Fan

by Danny Rhodes

Genres: Sports

Synopsis

In 1989, 18-year-old John Finch spends his Saturdays following Nottingham Forest up and down the country, and the rest of the week trudging the streets of his hometown as a postal worker. Leading inexorably towards the FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough, the worst sporting disaster on British history, 'Fan' glides between 1989 and 2004, when the true impact of this tragic day becomes evident.

Release date: April 15, 2014

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 267

Sample

PRAISE FOR DANNY RHODES


‘Danny Rhodes’ spare prose is convincing … he asks important questions about social justice, but also tells a compellingly human story. An impressive debut’ New Statesman


‘Danny Rhodes returns with a soldier’s tale that delivers a late, and startling, ricochet. Rhodes does the urban listlessness that drives his naïve hero to the colours with an unaffected grace and low-key empathy’ Independent


‘And excellent debut novel, definitely in my top ten of the year’ Scott Pack, The Bookseller


‘A grittily lyrical story of squandered youth … delivers a late and startling ricochet’ Boyd Tonkin, Independent


‘I can’t wait to read what comes next from Danny Rhodes’ dovegreyreader


‘What I find most appealing is the way that Rhodes is more than capable of making a social or political point without ever neglecting the actual storyline or sacrificing the relationships between his characters. Scottie’s journey and experiences are genuinely moving…’ Steven Harris, Open Wide


‘What I particularly like about Danny Rhodes is that what he is writing really is proper crossover fiction. It’s about life and death, life-changing decisions, coming of age, and the relationships we have with our family and friends. It’s about the places we grow up and the people we know. It’s about coming to terms with grief. Soldier Boy is written with good pace, emotional honesty and a clear-sighted and humane view of people’ The Book Bag


‘A tender take on modern youth. Rhodes dramatises their sense of exclusion with freshness and insight’ Guardian


‘Subject and setting imply a Loach-like bleakness, but this finely crafted and often lyrical debut novel offers far more than hoodie-hugging sympathy or sink-estate despair. JB, with his great but baffled expectations, shakes hands across time with Dickens’ Pip’ Independent


‘A powerful coming of age story with a difference’ First Post Review


‘A striking debut novel that deals with a vital topical issue. A young offender is sent to paint beach huts in Kent, and encounters people and forces that promise both his salvation and ruin’ Waterstones

‘This is Rhodes’ first novel, and his relatively unmannered voice alongside his deft combination of social issues and teen angst suggests that there may be even better to come from him’ London Paper


‘Rhodes is writing about what he knows and isn’t afraid to present it plain and unvarnished. You can’t ask more from a first time novelist than that’ The Book Bag

‘A smashing little debut novel’ Bookmunch


Rhodes provides our often misunderstood youth of today with a distinct and passionate voice. This is a fantastic debut, a definite two-day read that will have you scanning the shelves for his next novel’ Aesthetica








Cold September turned colder when he caught the evening news. Marooned in a forgotten room of some cavernous hotel, his little window served him a featureless rectangle of English Channel, of slate-grey sea etched with off-white breakers. The beach below was a shelf of deposited pebbles above another shelf and then another.

The edge of the world.

He struggled to the water on his arrival, slid on his haunches down each steep bank, satisfying some urge to stand at the shoreline, to hear the water gathering and dragging at the stones. Looking seaward he took in the miserable hue of ocean and sky, the distant hulking form of the power station out on the spit, and fuck all else. The air was fresh and zestful though. He sucked in a great lungful of the stuff, released it slowly, revelling in the act. But his calves still succumbed to cramp as he made his way back. He was forced to use his hands, to drag his frame up the shelf like a sea turtle, emerge breathless and flush-cheeked at the top.

A posse of golfers were making their way along the links course, dressed in garish yellow. A white van was parked on the kerb, two lads in the front stuffing their faces with service station sandwiches, copies of the Sun propped on the dashboard.


The sports pages.

Naturally.

He fought to regain control of his breathing. Out of order, knees fucked, his thirties catching up with him, attending a teachers’ conference he had no interest in. He’d asked if he could opt out, landed a certain look from the personnel manager. Apparently it wasn’t acceptable to stand still. He’d asked when that had changed, when it had become a sin to tread water.


‘You can’t tread water for long before you sink…’

The door had been politely closed in his face.

The students kept him grounded. He couldn’t resent them with their pie-in-the-sky ideas, even if most were lazy bastards who wouldn’t amount to anything. His job, he understood, was to make them believe anything was possible and to help them on their way by ensuring they reached their quota of acceptable grades. Truthfully, it didn’t matter much what happened to them after that. Sometimes he ran into one five years down the road, kid in tow, on the way to the supermarket or back from it, ciggie in hand, pushchair laden with nappies, lads three steps ahead of their girlfriends, tense enough to snap. But they smiled at him and called him Finchy, asked him if he was still at the school and some of them apologised for being little pricks and he lied and told them they weren’t so bad.

He sent them out each year with their little brown envelopes; sent them to get on with the rest of their lives. Somebody somewhere totted it all up. The gears shifted a notch. Another cohort dropped into place. It really didn’t matter.

But the news on the TV mattered.

Football Legend Clough Dies


The images on the screen mattered. There was the man in his baggy shorts banging in the goals for Middlesbrough and Sunderland and there he was again in his trademark green pullover on the dog track at Wembley, two arms raised above his head, thumbs up, playing to his people. There he was escorting a clown from the hallowed City Ground turf, cuffing some bloke around the ear, shooting two fingers at the Trent end boys for calling a stricken Charlie Nicholas a wanker. There he was with the Division One trophy, the League Cup, the European Cup, side by side with Peter Taylor. There was Trevor Francis stooping to head the winner against Malmö, rolling over the concrete shot-putt circle in the Olympiastadion. There was the mischievous grin as he fielded questions from reporters, gave Motto the runaround, messed with Ali. There was the beetroot-coloured, pockmarked face that signalled his final days in management, the wretched alcoholic. And there he was at the end, the old man in the cloth cap sat in the stands at Burton Albion.


Husband, father, grandfather.

Legend.

Brian Howard Clough OBE, 21st March 1935–20th September 2004.


Brian Howard Clough.

He felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach, stared out of the little window at the water, gulls arcing against the wind, spatters of rain on the glass. He had an hour to kill until dinner. He’d planned to go for a swim but his breath was well and truly knocked out of him. He fell back on the bed and stared at the ceiling instead, thinking about Kelly. She wouldn’t be home. It was too early. He didn’t want to speak to her anyway. He couldn’t speak to anybody. He turned on to his side and stared at the wall, closed his tired eyes.

Piss-flooded terraces and asbestos-roofed covered ends. Testosterone-fuelled foot soldiers and brutal police escorts. Soul-destroying defeats and ecstatic celebrations that suggested life really did depend on it all.

A procession of memories.

Arse-ache coach trips across the Pennines, to the Black Country, to London fucking town. Up the country and down again, week in, week out. Thatcher’s bloodied Britain coughing up its innards. Smokestacks and drizzle. Retching fucking suburbs. Moss Side. Toxteth. The Meadows.

Bradford. Kenilworth Road. Heysel. The Herald of Free Enterprise. Kegworth. Hansen strolling around at the back. Quarter to five on a Saturday. Ron bloody Atkinson. John fucking Aldridge.


And the boys. Bob’s bus. British Rail. The most boring town in England. The Brilliant Corners. Cud. The Wedding Present. The Stone Roses. High-school girls. A grammar school for boys. A new-build primary in 1976. A teacher who stood six feet six, who spent his weekends watching Nottingham Forest take on the whole of Europe and beat the fucking lot into vile submission.

Twice.

Two golden stars.

All of this spitting at him out of the past.

A torrent.

BJ, Jeff, T-Gally, Hopper, Gav, Stimmo, JC and Sharpster. The whole fucking bunch. He’d not seen any of them in years. He could see them in the gloom now, though, all of them, sixteen years old, seventeen, eighteen. Formative years dominated by one shared obsession. A way of life.

Nottingham Forest.

The mighty Reds.

Up the country, down the country, week in, week out.

No fucking excuses.

And something else. Something shifting in the silt of his memory. Twisted crowd barriers. Lads lugging makeshift stretchers across a pitch strewn with the injured and bewildered. The dead lined up in rows on the turf. Twisted minutes. Twisted metal. Twisted news reports. Everything twisted.

Scarves draped over the gates at Anfield.

Scarves hanging from the goalposts at the Kop end.

A carpet of colours.

Twisted fucking memories.

Him in full darkness now, removed from the present yet part of it still, the hotel pipes clanging, the far-off sound of doors closing, lifts humming. The distant echo of laughter. A clap of false thunder from the military range along the coast. A cold dread seeping through him, starting in his toes and rising. The things he’d buried coming back again. Everything kicked up. The silt lifting.


He switched on the lights, turned on the TV again, avoiding the news at all costs. He closed his eyes, painted himself a pastoral picture, a pleasant Sunday, a meadow, a barn and a blue sky.

The fens in summer.

He fought with all his might to block the bad memories out.

But they came anyway. Of course they did.

A broken heart. A broken girl. A broken summer.

A naked body dumped in a hedge beside a set of kiddies’ swings.

He sat up, desperately fending them off.

It was too late.

The barn door was open.

The black mares had bolted.




Early. Only Harding and Brompton in before him. No fucking surprises there. He walked the empty corridors, grabbed a mug from the cupboard in the Inclusion room and filled the kettle.

7.15 a.m. Quiet hour. Deathly still. Into his classroom. No fucking heat from the radiators, staring into the courtyard at the pathetic trees, the hard-packed earth, a lonely Bic biro, the torn-off cover of a kid’s planner. Hunched over his mug, motionless, searching for motivation. Footsteps passed by his doorway. McCarthy, white shirt and black tie, like he was heading to a funeral. No hint of the week in his face.

McCarthy the machine. Smiling.

‘Shit the bed, John?’

‘Thought I’d take a leaf out of your book.’

‘Grand. See you in briefing then,’ said McCarthy. ‘You can say a few words about that course we sent you on.’

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

It’s the winter of discontent. The rail workers are on strike. The public sector workers are on strike. The engineering firms, the heartbeat of the town, are floundering. Your dad works in one of them and there’s no money in the house. Your dad’s struggling to make ends meet. But so is everybody else. It’s 1979.

The streets are littered with uncollected rubbish.

Crisis? What crisis?


Your school closes because there’s no oil to heat the building.

Crisis? What crisis?


Twenty-nine million working days are lost in industrial disputes.


Crisis? What crisis?


You’re eight years old. You spend your days at school and your weekends kicking a football through a 1960s’ estate, locating grass wherever it grows, a patch here, a patch there. When there’s no grass there are ramshackle asbestos garage blocks and splintered panel fences.

What do you know about anything?

Nothing.

How do you know?

They fookin well tell you, don’t they? Every fucker you speak to.

It’s 1979.

A change is coming, a change with roots once bound to your own.

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.


But if you’re a working-class boy from a working-class estate with a working-class father you’d better brace yourself.

Because those roots are long since severed.

And you are fucked, mate.

Well and truly.

7.50 a.m. He stared at his planner, at the blank pages, at a full day in the classroom, five fucking lessons in a row, hardly time to take a breath.

Kirsty Watson the first in, as always. She only lived across the street but was one of the rarities, happier in school than out. And here she was, leaning against the door frame.

He set her off changing a display. She was glad enough doing it.

‘Did you see your mum lately?’

Without a blink.

‘I never see my mum.’

Enough said.

One by one the rest of his form dribbled in. He left them to it, fucked off to briefing.

Mullholland. Irish. Fit as fuck. Her and the rest of the English honeys huddled in the corner. He attached himself to their edge, listened to their stories of Thursday night shenanigans until attention fell his way.


‘How was the training?’

‘Like a slow death.’

‘At least you had an easy few days.’

He shrugged, brushing the training under the carpet. But the carpet was threadbare, on its way out.

Silence.

So he told them all about it, or what he remembered about setting meaningful targets, difficult conversations, the importance of self-evaluation and the appraisal of others. When he thought back to the hotel everything was monochrome.

Even his face in the mirror.

‘Did you hear about Cloughie?’ he asked.

Two of the girls looked at him.

‘Who?’

Simultaneous fucking ignorance.

At least it was Friday.

P1–Year 8. Fucking mad bunch. He stuck a DVD on, kept them in their seats. Animated Chaucer. The Pardoner’s Tale. Fucking Chaucer to that crowd. Fucking education system.


P2–Year 9. Testosterone and hormones. It hardly mattered what he planned. Ten minutes handing out pens. Ten minutes ridding the room of mobile phones. Ten minutes chasing homework. Ten minutes issuing instructions. Ten minutes repeating them. Ten minutes blocking the door to prevent the fuckers getting out to break early. A healthy routine that suited both sides.

P3–Year 11. All boys. It was Friday. There was the weekend’s football to talk about. Chelsea. Arsenal. Spurs. West Ham on the TV. Hardly any of the fuckers had ever been near a ground. He pitied them for it. He really did. He showed them some video footage of Cloughie in his prime. They laughed at the length of his shorts.

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.

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 . . .