Fan (5 page)
Authors: Danny Rhodes
‘I could do with the break,’ he said.
‘Couldn’t we all,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I have to get ready.’
She picked up the mug again and disappeared upstairs. He heard the bath running, the sound of her footsteps on the landing, in their room, in the spare room, in the room that might one day become the nursery. Her footsteps stopped there for a time, then moved on. He looked down at his bag, at the pile of essays squeezed between his diary and his sandwich box, already knowing the content of each one of them, wondering how much longer he could let the valiant efforts of the few able students carry him through the desperate ramblings of the rest, his mind drifting to the summer house and cardboard boxes. And to Friday, to somewhere he was expected to be, somewhere he didn’t want to be.
He heard the bathroom door slam, the lock slip across its runner. He could picture her, staring into the mirror, checking herself out, turning sideways, imagining a different profile. And he needed to talk to her about it. The two of them really needed to sit down and talk about it.
There are places you recognise on the TV every evening, Bilsthorpe and Newstead, Cresswell and Babbington. In these places miners are fighting with miners, miners are fighting with police.
There are mile-long convoys of police vans on the A1. You stand on the road bridge with your pals and watch them pass. You flick the V sign in their direction.
You scarper.
You laugh with your mates.
You’re twelve years old.
There’s fuck all else to do.
You live in the most boring town in England.
Finchy drove Kelly to her shift. Then he drove her home again. On both journeys, during both legs he waited for her to bring up the subject that was pulverising them, but she didn’t. She was fucking thinking about it, though. Of course she was thinking about it. It was all she ever thought about. It wasn’t like he had to be a fucking mind reader.
25th April 1984
UEFA Cup Semi-Final (Second Leg)
(Aggregate 3 v 2)
City Ground
In your little bedroom, portable radio by your side, you are listening to Peter Jones’ commentary, to Tottenham squeezing past Hadjuk Split, but hearing only the updates coming from Anderlecht where Forest are toiling in the protection of their 2–0 lead. Lying in bed in the darkness hoping and praying and dreaming, you take the body blows as Forest concede one-two-three goals. You feel the gut-wrenching disappointment as the reporter relays the news of Forest’s exit. You’re crushed by the harsh cruelty of the penalty that wasn’t, the goal that is disallowed, the acrid stench of injustice. You will one day come to learn about the referee, about him being on the take, about the corrupt nature of the game you love. But that day is a long time away.
You are not yet tainted.
You are not yet stained.
You cry yourself to sleep.
It won’t be the last time.
He sat up into the small hours, her upstairs and him downstairs. Fuck all between them sometimes, two isolated lives under one roof.
When he was ready for bed he switched off the lights, went to the back window, looked out at the block of darkness, at the summer house nestled in the shadows.
He felt the creeping of fifteen years.
He climbed the stairs and went to the bathroom, blinked in the brittle light, cleaned his teeth, took a piss, washed his face and hands. Routine, the seam that held a life together. His fucking anchor.
The bedroom was dark, just the glow of the digital radio. 1.23 a.m., the sound of Kelly breathing beneath the covers. He undressed and slipped into bed beside her, lay there on his back, acutely aware of his own heartbeat, the coursing of blood through his veins.
The dark hours, when the door opened a crack and invited him to consider it all.
The black nothingness.
It chilled him. Of course it fucking did. He turned on to his side, to face the wall, closed his eyes, waited for sleep to come.
And inevitably he got to thinking about the back door, about locking the fucking thing, or not locking it.
He resisted the urge. He’d tried the handle before climbing the stairs. He always tried the handle. He had a picture in his mind, of reaching out, of taking the handle in his grip, of feeling the fucking resistance. But was that tonight? Or was it another night? Nights melded into other nights until he couldn’t separate one from another.
11th May 1985
Valley Parade
It’s the end of another season. You’re at the City Ground and Everton are in town. Everton have just secured the First Division Championship. Up and down the country teams are winning promotion and falling into the relegation mire.
There’s a promotion party in Bradford.
Bradford City are Division Three Champions.
It’s their first trophy in fifty-six years.
Fathers and sons are there to witness this moment. Grandfathers and grandchildren. Generations of families.
Football as it used to be.
A spring day. The Main Stand full to bursting.
Valley Parade, eleven thousand strong.
Warnings from the council unheeded.
Warnings from the police unheeded.
Warning after warning unheeded.
Bradford City Football Club should clear the litter from under the Main Stand.
The timber construction is a fire hazard. There is a build-up of combustible materials in the voids beneath the seats. A carelessly discarded cigarette could give rise to a fire risk.
Exit from the ground should be achievable in 2.5 minutes.
A club with no money to deal with such things.
A club with part-time owners doing what they can.
The Green Guide is filed away, lost in darkness.
Letters from the County Council are filed away, lost in darkness.
Plans are in place for the future. Plans are in place for major works on the main stand after promotion is secured.
Plans are in place.
But there is a game today and over three and a half thousand people are situated in the Main Stand.
At 3.43 p.m. a single spark is all it takes.
And now smoke is rising from the void beneath the seats.
Black smoke is billowing from the void beneath the seats.
Funnelling.
Toxic.
The wooden Main Stand is a tinderbox.
The Main Stand is seventy-four years old, constructed from wood. The seats are made of wood…
A club with no money.
A spring breeze blowing.
The people that have come to a promotion party are now in serious danger.
… the existing felt roof covering and the areas of decayed boarding…
In the Main Stand the fire is spreading beneath their feet.
In the Main Stand the fire is spreading above their heads.
…
an unacceptable fire hazard and should be rectified as soon as possible.
And it takes just four minutes for the fire to engulf the Main Stand.
Four minutes of hell on earth.
Fire above, below and beyond.
… the available exits insufficient to enable escape…
Raging heat.
Burning timber.
Burning bitumen.
A rain of fire.
They die in their seats.
They die in the walkway behind the stand.
They die in the toilets.
Fifty-six die.
On the same day, a fifteen-year-old boy is killed when a wall collapses during rioting between Leeds United and Birmingham City supporters at St Andrews.
On Bob’s bus, traipsing back to the old town along the A52, you listen to the radio as it relays its sombre messages. At home that evening you sit and watch footage of the fire on television. You watch again and again and again.
You watch the fans spilling from the stand on to the pitch, hopping over a waist-high perimeter wall.
Like ants from a nest.
You watch a policeman paw at his burning scalp.
You watch grown men rolling on the turf while flames lick at their clothes.
You watch an old man emerge from the flames, a man on fire.
A bewildered burning man.
You watch all of this and you fight back tears.
You have never seen anything like this before and you never want to see anything like this again.
But you will.
Football in 1985.
No place for kids.
But you go anyway.
It’s part of what you are and without it you are nothing.
Popplewell publishes his interim inquiry into ‘Crowd Safety and Control at Sports Grounds’.
The problem right there in the remit.
Popplewell caught between safety and control, between two incidents that do not bear comparison.
Preoccupied with hooliganism following the incident at St Andrews, comparing the scenes to the Battle of Agincourt.
But lacking understanding.
Urgent consideration should be given by football clubs to introduce a membership system so as to exclude visiting fans.
Unable to square the circle.
Fences around the pitch need not come down though perimeter fences need to have gates in them and the facility to open them in an emergency.
And ignored.
Evacuation procedure should be a matter of police training and form part of the briefing by police officers before a football match…
Bradford.
A 1968 copy of the
Telegraph and Argus
pulled out of the cinders.
Sweet wrappers produced before decimalisation pulled out of the cinders.
Seventeen years of inattention.
A time bomb quietly ticking.
A time bomb exploding.
But no blame for Bradford from Popplewell. No culpability in his report despite the ignored warnings. Bradford City FC and Bradford City Council only forced to take responsibility by the private actions of the victims’ families.
The Popplewell Interim Inquiry.
Safety lost to control.
An opportunity missed.
1:40 a.m.
He was wide awake now, more awake than he had been when he came to bed. He pulled the covers off his skin and made his way, naked, exposed, across the room to the landing.
‘What are you doing?’
Kelly, agitated. Always fucking agitated.
‘Checking the back door,’ he said.
‘It’ll be locked,’ she said. ‘It’s always locked.’
‘It might not be.’
‘What time is it?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Go to sleep.’
‘I was asleep.’
He heard her sigh, heard her swear under her breath. He reached the top of the stairs. No fucking need to drag this out. No fucking need to make an issue of it. He trotted down the stairs two at a time to the back door, reached for the handle, forced it down, met the resistance.
It was locked then.
He cursed, climbed the stairs, got halfway up and felt the urge to go and check one last time. He fought that urge, knowing how ludicrous it was, ground out two further steps then turned and made his way back down again. Drifting across the carpet he reached into the darkness, took the handle in both hands, wrapped his fingers around it, took a mental photograph of the moment, two hands on the cold metal, fingers interlocked, a grainy image of his naked self in the French windows. He turned the handle with all the energy he could muster, felt no give at all. Of course there was no fucking give. Of course there wasn’t.
He climbed the stairs again, reached the landing, stopped there, his head full, a blur of thoughts.
There are hordes of bodies, you at their centre. Blue-lipped people with swollen faces stare into your eyes, through your eyes, at a place beyond. There’s a tightening, a constriction. You wake gasping for breath, your chest on fire.
But it isn’t over. They come out of the darkness, out of the walls, out of a black tunnel. They pile into you in unending numbers. They collapse on to you. They call your name in desperate, weakening voices.
Naked, tracing his fingers up and down the backs of his arms, across his shoulders, feeling his skin, picking, busying himself with blemishes, drifting off into some netherworld where thoughts wrestled for attention without ever becoming thoughts and memories surfaced without ever becoming memories. Time became timeless, meaning meaningless. He remained like that, naked on the landing, shivering with cold, arms and shoulders scratched and reddened, muscles tight and twisted, cock shrivelled to nothing, his head running at incredible speed, repeating itself, reaching overload. There was just the automotive action of his busy fingers.
And he wasn’t there.
He wasn’t fucking anywhere.
The summer after Hillsborough.
Top floor of National Express, en route to Torquay.
Just you and the boys.
The Stone Roses on the stereo.
I Wanna Be Adored.
‘What the fuck would you want to be a door for?’
‘Adored you daft fuck. Adored.’
Or is it Newquay?
No fucking sunshine either way, just football on the beach, endless fucking crazy golf and pissed-up evenings.
And birds. Chasing birds. On Fistral and Tolcarne, down Bank Street and Central Street, into the early hours, a relentless quest to make the holiday mean something, for it to carry some of the burden.
Or is it fucking Torquay?
Hanging out at Castle Circus, chasing the foreign birds. Seeing it in the fucking papers and magazines each and every day.
Story after story.
Image after image.
Bloated faces pressed against wire mesh fencing.
Seeing it and thinking ‘I was there. I was fucking there’ and telling the girls at Castle Circus and nobody giving a shit and showing them the pictures and the girls turning their faces to the ground and telling you to be a happy boy and the lads calling you a miserable bastard for dwelling on the subject and chasing the girls away.
Memories swamping your head. Memories threatening to sink you.
The rot setting in.
Even then.
He snapped out of himself, shuffled in the direction of the bedroom. The hall light came on. Kelly appeared, on her way to the bathroom.
2.10 a.m.
‘You should see someone about that,’ said Kelly when she climbed back into bed. ‘Sixteen fucking minutes you were stood there. I sat here and watched you. It’s not fucking normal.’
He blinked in the darkness.
Sixteen minutes lost to a slice of something that was nothing.
3.05 a.m.
The sound of a freight train inching its way through the city. The clack and clank of the trucks, the whine and squeal of the brakes. He listened to them dissolve into the darkness, listened to his own beating heart.
Years passing like days, a life racing away.
He turned on his side, watched the breeze flirt with the curtains, the window open to let the air in, Kelly’s pet hate, his unconditional need. Alongside all of the others: his routine at bedtime; cleaning the house prior to leaving it; tagging ‘all being well’ on to every arrangement; sleeping on the right side
of the bed. He told himself it was his broken nose but he knew the truth of it.
Averseness to sleep.
Sleep reduced to necessity.
He climbed out of bed, his bare feet nestling on soft carpet, wandered silently down the stairs to the dining room, to the French windows, slid them open, reached high on the shelf for the cigarette packet Kelly kept there, fumbled for the lighter. He didn’t smoke, had never smoked, only the odd drag when he could think of nothing else to do with himself. And so he lit the cigarette in the doorway, stepped outside on to the decking, felt the chill in the air.
He took a drag on the cigarette, coughed, took another, coughed again. He looked across at the shed, thinking of the box and its contents, its collection of translucent days. He thought about the lads and how long it had been since he last thought of them. He thought about Cloughie.
A man amongst men.
Cloughie shooting two fingers at the Trent end when Nicholas was stricken versus the Arsenal.
Cloughie and his fucking random programme notes.
Cloughie and his presence.
No fucking nonsense Cloughie.
The night was cold. He was stood on the decking with a cigarette he didn’t want. There was fuck all else happening, no fucking moon, no fucking stars. He half-willed Cloughie to turn up, Cloughie in his fucking green sweater, the scruffy bastard.
But nobody came.
He took a final drag on the cigarette, coughed, stared down at the lawn. Nothing stirred. There wasn’t anything in the darkness except his past. He retreated inside, locked up and climbed the stairs, went back to bed.
‘What are you doing now?’ asked Kelly.
‘I can’t sleep.’
‘Go downstairs then.’