Chapter 32: Work To Do I
I sat looking at the FA letter on the desk while she put the lid on the kettle and the kettle began its small dying-animal wheeze and a fly knocked twice against the inside of the sash window and went away again.
Then I did the maths again.
I had, in the carpet hours of the previous fortnight, worked out that to finish a flat one point off the bottom of the National League required four wins by Christmas and six wins between New Year and April, with a draw a week to plug the gaps in between.
Four and six. Ten wins and a draw a week, give or take. That had been the carpet maths. The carpet maths had been generous. The carpet maths had assumed Tilbrook started the season on zero.
Tilbrook were now starting it on minus ten.
I did the new maths in my head with the brick-pointing tea going cold between my hands. Six wins by Christmas. Seven wins between New Year and April. Plus a draw a week to plug. Thirteen wins and a draw a week.
Thirteen wins out of forty-six. For a side that had, in another life, scraped four points off relegation with one game to spare in April, and had not, in this life, played a single match yet, or paid a single one of its players, or trained, in the truest sense of the word, for more than seventy-five minutes of an evening at a time.
I put the tea down before I broke the cup with my hands.
"Maureen."
"Yes, Samuel."
"When does this go out."
"Press release at the FA’s discretion. They put it on the wire at two o’clock. By the late editions on Tuesday it’s in everybody’s print. By Wednesday morning it’s everywhere. By Wednesday lunchtime there’s a journalist outside on the forecourt with a microphone and a question for you in his head you’d rather he didn’t ask."
"How long have I got with the lads."
"You’ve got tonight. Sit any longer than tonight and they read it in the paper before you’ve shaken their hands."
"And the press today?"
She looked at the office phone.
The office phone, on cue, rang.
The office phone, which had been silent since the previous Wednesday’s call from the brewery, rang with a brrr brrr I had not yet, in nine days at Maureen’s elbow, heard out of it. It rang with the small particular insistence of a phone that, after thirty years of being rung only by the brewery, the rates, and a man called Davids who sold faded brewery calendars, had been rung instead by a journalist somewhere on the Press Association desk.
Maureen picked up the receiver.
"Tilbrook Town F.C., Maureen Tully speaking, the club’s response is no comment at this time, a full statement to follow Wednesday morning, all further enquiries by post please, thank you and good day."
She put the receiver down.
It rang again before her hand was off the cradle. She lifted it, said the same sentence in the same voice, put it back down. It rang twice more between half past ten and twelve. By twelve she had taken to leaving the receiver off the hook on the desk between us, boop boop boop of the engaged tone going under the kettle’s wheeze.
"Samuel."
"Maureen."
"Whatever you are about to say in your head, please do say it out loud. I have, on this morning of this particular Monday, run out of patience with you for being a thoughtful young man."
"Sully," I said.
"Yes, love."
"Sully is going to read this letter on page sixty-three of the Standard before he gets home from the office tonight. Sully is going to do the maths I have just done in his head. Sully is going to put the Standard on the back seat of the Range Rover, ring his receptionist, and pencil in a Wednesday morning meeting with a man from Barratt Homes."
"Probably is."
"Then I am going to find another way of getting to April."
"Yes you are, Samuel."
"And I am going to need a fresh page in the rates ledger. And a list of every single supplier we owe more than two hundred pounds to, with a column down the right that I will fill in myself on the Tuesday with the names of the ones who are going to wait. And I need you, between now and the meeting at six tonight, to think hard about one name in this town you have not yet thought of. Somebody you and me are going to sit across a kitchen table from before the end of next week with a proposition."
Maureen put her glasses back on, very slowly.
"You are cross, Samuel."
"I am cross, Maureen."
"About time, lad."
She got up. She filled the kettle. She put it on. The kettle began its dying-animal wheeze again from a colder start, and over the wheeze and the engaged-tone boop boop boop, Maureen Tully said, in a voice I had not yet heard out of her in nine days at her elbow:
"Right. Let’s go to work."
I rang Lenny at three. Six o’clock, back room of the clubhouse, all fifteen. He said Six. He rang back two minutes later to say he’d bring extra chairs because there were only seven in the room and there would be fifteen of them. I said cheers. He said don’t mention it.
The back room of the clubhouse at Tilbrook is a low brick room with a corrugated tin roof, a long folding table down the middle, a fridge that had not been switched on for ten months but had once held the half-time oranges of a 1992 cup run, and a single bare bulb on a flex.
They filed in still half in training kit, mud on their shins, Stan in his flat cap on a folded-out chair at the back, his big arthritic hands flat on his knees, Maureen by the door with her arms folded across the body warmer, fifteen grown men and one boy and one woman.
The room went very, very quiet when I stood up at the head of the table.
I did not sit down.
"Right."
The room went quieter.
"The FA have given us ten points off. Before a ball’s been kicked. Effective opening day. There is an appeal. The appeal is rubbish. Twenty-nine out of thirty. We are not appealing because we cannot afford to lose the appeal and we cannot afford to win it either. I am telling you now, before anyone outside this room knows, because the rest of the country knows by Wednesday."
Sid Hollis took his cap off and put it on his knee. The gap-tooth at the front of his grin was nowhere near a grin. Stan looked at the floor. Lenny did not move.
"There is more..."
