Glory Of The Football Manager System

Now. The car.

We took the big Mercedes, the quiet one, the long low diesel Jessica made me buy the day I went in for something yellow.

The DB11 stopped in the garage where it belongs. An Aston is a glorious thing for an hour of Surrey on a Sunday and a punishment for a day up the spine of England, all noise and temper and no patience, and a man does not take a car that wants a fight when he is driving the woman he loves four hours north to tell his mother he is getting married.

You take the quiet one. You take the one she will actually sit in.

Black glass on the back, the fronts done dark enough that nobody clocked who was driving it on a Monday school run.

Two and a half tonnes of hushed German money with a roof you could see the sky through and a stereo Emma had named. She calls it Brian. Seven years off the till at the shop on Princess Road and here I was telling a car called Brian to take me home.

Emma climbed in and pulled the door shut with the heavy thunk that tells you the world is now outside.

She ran a hand over the dash and said nothing, because she only takes the mick about the car when she is not happy, and this morning she was happy. She kicked her trainers off into the footwell, tucked one foot up under her, propped the other against the dash, and was home.

She put the route into Brian. The screen thought about it.

3 hr 58 min.

”Four hours,” she said.

”Four hours.”

It was never going to be four hours. It is never four hours with us. I pressed the button and the engine came up under us, long and low and barely there, a sound you feel more than hear, and I took us up the ramp into the grey Monday light, and the screen said four hours, and the screen was a fool.

London let us go slow, the Sunday vans long gone off our road, nobody on the black glass on a Monday school run. We got on the M1 and the city fell off behind us and the road opened up north, and for a long while we did not talk about the World Cup at all. We talked about who we were telling and when.

Her mother, who watched the parade and rang her crying and will deny it forever. Her sister, who would scream. Her dad Pete, who would cry into his half-and-half scarf and say one sentence and mean it. My mum, who already knew, who had known since the seventeenth of May and not breathed a word.

”She’s known three weeks and told no one,” Emma said. ”Your mum. Do you understand what that costs a Manchester woman?”

”I know exactly what it costs her.”

”My mother would have had it in the Cheshire Life before the ring left the shop.”

Then she got her socked feet up on the dash, put Brian on the playlist she has been building since the night we met and will not let me see the name of, and the road trip began properly.

Here is the thing about Emma on a long drive. She turns into a different woman.

The one the country sees on a Sunday morning, the one who has a column in the paper that managers ring up swearing about, and a podcast two million people download to hear her take a chairman apart, and a blog she still writes herself at midnight because she will not let anyone else hold the password, that woman gets left at the Dartford crossing.

The one who climbs into the passenger seat of my car with her shoes off is twenty-six again and on the way to a festival she has not got tickets for.

Except the work does not leave her alone, even here. Her phone went four times before Watford.

I heard each one. She had it face down on her thigh and she turned it over each time, fast, the way she cannot help, the editor wanting eight hundred words on the parade by six, the podcast producer wanting her in a studio Thursday, somebody from the blog comments she moderates herself because she trusts no one with the tone of it.

I watched her thumb hover. I watched her read the top line of each one with the small crease coming up between her eyebrows that means she is already half-writing the reply in her head.

”Leave it,” I said, the third time.

”I am leaving it. Look. Left.” She held both hands up off the phone for about a second and a half before the next one buzzed and her hand went straight back to it, traitor that it is.

”It does not turn off, Daniel, that’s the thing nobody tells you. You think you’ll get to the top of it and there is no top of it. There’s just more, every day, forever, and the minute you stop for one afternoon they find somebody younger who didn’t.”

She said it light. It was not light.

I have watched her carry three jobs for a year like a woman crossing a river on stones, never still, never once allowed to stand on both feet at the same time, and the only place I have ever seen her put it all the way down is in a car with me with the doors locked.

So I reached over and took the phone off her thigh, gently, and dropped it in the door pocket on my side where she could not reach it without climbing over me.

She looked at me.

”You did not just do that.”

”I did.”

For a second I thought she would fight me for it. Then her whole face went, the fight draining out of it, and she let her head fall back against the rest and laughed, a proper one, helpless and relieved, the laugh of a woman who has just been told the thing she could not tell herself.

”You absolute,” she said, to the roof. ”Right. Fine. Take it. Drive my whole life up a motorway, see if I care.”

And then the road trip began properly, because she put Brian on the playlist she has been building since the night we met and will not let me see the name of, and she sang.

She does not have a good voice and she does not care, which is the only correct way to not have a good voice.

She knew every word of every song, the proper words and the wrong ones she has been singing since she was a kid and refuses to correct, and she sang the wrong ones louder, daring me to argue.

She did the thing where she points at me on the big line and makes me take it, and I took it, because I will sing in a car for that woman and there is no camera in the world that will ever get that footage.

Somewhere around Milton Keynes she made me do the high bit on a song no man should attempt, and my voice went somewhere it has not been since I was twelve, and she laughed so hard she had to put her head between her knees, the red of her hair falling down over her face, both hands over her mouth, her shoulders going, and that is a sound I would walk into the sea for.

I started laughing at her laughing, the pair of us going at it like idiots at seventy miles an hour, and when she finally came up for air she wiped her eyes and looked at me, properly looked, the laugh still all over her face, and said,

”I am so glad it’s you. Do you know that. Of everybody. I am so glad it turned out to be you,” and went straight back to the next song before I could answer, which is how Emma says the enormous things, sideways and at speed so you cannot make a fuss of them.

She had her feet up on the dash and the soft grey of the joggers had gone warm in the sun coming through the glass, and at some point she reached into the back for the bag and started feeding me as we drove.

Not offering. Feeding.

She broke a corner off the yum-yum and held it to my mouth without looking, eyes on the road ahead, and I ate it off her fingers, and she did the next bit, and the next, the pair of us getting through a Greggs bag at seventy with her hand coming to my mouth every minute or so like it was the most normal thing in the world. Because it is.

Then she got the water out, cracked it, and held it up.

”Drink.”

”I’m all right.”

”You have not had a thing since Dulwich and you are driving my whole life up a motorway. Drink the water, Daniel.”

She put it to my mouth and tipped it and I drank, her other hand flat on my jaw, holding my head still like I was a child or a horse, and watched me do it the way she watches everything, making sure, and then capped it and put it back in the door.

”There,” she said, satisfied. ”Now you’ll not keel over before Cheshire and leave me to break the news to your mum on my own.”

”You’d manage. She already likes you better than me.”

”She has taste, your mum. Always said so.”

”You forget to look after yourself. That’s my job now. I’ve got it in writing.” She held the ring up. ”This is the receipt.”

Up past the Newport Pagnell turn the sun came round the windscreen and landed on my forearm on the wheel, and I felt her go quiet, and I looked over and she was just looking at it. My arm. The sleeve shoved up. She has had the whole of me all night and most of the morning and she was looking at my forearm on a steering wheel in the daylight like she had found it on a beach.

”What?”

”Nothing.” She did not look away.

”You’ve got good arms, Daniel Walsh. I knew that. I keep forgetting it and then the light does that and I remember it again.” She reached over and ran her thumb down the inside of my wrist, slow, once, and went back to her water. ”Eyes on the road. I’m just admiring the merchandise.”

”You can’t say things like that and then say eyes on the road.”

”I can say whatever I like. I’ve a ring.”

The motorway did what the motorway does, and she narrated all of it, because she cannot watch a thing without giving it a story. A lorry the length of a street sat in the middle lane doing fifty-three with a queue of reps in German saloons stacked up behind it flashing their lights at the sky like it would help.

Past the speed gantry a man in the next lane mouthed a swear word at his own dashboard. She invented his whole life through the glass, divorced, two kids on alternate weekends, a sales conference in Warrington he was dreading.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.