Fan (7 page)

‘If it’s not forever you can tell me where you’re going.’

His head a pitch invasion now, cunts running in all directions, climbing the floodlights, clambering over the scoreboard, dangling from it. A fucking mess.

‘It’s for a few days,’ he said.

‘If it’s another woman you can fuck off now and not bother coming back.’

He glanced out of the kitchen window. Two kids were kicking a football up and down the street in the twilight. He could hear the smack of leather on tarmac.

‘Is it?’ she said.

‘Is it what?’

‘A woman.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course it’s not. It’s no big deal.’

She clocked the notepad on the table.

‘Were you going to leave without telling me?’

He shook his head.

‘You’re a liar,’ she said.

She looked him up and down, really seeing him now, really taking him in.

‘Why are you wearing that?’

She pointed at his shirt.

‘You never wear things like that.’

He shrugged.

‘I found it in the attic.’

‘You’re going to football? Is that it? What is this, some lads’ weekend? A stag do? You don’t have to keep it a secret.’

‘Can I tell you when I get back?’

She pursed her lips.

‘Do what you like,’ she said. Then she turned and slammed the kitchen door behind her. He heard her thundering up the stairs. Somewhere in that whirlwind moment, her heels must have come off.

He wondered what the hell he was thinking.

Heading north through the heartland, north through the patchwork. Heading to the old town. Kelly’s screams in his head. The two of them in the bedroom. That cutting tongue of hers. Her in that towel. Fresh out of the shower. Her naked shoulders. Her wet skin. Her wrists slipping from his grip.

The two of them in the bedroom, wrestling, grappling, fighting.

Truly fighting.

The same piece of track. Sunday, 9th April 1989. Heading home from Wembley. League Cup Winners. First trophy in a decade. With the boys all the way, Chester, Coventry, Leicester, QPR, Bristol fucking City, a sun-drenched Sunday in London town, stuffing the holders, stuffing the Hatters.

Psycho in his little white hat.

Forest on a fucking roll. Confidence soaring. Tearing all and sundry to shreds. Seventeen wins in twenty-two games.

Cloughie clasping his hands, punching the air. A lone figure on the dog track, skirting the celebrations, slipping down the tunnel and away.

One job done.

They’d criticised him, the daft bastards, for sloping off like that, but they didn’t fucking understand. They didn’t see the bigger picture. Let the players have their fifteen minutes, then get on with things. There was so much more. There was
Hills-borough
for fuck’s sake, the FA Cup.

One big job left to do.

Kelly naked on the bed, the towel at her feet, her head buried in the pillow. Him breathless in the doorway, shocked at himself.

Lads on the 19.00 out of King’s Cross, revelling in it, the stuff of dreams. Spilling into the aisle, dancing the miles away. Conga up and down the carriages, blokes joining blokes, strangers united, five, ten, twenty deep, up the train and back again. Even the fucking guard joining in, the rest of the passengers laughing along, a party on the 19.00 King’s Cross to Leeds.

Sunday evening. 9th April 1989.

Party time.

‘Let’s all have a disco, La la la la La la la la…’

And they did.

Fifteen fucking years. He could see them all, half expected the door to slide open, the lads to come barrelling down the
carriage, lads and lads and lads and lads, each in their colours, loving the crack.

He could see them all.

A train full of ghosts.

A movie reel beyond the window. Lights flashing by. The train thundering onward. A tin of lager at his lips.

The bittersweet taste of what once was and what is.

Invisible death looming on a black horizon.

A perpetual shadow.

Then and now.

Now and then.

And in another dark corner, their bedroom door shut fast. Him on the dark landing, retreating down the stairs, leaving it behind.

Leaving Kelly behind.

The landscape gathered itself in. Familiar villages he recognised by patterns of street lights, the meandering river somewhere in the darkness, the red warning lights on the waterworks, the old factories convulsing in their death throes, the glow of halogen spotlights protecting the asset strippers’ bounty from the pilfering hands of the discarded and forgotten. Rows and rows of dark terraced houses beyond the window on his side of the train, well-lit commuter estates beyond the other.

Polarised fucking opposites.

The old town.

Dismantling the bedrock. Burying its foundations. A twenty-year process of decay, of living and dying … and dying … and dying.

A legacy of ruin in the manufacturing heartlands.

A mirror to the soul.

He walked out of the station, down the incline and into the old town, his footsteps leading the way, the rest of him following, straight to the hotel, straight to his hotel room, his hotel bed, exhausted from his journey, from his week, from the news about Stimmo, from all that had happened with Kelly.

He stroked the scratches on his forearms.

He winced with pain.

The same weather, bright and cold, the same fucking chapel. He’d not been there since a road accident killed an ex-schoolmate. He’d not had cause to go back.

But BJ and that fucking phone call. Cunt.

We’re suffering here so you can suffer too.

And fuck me, he was suffering.

He had every best intention, got up in plenty of time, ate breakfast in the hotel, got his black suit on, pulled his tie straight, strolled purposefully down into the old town, over the river and past his old gaff, altered now, the clock shop gone, developed as a flat, an extension of the ground floor where the Scotsman used to live, some fucking modern planning arrangement designed to squeeze people into spaces and money into fat wallets. And it was just a hundred yards from there, the length of a fucking football pitch. He could see the black gates, the driveway leading up to the arch, the chapel beyond, and if he’d been pressed for time perhaps he’d have headed straight up there, found himself a seat at the back somewhere, made himself part of something he really was no longer part of. But he wasn’t late. He was too fucking early by any measure. He had time to think and to revisit his doubts.

They strangled the life out of him.

He continued down to the river instead, stopping at the bridge, wrestling with guilt, telling himself it was better this way, to take a moment, to gather his thoughts, to arrive at the last minute and avoid the inevitable onslaught of bitter glances and barbed questions.

Bitter and barbed for what? For fucking off down south and leaving them to it?

Too right, serri. Too fucking right.

The river was deathly quiet, no sign of life on the water, some old guy in the allotment burning off the dead and the dying, the rotten and the wasted, black smoke rising in a thin plume, drifting up and away. An old gal came down the path. He felt her eyes on him, him in his suit, his shined shoes, his dew-glazed hair looking like fucking Brylcreem. But he wasn’t a ghost. She could see him better than that, he realised. She knew what he was and what he fucking wasn’t.

He looked down at the water, at the sluice gates holding everything back. Black thoughts started spilling in, trapping him between moments.

Dark water rising.

The river become a river of people moving inexorably towards a tunnel, trailing into a dark space where there was no space, filling an area that was already full, compressing and solidifying there.

The dead and the living, the living and the dead. The dead standing up. Blue lips. Vacant expressions. Lifeless eyes. The lights going out.

And Stimmo shouting over his head, shouting the same fucking thing over and over.

‘That one’s dead, mate. I’m telling you he’s fucking dead.’

A look on Stimmo’s face then, a look that etched itself on to him, became part of the person Stimmo was after that day, if he remembered it right, if he could be trusted to comprehend anything about the life he’d lived.

Stimmo. There and gone.

He didn’t go to the service. Did he fuck as like. He wandered the streets of the old town instead, feeling the separation of fifteen years, registering the changes.

For better.

For worse.

The corner garage transformed into a drive-through takeaway. Half the factory site already given over to housing association dwellings, clean bricked, neatly shrubbed, soulless.

The fleapit nightclub, his old stomping ground, gone. No trace of its shell or its footing in the earth but the topography the same, the stretch up to the town hall littered with the old and the new, with names he recognised on shop fronts and pub signs and vans, and names he didn’t know at all. A supermarket where the old town football ground used to stand. Nothing to remind him except the chip shop they used to visit at half-time. All other traces swept away.

Time moved relentlessly onward, the hour of the service passing into oblivion like everything else, leaving him untethered, without anchor in a place that had been his anchor for over half a lifetime.

And he should have gone home then, got himself on the train and made his way back, tried to get the wedge back in. But he didn’t. He couldn’t get past that bedroom door, couldn’t see beyond it. He was a daft bastard, really, a let-down to himself, a disappointment to others. So he really did have to stay. He had to explain himself, see the people he’d not seen, find out what the fuck it was all about, Stimmo doing himself in like that, discover if he was barking up the right tree or poking about in dark places he had no business with.

He returned to the hotel and booked himself in for the weekend, closed the curtains, switched off the lights and crashed on the bed, knowing he had to call BJ, to avoid being the one they’d all say didn’t give a fuck.

To be forgiven.

He raided the minibar, sank the whisky and the wine then drifted off into a vision of himself, sinking a six-pack of Fosters on the bank of the Trent, the churning river at his feet, the fucking Trent end looking like it might collapse into the water, tilting against the clouds, threatening to fall on top of him, crush his sad bones. Some woman on the bridge turning
down the steps, carrying a wreath under one arm, turning down the alley in the direction of the ticket office. Others following behind, little ants crossing the bridge, turning down the steps, wandering along the far bank, disappearing into the alley, an endless string of people in ones and twos and little clusters, him on the far bank watching them all, trying to build up the courage to do the same.

A drunken reverie.

Still he fancied himself following them down to discover a red brick wall decked in scarves, the cross of St George, that name ‘Brian Howard Clough’, those dates 1935–2004, the freshly daubed message ‘you did it your way’. He dreamed he stood there in the silent car park paying homage whilst his brothers and sisters drifted past him to lay their own messages, flowers, hats, scarves, ghosts to rest.

A car park full of memories. A sad fucking ending really. Couldn’t they have opened the gates, let the cunts on to the pitch, offered some sense of affiliation?

Because he was dreaming of the same colours draped over a goalmouth again now, Anfield in the aftermath, a carpet of condolence, a terrace bathed in remembrance, a different type of loss, but one connecting to the other, drawing fifteen years together so they might not have happened at all, his adult life bracketed by two moments, the death of one, the death of ninety-six. And then there was Stimmo, the spark that put a light to it all. He’d let that fucker down, well and fucking truly.

He was, as he’d often been called, a selfish bastard.

He woke in the dark, struggled to locate himself, floundered for a while in a room he didn’t recognise amongst anxieties he couldn’t control. And then he saw the golden church spire beyond the window, recognised the old town’s sombre silhouette, dropped back into the pillow, clicked on the TV, buried himself in mediocrity.

Somewhere amongst it all he dialled BJ’s number. BJ picked up on the second ring.

‘You’re a cunt.’

‘I couldn’t face it,’ he said. ‘I thought I could but I couldn’t.’

‘So you’re a cunt. And now you want to try and make it better.’

‘I guess so.’

‘I’ll be at the bank tomorrow.’

‘Eh?’

‘Sincil Bank. You daft bastard. 2 p.m. outside the Shakespeare.’

‘Are you fucking kidding?’

‘No, mate. Why would I kid about a serious thing like you buying me a pint?’

The phone went dead.