Chapter 30: Recap
VOLUME 2: THE CHAIRMAN
Right. You’re back.
Two weeks since I’d climbed down off a wobbly chair in a function room above a Premier Inn off the A13 with Lenny Marsh’s handshake still warm on my hand, and not a peep out of you in all that time, you cheeky bastard.
Get something to drink. Sit down.
The honest version is that I spent the first three days of those two weeks on the carpet of my flat above the kebab shop on Carling Street, on my back, doing the maths in the dark.
You can do the maths on a small football club a great many ways when you’ve just bought one with the thick end of nine thousand pounds in cash, with four hundred thousand quid of inherited debt sat on top of it like a fat man on a deckchair, and the maths comes out the same way every time you do it.
The maths comes out short.
There were sixteen thousand six hundred and sixty-seven pounds due to leave my new Lloyds business account on the thirty-first of every month for the next twenty-four months running, the first wire due on the thirty-first of July, and I had three thousand pounds in cash to my name in total.
Two of that three was a tidy little number sitting in a Bitcoin wallet on a beige laptop that took four minutes to turn on and was not going to be worth what I knew it was worth for another eight months at the absolute earliest, brrr, whirr, click.
Of the rest, nine hundred and forty-five quid was in the Lloyds account where Carol had set the thing up for me the Monday morning after the Premier Inn, and the remaining two thousand and fifty-five was in a Sports Direct bag-for-life with handles that had started to stretch, shoved under my bed, where it had been since the eleventh of July when Iniesta had hit one into the bottom corner against the Netherlands and I had walked home with the whole World Cup folded into my coat.
On top of all that, you had the football club itself, which is to say: a stand whose roof Maureen Tully had described to me on day four as one good gust away from a planning consultation, fourteen men I was about to be responsible for paying, a kit man, a physio called Stan who had cried into his envelope of cash in front of forty people the previous Friday and had not, by her account, slept properly since, the rates, the insurance, the gas, the electric.
And a brewery I had been warned on the very same fourth day to under no circumstances allow into the office unless I had at least a Hobnob to offer them, the brewery being thirty-eight grand of the four hundred and you did not, in Maureen Tully’s view, want to be sitting across a desk from a thirty-eight-grand creditor with an empty plate of biscuits between you.
Three grand. Sixteen six six seven. Twenty-four times running.
Lying on a carpet in the dark, you start to do things like price up a Pot Noodle by the gram.
So that was day one, day two, day three.
Day four, I got up off the carpet.
Old Sam would have stayed there the better part of a year.
New Sam, the one who had walked into Sportskit a fortnight earlier and handed Dean his polo over his head and walked out without looking back, was not interested in lying around any more, on the basis that Sportskit was not the only thing in this life I was prepared to walk out of.
The floor of my own front room was on the list.
Day five, I started at Maureen Tully’s elbow.
The office above the clubhouse at Marsh Road was a small room with a sloping ceiling and a sash window that looked out onto the forecourt, an electric three-bar fire that did not work and would not, by office policy, be replaced before she retired, which she had on no available evidence any intention of doing.
The walls were yellow at the top and a tea-darkened cream at the bottom, and pinned to them, at angles that had not changed in twenty years, were a faded line drawing of the 1971 promotion side, a hand-typed organisational chart from 1989 with three names crossed out across the years since in three different inks, a brewery calendar from 2003 the brewery had stopped sending calendars from in 2004, and an actual hockey stick.
Right there.
Leaning against the wall by the door. The hockey stick she had threatened to brain me with on the morning we had met.
I asked her about the hockey stick on the fifth morning.
She gave me a small dry look over the kettle, the same body warmer she had been wearing on the morning we met still on over the same club polo, the badge of it gone so faded over the years that you could only really read it if you knew what to look for, and her grey hair scraped back behind her ears the way her mother’s had been scraped back behind hers in 1953.
"I am sixty-four years old, Samuel, and I have been the only adult in this building since 1981. I have, on my watch, had four developers walk through that door, two of them on a single afternoon in 2007. The hockey stick is for those occasions."
"Got it."
"Don’t get clever about the hockey stick."
"No, Maureen."
"Sit down. Coats off. Don’t touch the kettle. The kettle has a system."
I sat down. I did not touch the kettle.
What I had walked into, in my one ironed-collared shirt and the trainers with the hole starting in the toe, was not, by any sense the wider business community would have recognised, a position.
It was a desk at the elbow of a woman who had been doing the entire job, on her own, since 1981, who had now agreed, by my reading of her face, to teach me, for a wage of zero, every single thing she had spent thirty years working out, so that I might in due course pretend to be a chairman in front of people who knew rather better.
The patience she had to put on for that was not a small ask.
And the patience she did, in fact, put on, day after day, with the kettle going and the rates bill on the corner of the desk and a pencil behind one ear the way a butcher carries a biro, was one of the genuinely staggering acts of kindness of my second life so far.
I lived in that office for the next nine days running.
Some of the small was lovely. Stan came in on the Tuesday in his flat cap with a clean white envelope and the better half of his March wages still in it.
He sat across the desk twisting the cap in big arthritic hands, eyes the colour of rain on a windscreen, and over a Hobnob he told me, very quietly, with his cap in his hands and his eyes on a spot on the desk between us, that the Tilbrook ankles had been strapped by a Stan since 1968, that his old man had done the strapping before him and had strapped Bill Mercer’s ankle once after a five-a-side at the welfare in the long hot summer of 1976, and would I mind, all things being equal, if he stayed on at the same rate as before.
I said the rate had just gone up to seventy a week and a fortnight’s strapping owed back. He told me to keep it at sixty and not be daft.
We went round and round about it for an hour. The argument was settled in the end by Maureen writing sixty-five on the back of a brewery envelope and pushing it across the desk without saying a word, and Stan and I both said, in approximately the same breath, "All right then, Maureen," and went back to our biscuits.
Stan’s hands, when he reached for the biscuit, were a working man’s hands gone wrong at the joints, knuckles like marbles under the skin, the index finger of the right hand that had strapped Bill Mercer’s ankle and ten thousand others curling against the bone the wrong way.
