Kit held the mug in both hands and looked at the photograph of Terry and the man from the caravan magazine, because it was easier than looking at Terry.
"If I told you," he said, "you'd think I'd gone mad."
"I manage a football club in the seventh tier for petrol money," said Terry. "I'm in no position to judge."
"You'd drop me."
"I can't drop you for being mad. Half that squad's mad. Aled talks to the crossbar." Terry waited. "Try me."
Kit tried. He didn't tell it all. He didn't know how to tell it all, not in a caravan called Windermere with the gas fire ticking, to a man who'd once sold his own mother a static with a leaky roof and still went round every spring to reseal it. So he gave Terry the shape of it instead.
"After ninety," he said, "I'm better. Something happens. I can't tell you what, because I don't properly understand it. Norman understands it better than me, and he doesn't understand it either. But I need to be on the pitch when it starts. And I need you not to ask me how."
Terry sat back. For a long time he said nothing at all.
"Is it going to hurt you?" he said at last.
It wasn't the question Kit had expected. He found he didn't have an answer ready.
"Maybe," he said.
Terry nodded slowly, as though that were the answer he'd been braced for.
"I've sold caravans for thirty years," he said. "I know when a man's lying to me. You're not lying." He picked up the fixtures folder and finally opened it. "You're just not telling me the truth. That's different. I can work with different."
"So you'll pick me?"
"I'll pick you. And I'll watch you. And if it turns out you've done a deal with the devil, I'd rather not hear about it until after the Cup." He ran a finger down the fixture list. "Now drink your tea. It's the good stuff. I only get it out for customers."
◆ ◆ ◆
Kit hadn't planned to tell Aled. He decided halfway through training on Tuesday night, standing in the rain on the halfway line, watching Aled dive the wrong way for the ninth time in a shooting drill.
It came to him as plainly as the answer to a sum. On Saturday he had seen the Morland goal a second too late, and a single word to the right person, one second earlier, would have stopped it. One word. Not a sprint half the length of the pitch. Not a header off the line that set his ears ringing and his nose running. One word, shouted to someone who would act on it without asking why.
Norman had used it alone, every second it would give him, and it had eaten him from the inside.
Kit didn't have to do it alone.
He waited until the car park had emptied, until only Aled's van was left under the one working floodlight, back doors open while Aled slung his kit bag in among the copper offcuts. The van was white, with PRYCE PLUMBING & HEATING – NO JOB TOO SMALL on the side, and somebody, probably Aled, had added (MOST JOBS TOO SMALL) underneath in smaller letters.
"Al," said Kit. "Have you got ten minutes?"
Aled looked at him. Two years, and Kit had never once asked him for ten minutes.
"Get in," said Aled.
The cab smelled of solder flux and wet dog and the same pine air freshener as the coach, which Kit was beginning to suspect was the official smell of the north of England. There was a child's car seat in the middle, full of crisp packets. Aled moved it into the footwell without comment.
Kit told him everything.
It came out more easily than it had with Terry, perhaps because Aled didn't interrupt, or perhaps because Kit had said some of it once already and the words had worn a groove. The board. The green dots. The ghosts. Five seconds, then five point one, then five point three. Norman, and 1972, and the grey lorry on the M1, and Becca's mug. The Morland goal, which he'd seen coming and been too careful to stop.
When he finished, rain drummed on the roof of the van. Aled was staring straight ahead through the windscreen at the dark bulk of the Wool Shed.
"I knew it," he said.
Kit stared at him. "You knew?"
"Well, not the board. Not the lights. But I knew it was something." Aled turned to face him, and his eyes were very bright. "My nan had the sight."
"Your what?"
"The sight. In Treorchy. She knew when the phone was going to ring. She'd put her cup down and say, 'That'll be your Auntie Glenys,' and it'd ring, and it'd be Auntie Glenys. Every time. Frightened the life out of the milkman." He nodded firmly, as though that settled it. "So when you screamed 'low left' across the whole of West Yorkshire before the boy had even got the ball, I thought to myself, Aled, that's a man who's seen something."
"You never said."
"You never asked." Aled grinned. Then the grin faded, and he said more quietly, "And the nose. That's this?"
"That's this."
"And it's getting worse."
"It gets worse when I use it. Norman thinks it's how much I use it. How hard I lean on it." Kit looked at his hands. "On Saturday I didn't use it at all. No nosebleed, no ghosts on the motorway. And we lost."
Aled was quiet for a moment.
"So what you need," he said slowly, "is to use it without leaning on it."
"That's what I thought."
"Like plumbing. You don't knock the wall down. You find the one joint that's leaking and you fix that one joint." He sat up, warming to it. "You don't need to run about. You need to tell people. Quick. One word. And they need to know what the word means without having to think."
"That's exactly what I thought," said Kit.
"Well, I thought it better." Aled pulled a biro off the dashboard and a delivery note out of the door pocket. On the back of it he drew a goal: two posts and a crossbar, slightly wonky. He split it into six boxes. "Top row, one, two, three, left to right. Bottom row, four, five, six. My left to my right. Always mine, never yours."
"Because you're the important one."
"Because I'm the one diving, Kit." He wrote the numbers in. "You shout 'four', I go low left. No thinking. 'Stay', I stay on my line. 'Come', I come out and claim it. And 'wait'—" he tapped the pen against his teeth "—'wait' means he's going to shape to shoot and not shoot. Stay on my feet."
Kit looked at the drawing. It was simple and wonky and obviously right.
"Your nan would be proud," he said.
"My nan would say I should've thought of it sooner." Aled folded the note and tucked it into his wallet, behind a photo of two small girls in matching yellow raincoats. Then he frowned. "What about penalties?"
"What about them?"
"A shoot-out. Does it work?"
Kit thought about it. The board came with stoppage time. A penalty shoot-out wasn't stoppage time. It wasn't any kind of time. It was just twelve yards, a man, and a ball.
"No," he said. "I don't think it does."
"Right." Aled started the engine. The wipers swept the rain aside, and for a moment the Wool Shed stood clear in the headlights, old and black and dripping. "Then we'd better not get to one."
◆ ◆ ◆
On Wednesday morning, at a quarter past five, Kit drove the laundry van past the Pinfold on his way to the industrial estate and saw something white on the lamp post outside the turnstiles.
He nearly drove on. He was early, the notice was small, and it was still dark. Instead he pulled over, left the engine running, and got out into the cold.
It was a sheet of A4 in a plastic sleeve, cable-tied to the lamp post at head height, with the council's crest at the top.
TOWN AND COUNTRY PLANNING ACT. NOTICE OF APPLICATION FOR PLANNING PERMISSION.
Beneath it, in smaller print: Demolition of existing football ground and stands. Erection of 64 dwellings with associated access road (Pinfold Close), parking and landscaping. Applicant: Kestrel Ridge Homes Ltd.
And beneath that: Anyone wishing to comment on this application should do so within 21 days.
There was a site plan printed at the bottom, small and grey and precise. Kit had to lean in close to read it under the streetlight. He found the outline of the Pinfold, the familiar oblong of it. He found the thin rectangle where the Wool Shed stood, now filled with neat numbered plots: 14, 15, 16, 17. He found the Lake end. He found the car park.
And he found the road.
Pinfold Close came in off Tenter Street, curved gently between the new houses, and ended in a tidy turning circle for the bin lorries, exactly where the centre spot was. Exactly where, after ninety minutes, the board hung in the air.
Somebody had drawn a cul-de-sac straight through the middle of it.
Kit stood in the cold with the van ticking over behind him and read it all again.
Three days until the landlords came to the Pinfold.
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