Chapter 18: Marsh Road
"You’re going to have to tell me where we’re going eventually," said Raj, both hands on the wheel of the minicab, the little pine tree air freshener swinging and spinning, tick, tick, tick.
"We’ve been driving for forty minutes. We’re basically in the sea. Sam. There’s a cow. There’s a cow just there, look, in a field, judging us. I’ve got fares I’m turning down for this, you know. Mrs Kapoor needs taking to the cash and carry at two and I have abandoned her. For a cow."
"I’ll cover your fares, Raj."
"With your pizza money?"
"With my pizza money. Keep going. Out past the refinery. Towards the water."
He’d agreed to drive me because I’d finally given him something. Not the truth, I couldn’t give him the truth.
But I’d looked at him over a fry-up at Maria’s that morning and said, "Raj. All the weirdness. The running, the betting, all of it. I want to show you what it’s been for." And a Loyalty of 18 doesn’t need much more than that. He’d just nodded, and got his keys.
The road got narrower and emptier the further east we went, the city thinning out into scrubland and pylons and that flat, grey, beautiful estuary light that I would know anywhere, the light I grew up under. Big skies. The smell of mud and salt coming in through the vents. Caw, went a gull, wheeling over a field.
And then we came round the bend by the old gasworks, and there she was.
"Pull over," I said. My voice had gone funny.
Marsh Road.
She looked like a corpse. That’s the only honest word for it.
The Main Stand sagged against the grey sky, rust bleeding down the corrugated roof in long orange streaks, and there, over the main entrance, the big white letters spelling out TILBROOK with that one wonky T that had been wonky my entire life, leaning drunkenly, holding on.
The turnstiles were chained. Clank, went the padlock against the metal when the wind caught the gate.
Weeds had come up through the cracks in the forecourt where ten thousand pairs of boots used to scrape on a Saturday. Somebody had cable-tied a few faded scarves to the railings, blue and white, going green at the edges, the way people leave flowers at the side of a road.
And taped to the locked gates, in a plastic wallet curling at the corners, an official notice. White. Cold. A judge’s words. Wound up. Finished.
I got out of the car. I didn’t really decide to. My legs just took me.
I walked up to those gates and I put my hands on the cold wet metal, the exact metal my dad used to lift me over when the queue was too long, "go on, son, quick, before the steward sees," and the whole thing came up out of me at once.
The Bovril. The milk crate. Watch the space. The roar when we scored. His big hand on the back of my neck. A hundred and three years and one ordinary forklift driver’s entire happiness, all of it, locked up behind a chain and a judge’s notice in a curling plastic wallet.
And underneath all that, ungratefully, a small clean corner of my brain registered the knee. Holding. Week seven of the protocol, the longest sustained standing-still I’d done in two whole lifetimes, on cold wet pavement on a July morning that had decided to drizzle, and it was holding. The system, for once, said nothing. It didn’t need to.
"All right, Dad," I whispered. "I’m here. I came. This time, I came."
"OI!"
A voice. Sharp. Female. Furious.
"You! Yes, you, sunshine! Hands off them gates!"
She came round the side of the stand like a small angry weather system, marching, a bin bag in one hand and a set of keys in the other, sixty-odd years old, a body warmer over a club polo so faded you could barely read the badge, grey hair scraped back, and a face on her like she’d fight the whole world and fancied her chances.
"If you’re from the developers you can sling your hook," she barked, "I’ve told the lot of you, you don’t set foot inside till the paperwork says so, and if you’re press, you can definitely sling your hook, and if you’re here to nick the copper out the floodlights like them two last week, I’ve called the police already and I’ve got a hockey stick in the office, so..."
And then the panel opened over her head, the way it did now, faint in the grey estuary light.
And I forgot how to breathe.
---
Name: Maureen Tully Age: 64
"Player": N/A Club Secretary, Tilbrook Town F.C., unpaid, since 1981. She has held this club together with her bare hands for thirty years. She is the only reason there is anything left here to save.
---
A name.
The system had shown me a name.
I’d looked at a hundred strangers in two weeks, the bus driver, the traffic warden, the kids in the park, the spotty lad in the bookies, and every single one had come up the same. Name: Unknown. Because a name had to be earned. A name meant the person had walked out of the background of my life and into the actual story of it. A name meant this one matters.
And here, at the gates of my dead father’s dead club, the first stranger the system had ever named in my whole second life was a furious sixty-four-year-old woman with a bin bag and a hockey stick.
The shivers went right through me, head to toe.
"...Are you having a funny turn?" said Maureen, suspicion curdling into something almost like concern. "You’ve gone grey, lad. You’re not on drugs, are you. We get a lot of that down here now. Sad, really."
"No. No, I’m..." I let go of the gates. Wiped my face, sniff, tried to remember how to be a person. "Sorry. I’m sorry. My dad. He used to bring me here. When I was a kid. I just heard, about the club, and I... I had to come and see it."
Something shifted in her face. The fury didn’t go, but it stepped back a pace, made room.
"...What’s his name," she said. "Your dad."
"Mercer. Bill Mercer. He worked the docks. Used to stand right there, halfway up the Bovril End, with me on a crate."
And Maureen Tully went very still as her eyes started to brighten.
"...Billy Mercer," she said slowly. "Flat cap. Quiet fella. Had a lad he was football daft about, used to copy the line-ups out in a little book."
She looked at me properly now, really looked, the way you look at a ghost. "You’re never the boy. The one that got taken on at the academy. He never stopped going on about you, your dad. Proud as owt."
Proud as owt. The exact words from the scrapbook. My throat closed right up.
"Yeah," I managed. "That’s me. The knee went. Bit of a comedown, sports shop and that. But yeah. That’s me."
"Well." She put the bin bag down. Looked at the sagging stand, the chained gates, the wonky T, with thirty years of love and exhaustion in her eyes.
"I’m sorry you had to see her like this, love. I really am. I’ve kept the lights on as long as I could. Cleared the gutters, paid the insurance out me own pension a couple of times, God help me. But you can’t fight the High Court with a hockey stick and a raffle. Four hundred grand they want. Four hundred thousand pounds."
She laughed, and it had no joy in it at all. "Might as well be four hundred million. Nobody’s coming, love. Nobody ever comes for a club like this."
She kicked at a weed coming up through the cracked concrete.
"Want to know the sick joke of it all? Now she’s dead, everyone’s interested. Phone’s not stopped ringing for a fortnight. Land, you see. That’s the thing nobody tells you about a dying football club, love. The club’s worth nothing. But the land she’s sat on?"
