Only a Game (15 page)

Percy shook his head. ‘No one close enough as yet. Golfers haven't the style and breadth of vision for this job. They tend to question my parentage every time I hole a long putt.'

‘What about a senior officer in the police force? Someone you've worked with for years?' suggested Agnes Blake hopefully.

Percy shuddered. Lucy said, ‘That's a thought, Percy. Chief Superintendent Tucker would do the job beautifully. He'd add the touch of gravitas which you don't seem able to muster for yourself.'

Percy glared at her; there were limits to humour. ‘Tommy Bloody Tucker couldn't even find the right church.'

‘Don't exaggerate.'

Percy glanced from the young face to the older one. ‘There is one bloke I might use, though. But I'd need Mrs B's approval first.'

‘And who is this mysterious and courageous person?'

Percy took a deep breath. ‘Clyde Northcott.'

‘You're not serious!'

‘I'm deadly serious.'

Agnes decided it was time to intervene. ‘So who is this person whom my daughter thinks cannot be a serious candidate?'

‘He's a DC who works for Percy,' said Lucy. ‘One of his protégés. Clyde was once a suspect in a murder case and a user and small-time supplier of cocaine. A man whom Percy recruited, first into the police service and a couple of years later into his CID team. A hard bastard.'

‘Language, our Lucy,' said Percy primly.

‘That's your own phrase for him. He's a young man, mum, about twenty-four, I think. He's six feet three and as tough as they come.'

‘Sounds like a hard bastard,' said Agnes Blake reflectively. ‘And a reformed sinner. Well, from your description, he seems eminently well suited for the job. If he's as tall and erect as you indicate, he might even bring a touch of added distinction to our old church.'

‘Oh, Clyde Northcott would stand out all right, Mrs B,' said Percy. ‘He's also very black indeed.'

‘Is that why you needed my approval?'

‘I suppose it is.'

Agnes sighed theatrically. It was always good to shock the young. ‘You disappoint me, Percy Peach. I didn't think I would ever have to say that, but now I do. He will certainly add distinction to this occasion. He will set off my daughter's pink and white complexion perfectly and probably be the star of the reception at Marton Towers.' She drew herself very erect on her chair. ‘I look forward to making Mr Northcott's acquaintance.'

Percy beamed fondly at her. ‘And Clyde will certainly think you are the cat's whiskers with cream on, Mrs B!'

It was confession time at Gamblers Anonymous.

Darren Pearson listened to a quiet catalogue of successes from the rest of the group with increasing dismay. They were like smug participants in a Weight Watchers group who were boasting gleefully of losing a few pounds in weight, he thought sourly. The difference here was that the pounds lost by gamblers were monetary and deadly serious. It was going to be his turn soon at the end of the circle; he willed each of the three before him to confess to some falling by the wayside, even to the veniality of being sorely tempted, but none of them did.

It was his turn. He stared down at the threadbare carpet, bit back the irrelevant comment that it would have been better removed altogether. ‘I slipped up, this week. Went to the betting shop, the one I always use.' He glanced at the counsellor in the middle of the group. ‘You're right; we should cultivate the habit of walking past those places, concentrating on some other shop at the end of the street. I didn't do that. I drove there specially to use the place.' He piled on the detail, needing to lacerate himself, to expose the full squalor of his failure.

He paused for such a long time, sinking more deeply into his misery, that they thought he was not going to speak again. He was not sure where the gentle voice came from as it said, ‘How much did you stake, Darren?'

They did not use surnames here, though some of them knew each other as friends now from long acquaintance. He smiled a mirthless smile, staring still at the tired carpet, echoing its defeated state in his own tone. ‘I tried to stake a thousand. They wouldn't take it. I already owed too much, they said.'

The silence was profound. The group did not know whether to celebrate this small, negative victory, which had been offered to him rather than won by him. Again they thought he was not going to speak, but eventually he said, as though the words were being wrung from him against his will, ‘It won, you know, that horse. Three to one. Supreme Nelly, it was called. Daft name, but I'd have knocked three thousand off my debts, if they'd taken the bet.'

It was the counsellor's voice which now said firmly, ‘I'm sorry about that, Darren. Believe me, it would have been better if it had lost. That way it wouldn't have fostered the absurd idea that you can get yourself out of trouble by more betting. You know and we all know that it doesn't work like that. The reason why all of you are here is that you have learned that the hard way. The odd win just supports illusion. What is the thing we have to do?'

She spoke to them like children, but they were children, in this context, and they knew it. A ragged wail from three or four of them said, ‘Look at the whole picture!' and the others nodded firmly, to show their endorsement of this new axiom of their existence.

‘And when we look at the whole picture, we invariably find that we lose far more than we gain, that the occasional windfall never compensates for our losses during a year, that we get ourselves further and further into trouble, if we try to bail ourselves out by the very means which has scuppered us.'

There was more nodding around the circle, a murmured affirmation in which even Darren Pearson eventually joined, as the group tried to bolster their weakling by a restatement of the saving dogma, like a church congregation joining fervently into the responses of a service.

Then two or three of them recounted similar falls by the wayside to that which Darren had just related, assuring him that there was strength in numbers, that he must not be discouraged, that this place and these people would help him, that the refusal to extend his credit was a blessing in itself, a tool he must use as he fought for salvation.

The counsellor had a few words with him alone before he left, voicing the truisms he knew he must observe, insisting he should ring whenever he felt tempted.

There was nothing subtle or magical about the session, yet he went home bolstered, feeling as he had not done before he enrolled that he had the strength to fight this, that he was not unique and above all not alone. It was only as he reviewed the group and its support in the small hours of the night that their comments seemed childish and their support too puny for his fight.

TEN

L
iverpool at Brunton. Always one of the games of the season, but this year more than ever so. Liverpool at the top of the Premiership in a tight race, contesting the title in the last six games of the season against Manchester United and Chelsea. Brunton Rovers at the other end of the league, clear of the bottom three places at the moment, but with a tough programme of games to end the season and relegation still a possibility.

Beautifully set up, the press and the broadcasting media had decided. The big boys going flat out for their first Premiership title of the century, the smaller team on a good run of results, with all the added spice of a Lancashire derby thrown in for good measure. The managers, players and supporters of the two teams were much too nervous to want a contest which was ‘beautifully set up'. They wanted not glorious uncertainty but a match with some assurance of points, of a victory in Liverpool's case and of at least a point for a draw in that of the Rovers.

Even the directors and senior officials of the two clubs had caught the excitement and the nervousness, so that there was a brittle quality to the conversation and the laughter in the board room at Grafton Park. As owner and chairman of the home team, Jim Capstick circulated among the visitors with glass in hand, as affable as he always was on these occasions. He acknowledged his team's need for points, ruefully nodded his assent to the view that Liverpool too needed the victory, for very different reasons. He did not talk about anything beyond the end of the season in another month, but that was not required of him; with such a match beginning in less than an hour, no one cared to look beyond five o'clock today.

Helen Capstick had an abstracted air: she was watching her husband's progress around the room rather than involving herself in any demanding conversational exchange. With her hair the colour of polished bronze and her erect figure and carriage, she could never be unnoticeable, but she took the easy way out and retreated behind a façade of ignorance, maintaining that her scanty knowledge of football made her a loyal supporter but nothing more. She was here as a lady who wanted to give her husband every support but did not pretend to the knowledge or involvement which excited most of the others around her.

Robbie Black was not here, of course. The Scottish manager was in the dressing room below them, bolstering his grim-faced players for the fray, stressing the tactics for the momentous ninety minutes ahead of them. But Debbie Black, still better known to most of the visitors as the glamorous tennis player and model Debbie Palmer, was making most of the men in the room think of things other than football, even with such a match in prospect. The irony was that Debbie, despite her large hazel eyes and still compelling figure, had a knowledge of the history of the game and of Brunton Rovers which would have surprised her listeners.

Debbie reminded the visiting chairman gently that Brunton Rovers were founder members of the league and had been around much longer than Liverpool. She spoke in surprising detail about the lads from Brunton who had ventured south in the nineteenth century to win the FA Cup from the southern public school toffs who regarded it as their private competition, then pointed out the old black and white photograph in the corner of the room of those sturdy champions who had won so many cups at the end of the nineteenth century.

Edward Lanchester relished the occasion because it reminded him of so many similar great days in the past. He was delighted to find that the old friend he had known for almost forty years was still on the Liverpool board. Joe Nolan was ten years older and more stooped than Edward, with red cheeks and a cherubic appearance which clothed a wealth of harsh experience. He had fought in the 1939–45 war, remembered coming home on leave and weeping when he found the Mersey dotted with the masts of sunken ships and his mother bombed out of her house. Both men remembered a harsher world, where it had seemed impossible for two or three years that their country could survive, where for six years there had been no football save for wartime ‘friendlies'. The octogenarian Scouser reminded Lanchester that football was an escape from the harsher realities of life, that no matter how passionately you felt about it, it was not life itself.

‘We're relics of an age that's gone,' Joe Nolan said to the younger man, without any great bitterness. ‘It's good of them to keep us on – sometimes I think they like to remind themselves of times when life was simpler and it was easier to see it for what it was.'

‘You're a wise man, Joe,' said Lanchester. ‘You see things as they are and don't resent it. I envy you that.' He told this man who was on the other side this afternoon about the death of his wife, confessed for the first time to this relative stranger how much he missed her presence and the way she had kept his judgements sound. Joe Nolan was more moved than he could explain to himself by the death of this woman he had never known and its effect upon his friend.

Darren Pearson sat at the side of the room with his opposite number from Liverpool. He kept an eye on the busy scene to make sure all was going well, that none of the club's visitors were being neglected, and listened to the very different problems of a club with foreign owners. Their massive investment in the club made it sound as if it was on another planet, not competing in the same league as Brunton Rovers.

The crowded room grew quieter as these privileged people looked at their watches and began to filter out towards the cloakrooms and their seats in the main stand. Darren was the last to leave, complimenting the girls coming in to clear the room on the excellence of the food, reminding them to be sure to tell Mrs Bates that the visitors had said once more that she made the finest apple pies in Britain. He marvelled again that he could function so competently on this public level whilst losing the battle in his private war.

All of these luminaries forgot their own concerns in the compressed ninety minutes of sporting war which began at three o'clock. It was a gloomy afternoon, and the floodlights made the football battlefield even more theatrical, illuminating the two acres of grass like a massive stage, contributing their own effect to the contest, as the skies gradually darkened around the old stadium and the world disappeared, save for the vivid green expanse and the players acting out their drama upon it.

Liverpool took the game to a rather nervous Rovers side at first, a fierce shot narrowly missing the goal, to a collective gasp of relief from the home supporters and a collective groan from the visitors' enclosure. Ten minutes into the match, the veteran Rovers goalkeeper pulled off a marvellous save, flicking the ball at full stretch over the corner of his goal, then rising from the turf to berate his relieved defence for not attending earlier to the threat.

The Rovers threatened more as they settled to the task, but it was twenty minutes before the Liverpool goalie made his first save and that was a straightforward one. Liverpool were swifter and more direct, exuding the confidence which came from their position in the league and a succession of good results. The Rovers' attacks were fitful and not as sustained as they would have wished. But they defended sturdily, so that there were few clear chances of goals at either end.