My mum went on her own. You know the shape of it by now, so I’ll spare you the saying of it again.

All I’ll say is the thing that cold floor finally made me say to myself: nobody was ever on their knees on the concrete with her. Nobody said her name to bring her back. Nobody got there in time. She went the way she lived, carrying the lot of them and asking after none, with the telly on for company.

And I came back to change that. It was half the reason for all of it.

Then I spent six months living a 15-minute walk from her front door, forking ice off a football pitch and staring down a property man and saving a club I kept telling myself I was saving for my dad, while my mother sat on her own three streets away with a boiler she’d stopped mentioning and the window that had whistled since I was a boy, doing the exact thing I was doing, alone, the way she always did, the way it one day gets her.

I got so lost in being my father’s son that I very nearly finished my mother’s job for her.

I went round on Christmas Eve and I didn’t leave for a long time.

I couldn’t clear the mortgage yet.

The money for that doesn’t wake until February, and I’m the only one alive who knows it’s coming. But I could bleed her radiators till the top ones went warm again, clank of the old pipes coming back to life.

I could put a proper seal on the back-bedroom window that has hissed cold air at this family since before my voice broke, hiss cut off dead at last, the quiet of it almost loud. And I could sit at her little oilcloth table with three sugars in a mug that says WORLD’S OKAYEST GARDENER, and go nowhere, and do nothing, for hours, until she stopped, tea halfway to her mouth, and looked at me properly.

"You’re sitting still," she said, like an accusation. "You never sit still. What’s happened to you?"

"Bit of a scare at the club, Mum. I’m all right now."

"You’ve gone grey. You look just like your father used to. Working himself daft on those cranes for people who never thanked him."

She reached over and put her hand flat on top of mine on the table, and hers was warm and small and alive. "There’s nothing worth that, love. No club. No amount of anybody’s money. Nothing’s worth doing that to yourself. You hear me?"

And I sat in my mum’s warm kitchen with the fixed window quiet behind me, my mum, 51 years old and telling me off over a mug, and I finally understood the thing that the System and Stan and Ray Sully and a walk-in doctor had all been walking me towards from different sides.

You cannot save a single soul from six feet under a workload. You have to set it down while you are still standing up.

So I made the decision I’d been outrunning since the first night Stan said the word.

In January, I am handing over the dugout.

Not because I failed.

Because I have finally sorted which of my two jobs a good man can do for me, and which one only I can do at all. The football, the eleven, the Saturdays, I spent the whole autumn deliberately building that so it could run without me, and this frozen, broken month it ran without me and won.

A good manager can be handed that. And I have already, quietly, on a dark drive home from my mum’s with the heater ticking, decided precisely who that man is going to be. I’m not going to set his name down here. Some things you carry in your coat a while before you take them out and show them to the room.

But the other job. The ground.

The covenant, and the patient man across the marshes reading his calendar by the fire, waiting on the one missed payment that ends us. That job I can’t hand to any living soul, because it isn’t a football job.

It’s the fight over whether there’s a Tilbrook Town in a hundred years at all, for some other boy’s dad to stand him at. That’s the chairman’s war, and it wants a chairman who isn’t face-down on a tunnel floor at 24.

I’m not stepping down. I’m stepping across. Into the bigger seat, and the colder one, the seat my father never got near and my mother would tell me to wrap up warm in.

Payment 6 went to the bank on the 31st of December, dug out of a dead month by a raffle, an urn, 500 loyal tenners and a hospitality room I heated with a blower borrowed off Brennan, and it went with 9 pounds to spare and my hand steadier on the pen than it had been in a fortnight.

Six cliffs this year.

Six cleared.

And the counting stops mattering so much soon, because I know what wakes up in February. Across the marshes a man drew another empty box on a calendar where he’d wanted a cross, and he would have to build his New Year out of something other than my funeral.

I saw the year in on my mum’s settee, the two of us, the football on with the sound turned right down, her asleep by half eleven with her head going and me not moving in case I woke her.

[SYSTEM] Payments: 6 met. Games: on schedule. The one thing I keep no column for went on the floor this month and was lifted off it, because they would not leave him there. That part was never mine to manage. Rest, Sam. The war keeps until January, and you go into it with people at your back.

People at my back.

For the first time since a Tuesday morning in June, I let myself believe it, and I slept.