Chapter 29: Work to Do
A magic football panel that could see a hundred and sixty-one out of two hundred standing in a council rec’s compost-bag mud could see a striker, too. With interest.
I closed the thought down quietly. Not yet, Samuel. One mountain at a time. Tilbrook first. The lad in Sheffield was going to be there in three weeks’ time.
Through the function room window I could see them. My team. Sid with one massive arm round Maureen, who was pretending she wasn’t crying and fooling absolutely nobody.
Lenny actually smiling, properly, for the first time since I’d met him. Stan the physio still holding his envelope of cash like it might turn out to be a dream.
And Bailey Quinn, seventeen years old, a hundred and sixty-one out of two hundred, the entire future of this football club, doing keepy-ups with a balloon somebody had brought, dropping it, laughing that great daft delighted laugh, scrambling to pick it up and start again.
Mine. All of it. The wonky T and the rust and the legend with no knees and the boy with the world in his boots and the whole impossible, beautiful, four-hundred-grand-in-the-hole lot of it.
I went back inside.
The room went quiet when I walked in, that expectant hush, fourteen footballers and twelve fans and one club secretary all turning to look at the skint twenty-four-year-old who’d somehow just become their owner, and for half a second the old me, the bottler, very nearly froze on the spot.
Then I thought, no. Not any more. And I climbed up on a chair for the second time that week.
"Right," I said.
"I’m not going to stand up here and promise you the moon. You’ve had men in nice suits promise you things before, and you’ve watched every last one of them let you down, and I’m not going to insult you by being the next one."
Lenny gave a small nod, like, good, get on with it. "So I’ll promise you the truth instead. We are skint. We’ve got no manager. We’ve got a stand held up by rust and Maureen’s prayers, and a season that starts in four weeks, and on paper we are the worst-equipped club in the entire division."
I let it land. "But on paper, last month, I was folding tracksuits. And on paper, that grass out there was already two hundred and forty flats. Paper," I said, "is not where this gets decided."
A ripple went round the room. Sid grinning. The big docker from the trust nodding along like he was in church.
"I can see things," I said, which was the truest and the maddest thing I’d said all week, and not one of them had the faintest idea how much I meant it.
"I can see what this club can be. I can’t tell you all of it, not yet; you’d have me sectioned. But I am telling you it finishes a long, long way up from here. So don’t go signing for anybody else. Come back to the rec on Tuesday. And let’s go and give some people the fright of their lives."
It was no Churchill speech. My voice cracked twice. I lost a word in the middle and Sid coughed loud enough to cover it. But when I climbed down off that wobbly chair, Lenny Marsh finally, finally put out that scaffolder’s hand, took mine, and shook it. Hard. Once. And looked me dead in the eye.
"All right," he said. "Gaffer."
Gaffer.
Not Mr Mercer. Not pal. Gaffer.
The breath went out of me. I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste it and I made the kind of small uh sound a man makes when he is not, under any circumstances available to him, going to cry in front of his own captain.
Sid, behind Lenny, very quietly reached over and put one massive paw on the back of my neck for half a second, the way my dad used to on a milk crate at the Bovril End in 1991. Squeezed once. Let go. Lenny pretended he hadn’t seen any of it. Click of my jaw setting back together. I straightened up.
Because four weeks ago I’d been folding tracksuits for Dean.
Six weeks ago I’d been dying on the A13 with the word failure ringing in my ears and a man’s whole wasted life behind me.
And now here I was, standing in a function room above a Premier Inn off the A13, twenty-four years old (again), the owner of a hundred-and-three-year-old football club, with a beaten developer’s warning in one ear and a dead father’s pride filling up my whole chest, and an impossible mountain rising in front of me, tier after tier after tier, all the way up to the top where the giants lived and the men who’d spent my entire life calling me a loser were going about their business without the slightest idea that I was coming for them.
And I started to feel, properly, sat there on the edge of a wobbly chair with Lenny Marsh’s handshake still warm on mine, the actual shape of what I had just gone and taken on. The size of it.
By Monday morning’s paperwork, I was going to be the chairman of Tilbrook Town Football Club.
By the embarrassing absence of any other living candidate, I was also, as of about ninety seconds ago, its manager.
And on top of both of those, I was the only person in that room with any earthly business worrying about how on God’s earth I was going to plug the running-money hole between now and next spring, because my own private wallet was, just at present, locked up in a small mad pile of magic beans buried under a flat above a kebab shop for another eight months, and three thousand pounds in cash was not, by any honest piece of arithmetic, going to keep eleven men and a stand and a kit man and a clubhouse fed for half a season, never mind a year.
Money was going to have to come from somewhere it had never come from at Marsh Road before. And it was going to have to start coming soon.
Three jobs no twenty-four-year-old had any honest business doing. All sat with a soft thump on the same pair of one-collared-shirt shoulders.
Make it four jobs, in actual fact.
Because somewhere off in West London, on this very same warm Friday afternoon, in approximately no item of clothing the universe had ever properly costed for, was Karen. Twenty years old.
Not yet remotely aware that the only man she was ever going to marry now had a football club, a covenant, a Premier Inn function room story, and was about to be every kind of busy for the foreseeable.
Not now, Karen. Gently. Cat off the counter. But on the list, all the same. Always on the list. Even if the list itself didn’t, this time round, know yet whether it was even going to be allowed to get her.
No manager.
No money.
No striker.
Four weeks.
I looked round at them. My ragtag, skint, hopeless, glorious blue-and-white football club. Sid and Maureen and Stan and Lenny and a seventeen-year-old miracle chasing a balloon.
Then I cracked my knuckles, click, and I grinned, and I felt, for the first time in two whole lifetimes, exactly where I was supposed to be.
"Right then," I said. "Let’s go to work."
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END OF VOLUME 1
TO BE CONTINUED...
