Chapter 976 The Empty Line I

I told Rebecca I would say it myself.

She turned the card back round, held it flat against her chest and went into the physio room. She left the door open the width of a hand.

The floor of that corridor is painted grey, and it was cold through my trousers before I had finished sitting down on it.

Kirby moved his wash bag along the wall to make room for me. His foot was out in front of him in its white dressing. He had pulled the lace all the way out of the boot in his lap and he was threading it back in, hole by hole, and getting it wrong.

"You are not playing on Wednesday," I said.

"I know, gaffer."

"I know you know. I want you to have heard it from me."

He nodded at the boot. He pushed the lace through the next hole and pulled it, and it came out on the wrong side, and he had missed 1.

"I went to my own doctor so she would not find out," he said. "So I could play Wednesday. And now I cannot play Wednesday because I went to my own doctor."

He laughed at the end of it, through his nose, and the laugh broke in the middle. He put the heel of his hand into his eye and kept it there.

Down the corridor somebody had a hairdryer going in our dressing room, and Grealish was shouting for his other sock.

I asked him what he would have done if it was somebody else's heel. Would he have kept quiet for them?

"I would have told Rebecca," he said, from behind his hand. "And then told you she was being soft."

"Next time you tell her first. Then you can tell me she is soft."

He took his hand away. He looked at the boot for a while, and then he asked who was playing.

"Macca."

"He will not let Gündoğan breathe," Kirby said. "I let him breathe in Manchester. I was thinking about my foot the whole second half."

I told him he was in the dressing room on Wednesday night. Before the match, at half time and after it, with his foot up on a chair where everybody could see it.

"In a flip-flop," Rebecca said, through the gap in the door.

Kirby looked at the door. Then he put the boot in his bag with the lace still hanging out of it and zipped the bag shut over the top.

I told James McArthur on the coach, on the M3, somewhere past Winchester.

He was 4 rows from the back with a bag of grapes on the seat beside him and his headphones in, watching a film on his phone. He saw me coming down the aisle and took them both out before I got there.

"Wednesday," I said. "Kirby's place."

He wound the wire round his fingers and put it in his top pocket.

"Aye," he said. "Who have I got? Gündoğan?"

I said he had whoever came into the space between Neves and Olise, and that Sarah would put it on the board on Monday morning.

"Can I have the Etihad? Not the goals. Kirby's bits."

Marcus was 2 rows in front of him with his laptop already open. He had every touch Kirby made in 82 minutes cut together before we reached Basingstoke, and passed the laptop back over the seat.

McArthur watched it twice on the way back to London. He had the grapes in his lap the whole time and he did not eat any of them.

On Sunday Emma went to her parents' for lunch and to look at her father's knee, and I stayed at home and watched City at Huddersfield on my own with a pad on the arm of the sofa.

Guardiola picked Ederson. Walker, Otamendi, Laporte, and Danilo at left back. Fernandinho in front of them with De Bruyne and Gündoğan. Sterling, Agüero and Sané. Danilo scored 17 minutes in. Sterling and Sané scored within a few minutes of each other early in the second half, and Fernandinho was booked and taken off before the hour.

I wrote the 11 down. It was the best team he had. Sat there with the pen in my hand, I could not find 1 name he would want to change on Wednesday.

Marcus had the same 11 on my desk at 8 on Monday morning, with a line underneath in his small capitals. IF FERNANDINHO STARTS, HE IS OFF BY 60. SAME AS SUNDAY. He had underlined 60 twice.

Sarah came in behind him with the penalty sheet from the Burton night.

It still had my writing on it. Bowen, Olise, Blake, Grealish, Kirby. She had put a line through Olise, because Rebecca's 70 was already on the card for Wednesday and nobody takes a penalty from the bench. She had put a line through Kirby.

In the second space, in her own writing, she had put Eze.

The fifth space was a ruled line with nothing on it.

"That 1 is yours," she said. "I want it before they go out on Wednesday."

I said she would have it. She wrote WED in the margin next to the empty line and went to take the session.

She ran it with City's shape in the bibs. McArthur played Kirby's position for an hour and Sarah stopped it 4 times to move him a yard, and the fourth time he moved before she had finished pointing.

At the end she had 8 of them take 2 penalties each at Hennessey and wrote every 1 down on her clipboard, left, right, scored, saved.

Tyrick Mitchell was not 1 of the 8.

I saw him from the canteen window at half 1, when everybody had gone in. He had a bag of balls and Wayne Hennessey, and he took 10. Hennessey saved the fourth. Mitchell put the other 9 low to the same side, and Hennessey knew which side it was going and still could not get down to any of them.

Then Mitchell collected the balls himself, put them in the bag and carried it in. He did not look up at the window.

On Tuesday Dougie had the loan papers on his desk in 2 piles, Portsmouth on the left and Middlesbrough on the right. Both clubs had signed. Both had the 24th in the box at the top.

"Tony has texted me again," he said. "1 word. Thursday. That is twice now he has told me what day it is."

Michael Steele spent Tuesday afternoon in the video room with Tim Krul and every City penalty Marcus could find from 2 seasons.

I put my head round the door at 4. Krul had his feet on the desk.

Steele had a roll of white tape on his wrist and a biro behind his ear, and he was writing on a strip of tape stuck to the back of a plastic water bottle, in letters too small for me to read from the door.

He told me to shut it.

I shut it.

Tuesday night the kitchen table was covered in yellow Post-it notes.

Emma's mother had rung twice before I got home. There were 91 people coming to the wedding and 10 round tables in the room, and every Post-it had a name on it in Emma's writing, and some of them had been moved so often the glue had gone and they kept sliding off onto the floor.

"Ron," Emma said, holding 1 up. "Where does Ron go?"

I said next to my mother.

She looked at me past the edge of the yellow square.

"That is either the best idea you have ever had or the worst."

My mother talks to anybody at a bus stop. Ron has been on that barrier since 1999, and I did not know his surname until November. I said they would either not say a word all night or they would be the last 2 people in the building.

She stuck Ron to table 4, next to my mother, and pressed it down hard with her thumb.

Then she stood up, put the radio on, turned it down low and held out her hands.

"Thursday is lesson 2," she said. "I am not going back in there with you the same as last week."

We did the box step round the kitchen table, between the table and the cooker, where there was not really room for it. I counted out loud the way the teacher counts. Emma told me to stop.

"She counts. You do not count. If you count, you think, and if you think, you stand on me."

I stopped counting. I stood on her.

She set the timer on the oven for 3 minutes and said we were not stopping until it went off, whatever happened. My hip went into the corner of the table twice. The Post-its came off the edge in a yellow drift and we danced on them.

Ding.

She stopped and looked down. There was a Post-it stuck to the bottom of my sock.

RON.

She peeled it off my foot and stuck it back on table 4, next to my mother, and laughed so hard she had to hold the back of a chair.