Chapter 63: The Bell II
The celebrations didn’t happen in the Anchor anymore. Not since Mooney came back. They happened at Murat’s, or in the dressing room, or round the bell. Tea and burgers and Cal’s terrible singing.
If Mooney ever clocked that 22 men had quietly rebuilt their whole social life so he’d never once have to stand in a pub and want a drink, he never let on. He just kept scoring. He kept the goals coming and they kept the door shut on the thing that nearly had him, and not a word of it was ever spoken, and all of it was love.
I’ll tell you what I never told them.
I knew exactly why I let the bell run riot. Why I rang it for parking spaces and burgers and a good night’s sleep.
Because I have been the other way.
I had a person in my life once, the most important one there is, and I let a thousand ordinary Tuesdays go by without ringing a single bell for any of them. Told myself there’d be time. Told myself the big days were the ones that counted.
And then one October the ordinary Tuesdays ran out, and I never got to ring a bell for her at all.
I wasn’t doing that twice. Not to her, when my second go at it comes round. And not here.
So we rang the bloody bell for everything. While we had it. While we were all still in the room.
The sound of it got me, if I’m honest.
A barge bell off the river. My old man worked the cranes that swung the timber those barges carried, and a bell like that ringing out over the water was the sound of his whole working life. The sound of a thing arriving home safe.
Watch the space, son. I reckon he’d have liked that we hung it by the door.
Word of it got out, too. You can’t ring a bell on the marsh and keep it quiet.
By the last home game the Bovril End had got hold of one of their own from somewhere, an old hand bell, and Bald Tony stood on the terrace clanging it every time we won a corner till Maureen threatened to confiscate it.
"It’s tradition now, Maureen!"
"It’s three weeks old, Tony."
"Three weeks is how traditions start!"
He’s not wrong, Tony. That’s exactly how they start. A thing you do twice and then can’t stop.
I stood and watched a bald man ring a bell he’d carried from home for a club he’d watched all but die, and I thought, that’s a season ticket nobody’s printed yet. You don’t build a thing that lasts out of trophies.
You build it out of people who’d feel robbed if you took the bell off them. Sully can buy bricks. He cannot buy that, and that, in the end, is the only wall I’ve got.
Raj was in it too, mind, and he’d never kicked a ball in his life. He ran half the squad to away games in the cab for diesel money and a cut of the chip stops, tk-tk-tk of the indicator the whole way up the A12, telling 17-year-old Bailey to eat his apple and keep his eyes on the road like the road was Bailey’s to watch.
"I’m in the back seat, Raj. I’m not driving."
"You will one day, son. Start practising the eyes now."
None of it was safe.
I pulled the table up most mornings, the way you press a bruise to check it still hurts.
[NATIONAL LEAGUE · AFTER 7 PLAYED]
20 · Hayes & Yeading .... P8 · GD -2 · Pts 7
21 · TILBROOK TOWN ... P7 W5 D1 L1 · GD +5 · Pts 6 22 · Histon .... P8 · GD -6 · Pts 6
23 · Eastbourne Boro .... P8 · GD -9 · Pts 4
24 · Southport .... P8 · GD -11 · Pts 2
21st.
A stranger reads that on a Sunday and thinks, drop zone, dead club walking. Let him. I’d have bitten his hand off for 21st back in July, when there was a minus 10 sat in front of our name and a winding-up order still warm on Maureen’s desk.
We started this season 10 points in a hole that was dug for us in a courtroom before a ball was kicked.
Seven games on, we’d clawed every one of them back out of the ground with our own boots, come up off the bottom, and put a goal difference of plus 5 on the board that was the best in the bottom half and top-6 form on anybody’s sheet. That is not a club dying. That is a club going up.
I let myself have that for a minute. You’re allowed. Sid had gone down on his haunches and wept the afternoon the minus finally died, and I’d not been far behind him.
Then I made myself read the rest of it, because a chairman who only looks at the happy half of a table is a chairman who loses his ground.
21st is still bottom 4. Still the drop zone, 1 point off dry land, and the 10 we’d won back hadn’t bought us a single yard of safety. It had only got us level with every club that was never docked a thing in the first place. We weren’t safe. We were just, at long last, in the same race as everyone else.
After July, mind, that felt like a kind of winning all on its own.
The 30th was three days off and the wolf wanted his £16,667, same as every month, and a barge bell does not ring up 16 grand.
And somewhere under all the singing I’d started turning a harder thing over, the one I could never ring any bell for.
A club that can throw a party without me in the middle of it is a club that doesn’t need me in a tracksuit.
I want to be careful how I tell you this, because the first time it came to me I had it the wrong way round and it frightened me half to death. I thought: I’m building a family I’ll have to leave.
I had it backwards.
I wasn’t going to have to leave them. I was going to get to put down one of the two jobs that were slowly killing me. The tracksuit one. Because I’d gone and built a thing that could run a Saturday without me swinging the rope. Stan could take a session. Doyle could take a Thursday. The old men would raise the young ones. The bell would ring whether I was there or not.
But the other job. The chairman’s. The one where a patient man sits out across the marsh waiting for me to miss by a single pound so he can put a retail park where the centre circle is. That one nobody could take off me, and nobody was going to, because that one was the whole reason the rest of it got to exist.
You can hand a good man a dugout. You cannot hand anyone the fight for the ground underneath it.
I just hadn’t had anything worth fighting that hard for until now. Having something. The brand-new way to be frightened.
The bell’s best night came at twenty to ten on the Thursday.
We were doing finishing under the lights, hmmmm of them overhead, the ball going thp, thp into Sid’s gloves, when the Crayford midfielder’s phone went off on the touchline. Brrt-brrt. He answered it, went the colour of the floodlights, and dropped it in the mud. Splat.
"She’s." He couldn’t get it out. "It’s coming. She’s having it. Oh, Christ, it’s coming."
Nobody finished the drill.
Lenny had his car keys out before the lad found his own feet. Pete was already at the wall.
"GO! GO ON, SON, GO!"
And as the Crayford lad ran for Lenny’s motor in his boots, still in his boots, Cal Murphy took the rope and rang that barge bell out into the dark over the rec like the whole river was coming home.
CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG.
11 daft men under the lights, roaring a baby into a world it hadn’t even reached yet. A Tilbrook lad, born to a Tilbrook lad, on a Thursday, to the sound of a barge bell off the river. First of the next lot. You don’t always build a club that lasts with cups and medals. Sometimes you just make sure there’s a next lot, and that they’re already on the way.
And I stood in the middle of it with my throat gone, and I thought, ring it. Ring it for every last scrap of it.
You don’t get the Tuesdays back.
[SYSTEM] A family is not a number I can give you. It will not pay the wolf on the 30th. Ring it anyway.
Ring it anyway.
So we did. Every chance we got, while the wolf counted down the days, and the family that didn’t know it was borrowed sang its head off under the lights.
