Knowledge Is Money

VOLUME 3

The fixture list went up on the wall of the Anchor on a Tuesday night, and for the first time in a hundred and four years, our name was in it, printed the same size as everybody else’s.

I was the only man in that pub who already knew how the whole thing ended. And for the first time in two lifetimes, I was starting to suspect that knowing might not be enough.

Right. You’re back. Good. Pull a stool up.

If you’re new to me: last year I could tell you a Saturday result on the Tuesday before it happened, and I used it to drag this club up out of the non-league.

It nearly killed me, and it hauled me through a courtroom, and I’d do the whole thing again tomorrow. This year, mostly, I can’t. Hold on to that, because it’s the whole story of the summer I’m about to tell you.

Bald Tony had run the list off at the library and laminated it, mind, like it was the Magna Carta, and Blu-Tacked it to the wall between the dartboard and the 1974 promotion photo, an inch above the stool nobody sits on.

LEAGUE TWO. 2011/12. And under it, in a column with all the rest of them, no bigger and no smaller: Tilbrook Town.

Crewe away, the sixth of August. Then Bradford at home. Port Vale, Northampton, Rotherham, Cheltenham. And halfway down, in the same tired library ink as everybody else, a name I’d hoped I wouldn’t see: Crawley Town.

"Read it out, Ted," said Tony. "Go on. Do the voice."

Ted Cutler didn’t do the voice.

Ted took his flat cap off, which for Ted is the voice.

He held it against his chest with both hands, and he looked at that laminated sheet the way you look at your own name somewhere you never thought you’d see it, and he said, quiet, "We’re in it, son. We’re actually in it."

"We’re in it, Ted."

Clink of Tony’s pint against mine.

Somebody got the old brass bell going down the far end, dong, dong, dong, and Murat sent over a tray of chips nobody had ordered and wouldn’t take a penny for, and I stood in the middle of it with a warm lager and the one thing I could never put up on that wall.

I’d watched this season before.

From a sofa, in a life nobody in that pub remembers. And I knew three things about the list that not one of them did.

I knew Swindon Town would win the division going away, because a little Italian with a temper the size of a house had marched into their dugout back in May, and was about to turn the place into a circus that happened to be brilliant.

I knew Crawley would go up again. That same Crawley that had spent a fortune buying a title out from under us the year before, a division down, and had followed us up here like a smell you can’t wash off.

And I knew that on the ninth of March, a club called Port Vale would go into administration and get ten points docked off them. Ten. The exact ten they’d hung round my neck the summer before, in a courtroom, for the crime of nearly dying.

I’ll be honest with you, same as always. I did not feel sorry for Port Vale.

That’s the whole of what the gift’s left me now. I can’t reach out and read a Tuesday scoreline off a beer mat any more.

That door shut in June, in a website going dark on the other side of the world. But the memory of it is still in there, going out slow, like a bulb somebody’s turned down but not off, and most of what’s left glowing is this exact league, laid out in front of me like a coupon I’m not allowed to cash.

A lad came to the bar, hood up, eighteen or so, and for half a second the old panel bloomed over his head, faint as a torch in daylight.

[ Name: Unknown ] CA 41 · a good engine, a worse first touch. Anchor Sunday side. Would run through a wall for you, and into it as well.

Then it faded. It still shows me what a man could become. It just can’t show me a scoreline any more, and after two lifetimes of the second one, I’ve decided I prefer the first.

My phone went. Brrt. A call, this hour, which meant one man.

"Craig."

"You’ve seen the fixtures." Not a question. Craig Sadler doesn’t say hello, and in the six months since I handed him the club he has never once thanked me for it.

"Tony’s laminated them."

A pause, the particular pause of a man deciding whether that’s worth a word. It wasn’t. "Crewe away. They’re better than us. Everybody’s better than us, that’s the division." Another pause. "So. You sorting the squad, or am I?"

There it was. The whole new world, in one question, from a man in no hat.

"Tomorrow. Ten o’clock. Bring your list, I’ll bring mine."

"You’ve got a list."

"Craig, I’ve had a list since 1994."

He hung up. He always hangs up first.

I finished the half. I did not finish the chips.

And I walked home along Marsh Road with the wonky white T leaning against the evening sky at the gable end of the stand, holding on the way it’s held on my whole life, and I thought: right, then. One of the ninety-two. Now let’s find out what it costs.

I found out at half past eight the next morning, and it cost more than any beer mat ever had.

There was a courier’s box on Maureen’s desk, and Maureen behind it with her glasses on the end of her nose, and Margaret Bell standing at her shoulder, and neither of them drinking their tea, which at Tilbrook Town is the same as a fire alarm.