Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 110: Out III

The last transfer landed on the Thursday afternoon. The thirtieth of June. The day every contract at this football club ran out at midnight.

I was in the office. Maureen was at the filing cabinet with her back to me, doing the thing she does where she puts things in order that are already in order.

And the email came, ping, and I opened it, and I sat and looked at a number in a British bank account that had my name on it.

And I made a noise.

Maureen turned round.

"What."

"Nothing."

"Sam."

And I want to tell you I was dignified. I was not. I put both hands flat on that desk and I put my head down on top of them, in front of my office manager, and I stayed there for about ten seconds while my shoulders did something I had no control over at all.

I heard her walk over. I heard the chair, my chair, the one she’d confiscated, get pulled round. I felt her sit down next to me.

"Right," Maureen said.

"I’m all right."

"You’re clearly not." A pause. "Is it good or bad?"

"Good."

"Well then stop crying on the desk, you’ll ruin the ledger."

But she didn’t move, and she didn’t get up, and after a bit she said, in a completely different voice, "Nine days you sat in that chair.

"Nine days, and you wouldn’t say a word, and I’ve been coming in here every morning wondering if I was going to arrive and find the locks changed."

I lifted my head.

"That’s what you thought it was?"

"What was I meant to think?" She was very calm about it. "A man stops eating and starts sleeping in the office and won’t look you in the eye. I’ve seen it before, Sam.

"I saw it in nineteen eighty-nine with a haulage firm I did the books for. Same face on the boss. He shut it on a Friday and we found out from the paper."

And I sat there feeling about two inches tall. For three weeks I had thought of my silence as a burden I was nobly carrying on my own. It had never once occurred to me that from the other side of that desk it looked exactly like a man getting ready to close a company down.

"It’s not that," I said. "Maureen, it’s the opposite of that. I promise you it is the opposite of that."

"Then say a number," she said. "Not where it’s from. I’ve stopped asking where it’s from. Just say a number, so I know what I’m doing when the invoices come in."

So I said it.

And Maureen Tully, who has not shown me a feeling on purpose since 1987, said a word I will not print, and then said, "Sorry," and then said it again.

[SYSTEM] Tilbrook Town AFC, 30 June 2011. BANKED: ~£568,000 · STANDING DEBT: £216,332 Objective progress: SAVE TILBROOK TOWN... 84%. It was four percent the morning you handed a man your polo shirt.

Five hundred and sixty-eight thousand pounds.

For the first time in a hundred and three years, this football club had more money than it owed.

And it should have been closer to seven hundred.

I sold half my coins at the top, near enough thirty dollars each, like a sensible man. And I held the other half waiting for a number I half remembered from a life I’d already lived, and it never came, and the market slid, and I dumped the rest at about twenty.

Eleven dollars a coin I did not get, times eighteen thousand coins. A hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds.

That is a centre-half. That is a roof on the away end. That is three years of an academy that does not exist yet. I did not lose it in the crash and I did not lose it to a hacker and I cannot blame Ray Sully or the weather.

I lost it because I was the best-informed man alive and I got greedy anyway.

And the lesson isn’t "don’t be greedy," which is the sort of thing they cross-stitch onto cushions. It’s worse than that. The gift never made me safe. It only ever made me early.

A man who is early and disciplined is unstoppable. A man who is early and greedy is just another mug with a good tip, stood at the rail watching a horse he should have backed properly.

And there is one more thing about that money, and it matters for everything that comes after.

That was the last of it.

Not the last of the money. The last of the gift, in any way that pays.

Everything I have ever squeezed out of knowing the future came from two things: a beer mat with a striker’s name on it, and two thousand pounds of World Cup winnings put on magic beans last summer by a man nobody would have lent tuppence to.

Two grand. That was the start-up loan. And it has just been repaid, with interest, to the tune of half a million pounds.

The beans are cashed. There isn’t another one coming, because the memory that made it possible is going out like a bulb, and even where it still glows I have shoved this timeline so far off its rails that the readings are worthless.

From this Thursday afternoon in June, I do not have a superpower. I have a bank balance, a club in the Football League, a manager better at his job than I am, and a town that thinks I can do anything.

From here I am just a man who has to be good at this.

Which, if I’m honest, is the thing I have been afraid of since the day I woke up.

I rang Craig Sadler at four o’clock on that Thursday.

"You said Friday," he said.

"I’m early."

"Go on then."

And I sat back in my own chair, in my own office, over my own ground, with Maureen pretending very hard to file something eighteen inches away, and I told the manager of Tilbrook Town what there was.

There was a long silence on the other end of that phone. Long enough that I said his name.

"Craig?"

"I’m here." His voice had gone odd. "Say the number again."

I said it again.

"Right," said Sadler. And then, "Sam, do you understand what that is, at this level? Do you actually understand? There’ll be clubs in League Two next season operating on less than that for the whole year."

"I know."

"No, I don’t think you do." A chair scraped somewhere in his kitchen. "Because in about ten seconds you’re going to find out that every single person at this football club wants a piece of it, and they’re all going to be right, and there isn’t enough for all of them."

He was not wrong. He is almost never wrong, which is why I hired him.

Because that debt is still sat there, two hundred and sixteen thousand pounds of it, and it has to die.

And there’s a squad to build out of eleven men whose contracts run out at midnight tonight.

And there’s a stand that isn’t safe and a training ground that’s a farmer’s field and an academy I promised a dead man I’d build.

And there is Sid Hollis, thirty-eight years old, four hundred games, one knee, waiting by a phone in a terraced house to find out whether the Football League has room for him.

"So what do we do first?" said Sadler.

And before I answer that, I want to tell you what actually went through my head, sat there with the phone against my ear, because it was not sensible and it was not modest and it is the truest thing in this whole Chapter.

I thought: this is the bottom rung.

Because a year ago I was stood in a bedsit over a kebab shop with forty quid and a dead man’s football club, and I told you, out loud, that I was going to take a hundred-and-three-year-old corpse off the very bottom of the English game and drag her up.

Tier by tier. The whole pyramid. All the way to the top, where the giants live.

I meant it at the time and I know exactly how it sounded. It sounded like a nice thing for a grieving man to say.

Well. We are in the Football League. There is half a million pounds in the bank with my name on it.

There is a manager on the other end of this phone who is better at his job than I will ever be at mine, and a boy in that squad nobody has counted yet, and a town out there that has started painting bedsheets.

That was never the mad part. The mad part was always going to be starting.

We’ve started.

So I looked out of that window at my father’s football club, and for the first time in two whole lives I had the money to answer a question like that properly.

Which meant, for the first time in two whole lives, I had absolutely no excuse if I got it wrong.