Chapter 34: Watch the Space
Four in the morning, Tuesday, and I was stood at the kitchen table counting fifties into envelopes.
I’d not been to bed. The last time I’d laid down on top of the duvet, about one o’clock, I’d spent forty straight minutes staring up at the damp patch on the bedroom ceiling and worrying about a man in Sheffield I had not yet met, so I’d given up. Put the kettle on, click, hiss. Decided to do something useful with my hands instead.
Eight envelopes. Two-fifty in each. Two thousand pounds.
The Sports Direct bag-for-life was on the chair, gone limp now I’d emptied it, and the wad of fifties on the table was working its way down a fifty at a time as I counted them into the envelopes, flick, flick, flick.
The FA letter sat off to one side where I’d laid it the previous morning, blue ink up, deduction of ten points in the third paragraph.
The Sportskit till receipt was next to it. WATCH THE SPACE in blocky biro capitals across the top. 13 on the back in the same hand. Six items down the front. Item four underlined twice.
Item four was underlined twice because the biro had run out halfway through the first underline and I’d had to fish a fresh one out of the kitchen drawer to finish it, and the two lines did not, on a fresh look at half past four in the morning, line up. Item four looked like it had been underlined by an enthusiastic child.
Item four was a twenty-three-year-old lad in a borrowed kit in a steelworks town outside Sheffield called Stocksbridge who, by my watch as I counted out the seventh envelope, was asleep in a flat above a takeaway with his alarm set for half six and a Tuesday shift on a medical splints factory floor ahead of him.
He did not know I existed. He would not, until the Friday lunchtime, when I was going to walk into a clubhouse at the back of a council pitch and ask him to sign for a fifth-tier football club that, by lunchtime on the Friday, was going to have lost ten points before a ball had been kicked.
I finished the eighth envelope. Sealed it. Put it on the pile.
The Nokia rang on the kitchen counter at five past five.
"Mercer."
"Gaffer, it’s Lenny."
"Lenny."
"Switch the telly on."
I switched the telly on. The yellow ticker at the bottom of the Sky News screen was running through the FTSE, the cricket score from Lahore, and then a third sentence that took me a second to make sense of.
TILBROOK TOWN FC EXPECTED TO FACE TEN-POINT SANCTION ON EMERGENCE FROM ADMINISTRATION.
Bloody hell.
"Somebody at the FA’s been talking," Lenny said. "Wanted you to know. Half the country that watches Sky News of a Tuesday morning has it."
"Cheers, Lenny."
"You’re up early."
"I haven’t been to bed."
"Right then. The lads on the rec at six. Mooney’s running."
"Mooney’s running?"
"Mooney is running, gaffer. Told him last night. He turned up at ten to five looking like a man who had had a stern word with himself in the bathroom mirror."
"Good lad."
He rang off.
The press release wasn’t going on the wire until two. The country was supposed to find out in the late editions tonight. Instead it was running on a yellow ticker at five past five in the morning, crawl, crawl, crawl, over a bloke in Lahore lifting a cricket bat.
I switched the telly off.
I sat down and finished my tea.
By eight or nine the journalists were on the train down from Liverpool Street. By ten they were at the gate at Marsh Road with notepads and a Dictaphone each. By two o’clock it was everyone, not just the early-morning Sky News watchers. I had a window.
I put my clean white shirt on under the jacket. I had a Hobnob from the tin. I put the eight sealed envelopes into the inside pockets of the jacket and the trousers and the rucksack, two to each, and I left the FA letter where it was on the Formica, blue ink up, with the receipt next to it and 13 face down on the back.
Item four. Friday morning.
I caught the half-six bus into town.
The bus was quiet at that hour.
Two cleaners going home off a night shift, a paper boy with his sack between his knees, and me at the back with my hands in my pockets and the eight envelopes warming the inside of the jacket.
The driver had a Loyalty of 16 floating over his head. The cleaners were both off the scale on Work Rate.
And of course, the second I had a quiet five seconds in the head, in she walked.
Karen. Twenty years old somewhere off west on a warm Tuesday morning, asleep on a single bed in a student flat she did not know I knew the postcode of, in approximately no item of clothing my brain was capable of leaving alone for more than four seconds at a stretch.
Not now, Karen. I shoved her gently back out the way you shove a cat off a kitchen counter, because the cat is yours and you love her. Buy a football club. Find a striker. Do the work. Karen later.
Karen later.
The bus stopped at the top of the high street and I got off.
NatWest opened at half nine. There was already a queue of three at the door. Two old boys with chequebooks.
A woman in her thirties with a wedding-cake folder. I joined the back of it. The brass plaque on the door said NATWEST. THE FRIENDLY BANK, and had not been polished since the 1980s.
Click, brrr. The door went.
I went in.
The kid behind the INVESTMENTS desk had a haircut his mum still trimmed of a Sunday and a lanyard from his first day on the Wednesday before. He looked up when I came over. He looked at the eight envelopes I started laying out in a neat row across the desk.
"...Mr Mercer."
"Mr Mercer."
"You’re..."
"Two grand cash. BP shares. Buy at market. Today. Before ten."
He went a bit pale.
"Mr Mercer, I have a duty to mention, given the current Deepwater Horizon situation, that BP shares are at a multi-year low and a substantial number of analysts..."
"Adam." I’d seen his name on the little plastic strip clipped to the lanyard.
"...Sir?"
"Have a look at the eight envelopes on the desk. Have a look at me. Then have a think about whether you, in your first week, want to be the lad who tells the man with the eight envelopes he can’t have his trade."
He looked at the envelopes. He looked at me.
He pushed his glasses up his nose.
He tapped at the keyboard.
He looked at the screen for the longer half of a minute, the way a man does when he’s working out whether his pension is worth what his pride is.
Then he pressed something on the keyboard, and the dot-matrix printer to his left chuntered, zzzzt, and a slip rolled out.
He tore it off.
He pushed it across the desk.
Trade confirmation. BP plc. £1,995.40 at market. Settlement T+3.
I picked it up. I put it in the inside pocket where the second envelope had been.
"Cheers, Adam."
"...Sir."
"Listen. Next spring BP comes back through four pounds a share. Spring after, five. Don’t tell your old man, he won’t listen. Tell your sister. And learn to press that button quicker, mate. The button’s the job."
