Free Web NovelChapter 4: Extra Time II
"Sorry," I said. Out loud. To the void. "Sorry. Miles away. You were saying?"
Focus, Sam. You are dead. You can stand about mooning over Karen on your own time, of which, let’s be honest, you have currently got an infinite and frankly terrifying amount.
There is a magic football panel sitting here offering you the entire universe back. Pay attention to the magic football panel.
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[SYSTEM] No catch. One condition.
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[SYSTEM] I open the door. You walk through it. I will show you what is hidden, every player’s true ability laid bare, exactly the way you always wished you could see it out there in the real world. But I will not kick one ball for you. I will not sign one contract. I will not win one match, or survive one relegation, or talk one chairman round.
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[SYSTEM] You wanted to be a winner, Samuel? Then go and bloody win.
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And under the two buttons, one more line appeared. Different from the rest. Older. Handwritten, almost, in a looping ink script that didn’t match the clean white font of everything else.
Sign to begin.
I’m not going to pretend I agonised over it.
I’m not going to stand here and tell you there was some big noble speech in my head about second chances and the beautiful game and the meaning of it all.
There wasn’t.
There was just a forty-year-old failure floating in the dark, looking at a picture of his dead dad on a terrace, being handed the one thing he’d wanted since he was eight years old on a milk crate.
I’d have signed it in blood. I’d have signed it with my teeth. I’d have signed it on a contract that gave the system my kidneys, my pension and my Spotify password.
"How?" I said. "I haven’t got a hand. I haven’t got a pen. How am I supposed to..."
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[SYSTEM] You have been signing your name in the margins of that scrapbook since you were eight years old.
[SYSTEM] Sign it the way he taught you.
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And, look, I don’t know how to explain this part properly. I just did it. I thought my name. I thought it the way Dad used to make me write the line-ups out, neat, tongue poking between my teeth, in the little box at the bottom of the page where the home team went.
Mercer, S.
The world went WRONG.
Not dark. Not light. Wrong.
Every colour turned itself inside out at once. The gentle little bing swelled up into a BONG and then into a roar, a full stadium at maximum volume going off six inches from each ear, RAAAAAAAAAAA.
I was falling, no I was rising, I genuinely could not tell you which, being squeezed through the eye of a needle the size of a five-pence piece, every bone I didn’t have grinding against every other bone I didn’t have, and somewhere underneath all of it, somewhere far away and very close, a voice that was not the system, a voice with a flat cap and forklift hands, said it one more time.
Watch the space, son.
...thunk.
I sat bolt upright.
GASP.
Air. Cold, damp, slightly-smells-of-garlic air.
A pillow under me, lumpy in the exact spot I remembered, and a duvet I knew, navy blue, a cigarette burn near one corner that I’d done myself with a roll-up in 2009 and never owned up to.
The duvet from my old flat. The flat above the kebab shop on Carling Street. The flat they knocked down with the whole row in 2013 and turned into "luxury studio living" I could never have afforded.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
An alarm clock. A physical alarm clock. The cheap Argos one with the angry green numbers, sat buzzing its little heart out on a bedside table that had spent the last decade and a half in a landfill in Essex.
Slowly, very slowly, like it might bite me, I turned my head and looked at it.
07:00 TUE 1 JUNE 2010
My hands shot up in front of my face. Young hands. No scars across the knuckles from a thousand training-ground drills. No grey hairs on the wrists.
Nails bitten down to nothing, because I was twenty-four again and skint and frightened of everything, and I made a noise I am not proud of, a sort of strangled "hhhnnngh-WHAT," and I went straight off the side of the bed, CRASH, taking the duvet, the alarm clock and a half-finished can of warm Red Bull down with me onto the carpet.
I lay there. Breathing. Heart slamming, bang, bang, bang.
Twenty-four.
Alive.
Whole knee.
Whole life.
For a second I just lay on that manky carpet with the Red Bull soaking into my sock and I started to laugh, and then the laugh went somewhere wobbly and turned into something else, and I pressed the heels of my young hands into my young eyes and just let it come, the whole lot of it, sixteen years of it.
Karen. The interviews. The roofer. The lorry. My dad on the terrace. I cried like a kid on the floor of a flat that shouldn’t exist anymore, and it was, hand on heart, the best cry of my entire life or lives or whatever I was meant to call them now.
Then I wiped my face on my sleeve, sniff, and told myself to get a grip, because grown men sobbing on the carpet at seven in the morning do not save football clubs.
And then, through the thin single-glazed window, I heard it. Brrrrrm, hiss. The number 42 bus, pulling into the stop across the road, the exact same wheeze it always made.
And I scrambled up off the floor and shoved my face against the cold glass, and there it was, idling at the kerb, and there was the driver, leaning out the cab door having a crafty fag before his shift, and floating in the morning air right above his head, shimmering, faint in the daylight but absolutely, unmistakably, impossibly there:
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Name: Unknown
Age: 51
"Player": Sunday League (retired, knees)
Current Ability: 14 / 200
Potential Ability: 14 / 200 Two left feet and a dodgy hip. Wouldn’t trust him in a five-a-side. Would trust him with the last bus home.
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"...Bloody hell," I breathed, and my breath fogged the glass, and underneath the fog the numbers just kept on glowing.
Name: Unknown. That bit snagged me, even through the shock of it all. It hadn’t given me the bloke’s name.
And of course it hadn’t, why would it? I didn’t know him from Adam. I’d seen him through a bus window a thousand mornings and never once said a word to the man. The system would show me what he could do.
His numbers. His ceiling. The honest truth of him, the stuff he couldn’t hide and probably didn’t even know he had. But a name? A name you had to earn off it.
A name meant the person had walked into my actual life and started to matter. I don’t know how I knew that. I just knew it, the way you know a free kick’s going in the second it leaves the boot. And for some reason it gave me the shivers worse than the numbers did.
It all felt real.
It was real.
All of it.
The eye.
The panels.
The whole mad gift.
And then the second thing landed on me, the thing the system never even mentioned in all that, the thing that came free in the post, and it hit so hard I had to grip the windowsill with both young hands until the knuckles went white.
I didn’t just know the bus driver’s stats.
I knew everything.
I knew who lifted the World Cup in ten days’ time. I knew which spotty seventeen-year-olds in this very country were about to become household names. I knew there was a thing out there right now, this exact morning, called Bitcoin, and that it was worth less than a single penny.
I knew the next sixteen years stone cold.
And I knew, down the river, down the estuary, behind a wonky, rusting T, there was a dying old football club that nobody, nobody, was coming to save.
Except this time, me.
