January Window (41 page)

‘Are you serious?’ asked her daughter.

‘Very.’

‘No, really, we couldn’t,’ said the old man. ‘Not now he’s dead. It wouldn’t seem fair, somehow. I mean on the television it said the man had been murdered. We couldn’t accept it, could we, dear? Mariella? What do you think?’

‘Oh, Dad,’ his daughter said irritably. ‘Of course we can accept it. It only seems unfair. But it isn’t unfair at all. After all you’ve gone through, it’s exactly what you and Mum should do.’

‘But Mrs Zarco is a widow now,’ said his wife. ‘She can ill afford this kind of expense, surely. That poor man. What his wife must be feeling now. We should speak to John. Ask him what he thinks.’

‘We’ll take it, Mr Manson,’ Mariella told me firmly.

Her parents looked at each other uncertainly, and then Mrs Van de Merwe began to cry.

‘It’s all been very trying for my wife,’ explained the old man. ‘What with the noise and everything. She’s quite exhausted.’

‘We’ll take it,’ repeated his daughter. ‘Won’t we? I think we should. And I’m speaking for John now, too. If he were here he’d say that this is absolutely the right thing to do. Yes, we’ll take it.’

The old man nodded. ‘If you think so, dear, then yes.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘I think you’re doing the right thing, too.’

I got up to leave with Mr Van de Merwe accompanying me to the door.

‘You’ve been very kind to us, Mr Manson,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what to say, really. I’m almost speechless. It’s more than generous.’

‘Don’t thank me. Thank Mrs Zarco. Only not right now, eh? Perhaps when the work is complete and she’s finally living next door, you might thank her then.’

‘Yes, yes I will.’ He held my hand for a moment too long; there were tears in his eyes, too.

‘The blue plaque outside,’ I said in the hall, anxious to be gone from my good deed. ‘I’m just curious – who was it who lived here?’

‘Isadora Duncan,’ he said and pointed at the glass figurine on the hall table. ‘That’s her.’

‘The stripper,’ I said.

‘If you like.’ He smiled uncertainly. ‘Yes, I suppose she was, really.’

Isadora Duncan wasn’t really a stripper; not as such. I knew that. It was just my way of making him think a little less highly of me. That seemed only proper; after all, it wasn’t my money I’d just given away.

I shouldn’t have been nervous but because this was my first match as the new manager of London City, I was. The previous Saturday’s game against Newcastle didn’t count; then I’d been talking to a football team that Zarco had picked and which was playing for him. All of the players had wrongly assumed that at some stage Zarco would turn up in the dressing room and hand out praise to those who’d played well and, more importantly, bollockings to those who’d played badly. No one ever wanted a bollocking from João Zarco.

But the game against West Ham was very different and everyone knew it. A manager’s first match in charge sets the tone for how his tenure is perceived, not just by the owner and the sports writers, but more importantly by the club’s supporters, who are as superstitious as a wagon-load of gypsies. My ex-wife’s brother refuses to go to an Arsenal game without his lucky cat’s whisker; he’s just one of many serious, rational men who follow football but who believe in jinxes and curses and the acts of a capricious God who ordains a win or a loss. A bad defeat in this first match would be like an albatross around my neck. I don’t know what Napoleon’s opinion of Premier League football was, but he knew the value of luck and I badly wanted to be lucky with my first game in charge. In spite of what Geoff Boycott says, good luck is the most valuable commodity in sport.

I’d even managed to convince myself that the League Cup was worth the candle; if we beat West Ham we’d be in the final and now that the match was less than an hour away the idea of my first trophy as manager of City was looking much more persuasive. Hadn’t the League Cup win cemented José Mourinho’s reputation in his debut season as manager at Chelsea, in 2005?

Of course none of this meant I was any less inclined to play a stronger side against the Hammers; I was sticking to my young guns, come what may, with only five of our regular first team players in the side: Ayrton Taylor, Kenny Traynor, Ken Okri, Gary Ferguson and Xavier Pepe. Three of our back four – Ken, Gary and Xavier – were first team regulars, of course, and I was trusting that they would steady the rest, none of whom – with the exception of Kenny and Ayrton – was older than twenty-two. I wasn’t and never had been a believer in what Alan Hansen had famously said, that you don’t win anything with kids.

Our second youngest player, Daryl Hemingway, who we’d bought in the summer from West Ham’s Academy of Football for £2.5 million, was just seventeen. I’d watched Daryl play when he was still at Hainault Road and thought him as promising a midfielder as I’d seen in a long time; he reminded me a lot of Cesc Fabregas. He wanted to show his old club the mistake they had made getting rid of him. Daryl was playing alongside our youngest, the sixteen-year-old Zénobe Schuermans, from Belgium, and Iñárritu, the twenty-year-old Mexican that João Zarco had bought from Estudiantes Tecos, in Guadalajara.

Iñárritu’s was an interesting story. The young Mexican had fled his country after police rescued him from a kidnapping ring tied to the local Gulf Cartel, which had abducted him. Iñárritu had narrowly escaped death when members of the drug cartel filmed him on their phones being dangled outside the window of his apartment building – the ninety-metre-high Plaza building in Cuauhtémoc – in the hope of making his father, who was a wealthy banker with BBVA Bancomer, pay a ten-million-dollar ransom. The kidnappers had actually dropped him – accidentally – and Iñárritu had only survived because he had fallen into a window-cleaning cart a couple of floors below. The Mexican was keen to play although, following a broken leg against Stoke City who were always good at breaking legs, he was still getting himself back up to first team fitness.

Playing 4-3-3 requires enormous stamina from your midfielders, but given our three had a combined age of just fifty-three, I figured they could probably run around all night without much of a problem. Even Iñárritu. I had no real worries about him, either. Iñárritu had been fond of Zarco and wept openly when the news of his death was announced; I knew that if anyone was going to play his heart out in memory of the Portuguese it was the young Mexican.

Of the three up front, Jimmy Ribbans on the wing was returning from a groin strain. There are plenty of players who are right-footed – too many, if I’m honest – but Jimmy was naturally left-footed, which was odd as he was actually right-handed. They say left-footers are a dying breed but they’re often very good technically, and the importance of having a great left-footer in your team cannot be overstated; most teams will try hard to hang onto a good one. Messi is a lefty and so are Ryan Giggs, Patrice Evra and Robin Van Persie. But Jimmy had a good right foot, too, and we usually played him on the right side, which made his sweet left foot even more unpredictable. As a defender I always found natural lefties more difficult to deal with and perhaps the best of these was Giggsy.

On the left wing was Soltani Boumediene, a twenty-four-year-old from Israel who was almost as good with his left as he was with his right: nicknamed the Comedian, for obvious reasons – he was indeed a bit of a joker – Soltani had previously played for Haifa and had been Israel’s most prominent Arab footballer before joining Portsmouth, from whom City had bought him during the garage sale that followed Pompey’s relegation from the Premier League in 2010.

Ayrton Taylor was, of course, our centre forward. The newspapers said he’d lost his mojo and had no chance of playing for England again, but although it was five weeks since Ayrton had scored a goal – at least a goal that was not disallowed – I knew that he was keen to show that the sports writers were mistaken. I was confident that his disciplinary problems were behind him. I suspected that these were mostly the result of the relentless ribbing he’d endured at the hands of his team mates following an incident in a London nightclub when two girls had spiked
his
drink with Rohypnol and, back at his flat, had photographed him on their iPhones in a state of disarray; they subsequently sold their story and the pictures to a Sunday newspaper. It was, they famously remarked, like taking candy from a baby. Footballers are a merciless lot and for several weeks afterwards Ayrton had found his shearling coat pockets filled with packets of Haribos and lollipops. If anyone was going to score a goal for us I felt it was Ayrton Taylor, despite William Hill, Bet 365 and Ladbrokes giving odds of 4-1 against him scoring at all.

Odds like that were too good to miss, even for me, especially as I still had ten grand of Zarco’s bung left in my bag.

‘You want to be careful, boss,’ Maurice said when I told him what I was planning to do with the money. ‘This isn’t a five-pound Yankee. If Sportradar or the FA finds out you’ve got ten bags of sand on with a bookie then they’ll have your guts for fucking garters.’

He was right – what I was doing was expressly forbidden by the FA’s betting rules but we’d done it before, of course.
Everyone
in football was betting on games, week in week out, and provided you never did anything as bent as betting against your own team there was, in my opinion, nothing wrong with this. It’s no different to what boys in the City do all the time.

‘I take it you want me to use our mate Dostoyevsky,’ he said.

Dostoyevsky was what we called a professional punter whom we’d met in the nick. For five per cent of a bet he’d put a house to let for anyone, on anything.

‘Of course. For the usual commission. Besides, if I win, the money isn’t for me. It’s for the Kenward Trust. An anonymous donation. Seems appropriate somehow, don’t you think? That some old cons should profit from a dodgy bet?’

Maurice laughed indulgently. ‘That sense of humour of yours, boss. One day it’s going to get you in trouble.’

‘I’m an old con myself, Maurice. What do you expect?’

‘On the other hand maybe you should mention it in the team talk before the match. They might play a bit harder if they know you’ve got ten k on Ayrton Taylor.’

‘This is Zarco’s night, Maurice, not mine. It might be me giving the team talk but it’s him they’re going to be playing for. They won’t be in any doubt about that, I promise you. The minute they walk into that dressing room they’ll know exactly what this match means. Not just to me, but to anyone who supports this football club. Anyone who fucks up tonight is going to have to explain himself to Zarco, not me. You see, he’s going to be there, Maurice. Zarco’s going to be with us all in that dressing room.’

Zarco might have been dead but I was certain that the Portuguese’s memory could still inspire the City team to victory. And not just his memory. I didn’t blame him, but Maurice probably thought I was crazy, or, even worse, that I was going religious on him – that I was going to tell him that Zarco’s spirit would actually be present in the dressing room. Of course I didn’t believe this any more than he did; however, I did want the players to think something like that, which was why, before any of the players arrived in the dressing room – while Manny Rosenberg was still laying out the kit – I went in there with a hammer and some nails and hung Zarco’s portrait on the wall. I’d brought it with me from Manresa Road especially for this purpose.

Manny was a tall, thin man with thick, white hair and heavy black glasses; he looked like Michael Caine’s older brother. Sounded like him, too.

He was about to lay the black armbands on each shirt when I stopped him.

‘I’ll give those out tonight if you don’t mind, Manny,’ I said.

‘As you wish.’ He handed them over.

‘I want to make this feel personal,’ I explained.

‘I take it that picture’s not permanent,’ he said, with one eye on the portrait. ‘I wouldn’t want to leave anything as nice as that in here. You know what these sods are like. Balls getting kicked around. Boots thrown. So-called practical jokes.’

‘No, it’s just for tonight.’

‘Wise.’

Manny nodded and gave it a longish appraisal. ‘Who did that, then?’

‘An artist called Jonathan Yeo.’

‘I know. He’s the Tory politician’s son. I read about him in the paper. That’s a good portrait, that is. Lad’s got talent. Not easy to capture with a brush, a man like João Zarco and what made him tick, but he’s done it very well, so he has. Soft twinkly brown eyes, big broad nose, sulky mouth, with just a hint of a sneer. Face like an African tribal mask, when you think about it. Hard as fucking wood but full of mischief, too. There was always so much going on behind the eyes, you know? Like now. I mean you can look at this painting and tell exactly what’s in Zarco’s mind.’

‘What’s in his mind, Manny? Tell me. I’m interested.’

‘Easy. He’s thinking if these overpaid cunts don’t win this fucking match tonight out of respect for my memory I’m going to haunt the bastards forever. I’ll sit in their fucking Ferraris and their ridiculous Lamborghinis and scare the cunts off the road and into a ditch. And they’ll deserve it, too.’

I grinned. ‘Maybe you should do the team talk, Manny.’

‘Nah. They’re so gullible they might actually believe me. Besides, you’ll know what to say, Mr Manson, sir.’

‘I hope so.’

Of course, I’d thought long and hard about what I was going to tell the players. Every word, every inflection of my voice would be important. I knew they would be looking for something extra from me tonight, a reminder of who and what they were playing for. And as I looked into Zarco’s eyes now I could hear the advice he had once given me about how a manager talks to his players. I was grateful to Manny for reminding me of what Zarco had said:

‘I’ve heard a lot of dressing-room team talks in my time, Scott. We both have. Most of them were a joke – David Brent in a tracksuit, a shop-steward on a soapbox, a travesty of what it means to manage players. You know why? Because most managers and coaches are stupid, ignorant men, who’ve had no real education and possess no imagination. Can you picture some of our own players becoming managers? Jesus Christ, they can’t even manage their pet dogs, let alone men. Their brains are in their feet. They haven’t got the words – at least not ones that don’t have four letters. I don’t know why but a lot of guys in football think they’ve got to behave like that marine drill sergeant in
Full Metal Jacket
. Fuck this, fuck that, kicking lockers, punching the air. Ridiculous. Embarrassing. Futile. When I was a player and I heard this kind of thing I wanted to laugh, every time. This kind of talk is going to motivate me? I don’t think so. You shouting in my ear like I’m some guy in the army is going to make me score a goal? Not a chance. Half the time I think maybe the managers are shouting because they really don’t know
what
to say. They’re angry because they don’t have a solution to the problems they see on the pitch.