Chapter 84: The Suit I
Right. You’re back. Sit down, because the fight I’ve got to tell you about this time doesn’t happen on grass, and I’m not sure I win it.
When I left you, we’d survived.
That was the whole of the job for eight months and we’d gone and done it, off minus 10, off a beer mat and a bedsit, and I’d handed the team to a better man and let myself feel, for one afternoon in a plastic seat, like someone who’d won a thing.
The voice in my head shut the book on surviving and opened a new one. Start winning. Build the dynasty. And under it, quiet, a date I’d spent a fortnight trying not to look at. The 14th of March.
That’s where we stood. Survived, and eight days out from the fight for the ground itself.
So I did the thing I’ve always done before a match that frightened me. I pointed the gift at the 14th and asked it how the day ends.
It gave me nothing. A flat grey wall where the future used to be.
That’s the bill for changing too much, come due on the one morning I’d sell a finger to see the end of.
The biggest fight this club has ever had, the ground my dad stood me on a crate to watch, and the only edge a dead man gets has gone dark the week I need it most.
I walk into that room as blind as anybody in it.
Which leaves one way to win it. Not with what I know. With what I’ve built.
[SYSTEM] OBJECTIVE: BUILD THE DYNASTY. Sub-objective, top priority, everything else locked behind it: HOLD THE LAND. You do not build on ground you can lose. And no, before you ask a fourth time, I cannot read the 14th of March any better than you can. First time for both of us. Go and win it with your hands.
I read that panel twice. It’s a new shape, that one. For eight months the thing in my head gave me a table and a survival line.
Now it’s started talking like a blueprint, HOLD THE LAND, like there’s a thing being drawn that the ground is only the first line of. I’ll come back to that. First I had to keep the ground at all.
Which meant the suit. It cost more than my first car and fit worse, and I stood in a mirror in it, tick of the office clock eating the days down to the 14th, and did not know the man.
I’ve been a lot of men in two lives.
Never that one, grey worsted and a barrister’s fee, walking into a room where I can’t kick a ball, can’t move a full-back five yards, can’t do the one thing I came back from the dead able to do. Win.
Ruth Ellory QC had a voice like a closing door and a way of reading a room I’d have paid twice her fee for on a touchline.
The beans bought her, which is a sentence I could not have written a month ago. She sat in my cold office with Carbery, rustle of a brief thicker than my arm, and laid it out flat.
"He’s applying under section 84 to discharge your covenant. Two grounds. That it’s obsolete, and that it impedes reasonable use of the land." She tapped Eliza Pargeter’s 1923 deed. "Obsolete is the hard one for him, Mr Mercer.
Tribunals do not call a covenant obsolete because it’s old and it’s in a developer’s way. They call it obsolete when the thing it was written to protect has gone. Has it gone?"
"There were 3,100 in that ground in January. There’s a supporters’ trust with 500 names on it. There’s a junior side, a walking-football lot on a Tuesday, a whole town that has one field to call its own, and it’s that one."
I heard my own voice climb and made it sit down. "It hasn’t gone. It’s more here than it’s been in 30 years."
"Then it isn’t obsolete, and I will make him choke on the word." Click of her pen, capped. A thin smile.
"The other ground, that it impedes a reasonable use and secures no practical benefit of substantial value, is where the fight is. And on that one we have a gift.
His name is Ray Sully, and he bought your debt six weeks ago to try to kill this club so the ground would fall empty and prove his own case for him." She let that sit.
"There is a case, Millgate against the Alexander Devine children’s trust, a hospice, where a builder tried much the same, and the Supreme Court did not care for a man who manufactures the ruin he then asks a court to bless.
Neither will this one, if we make them see it. A man who buys a wolf, sets it on the flock, then tells the shepherd the field’s no use for sheep."
I have hired a lot of people in two lives. I have rarely felt the thing I felt then, which is the relief of handing a fight to someone plainly better at it than you.
"What do you need from me," I said.
"The truth, and not a syllable of law. You leave the law to me. You get in that box and you tell them what the field is, and whose it is, and you do not perform it, because you won’t need to."
She gathered her papers. "Bring the town. All of it they’ll let through the door."
"And do we win," I said, because I had to ask a human being a thing my gift used to answer for me before I’d finished thinking it.
She looked at me a long moment, and I’ll give her this, she sold me nothing. "We have the better case, Mr Mercer. On the law, comfortably.
But a tribunal has a discretion, and a discretion is a human being, and I have never once in 30 years been able to promise a client what a human being will do on a given Tuesday." Snap of her briefcase.
"So bring the town. Rooms of one are still moved by 500 people who love a field."
I’d have paid her fee twice for the honesty of not lying to me. It’s only that the honesty put me exactly where the grey wall did. Blind, holding what I’d built, hoping it came to enough.
The town needed no bringing.
