The Damned Utd by David Peace (easy readers txt) 📕

‘Be bloody kids,’ I tell them as I pass them.

Sydney says something that sounds like, ‘Bloody big mouth again.’

‘You what?’ I ask him –

‘I said, be bloody big ones then,’ says Sydney.

Least there’s no Maurice today. Maurice is in Switzerland to watch Zurich play Geneva. To spy on Zurich. To compile his dossier. To write his report. There’s no John Giles either. The Irishman is down in London with his Eire squad. To meet with Tottenham. His ticket bloody out of here.

This is what those players are thinking about at training today –

Not Stoke City. Not QPR. Not Birmingham or Manchester City –

Not the chances they missed; the chances they must take –

Against Luton. Against Huddersfield and against Zurich –

Johnny fucking Giles, that’s what they’re thinking about –

Johnny fucking Giles and Vauxhall bloody motors –

‘What kind you going to get, Boss?’ Jimmy had asked me first thing this morning.

‘I’m not off, am I,’ I told him.

‘Why not?’

‘Not been invited, have I.’

‘Why not?’ he asked me again.

‘Maybe they think I won’t be around long enough to need a new bloody car.’

‘I hope you’re fucking joking,’ said Jimmy.

‘I wish I were,’ I told him. ‘Wish I were.’

* * *

You leave the Derby players, your players, until tonight. You drive over to see Mike Keeling. Mike Keeling thinks the board have turned against Longson. He thinks there might be a wedge between them now –

‘They’re at each other’s throats,’ he says. ‘At each other’s throats!’

‘Bet you wish you’d not been so bloody quick to resign now, don’t you?’

‘What about you?’ he asks you. ‘Is that how you feel, Brian? Is it?’

‘You know it is,’ you tell him. ‘You know it bloody is.’

‘Well, just this once,’ he says, ‘we might just be able to turn back the clock.’

‘You really think so, Mike? Really?’

‘I can’t promise,’ he says. ‘But I really think we have a chance, yes.’

‘So what can I do to help you?’ you ask him. ‘To help you make it happen?’

‘An olive branch, Brian,’ he says. ‘Some kind of olive branch would help.’

‘Well, I’ve been thinking,’ you tell him, ‘thinking that if they’ll take me back, and when I say they, I’m not talking about that bastard Longson, but if the board will take me back, me and Peter, then I’d be willing to jack in all the telly and the papers.’

‘Really? You’d give all that up? The television and the papers?’

‘Course I bloody would,’ you tell him. ‘If it meant I could get my real job back.’

* * *

I finish my drink. I finish my fag. I leave the office. I lock the door. I double check it’s locked. I walk down the corridor, round the corner, up the stairs, round another corner, down another corridor towards the doors to the directors’ dining room. I can already hear their Yorkshire voices behind the doors, their raised Yorkshire voices –

I can hear my name, hear my name, and only my fucking name …

I light another fag and I listen. Then I open the doors to the dining room and their Yorkshire voices suddenly fall. The dining room silent. Their eyes on their plates. Their knives and their forks.

Sam Bolton looks up from his. Sam Bolton has his knife in his hand as he asks me, ‘What the bloody hell is going on with John Giles and Tottenham bloody Hotspur?’

‘What you all so bothered about?’ I ask him, all of them. ‘Not two bleeding minutes ago you wanted the bugger gone, didn’t you?’

They’ve still lost their Yorkshire voices, rest of them. Eyes still on their plates. Their knives and their forks.

‘So let’s get them bloody fingers crossed,’ I tell them –

But no one laughs. No one smiles. No one says a fucking word.

I put down my drink. I put out my fag. I turn back towards the doors. The exit –

‘One last thing,’ says Bolton. ‘We don’t much care for being third from bottom.’

‘Fourth from bottom,’ I correct him.

‘Nor do we much care for managers who clutch at straws, Clough.’

* * *

You take your wife and your kids to the Newton Park Hotel near Burton- upon-Trent. You take your wife and your kids to meet the Derby players, your players, and their wives and their kids. Peter and Lillian come too. It is supposed  to be a farewell dinner, that’s how you sold it to your wife and your kids, to Peter and to Lillian –

But no one wants to say farewell. No one wants to say goodbye.

So the champagne flows, all thirty bottles of it, all paid for by you, as the kids run riot and the wives wilt, as the jokes and the stories start, the memories and the tales –

The jokes and the stories, the memories and the tales of the games and the cups; the games and the cups you’ve won; the memories and the tales no one wants to end.

‘If I’m not playing for the Boss,’ says someone, ‘I don’t want to bloody play.’

‘Me and all,’ says everyone else. ‘Me and all.’

‘I reckon we should all boycott the fucking club,’ says someone –

Then someone else, ‘Let’s bloody train in the fucking park with the Boss.’

‘We should all get on a plane and bugger off to Majorca,’ says another, probably you as you open one more bottle and order another, drink one more drink and pour another, put out one more fag and light another –

‘Let’s bloody do it,’ says everyone else. ‘Come on, let’s fucking do it!’

Every player on his feet now. Every player halfway to Spain –

‘Y viva España,’ everyone sings. ‘We’re all off to sunny Spain …’

But then the wives get to their feet and sit their husbands back down, calming them down and squeezing their hands, tighter and