Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 23: The Team II

"Sam Mercer," I said, and stuck my hand out.

He didn’t take it. "And?"

"And I’m the bloke who’s going to try and buy this football club."

Silence. Even the spaniel stopped barking.

Fourteen men, plus a legend in goal, all turned and looked at me, and I watched fifteen faces do the exact same thing in the exact same order: a flare of hope, instant and helpless, and then, half a second later, the hard shutter slamming straight back down over it, because these were men who’d had their hearts broken by this club a dozen times already that year and were not about to hand them over to a stranger in trainers.

"Course you are," said Lenny, flat as the estuary. "And I’m Roman Abramovich. We’ve had three of you this month, pal. Suits with clipboards. One of them measured my centre circle for a car park."

"I’m not a suit."

"No," he said, looking me up and down, the trainers, the hole starting in the toe. "No, you’re really not. Which is almost worse, somehow. At least the suits have got money."

Fair.

Completely fair.

So I didn’t argue.

I did the only thing I had, the only thing that had got me this far. I told them the truth, or as much of it as a man can tell without getting himself sectioned.

"My dad stood on that Bovril End for forty years," I said.

"Bill Mercer. He’s gone now. This club was the best thing in his life after his family, and a few of you are old enough to have heard him, because he had a voice on him like a foghorn."

A flicker, there, across Sid’s big face. He remembered. "I can’t promise you I’ll pull this off. The odds are rubbish and the bloke I’m up against has got more money than God. But I have got one real shot at saving this place, a week on Friday, and I’m asking you for one thing. One."

"Go on," said Lenny.

"Don’t sign for anyone else. Not yet. I know the better ones of you have had offers. I know it’s mad to ask a man to turn down a wage on the say-so of a stranger. So give me nine days, that’s all. If I fail, you’ve lost nothing. You sign your forms, you go, no hard feelings, and at least somebody tried. But if I don’t fail..."

I looked down the line at them, at Sid and Lenny and rotting, wasted Mooney and a seventeen-year-old garden-centre boy worth more than the lot of them put together and none of them knowing it. "...if I don’t fail, then come August I am going to need a team. And I would very much like it to be this one."

Nobody said a word for a long moment. Caw, went the gull. The spaniel found its ball and lost interest in us entirely.

Then Big Sid, forty-one games from the wrong end of his legend, peeled off a glove, walked the whole length of the line, and shook my hand with a grip like a slammed car door.

"Billy Mercer’s lad," he rumbled.

"Heard you got took on at the academy. Heard the knee went." He kept hold of my hand and looked at me with old, kind, knowing eyes.

"Nine days, son. You’ve got nine days off me, easy. I’m thirty-eight, where am I going to go anyway." He grinned, gap-toothed. "Just don’t make an old man look daft."

The knee, by the way, since we were on the subject. The knee was no longer the knee I’d had a month ago. I could feel it under me, square on the dog-fouled turf of the rec, taking my weight without a single word of objection.

The system’s protocol had done what the system’s protocol said it would. I was never going to play professional football again, not in this life or any of the other ones, but I was going to be able to stand on a touchline for ninety minutes and stoppage time without falling over, and on a council pitch in front of fourteen men whose Saturdays I was about to be responsible for, that was the only number that mattered.

And one by one, God help the lot of them, the others nodded too. Not because they believed me. Because Sid did. And because hope, even stupid hope, even hope wearing a hole in its trainer, is a desperately hard thing for a football man to put down once he’s gone and picked it up.

Lenny was last. He still didn’t shake my hand. But he gave me one short nod, the nod of a man reserving every last right to be proven right about me, and said, "Nine days. Then we talk properly. And it’s Mr Marsh to you in the meantime."

"Wouldn’t dream of anything else, captain."

I went back down into that cellar in the afternoon with something burning in my chest that hadn’t been there in the morning.

Because now it wasn’t an idea any more. It wasn’t a dead dad and a wonky letter and a hunch. It was Sid’s grip, and Lenny’s nod, and a seventeen-year-old with the entire world in his left boot who deserved to have a club to stand in come August.

Now I had to find it.

And in the end, it was Dad who found it for me. Of course it was.

I’d brought the scrapbook down with me. I’m not entirely sure why. I’d told myself it was for cross-referencing dates, but the honest truth is I just wanted him down there with me, in the place he loved best, while I tried to save it.

And around nine that night, with Maureen long gone home and Raj asleep sitting bolt upright against a filing cabinet, the corner flag letter still clutched in his hand, I was turning through it, through the soft old ticket stubs and the line-ups in careful biro, and I reached a page near the very front, the oldest part, history he’d copied out as a boy because my dad had loved this place since he was a lad an’ all.

And there, under a faded postcard of the ground from the 1950s, in my father’s blocky little-boy capitals, was a single underlined line.

THE FIELD WAS GIVE TO THE TOWN. CANT NEVER BE SOLD. ITS OURS FOR EVER. DAD SAYS.

Dad says. My granddad. Telling my dad. My dad writing it down, a kid, dead certain of it the way you’re certain of everything your father tells you, never once dreaming his own son would read it in a cellar a lifetime later with the whole world hanging off whether or not it was true.

The field was given to the town. Can’t never be sold.

My hands started to shake. I set the scrapbook down very, very carefully, and I went to the minute books, the oldest one, 1920s, leather flaking off it like pastry, and I turned the brittle pages under the swinging bulb, creak, creak, and I found it. November 1923.

I read it three times to be sure I hadn’t gone mad and dreamed it.

And then I laughed out loud in that empty cellar, this cracked, mad bark of a laugh, and Raj jolted awake going "WHAT, what, who’s there," and I grabbed his startled face in both my hands and I think I may genuinely have kissed him on the forehead.

"It’s real," I said. "Raj. It’s real. He thinks he’s already won, and it is real."

"What is? Sam. What’s real? You’re frightening me, and I was having a lovely dream about the corner flag."

But here was the catch.

There’s always a catch.

The minute book spoke of it, the gift, the deed, the covenant, the conditions, all of it. But a minute book isn’t proof.

A minute book is a long-dead secretary’s note from 1923.

To stop Ray Sully and his two hundred and forty luxury apartments stone dead, to walk into that creditors’ meeting and blow his bid to splinters in front of everyone, I didn’t need a note about the deed.

I needed the deed itself.