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  P4–Year 12. Lazy bastards. Literature students with not the slightest interest in English fucking literature. Pick a poem. Any poem.

  P5–Year 7. Drama. Fuck me.

  Duty at break. A mug of tea outside the toilets, the reek of piss, discount perfume and teenage sweat. Lunch in his room, ham sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil, a packet of crisps, an apple. Kelly’s killer cuisine. Department catch-up after school. Tea and biscuits. The girls calling him a miserable bastard each time he risked a contribution. At least Davies didn’t piss about or pontificate. They were done in a half an hour.

  He drove home in the forlorn twilight, past the leafy grounds of the local grammar school half a mile up the road, felt the familiar resentment and a faint glimmer of pride in himself. He hadn’t succumbed. He still had his principles in place.

  Not that it fucking mattered.

  A tall, stooping man. Fuzzy hair. Glasses. A bigger smile when he spots the shirt. Not Liverpool. Not Manchester United. The Major Oak with the three lines, the little curve on the extended ‘R’ in the word ‘Forest’.

  Your parents buy you the away strip, yellow with a blue trim. It sets you apart. You love it for that reason, even then. You love to pull it on, to feel the crackle of the fabric against your skin, love to run out on the school field in it, to smack the brown leather ball around, love to imagine you’re John Robertson jinking this way, jinking that way. You’re in love with a girl at eight years old but you love your football more. You will always love your football more. And you respect this teacher, this tall, willowy man who reads you chilling stories by Roald Dahl while East Midland sleet raps at the windows of the classroom and dark clouds race across February skies. This teacher who is a bit of a maverick and popular with the mums, who you spot on a street corner with a group of other excited souls one early morning during a May holiday, his neck draped in a red Forest scarf.

  ‘Isn’t that Mr what’s-his-name?’ asks your dad.

  You nod your head in wonder.

  ‘I know where he’s going,’ says your dad. ‘Lucky bugger.’

  The European Cup Final.

  You’re old enough to stay up and watch it but you don’t really understand what it means for a provincial club like yours to have made such a step, to have swept aside Liverpool (the Champions of Europe), AEK Athens, Grasshopper Zurich and FC Cologne on their way to Munich to take on the unlikely Swedes, FC Malmö. You’re eight years old. You do not know that just two years earlier your side were playing in Football League Division Two. You do not yet appreciate the genius of Clough and Taylor. But you adore Trevor Francis for that goal. Just like your adoration for John Robertson grows when he shimmies and sways past Manny Kaltz to win the trophy again a year later against Keegan’s FC Hamburg.

  You are Nottingham Forest.

  You don’t quite understand that yet, but you are.

  Saturday

  He spent the day on the sofa, watching the tributes to Clough, listening to the updates from grounds he knew and grounds he’d never know. In the evening he collected Kelly from her shift, fetched Chinese food, shared it with her whilst staring at the TV, the two of them shirking the subject of where they were heading, their elephant filling the space between them on the sofa, in the bedroom, in their double bed.

  Together apart.

  Later, he wrestled his mares in the darkness.

  Sunday

  He took himself out along the river, trudged up the path, hands in pockets, sometimes stopping to stare at the rolling water, sometimes looking down at his reflection, not liking what he saw, wondering what was coming next, how long it would be before Kelly brought the subject up again, where it might lead them.

  Because she would do.

  Five years and all the associated baggage, the good times and the bad times. Five years in this singular relationship. The road ahead paved with expectation. Him floundering, tripping on the flagstones.

  Mares and elephants.

  Elephants and mares.

  How the fuck had it come to this?

  Monday

  Monday morning blues.

  He couldn’t face work, got Kelly to call in sick for him, tell them his voice had gone. And it had. He wasn’t fucking lying about it. He lay under the covers listening to her move about the house, tense until he heard the door slam and her footsteps disappearing down the garden path and away.

  He collapsed in on himself.

  Dark clouds trooping in. He shut his eyes against it all.

  When he woke later the house was fucking freezing. He cranked up the heating, made himself a mug of the good stuff and retreated to bed with a handful of ginger nuts. He sat there propped against the pillows, dunking each biscuit and savouring the sheer indulgence. He looked at the time and pitied the poor bastard that had been taken to cover him. Well, fuck it, he needed a rest. He stayed in bed until lunchtime, ignoring the phone twice, hearing the post land on the doormat, half dreaming these things, slipping in and out of consciousness. When the phone rang the third time he was in the kitchen, trying to make himself a sarnie. It was Kelly.

  ‘You’re up then.’

  ‘Just.’

  ‘Feeling better?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Have you called the doctor?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Are you going to?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’ll give you something.’

  ‘I don’t want anything.’

  A pause.

  ‘So you’re okay then?’ she asked again.

  ‘I have a bad throat.’

  Another pause.

  ‘Are you going to fetch me?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘5.15, the usual place?’

  ‘Yep. All being well…’

  He heard her sigh.

  ‘Stop being so morose,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘Revel in my freedom. Be the life and soul…’

  ‘Fuck your sarcasm,’ she said. ‘Are you going to make some room in the attic? You said you were.’

  ‘If I feel up to it,’ he said.

  He didn’t bother with a sandwich in the end. He made himself soup instead and stuffed the bread into it, sat in the living room watching the Boating Channel, thinking about buying a canal boat and fucking off into a netherworld. When the soup was done he went upstairs, opened the hatch to the attic. He carried the ladder up from the garage and set it in place, switched on the light and peered into the fucking shambles beyond.

  Boxes of shit. His and hers. He hoarded stuff like he hoarded memories. Wasn’t that the fucking problem? The immediate passed him by but the past lingered.

  On his hands and knees, shuffling about, his shadow forever blocking the way. Suitcases full of clothes. Her clothes. Her handbags. Her shoes. More clothes than fucking Elton. All as good as new. The box of tricks they’d collected and had fun with in their livelier days, now consigned to the attic. Another fucking life. What if he called her now, ordered her home, told her he had the box out and wanted to try a few things? He sat with his legs dangling from the attic hatch, pondering the thought. Given the circumstances it was best to leave it.

  Crawling. Forcing his way into the darkest corners. Somewhere. Fucking somewhere. Boxes. Another life. Before Kelly. Before teaching. Before all the middle-aged mediocre bollocks. Uni files. Before those. A box in the corner. Cardboard. Taped shut. Maybe. Just maybe.

  They were piled together, a couple of hundred at least. Two hundred games. Two hundred days. Two hundred great adventures. Home and away. He dragged the box into the light, down the ladder, down the stairs, out into the garden, out to the summer house. He kicked away the summer chairs, the wheelbarrow, the gardening tools, cleared the worktop. It wasn’t meant to be a shed. It was never meant to be a shed.

  He raised one from the box, lifted it to his face, buried his nose in it, breathed it all in, the agony and the fucking ecstasy, the magic and the mayhem.
His first forays into manhood played out in squalid away ends, on dirty British Rail trains and tired city streets. It was all here, written on these pages. He could smell it. He could fucking well reach out and touch it.

  In the bottom of the box, an enamel badge, a subtle thing, the simple tree, the heraldic treatment of water, red, white and gold, a centimetre square. He rested it on the worktop, placed it there with precision and reverence.

  He started sorting the programmes, season by season, match day by match day. Virgin trips to Anfield, Old Trafford, Highbury. Chaz and Dave at White Hart Lane. Short-sleeved on a pitch-level terrace at Goodison in August. Huddled with the others at Upton Park in dark November. There were implausible gaps and omissions, games he remembered not evidenced by a programme, games long forgotten with a programme to prove he was there.

  Snakes and ladders.

  There was one complete pile. One full season. Every single minute of every single game.

  88–89.

  A season to remember.

  A season to forget.

  And not forget.

  To never, ever forget.

  Eight years old.

  Nottingham?

  Aye, meh duck. Nottingham.

  The old Market Square rammed with people.

  Your fookin people.

  The players on the balcony of the council building, high above the two lions. The European Cup glistening in the sunlight.

  The crowd at the barricades, swaying and rocking. Eight years old, on your dad’s shoulders, three hundred yards away but feeling like you can reach out and touch it. The crowd surging against the barriers, a heaving mass of joy. Flags waving, banners flying in the sunlight, in the city.

  The envy of Europe.

  The pinnacle.

  And singing.

  Everybody singing.

  A great mass of people becoming one, celebrating one thing, living as one, breathing as one.

  The players on the balcony.

  Clough and Taylor on the balcony.

  You and your dad.

  Your dad and you.

  The whole world in your hands.

  He was waiting in the car park when she finished work, sat with the engine idling watching the other women. When she opened the passenger door he was miles away, lost in a dream of slender ankles and tight arses.

  ‘Alright now?’ she asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘I’ve felt better,’ he said.

  ‘Well, thanks for coming out,’ she said. ‘I didn’t fancy the bus.’

  ‘Couldn’t any of these have given you a ride?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But I wanted you to do it.’

  She leant over and kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘Can we talk later?’ she asked him. ‘Just talk.’

  ‘You know we can,’ he said.

  He felt a tinge of affection for her, a stab of guilt too. She was like that, able to catch him off guard. For a few moments, as he pulled out and joined the queue of cars shifting towards the ring road, he felt his spirits rise. But it was stop-start after that. All headlights and tail lights. Rain too. Spray and mist. The wiper blades made a poor job of it all, had him squinting through the smeared windscreen, the lights a blurred collage, his head pounding, Kelly talking through all of it about work, about women he didn’t know and processes he had no interest in. It took a lifetime to reach their driveway, to slip the car on to it, to unlock the doors and get into the house.

  She disappeared upstairs for a shower then.

  Mercifully.

  He lifted the key off the hook in the hall, slid open the French windows and stepped outside. Beyond the gardens, the sound of evening traffic on the High Road. He floated across the lawn to the summer house, stared through the beads of water on the glass at the neatly stacked piles, slid the key into the lock. And then he stopped. He stared at his dark reflection in the glass, stared at a seventeen-year-old version of himself, gazed into the eyes, fought his way behind those eyes, searching for a sign, not knowing what parts of himself were shaped by the things those eyes witnessed one day in April long ago and what parts were not, but knowing they were coming at him all the same, galloping freely through the fields, heading his way.

  He braced himself against them. There was nothing else he could do.

  And they didn’t talk, not about anything.

  It was the Trent end at 3 p.m. on a Saturday.

  It was your Trent end.

  It was the central pen to the right of the goal.

  You can see it now, packed to the rafters.

  You can feel the ebb and the flow.

  You can see your people.

  You can hear their songs.

  Your skull is a symphony hall.

  The music resonates within it.

  Tuesday

  Munching on toast, the phone erupting in the hallway. He waited for Kelly to get it.

  ‘It’s for you,’ she said.

  ‘Not work…’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. It’s nobody I recognise.’

  He didn’t get up.

  ‘Not a fucking sales call.’

  Kelly moved across the kitchen to the sink, flushed her mug under the tap.

  ‘He asked for John,’ she said.

  He lugged himself out of the chair and barefooted it across the cold tiles to the phone, lifted the receiver, listened, waited a moment.

  ‘Alright?’

  A voice on the other end. East Midlands accent. A voice from the old town?

  ‘Alright—’

  ‘Remember me?’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘You don’t remember?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t.’

  A fucking fruit machine, the images revolving and flashing. This face. That face.

  ‘Black Jack,’ said the voice.

  His felt his stomach drop away.

  Reels dropping into place.

  ‘I’ve some news, mate.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It’s not easy…’

  Dead tone. Monosyllabic.

  ‘It’s Stimmo.’

  Stimmo.

  ‘He’s only gone and done himself.’

  A chill in his bones, a raking down his spine.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Yes, mate, I’m here.’

  ‘The service is on Friday. I know it’s late notice. Took me a while to find you…’

  ‘Right. Cheers. For letting me know.’

  ‘10 a.m. at the crem.’

  ‘Right, mate.’

  ‘We thought you’d want to know. We’re all in shock. Right fucked up, to be honest.’

  ‘How did you…’

  ‘T-Gally. His mam called your mam. Friday. See you there.’

  ‘Right. Cheers, mate. Cheers for calling.’

  Silence at the other end.

  ‘Hello?’ asked Finchy.

  ‘Yes, mate.’

  ‘I said thanks for calling.’

  ‘I heard. I said we’ll see you Friday.’

  Finchy paused.

  ‘Aye,’ he said, at last. ‘I’ll be there.’

  The reels at a standstill. Him at a standstill, in the kitchen, bare feet on the cold tiles.

  Stimmo. Stimmo. Fucking Stimmo.

  The black mares in free gallop, running wherever they fucking pleased. The black mares trapped in a mass of bodies.

  Kelly came into the kitchen. He stared ahead of himself, feeling her in his peripheral vision. A blur. A shadow.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  An absent nod of the head.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘An old mate of mine. A bloke from years ago. Nobody you’d know.’

  She stood there watching him. He didn’t say anything else.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘Will you be okay?’

  He nodded.

  He spotted the twist in her lips, knew what she was thinking. And then he s
aid, ‘Tonight. We can talk about it tonight. We can talk about everything tonight.’

  After she’d gone, after she’d shut the door behind her, he went upstairs to get ready for work. He pulled on a shirt and stood at the window doing up the buttons, looking down on the little patch of lawn, the scattered leaves, the cluster of houses.

  The Close in autumn.

  Stimmo ahead of him in the queue for the Trent end, the turnstile clicking and counting them in. The two of them slipping in the side of the end pen, along the fence, into the centre pen, up behind the goal. Into the action. Stimmo at Derby giving the sheep-shaggers grief. The rain pelting down. Stimmo piling on top of the others at Tottenham as Forest nick a late winner. Stimmo on the train on the way back from Hillsborough, staring out of the window, blanking the guard when he came for the tickets, telling the guard to fuck off, telling each and every one of them to fuck off. Stimmo at the bar in the Hound during Italia 90, older than his years, yet a lesser being. That was the last time he saw the guy. He’d stopped going to football, worked every Saturday, said he had to, said he had no fucking choice. Maybe it was true.

  Or maybe it was bollocks?

  He pulled a tie out of the wardrobe and placed it around his neck, thinking about method, wondering, imagining, trying not to imagine. The postman came up the drive. He watched him sort the letters in the bundle, pick out a couple. He heard the letter box snap. The woman at number nine was in her window, standing looking in his direction, there in just her bathrobe. She pulled the curtains shut. The postie was two doors down already. Finchy looked at the clock on the dresser. Time was ticking on. He had to get going. He coughed. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go anywhere.

  Town was busy, the streets rammed, the sky full of charcoal clouds. It was raining again. Everything was blurred streaks. When he reached the school he sat in the car park with the engine idling, watching the kids meander through the gates and scatter in all directions, watching the buses pull in and kids flood out. He looked at the school building, bent out of shape by the water droplets on the windscreen. He sat there for fifteen minutes trying to drag himself in the direction of his classroom, lost in a fog.