Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 45: The Kiosk I

I came back into the office above the clubhouse at half past eight on the Tuesday evening with the Aiden Reece contract in the folder and the squad at nineteen and a good feeling on me that lasted exactly as long as it took Maureen to put the phone down.

She was at her desk. Tap, tap, tap of her finger working down a column. The desk lamp on, the window gone dark behind her, the wonky T just a deeper black against the sky outside. The phone rang on the corner as I came in. Brrng, brrng.

She picked up. She listened. She said, "Yes. ...I see. ...And that is the company’s final position, is it, Mr Wadsworth. ...Of course. Thank you for the courtesy of the call." She put the phone down. Click.

"That, Samuel, was a Mr Wadsworth of the brewery."

"Yes."

"The brewery does not propose to renew the bar concession in the clubhouse for the coming season, on account of, in his words, the present uncertainty around the club’s competitive status."

"...Bloody hell."

"He has expressed his sympathy. He has also expressed his certainty. The lease is up Friday. He wants the till and the keg lines back by Monday."

I sat down on the corner of her desk, all the good feeling running straight out of the bottom of me.

The bar at the back of the clubhouse was where the lads’ fathers had drunk on Saturdays since 1968. Big Pete’s old man had drunk in it.

My dad had, on the rare Saturday he wasn’t on a shift. It was a quarter of the club’s gate-day income, and a quarter of gate-day income on a club running eleven pounds to the good in a good month is not a line you lose twelve days before opening day and shrug about.

"Mr Sully?" I said.

"Mr Sully’s name was not mentioned. Mr Sully’s name did not need to be mentioned. Mr Wadsworth’s brewery does a great deal of business with a property concern that does a great deal of business with Mr Sully, and the present uncertainty around our competitive status was, you will note, certain enough for a brewery to act on a full nine days before the FA has confirmed a single thing in writing beyond the points."

I looked at the gallery above the kettle.

The brewery bill was on it, far from the steam, where I’d hung the biggest creditors. I’d hung it there because Maureen taught me the biggest creditor wants you alive. The brewery had just told me it had found a reason it would rather have me dead. Sully had got to the one creditor whose maths I’d had wrong.

"Maureen."

"Yes."

"Pass me the office phone."

She passed me the office phone.

I rang Erol.

He picked up on the third.

"Samuel. You are ringing me at quarter to nine of a Tuesday evening. This is either very good or very bad."

"The brewery’s gone, Erol. Pulled the bar concession. The lease is up Friday. I’m going to lose a quarter of my gate-day take on opening day in twelve days’ time, and I think a man called Sully leaned on them to do it."

A pause.

"...I’ll bring tea."

He hung up.

He was on the forecourt at twenty-five past nine in the apron, with three takeaway teas in a cardboard tray and a young lad behind him in chef whites. Putter, putter of the engine of an old Transit cooling down.

"Samuel. Maureen."

"Erol."

"This is Murat. My sister’s boy. Out of the Bromley catering college two weeks ago. He needs a project. You have a problem. I have brought him to take a look."

We went up to the office. Maureen put the kettle on. Hsss. Erol pulled a napkin out of his apron pocket and laid it flat on the desk. Smooth of his hand on the paper. He took a biro out of the other pocket. Click.

"Right. The bar."

I drew the bar on the napkin. Skritch of the biro. The corridor. The back door onto Marsh Road. The car park out front where the crowd came in.

Erol looked at it. He did not look at it long.

"You don’t need a bar," he said.

"You need a kiosk. Permanent. Out on the forecourt where the crowd actually walks in, not down a corridor at the back where the brewery hid it so nobody bought a second pint. Hot food, hot tea, cans, beer late once a fortnight if you renew the lease another way. Hatch out the front. Eight feet by twelve. You take twenty per cent. I take eighty. Murat runs the build and the kitchen. You do not, in any week, see me. You see Murat. Murat is, between you and me, twice the businessman his uncle is. I am giving you the boy because I am being generous in front of your secretary."

Maureen, without looking up: "Thank you, Erol."

"You are welcome, Maureen."

I looked at the napkin. A kiosk on the forecourt, in the flow of the crowd, open hot food, was not a worse business than a hidden bar. It was a better one. The brewery had done me a backhanded favour and Erol had spotted it inside ninety seconds.

"Twenty per cent, Erol."

"Twenty per cent."

"Build cost up front?"

"On my account. We split it back out of the first six months. Eight thousand pounds, build cost. Murat has had a quote in his back pocket since Monday morning for an eight-by-twelve catering kiosk in galvanised steel with a deep fryer, a hot-water boiler, two fridges and a serving hatch."

"...You’ve had a quote in your back pocket since Monday morning."

"Samuel. I read the back page of the Standard like everybody else. A man with a ten-point deduction and a brewery bill is a man who is going to lose his bar before September. I am a businessman. I have simply done my worrying about your bar a week before you got round to doing yours."

I picked the biro up.

I wrote on the napkin, in blocky biro capitals, the same hand as the receipt on the Formica at home:

TILBROOK TOWN F.C. AND EROL OF THE CARLING STREET HATCH, TRADING AS THE MARSH ROAD KIOSK, AGREE 20/80 SPLIT OF KIOSK REVENUE FROM AUGUST 2010, INITIAL TERM TWO YEARS, BUILD ON EROL’S ACCOUNT, NEPHEW MURAT OPERATING. SIGNED S. MERCER / EROL / MURAT, TUESDAY 3 AUGUST 2010.