Chapter 310: Piece 1 II

On the Friday the quiet man rang at 10 past 9. Maureen’s line came up at 20 to 11. She wrote it under the other 4 and added them up before she turned the book round to me.

GREEN BOOK · 2013-14 · ACADEMY BLOCK Mon 21 Oct · Equity, S. Mercer · 100,000 Tue 22 Oct · Equity, S. Mercer · 100,000 Wed 23 Oct · Equity, S. Mercer · 100,000 Thu 24 Oct · Equity, S. Mercer · 100,000 Fri 25 Oct · Equity, S. Mercer · 100,000 500,000

Margaret had the contractor’s form ready on her desk. She filled in the figure, signed it and fed it into the fax, and stood beside it until the confirmation came out. Then she rang the contractor’s office and asked them to read the figure back to her.

"Yes," she said into the phone. "The 1st of November. 10 o’clock. I will be here."

I drove out to the training ground at dinnertime.

Doyle’s scholars were in the corridor after the morning session, 16 of them, on Kieran’s bench with their bags under it and their boots on the floor. Dev was trying to get past them to the canteen with a bag of ice held over his head.

Doyle stood at the end of the corridor and kept his voice down.

"Lads," he said. "Listen. The money for the block is in the bank. This morning. The contract is signed next Friday. Men on site on the 18th of November."

Nobody said anything for a second. Then a tall lad at the far end said, "Is that true, Robbie?"

"ASK HIM." Doyle pointed at me. "HE IS STOOD THERE."

"It is true," I said. "It went in at 20 to 11."

They made a noise like a goal, 16 of them in a corridor, RAAAH, and one of them threw a boot at the ceiling, thump. Dev put his ice down on the floor.

"Will there be a proper bed?" said a small lad near the door. "For Dev?"

"A proper bed," said Doyle. "And a room with desks, where you do your English, so do not get excited."

The small lad looked at me. "Thank you, Mr Mercer."

"Thank Robbie. He asked every week."

Doyle walked me out to the car park afterwards. He stopped by my car.

"EVERY MONDAY SINCE MAY, SAM," he said. "’IS IT THIS WEEK, ROBBIE?’ EVERY MONDAY, ONE OF THEM."

"It came."

"It came on the day you said." He looked back at the clubhouse for a while. Then he shook my hand, hard, and went back inside.

We beat Forest 2-0 at Marsh Road the next afternoon, Jamie and Riyad. The forecast was on the screens in the bar before the players were off the pitch. Amber warnings. Wind and rain from the south-west on the Sunday night.

In the life before, the storm came in off the Atlantic in the early hours of Monday the 28th of October and went out over East Anglia into the North Sea in the morning. It blew the helter-skelter down on the pier at Clacton and dropped a crane onto the Cabinet Office in Whitehall.

On the Sunday afternoon Kieran and I took the banner down off the Bovril End and walked the whole ground. We roped the dugout roofs and lashed the away end gate shut. Kieran put the corner flags in the shed and weighted the covers on the goalmouths with sandbags.

"I done the flags, boss. Anything else?"

I looked round Marsh Road and could not think of anything.

At teatime the railway said there would be no trains in East Anglia before 9 the next morning. I rang Doyle as soon as it was on the news.

"Tomorrow," I said. "Nobody comes in before 11. Not the scholars, not the staff. Tell them to stay in bed."

"IT IS A BIT OF WIND, SAM."

"Half your lads come on the train, and there are no trains before 9. If it comes in like they say, there will be trees down after that. 11 o’clock."

He did not like it, but he rang round. So did Sadler, for the first team. I rang Stan myself, because Stan opens up at the training ground at 7 every Monday whatever anybody says.

"11, Stan."

"The kit wants putting out, Sam."

"The kit can wait till 11."

It came through in the dark and kept coming after it got light. I lay awake from 4 and listened to it get into the gutters, whoooom. The bins went over in the road, clatter, and something in the next street came down with a crash.

Had I roped the right things? What had I forgotten? At 7 it was at its worst. By 9 it was dropping, and by 10 there was blue sky in the gaps.

At 9 I sent the steel’s first morning from the kitchen table, and the quiet man rang at 10 past, the same as every day.

"Received, Mr Mercer," he said. "I am the only one in the office this morning."

Kieran rang at 20 to 10. He had gone in at 9 anyway, for his grass.

"Boss. You need to come to the training ground."

The old portakabin had come with the field, before there was a clubhouse. Doyle’s scholars had changed in it the summer before last. Since then Stan had kept the training kit in it, and Doyle his cones and his poles.

Its roof was on the strip behind the clubhouse. It had come off in one piece and landed upside down, and it had dragged a furrow through the grass, straight across the paint marks where Robbie’s block was going to stand and on into the goalmouth of the second pitch.

The rest of the portakabin was on its side against the fence. The kit and the cones were all over the field, and a goalkeeper’s shirt was caught in the hedge, snap, snap, in what was left of the wind.

The contractor’s container on the corner of the strip was where his men had left it on the Friday, chained to 4 concrete blocks, the way his firm always left them.

Kieran was standing in the furrow with a lump of turf in his hand.

"That is my new pitch, boss," he said. "Look at it."

"I am sorry, Kieran."

"The farmer over the fence heard the roof go just after 7." He put the turf back in the furrow and trod it in, thud.

When I had remembered that storm, there had been no training ground in it. I had roped dugouts at Marsh Road and never once thought of the box behind the clubhouse.

Stan came at 11, in his coat and flat cap, and stopped at the end of the clubhouse when he saw it. He looked at the portakabin on its side for a long time.

"I would have been in there at 7," he said. "Getting the training kit out for 10 o’clock."

Nobody answered him. He went and sat on the bench by the clubhouse door with his hands on his knees.

"All the training kit," he said after a while. "All over the field."

"I will dry it, Stan," said Kieran. "Every bit."

Doyle arrived at 11 with 2 of his lads in the back of his car. He stood at the fence and looked at the roof, and the furrow, and the cones in the hedge.

"THAT IS WHERE THEY HAVE BEEN KEEPING THEIR BOOTS," he said. "SINCE SEPTEMBER. IN A BOX ON THE FLOOR IN THERE."

"Then they keep them in the corridor till the block is up."

"A CORRIDOR AND KIERAN’S BENCH, SAM. THAT IS ALL THEY HAVE GOT."

"For this winter, Robbie," I said. "The men start on the 18th. Margaret has it in writing."

He stood there a while longer. Then he climbed over the fence and started picking his cones up out of the mud, one at a time, and his 2 lads went after him and did the same. I went with them. Kieran went for the barrow.

On the Friday Margaret signed the block contract at 10, at her desk, with the contractor’s man beside her and Doyle in the doorway with mud still on his trainers. She read every page first. The contractor’s man went away with his copy at 25 past.

At half past, the post came. There was a letter from the engineer’s firm near Chelmsford, a month later than he had promised it. The mill had put its prices up in October.

Margaret handed it across the desk to Maureen.

"The exact figure for the steel," Maureen said. "1,463,000."

"63,000 over," said Margaret.

Maureen already had the green book open at the steel line. She had 5 mornings on it, from the Monday of the storm to that morning.

"In the account by the 14th," she said. "That is Margaret’s schedule. The order goes in at 9 on the Friday. Your man does 100,000 a morning. You need 963,000 more, and from Monday to the 14th is 9 mornings."

"900,000," I said.

"63,000 short. One morning short. And he will not do more than 100,000."

"I asked the engineer this morning," said Margaret. "He will not move the order."

"And your money?" said Maureen. "In pounds?"

"The last pounds I had to spare went into this club in the summer of 2012," I said. "And I am not putting coin back on an exchange for anybody’s steel."

The coin was 202 that morning. The quiet man would not double a morning, and the man on the Mile End Road did not get out of bed for under a million.

If I went to him before the 14th, I would have to take him more than the steel. How much of the stand went with it, at that week’s price, with the last week of November still to come?

I had known since September there was no spare morning in the steel, and I had left it that way for a better price.

It meant the Mile End Road a fortnight early.