Chapter 91: The Verdict II
I looked for him.
I actually turned my head and looked, the way you look for someone in a crowd, and for about a second and a half I was eight years old and I was going to find a big man in a donkey jacket at the back with his arms folded, waiting to say now then.
He wasn’t there. He is never going to be there.
I have got him a hundred years of that field and I cannot get him one afternoon of standing on it, and that is the arithmetic of what I am, and there is no bargain anywhere that fixes it.
And the docker was there. The big one, from the tribunal, who stood up in a room in London and asked a judge what he was supposed to do about his dad and his uncle Trevor.
He came over and shook my hand, and he still didn’t cry, he just nodded a lot, and I said, because it had been eating me since Chancery Lane, "I’ve never asked your name."
"Dennis," he said. "Dennis Coyle." He looked at his boots. "Me dad was Frank."
"Frank Coyle."
"He’d have liked today," he said.
Frank Coyle. Nine months I’ve walked past that man’s ashes and I never knew what to call them.
Danny Vine got his quote. He’d got his dictaphone the right way round by then, which I took as a good sign for his career.
"Mr Mercer, what do you say to Ray Sully?"
And I thought about being clever. I’d earned clever, I reckoned.
"Tell him the field was give to the town," I said. "It can’t never be sold. It’s ours for ever."
He never knew he was quoting a ten-year-old who left school at 14. He printed it on the front page over a photograph of Ted with both arms in the air, and Ted has it in a frame now, and will not have it on the wall, and will not put it away either.
There was one more thing I had to do, and I did it before I did anything else, before the chips and the shouting had even finished in the street.
I drove to my mum’s.
She was at the sink. She’d seen it on the regional news at lunchtime, so she knew, and she’d been waiting all afternoon for me to come, and she hadn’t rung once, because she knew I’d come.
"Well," she said, and her chin went, and she got it back under control, and turned to the sink so I wouldn’t see her do it.
I put my dad’s scrapbook on the kitchen table, open at the page.
She dried her hands very slowly on the towel. Then she sat down and she looked at a ten-year-old’s pencil writing for a long time without touching it.
"He were forever on about that," she said. "That field. Drove me mad with it." Tick of the kitchen clock. "His dad told him. And he told you, and he’d have told his grandkids, and now I suppose he has, in a manner of speaking. In a court."
"I read it out, Mum. In London. Stood up in front of a judge and read our Bill’s handwriting out loud, and the whole room went quiet." I touched the sticker on the cover. "That’s the court’s number on it. They put it in evidence. His scrapbook."
She put her hand flat on that page. Flat, like you’d put it on a chest.
"Was he right?" she said. "In the end. Was my Bill right?"
"He was right, Mum."
And she went.
My mother is not a woman who cries. She did not cry at the funeral, not where anybody could see, and she has not cried in front of me since I was a boy with a broken arm.
She put both hands over that scrapbook and she went down onto the kitchen table and she wept like it had happened this morning.
"He were a joke to them," she said. Into her arms. Not to me. "Down the club. Down the yard. Bill and his field. Bill and his bloody covenant, give it a rest, Bill." Tick of the kitchen clock. "Thirty year they laughed at him."
"Mum."
"He weren’t clever, Sam." She looked up and her face was wrecked and she did not care. "He knew he weren’t. He used to say to me, Sue, I’ve got nowt to leave the lad. Nowt. No money, no trade, nowt."
Her mouth went. "And he were sat on it. He were sat on the one thing that couldn’t be took off him and he never knew what he’d done."
I got down on my knees on my mother’s kitchen lino, which I have not done since I was five, and I put my arms round her, and the pair of us went, and the scrapbook got wet, and I did not care and neither did she.
"He knew, Mum," I said, into her hair, which has gone grey without me ever noticing it happen. "That’s why he wrote it down. He knew exactly what he’d done. He just never got told he was right."
We sat on the floor of that kitchen for about twenty minutes, my mother and me, with our backs against the cupboards, and the kettle went cold, and neither of us got up to do anything about it.
Sully rang me at ten past six that evening, at the office, when everyone had gone.
He didn’t sound beaten. I’d have paid money for him to sound beaten.
"Congratulations, Sam. Genuinely. That was a better fight than I expected from you."
"You’ll be paying our costs."
"I will. It’s a rounding error, but I’ll pay it." A pause. Ice in a glass, somewhere. Chink. "You know what you’ve actually won, don’t you?
You’ve won the right to keep a field that can never be sold, never be developed, never be borrowed against, and never be worth a single penny to anybody. It is now, legally, the most worthless twelve acres in Essex. Congratulations."
"It’s not worthless."
"It’s priceless. That’s the same thing on a balance sheet." I could hear him smiling. "So. You’ve won the ground. Now try keeping the club."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning a covenant protects grass. It doesn’t protect a football team." Chink. "You’ve a seventeen-year-old who’ll be gone by Christmas, a centre-forward half the Football League is asking about, and a manager who’s about to become very fashionable. In three years that field will still be there, and there’ll be nothing playing on it, and I’ll not have lifted a finger."
"You’ve been beaten, Ray."
"I’ve been beaten today," he said, kindly, as if correcting a child’s homework. "I’m fifty-six, Sam. I’m a patient man. You know that about me by now."
And the worst of it, sat there in the dark of that office with the phone hot against my ear, was that he isn’t wrong.
Every other club in this division can borrow against their ground when the roof goes. We can’t. Not now. Not ever. I made sure of it myself.
I have spent eight months and every advantage a dead man gets making my own club permanently, legally, gloriously poor.
I’d do it again tomorrow. But it cost us the only asset we had, and he knew that before I did.
And then he said a thing I did not want and have not been able to put down since.
"My old man stood me on that terrace, you know. The Bovril End. Same as yours did." Chink. "I’ve still got the scarf in a box in the loft. Half and half, from a cup game in 1962."
"Then how in God’s name can you"
"Because it didn’t save him, Sam." Flat. No malice at all in it, which was worse. "He stood on that terrace every other Saturday for thirty years and he died in a two-up two-down with nothing, and the field was still there, and it never gave him a thing. Your dad too, I expect."
I didn’t answer him.
"I’m not trying to take a football ground off a town," he said. "I’m trying to build four hundred people somewhere to live on a marsh that’s given this town nothing but a place to stand in the rain. You think you’re the one who loves it. I’m the one who’s noticed what it costs."
And he hung up first. He always does.
Saturday, 3,900 through the gate, and Sadler, who had not mentioned the tribunal once all week, stopped me in the tunnel before kick-off.
He looked at his boots for a second. He is not built for this and he knows it.
"That thing you did in London," he said. "With your dad’s book."
"Craig."
"No, I’ll say it once and then I’ll not say it again, because it’s not my business and I’ve a game on." He still didn’t look up. "My old man never come and watched me play. Not once. Not one game." He cleared his throat. "So. Aye. Well done."
And he walked off down the tunnel before I could say a word to him, and that is the most Craig Sadler has ever said to me in one go, and he beat Kettering 2-0 in a howling wind.
Vardy got the first inside four minutes. A ball over the top that only he was ever getting to, thwock, and he was through and it was in the corner before the Kettering centre-half had turned round, and he ran to the Bovril End and stood there with his arms out, saying nothing, the way he does.
Twenty-eight for the season now. In the fifth tier. On a wage that would embarrass a plumber.
DONG-DONG went the barge bell, and then 3,900 people found the same four words.
"WE ARE STAYING, WE ARE STAYING, WE ARE STAYING WHERE WE ARE."
That was the Bovril End, all of it, for a solid ten minutes in the second half, and it is not a very good chant, and I will hear it in my head on the day I die.
Bailey got the second, and came off with 10 minutes to go, and the whole ground stood up.
And so did the man in the Fleetwood coat.
Same fella from the tunnel a fortnight back, the one who wanted to know the story with my number nine. He was in my directors’ box this time, drinking my tea, and he stood and applauded a seventeen-year-old, and then he sat down and wrote in a little book.
I watched him do it. He caught me watching, and he smiled, and he did not stop writing.
He’d come for Vardy. He was leaving with two names.
[BLUE SQUARE BET PREMIER · after 39 games] 1 · Crawley .... 92 2 · Wimbledon ..... 78 3 · Luton ... 76 4 · Wrexham .... 75 5 · TILBROOK TOWN · W25 D9 L5 · Pts 74 6 · Fleetwood ..... 73 Points actually won: 84. The coat is still on your back and you are in the play-off places anyway. Seven games left. [C. Sadler] W12 D2 L0. Fourteen games. Not one defeat. Still hasn’t thanked you.
Fifth. In the places. Off minus ten, with seven to play.
My father’s field will still be a football field when every last one of us who fought for it is dead. That is exactly what a widow sat down and made sure of in 1923, and it is the only thing I have ever done that I am certain of.
And a man with ice in his glass has told me he isn’t in a hurry.
Neither am I, Ray. I’ve more time than you think.
[SYSTEM] OBJECTIVE: HOLD THE LAND. Complete. Filed. For ever, which is a word this system does not often get to use. Next objective is already open and you know what it is, because he just said it out loud to you down a telephone. BUILD THE DYNASTY. A ground is not a club. A club is not a team. And a team, Sam, is eleven men who can be bought.
Seven games. Play-offs. And a bloke from Fleetwood in my directors’ box with a little book.
