I sat at the desk a while.

Maureen, not looking up: "All right, love?"

"All right."

"What did she say."

"She said it was either that or a girl."

A small Maureen mouth-corner.

"...Your mother."

"My mother."

"Has been expecting this."

"So it would appear."

I rang Mo from Erol’s payphone at eight that evening. Twenty-pence piece. The only one in central Tilbrook that didn’t charge long-distance to Stratford.

"Sam."

"Mo. Wansbeck Road, Hackney Wick. Flat above the Italian deli. Eighty-two grand on the market. Sign in the window saying REDUCED before the end of next week, eighty grand on it. Get it on. I’ll find the deposit if your father-in-law won’t. Buy it before September."

A long pause.

"Sam."

"Mo."

"Sam, mate. Have you bought a football club."

"Where’d you hear that, Mo."

"Sky News, Sam. I am on my mother’s settee with a cup of her tea that is the colour of a creosote fence, watching the yellow ticker go past with your full name on it in capital letters and the words ten-point deduction. You are a chairman, Sam."

"Pen. Paper. Quick."

"My mother does not know I am on the phone to a chairman."

"Don’t tell your mother."

"I am not going to tell my mother. My mother will have me round here every Sunday lunch for the rest of my natural life trying to set you up with one of my cousins. Wansbeck Road, did you say?"

"Wansbeck Road. Hackney Wick. Italian deli. Eighty grand by September."

He wrote it down. I could hear the biro on a wrapper and his mother in the background asking about the lamb.

"Sam."

"Mo."

"I love you, mate."

"Hang up the phone, Mo."

He hung up.

I rang Raj from the same payphone four minutes later.

"Sam."

"Raj."

"You’re a chairman."

"You and me, Friday. Five o’clock. Your car."

A pause.

"Sam."

"Raj."

"Sam, mate, you are aware that I drive a minicab. I do not have a car so much as I have a portable headache that occasionally takes a fare to Stansted."

"It runs."

"It runs, Sam, on luck and prayer and a coat hanger I have been meaning to do something proper about since 2008."

"Five o’clock Friday. Sheffield."

"Sheffield. Sheffield."

"I’ll tell you in the car. Eat your apple. Bring the cap."

"...The cap."

"The cap, Raj."

"Sam, mate. The last time you told me to bring the cap I ended up at a wedding in Walthamstow with a flat cap on my head in front of a hundred and twelve people, four of whom were my cousins, and one of whom was the girl I had once asked out behind the science block in 1997 and never been allowed to forget about. The cap, Sam, is not a small request."

"The cap, Raj."

"...I’ll bring the cap."

He hung up.

I went home on the bus at twenty past nine.

The fixture list arrived in the post on the Wednesday morning at twenty past ten.

I’d been at the desk since seven. Two journalists at the gate when I came in. I stopped at the gate for them. The bloke with the Dictaphone asked what Mr Mercer’s response was to the deduction.

I looked at him.

"Thirteen wins by April, son. Print that."

I walked on.

At twenty past ten the envelope came through the letter box on the forecourt door, thrrrp.

Maureen brought it up.

I opened it.

I read the first row.

I read it again.

I looked up at Maureen.

"...Well, Samuel?"

"Saturday the fourteenth of August. Three o’clock kick-off. Home."

"Who."

"AFC Wimbledon."

A small silence.

"...The AFC Wimbledon."

"The AFC Wimbledon."

I sat down on the corner of the desk. The legs had gone funny on me.

AFC Wimbledon.

The supporter-owned club founded in a pub in 2002, after an American consortium had moved the husk of the old Wimbledon to Milton Keynes. The club that, in its eight years of existence so far, had risen five divisions on the back of nothing but its own fans. The only club in the National League whose story was the same story as ours.

The opening day of my chairmanship of Tilbrook Town Football Club was a home tie against AFC Wimbledon.

I sat for ten seconds.

"Maureen."

"Yes, love."

"Pin it on the wall."

"Where."

"Top. Above everything. Above the brewery, the rates, the insurance, the kit, the lot. Right at the top of the gallery."

She pinned it.

The fixture list went up at the top of the gallery above the kettle. Saturday the 14th of August. Home. AFC Wimbledon. 3pm.

"Bring it on, then, Samuel."

"Bring it on, Maureen."

I got my coat at twenty to eleven.

"Where are you off to."

"Carbery’s. I need a beer mat drawn up."

"...A beer mat."

"A beer mat."

"Will I want to know more."

"Not yet."

"Off you go."

I went off.

Out on Tilbrook High Street, on the news rack outside Hussain’s newsagent, the back page of the Wednesday lunchtime Evening Standard was running a photograph of the wonky T at the gable end of the Main Stand and a headline that took me a second to make sense of even though I had said the words out loud at twenty past seven that morning at the gate to a journalist with a Dictaphone.

TILBROOK TOWN: −10 AND COUNTING.

NEW OWNER VOWS: "THIRTEEN WINS BY APRIL."

I stopped on the pavement.

I read it again.

I went into Hussain’s. I bought a copy. Mr Hussain looked at the back page, looked at me, looked at the back page, looked at me. He said nothing. I said nothing. He gave me a pound and twenty pence change of a two-pound coin and a small private nod.

I came back out onto the pavement with the paper rolled in my hand.

I had not, in two whole lifetimes, bought a paper with my own name on a page of it.

Bill Mercer, who had kept every Tilbrook line-up he ever saw copied out in careful biro on the back of a torn-open envelope, and a 1991 ticket stub from a youth-team game in which he had seen his only son score his one and only goal (SAW THE LAD MERCER GET A GOAL, PROUD AS OWT, on the page underneath in his blocky capitals), and a yellowing front of the East Anglian Daily Times from the day Tilbrook went down by a point in 1996, would have framed this. Or stuck it in the scrapbook.

Or stood in the back kitchen with it on a Wednesday afternoon and said nothing about it to anyone.

I folded it under my arm.

Raj’s car was leaving Carling Street at five on the Friday morning. Forty-two hours away. Between now and then I had a beer mat to draft, a contract to draft round the beer mat, a kit-man’s lad to slip a fiver to and another a tenner, an apple to eat, and a name Maureen had given me on the back of a brewery envelope at twenty to eleven that I would tell you about next week.

[SYSTEM] Forty-two hours, Samuel.

"Forty-two hours."

I walked up Tilbrook High Street with my own name on a newspaper folded under my arm and the wonky T leaning at the top of the road ahead of me, and for the first time since the FA letter had come through the post on the Monday morning, I caught myself smiling.

Off to see Carbery.