Mombasa Road Retravelled Read online

  Chapter 3

  We're chatting all afternoon right up till kick-off, so by 6:00 p.m. I'm feeling drowsy from the high November sun on my arms and shoulders and the equally unfamiliar feel of daytime drinking.

  Little Stevie is back indoors now. His countdown alarm went off fifteen minutes before kick-off, meaning that Almas and Lulu are quickly ignored. The laptop is soon booted up and Little Stevie checks his Excel charts ready to log all the stats in the Premiership, Championship and League One. We switch up the volume on the speakers and are back listening to Alan Green on Five Live, just as we do every Saturday afternoon from mid-August to May.

  Though the big money is on Ipswich today, we need to maintain an accurate picture of what's going on in all the other games both in England and Europe, like the Masai need to know where the rain clouds are heading and the grass will be lushest tomorrow. Today the grass rains are taking us to Portman Road to pasture, but it will be a fleeting visit and the next day we'll rustle up and move on elsewhere as all good nomads do.

  The alarm goes on Little Stevie's watch and referees' whistles blow all over a fog-bound UK I'm now glad to have escaped. Kiwi John, Laila and the girls seem more excited than we are. For us it's a way of life, for them it is unbelievable that we've got ?5,000 riding on what twenty-two men do on a chilly Saturday afternoon in East Anglia.

  It takes Ipswich thirty-seven minutes to break the deadlock; a messy scrambled goal from a corner, Alan Green tells us, but Little Stevie's computer model gave a 79% prediction of a home win, so it's about time the Tractor Boys came up with something to justify being the Wood Team's solitary selection from today's matches.

  Laila and the two girls are euphoric. They mob both me and Little Stevie and for a second or two Little Stevie seems comfortable with the distraction, which for me is a very welcome departure from the norm, but then Alan Green tells us of goals at Everton and Carlisle and Little Stevie is once again exclusively focused on his laptop, frantically switching tabs between Premiership and League One worksheets to input the data.

  'Now I'm going to lay Ipswich off a little on Betfair,' I shout to Kiwi John when the noise dies down, 'because the lay odds have plummeted now that they've scored, and despite the fact we've got some correct score draw insurance, I want to have us we're double insured just in case Ipswich cock it up.'

  Kiwi John nods, but I can tell he hasn't a clue what I mean and I'm not going to bother explaining what laying is or how our insurance system works, just as I wouldn't be too interested in learning how to fix the crankshaft on one of the old Mercedes lorries he drives up to southern Sudan when he picks up disaster relief contracts from the UN.

  There's no further news from Portman Road for the duration of the second half. Little Stevie double checks every couple of minutes on flashscores.co.uk to make sure that Five Live haven't forgotten to tell us anything. They haven't, but it's only when the red scores turn grey on the website that the Ipswich win is finally confirmed and Little Stevie and I share our own high-five ritual, which culminates in a whopping great bear hug. The girls want to hug and celebrate too, and again, from their noise, it's almost as if they've just pocketed the ?3,500 profit from the South American Ipswich striker's bundled thirty-seventh minute effort.

  Little Stevie seems happy with the interference from the girls for a short while, but soon enough wants to come back to me.

  'Seven from eight now this month, Dad,' he grins at me, and I love to see him so animated:

  'You're getting better every week, mate,' I smile, then turning to the gallery:

  'What do you think of that, eh girls?'

  Almas and Lulu take my bait and return to Little Stevie once again. And this time they do get his full attention, and I'm so happy to see him ready to follow them into the lounge to watch television, though I'm curious to find out how he'll cope with proper teen TV rather than the solitary diet of wildlife or astronomy DVDs played on his laptop that so far has formed the entire content of our non-football television watching together.

  Kiwi John is still shaking his head in disbelief:

  'Do you put that kind of money on every game, mate?' he gasps.

  'Not every game. But even ?5,000 is still less than 2% of our total bank, so if anything we're probably being over-cautious. The size of our stake depends on the win-chance prediction Little Stevie gives and on the Betfair odds. Minimum stake ?1,000, up to ?10,000 max at the moment, but that too will go up in time as our bank increases.'

  'Jesus Effing Christ! You're telling me you've been making that kind of money on every game you bet on this month?'

  'More or less,' I shrug. 'I think we've banked over twenty thousand so far.'

  'Bloody hell!' Kiwi John shouts out, almost choking on his beer. 'Now it's all starting to make sense! When you told me about the football money in your e-mails I didn't get you, mate. But ?20,000 quid in a month? That's more like what the bloody players earn!'

  Kiwi John's excitement is infectious and I'm suddenly alive again.

  'Oh, yes, this is it, mate, let me tell you! Forget Comic Relief, forget Live Aid, forget UN Aid, or Aids Aid, or Religious-Bigots-Disguising-Their-Brainwashing-Shit-As-Aid-Aid! This is going to be the real thing - straight cash straight into the emptiest African pockets! No donor guarantees, no bribe-guzzling politico middlemen, no fat cat UN experts to pie chart it all and carry out performance management from the comfort of their Hilton conferences. This is the aid game played like it should be: just me, Little Stevie, his laptop, the Beautiful Game and Betfair!'

  Kiwi John is rocking with laughter and I'm on a roll too, so we crack open another couple of bottles and it's just like old days.

  'Come on, you short-arsed bastard, let's check on the kids,' I say, putting a boozy arm around my dear old friend's shoulders.