Chapter 807: Welcome Home
The building has a lift and I did not take it.
I do not know why. 6 flights, with a case with a green ribbon on the handle and a wooden box in it, at 20 past midnight, in a stairwell that smelled of the same paint it has smelled of since May.
I stopped on the 4th floor landing and put the case down and stood there.
42 days.
Then I picked it up and did the last 2 flights, and I did not get my key out, because the door was already open.
She had left it on the latch and gone back inside, which is the most Emma thing that has ever happened to me.
I pushed it with my knuckles and there she was at the end of the hall.
Bare feet on the boards. My grey Palace training top, which is 4 sizes too big and which she has stolen since March and which came down to the middle of her thighs and nothing else that I could see anywhere in the world.
Red hair up off her neck and coming down out of it on one side. Green eyes. And that watch on her wrist at that hour in a hallway, because she does not take it off for anything.
And every light in that flat off except the one over the cooker.
"Hiya," she said.
"Hiya."
"You look horrendous."
"Thank you."
"You have got a sunburn line on your neck like a vicar."
"Em."
"I know," she said, and came down the hall.
We do not talk. That is the thing about us and it took me a year and a half to work out.
Emma Hartley talks for a living. She talks for 3,000 words a week and 40 minutes of podcast and 9 hours a day into a phone, and when it matters, when it actually matters, she does not say anything at all.
She got hold of the front of my shirt with both hands, the way she did in a concrete corridor under the Luzhniki 4 days ago, and put her forehead in the middle of my chest and stood there.
I got my arms round her and I could feel every bit of her through that training top and she was warm and she smelled like our flat and she was here.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
That was my own heart. I could hear it in my own ears in a silent hallway.
"You are shaking," she said, into my shirt.
"I am not."
"Danny."
"It has been a long 6 weeks."
She put her hands flat on my back, both of them, and moved them slowly up to my shoulders and back down, and that is our entire language, and 6 weeks of it had been done down a telephone.
Then she put her chin on my chest and looked up.
Green eyes. Freckles she hates. A mouth doing something complicated.
"I watched you on that bus," she said.
"Em."
"I watched a whole country sing your name off a phone, in a flat, on my own, in Dulwich." Her hands stopped moving. "And then I read what they wrote about you here this morning, and I put my phone in a drawer, and I have not taken it out."
"Jessica told me not to look."
"Do not look." Her hands started again. "Not tonight."
"There are 40 of them at Heathrow."
"And there is nobody at all in this flat," she said, "and you are stood in your own hallway with your coat still on."
She got the coat off my shoulders and dropped it on the floor of our hall, which she has never done in her life.
Then she got both hands on my face and pulled it down to hers.
She kissed me like a woman who had spent 42 days on the wrong end of a telephone.
Not a hello. Nothing polite about it. Both hands up the sides of my jaw and her thumbs on my cheekbones so I could not have turned my head if I had wanted to, and her mouth open on mine and her whole body coming up onto the balls of her feet to close the last 4 inches of it.
I got a hand into the back of her hair where she had it up and the whole lot came down over my knuckles at once, and she made a sound into my mouth that I have thought about at inconvenient moments ever since.
The training top had ridden up on one side and my hand went onto bare skin at her waist, and she was warm all the way through, and she pushed into my hand instead of away from it.
6 weeks.
42 days of a phone propped against a hotel lamp, and her voice going in the dark while I fell asleep with my boots still on.
42 days of the wrong time zone and the wrong bed, and a woman I am going to marry doing every bit of the work of it from 2,000 miles away and never once making me feel it.
When she came off me she did not go far. She stayed with her forehead against my chin and her hands still on my face and her breathing all over the place.
"Right," she said.
"Em."
"No, wait. Wait. I have got something to say and if I do not say it now I am not going to say it."
She got my collar in both fists.
"I have read every word they have written about you today."
"Emma."
"Every word. All of it. And I want you to hear this from me before you hear anything from anybody with a lanyard on."
She was not crying. Emma Hartley does not cry. Her voice does a thing instead, and it did it.
"You are not a traitor. You did your job. You were handed 23 men that nobody in this country would have crossed the road for, and you took them to a World Cup final, and you beat England on the way because that is what the fixture list said.
"And then you stood up on live television and took the blame for losing it so a 19-year-old would not have to."
"That is not the version out there."
"I do not care what is out there. I am the version."
She pulled the collar.
"There is going to be a bloke at Selhurst in 3 weeks who sings something at you. There will be 900 words in a paper every time you lose.
"And I will be in that flat, and I will be at that ground, and I will know exactly what you did. So will 35 million people on a coast in Africa. Everybody else can get in the sea."
I did not have anything for that.
"Say something."
"I have got nothing, Em."
"Good." She got up on her toes again and kissed me, and this one was different, and slower, and it went on. "Then stop talking."
I got both hands under her and lifted her, and she got her legs round my waist without breaking off, which she has done since the first month and which I have never once seen coming.
That top of mine came off in the hallway.
She has a scar on her left shoulder blade from going over a wall at 11 and I found it with my thumb in the dark the way I have found it every time since March 2016, and she went still for a second the way she always does.
And at some point after that, with the rain going on the window and the whole of London out there deciding what I am, she put her hand flat on my chest and held it there and said, "There you are," in a voice with nothing left in it.
That is the sentence. Out of everything anybody said to me in July 2018, in 4 countries, that is the one.
There you are.
I got about 4 hours.
At half 6 I was awake with the light coming round the blind, and her leg over both of mine, and her hair in my mouth, and her hand still flat on my ribs where she had left it.
I did not move a muscle for 40 minutes in case it woke her.
Bzz.
My phone, face down on the floor by the bed where I had thrown it.
I got it with 2 fingers without moving my shoulder.
Sarah. 06:31.
Building’s open. Kettle’s on. 23 of them in at 9 and every one of them has watched that final about 40 times, so do not expect a lot of running today.
Also there’s a lad from the youth team who has been in since 7 every morning for 6 weeks doing his own sessions and nobody asked him to. Ellis. Bring your eyes.
Welcome back, gaffer.
I read it 3 times.
Then I lay there in the dark with a woman asleep across me and let the whole of it come at once, because on 4 hours you have got nothing to hold it off with.
23 men at Beckenham at 9 o’clock who I have not stood in front of since May.
Wembley on the 5th, and Manchester City, and a trophy nobody at that club expects us to win.
A window with 20 days left in it and a squad that is not deep enough for what is coming.
Tallinn on the 15th, and Real Madrid, and the first European Cup night in 113 years of Crystal Palace Football Club.
A draw on the 30th that is going to put a team from Selhurst Park into a group with 3 sides who have all won it.
A lad called Ellis who has been letting himself in at 7 in the morning for 6 weeks.
40 of them at Heathrow last night and a section of a country that has decided what I am.
And 4 telephone calls sat in a drawer in an office in London until Monday morning at 9.
Emma made a noise and got her arm tighter across me without waking up.
I put the phone face down on the floor, and I gave it 20 more minutes, and then I got up in the dark and found my kit bag where I had dropped it 6 hours before, and went to work.