lose the ball, but never actually doing so. And then he would do it again, and again, and the person watching would realise that this weird-looking boy was not just a not-bad football player, not just a good or even very good football player, but a prodigy, a miracle of balance and timing and speed and coordination, a dancer, an athlete, a natural.
Freddy had his big growth spurt at thirteen. He had always had the skill but now the size and speed came too. Before that, other kids would get bored of having him go round them as if they weren’t there and would simply kick or push him off the ball. Then it all changed. When Freddy was only fourteen, playing a game of football near his home at Linguere, a mother pushing her pram past the kickabout would stop to watch him. A bus driver would lose concentration and miss the change of lights. Other kids would stop their game and come over to watch. The effect on people who did know about football was more pronounced still. They would blink, wonder if they could quite believe what they were seeing, rub their eyes. The scout who spotted Freddy was rung by a contact who had seen him play in a schools tournament in Louga, the provincial capital. The scout lived in Dakar and there was nothing convenient about getting up-country while the three-day tournament was still running, but his contact told him he would never speak to him again if he didn’t go, so he did, and felt that on his deathbed he would still be able to remember, first, his nausea, lasting for about ten seconds, that he had been dragged several hundred kilometres inland just to watch this badly coordinated freak falling over his own feet, then a slow sense that he wasn’t watching quite what he thought he was watching but something else, giving way to the certainty that today, for the first time in his twenty years of scouting two or three or five matches a week, and perhaps once a year spotting someone who would go on to play professional football, he was watching a genuine genius, a talent on the world scale. Freddy Kamo: there would be a day when everyone in the world with the slightest interest in football, amounting to billions of people, would know that name.
After the game, the scout had virtually bankrupted himself making calls on his mobile, trying to get through to his most important contact of all, the director of the Arsenal scouting network who reported directly to Arsene Wenger. He also went to meet the boy, to sniff around and see if he had the field to himself, and found two things: first, that he didn’t – two or three of his competitors had already approached Freddy to discuss terms; second, that talking to Freddy was not a question of approaching Freddy, who was low-key and at ease with himself off the field, but of talking to his father, who was a dignified, unsmiling, strict-seeming police sergeant of forty. Patrick Kamo spoke fluent French. He did not want Freddy to sign terms yet; thought he was too young and that he needed to grow up at home with his father and his three half-sisters. The negotiations took months and the key to getting Patrick onside was the club’s willingness to let Freddy grow up in Senegal until he was ready. Other suitors wanted him to move to Europe; this was the clincher for Arsenal. Negotiations ended with an agreement to pay Freddy a retainer until he turned seventeen, at which point he would move to London. The scout was on the point of agreeing this deal when an even richer club came along – since Freddy Kamo was now one of football’s least well-kept secrets – and offered the same deal except for two and a half times more money, at which point the biggest triumph of the scout’s professional life turned into the biggest disappointment he had ever had, as Freddy signed terms for the other team.
And now Freddy Kamo had turned seventeen and was coming to London – specifically, to 27 Pepys Road. His father had chosen the house from the three alternatives offered by the club, in the person of Mickey Lipton-Miller. Patrick thought living in town would suit Freddy better than the country and he thought there would be more black people there. He thought that might be an issue in England. The club had brought the two of them to England to look around three months before, in a sensible attempt to let them get a feel of the place. It had been the first time either Kamo had been out of Senegal, the first time either of them had been on an aeroplane, and several other firsts too – their first time in a lift, in a restaurant, in a taxi, in a hotel. Patrick had found the experience overwhelming, but hadn’t wanted to let this feeling show to his son, so he had kept a straight policeman’s face on for the whole trip. Freddy had been smiling and cheerful throughout all the extraordinary sights and experiences, the size and noise and richness and the meetings and the medical tests and the people, and Patrick had not wanted to betray his own anxieties by asking too many questions about what Freddy really felt. The end result was that now, on their second trip to England, this time to move there permanently for the sake of Freddy’s football career, he had no reliable idea about Freddy’s state of mind. He might be panicking, just as Patrick was. Or he might be as blankly cheerful as he seemed.
But Freddy didn’t look like he was panicking. He had slept, sprawled across the first-class bed-seat, all the way from Dakar to Paris, and then spent the short flight to London looking out the window and laughing at shapes he claimed to see in the clouds.
‘That one looks like Uncle Kama,’ he said to his father, about a cloud which did indeed look like a short fat man with very well-developed buttocks.
‘Wrong colour,’ said Patrick. Freddy reached across and very softly punched him on the upper arm.
Patrick was rigid with tension, ready to bristle and flare up, in the immigration hall, but although the queue had moved very slowly, the middle-aged woman looking at their passports and visas had let them through with no questions, indeed without speaking at all. Now they were in the arrivals hall.
‘Are you ready?’ Patrick asked Freddy as they stood beside the trolley on which they had put their suitcases. They were both wearing their best suits. Patrick had refused to employ an agent for Freddy, but he had taken legal and business advice. From this day, the club were paying Freddy ?20,000 a week, with a complex series of escalators and option clauses taking account of what would happen when his career took off. In other words, from this moment on, they were rich. It was a hard thought to keep hold of; mainly Patrick was worrying about what would happen if they came through the arrivals door and Mickey Lipton-Miller and the others weren’t there to meet them. Mickey had offered to fly someone to Dakar just to fly back with them, but Patrick was a proud man and that seemed too much; he was not a child who needed his hand held. But the chaos and rushing and sheer indifference of Heathrow – the sense that every single person there was familiar with what they were doing and where they were going, and none of them would spare a thought for the Kamos – were close to overwhelming.
‘I am fine,’ said Freddy.
‘
Freddy nodded and took charge of the luggage trolley. They went through the deserted customs hall and out before a wall of faces, two of whom, Patrick was pleased to see, were Mickey Lipton-Miller and the club translator.
17
Zbigniew and Piotr leaned against the wall of Uprising, their favourite bar, and watched the midweek crowd jostling and flirting and drinking and shouting. Piotr was going home early for Christmas, so they wouldn’t see each other until the new year; Zbigniew was going to stay in London. He was on standby for any small plumbing or electrical jobs that came up at any of Piotr’s sites. It was a good time to get work because British builders were all on holiday. For that very reason Zbigniew had a couple of jobs which he had promised to finish over the holidays, while the owners of 33 Pepys Road and 17 Grove Crescent were in Mauritius and Dubai, respectively. They would be staying in expensive hotels and doing whatever it was people did when they went to expensive places – sit by the pool with expensive drinks, eat expensive food, talk about other expensive holidays they might go on and how nice it was to have so much money.
Zbigniew was planning to go home in early January and had already booked a Ryanair flight for 99p plus tax. His mother would make a fuss over him and his father would take a day or two off work. It would be good to be home; Zbigniew hadn’t been to Warsaw since the previous spring. He would see some friends and dandle some babies on his knees and dream about the time he would be able to come back as a wealthy man.
‘That one,’ said Piotr. The pub had no Polish beers so both men were drinking Budvar, in their view the only good thing to come out of the former Czechoslovakia.
‘The blonde? Too short. Almost a dwarf.’
‘No, not the blonde, the one next to her. With dark hair. I am in love.’
‘You are always in love.’
‘Love is what makes the earth go around the sun.’
‘No, that’s gravity,’ said Zbigniew. This was an old debate between them and they barely listened to each
