Chapter 26: The People’s Game II
Maureen, meanwhile, was upstairs in the office above the clubhouse till one in the morning every night with a desk lamp on a wonky shade and a Tupperware of her own homemade flapjack open at her elbow, flick, flick, flick of yellowing carbon-paper gate records going past her thumbnail.
"Seven hundred and forty home in the eighty-nine to ninety season, Samuel. Seven hundred and forty. I want that on a sheet of A4 on top of that liquidator’s stack before she’s even taken her coat off."
"Yes, Maureen."
"And the cup run in ninety-two. And the centenary year."
"Yes, Maureen."
"Yes, Maureen, he says." But she was smiling round the biro between her teeth.
On the Thursday morning I went into the bank in my one ironed collared shirt. Carol behind the counter had known me since I was nineteen, since I’d come in with my first wage packet from a building site, and she blinked at the withdrawal slip I pushed across.
"Four thousand pounds, Samuel."
"Four thousand pounds, Carol."
"In cash?"
"In cash."
"Four thousand pounds is a lot of cash, love."
"It is, yeah."
"Are you... is everything... should I..."
"Carol. I’m not in trouble. I’m not doing anything daft. I’m paying somebody back what they’re owed."
She studied me for a long, careful second over the top of her glasses. Then she nodded, slowly. "Right you are, then, love. You wait there. Don’t go anywhere." And she went to the safe.
I walked out with the envelope warm inside my jacket pocket, and I did not, between Carol’s safe and Ms Adeyemi’s function room, sleep more than ninety minutes at a stretch for three nights.
Did not eat much either. God, I was wired.
I sat on the carpet of my flat at three in the morning the Thursday, brmm of a lorry going past out the window, meow of Erol’s tabby in through the fire-escape door for her usual saucer of milk and a chinwag, and I drew up a one-sheet brief in biro on the back of an old Sportskit till receipt of every single thing I was going to need to say in that room and every single thing they were going to use against me, and I rehearsed it out loud at the cat until even she got bored of me and went home.
The morning of the meeting, before I put on the one shirt I owned with a collar, I sat on the edge of my bed with the scrapbook open on my knees.
I turned to the line. THE FIELD WAS GIVE TO THE TOWN. CANT NEVER BE SOLD. ITS OURS FOR EVER. DAD SAYS. My dad’s blocky little-boy capitals. The thing he’d known his entire life and never had any cause to prove, handed down to him by his own dad up on the Bovril End, handed to me in a battered shoebox I’d very nearly chucked in a skip in another life.
"You knew," I said to him, quiet, in the empty flat.
"All them years. You knew it couldn’t be sold and you just knew it, in your bones, because your dad told you, and you never once needed a solicitor to believe a word of it." I ran my thumb over the underline he’d pressed so hard it had nearly gone through the page. "I’m going to go and make it true today, Dad. On paper. The way the clever men need it done."
I don’t believe in much. I didn’t believe in time travel either, mind, right up until it happened to me. But I’ll tell you this for nothing. Sat on the edge of that bed with my dead father’s handwriting under my thumb, I felt him there. The big warm shape of him. The hand on the back of my neck. Watch the space, son.
"I’m watching it," I whispered. "I’m watching all of it now."
Then I closed the scrapbook, and I put on my one collared shirt, and I went to go and win.
The creditors’ meeting was held in a function room above a Premier Inn off the A13, the kind of room with a swirly carpet and a faint smell of yesterday’s buffet, and it was the most important room I had ever walked into in my life.
Ms Adeyemi was at the top table. Tired, careful, decent-looking, hair scraped back into a clip, a thin gold wedding band on her left hand. Laptop open. A stack of bound files at her left elbow. The air of a woman who did sad work for a living and did it properly because somebody had to.
The creditors were in rows. Maureen had briefed me on every face on the bus over. The brewery rep, fifties, blazer slightly too tight across the shoulders, tap, tap, tap of his biro on his pad, kept checking his watch because his next meeting was in Romford at three and the M25 was already crawling.
The bloke from the kit supplier, beard, lanyard from his own company round his neck, on his phone half the time over a deal in Slough that was going sideways.
A woman from the laundry firm with a ring binder open on her knees, a small gold cross on a chain, and the face of a person who had written off worse than four hundred grand in her career and would write this off, too, and go home to her husband for fish and chips and the ten o’clock news.
And down at the very front, twisting a flat cap in big arthritic hands, an older fella with eyes the colour of rain on a windscreen: Stan. Who’d strapped Tilbrook ankles for twenty years and had not seen a wage since the seventh of March.
And at the front, in the good seats, beautiful suit, beautiful watch, two beautiful lawyers flanking him like Dobermans, sat Ray Sully, who turned and saw me come in and gave me a small, warm, genuinely friendly nod, because he thought he’d already won, and a man who thinks he’s already won can afford to be gracious.
Then he saw what came in behind me.
Fourteen footballers in blue-and-white club tracksuits. Maureen with two box files of gate records. Twelve members of the supporters’ trust. A dozen more fans who’d heard.
And they filed in, shuffle, shuffle, scrape of chairs, and they filled the whole back half of that swirly-carpeted room, silent, arms folded, and I watched Ray Sully’s friendly nod curdle very slightly at the edges.
Ms Adeyemi looked up over her glasses at the crowd, then at me. "And you are?"
"Sam Mercer," I said. "I’m here to make an offer for the club."
"Mr Mercer’s offer," said one of Sully’s lawyers smoothly, before I’d even sat down, "with respect, cannot be a serious one. We’ve reviewed the position. There is one credible bid before this meeting, and it clears the creditors in full." He smiled at the room, at Stan the physio especially. "In full. Today."
And there it was. The cash sweetener. The number that would make a tired liquidator and a room full of unpaid people want to say yes and go home.
I stood up.
"Can I ask Mr Sully one question?" I said.
Sully spread his hands, magnanimous. "Course, son."
"When you’ve cleared the debts and you own the land," I said, "what are you going to build on it?"
