One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel (21 page)

Some national leaders namby-pamby their people. Why not ours? Post-war Britain had been a world hub of welfare and caring. So how had it been seized by the kind of gruelling and vindictive leadership that WW2 should have put to rest? Semi-legal governments all across the Third World looked to Dictator Thatcher’s behaviour towards her own people as permission to roughride their own populations into the ground. Why
have freedom when you can make do with the Semblance of Freedom? That was her message. And woe betide all those who found Thatcher’s simplistic capitalist ideals too alienating and destructive. Liverpudlians? Pah. Why can they not be brought into line? Liverpool? Harrumph. Just as Tibet was to the Chinese, Liverpool in all of its Cultural
and
Physical Remove became a constant target for the Creedist enmity of the 1980s Conservatives. National leaders who hate their own: what are they? Stalin hated his people because he’d been raised in Georgia over a thousand miles from Moscow, spoke mainly Georgian and felt therefore permanently hung up around the urbanites of Moscow. Chairman Mao was another peripheral for whom city people brought out the very worst in him. But Margaret Thatcher didn’t have that excuse. Barren-ness Thatcher wasn’t a Gaelic speaker from the Outer Hebrides. No, she was a secular Oliver Cromwell with the keys to the wrong fucking country. She was like a bighead architect who refuses to work with the materials provided. Bricks, mortar? Bring me white marble. Why are my own people not motivated like the Yanks? Why can I not insist that they exchange their own values for my own? And like the Vichy French government that supported the Nazi Occupation, Greed-Is-Good Thatcher was relentless in her need to inflict upon us all her Nihilistic Un-Values. She was like some ancient kiddy fiddler monarch who had attempted through legislation to normalise in the Public Mind their own voracious rapine tendencies. She was at least partly successful. For Hillsborough had been the Let-Them-Get-On-With-It disaster. And the abandoning of Liverpool’s most fervent away fans during the 1989 F.A. Cup Semi-Final would remain forever the primary evidence that the Kingdom of Thatcher had simply not extended as far as Merseyside.

Disaster night in Sheffield felt like a bomb had hit it, especially once all the chartered coaches and trains and minibuses had inhaled their grieving red masses and ferried them off down their respective motorways. Locals on the city streets there were none, all locked away behind closed doors, wringing their hands at the civic shame brought down upon their heads this day. The sole life-forms that remained in the city centre were shell-shocked packs of hollow-eyed out-of-town business boys, who – too late to check into any of Sheffield’s now-bulging hotels – roamed the streets far too drunk to drive the hundred-odd miles home, but still done up in their best Lager Lout threads. Poor fuckers. They all looked like their jeans and red footy shirts would explode at midnight, all of them stranded miles from work left bereft in their business grey. Knowing how hard it was for Yeh-Yeh to get out as much as the rest of us, him being a magistrate and all, our little gang – all now brimming over with love for the Sanctity of Life – recognised in the haunted expression of each red-shirted man who passed us in the night, the plight of our own little magistrate had he – after an experience of today’s magnitude – been left to fend for himself in late-night Glasgow, Hamburg or some other rum city centre. Yeh-Yeh would need help! Shit, therefore these poor fuckers need help!

And so we enacted an idea. All of us eager after the brown
bath episode to squeeze the best possible deal out of the Hallam Towers, and several of us – me, Rob Dean, Stu, Have-a-laugh and Yeh-Yeh – each in possession of a vast thirteenth-floor room with a view to the Peak District, we put the word around Sheff that the only wake in town was our wake. Come all ye Faithful, come all ye Fucked Up. Myself and Have-a-laugh being the only well dressed amongst us, i.e.: perpetual black clothes, the pair of us decorated my bedroom by tying black socks and t-shirts around the appropriate furniture points, thereby creating a special room of peace and quiet, a Room of Gloom wherein anyone who had suffered genuine losses could just fall to pieces in silence. Yeh-Yeh being cultured and a bit jittery about others invading his territory, we piled all of our personal belongings into his room, and kept it locked. Doughy as usual saved his money by kipping, or intending to kip in the back of ‘Wash Me #1’. What were the other four rooms to be used for? Forgetting. A whole night of forgetting. Then we waited. Will they come? Will the word get out to those who need it most?

They came. Slowly at first, but with the passing hours scores of The Appalled drifted through our open doors, sought sanctuary through our open doors. Liverpool fans, Forest fans, even five distraught Sheffield Wednesday supporters who accused ‘The Powers That Be’ of having turned beloved Hillsborough into a State Abattoir. Some of the faces looked immediately familiar. No way! More than coincidentally, I’d met three of these top blokes – Steve Repping and the Say-Everything-Twice Brothers – at Keele Services eighteen months previously. I was gassing up on the forecourt at 2.30am, and there they all stood saluting something-or-other in white shirts and ties, sleeves rolled up, ciggies aglow. It had been wonderful to observe such robust, rigorous behaviour that late at night, and I’d told them
so. We’d even shared a ciggy spliff and pissed collectively up the sides of a Chelsea Supporters’ minibus in the Travelodge car park. We’d had a moment. But now, these top blokes were among the walking wounded, and they were accompanied by a tall, wavering figure, similarly outfitted in white shirt and tie, sleeves rolled up, but shaking all over.

‘Fed-Up Keith!’ beamed the affable NZ bartender in obvious recognition of this struggler, who immediately broke down in tears and had to be assisted into the Room of Gloom. Apparently, Keith’s seventeen-year-old nephew had – after the exertions of attempting to free himself from the Leppings Lane crush – fallen into a coma on the side of the pitch. More tragically, there had been so much vomit in the boy’s mouth that it had prevented Keith from attempting the Kiss of Life. Back in the bar, the affable New Zealander mixed drinks and attempted to avoid interjections of any kind in case he was just too way off the mark. But everybody was in a Super Generous state-of-mind, and even flippant, ignorant off-the-wall comments were treated as no more than aberrations brought on by the severe circumstances. Then around midnight, Fed-Up Keith’s brother Dylan MacMillan walked in and set everyone gassing once again. That afternoon, he’d attended a wedding in Clonakilty, County Cork and – having seen the ‘whole match’ on RTÉ-TV – had jetted back to Sheff with a long string of questions.

And with that, Steve Repping led the weeping toastmaster off to the Room of Gloom to seek the tragic company of his grieving brother, whilst the aggressive kerchink of umpteen beer glasses saluted our collective hopes for the wellbeing of poor Raymond. Now reignited and reunited by Mr MacMillan’s exhortations, everyone in the bar once again cranked up their still-idling motors of discontent. How had the authorities been allowed to remove so many of last year’s safety considerations? Why would they have done this? And soon we were again raking over those same hot coals as we would be raking over for nigh on the next two decades and beyond. Start as you mean to go on.

On the other side of the bar, Steve Repping and the Say-Everything-Twice Brothers stood saluting their two beleaguered comrades, Fed-Up Keith and Dylan MacMillan, whose sudden and brave emergence from our Room of Gloom uplifted everybody’s spirits no end. Then, after another quick round of ‘Hail’s and ‘Well Met’s, the room fell silent for Fed-Up Keith as he made his point gingerly.

Man, that was so true. Anybody who goes down the football regularly knows the difference between a goal going in and just hitting the bar. It’s
huge
! Fans go mad when a goal goes in, and even that much more in an F.A. Cup semi. The death toll could have gone stratospheric after a goal.