Free One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel by Julian Cope Page A

sniggered at his crop of slight, sensitive 10″ singles released throughout the ’90s under the name Forest Of Dean. But now, from the sheer edge of the ravine, I suddenly unleashed into the black night a full-blooded wail for Dean the Survivor. For what is this tragedy that names him ‘Survivor’, but still sees him dead before the age of thirty?

12. NOT EVERYBODY GOT BUMMED
    Midnight, Sunday June 11th, 2006
Room 6, Hotel Su Talleri, Macomér
    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. Fairenough, 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 inan ‘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