Chapter 236: What The Coin Is Doing II

Kieran knocked at 3, soaked to the shoulders, grinning like a boy who has been let drive the tractor.

"You have to come and see it," he said. "The rain. You have to see what it is doing."

"What is it doing, Kieran?"

"Nothing," he said. "That is the point. Come on."

We drove the 5 minutes to the training ground in his van, wipers going flat out, and he would not tell me, he just kept grinning.

The training ground was 6 weeks ago a bog with a portakabin. It was now a low brick building with a roof on it and glass in half the windows, and 3 pitches marked out in the churned earth, the near one already green and stitched with new grass.

"There." Kieran pointed through the streaming windscreen at the near pitch. "Rain like this, that pitch used to be a lake. You could not train on it. The lads did fitness in the car park."

drum of the rain on the van roof.

"Look at it now. Drinking it. Proper drainage under the whole thing. The water is going where water is meant to go, and taking none of my Saturdays with it."

"You brought me out in a storm to look at grass behaving itself."

"I brought you out to look at 9 years of my life not being a swamp any more." He was not joking, under the grin.

"My old man was groundsman here before me. He trained them on that bog 20 years and cursed it every winter of them. He would not credit this. Nobody who stood on that car park in the wet would credit it."

I looked at the water going quietly into the ground the way I had paid, in a currency I could not name, for it to go.

"Your old man," I said. "He would credit it. He just would not credit that we found the money."

"Aye, well." Kieran wiped the inside of the glass with his sleeve. "Nobody credits where the money comes from. They have all decided you are a magician and stopped asking to see up your sleeve. Whole club is like that now."

"Is it."

"Since Saturday, aye. You could tell them the roof was held up by prayer and they would sing about it."

I got out into the rain to walk the near pitch, because a man should feel the ground he has bought.

Sadler was on the far pitch with the ones not carrying a knock, and he came to the fence when he saw me, breath steaming off him.

"You are getting soft, driving 5 minutes in a van," he said.

"I came to look at the grass. Kieran is very proud of the grass."

"He has earned it. First winter in 20 years I can put a session on and know the pitch will still be there at the end of it." He leaned on the wet rail. "They are good this week. Careful good. They know what Saturday was."

"Do they know what the table still says?"

"They know we are 1 win off the middle and 1 bad fortnight off the bottom. I tell them every morning so they do not have to read it in a paper."

He looked over at Marsh, off on his own, jogging the knee back into service.

"The captain wants Saturday. I am going to give him 45 minutes of a cup tie and see what the leg has left in it."

"Is there much left in it?"

"Enough for 45 minutes of a cup tie. After that, him and me find out together." Sadler came as near to a smile as he comes. "He prefers the honest answer. So do I. It is why we have lasted each other."

Doyle caught me on the way back to the van, a folder held over his head against the rain, the same folder he has carried 9 years, fatter now.

"It has gone in," he said. "The category application. Signed, sent, the fee paid this morning."

"How does it feel."

"Like handing in an exam I have revised for since before you owned the place." He tucked the folder inside his coat, out of the wet.

"If it comes back the grade we asked for, we keep our own by right. No more letters from big clubs telling me the price they will pay to lift a 15-year-old I raised out of my hands."

"It will come back the grade we asked for, Robbie."

"You say that the way you say everything. Like you have read the letter already." He did not push it. Nobody pushes it any more. "I gave up needing to know how you know things. I am just glad you spend the knowing on us."

Kieran had the van door open and the heater roaring by the time I got back to it. "Come and see the roof," he called through the rain. "It has had its first proper test and all."

The stand roof, the one that had gone up on a fund Bill kept on the back of a fag packet for 30 years, was holding a winter storm the way it was built to.

hiss of the rain sheeting off the front lip of it, a clean grey curtain. Under it the terrace stood bone dry, the Bovril End that had been wet through every winter since before I was born.

Ted would be dry on Saturday. His father never had a dry Saturday in his life. I had thought about that more than a grown man should.

"It is a good roof," Kieran said, beside me, both of us under it looking out at the rain we could not feel.

"It is a good roof."

"You did all this on money nobody can find." He was not asking. He was a 19-year-old standing under the first dry terrace his family had ever seen. "I do not care where it come from, Mr Mercer. I want you to know that. Whatever it is. I do not care and I never will."

I have been paid a great many things by this club, in a currency I chose over the one I understood. That sentence, from that boy, under that roof, was near the top of the list.

Back at the office the light had gone and the phone had 2 more messages on it, and I knew without listening that they were more of the same, the market clearing its throat.

The turn had done exactly what I built it to do, and exactly what I feared it would. We were 20th, out of the drop by a point, climbing. We had beaten the money at home and the run had turned and the town believed again.

And the moment we started to look like what we were, the world had begun, very politely, to try to take the pieces of it away.

I sat with the green book Maureen had left, and I did the one sum I am actually good at. It has never once been addition.

What is a refusal worth, if you cannot afford to mean it? Nothing at all. A no you have not got the money to back is only a slower way of saying yes.

The town thought the danger had passed on Saturday. The board thought the season was finally safe. Both were wrong, in the pleasant direction.

The relegation the bookies priced in August had never been the real fight. The real fight was January.

In January, clubs 4 divisions richer would come with cheques for a fraction of what my players were worth. And it would fall to me, alone, knowing what I knew, to say a word that would look to everyone in the building like madness.

No.

I would say it a dozen times if I had to. I had the money to make the no stick, or I would have it in 4 days, when the world caught up to a morning I had already lived through once.

I turned the desk lamp off and sat a minute in the dark with the rain on the glass.

The coin was 4 days from a milestone only I could hear coming. The vultures were circling a thing they had priced as a bargain and I knew to be the healthiest young side in the division.

And on Saturday, before a penny of the money came due, there was a cup tie. A smaller club coming to Marsh Road to be the away team for once.

90 more minutes I could see the end of no better than the scout could, with his press ticket and his good long view of my number 7.

click of the lamp, back on. There was a team sheet to think about first. The money could wait 4 days. It had waited years for me. It could wait a weekend more.