Glory Of The Football Manager System

Here is where I was, at half six on the Monday morning, before any of it started.

I was in a bed in Dulwich with three trophies in a cabinet at Selhurst, a parade two days behind me, half a million people who had stood in the rain in Croydon to sing my name, and the most wanted manager’s job on the planet about to ring my phone.

Yesterday the country had called me the most arrogant man in England. By this morning it had changed its mind entirely, and the reason it had changed its mind was asleep on my chest with her left hand over my heart and a ring on it I had spent four months too frightened to buy.

I had the lot. For one held second, before the world got its hands back on me, I had every single thing.

And I lay dead still under the weight of it and did not move a muscle, because Emma was asleep on me and moving would have been a sin.

She had ended up half across me in the night the way she does when she has properly gone under, one knee hooked over my legs, an arm thrown across my chest, her face turned into my neck and her breath going slow and warm against my throat.

The cropped thing she sleeps in had twisted round and the duvet was down off the both of us where she had kicked it in the night and not gone looking for it, and that is Emma, three years and a ring on her and she still sleeps like she is the only person who has ever lived, sprawled, careless, taking up more of a super-king than a woman her size has any business taking.

I got an arm round her and pulled the duvet back over the pair of us and brought her in, and she came, dead asleep, made a small sound, and burrowed her face further into my neck, and the warmth of her came right down my side, all of it, soft and heavy and asleep. The red of her hair was under my chin. The ring was cool against my chest and her hand was warm around it.

A man does not get a morning much better than this one, I thought. And I was right. I just did not yet know what was coming to test it.

She murmured something into my throat. Not words. She does that. Has whole conversations down there I will never get to hear.

And I had a daft thought, the kind you only have at half six with a warm woman asleep on you and the whole world gone quiet. I thought: I could set her up.

I have the money now, properly, the daft kind, and a country was about to make it dafter. I could take her off the road tomorrow. No more red-eyes to a war zone, no more sitting in a car park at one in the morning editing a podcast because the guest ran long, no more deadlines, none of it. She could just be.

Then I nearly laughed out loud in the dark, because the woman would sooner divorce me.

She has worked for everything she has got and the one thing she has never wanted off me is to be looked after.

She came up the hard way in a soft world, the only one of her lot who turned down the leg-up, and she would put me through the bedroom window if I so much as hinted she could stop.

Three years and I have learned the right amount about Emma, which is that the day she stops chasing the next story is the day she stops being the woman I am marrying. I do not want to retire her. I want a front-row seat to watch her win.

I just liked, on a grey Monday morning with her warm and snoring faintly on my chest, knowing that I could, and would not dare.

She would deny the snoring to her grave, by the way.

So obviously the phone ruined it.

I had killed the data the night before, in the lift, before the door even shut on us. A habit I picked up the day after the parade, because the day after the parade had taught me a lesson.

I had won every final I had been in, three of them, a whole season, and the thanks I got for we told you was forty-eight hours of being called the most arrogant man in England by men who have won nothing.

So I stopped looking.

Notifications off.

Data off at night.

A quiet phone is a happy man.

Which meant I had no idea what had gone on in the night while we slept.

I reached over her for it, thumbed the data back on out of pure habit, and the thing went off in my hand like a wet firework.

Buzz. Buzz. Buzzbuzzbuzz.

It did not stop. Texts stacking, the little red numbers spinning up, ninety-odd, two hundred-odd, a count on the messages I could not read because it kept jumping. The phone went hot with it.

”God.”

”Mm,” said Emma, not awake.

Buzz. Buzz.

I opened the texts. Mum. Ring me. Paddy. Coppell. A number I did not know that turned out to be a fella I played non-league with in 2003.

My old PE teacher, who has had my number ten years and used it twice. All of them since midnight, all saying a version of the same thing, and I could not work out what the thing was, because nobody puts the actual news in a text, they just go mate and no way and over the moon for you, son.

The cold drop you get when you have missed something enormous.

I opened Instagram to see what the country knew that I did not.

And there it was. On my own account. A post I had not made.

Emma’s left hand lifted into lamplight, last night, the ring catching it, the dark of our bedroom behind. He asked. Yes.

Two million likes. On my grid. Put there by a hand currently asleep across my chest.

”Emma.”

”Mm.”

”Emma.”

”I’m asleep, Daniel.”

”You’re on my Instagram.”

One green eye opened. Found me. Read my whole face in about a second, which is a thing she can do and I cannot, and the corner of her mouth went before the eye had even finished.

”Oh,” she said. ”That. Yeah.”

”You posted to my account.”

”I have had your passwords for two years.”

”In the night.”

”You were asleep and somebody had to do it properly, and if I’d left it to you you’d have put up a picture of the salt-bake.” She had not moved. She had not even taken the arm off my chest. ”You’re welcome.”

”It’s got two million likes, Emma.”

”I know. It’s gorgeous. I took it.” She stretched, slow, the cropped top riding up, and did not bother pulling it back down. ”Yesterday they called you cocky. Today the whole country’s gone soft over your hand. I fixed your image while you slept. That’s what a wife does.”

”You’re not my wife yet.”

”I’m doing the job early. Free trial.” She finally cracked the other eye, looked at the chaos of the phone still going off in my hand, and made the face of a woman entirely at peace with the carnage she had caused. ”Turn it off. It’ll still be two million in an hour.”

”You logged into my account.”

”I did.”

”At one in the morning.”

”I did that an’ all.”

”Right.”

I put the phone down on the floor, well out of reach, and went for her.

She knew it was coming half a second before it came, which is half a second too late, because she has a weakness and I have known where it is for three years. Ribs. The soft bit under the arm.

I got both hands in and she came up off the pillow with a shriek that was not at all dignified for a woman who interviews cabinet ministers, twisting, the cropped top going everywhere, batting at me, laughing, swearing, calling me every name she had, get off, Daniel, get OFF, you absolute, and I did not get off. I have a fiancée who logged into my Instagram. There are consequences.

”Say sorry.”

”I will not. ”

”Say sorry for posting on my account.”

”It’s the best thing that’s ever, Daniel, stop, ” she got a hand free and grabbed my wrist with the ring hand, the stone catching the light between us, ”stop, stop, ”

I stopped.

Not because she said. Because she had hold of my wrist and was looking at me, both of us breathing, her hair everywhere and her face flushed and the laugh still going out of her in little aftershocks.

Then the laugh went out of it and something else came up underneath, and she was not batting my hand off any more, she was holding the wrist, and we were both very still, and the phone was face down on the floor going off about a wedding the country thought it was invited to.

”Daniel,” she said. Different now. Low.

”Aye.”

She did not say anything else. She pulled the wrist she was holding, which pulled the rest of me, and I went, and her other hand came up into my hair, and I got an arm right round her and the warmth of her came in against me and she made a sound into my mouth that had nothing to do with tickling.

The phone could ring. Mum could wait ten minutes. The country had its photo.

This bit it was not getting.

I will tell you we were late leaving. That is all I am telling you.

Jessica rang at twenty past eight, in the after of it.

Jessica does not ring on a Monday morning to congratulate you; she has staff for that, and Jessica is the last person on earth who needs telling I got engaged, because Jessica is the reason I had a ring to do it with. She found it.

She walked half of London for it back in the spring, she put three photographs in front of my mother in April and let the woman choose, she has been sat on the whole thing for four months without one word slipping, and she handed me the box a fortnight ago like she was handing me my own car keys. So when she rang, it was not to coo.

”Walsh.” Flat. Down to business before the line had even settled.

”Jess. It’s twenty past eight.”

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.