Knowledge Is Money

Peep peep. 0-0.

"I cannot feel my hands," Ted said. "Nerves have gone and took them clean off me."

"Nor can I feel mine."

"You, though. You are meant to be the calm one. The one who always had the sharpest read in the room."

"There is no read left in me, Ted. Not since November. I am as blind as you now, and I have made my peace with the dark."

He turned and looked at me a long moment, an old man working a puzzle out.

"Then I am sorry for you, and glad of you, both in the one breath." He worked his cold jaw. "A man should not have to learn the not knowing this late, with this much stood on it."

"I am learning it off the best there is. You have carried 60 years of it up these terraces."

"That is why you gave me the ticket." He said it slowly, the puzzle coming clear in him.

"It was never a favour to me at all. You did not want to sit up here on your own, blind. You wanted somebody beside you who has done nothing but not know for 60 years, and loved the club through every hour of it."

"You have found me out, Ted."

"Aye, well." He passed me the flask. "Drink that. You get used to the not knowing, in the end. It is how any of us has ever done it, every Saturday of our lives, and here we all still are, waiting on the next one."

The second half, Sadler pushed us up the pitch and threw fresh legs on, and on 66 minutes the game broke our way.

A corner, swung in deep. whud, Marsh climbed one last time on his 33-year-old knees and glanced it back across the 6-yard box. Big Pete came thundering off the bench and nodded it down and in from a yard out.

RRRRP. 1-0.

The 700 came off their feet, and Ted came up off his with them, 79 years old and both arms straight in the air, the cup and the flask gone flying, hot tea over 3 rows and not one soul minding it.

"GET IN," he was roaring, gripping my shoulder. "GET IN, MY SON. THAT ONE IS OURS."

"WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED. WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED."

The whole amber corner, arms round one another, swaying on their feet, singing the old hymn across at a home end that had gone silent with dread.

"20 minutes." Ted dropped back into his seat and took my arm, gripping it hard enough to leave a mark.

"20 minutes and we are on the brink of it. I have waited my whole life for 20 minutes of football. Do not let me watch, son. Tell me the second it is done."

"I cannot see the end any better than you can, Ted. We wait it out together, the 2 of us."

So we waited, and it was the longest wait of 2 whole lives.

Barnet threw at us everything a drowning club has to throw. Every ball came looping back into our box. Prentice headed one off our own line with Braithwaite stranded. thunk. A shot took a deflection and spun a yard the right side of the post. dnk.

"They cannot score now," Ted kept saying, half to me, half to a God he had let go of a long time back. "They cannot. Not with us this close. Not now."

The clock on the little scoreboard crawled. 82 minutes. 84. Sadler was off his bench and onto the touchline, waving them deeper, then waving them higher, a man wrestling the same helplessness we were all sat in.

"Sit on it or see it out," Ted said. "There is no right answer to that one. There is only the whistle, and the whistle will not come."

Barnet won another corner. Peep. Our lot stopped singing and started praying, 700 mouths gone still at once. 20 years I had sat above days like this, the ending already in my pocket, while these people sweated every ball with nothing to hold. Now I sweated it with them.

whud, a header cleared. The breath came back into our corner in a rush.

On 88 minutes they scored.

A long throw we half cleared. A shot we half blocked. The ball reared up off somebody’s shin and dropped over Braithwaite’s fingers and under the bar. The scruffiest goal in the world, and it counted.

rrp. 1-1. And Underhill came down around our ears.

"STAY UP. STAY UP. STAY UP."

The home end went up like a roof torn off in a gale. Beside me Ted made no sound at all. All afternoon he had roared himself raw, and now there was nothing coming off him, and the nothing was louder than the whole home end put together.

His hand was still shut round my arm from the goal 20 minutes gone, and he had forgotten it was there. I left it where it was.

"Sam." He said it very quietly, after a while. "Sam. We were 2 minutes from the brink of it."

"I know, Ted."

"2 minutes."

"I know."

We threw men forward for the 6 minutes the referee gave us on top. Vardy dragged one wide off his weaker foot and stood with his hands on his head, saying nothing to anybody. Gray forced their keeper into a sprawling save, slap, that kept a frightened little club breathing another week.

Peeep, peep, PEEEEEEP. Barnet 1, Tilbrook 1.

Down on the pitch Craig pulled the players into a tight knot by the travelling support and said something short into the middle of it.

They lifted their heads and clapped the 700 who had driven all that way, and the 700 stood and clapped them back. Nobody hid from it. Craig does not let them hide.

A point. It landed on us like a defeat and on them like a man dragged out of a river. One point, off one scruffy goal, and it broke our end of the ground and saved theirs.

Ted sat with the empty flask in his lap and did not rise while the ground emptied around the 2 of us.

"I am not downhearted," he said at last, which was the bravest lie I heard told all season.

"We are still up there, Sam. Still standing, with a home game left to put it right. It is only that I am 79, and a man my age has learned to be careful about counting on next week."

"Next week is all we have got now, Ted. So you and I will count on it together, hard as we can, and we will be proved right for it."

Priya rang the car on the road home with the other results in.

"Crawley won," she said. "They do not slip, that lot. So it comes down to the final day. Level on points, us and them, and one game each left to play."

"Give me the shape of it. Plain as you can make it."

"Plain as I can, then. Beat them at home next Saturday and you are up. Win, and it does not matter a jot what Crawley do at their place, because our goal difference carries the day." A breath.

"Win, and we climb up in front of your own people, on your own grass, with the whole town packed in to see it."

"And if we do not win?"

"A draw or worse, and Crawley can take that last automatic seat off us, and it is the play-off lottery and a month of prayer." She let that sit a second. "You will win it, though, Sam. At home. I can feel it in my water."

"You feel it. I used to know it. A feeling is what we are down to now, the pair of us, and a feeling will have to carry the day."

One game. At Marsh Road. The whole town packed onto our own grass, and everything I had spent 2 lives building, come down to 90 minutes of football.

I would watch it the way Ted watches, the way every honest soul in that ground has taken their football since long before I ever walked in the door of it.

[ SYSTEM ]no map. no shape. nothing.the same next saturday everyone else gets.

The panel had gone so faint I took it more from memory than from any light it threw. Whatever it once held for me had emptied out a long time back, and I had stopped reaching after the last of it.

Ted wound his window down as the town lights came up on the ring road, and let the cold air in, and breathed it deep, like a man settling his mind to be around for one more Saturday whatever the week tried to charge him for it.

"One more week," he said. "60 years, and it all comes down to one more week. I can do one more week stood on my head, son."

"Marsh Road, next Saturday, my box, that same seat," I said. "You and me, in the dark, finding out with everybody else in the place."

"I would not miss that," Ted said, "for anything left to me on this earth."

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