Chapter 228: The Book Opens II

THE BOOK ON US · the page the whole league can now read How to beat Tilbrook, autumn 2012, and every side in the division has it now: sit 2 banks of 4, give them the ball in front of you, it frightens them.

Put a man tight on the little Frenchman so he cannot turn. Kick the winger, the referee will let you. Starve the number 9, he lives on scraps, give him none. Then wait for a corner, because the boy at the back is 19 and the one beside him is on loan and the captain is in a brace. Every word of it is true today.

That is what a book is. What is also true, and written on no page but the one I carry: a book has a shelf life. These players outgrow it. The winger learns to beat 2 men, the boy at the back learns the near post, the Frenchman learns to turn into the tackle. I have watched them do it. The trouble is that they do it over years, and I am being asked to survive weeks.

I put my head into the dressing room when the boos had gone home. Sadler was where he always is after a bad one, coat still on, letting the young ones sit in it a while before he spoke.

"They will want you gone by Monday," I told him. "The phone-in, the board, all of it. I want you to hear it from me first. You are not going anywhere."

He did not turn all the way round. He never does.

"I know what I am doing, Sam."

"I know you do. That is why I am telling you the noise does not reach you. It reaches me, and it stops at me. You coach. I will hold the door."

He nodded once, at the wall, and it was enough.

Maureen found me in the office after, and she had the green book with her now, and a face that told me the board had been in her ear.

"Terry rang. And 2 of the others." She sat. "The word they keep using is ’react’. As in, the chairman needs to be seen to react."

"React how."

"You know how. It is always the same 3 things when a club panics." She counted them on the desk with a fingertip.

"Sack the manager, because it is quick and cheap and feels like doing something. Bring the January money forward and buy a big name in a hurry. Or sell one of the young ones for a fee that shuts the board up and steadies the books while the run costs us gates."

"And what do you think."

She was quiet a moment. That is rare with Maureen.

"I think 2 years ago I would have told you to do the third one. Sell the winger, take the money, save the season." She looked at the shut book. "And I have watched you be right too many times to say it now."

"But."

"But I am going to be honest with you, because you have never once let me be anything else. I do not know, this time. For the first time, Sam, I do not know that you are right, and neither, I think, do you."

There it was, said plain by the one person in the building who never flinched. Even Maureen had stopped being sure.

"Every one of those 3 things is the wrong thing," I said. "I will tell you why, and you are going to have to take most of it on trust the way you have learned to."

"Go on."

"Sadler is the best manager this club will have in my lifetime, and sacking him in October to please a phone-in would be the single most expensive mistake I could make. I would be paying, for the rest of my life, for a Tuesday’s worth of feeling better."

"The board will not love that."

"The board did not turn down 3 million pounds in June. I did." I let that sit. "The big name in a hurry is what Sully does, and we saw at his ground what it buys and what it costs."

"And the third thing."

"Selling a young one to steady the books is selling the one thing we own that his money cannot make. I built this club so it would never have to make that sale in a panic, and I am not making it in the first October we are tested."

"So we do nothing."

"We do the hardest thing there is, which looks exactly like nothing." I stood and looked out at the dark ground, Kieran already on it with his fork.

"We hold. We back the manager to his face and in the paper. We protect the boy." I turned from the window.

"We take the boos, because the boos are fair on what they can see. And we wait for players I know come good to come good, on a timetable I would give a great deal to read and cannot."

Maureen watched me a long moment.

"You said ’I know they come good’," she said. "Not ’I think’. You always say know."

"I do. It is the one thing I have never once been wrong about at this club, and it is the one thing I can never explain to you, and I am asking you to stand next to me on it one more time, in the worst week we have had."

She opened the book, because feeling makes her reach for a column, and then she shut it again, because there was no column for this.

"On your head," she said, the old words, quieter than she has ever said them. "But I will tell you, this is the first time I have said it and been afraid it is the truth."

BBC ESSEX, THE MONDAY PHONE-IN · drive-time "...and we go to Dave in Tilbrook, who has called before. Dave, you were on this show in August worried about the goalkeeper." "I was, and I got shouted down, and look now. One win in 8. Booed off by our own. I said in the summer, sign experience, do not gamble the season on kids and a chairman’s clever ideas, and here we are, second bottom, and where is the experience? In a brace, or never bought." A breath. "I have supported this club 40 years. I do not want clever. I want to stay up. And right now I do not see how we do." The host: "Strong words. Anyone want to defend the chairman?" And a silence on the line, 4 seconds of dead air, that told me more than the boos had.

I did not turn the radio off. A man should hear the worst of it said plain, in his own accent, by people who love the thing he is meant to be minding.

Dave was not wrong on a single fact. One win in 8 was real. The boos were real. The keeper I passed on was real, and so was Marsh’s brace, and so was a 17-year-old carrying more than a boy should.

Every stone Dave threw landed, because I had built a house that October could throw stones at. I had done it on purpose, and only I knew why.

I could have ended the phone-in with one sentence. I could have told Dave that his goalkeeper keeps for England inside 4 years, and the boy he wants protected wins things this town cannot dream of, and the winger he wants sold is worth more than Marsh Road.

Every word of it would have been true. Not one word of it could ever leave my mouth.

So I sat in a dark office with a radio full of my own town’s fear, and I held the one thing I had, which was a knowing I could not spend, share, or prove, against a run that did not care what I knew.

The window was shut. The money I was truly waiting on sat on a laptop climbing toward a day in late November that only I had circled, months from any use to a side sliding in October.

I could not buy my way out. I could not read my way out. I had built the answer to Ray Sully, and the answer took years, and October takes weeks, and the gap between the 2 was the loneliest place I had stood in either of the lives I had been handed.

Saturday we went to the club having the best autumn in the division, away, and everyone from Dave to the board to the man in my own mirror expected it to be the day the wheels came off for good.

I turned the radio off at last, and I did not go home. I sat with the dark and the fear and the knowing, and I made myself say the only true thing I had, out loud, to an empty room, so that at least one voice in Tilbrook that night would say it.

"They come good," I said. "I do not know when. I know that they do."

Then I went to find out how much worse it had to get before it got better, in the one week of my 2 lives I would not have chosen to live through twice.