One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel (7 page)

From midnight to 7am, a seemingly endless series of ‘what ifs’ clanged and resounded through my empty brain. But each time, every aspect of our incarceration that I explored pointed me not at the dubious political endgames and Anglophobia of Judge Barry Hertzog as the catalyst for our Kidnapping, but instead to the collective guilt of Mick, Brent and Dean, whose shared need to prove their hooligan credentials at Italia ’90 had followed hot on the heels of their spectacular, ahem, non-attendance at Hillsborough. Call yourselves Liverpool fans? But then, even I was somewhat responsible for their predicament. What if I
hadn’t
been a lifelong Nottingham Forest fan with connections? What if I
hadn’t
bowed to pressure from Mick’s sister Sharon for Forest tickets to keep her 13-year-old twins nice-and-safe up my end, far from poor Liverpool’s Leppings Laners? What if Mick’s social worker persona had
not
kicked in and forced the twins to hold their tongues as jeering Forest fans at first mistook the flailing behaviour of the dying Liverpool fans for Hooliganism? And what if that total teenage hardcase Brent – thereafter always so utterly guilty, emasculated and humiliated at being up the wrong end – hadn’t been excluded by an insensitive headmaster for nihilistically spraying swastikas on Everton’s walls just one month after Hillsborough? ‘Everything means nothing,’ commented Brent to the judge at the time. Fair
enough, I’d thought. As the twins’ blood uncle, Mick the social worker had thereafter felt obligated by his sister to look after Brent’s case. But as both Brent and Dean already stood six-foot-three, Mick had soon conveniently forgotten their tender ages, press-ganging these two highly resentful electronica obsessives into his Brits Abroad project, and thereafter using their extreme youth to enlist/entrap a young cool drummer. Which is precisely why Brent and Dean had – on encountering half of the Italian cop force on their tail at Italia ’90 – spent the entire 131 chase spraying squeaky dog toys in Uncle Mick’s face and goading him more and more and more into proving just how much of a Brit Abroad he really was. Oooooooohhhhhhhhhhhh. These were some thorny problems we’d faced.

As I drifted in and out of consciousness in the June heat of this Sardu Su Talleri night, the click-clack of the trains crossing main street served this time to awaken me back in that summer of 1990, or so it seemed from the now scorching heat. Now I was lying in my white stall, chained and smiling nearly hysterical. For what would my own life have become had I not been lactose intolerant? I sweated and trembled with relief at my luck. For, after starving us all for the first three days of the kidnap, some very tall and rank-smelling long-haired cunt in an apron had walked in nonchalant-like and asked us all in splendid pseudo-Sard if we ‘required spaghetti?’ As all of us were Westerners unused to three days of enforcèd fasting, we leapt at the chance and all but me accepted the lanky twat’s offer of ‘Pecorina’. A good cheese, explained Mick from his Sardu vantage point, and Brent and Dean concurred. Not me, sorry, says I. I’m lactose intolerant. How’s your tomato sauce? Only then did we discover how royally that long-haired cunt had set us up. The Sardu cheese ends in an ‘o’ – Pecorino. End it in
an ‘a’ – Pecorina – and those three had all just agreed to anal sex. Thereafter, Mick, Brent and Dean got bummed every third day in the white stalls. Bummed and never fed. I got beaten up every day and never fed. The munter that did the bumming had a hacking cough that reminded Mick of his old chemistry teacher Colin Best. So, before each bumming, Mick recited this poem to calm himself down:
Faster than a speeding ticket, headlong to disaster, cheesy as his middle wicket, dreadlocked as a Rasta. No choice as you bend-and-scrape that mad Jap’s Eye, it
will
dislodge
your kack. Why? Besty’s back!
And every time I’d sat in my white stall, listening to that plaintive chant ringing out from the full six-foot-three frame of my dear friend the poet Goodby, how I’d resented even one of his dubious rhyming couplets being wasted on such evil, twisted endeavours. I didn’t want Mick to make a cult character out of Besty. That evil Bum Chum deserved a surly sorry saddo’s name – not fucking Besty. But as my own sphincter had remained intact, I’d felt an obligation to grant ye Bard his metaphor … and held my peace.

Lying inert in the heat at Su Talleri, as Macomér’s sunrise birds piped each other a Sunday greeting, I pictured Mick asleep at his mother’s house in Manchester, tossing and turning endlessly on the narrow travel mattress under the stairs where Gabriella used to keep her Brasso. After the kidnap, Mick had initially sought the refuge of his old teenage bedroom, still be-stickered with
Peanuts
cuttings and comforting sayings from E. E. Munkey. But as the novelty of the kidnap had faded at last from those T-Zers columns of the national music press, still the ignominy of that mysterious Sardinian Affair could be experienced every day at a simple buying-fizz-down-the-corner-shop level. Moreover, the notoriety of the Brits Abroad case and the curious, scurrilous, almost ‘tut-tut’ Victorian manner with which the press had reported it had ensured that Mick nowadays – rather than do battle with the outside world – found it far easier to hole up under Gabriella Goodby’s stairs with his fizz, his promo poster of Lou Reed’s
Berlin
and fifty-plus Charles M. Schultz paperbacks. By the late ’90s, the sociopathic M. Goodby had begun to be considered whacked-out enough to be press-worthy, especially after a Thames TV crew headed north and filmed a second documentary of him under the stairs. But when Mick, in lieu of payment, had accepted the TV crew’s offer of a Green Screen paintjob for his dugout, they had humiliated him throughout the film, cheap video FX portraying him as though flying Arabian Nights-like through
a starlit sky. Worse still, they even got vicious blobs of Chroma-key green on his beloved
Berlin
poster, for fuck’s sake! After that debacle, nearly half-a-decade passed before Mick re-emerged in any public capacity. Oh, it’s Oz! Oh, it’s Gong! Oh, it’s God! Never knowing what uncalled-for harshness might be expectorated in his direction should any cruel randomers stray his way during a corner shop fizz offensive, instead, Mick refused to take risks any longer, malingering in his dugout under the stairs and letting the fizz wagons deliver right to his door. Vimto, Corona, Kola Bear: everyone delivered. Six-foot-three and taking up no space at all. And then out of nowhere, around 2003, came Exercise Club. All Mama Gabriella’s doing apparently. Fed up with Mick joking and mimicking her yoga kriyas, his tiny spitfire of a Sardinian mother told him to wake up, that he was good, that he should start taking it seriously. Still making a big joke of it – as Mick is always wont to – he nevertheless secretly joined a yoga class and got great at it. Within the year, Mick had convinced half the women in his street to join his own ‘Exercise Club’, emphatically denying the presence of yoga or anything spiritual in his teachings. Smartest move ever. Attendances soared and locals started to have more time for his madness. Even better for his agoraphobia, Mick’s Exercise Club CD sets became even more successful through his mail order business. I’ve never seen such a PR job! It’s all a fudge, of course. Surrounded by ladies at his Exercise Club, Mick’s promo photos portray a picture of fine mental health and robust physical vigour. But really Mick’s Exercise Club is just for two days per week. Mick rents his space out from Ken Heathcote, the
Fatigues
Magnate. And for the other five days, he just keeps a low low profile at home. Never leaves his room. Never lets anybody in. But that two days of Exercise Club per week is Mick’s lifeline. And while he’s got that lifeline, he’s still Mick Goodby – just.

Having only four hours previously examined close-up the gruesome Bastille of our kidnap
and
viewed it through the keen lens of my cosmically rejuvenated Being, the tragic early deaths of Brent and Dean Garrett stuck more than ever in my psychic craw. Gone. And Goner: despatched without honour. And if the black events acted out within that fascist monstrosity had reduced the remarkable poet-ruffian M. Goodby, himself already thirty-two years old, to a mentalised splash, what chance had there been precisely for twins on the edge of their fourteenth birthday? How I hated to waste time with ‘what ifs’ and hindsight. But the reality of Dean’s suicide was just too stringent to confront right now, and my psychic hackles were up. What if? What if? What if?

Bathing in the stream at Faraway Field yesterday, as Rob Dean’s exquisite guitar solo had pealed out its exultant themes, I’d registered – and possibly for the first time – not only how great was his musical contribution to Brits Abroad, but also how essential his place at Italia ’90 should have been, had it not been for Mick’s crazy ego and clueless career decision to bully Rob into swapping his six-string-razor for Brits Abroad’s drum stool just as ‘Last Tango in Paris’ had entered the BBC Top 75. Viewing it only as a demotion and having none of it, Rob had quit with the song at number 73, and then regretted
the purity of his decision for the rest of his life. So did several of us, but for different reasons. The presence at Italia ’90 of Uncle Rob ‘Hardcase’ Dean – the twins’ Godfather whence came Dean Garrett’s first name, for fuck’s sake – would most certainly have prevented Mick from risking their safety. Tough enough? At Austria’s East Tyrol, Rob had even poked the ref up the arse with a flag he’d just nicked off a linesman. He was the gaffer, our central defender. He was Tony Adams. Thus, feeling so very cheated out of
Top of the Pops
, Rob went on a total bender. Then, just before Italia ’90, completely AWOL. After all the months of hard work he’d endured convincing Mick he could become a singer, slowly divining melodies from Goodby’s near-chromatic warbling, then press-ganging various younger Brits into impromptu rehearsals, the desperately hurt guitarist had felt obliged to stay back in the UK as a protest against his lack of recognition. Talk about being conspicuous by your absence! What if Rob
had
kept his date with Italia ’90? Would his presence have tipped the balance back our way?

Now, from my Su Talleri bedroom, I was pitched back to those days just prior to Italia ’90, not through Time Travel on this occasion, more likely through lucid dreaming brought on by my sensitivity to Dean’s suicide and proximity to Sardu Cheese Hell. Apparently right back there in Gabriella’s front room, I again experienced the uncanny power of Brits’ sudden media success holding us all under its 1990 spell, as the empire-dreaming Poet Goodby declaimed grandly over the phone to Uncle Rob Dean in mock-noble tones.

At the other end of the phone, however, Rob Dean’s year zero had already commenced. No, he would
not
play drums in Brits Abroad, he said. He would take his guitar chords and FX where they would be better appreciated. But, Rob asked, could he please have his copy of Happy Mondays’
Bummed
back now that Mick had learned from Shaun Ryder all the tricks of the Non-Singer? Burn. Mick got off the phone fit to explode, heaved a bearish sigh and stared right past me.

Turn it on me, why dontcha? Fucking hell … just because Rob and I had both dated the extremely gorgeous Czywczynsky sisters throughout the previous year! But now that Rob had quit the band, Mick was truly kippered. By forgetting that barely eighteen months previously, he himself had been no more than an impromptu pre-footy match pub rhymer, Mick had now ejected that very guru, that very
patient
guru who had facilitated the poet’s enormous journey, his own recklessness thereby guaranteeing self-termination in the process! Who else would have had
the patience but Rob? Who but Rob could make head or tail of the early Goodby vocal delivery? What’s
that
accent?
Who
you being now? And who but Rob had cared enough to sift through and edit pages of Mick’s supposedly long-finished poetry book simply in order to create studio-worthy material for Brits Abroad? Without Rob’s persistence and editing, would Mick have even published his ‘Rave poetry volume’
Juan Fluorescent (The Cuckoo’s Nest)
? It’s debatable. Rob Dean’s departure, dismissal, whatever-you-call-it, that weekend before
Top of the Pops
, would actually signal the true end of the Brits as a creative force. The catchy songs like ‘Last Tango in Paris’ and ‘100 Watt the Funk’ soon disappeared to be replaced with spirited atonal workouts and squeaky toy Uber-thrashes. Nevertheless, when I delivered to the Great Goodby my musical analysis regarding his Rob Dean-less re-shuffle, Mick appeared entirely unfazed, having already ascended to a more impervious phase of stardom.

So Mick the poet wanted it all, whatever
all
was in his fragmented mind. Change the rules, why can’t I? Back then, Mick had been engorged with himself and his own possibilities. But
he
had
been right and Brits Abroad
were
a teen band. Squirting out ‘samples’ from their squeaky rubber dog bones across the rowdier Saturday morning TV shows, Brent and Dean and their new bongo compadré Kev Noggins caught the Rave Era like no other youths. All three were so ultra tall, good-looking and young that their enthusiasm drove the BBC props department, particularly the females, to new pinnacles of achievement.
Saturday Special
supplied a sandpit for Kev Noggins, who sat cross-legged in Union Jack shorts playing his bongos, his Johnny Ramone hairdo surmounted by the tiniest plastic tourist bowler hat this side of Action Man. Then
Playaway
unprompted brought in a Rave-orange mobile cement mixer filled with ice and bright cans of fizzy drinks for Mick to interact with. Thusly, the slow rise up the charts of ‘Last Tango in Paris’ enabled the four Brits – through the kids’ shows – to graduate more gently towards becoming TV stars. So by the time of their
Top of the Pops
debut, Mick & Co. had clocked their own moves enough on the box to know what suited and what didn’t. And of course, the embattled seafront imagery won through every time: the cement mixer, the barbed-wire barricades and sandpit gun emplacements all inspired by Golan Heights news footage. Kate W. Bush, look out! But whilst all of this Brits TV skulduggery was conspiring to rile up the greater portion of World Nazidom and have them plotting Brits’ rapid downfall, the band’s success had only been achieved through the sacrifice of one Rob Dean and his tattooed forearms. And what a price to pay! Yes, Mick had a way of getting his way but oh, what a Pyrrhic victory!