The dressing rooms are on a sub meter because the club pays for water by the litre, and the showers are push button. At ten to five every Saturday the home showers run. Eleven heads, eleven minutes, the litres of eleven men, and the building is locked, and the steam that comes out under the door has the sound in it of a team that has won, and that team has not played here since the ground was rebuilt.
I am the kit manager at a football club and the home dressing room is my room, and once a week it is not.
The showers.
Eleven heads along a wall. Push button, thirty seconds a push, because footballers left to themselves would stand under a shower till Tuesday. The room is on a sub meter. The meter tells me what the room used, and after a match it is a number I know, eleven men, eleven minutes, and the number is the same every Saturday whether or not there has been a match.
At ten to five. Every Saturday. Home or away or no game.
The room.
Locked. I lock it. The camera on the corridor shows the door shut. And at ten to five the meter starts and the steam comes out under the door, and with the steam comes the sound.
I do not know how to describe the sound to somebody who has not been in a dressing room after a win, and if you have been in one you do not need it described. Water. Singing, badly. A shout, and laughter at it. A locker door. Somebody being told to shut up in the way that means the opposite. Eleven men who have done a thing together and are wet and warm and pleased.
For eleven minutes. And then the meter stops and the steam thins and the room, when I unlock it, is dry, and the benches are dry, and the floor is dry, and the kit I have laid out for Monday is where I laid it, and the room smells of soap.
What has been checked.
The push buttons, replaced. The meter, replaced. The showers run at ten to five.
The room, at a quarter to five on a Saturday with no match, by me, sitting on the bench, in the dark, with the door locked from the inside. At ten to five the first shower came on. Then the second. Then all of them, and the room filled with steam, and the sound came up round me, from the showers, from the benches, from the pegs, and a voice a foot from me said, get in, you, and laughed, and something wet went past my face, a towel, flicked, and I sat with my hands on my knees and my eyes shut for eleven minutes in the middle of a team that had won something, and I have played, and I know what it is, and I had not felt it for twenty years, and I felt it.
Who.
The ground was rebuilt on the same site and the dressing room is where the old one was. The club historian, when I described the singing, which was a particular song, sung badly in a particular way, said, that's the cup team. He did not mean a cup we won recently. He meant the one, the only one, the year everybody at the club knows, a team of eleven local men, and the historian said that they had been photographed in the old dressing room after the final, in the showers, singing, and the photograph is in the boardroom.
Ten to five was full time. The historian checked. The final had kicked off at three and gone to time and the whistle had been at ten to five, and the team had gone in, and the showers had gone on.
They are all dead. The last one died a few years ago. They are in the showers.
What is done about it.
The water is on the sub meter every Saturday and the finance office has the room as a leak and the plumber has been and found no leak and the finance office has stopped sending the plumber.
What I do.
I do the kit.
A kit man after a win has a job, which is the same as after a loss, which is to collect the kit off the floor and get it in the skip for the wash, and the difference is that after a win the players throw it at him and he lets them.
So I go in. At ten to five on a Saturday I unlock the room and I go in with the skip, into the steam, into the noise, and I go along the benches, and I pick up shirts that are not there, off pegs that are empty, and I put them in the skip, and I say, come on, lads, kit in the skip, which is what I say, and the towel flicks, and something wet lands on my head, which is a shirt, and I put it in the skip, and at the end of the eleven minutes the room is dry and the skip is empty and I wheel it out.
The historian has been in with me once. He stood at the door and did not come in. He said, at the end, that he could hear his grandfather, and that he had not expected to, and that he would not come again, and that he was glad he had. I told him the skip was for the shirts. He said he knew, and asked if he could push it, and I let him.