Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 64: The Spine I

"You want me to pay you," said Derek Hubble, "to put my name up at a football club that was getting buried in July."

"I want you to put your name up at a club that climbed off the bottom of the whole country in September."

I had the sketch flat on his counter, between a vase of lilies and a laminated price list for oak veneer.

"40 quid a month. The board nearest the Bovril End. Every old boy in this town stands on that terrace of a Saturday, Derek, and every old boy in this town is, no offence, a future client."

He looked at me over his half-moon glasses. 40 years burying the marsh’s dead, and here was a lad of 24 in his father’s old club tie trying to sell him advertising off the back of a near-death experience.

"Cheeky little sod." It came out fond. Scritch went his fountain pen across the chequebook. "Go on. The one by the Bovril. Put me where they can read it while they wait."

Board number 4.

I’d started the boards a fortnight back with a marker and the back of Maureen’s raffle pad. 12 of them, the whole run round the paddock, where for years only Brennan’s green hoarding and the old Pelham board behind the Bovril End had broken a line of rust and peeling paint.

A board is the easy kind of money. It’s a yes or a no and a chequebook. And you’d be amazed who says yes once you’ve stopped being the joke of the marsh and started being the comeback.

Sanjay at the tyre place took 2, clang of him dropping a wheel to shake on it, "one each end, so they see me coming and going."

Big Pete’s landlord at the Anchor took one and tried to pay in pints. I let him do half. The kebab van by the station took one and paid cash out of a bag that smelled of chilli sauce, crinkle of twenties, the lad on the grill grinning. "My shop. On a board. My mum is going to lose her mind."

Raj took one for the cab firm and haggled me like I was a stranger off the rank.

"Mate’s rates."

"Raj, you ARE the mate. There’s no further rate to give you."

"Then it should be free."

"It’s 30 quid."

"That’s not mate’s rates, that’s robbery in a tie."

He paid the 30. Then sat in the cab outside for 20 minutes taking a photo of his own board through the windscreen to send his brother, tk-tk-tk of the hazards going the whole time, proud as a new dad.

Boards were the easy half, though. A board’s just a name on a fence.

The harder thing I was building that fortnight you couldn’t paint on a hoarding, and it frightened me more than the wolf did.

I was building a club that could run without me in it.

I started with Stan.

I caught him in the treatment room, elbows deep in a bucket of ice and Sid Hollis’s knee, slosh every time he shifted it.

"I want to make it official," I said. "Assistant manager. Your name on the line, your say on the team. Proper money when there’s proper money."

Stan didn’t look up from the knee.

"Short of someone to blame, are you," he said.

"I’m short of someone who’ll tell me I’m wrong before we lose. Not after."

That got me a look. Stan’s a man who’s been let down by football enough times to keep his face shut about it. But something went across it all the same.

"Aye," he said, to the knee. "Go on, then. Someone’s got to drive when you’re off selling fences."

Sid, flat on the table, eyes on the ceiling: "He said yes. Ring the bell."

"You ring it. You’ve two good legs."

"I’ve one and a half, and they’re both yours till May."

Doyle I made player-coach, which mostly meant putting a title and a tenner a week on a thing he’d done for free all season, taking the Thursdays while I did the books.

Robbie Doyle, 31, a centre-half who reads a game like a man reading the racing pages, knows the horse before the gun goes. He took it the way he takes everything, a nod and a "right," and then ran the Thursday session so hard that 2 of the kids were sick behind the dugout, splat, and the rest ran harder for seeing it.

And Stan brought in a lad to help with the bits the two of us kept dropping.

Danny Tomlin. Local, quiet, mid-20s, played a bit of non-league at a level that goes nowhere and knew it, came home and coached kids’ Saturday football for the love of it.

Turned up in a cagoule with his own cones, clk, clk of him stacking them, and didn’t say ten words the first week.

Just watched. Then set up a finishing drill on the Thursday that was tidier than anything I’d have thought of, the angle of it, the way it made Mooney’s runs come off without a soul being told.

"Where’d you get that one," I asked him.

"Saw a Dutch fella do it on the internet," he said. "Changed the numbers a bit."

I left it there. You don’t make a fuss of a quiet one. You notice, and you keep him.

The club itself I had to build the same as the team.

Maureen ran the whole finances of Tilbrook Town out of a biscuit tin and a ledger she’d kept by hand since Thatcher, and she ran it better than men with letters after their names. But she ran it alone, and she was 64, and one bad winter chest and the club’s entire memory went with her.

So I sat her down and told her she was getting help whether she liked it or not.

She did not like it.

"I’ve kept this club’s books 30 year without losing a penny."

"I know. That’s exactly why I can’t have it all in one head and one tin."

I gave her Yasmin three mornings a week. Erol’s girl, 19, whose Goldsmiths fee I’d quietly covered back in the summer, and quick on a laptop in a way that made Maureen suck her teeth.

Clatter of the keys, chunter of a secondhand printer warming up. Inside a fortnight the biscuit tin had become a spreadsheet, and Maureen, who’d have died before admitting it, had started saying "my system" about a thing she’d called "that bloody machine" on the Monday.

And I made her teach me the order.

The order was Maureen’s word for the queue of people Tilbrook Town owed money to, ranked by how much they could hurt us and how long they’d wait. The brewery. The laundry. The council. The diesel man.

The bloke who’d resurfaced the car park in 2008 and was still being paid for it in instalments and Christmas cards. For a year she’d held that order together alone, paying the dangerous ones, sweet-talking the patient ones, all of it on a biro and a long memory.

A chairman who doesn’t know his own order is a chairman with his eyes shut. So I learned it. Every name, every number, every grudge. It isn’t glamorous, the order. It’s the most important page in the building.