Josh picked up his fork, but he didn’t touch the steak. He set his bottle of lager down on the table, leaned his elbows on his knees, and looked straight at me.
"You know your ban’s finished, don’t you?"
The air in the garden suddenly felt ten degrees colder.
"I can read a calendar," I said, grabbing a pair of sausage rolls out of a plastic bag and dropping them onto my own paper plate.
"I know you can read a calendar, Matt. I’m asking if you’ve actually thought about what comes next."
"I work twelve hours a day at a logistics depot," I said, taking a bite of a sausage.
It was burning hot, mustard burning my nose. "That’s what comes next. Pulling pallets on a forklift."
"Craig Lomax called me on Tuesday," Josh said.
My hand froze for a split second before I could catch myself. I forced myself to chew, swallowed hard, and wiped my chin with the back of my hand.
"Lommo?" I asked.
"Yeah. Lommo."
"Craig Lomax," I repeated, the name dragging up a wave of old, muddy memories from eight years ago. "The left-back? The lad who used to steal my shin pads out of my kit bag before every away match because he was too lazy to pack his own?"
"That’s him," Josh said. "He retired two years ago after his Achilles blew out at Altrincham. He’s coaching now. He took over the football development setup up at Ellerby Bridge Town."
"Ellerby Bridge," I said, thinking. "Northern Premier League, isn’t it? Division One North?"
"Premier Division now," Josh corrected.
"Tier seven. Proper non-league grafting club. Hard fans, mud up to your knees, fifty-quid win bonuses. They’re trying to completely rebuild their youth academy and reserve squad from the ground up. Lommo’s running the whole sporting side, but he’s got nobody on his staff who knows the first thing about coaching structural defence."
Josh reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a small piece of white paper with a phone number scrawled on it in blue biro, and slid it across the plastic table toward me.
"He wants you in, Matt. Assistant coach. Head of defensive organization. He said if you take it and sort out their back line, there’s a paid path to taking your UEFA B license next spring."
I looked at the slip of paper lying on the table between the pomegranate seeds and the steak fat.
A quiet, bitter laugh bubbled up in my throat before I could stop it. "Assistant coach? At a semi-pro club?"
"It’s a start," Josh said.
"Josh, be realistic for five seconds," I said, leaning over the table.
"Who in their right mind is going to hire a disgraced League One centre-back to coach eighteen-year-old lads? What am I supposed to teach them during Tuesday night drills? How to slice a clearance over the stand in the eighty-eighth minute? How to make five grand off a corner count without the referee noticing?"
"Don’t do that," Josh said, his voice dropping an octave.
"Do what?"
"That. Making a fucking joke out of it so you don’t have to face it."
The easy-going Premier League star was completely gone now. Josh was staring at me with a fierce, burning intensity that made me want to look away. "Lommo knows exactly what you did. Everyone in North-West football knows what you did. He didn’t care. He asked for your number specifically."
"Then why didn’t he call me himself?"
"Because nobody’s got your fucking number, Matt!" Josh snapped, throwing his hands up.
"You deleted your social media, you changed your mobile contract the week after the FA hearing, and you didn’t give the new number to a single person on earth except me and Mum! You’ve spent seven years living like a ghost in a two-room flat, pretending you don’t exist!"
I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t.
"Nobody reads a football match the way you do," Josh said, his voice softening slightly, though the strain was still there.
"I’ve shared a dressing room with international captains, multi-million-pound signings, and managers who’ve won trophies in Europe. Not one of them sees the pitch the way you see it. It makes me sick to my stomach watching you drag iron pallets across a concrete warehouse floor every single day when you should be standing on a touchline."
I stared down at my plate, watching a thin line of clear meat juice run off the edge of the paper onto the table.
"And don’t tell me you don’t care about football anymore," Josh added, pointing a finger at my chest. "Because I know you’re still playing Touchline Manager every night."
I looked up sharp. "What?"
"I saw it on your laptop screen when I came round three weeks ago," Josh said softly.
"You thought you’d closed the lid before I walked into the front room, but I saw the green user interface. You had the tactical instruction screen up for Hallowfield Town."
My mouth felt completely dry. I looked away toward the back fence where the yellowing grass met the damp brick wall.
"Go up to Ellerby Bridge and talk to Lommo," Josh urged, leaning closer. "Teach those kids how a proper centre-back moves. Show them how to organize a line before somebody else teaches them all wrong."
I picked up the tongs, turned the grill off, and pushed the lingering coals into a neat pile at the back of the kettle. I didn’t say yes. I didn’t say no. I just kept my eyes glued to the black iron rim until the silence stretched so long that Josh finally sighed, picked up his beer bottle, and took another long drink.
"Mum’s knee is getting worse," he said quietly, changing the subject.
"Is it?" I asked, grateful for the exit route.
"She’s on the NHS waiting list for a full knee replacement," Josh said. "Dad’s doing all the household shopping now down at the Tesco in Fleetwood. He bought her the wrong teabags last Tuesday and she’s been giving him stick for five days straight."
"Which ones did he get?"
"The value brand," Josh grinned faintly. "Red box. She told him it tasted like he’d brewed an old cardboard shoe box in boiling water."
A small, genuine smile cracked through my face. I could hear Mum’s sharp Lancashire voice saying those exact words across the kitchen table.
"And their new kitchen is nearly finished," Josh continued. "Got one of those fancy instant boiling water taps fitted last Friday. Boiling water straight out of the spout, Matt. Mum thinks it’s black magic."
We sat in the back garden for another hour, talking about normal things Dad’s vegetable patch, our cousin’s wedding up in Lancaster, the rain that was forecast for Sunday afternoon. We didn’t mention match-fixing again. We didn’t mention the FA ban.
By eight o’clock, the damp evening chill was settling over the estate, and the streetlights on Moorside Close were flickering to life in long, orange rows.
Josh stood up, stretched his arms over his head, and tossed his empty lager bottle into my plastic recycling bin.
"I’ve got to get back down the M6," he said, pulling his car keys out. "Early recovery session at the training ground tomorrow morning. Ice baths and leg compression sleeves."
"Right," I said, walking him through the quiet flat toward the front door. "Drive safe."
"Call Lommo, Matt," Josh said, stopping at the threshold and looking back at me one last time. "Just call him. Hear what he has to say."
"I’ll think about it," I lied.
He gave me a hard nod, stepped out onto the concrete walkway, and walked over to his massive black Range Rover parked under the flickering streetlight.
The engine purred to life with a deep, throaty rumble, the subwoofers thumped once through the tinted glass, and then he pulled out of the estate close, leaving me alone in the quiet dusk.
I closed the front door, turned the deadbolt, and stood in the narrow hallway for a long moment.
The flat was dead quiet, save for the faint hum of the ancient refrigerator in the kitchen and the steady drip... drip... drip of the upstairs neighbor’s bath water leaking into the ceiling plaster above the sofa.
I walked into the front room, picked up my grease-spotted fleece off the back of a chair, and sat down at the small wooden desk in the corner.
My laptop was sitting there, dark and cold. A cheap, four-hundred-pound machine with a scratched plastic casing that I’d bought off an electronics pawn shop two years ago.
I opened the lid. The screen flickered to life, casting a cold, blue glow across my face and lighting up the dark room.
I didn’t turn the sound on. I never did.
I bypassed the main menu, clicked past the saved games, and selected New Game.
The league selection screen popped up in neat, crisp rows. I scrolled past the Premier League, past the Championship, past League One and League Two, scrolling all the way down into the regional non-league tiers.
I clicked on National League North.
The team selection list expanded. I scrolled down through the alphabetical list until my eyes landed on the familiar round crest with the blue and white diagonal stripes.
Hallowfield Town FC.
Three divisions lower than where I’d left them seven years ago when the integrity officers escorted me off the pitch. A broken club struggling at the bottom of the sixth tier, playing in front of eight hundred die-hard fans on a crumbling pitch at Beck Road.
I hovered the cursor over the badge for a long ten seconds.
My chest tightened with that familiar, dark knot of memory the cold rain on Carr Street, the white plastic carrier bag filled with five thousand pounds in twenty-pound notes, the grey-haired FA investigator pulling his glasses down his nose.
You were paid five thousand pounds a corner, Mr Kershaw.
My finger pressed down on the touchpad.
Click.
The screen loaded, the blue crest flashed bright, and the squad screen expanded across the display.
It was time to see how deep the damage went.