Glory Of The Football Manager System

By the time we passed him for good she had him remarried to a woman called Sandra and happy at last, and she waved at him as we went by, and he had no idea he had just been handed a future by the cleverest woman in England.

We played the game we always play, the one where you have to name a better song than the last one or you lose, and there are no rules and no winner and we have been playing it three years and it has never once ended.

And the whole time, between songs, she kept doing a thing with her hand. Somewhere past Luton she had reached over me into the door pocket for the phone, and I let her have it back, because the thing she wanted it for was not work.

She lifted the left hand up into the light coming through the windscreen, turned it slow, watched the stone catch, and filmed it. Ten seconds of the ring throwing light round the inside of the car. Her thumb moving on it. Once, the ring and the side of my face in the same frame, me not knowing till I caught her at it.

She did not post any of them. She would film it, watch it back with a little private smile, and put the phone face down on her thigh, and a minute later do it again. Five, six times she did it. A whole reel of a thing nobody would ever see.

”You know you can post one,” I said.

”I know I can.”

”You’ve made about nine.”

”I have made about nine and I am keeping about nine.” She turned the ring again, watched it go.

”I post one clip of this with a motorway sign in the background and we are a location, Daniel. Some lad clips it, geotags it, forty of them at your mum’s gate by teatime. I’ve spent my whole career watching the internet eat people alive in an afternoon. I know exactly how fast it moves.”

She filmed it one more time, the ring and the first rain starting on the window behind it. ”They got the hand last night because I gave it them. Framed. Clean. On my terms. They are not getting the M6. The M6 is just for me.”

She had a folder on that phone by Manchester, I would bet, a dozen little videos of her own ring the two million would have torn each other apart for, and not one of them would ever leave her. She knows the value of not feeding the thing that wants her. It is the same instinct that made her say yes to a salt-bake on a Sunday and no to a scoreboard.

Then she got the phone up again, not for the ring this time, for us.

She leaned across the console, got her cheek against mine, and took a run of daft ones, her pulling a face, me trying to drive, her kissing my cheek in the next one, the two of us looking like a pair of teenagers who had nicked a German car.

She did not post those either. She made them and kept them and laughed at them and turned the screen to show me and put it away.

Around Northampton she shifted in her seat, restless, and I clocked it before she said anything, because I have spent three years learning the tells. The phone in the door had gone again, twice, and I had watched her not reach for it and watched what not reaching cost her.

The eight hundred words. The studio Thursday. The blog she would be up moderating till one in the morning.

All of it stacking up under that calm she wears, the World Cup that had no business landing this week, my mum at the end of it, and she had gone warm with the carrying of it, a flush coming up her throat, the sleeves of the hoodie shoved up off her wrists, a strand of hair blown off her face.

”Pull in at the next one,” she said. ”I’ll drive a bit. Give you a rest before your mum’s.”

”You’re not driving, Em.”

”You’ve had four hours’ sleep.”

”I’ve driven on less and you know it. You’re not driving today.” I reached over and turned the air con up, and the cool came down over her, and I watched her shoulders drop half an inch. ”You’re wound up. I can see it off you. The day’s getting at you and you’re trying not to let it.”

She did not deny it. That is a thing about Emma, she does not waste a lie on me. She just breathed out and let her head go back against the rest.

”It’s a big day, Daniel.”

”It’s not just today. It’s never just today with you, that’s the trouble.” I put my hand on the back of her neck, under the twist of hair, where the warmth had gathered, and worked my thumb slow into the knot of it, and she made the sound low in her throat and let her eyes close.

”Column, podcast, blog, the lot of it, all going at once, all the time, and now this on top. You’ve not put it down since Dulwich. You’ve not put it down in two years.”

”Somebody has to keep it spinning.”

”Not this afternoon they don’t.” I kept the thumb moving, slow circles, finding the tight bits, and I felt her start to go under it, the breath getting longer, the shoulders dropping.

”This afternoon it can all wait. You are going to sit in my passenger seat with the cold air on you and my hand on your neck and you are going to let me carry today, because I have got two hands free and nothing in the world to do with them but you. That’s the whole of your job. Sit there. Be looked after.”

She did not answer for a second. I had found the place under her ear where she keeps everything and she had gone quiet and pliant under my thumb, her head tipping into my hand, chasing it, and that is the thing about Emma that nobody who watches her work would ever guess.

She lives in her head, three jobs deep, words and arguments going round it at all hours. The only way out of her own head she has ever found is a hand on her. Mine, by preference. She will take being touched over being told she is right any day of the week, and I worked that out about her in the first month and have been using it shamelessly ever since.

”That feels,” she said, and did not finish it.

”I know.”

”That is not fair, what you’re doing with your thumb; I was trying to be stressed.”

”Give it up.”

”That’s meant to be my job. Looking after you. I’ve got it in writing.” She held the ring up without opening her eyes.

”Aye, well. I had the ring made. I get the first go.” I kept the thumb working at her neck. ”Stop stressing, Em. I’ve got it. I’ve got the day, I’ve got the drive, I’ve got my mum, I’ve got you. Put it down.”

She opened one green eye and looked at me, and something in her went loose that had been tight since Dulwich, and she turned her head and kissed the inside of my wrist where it ran past her cheek, once, and left her lips there a second.

”You are going to be a very annoying husband,” she said, into my wrist. ”Looking after me. I’ll never get a thing past you.”

”Not a thing. Best make your peace with it now.”

She settled down into the cool of the seat with my hand on her neck, and the flush went off her throat, and for a long stretch she just let herself be driven, which for Emma is the rarest thing there is, and the fact that she could do it at all, with me, was the whole of why she was wearing the ring.

After a mile her hand came onto my thigh, high, the warmth of her palm coming through the worn grey, and she leaned across and put her mouth right at my ear, low, just for me, and told me what she had been thinking about for the last twenty miles, which is not a thing I am writing down, and then sat back innocent as a vicar’s wife and looked out the window.

”Emma.”

”What.”

”You can’t say that to a man doing seventy.”

”Sixty-eight,” she said. ”And I can say what I like. Behave, or find me somewhere to stop.”

I filed somewhere to stop.

We needed fuel by Northampton, which suited everybody, because Emma needed a wee and I needed a coffee and she needed, the second we were off the slip road, a Greggs, because she has the palate of an old-money girl in everything except service stations, where she becomes, instantly, a steak bake in human form.

That is where it happened, the first time, properly. The fan, I mean.

I was at the coffee machine inside when a lad of about nineteen in a Palace shirt, an actual Palace shirt, the whole way up here on a Monday, walked in and stopped dead like he had hit glass.

”No,” he said. To me. To the room. ”No way. No way.”

”All right, mate.”

”You’re, the video, we told you, my whole group chat, can I, my dad’s a season ticket, he was at Lyon, can I, ”

”Course you can.”

He could not work his own camera. Emma took the phone off him, calm as anything, lined the two of us up, told him his shirt was lovely, gave it back, and he looked at the photo like it was the moon. Then his eyes went to her hand, to the ring, because a nineteen-year-old who has lived on the internet for a fortnight knows exactly who Emma is, and he opened his mouth.

Emma got there first. ”Not yet, love. You can have the photo. Not the other thing. Not yet.”

”I won’t say owt,” he said, holy.

”I know you won’t.”

He went off shaking to a fella by the Greggs who had to be his dad, the shirt and the older version of the shirt, and the dad looked over, and I lifted a hand, and the dad put his own hand flat on his own chest the way they do now, and did not come over, just held it there, and that was the whole conversation.