Fweeeep. Fweep-fweeeeep.
Notts County 1, Torquay United 1.
They drew against ten men. At home. In front of 6,934 people, the first proper crowd Meadow Lane had held in seventeen months, and they went home quiet.
Reece Angell came down the steps from the seats they gave the lads who were not in the sixteen, and he reached the tunnel mouth as the team came off. Nobody clapped them in.
Clatter-clatter-clatter.
Studs on concrete.
"Sixty-five minutes," Ste Fallows said, dropping into step beside him.
He was thirty-one years old, thin as a rake, ginger going grey at the temples, released by three clubs and re-signed by two of them.
"Sixty-five minutes against ten men and we take a point."
"I know."
"I'm saying it out loud because it helps."
"Does it?"
"No," Fallows said. "It does not help at all."
It smelled of wet grass and Deep Heat and somebody's aftershave, and underneath all of it, the drains.
Squelch. Squelch.
Wet socks on the tunnel floor.
Shlop. Shlop.
Muddy boots on the rubber mat by the door.
Cameron went past with his shirt already off, one hand up to somebody in the stand behind them. Wootton went past behind him with a bag of ice on the back of his neck, and three voices went up at once.
"Wooters."
"Good header, big man."
"Near post. Textbook, that."
"He gave me nothing all day," Wootton said, "and then he gave me that."
The changing room filled in about forty seconds and got loud. Angell put himself on the bench under peg nine and started taking his boots off. He had not played. He took them off anyway.
Zip. His boot bag, open.
Clunk. The right boot into it.
Clunk. The left.
Ricky Loach dropped down next to him and stretched his legs out into the middle of the floor so people had to go round him.
Arms off a gym and legs off a filing clerk, and boots in a green you could pick out from the back of the Kop.
"You watch that from up top?"
"Yeah."
"Go on then. What did it look like from up there?"
"Slow."
Loach turned his head. "Slow."
"You had them ten against eleven for an hour and you played it sideways."
"Sideways." Loach sat up and looked at him properly.
"Let me tell you something, son. You have played sixty-one minutes for this club. I checked. Sixty-one minutes in eight months, and every one of them in front of empty seats, and you are sat there telling me how the game looks."
Angell pulled the laces out of his left boot.
"Sixty-one minutes," Loach said again, "and you're lecturing me about tempo."
"It did look slow."
"You know what your problem is?"
"I have a feeling I am about to find out."
"Your problem is you still think you're at Schalke." Loach let that sit for a second.
"You are not at Schalke. You are at Meadow Lane on four hundred quid a week, and you were not in the sixteen for Torquay."
"Right."
"And you want to have a look at yourself as well, because you have looked knackered since about March, and it is starting to worry people."
"Ricky." Ian Boyd said it from across the room without looking up from the tape on his ankle.
Six foot three, shoulders like a door frame, head shaved since he was twenty-eight, and a white scar splitting his left eyebrow into two pieces.
Thirty-four years old. He kept his voice low and flat, and every man in that room heard him anyway. "Leave it."
"I'm having a conversation, Boysie."
"No, you are having a go. There is a difference."
Somebody laughed. Loach laughed as well, because he had to, and then he stood up and put himself somewhere else.
Boysie finished the tape, rolled it into a ball, threw it at the bin, and missed.
"How's the ankle?"
Angell had the sock down before he thought about it. The right one had never gone back to the size of the left one.
There were four centimetres of shiny skin running up the inside of it where they had gone in with the screws, and a knuckle of bone sitting where nobody else had a knuckle of bone.
"Fine."
"Fine as in fine, or fine as in you would say fine either way?"
"It's fine, Boysie."
"Right," Boysie said, and let it go.
It was more than anybody at that football club had said to him about the ankle since January.
Michael Doyle was going back over the second half to nobody in particular. Click.
Somebody put the radio on. Click.
Somebody else turned it off. Two of the young lads were arguing about whose turn it was to collect the balls, and one of them lost, and the other made a noise like a crowd.
Bang.
The door went, and Dessie Quinn came in with a clipboard, and half the noise went out of the room.
Shaved head, a nose broken twice and set badly both times, and no coat on, in the rain, in a car park, in February. There was a book running on when he would put a coat on, and it had been running since 2019.
"Nice of you all to turn up," he said. "Monday. Half nine. On the grass, boots on."
"Gaffer said Monday off."
"He said the sixteen have Monday off. Are you in the sixteen?"
Nobody said anything.
"No," Quinn said. "You are not. Half nine."
He worked round the room with the clipboard, and when he reached peg nine he stopped and stood there for a bit without saying anything.
"You alright?"
"Yeah."
"You've been down here an hour."
"Twenty minutes."
"An hour. I watched you sat up in them seats forty minutes after everyone else stood up and went home." Quinn tucked the clipboard under his arm. "What time are you in Monday?"
"Eight."
"Half nine, I said."
"I'm in at eight most days."
"I know you are. That is why I asked." He scratched the side of his face. "Why?"
Angell put the boot in the bag and said nothing.
"Go on."
"It's nothing."
"It is eight months of turning up ninety minutes early to train with lads who do not want to be there. That is something."
Quinn pulled the door to, so it was shut, so it was the two of them and four lads at the far end who were not listening. "Why?"
"There's a clause."
"There is always a clause. What does it say?"
"Fifteen starts and the option triggers. Automatic. Two more years."
Quinn looked at the ceiling for a second. "And how many starts have you got?"
"None."
"None."
"Four off the bench. No starts."
"Who wrote it?"
"Kemp."
"So the man who signed you wrote a clause that means he only has to keep you if he plays you, and then he does not play you. And your agent looked at that contract and told you to sign it."
"Sean said it was standard."
"Sean's a liar. Where's Sean now?"
"He stopped picking up in April."
Quinn nodded slowly, like a man being told a thing he had already guessed. "When's it up?"
"Thirtieth of June."
"So you have got forty-two league games to get fifteen starts, you are not in the squad, and it is the end of August."
"Yeah."
"Right." Quinn tapped the clipboard against his leg twice.
Tap. Tap.
"Do you want my honest opinion?"
"Not particularly."
"You're getting it anyway. You are twenty-two, and you train harder than any man in this building, and it has bought you nothing this year. Nobody is watching. Nobody is going to watch, because there is nothing to watch."
He put his hand on the door.
"So work out what else you have got to give them. Because right now you are the fittest man in the National League who cannot get in a National League team, and I have been coaching twenty years and I have never seen anything sadder."
"Noted, Dessie."
"I mean it."
"I know you do."
He went, and the room went after him inside eleven minutes.
Boysie went. Doyle went. Loach went last and loud, on the phone, telling somebody it was one-one and they would have to make it half nine.
Fallows came back through with his bag on his shoulder and his coat half on.
"You stopping?"
"For a bit."
"There's nothing to stop for."
"I know."
"Lift?"
"I'm alright."
"It's uphill."
"I know where I live, Ste."
Fallows laughed and went, and the door went thump-thump-thump on its closer, and then it was Angell and a radiator that knocked twice and settled. Clink. Clink.
The players' shower block at Meadow Lane sits between the home changing room and the away changing room, one wet corridor of white tile with a drying area in the middle, and the away room beyond it.
The away room is a long white box with a bench down both sides and eighteen pegs screwed into the wall above it, and a strip light at one end that had hummed since before Reece Angell was born.
There was a whiteboard nobody wrote on. There was a bucket under the radiator for when the radiator did what it did.
Above the far bench, somebody in about 1998 had painted a magpie, and successive kitmen had painted over it, and you could still see the shape of it if the light was off.
He sat with his boots in the bag between his feet and ran a hand back over his head. He had cut his own hair over a sink since he was nineteen, and you could tell, if you looked. Nobody looked.