The Football Factory
Page 32
I feel like the kid I was, thinking about it all these years later. Must be more than twenty years since I first went down Chelsea. All that time and I’ve grown into what I am now, and after that first game at home to Arsenal I latched on to the Blues. It’s just how it happens. It’s part of you and what you are makes you what you are at football. If you’re a programme collector you’re the same outside. If you’re mad you don’t turn into a Samaritan once you walk out of the gates. Makes me laugh the cunts calling it football violence when it’s nothing to do with football. Nothing at all. Anyone can work that out if they take the time. But they don’t because they don’t really care. Just drop everyone in a filing cabinet and give them a label.
Suppose you get cynical and ground down the older you get. England’s changed since I was a kid. Sound like a real old geezer ready to collect my pension, so fuck knows what it’s like for people who can remember back sixty or seventy years. Change comes gradual and worms its way under your skin, irritates the fuck out of you in your sleep so you start scratching like you’ve got a dose and wake up with the inside of your legs ripped and bleeding. But it’s different now, because when I was a kid there were a few punch-ups and whatever, and it went off inside grounds fairly regular, but today, with everything crushed, and more and more people plugged into their TVs and video games, everything’s about having money and doing the right thing. Looking like you’re behaving yourself. Least that’s what they’d have you believe.
—When I get my redundancy I’m lining up a coach for the first away game comes up. Mark wants to share his fortune. No-one pays a penny. It’s coming out of my pay-off. Bit of wealth distribution.
—Look at those cunts getting out of the car, Facelift’s butting in, bringing us back to the here and now.
—Who you looking at?
—Four blokes across the street. Just parked up. They’re Derby alright. Bit smart like they’ve got money in their pockets.
I look over and see the four men Facelift’s pointing out. Blokes in expensive gear. Dressed to blend into the background with a bit of style. Keeping quiet but not through being scared.
—Oi, you, Derby. Facelift shouts across the street.
One of the men turns. I recognise his face. A bloke who did his time in the services. In Poland when the Poles were going mental having a go at the famous English hooligans, lobbing bricks, bottles, anything you can name. Getting stuck in for England. All grudges forgotten for a while. Another flag to fly. Petty local rivalries suspended.
—Fuck off, you cockney bastard.
No fear in Derby’s face. Looks older than I remember. Same close-cut ginger hair. Expensive coat and the look of someone who’s made a few bob. And I’m just a cunt working in a warehouse who doesn’t do too bad selling gear on the side. But he’s got more than me, making me the nigger locked out of the shop again, looking in through the window, denied access.
Facelift walks across the street and Derby stands facing him, his mates on both sides, broad faces, cut faces. I hang back watching, wanting to say something but thinking there’s nothing I can do. The odds are stacked and when all’s said and done it’s one of those situations you swear you don’t go in for but with Facelift and Billy Bright around, Black John as well, it’ll happen because the rules are drawn a bit further down the line for those cunts. The rest of the firm don’t care because these are bad odds, thirty or so onto four if everyone goes for it, though I reckon one or two will stand back. Makes me feel sick inside. The odds and the man.
Derby’s a good bloke. I want to say something but don’t. Just bottle out. He knows the score. He’s no fool. So I just stay where I am and don’t bother. I’m not going to cover my eyes like a kid, because you see enough blood and guts on the telly so what’s a bit more, except in real life it’s always raw and dull. No romance. Not now with Derby about to get a kicking and me keeping quiet. Knowing I should speak up, but telling myself this is no innocent sneering at Facelift.
Suppose when it comes down to it I don’t want to look bad now Derby’s had his say and no way is Facelift going to back off. Don’t want the lads thinking I’m a wanker. I have to belong somewhere and when you belong you don’t stitch yourself up. You eat shit and follow the rules, even though you keep telling yourself you don’t. But I’m trying to persuade myself that Derby’s got it coming in a way. Rough justice. He’s been in enough trouble in his life to know what’s what. But I’m not in the swing of it so it’s going to be worse somehow. Like the cunts who watch life through their videos and TVs and clips of porn. The old bill with their surveillance gear and Marshall with his soldier gang rape show. Rod on stage getting the business off some old slapper. The whole fucking game recorded and examined.
Facelift gets close enough and Derby’s arm shoots up from his waist, knife buried in Facelift’s gut. I want to hear a popping sound. Like the balloon’s been deflated or something. But I just hear someone yelling down the road a bit and a load of men coming our way. I look back towards Facelift and he slumps over a car bonnet. Derby slashes his arse with the knife and I want to laugh because he’s going to have a lot of grief when he sits down over the next couple of months. I pity the poor bastard who gets the job of sewing him together again.
I look back and there’s the old bill escorting some Derby fans and Harris reckons we should get moving. That it’s not the time or place. We melt away and a couple of the lads are bent over Facelift who’s bleeding into a puddle. Blood and water mixing patterns. A copper comes over from the firm we must’ve been looking for originally. We keep moving away because the streets are narrow and we don’t want to get boxed in by the old bill. We leave Facelift to himself and I’ve got away without seeing Derby battered. It makes me feel better. I’d have felt a cunt letting him get done like that. He’s moved on himself and I’ve been saved any feelings of guilt.
Thanks to: Anita Nowakowski for the kick-start, Kevin Williamson and Irvine Welsh for encouragement, and Robin Robertson for taking me on
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John King is the author of seven novels to date. His first book, The Football Factory, was an instant word-of-mouth success and was later turned into a high-profile film. Sales in the UK now top a quarter of a million copies. The novels Headhunters, England Away, Human Punk, White Trash, The Prison House, and Skinheads followed. King’s writing reflects his interests—social history, music, literature, drinking, travel, soccer, and non-party politics. Before becoming an author King worked at a variety of jobs and spent two years travelling around the world in the late-1980s. He has long been associated with fanzines, writing for various titles over the years and running Two Sevens in the early 1990s. He currently publishes and edits Verbal, a fiction-based publication. Other interests include a regular Human Punk night at London’s legendary 100 Club. He lives in London.
ABOUT PM PRESS
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Human Punk
John King
ISBN: 978-1-62963-115-8
368 pages
For fifteen-year-old Joe Martin, growing up on the outskirts of West London, the summer of 1977 means punk rock, busy pubs, disco girls, stolen cars, social-club lager, cutthroat Teddy Boys and a job picking cherries with the gypsies. Life is sweet—until he is attacked by a gang of youths and thrown into the Grand Union Canal with his best friend Smiles.
Fast forward to 1988, and Joe is travelling home on the Trans-Siberian Express after three years away, remembering the highs and lows of the intervening years as he comes to terms with tragedy. Fast forward to 2000, and life is sweet once more. Joe is earning a living selling records and fight tickets, playing his favourite 45s as a punk DJ, but when a face from the past steps out of the mist he is forced to relive that night in 1977 and deal with the fallout.
Human Punk is the story of punk, a story of friendship, a story of common bonds and a shared cultured—sticking the boot in, sticking together.
“In its ambition and exuberance, Human Punk is a league ahead of much contemporary English fiction.”
—New Statesman
“The long sentences and paragraphs build up cumulatively, with the sequences describing an end-of-term punch-up and the final canal visit just two virtuoso examples. These passages come close to matching the coiled energy of Hubert Selby’s prose, one of King’s keynote influences..… In the resolution of the novel’s central, devastating act, there is an almost Shakespearean sense of a brief restoration of balance after the necessary bloodletting.”
—Gareth Evans, The Independent
“King’s eye for detail is as sharp as his characters’ tongues, and his creations are eminently three-dimensional: insightful and funny one minute, bigoted and fucked up the next. Like real people, then.”
—The Face
The Colonel Pyat Quartet
Michael Moorcock with introductions by Alan Wall
Byzantium Endures
ISBN: 978-1-60486-491-5
400 pages
The Laughter of Carthage
ISBN: 978-1-60486-492-2
448 pages
Jerusalem Commands
ISBN: 978-1-60486-493-9
448 pages
The Vengeance of Rome
ISBN: 978-1-60486-494-6
500 pages
Moorcock’s Pyat Quartet has been described as an authentic masterpiece of the 20th and 21st centuries. It’s the story of Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, a cocaine addict, sexual adventurer, and obsessive anti-Semite whose epic journey from Leningrad to London connects him with scoundrels and heroes from Trotsky to Makhno, and whose career echoes that of the 20th century’s descent into Fascism and total war.
It is Michael Moorcock’s extraordinary achievement to convert the life of Maxim Pyatnitski into epic and often hilariously comic adventure. Sustained by his dreams and profligate inventions, his determination to turn his back on the realities of his own origins, Pyat runs from crisis to crisis, every ruse a further link in a vast chain of deceit, suppression, betrayal. Yet, in his deranged self-deception, his monumentally distorted vision, this thoroughly unreliable narrator becomes a lens for focusing, through the dimensions of wild farce and chilling terror, on an uneasy brand of truth.
Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail: Stories of Crime, Love and Rebellion
Edited by Gary Phillips and Andrea Gibbons
ISBN: 978-1-60486-096-2
368 pages
An incendiary mixture of genres and voices, this collection of short stories compiles a unique set of work that revolves around riots, revolts, and revolution. From the turbulent days of unionism in the streets of New York City during the Great Depression to a group of old women who meet at their local café to plan a radical act that will change the world forever, these original and once out-of-print stories capture the various ways people rise up to challenge the status quo and change up the relationships of power. Ideal for any fan of noir, science fiction, and revolution and mayhem, this collection includes works from Sara Paretsky, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Cory Doctorow, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Summer Brenner.
Full list of contributors:
Summer Brenner
Rick Dakan
Barry Graham
Penny Mickelbury
Gary Phillips
Luis Rodriguez
Benjamin Whitmer
Michael Moorcock
Larry Fondation
Cory Doctorow
Andrea Gibbons
John A. Imani
Sara Paretsky
Kim Stanley Robinson
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
Ken Wishnia
Michael Skeet
Tim Wohlforth
Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology
Edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer
ISBN: 978-1-62963-035-9
352 pages
Sisters of the Revolution gathers a highly curated selection of feminist speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and more) chosen by one of the most respected editorial teams in speculative literature today, the award-winning Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Including stories from the 1970s to the present day, the collection seeks to expand the conversation about feminism while engaging the reader in a wealth of imaginative ideas.
From the literary heft of Angela Carter to the searing power of Octavia Butler, Sisters of the Revolution gathers daring examples of speculative fiction’s engagement with feminism. Dark, satirical stories such as Eileen Gunn’s “Stable Strategies for Middle Management” and the disturbing horror of James Tiptree Jr.’s “The Screwfly Solution” reveal the charged intensity at work in the field. Including new, emerging voices like Nnedi Okorafor and featuring international contributions from Angelica Gorodischer and many more, Sisters of the Revolution seeks to expand the ideas of both contemporary fiction a
nd feminism to new fronts. Moving from the fantastic to the futuristic, the subtle to the surreal, these stories will provoke thoughts and emotions about feminism like no other book available today.
Contributors include: Angela Carter, Angelica Gorodischer, Anne Richter, Carol Emshwiller, Eileen Gunn, Eleanor Arnason, Hiromi Goto, James Tiptree Jr., Joanna Russ, Karin Tidbeck, Kelley Eskridge, Kelly Barnhill, Kit Reed, L. Timmel Duchamp, Leena Krohn, Leonora Carrington, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler, Pamela Sargent, Rose Lemberg, Susan Palwick, Tanith Lee, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Vandana Singh.
“The VanderMeers are a literary power couple.”
—Boing Boing
Jewish Noir
Edited by Kenneth Wishnia
ISBN: 978-1-62963-111-0
432 pages
Jewish Noir is a unique collection of new stories by Jewish and non-Jewish literary and genre writers, including numerous award-winning authors such as Marge Piercy, Harlan Ellison, S.J. Rozan, Nancy Richler, Moe Prager, Wendy Hornsby, Charles Ardai, and Kenneth Wishnia. The stories explore such issues as the Holocaust and its long-term effects on subsequent generations, anti-Semitism in the mid– and late-twentieth-century United States, and the dark side of the Diaspora (the decline of revolutionary fervor, the passing of generations, the Golden Ghetto, etc.). The stories in this collection also include many “teachable moments” about the history of prejudice, and the contradictions of ethnic identity and assimilation into American society.