Eltham to Catford. Catford to Bexford. Bexford (without stopping) to Lewisham, and then—
‘What’s this?’ says Vern, looking at the car park of the New Den. ‘You’re not taking me to the football?’
‘I thought you deserved an outing. Because you’ve done really well this year.’
Done really well? How old does she think he is? Is she running an invisible version, for him, of the good-behaviour charts she has taped up on the fridge for the boys? Ten gold stars and they get to do go-karting. Lose ten stone and he, apparently, gets to go to fucking Millwall. Always the sports in that house, as if they can’t think of anything else to do with a human body except to bounce it around.
‘I can’t stand for ninety minutes.’
‘Don’t worry, you don’t have to. They do this VIP package thing, where you watch the match from the boardroom. I got us two of those.’
‘Where’s the boardroom?’
‘Up at the top of the stand, I think.’
‘I can’t climb up there.’
‘There’s a lift,’ she says. ‘I checked. And a silver-service lunch beforehand, if that helps.’ A touch of sharpness in the voice.
‘Oh. All right.’
Vern pushes at the Range Rover’s slab of a door, and manages to open a gap wide enough for him to start the process of slithering down, with a grunt and a gasp, onto his sticks.
‘You’re welcome, Dad,’ Becky mutters behind him. ‘No trouble at all, Dad.’
It seems a long way across the tarmac to the grey-and-blue wall of the stadium. They’re not aiming for the turnstiles but for a more discreet door. The office entrance, by the look of it. In any case, it’s so early for the match that there’s hardly anybody about yet. No crowd to cut across, just the two of them labouring along with the South London wind blowing on them – hint of distant kebabs – from a cool grey sky. It’s only the end of September but Vern chills easily now. He’s glad of the seat in the little lobby where the VIPs are gathering: quite often, by the look of it, people’s dads, or other non-habitual match-goers. He is not the oldest person there, by quite a long way, nor the most decrepit. That honour goes to a teenage boy in a wheelchair, one of those full-service whirringly electric Stephen-Hawking-type ones, which can tip and fold and lift its twisted occupant into all sorts of positions at all sorts of heights. But there is also a boy even younger than Becky’s two, wearing an obviously mint blue-and-white bobble hat and clearly being given the safest possible version of the Millwall experience by his anxiously posh father.
When the lift lets them out into the corporate penthouse just above the last rows of seating, the others scatter to look at the memorabilia on the walls: the century’s worth of scarves, the framed photos of Edwardian dockers, the old Den burning in the Blitz, the carnivorous fans of the seventies with their sideburns, a carefully diverse vista of the present. Not Vern. He goes to the row of windows, and when he gets there he doesn’t do more than glance down at the green rectangle of the pitch, surprisingly small from here even though they can only be seventy or eighty feet up. He gazes out, through the gap at the corner of the opposite stand, over the railway and away.
There it is. Enough of it at once, in one glance, in one gulp at the skyline, for you to see how big it is, how unappeasably, inexhaustibly much there is of it; his city, whose jumbled collage of blocks and spires and roofs and stacks never stops changing, never ceases cell by cell to be demolished and then to rise again under the red lights of the cranes, and whose hard angles and crumbling surfaces seem to fend you off, to push you back, but if you know their secret yield a coddled concentrate, a devourable sweetness, veins of rich fat. He loved looking down on it from his eyrie at the Wharf, somewhere, yes, just over there to the north-east, one of those towers sprouted from the corpse of the docks. He was a South Londoner, bred up in Bexford’s low red brick. He had made his money – before he lost it again – from primping the city’s past. But it was the spectacle of the central city and its eastern annexes renewing themselves that got to him, that spoke the promise loudest. The towers he’d never built himself, maybe that was partly the draw. He’d stand at the floor-to-ceiling glass, shagpile under his bare toes, Rossini blasting from the speakers, gazing at the rising spindles of concrete, waiting for their glittering skin. Watching the snaking trains, the lines of traffic bumping along like corpuscles. The light coming and going. Sunrise from up there was a smudge of colour swelling the dim band of the eastern horizon, then a roar of brilliance pushing in over the gunmetal flats of the estuary. Sunset a hazy swathing of the west, his own aurora. He wore a silk dressing gown as big around as a wine barrel or, why not, since there was no one to see but the gulls and the helicopter pilots, nothing. London’s pendulous figurehead. A lard monolith. A gigantic fuck-you. All gone. All gone; even the flesh. His eyes, to his embarrassment, prickle and brim, and his fumble for a tissue alerts Becky, standing next to him.
‘You all right, Dad?’ she says, surprised. ‘Dad! What is it?’
‘Nothing,’ he says, muffled in a nose blow.
‘No, what is it?’ she insists, and she touches his arm.
‘I just miss it,’ he can’t help saying, can’t help admitting, weak in the face of solicitude.
‘Course you do,’ she says. ‘Everyone misses where they grew up.’ Sentimental, clueless.
‘I didn’t grow up down there,’ he says. ‘For God’s sake. Bexford’s over on that bloody side, over—’ and turning, he lifts one of his sticks to try to point out, in the other windows, the ridge the borough straddles. And knocks a carafe, luckily empty, off the set lunch table, which Becky neatly catches mid-air before it can smash.
‘Never mind,’ she says soothingly. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’
He does, and other people are following suit. A hostess-chipmunk in, of course, Millwall-blue skirt and jacket is clapping her hands.
‘Hello, everyone!’ she squeaks. ‘Welcome to Millwall. Come on, you Lions!’
‘Come on, you Lions,’ chorus the diners loyally, Becky included. Even the boy in the wheelchair makes some sounds with the right rhythm. Becky jogs him with her elbow.
‘… you Lions,’ Vern mumbles.
‘Now, we’ve got a great afternoon lined up for you. Can’t guarantee we’re going to win, but we can guarantee you’re going to have a good time, with some great football, a fabulous view, a terrific lunch, and some surprises. One of the lads will be up to give you his exclusive thoughts on the match at full time – with any luck, to tell you how we won it, yeah? – and at half-time, we’ve got our regular Stars of the Past feature, where we’re gonna be joined by one of Millwall’s heroes from the old days. But I’m not going to tell you who it is, or even when he was on the team, because that’s part of the surprise, innit. I’ll just say, for the older fans among you, this is someone who’s gonna bring some memories, okay? And that’s my only clue. Are you ready for your lunch? I bet you are. And here it comes.’
In come a small squad of waiters and waitresses toting metal platters and serving spoons. Roast beef, Yorkshires, roast potatoes, cauliflower, green beans, gravy. It’s a poshed-up school dinner, basically, or the kind of thing you’d get in a pub carvery on a Sunday, and in his glory days Vern would’ve been poking at the spuds with his fork and noticing that they definitely hadn’t been browned in goose fat or got as crunchy as they might have been. But now, after a year in smoothie-purgatory, Vern is almost desperately eager.
‘You going to let me eat these, then?’ he says.
‘Yes, of course I am,’ says Becky. ‘It’s a treat. It’s my treat for you because, like I said, you’ve made really good progress this year. And you know what they say, moderation in all things, including moderation, right? You just go ahead and enjoy yourself.’
Round come the servers. Becky only lets herself be given one small roastie, and she frowns when Vern looks as if he might say yes to a third for himself. Still, it’s a loaded plate, a still life of pleasure in a brown
puddle.
‘So, tell me what it was like growing up round here,’ she says brightly as he lifts his knife and fork; and he’s so grateful for the unctuousness of the beef, and the flouriness-inside-crispiness of the potatoes, that he actually tries. He has no idea what will interest her, but he dredges around, and fetches up the memory of the old Commer van his uncles used to use for their under-the-counter runs to Smithfield and Covent Garden. A van that smelt like a grocery cupboard even parked under a railway arch. Bacon on wheels.
‘Wasn’t that stuff rationed?’ Becky asks.
‘Oh yeah, that was the point. You could get really good prices for it, if you had the contacts – to sell it and to get hold of it in the first place, I mean. Den and Hubert went all over: Essex, Kent, way up to Scarborough once. They nearly got nicked, this one time, coming back into town; got flagged down in the fog by this copper with a flare, when the back was chock-full of cheese and game. “Where are you gents going?” he said, and Hubert said, “Delivery to the Ritz, my good man”, and he let ’em through because, you see, the fog was that thick, and Hube knew he wasn’t going to be able to see – the copper – what it actually said on the side of the van.’
‘What did it say?’
‘“Taylor and Sons, Plumbers”.’
At this, Becky nearly laughs, which encourages him to go on dredging. She nods and smiles and drinks water, possibly as a way of avoiding having more than a mouthful or two of the lunch. She certainly leaves the cheesecake entirely untouched. The odd thing is that Vern can’t make it to the end of the main course, or eat more than a couple of mouthfuls of the dessert either. He feels … full.
‘Your stomach’s shrunk,’ says Becky with satisfaction. ‘That’s how it works, when you get into good habits.’
‘Oh,’ says Vern.
When lunch is over, the VIP package-holders are ushered out of a door into the very top of the stand, where a row of tip-up blue seats are waiting for them. Millwall are at home to Yeovil Town, and there’s some kind of complicated grudge issue that Vern doesn’t bother to follow the explanation of, about how Yeovil unexpectedly beat the Lions last season, and snatched a promotion chance that was rightfully theirs. Or something. In fact, once kick-off has happened, and he’s blinked down at the blues on one side of the small green rectangle beginning to run about with the green-and-blacks on the other side, he doesn’t really bother to watch the match. He laces his hands across the almost-uncomfortable sensation in his stomach, and lets his gaze drift. Across the stand opposite – it’s a rather thin crowd – into the sky – onto the face of his daughter next to him. She’s not watching either: she’s texting furiously on her BlackBerry, frown line back in place. Who is she, this skinny, never-motionless woman in her Juicy Couture velour? What has she got to do with him? What does she want? He’s been living in her house for a year, but querulous and ill, with his head down, fixed on his resentment over what he wants and can’t have back. A faint curiosity flickers. But down on the pitch, the Millwall strikers and the Yeovil strikers miss chance after chance, and the cyclic swell of excitement followed by disappointment, followed by excitement, followed by disappointment again, is kind of soporific. It sets up a soothing dialogue with Vern’s stomachful of gravy, and his chin sinks onto his chest.
‘Wake up, Dad. It’s half-time.’
‘Yeah? What’s the score?’ says Vern, feeling he should ask.
‘Nil–nil.’
‘Right, okay.’
‘Now we go back inside again?’
‘Right, right.’
‘Well!’ says the chipmunk, once they’ve all trooped back in. Lunch has been cleared, and teas and coffees in blue-and-white china have appeared. ‘Everything still to play for today! But now it’s time for us to take a little journey into the Millwall of yesterday, with our Star of the Past! And our guest this afternoon is someone from a good long time back, ’cause we like to cover all the decades, you know. He played for the Lions from 1963 to 1966, he was a midfielder mostly and a forward sometimes – that’s how you put it, isn’t it, Joe? – and his shirt number back then was eleven. Let’s give him a warm welcome back to the Den – Joe McLeish!’
For a minute Vern genuinely doesn’t recognise the name. Or rather, it seems vaguely familiar but he doesn’t know why. He is still half-asleep, still swaddled in the rituals of corporate hospitality; and the man to the chipmunk’s left is bald and red-faced, with big hearing aids in both ears, so offers no visual cues. But it’s him all right, the involuntary backer of Vern’s first business, the fresh-faced sucker of Tognozzi’s.
‘Fuck,’ says Vern, not loud but with enough intensity to get a disapproving glance from Posh Dad on one side of him and a shushing sound from Becky on the other.
‘It’s a pleasure to be here, Kirsty,’ McLeish is saying.
‘It’s a pleasure to have you, Joe. So first off, Joe, what do you make of the game today? Any advice for the lads?’
Off goes McLeish into fluent footballer-bollocks, which he has clearly not lost the knack of talking with the passing years. The lads are playing with a lot of heart; the lads need to give it a hundred and ten per cent; et cetera. I must look just as different, thinks Vern. More different, probably, what with all this dieting. Why would he know me? He probably won’t know me. Vern tries to make himself as small as possible. He ducks his head down, folds his arms on his chest and stares into his cup of tea. All he has to do, he tells himself, is to get through the next ten minutes unobtrusively. Then half-time will be over, and with it McLeish’s little turn.
Unfortunately, Becky clocks the way he’s sitting, and takes it into her head to worry about it.
‘Are you all right, Dad?’ she whispers. ‘D’you need one of your pills?’
‘’m fine,’ he hisses.
‘No, you should definitely have one if you don’t feel right. Don’t be heroic. You know what the doctor said. Excuse me?’ says Becky, raising her voice. ‘Sorry to interrupt but could I just get a glass of water for my dad? He needs his medicine.’
‘What’s that?’ says McLeish. He really must be quite deaf.
‘Just one moment, Joe,’ says the chipmunk, raising her voice in turn. ‘We – just – need – to get – this gentleman – some water, yeah?’
‘Oh, no problem,’ McLeish says benignly. ‘Nae problemo. Are you all right there, chum?’
And now everyone looks at Vern, and as well as swallowing the angina tablet Becky has just thrust at him, he has to look up, meet McLeish’s eye and grimace a smile at him and mumble something.
McLeish smiles back, then looks puzzled. He shakes his head for an instant, as if something has got into it and needs dislodging, and goes back to his spiel. But then, with horrible clarity, Vern sees him getting it. It’s like watching an alarm clock go off. His eyes go wide, and fly back to Vern’s face.
‘My God,’ he says, breaking off mid-sentence. ‘It’s you, isn’t it. You – you – bastard.’ And he sets off up the table towards Vern, lurching a bit, on legs which were once superlatively faster and sleeker than Vern’s, but are now, just like Vern’s, the legs of a man of seventy.
‘Er, Joe?’ says the chipmunk.
‘What’s this?’ asks Becky.
‘This,’ says McLeish, arriving with a red finger out, and stabbing it unsteadily at Vern, who has stood up to avoid being stood over, ‘this is the tosser, the con artist, who stole everything I made playing fucking football!’
‘Now you wait a minute …’ says Becky.
‘Can everyone please calm down?’ says the chipmunk.
‘I never stole a penny from you,’ says Vern.
‘What?’ says McLeish, both enraged and deaf, both deaf and enraged. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said, I never STOLE ANYTHING FROM YOU—’
‘You didn’t have to! Did you, ya bastard? You just stuck me with your debts. Everything I had, because your firm went tits-up! I had to go back on the railways with nothing because of you! And I didn’t eve
n know it was happening, till it was too late. Just a brown fucking envelope out of the blue!’
Everyone is staring.
‘Well, you should have done,’ says Vern.
‘You what?’
‘You should have known. What kind of fucking idiot signs something without reading it first? You were a sitting duck for the first person to come along who had half a brain. I just happened to be the one who did.’
‘Joe! – sir!—’ says the chipmunk.
‘You were a moron. You were a mug. You might as well have had “MUG” written on your forehead.’
‘Dad!’ says Becky.
‘You bastard,’ says McLeish, but with astonishment in his voice now as well as fury: an almost wondering note.
‘What, did you think I was gonna say sorry? Oh sorry, sorry,’ mimics Vern.
‘I should fucking punch you,’ McLeish says. ‘I should punch your fucking lights out.’
‘Now, that’s enough,’ says Becky, rising to her feet practically spitting, five foot two inches of angry string. ‘You leave him alone, he’s an old man.’
‘What?’
‘He’s an old man!’
‘So’m I! A skint one, thanks to him!’
‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave,’ says the chipmunk. ‘Right now, please!’
‘Oh, we’re going,’ says Becky. ‘Right now.’
And she tows Vern to the lift, whose doors, at least, open immediately.
‘Mug,’ says Vern, as they close again.
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