Free Web NovelChapter 54: Wages Day
Right. No match this week.
Put the kettle on, because this is where football stops and the other thing starts: the thing nobody puts on a highlights reel, the thing that actually kills clubs. Money. But before I take you into the worst Tuesday of my second life, let me stand you where we stood, because it’s the standing that made the week so cruel.
4 games gone. We beat AFC Wimbledon, the title favourites, on the opening day, 2-1, over the dockers’ ashes.
We went to Tamworth and ground out a 0-0 with their big lad hanging off Vardy all afternoon and Mooney rattling the bar twice. We led Wrexham 2-0 at the Racecourse and threw it away to a switch I never saw coming, and that hour taught me more than the two wins did.
Then we went to Cambridge and nicked a 1-0 with a closed fist and a left-back who loved the ball. 2 wins, 1 draw, 1 defeat. 7 points earned, off our own boots, in three weeks that should by rights have buried us.
And here’s the cruelty. Not one of those 7 points, not the win over the favourites, not the trapdoor, not the team we’d turned into on a dark coach on the M6, put a single pound in the Lloyds account against what was due on Tuesday the 31st.
£16,667.
I’ll not dress the maths up, because the maths doesn’t dress up. One home gate all month, the Wimbledon crowd of 1,140, near enough every penny of it long since swallowed.
Three away days after that, three coaches, three tanks of diesel, nothing coming back through a turnstile because the fixture computer had sent us up and down the country and never once brought a paying soul to Marsh Road.
The kiosk’s 20p in the pound off Murat. The £80 off Pelham for the board behind the Bovril End. The £140 from the supporters’ raffle. The float. The tin. The fold of notes in my own back pocket.
I sat at Maureen’s desk under the dead three-bar fire on the Monday night, the kettle just off the boil behind me, hsss, and I added every last one of them up twice, tk tk tk of the biro, and twice it came up the same, and twice it came up short.
Short by thousands. Not pounds. Thousands.
"You’ve two creditors that matter," Maureen said, glasses down her nose, the green ledger open between us, fwip as she turned to the page. "And you cannot pay them both. So you do the order."
She’d taught me the order in my first week. Pay the small angry one first, the one who’ll cut your gas on the Tuesday out of spite. Leave the big one, because the big one wants you alive to keep paying him. By the order, by every rule Maureen Tully had run this club on for thirty years, I should pay the lads their wages on the Friday and let the bank wait.
Except the bank wasn’t a bank. The bank was Sully.
Because the moment a payment bounced, the deed Carbery kept in his office above the Greggs stopped protecting me and started protecting him.
One missed payment and the patient man across the marshes picks up the phone he’s had in his hand since July, and the Lands Tribunal wakes up, and the bulldozers get a date. Sully didn’t need to beat me.
He needed me to miss once. Miss the £16,667 by a day, by a pound, and a hundred and three years of Marsh Road goes under a retail park with his name on the planning notice.
So I broke Maureen’s order. I had to. I paid the big one.
I scraped the £16,667 together out of every corner of that club and out of my own pocket and I got it into the Lloyds account by close of business on the Tuesday with about ninety minutes to spare, and the standing order went out, ka-chunk, and it cleared, and somewhere out across the marshes a patient man looked at his calendar and crossed nothing off, because there was nothing to cross.
He’d have to wait for next month. They always come back next month. But not this one. This one we’d survived.
And it left me, on the Friday, Wages Day, with a club full of men who’d run themselves into the ground for me for three weeks, and nothing in the tin to pay a single one of them.
That’s the bit I’d been dreading since Monday. Not Sully. Sully I could fight. This.
These aren’t millionaires. Bailey’s seventeen and stacks shelves at a garden centre. The Crayford lad’s eighteen.
Half my squad do a shift somewhere before they ever pull a boot on, and the fifty quid and the twenty a game isn’t pocket money to them, it’s the gas bill, it’s the kids’ shoes, it’s the thing Lenny stood in front of me my first week and said had to be there by Friday because the lads’ missus’s do.
I’d taken that fifty quid off them to keep a patient man from a planning office. By every law of football management that loses you a dressing room.
I called them in on the Friday, the clubhouse door banging in the wind off the marshes, clunk, and I stood in front of them and I told them the truth, because I’d promised them the truth and you don’t get to pick the days you keep that promise.
I told them about Sully. About the deed, about the missed payment, about the choice. I told them I’d paid the bank with their wages and I had nothing for Friday and I would not insult them by pretending I had a clever fix.
I said the money would be there next Friday on my own mother’s life, that the home games were coming and the gates with them, but that this week I’d nothing, and I’d understand any man who walked.
Nobody walked.
Scrrk of a chair on the lino, and Lenny Marsh stood up, captain, scaffolder, thirty-three years old with three kids and a missus and a mortgage and more reason than any of them to want his fifty quid, and he looked round the room and then back at me and he said, "We had a vote on the coach Tuesday. Before you’d even told us."
He shrugged like it was nothing, like it wasn’t the thing that put a stone in my throat I couldn’t speak round.
"We know what a turnstile is, boss. We know there’s been no home game. We’re not daft. The lads who can wait, wait. The two or three who genuinely can’t, you sort quiet, out your own pocket, and nobody hears about it, and we never speak of it again."
He sat back down, thunk. "You kept the ground. That’s our ground. You think we don’t know what you did Tuesday?"
You cannot drill that. I told you that two Chapters back and I’ll tell you again.
I drilled the Wharf and the trapdoor and the shape. I never drilled a single second of what happened in that room on the Friday.
That was the M6 paying me back. That was the team I’d built choosing me on the worst week I’d had, choosing the club, sorting it among themselves on a dark coach before I’d even had the bottle to ask.
I sorted the two or three quiet, out of the back pocket, like Lenny said. We never spoke of it again. I’m only telling you because you’ve earned it.
My old man never had money either. Forty years on the cranes and he kept the same stool in the same pub and never owned much past a Cortina and a scrapbook, and the one thing I remember him saying about it, the once, was that a man’s not skint while he’s got people who’ll wait for him.
I didn’t understand it as a boy. I understood it on that Friday, a gull going over the roof, caw, stood in a cold clubhouse in front of fourteen men who’d just waited for me.
We were minus 3 and we were broke and we had got away with it by the width of a single Tuesday.
And out across the marshes the patient man turned a page in his calendar to September, where there was another £16,667 with my name on it, loading itself up the way it does, and behind it October, and behind that all the rest of them, twenty-three more, marching at me one a month like a fixture list that never ends.
But the home games were coming. And the lads had waited. Put those two things together and you’d nearly call it hope.
[SYSTEM] You made the payment. The team made sure you could.
The team made sure I could.
***
Thank you for the constant support.
