Fan (28 page)

You go to games and you don’t go to games.

You see Jen and you don’t see Jen.

You’re unwelcome at her place but she comes to yours.

Against her sister’s will.

Against her mam’s will.

Somehow you drag yourself through Christmas.

Somehow.

The suits give up the lower tier again, shift the Forest fans into the upper tier.

Idiots.

United bring their hordes. United fill the lower tier.

A home game feels like an away game. Again.

Ferguson is on the rack. Some say Ferguson is one game from the sack. But United are up for this one, up for revenge for 89. Pallister sticks Crosby on his backside. Martyn outmuscles Örlygsson. Hughes clips one in towards the penalty spot and Robbins heads home the only goal.

You watch from the upper tier of the Executive Stand, separated from the action by circumstance. It is not the end, not quite, but you can feel it coming, something shaking loose, setting you free. You do not want to be free but it is happening all the same.

A late Nigel Jemson equaliser is ruled out by the referee for fuck knows what and Forest lose at home to Ferguson’s Manchester United. United will go on to win the FA Cup.

You will go to Wembley anyway as Forest successfully defend the League Cup but it’s the FA Cup you want. It’s the FA Cup that Clough wants.

In 1990 it’s what everybody wants.

But you will never have it.

And Clough will never have it.

Snow comes to the old town, smothering it, making a slow job slower. Finchy wakes to a silent, muffled morning, traipses to the office on foot, leaving virgin footprints behind him. A solitary car passes by, creeping through the fall, hardly managing it. When it’s gone, the silence settles once more.

Like a tomb.

The older boys on the vans are stood on the ramp discussing routes, which places they might reach, which places are beyond them. Then they head inside and pull out their selections. No such luck for the townies. He frames up and bags up, trudges to the bikes, no good to ride on but a packhorse to push up the hill into the softened bowels of the estate. And then he’s out in it, pressing onwards, the soundtrack to his morning the muffled clacks of gates and letter boxes, the crump of his boots, the song of a solitary robin. Hope Close is dressed in virgin snow. The hedge bottom is a white linen shroud. There’s just him and his ghosts. Every fucker else is inside, not bothering.

The old town at a standstill.

He props the bike against the wall outside the flats and keys in the security code, carries his bundle of letters into the echoing stairwell, the discarded rubbish in the windowless foyers where the lazy bastards can’t be bothered to negotiate a flight to the bins. He delivers the giros and the court summonses, the fucking
Reader’s Digest
videos. When he emerges from the fifth block his bike’s gone. The bag of mail’s gone. There’s just a set of cycle tracks in the snow, snaking away, disappearing into the estate. Ridiculously he sets off in pursuit, manages twenty steps and then stops. He turns back to the flats, stands there marooned amongst them, a pathetic figure.

Someone calls down at him from a bedroom window, points a finger.

‘He went that way, mate.’

He shrugs his shoulders.

He wanders to a phone box, sticks his ten pence in the slot, calls the office.

‘Someone’s nicked my bike,’ he says.

Harcross on the other end. Sounding fucked off.

‘Where from?’

‘Canal Court.’

‘What are you doing there already?’

‘I wanted to get it out of the way.’

‘You daft bastard. You’ll just have to walk the rest.’

‘Eh?’

‘Walk the rest of the delivery.’

He gulps in a lungful of air.

‘They nicked the mail too.’

‘You left your mailbag outside the flats?’

‘Aye.’

‘You’re in the shit then, aren’t you?’

‘Shall I follow the tracks?’

‘Don’t be a twat. Go and deliver your second bag. I’ll head up there and find you. Carson’s going to go fucking mental.’

‘They nicked my box keys.’

Silence on the line. Harcross taking a deep fucking breath of his own.

‘Right. Meet me at the box. Carson’s going to have my balls over this. Do the fucking route how it’s designed. Fuck me. I was just sitting down for some brekky. Told myself to fucking ignore the phone. I’ve a good fucking mind to make you wait and freeze your bollocks off.’

Harcross puts the phone down, leaves him standing in a phone box suffocated by snow. Beyond the glass some kids are packing snowballs. When he steps out they hurl their ammunition at him.

‘Special delivery!’

Then they leg it.

Little bastards.

And later that morning, during the grilling that comes from Carson, a warning light flashes in the back of his head, that this is how it will always be.

‘Are you listening?’ asks Carson.

He snaps out of it.

‘I’m just thinking,’ he says.

‘We’re not paying you to think,’ says Carson. ‘All you have to do is take the mail and stick it through a letter box. It’s not rocket science. It isn’t any type of science.’

Finchy nods. There’s nothing to do but nod.

As he’s leaving, Harcross pulls him to one side.

‘Do yourself a favour,’ says Harcross. ‘You can’t spend the next forty years living for Saturdays and football.’

‘So my dad keeps saying,’ says Finchy.

‘You should listen to your dad,’ says Harcross.

The tax burden shifted from the rich to the poor.

Two hundred and fifty thousand in Kennington Park.

Two hundred and fifty thousand on the streets.

Sit-down protests in Whitehall. Mounted police. Scarves and staves. Shields and batons.

There are pitched battles on the streets of London.

There are burning vehicles on the streets of London.

One hundred and thirteen people are injured. Three hundred and forty are arrested.

You deliver the letters because that’s your job. You deliver the telephone bills and the electric bills, the gas bills and the water bills.

You deliver the community charge letters too.

You deliver the community charge letters and then go to the postbox, open it to find half of the fuckers have posted them back where they’ve come from. This goes on for weeks and weeks, to and fro, to and fro. Some people take to ripping the bastard things up and throwing them back at you on their doorstep. It’s like that for a time.

But you’re not their enemy.

You’re really not.

In Cheltenham, at a Conservative Party Council Conference, Thatcher is confronted about the poll tax.

There are questions and more questions.

There are rumblings of disquiet in the rank and file.

Thatcher’s days are numbered.

The knives are out.

4.30 p.m. Friday. Another dusk.

The doorbell sounds in the flat, an angry, distant echo in the stairwell. Prone on his bed he doesn’t move. He doesn’t do anything. The doorbell rings again. He rolls out of bed, aching, his shoulders tight, his back protesting, He creeps to the window, peers down into the street. The street is dirty with melting snow. The cars are covered in black salt. There’s no blue Sierra across the way. There’s no shifty-looking fucker after a bag of beans. Those days are a distant dream.

Her then.

He thinks about not answering the door, about hiding, wishing her away, but his car’s on the kerb, the landing lights are on in the flat, there’s no way she’s going anywhere. He moves to the mirror, checks himself over, rolls on some deodorant.

Vain, arrogant bastard, even still.

His flatmate’s out, the door to the bloke’s room wide open, the stink of a thousand fags and tokes permeating the air. He slams the door shut and makes his way down one flight, two, to the foyer and the glass door, sees the disproportioned shape of her beyond. Guilt surges through him, and the other thing, the thing he can’t beat into submission. His fucking nemesis.

He opens the door to the smell of her perfume. She’s made up, smiling that forced smile. It’s become routine. This is what they are.

‘Alright?’ she says.

‘Alright.’

‘I’ve come to see you … to make sure you’re okay, to see if you need anything.’

He’s thinking ‘Remember her fucking sister. Remember what you fucking told her. Remember what you promised. Months ago.’

He thinks this every time.

But he’s saying, ‘Come in if you want’ without compre-hending
how those words have come to arrive at his lips, fall from his mouth, exist in this moment.

Because he’s still fucking at it.

He follows her up the stairs. Her in the tightest jeans. Those fucking black boots. He has a face full of her arse which moves just so on this evening, coaxing him.

The whole thing happens as he wills it not to happen.

She turns left, into the kitchen, drops her bag on the table and turns to face him. The kitchen smells of her perfume. He offers her tea but doesn’t make it to the sink. He has her pressed against the wall instead, his mouth pressed against her mouth. He feels her stiff nipples against his chest, grips her arse through the denim, kisses her, teeth bashing teeth, has her moaning in the hollow shell of the kitchen. Her shirt’s open, her heavy tits are falling out of her bra, her hands are busy at his flies, her hands are on his cock and balls, his fingers are inside her, deep in her wetness.

And then he’s lifting her against the wall in the kitchen, fucking her against the wall in the kitchen, fucking her in her boots whilst she bites his neck.

Pain and pleasure.

Pleasure and pain.

His back’s protesting, his cock begging for more. Her jeans around her ankles, he’s fucking her because it’s easier than not fucking her, because he can get away with it, fucking her with his unprotected cock. When he’s getting close he turns her around, bends her over the kitchen table and fucks her that way instead, pulling her on to him until he’s ready to burst. He whips it out and sprays his cum over her arse, feels the need and desire and all of those things drain away in an instant, until he’s simply stood in the kitchen of his flat with a limp cock exposed to the world, his trousers around his ankles, the kitchen smelling of spunk and perfume and fucking, and she’s slipping away to the bathroom, all of that over in an instant and he’s already
watching the clock and listening for the clocks and wishing her gone from the place.

She’s hardly fucking arrived.

When she returns he’s on the yellow sofa in the living room. She drops down beside him, wanting more than he can give, no longer a potential receptacle, just an ex-girlfriend, someone he’s dumped and then gone on fucking because it’s easier than not fucking her, someone he doesn’t want to have to care about, something he wants to be free of. If only she’ll let him.

Spineless bastard.

‘College was rubbish,’ she says.

He grunts.

‘Lisa’s set a wedding date for the summer.’

He pulls away from her.

‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I was just saying.’

‘It’s bollocks,’ he says.

She falls into her own silence. He imagines what she’s thinking, that she’s pushing her luck, that she mustn’t mention the two of them, that if she just keeps her mouth shut he might let her stay for the night. He thinks he might too.

He has no other plans.

It’s dark when he wakes. She’s asleep on the sofa beside him, her cheek resting on his shoulder. He moves away from her, trying not to disturb her, watches her for a minute or more, wondering what he’s doing to her and why the fuck he feels he has to fashion an escape route from someone so pretty and so fucking dedicated to him despite the bastard he’s turned out to be. And then he imagines himself five years hence, stuck in this flat with her, stuck in the postie job, stuck in the old town. He imagines wedding bells, her family and all of that shit, imagines the two of them forever one step behind her sister through forty years of married purgatory, through maternity wards and christenings, and any
lingering doubts he has crawl away down the steep stairs and out into the night.

He skulks through the flat to the bathroom, turns on the hot water and runs himself a bath. He strips naked, pulls off his crusty underpants, delicately detaching his foreskin from the fabric. He locks the fucking door and slips down into the water, trying not to think about the fuck from earlier, unable to think about anything else, picturing her arse bent in front of him, his cock in her cunt, her tits dangling, gripping them from underneath and squeezing those stiff nipples. He watches his cock harden again in the fucking bubble bath and laughs to himself, at his own feebleness, closes his eyes, imagines the next morning, the M62, the Pennines, Stanley Park, Anfield.

One he can’t miss.

Some of the lads had been up there since Hillsborough, to lay flowers, to pay their respects. Not him, not yet. He imagines it will be alright though, just a fucking football match, but surely it will be so much more than a fucking football match this time, so much fucking more. He closes his eyes, tries to think about fucking her again, but it’s no use, his mood’s shattered. All he can think about is three hundred and sixty-four days ago and everything, every single bastard little thing that’s presented itself in the interim, the life he knew before, the life he knows now. He becomes acutely aware of the ticking clock in the bathroom, the ticking clocks in the shop below, the fucking ticking clocks, leading him inexorably onwards towards some final, inevitable destruction.

He’s still lying there, in tepid water, when he hears the doorbell go, some fucker hammering like crazy on the door, someone screaming up at his window, screaming the fucking street down. He clambers out of the bath, bollock-naked. Jen’s mam and sister, the two of them in the fucking street, the car blocking the fucking road. Engine running, lights on. Her mam screaming like a fucking banshee, screaming his name, her sister hammering on the door like she means
to break through it. He gets himself dressed, meets Jen in the hallway, her looking mortified and terrified, not knowing what to do with herself. Her mam still screaming, howling that he’s a ‘prick’ and ‘cunt’. And she’s right. She’s fucking right. He’s ashamed to be living. He feels pathetic standing there with this beautiful thing in front of him, every bit the fucking animal he is. He looks Jen in the eye and he realises that she truly doesn’t see it.

But she will, one day.

She fucking will.

‘I’m staying here,’ she says.

He shook his head.

‘No, no, no,’ he says. ‘You can’t.’

‘They’re an embarrassment,’ she says. ‘I can make my own decisions.’

He shakes his head again. He steps towards her, steps away from her.

‘They’re right,’ he says. ‘I’m a cunt. I’ve been doing this to you for months.’

She starts to panic then, starts to tremble and cry and beg him not to open the door and all he can do is shake his head and tell her he’s sorry. And still she isn’t angry with him, only desperate for him to change things. But he can’t change things. He’s incapable of changing anything.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I need to man up.’

He starts down the stairs, gets halfway before the glass window smashes. The Scotsman appears, steps into the lobby. Finchy watches as he’s bundled out of the way by Jen’s mam. Then she’s on the stairs, energised by plain fucking fury, shoving him to one side. They start going at it, Jen and her mam, on the first-floor landing, Jen shouting that she isn’t going anywhere, her mam having none of it. He stands there in the stairwell, weak and pathetic, trying to sink into the shadows that are too delicate to protect him. Her sister follows, shoots him a look, spits words in his direction.

‘You fucking bastard,’ she says.

‘She just turned up,’ he says.

‘Fuck off.’

She pushes past him too, climbs the stairs. And then Jen’s sister and mam enter the stairs again, heading downwards this time, Jen locked between them, Jen reduced to a kicking, screaming child. They have to pry her off every fucking surface to get her from the flat to the car and she won’t go and now the neighbours from over the street are out to witness the fucking spectacle and he’s reduced yet further to a mere scrap of a man, weak and pathetic. When she’s finally trapped in the back of the car, her mam comes for him, swearing into his fucking face, telling him to fuck off and to never, ever speak to her daughter again and there’s nothing he can do but stand and take it. Because he fucking deserves it.

For what we are about to receive…

Jen’s mam slams the door behind her, causing what’s left of the glass to fall out and then she launches herself at his car, giving it a flying kick, denting the bodywork. He catches one last sight of Jen, turning to look at him through the rear window, tears streaming down her face, make-up smudged, hair a mess, a wreck of a girl.

And may we always be mindful of the needs of others…

And they’re gone, the show over. The Scotsman stands staring at the hole where the glass panel used to be.

‘Fucking hell,’ he says, ‘better than
EastEnders.
’

Finchy turns around and heads upstairs, leaving the foyer exposed to whatever, leaving the dent in his car, not wanting to step into the street. He gets himself a beer and carries it to his room, sticks the Carpets on full fucking blast, collapses on the bed feeling like a fucking scolded teenager, lays there until the Scotsman starts banging on the wall and telling him to shut the fucking noise up.

He fucks off out instead, drives through the old town until
he reaches the car park by the canal, pulls up there, sits with the engine idling, staring at the spot in the hedge where they found Tracey Carlton, wondering how he’d come to miss a body in a hedge, white skin in green foliage, sitting there in the driving seat with all of it racing through his fucking head.

Again.

Nine months. Nine fucking months.

He sits there for ten minutes, the engine turning over, his stomach performing somersaults. It takes him that long to notice the car sat in the corner of the car park, the driver hunched in the driver’s seat, much like he’s hunched. He might be staring at himself, at some all-revealing reflection. He stares across the car park, stares right into the cunt’s eyes and the cunt stares back at him. There’s no reason for anybody to be parked up in the car park of a boarded-up business, no fucking reason at all, but here they fucking are, the two of them.

A moment passes, a moment where Finchy feels himself folding inwards on himself, and then he makes a move to step out of the car. As soon as he does the other car pulls away. He watches it turn left down out of the car park, disappear into the evening. Finchy sits there, half in, half out of the car, thinking only of the bloke’s eyes.

Dark eyes.

Furious eyes.

The same as the pair staring back at him now in the fucking rear-view mirror.

Exactly the fucking same.