One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel (22 page)

Throughout this dynamic outpouring of grief and frustration, Mick and I sat skinning up and not getting stoned, me drinking Carlsberg Export and not getting drunk, both thinking vicious thoughts but not saying anything, and generally fretting at the sheer non-achievements of our respective Bystander Roles. Brent and Dean – both still only twelve, remember – had fallen asleep hours before, but we knew that their distraught mother Sharon was now on her way across Snake Pass, desperate to take charge of her two junior offspring.

By 4am, the entire human contents of the bar was ensconced in our thirteenth-floor sanatorium, thirty-seven of us loosely packed across the four rooms, while Brent and Dean slept on undisturbed in the sumptuous confines of Yeh-Yeh’s elite suite. Myself and Mick sat together in the cushy corridor opposite the lifts, knees pushed up, awaiting the arrival of his sister, who – having lent him her car for the day – had been forced to seek alternative transport across the Pennines. But when Sharon Goodby finally appeared, she had brought tragic company in the form of her neighbour Jennifer Gilhooley, whose son Vincent had been ‘lost to this afternoon’s crush’, as she so poetically described his fate. Only twelve years old, this F.A. Cup Semi-Final had been Vincent’s first away match. Poor Mrs Gilhooley, a tiny single mother-of-three with no babysitter on offer, had been stuck at home all day with nothing more than conflicting radio reports to keep her insane, until Sharon – ignorant of Jennifer’s own plight – had called her with a request to borrow the car. Now at last somewhat among like-kind, the distraught Mrs Gilhooley roared with grief, so incandescent with rage that I worried about her response to Sharon’s reunion with the twins. For, on reaching Sheff with Sharon Goodby, the South Yorkshire Police had obliged Jennifer first to identify her poor son’s body from over eighty snapshots of the Hillsborough corpses – Vincent Gilhooley had been snapshot #81 – then leave
her dead child lying in the temporary mortuary. And as Mick took Sharon down to wake her sleeping boys, Jennifer instinctively reached out to me and I wrapped myself around this fragile lady and cradled her head as her stomach fizzed with crazy sounds. She wheezed and sobbed and shuddered and retched as only one can who has been dealt such a Cosmic Blow.

Who were these Great Beasts who had laid her so low, these foul Civic Frauds who had invited her child to their city then abandoned him? Did they not have names? Was there not one man among them who could stand above the other fakers and say: ‘I it was who failed you. I it was who looked away. I it was whom they paid to ensure the safety of the day. I it was who took away your loved ones.’ And it was not until around 6am that I unpeeled dear, quaking Jennifer Gilhooley from off my tear-soaked chest, and led her down to the car park. In front of us, Mick and Sharon dragged her reluctant, exhausted twins and I could hear Brent whining petulantly.

Anna stretched out her bare left foot and kicked my right boot lightly. We lay side-by-side scrunched up together, like an old married couple supping late night Ovaltine in bed with the TV on. Ah, but she warmed me. Supporting our backs the sandstone bolster of the Iloi tomb, below us the spellbinding azure blue of Lake Omodeo – nature’s television screen.

Almost zombified by the heat and the near-asphyxiating beauty of Lake Omodeo and its volcanic horizons, I struggled to accept that Death had struck sunny Hillsborough on just such a day as this – peaceful, cloudless, tranquil. Right this minute, this ardent City Dweller wished for nothing more than to remain side-by-side with Blessèd Anna – my troubled, intellectual Surrogate Lover – the two of us basking in the incapacitating heat of this typical Sardu June morning. But I understood that we must, sooner rather than later, wrap up Anna’s crash course in all things M. Goodby, and return to Santa Cristina in order to exchange cars with her father. And so – hoping to nail all of the salient points of the Mick story without getting caught up in too many Cultural Flummoxers – I continued recounting ye Bard’s tale, and at quite a pace.

Suddenly I was sucking in great quantities of air, pursing my lips and on the edge of growling, as I recalled the umpteen embarrassing scenes we’d all been put through during ye Bard’s brief assault on the UK Charts. Fucking hell, suddenly I was back there and I was not happy! For throughout M. Goodby’s awesome post-Hillsborough Disaster sequence of shitting-on-your-homeys, nobody had been safe from the fallout of his Machiavellian wiles. First, Mick had pestered and pestered the Kit Kat Rappers into letting Full English Breakfast join them; Breakfast didn’t even know until he was in the band! Next, Mick hassled and hassled the not-arsed Gary Have-a-laugh into singing lead vocal on the first Kit Kat Rappers single ‘Second Class to Dottingham’. Then, Mick pestered Stu and Yeh-Yeh into adding ‘
Feat. Gary Have-a-laugh’
on the front of the single’s sleeve – ‘You’ll need
a focus of attention.’ Next, in that previously mentioned act of utter ingenious cruelty, ye Bard had edged out his Brits Abroad co-founder Uncle Rob Dean for looking too old to appear on the impending
Top of the Pops
. Next! Next! Er, next, having written a so-called Posh Rap for our beloved Full English Breakfast, Mick had visited the Kit Kats’ Manchester record company – behind everybody’s backs, mind you – and persuaded them of the commercial soundness of billing the second Kit Kat Rappers single to Full English Breakfast alone, thereby relegating Stu, Yeh-Yeh and the by-now well-miffed Gary Have-a-laugh to passengers on their own record! And yet? And yet, the more ye Bard had pushed and cajoled and mistreated those around him, somehow the more we’d all fallen into line with his wishes. With hindsight, I could only ask myself: Why? What was
that
all about? Why had we all been so enthralled?

During those five brief months as a big Pop Star, Mick had trailed around the cities of the UK dispensing Rave Wisdom to an obsessed gaggle of be-hooded, sugared-up Fizz-o-philes. ‘Last Tango in Paris’ was a phenomenon. And while UK sales of Mick’s belovèd Kola Max rocketed, so did the international sales of Tango push it briefly to the world’s number one soft drink! So what colour was the Rave Zeitgeist? Uh-oh! Stu, Rob Dean, Yeh-Yeh, Gary Have-a-laugh: every one of them had been in the Hillsborough Crush and every one had – in its aftermath – suffered a right dissing from ye Bard. Full English Breakfast, on the other hand, had appeared on our scene too recently to have played any part at Hillsborough. Hmm, there’s surely some correlation here, officer?

Now total-recalling the maelstrom of Chart Topper Goodby’s brief early-1990 media assault, I was once again embarrassed and affronted at the undue haste with which ye Bard had jettisoned all sense of normality in favour of an Uppity-Chav-Buys-Internet-Lordship sensibility. And in my mind’s eye, from here in the heat of Sardinia, I could suddenly picture Brits Abroad’s bizarre arrival at
Top of the Pops
that chilly February 1990 morning. Stu and Gaz Have-a-laugh were there to mime their backing vocals. Brent and Dean were delighted to be courted by a Korg Synthesizers rep. New boy drummer Kev Noggins was hassling WASP’s singer Blackie Lawless, and I was just there for the crack – which my connection had promised me would ‘be here presently’. Mick meanwhile sashayed around the BBC corridors like one born to it. Moreover, he was suddenly behaving around these media types as though he’d been raised as a Holy Man in the foothills of Tibet and had zero cultural awareness. So when this tall, suave Australian guy walked up and told Mick how much he loved ‘Last Tango in Paris’, it was obvious from the way the BBC were fawning that this guy was also famous. But Mick, highly offended even at the mere idea of sharing this limelight with some other celebrity, produced a spectacular child-star outburst exhibiting zero sense of proportion.

And thus, by deploying such severe ‘I Remember Nothing’ cultural severance tactics, ye Bard in one short month successfully slewed off nearly everything from his former self, jettisoning all of his compassionate, life-affirming Poetic Splendour in favour of that time-honoured super-temporary UK phenomenon: the Celebrity Solipsist. WWF? Call dear old David Attenborough! A chap in here thinks he can make the whole world disappear if only he closes his eyes. What a documentary! Talk about changed priorities.

I next explained to Anna how Mick had insisted on overseeing the entire booking of our tickets to Italia ’90 from a mythological point of view, i.e.: how our trip would best read in his planned autobiography. Mick wanted us to leave in glory from Manchester’s new Graham Nash Airport, landing in Northern Sardinia at Alghero, where his excited Catalan family wished to take us all out ‘for a celebratory slap-up-do’. Thereafter, we could rent two cars and take in the whole island as we roadtripped south down the 131 to Italia ’90. Sounded brilliant. Sounded utterly brilliant. Mick’s route would add considerable time to our journey, but I wasn’t complaining – the World Cup’s worth lingering over. Let’s fucking do that. Beautiful airport, Alghero. Been there before, no security, sweet. I could already picture me and Have-a-laugh smuggling in several well-packed 4 oz tins of the gardening. In reality, however, Mick-in-charge was a disaster. Indeed, ye Bard hummed and ha’d for so long that all the Alghero plane tickets were gone by the time he’d even made preliminary enquiries. Thus, we would be forced instead to take the motor coach to far-off Stansted Airport, thereafter flying directly into the arms of Europe’s most paranoid police force at Cágliari, all of them sure to be brimming over with a current need to frisk every UK passport holder. By now, however, there was no one in our little party who could be easily fazed. We were, after all, the current top flight of UK Hooliganistas bar none. Even W. Ham’s Inter City Firm had never topped the BBC charts! Take that!

And so it came to pass that our vibe-tribe assembled at Manchester Coach Station, at 8pm that still-sunny June 1990 evening, each of us ready to keep our Stansted appointment with the 5am flight out to Sardinia’s capital. The team lining up on the tarmac would be comprised of myself, M. Goodby, Gary
Have-a-laugh, Stu, Full English Breakfast, Brent and Dean Garrett, and Doughy. Yeh-Yeh being a magistrate couldn’t get enough time off. Uncle Rob Dean was of course staying back in the UK to make his protest over his Brits Abroad mistreatment. Despite the airport swap from Alghero to Cágliari, both Have-a-laugh and myself had decided the risk was still worth taking and I lovingly loaded my bags with the green stuff and the black stuff. Oh, and some of the amber stuff just in case we got sleepy. Clothes? One shirt, one pair of kecks, one black designer jacket – because it’s Italy, technically – one pair of boots, one black v-neck sweater, never wear undies: me sorted. And that was about the short-and-long of it for all the gents. Except for one of us yet to arrive. Where was Doughy? More to the point, what was that cabbage patch doll thing that now approached us with such a sunny demeanour? Do please keep those dusty ostrich feathers away from me, Madam! But it was not until the strange doll thing was actually upon us and cackling its familiar greetings that anyone made the unlikely connection. Hey, I recognised
that
voice! No way! This was Doughy? No, said the voice. This was not Doughy but Zoughy! What the fuck is going on now? Who set Strawberry Switchblade on you? What’s with all that taffeta and lace? And whilst this abject woman-thing proclaimed the death of Doughy As Was, Mick clucked at being so thoroughly upstaged, whilst Have-a-laugh and I just smiled to each other, knowing that the novel cross-dressing presence of I’m Zoughy, Fly Me would act as a perfect smokescreen behind which to hide as we brazened it through Sardinian Customs.

And thus, our little gang all now assembled, off we jolly well popped on the first stage of our long journey to those southern climes. And boy was our National Express coach running on love! Too much for some! Mistaking Boy Doughy’s daft ’80s
get-up for a jolly World Cup jape too far, our sulky, humourless driver at first attempted to dampen our Northern Ardour by throwing on a Style Council cassette. But nothing could stop us now, and the aisles were soon shaking shaking shaking. And while Brent and Dean slept like the babbies they still were, Stu, Zoughy, Have-a-laugh and I quietly caned the half-oz we’d allowed to cover the duration of the coach ride, all the while eavesdropping on the fascinating conversations between ye Bard and His Mighty Breakfastness, Lord Leander Pitt-Rivers Baring-Gould.