Chapter 6: Kick Off II
I tested it as I walked, because that’s what you do, isn’t it, you poke the thing to see if it’s real. I’d look at someone, and the panel would fade up, soft, like it was developing out of the air. I’d look away, and it would dissolve.
I tried squinting, and the detail sharpened: I could push past the headline numbers right down into the attributes if I concentrated, the way you’d scroll into a player’s profile in the game.
A postman pushing his trolley up the hill, squeak, squeak, squeak, turned out to have Stamina 15, Natural Fitness 16, and I thought, well, course he has, look at the calves on him.
A lad on a corner with his hood up that the whole street was giving a wide berth, I braced myself, expecting trouble, and his panel said Determination 17, Leadership 14, Aggression 4, good kid, wrong postcode, scared of his own shadow, and I felt something turn over in my chest.
Because that was the gift, wasn’t it.
Not the magic.
The truth.
I could see who people actually were, under all the noise. I’d always been able to, a little bit. Now I could see it in numbers, and the numbers did not lie, and the numbers did not care about anybody’s surname.
Maria’s caff was steamed up to the windows, hsss of the urn, clatter of plates, Radio 1 chattering away in the corner. Raj was already wedged in the window booth, mopping up beans with a triangle of fried bread, and he clocked me and threw his arms wide.
"There he is! State of you. You look like you’ve seen a ghost, mate. Sit down, your tea’s going cold."
"Something like that," I said, and sat.
And I looked at him. Properly looked, the way Dad taught me, the way the system was letting me now.
---
Name: Rajesh "Raj" Sandhu
Age: 26
"Player": Pub League (Sunday)
CA: 22 · PA: 24
Key: Determination 16, Work Rate 17, Loyalty 18, Finishing 5, Pace 6 A grafter. Heart the size of a dinner plate. Wasted on a minicab. Trust him with your life. Do not trust him with a one-on-one.
---
Loyalty eighteen. Work rate seventeen.
My best mate, broken down into glowing numbers, and the numbers were just confirming what I’d known in my bones for two whole lifetimes. That this was a good man. The best one I knew. And that in sixteen years, through all of it, he would never once let me down.
"Raj," I said. "Do you trust me?"
He froze with the fried bread halfway to his mouth. "...That is never a good question, that. That’s the question that comes right before someone asks me for money."
"It might be the question that comes right before someone makes you money."
He put the bread down. Narrowed his eyes. Drummed his fingers on the Formica, tk-tk-tk-tk. "Go on then. I’m listening. Reluctantly."
"What’ve you got? Savings. Be honest with me."
"What’ve I got?" He laughed.
"Mate. I drive a Vauxhall that smells of strangers’ kebabs for a living. I’ve got about three hundred quid and a Provident loan I’m pretending isn’t happening. Why? What’s this about? You’re being weird. Weirder."
I had forty pounds and an overdraft. That was the entire war chest of the man who was going to buy a football club and drag it up the entire English pyramid. Forty quid and a head full of the future.
But I didn’t need a fortune.
Not yet.
I needed to be right. Once. Out loud. In public. Somewhere it counted.
"World Cup," I said. "Starts a week Friday. Group stage. Spain’s first game. They play Switzerland."
Raj snorted so hard a bit of beans went airborne. "Spain’ll batter them, man. They’re the best team on the planet. European champions! Best midfield ever put together, Xavi, Iniesta, the lot. Switzerland have got a postman and three blokes called Hans."
"Switzerland win," I said. "One-nil."
Silence. Drip... drip... went the caff’s knackered tap behind the counter. Somewhere the urn went hsssss.
Then Raj barked out a laugh. "Do one! Switzerland? To beat Spain? You’ve finally lost it. Too many night shifts. They’re unbackable, Spain, that’s not a bet, that’s just giving the bookies a tip."
"That’s the whole point," I said, and I could feel it now, the old fire, the thing that made me me, except this time it had somewhere to go that wasn’t a monitor at 3 am. I leaned in.
"When the entire world is certain, Raj, the price goes massive. You can get six, seven to one on a Switzerland win. Stick a tenner on, you walk out with seventy. The crowd is always certain. And the crowd is usually wrong."
"And you know they’re wrong because...?"
I held his eye. "Because I’ve got a feeling. The best feeling I’ve ever had in my life."
And here’s the thing about a Loyalty of 18. It wasn’t that he suddenly believed in Switzerland. He didn’t. It was that he believed in me.
The skint genius mate who’d been telling him for years which of his Football Manager wonderkids to buy, who’d told him to stick with that holding midfielder when he wanted to sell him, who had, on the subject of football and football alone, never, ever been wrong.
"...One tenner," he said at last, jabbing a finger at me. "One. And when it loses, you are buying me breakfast at Maria’s every day for a month, and you’re telling her why."
"Deal," I said, and stuck my hand out, and we shook on it, clap, over the cooling beans.
We walked the two doors down to the Ladbrokes. Ding went the door. Inside it smelled of carpet and biros and old men’s hope.
The lad behind the counter had spots and a lanyard and a look on his face like the world had never once surprised him, and he took my slip, and he read it, and he said the exact line I’d been waiting sixteen years to hear come round again.
"Switzerland to beat Spain? You sure about that, mate?" Little smile. The bookies smile. The smile that says thank you very much. "Spain are red-hot favourites. Easy money. For us, like."
"Forty pounds," I said, and I slid every single note I owned across the counter, and my young hand only shook a little bit. "Switzerland. One-nil. Correct score, please."
"...Forty?" His eyebrows went up. He glanced at Raj. Raj shrugged, like, I know, mate, I’ve given up. Tap, tap, tap went the keyboard. The slip printed, whrrr, chk, and he tore it off and slid it across like he was doing me a kindness. "Good luck."
---
[SYSTEM] Wagering 100% of liquid assets on foreknowledge.
[SYSTEM] ...Reckless. I love it. Luck was never your problem, Samuel. Nerve was. You appear to have found some.
---
"Yeah, all right," I muttered.
"What?" said Raj.
"Nothing. Talking to myself. New habit."
Out on the pavement I folded the slip into my back pocket like it was the deeds to a mansion, which, in a way, it sort of was. My hands were buzzing. Not the bad shake from the night before, on the floor, in the dark. A different shake entirely. The good kind. The kick-off kind. The whistle’s-about-to-go kind.
And that’s exactly when it came.
The whole mad black morning finally clicked into place, because the system stopped messing about with bus drivers and dinner ladies and toddlers in buggies, and laid the real thing down in front of me, glowing, square, serious. Sixteen days and a hundred and nineteen years, all hanging off four words.
---
THE DYNASTY SYSTEM Primary Objective Issued.
SAVE TILBROOK TOWN F.C. Status: 103 years old. Fifth tier. £400,000 of debt and counting. Projected time of death (your timeline): the High Court.
Reward: A club of your own.
Failure: He kept that scrapbook for nothing.
Acquisition window opens in: 16 days.
---
Fifth tier. For anyone who hasn’t done the byzantine map of English football, fifth tier is the basement. Two whole divisions below the Football League proper, five below the Premier League up at the top where the giants live.
The point where football just about stops being properly professional and starts being part-time blokes who plumb in your boiler Monday to Friday and turn out for the Saturday gate.
Below the fifth tier there’s another half-dozen rungs of regional leagues going all the way down, division by division, to lads playing on dog-fouled cow fields with a portacabin for a changing room. The English pyramid has more divisions than this country has chip shops, and there are an awful lot of chip shops.
That was where Tilbrook Town sat. Right at the bottom of where you’re allowed to call yourself a proper football club. And in sixteen days, if I didn’t do something stupid and brave and clever in roughly that order, it was going to stop existing altogether.
Sixteen days.
The exact number of days until a country full of postmen and blokes called Hans turned forty quid into the better part of three hundred.
And three hundred into a stake on a thing the rest of the world hadn’t even heard of yet. And that into something I knew, I knew, was about to be worth more than every footballer who had ever drawn breath.
I looked down the road. East. Towards the river. Towards the estuary, and the marshes, and a wonky rusting T on a stand full of holes, and an old man’s voice telling a boy on a milk crate to watch the space.
"Right then, Dad," I said, quiet, just for me and him. "Let’s go and get your club back."
Brrrrrm, hiss. The number 42 pulled in behind me, the driver hanging out the cab for his fag, no name above his head, just CA 14 and two left feet and a dodgy hip.
I didn’t get on it.
I had sixteen days. Forty quid riding on the impossible. A best mate with a heart the size of a dinner plate. And a head absolutely stuffed full of the future.
Time to go to work.
