LITMIR.BIZ

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the ranks of the red, white and blue.

      Padre Pio snatches the joint out of my hand and takes another draw while cocking his head up and down to watch the pre-match entertainment on the pitch. ‘He may have good blow, but your cousin is one stupid cunt, Ruin. He’s hard ta miss with that head a fucking hair on him. A red fucking Mohican! He’ll easily get lifted and the peelers will dump him in the middle of the Orangemen on the Lisburn Road. Still, we can keep the rest of his blow if he does get scooped. We can keep the whole batch for ourselves if Trout stays out there in the crowd trying to save Ireland’s honour,’ he says.

      ‘At least he’s got the balls to get over that wire and get into them bastards,’ I blurt out in defence of my cousin.

      Suddenly everything around the two of us goes quiet, as if time and motion are frozen; as if PP and I have been transported out of this chaotic cauldron of noise, hatred, stoning, hand-to-hand pitch combat, chanting, farting, belching, retching and vomiting; as if we are transported into another one-to-one dimension, to our own private combat zone. Because I know in an instant what is coming when I dared to suggest that Rex Mundi is gamer than Padre Pio.

      PP screams into my face, ‘I’m not yellow. I’m not a lapper like your da. I’ll fuckin’ show ya who’s game in this ground.’

      He charges towards the fence, elbowing children and oul fellas out of his path. Yet before he can climb over the fence, the riot squad are at the barrier and manage to deliver a few winding blows to his kidneys before he collapses onto the dirt track between the first tier of terracing and the barrier.

      I try to stop myself from laughing as Padre Pio pukes. In fact, I am praying inwardly that he chokes to death down there on the dirt. Meanwhile, beyond the wire, there are several contests going on between two sets of fans, including Lanky Balls, who is booting the shit out of some spide with fuzzy Starsky hair and a Portadown scarf. Rex Mundi and a handful of other Reds supporters who reached the pitch are now dodging and weaving their way back to the Kop as bottles and stones are showered on them from the South Stand.

      The gladiators from either side eventually scatter as the cops chase them down. My cousin trampolines over the fence and into a group of fans who help him hide from the arrest squads. Missiles, toilet rolls, even smoke bombs keep coming over as the peelers grab a couple of stragglers caught on the pitch, including Lanky Balls himself with someone else’s blood over his face and fists. While I picture him handcuffed in the back of an RUC Land Rover, Padre Pio is still writhing on the ground. ‘Suffer baby, suffer,’ I whisper, as Trout reappears beside me. He runs down the steps to pick up PP just as Jackie Hutton appears from the side of the stadium and marches over to our end. Our manager has his hands outstretched like some spirit-possessed American preacher: the voice of reason on the park, appealing for us to let the game get started. His pleadings actually seem to be working miracles: the Red Army suddenly goes quiet and there are no more attempts to invade the pitch. As the fans pay homage to Hutton, Trout is helping Padre Pio back to our spot.

      ‘What the fuck happened to him, Mr Ruin?’ Trout asks in an accusatory tone, as if I’m in charge of that fuckwit’s welfare.

      ‘Never mind what happened to him, where the fuck is that joint I rolled?’ Rex Mundi interrupts, before receiving congratulatory slaps on the back for making it back amongst us after the pitch incursion.

      The crowd sing to the tune of ‘Guantanamera’ – one of my mother’s favourite songs: ‘One Jackie Hutton, there’s only one Jackie Hutton, one Jackie Hutton, there’s only one Jackie Hutton …’

      Padre Pio turns his pain into a sudden surge of ire towards me. ‘See when this is over today, I’m gonna get you outside, you cunt.’

      ‘Don’t talk shite, PP. You’re still stoned,’ I say, trying to play down his threat.

      ‘Cos I know what you’re at with my ma,’ he goes on. ‘I’m wise to you, lover boy.’

      ‘You are well and truly out of your box, mate,’ I say, attempting to calm him.

      ‘Cos she told me, lover boy. She bastard and well blurted it out. She couldn’t help herself. She can never help herself, the dirty oul cow,’ he hisses, right into my face.

      I am sure he is about to make his move when Trout comes to the rescue and delivers a sober-up slap to the back of Padre Pio’s head.

      ‘Stop acting the wanker. There’s more important work to be done here today than you two squarin’ up to each other. We need to get on TV shouting for prisoner rights,’ Trout says as he turns to Rex Mundi and me. ‘And you two – just ask yourselves what we can do for the struggle today! Ask yourselves how we can show that none of this here in this place is really normal!’

      ‘What are you waffling on about, Trout? Of course it’s not normal. That’s what’s great about it all,’ PP interrupts with regained lucidity.

      Rex Mundi tears off his biker jacket, jumps up on one of the crush barriers, whips off his Troops-Out T-shirt and starts waving it at the snouts of the South Stand. The assorted Blues and Ports fans retaliate with wank-hand signals, choruses of ‘Oh Spot the Loony’ and then a piece of flying roof slate skims over the top of the flame-haired punk before slicing into the face of some poor kid standing behind us. In celebration of another injured Taig, the North Stand breaks into what must be now the fifteenth version of ‘The Sash my Father Wore’. On cue, the teams file out onto the pitch, the band strikes up a couple of marching tunes and 15,000 spectators wait for what’s coming next.

      Cliftonville and Portadown players, their managers, their coaches and their team doctors all line up near the touchline facing the South Stand, and the band break into the first bars of a very familiar song. The North and South Stands start to sway in hypnotic unison. Red, white and blue colours are held aloft. Union Jacks and even Orange Order banners with King Billy on his white horse are waving in deference. Their loyal emblems are billowing and swelling in the gentle April wind.

      When the upright and vocal Portadown fans and their newly found friends from Belfast find their voice, Trout and his beefy, beardy mates, dotted all over our end of the ground, start roaring at everyone around them, ‘Sit down, sit fucking down. Don’t stand for it! Don’t fucking stand up. Get down!’

      Almost everyone in our end suddenly crumples to the concrete, into a defiant protesting seated mass. As ‘God Save the Queen’ is met by thousands of wanking hands, it occurs to me that this is the big dramatic event Trout has being harping on about. And here was me worried that he’d slipped Padre Pio a few exploding pineapples.

      8

      ‘BREAKING GLASS’

      July 1978

      All through the summer, my father continued to be obsessed with the Dutch midfielder Robbie Rensenbrink. The TV broadcasted images from Buenos Aires of the Argentine masses marking out their team’s triumphant progress with ticker-tape and toilet-roll storms and of their manager, Menotti, chain-smoking in the dugout. When their captain, Passarella, eventually lifted the World Cup in the sky-blue-and-white stripes, my dad cursed under his breath and muttered angrily about an ‘inch’ and a Junta.

      For him the ‘inch’ became the difference between justice and injustice both on and off the field. In the last thirty seconds of normal time, the Dutch midfielder broke through Argentina’s defence and almost won the World Cup for the Netherlands, his shot striking the post just an inch away from global football glory. But that inch gave the Argentinians the space to regroup and go on to win 3-1 in extra time, thus allowing the military dictatorship to milk the victory. Even before that if-only moment, I had been subjected to lectures from my father all through the competition about CIA-trained torturers who put electrodes on their captives’ genitals, the thousands of ‘Disappeared’, the reports and rumours of death flights over the South Atlantic and the near total annihilation of his comrades far away across the ocean. After the Argentine team won, he would preface every lecture about the Junta’s exploitation of the World Cup by berating Rensenbrink for missing his chance.

      When Rex Mundi arrived back in Belfast after six long years of exile, he

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