Glory Of The Football Manager System

[Dulwich. Saturday. 09:48 BST.]

I woke up with three medals on my chest and only two of them were mine.

Mine were warm, the Carabao and the FA Cup, where they had ended up some time in the night.

The third was cold, and it was the Europa, and it was cold because it was not mine anymore, it was hers, and it was cold because Emma was asleep half on top of me with her cheek on my collarbone and the ribbon of it had slid round and come to rest on my sternum between us, all three of them tangled together in a knot of ribbon I was not going to be the one to undo.

I lay there a while and did the maths of the night before.

I had not had a drink. Not one.

I had stood in a function room above a pub in Croydon until gone three in the morning, stone cold sober, while twenty-eight footballers and the entire staff of a football club got comprehensively, historically, beautifully wrecked, and there is a particular kind of tired you get from being the only clear head in a room full of people having the best night of their lives. It is not a hangover.

It is better and worse than a hangover. Your head is clean and your body has been run over.

It had been a hell of a night.

The function room was above a pub off the Croydon end of the high street, the sort of place that does christenings and wakes and Sunday carveries, low ceiling, swirly carpet that had survived three decades of spilt lager, a hatch of a bar at one end and a parquet square at the other that was never meant to be a dance floor and became one anyway.

Somebody had hung a banner over the hatch, CHAMPIONS OF EUROPE in gold letters that kept peeling at one corner. Somebody else had carried the three trophies up the stairs and set them in the middle of the long buffet table, in among the foil trays of sausage rolls and the cocktail sticks and a bowl of Twiglets, three pieces of European and domestic silver sat there like they had always been there.

By eleven the windows were running with condensation. The whole room smelled of hot food and warm bodies and the disposable barbecue someone had set going in the beer garden against everyone’s advice, and the bass off the little hired DJ rig came up through your feet, boom, boom, boom, rattling the cocktail sticks against the trophies.

Pato cried at one point, in the corner by the fruit machine. Properly, big shaking sobs, his arm round Konaté, telling him through the tears that the yellow Lamborghini was happening, it was ordered, it was real, and Konaté, who I have watched go a whole season without changing his face, told him in French that nobody needed a yellow car, and then put his head on Pato’s shoulder and went too, the pair of them gone, holding each other up by a fruit machine in Croydon.

Half eleven, Konaté got up on a chair right under the peeling banner and conducted the entire room through a song in French that nobody knew the words to, including, I suspect, Konaté, the whole place swaying with their arms up and getting every word wrong. Sarah had the cookies crew out on the parquet, the kit men and the canteen women and a groundsman doing a move near the speakers that should be illegal in a man of his age, and Bray watched it from the edge of the bar with an expression of pure scientific alarm.

Mama found me by the window near one, away from the worst of it, his shirt undone, told me his father had gone back to the hotel happy and was asleep with the radio on, then gripped the back of my neck the way he does and said, Sunday, Daniel, just that, and went back to his wife on the dance floor.

Parish climbed up onto a chair by the buffet table to make a speech and the whole room hushed and chanted him up, and he got two words out, ”Thirteen months,” and his voice went, and he stood there on the chair with his hand over his mouth, and sat back down to the biggest cheer of the night without ever finishing it.

And Emma was there through all of it, leaning on the end of the bar in a green dress with my medal round her neck.

Every time I lost her she’d turned up somewhere new, sat with somebody’s mum on the bench seats under the window, the groundsman’s wife, Mili’s mother who has no English and Emma has no Portuguese and the pair of them got on like a house on fire anyway.

By two in the morning she knew more about the groundsman’s hip replacement than his own GP did. Every so often she’d find me across all of it and lift her glass an inch, just at me, our little private toast in a room of four hundred people having the night of their lives, and I’d lift mine back, and that was a whole conversation.

Now she made the small cross noise she does when the light gets at her before she is ready, and turned her face away from the window, which meant turning it into the side of my neck.

I put my hand into her hair without thinking about it.

She made a different sound. The good one. The one she has been making for three years when I do that.

It is a strange thing, what three years does.

The first morning we woke up together, I would have been frozen. I would have been working out where to put my hand. I would have been running every move through a checkpoint in my head, is this all right, is she awake, do I touch her, do I not touch her, and I would have got it wrong, and she would have laughed at me, and I would have learned.

The morning version of me three years later does not run checkpoints. The morning version of me three years later puts a hand into her hair because that is where the hand goes.

She rolled, slow, the warm length of her dragging across mine, and settled on top of me properly, her cheek finding the dip of my collarbone the way her cheek has found it on most mornings of the last hundred and fifty-six weeks.

”You’ve got my medal stuck to you,” she mumbled.

”You’ve got your whole self stuck to me, so we’re even.”

”That’s allowed.” Sleepy. Smug. ”I’m yours.”

She got heavier on purpose. She does that. Slides a knee over mine and lets her weight settle, the way a cat does when it is committing, and I ran my hand down the warm length of her back, slow, and found, somewhere around the curve of her at the bottom, that at some point in the night she had got rid of the last of what she had had on.

I closed my hand on her where my hand had landed.

She made a low sound into my neck that was not the wine and not for show.

”Emma.”

”Mm.”

”You’ve nothing on.”

”It was hot.”

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.