Fan

by Danny Rhodes

  Sunday evening. 9th April 1989.

  Party time.

  ‘Let’s all have a disco, La la la la La la la la…’

  And they did.

  Fifteen fucking years. He could see them all, half expected the door to slide open, the lads to come barrelling down the carriage, lads and lads and lads and lads, each in their colours, loving the crack.

  He could see them all.

  A train full of ghosts.

  A movie reel beyond the window. Lights flashing by. The train thundering onward. A tin of lager at his lips.

  The bittersweet taste of what once was and what is.

  Invisible death looming on a black horizon.

  A perpetual shadow.

  Then and now.

  Now and then.

  And in another dark corner, their bedroom door shut fast. Him on the dark landing, retreating down the stairs, leaving it behind.

  Leaving Kelly behind.

  The landscape gathered itself in. Familiar villages he recognised by patterns of street lights, the meandering river somewhere in the darkness, the red warning lights on the waterworks, the old factories convulsing in their death throes, the glow of halogen spotlights protecting the asset strippers’ bounty from the pilfering hands of the discarded and forgotten. Rows and rows of dark terraced houses beyond the window on his side of the train, well-lit commuter estates beyond the other.

  Polarised fucking opposites.

  The old town.

  Dismantling the bedrock. Burying its foundations. A twenty-year process of decay, of living and dying … and dying … and dying.

  A legacy of ruin in the manufacturing heartlands.

  A mirror to the soul.

  He walked out of the station, down the incline and into the old town, his footsteps leading the way, the rest of him following, straight to the hotel, straight to his hotel room, his hotel bed, exhausted from his journey, from his week, from the news about Stimmo, from all that had happened with Kelly.

  He stroked the scratches on his forearms.

  He winced with pain.

  You’re fifteen years old. You are travelling to Leicester. You have a ticket to the biggest derby game of the season.

  And there’s no fucking love lost either.

  It’s a nasty day to watch a football match. It’s a nasty fucking place.

  And it will rain burning toilet rolls.

  Off the stinking train, out of the station.

  Get in, get out, fuck them about.

  Into a wall of police. Penned against the station wall, pressed into half a pavement. Held there for an hour.

  ‘Let us go…’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere.’

  ‘We’re here for the game.’

  ‘You’ll watch the game when we say so.’

  A bitter, antagonising hour.

  ‘This is a joke.’

  ‘I can’t see anybody laughing. Stand there and shut up.’

  Treat them like animals. Herd them like animals.

  Down the fucking High Street. Shoppers cowering in doorways.

  Strangers in a strange land.

  Invaders and raiders.

  Through the industrial estate, floundering, on its knees. Lads and more lads, blokes and more blokes. Wound up. Acting up. The escort rocking and rolling, pulsing, throbbing. The fucking buzz of it. The notoriety. The adrenalin rush. Black fucking polo shirt, scarf covering the face, bellowing out the Forest sound.

  The mad fuckers with their missiles.

  The bricks and the mortar.

  The splinter of windows.

  The shiver and shatter of glass.

  The cheers.

  The laughter.

  Singing working its way down the line, voice catching voice.

  Red Army! Red Army!

  ‘Stop singing or I’ll arrest you.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Because I can. And take that scarf off.’

  2 p.m. on a Saturday.

  ‘Wipe that fucking grin off your face.’

  We are Nottingham, I said we are Nottingham.

  Penned by great fuck-off horses and dogs and big fuck-off policemen.

  Marched like prisoners.

  To the turnstiles. The click and the clack. The rust and decay. Into the guts, into the away end. A terrace fit for dogs or the criminally insane. All metal and wire mesh. Cigarette smoke, beer, piss, the home fuckers baying for blood. Three hours of chanting, at the pitch, at the home end, at life itself.

  The throat red raw.

  Every fucking Saturday.

  Penned like fucking fish in a can. Forest scoring. Forest going mental. Leicester scoring. Leicester going mental. Leicester scoring again and again.

  Windows at the back of the away end.

  Prime fucking targets.

  Police in the pen. Everything kicking off. Police dragging some poor fucker down the concrete steps, his clothes riding up, dragging him down the pen on his backside, hearing the poor bastard shriek, seeing the skin tear clean to the bone.

  Somewhere beyond the heads and the mouths and the fists, somewhere beyond the fences and spikes and mesh, a football match on a green velvet carpet.

  No fucker taking any notice.

  You are fifteen years old. You go to Goodison Park, to Highfield Road, White Hart Lane, Carrow Road and Villa Park. You visit Selhurst Park on a cold Wednesday evening, a two hundred and forty mile round trip, six of you crammed into a Ford Granada. You go to Vicarage Road, Old Trafford and Anfield. Up the country, down the country, through the streets and alleys.

  The broken-backed blur of Thatcher’s Britain beyond the windows.

  Week in, week out.

  Living for football.

  Living for the crack.

  The foookin crack.

  School on the Monday. What a fucking joke. A bunch of naïve virgin fucks who don’t have a clue about life or how to live it.

  ‘What did you do at the weekend?’

  ‘I was at Filbert Street and in the dirty Leicester streets with five thousand Forest, watching fuckers bleed for the cause.’

  ‘Why, what the fuck were you doing?’

  Friday

  The same weather, bright and cold, the same fucking chapel. He’d not been there since a road accident killed an ex-schoolmate. He’d not had cause to go back.

  But BJ and that fucking phone call. Cunt.

  We’re suffering here so you can suffer too.

  And fuck me, he was suffering.

  He had every best intention, got up in plenty of time, ate breakfast in the hotel, got his black suit on, pulled his tie straight, strolled purposefully down into the old town, over the river and past his old gaff, altered now, the clock shop gone, developed as a flat, an extension of the ground floor where the Scotsman used to live, some fucking modern planning arrangement designed to squeeze people into spaces and money into fat wallets. And it was just a hundred yards from there, the length of a fucking football pitch. He could see the black gates, the driveway leading up to the arch, the chapel beyond, and if he’d been pressed for time perhaps he’d have headed straight up there, found himself a seat at the back somewhere, made himself part of something he really was no longer part of. But he wasn’t late. He was too fucking early by any measure. He had time to think and to revisit his doubts.

  They strangled the life out of him.

  He continued down to the river instead, stopping at the bridge, wrestling with guilt, telling himself it was better this way, to take a moment, to gather his thoughts, to arrive at the last minute and avoid the inevitable onslaught of bitter glances and barbed questions.

  Bitter and barbed for what? For fucking off down south and leaving them to it?

  Too right, serri. Too fucking right.

  The river was deathly quiet, no sign of life on the water, some old guy in the allotment burning off the dead and the dying, the rotten and the wasted, black smoke rising in a thin plume, drifting up and away. An old gal came down the path. H
e felt her eyes on him, him in his suit, his shined shoes, his dew-glazed hair looking like fucking Brylcreem. But he wasn’t a ghost. She could see him better than that, he realised. She knew what he was and what he fucking wasn’t.

  He looked down at the water, at the sluice gates holding everything back. Black thoughts started spilling in, trapping him between moments.

  Dark water rising.

  The river become a river of people moving inexorably towards a tunnel, trailing into a dark space where there was no space, filling an area that was already full, compressing and solidifying there.

  The dead and the living, the living and the dead. The dead standing up. Blue lips. Vacant expressions. Lifeless eyes. The lights going out.

  And Stimmo shouting over his head, shouting the same fucking thing over and over.

  ‘That one’s dead, mate. I’m telling you he’s fucking dead.’

  A look on Stimmo’s face then, a look that etched itself on to him, became part of the person Stimmo was after that day, if he remembered it right, if he could be trusted to comprehend anything about the life he’d lived.

  Stimmo. There and gone.

  He didn’t go to the service. Did he fuck as like. He wandered the streets of the old town instead, feeling the separation of fifteen years, registering the changes.

  For better.

  For worse.

  The corner garage transformed into a drive-through takeaway. Half the factory site already given over to housing association dwellings, clean bricked, neatly shrubbed, soulless.

  The fleapit nightclub, his old stomping ground, gone. No trace of its shell or its footing in the earth but the topography the same, the stretch up to the town hall littered with the old and the new, with names he recognised on shop fronts and pub signs and vans, and names he didn’t know at all. A supermarket where the old town football ground used to stand. Nothing to remind him except the chip shop they used to visit at half-time. All other traces swept away.

  Time moved relentlessly onward, the hour of the service passing into oblivion like everything else, leaving him untethered, without anchor in a place that had been his anchor for over half a lifetime.

  And he should have gone home then, got himself on the train and made his way back, tried to get the wedge back in. But he didn’t. He couldn’t get past that bedroom door, couldn’t see beyond it. He was a daft bastard, really, a let-down to himself, a disappointment to others. So he really did have to stay. He had to explain himself, see the people he’d not seen, find out what the fuck it was all about, Stimmo doing himself in like that, discover if he was barking up the right tree or poking about in dark places he had no business with.

  He returned to the hotel and booked himself in for the weekend, closed the curtains, switched off the lights and crashed on the bed, knowing he had to call BJ, to avoid being the one they’d all say didn’t give a fuck.

  To be forgiven.

  He raided the minibar, sank the whisky and the wine then drifted off into a vision of himself, sinking a six-pack of Fosters on the bank of the Trent, the churning river at his feet, the fucking Trent end looking like it might collapse into the water, tilting against the clouds, threatening to fall on top of him, crush his sad bones. Some woman on the bridge turning down the steps, carrying a wreath under one arm, turning down the alley in the direction of the ticket office. Others following behind, little ants crossing the bridge, turning down the steps, wandering along the far bank, disappearing into the alley, an endless string of people in ones and twos and little clusters, him on the far bank watching them all, trying to build up the courage to do the same.

  A drunken reverie.

  Still he fancied himself following them down to discover a red brick wall decked in scarves, the cross of St George, that name ‘Brian Howard Clough’, those dates 1935–2004, the freshly daubed message ‘you did it your way’. He dreamed he stood there in the silent car park paying homage whilst his brothers and sisters drifted past him to lay their own messages, flowers, hats, scarves, ghosts to rest.

  A car park full of memories. A sad fucking ending really. Couldn’t they have opened the gates, let the cunts on to the pitch, offered some sense of affiliation?

  Because he was dreaming of the same colours draped over a goalmouth again now, Anfield in the aftermath, a carpet of condolence, a terrace bathed in remembrance, a different type of loss, but one connecting to the other, drawing fifteen years together so they might not have happened at all, his adult life bracketed by two moments, the death of one, the death of ninety-six. And then there was Stimmo, the spark that put a light to it all. He’d let that fucker down, well and fucking truly.

  He was, as he’d often been called, a selfish bastard.

  He woke in the dark, struggled to locate himself, floundered for a while in a room he didn’t recognise amongst anxieties he couldn’t control. And then he saw the golden church spire beyond the window, recognised the old town’s sombre silhouette, dropped back into the pillow, clicked on the TV, buried himself in mediocrity.

  Somewhere amongst it all he dialled BJ’s number. BJ picked up on the second ring.

  ‘You’re a cunt.’

  ‘I couldn’t face it,’ he said. ‘I thought I could but I couldn’t.’

  ‘So you’re a cunt. And now you want to try and make it better.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘I’ll be at the bank tomorrow.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Sincil Bank. You daft bastard. 2 p.m. outside the Shakespeare.’

  ‘Are you fucking kidding?’

  ‘No, mate. Why would I kid about a serious thing like you buying me a pint?’

  The phone went dead.

  Barely sixteen. Finished with school. Sixteen and a day on the Government Youth Training Scheme. None the fucking wiser. Dead hours. Dead days. The barest fucking interest in the job and the job with the barest fucking interest in you.

  £27 a week.

  £32 a week.

  £70 a week.

  An idiot’s progress.

  A day a week in college. On the bus at the crack of dawn, sleeping on the back seat as it rattles its way through village after village, heading to the cathedral city.

  Learning nothing and having nothing to offer but the vaguest awareness of the skills required to work in a dying industry.

  Two fucking years of cheap labour then dumped back into the world.

  Redundant.

  Twice.

  Seventeen and on the scrapheap.

  Getting nowhere fast.

  A summer of fuck all. Sat with your feet up. Mam and dad on holiday. Family home to yourself. But no spends. Six fucking weeks on the giro. The season coming around, and no fucking spends. Your dad on your case. The world on your shoulders. Down the jobby on a Friday. The jobby with the dead heads. Hating that more. Hating that the most. Patronised. Sneered at. Laughed at.

  Your ex-schoolmates starting out at Oxford and Cambridge and Durham and LSE.

  Hate and resentment brimming. Hate and resentment bubbling. You with your O levels in English and Geography and fuck all else.

  Not what you know but who you know and you don’t know any fucker worth knowing.

  Except your dad knows someone, someone at Royal Mail. Maybe. Perhaps. Just to tide you over. Just for a few weeks, that will become months, become years, threaten a lifetime.

  But that first morning, up at the crack, down to the Sorting Office, out on the streets in the bright summer sunshine. It isn’t so bad. Not bad at all. You and the bike. You and the morning. You and your thoughts. No fucker bothering you. No fucker asking for anything. Nothing to get bored about. You in your shirtsleeves. House to house, street to street. You by the river. You in the park. You in your uniform. You with an identity. Mr Postie. The girls loving it. Loving you. You loving the girls. Home by mid-morning. Home with the day to devour.

  Just the fucking evening shifts to get through. Three hours at the facing table. The clock crawling. You part of a machine, do
ing a job a machine could do. The mail coming at you from all quarters, bag after bag. Pile upon fucking pile.

  The good and the bad. The rough and the smooth. The rough and the fucking smooth.

  But money in the bank. Real money, not fucking pocket money. More than you need. More than enough. Summer fading. Autumn falling away. Winter coming on. The season ticking by. Forest ticking off the wins. Getting to games no trouble. No fucking trouble at all. You and the boys, a band of merry men, of merry lads, traipsing up and down the country, eating up the burgers and the miles, road and rail, rail and road, following the Tricky Trees.

  Over land and sea.

  And Leicester.

  Because it is steep banks of concrete and steel crowd barriers.

  It is metal cages.

  It is wide-open terraces exposed to the elements.

  It is taking whatever mother nature and the world can throw at you.

  And throwing it back.

  Saturday

  Lincoln fucking City. A Saturday afternoon smeared with rain. BJ munching a steak and mushroom pie, the two of them huddled in the Stacey West Stand.

  In memory of Bill Stacey and Jim West.

  In memory of Bradford.

  ‘You should have come. You should have made the effort,’ said BJ.

  ‘I couldn’t face it,’ he said.

  ‘None of us could. But we faced it.’

  ‘It brought back too many memories.’

  ‘Aye, well we’ve all got those memories, mate.’

  BJ brought his pie up to his face, bit out a chunk of steak. A thick globule of gravy dripped into his lap.

  ‘Fucking pies,’ he said.

  ‘Fucking prawn sandwiches more like,’ said Finchy.

  ‘Not here mate,’ said BJ. ‘Not in this fucking league.’

  ‘Do you watch it much?’

  ‘The Premiership?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘I don’t go to games. I’ve no cause. There’s something not right about it. Fucking Premiership and fucking Sky TV. All that money sloshing about. All those foreign fuckers. And don’t get me started on fucking all-seater stadia.’

  Finchy looked out across the ground, thinking ‘this is all seater’.

  ‘A bloke pissed on me in the Trent end once,’ he said.