Free Web NovelChapter 17: Magic Internet Money II
I mean, I’d never actually heard it. But I’d been pointedly not-talking to its owner by a bandstand for two solid weeks, so I knew the shape of her before I’d even straightened up.
Her. The runner. Ponytail. Determination of 18. Comfortably out of my league.
And, it turned out, a regular at Big Stavros’s grotty little gym over the launderette, because the serious woman from the park was, of course, serious about everything, and right that second she was looking at my deadlift with the exact pained expression of a person watching someone reverse a car into a wall very, very slowly.
"Hips back," she said, stepping in, all business, no nonsense. "Bar tight to your shins. Chest up. You’re hauling it with your lower back like it owes you money."
A flicker of a smile at her own line, gone before it landed. "Here." And she put one hand flat between my shoulder blades and the other on my hip and just moved me, firm, matter-of-fact, and the bar came up clean and smooth and my spine stayed, against all odds, on the inside of my body.
And I, twenty-four-year-old man of the world, secret time-traveller, future lord of English football, replied with the following:
"Nnghh. Ta. Yep. Hips. Yes. Back. Good."
Devastating. Poetry, really. Lock up your daughters.
The corner of her mouth twitched. The panel bloomed up over her head, and it still said Name: Unknown, still, because of course she didn’t tell me her name and of course I was far too busy turning the colour of a Royal Mail postbox to think to ask for it.
She just nodded once, said "better," and went back to her end of the gym, and I stood there holding a loaded barbell and the absolute wreckage of my own composure, both of which had got remarkably heavy all of a sudden.
The system pinged in the bottom of my vision with the cool moral satisfaction of an entity that had been right about something all afternoon.
---
[SYSTEM] Week six. Left knee, seventy-eight percent integrity, holding. Loaded movement under control. Knee, additionally, just saved by a third party, because the man it belongs to was too busy staring at the third party to notice he was folding himself in half. Embarrassing.
[SYSTEM] Stick to the protocol. Drop the bar. Breathe.
---
I dropped the bar, CLANG, I breathed, and I ignored the panel.
"SMOOTH," boomed Stavros, from across the room, not even looking up. "Like a brick through a window."
"Shut up, Stavros."
"AGAIN."
And before you ask, because I lay awake asking myself the exact same thing that night: yes. She was beautiful. Properly, stupidly beautiful.
But she didn’t reach Karen.
Nobody reached Karen. That’s not me being soft, it’s just the truth as I’ve lived it now across two entire lifetimes. The woman in the gym was a ten out of ten. Karen was the reason somebody invented the scale.
Which lands you smack on the obvious question, and I’ll save you the bother of being too polite to ask it, because Raj has put it to my face about forty times over the years: how in the name of God did a skint, knock-kneed, ex-footballer-turned-failing-coach like me ever pull a woman like that to begin with?
Honest answer? I have not got the faintest idea. And I’ve had a long, long time to think about it.
Best I’ve ever worked out, it went like this. I met Karen when I was thirty, in the function room of some cousin’s wedding I’d been dragged along to, sat slumped at the free bar in a borrowed suit watching a five-a-side highlight on the telly above the optics and muttering to nobody about the keeper’s positioning.
And she wandered over, this absolute vision in a green dress, and nodded at the screen and went, "Go on then. What’s he done wrong?"
And I, for the first and possibly only time in my whole life, did not try. I didn’t reach for a chat-up line; I’ve never owned one. I just told her, dead honest, exactly what was wrong with that keeper’s positioning, for a solid four minutes, with my entire heart, like a beautiful idiot.
And she laughed. And she stayed. And four years later she married me.
That’s the cruel joke of my entire existence, right there. The one time I ever "pulled" anybody worth pulling, it was precisely because I forgot to try. I wasn’t dreaming about it, or planning it, or bottling it for once. I was just sat there, being myself, banging on about the thing I love.
And then I spent the next five years overthinking every single move, grinding away, working late, forever planning the big romantic gesture I never quite got round to making, right up until the morning she sat me down at the kitchen table. The harder I tried to deserve her, the further I shoved her towards the door.
So, no. The gorgeous woman in the gym did not reach Karen. And no, I did not go over and talk to her. Because the last time the universe put a ten out of ten in front of me and gave me a working heartbeat, I loved her with everything I had and still managed to lose her, by trying too hard and moving too late.
Some lessons you drag into the next life whether you fancy them or not.
I made the mistake of telling Raj about the beans.
Not the truth, obviously. God, no. But I couldn’t keep nine grand in a bag under the bed forever, and one thing led to another, and somehow I ended up trying to explain Bitcoin to a minicab driver in the window of a Greggs.
"Let me get this dead straight," said Raj, very slowly, a sausage roll frozen halfway to his gob, flake, flake going the pastry down his front. "You won nine grand. Nine grand, Sam. Real money. Money you can actually hold. And you’ve took two grand of it, and you’ve bought... computer money."
"Bitcoin."
"Money that lives in the computer. That you can’t touch. That some bloke made up. And spent on pizza."
"When you say it like that, it does sound bad."
"It sounds mental, mate!" A bit of sausage roll went flying. "Two grand! I could put a deposit on a flat down for two grand! You’ve gone and bought magic beans off the internet!"
"That’s exactly what they are," I said, and I couldn’t help grinning. "Magic beans. And one day, Raj, I swear to you on my dad’s grave, there is going to be a beanstalk. The biggest beanstalk you have ever seen in your life. All you’ve got to do is not sell the beans."
He stared at me for a long moment. Then he put the sausage roll down on the table, which, for Raj, is basically dialling 999.
"You’ve had a bang on the head," he said quietly. "That’s what this is. The knee, and then a bang on the head, and now you reckon you can see the future and you’re out buying internet pizza money."
"Something like that."
"...Should I buy some?"
"No," I said. Too fast. Because I knew exactly where Raj’s three hundred quid needed to be, and it wasn’t in beans, not yet. "Not yet. Trust me. I’ll tell you the day. And when I do, you do it, no questions."
He looked at me like I’d grown a second head. But he nodded. Because that’s Raj. Loyalty of eighteen.
Six weeks. Six weeks since I’d died on the A13 and woken up with the world at my feet. And in those six weeks I’d turned forty quid into nine grand, two grand into a fortune that didn’t exist yet, and a soft, sad, sacked shelf-stacker into something that was starting, just starting, to look like a man with a plan.
And it wasn’t a small plan. Let me be clear about that, because I was finished with small. I wasn’t going to nudge some little club up one division and call that a life well lived.
I was going to take a dead, broke, hundred-and-three-year-old corpse of a football club, off the very bottom of the English game, and I was going to drag her up. Tier by tier. The whole pyramid.
All the way to the top, where the giants live. And one day, the men with the right names and the fat chequebooks, the ones who’d spent my entire life smiling at me and telling me I wasn’t a winner, were going to look up from the Premier League and see Tilbrook Town coming straight for their throats.
Mad as a box of frogs, the plan. I knew that. But for the first time across two whole lifetimes, I had the money, the knowledge, and, finally, the nerve to go and start it.
There was only one thing left to do before the real work began.
I had to go and see her.
Not Karen. Not yet.
The other love of my life. The one with the rust-streaked stand, the wonky T, and a hundred and three years of my family’s heart soaked into her terraces.
I had to go to Marsh Road.
