Becca got up at four in the afternoon, which for a nurse on nights was the crack of dawn, and she was at Kit's door by five with her hair still wet and her phone already out.
"Explain this," she said.
It was a video Nadia had posted from the coach home: forty seconds of grown men with their arms round each other, singing ninety, ninety, ninety-FIVE, the camera swinging past headrests and crisp packets until it found Kit, grey as a dishcloth, with a twist of cotton wool poking out of one nostril, trying to smile.
"It's a song," said Kit. "Not a good one."
"The nose, Kit."
"It bled."
"How much?"
He considered lying, then considered who he'd be lying to. "Three towels."
Becca shut her eyes for a second, the way she did when a patient admitted they'd had chest pains for a fortnight but hadn't wanted to be a bother. Then she walked past him into the kitchen and put the kettle on, because that was what Rawleys did in a crisis.
The kitchen in the flat above the bookmaker's was the size of a phone box; when two people stood in it, one of them had to breathe in. Becca reached for the cupboard. Her ghost reached first, a grey arm sliding past her real one toward the chipped mug on the drainer, the only clean one, and Kit picked it up and held it out before he'd thought about it.
Becca's real hand stopped halfway to the shelf. She looked at the mug. Then at him.
"How did you know I wanted that?"
"It's the only clean one."
"It was behind you. You didn't look." She took it slowly. "And you flinched at the kettle before it clicked off. I saw you."
Kit said nothing. The kettle clicked off.
"Sit down," said Becca.
He sat on the one stool. She leaned against the fridge with her arms folded and the empty mug in her hand, and he told her what he could. Not the board. Not the ghosts, or the grey lorry on the M1, or a man called Late Norrie who had watched his mother put the teapot down five seconds early. He told her about Gareth Lomas, and the two thousand pounds, and the job.
"Trainee site manager," Becca repeated. "Thirty-one thousand."
"And a van."
"And weekends off." She put the mug down. "Kit. That's more than I earn."
"I know."
"You'd have a pension. A real one, not a laundry's idea of one." She was counting on her fingers now, the way she had across the table in the carvery. "You've got a knee that clicks. You've got nosebleeds that go through towels. You've been seeing—" She stopped, and chose a different word. "You've been odd. And a man is offering you a proper job with a proper wage, and all you have to do is stop playing for a club that pays you a hundred and twenty quid a week when Mags remembers."
"It's not about the money."
"Everything's about the money when you haven't got any." She said it gently, which made it worse. "You gave football eleven years. What did it give you back?"
He thought of Dennis at the front of the away end, arms unfolding. He thought of Jaylen screaming I CUT IT BACK. He thought of Norman watching the maroon shirts turn over behind the glass, saying Or that.
None of it was the kind of answer you could give a nurse.
"I'll go and see him," he said. "I'll listen."
"Good." Becca picked up her keys. At the door she turned back. "I've booked you in at the doctor's on Thursday. Twenty past eight. Don't argue. And Kit? Whatever that was with the mug—" She hesitated. "Don't do it at work."
◆ ◆ ◆
The Kestrel Ridge showhome stood at the end of a brand-new road on the east side of Wetherfold, where the dye works used to be. Kit's grandad had worked at the dye works for thirty years and come home every night with blue hands. Now it was forty identical houses in pale brick, a sign at the entrance that said HERON'S REACH – LUXURY 3 & 4 BEDROOM FAMILY HOMES, and a flag on a pole cracking in the wind with a kestrel on it.
Inside, the showhome smelled of scented candles and new carpet. Everything was cream. There was a bowl of plastic lemons on the kitchen island, a shelf of books whose spines said nothing at all, and, Kit suspected, a king-size bed upstairs that nobody had ever slept in. He found himself wondering who supplied the sheets.
Gareth Lomas was waiting at the kitchen island with two coffees from a proper machine.
He was more ordinary than his photograph. Tanned, yes, and silver-haired, but shorter than Kit had expected, with a slight limp on his left side and a handshake that was warm and dry and brief. He wore a navy jumper with no logo on it. He looked like somebody's favourite uncle.
"Kit. Thanks for coming. I know you're on your break." He pushed a coffee across. "Flat white. I guessed. Tell me if I guessed wrong and I'll make you another."
"It's fine."
"That goal on Saturday." Lomas shook his head, smiling. "I've watched it more times than I'd admit to my wife. The cut-back. You were on the spot before the lad had decided to pull it back. That's not something you can coach."
"It went in," said Kit. "That's all."
"That's all it ever needs to do." Lomas settled onto one of the bar stools and waited until Kit took the other. He didn't hurry. He had the manner of a man who'd had a thousand of these conversations on a thousand kitchen islands and had learned that whoever talked first usually lost.
So Kit waited too.
"I'll be straight with you," said Lomas eventually. "The job's real. It isn't a trick. We've got four sites opening in the next eighteen months, and I need people who can manage lorries and deliveries and grown men who don't want to be told what to do. That's you. You've spent six years getting sheets to hotels on time and eleven years in dressing rooms." He turned his cup slowly on the counter. "I did my cruciate at thirty-one. Left knee. Best thing that ever happened to me. Made me get a proper job."
"You were a left-back."
"A decent one. For about a fortnight." He smiled again. "Football's a lovely thing to love, Kit. It's a terrible thing to rely on. It never loves you back the way you want. You'd know. Ravensmoor let you go at eighteen, didn't they?"
Kit didn't answer.
"I'm not saying it to be cruel. I'm saying you've had one door shut in your face already. I'm offering you one that stays open."
"And takes me out of Saturday."
Lomas didn't pretend. Kit gave him that.
"Yes," he said simply. "It does. I won't insult you. I'd like to win on Saturday week, and you're the most dangerous thing Wetherfold have got. Margaret knows it, I know it, you know it." He spread his hands. "But the job would still be real on the Monday after, whatever the score. And the Monday after that. And when you're thirty-five, and forty, and your knee has finally had enough."
It was a good speech. That was the trouble. Kit could hear Becca in it, counting on her fingers. He could hear himself at three in the morning, adding up what the laundry paid.
And underneath it all, there was the thing Lomas didn't know he was offering. Change the shirt, and the board goes. The grey lorries go. The cyclists and the teapots and the mug on the drainer. Everything goes quiet.
Whether I lost it, Norman had said, or it let me go.
Or whether you ran.
Kit put his coffee down.
"Thanks," he said. "It's a good job. Whoever gets it will be lucky." He stood up. "But I've got a job. And I've got a club."
Lomas looked at him for a long moment. He didn't seem angry. If anything he seemed interested, the way a man looks at a crossword clue that has turned out harder than he expected.
"Offer stands until the Friday before the tie," he said. "In case you change your mind."
"I won't."
"People do." He walked Kit to the door himself, past the plastic lemons and the books with no words in them. On the step, with the kestrel flag snapping overhead, he stopped.
"Can I tell you something odd?"
Kit waited.
"Boxing Day, 1971," said Lomas. "Cleckfield away at Wetherfold. My father played centre-half for us in those days. Big Ray Lomas. I was seven. He sat me in the stand with a flask of Bovril, and we were winning two–one at ninety minutes." He looked out across the pale brick houses. "Then a skinny lad called Beck scored twice in stoppage time, and my father never forgot it. He talked about that game until the week he died. Do you know what he used to say?"
"No," said Kit, though something cold had started to gather in his stomach.
"He said it was like marking a ghost." Lomas smiled his favourite-uncle smile. "Watching your goals, I keep thinking about that. Is he still there, your kitman? Norman Beck?"
Kit didn't answer.
"Give him my regards," said Gareth Lomas, and closed the door.
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