Chapter 35: The News
I went back out the door at quarter to ten on the morning of Tuesday the twenty-seventh of July 2010 with a thousand and forty BP shares to my name and a Hobnob crumb on the corner of my mouth, and the same fizz down the back of my hands that I’d had walking out of Ladbrokes with six hundred and eighty quid sixteen days before.
Erol clocked me coming back up Carling Street.
"Samuel! You’re walking different, son. Like you’ve just eaten somebody else’s lunch."
"I might have done, Erol."
"Bacon roll?"
"Bacon roll, mate."
He fried it, sizzle, hsss.
He came round the counter with it on a paper plate, leant on the doorway in his apron with the chip oil shining off it in the morning sun, the Tottenham scarf nailed up behind him faded to a kind of pink, three photos of three kids Blu-Tacked next to it curling at the edges from twelve years’ heat.
He weighed me up the way he weighed everything up, slow and serious, like a magistrate passing sentence on a portion of chips.
"Yasmin starts at Goldsmiths the Tuesday after the bank holiday."
"Good for Yasmin."
"They want eight hundred and forty quid for the first term, Samuel. Up front. Before the loan kicks in. Friday of the second week. I’ll be honest with you, I have had this number on a piece of paper on my fridge for three weeks, and the number is not, I have noticed, getting any smaller of its own accord."
I took the bacon roll off him.
"Erol."
"Yes, lad."
"Eight forty on the back step of this hatch on the Thursday of the second week. Cash. Envelope. No note. Drop it in the pile when the rest of the term money comes in. Tell her her dad sorted it."
He looked at me for a second.
He looked at me for another second.
"Samuel."
"Erol."
"My cousin Hakan, he knows a fella. If you have done something you did not mean to do, you ring me. Don’t ring Hakan. Hakan, I love him, but Hakan is the reason I am running a kebab shop at half past nine of a Tuesday morning and not running my father’s tile shop in Famagusta. I will find the honest fella myself."
"It’s honest, Erol. I’ll tell you when I can."
He nodded once. He put a big chip-oil hand on my shoulder. Took it off. Wiped his eye on the back of the same hand and swore quietly at the fryer in a language I had been hearing through this hatch since I was twelve years old.
"Bacon roll is on the house," he said. "And a chip butty. And do not cry on my pavement, please, Samuel, I have a Hygiene rating to think about."
"I’ll do my best, mate."
"You do that, son."
I ate the bacon roll standing in his doorway and listened to him mutter at the extractor.
Maureen was at the desk in the office above the clubhouse when I came in. Rates ledger open in front of her. The phone on the desk was still silent. Twenty past ten. The release wasn’t on the wire for another three and a half hours, and the Sky News tip was still small enough that nobody had thought to ring the office.
"Samuel."
"Maureen. Have you seen Sky News this morning."
"I have, love."
"How long have we got."
"On the press release? Two o’clock. On the rest of the world?" She nodded at the silent phone. "Half an hour, give or take."
"Right. Three things on your desk before then."
"Three things, Samuel?"
"Three reports. Pearson Football Consulting. Brentford, Millwall, the office in Hammersmith. Cal Murphy at Crewe. He’s going to bang in twenty-six in a Championship season in three years’ time and I want a finder’s commission written into a three-page report before the country knows we exist."
She looked at me a long second.
She got the typewriter ribbon out of the drawer.
"Sit. Coat off. Don’t touch the kettle."
I sat. Took the coat off. Did not touch the kettle.
I had the first report written by twenty past eleven, off a brewery envelope I’d filled in at the kitchen table at three in the morning. Three pages.
Twelve hundred and forty words. The conclusion was three sentences and a number, the number being a modest sum that, if Brentford acted by the second week of August, would get them a striker who would be sold for the thick end of two and a half million pounds in three seasons.
Maureen read it. She looked at me over her half-glasses.
"You know all this."
"I know it."
"And Mr Pearson on the cover."
"Retired ex-pro from Hartlepool living in the South of France. No phone. No correspondent. I cleared the legality with Edwin Carbery yesterday afternoon. Seven clauses of the player registration rulebook of 1971. He wrote me a letter for the files."
"For what fee."
"He said he’d not had a Monday afternoon as interesting in eleven years and wasn’t going to charge me for it."
She nodded once.
"Type the next one, Samuel. The phone’s about to go."
The phone went at twenty to twelve.
It was the East Anglian Daily Times. Maureen handled them with a sentence I had not heard her say before, in a voice I had not heard her use before.
"Tilbrook Town F.C., Maureen Tully speaking, no comment at this time, full statement to follow Wednesday morning, all further enquiries by post please, thank you and good day."
She put the phone down.
It went again at five to. The Standard. Same sentence. Same voice. Down.
At ten past twelve the Mirror rang. At a quarter past, BBC Essex sports desk. By half twelve she had taken to leaving the receiver off the hook on the desk between us, boop boop boop, and we got on with the reports.
I had three completed by one. She signed each as witness. I addressed the envelopes by hand. She ran them through the fax. Brrr-zzzt, brrr-zzzt, brrr-zzzt.
Three confirmations. I pinned them on the wall above the kettle.
Sent. Sent. Sent.
"Most productive Tuesday this office has had since 1988, Samuel."
"Cheers, Maureen."
"In 1988 we were also in administration."
"Aye."
"There is a pattern."
The FA put it on the wire at two o’clock on the dot. Maureen handed me a fresh cup of tea. She pinned the FA press release next to the brewery schedule above the kettle. DEDUCTION OF TEN (10) POINTS, EFFECTIVE 14 AUGUST 2010, PURSUANT TO FA RULES ON EMERGENCE FROM INSOLVENCY PROCEEDINGS. It went up between the rates bill and the kit supplier’s invoice.
I sat with my tea and looked at the gallery.
Somewhere up in Sheffield, on his lunch break, a lad in his work boots was scrolling through the football pages on a free paper he’d picked up off the train into town. He would not see Tilbrook Town.
He would not see Tilbrook Town anywhere in any paper in the country, not until I walked into a clubhouse on a council pitch on the Friday lunchtime with a beer mat in my back pocket.
I rang Mum at four.
She picked up on the second.
"Samuel."
"Mum. Listen to me a second."
"I’m listening."
"You’re going to hear something on the news tonight. Or off your sister at Pilates tomorrow. Or read it in the paper at the weekend. About Tilbrook Town. A ten-point deduction. My name on it. I want you to hear it from me first."
A pause.
"Samuel."
"Yes."
"Have you bought a football club."
"I have."
"Tilbrook?"
"Tilbrook. Where Dad used to take me. Marsh Road."
A long pause.
Then Mum, in the kind of voice she’d had on her since I was about eleven, said: "I knew it was either that or a girl, Samuel."
"...Mum."
"On the balance of probabilities I had been planning for the girl."
"Mum."
"What’s done is done. You watch the space."
"Watching it."
"Battenberg on Sunday."
"Yes, Mum."
"And put a clean shirt on tomorrow, Samuel. There will be photographs."
"...Mum."
"You bought a football club, my boy. There will be photographs. Don’t argue with me. Clean shirt. Clean trousers. And eat something before you go in, you look like a wraith on the telly."
"...Yes, Mum."
"Good lad."
She rang off.
***
Thank you to Victor_De_Paula for the gift.
