Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 111: Owe No Man I

I have written a lot of cheques in two lifetimes and only one of them ever made my hand shake.

One hundred and ninety-nine thousand, six hundred and sixty-five pounds.

Maureen wrote the counterfoil for me, because my writing has been terrible since school and she said if I was going to do the biggest thing this club had ever done she would rather it was legible.

"Date it Monday," she said.

"Why Monday?"

"Because it clears Wednesday, and Wednesday’s the board meeting, and I want to sit in that meeting and say the words." She squared the chequebook on the desk.

"I’ve done this club’s books for eleven years, Sam. I have written the word ’deficit’ at the bottom of a page eleven times. I’d quite like a go at the other thing."

"What’s the other thing?"

"I don’t know," said Maureen. "I’ve never written it."

I want to tell you what was actually in that cheque, because it was not my money. Not all of it. Not the part that counts.

There was a bucket in it.

Three thousand, one hundred and forty pounds, collected in February by a town that did not have it, in a plastic bucket that had been holding whitewash the week before, because a man in a suit had bought our debt and was waiting for us to miss one payment.

There was Yasmin’s eight hundred and forty quid in it, which she gave us out of a savings account for a car she still has not bought.

There was Murat’s twenty pence in the pound in it, and Raj driving people to away games with the meter off for a year, and a raffled Vardy shirt, and Big Pete’s pub team drinking the Anchor dry on purpose so the club got its cut behind the bar.

There was a tenner in it off Ted Cutler, who is seventy-nine and gets his pension on a Thursday, and who has put a tenner in every bucket this club has ever passed round since 1950.

And there was sixteen thousand, six hundred and sixty-seven pounds a month, on the last day of every month since August, never once late.

Paid out of gates and kiosk money and my own pocket, and at the end out of magic beans sold a slice at a time in a market so thin it moved when I sneezed.

That is what was in it. Thirteen months of a whole town not letting a thing die.

And on the Monday morning, at eleven minutes past nine, in a post office on the high street, I bought a recorded delivery envelope off a woman called Pat who has known me since I was six, and I put the cheque in it, and I sealed it, and I paid one pound forty-two.

"That’s a big one, is it," said Pat, weighing it.

"It’s the last one, Pat."

She looked at me. She has been on that counter for thirty years. She knows exactly what a football club and a Monday morning and a man’s face mean in this town.

"The last one," she said.

"The last one."

And Pat, behind the glass, in her cardigan, franked it and put it in the sack and said, "Well then," and had to look at her keyboard for a second.

Wednesday morning it cleared.

Maureen came and got me.

She did not say anything, she just appeared in the doorway of my office with the ledger held against her chest like a hymn book, and jerked her head, and I followed her down the corridor to the little room where this club keeps its money in a book because we have never trusted computers.

She put the ledger on the desk and opened it and turned it round so it faced me.

Eleven years of that woman’s handwriting. Small, straight, hard as nails. Column after column, month after month, and at the bottom of every page the same word in the same neat capitals.

DEFICIT.

DEFICIT.

DEFICIT.

Page after page after page of it, going back to before I could drive, a decade of a woman writing down in her own hand that the thing she works for is drowning.

And on the last page, on the sixth of July, two thousand and eleven, under a line she had ruled with a ruler because Maureen Tully does not draw a line freehand, she had written a figure with a nought after it and then, underneath, in the same neat capitals:

NIL.

That is the whole of it. Three letters.

"Nil," I said.

"Nil."

"Maureen."

"Don’t." She had both hands flat on the desk either side of the book and she was looking straight down at it. "Don’t, because I’ve been holding it since half past eight and I’m not doing it in the office."

And we stood there, the two of us, over a book, not doing it in the office.

Then she shut the ledger, and said, "Right," and went and put the kettle on, and I heard her blow her nose in the corridor, and neither of us has ever mentioned it since.

I did not go to the board first. I know I should have.

I went to the Anchor, at half eleven in the morning on a Wednesday, when it is just Big Pete doing the bottles and the smell of last night, and I sat down next to Ted Cutler on his stool by the door.

He knew something was up. He put his paper down.

"Go on then."

"It’s gone, Ted."

He did not say anything.

"The debt. All of it. The whole four hundred thousand pound of it, the ten points, the administration, the lot. It cleared this morning. The club doesn’t owe anybody a penny."

Ted Cutler looked at me for a long moment.

Then he got off his stool, which takes him a while, and he walked the four steps to the dartboard, to the stool by the dartboard that nobody sits on, and has not sat on since my father died, because Big Pete will not have it.

And he put his hand flat on the seat of my father’s stool.

"You hear that, Bill," he said.

Not loudly. Not to me. To the pub, to the dartboard, to a bit of wood.

"Your boy’s paid it off."

And I sat there in an empty pub at half eleven in the morning with my hands over my face and cried like a child in front of a seventy-nine-year-old man and a landlord.

Big Pete put a pint down in front of me that I did not ask for and did not drink, and went back to his bottles, and let me get on with it.

Thirteen months. From forty quid and a dead man’s club, to that.

Now. The rest of it, and there is a fair bit, because things happen quickly once a thing is dead.

Ray Sully rang me himself on the Wednesday afternoon. I knew he would. That is exactly the sort of thing Ray Sully cannot help.

"Mercer."

"Ray."

"There’s a cheque here." Rustle of paper, deliberate, close to the phone, so I could hear it. "For the balance."

"There is."

"In full."

"To the penny. Maureen did the arithmetic and she doesn’t make mistakes." I let a beat go by. "You’ll want to bank it. They do go stale."

There was a silence on that line that I have replayed in my head more times than I would like to admit to a therapist.

"Where’s a boy your age get two hundred thousand pounds?" he said.

And there it was. Not anger. Not even much surprise. Just the flat, patient, deeply unsettling curiosity of a man turning something over in his hands to find the seam.

"My dad’s old pension came good," I said. "Barge works. Took the solicitors a while."

"Did it."

"It did."

"Barge works." He said the words like a man tasting wine he suspects has been watered. "That’s a lot of pension, son."

"He worked a lot of years."

Another silence.

"You know what I’ve got, now that clears?" he said, and I could hear that he had already worked it out, days ago, and had rung me anyway.

"I’ve got a piece of paper saying a football club used to owe me money. That’s it. That’s the whole of it.

No charge on the ground, because that daft old woman’s covenant makes the ground worthless to anybody who isn’t playing football on it. No leverage. No lever. Nothing."

"That’s about the size of it."

"I paid nearly three hundred thousand pounds for that."

"You did, Ray."

"And you’ve paid me back with interest, on time, every month, for a year." A short breath down the line that might have been a laugh in a man built differently. "Do you know what that makes me, Mercer?"

"Go on."

"The best-performing investment on my books this year," said Ray Sully. "I’ve made about forty grand off you. And it is the worst money I have ever earned in my life."

"I told you in February," I said. "You didn’t find a faster door. You paid for a longer wall."

"You did tell me that." He let it sit. "Enjoy your afternoon, son."

And he hung up, and I sat there in my office over a rusting little football ground with a phone in my hand, and I had won, absolutely and completely, and I did not feel one ounce of what I expected to feel.

Because he had not sounded beaten.

He had sounded interested.