Gareth Roberts - Whatever Happened to Billy Parks

Gerry’s face breaks into a big smile revealing yellow chipped teeth. He claps me on the shoulder. ‘Then, old son, everything changes, you get the chance to put everything right. You get the chance to make everything bad that’s happened in the last thirty- odd years disappear.’ He pauses again, adding slowly, ‘If, of course, you manage to put the ball in the back of the Polish net.’

I don’t sleep that night.

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.

‘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?’