Chapter 793: Four
Bzz. Bzz.
She turned the phone face up, looked at it, and put it back down without answering.
"That is Jessica. 4th time. Your agent has rung 4 times since it went out, and that woman has never rung twice in her life."
"I know what I did, Em."
"Then tell me why."
"Because it is true. And because if I do not stand on it tonight, some newspaper puts a 19-year-old on the front page instead."
She stood there in a soaking replica shirt with her jaw going.
"Right," she said, eventually.
"You just told me not to say that."
"I am allowed. I am on holiday." She rubbed her face with the back of her wrist. "God. You are going to be so ill when this lands, and I am going to have to watch you be ill about it in a country you have never set foot in."
"Give me the rest of it," I said.
"You do not want the rest of it."
"I want the rest of it, Em. You read it so I do not have to. So read it to me."
She looked at me for a second. Then she gave it to me the way she always gives it to me. Flat, in order, no cushioning, because that is the arrangement and it has been since about a month in.
"L’Équipe have gone with the greatest final ever played. Not the greatest French performance. The greatest final. That is their front page and they are not a paper that gives anything away.
"Marca have got Achraf on theirs and one word. Nuestro. Ours. They have started the Madrid piece already and it is not subtle.
"Gazzetta have run a diagram of your 6-second press at 47 minutes and called it the 15 minutes that broke a champion.
"And the Moroccan outlets are not doing football at all. Not one of them is leading on the match. They are leading on the streets. There are 4 different cities on 4 different front pages and there is not a single footballer in any of the pictures."
Bzz. Her phone, face down, going again. She ignored it.
"And England?" I said.
She stopped.
"Go on."
"2 of them have gone with the photograph of you alone on the white line. One has put THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY across the top of it."
"And?"
"And one has run 900 words tonight on whether the FA ought to be looking at you."
6 weeks ago that lot had me down as a traitor for taking the job.
"They are not serious."
"They will not do it," she said. "But they are serious, and by Wednesday every person you have ever worked for will have read it."
Then she put the phone face down on the chair, which is what she does when she is about to say a thing she has been carrying.
"Sit down."
"Em."
"Sit down, Danny."
I sat down.
"You are not flying home on Tuesday."
"I am. Pre-season on the 9th. Steve has already been on."
"The federation have called an event in Rabat. Wednesday afternoon, on their internal running order." She waited a beat. "It has been on that sheet since Thursday."
"Thursday."
"Before you played England."
I did the arithmetic and did not much like where it came out.
"So it is a homecoming," I said. "Somebody backed us to reach a final and booked the coaches early."
"It is not a homecoming." She was almost smiling at me, which I did not expect at all. "The item on the sheet is your farewell."
I sat with that.
"Nobody is asking me to stay, then."
"Course nobody is. Your deal is 6 weeks. You signed it, I read it, and every person in that building has known since May."
She leaned forward off the arm of the chair.
"They put it in the diary on a Thursday, Danny. Before the semi. Before anybody alive knew whether you were coming out of this a world champion, or a beaten finalist, or a fella knocked out on penalties in the last 4.
"They were not waiting to find out what you were worth. They had already worked that out."
Down the corridor somebody dropped a crate of bottles and 4 people laughed at him.
"I am not telling you to go," she said. "That is not my job and I am not doing it."
Bzz. Bzz.
Her phone again, face down on the plastic. 5th time.
She turned it over, looked at it, and this time she did not put it back down. She held it out to me at arm’s length.
"But she is going to."
Jessica Finch has represented me since January 2017. In 18 months she has never once said hello to me and has never once said goodbye. She picks up on the 1st ring at any hour of the day or night and she talks like a woman being charged by the word.
I put it to my ear and got as far as opening my mouth.
"Do not speak," she said. "Sit down and do not speak."
"I am sat down."
"Good. Rabat. Wednesday. You are going."
"Jess, the deal is 6 weeks. It is finished. There is nothing to go for."
"I said do not speak."
Paper moving on the other end of it. Somewhere in London it was gone 10 at night and Jessica Finch was at a desk.
"I have watched your press conference 3 times," she said. "It is the stupidest thing I have ever seen a client of mine do on a live feed, and on Friday I am going to be extremely unkind to you about it.
"Tonight it does not matter. Because of what has happened since."
"What has happened since?"
"You go to Rabat," she said, straight over the top of me. "You stand there on Wednesday and you let that country say thank you, and you keep your face right while they do it, and you do not say one word about your future to one living soul on that continent.
"Then you fly home on Thursday and you come and sit in my office before you go anywhere near Beckenham."
"Jessica. What has happened since?"
There was a silence on that line of about 4 seconds, which out of her is an hour.
"My phone has not stopped since the 92nd minute," she said.
"Journalists."
"No."
I sat in a plastic chair in a room under the Luzhniki, with my mother 30 feet down a corridor and a soaking green replica shirt on the arm of the chair opposite me.
"How many?" I said.
"Tonight?"
"Tonight."
"4," said Jessica Finch, and put the phone down.
***
Thank you for 200 Power Stones.