Whatever Happened to Billy Parks

Of course I don’t.

I mean, this was the biggest thing, the best thing ever. For an hour I lie there. I can just see their faces, the Council of Football Immortals – funny, none of them had aged, they all looked just the same as they used to. I imagine presenting myself before them – answering their questions, but I have to stop myself thinking about that – as the image grows in my mind, a fierce thirst for a fiery drink grows with it.

So I think about something else. I think about what Gerry Higgs had said. ‘The chance to put everything right,’ he’d said, ‘the chance to make everything bad disappear.’

I think about this and a smile breaks out across my mouth. Gerry was right: if I was picked, I would be able to live it all again, have a second chance. The idea gathers momentum in my mind; it doesn’t seem at all strange, in fact, as I lie there, with the noise of the south London train to Lewisham creaking behind my flat and the footsteps of smashed-out kids running along the landing outside I assume that most people have the chance to go back and right a few wrongs: it seems quite normal. It seems absolutely right.

And what wrongs I would put right, oh God, everything would be so much better; Rebecca and her mother, they would be first on my list, well, maybe not her mother, that was complicated, but definitely Rebecca, yes, I would make sure that this time she had everything, that she would be happy. That would be the first thing.

And her boy, my grandson, Liam, there would be no more mistakes there either: he would know me for a hero.

And, of course, Johnny Smith – oh poor Johnny Smith – I would somehow help him, stop him from doing what he did, find him, be there for him: he would know me for the friend I had failed to be.

And so would everyone else; there would be no trying to run rubbish backstreet boozers or drink driving bans or those pictures in the News of the World with that young girl from Gateshead; no begging talentless managers to give me one last chance and being ignored by dishonest chairmen who didn’t know the first thing about the game; no, all that would go. No getting kicked to high heaven by some kid who knows that I’m no longer fast enough to get away before being hauled off at half-time at Brentford, bloody Brentford.

None of this. None of this. None of this. All of this would disappear, Gerry Higgs told me.

Just as long as I score the goal.

I sit and consider it all.

And then my smile disappears.

I want a drink. I want a drink so bad. I can taste it. I can feel the glass in my hand, rounded, beautiful, fitting perfectly in the fleshy arc between my thumb and finger, as the malted liquid glints and sparkles like a midnight lake. Christ. Would one drink be so bad?

I sit up. I wipe the sweat off my forehead. I put the light on and everything evaporates in the yellow of the sixty-watt bulb.

I sigh then I make another start on the bloody London Marathon jigsaw. And as I try desperately to try to find the head of a bloke dressed up as some kind of giant Yorkshire pudding, I vow that tomorrow I’ll make a start on finding Rebecca. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll find her, because everything bad will be about to disappear for her too. I’ll find her and make it better, because, if I’m picked, there’s no way on God’s green earth that I’ll not score that goal.

I am Billy Parks and this will be my chance to make everything better.

8 (#ulink_7a8a1c9b-2945-5a19-aea9-c237a2c766ea)

‘This is your chance, Billy. This is your opportunity to prove to everyone that you are the best young footballer in the country. Do you understand?’

I nodded.

Taffy Watkins had cornered me in the toilets at White Hart Lane. I was about to play for London Boys against Manchester Boys and I’d snuck off for a piss. Bless him, old Taffy probably thought I was nervous, but I wasn’t. Perhaps he thought that my confidence needed boosting – but it didn’t. He was more nervous than me: there was a lot riding on the game. There was a crowd of about 5,000 and scouts from every club in England. Or that’s what we were told.

‘You see, Billy,’ he continued, looking down at me, his hands on my shoulders and his neck arched in my direction, searching for my eyes which I had cast downwards, ‘there is nothing greater than football, it’s what we’ve been left with, as men. Do you understand?’

I nodded, but I wasn’t really sure that I understood him. Not then.

‘And you, boy, have a God-given talent.’

He paused and I nodded, dutifully, again.

‘You could be a person who makes grown men cry or sing. You could be the person they think about last thing at night and the first thing in the morning. You could be the man they worry about when they’re doing their shift in the factory or down the mine, or on the docks; you could be the man they want to be. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Sir,’ I said, still averting my gaze from the intensity of his glare.

‘Good,’ he said, then repeated softly, ‘Good. Now, there are scouts from all over the country watching this game, watching you, my boy. Remember, the ball is your ball, the pitch is your pitch, there is no other boy on that field who can do what you can do – it’s your stage – do you hear me?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Good, now go and prove yourself.’

Finally I looked up at him, my lips sucked into my mouth and nodded, mute, before taking myself off on to the pitch.

‘Oh, and Billy,’ he called after me and I turned around, ‘pull your socks up and tuck your shirt in, man!’

I smiled my sparkling smile and took myself out and into my position on the left-hand side of the pitch.

It was raining that night; great bucketfuls of splodgy cold rain that seemed to cascade like a dirty waterfall through the dingy yellow of the floodlights. Not really the conditions for a mercurial, sparkling forward like me. I could feel my boots squelch against the cold turf and knew the ball would sting against my thighs.

Opposite me the Manchester right-back scowled. He was a horrible, ugly, bow-legged, northern monkey called Feeney – he probably knew nothing other than bloody rain. He pointed at me, said something I didn’t understand, then tried to laugh. I sighed, intimidation was lost on me: I was more worried about the bloody cold.

They kicked off; Brian Kidd passing to Stan Bowles, who had his shirt-sleeves pulled over his hands and wore the expression of a kid who wanted nothing better than to get back on the team bus.

They had a good team did Manchester, plenty of their lads went on to forge decent careers in the game, but we had a brilliant one – Trevor Brooking, Dave Clement, Frank Lampard (senior not junior, obviously) and Harry Redknapp – true greats, all of them. We were just kids then: all with hopeful faces and bandy legs. Apart from Trevor Brooking, of course; he seemed older by miles than all of us. Good old Trev, I met him for the first time that evening; he wasn’t quite so posh back then, still immaculate though, still brainy and good with words. ‘I’m Trevor,’ he said. ‘You keep making runs inside their full-back and I’ll try and play you through.’

I nodded. I just wanted him to pass me the ball. I didn’t care where he put it.

The first half was difficult; the ball kept getting stuck in pools of standing water and even Trevor Brooking couldn’t get it to go where he wanted. I hardly got a look in and was getting a bit bored with the northern monkey Feeney telling me how he was going to kick me all the way ‘oop the Thames’ if ever I got the ball. So I drifted infield and out of position; if the coach of the London Boys, an old pro called Barry Hickman, shouted at me, I didn’t hear him, because I was stood in the centre circle, with my back to goal, when the ball finally came to me.

It was another one of those moments – moments that you can’t predict, moments that change your life. Fate. As the ball slowly made its way across the quaggy turf to my feet, big Tommy Booth, the Manchester centre-half, a great oaf of a boy, tried to clatter into me from behind; as fortune would have it, though, rather than knock me over, he just managed to put himself off balance and force the ball to wriggle away from us to my right, which also happened to be where the ground was driest; in a flash I was on to it and turned towards the goal.

Ahead of me was a mass of open field. Instinctively, I knew that if I hoofed it forward the wet pitch would stop it carrying through to their keeper. I knew this without a moment’s conscious thought. I knew it and I did it: I hoofed it towards the edge of the penalty area where it stuck fast in the mud. Now, there was just a foot race to the ball between me, northern monkey Feeney, who was charging from my left, the Manc goalie Joe Corrigan and Big Tommy Booth. But I was away, my feet gliding along the glistening grass, water sputtering upwards as I went. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Feeney coming towards me, while straight ahead was the massive frame of Joe Corrigan. If Joe had been more decisive, he’d have got there first, but he held off just a second, just long enough for me to reach the ball a moment before he did, a tiny weeny insignificant moment, nothing in the great encyclopaedia of time, but long enough for me to clip the ball over him, hurdle him, and steer the ball into the empty net as Feeney crashed into his own goalkeeper.

I trotted past the mud-splattered defender, grinned at him then shook the hand of Trevor Brooking. ‘Well done, Barry,’ he said, and I grinned at him as well. ‘It’s Billy,’ I said. ‘Billy Parks.’

It was the winning goal.

Afterwards I sat in the changing room, listening to Stevie Kember, Harry and Frankie Lampard; they seemed so confident, so aware, so much bigger and older than me with their skinny ties and winkle picker boots. They were all going to play for Crystal Palace or Chelsea or West Ham. They were all going to be footballers. I thought about my dad. The Hammers were his team. Perhaps I could play for West Ham.

Taffy Watkins stood by the door. ‘Parks,’ he bellowed, and I looked up as he beckoned me.

‘There’s someone who wants to meet you, boy,’ he said and turned, so I followed him up the corridor, up some stairs and into a lounge bar, which smelled of cigar smoke and booze.

Two men were standing by the bar; by the welcoming looks on their faces I could tell that they were waiting for us to join them.

Taffy led me over. ‘This, Billy,’ he said proudly, ‘is Mr Matt Busby. Mr Busby, this is Billy Parks.’

Matt Busby smiled at me; thinning hair and squint-eyes smiling a lovely warm straight-to-your-soul smile, like the uncle we all wished we’d had.

‘Good goal out there, Billy,’ he said, or at least that’s what I thought he said; to my ear, untrained in Glaswegian, it sounded more like a collection of ‘grrs’ followed by my name. I nodded, though, and smiled, and muttered something about it being difficult conditions as I sensed that Taffy wanted me to sound vaguely intelligent and interested.

‘Billy,’ he continued, ‘we’d like you to come up to Manchester for a week’s trial at our football club, Manchester United, next week. Would you like that?’