The Football Factory

by John King

  Albert moved into the room and sat on the edge of the bath. He waited for the next drop of water. It took time to form. He moved closer so he could see the water gather. It swelled, then burst its skin and fell against the white bath tub. He looked at the plug and knew it was out of harm’s way. The last thing he wanted was the bath to overflow and flood the flat below. The man who lived there was a nasty bit of work. Albert was too old to fight angry young men. His heart wasn’t what it was and the doctor had told him to take things easy. His nerves weren’t as strong as they used to be, and his thoughts had started turning inward. Confusion built up and he was a bit worried about the future. He had his faith, though, which pulled him through.

  Albert wasn’t a rich man and had to get to his appointment, but was worried about the tap. He argued with weakness and felt disgust at his lack of decisiveness. He had to get a grip and take control of his life. If not, he would lose his self respect, and once that went he was doomed. He reasoned with fear and knew that the bath wouldn’t flood. The drop of water was too small and the plug far from the hole. He stood up defiant. Buttoned his jacket which had come undone. He held a hand under each of the taps. The taps in the sink left his hand dry. He did the same with the bath. The cold tap was tight and secure. He felt a drip hit his palm under the hot tap. It would be okay. He shouldn’t worry. He checked the taps in the kitchen and made sure the cooker was safe. He went down the stairs and closed his front door.

  It was a beautiful day. The sky was clear and though it was cold Albert didn’t mind. He promised himself he would get out more often. He hadn’t left his flat for four days and was missing a burst of crisp, clear weather. The winters were getting harder the older he became. He couldn’t afford the heating bills and the doctor had told him to eat a high-protein diet. But protein cost money. He had three hundred pounds in his bank account and it would go towards his funeral. The winter months dragged and Albert was sure the temperature was falling each year. Perhaps another Ice Age was due. He wished he was a young man. He wished he could sit with his brother in the pub and drink and laugh like they did when they were young men. But his brother was dead. Everyone was dead. Albert was alive. He was living and should be making the most of his time. Things could have been worse. And he had that three hundred pounds set aside. They couldn’t take it away from him. He would pay for his own funeral.

  Albert Moss was no sponger and he didn’t expect charity. He had his self respect. He made it to the corner and then stopped by the estate agent’s. He felt water drying on his hand. Had the tap been secure when he left? Was the front door shut tight? Would the gas escape and destroy his home? He was late for his interview and needed the extra fiver he was trying to claim for heating, but he had to go back and check. He would hurry. He would walk briskly back to his flat and have one final run through the routine. If he was quick everything would be fine and everyone happy. That was all he wanted.

  Michelle Watson was keen and sincere and working for the state. Albert Moss hadn’t kept yesterday’s appointment and she knew enough about the pensioner that it would be his condition more than anything keeping him away. It had happened before. As a dedicated socialist Michelle was appalled at the way working-class pensioners had been conditioned to regard their financial entitlements as charity. The idea was changing, but it should never have existed in the first place. She would write to him because he didn’t have a telephone and line up another date.

  At times Michelle despaired of the working-class people with whom she dealt each day, especially the younger elements of the community. They had no idea of directing their anger and aggression in the cause of class solidarity, preferring to drink themselves near to a state of coma and then fight each other over trivialities. There was no logic to this self-destructiveness when the people who crippled their lives with unjust laws and oppressive propaganda were so near in the Houses of Parliament. The young men kicked and stabbed each other at closing time, or in clubs, or when they were cut up at traffic lights, yet they allowed weak, chinless men in suits to rob them blind and tell them who they should hate.

  If the joyriders and ecstasy users woke up and looked around they would find better ways of using their energy. Michelle could find no logic in drugging yourself up to the eyeballs and ignoring the realities of life. Everything that happened in society was political. Those football hooligans she’d read about were avoiding the issues, kicking lumps out of each over a sport. It was unbelievable. Sport was the ultimate indignity of a capitalist society, resting as it did on the importance of competition, the wastage of resources, concentrating people’s energies away from the class struggle towards silly games. So many of these young men were reactionary right-wing thugs and she could well believe that a good ninety-five per cent were bordering on membership of extremist organisations. She had never been to a football match herself, though she had listened to gutter conversations in her local, but felt qualified enough to comment.

  Michelle’s great hope, as a radical socialist raised in deepest Hampshire but now living and thriving in London, was the black population. Downtrodden through the centuries they were the ultimate in crushed humanity. With the help of left-wing, educated whites such as herself the blacks would gradually fight their way up the scale, and in the black youth out on the streets there was potential for a political cadre of fit young men ready to overthrow the barriers of white capitalist racist oppression. She listened to gangster rap by the likes of early pioneers such as NWA and Public Enemy, though the violent and sexist lyrics were not exactly conducive to informed political struggle. Even so, they were talking about life on the streets of Los Angeles and New York as it appeared in the flesh and therefore a little slack could be allowed.

  She shuffled the papers on her desk and opened the next file. Billy Bright. A deformed neo-Nazi by the look of the man when he responded to the raffle ticket he was holding in his one good hand. He had the short hair and black combat jacket she had seen on TV reports covering fascist activity in Brick Lane, and appearances while generally deceiving could easily be assumed correct in such right-wing instances. She studied his file, making the man wait. This was the kind of thing socialism was up against. He had been made redundant and expected the state to help him out.

  Mr Farrell had become a gardener after the war. He loved plants and flowers and had been lucky enough to get in with his local park’s commission. The seasons came and went and because he was outside Mr Farrell was able to appreciate the changes. The work kept him healthy and now that he was retired he benefited from a life of moderately superior health. He walked most places to keep the flow of energy circulating through his body and also because he appreciated the ability to move freely in a democratic society. He knocked on the peeling door and waited.

  —Hello Albert, Mr Farrell said, when his friend opened up.

  Albert Moss stood back and Mr Farrell entered. The flat was spotless and Mr Farrell marvelled at the order and control of Albert’s life. He scrubbed the place weekly and kept the fittings and furniture in pristine condition. He walked down the hall to the living room and saw that Albert had everything ready for his arrival. There was a nice pot of tea on the table and the two easy armchairs had been moved from their normal positions so that they were now at an angle to each other.

  —Would you like a cup? Albert asked, looking to Mr Farrell for the biscuits he always brought along.

  —I’d love one. It’s a nice day out, but turning a bit nippy.

  The two men sat in the armchairs and blew on the tea to help cool it down. They said little and worked their way through the pack of biscuits. Mr Farrell enjoyed the calm atmosphere and liked Albert’s flat.

  His friend had gone to the trouble of framing old photographs and positioning them strategically around the room. Most were black and white, which worked well against the white walls, although Mr Farrell wondered what the golden pagoda in Rangoon would have looked like in colour. Albert had taken it during the war while he was serving in B
urma and said that the original image was there in his memory and would never be dislodged. There was a colour drawing that stood out, a present from someone at the Spiritualist church he attended. It represented his aura. Mr Farrell didn’t understand exactly what it meant, but found it interesting in its way, like a piece of abstract art.

  —Are you ready then? Shall we get started?

  The curtains were drawn and the two men sat in silence, their eyes closed. Soon Albert would begin talking and Mr Farrell would have some kind of contact with those he loved but who had passed over to the other side. Albert tried to relax his thoughts and let the spirits come to him. Leaking taps were the last thing on his mind.

  Number 46 studied the woman interviewer in front of him as she examined his papers. She was a fair looker but he wasn’t wanting female company at the moment. He was skint. Made redundant by the captains of industry who spent their time bleating on about national identity and then invested British resources overseas. He felt the hatred deep inside, shoved forcibly down his throat and left to rot and fester in the pit of his stomach. The woman looked like a right Trotskyist with her specs and clear skin, scruffy long hair and roll-up stained fingers; the kind of know-nothing outsider who came onto his manor and practised so-called positive discrimination for every minority that could ever possibly exist. These people talked about the working class but didn’t have a clue what the working class was all about. Maybe he was wrong, but he doubted it. They all looked the same. Dykes and Marxist theorists with mortgages and framed university degrees next to the futon.

  He wasn’t saying anything though, because he didn’t have a grievance with the woman and he wanted some cash to keep him going till he got a job. The cunts in charge of his firm had shifted their resources around to save a few bob and thirty people had ended up on the dole. Top management within the firm had awarded themselves big increases on the savings made. Fascism was an attractive proposition. Listening to speakers at local, clandestine meetings and their calls for the hanging of child molesters, rapists and the scum in the Tory party made a lot of sense. Blokes with the same attitude went along and the social workers and students with placards shouting Nazi at them from behind police lines just made him more determined. He wasn’t into the Combat 18 bit but was gearing up for the push. He was white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual and fed up of being told he was shit.

  The queers and Jews in the Tory party were shafting more than each other. They were stitching up the white population for the liberal wankers in the BBC and got all the plum jobs in the media. It was a cliché but true that Zionists controlled the media, and there was no need to look further than Washington’s manipulation of the British establishment to understand the reasons why. The Klan had been making itself understood in the States and it was time nationalist groups in Britain became better known. It was like any ethnic or religious minority who wanted could walk straight in, get their benefits, shoot to the top of the housing list and the whites were expected to sit back and listen to the left-wing set up shop and slag off the native way of life.

  Billy Bright hated the Tories even more than the scum on the Left. The Tories had taken charge of the patriotic stance, waving the Union Jack around while milking the common man as though he was a factory farm animal. He would gladly have seen the cabinet strung up in the street. They were con artists with their plum accents and even though they made subtle noises about race he didn’t trust them. Jews in high places were talking double standards. Hitler understood what was what and while he didn’t exactly go along with the mass extermination of a race he had to admit that he would probably have stood back just like the majority of Germans had done and said he didn’t know what was going on. It was easier to let the subhumans in the East do the dirty work than get their own hands dirty. Sometimes, though, he got so fucking wound up by the whole thing that he could see himself out on the streets shipping the bastards off. He knew the official line, but would have preferred the bankers in the City and all the other public-school wankers to be on the first trains out of Paddington. He would have to change a lot himself, though, if the thing became official, because there would be no more drugs, drink or random violence. He would have to become a new man and hoped his deformity wouldn’t count against him when it came to the crunch.

  Everyone was as happy as could be expected given the circumstances. Albert Moss died peacefully in his sleep and his body was found four days later when Mr Farrell became concerned by an unanswered knock on the door. Mr Farrell was sad, but knew death came to everyone and that Albert would find things easier in the afterlife he so strongly believed existed. At least he had gone peacefully in his sleep and hadn’t been forced to endure years of treatment for a crippling disease. He hadn’t died of cancer or spent his last years paralysed after a stroke. He had gone with as much dignity as death allowed and had paid towards his own funeral. Prices had rocketed since Albert last looked into the matter and Mr Farrell was glad the tight-fisted bastards in the council were being forced to contribute.

  Albert’s neighbour downstairs was happy in his own way because though he felt a bit sorry for the old boy, who had fought in the war in Burma and along the Malay Peninsular, he wouldn’t have to listen to him moving around upstairs any more. It drove him mad at times, furniture being shifted at three in the morning, and whenever he said hello Mr Moss wasn’t exactly friendly. He’d heard the old man was into Spiritualism and though he wasn’t superstitious and didn’t believe in all that ghost stuff, Mr Moss’s neighbour didn’t fancy his flat ending up haunted by a spirit which came for a chat and fancied staying.

  Michelle Watson was happiest because Mr Farrell had discovered the body after four days. She could have found herself in trouble if the corpse had remained undiscovered for months on end and a local journalist had got hold of the story. There had been other well-publicised incidents in the national media and that kind of thing just did not look good whichever way it was explained. While the locals would get much of the blame, the social services would have come under scrutiny and it would have done her career prospects no good at all to be involved in something so messy. She was ambitious and knew she had what it took to make the grade.

  NEWCASTLE AWAY

  I’m pissed and hungry and telling the bird behind the counter to get her finger out. The coach will be leaving soon and we haven’t got time to fuck about. The chinky’s packed with closing-time pissheads but we’re taking priority because it’s Friday night and we’re on our way to Newcastle. It’s a daft time to leave but that’s the way it’s got to be when Chelsea play away and you’re lining up a major beano. Mark’s chatting up a couple of birds and he’s obviously in with one of them, and her mate’s going spare, but we’ll just have to do without. A shag’s a shag and no bird can compare with a trip to Newcastle. Would we rather take them back and give them a good servicing? Full lubrication job and a tank full of petrol? Wake up with a slab of freshly greased tart on the pillow tomorrow morning? Or open our eyes in Newcastle with the lads looking for geordies?

  It’s a cold night and these two sleep in beds kept hot with the flow of one-nighters. It’s so fucking easy you want to laugh. No need for electric blankets with these two slappers. It’s a long trip to Newcastle, uphill all the way. The inevitable hangover and a broken night’s sleep. That or a takeaway girl. Number sixty-nine on the menu. No contest. The chink bird hands over a white plastic bag and the smell hits me full frontal. Mushroom noodles and sweet and sour. An away day special. I tell Mark to leave the slags for some other cunt and he smiles when they tell me to fuck off. Turns on his heel.

  Rod’s outside sitting in a doorway. Been mixing shorts with lager and it knocks him out. He should know better. We’ve got five minutes to get down Hammersmith roundabout and meet the coach. We start running and I’m huffing and puffing like a fat bastard, the night’s lager rumbling inside, but I’m more concerned with spilling the sweet and sour because that’s the fucker that always goes over. I get to the roundabout firs
t and the coach is nowhere to be seen. Gary Jones and Neil Kitson sit on railings by the subway. We’re in time.

  —I’m going to have a fucking heart attack in a minute. Rod’s the last one to arrive. I’m fucked.

  —It’s because you’re Chelsea. Mark’s quick with the oldest line around. Not used to running. Yids would have set a new world record. Don’t know what I’m doing this for when I could be at home tucked up with that bird.

  —It’s because you’re Chelsea. Anyway, it saves you getting a dose. They were well rough those two. Wouldn’t have touched them with yours.

  —Fucking unbelievable, Mark says. I can hear my heart beating.

  —Least you’re still alive. I was wondering for a while tonight. Mister fucking interesting sniffing round birds every chance you get.

  —Leave it out. We’re not at the football yet. It’s just something to fill in the time. Let me think straight and get my breath back.

  —You want to get on the weights. Do some running.

  —Like you? I’ve really seen you down the gym pumping iron.

  —I’m married mate. Nothing’s expected once you put that ring on a woman’s finger. Get married and it doesn’t matter what happens to your body. Mandy loves me for my brain.

  —What fucking brain? Only brain you’ve got is wedged between your legs.

  —That’s where I get my exercise. Fifteen times a night. Regular as clockwork. I’m a sex machine. Fuelled up on lager and ready to shag her rigid. Fifteen times a night, every fucking night without fail.