Chapter 31: Minus Ten
Lenny came in on the Wednesday at quarter to seven in the morning.
I had not, by this stage, yet learnt that Lenny did everything before quarter to seven in the morning unless he was on a scaffold, on which occasions he did it at half past three of an afternoon instead.
He stood in the doorway in his hi-vis with brick dust still on the cheekbone he had pressed against a girder twenty minutes earlier and a mug of his own tea he had brought from the caff downstairs, the hand holding the mug rough as a builder’s rasp from twelve years of climbing wet poles, half-skinned across the back of the knuckles from a Tuesday afternoon’s rope work he had not so much as washed yet.
"Mr Mercer."
"Lenny."
"Two questions."
"Go on, mate."
"One. The lads start back on the rec from Monday week. Four nights a week, plus the Saturdays. Stan’s got the bibs. That all right with you."
"That’s all right by me."
"Two. I’d like the lads to know what they’re playing for. Money-wise. By the end of next week. Not because the lads need it. Because the lads’ missus’s do."
"Friday."
"Friday what?"
"I’ll have a number on the table by Friday. For everyone."
He nodded. Drank from the mug. Looked at me across the desk, the trainers, the borrowed-off-Maureen biro, the lamp with the wonky shade.
The look on his face was the look of a thirty-three-year-old scaffolder centre-back who had agreed to give a skint twenty-four-year-old nine days, had got him those nine days, and was now waiting, professionally, with no fuss, to find out whether the twenty-four-year-old was going to be worth a tenth.
"Friday," he said again, on the way out the door, and that was Lenny.
Some of the small was less lovely.
The brewery bill turned up in the post on the Thursday.
I will spare you the figure, because the figure is enough to ruin the Chapter for both of us, and I will spare you the column of red ink down the right-hand side of the page, because the column is enough to ruin the Chapter for both of us a second time.
The secretary pinned the bill above the kettle without speaking. We had, by close of business that Thursday, written the brewery into the schedule and signed the schedule and posted it back, and she had, by way of personal protest, put one extra spoon of leaves into her own pot.
The rates bill came on the Friday.
The insurance renewal on the Saturday. The kit supplier’s invoice on the Monday morning following.
Both rates and insurance were exactly as bad as she had told me on the Tuesday they would be, and the kit supplier was, by her quiet aside, worse. We did the same with all three. Wrote them in. Posted them back.
Put them above the kettle. By the second week, the wall above the kettle had become a small, polite, neatly-spaced gallery of the men I owed money to, hung to a policy I had worked out without anybody having to tell me, which was that the largest invoice went furthest from the steam.
On the Sunday I went round Mum’s.
Mum did not know yet that I had bought a football club.
Mum did not yet need to know that I had bought a football club.
Mum knew only that her son Samuel had quit Sportskit, had told her one of his small-print plans was, by his estimation, going to come good before Christmas, and was, by every external sign she could see across her tea table, eating better than he had been in May.
She had, on those three observations, decided to leave it alone for now, on the working theory that pressing a twenty-four-year-old son for more information was, in her thirty-year experience of running a man through the airing cupboard of a small terrace off the high street, a sure way of getting less of it.
She let me in in her cardigan with the gauze net curtain flapping behind her in the open front door. She made me a fry-up. She fussed over the curtain I had put up in her back bedroom four weeks before.
She slid the Battenberg cake she had bought at Marks the previous Wednesday across the kitchen table to my elbow, patted my hand once, dry and warm and old, and said, "Whatever it is, Samuel."
"Yes, Mum."
"You watch the space."
"I’m watching it."
"Good lad."
I went home on the Sunday evening on the 364 bus with three sugars of her tea still on my breath and a slice of Battenberg in a tinfoil parcel in my jacket pocket. I sat at the back of the upper deck looking out the window at an Essex going past in the long gold late summer light, and I thought, you know what, Sam Mercer. You are going to be all right.
I should have known better.
On the Monday morning, on Maureen’s desk above the clubhouse at twenty past nine, there was an envelope on the National League’s headed paper.
Maureen had not yet opened it.
Maureen had made me a cup of tea and put me on a chair in the corner before she opened it, because she could read the postmark and the postmark told her, with the directness of forty years of post into this office, that what was in the envelope was not, on any reading, going to be a Christmas card.
She picked it up with two fingers. Slit the top. Pulled the sheet.
She read it.
She put it down on the desk.
She looked at me.
"Ten."
"...Ten what?"
"Ten points, Samuel. Off the table. Before a ball’s been kicked."
I took the sheet off her.
I read it standing up because I had read bad news standing up since I was fifteen years old. Black FA crest at the top, blue ink underneath, RE: Tilbrook Town Football Club, Emergence from Insolvency Proceedings, Sporting Sanction.
The number ten was in the third paragraph, halfway down the page, in a font no bigger than the surrounding text, sat between the words deduction of and points, the way the worst numbers always do.
The recent precedents were set out in a column down the left-hand margin for reference, nine and ten points off down the years at clubs you’ve heard of and clubs you haven’t. Underneath the column there was an appeal process. The appeal process ran to seven sentences and was very nearly all of it the words not and unless.
I read it again.
I read it a third time, because the third time I had stopped reading the words and had started reading the number, and the number was the same the third time as it had been the first two, which had been the only piece of information I had wanted, very honestly and very personally, to be different.
I will tell you that the punch of it, when I felt it, did not feel like a punch. It felt like the floor of the office above the clubhouse had been pulled out from under me and put back in exactly the same place.
Same desk.
Same kettle.
Same brewery calendar from 2003.
Same yellow at the top of the wall and the same tea-darkened cream at the bottom.
Same Maureen Tully in the same body warmer over the same faded polo, looking at me from her chair across the desk with her hands folded in her lap and her face on her like she’d fight the whole world and fancied her chances.
Same office. Different building. Different country. Different job.
Ten.
"Bloody hell," I said, very quietly.
Maureen, who had spent thirty years not being shocked by anything that had ever come through that office door, nodded once.
I sat down.
I sat down before the knee did the thing it did when I forgot it was held together with surgical thread and good intentions.
"Appeal."
Maureen looked at me steadily over the half-rim of her glasses.
"Samuel, love."
"How much, Maureen?"
"For a barrister out of the West End who has actually won one of these in the last decade, with a junior, a clerk, court fees, hearing fees, and a non-refundable deposit on the Friday of next week? Twenty-five thousand pounds and a Tuesday afternoon in Wembley. The appeal would take eighteen months. The last club to win one of these on appeal was Wycombe in 1997, and that was the thirtieth out of thirty, and they had a chairman who owned a haulage firm."
"Twenty-five grand."
"Twenty-five. Plus disbursements."
"And we have..."
"We have three thousand pounds in two accounts and a brewery bill due Friday. We have, before the wire goes on the thirty-first, no spare money of any kind, anywhere, in the entire enterprise. You cannot appeal what you cannot pay to lose, Samuel. You also cannot appeal what you cannot pay to win, which is a separate problem, but a problem all the same."
"No."
"I’m sorry, lad."
"Don’t be sorry, Maureen."
