‘Just a bit of trouble, love.’
‘Bobby again?’ she says.
‘No. No one we know.’
‘Better phone Lionel,’ Alina nods towards the broken glass, looks at Liam.
‘Liam was just passing, love,’ Dee Dee says. Alina nods at him as with the broken glass, moves back towards the stairs as quietly as she arrived.
‘Bobby?’ Liam looks at her.
Dee Dee nods, ‘In here kicking up a fuss a while ago. He’s in a bad way.’
‘He did the same at Tony’s,’ Liam says. He needs to go. Seeing the girl has made him uneasy.
Dee Dee asks him about Greta and Jari and he’s surprised she remembers their names. He tells her about not seeing them over Christmas, that he thinks that means a change, an ending. She just nods.
‘That must be hard,’ she says to him and he can’t tell if her voice has changed or not. ‘I’d phoned you about Mark,’ she says. ‘You could go and see him, Liam. It wouldn’t kill you.’
‘Has he said he wants to see me?’
‘It’d be good for him, Liam. Might be good for you both.’
‘No,’ he says, ‘he doesn’t want to see me.’
When he stands up to leave it’s awkward.
‘Thanks, Liam, thanks,’ she manages to say, although there’s something about it that doesn’t ring true to him, he’s just saved her life and she wants to talk to him about Mark. They hug at the door with the broken glass. He goes to kiss her and she puts the palms of her hands on his chest again and pushes him away.
‘It’s a bit late for that, Liam, don’t you think?’ is all she says.
…
Billy Meredith sits in his good suit at the FA Tribunal. It’s a much better cut, more expensive cloth, than the ones worn by the men who accuse him, these petty men, these rich men who know nothing and yet think they own the world. When they accuse him of those things, as if he’d have fixed those matches in the way they said, in full sight of everyone, he wishes he had the toothpick, so he could play it along his lips and show them what he thought of them. He would stroll down the wing chewing on it sometimes, and the crowd would laugh and sing his name.
Oh I wish I was you Billy Meredith
I wish I was you, I envy you, indeed I do.
It is a game, nothing more, and people should remember that. He shows how he feels instead with the look in his dark eyes. He knows all about contempt, how to give it and receive it. He knows they can see what he thinks of them, these rich men, these men who think they have the power, think they can buy the world. The people do not sing their names.
These men want to treat them like the pit ponies, stabled in the dark underground, and he wants to see the stars in the night sky, the sun on the fields. These ways of thinking are irreconcilable. It’s what one of them says. And he has seen all this before. At Black Park as a boy, and at all the mines and factories and mills beyond. The whole country is a robbers’ den. Well, the tables can be overturned. The world does not have to be the way it is.
They ban him and he comes back stronger, looks at them with his dark eyes and doesn’t blink. (Cantona, years later, points at the three Federation officials, ‘Idiot! Idiot! Idiot!’, leaves France and starts out on a road that leads to Old Trafford.)
And when he lifts the cup again, for United this time, not City, the colours of the shirt matter little to these men and, it’s true, that is the difference between them and the crowds.
The people sing his name over and over.
It is their own names they sing.
…
Christmas night. Liam sits on the bed that had been his as a child. His mum and dad have never altered his room, all these years. His sisters used to share the bigger bedroom and now that’s made up as a spare room, but this room has stayed the same, as if some kind of shrine.
He has brought a bottle of beer upstairs with him, it’s been too hard trying not to drink, been trying to hide it all day. He wonders if there’s a way to get back to the hotel, gives that idea up, will sleep in this narrow bed, with his legs sticking out of the end like they always have since he was fourteen or so, and his dad will take him to the match tomorrow.
‘I thought I’d told you to stay at home, son?’ Ally said to him this morning, down at the Heath after he’d watched Jari wave at him on the computer screen, saying, ‘Merry Christmas, Daddy’ in English, looking happy, a few thousand miles away.
‘They’re not here, Ally. They never came. She wants to keep him over there,’ was what he said to him, nothing more, and trained on Christmas morning like they always had, ran around the field like a kid. Everyone else quick to get off and back home and Liam was last away, doing a proper warm-down.
‘You OK, son?’ Ally said to him, the last two in the showers and he’d just nodded.
‘It must be hard,’ and Liam nodded again and Ally went to say something more and then didn’t, patted his shoulder as they came out into the damp car park with their wet hair.
He looks at the pictures on the walls, all taken from the football magazines he and Mark would pore over. Baresi, Maldini, Paul McGrath, Des Walker. There’s an Italia ’90 wall chart, filled in meticulously up until the semi-finals, then nothing, as if he didn’t fill in the score Gazza’s tears might cry their way back into his head. He used to look at these pictures and imagine himself as these men, in the way that all boys do with their heroes he supposes, but then he somehow stepped into the pages of the magazines, was somehow out there on the pitch, like he walked out of the real world at some point and now couldn’t find a way back, became his own tattoo. There are pictures of these men on his walls, pictures of them on his body.
He should not be playing tomorrow. He could still have gone to Finland. God knows what to do about Dee Dee; Goldie’s resurrection.
He reaches to the shelf, takes down one of his old football annuals to flip through, to distract himself. He remembers this one. Ally Barr’s All Time Anvil Yards XI. The players must have played at the Anvil Yards at least once: Lev Yashin, Djalma Santos, Luigi Allemandi, John Charles, Billy Wright, Duncan Edwards, Billy Meredith, Steve Bloomer, Eusébio, Alfredo di Stéfano, George Best. He and Mark would pick their own teams, riding in his dad’s car on the way to games, or in the back of the minibus, students of the game. On the back leaf of the book is some writing in pencil.
DAD: Banks, Santos (D), Santos (N), Moore, Beckenbauer, Jairzinho, Edwards, Charlton (R), Pelé, Greaves, Best.
MARK: Schumacher, Josimar, Bossis, Olsen, Koeman, Laudrup, Baggio, Socrates, Van Basten, Maradona, Gullit.
LIAM: Shilton, Kaltz, Maldini, Baresi, McGrath, Matthäus, Gascoigne, Baggio, Dalglish, Maradona, Barnes.
If only everything could be contained by eleven names on a team-sheet, by the white lines around a pitch. He has lived his life as if it could, and look at the mess it’s brought.
He hears his mum say downstairs, ‘Where’s our Liam?’ in a voice that could not sound more tired or disappointed, hears his sisters and the kids getting ready to leave so Gary and Martin can have a drink at home. He wonders how they manage to keep their lives in such order. And she could be a bit more sympathetic, his mum, with him stuck here and exiled from his own family. He exiled himself, all right. But he treads carefully around his mum, kept his distance when she was ill. He can see in the look in her eyes, the mess she thinks he’s made of things.
And Dee Dee. He saved her life, for god’s sake, from a maniac with a knife, because that is all Goldie is now, perhaps all he ever was, not that she seemed very grateful. He wants that to be dif ferent. On the phone it had sounded like she needed him. He might go and see Lionel, tell him about Goldie, considers the police but thinks Lionel might know what to do. He wishes he did, that’s for sure. He tries to think about the United match, the excitement building, and a quiet dread in his stomach that they might run riot, end up with eight, nine, ten, imagine. He should leave off the drink, that’s for sure. He lies back on the bed and thinks of lifting t
he cup, the same dreams he had in this room as a kid, to stop himself thinking of anything else.
…
A man in a room dreaming dreams, bloated and reaching for the drink. He tells that joke so often, the one where he is in bed with Miss World and a couple of bottles of champagne, or is it one bottle and two Miss Worlds, and the waiter bringing room service, the fall guy, with his thinning hair and an odd button on his uniform sewn on by his wife, with his grey face and Manchester accent and season ticket for the Stretford End and pale blue eyes, who says, ‘Oh George, where did it all go wrong?’
And they laugh their brittle laughs, on the television chat shows and in after-dinner smoke-filled rooms, but he understands as he says it, even as they laugh with him that these people are from a world that is not his.
Where did it all go wrong, George?
Whole iron towns warped with rust and time and pain.
…
Liam remembers the story that they picked Yorke off the beach, that he’d been a crab fisherman, would haul his lines up and down and do tricks with the ball for the tourists. There were Union flags that flapped in the harbour, under the Caribbean sun, people in yachts waiting for crab meat and cocktails and black people to fetch and carry for them, it was how they’d built an empire. Taylor could spot a player, in spite of what they said when he managed England, signed John Barnes from a London park pitch, so there was at least something to the story.
Then he did it again, like he’d perfected it this time, and it’s unusual, because when you’ve done it once, why would you try it again, because at some point you’ll mess it up.
At home against Arsenal, this, a full house at Villa Park, and he runs up with more purpose than the one before, like he’s about to blast it into the corner, and this time opens his foot as he strikes it, might have toppled backwards as he hit it, balls of iron, so it hovers in the air, a couple of feet off the ground, and Seaman sits down, tries to get up, crumples, and the ball lands in the goal, and in Liam’s head at least, stops dead. Sits there like a full stop at the end of a story.
Liam imagines watching this with Mark.
‘You should’ve just done that,’ he says to him.
‘I should’ve just smashed it,’ is what Mark – the Mark in his head – says back.
…
Jeff Stelling: And another goal at the Anvil Yards. Dave Willis is there for us.
Dave ‘Iron’ Willis: A third for Accrington Stanley. Francis Jeffers, the original fox in the box, strikes again. Very little seasonal cheer at the Anvil Yards for the second year running for Liam Corwen, sent off for a foul on Jeffers, who in all honesty was giving the big man a runaround, definitely getting the upper hand in the battle of the former England internationals, and the red card might have put Corwen out of his misery. That’s the tenth sending off of his career, incidentally. Looks like Irontown will be in the relegation places for the new year. They need to liven up their act for the visit of Manchester United in the cup, a wonderful distraction from the reality of the league table, that’s for sure…
…
He can tell something’s up when he gets to training, thinks for a moment that it’s just the six-nil to Accrington, a feeling of doom all around. The sending off was a joke, he barely touched him. There’s been an intensity in the last few weeks since the cup draw, but with a few wins as well, and the sense, if nothing more than that, that they might start to climb the table, but the wheels fell off the wagon with the Boxing Day match and there’s something even about the way the cars are parked haphazardly in the car park, as he walks across it from the bus turnaround and up the wooden steps into the prefab that moonlights as the canteen and gym and sometime meeting room, that doesn’t add up at all. Half a dozen of them sit on plastic chairs not looking at each other.
‘You heard?’ Devon asks him.
‘Who’s dead?’
‘We’ve been thrown out of the cup. Ally’s been sacked.’
And he is halfway across the room, to the connecting doors that lead to the dressing rooms, before this registers.
‘What?’
‘He fucked up the paperwork for that First Round game. That kid we’d got in from Cheltenham, he’d played in the qualifiers for some non-league side, fucking August they start them games, never thought to say though, the kid must have forgot, not realised.’
‘Thrown out the cup for that?’
‘Ineligible player. It’s in the rules.’
‘He was shit an’ all!’
Liam can’t tell who says this but still replies, ‘But better than you.’
‘He probably forgot. He was a good player. Prick.’ Kyran says towards the floor and the unidentified voice.
Liam stands in the doorway, ‘No one’s dead,’ he says, ‘no one died.’ He does not know why he says this. The players look at the floor. He thinks of Boris Becker that time, another picture from his bedroom wall, summer distractions, when Becker lost for the first time at Wimbledon, ‘I did not lose a war. No one died.’
No one ever gets sacked here. No one has made a decision for twenty years. Dorothea sits there drooling in the Atlantic sun, from what he understands, refuses to sell up, refuses to do anything, holds all the shares, the last in the dynasty. Steve Stringer fills out bits of paper, writes cheques and invoices, talks to the bank and the league.
‘Who’s sacked him?’
No one answers.
‘Archie says there’s a meeting in a bit, to wait here.’
‘Where else we gonna go?’
‘Archie didn’t fucking sack him,’
‘Archie’s in charge for now.’
‘Who said that?’
‘Archie.’
‘Better get changed anyway, lads,’ is all Liam says, punches the wall in the dressing room when he gets in there, doesn’t notice Julius sitting there in the corner until he’s already done it and his knuckles are bleeding, staring into space, thinks, this whole place is fucking cursed.
‘Archie said to go home,’ Julius says, sitting there, staring into space with a towel wrapped around him, ‘Have the day off. There’ll be a meeting tomorrow.’
…
He pulled her out, saved her. Even the judge had mentioned it when he sentenced him. He pulled her out. There was the shock of hitting the water. It came in through the open window and he felt the shock of it, cold, as it hit his leg and the lurch of the car with the water entering so they went nose first into it and it felt like Alina was in a seat above them as well as behind them, at the angle now, but all of them sinking. The log flume at Alton Towers, that’s what he thought of, shocked by the water. Sonia’s head had gone forward and thumped into the dashboard, she turned to him with her nose bleeding and they look at each other. He swears he can see the look on her face when he shuts his eyes. The back half of the car dropped into the water. Alina was quiet, had been crying, was quiet now, with the shock of the impact he guesses, and the car filling up, going under, the sound of the water sloshing up the sides of the culvert and then come running in through the car windows. She tries to hit him, scratches at his face, his eyes. Both of them still in their seats, water up to their waists. They would find his skin under her nails in the post-mortem. He grabs her wrists and she won’t calm down. He can hear the siren. Alina begins to scream. The windscreen gives way with the brown water, there was a crack in it he knew he should’ve seen to. The glass and water hit him. He twists and reaches to the baby seat, has to pull himself with the water filling the car. They are jammed tight against the bank on Sonia’s side. This is what kills her, when she’s underwater she tries the door handle but it won’t open. Goldie pulls Alina to him, through the gap between the headrests the sound of water pouring in. A splinter in his brain says they are going to die. He pulls him to her, ducks under the water, pushes her from him through the window now because the car is full of water, they are underwater now, and from somewhere, somewhere, some old action film or something he thinks later when he talks of it, and talks
and talks, in counselling, and it is not all bullshit, it has not all wrecked his head, his mind is the shape of the crumpled car all right, but he knows, he understands that with the car full of water they can come out through the window, it shows his speed of thought, he thinks, and he saves his daughter’s life that way, pushes her out and away from him through the window, has to take a hand off her to get himself through the gap wriggling and swallowing some of it, so that he’s choking when he gets his head out, holding Alina away from him half on the steep grass bank that rises from the concrete and if the grass had not been so steep he might have been able to lay Alina down and go back and get Sonia, her belt still fastened, and it is here, still choking and holding Alina and not thinking she is dead, never thinking that until some minutes later, when he sees the policewoman walking away from him with the baby in her arms looking down at her and talking into her radio.
‘Jesus, Rita, there’s a babby.’ He hears a man’s voice, the policeman, and the sound of their boots on the lane. Sonia struggling, the water only just above her head, not quite filling the car, the water not that deep, she could’ve stood up in it.
She didn’t stand up in it. He remembers looking at the water sloshing against steep banks and then back again towards the car roof that was still above the water, at an angle, sloping forward, and the water going more and more still. There was no movement at all. He looked at the banks, still thinking he’d see Sonia, not thinking anything, looking back at the still water and the still car.
‘There’s someone in the car,’ he says to them.
That’s what they talked about after, in the court, how calm he’d said this. He was trying not to panic.
…
Scotland against England is serious business. It is 5 April, 1902, and at Ibrox they have to walk past dead bodies to get back onto the pitch. There are arms and legs at angles they would never be in life. There are men behind the men in charge, always, men in suits in the dressing rooms who tell them to get back out there. They say if they don’t play on there’ll be more dead. They say this time and again through the years.
Iron Towns Page 16