Chapter 43: Old Dockers II
"...Why?"
"I have a season-long loan I’d like to propose to him. I have spoken to his manager at Crewe this morning. Crewe are happy. Cal will get thirty league starts at first-team level by April that he is not currently going to get on the bench at Gresty Road. We’re National League. We start the fourteenth of August."
A longer pause.
"...Tilbrook."
"Mrs Murphy."
"My Calum has been on the bench at Crewe since he was sixteen. He is twenty-one. He has not had a first-team start since March. I have been telling him for two years that he needs a loan move to a side where he is going to get on the pitch. He has been telling me he is going to be patient. I am going to put him on the phone, Mr Mercer. You are not going to tell him you have been talking to me. We will leave my opinion out of this."
"Yes, Mrs Murphy."
She put the phone down on a hard surface. I heard her shout CALUM up some stairs.
Cal Murphy was on the line in thirty seconds. We talked for eleven minutes. I did not tell him his mother had been on the phone.
I told him about the pitch, the lads, the thirty starts, the wonky T at the gable end of the stand, and the fact that I had signed a number nine off a council pitch in Sheffield on a Friday who was going to need a midfielder who could find him.
He signed by phone, on a Monday lunchtime, from his mum’s front room in Crewe, by saying yes, and I could hear his mum in the background not saying a word and the not-saying-a-word being the loudest thing in the house.
"Seventeen," said Maureen.
"Seventeen."
There was a name Lenny had given me on the Sunday with a nod and not much else, Stevie Royle, a left-sided midfielder who’d made forty-odd starts for Tilbrook in the nineties and could still, Lenny reckoned, slide a ball through the eye of a needle on a Sunday morning.
I drove out to a pebble-dashed semi in Dagenham on the Tuesday dinnertime, and Stevie Royle heard me out on his own doorstep in a vest with a mug of tea going cold in his hand, the whole pitch, the wonky T, the lot, and then he shook his head, slow, not unkind.
"I’d love to, son. I would. But I’m forty hours a week on the bins and I’ve a back to show for it, and a little lass of three I see of an evening, and the last time I gave a football club my Tuesdays and my Thursdays it cost me a marriage. Your dad’d have understood that one better than most. Go and get your young lads. The likes of me had our go."
And he shut his door, gently, on the best Tilbrook midfielder of 1994, and I stood on his path a second in the August sun and put one thing in my pocket alongside all the yeses. Not every door opens. And the ones that stay shut, stay shut for reasons you can’t say a word against.
The Anchor at the end of Marsh Road was on the corner with the chippy. I walked in at half four on the Tuesday afternoon. Creak of the saloon door, bing of the bell over it. Bald Tony was on his stool by the door with a pint and the Racing Post. He clocked me. He raised the pint. Clink.
"Sammy."
"Tony."
"Back page of the Standard last week."
"That was me."
"...Aye, lad. Your dad drank in here, you know. That stool by the dartboard. Same stool thirty year. We kept it for him a month after he went, daft as that sounds. Wouldn’t let anyone sit on it."
"...I didn’t know that, Tony."
"No reason you would. You were a nipper." He went back to the Racing Post. "He’d have had something to say about a ten-point deduction, mind. Probably unprintable."
Big Pete was at the table under the dartboard. Thunk, thunk, thunk of three darts going into the board behind him from a lad at the oche. Pint of London Pride, half drunk. Six foot four. A face you could have used to break up a fight on a bus.
---
Name: Big Pete
Age: 34
"Player": Sunday pub league CA: 71 / 200 PA: 71 / 200 A centre-forward built like a Sunday roast. Hard to move off a ball. Heading 17.
--
I sat down.
"Mr Mercer."
"Pete."
"You’re the lad off the back of the Standard."
"That’s me."
"Lenny rang me last night. Said you might come and have a sit-down with one or two of us that used to turn out for the old place."
"He’s right. I’m signing local men who still love it. You’re one of them."
"...You signing me, Mr Mercer."
"Sixty a week, match-day twenty, target man, last twenty minutes off the bench when we are chasing one. You play Sundays for the Anchor. You stay playing Sundays for the Anchor. I’m not having you give that up, a man needs his own team as well as mine."
"...Right. Right. Right."
He held out the hand the size of a small bin lid.
I shook it.
He picked his pint up. Glug.
"Pint, Mr Mercer."
"Pint, Pete."
"My old fella unloaded timber on that wharf forty year," he said, nodding at the bar for two more. "Tilbrook Timber Wharf. Gone now, all flats coming. He took me to Marsh Road on his shoulders before I could walk. I’ll head every ball that comes in that box for you, Mr Mercer, and I’ll head it for him."
I had a half with Big Pete and Bald Tony in the Anchor at five o’clock on a Tuesday with the darts going thunk thunk thunk behind us and my dad’s stool kept thirty years by the dartboard, and I thought about what Maureen had said at half past eight that morning, that there was a generation of these men walking round Tilbrook with bad knees and good memories and nobody had asked them in years.
Eighteen in the squad now. Doyle, Cal, Pete, all in two days, all of them men whose fathers had worked the same wharf my dad had worked the cranes over.
I finished the half. I stood up.
"Where you off, Sammy," said Tony.
"One more, Tony. Lad on West Ham Lane. Lenny gave me his name and a warning to go with it."
Tony looked at me over the Racing Post.
"What’s the warning?"
"That this one isn’t a bad knee and a good memory, Tony. This one’s still got the feet. It’s the rest of him that’s the trouble."
I put my glass on the bar, and I picked up the folder I’d had under my arm all afternoon with one name on the front of it, and I walked out of the Anchor into the early evening with a knot starting back up in my chest the size of a small Wagon Wheel, towards a bedsit at the end of a row of bedsits behind the Co-op, where a lad of twenty-four was sat on a single bed with a tattoo on his wrist and the best left foot I had seen in this country in two lifetimes going to waste in the half-dark.
