Knowledge Is Money

You want to know the daftest thing all the money has taught me.

I could buy this woman 100 Fuerteventuras. I could buy the aeroplane she flew home on.

And there is not a pound in a single account of mine that buys me back one ordinary hour in her kitchen that I spent, the first time round, at the ground, being important.

The club rings a bell for everything. Clean sheets. Off the bottom. A parking space. Somebody’s baby on the way.

Nobody has ever rung one for an hour like this. And an hour like this is the only sort you do not get back.

Yesterday went in no table and no record book. This one will not even make a diary.

She got up to put the biscuits away and reached for the high cupboard, the one my dad hung a good 6 inches too high 30 years back, that she has never once asked a living soul to move.

And she stopped.

Hand flat on the worktop. A breath pulled in slow and careful, the way you test a stair you are not sure will take you.

Then a cough. Small, dry, into the back of her hand.

"That flight," she said, before I could get my mouth open. "Recycled air, the lot of them hacking away, 300 of us breathing the same tin of it for 4 hours. Half of Fuerteventura’s brought it home."

"You want to get that looked at."

"I am not sitting half a day in that waiting room for a tickle I caught off a cheap airline."

"It’s 5 minutes on the phone, Mum. I’ll ring them for you now."

"You will not." She put the biscuits up on the high shelf, on her toes, cross at the cupboard and not at herself, and shut the door on them. "Give over fussing. You’re as bad as her next door, and she’s a martyr to it. I’m right as rain. I’ve a tan, look."

She held her brown arm out over the table as her evidence. It was a good arm. A well arm, brown to the elbow.

I looked at it, and not at the hand that had gone flat on the worktop a minute before.

And I let it go.

I am not a man who lets things go. I have sat in a retail-park car park in the rain until a boy’s mother decided she could trust me with her son. I have read a man who plays for his country clean through a pane of glass.

I do not, as a rule, let a single thing on this earth go.

I let that go. I sat back down at her table and I let it go, exactly the way I let it go the first time, in a life she has not the first idea I remember.

And the gift, what is left of it, the last of the light nearly gone out of the thing, it did something it has never done.

It came up over her.

[ ⋯ ] i can read a left-back’s nerve off the roll of his hips. i had the measure of every man who ever pulled your colours on before he’d finished lacing his boots. not her. no arrow. no number. no column for it, and there was never going to be one. this one you do blind. like every other soul alive. and i’m sorry.

Then it went dark, the way it goes dark now, and left me at my mum’s table with a cold sweet tea and no reading at all.

"Sit down," she said, though I was sitting. "You’re giving me a headache with your face."

"I am sat down."

"Then stop looming in the chair. And watch the space, Samuel, you’ll have my good cups off the edge with them elbows."

Watch the space.

My dad’s words, in my mum’s mouth, about a kitchen table and a set of cups. He meant a football pitch. She means the milk jug.

And I have spent 2 whole lifetimes now watching the wrong space entirely.

I meant to stay an hour. I stayed until the light came off the back wall and went orange and then went altogether.

mutter, mutter, went the telly to itself in the front room, the teatime news to nobody. She told me every last thing next door’s daughter had got up to in Marbella. The wedding. The fella. The state of the buffet.

BZZT, went the phone again, loud in the quiet the way the machine always is. I turned it face down on the table without looking, which I have never done in 2 lives.

She saw me do it. Something crossed her face that she chose not to mention.

I did not hear a word about next door’s daughter.

I heard my mum’s voice going up and down in a warm kitchen, cross and soft and cross again, and I sat still in a chair, and I let her tell me, and it was the best hour I have had since I got here.

Gone 7, she started yawning and pretending she was not.

"Go on." She loaded me up with a carrier bag of things I did not need and would not bin if you paid me. "Go and run your football club."

She said football club the way you would say sandcastle, fond and daft. "And eat something, Samuel, that has not come out of Murat’s fryer. You’ve gone peaky under a tan you haven’t got."

"Night, Mum."

"Night, love." She stood in the door with the hall light behind her. "Come again in the week. Don’t leave it for a match."

Thunk, went the car door.

I sat on her drive in the dark and turned the phone over in my hand.

3 missed calls. Margaret, Margaret, Maureen. The machine, wanting its team named and its wage bill squared under the cap before Thursday.

Because the machine does not care that today I sat in a chair for the first time in 2 lifetimes. In all the years I have poured into it, the machine has never once asked me how my mum is.

I waited for the guilt.

The old kick of it. Sam, you were sat with your mum while the club rang out. Ring them back. Say sorry. Half-leave the hour you are in for the one on the phone, the way you always, always have.

It did not come.

For the first time across 2 lives, I had chosen the kitchen over the machine, and I sat on my mum’s drive and felt no debt for it at all.

And then, quiet, underneath that, the other thing.

The reason there was no guilt. The reason I could sit still today of all days and let the whole machine ring itself out.

I am not going to put it on the page. You will have worked it out, or you will not have, and either way I am not saying it out loud on my mum’s drive with her kitchen light still on in my mirror.

But I will tell you the last thing the gift said, before it went for the night.

[ SYSTEM ] the machine can wait. name your team tomorrow. i told you once that going in blind was the happy way. that being as lost as everyone else in the ground was a gift all of its own. i meant it, and it was true, and you were happy. not this. this one i would hand you back every reading i ever gave you, just to see, and i can’t, and it is not better this way, and i will not pretend it is. you don’t lie to her. i don’t lie to you. go home. come again in the week, like she said. it is the only fixture that was ever truly un-missable, and you keep finding that out a life too late.

I put the car in gear.

Behind me her light stayed on. A small yellow square in the dark off the high street. One ordinary woman washing up 2 mugs and a cup she had sugared out of pure habit for a man who has been gone 9 years.

8 days to Crewe.

I drove towards the whole of it, the season and the machine and the men with the books who want my striker, and for once in either life, I did not hurry.