Glory Of The Football Manager System

Chapter 680: Back London & Steve

We flew down on the Wednesday.

There was no drive this time, no privacy-glass corner and no greasy spoon, because I had a clock on me now with a federation at the end of it, and because a man who got signed by a World Cup on the Tuesday does not spend five hours on the M6 on the Wednesday.

Jessica had a plane on the runway at Manchester before I had finished saying I needed to be in London by noon. A small one, eight seats, the kind of quiet money that does not have a name painted on the side. I have flown business to away legs in Europe. I had never had the whole tube to myself with my fiancée and a flask of proper coffee somebody had remembered I take black.

Emma came with me. She had three jobs in London screaming for her and she put all three on hold one more day, because she said a man does not sign his life over to a tournament on a Tuesday and walk in to leave his football club on a Wednesday on his own, and she was right, the way she is usually right about the things I’d have got wrong without her.

She had dressed for landing, not for the sofa, and that was the first thing I clocked when she came up the little fold-down steps.

The soft grey joggers were gone. Good dark jeans cut to fit her, the denim sitting on the wide curve of her hips the way the price tag promised it would.

A thin knit the colour of red wine, the kind she only wears when she means business, and under it, for once, the proper architecture, the bra doing the lifting it was built for, holding the shape of her up and out so the whole line of her landed across that little cabin before she had said a single word.

She had a podcast to record the second we touched down, and Emma armours up for work the way I armour up for a press conference. She looked like the woman the country thinks she is.

Not the one who eats my chips at the wheel, or arches into my hands in the dark with nothing on but the ring. Both of them are mine. I get the warm yielding one in the dark and the sharp untouchable one walking into a room, and I have never once decided which I would rather watch.

She caught me looking somewhere over Stafford, the engines a steady drone under everything, a paper cup creaking in the holder by my knee.

"Stop it," she said, not looking up from her phone, doing the thing where she knows.

"I’ve not said a word."

"You’ve gone quiet in the way that’s louder than talking, Daniel. I can hear it from here."

"You look like you’re about to sack somebody on air."

"The day’s young." She put the phone face down in her lap and looked over, and the corner of her mouth went up, slow, because she had clocked exactly where my eyes had been and was deciding what to do about it. "It’s the jumper."

"It’s the assembled effect."

"The assembled effect." She liked that. She sat back in the leather and let me have a proper look, deliberate, the knit pulling as she stretched, just to watch it do what it was doing to me. "You’ve had me in your boxers and a vest top for three days straight, Daniel Walsh, and the thing that undoes you is a clean jumper and a bit of underwiring."

"You scrub up, Em. It’s a known fact. I’m allowed to notice."

"You’re allowed to notice." She undid her seatbelt, the buckle going snick, leaned across the little aisle, and put her hand flat and high on my thigh, warm through the denim, her mouth close to my ear so the pilot’s lot up front got none of it.

"You’re not allowed to do anything about it at thirty thousand feet with a federation waiting. So hold the thought, Walsh. You’re good at holding thoughts."

But she did not take the hand back. That is the thing about Emma.

She picked the phone up again left-handed and went back to her notes, frowning at a running order, building a podcast in her head, and the whole while her right hand stayed where it was on my leg, moving a little, an absent stroke of her thumb she was not even thinking about, because Emma cannot work and love you and not be touching you all at the same time, she has to have a hand on me the way some people have to have the radio on. She held off the rest of it. She never once let go.

We were halfway to London with her thumb still going on my thigh and her eyes on a script, and that, more than anything she had said, was the most Emma thing in the world.

Ding. Seatbelt sign for the descent, and only then did she give my leg one last squeeze and sit back and do her belt up. We came down through the grey into London in the time it would have taken us to clear Birmingham by road, the wheels meeting the runway with a chirp and a rumble that ran up through the seats.

And Jessica was on the tarmac.

This is the bit I cannot explain about her.

She had been in a Manchester coffee shop yesterday lunchtime and on a last flight south last night, she had spent the small hours getting forty pages of contract across two sets of lawyers, and here she was on the apron at a London airfield in a coat that had not got a single crease in it, beside a black car with the engine running and a chauffeur already holding the back door, looking like a woman who had strolled out of her own front room thirty seconds ago.

I do not know when she sleeps. I have decided she does not, that she powers down for an hour a night somewhere in a cupboard and wakes fully charged. She does not so much arrive places as turn out to have been there the whole time, waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

"Walsh." No hello. She has not said hello to me in twelve months.

"You’re at Parish’s for half eleven, I moved it forward, he’s better in the morning. Car’s yours all day. Emma." A nod, warmer, the only soft edge she has. "There’s a second car for you, your three o’clock got bumped to four, you’re welcome."

"How did you...? " Emma started.

"I rang them." Like that explained anything. Like ringing a national broadcaster and rearranging their schedule was the same as ringing for a pizza.

She was already walking, heels going clack clack clack fast and even across the tarmac, and we followed, because everybody follows Jessica, it is simply what the body does.

It is a small thing, the car waiting, the meeting moved, the coffee that was black without my asking. It is the kind of small thing you only notice when somebody has done it for you. I had a hundred decisions coming that day and Jessica had quietly lifted six of them off the pile before I’d known they were on it.

"She’s not human," Emma said, low, watching her get into the front car. "I keep saying it and it keeps being true."

"She’ll have the wedding booked by August if we let her."

"Let her." Emma kissed me at the car door, hard, business and love in the same press of it, the new ring cold against my jaw. "Go and break their hearts gently. You’re good at that." And she got into her car, the door going thunk behind her, and was gone to talk about somebody else’s football, and I got into mine.

I went straight to Steve.

I saw Parish first. Before my own staff, before anyone. That was the right order and I wanted to be looking at the man’s face when there was nobody else in the room to perform for. He gave me five matches when I was a caretaker nobody fancied. I was not going to let him learn the real shape of this off a lawyer’s email.

He was happier than I had any right to expect.

"Sit down. Stop standing there like you’ve come to confess to a murder." He had the look of a man who’d been awake on it for two nights and had come out the other side somewhere good.

"I’ve chewed this for two days and I’ve gone from worried sick to a thing I did not see coming, which is pleased. You want to know why?"

"Because I’m coming back."

"Because of what we got out of it." He spun his monitor round, the base scraping on the desk. A document, federation crest at the top, Palace badge at the bottom, a heading I’d never seen because it had been built in the small hours by two sets of lawyers while I was squinting at a goalkeeper on a hotel telly.

"They came to us needing a manager for six weeks. So my lot asked the only question a football club should ever ask, which is, and what’s in it for us, beyond the warm glow." He tapped the glass, tk tk.

"A development partnership. A joint academy, out there, on the ground. Our coaching, our methods, first look at the talent coming out of one of the best young-player nations on the planet. We’ve been trying to get a foot in that door for three years and getting it shut on us every time, and your six weeks has just kicked it clean off the hinges. So no, lad. I am not sat here mourning. I am sat here looking at the best bit of business this club has done since the morning I gave you the job, and I’m including the football in that."

"You’d not have got near that academy without me going out there."

"I would not have got within a thousand miles of it."

He stood, came round the desk, put a hand on my shoulder, which is as far inside the gate as Steve ever lets you.

"So you go with my blessing in writing and a clean conscience, and when you come home there’ll be a building out there with our crest on the wall that exists because you said yes to a daft phone call. Now."

The hand tightened once. "Sort your staff. That’s the bit that keeps me up, not you. This club runs in eight days without its manager, its lead analyst, its set-piece coach and its head of medicine, in the middle of a window, and somebody has to hold the whole thing on their back while you’re gone. Have you thought about who."

"Steve, I’ve thought about nothing else since Manchester."

"Good. Then go and tell her she’s getting the job before she talks herself out of it."

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.