Glory Of The Football Manager System

The next day went by in a blur of front rooms.

We had stayed in a hotel in town the night before, the pair of us, because you do not put a fiancée in your mum’s home in Moss Side and you do not put your mum out either, and because there are some mornings a man wants to wake up next to the woman he is marrying without a thin wall between him and the kettle.

I woke before her with the city grey-gold in the gap in the curtains and Emma half on top of me, the sheet down off her back, the ring hand flat on my chest where it lives now. No bra, no phone, no three jobs yet, just the warm weight of her breathing slow and the heavy red of her hair across me.

I had one hand resting on the bare dip of her waist, but I moved the other up, dragging slow over the warm, sleep-flushed skin of her ribs until I found the heavy, bare weight of her breast.

I took the full, spilling curve of her into my palm, my rough calluses a sharp contrast against the absolute softness of her. I squeezed, a slow, firm pressure, letting my fingers sink deep into the warm flesh.

She made a low, broken sound without waking, her back arching instinctively as she pushed her chest deeper into my grip, demanding the weight of it. I squeezed again, my hand closing fully around her, rolling my thumb over the tight peak as the morning air hit it.

Her breath hitched and broke against my neck, the heavy heat of her filling my hand entirely. For a while there was no World Cup federation and no Premier League team and no four o’clock; there was just a hotel room in Manchester, the physical reality of my fiancée pressed bare against me, and nowhere in the world either of us had to be for another hour.

She woke up under the pressure of that hand, her chest rising hard against my fingers, the green eyes coming open heavy, already knowing, already smiling.

”That,” she said, her voice a wrecked, husky whisper into my collarbone, ”is a dangerous way to start a day you’ve got to be clever in.”

”It’s half seven.”

”It is not the time I’m worried about, Daniel, it’s that look.”

But she came up and kissed me anyway, slow and deep, the ring cool against my jaw while my hand stayed exactly where it was, anchoring her down. And we were a good while later down to breakfast than we meant to be, and they brought it up in the end, and she ate most of mine.

Then we did the rounds.

My mum’s first, because you do not visit my mother once, you visit her, leave, and come back.

By the second morning she had told Margaret at number forty-six, which meant she had told the street, and Margaret came round with her own chair the way Margaret does and cried enough for the both of them.

My mum did not, in front of anyone, and did once in the kitchen when she thought I had gone to the loo, and we both pretended it had not happened, which is how we have run our entire relationship and it works.

Then Emma’s people. The Hartleys do not live the way my mum lives.

They live the other way, the long gravel drive and the house you could fit my mum’s into four or five times and still lose it, the quiet, deep, old kind of money that does not put a thing on the internet and does not need to tell you what it is worth because it has never once had to think about it.

I had met them the once, last year, when Emma decided it was time and I stood in that hall in my one good shirt feeling like a man who had wandered in to read the meter. This was not that. Last year I was the boyfriend they were taking a look at. This time I had a ring on their daughter, and the whole house knew it before the car was off the gravel.

Mrs Hartley has decided to like me and does it the way that house does everything, thoroughly and without ever saying so out loud.

Mr Hartley took me off under the pretence of showing me a bottle of something, shut a door, shook my hand, could not get a word out for a good while, and finally managed, ”Look after her,” which was the one sentence, and meant it, and I said I would, and that was the whole of it between us and it was enough.

He had a Palace scarf on the back of his chair, a proper club one, half blue half red, and it made me smile, because Mr Hartley had not watched a game of football in his life until his daughter rang him three years ago to say she was seeing a manager, and the man had gone away and learned the whole sport from a standing start the way he has clearly learned everything, properly, so he would have something to say to me.

He has a season ticket now he barely uses and an opinion on a back three he did not have last spring. A grown man taught himself football for his girl. I have a soft spot for him I will never tell him about.

The brothers were just glad, all of them, glad in the easy way people are glad when they have never had to worry about anything, slapping my back and pouring things and asking when, and Emma in the middle of it lit up like I have not often seen her lit, because for all she ran off to London and made her own name with her own hands, they are still hers and they were happy, and a person is never too grand to want their family to be happy for them.

Then the old place.

Moss Side Athletic, the county-league council pitch with the bald spot in the centre circle that has been there since I played on it, the prefab, the lads who knew me before any of it, before the badge, before the telly, when I was just the fella who turned up to run a team nobody else would run and dragged a kid out of there and sold him to Brighton for a hundred grand to keep the lights on.

Raj was there with the camera he is never without. We had a brew in plastic cups and they took the mick out of me solid for an hour and not one of them mentioned a trophy, which was the highest honour they could have paid me, and when I left, the bloke who runs it now held the door and said, ”You’ve not changed, our kid,” and I had to sit in the car a minute.

All of that.

A whole day of it, every room I have ever been loved in, and I am not going to walk you through more, because it is mine, and because at four o’clock I left Emma happy in the middle of her happy family and drove into town on my own to find out which country wanted to take my summer off me.

It is a strange thing, being known in Manchester.

I am a Manchester lad. I grew up eight miles and a different planet from where Emma did, on a red diet, United till it hurt, the treble year burned into me at an age where you do not get a say in who you love.

And then I grew up and went into the game the other way round, took jobs nobody wanted at clubs nobody fancied, and the football fates being what they are, I have spent the back end of my career stood in the other dugout to the club I bled for as a boy. Played them at least three times now and only drew once.

Never once lost to them, which in this city is either the finest thing a local can do or an act of treason, depending on which pub you say it in.

So I get a particular kind of look, walking through town. Not the London look, the phones-up, gawping, here-he-is. A Manchester look. A bloke outside a barber’s on Oldham Street clocked me, did the up-nod, said, ”Walsh,” flat, the way you greet a man you have decided about.

Then, as I passed, lower, half a grin he did not want to give me, ”You’re still a reet pain in the arse, but fair play, lad.” A United fan. Had to be.

Could not bring himself to say well done and could not not say something, because I am one of his own who keeps beating his team and there is no clean way to feel about that.

I gave him the nod back. That is the whole transaction in this city, and I would not swap it for all the adoration in the south.

Down there they love me because I won them things. Up here they respect me through gritted teeth because I am theirs and I am a nuisance, and a Manchester nuisance who comes home is a finer thing to be than a London hero.

It was good to be back. The June light on the red brick, the trams, the smell of the place. I had not done a thing yet and the city already felt like it was on my side, even the half of it that would rather choke than admit it.

Oh! I almost forgot I had a meeting with Jessica today.

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Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.