by Alison Bond
‘Everyone knows. It’s quite the buzzy topic. Sam Sharp’s off in some Eastern European backwater trying to find the next Davor Šuker.’
Good. Her activities still caused ripples back home. It would help when she unveiled her slate of players for sale. A slate that currently stood at one inexperienced seventeen-year-old. She needed to get it together, and fast, if she wanted to make her splash in the transfer window. ‘You’re here to visit?’
Leanne shrugged, offering the lifeline with about as much ceremony as a stick of chewing gum. ‘I thought you might need my help,’ she said.
‘They fired you too, didn’t they?’ said Samantha.
‘Of course not!’ said Leanne indignantly. ‘I’m shit hot at what I do. Though evidently that’s not enough to save your job in a place like Legends.’
‘No,’ said Samantha. ‘It isn’t.’
‘Don’t worry. I left of my own accord. If I wanted to work for a dickhead like Richard I’d go and work in the City for a lot more money. I realized that what they did to you was bullshit. And, besides, I’ve always fancied Eastern European men. That Luka Kovač off ER? Hot. Viggo Mortensen? Hot.’
‘I think he’s Danish.’
‘Oh.’ Leanne looked disappointed. ‘Well, never mind. There’s bound to be somebody that catches my eye.’
She didn’t doubt it. ‘I can’t pay very much,’ she said. ‘Not to begin with.’
‘You didn’t pay me very much before.’
Within a week she realized that Leanne was the missing element in her grand plan. She didn’t know how she had managed without her.
‘You didn’t,’ said Leanne. ‘Simple.’
Leanne made her operate more efficiently, kept her diary, opened bank accounts, found a new travel agent who worked miracles and soon Samantha went off on her mission to discover the best unknown talent that there was.
‘I didn’t expect it to be easy,’ she said to Leanne during one of their nightly telephone catch-ups, ‘but some of these guys are locking into seven-year contracts; they’ve already got agents. I met a Hungarian kid yesterday who signed with an agent when he was thirteen. Thirteen! Am I supposed to do a tour of schools?’
‘You did plenty of school visits in England,’ said Leanne.
‘True, but …’
‘This isn’t some unknown mountain village,’ said Leanne. ‘It’s Europe. They have broadband internet and everything. They’re clued up.’
One dismal hotel room blended into the next and she thought about giving up. There was no way this was going to work. How had Jackson done it all those years ago? Building something out of nothing was hard. And she was no Jackson Ramsay – who was she trying to kid?
Somewhere in deepest Slovenia she found her confidence again.
She was standing in the rain, a puddle of muddy water collecting around her wellington boots as she waited with infinite patience for the manager of the team out there training. He was late for his appointment with her. Her feet were as sensitive as bricks on the end of her legs and her face was raw from the lashing downpour. She had her hat pulled low and her scarf pulled high but apart from that the only thing she had to shelter herself was a newspaper, which she had held above her head for so long that it was falling apart.
Still, she didn’t mind too much. She was watching her quarry, a twenty-one-year-old midfielder she had never heard of until six days ago when she’d picked him out of a highlights package that Leanne had put together from this small, and so far terribly damp, country. He was good. Good enough to warrant waiting in the rain for his manager, an Italian gentleman she had been exchanging emails with for the last few days. She wasn’t prepared to miss this appointment for the sake of a bit of weather.
Eventually she saw a portly man dashing over to her, the rain bouncing off his bare, bald head.
‘Sam Sharp?’ he shouted. ‘Inside, please, it is raining.’
I noticed.
She followed him gratefully to a warm anteroom outside what she presumed was the dressing room, where she unwrapped her wet scarf and took off her hat, her hair tumbling down her back.
He looked at her with amazement.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought you were someone else.’
‘I’m Sam Sharp.’
‘You can’t be.’
‘I’m pretty sure I am.’
‘You are a woman.’
‘I’m pretty sure of that too.’
‘Sam Sharp?’
‘Samantha,’ she said, shrugging, confident that was explanation enough.
‘But this is ridiculous! I cut my lunch short to talk to a top agent about my star player, not meet with a woman about … about what exactly?’
‘About your star player.’
‘But you are a woman.’
‘So we have established.’ She sighed. Hadn’t she spent enough years already trying to break down barriers? Was she really expected to do it all over again? She jerked her head towards what she presumed was his office. ‘You have a computer in there?’
He nodded.
‘Take five minutes,’ she said. ‘Google me if it will put your mind at rest. I’ll be out here checking my lipstick and, well, you know, women’s things.’
He studied her, curious and then amused. ‘You are not wearing lipstick.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Neither are you. Perhaps we have more in common than you realize. Such as recognizing Marco Vesna as a potential star and a goldmine for your club.’
‘A goldmine? I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘my English …’
Smoothly she switched into Italian and he was grateful and perhaps a little bit impressed. Certainly he was impressed enough to take her to meet Marco Vesna, whom he intended to sell as soon as the price was right.
‘You should tell people you are a woman,’ he suggested as they said goodbye.
‘Why? Do you tell people you’re a man?’
‘But is rare, no, for a woman to be in this business?’
‘It’s unique,’ she said. And for the first time in her career she speculated that might be a blessing and not a curse.
She stopped questioning why any decent player would want her, a woman on her own, when they could sign with a major agency, an agency like Legends. As a woman she had gifts to draw upon that men might not have. Intuition, sensitivity, tact and a special kind of charm. She had to believe that Samantha Sharp was a force unto herself, the best in the world, not just the best they could get.
And if she had to stretch the truth a little, then so be it.
‘One of the big London clubs,’ she told an Estonian goalkeeper who didn’t stand a chance with Arsenal or Chelsea, but might land a high six-figure sum with Millwall.
‘Manchester United,’ she told the mother of a talented nineteen-year-old Georgian who could possibly be seen by Manchester City if she called in a favour.
And slowly she began to build her roster.
I can do this.
Of course you can.
21
She didn’t realize everyone at Legends thought she was sleeping with Jackson Ramsay until she had been working there for almost six months. Up until that point she just thought that everyone hated her because she was useless.
The night before she started work she was too nervous to get much sleep. She lay in bed, Liam’s bed, and thought of him locked up in prison.
Was it wrong to be following her dreams?
From now on I’ll dream for both of us.
She looked across at the second-hand suit she had bought from the Red Cross shop on Albany Road hanging on the back of the bedroom door. It had cost more to dry-clean it than to buy it. She imagined herself inhabiting that suit, inhabiting the personality of success, walking through corridors of power and making something of herself. This was the first step on the path. Her best chance.
Now all she had to do was not mess it up.
Jennie, Jackson’s assistant back then, watched her trying to use a fax machine on day one and
snatched the papers off her, slapping her hand away with a sigh, then fed the pages to the machine face down as they should have been and rolled her eyes. ‘What kind of admin assistant doesn’t know how to use a fax?’
Samantha bit back her response – an admin assistant on her very first day – because she badly wanted to do well and be popular.
Soon she realized that one was not entirely dependent on the other.
She stopped taking public transport after three days of commuting. She’d never tackled rush hour before, fighting her way onto the overcrowded bus to get to Kennington tube just so she could feel strangers’ thighs pressed against hers for the fifteen-minute journey to Embankment. By the third day she was exhausted and strung out before the working day had even begun.
That evening the air was warm with the bud of spring. When she reached the tube station she stared forlornly at the masses tumbling into the underground cans and she just kept on walking.
She thought that perhaps she would pick up a bus somewhere along the way, but her legs kept placing her feet one in front of the other and soon she was wrapping herself against the cold chill off the Thames, walking past Lambeth Palace and a Southwark library, and then soon enough she was in Camberwell, her cheeks flushed from the walk, her heart glad with the exercise.
From that day forth she walked every day, immediately immune to the delays and the tube strikes and the rush-hour doldrums that blighted everybody else’s day.
On day six, the beginning of her second week, she watched Jennie struggle with an Argentinian player on the telephone, trying to communicate simple instructions over the language barrier, and stopped off at the library on the way home.
It was quiet and calm inside and she felt soothed just by being within the hushed cool of the enormous Victorian building. You never would have known that outside four lanes of traffic went thundering past. Two forms of ID and she could borrow what she liked. It was like having an obliging friend with a fabulous old house and a massive collection of books and microfiche.
In the stacks, crammed in between out-of-date road atlases of Europe, she found a set of dusty Berlitz teach-yourself-Spanish cassettes, their cardboard cases falling apart, held together with brittle elastic bands. She popped the first one in her newly acquired Sony Walkman as she walked out.
It took her almost an hour to walk to work every day, and an hour to walk back, and though she got some funny looks at pedestrian crossings when she repeated the Spanish phrases aloud, it didn’t take long for the basics to sink in.
‘Let me,’ she said to Jennie when she felt confident enough to try. She enjoyed watching the other girl’s incredulous expression as she spoke to the Argentinian client with her newly learnt Spanish, making herself indispensable in the process. She learnt Italian next, then Portuguese. She had a bit of Japanese from evening classes that she hardly ever used and a smattering of French from school. But then everyone had a bit of French.
‘If you’re after my job,’ said Jennie primly, ‘it won’t work.’
‘I don’t want your job,’ she said truthfully. She had her eye on a bigger prize than that.
With Liam gone it was too expensive to stay in the Camberwell flat. She took a room in a house-share in Elephant and Castle. An ugly squat house of orange brick with no redeeming features in a nervous neighbourhood. The box room had space for a single bed and a narrow clothes rail. She took it unquestioningly, which surprised the twitchy art student showing her around. Samantha was the perfect flatmate: clean, tidy and never around.
‘What about when I’m back?’ said Liam. He was currently in the midst of his appeal. ‘My new lawyer seems a bit more clued up.’
By the time he came out it wouldn’t matter that he no longer had a poky flat to go home to on Camberwell New Road. By then she’d be a success.
‘I’m going to earn so much money,’ she said, ‘you’ll be able to employ the best lawyer in London.’
She followed a comforting routine. Walk to work with her language tapes for company, work hard, a baked potato in the microwave for lunch, work hard, walk home. She sat in her room at night eating baked beans on toast or sometimes pasta and always an apple for pudding. She liked reading books she borrowed from the library. Even though Jackson was paying her a pittance she was able to open a savings account. When she felt miserable she looked at her paying-in book and watched the figures in the right-hand column steadily grow.
‘Neville Potterton’s office, can I help you?’
Soon she was promoted from general assistant to Neville’s assistant. Only problem was she thought Neville was a dickhead. Working in his office was a dead-end – you could see it from the top of the road.
‘Oh, hi, Mickey,’ she said. Mickey was typical of the clients in this office. Old, past it, retired and earning nothing. Neville Potterton needed to draw some young blood and quick, but instead of looking out for new talent he spent most of his time catering to the whims of his doddering clients.
‘Remember,’ Neville told her once when he (wrongly) accused her of being disrespectful, ‘these men were heroes. Ask your father – he’ll tell you.’
‘I’d have to find him first,’ said Samantha.
Neville spluttered an apology and seeing him squirm like that was the highlight of her day. She wasn’t mean spirited – it was just that she was bored with making restaurant reservations for grown men who really could be making their own.
Today Mickey wanted to get upgraded on his flight to Florida. ‘Taking the kids to Disneyland,’ he said, misjudging the depth of her interest.
‘Let me speak to our travel agent,’ she said.
‘We’re taking the mother-in-law, so she can sit in economy with the kids if that helps.’
Charming.
Neville poked his head out of his office. ‘Is that Mickey? Why didn’t you say?’ he reprimanded. ‘Let me speak to him.’ Then he snapped his fingers at her even though she had asked him very politely not to do that any more.
She united Neville and Mickey and tuned out the sycophantic noises that were soon emanating from his office. If that was how her boss wanted to spend his time then it was little wonder that he was the least profitable agent in the company. But she hated that it made her look bad.
Jackson’s company was going places. Nobody was quite sure where exactly; a few eyebrows had been raised when he had audaciously called his firm Legends, but it was starting to seem prophetic as he siphoned clients from more established agencies, wooed agents with promises of perks, agents who brought their lists across with them, while men with more gumption than her boss scoured the country to find newcomers who became sensations. Soon Legends was a powerful player in a very rich man’s game. Samantha had joined the right company at the right time.
But she was stuck in the wrong office.
Early in the new year Jackson decided to throw a party to show off.
Maybe she was just an assistant, maybe she was at the party as window dressing or logistical back-up, maybe she looked impossibly gauche as she watched sports stars pile into the east London warehouse where this glittering event was taking place, but she didn’t care about any of that.
Wow.
This party was dynamite.
She didn’t even mind that she had spent her whole week explaining to Neville’s dreary clients why, no, they couldn’t bring two dozen friends with them; they were lucky to be here at all.
The air was thick with the sound of laughter and the thump of the bass from the sound system in the marquee outside. Man-sized canapés were circulating, slices of rare roast beef rolled around caramelized onions, salty roast potatoes and individual chicken pies. There was a cocktail bar where drinks were flamboyantly mixed, a champagne bar with prominent branding and trays of drinks somewhere nearby whenever you needed one. At the far side of the warehouse people were queuing up to take a ride on one of the NASA flight simulators that had been hired for the party.
She’d already spotted Gary Lineker and Pa
ul Gascoigne, the only two footballers she was confident of recognizing, but soon she realized that it really didn’t matter if she didn’t know the faces yet. You could tell a world-class football player as soon as he walked in the room.
It wasn’t the expensive suit or the perfect body and clear skin – it was the glow of sheer Alpha-ness that surrounded each of them, like a ring round the moon. It was magical, like a force field of testosterone that would crackle when you touched it.
Next to men like that men such as Mickey-bloody-Jenkins looked decrepit.
Across the room she saw Jackson. He was holding his own amid all this man candy – as well he might, being the munificent host. She thought he looked very handsome in his deep purple suit; not many men could carry off such a colour. She decided, perhaps unwisely, that this was a perfect opportunity to push for some career advancement.
‘Jackson!’ she said. ‘Great party, thanks for inviting me.’
He looked at her blankly for a second and then remembered exactly who she was. He hadn’t recognized her out of that dreary business suit she wore every day.
‘Great dress,’ he said.
She fingered the deep rose silk that showed off her long legs. ‘It’s second-hand,’ she admitted.
‘Vintage,’ he said. ‘Nobody says second-hand any more.’
‘Can I talk to you?’ She stumbled over her words and took a deep breath to steady herself. She felt unexpectedly shy. It must be the excitement.
‘People aren’t dancing,’ said Jackson. ‘Do you think we misjudged the music? Should it be more poppy, less house?’
‘I think it’s still early,’ she said. ‘Give them time; they’ll dance.’
‘Maybe it was a mistake to set up the marquee outside, too separate.’
‘It’s pretty warm in here now,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you open both those sets of doors over there and roll up the long side of the marquee? Then it’ll be more integrated.’
He saw that she was right and swiftly organized things as she had suggested. She watched while he supervised a team.
‘You’re nervous,’ she said, surprised.