Chapter 951 - 951: Needles I

Dougie told him. He did not dress it up and he did not look at me first.

Portsmouth wanted him from Friday. Their manager had rung at full time. They had a home match on the Saturday and they were at the top of their division, and the paper on Dougie's desk said the 24th.

Tyrick Mitchell stood in the doorway in his towel with the ripped sock in his hand and heard the whole thing. Behind him, Kirby had stopped singing.

"What do you want, gaffer?"

I told him I wanted him at Wembley. I told him it was his season and not mine, and whatever he chose I would back him in front of anybody.

He looked at the sock for a while.

Then he asked Dougie for the man's number.

Dougie read it off his phone. Mitchell typed it into his own with his thumb, wet hair dripping on the screen, and rang it there in the corridor in a towel, 2 yards from us, with his back turned.

I heard about half of it.

He said good evening. He said thank you for wanting him. He said he had 1 match left for the club that brought him up and he wanted to play it. After that he was theirs for as long as they would have him, every Saturday and every Tuesday, on the first train the Thursday morning.

There was a long gap with somebody talking on the other end.

"Yes," Mitchell said. "I know. Thank you."

He hung up and turned round.

"He said the 24th, then," he said. "He said I had better be good on the 23rd, because he is going to be watching."

He went back into the dressing room. A second later the noise started up again, and Kirby was the loudest thing in it.

Dougie put his phone away and wrote something in the notebook.

"I have never once seen a player ring the other club himself," he said.

On the train home on the Thursday morning Sarah sat down opposite me and put the folder on the table between us, on top of my coffee.

"After Manchester," she said.

It was after Manchester. I had said those 2 words to her in a corridor at Wembley 5 days earlier, and she had been carrying them round since.

Wayne Hennessey's line was the easy half. Steele had told him on the Monday before we went north, on pitch 3, the way I asked, and Wayne had heard it out in about a minute and gone in goal.

The other line was Dion's. 2 names on, so 2 names off, and every 1 of the 25 had a night against it that I could remember without trying.

I did not have them. I told her so.

Sarah opened List A and turned it round to face me, and left it there while the train went through Crewe.

"UEFA want it by the 1st of February," she said. "I want it the morning after Wembley, so I have a week to do it properly and not a weekend."

I said the 24th.

She wrote 24 in the margin and drew a box round it. Then, underneath, much smaller, she wrote 31.

"That 1 is for when the 24th turns into the 31st," she said, and took my coffee back off the folder and gave it to me.

We got home on the Thursday afternoon, and the flat smelled of pine.

The tree was still up.

Emma had said on New Year's Day that it was coming down on the 6th. On the 6th she covered somebody's Sunday shift. On the 7th I was in Beckenham at half 7.

The tree had been leaning in that corner ever since, a little further every day, dropping needles onto the carpet with a sound you could only hear at night when the boiler was off.

Emma was sat on the floor in front of it in her socks with a cup of tea, looking at it.

"It has gone brown on the window side."

It had always been brown on the window side, I said.

"You chose the brown side to face the window so the man would knock 5 pounds off."

He had knocked 5 pounds off.

She drank some tea and told me it was coming down on Sunday. Both of us. I should write it down.

I wrote TREE SUN on the back of my hand with the pen off the fridge. She watched me do it and laughed into her cup.

Watford came to Wembley on the Saturday.

Javi Gracia is 48. He has had Watford higher up the table than anybody gave them since August, and he came at us the way he came at us at Vicarage Road, Hughes and Femenía down our right, every time, as though nobody had told him it had not worked then either.

CRYSTAL PALACE: Pope. Wan-Bissaka, Konaté, Tarkowski, Chilwell. Neves. Townsend, Kovačić, McArthur, Zaha. Benteke.

Bench: Krul, Dann, Hakimi, Højbjerg, Eze, Rodríguez, Perišić.

WATFORD: Foster. Femenía, Mariappa, Cathcart, Holebas. Capoue, Doucouré. Hughes, Pereyra. Deulofeu, Deeney.

Rebecca had given me a sheet on Thursday with a red line under 4 names who would start nothing but the 23rd. Mitchell's was the first of the 4.

Prrrp.

We were 1 up on 22. Neves curled a corner to the near post, Benteke got in front of Mariappa and flicked it on, and it went off Cathcart's thigh on the way through. Benteke ran off with his arms out claiming it before anybody could stop him.

Thud.

1-0.

Troy Deeney spent the rest of the half looking for Tarkowski's ankles. He found them twice. The second time Paul Tierney booked him, and Deeney laughed and shook Tarkowski's hand and then stood on his foot at the next corner anyway.

On 61 he scored. Holebas crossed it, Pope came and did not get there, and Deeney headed it in from about a yard and ran to the Watford end with his shirt pulled up over his face.

Thump.

1-1.

64 minutes. Eze for Townsend.

70 minutes. Hakimi for Wan-Bissaka.

On 83 Zaha took it off Kovačić on the left touchline with Femenía in front of him. He had done nothing for 20 minutes except get kicked. He went inside, then outside, then inside again, and Femenía went to ground on the third.

Zaha was in the box with the ball on his right foot, and he put it under Ben Foster.

Swsh.

2-1.

86 minutes. Højbjerg for Kovačić.

Prrrp. Prrrp. Prrrrp.

Crystal Palace 2 Watford 1.

Gracia shook my hand on the line, said well played, and walked off with his hands in his coat. In the tunnel Deeney got Tarkowski by both ears and shouted something into his face, and the 2 of them went off down the corridor laughing. 60 points.

On Sunday we took the tree down.

It was worse than either of us had thought. The needles came off it if you looked at it. Emma had the idea of laying a sheet on the carpet and dragging the tree out on that. The sheet worked for about 4 feet.

Then the tree went over sideways, and a brown shower came off it into the carpet and the sofa and Emma's hair and the inside of my collar, where I could feel them for the rest of the day.

The pot was the real problem. It had been full of water since before Christmas, and the water had gone a colour I had never seen water go. We carried it to the bathroom between us like a pair of men carrying an unexploded bomb. It slopped on the hall carpet anyway.

Emma stood in the bathroom doorway with her hand over her nose and her eyes running, laughing so hard she had to sit down on the edge of the bath.

The tree would not go down the stairs. There is a turn in our stairwell at the first floor and the tree did not want to make it. I was at the top pulling. Emma was at the bottom steering and swearing. She swears about twice a year, and she is very good at it.

A door opened on the second floor.

It was the neighbour, the 1 with the bottle from Spain at New Year. He came out in his slippers, looked at the tree jammed across his landing and the 2 of us either side of it covered in needles, and went back inside without a word.

He came back out with a saw.

He did not ask. He cut the top 3 feet off on his own landing, handed the top to Emma, and shut his door. We had the rest of it down at the bins in 2 minutes.

Emma stood by the bins holding the top of our Christmas tree in both arms like a baby.

What do you give a man who saws your tree in half for you? We did not know.

We stood in the off licence on Lordship Lane for 10 minutes arguing about it, and bought him a bottle of Spanish wine in the end, because Spanish seemed to be a language he spoke. Emma wrote the card. Thank you for the saw. She would not let me put anything else on it.

It took until 11 o'clock that night to get the needles out. The Hoover clogged 3 times. Emma did the corners on her knees with a dustpan and brush and kept finding them in places a tree had never been near: the bread bin, the inside of the shower curtain, her own sock drawer.

At 11 she lay down on her back on the clean bit of carpet with her arms out and announced that we were getting a fake 1 next year.

She had said that last year, I told her.

"Last year I was not marrying you," she said, to the ceiling. "Last year I could walk out and leave you with it."

I lay down on the carpet next to her. There was a needle in my ear. I left it there.

Click. The boiler came on in its cupboard.

Monday was Wembley. Not a match. The building.

Sarah had booked the pitch for an hour on the Monday afternoon. A semi-final at home should not feel like the first time you have stood on the grass, she said, even when you have stood on it every other week since August.

We did 40 minutes. Bray did corners at the west end, the end our lot would be in on Wednesday night. He had Konaté and Sakho at the near post and Mitchell and Blake on the edge of the box. He called out every ball by the name of the City player who would be stood there. Laporte. Otamendi. Stones.

Dougie rang me in the car on the way back from Wembley.

Santos had been on to him that afternoon. Their president wanted to keep Rodrygo past May. To the end of their own season in December, 7 more months of him in Brazil, and they had put it very politely and twice.

"I told them May," Dougie said. "Before I rang you. I wanted to hear you say it anyway."

"May," I said.

"May." I heard the notebook shut. "And Tony Pulis rang at 4 to ask how the boy's knee was. The 1 he scored with in Manchester. I said it was fine. He said good, and rang off."

Marcus had put the first sheet of Atlético on the canteen wall that morning, a month early, in the gap next to City. Nobody had asked him to and nobody took it down.

Marcus watched City beat Wolves 3-0 on the Monday night with a notebook on his knee and the sound down, and had their Wembley team guessed on my desk by 8 on Tuesday morning.