Football Crazy

by Terry Ravenscroft

  The word had the desired effect on the superintendent, and all thoughts of Mrs Screwer's lack of libido were put on hold for the time being. However the police chief still didn't know what his sergeant was getting at. Of course they would still be out there festering, so what was new? He looked at Hawks impatiently. “Well spit it out then man, if I wanted to do riddles I'd buy a riddle book.”

  “Or set about trying to have The Riddler arrested,” thought Hawks, but he said, “I mean all right, we've got the football team safely under lock and key, so we've been able to put a temporary stop to the hooliganism; but even if the players get sent down for twelve months, as they should be, the club will just buy more players, and when that happens we'll have the hooligan problem back with us again. Locking the players up is just delaying the issue. Putting it off until a later date. Whereas if you were to release them, and let them play....?”

  Screwer regarded his sergeant in a new light and rewarded him with a smile, which Hawks would rather have done without. “We'll make a copper out of you yet, Hawks,” he beamed.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Charge them all with affray and let them go. Crack them all one with a truncheon on the way out, bastards.”

  Reflecting on it a week later, Hawks wondered what the eventual outcome would have been had he not interfered, had he let things run their course. But he couldn't say. All he could be sure of was that what happened wouldn't have happened. And that one of the things that wouldn't have happened was that the match between Frogley Town and Brailsford Wanderers would not have taken place when it did, whilst another was that there would not now be a countrywide search for Superintendent Screwer, still missing since the night of the fateful match.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “I was very nearly famous” - Des Linesman

  Stanley had been walking on air for two days. He could hardly have been happier had he been the man who had broke the bank at Monte Carlo and on the way home had tripped up and fallen into a bed of Claudia Schiffer's. His beloved football team had been released from prison, three valuable points were already in the bag with only one game played, and there was another home fixture to look forward to on Wednesday night! Was it possible for things to be better?

  Actually it was Stanley's turn to work the 2-10 shift that week but as usual when work clashed with a football fixture he had arranged to change his shift with his opposite number on the Bone Pulveriser, Albert Humphries. It had been a close run thing this time however, Stanley reflected, as he made his way to the police station.

  “I know I'd promised to swap shifts with thee Stanley,” Albert had said, “but I have to visit t' wife in hospital.”

  Stanley was devastated. “But....but that means I won't be able to see t' Town if tha doesn't swap with me, Albert.”

  His work mate commiserated with him was adamant. “I know that, Stanley, and I'm sorry, I really am. But I have to go, it's t' wife.”

  “But they're my whole life, t' Town, Albert,” Stanley pleaded.

  “Sorry Stanley. If it were anybody else but t' wife....”

  Stanley started to cry. It wasn't an act. If he had thought that by crying it would have helped his case by the merest fraction he would have wept buckets. But he didn't, he started to cry simply because he couldn't help himself. It worked.

  “Oh what the hell,” Albert said. “Go on. I'll send her some grapes and a cowheel in instead.”

  His attendance at the match now back on course the only thing to darken Stanley's horizons was that Fentonbottom was still missing. Stanley had searched high and low for his dog, especially high, as the last time Fentonbottom had done a runner, oddly enough also when his master had been painting, Stanley had found him hiding in the cave near the top of Dad Tor, the highest of the range of moorland hills just to the north of Frogley.

  Recalling this, the cave was where Stanley had started his search, but all he had found on this occasion was a condom still in its wrapper, a Mars bar and an unopened can of Coca-Cola, neatly together behind a small boulder, as if stashed there by some boy who planned to visit the cave with a girl who would do anything for a Mars bar and a Coca-Cola.

  Having no use for neither condoms nor Coca Cola, on the grounds of lack of opportunity with regard to the former and a respect for his stomach with regard to the latter, Stanley had left them there, eaten the Mars bar and continued his search.

  But nowhere he had looked thus far had yielded Fentonbottom. Which is why he was now on the way to the police station, to see if the local constabulary could help him in his search. After all there were enough of them, judging by the number of policemen there had been at the match last Saturday. It would give them something to do, for they'd had precious little to do at the match.

  *

  Some might say that to hire an open-top bus in which to tour the town centre after winning just one match was a little over the top, but Big Donny Donnelly, thanks to having been schooled in such matters by The Psychiatry of Football with a foreword by Ron Atkinson, knew otherwise.

  “I'm giving the lads a taste of the feeling of what it will be like for them when they've pulled off the big one,” he explained to a surprised George Fearnley, who had joined Donny outside the stadium on leaving his office to find out what all the merriment was about. “So they’ll be able to take it in their stride when it actually happens later in the season.”

  “Hence one of the players holding aloft a cardboard cut-out of the FA Cup,” the club secretary observed.

  “Well obviously,” said Donny. “Then, having got that feeling into their systems, they won't want to let it go, have it taken away from them if you like; so come the first round of the FA Cup they will go out there and fight hammer and nail.”

  “A bit like they're doing now, you mean,” said George.

  “What?”

  George pointed to the top deck of the bus where several of the players were fighting for the seats on the front row. Donny grimaced and shouted to them. “Hey, cut that out you lot!”

  “Who should be at the front, Boss?” called Briggs, then, without waiting for an answer: “Me, shouldn't I.”

  “Why yow more than anybody else, Briggsy?” demanded Stock.

  “Because I’m up front in the team, ain’t I,” said Briggs. “So it stands to reason I should be up front on the coach.”

  “Not my reason it doesn’t,” said Moggs, “That would put me at the back and I’m as entitled to be at the front as much as anybody, the way I performed.”

  Parks chimed in with his two pennyworth. “If anybody should be at the front it should be me, it was me who scored the goal.”

  Parks, after having eventually been caught by his team mates and suffering the same fate with his hair as the rest of them, had initially vowed never to go out in public again without the advantage of a hat. However now that he didn't stand out from them so much, by virtue of his affected hairstyle, the rest of the players' attitude towards him had softened a little. For one thing they had stopped calling him Stephanie. And for another they didn't seem to dislike him quite so much as they previously had. Especially so after he’d had scored the winning goal against Grimely.

  Added to that, on the evening of the match Parks had found out that good looks aren't everything, especially to nubile young Frogley Town fans who only hours earlier had seen you score the winning goal, as he’d had no difficulty at all scoring again with three of them, or at least would have scored with them had he been able to get an erection. Consequentially he had quickly become more tolerant of his new hairstyle.

  Crooks too thought he had a strong claim to be on the front row of the bus. “I passed the ball to Parksy when he scored, Boss,” he called to Donny, “A great through ball, so I'm as entitled to be at the front as much as anybody.”

  “And I passed the ball to Crooksy, Boss,” said Cook, “So I am.”

  “You're a bliddy liar Cooky, it was me who passed it to Crooksy!” said Jimmy 'Floyd' Cragg.

  Donny,
regarding them hands on hips, had had enough. “Can you hear yourselves?” he said. “Can you? Just listen to yourselves, you're like a gang of kids.” He mimicked them. “'I should be at the front', 'No you shouldn't, I should be at the front.’ You're a team for God’s sake. Football is a team game. You're all in this together. It doesn't matter who's at the front!”

  The players went quiet, a few of them shamefaced at their behaviour. Donny regarded them like a teacher who has just regained control of a class of ten-year-olds, and said, “That's better. That’s more like it.”

  Order restored and players firmly put in their place Donny set off for his office. Moggs called after him. “When will we be setting off then, Boss?”

  “In about five minutes,” said Donny. “I've just got something to attend to. Save me a place at the front.”

  *

  “I want to report a dog missing.”

  Constable Dredge, who was manning the desk at the moment, looked up from the police station's current copy of 'Loaded'. He regarded Stanley for a moment then said, “And what’s happened to you then?”

  “What?”

  “Who blacked your eyes?”

  “Bloke at work. T' wife,” said Stanley, matter of fact, pointing to each eye in turn.

  “Do you want to make a complaint?”

  “No I just want to report my dog missing.”

  Dredge, anxious to get back to Loaded, especially the girl on page seventy seven with the python, didn't push Stanley. “Right,” he said, arming himself with his pen and taking out the relevant form from the filing cabinet. “Name?”, he asked, then quickly added “Of dog”, remembering that the last time he had asked the question of someone reporting a lost dog its owner had given her own name, Montmorency, and it hadn't come to light until he'd asked her “Name of owner?” and she'd given the same name. He'd had to rip up the form and start all over again and he didn't want the same thing happening again, not when there was a girl with bare breasts and a python between her legs waiting to be lusted over.

  “Fentonbottom,” said Stanley. “He's named after Billy Fentonbottom, t' famous Frogley footballer,” he added.

  “Very nice too,” said Dredge. He wrote it down on the form and moved on to the next question. “And what colour is Fentonbottom?”

  “White.”

  Dredge wrote it down.

  “Well there were no darkies playing football in them days,” Stanley explained.

  Dredge slowly looked up from the form, fearing the worst. “You mean that the Fentonbottom who played football is white?”

  “Was, when he were alive. Well there were no darkies then,” Stanley reiterated. “I think there were a Chinky as played with Stoke,” he added, helpfully. “Frank Soo I think he were called.”

  Dredge knew the answer to his next question but had to ask it all the same. “Is your dog white?”

  “No,” said Stanley.

  Dredge crumpled up the form, threw it in the bin and reached for another one. He wrote 'Fentonbottom' alongside 'Name of dog' then asked Stanley, “Colour of dog?”

  “Red, green and yellow.”

  Dredge batted his eyelids. “Your dog?”

  “Yes,” Stanley confirmed. “Red, green and yellow. You can't miss him.”

  “No, I shouldn't think you can,” said Dredge.

  *

  Having been persuaded that the release of the Frogley Town team was the way forward Screwer now focused his attentions fully on the football hooligan problem that had yet to manifest itself. It was there all right though. Festering. Good word that, the word Hawks had used to describe the situation, festering, he would have to use it in one of his recommendations sometime, maybe the one he was currently formulating about castrating traffic offenders.

  Oh yes it was festering all right. Bubbling just under the surface. No doubt about it, he could feel it in his water, and his water had never let him down yet, not even when he'd had that prostate trouble and hadn't been able to piss properly. Yes it was there all right. It was just that it hadn't come out yet. And football hooliganism that hadn't come out yet was worse than football hooliganism that had come out, it was the very worst kind of football hooliganism, because you didn't know when it was going to come out, when it was going to rise up and leap out at you and bite you in the bollocks, usually when you weren't looking, when you were off guard, when you’d maybe got a bit complacent and in your complacency had perhaps reduced a strong police presence at the stadium. Well Herman Screwer wasn’t about to get complacent.

  Screwer mulled the problem over in his mind for a while, but despite all his efforts nothing came, no plan of action that would nip the problem in the bud and do away with it once and for all.

  After making a mental note to ship in a few more Specials from nearby Naresbury for the next match, he was about to put it on the back burner and return to the problem of Mrs Screwer's declining sex-drive and what to do about it, when it suddenly came to him. That was why the hooligans weren't revealing their true colours! There were too many policemen. He needed a smaller police presence, not a larger one, because at the last match the crowd had seen how many policemen were in attendance, ready to whip them back into line if they dared to step out of it, and had thought better of it; they’d screwed the loaf and hadn't revealed themselves. Of course!

  Screwer allowed himself a smile. Maybe they would come crawling out from under their stones if there weren't as many policemen around? Never mind maybe, they would, definitely. He made a note on his pad: 'Reduce police presence considerably at next match. Covert not overt’. He thought for a moment, then added, 'Lull the bastards into a false sense of security'. He thought again, then added, 'Try popping one of those date rate pills into Mrs Screwer's bedtime cocoa, see if that will get the bitch going.'

  He was about to send for Sergeant Hawks to tell him to obtain a supply of date rape pills when Constable Balfour came in. He handed a sheet of paper to Screwer.

  “The figures you wanted on how many of the shops between the railway station and the football ground have security shutters, sir.”

  Screwer took the report and began to read it. What he read clearly didn't meet with his approval. “Four?” he said. “Out of a total of one hundred and eight? Are you sure this is right, Balfour?” He looked up at Balfour to see the constable smiling to himself. “Said something funny have I, Balfour?”

  “What? Oh, no sir. Sorry sir. I was just thinking about what Constable Dredge told me a few minutes ago. Apparently Stanley Sutton has reported his dog missing and he's dyed it in the football club's colours.”

  Screwer's head shot back. “And that's funny, is it? You find an act that could only have been perpetrated by a football hooligan amusing, do you Balfour?”

  “Oh Stanley Sutton isn't a football hooligan sir, he's....” Balfour said, but before he could go on to inform Screwer what Stanley was the police chief hit the roof.

  “Will you fucking people stop telling me that football fans aren't hooligans! Christ Almighty man, he's dyed his dog red, green and yellow, what does he have to do to qualify as a hooligan in your eyes, stick a corner flag up its arse?”

  “Sorry sir.”

  Screwer got to his feet and started to button up the tunic of his uniform. “Where does the bastard live?”

  “Abbatoir Street I think, sir.”

  “Take me there. Now.”

  *

  After Stanley had reported Fentonbottom missing he hadn't returned home but had carried on looking for his dog, viewing the assistance of the local constabulary as an addition to the search rather than a replacement of it. Consequently when Screwer had pounded on the door of Stanley's home some ten minutes after learning of his existence he had first been asked by Sarah Jane if he was trying to knock the bloody door down, then, in answer to Screwer’s question about her husband's availability, had been told that he was out and where she didn't know, nor did she care.

  Screwer had been greatly disappointed at this news, especiall
y as since seeing Stanley's brightly-painted house a minute earlier he had been even more anxious than ever to get his hands on Stanley, having quickly formed the opinion that only a hooligan of the first water could be responsible for such an overt act of vandalism on his own property.

  “Have you seen this?” he had said to Constable Balfour, on first seeing the house. The remark was an expression of disbelief, but unfortunately Balfour had taken it to be a question.

  “Oh many times, sir,” he had smiled.

  Screwer had found this very hard to believe, even after taking into account the ineptitude and dilatory manner he had come to expect from his underlings at Frogley.

  “You mean to say you knew about it?”

  “Everybody in Frogley knows about Stanley Sutton's house, sir. It’s a bit of a tourist attraction.”

  “Well I didn't bloody know about it!” Screwer screamed at him, showering him with spittle.

  Balfour wondered if he was carrying any tissues. “Sorry sir.”

  “Why wasn't I told about it?” snapped Screwer, in the process making Balfour even more concerned about his tissue situation.

  “Well perhaps nobody thought it was important, sir,” Balfour said, knowing even before he said it that it was the wrong to say, but not knowing what was the right thing to say.

  Screwer went berserk. “Not fucking important? I'm trying to bring football hooligans to book and you don't think it's important that one of the twats has painted his house from top to bottom in the football club's colours? And his dog. Are you fucking cracked, Balfour?”

  “Yes sir....no sir….possibly sir,” said Balfour, in a desperate attempt to find a reply that might be acceptable to this terrible man.

  With a final withering look at the unfortunate Balfour the police chief switched his attention back to Sarah Jane, who had been watching, entirely unfazed by what she had been listening to. “Have you got a photograph of your husband I can have?” he asked her.

  Balfour saw an opportunity to start the long journey back into Screwer's good books. “I know what he looks like, sir” he offered. “I'll be able to recognise him immediately.”