When I did get back, I had to invent a modus vivendi that would do me for the next few years, a task I thought best accomplished by ensuring that the new world was never ever mentioned in the old, although it wouldn’t have achieved much to complain about the absence of a swimming pool in our tiny back garden in any case; thus one huge and important part of my life was kept entirely and pacifically separate from another, an arrangement perfectly designed to produce mendacity, self-delusion and schizophrenia in an already confused teenager.
When my stepmother sat down next to me at Highbury for the Wolves game, it was as if Elsie Tanner had walked into the Crossroads Motel; the appearance of an inhabitant from one world at the centre of the other somehow drained the reality out of both. And then Arsenal started to bang inch-perfect passes along the ground all over the pitch, and our defenders popped up in the opposing penalty area to lob the opposing goalkeeper with Cruyff-like precision and delicacy, and my suspicion that this was a world gone mad was confirmed. I was sitting with the Enemy, Arsenal thought they were Holland, and if I had looked carefully, I would surely have seen pigs floating serenely over the Clock End.
A couple of months later we got thumped 5-0 at Derby and immediately reverted to our old, dogged and reassuring ways; the fact that the experiment had been so brief seemed to reinforce the impression that it had all been a particularly ingenious metaphor, invented for my benefit and abandoned the moment I had understood it.
A Matter of Life and Death
CRYSTAL PALACE v LIVERPOOL
October 1972
I have learned things from the game. Much of my knowledge of locations in Britain and Europe comes not from school, but from away games or the sports pages, and hooliganism has given me both a taste for sociology and a degree of fieldwork experience. I have learned the value of investing time and emotion in things I cannot control, and of belonging to a community whose aspirations I share completely and uncritically. And on my first visit to Selhurst Park with my friend Frog, I saw a dead body, still my first, and learned a little bit about, well, life itself.
As we walked towards the railway station after the game, we saw the man lying in the road, partially covered by a raincoat, a purple-and-blue Palace scarf around his neck. Another younger man was crouched over him, and the two of us crossed the road and went to have a look.
“Is he all right?” Frog asked.
The man shook his head. “No. Dead. I was just walking behind him and he keeled over.”
He looked dead. He was grey and, as far as we were concerned, unimaginably motionless. We were impressed.
Frog sensed a story that would interest not only the fourth year but much of the fifth as well. “Who done him? Scousers?”
At this point the man lost patience. “No. He’s had a heart attack, you little prats. Now fuck off.”
And we did, and that was the end of the incident. But it has never been very far away from me since then, my one and only image of death; it is an image which instructs. The Palace scarf, a banal and homely detail; the timing (after the game, but mid-season), the stranger paying distressed but ultimately detached attention. And, of course, the two idiotic teenagers gawping at a tiny tragedy with unembarrassed fascination, even glee.
It worries me, the prospect of dying in mid-season like that, but of course, in all probability I will die sometime between August and May. We have the naive expectation that when we go, we won’t be leaving any loose ends lying around: we will have made our peace with our children, left them happy and stable, and we will have achieved more or less everything that we wanted to with our lives. It’s all nonsense, of course, and football fans contemplating their own mortality know that it is all nonsense. There will be hundreds of loose ends. Maybe we will die the night before our team appears at Wembley, or the day after a European Cup first-leg match, or in the middle of a promotion campaign or a relegation battle, and there is every prospect, according to many theories about the afterlife, that we will not be able to discover the eventual outcome. The whole point about death, metaphorically speaking, is that it is almost bound to occur before the major trophies have been awarded. The man lying on the pavement would not, as Frog observed on the way home, discover whether Palace stayed up or not that season; nor that they would continue to bob up and down between the divisions over the next twenty years, that they would change their colours half a dozen times, that they would eventually reach their first FA Cup Final, or that they would end up running around with the legend “VIRGIN” plastered all over their shirts. That’s life, though.
I do not wish to die in mid-season but, on the other hand, I am one of those who would, I think, be happy to have my ashes scattered over the Highbury pitch (although I understand that there are restrictions: too many widows contact the club, and there are fears that the turf would not respond kindly to the contents of urn after urn). It would be nice to think that I could hang around inside the stadium in some form, and watch the first team one Saturday, the reserves the next; I would like to feel that my children and grandchildren will be Arsenal fans and that I could watch with them. It doesn’t seem a bad way to spend eternity, and certainly I’d rather be sprinkled over the East Stand than dumped into the Atlantic or left up some mountain.
I don’t want to die immediately after a game, though (like Jock Stein, who died seconds after Scotland beat Wales to qualify for the World Cup, or like a friend’s father, who died at a Celtic-Rangers game a few years ago). It seems excessive, somehow, as if football were the only fitting context for the death of a football fan. (And I’m not talking about the deaths of Heysel or Hillsborough or Ibrox or Bradford here, of course; those were tragedies of a different order altogether.) I don’t want to be remembered with a shake of the head and a fond smile intended to imply that this is the way I would have chosen to go out if I could; give me gravitas over cheap congruence any time.
So let’s get this straight. I don’t want to peg out in Gillespie Road after a game because I might be remembered as a crank; and yet, crankily, I want to float around Highbury as a ghost watching reserve games for the rest of time. And in a sense these two desires—at first glance incomprehensibly inconsistent, I would imagine, to those without equivalent fixations—characterise obsessives and encapsulate their dilemma. We hate being patronised (there are some people who know me only as a monomaniac, and who ask me slowly and patiently, in words of one syllable, about Arsenal results before turning to someone else to talk about life—as if being a football fan precludes the possibility of possessing a family or a job or an opinion on alternative medicine), but our lunacy makes condescension almost inevitable. I know all this, and I still want to lumber my son with the names Liam Charles George Michael Thomas. I get what I deserve, I guess.
Graduation Day
ARSENAL v IPSWICH
14.10.72
By the time I was fifteen I was no longer quite so small—indeed, there were now a number of boys in my year smaller than me. This was a relief in most ways, but brought with it a problem that gnawed at me constantly for some weeks: I could no longer, if I was to maintain any self-respect, postpone my transfer from the Schoolboys’ Enclosure to the North Bank, the covered terrace behind one of the goals where Arsenal’s most vocal supporters stood.