January Window

5

After a hard training session at Hangman’s Wood I have an ice bath and a sports massage, but a good sports massage given by the club’s full-time masseur, Jimmy Gregg, is always excruciatingly painful. Jimmy has fingers like fire-tongs. That’s why they call it a sports massage: because you have to be a bloody good sport to endure that level of pain without punching Jimmy in the face. And the older I get the more painful it is. Much as I try to behave like a Spartan and stoically take the pain without a sound, I always squeal like a frightened guinea pig. Everyone does. And because footballers will gamble on anything, bets are often taken among the lads on who can endure thirty minutes on the table without uttering a groan or a moan; until now no one has come through the experience without uttering a sound. Jimmy takes pride in his work. I don’t think there’s anyone who would disagree with me when I say that there are occasions when the massage seems worse than the training session. Perhaps that’s why they call Jimmy’s treatment room the London Dungeon.

So sometimes when I get home and before I go to bed, Sonja sets up a massage table in my bathroom, puts on a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes, a little white tunic that doesn’t quite cover her stocking-tops and tiny G-string, and plays the rub-joint whore, with the happy ending included. She has wonderful, light fingers and has fully mastered the technique of touching without quite touching, if you know what I mean. But if the caressing touch of her hands is magical — and it is — it can’t begin to compare with her sweet and loving mouth; she likes to drink a very cold martini before putting my cock in her mouth, and the combination of the alcohol, her lips and her teeth is nothing short of transfiguring. Christ ascending into heaven could not have felt better than I feel as she waits patiently for my ejaculations to end in her mouth, and she always swallows every last drop as if it’s the most expensive Manuka honey.

‘Now that’s what I call therapy,’ I said as I climbed down off the table and stepped into the shower beside her. ‘If they ever put that on the National Health the whole of fucking Romania will be living here.’

After that I slept like a hibernating bear. My iPhone started ringing, just before midnight.

Normally I switch off my phone at night and put the landline on answer-machine; sports reporters think nothing of ringing you up at all hours to ask you this or that. That was before Twitter, mind. Nowadays the press are lazier and just use player tweets for all the ‘tributes were being paid’ quotes they could ever need. But during the January window I tend to pick up the phone at all hours, in case it’s related to a transfer. Players’ agents are more nocturnal than their clients, as befits their vampire-like nature. Some of the best deals I’ve helped make have been as a result of midnight negotiations.

I have individual ring tones for different people, of course. Viktor Sokolnikov has the Red Army singing a famous Russian folk song called ‘Kalinka’. Zarco’s is the Clash song ‘London Calling’. Sonja has the Pointer Sisters’ ‘I’m So Excited’. But this time it was none of these. The Stranglers song ‘Peaches’ meant that it was Maurice McShane, after Ian McShane who was in Sexy Beast; Maurice was City’s life-coach and fixer and the club’s first line of defence in any off-the-field crisis. It was his job to help our overpaid and often naïve players do everything from open an offshore bank account to pay off some skank who they’d knocked up. This meant that Maurice was one of the busiest men at the training ground. Players tend to bring problems to the coach that they wouldn’t dream of mentioning to the manager; only now they bring them to Maurice, who sometimes — if the matter is serious — brings them back to me. It had been my idea to hire Maurice; I’d met him in the nick and in the five months we’d been together at City we’d already seen off several scandals. I won’t go into these right now. Suffice to say that we never did anything illegal. Just stuff that kept some of our stupid fuck-head players out of the newspapers, for one thing or another.

I went into the bathroom, closed the door, and sat down on the toilet. I think this is what they call multi-tasking. There were several texts from a variety of sports reporters asking me to call them but these I ignored, for the moment; better to get it from the horse’s mouth, I thought, already imagining some scandal involving Ayrton Taylor, mouthing off to a newspaper perhaps. Or getting himself into trouble with another player’s wife, again; he wasn’t such an example of good sportsmanship when it came to shagging someone else’s missus.

‘What’s up, Maurice?’

‘I thought you should know, as soon as possible,’ said Maurice. ‘A pal who works for the Met has just given me the heads-up on this. And I think you ought to prepare yourself for a shock. The police have found a body hanging from the railings along Wembley Way.’ He paused. ‘It’s Drenno. He’s only gone and hanged himself.’

‘Oh, fuck, no,’ I said. ‘The stupid, stupid bastard.’

We were silent for several seconds.

‘You know his wife is in the same hospital as Didier,’ said Maurice.

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Drenno beat her up quite badly.’

‘Christ. Has she been told?’

‘Yes. The press are there. And given your high-profile friendship it’s safe to imagine that they’ll be outside your flat before very long.’

‘Like a pack of vultures,’ I said. ‘To pick over the entrails.’

‘That’s what generally happens in these situations.’

‘Look, I’ll tweet something,’ I said. ‘And release a statement to the City press office at Silvertown Dock. And to Arsenal. Fuck. He was here, you know. The day before yesterday. Pissed as usual.’

‘Do you want me to tell the police?’

‘No, I’ll do it. But find out who’s heading up the inquiry, will you? And text me a number? I don’t want to explain myself more than once to these bastards.’

‘They’re bound to ask. So I’ll ask: was he suicidal when you saw him?’

‘No more so than usual.’ I sighed because then I remembered what he’d said. ‘But he did say something about making one last headline at Wembley. But I had no idea — Jesus, so that’s what he meant. Oh God. The stupid bastard.’

‘Scott.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m sorry. I know you were fond of him.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t fond of him at all, Maurice. But I did love that man.’

I rang off, wiped the tears from my eyes, washed my face and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. I knew what the guy who was looking back at me was thinking, because he looked angry; he was thinking — Drenno came to you for help but you were too dumb to see that; too dumb or just too lazy. You thought you were being such a fucking hero volunteering to take him to the Priory and offering to pay for his first week of treatment, didn’t you? Christ, that was generous of you, Scott. The man needed a friend. Somewhere to stay for a couple of days until he was ready to face the music. He must have known he was going to be arrested for the assault on Tiffany; he’d been cautioned for that before. And you let him down. When you needed a friend, Drenno was there for you — when no one else would give you the time of day; but when he needed someone, where the fuck were you? Christ, he even visited you when you were in the nick. Anne didn’t. Your own wife. In the eighteen months you were inside, Drenno was the only one who visited you, apart from your parents and the lawyers. That’s the kind of friend he was. He came to visit you when everyone in the club told him to stay away.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the guy in the mirror, wishing it was Drenno. ‘I am so, so sorry.’

Being sorry won’t bring him back, you bastard. One of the finest, most naturally skilled midfielders this country has ever produced — certainly the best you ever played with — and now he’s gone, aged just thirty-eight years old. What a fucking waste.

‘I’m sorry, Matt,’ I said and started crying again.

‘What’s wrong?’

I turned to see Sonja standing in the doorway. She was naked. In the bathroom mirror she looked as perfect as a woman can look and if I’d had a golden apple I’d certainly have given it to her. I felt like Caliban standing next to Miranda. Or something callous and ugly, anyway.

‘It’s Matt,’ I said. ‘He’s hanged himself.’

‘Oh, my God, Scott. I’m so sorry.’

She hugged me for a second and then sat down on the toilet.

‘That’s awful.’

‘He was just thirty-eight,’ I said, as if somehow that made it worse.

‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ she said.

‘But I do blame myself. He needed help. That’s obviously why he came here the other night. Because — because he had nowhere else to go.’

‘Yes, he did need help but the help he needed was the professional kind. Frankly, I’ve been expecting this for a while. He was ill. He should have been in a hospital. His family should have had him sectioned a long time ago. And you know, I think we’ll find out that it wasn’t just depression that he couldn’t play football any more that caused him to kill himself. I’m sure there was something deeper that lay at the bottom of all his psychological issues. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we find that Matt’s childhood was marked by instability and tragedy. Perhaps even the suicide of someone who was close to him.’

‘Thanks.’ I nodded. ‘And you’re right, actually. His brother killed himself — threw himself in front of a train when he was fifteen. And there was some other stuff, too, that he didn’t like speaking about. Like when his best friend and drinking buddy, Mackie, cleared off and joined the army; Drenno was always rather lost without Mackie there to share his exploits. He’s been fucked up all his life, one way or the other.’

‘Come back to bed,’ she said. ‘And let me take care of you.’

‘I will in a while.’

She kept hold of me for a minute. ‘You’re a good man,’ she said. ‘A decent man. That’s why Drenno came here. Because you’re the kind of decent man a man like him needed to cling onto.’

‘I still find that hard to believe. I mean, after everything that’s happened in my life.’

‘Believe it,’ she said. ‘Because it’s true.’

I nodded. ‘Yeah, well if it is, it’s mostly down to you, Sonja. You make me a better person.’

I went into my study, turned on my computer and then switched my phone to mute when it started ringing again: someone from the Sun I didn’t want to speak to. Then I logged on and spent an hour writing something kind but probably anodyne about Matt on Twitter — how could you describe a great character like Drenno in 140 characters? — and composing an email to the Arsenal press office with a quote for the Gunners website. A few minutes later I got a text from Maurice with the name and number of the police officer dealing with the inquiry into Drennan’s death: Detective Inspector Louise Considine LLB from Brent Police, 020 8733 3709. On the BBC News website there was a famous picture of Drenno celebrating after scoring a goal for Arsenal against Aston Villa in 1998, but the sole fact beyond what I already knew was that when he’d hanged himself he’d been wearing his white number eight England shirt — probably the only one he hadn’t yet sold on eBay.

Sonja was right, of course; it was less of a surprise that Drennan had killed himself than that players like Gary Speed or Robert Enke should have done it, but I’d always hoped and believed that my old team mate might turn his life around. After all, I was living proof that you could come back to football after a disaster. Wasn’t I?

I sat in an armchair with my iPad and spent another hour watching a selection of Drenno’s best goals on YouTube. These were some of the sweetest strikes I’d ever seen and a few of them had had an assist from me, which was nice, but the accompanying music — Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ — while wholly appropriate for a man like Drenno, did nothing for my spirits. And I started to weep once again.

I was about to go back to bed when I noticed another text from Maurice, asking me to call him urgently. So I did.

‘What now?’ I asked.

‘Sorry to call you again, and so late, but I’m at the Crown of Thorns,’ he said. ‘And I think you ought to get down here as soon as. Something’s happened. Something unpleasant.’

‘Like what?’

‘Not on the phone, eh? Just in case. Walls have ears.’

‘They wouldn’t dare. Not after paying me all those damages for hacking my phone.’

‘They might, you know.’

‘It’s two thirty in the morning, Maurice. I just lost a good friend. And we’ve got a training session at ten.’

‘So let someone else take it.’

‘You really think I need to come to Silvertown Dock? Tonight?’

‘I wouldn’t have called otherwise.’

‘No one’s dead, are they?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘What the fuck does that mean?’

‘Look, Scott, I can’t handle this on my own. I can’t get hold of João Zarco, Sarah Crompton, and Philip Hobday is away on Sokolnikov’s yacht.’

Philip Hobday was the London City chairman and Sarah Crompton was the club’s public relations officer.

‘I really don’t know what the fuck to say here,’ he continued. ‘And I’m going to need to say something. You’ll understand why when you get to Silvertown Dock.’

‘Say something to who?’

‘The fucking press, of course. They were here before the police. It looks as if some fucker from Royal Hill tipped them off.’

‘Royal Hill? What’s that?’

‘Greenwich Police Station. Look, trust me, it’s important you get here and as soon as possible. Seriously, Scott, this is a situation that is going to require some delicate handling.’

‘I’m not sure I’m the right man for that job. Especially with the press. Where they’re concerned I feel like I’m wearing boxing gloves when I speak to them. But I take your point. You’re right, you’re right. If it’s serious, you need me the same way I need you.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘I’ll be there within the hour.’