The taxi from Meadow Lane to Sneinton cost six quid and took nine minutes, and Reece Angell spent all nine of those minutes being talked at about Cristiano Ronaldo.
The engine hummed along, vrrrm, underneath the driver's voice, and the indicator went tik-tak, tik-tak at the lights by the station.
"The news broke on Friday," the driver said. "United have signed Cristiano Ronaldo. The man is thirty-six years old."
"I saw that."
"All week, everybody said City were having him. City were definitely having him. And then on Friday, out of nowhere, United announced it."
"It is mad."
"Are you a football man?"
Angell looked out of the window at the Trent going past under the bridge, black in the dark, with the City Ground lights already off on the far side of it. He thought about the answer for longer than the question deserved.
"A bit," he said.
He was not, at that moment, a football man.
He was a man in the back of a Skoda with his kit bag between his feet, running the same ninety seconds through his head for the eleventh time since he had got into the car.
Her hand on the back of his neck.
Her voice dropping to almost nothing when she told him to go faster. And then the twenty seconds, which he had counted, because he counted everything, and which he could not stop counting now.
He looked up and found the driver's eyes watching him in the mirror, so he looked back out of the window.
"Well then." The driver patted the top of the steering wheel, tap-tap. "The man is thirty-six years old, and he will still get twenty goals this season. You watch."
"He probably will."
"Meanwhile." The driver tipped his head back towards Meadow Lane, somewhere behind them in the dark. "Meanwhile, that lot cannot beat ten men in their own ground."
"Were you there tonight?"
"I was there in 1991, and I have been there ever since, so yes, I was there tonight." He came off the bridge and dropped a gear, and the gearbox complained, grk, underneath them.
"That was the second game of the season, that was. Two games in and we have a win and a draw, and one of those was against Barnet, who could not defend a bus stop. Do you know how many teams go up out of our league?"
"Not many."
"One team goes up. One, out of twenty-three clubs. The teams from second to seventh get the play-offs, and we have done the play-offs, thank you very much."
He put two fingers up without taking his hand off the wheel. "We have done it twice. Wembley in an empty ground in 2020, and Torquay away last season. I have had enough of the play-offs to last me the rest of my life."
"It is a bad way to go up."
"It is the only way we go anywhere." The meter ticked over with a click.
"This is our third year in this league, and we were in the Football League for a hundred and thirty-one years before that. We are the oldest professional club in the world, and a week on Saturday we are playing Weymouth."
Angell said nothing to that, because there was nothing in it he could argue with, so he watched the shops go by instead. Most of them were shut, and a man was hosing down the pavement outside a takeaway.
The brakes sighed, ssshh, as they pulled up outside the barber's. His coins went chink-chink into the driver's hand, and the door shut behind him with a thunk, and then the Skoda pulled away and left him standing on the pavement with his bag.
The flat was two rooms above a barber's on Sneinton Dale.
It cost four hundred and eighty a month with the bills on top, and the whole place smelled faintly of the shop underneath, which was hair and blue disinfectant most days and cigarettes coming up through the floor on a Thursday.
The first room was a bed, a chest of drawers with a telly on it that he had bought off Fallows for thirty quid, and a rail with four hangers on it.
The second room was a kitchen with a two-ring hob, a fridge, a table with one chair, and a window over the yard where the bins went.
The shower ran hot for four minutes and then made a noise like a man being disappointed and went cold, so he had worked out back in February that what you actually got was three minutes and forty seconds, and you planned accordingly.
The stairs creaked under his weight, the key clicked in the lock, and the light came on with a click.
He shut the door behind him at 9:14pm on Saturday the 28th of August 2021, and dropped his bag on the floor with a thud.
The fridge was humming at him from the corner, hmmm, the way it always did.
Inside the fridge there were eighteen eggs, a two-litre milk, a bag of chicken thighs on the yellow sticker from the big Asda, half a cucumber, and a tub of margarine.
On the side there was a three-kilo bag of porridge oats with rice underneath it and a box of value teabags, four bananas going black in a bowl, and the beans.
That was his food from Saturday to Wednesday, and he knew that because he had written it down.
Four hundred a week was what the contract said, and three hundred and thirteen was what actually turned up in his account, and he kept both numbers in the back of the same black notebook that had his sprint times in the front of it, because a man who counts one thing ends up counting everything.
A hundred and twenty a week went to the landlord, fifteen went on the bus, and somewhere between thirty-five and forty went on food if he was sensible, or fifty-five if he was not, and he had been not, twice, both times in the week after they told him he was not in the sixteen.
Everything else went into a savings account that he did not have a card for, because on the thirtieth of June the club could let him go, and a footballer with no club in July was a man with rent and no wage and a CV that said sixty-one minutes.
He sat down on the end of the bed without taking his coat off, and the bed creaked under him.
When he was eighteen, he had lived on the sixth floor of a building with a lift in it, twenty minutes from the training ground, and a man from the club had met him at the airport and handed him keys and a phone.
Somebody had come in on a Tuesday and cleaned the place for him.
Breakfast was laid out at the training ground on a long table, weighed out, with little cards saying what everything was, and there was a chef who would do your eggs however you wanted them, and the kit was washed and folded at your peg by the time you came back off the grass with your name printed above it.
When his calf had been tight at seventeen, there had been three physios in the room, and one of them had been free.
He had thought about none of it at the time, and that was the thing nobody told you.
You did not walk around a place like that thinking about how remarkable it was, admiring the little cards. You walked around it thinking about whether you were in the eighteen on Saturday.
Right. And now he was sitting on a bed above a barber's, working out whether he could afford to buy chicken twice in one week.
He was aware that this was self-pity, and he gave it ten more seconds, because it was free.
The two blue lines were still hanging in front of his face.
[REWARD HAS BEEN PAID]
[CHECK THE REWARD THROUGH "STATUS"]
They had been there since the away changing room. They had been there in the taxi as well, floating over the driver's shoulder for the entire nine minutes he had spent being told about Ronaldo.
Right, then. He needed to think about his options.
Option one was that there was something growing in his head. Marcel had had lights at the edge of his vision, and Angell had a window with words on it, except his words were in English and they were spelled correctly, and tumours did not spell.
He tried to find an option two, and he could not find one, because there was not one.
He sat there with his coat on and made himself think about it properly, because he had learned at nineteen that the thing you did not want to look at was the thing that ended up deciding your life.
The name. His mind kept coming back to the name.
He had said alright to that girl about twenty times since July, and he had never once asked her what she was called.
There had been nothing in that room with her name written on it, and he had not been within three metres of her coat.
He could still see the panel when he shut his eyes, and he had seen the word Ellie on it a full four minutes before she ever opened her mouth.
A tumour could not know a thing that he did not know. So either he had invented the name and got it right by accident, or he had not invented it at all.
"Status," he said.