Chapter 42: Old Dockers I
Half past eight Monday morning and Maureen and I were at the desk with the list of trial signings in front of us and three names on it. Outside, a milk float, whrrr, and the bottles going on the back step of Carbery’s, clink, clink, clink.
"And the squad now stands at?"
"Fifteen, Maureen."
"And we need by the fourteenth of August?"
"Twenty-two."
"Seven more lads in fourteen days. From a council pitch trial that, on yesterday’s evidence, has another half a dozen lads on the file we might want a second look at, none of whom is a striker, none of whom is a holding six, and none of whom, on the trial sheets I went through at twenty to nine on the Sunday evening, is going to be ready for AFC Wimbledon on the fourteenth."
"Yes, Maureen."
"So you are going to do the thing your father’s lot would have done."
"What’s that."
"You’re going to go round the doors. You’re going to go and find the men who already love this club and have only stopped playing for it because life got in the way. There’s a generation of them out there, Samuel, walking round Tilbrook with bad knees and good memories, plumbers and sparkies and forklift men, and not one of them has had a single person ask them in years whether they fancied lacing a boot for the old place one more time. You go and ask them. The trial gives you legs. The doors give you a spine."
"Tea?"
"Tea."
She made tea. Hsss of the kettle on the gas. Click of the lid. Glug of the pour. The phone went at twenty past nine. Brrng. Brrng.
"Gaffer."
"Lenny."
"You at the office?"
"At the office."
"I’m bringing a lad in at half ten. Robbie Doyle. He played here in oh-five, oh-six, oh-seven. Left for Crayford on better money in oh-eight. Retired last summer to run his uncle’s plumbing in Tilbury. He’s thirty-one, he’s solid as a brick wall, and he is, by his own account, missing the lads more than he is missing the plumbing."
"Why is he missing the lads, Lenny."
"Because he is, gaffer. Some men are. You’ll see it on him when he walks in."
"Half ten."
He rang off. Click.
Doyle was in at twenty-five past with Lenny behind him. Thunk, thunk of his boots on the office lino. Six foot one. Head shaved down. A hand the size of a small Christmas ham. Jeans of a man who had been retired a year and a polo shirt with a plumbing firm’s name on the breast that he had clearly forgotten he was still wearing.
---
Name: Robbie Doyle
Age: 31
"Player": Retired CA: 79 / 200 PA: 79 / 200 A centre-half who eats corner kicks. Hits a ball with the inside of the boot. Will, on a bad day, eat a referee.
---
He sat down. Creak of the chair under sixteen stone. Lenny leaned on the door frame.
"Robbie."
"Mr Mercer."
"Lenny says you’re missing it."
"Lenny is not wrong."
"What is it you’re missing, Robbie. Honest. Because if it’s the football I can give you the football, but if it’s something else I want to know what I’m signing."
He turned the question over the way a big man turns over a small thing in his hands.
"...I do gas boilers, Mr Mercer. On my own, mostly. Tilbury, Grays, out as far as Basildon. I’m good at it, the money’s all right. And I’ll tell you what I worked out about nine months into it. A boiler doesn’t know your name. You fix it, it goes off, the woman gives you a cup of tea if you’re lucky and you never see her again. Twenty years I played football, and every Saturday there were eleven other blokes who knew exactly what I was for and would have run through a wall for me, and I have not had that since the day I packed it in, and I am thirty-one years old and I did not know, when I packed it in, that I was packing in the only place I’d ever had it."
The office was quiet a second. Lenny looked at the floor with the small private look of a man hearing his own reason said out loud in another man’s voice.
"Fifty a week to Christmas, twenty a match-day, back-pay to the contract figure Christmas to April. Same deal as everyone else in the changing huts. Captain’s armband off the table, Lenny has that. Coaching role from October if you want it, fifty extra for taking Tuesday and Thursday nights on the back end of training. You give me your Saturdays, Robbie, and I give you back the eleven blokes."
"...Sam."
"Yes."
"My missus is going to want to know what I’m doing."
"Tell her you’re playing football for Tilbrook Town, Robbie."
"...Right."
He shook my hand. The hand swallowed mine to the wrist. Lenny showed him out, and the two of them stood on the forecourt a minute talking low, two centre-halves who’d marked the same crosses a decade ago, and then Doyle got in a van with a boiler firm on the side and Lenny came back up the stairs. Click of the office door behind him.
"He all right?" I said.
"He’s been crying in that van, gaffer. Don’t tell him I said. He’ll be the best signing you make all summer and he hasn’t kicked a ball." Lenny picked his own mug up. "That’s what the doors get you that a trial never will. Off you go to the next one."
When the door closed Maureen put a tick next to Doyle on the list. Scratch of the biro.
"Sixteen."
"Sixteen, Maureen."
She put the kettle on again. Hsss.
I rang Crewe at twenty to twelve. Tk-tk-tk of the dial on the old office phone.
A woman picked up on the second ring. Brrng. Click.
"Mrs Murphy?"
"Yes."
"Sam Mercer. Chairman of Tilbrook Town Football Club. I am ringing to speak to your son Calum if he’s about."
A pause.
"...Why?"
***
Thank you to Victor_De_Paula for the gift.
