Free Web NovelChapter 55: The Sponsor
Right.
When I left you on the Friday, we’d survived Wages Day by the width of a single Tuesday, the lads had waited for their fifty quid like the men they are, and out across the marshes the next £16,667 was already loading itself up for the last day of September.
That was exactly where we stood. Still broke. Still at the bottom of the whole division, 24th of 24, on minus 3 points, because we’d earned 7 off our own boots and a 10-point head start in the wrong direction still had us pinned to the floor of the table.
Survived, and last.
So the morning after Wages Day, I went looking for money that didn’t come through a turnstile. A gate, you can’t control.
The fixture computer sends you to Cambridge for three weeks and your home income vanishes into diesel. But a sponsor, a sponsor you can go and get with your own two feet, and that’s what I went and did.
Maureen had the name, and had done since my first fortnight, the way she has everything before you know you need it.
"Terry Brennan," she said, not looking up from the ledger.
"Building firm off the Barking Road. Stood on the Bovril End as a boy, every other Saturday, before he had two coins to rub together and a long time before he owned the half of Barking he owns now." She turned a page.
"And you don’t go cap in hand. Men like that have had enough cap-in-hand to last them three lives. You go and offer him a thing to belong to."
So I rang him, brr-brr, click, and on the Wednesday Raj drove me out to the yard.
"This the bloke with all the diggers?" Raj said, taking the North Circular like it owed him money.
"Eyes on the road, mate," I said, because one of us has to, and he grinned and ate his apple one-handed at fifty, crnch crnch, indicator going tk-tk-tk as he carved across two lanes.
Brennan’s yard was off the Barking Road behind a fence with razor wire on it, grnng of a cement mixer turning somewhere, a forklift going beep beep beep in reverse, two Alsatians that looked like they did the firm’s invoicing, WOOF WOOF, then deciding I wasn’t worth the bark, whuff.
Gravel under my shoes, scrnch scrnch, all the way to a portacabin where a kettle had just boiled, hsss, and a desk you couldn’t see the wood of for paperwork, shff as a big hand cleared a pile to see me. Behind it sat the man himself, sixty if he was a day, forearms like the men in Bill’s old photos, reading glasses pushed up into grey hair.
The System put its panel up over him the way it does whether I asked it to or not.
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[Name: Unknown] Age: 58
"Player": 21/45 A Bovril End boy who built the rest of himself out of other people’s roofs. Never forgot the terrace. Hates one man more than he loves money, which is saying something.
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21 out of 200.
The System had clocked Terry Brennan’s footballing ability at one notch above the bus driver who couldn’t trap a bag of sand, and given me a line about him anyway, because it grades everyone, the daft thing, whether they ever kicked a ball or not. But it was the last sentence I was reading. Hates one man more than he loves money. I had a fair idea who.
He slid a mug of tea at me without asking, clunk, the colour of a creosote fence and twice as strong. I didn’t go cap in hand. I sat down, creak of a plastic chair that had seen a thousand quotes, and before he could get the "now what’s a non-league club want with me" speech out, I started with the land.
"You know that ground can’t be sold?" I said.
"Covenant on it. 1923. A widow gave the field to the town for football, forever, and the day the football stops on it, it goes back to the town in trust. Cast iron."
His eyebrows went up a half-inch and he leaned in, because a builder knows to the penny what a covenant like that is worth, which is nothing, to a man with a digger. "So while we keep playing, nobody lays a brick on it. Keeping the club alive is the whole game."
"Go on," he said.
So I went on. I told him where we stood, dead last and climbing, and that we’d beaten AFC Wimbledon, the title favourites, on the opening day, a club the fans had built back up off the parks pitches themselves after they lost the old one, which is a story a man like Brennan leans into without you having to point at it.
And I told him about the boy. Not the number, never the number, that one stays behind my teeth. Just that we had a 17-year-old I’d one day watch from the gantry of any ground in the country, and that I’d sooner have Brennan’s name on his shirt when I did than anybody else’s.
I sold him the club. I did not sell him a charity.
He let me finish. Then he said, "Mercer." He said it slow, turning it over. "Your old man weren’t Bill Mercer? On the cranes? Stood up the Bovril End, lent his flask out and never wanted it filled back?"
And there he was again, my dad, walking into a portacabin off the Barking Road eight years after he died, the way he walks into nearly everything if you give him half a door.
"That’s him," I said.
"Stood next to your dad more Saturdays than I stood next to my own," Brennan said. "God. Bill Mercer’s boy, running Tilbrook." He looked at me properly then, and something in the deal changed before a number had been said, and I’m honest enough to tell you I didn’t earn that bit. Bill earned it, thirty years ago, with a flask.
Then he told me about Sully, because I hadn’t asked and a man like Brennan tells you the thing you didn’t ask for first.
"I know Ray Sully," he said.
"Came up the same years, same trade. I’ll say a different church and leave it there." Tk of a biro he picked up and put down.
"He stood on that End as a boy, same as me, same as your dad. And he wants to put 240 flats on it and call the road after himself. Tilbrook Way." He said the name like it tasted of something.
"40 of them affordable. You know what 40 affordable out of 240 is, son? It’s a man who’s worked out the exact smallest number of poor people he can be seen to care about." He sat back, creak, hands behind his head. "I’ll not have it. I’d sponsor a Sunday pub side to stop Ray Sully having that field. You’ve saved me the bother of finding one."
Here’s the deal we shook on, and I’ll give it you straight, the good and the size of it both.
Brennan Construction on the shirts for the season. £10,000.
£3,000 of it in cash in my hand before I left the yard, the rest across the campaign. And then the thing that was worth more than the £10,000, the thing only a builder gives you: he’d send a gang round to make the Main Stand safe for nothing.
Marsh Road’s Main Stand holds 3,000 and the safety certificate won’t let us put 1,000 in it, which means every home game I’ve been turning away money I’m allowed to want. Brennan’s lads would have it signed off in a fortnight. Bigger gates. Legal ones.
Now. £10,000 across a whole season is not £16,667. It is not one month of what I owe. I want you clear-eyed about that, because I was. A sponsor doesn’t save you.
The clock still bites on the last day of every month and Brennan’s £10,000 wouldn’t cover one of them on its own.
But £3,000 in cash that Tuesday, and a stand I could fill by the next home game, and a builder in my corner who’d come up the same streets as the man trying to bury me? That wasn’t salvation. It was a notch. After the month I’d had, I’d have arm-wrestled him for a notch.
We shook on it, clap of his hand swallowing mine, and as I stood to go the System did the thing it has only done a handful of times in this second life of mine. It changed the panel. Not the numbers. The top line.
[Terry Brennan]
It had named him.
Because the System doesn’t hand you a name when you meet a man. It hands it to you when the man stops being a face in your week and becomes a part of your story, and somewhere between the covenant and my dad’s flask, Terry Brennan had walked out of the background of my life and into the actual middle of it.
The machine knew it before I’d let myself feel it.
"Your dad," Brennan said at the door, the yard wind catching it, bang, "used to say a thing about that ground. Watch the space, he’d say. Never knew what he meant by it."
"Neither did I," I said.
Raj drove me home with £3,000 in an envelope in my coat and his apple core out the window at a roundabout, fmp into a hedge, which I told him off for, and the whole way back I had the same feeling I’d had stood in the away end at Wrexham looking at the rust, except the right way up.
A self-made builder who’d stood on the Bovril End as a boy. There were two of those in this story now. One of them wanted to knock my ground down and name the road after himself. The other one had just put his name on my shirts and was sending men to make my stand safe, because of a covenant, and a kid, and a flask thirty years cold.
The home games were coming. And now there’d be a name on the shirts when they came, and room in the stand for the town to come and see it.
[SYSTEM] Two men off the same terrace. One brings bulldozers. One brought a brush and a tin of paint. Pick your builder.
I’d picked mine.
