Chapter 87: The Upper Tribunal II
Now back to the beige room, because I still hadn’t seen the thing, and I wanted it the way you want a thing you paid for and never got.
The Member broke us for ten minutes after Pemberton’s opening. And in a corridor off Chancery Lane, I got it. Properly.
In a corridor off Chancery Lane with a vending machine humming, hmmm, and four men from an estuary town who’d been in the away end at Kingsmeadow on Saturday and had not stopped talking about it since.
They all told it at once, which is the only way that town has ever told anything.
"Ninety-three minutes," Ted said. "Ninety-three."
"Corner," said the docker. "Doyle’s stood on the edge like a lamppost, and I says to him, I says, GET IN THE BOX, DOYLE, YOU GREAT..." He remembered where he was and coughed. "And he goes in."
"He never goes in," Ted said.
"He never goes in! All season I’ve watched that man stand on the edge of a box like he’s paying rent on it."
Murat had his hands up, framing it, the way he does across the kiosk counter. "Bailey. He does not put it in the middle, Sam. Everybody screams put it in the middle. He puts it here." A hand, flat, chopping the air at the near post. "One yard. Nobody is there. Then Doyle is there."
"Header," said the docker, "and the net goes, and I’m on the floor. I’m on the floor of a stand in Kingston, 51 year old, with a fella I’ve never met on top of me."
"And the noise," Ted said, and he stopped, and he had to look at the vending machine for a moment. "Sam. The noise. Three hundred of us behind that goal and half of them lads who’ve never seen us win owt. Kids. Kids screaming your name."
"Not my name," I said. "I wasn’t there."
"They were screaming BILL’S BOY," said Ted. "Same thing, in’t it."
And I stood in a corridor in a suit that cost more than my first car, with a clerk waiting to call me back into a room where a man was going to argue that this was all a memory, and I could hear it.
I could hear 300 people from a marsh in Essex making that noise in a ground on the other side of London.
They’d gone. Every one of them, on a coach at seven in the morning, twice in three days, for a football club and for a field.
That’s the answer, I thought. That’s what the restriction protects. Somebody just has to get it into the room.
Then the clerk called us back in, and Pemberton sat down, and Ruth Ellory stood up.
The first thing she did was walk to the projector and put up a different photograph.
3,100 people at Marsh Road in January. The bedsheet. THANKS GAFER. A ground so full the terraces were breathing.
"Taken seven weeks ago," she said. "My learned friend describes a memory. This is a photograph of it."
And I felt the room move. Not much. An inch. But it moved.
The Member looked at that photograph for a long moment.
Then he looked, over his glasses, at the back wall of his own courtroom, where 30-odd people from an estuary town were stood up because there weren’t chairs for them, in their coats, on a Monday, having taken a day they could not afford off work.
Cough from a docker. Somebody’s stomach rumbled. Ted had his cap off and held against his chest the whole time, the way you do in a church.
Then Pemberton got up to cross-examine, and he came for the soft place, exactly as I’d known he would since the cream envelope, and he did it gently, which is how the worst ones do it.
"Mr Mercer. In February of this year, was this club nine days from being wound up?"
"It was not wound up."
"That was not my question."
"There was a payment due. It was made."
"It was made by you. Personally. Out of your own pocket." He didn’t even look at his papers. "Mr Mercer, this club is sustained by one man’s money and one man’s obsession. You have paid its debts.
You have paid a compensation to a Nottinghamshire football club for its manager. You are paying, today, for the silk sitting in front of you, out of a private fortune that appeared, as far as this tribunal can tell, from nowhere.
Is that a fair summary?"
There it was. The whole of his case, laid out on the table, and he was so pleased with it he’d got sloppy.
Because a barrister in London had read a balance sheet and a bank statement and thought he knew what keeps a football club alive.
"No," I said. "It isn’t."
"I beg your pardon?"
"You’ve read the last six weeks. Read the other eight months." I turned to the Member, because Ruth had told me to talk to the man who decides and never to the man who’s paid to trip me.
"Sir, until February I had £3,000 to my name and most of it was in a carrier bag. Ask him what this club ran on. He can’t tell you, because it isn’t in his bundle."
Rustle, at the back of the room.
"Twenty pence in the pound off a kebab kiosk. Erol’s kiosk. That’s a real line on our books. Eighty pound off an advertising board behind the Bovril End that a builder pays because his dad stood on that terrace.
A raffle that made a hundred and forty. Four hundred people through a turnstile on a Tuesday night in the rain in November."
I could hear my own voice going and I let it.
"Our best month all season, sir, we finished eleven pound forty to the good. Eleven pound forty. I have the ledger in that folder and my company secretary can put it in your hand."
Maureen was already half out of her seat with it.
"And that payment in February that he says I made?" I said. "I didn’t. Not on my own.
That town raised three thousand one hundred and forty pounds in a bucket, in six days, in the cold, and not one of them asked me what it was for.
There’s a man behind me who put in a tenner folded so small I had to unpick it with my thumbnail."
I heard Ted say something. I didn’t catch what.
"So no, sir. It is not a fair summary. This club does not live because of my money. My money is nine weeks old. This club lived for eighty-eight years before I had a penny, and it has lived this season on a kiosk, a raffle, an old woman’s arithmetic, and a bucket."
Silence in the beige room.
And I’ll be honest with you, because I’ve been honest all the way. For about four seconds I thought I’d won it.
Then Pemberton did the thing the good ones do, which is not to fight you where you’re strong.
"Very well," he said, mildly, and set the balance sheet down. "Not your money, then."
He let it go, and picked up the other thing.
"Your will. Mr Mercer, how old are you?"
"Twenty-four."
"Twenty-four." He let the room have it. "A young man of twenty-four has run this club, coached this club, scouted for this club, and now funds and litigates for this club.
And every witness statement in my learned friend’s bundle, all forty-one of them, says the same word about you. Sam. Sam. Sam." He smiled, kindly, and it was the worst thing in the room.
"So let me ask you what the Member must ask himself.
What happens to this ground the day you lose interest? The day you fall ill? The day you are simply no longer here?"
And there it was. In a beige room, out loud, from a stranger, the question I have not been able to answer at four in the morning since a Tuesday in June.
Because he’s right, and he doesn’t even know how right. I am a thing that ends. I’ve done it once.
I know what it’s like, and I know it doesn’t send a warning, and there is nothing in the deed or the law or the thing in my head that has ever promised me a second Tuesday.
I sat in that box and I did not have a word in my mouth.
The silence went on long enough that Ruth Ellory shifted in her seat. Long enough that a docker at the back of the room said, quietly, "Go on, son," and the clerk didn’t even tell him off.
And the Member took off his reading glasses, and he looked at me, and he asked the question himself. Not to Pemberton. To me. In a voice with nothing in it at all.
"Mr Mercer. Setting aside sentiment, and setting aside yourself. Can you tell me what, precisely, this restriction protects, that would not survive its discharge?"
Which is the question of the whole war, and he asked it like a man who has heard the answer already and did not think much of it.
