Fan (22 page)

Back at BJ’s. Back with the one soul who could link it all together.

The past and the present.

The present and the past.

‘I could have told you you’d hate it. Don’t you watch the TV?’

‘It wasn’t top flight though, was it?’

‘No, mate, but this thing’s bleeding down through the ladder. Ten years from now it’ll be in park football and then we’re all fucked.’

BJ rummaging in the fridge for a bite. BJ humming to himself.

‘
And if you know your history, it’s enough to make your heart go
…’

‘Fucking hell,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to go.’

‘What for?’ asked Finchy

‘You’re eating me out of house and home.’

‘I’ve had one fucking biscuit and a beer,’ said Finchy.

BJ stood up. He laughed. They both laughed. There was fuck all to laugh about, fuck all funny about any of it.

Finchy picked up a Forest programme from 84. UEFA Cup. Sturm Graz at home.

‘I went to this game,’ he said. ‘My dad took me.’

‘Quarter-Final,’ said BJ. ‘1–0. Paul Hart header.’

Finchy grinned, a grainy image in his head, his dad not yet turned forty, the two of them high in the upper tier of the Executive Stand.

‘One of the first games I went to,’ he said. ‘I remember looking around for the TV replay when we scored.’

‘Daft bastard,’ said BJ. Then he said, ‘You remember Anderlecht?’

Finchy nodded.

‘Cheating cunts,’ said BJ.

‘The ref was killed in a car crash.’

‘The dirty cheating bastard ruined one of my fucking childhood dreams. I can still feel the hurt, my dad saying “It’s only football”.’

‘He fucked up with some real estate.’

‘So fucking what?’

‘I’m just saying. He was ripe for suggestion.’

‘You know the best thing about all that?’ asked BJ. ‘The Anderlecht president getting blackmailed by the gangster who arranged it all. I love that. Mess around in things like football, you deserve a good fucking from all sides.’

BJ chuckling to himself.

‘Fuck me,’ said Finchy. ‘You’ve got it worse than I realised.’

‘Not really,’ said BJ. ‘Cloughie said it himself. The game was corrupt in those days. That’s why all the old school took a little bit. The game fucked them so they fucked the game.’

Finchy stared across the poky room, at BJ, spread out on the opposite sofa in his boxers, all belly and balls, empty lager tins on the mantelpiece, crisps on the carpet.

‘I should call Kelly,’ he said. And then he hesitated. ‘What do you think?’

‘Me? You’re asking me?’ BJ laughed. ‘Don’t look to me, mate. I’m a complete fuck-up. I got sent down due to a woman.’

Finchy looked at the tin of lager on the table, thinking for the hundredth time
Why the fuck am I here?

‘Caught my missus with some Polish prick. Or thought I did, daft tosser that I am. Went to Forest, cheated the ban. Lads convinced me to go for a pint when we got back to town. Found her in this pub. All tarted up. He was a cunt. Started
giving it some. So I battered the fucker. Turns out he was a workmate. Innocent stuff. Looked pretty fucking cosy to me though.’

For a moment he stared off into a distant place only he could see. Finchy leafed through the programme, busying himself the only way he could.

‘I got eighteen months,’ BJ said at last. ‘She threw me out. Now look at me. A one-bedroom pisshole on Radley Street. Fucking dump. Thirty-five years of age. Shit job. No prospects. What a wanker. She doesn’t talk to me any more. Tell you something, mate. Fifteen years and fuck all has changed. The same blokes. The same casuals. The same pubs. The same shit.’

He reached down and swilled the beer cans at his feet in turn, until he found what he was looking for. He lifted a can to his lips and took a swig. He grimaced. Finchy grimaced.

‘Thank fuck for football,’ said BJ. ‘It’s a fucking lifesaver. Don’t know where I’d be without it, where the fuck I’d be headed. Saturdays. I live for Saturdays. You should see me in the summer. I’m a fucking coiled spring.’

He rolled off the sofa, sat up on his haunches.

‘Solved that, though. I go on fucking tour. It used to be England. Now I tour with the Reds.’

He trailed off, the way BJ always had, trailed off into the blackness that devoured him. What Finchy wanted to do was grab the cunt and give him a great fucking hug, for being what he was, for not fucking changing when so much had changed.

What he wanted to do was cry his fucking eyes out.

‘Thanks, mate,’ he said.

‘What for?’

‘Being honest … and the other stuff.’

BJ shrugged, shot him a wink.

‘Like I said the other day, mate, what are friends for? But you’re coming tomorrow, right? One last crack before you go?’

‘Aye, mate,’ he said. ‘After tonight, I think I need a dose of reality.’

‘For old time’s sake,’ said BJ. He raised his tin of lager.

‘Aye,’ said Finchy.

Clashing fucking lager cans.

‘And those gone by the wayside,’ said BJ.

‘Aye.’

‘One and then the next and then the next, like fucking dominoes. I’ve started to wonder when it’s going to be my turn.’

‘It’s not age though, is it? It can’t be our fucking age.’

‘Stimmo did what he had to do,’ said BJ. ‘He took control. The fucker made up his mind not to fester. He’d had enough of all that. Not like old Nev. Nev capitulated in a different way. I know which one I’d go for, given a fucking choice. Mind you, Nev knew where the crack was. He knew what all this shit was about. He lived three lives in the time cunts like us manage one. It’s just his kid I feel for. She deserved to know her dad better. One fucking day I’ll tell her all about him, if I’m still about, if I haven’t fucked off on his coat-tails.’

Finchy raised his glass.

‘He was a top bloke,’ said BJ. ‘Quiet sometimes. Off in his own world. Nothing fucking wrong with that. I just wish I’d done more to help him at the end.’

Finchy nodded, thinking
we’re all off in our own worlds, every single one of us
.

‘Jen White doesn’t feel that way about Stimmo,’ he said.

‘Aye,’ said BJ. ‘Well, she has a right to her opinion, I suppose. But I’d rather go out like Stimmo, in my own way, than let things take me.’

Another bout of silence. It filled the room.

‘Do you think about it?’ asked Finchy, at last.

‘What?’

‘Being next.’

‘Aye, mate, all the fucking time.’

‘Me too,’ he said. ‘Every day.’

‘The curse of the survivor,’ said BJ.

‘Do you think so? We were hardly survivors though, were we? We were in the opposite end. No different to witnessing a car crash.’

‘That whole day was a car crash, mate.’

‘So now we’re burdened. Forever.’

‘Not forever. Just until we cop it, then who gives a fuck?’

‘I thought I’d moved beyond it,’ said Finchy. ‘I thought I’d found it a place to rest.’

BJ shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s just fucking kidding yourself. That’s no good to anyone. You have to face it down. Or try to.’

‘Hopper?’

‘You think he’s buried it?’

‘He just about said as much.’

‘Fuck off, mate. It’s in that house he lives in. In that fucking pristine lawn of his. It’s in that fucking missus of his, too. And his kids.’

‘I hope not, for all of them.’

‘It’s simmering, mate. You mark my fucking words.’

‘Fucking hell…’

‘I fucking hope so, mate. I fucking hope so.’ BJ laughed.

‘What happened with you and Hopper anyway?’ asked Finchy.

‘Eh?’

‘You two were like that.’

Finchy pinched his finger and thumb together.

BJ shrugged, smiled his quiet smile, diverted his eyes to the TV.

‘Life, mate. Life’s what happened. He got married. I didn’t. He stopped flirting with the old bill. I didn’t. That’s about the sum of it. I got nicked at Bramall Lane, he wiped his hands. Fucking SYP again.’

‘I remember how hostile they were. I remember that. On the bus up from the station, on the Penistone Road…’

‘That’s the SYP for you. Those bastards fucked everybody over, just like they fucked the blokes at Orgreave.’

‘Some of them, mate. Not all of them. I saw police in tears that day.’

‘Aye, some of them. And some of them lied … anyway, fuck it. I don’t want to talk about that any more. I’m done talking about it. I thought you were going to call your missus.’

Finchy thought about Kelly, of the early years, the life they had then, their social circle, the travelling, the two of them in catering jobs they forgot about the moment they came off a shift. Everything easy. He thought about Hopper in the cul-de-sac, the freshly cut lawn, the cosy shape of his missus beyond the frosted glass, the way she’d looked at him when he turned up on the doorstep. He looked at BJ laid out on the sofa, at the piles of match-day programmes on the carpet. He looked at the stacks of DVDs, the row of coffee mugs on the TV, the tin cans. His mind drifted once more to Kelly, the circle forever completing itself, the look on her face when she told him the test result, the fucking joy there, and he thought of how he’d well and truly wiped that fucking joy off her face, how he’d crushed that joy with his reaction. He was suddenly full of self-loathing.

Not for the fucking first time.

‘Just gonna borrow your phone, mate,’ he said.

BJ barely stirred.

‘Stick your cash in the jar,’ he said.

There was no jar. He dialled home, thinking how fucking strange that word was. He really didn’t know what home was any more, where the fuck to lay his hat or plonk his backside. Still, a phone rang in some distant fucking place, rang and fucking rang, rang some more.

The phone rang and rang. He pictured the empty house, the phone sounding out in the hollow kitchen. He pictured Kelly standing beside it, waiting for it to stop, waiting to see who was calling, if it was him, too fucking stubborn to speak to him. And he imagined the other thing, the house colder than cold, exactly as he’d left it, the same mug on the side, the same unwashed pans in the sink, the bedroom door closed, hiding a diabolical secret.

His life on a fucking precipice.

The present and the past.

The past and the present.

Kelly in their early days. Kelly all arse and attitude. Right up his street.

The two of them in the corner of the club, him with one eye on the place, petrified of running into his sixth-formers. The two of them at her place. Six months of untethered fucking until the novelty wore off, a year of settled solidarity, another of soul-searching and somnambulism.

And everything that came after.

Everything that had happened since.

Another Friday evening. Him and Kelly on the sofa, pile of shite on the TV.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.

Fatal hesitation. The weight of a moment.

‘You can’t be…’

He watched her face fall.

Such a cunt.

‘I took a test.’

He got to his feet, walked into the kitchen, left her sitting there.

Such a fucking cunt
.

Him pacing the lino, lost in the fuzz of information, floundering in his own terror.

It was dark out. The garden was just a black vault beyond the window. Panic black. Breathing shallow, head pounding, part of him wanted to tear into it, tear off like a mad fucker and never look back. He stopped at the kitchen door instead, turned on himself, stared across the living room to the place where he’d left her staring at the wall. And he understood what he was, what a bastard. Years of daydreaming about this moment, half a fucking lifetime and this is what she got, the cold fucking shoulder, a bloke that couldn’t see past his own arsehole. He stepped back into the living room, sat down opposite her again.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

She shook her head.

‘I get it,’ she said.

He raised his hands.

‘No, I really do get it,’ she said. ‘I’ve been there the past week.’

She shifted across on the sofa.

‘Sit down next to me,’ she said. When he didn’t move she added, ‘please.’

He placed himself next to her. She leant against him.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.

‘It’s alright,’ he said.

‘Is it?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I just need a while.’

It wasn’t alright. She miscarried at twelve weeks. She was away when it happened, visiting her folks. Like a cunt, like a self-centred fucking cunt he measured his relief in pints at the local. It was two days before he went to fetch her, until he met her zombified form on the doorstep of her mother’s place.

Hard going after that. A year of toil, pathetic shots at tenderness and understanding until she started talking about trying again.

‘We didn’t try the last time,’ he said.

‘I want to try now.’

‘Soon,’ he said.

‘How soon?’

‘Christmas,’ he said. ‘Let’s try after Christmas.’

And Christmas came and went. Winter became spring. Spring became summer. He got his two banks of four in place, fended off wave after wave of pressure, happy to keep the fucking score at 0–0.

Such a fucking cunt
.

And now it was October, the months grating away, a great fuck-off elephant with them in everything they did. One great fucking elephant and then another. It was all fucking elephants. A great herd of the bastards.

They were miles from each other.

In all sorts of ways.

Or worse.

When he came out of himself BJ was standing beside him.

‘What?’

‘You need to see a fucking doctor,’ said BJ.

‘Yeah? Why’s that?’

‘You’ve been muttering away to yourself for the past two minutes. You were in another fucking world.’