Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 112: Owe No Man II

The board met at six that evening. Four of us and a plate of biscuits nobody eats.

I had already told an old man in an empty pub, which is not the correct order of things, and I would do it again.

Maureen stood up, which she never does, and read out the position of Tilbrook Town Association Football Club as at the sixth of July, two thousand and eleven.

And then she said the words she had never got to write.

"The club has no debt."

Nobody said anything for a second.

Then old Vic Prowse, who has been on this board since the seventies and has sat through eleven years of that same woman reading out worse and worse numbers, took his glasses off, folded them, and started to laugh.

"Say it again."

"The club has no debt, Vic."

"Again."

"Vic."

"Maureen, I have sat at this table since Harold Wilson and I have never once heard a good sentence in this room." He was wiping his eyes with the back of his hand and still laughing. "Humour an old man. Say it again."

So Maureen Tully put the ledger down, and folded her hands, and said it properly, the way you read out a score.

"Tilbrook Town Association Football Club owes nobody anything. Not a bank. Not the taxman. Not the brewery. Not a man in Essex with a photograph of himself on a stand." She looked up. "For the first time since 1907, this club is clear."

And Vic Prowse said, "Well, I’ll be damned," and reached across the table and took a custard cream, and ate the whole thing, very slowly, with enormous satisfaction, like a man who has been waiting forty years for a biscuit.

[SYSTEM] Objective progress: SAVE TILBROOK TOWN... 100%. [SYSTEM] That one’s finished, Samuel. It took you thirteen months, a beer mat, a bucket, and a currency that did not exist. Do try not to look smug, you’ve a face for it.

Ted told the Anchor on the Wednesday night, and the Anchor told Marsh Road, and Marsh Road told the town, and by Thursday dinnertime there was not a soul in Tilbrook who did not know.

Bald Tony came up the high street at a trot with a newspaper under his arm and Murat behind him still in his apron and flour up both forearms.

"Is it true?"

"Is what true, Tony?"

"Don’t." He pointed the newspaper at me. "Don’t you dare stand there and ’is what true’ me, Sam Mercer."

"It’s true."

He stopped dead in the middle of the pavement.

"Say the words."

"We don’t owe anybody anything, Tony. Not a penny. It’s gone."

And Bald Tony, twenty-odd stone of scaffolder’s mate in a Tilbrook shirt gone thin at the shoulders, put both hands on top of his own bald head and turned a complete circle in the middle of the high street.

"WE OWE NOWT!" He roared it at a bus. He roared it at the vape shop. He roared it at a woman coming out of the chemist who nearly dropped her prescription. "WE OWE NOWT! WE OWE NO MAN! DO YOU HEAR ME, TILBROOK? WE OWE NO MAN!"

"TONY," shouted somebody from a first-floor window.

"WE OWE NOWT, DENISE!"

"I HEARD YOU THE FIRST TIME, YOU DAFT SOD!" A pause. Then, differently: "...Is that right, though? Is it really?"

"IT’S RIGHT!"

And Denise from the flat above the bookmaker’s, who I have never spoken to in my life, put both hands over her mouth in a first-floor window on the high street of a town that has been told it was finished since before I was born.

Murat had gone very quiet.

"Murat."

"I am fine."

"Murat, I want to tell you something, and I want you to listen to it properly, because you’ll argue."

"I am listening."

"That bucket in February. Three thousand, one hundred and forty pounds. Yours, Yasmin’s eight hundred and forty, Ted’s tenner, Raj’s petrol, the raffle, all of it." I had to stop for a second.

"That money didn’t just make a payment. If that payment had been missed, the whole two hundred and eighty-three thousand fell due that week and this club would have been wound up in March.

"There is no promotion. There is no Manchester. There is no League Two. That bucket is the only reason any of it exists."

Murat looked at me with his flour-white forearms folded.

"So," he said. "What you are telling me is that I own the football club."

"That is not what I"

"Because that is what I heard." He was already going, walking backwards up the pavement, pointing at me, delighted beyond words. "Tony. TONY. He says I own the football club."

"YOU DON’T OWN THE FOOTBALL CLUB, MURAT."

"He says I own it."

And by four o’clock there were about sixty people outside the Anchor on a Thursday afternoon in July, with no game on and nothing to celebrate except a number that had stopped existing.

Somebody had got a speaker into a first-floor window. Big Pete gave up trying to serve them all and started leaving crates out on the pavement.

And I did not stand across the road and watch this one. I have done enough watching from across roads this summer to last me two lifetimes.

I went in.

Tony got me by the shoulders and marched me into the middle of the pavement and announced, at a volume you could have heard in Southend, that this was the man, THIS ONE, and about sixty people cheered a bloke in a cheap suit who had done nothing that afternoon except stand there.

Murat put a tray of free chips on the wall and would not take a penny off anybody, and Big Pete told him he was an idiot, and Murat said yes, and carried on doing it.

Somebody started "UP THE DOCKERS" and it went round twice.

Ted sat on a plastic chair somebody had carried out for him with a pint he actually drank, and every time the singing got going he conducted it with one finger like a man keeping time to something only he could hear.

And Yasmin, who gave us eight hundred and forty pounds out of a car fund when she had every reason not to, got told by Bald Tony in front of everybody exactly what that money had bought, and went the colour of a postbox.

"It was only eight hundred quid, Tony."

"IT WAS EIGHT HUNDRED AND FORTY, YASMIN."

And he would not let it go all night.

I stood in the middle of my town on a Thursday afternoon in July with a paper tray of Murat’s chips in my hand and let it happen to me.

Thirteen months ago I woke up on a bedsit floor with forty pounds in the world and a dead man’s football club that was ten points down and four hundred grand in the hole and eleven weeks from being wound up.

Now it owed nobody anything, and it was in the Football League, and there was a party in the street about it.

I want to be careful how I say this, because I am not a man who is comfortable with it.

But that was mine. Some of it was luck and a lot of it was other people and one enormous piece of it was a thing I will never be able to explain to anybody.

But I did that.

And I stood there in the sun and let myself have it for about four minutes, which is the longest I have ever managed.

And Danny Vine had it on the front of the Gazette by Friday, above a photograph of the wonky T:

TILBROOK TOWN: WE OWE NO MAN Football League club settles administration debt in full. "In eleven years of doing these books I have never written that sentence," says club secretary Maureen Tully. Chairman Sam Mercer, 24, declined to comment on the source of the funds.

Declined to comment on the source of the funds.

Danny had rung me twice about it, and I had given him nothing, and he had printed that line to let me know he had noticed I was giving him nothing. He is a better journalist than this town deserves and one day that is going to be a problem for me.