Chapter 13: Final Whistle I
Saturday the third of July, and Argentina were about to discover, on national television, that Germany did not love them.
Four-nil, the script said in my head. Four straight. Müller, Klose, Friedrich, Klose again. Maradona on the touchline doing his sad-walrus face. Pop, pop, pop, pop, one goal at a time, in his face.
I clocked off the second the Sportskit bell went, said goodbye to Dean with a politeness that almost killed me, and was in the corner booth of the Crown twenty minutes before kick-off with Raj already there and a fresh pint going flat in front of him.
"Eighty quid, Sam," he hissed across the table.
"Spread out. Just like you said. William Hill in Stratford, Coral by the station, that creepy bookies up Goodmayes I never go in. You said no big ones, I did no big ones."
"Good lad."
"Germany to win by three or more."
"That’s the one."
"You’re sure."
"Raj." I looked at him over my lager. "I have been sure since the day I was born, mate. Watch the football."
We watched the football.
The whole Crown watched, the whole country watched, and I drank my pint slow and tried hard to look surprised every time one of them went in, and by the time the fourth one went in, pop, Friedrich on the rebound, Bald Tony two booths over caught my eye and tapped the side of his nose in his very-clearly-not-checking-for-a-bogey style, and I tipped him the same nod a sober general gives a soldier, and that was that.
Four hundred and forty quid back on Raj’s eighty. Another four hundred and twenty on a small Coral correct-score punt of my own.
I had close to five grand on me, walking out of the Crown that summer evening, and the streets smelled of barbecue and dust and the long blue dusk of an English July, and I was, for the first time I could remember in two lifetimes, smiling for no reason at all.
The Spain-Paraguay quarter-final the next afternoon was a one-nil scrap, Villa nicking it, and I took two hundred clean off it in three different bookies. Boring. Lovely. I added it to the bag.
On the Sunday after that, with the semis still three days away, I went round Mum’s, and this time I did not go empty-handed. I went with a curtain pole.
Specifically, the curtain pole she’d been talking about putting up in the back bedroom for, by my count, the better part of nine years.
"What is that, Samuel," said Mum, in the doorway, in her cardigan, looking at the long brown paper parcel under my arm.
"It’s a curtain pole, Mum."
"I can see it’s a curtain pole. I’m asking why."
"Because you’ve been on about putting one up in the back bedroom since 2001, Mum, and I’m not going to live for ever and neither are you, and I happen to have a Saturday afternoon and a spirit level. May I come in?"
She let me in. She fussed.
She put the kettle on. She brought me tea with three sugars in it because Mum’s tea always has three sugars in it whether you’ve asked for them or not, click, roar, hsss, and I went upstairs into the little back bedroom that used to be mine, and I drilled four neat holes into a wall I had once, aged eleven, drawn Ryan Giggs on in biro and got walloped for, and I put the pole up and I hung the curtains she’d been keeping in a Boots bag in the airing cupboard since 2003.
She stood in the doorway when I was done and looked at them.
"Bill always said he’d do that," she said, very quiet.
"I know, Mum."
"You’re so much like him, you know. When he was your age. Sweet and useless in exactly the same proportions."
I laughed, properly, and she put her arm round me from the side, the way you do when you don’t want a fuss, and we stood there in that little back room with the new curtains hanging slightly crooked and the late afternoon light coming through them, and Mum said, after a while, in her smallest voice, "Whatever it is you’re up to, Samuel, you be careful with it. All right? Promise me."
"I promise, Mum."
"And come and see your mother."
"I will, Mum."
"More than you have been."
"I will, Mum."
And I added, inside, where I could say it without scaring her, the rest of it. The whole rest of it. The things I was not going to be able to say out loud for a long time, perhaps ever.
That this Sunday and every Sunday I had legs and a working heart for, I was going to be sat in her front room with the kettle on.
That the mortgage on this little terrace, the one she’d been chipping away at since 1989 in small monthly bits she pretended she did not think about, was going to be paid off before Christmas, quietly, the way she would actually want it.
That she was, before this calendar year was out, going to be on an aeroplane heading somewhere with proper sun on it, because she had not been on a plane since my dad took her to Tenerife in 1992 and she did not, even then, want to come home.
That her telly was going to be replaced. Her windows, the rotten one in the bathroom, fixed. Her boiler, which she had been pretending was fine for two winters, sorted.
That she was, on a particular morning in October 2019 which she did not yet know was coming, going to feel something funny in her chest and decide she would not bother the doctor with it because it was probably nothing.
And that this time, she was not going to be on her own in a kitchen with that decision. I was going to be there. With money, and time, and patience, and a doctor’s number already dialled, and an answer for every excuse she came up with.
I had failed her, in another life, by not being there, and I had been told, by a system in white letters, that I was getting a second chance to live for the people I loved. So I would. I would. Whatever else this thing took, whatever else I bet on or borrowed against or lost my own knees over to make happen, I was not, this time, losing her too.
I did not say a word of any of that out loud. I just kept her hand in mine while the curtains hung slightly crooked behind us, and stayed for an extra cup of tea I did not really want, and then another after that.
The crooked curtain.
The arm round me.
The three sugars cooling on the bedside table.
I banked every single second of it. Because I knew exactly how many Sundays of these I was going to get with my mum this time around if I played it right, and how many I had not got in another life because I had been a coward in a tracksuit who never came home.
