Chapter 799: The Crowd
We turned onto Mohammed V somewhere in the 2nd hour, and that is where I stopped understanding what I was looking at.
There was no road.
I could not see the surface of that road at any point in any direction. Not one square metre of it. Not in front of the bus, not behind it, not on either side.
4 lanes each way, a central reservation, pavements. Every bit of it people, packed shoulder to shoulder, all the way to where the road bent and I could not see further.
And when we got round the bend it was the same.
It is not that it is big. It is that it has no edges.
You keep waiting to come to the end of it and there is no end of it. It gets round every corner before you do.
"Nadia."
"Coach."
"Where does it stop?"
She looked out at it for a while.
"It does not," she said.
"Nadia. How many is that."
"I do not know, coach."
"Guess."
"No."
"Nadia."
"I will not guess," she said, "and you should not either, and by tomorrow morning 4 different men who were not on this bus will have given you 4 different numbers and every one of them will be a lie."
She was right. The federation put one out that night. The ministry put a different one out on Wednesday. I have been given 3 more since and I have never repeated any of them to anybody.
You cannot count people you cannot see the end of.
What I can count is 5 hours to do 11 kilometres, and 30 motorbikes before I lost the number, and 4 hours in which not one phone on that deck had a single bar on it.
Everything that stood upright had people on it.
Lamp posts. Bus shelters. A petrol station forecourt roof with about 40 on it. Palm trees, with lads out along them.
Scaffolding up a half-built block, 3 floors, boards full. A police officer looked up at that scaffolding, worked out what he was going to do about it, and decided to look at something else.
Balconies stacked 6 high with whole families crushed onto them.
"THERE IS A MAN ON A CRANE." Bray, with his arm out. "DANNY. THERE IS A MAN ON A CRANE."
The phones went at about the second kilometre.
Sofyan held his up and there was nothing on it. No bars. Mine had nothing. Nobody’s had anything, because you cannot put that many human beings in one place and expect a network to stay up.
"Coach." Nadia, with hers in the air. "Nothing."
"None of us?"
"None of us. Not one." She put it in her bag and did not take it out again for 5 hours.
So my squad could not ring their own mothers, and their mothers could not ring them, and every man on that deck found that out inside the same 2 minutes.
En-Nesyri could not stand for it, so they made him a chair out of the bench seat and he did the whole 5 hours sat down with his leg out and both crutches across his knees.
Every time the bus stopped, and it stopped a lot, a section of that road would work out who the lad sitting down was.
YOUSSEF! YOUSSEF! YOUSSEF!
"Boss." He had his hand up without getting up. "Boss, they know I did not finish it."
"They know you scored it."
"I did not finish the match."
"Youssef." I got hold of the back of his neck. "You went up backwards in the air on one leg in a World Cup final. Sit there and take it."
He sat there and took it, and grinned for 5 hours, and did not put the crutches down once.
Bounou got the loudest of the afternoon and it was not close.
YAAASSSINE! YAAASSSINE! YAAASSSINE!
The goalkeeper beaten by the last kick of a World Cup. When it started he had his hand halfway up and it stopped in the air, and then he sat down hard on the bench seat with it over his mouth.
Benatia stood over him with his back to the crowd so nobody could photograph him.
"Up," he said. "Yassine. Up."
"Mehdi."
"They are not sorry for you. Listen to it. Get up."
He got up. They went again, louder.
"BONO! BONO! BONO!"
Bang-bang. Bang-bang-bang.
And a woman about 4 rows deep at a barrier was screaming his name with both arms straight up and no gaps at all in it, over and over, until her voice went, and then she carried on with no voice.
I had 2 people missing off that bus, and it took me most of that afternoon to think about either of them, which I am not proud of.
"Nadia. Emma and my mum."
"On the 4 o’clock out of Moscow."
"That lands where?"
"Here. About now." She did not need to check it. "Coach, they are not getting into this city tonight. Nothing is moving. I have got a car sat at that airport that has not gone anywhere in 2 hours."
"So where do they go?"
"They go to the hotel in Salé and they watch you on the television like everybody else on this coast," she said. "Your mother has already rung me twice."
"You said the phones were down."
"They were down for us." Nadia almost smiled. "Your mother got through at half past 12 to tell me you would not have eaten."
They shouted things up at us all afternoon, in 3 languages and 2 I could not place.
A lad on a barrier with a scarf round his head, in English, because he had clocked me and worked out which one I was.
"COACH! COACH! ENGLAND MAN!"
"That is me."
"MY NAME IS YOUNES! I AM FROM MEKNES!" He had both hands cupped round his mouth. "I COME 150 KILOMETRE THIS MORNING! I HAVE NO TICKET, I HAVE NO NOTHING, I COME ANYWAY!"
"Younes."
"YES!"
"Thank you."
"NO! THANK YOU!" And then he was gone behind us and I never saw him again.
An older man in a suit, in French, walking alongside the bus for about 40 metres with his hand up.
"Vous nous avez rendus fiers. Marocains, Arabes, Africains."
You have made us proud. Moroccans, Arabs, Africans. He said it 3 times and then he could not keep up any more.
A young woman was up on a wall with about 8 friends, in a Bounou shirt, laughing and crying at the same time.
"I AM LEILA! I STUDY LAW!"
"Good!"
"I WOULD LIKE TO TAKE THEM ALL IN MY ARMS!" she shouted. "ALL OF THEM! TELL THEM!"
I told them. Ziyech laughed for the first time since Moscow.
Somewhere on the long straight before the last squares, they started on me.
I did not hear it at first. I heard the shape of it and thought it was a player’s name, because every name on that road for 4 hours had been a player’s name, and I had been glad of it.
Bray got hold of my arm.
"Danny."
"What?"
"Listen."
"WALSH! WALSH! WALSH!"
Bang-bang. Bang-bang-bang.
It came off a barrier about 200 metres up and went backwards through that crowd the way fire goes through a hedge, and inside 30 seconds it had the drums on it, and inside a minute it had the whole boulevard.
"DAN-NY WALSH! DAN-NY WALSH!"
Clapped out on the offbeat by a city of people who could not pronounce it and were doing it anyway.
I stood on the top deck of a bus with my hands on the rail and my arm would not go up.
"DAN-NY WALSH! DAN-NY WALSH!"
"Coach." Nadia was at my shoulder and she was not looking at me. "Put your hand up."
"Nadia, I am English."
"I know what you are."
"I lost them a World Cup on Sunday and I went on the television and said so."
"Coach." She still did not look at me. "Put your hand up. They have been out here since last night."
***
Thank you for 300 Power Stones.