Authors: Philip Kerr
‘But he’s paying for the bridge, isn’t he?’ I said. ‘Rather a lot if the newspapers are correct.’
‘He’s paying for some of it, yes. But don’t forget, the Thames Gateway is going to be a toll bridge. And the only bridge between Tower Bridge and the QEII Bridge. That’s exactly ten kilometres of river either side of where it will be built. Fifty thousand vehicles a day – that’s what they estimate. At five pounds a time, that’s two hundred and fifty grand a day, gentlemen.’
‘Five quid? Who’s going to pay that?’ asked Colin.
‘It costs six quid to get across the Severn Bridge into Wales.’
‘Surely it should be six quid to get out of Wales,’ I muttered.
‘It’s only two quid to go through the Dartford Tunnel,’ persisted Colin.
‘Yes, but it takes forever,’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ said Zarco. ‘So you do the math. They reckon the new bridge will make more than eighty million a year, just in tolls, and pay for itself in less than five years. You see? It only looks like philanthropy for five years, then it starts to look like very good business. He owns the bridge for the next ten years after that, before he gives it as a gift to the people of the RBG; but by then he’ll have made at least eight hundred million. Maybe more.’
‘No wonder he’s smiling,’ I said.
‘He’s not smiling,’ said Zarco. ‘He’s laughing. All the way to the Sumy Capital Bank of Geneva. Which, by the way, he also owns.’
‘That must come in handy when you need an overdraft,’ said Colin.
‘Did you hear that?’ Zarco shook his head and smiled, wryly. ‘Trophy guest, indeed. He never misses an opportunity to have a little dig at me.’
‘Talking of having a dig,’ said Colin, ‘that copper came back here, to the Crown of Thorns. Detective Inspector Neville. He wasn’t very pleased to see we’d filled in and grassed over the hole.’
‘What did he expect us to do with it?’ snarled Zarco. ‘Play around it?’
‘He said we should have let him know we were going to fill it in. That it was evidence. That they hadn’t had time to take a photograph.’
‘I’ll send him a photograph of a hole,’ I said. ‘Only it won’t be a hole in the ground.’
‘What did you tell him?’ asked Zarco. ‘The cop. You didn’t tell him about
my
photograph, I hope.’
‘No, of course not. Look, all I told him was what Scott told me to tell him. That he took full responsibility.’
‘What did he say to that?’
‘He said that suing the Metropolitan Police successfully had made you too big for your boots and that it was time someone took you down a peg or two.’
‘He said that?’
Colin nodded.
‘The cunt. You’re sure it was me he was talking about and not João?’
Colin nodded again.
‘Hey, don’t drag me into this,’ said Zarco. ‘I’ve enough enemies already.’
‘You’ve noticed that too, huh?’
João Zarco had been on the front of
GQ
and
Esquire
and was frequently voted the best-dressed man in football; on match day he cut a very dapper figure in his Zegna suits, cashmere coats and silk scarves. Sometimes he seemed to be as famous for his designer stubble, his Tiffany cufflinks and his bling watches as for his candid thoughts about football. Perhaps that’s not a surprise; these days you don’t just judge a club by results but by the style of the manager, and if you doubt that then ask yourself this: if you were obliged to support a club because of the manager, who would you choose? José Mourinho or Sir Alex Ferguson? Pep Guardiola or David Moyes? Diego Simeone or Rafa Benitez? AVB or Guus Hiddink? These days it’s not just the image rights of players that are important to football clubs; how a manager looks can actually affect the club’s share price. Winning is no longer enough on its own; winning while looking good is the essence of the modern game.
I like good suits but I think it’s important that, unlike the manager, the coach dresses like his players on a match day. Besides, it looks a bit weird if you take charge of the warm-up in a tailor-made whistle that cost five grand. I don’t like tracksuits very much but I always wear one on the day of a match; picking training cones off the pitch and doing mountain climbs alongside the lads is just easier in a tracksuit.
London City is nicknamed Vitamin C because the club colours are orange and because it’s good for you; no one in east London gives a fuck about Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, which is why the club colours are orange in the first place. A lot of modern kit looks like it was designed by the art class in a primary school. You expect African World Cup sides to wear shirts that look like shit, and even a few Scottish ones, but not big European sides. Was there ever a worse kit than the one Athletico Bilbao wore in 2004, which looked like some fat bloke’s intestines?
City’s kit was designed by Stella McCartney, and so were the tracksuits. I don’t mind the kit so much: the orange makes your players easy to see on the park, and on a foggy night in Leeds that can be a real advantage. It’s the equivalent of playing golf with an orange ball; it seems that seventy-three per cent of golfers find a vividly coloured ball easier to see in flight and on the grass. Come to think of it, that must be why I’m so crap at golf.
In truth, Sonja likes the City tracksuits better than I do. It helps that hers is a size too small and when she wears it she looks just like Uma Thurman in
Kill Bill: Volume 1
, only without the Hattori Hanzo¯ sword. But when I’m wearing an orange tracksuit I look like a fucking carrot. We all do. Which is why some rival supporters call us cat shit; apparently some cat shit is orange. You learn something every day.
When Sonja puts her tracksuit on it’s all I can do not to put my hands inside her bottoms, so I usually don’t bother trying to resist the temptation; unless it’s the day of a big game when, out of solidarity with my players – who are supposed to refrain from sex on the day of a match in order to keep their testosterone levels high – I do my best not to touch her. Testosterone helps players remain aggressive and it’s generally held that aggression helps sportsmen to win. Of course, Sonja knows I find her sexy when she’s wearing the tracksuit and, on a match-day morning, she often wears it anyway and then goes out of her way to be sexually provocative; I don’t know what else you’d call it when she wears the tracksuit bottoms a little too far down her butt and with a tiny bit of dental floss that masquerades as a pair of knickers. Then again she never has knickers like that on for very long; not when I’m around.
You wouldn’t believe how different Sonja looks when she goes off to her Knightsbridge consulting rooms to listen to girls discuss their eating disorders – anorexic girls on Tuesdays and Thursdays, fat girls on Mondays and Wednesdays: it wouldn’t ever do for them to be in the same waiting room. She doesn’t think my jokes on that subject are very funny, however.
Sonja wears a lot of nice Max Mara suits, good shoes and stockings. It’s her Dr Melfi look, which I find almost as sexy as her arse in an orange tracksuit. Unlike a lot of the girls she treats, Sonja has a great-looking arse – she works out a lot – and if I mention her arse so fondly it’s because the part of me that’s still a player seems to find it easier talking about how attractive and sexy my girlfriend is than saying how much I love her, which I do. Like a lot of men in football I find it hard to discuss my feelings; being a shrink she’s aware of that and makes allowances. At least I think she does. She knew I was already upset about what had happened to Didier Cassell and then to Drenno, which was why I didn’t talk about it; and until the day of the Newcastle match I really thought that the worst had already happened. But in truth it hadn’t, not by a long chalk.
I expect Ukrainians like Viktor Sokolnikov have all sort of poetic proverbs and sayings for it, but where I come from we just say this: that troubles come in a packet of three.
Zarco and I always picked the team in his office at Hangman’s Wood before boarding the coach to Silvertown Dock. Organising a squad of overpaid, often intellectually challenged young men can be like herding cats and it’s always better if everyone arrives at the stadium as a team to avoid any confusion.
There’s a lot of bullshit talked about choosing the tactics before you choose the team but here’s a truth: unless you want to rest someone for a more important fixture you always pick the very best players available to you. It’s really that simple. Anything else is just Fantasy fucking Football. The press loves to speculate that one player has been picked at the expense of another – to cause trouble, if they can – but if someone has been left on the bench there’s usually a damn good reason, and more often than not it’s simply to do with fitness and attitude. Attitude is even more important than fitness because even when a player is fully fit, he’ll sometimes get it into his head that he’s not playing well. And if there’s one thing that a manager or a coach is paid to do, it’s to try and fix whatever is going wrong in a player’s mind. To that extent it’s useful living with a psychiatrist, as she gives me some good tips on motivation.
Of course, now and then you get a player who pulls a sickie and claims that he’s not fully fit, although this isn’t nearly as common these days. Thankfully physios are better able than ever to find out if a player is bullshitting you about a niggling muscle or hamstring, and to treat it, too: electrotherapy, ultrasound, lasers, magnetotherapy, diathermy and traction therapy can fix a lot of problems in a short period of time. If all else fails you can always inject some cortisone into a joint that’s giving pain, and few players are even remotely keen on that solution; the truth is it hurts to have a needle pushed four or five millimetres into a leg. It hurts like buggery.
After we’d picked the team, Zarco left early in his own car to attend Viktor’s lunch, grumbling about how he had better things to do on the day of a match than meet with a lot of Greenwich planning officers and town councillors. Apart from that he was in a very good mood and loudly confident that we were going to stuff it to the Toon.
I waited for the team to show up at the training ground and boarded the coach with them. There are always one or two who manage to be late and in those cases I have to order them to pay a fine. But today was different; two players were late for the team coach but these were my two Africans – Kwame Botchwey and John Ayensu were both from Ghana – and I had a very good reason for wanting them on my side so for once, fines were not imposed.
We arrived at Silvertown Dock at about the same time as the Newcastle team and let them go in first in order to avoid confusing the sports reporters, who were waiting in the players’ tunnel to watch the yobs walk into the dressing room. In their woolly hats and big Dr Dre headphones, and dragging carry-on luggage containing all their personal items, our yobs looked much like the Toon yobs. Besides, I had an extra reason to want to keep the two teams apart for as long as possible.
Fit or not, everyone in the team is obliged to turn up for the team coach on a match day; that’s how it works. Even the players who are injured or on the transfer list like Ayrton Taylor are required to put in an appearance, although generally speaking they can remain in their normal clothes. In Taylor’s case this seemed to involve looking like a tramp, which, after the match, was going to cost him a fine: at Silvertown Dock it’s jackets and ties for players who aren’t playing through injury or for disciplinary reasons.
I shook hands with the Newcastle management and coaching team: Alan Pardew, John Carver, Steve Stone and Peter Beardsley. I have a lot of time for Beardsley. People talk about Lionel Messi but, in his prime for the Toons, Beardsley was very like Messi. Like him, Beards could beat three men, get tripped, stay on his feet and score a beauty with either foot. Christ, he even looked like Messi. Some of these arrogant young bastards today should be honoured just to be on the same coach as Peter Beardsley.
Team sheets were exchanged and I gave theirs and ours to a club spokesman to read them out to the waiting reporters. As usual it was all filmed for London City TV and must have made some very boring television; then again, some fans will watch anything to do with football.
Feeling the butterflies now – I always get them before a match, even more now that I’m no longer playing – I went along to our dressing room and waited for Zarco to show up and do his pre-match talk. He was pretty good at this kind of thing. There was no one better at understanding and motivating men; he inspires loyalty and players just want to do well for him. If he hadn’t been a football manager he’d have made a very good general, I think. But not a politician: he was much too direct and straight-talking to be a politician, although in my humble opinion what this country needs most is someone to tell us that we’re all a bunch of lazy cunts.
The game was supposed to kick off at 4 p.m. but it was now nearly three and Zarco still wasn’t here, so I picked up the dressing-room landline and I was about to call the dining room when Phil Hobday put his head around the door; he might have been club chairman but he wasn’t above running the odd errand for Viktor Sokolnikov. Phil was smooth and talked the same language as Viktor; he was fond of comparing football clubs to big companies like Rolls-Royce, or Jaguar, or Barclays Bank. For Phil, London City was a company just like Thames Water. I’d learned a lot from Phil Hobday.
‘Do you know where João is, Scott?’
‘No. As a matter of fact I was just calling the dining room to tell him to get his arse down here.’
Hobday shook his head. ‘He was there until about an hour ago, when he took a call and left. When he didn’t return we thought he must have come down here. Viktor’s pretty angry that he just buggered off like that without saying goodbye to any of his guests. Even he’s gone to look for him.’
‘Well, Zarco’s not in here as you can see. Although I rather wish he was.’ I shrugged. ‘I take it you’ve called his mobile.’
‘Tried. Several times. But it’s pointless. The signal here on a match day is awful, as I’m sure you know.’
I nodded. ‘Sixty thousand people trying to get reception. You might just as well get a word from God.’