The kit room at the Pinfold was the size of a garden shed and smelled like the inside of a warm towel. Most of it was taken up by a washing machine older than Kit, an industrial monster in chipped white enamel, bolted to the concrete floor because, according to Norman, it had once walked halfway to the door on a spin cycle and tried to leave. Socks hung in pairs from a line strung between the pipes. On the shelf, a radio muttered football scores from grounds a long way away.
Norman took the only chair. Kit stood, because there was nowhere else to stand.
"How long have you known?" Kit said.
"Known what?"
"Yesterday. In the dressing room. You looked at me."
"I look at everybody. I'm the kitman. I'm looking for stains." Norman unscrewed the flask, poured tea into the cup-lid, and held it out. Kit shook his head, so Norman drank it himself. "October 1970," he said. "Home to a side from Barnsley that doesn't exist anymore. I was twenty-two. I'd decided I was packing it in after that game. I'd been offered a job at the wire works. Five and a half days a week, Saturdays included."
Kit went very still.
"Ninetieth minute. Referee's looking at his watch, adding on for a lad who'd been carted off with his ankle. No fingers held up in them days. Nobody told you owt; you played till he blew. And then there it was, hanging over the centre spot, all green lights. Nobody had boards back then. I'd never seen owt like it. I thought I'd had a stroke."
"What did it say?"
"Plus two, to start with. Then it told me the other thing." Norman held up three fingers, thick and bent at the knuckles. "Three seconds. That's what it gave me."
Kit sat down on an upturned crate of shin pads, because his legs had decided for him.
"Mine said five."
"I know. I saw your face." Norman's mouth did something that was nearly a smile. "Five. Well."
He told it the way old men tell you about the weather, flat and without decoration. How he'd seen the ghosts and thought he'd gone daft. How he'd scored that afternoon with his knee from a corner, deep in stoppage time, because he'd seen where the ball would drop before anyone else had. How he'd gone home and not told his mother and not taken the job at the wire works. How the next season Wetherfold had won their league, and the season after that they'd won the one above it, and Norman Beck had scored eleven goals after the ninetieth minute in two years, which was the kind of statistic nobody thought to keep, so nobody had.
"Then Ravensmoor City came in for me," he said. "Proper league club. Forty quid a week and a Ford Cortina. My dad cried. First game for City, ninetieth minute, I'm stood there like a lemon, waiting for the lights."
"And?"
"Nowt." Norman screwed the cup back onto the flask. "Never saw it again. Fourteen games. Then I broke my leg in two places playing for the reserves, and in seventy-four I came back here on a stick, and Frank Culley's father gave me the kit to wash so I'd have a reason to get out of bed." He nodded at the washing machine. "Been washing it since."
The radio read out a score from somewhere on the south coast. The machine ticked as it cooled.
"So it's not me," Kit said slowly. "It's the club."
"It's the shirt. Home or away, didn't matter, long as I had the ram on my chest." Norman tapped his cardigan over his heart, where a badge would be. "It doesn't work from the stand. It doesn't work in training. God knows I tried. It doesn't work in anybody else's colours. And it came to me the week I'd decided to pack it in, and it's come to you the same." He looked at Kit properly for the first time. "I've had fifty-odd years to think about that."
"And?"
"And I reckon that's the only time a man ever properly looks at the clock."
The washing machine clunked, shuddered, and began to fill.
"The nose," said Kit.
"Every time?"
"Only the once, so far."
"Mine was every time. Worse, near the end." Norman said it lightly. Then he didn't say anything else, and the silence took up most of the room.
"Worse how?"
"Just worse." Norman got up, his knees cracking like kindling, and began unpegging socks. "What did it say at the finish? After the whistle."
"Decisive actions, two. Window, five point oh to five point one. Next, forty-five plus."
Norman's hands stopped on the line.
"Point one," he said.
"Is that bad?"
"Mine said three at the start and three at the end. First game to last. It never moved." He turned round with a pair of maroon socks in each hand, and on his face was a look Kit had seen on physios, when they pressed a knee and felt something shift that shouldn't. "I don't know what that means, son. I'd be lying if I said I did."
◆ ◆ ◆
On Tuesday night, Mags Culley called a meeting in the clubhouse.
The clubhouse was a low brick building behind the Wool Shed, with a bar, a dartboard, a carpet that held on to your shoes, and a wall of framed team photographs going back to men with moustaches and centre partings. Kit had walked past them a hundred times. Tonight he stopped at one of them, 1971–72, twenty lads in tight collars and folded arms, squinting into the sun, and found, second from the left on the front row, a skinny, dark-haired boy with a ball under his arm and the grin of someone who had got away with something.
N. BECK, said the typed label.
"Sit down, please, everybody," said Mags. "This won't take long, and none of it's nice."
Margaret Culley was seventy-four and had worn a maroon-and-gold scarf to every occasion Kit had ever seen her at, including a barbecue in July. She had run the club since her husband Frank died six years ago. Everybody was slightly frightened of her, Terry included. He stood at the back with his arms folded and his car keys in his hand, like a man planning his exit.
Mags didn't use notes.
"We owe two hundred and sixty thousand pounds," she said. "Most of it to the taxman, who is not a patient man. I have put in everything Frank left me and a fair bit he didn't. I'm not putting in any more, because there isn't any more."
Nobody spoke. Jaylen, who had clearly come for the free crisps, quietly put his packet down.
"Three weeks ago, a company called Kestrel Ridge Homes offered to buy the Pinfold. Three million, one hundred thousand pounds. Sixty-four houses. They've even named the road. Pinfold Close." Her mouth went thin. "I suppose they think that's a kindness."
"And the club?" asked Marcus. He said it quietly. He'd been coming to the Pinfold since he was six.
"The club would carry on. Ground-share at Cleckfield Athletic. They've a free Saturday every other week."
Cleckfield was twenty-two miles away, over the tops, on a road that shut whenever it snowed. Everyone in the room knew what a ground-share meant for a club like Wetherfold. You kept your name and lost everything else. Dennis wouldn't go to Cleckfield. The under-elevens on the wall wouldn't. In five years there'd be a club called Wetherfold Town playing in front of forty people in somebody else's town, and a few years after that there wouldn't.
"I haven't said yes," said Mags. "I've told them they'll have their answer after the first round proper of the FA Cup."
Kit sat up.
"First Saturday in November. If we're still in the Cup by then, there's gate money and prize money, and if we draw somebody with a name there's the television, and that's a different kind of money altogether. Enough to walk into the bank looking like a football club instead of a charity." She looked round the room at each of them in turn. "Two wins. That's what I'm asking for. Brantholme Town away on Saturday, who are a division above us and like to mention it. Then whoever we draw after that. Win two Cup ties, and I'll tell Kestrel Ridge Homes to try again next year."
"And if we don't?" said Aled.
Mags picked up her handbag.
"Then I'll have done my best," she said, "and so will you. And I'll sign."
◆ ◆ ◆
Kit sat in his car in the dark car park for a long time afterwards, engine off, windows fogging.
He opened his messages. Craig first.
Thanks for asking, mate. I can't do Saturdays. Sorry.
He read it three times and sent it before he could read it a fourth. Then he opened the draft to Terry, the one that had taken three days to write, and deleted it one letter at a time, from the end, so that "honestly" went first.
His phone buzzed almost immediately. Craig: your funeral mate.
A minute later, another one: good goal tho
◆ ◆ ◆
On Thursday, Terry met him at the gate before training with a young man Kit had never seen before.
"Kit, this is Theo. Theo Ackroyd. He's with us on loan for a month."
Theo was twenty and tall, with the careful neatness of someone who'd grown up at a training ground with a canteen and a nutritionist. His training top carried a crest Kit knew better than his own face: a black raven on a white shield. His boots were neon orange and had probably cost more than Kit's car.
"Ravensmoor City," Terry said, as though Kit might have missed it. "Under-21s. Twenty-two goals last season. City are paying his wages, which makes him the cheapest good player I've ever had."
"Nice to meet you," said Theo, and held out his hand. He had a firm, polite handshake and the easy manners of someone who'd been media-trained. "The coaches said you were at City. Before."
"Long time ago."
"They still talk about your year," Theo said. "The year they let everyone go."
He probably meant it kindly. Kit shook his hand and let go of it.
Terry waited until Theo had jogged off toward the pitch, then jerked his head at the nearest floodlight pylon, which was where he did his serious talking.
"He starts Saturday," Terry said. "You're on the bench."
Kit had known it was coming from the moment he saw the orange boots. It still landed like one of Duggan's elbows.
"I scored on Saturday."
"You did. First time you've looked like a footballer since about March. And before that it was one in eleven, Kit, and the one went in off your shin." Terry rubbed his face with both hands. "It's the Cup. It's the whole club. I can't pick a team on one good half-minute. If we need a goal, I'll bring you on."
"When?"
"When I think."
"It has to be before ninety."
Terry frowned. "You what?"
Kit opened his mouth and found nothing in it that he could say out loud. Across the pitch, Norman was pegging wet bibs along the fence to dry, and he didn't look up.
"If you bring me on," Kit said, "it's got to be before the ninetieth minute. I don't care when. Eighty-nine, if you want. Just before ninety."
Terry studied him the way he studied customers who wanted money off a caravan with a cracked chassis.
"Son," he said, "you're a substitute. You'll come on when I tell you."
He went off to put out cones. Kit stayed under the pylon, thinking about a plastic chair outside the kit room, and three bent fingers held up in a warm room, and a board that didn't work from the stand.
Nobody had said anything about the bench.
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