Glory Of The Football Manager System

Chapter 667: Spontaneous

We got on the A23. Then off it. Then off everything. South. The houses thinning to trees. Trees to green going up either side. Somewhere around the M23 the noise dropped out of the morning and stayed out.

She fiddled with the radio. Three different stations had her on it before she gave up and put on a CD. Joni Mitchell.

"Oh good," I said. "Cheerful."

"Shut up."

She had her window cracked, her hand out in the air doing the thing she does, the flat palm riding the wind, and the red of her hair went mad across her face and she did not tie it back.

I had to look at the road.

I looked back.

She had the grin going against the headrest, eyes shut. She knew.

After a while she leaned across the centre console, put her head on my shoulder, and her hand came off the gearstick and went onto the inside of my thigh. High. The warm of her palm through the worn denim. She did not ask. She put it there.

I took my own hand off the gearstick and put it on the inside of her thigh. High. We drove like that for a long time.

Her thumb moved once, slow. Mine moved once on hers. She made the small low sound into the side of my neck and the head on my shoulder got heavier.

"Stop looking at me and drive."

"I’m driving."

"You’re doing both. You’ve been doing both all weekend. You keep looking at me like I’m going somewhere."

I did not say the rest.

The lay-by came up. The indicator was already half in my head. The ring an inch under my hand on the wheel. The whole of it rose up in me like water and I nearly pulled over and did it right there with a Greggs bag in the footwell and her hand on the inside of my thigh and Joni Mitchell singing about a river.

I did not. She deserved more than a lay-by.

Buzz against my leg in the cup holder. Jessica. One word.

Doors open. Stay out till six.

So I had a clock now. Ten hours to keep her out of her own home without telling her why.

We did Sunday properly.

We found a pub with a garden and a view of nothing in particular. The bloke behind the bar clocked me as I walked in, did the small no shake of his head at his colleague the way you do when you want a man left alone, and only said Garden, love? to Emma at the bar.

She got a glass of red. I got a lime and soda.

We took a corner table in the garden. She sat next to me instead of across, which she does in pubs, always has, because across is for interviews. The whole warm line of her thigh against mine under the table.

My hand went onto it before the drinks were down and her hand came on top of mine and kept it there, and that is how we drank, one-handed, like it was normal. Because it is normal. It is the most normal thing in my life.

A couple our age trying not to look at us. The bloke of the couple eventually came over with his pint in his hand, not quite meeting my eye, turning the glass round and round in his fingers.

"Sorry mate. It’s just my brother won’t believe me if I don’t get a photo and he is mental about you."

"Go on."

His wife took it. He shook my hand. Cheers, Danny. You’ve absolutely made his year, son. Back to his pint.

His wife had said hello to Emma. Not at the hoodie. Through it at her face. A woman talking to a woman about the bloke they had both come out with.

That was what the world got of Emma today. Her face above the collar of my hoodie. A grin. The Cartier on her left wrist. The rest of her in there with me.

"You called him son," Emma said into her wine.

"He was younger than me."

"You’re picking it up, Daniel. The thing your mum does. You called me love in the kitchen last week. I have got it in my head and I am keeping it."

"Eat your roast."

We ate the roast. It was not as good as my mum’s. We said so.

The waitress brought our plates, clocked who Emma was, and did the small respectful nothing of a woman who is not going to make a thing of it. Cheers, Emma said. Love your column, the waitress said. Walked off. Emma went pink at her wine glass and would not look at me.

We finished up and walked the field the pub had pointed us at. Bridleway off the lane, mate. Don’t bother with the far one, the sheep are absolute bastards.

She went over the stile first.

I had a hand on her hip going over and on the back of her thigh through the soft denim coming down the other side, and she did not move either.

We walked the bridleway with my hand in the back pocket of her jeans and her arm round my waist under my jacket, fitted together the way we have walked since the first winter, her hip bumping mine on every other stride.

A group of teenagers came past us on the bridleway going the other way, fifteen, sixteen, in tracksuits. The one at the back clocked me, did the double take, did the too cool to say anything thing for about a second, and then one of his mates saw me too and the cool went out of all of them at once.

"Danny."

"Aye, mate."

"Bloody hell, mate. Mum is gonna cry; she has been crying about you all week. Can I?"

"Go on."

The three of them did selfies. The fourth one was too cool to do a selfie and shook my hand very seriously like he was at a funeral. They asked Emma if she would be in the photo. She said no. They were not pushy. Cheers Danny. They went off down the bridleway already on their phones.

"Mum is going to cry, Daniel. His mum. He was sixteen."

"He was a good lad."

She had her arm in mine. We walked on.

Halfway across the field she stopped to look at a kestrel doing the still thing kestrels do.

I came up behind her. Both hands on her hips. She leaned back against the front of me, reached up, put her hand on the side of my face, turned my face down to hers without saying anything.

She kissed me.

Slow. Sun on the back of my head. Her hand on my jaw. The hoodie warm against the front of me where her back was.

My hands went round to the back of her, both palms full of her through the soft denim. I closed them on her and pulled her in.

She moaned into my mouth. Mmh. Low. Warm. Not stopping.

A man with a dog at the far end of the field did the kind of polite not-looking that means he had looked and was now politely not looking. He took his dog the other way down the hedge.

She broke off half an inch. Forehead on mine.

"Behave, Walsh."

"Mm."

"You followed me into a field. Get me to the car."

"In a minute."

I kissed her again. Quick. She did the small wrecked laugh into my mouth.

She walked off across the field with her hand in mine.

Her people are not my people.

That is the thing nobody who sees us understands.

She grew up in the good part of Manchester, the green leafy part with the long drives and the gravel, properly comfortable, the quiet old kind of money that does not shout. I was eight miles and a different planet away in Moss Side learning which streets to walk fast down.

She went to Cambridge. Her dad gave her a vintage Cartier when she got in, the watch she still wears, the only flash thing she owns, and even that is forty years old and was somebody else’s first.

By every law of how the world is supposed to sort itself she should have married a man with a boat by now.

And she sat down at the wrong end of a freezing bench in 2015 next to a lad on eight pound fifteen an hour with a notebook full of left-backs, and called him a fraud, and stayed.

That is the part I think about. Not the money.

The choosing.

She has never once in three years wanted the boat. The big gesture, the public thing, the Valentine’s flowers, the bloke on one knee on a scoreboard in front of forty thousand people, she finds all of it faintly embarrassing. Performed, she said once. A thing done at someone rather than for them.

She told me once, early, watching some proposal go viral on her phone, If anyone ever does that to me in public I will say no on principle and we’ll discuss it in the car.

She meant it.

She means everything.

***

Thank you for 200 Power Stones.