inside a fortnight a man called Trev with knuckles like Ribena bottles was going to be standing outside my flat asking what the bloody hell was going on.
So I did the kind thing, which is rarely the same as the easy thing. I put my hand on his shoulder and I looked him in his sad red eye.
"Tony, mate. I love you. I am going to tell you exactly one thing about the rest of this World Cup, and you are going to listen, and then you are never, ever going to ask me about a football match again. Yeah?"
"...Yeah."
"Stick a tenner on Spain to win the lot. A tenner. Not a penny more. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t increase it. Don’t get clever. Don’t ask me about the next match, or the one after, or the one after that. You watch the football, you back your boys, you have a lovely tournament. The end."
He blinked at me. "...A tenner."
"A tenner."
"That’s not very generous of you, Sam."
"Tony, it is wildly generous of me, you’d just need to know what I know to see it. A tenner. And don’t breathe a word about where it came from to a soul, including me."
He grumbled. But he did it. Stuck his tenner on Spain at twelve to one (which would, in just over a fortnight, be a hundred and thirty quid in his pocket and a free round for the Crown), and to his complete and utter credit he never asked me another football question again, although every time he saw me thereafter he put one solemn finger to the side of his nose. Which I’m fairly sure he meant to look mysterious. It mainly looked like he was checking for a bogey.
I went round Mum’s on the Sunday after the England match with a bunch of roses for the kitchen and a bag of decent stuff from the Marks down the road, the proper biscuits, the nice ham, a tin of those Belgian wafers that cost more than they should and that my dad had always bought her for her birthday.
She stood in the front door in her cardigan looking at the bags. Then at me. Then at the bags again.
"Samuel."
"Mum."
"Have you robbed a Marks and Spencer?"
"No, Mum."
"Are you in any kind of trouble I should know about, because I am fifty-one years old now and my heart is not what it was."
"I won a bit on the World Cup, Mum. That’s all. Quite a bit, all right, but I’m being careful. Don’t worry."
She stood in that doorway for a long moment in her cardigan with the gauze net curtain flapping behind her, looking up at me with the exact same look she’d given Dad in 1989 when he’d come home from the working men’s club with a perm because a bloke at the bar had told him birds liked them.
"You’re being good to yourself," she said, gentler.
"Eating, Mum."
"Sleeping?"
"Sleeping a bit, Mum."
"Drinking?"
"Off the energy drinks. On the eggs."
"...Eggs are good." She took the bag with the Belgian wafers in. "Come in, lad. I want to hear about your plan."
I sat at her little kitchen table while she put the kettle on, click, roar, and I gave her the exact version of my plan a son can give his mother. Not the time-travel bit, obviously. Not the magic football panel, definitely not the magic football panel.
Just enough of the shape: that I was going to come into a bit of money, that I had something specific in mind for it, that it involved a place that had mattered very much to her Bill once upon a time.
And her hand stopped halfway between the tea caddy and the pot when I said that last bit. It stayed there for a long moment.
Then she put two extra spoons of tea in and turned the gas off and came round the table and laid her warm dry old hand on the back of my neck the way Dad always used to.
"You watch the space, Samuel," she said. "Your father always said it. Watch the space."
I did not trust myself to speak.
So I just sat there at her kitchen table with my mother’s hand on the back of my neck and the kettle hissing behind her, hsss, and the late afternoon sun coming sideways through the window, and I banked every single second of it like it was the biggest bet I had laid that whole World Cup.
