One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel (23 page)

When we got to Peterborough Services, Stu and Gary Have-a-laugh started taking the piss out of this Native American guy who was busking his own protest songs in the windy porch of the entrance. No top on, moccasins, face paint, the lot. His name was Jim Feather and he claimed to be 100% Indian. No way, said everybody. Where you from? Halfway between Boston and Denver, said Jim Feather – a Cambridgeshire village called Tydd Gote. Where you lot off to? But Jim’s songs were all instant and lyrically powerful and his performance right there in the doorway was massive. So when his detractors had shuffled off for piss and chips, the people whose opinion counted remained there entranced.

And for the next hour Mick acted like he’d just met Donovan. Jim Feather never ate, never smoked, slept upright and believed that 2012 would be the beginning of the world. He had no clothes, no money, no passport and no driving licence. Yet in the past decade, he’d travelled to India, Sri Lanka, Greece, even Afghanistan without any of these things. He had, or so he claimed, Inner Mobility brought on by Cosmic Awareness-ness … and a magic cloak. Two coffees later, Jim Feather announced that he would be travelling with us to Italia ’90, news that passed among us without fanfare or even acknowledgement. Besides, in our collective knuckles-dragging-on-the-ground World Xenophobic state, the abject frilliness of the Zoughy coach station episode was still shocking us to the core. So taking in a half-naked tribesman with neither passport nor clean grundies deffo edged the balance of our little band back into the realm of Mad Cunt Barbarians somewhat. But when Mick – staring up at the blue motorway sign – casually announced that Stansted Airport was fast approaching, Jim Feather suddenly became alarmed. Were we not going to be travelling all the way to Sardinia in this wonderful coach? Jim’s feathers were ruffled. He must leave immediately. And as we slowed down at the first available exit, the murmurs and chortles of the doubting Thomases had swelled to an ungenerous crescendo.

At the back of our coach, meanwhile, the party behaviour of five top blokes suddenly caught our attention. They had all boarded at Peterborough and now stood saluting something-or-other in white shirts and ties, sleeves rolled up, ciggies aglow. Hey, it was our Hallam Towers comrades of contraflow: Steve Repping, Fed-Up Keith, Dylan MacMillan and the Say-Everything-Twice Brothers. Where did you lot sneak on? Being deliver-it-by-yesterday estate car reps – chronic motorway veterans the lot of them – the simple pleasure of not having to drive to Stansted was overwhelming to the Repping Contingent. Indeed, they were each one so o’erfilled with gratitude that the churlish coach driver had already had to ban them from coming down the front to give thanks. Poor old Fed-Up Keith – clearly desperate to put as much mileage as was possible between him and the Hillsborough Disaster – had even, after the ban, crawled down to the front in a zipped-up sleeping bag to mouth his silent gratitude under the hum of the diesel engine. But the sulky, humourless driver had soon spotted him in the mirror and pulled over on the hard shoulder until Caterpillar Keith had inched his way back to Repping & Co., buoyed up by our standing ovation.

On arrival in Cágliari, it had been Mick’s stupid/inspired idea to leg it off the plane and cause Instant Hooligan chaos by zig-zagging across the tarmac making plane shapes. I couldn’t go for that. He was supposed to be watching the twins with Sharon
Goodby’s Eyes. Besides, my bags all bulged with spray-paint and narcotics and I was wearing a t-shirt that declared: ‘I’m Not Just Here For The Crack’. No way could I risk being without that sack o’goodies to help nurse me through the forthcoming Drearies of Group 6. Egypt? Fuck’s sake! Anyway, passing through customs with aerobatic Mick now caught in the vicelike grip of two ¾ scale Fascisti, Stu took temporary charge of Brent and Dean’s passports, whilst Have-a-laugh and myself ranged low and slinky behind our very own Cindi Lauper – it worked like a charm. All the customs officers approached the Doughy One with such unrestrained lust that their forty-five-second strip-search turned the ground around him into a bizarre mega-doily, with him at its volcanic centre starring as Cicciolina the Christmas fairy. Rubbernecking footy fans stalled any further egression through the Great Gates To Freedom, but the toke-a-holic and tunnel-visioned Have-a-laugh and myself – jonesing for a five-skinner – olive oiled our way through with the residue of our gang riding tight behind us on Hobson’s Trailer. What a scene of threatened violence greeted our dismayed peepers! Where was the love? Cágliari’s arrivals hall seethed with Italian Ultraviolentistas, who bayed for our blood and tried immediately to spill some! Breaking through the police cordon, one miniature fucker launched himself at Brent like a starving weasel on a lofty rabbit, but he was instantly dragged off the shaken boy and given a jolly good arse kicking by a tall Irish fan clad head-to-toe in green. It was Dylan MacMillan to the rescue! I’d never even clocked that he and Fed-Up Keith had been Irish, but ye Bard – now free of his two male backing singers and having guiltily witnessed from afar the clonking doled out to one of Sister Sharon’s beloved offspring – well, he was not about to give praise to another for doing what he himself should have
been taking care of. Moreover, ye Bard now abroad was determined to pursue at all times his most combative trajectory.

And thus in such psychic smoke and flames had Italia ’90 finally begun, the half-naked Cabbaged Patch Doughy ejected at last from Dante’s Customs Hall, Basher Breakfast already wringing mindlessly the sorry neck of some perhaps innocent fellow bird lover merely because of his grotesque Mediterranean tribal allegiances. What a cracking beginning! Someone was smiling down on us for sure!

Piling ourselves and our gear into an airport minibus, we were suddenly overwhelmed by a second wave of cops, who swarmed over our vehicle ‘looking for the Dutch’ apparently, and nearly giving myself and Signor Have-a-laugh cardiac arrest. These be-shaded gun-toting federalés were Italy’s Carabinieri, literally ‘those-armed-with-carbines’. But the absence of police dogs and the ever-increasing swell of international footy fans through Cágliari Airport’s bulging portals ensured that their search would be brief, and we were soon bumping and bouncing our way towards the capital. As we’d left the airport, a minuscule but highly rotund figure had handed Mick a CD affixed
with this note:
Please join us for a kick-about on Poett Beach at 11am prompt. Drinks and other sundries will be served. Regards, Bugs Rabbit and the Master Musicians Of Buggeru.
But as it was already past 9am, and the effects of the journey were lying heavy upon our weary heads, we collectively vetoed the idea in favour of a proper kip at our Selárgius Hotel, thereby giving us plenty of time to spruce up for the England–Ireland match at 3pm this afternoon. In our dreams of course, we’d each imagined a full day of hanging out before the footy started in earnest. But you could never think strategically with M. Goodby in charge, for he was a sub-tactician at best. We’d had almost a year to prepare our Poett Beach attacks, but – as evidenced by the bluff ’n’busking of the Brits’ ‘Last Tango in Paris’ media campaign – ye Bard was a good furlong behind Ethelred the Unready. Concurrent with his chronic leadership letdowns was Colonel Goodby’s latest act of Elvisian nepotism in which ye Bard had allowed his sister to pressurise him into leaving for the World Cup as late on June 10th as was possible, thereby letting Sharon wake up with her twins on the morning of their fourteenth birthdays. Sweet, nice, compassionate. But – and it’s a big hairy but – Mick’s demonstration of sibling love ensured thereafter that our gang of Warmongers would be, in Cágliari, always somewhat behind, rather than ahead of our game. The World Cup was to be taken seriously, but we were too full of media bullshit and too numbed by Hillsborough to clock the fact until too too many years after the event. For all of us had assumed – mistakenly as it turns out – that the really violent matches would not kick in until England versus Holland on faraway June 16th. And as that was still almost a week away, we believed that we could – whilst settling gently into the Mediterranean summer heat of footy and drugs – develop in
that five-day window an entirely new and incisive battle plan. Or so we hoped. Yeah, right.

Due to the unfortunate island location of England’s World Cup matches, we had reluctantly accepted the absence in our plans of the two ‘Wash Me’ orphans and the invaluable weapons storage that their many dark corners had facilitated. Unfortunately, this decision obliged us to eschew entirely all of our hard-earned UK and European hooligan methodologies, leaving a vacuum that mere enthusiasm and Lust For Violence could not hope to fill. But so off-the-ball were our starry TV eyes that cracking summer of June 1990 that none of us did even discuss the possibilities of failure. On arrival at our Selárgius Hotel, our exhausted throng had hoped to melt quickly into our respective rooms and bed down for a gratefully received siesta, thereafter marching through the streets as one united front to our ringside seats, whence we could observe England’s dispassionate execution of those hopeless so-called Irish Republicans. Ah me, but ye Bard’s pitifully inadequate arrangements ensured that for most of us sleep was only to be dreamed of. For despite his epic promises, Last-Minute Goodby had been forced to find us all lodgings in the Hotel Apocalypse Now. Not really. But what pit of squalor was this in which to thrust his maverick troop? Treatment would have murdered their leader Vic Nesbit for less. Surely Michael Buenaventura Durruti Goodby could have served up his International Brigade something with a mite more going for it than this right-load-of-cobblers? Without even the simple word ‘hotel’ adorning its crumbling façade, our creepy hostelry looked as though it had long ago been appropriated by some Gestapo-inspired S. American military junta for the torture of its Disappeared. At least, that is, until Zoughy pointed out the enormous, faded letters Y.W.C.A. still clearly
visible upon the roof ’s wide gable end. A brief relief o’ercame our band upon appraising the surprisingly decent reception and bar, both of which were administered by a delightfully severe be-corseted lady of late middle age, whose great heaving breasts and gloomy pouting raised all of our temperatures. And so, a mere two or three Fernet Brancas later, we ascended the crumbling staircase with something approaching hope. But then, upon reaching our respective rooms, the despondency started up all over again. For every chamber on offer to our group was the very picture of abjectness.

Mick’s room was as tiny as a cupboard, but with a window. North-facing: no sun, therefore. Mine was a paint store cleared out just for the World Cup – appropriate in the circumstances. But, in an effort to hide the room’s real purpose – decades of decorators’ brush strokes attesting to the emulsion tests of time – even the walls had been newly glossed over with one streaky-but-pungent yellow coat. Satin-black ribbed industrial flooring. North-facing, of course. Stu’s room was enormous and freezing and again north-facing, a single bed, a dirty black-painted floor and a sink to piss in. A blessing. But no sun. Gary Have-a-laugh had a Grecian four-pillared bed big enough for eight people but no other furniture whatsoever. A vast olive-drab bolster once white cowered at the foot of his soaring altar of a headboard, only serving to reinforce the Kafkaesque inhumanity of this Titanic cot. North-facing, natch. Brent and Dean were sharing an awful children’s dormitory done up forty years previously with faded but now classic 1950s kids’ wallpaper featuring cartoons of Crissolli the Clown, each illustration picked out in felt pen or biro by the bored shitless sprogs of the Post-War Age. But although chocker with bunk beds and baby-changers, the twins nevertheless rallied visibly at the mere thought of
overnight separation from Uncle Herr Hitler and his Travelling Botch-the-lotters. Of Zoughy’s room we knew not even where it lay. Breakfast’s neither. Nevertheless, as each one of us shattered international travellers required this minute no more than a temporary crash pad, we sleepily deluded ourselves that other accommodation could be sought as soon as we’d sanded off the edges of exhaustion with a quick forty winks. Hey, my bogies are gonna be bright yellow when I wake up!