But it’s true he has half-brothers, half-sisters somewhere, twenty years older than him, some of them, older, in their sixties, dying off themselves now, most likely. His own flesh and blood. He used to think he should try and get in touch with them, track them down like you see on the telly. When he was with Nadine, she’d pointed a bus driver out to him, on the number 7, similar age, lighter skinned than Nadine, but the same cheekbones high up his face.
‘That’s my brother,’ she’d said.
‘What? Your brother don’t work on the buses.’
‘Half, half-brother. Me dad’s babby with that Denise, whoever, fat Irish cow. Lives in Erdington, don’t speak to us.’ She’d given the finger to the bus as it sat in traffic. The driver wore dark glasses and sat looking at the lights. Nadine had stepped out into the road and Goldie could picture her hammering on the bus doors with her hard little fists, mouthing off, spitting up the window as the bus edged along, people looking and then looking away, but he was saved from this by the lights going green and the bus pulling across the junction.
‘He’s normally on the 11,’ she’d said, and then they must’ve got distracted because he can’t ever remember talking about it again. No idea what his name was. But then, he didn’t know the names of his relations either. Ann had a son, Michael, who everyone knew as Snowball because he had a patch of white hair big as a fist above his right ear, even from when he was a little kid. He was killed that year there was the big feud between the Oxo and Cowton, kicked to death in a back field. Snowball had run with the Bullet Krew, before they were even called that, just young kids messing about. They only became the Bullet Krew after Goldie went inside. He’d hear stories. The Bullet Krew only came after everything fell apart with the Ahmeds. Not that Stan Ahmed ever had anything to do with Cowton or the Oxo. ‘Leave ’em to it,’ he’d say, ‘Scottish Jamaican cunts. There’s no one you can speak to up there. They’m all nine years old, running round with razors.’ Which had some truth in it. No hierarchy. The Ahmeds were a family, a clan, and they’d only come to the fore with Stan and his brothers, taken over from the Carter family, the ones they said had stolen the FA Cup in Birmingham and buried it somewhere on the Heath and got the Anvil Yards cursed by a gypsy because of it, who’d ruled the roost since way back in the days of the Peaky Blinders and the Iron Towns Sloggers fighting it out at the Heath races. The gangs had come down from Glasgow in the thirties as well but they ran out steam after the war when Oxton and Cowton went up. Funny thing was, everything had reversed now, from what Goldie heard. The Bullet Krew had old men his age sitting up there, looking down the valley. When everything collapsed they’d taken over. All the drugs came in and out of Cowton. Lowtown, the Ironport and the Anvil Yards, were just full of empty buildings with holes kicked through them and kids running wild. But now there were real Somalis and Bengalis in Lascar again and power was going to come back down the valley. It would come to whoever was most desperate and then seep away from them like blood running down a drain. It was a whole secret history, he thought to himself, the kind that never gets written down or anything like that, or if it does, they just get it all wrong. Because the Ahmeds grew rich and lazy and moved away, other groups moved in. You cannot have a vacuum. Nothing stands still. Because the works closed everyone started killing themselves in as many ways you could think of, and some you couldn’t. It was cause and effect.
The gangs were the opposite of the works, the opposite of working for a living. Thousands and thousands of people poured through those gates when the works were open, banging metal, crawling through mine tunnels under the hills, all for nothing if you asked him, all for lungs full of black dust and a few days at the seaside. A handful sat in back rooms with people like Stan Ahmed. It was a way of setting yourself apart. And they’d been right, of course, because nobody worked now, and everyone was on the hustle, on the make, and desperate too. They were pioneers. The gangs had always know that working was a waste of time. Everyone was a gangster now.
And here he was, a gang of one, just like his old man, like everyone else these days. But without as many kids, he laughed to himself. Just one, he thinks to himself, one little girl. A man should have a daughter.
…
‘He is here! He is fucking here!’ Devon grabs Liam’s head and pulls it into his chest. Liam sits, slumped forward, in his shorts, with his socks rolled down and shin pads untaped, pushes his matted hair into Devon and kisses him as Devon pulls away to point at Liam again.
‘He is here! He is here!’ Devon bangs his own chest now and moves towards the showers. Liam wants him to stay here, to savour the moment, everyone grinning, laughing, Ally talking thirty to the dozen to someone. There has been some talk of him taking an ice bath after a game, Devon and Julius too, the over-thirties, but steam curls through this dressing room now, pipes hiss, mud splatters the floor. The classified results plays from somewhere, patrician English voice, like every Saturday teatime he has ever known. They are announced as a late result.
He scored when time was up. A late, late free kick down the left, Kyran somehow skipping along the heavy pitch. He didn’t even want to go up for it. They were lucky to get the point, luckier still with a clean sheet after getting the runaround for ninety-odd minutes, a chasing, he wasn’t sure he could move. But there was Archie waving him up there from the touchline.
He got fouled, thought he was blocked off, stumbled at the back post and then there was the ball, a shit free kick which had barely risen off the ground, through a thicket of players who all missed it, body after body in front of him until there it was, and because he was tumbling, falling, he headed it, not eighteen inches off the ground, down into the wet turf, and it skidded inside the post at some pace and he saw it go in and heard the whistle and nestled his face into the soft pitch as they all leapt on top of him. Pandemonium. He saw a pair of black brogues come running past, a bloke had leapt the hoarding and onto the pitch in the rain, trailing an Irontown flag. In the melee, he could hear Devon shouting, ‘He is here! He is here!’
When he got to his feet, groggy, he hadn’t realised the ref had blown for time, and walked with his fist clenched and raised towards the hundred or so Irontown supporters behind the goal, all going crazy in the rain, up and down the old terrace, the Baa Baa boys starting a conga, the bloke who’d run on the pitch, old enough to know better and red-faced drunk, clinging to an orange-coated steward.
Big Archie hauls him up, slaps him on the back, tells him to speak to the radio. He doesn’t want to leave the dressing-room warmth, steps on the toes of his socks to pull them off so to walk barefoot across the wet floor, mud between his toes. He pulls on a too small T-shirt that someone else has sweated in to dip his head out of the door and speak to Dave Willis who grins at him with crooked teeth, thrusts what looks to be his phone up at Liam. He is aware of steam coming off him.
‘We can hear, Liam, how much you all enjoyed that victory.’
It is true. The commotion inside comes through the thin walls. Devon still going on. ‘Stop that fucking swearing, but,’ he hears Ally say and hope it isn’t picked up, some fuck-up to take the edge off the warm glow. Dave Willis and his crooked grin.
‘Well, last-minute winner, last touch, I think. Away from home. Clean sheet as well, rode our luck a bit, maybe, but we deserve some. Delighted.’
‘Relief as well, I guess. Had you not scored, the way the results have gone would have put you in the bottom two tonight. As it is, eighteenth. The only way is up?’
‘Of course. Listen. We know we’re better than the table suggests. So do the people who turn up every week. With this group of players we know we can achieve more. I’m just delighted for everyone tonight, the supporters who come up here to stand in the rain, it’s a long way, everyone.’
‘Liam,’ Dave Willis leans forward, puts his hand on his shoulder. When Liam left for Finland Dave wrote a piece in the Chronicle which said end of a chapter long unfulfilled, basically saying what a disappointment Liam had turned
out to be. Still spoke to him like they were good mates, seemed quite a nice bloke really, always cheerful, asked Liam if he fancied doing a book with him, to which Liam had said no, he didn’t believe in books. ‘I know it’s a team game but a word on your defensive partner, Devon Samuels. He’s playing well for an old-stager.’
There it is, a barb about his age. He is six years older than Devon.
‘Immense, a rock. He’s great to play with, reads the game so well.’
‘And you must be delighted with your goal.’
‘Well, yeah, of course. I was shocked it come to me really. Shocked to be up there. I thought I’d been fouled, got summat on it, yer know. Not bad for an old-stager, I suppose.’ He smiles now, pleased with himself. Dave doesn’t.
‘Well said, Liam. You’re still breathing heavy, what a battle today. We’ll let you get back in the dressing room and have a well-earned sit down.’
Dave presses something on the phone, looks grey in the tunnel strip-lights.
‘Well played, Liam,’ he says in his everyday voice, a lower pitch than for the radio. Liam says thanks but he is already halfway back through the door.
And last in the showers until the water cools, same as it’s been all these years. The shouts and the bangs die down but the feeling remains.
Julius flashes his phone at him as they board the coach, he feels his own phone beep in the pocket of his blazer, under the Irontown badge. He sees his name, Corwen 90+6 mins. A goal in the time beyond time. You just never know. He settles into his seat, lets his phone ring away in his pocket, closes his eyes, holds on to this feeling of early Saturday night. Ally says they’re stopping for a fish supper on the way home. Old school, old school. Kyran asks if they do chicken. They move through the English dark. Wet snow falls gently on fast tarmac and metal.
…
In a small room in the museum in Dudley are Duncan Edwards’s things, caps, shirts, medals and cups. A screen plays flickering images of the ’57 cup final on a loop, a strange choice in many ways, it’s his last appearance at Wembley. Peter McParland flattens Ray Wood, smashes his cheek and wins the game for the Villa, a curse on them ever since in the cup. They say it was the only time Big Duncan lost his temper on the pitch.
This shrine is in a small room in a building of red Victorian brick, the relics are neighbours to dinosaur footprints and paintings of furnaces long since put out. The caps used to be held in a glass case in the foyer of Dudley Baths. You could look at them and sip a hot chocolate from the machine, the smell of chlorine and shouts of kids everywhere. This place is a quieter tomb. On a shelf there is a coffee set, Ottoman style, stamped ‘Red Star Belgrade’, never used.
…
…will complete the draw for the Third Round of the FA Cup.
They are the first team out of the hat. Here in the hotel where the players are gathered to watch the draw, not everyone is sitting down or even listening yet. Liam leans towards the screen and concentrates, sees the hands swirl the balls in the glass bowl. They are the same balls they used to use at the bingo. He remembers sitting with a bottle of vimto or dandelion & burdock if he went to the Miners’ Welfare when his nan was alive, the clack of the bingo balls and the tray they’d be placed in when drawn.
…Irontown…
He has only ever played in the Third Round twice, the years they were in the second division, first division, Championship, whatever you want to call it, it had the same name for a hundred years and now they change it every five minutes. The year they lost the play-off final, they got beaten by Crewe in a replay, extratime. Their cup record had been terrible since the twenties, apart from that one run in the fifty-seven and a couple of seasons when Ally first took over. Liam made his debut in a First Round match when he was sixteen, Ally threw him on wide on the left, the only time he ever played there apart from his seconds with England, getting beaten by Leigh Railwaymen’s Institute, non-leaguers. He remembers them all sat in the dressing room with their heads down afterwards, Ally standing in the middle of them all, naked, telling them all what a waste of space they were apart from Liam, exempt from all blame, and the older blokes looking at him under their eyebrows and him thinking that he was in for a kicking if he joined first team training again. And he was, but he kicked them back.
There are voices shushing each other in the seats behind. It had been his idea to get people together, players who live close enough, a few families and hangers-on, Sunday night out, there are sausage rolls on plates on a side table, they sit in one of the conference rooms in the hotel with sofas and chairs laid out in front of the telly. Amir thought it was a good idea, would bring a bit of cash in at the bar. The camera pans to Ally, who has been invited to the draw, they’re making a big deal of it, trying to revive the cup, which is dying, like all things.
…will play…
He knows, wills it, as he watches the hand retrieve the ball, that it’s a big one.
‘Come on,’ he hears himself say.
It used to be Monday dinnertimes. He remembers hopping over the school wall and across the garage roofs to get to Mark’s where his mum let them listen to it on the radio, in the kitchen, and she made them cheese on toast. There were those years when they got to the quarter-finals, lost to Liverpool, then to Everton, and nothing since.
…Number twenty-six… Manchester United…
They are on their feet. Liam has his fists clenched above his head, someone is banging him on the back, there are whoops and cheers around the room, people lifting their heads from the carvery table and their meal deals to ask what all the fuss is about, the sound of thirty ring tones all going at once.
They’ll switch it, Liam thinks, as he goes to each player in turn, clasps their hand and then pulls them into a bear hug, like he willed that ball out of the pot. They’ll switch it for the money and we’ll get to play at Old Trafford, either that or we’ll have the telly here. He can see Steve Stringer at the back of the room, talking on the phone, a smile in his grey face for once, heading out into the corridor. Liam puts his thumb up to him. This season, you just never knew, what with the Hartlepool game and now this, win a couple more and their game in hand and they were mid-table, fringe of the play-offs, some kind of miracle against United, some kind of backs to the wall draw in the mud and then a replay, cannot even dare to dream of a win, and the telly again, you just never knew. He looks around at the shining eyes. There is life yet, is what he thinks. He’ll be marking Van Persie. Fucking hell.
Ally is talking on the telly, too noisy to hear him. They must have finished the rest of the draw. He hears a voice say, ‘Possibly the tie of the round, certainly the most drenched in cup folklore is Irontown versus Manchester United, a repeat of a famous tie played there by the Busby Babes nearly sixty years ago…’
Dave Willis, by the plate of sausage rolls, is talking into his phone with another one clamped to his ear.
Liam sees Amir, asks for some champagne, when he looks back at him, says, ‘Well, that cheap fizz you put out for the weddings,’ and Amir grins and says he’ll find some good stuff and put it on Liam’s room.
He sits down with a bottle of beer in a chair next to Devon and the Irish lads and Kyran who cannot stop saying, ‘Man United, man, Man United, man,’ over and over, where they have settled in the lounge bar. They’ve put the big screen on in here now and switched Sky Sports on and they’ve got Ted Groves on the phone, Ted, who is standing with Steve Stringer near the bar, Steve holding the phone to Ted’s ear, who is being interviewed about the game in ’57, a match that Liam knows his dad was at too, as a kid, down the front of the Greenfield End, the record crowd, fifty-six thousand and Liam thinks of old records books, sat poring over numbers and results and memorising whole lists of matches and scorers and attendances like some kind of catechism. He thinks of Mark, wonders if he is sitting there in that same kitchen now, listening to it on the radio with his toast. It’s possible. One day he’ll go round there and just bang on the door. Maybe he’ll take him a ticket round for
this match.
All things are possible, he thinks.
…
Like Bonnie and Clyde or something is how they took off. Goldie had bought these magazines for ages, years, still never got the full collection, which concentrated on a particular criminal or crime. Bonnie and Clyde were one of the editions. Then there were those kids in that film Badlands, which Dee Dee made them watch, and Liam took the piss out of all the way through. He remembered thinking that if he was going on a killing spree then Liam Corwen might well end up first in line and that was sort of how the events of that afternoon started. He’d talked about it so much since, that the language he used, even in his head, was touched with other people’s view of the world, therapists and the prison chaplain and social workers and the like. It wasn’t even his story, not any more.
After Mark had missed the penalty, after they had shown Liam lying on the pitch, his face pressed into the grass, after they showed them both crying, and the commentator said, ‘You have to feel for these Irontown boys. They have given everything,’ the whole pub swooning over them, Sonia looking at Liam lying there on the grass and going to hug Dee Dee, he had to do something.
They’d always had this thing between them, egging each other on.
‘I don’t believe you’ve got it in you, Goldie, I don’t,’ Sonia would say, that kind of thing. Well, he called her bluff this time.
‘Goldie, you’re not OK to drive,’ Dee Dee said, came out to the street, her make-up all run across her face with the tears. Goldie imagined Liam’s big homecoming that night.
‘He’s all right, Dee Dee, honest,’ Sonia had jumped in, and she was pissed, an unlit cigarette hanging out of her mouth, did not even smoke. Alina was sitting there in the back of the car, always a calm baby, assured. God knows who she got that from.
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