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‘I’ve been downstairs. Now I’m back.’

‘You stink of fags.’

‘I had—’

‘Fucking disgusting habit,’ she said.

‘… one of yours.’

29th May 1985

Another day mooching about the house. Kelly at work. Kelly home. In the evening everything kicking off again.

‘I spoke to Mike,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I spoke to Mike, about the other day. I called him.’

‘He’s walking on eggshells. He’ll exaggerate everything,’ he said. ‘You know how these things work.’

‘Mike said they have it on film. Mike said it wasn’t very pleasant. Those were his exact words.’

He moved away from her, across the room towards the sofa, keeping his distance.

‘Not-very-pleasant,’ she said, stressing each syllable like it meant something.

‘Fuck off, Kelly,’ he said.

‘It’s a miracle it hasn’t made the papers,’ she said.

Mike’s machinery clicking into gear. Closing fucking shop on him. He puffed out his cheeks.

‘That’s over-dramatic,’ he said.

In truth, he couldn’t remember much about it, just the big lads, the rest toppling and tumbling into one another, legs, arms, torsos. And screams. Shrill, involuntary screams. Hollowed-out fucking screams. Swimming-bath screams. Him a helpless bystander. The big lads laughing, cracking up, two of them legging it but the third holding his ground, gagging for a confrontation, him shouting down the corridor, the lad bigging it up, the two of them chin to fucking chin.

Him and the lad.

The lad and him.

Billy Stubbs and John fucking Finch.

In the corridor. In the camera’s eye.

And then everything falling away. A void.

Dark fucking matter.

Kelly standing in the doorway to the kitchen, looking high and mighty, like he had some burden to bear that would damage the both of them, like she was tied to his shame.

‘It’ll not be a week,’ she said.

‘It’ll be fine.’

‘It might be weeks and weeks.’

‘It won’t be.’

‘What if they sack you?’

‘They won’t sack me.’

‘What if they take your teaching licence away?’

‘They won’t do that either. Nothing happened.’

He could see her dropping out, see the faraway look in her eye. He was pushing all the buttons, aggravating her to ‘tilt’.

But he couldn’t fucking help himself.

‘Whose side are you on, Kelly?’ he asked at last.

‘How about the mortgage? Or the fucking credit card? How about I’m on their side? And you being the man I moved in with instead of the miserable bastard you’ve become.’

He felt the bad stuff rip through him, the two of them adept at crucifying each other.

‘Something’s going on,’ she said. ‘I’ve not seen you like this before.’

‘Nothing’s going on.’

She turned away from him.

‘Kelly,’ he said. ‘Kelly…’

He could tell her now, he realised, tell her everything. Tell her about the phone call, about Clough and Stimmo, the whole fucking mess. Maybe she’d listen. And perhaps if she listened she’d understand. But she wouldn’t fucking listen and she wouldn’t understand because people didn’t understand. They carried the burden on their own terms, slotted it in a neat little place of their own design and chose to leave it there. It didn’t matter if that person was a pal, a parent or a fucking fiancée.

When he reached the bedroom she was sleeping. Of course she was, it was 3 a.m. for fuck’s sake. He slipped into bed next to her, lay there for ten minutes unable to find any sort of restfulness. Lying on his back he felt the weight of the duvet against his chest, the obvious presence of his beating heart. He felt the blood rushing through his body, felt it in his limbs, his toes and fingers. He heard it racing through his head in pulsing torrents. He thought about cut-off points, about when a life starts and when a life ends, about when a life is and when a life isn’t. He looked at the clock on the dresser.

3.13 a.m.

He thought about a solitary St John’s ambulance threading its way through a disaster zone, a policeman lifting the corner flag from its berth, a second policeman tearing along at the ambulance’s flank. A solitary St John’s ambulance soon mobbed by the desperate and the distraught.

A single St John’s ambulance.

He pictured the Liverpool skyline, the two Liver birds, the monolithic cathedral, the gates of Anfield draped in scarves that hung like tears, a carpet of grief on the sacred turf.

The dark of the room unsettled him. He listened to the trains shunting around the station, tried to search for an away day, any day that wasn’t that day, a day with a happy ending. He couldn’t locate one.

He turned to look at Kelly, the familiar outline of her turned-away shoulder.

The two of them lost in the darkness.

Again.

Kelly sniffed. He noticed her breathing had changed, that she was awake as he was awake, locked in her own thoughts.

‘Kelly…’ he whispered.

‘What?’

Agitated. Again.

‘Kelly?’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to love me,’ he said.

He just came out with it, like that, could hardly believe it himself.

‘What does that mean?’

‘I want you to empathise with me,’ he said. ‘Just the once. I want to know that it’s possible for you to do that.’

The darkness had him. Somehow it was spiralling and hurtling around him, a fucking maelstrom. He was trapped at its centre. He could hear the discomfort in her voice as she responded, Kelly thrown off balance, the two of them teetering on the brink of two different lives, two separate pathways, neither of them prepared for that.

Not yet. Not yet.

‘You’re incapable of loving me,’ she said. ‘Why should I love you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m just incapable of saying it.’

‘So you love me?’

‘Fucking hell, Kelly,’ he said.

‘Tell me you love me…’

‘Shut up. You’re not listening.’

‘Say it,’ she said. ‘If you really feel it, then say it.’

‘You’ve fucking turned it around,’ he said. ‘You always turn it around.’

And that’s what she did. Just like Cloughie, turned defence into attack in the blink of an eye. Slick. Sublime. Ruthless. The irony was fucking blinding.

He climbed out of bed, pulled on his T-shirt and boxers, moved across the room, out on to the landing, down the stairs, heard her shouting after him.

‘Say it! Say it!’

He pushed open the doors and stepped out into the garden, took himself off to the summer house, shut himself away. For a while he was alone with it all, his head a mess, his hands shaking, his heart beating at ten to the fucking dozen. Then she appeared in the doorway, wrapped up in his Paul Smith cardigan, quieter now, calmer, almost understanding.

‘Why can’t you say it?’ she asked him.

He shook his head. He stared at the box of programmes, picked his way absently through the pile that was 88–89, seeking it out. The FA Cup Semi-Final 1989. Liverpool v Nottingham Forest. Hillsborough. He turned it over in his hands, considering that this item and nothing else in his possession had witnessed what he had witnessed. He almost forgot Kelly was there.

‘John,’ she said.

‘It’s not in me to say it,’ he said. ‘Not to you or anybody.’

‘That doesn’t make it better,’ she said. ‘How does that make it any better when you’re talking to your fiancée?’

He felt himself shaking. He stared at his quivering fingers, at the pages of the programme shivering in the damp air. He couldn’t leave them out here, he realised. He had to bring them back inside, look after them, allow them access to the world he inhabited.

‘Look at you. Look at how cold you are. Come inside,’ she said.

‘It’s not the cold,’ he said, but she was already on the garden path, already walking away from him, back towards the house. He replaced the programme in the pile, packed the piles back into their boxes, carried the boxes across the garden into the house. When he reached the lounge she was waiting for him.

‘What the fuck do you do out there, anyway?’

He walked past her into the kitchen, placed the boxes on the table. She followed him.

‘Come on. What do you do out there that’s so fucking interesting it’s better than sitting in here next to me.’

‘I don’t want to watch TV,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You watch TV and I don’t want to watch it.’

‘Except that when I fuck off to bed, then you’ll come inside and watch the thing.’

‘It’s just on,’ he said. ‘I don’t watch it.’

‘No, you just sit up half of the night, staring into space. You could come to bed with me.’

‘I don’t need much sleep,’ he said. ‘You know how I am.’

He felt exposed in the brightness of the kitchen, the subject of a fucking lab experiment. He opened the fridge and fished about, not really looking for anything, simply trying not to look at her, not to have his eyes meet her eyes, expecting her to go to the boxes on the table, fish about, start asking questions. But she didn’t.

‘You’re a useless prick these days,’ she said. ‘A fucking useless prick. I’m not talking about sleeping!’

And then she was gone. He heard her storming up the stairs, heard the bedroom door slam shut.

He went into the hallway, grabbed his school bag, dug out the pile of cellophane zip files he’d nicked from the stockroom, carried them back to the kitchen. He sat at the table and started the job of filing his programmes, one cellophane wrapper for each, a protective cell to keep everything in place, to prevent the past from spilling everywhere and making a mess, to protect the present from the things coming its way. He turned his head to look at the kitchen clock.

It was 3.50 a.m.

It didn’t matter what the time was.

In the morning. Kelly on afternoon shift. Kelly slamming around the house, making her fucking statement. He stayed in bed out of the way, drifting in and out of himself, fighting the rushes when they came. A war of attrition. Later, when he ventured down, she was sat in the living room watching Jeremy Kyle. He wondered what the fuck had happened to her, the woman who once kept him up all night analysing the set design and social commentary of Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
. Kelly who once loved the movies of David fucking Lynch.

Kelly and her adult situations. She worked in telesales for fuck’s sake, managed a bunch of lads and lasses in their twenties, managed their behaviour, their absenteeism, their prospects. Or lack of them. There was hardly a difference between his job and hers. And now their routine was set out of joint, neither of them knowing what to do with themselves, fresh wounds festering.

But Jeremy fucking Kyle. It niggled at him until he couldn’t help himself.

‘This is what you get up to on your day off?’

‘It’s not my day off. I’m in at eleven.’

‘Even so…’

‘It’s just on,’ she said. ‘Background noise.’

‘While you do what?’

‘While I wonder what happened to my fucking life…’

Just like that. A short and sharp stab to the ribs. Kelly at her cutting worst.

Multiple fucking stab wounds on his person, on his wretched cadaver.

He left her to it, took the bus into town, wandered in and out of bookshops and charity shops, killing minutes, playing
for time, running down the clock, one minute after another, acutely conscious of their passing. When he was done, when he had no imagination left to play with he took himself back to the house, made himself useful by cooking up some pasta, left Kelly’s in the fridge in case she fancied a bite when she got home. Humdrum stuff. Nothing extraordinary about any of it. But trying. Trying to retreat his ten yards and forget about Stimmo and every fucking thing else.

He watched his own daytime TV, observed the clock on the Sky menu tick on and on towards nightfall, watched the sky darken beyond the French windows, considered where the fuck another day of life had disappeared to.

To the local pub then. To a replay of some Premiership game on the TV. Villa versus Palace. Hardly fucking inspiring. A smattering of souls in the place, the football an afterthought. In between glances at the barmaid, he watched the match over the top of his pint, trying to claw back some interest. But it wasn’t the same, would never be the same, would only be different in ways that made others baulk and laugh and pour scorn because they didn’t know about the edge, the raw energy, the chipped paint, the crumbling concrete, the cages. They didn’t know about Derby at the Baseball Ground in clinging drizzle, crammed into the away end, piss wet through but pissing on the fucking sheep. They didn’t know about Maine Road on a filthy Wednesday evening, 0–3 down at half-time, Loftus Road when the chips were down, Selhurst Park in the snow. They didn’t know. They hadn’t lived those days. They weren’t fucking there.

And so he watched Villa versus Palace and watched the barmaid until he’d had enough then wandered back home to find the house empty. He nipped upstairs, pulled out the laptop, clicked through to some pictures of Kelly displaying her wares, worse for drink and up for a bit, thought about what his chances were of taking more pictures like that, a fresh batch, knowing it would be a while, knowing it might be
never, knowing that the way they were he’d be lucky to catch a glimpse of her bare arse, let alone have the thing shoved in his camera lens.

And all he was really doing was delaying the inevitable, delaying packing his bag, folding his suit into it, stepping out of the house and out of the close in the direction of the station, delaying a journey he’d put off for fifteen years. With nowhere left to turn he found himself searching the boxes for his old DVDs, Goals of the Season, Champions of Europe, stuff like that. He carried them back to the living room, laid himself out on the carpet, slipped the first one in the pile into the machine, dropped seamlessly into another era.

In the past it might have been a porno.

In the past.

By five he’d made his decision. He’d shoot straight up to the old town that evening, get a hotel, attend the service and shoot home again. He packed his bag and stuck it in the hall, fixed the enamel badge to the lapel of his suit and folded it away. He was contemplating writing a note to Kelly when he heard the key in the lock.

Fuck.

He considered making a bolt for the back door, sneaking around the side of the house and legging it. Instead he listened to the sound of her heels coming to a halt on laminate, the sound of her muttering to herself.

‘John?’

He kept his mouth shut, uncertain whether to make light of it or lay it on thick. From the living room came the sound of the TV, still showing the goals of the eighties, Psycho banging one in from outside the box versus Ipswich.

‘John?’

‘Yep?’

Casual. Forced. Ridiculous.

She opened the door, looked him up and down, saw straight through him.

‘What’s the bag for?’

‘The bag?’

Pathetic.

‘The bag in the hall.’

‘Just some things,’ he said.

‘Some things?’

‘Some things I need.’

‘For what?’

‘I’m going away…’

‘Fuck off.’

‘I have to,’ he said.

Liberated. Shit scared.

‘Where?’

Her posture stiffened. He imagined how it would be if he
tried to push past her, if he went for the bag and the door. He didn’t move a muscle.

‘Just away,’ he said.

‘For how long?’

He shrugged.

‘Forever?’

He shook his head. Not forever. Surely not forever.