Free Fan by Danny Rhodes Page A

station.
    Get in, get out, fuck them about.
    Into a wall of police. Penned against the station wall, pressed into half a pavement. Held there for an hour.
    ‘Let us go…’
    ‘You’re not going anywhere.’
    ‘We’re here for the game.’
    ‘You’ll watch the game when we say so.’
    A bitter, antagonising hour.
    ‘This is a joke.’
    ‘I can’t see anybody laughing. Stand there and shut up.’
    Treat them like animals. Herd them like animals.
    Down the fucking High Street. Shoppers cowering in doorways.
    Strangers in a strange land.
    Invaders and raiders.
    Through the industrial estate, floundering, on its knees. Lads and more lads, blokes and more blokes. Wound up. Acting up. The escort rocking and rolling, pulsing, throbbing. The fucking buzz of it. The notoriety. The adrenalin rush. Black fucking polo shirt, scarf covering the face, bellowing out the Forest sound.
    The mad fuckers with their missiles.
    The bricks and the mortar.
    The splinter of windows.
    The shiver and shatter of glass.
    The cheers.
    The laughter.
    Singing working its way down the line, voice catching voice.
    Red Army! Red Army!
    ‘Stop singing or I’ll arrest you.’
    ‘What for?’
    ‘Because I can. And take that scarf off.’
    2 p.m. on a Saturday.
    ‘Wipe that fucking grin off your face.’
    We are Nottingham, I said we are Nottingham.
    Penned by great fuck-off horses and dogs and big fuck-off policemen.
    Marched like prisoners.
    To the turnstiles. The click and the clack. The rust and decay. Into the guts, into the away end. A terrace fit for dogs or the criminally insane. All metal and wire mesh. Cigarette smoke, beer, piss, the home fuckers baying for blood. Three hours of chanting, at the pitch, at the home end, at life itself.
    The throat red raw.
    Every fucking Saturday.
    Penned like fucking fish in a can. Forest scoring. Forest going mental. Leicester scoring. Leicester going mental. Leicester scoring again and again.
    Windows at the back of the away end.
    Prime fucking targets.
    Police in the pen. Everything kicking off. Police dragging some poor fucker down the concrete steps, his clothes riding up, dragging him down the pen on his backside, hearing the poor bastard shriek, seeing the skin tear clean to the bone.
    Somewhere beyond the heads and the mouths and the fists, somewhere beyond the fences and spikes and mesh, a football match on a green velvet carpet.
    No fucker taking any notice.
     
    You are fifteen years old. You go to Goodison Park, to Highfield Road, White Hart Lane, Carrow Road and Villa Park. You visit Selhurst Park on a cold Wednesday evening, a two hundred and forty mile round trip, six of you crammed into a Ford Granada. You go to Vicarage Road, Old Trafford and Anfield. Up the country, down the country, through the streets and alleys.
    The broken-backed blur of Thatcher’s Britain beyond the windows.
    Week in, week out.
    Living for football.
    Living for the crack.
    The foookin crack.
    School on the Monday. What a fucking joke. A bunch of naïve virgin fucks who don’t have a clue about life or how to live it.
    ‘What did you do at the weekend?’
    ‘I was at Filbert Street and in the dirty Leicester streets with five thousand Forest, watching fuckers bleed for the cause.’
    ‘Why, what the fuck were you doing?’

Friday
    The same weather, bright and cold, the same fucking chapel. He’d not been there since a road accident killed an ex-schoolmate. He’d not had cause to go back.
    But BJ and that fucking phone call. Cunt.
    We’re suffering here so you can suffer too.
    And fuck me, he was suffering.
    He had every best intention, got up in plenty of time, ate breakfast in the hotel, got his black suit on, pulled his tie straight, strolled purposefully down into the old town, over the river and past his old gaff, altered now, the clock shop gone, developed as a flat, an extension of the ground floor where the Scotsman used to live, some fucking modern planning arrangement designed to squeeze people