Among the Thugs

by Bill Buford

  Everyone was now very excited. But no one was more excited than our bus driver. Amid all this, few people had noticed that our bus driver had been rendered insane.

  I had been nervous about the bus driver for some time. Since entering the city, he had been trying to bring everyone to order. He could see what was going on in the large rear-view mirror above his head. He tried dealing with his passengers diplomatically: he had no reason to believe that they were, in any fundamental sense, different from others he had driven before. But his request for order was ignored. And so he remonstrated. He appealed with his hands, his face, his whole body, as if to say, ‘Please, there are laws and we must obey them.’ This time, he was not ignored, but the response was not the desired one. The entire bus, which had been singing something about the Falklands or Britannia or the Queen, started chanting in unison that the driver should fuck himself. They then changed languages and said the same, more or less, in Italian.

  I did not think this was a good idea. I cannot begin to convey the strength of my feeling. After all, the driver was just trying to do his job. Our lives were in his hands. In fact, our lives were literally in his hands. And it was with those hands that he expressed his unhappiness.

  What he wanted, I suspect, was to stop the bus and order everyone off. He’d had enough. But he couldn’t stop because he had three other coaches hurtling at top speed behind him. Nor could he go any faster because he had two motorcycle policemen in front. Unable to go forwards or backwards, he expressed his rage by going sideways: by swinging the steering-wheel violently to the left, to the right and then back again. Those lads perched atop the seats found that they were not perched atop anything at all. Very few of us were: so violent were the driver’s movements that most of the slippery vinyl seats were emptied. Jackie, our twenty-two-year-old caretaker, had stood up and turned, with school-matronly authority, to reprimand her unruly following, but when she opened her mouth a strange, incomprehensible gurgling came out and then she, like everyone else, was catapulted off her feet. The interesting thing about the driver’s rage was that the act of venting it seemed to increase it, as if expressing his anger showed him how really angry he was. His face started changing colour—it was now a very deep red—when he swung the steering-wheel again, and we lurched to the left, and then again swung it to the right, and back we tumbled. I feared, watching the terrible chromatic display across his features, that something was about to burst. I feared that his heart would seize up and, mid-way through another lurching swing of the steering-wheel, he would clutch his chest, leaving the bus to spin into the oncoming traffic.

  And then: a rainbow. The streets, which had been getting tighter and tighter, opened, at last, on to a square: Piazza San Carlo. Light, air, the sky, and the bus slowly, undeniably, coming to rest. We had arrived.

  More to the point: we were not dead, or, rather, I was not dead. We had survived the drive from the airport. As we were disembarking, the supporter ahead of me turned, just before stepping off the bus, and shouted at the driver: that had been completely out of order. And then, drawing deep from within his sinuses, he spat into the driver’s face, and missed, leaving a drooping wet, elastic ball dripping from his shoulder.

  And so four coaches of supporters arrived to attend the match that they had been banned from attending only to discover that many people had got there before them. Where had they come from? The square was packed. As we pulled in, someone waved to us, one hand wild above his head, the other clinging to his penis, urinating into a fountain. There could be no doubt about his nationality, or, for that matter, any of the others’, familiar bloated examples of an island race who, sweltering under the warm Italian sun, had taken off their shirts, a great, fatty manifestation of the history of pub opening hours, of gallons and gallons of lager and incalculable quantities of bacon-flavoured crisps. They were singing: ‘Manchester, la-la-la, Manchester, la-la-la.’ They had the appearance of people who had been at the square, singing and drinking and urinating into the fountain, for many days. The pavement was covered with large empty bottles.

  There was some confusion about where we were meant to be staying. Four hotels had been booked, and, while Jackie was trying to sort out who was meant to be where, flipping through the correspondence on her clipboard, she was interrupted by a terrible howl.

  A woman dressed in black rushed out into the street and started wailing. Nobody could understand what she was saying, except the police—the police were everywhere—and five of them followed the woman back into one of the hotels. You could still hear her howling as she ascended the stairs inside. Jackie had stopped flipping through her correspondence and her face had assumed an uncertain shape. It was flattened as though she had been punched. It was a face—experiencing some kind of pre-verbal dread—that was trying to figure out how to express itself. You could tell that, although she didn’t know what would happen next, she should have a response prepared beforehand.

  I don’t know how it had been done so quickly, but, shortly after arriving, several supporters had broken into the rooms on the hotel’s second floor. Within minutes, they had gone through eight rooms, popping open the doors, dumping drawers on the floor, turning out the closets, looking for cash, traveller’s cheques, airline tickets, jewellery. Only one supporter was caught—unable to resist lingering to make a long-distance phone call—and as the police reappeared, culprit in hand, Jackie marched up to him. Before her was a young man, ostensibly her responsibility, whose arms had been twisted behind his back by two policemen. Next to him was the woman in black. She was the manager of the hotel. She was no longer howling; she was also no longer honouring Jackie’s booking. Then there was Jackie’s clipboard, thick with correspondence, which, while all this was going on, continued in its failure to reveal where everyone was meant to be staying, even if the woman in black would accept them. And finally, diminishing the importance of her clipboard and the answers that it may or may not have yielded up, there was virtually no one else in sight. Room or no room, most supporters, having grown restless watching the party on the square, had vanished.

  I spotted Mick who, ever vigilant, had discovered the place to buy cheap beer very cheaply, and who, ever generous, appeared with three two-litre bottles of lager, including one for me. Then Mick made for the middle of the throng, shouting ‘C’mon, you Reds’—red for the red of Manchester United’s Red Devils—and he, too, vanished, only his upturned two-litre bottle remaining visible above everyone’s heads.

  The throng itself was something to behold. The flesh exposed was your standard, assembly-line, grey-weather English flesh—bright pink, therefore, and burning rapidly—except in this one respect: everybody had a tattoo. And not just a tattoo, but many tattoos. They had tattoos in the places where you expect to find them—on the forearms, say, or the biceps—and everywhere else as well: on their foreheads, or behind their ears, or on the backs of their hands. Some had tattoos up and down the full length of their backs. These were not ordinary tattoos; these were murals on the flesh. There was one fellow who was a billboard for Manchester United Football Club. Looking at him, you could only conclude that this was what he had decided his function in life would be; it was his career. Every centimetre of his back had been given over to variations on the satanic theme suggested by the team name. On the lower part of his back were two red devils. They were drawn in great detail, with tails, fangs, forked tongues and pitchforks. Above the pitchforks, climbing up the spine and fanning across it, was an abundance of flames. Above the flames, around the upper shoulders, were famous players from other teams: you could see that they were meant to be tumbling from the sky (the clouds climbed into the neck) on their way to the hell below. It was narrative art of a sort, and hard not to admire the commitment.

  It was also hard not to wonder about the person who would do this to his body. Getting a tattoo is a painful experience, a hot needle poking its way across the surface of the skin, filling up the cells underneath with ink. The pain, however—the blo
od that comes bubbling up, the rawness—goes away; the result, until it fades in late middle age or is eradicated by surgery, lasts for ever. All around I saw metres and metres of skin that had been stained with these totemic pledges of permanence. In addition to the cinematic display on this one fellow’s back, there was a tattooed neck, encircled with the neatly proportioned letters, M-A-N-C-H-E-S-T-E-R U-N-I-T-E-D. There was a pair of tattooed nipples—they served as the eyes for the head of an especially ornate red devil (spreading across the chest and stomach). And there was a tattooed forehead imprinted with the name ‘Bryan Robson’, in honour of the Manchester United midfield player (and in the hope, perhaps, that Robson would neither be traded to another football club nor ever die).

  I wandered round the square. I was not uncomfortable, mainly because I had decided that I wasn’t going to allow myself to be uncomfortable. If I had allowed myself to be uncomfortable then it would follow that I would start to feel ridiculous and ask myself questions like: why am I here? Now that the journey to Turin was properly completed, I had, I realized, done little more than gawk and drink. Mick had disappeared, although I thought I could pick out his bellowing amid the noise around me. Apart from him, however, I knew nobody. Here I was, my little black notebook hidden away in my back trouser pocket, hoping to come up with a way of ingratiating myself into a group that, from what I could see, was not looking for new members. For a moment I had the unpleasant experience of seeing myself as I must have appeared: as an American who had made a long journey to Italy that he shouldn’t have known about so that he could stand alone in the middle of what was by now several hundred Manchester United supporters who all knew each other, had probably known each other for years, were accustomed to travelling many miles to meet every week and who spoke with the same thick accent, drank the same thick beer and wore many of the same preposterous, vaguely designed, Top Man clothes.

  What was worse, word had got round that I was in Turin to write about the supporters—a piece of news that few had found particularly attractive. Two people came up and told me that they never read the Express (the Express?) and that when they did they found only rubbish in it. When I tried to explain that I wasn’t writing for the Express, I could see that they didn’t believe me or—a more unpleasant prospect—thought that, therefore, I must be writing for the Sun. Another, speaking sotto voce, tried to sell me his story (‘The Star’s already offered me a thousand quid’). In its way this was a positive development, except that someone else appeared and started jabbing me vigorously in the chest: You don’t look like a reporter. Where was my notebook? Where was my camera? What’s an American doing here anyway?

  There had been other journalists. In Valencia, a Spanish television crew had offered ten pounds to any supporter who was prepared to throw stones, while jumping up and down and shouting dirty words. At Portsmouth, someone had appeared from the Daily Mail, working ‘undercover’, wearing a bomber jacket and Doc Marten boots, but, he was chased away by the supporters: it was pointed out that no one had worn a bomber jacket and a pair of Doc Marten boots for about ten years, except for an isolated number of confused Chelsea fans. And last year, in Barcelona there was a journalist from the Star. His was the story that I found most compelling. He had been accepted by most members of the group, but had then kept asking them about the violence. This, I was told, just wasn’t done. When is it going to go off? he would ask. Is it going to go off now? Will it go off tonight? No doubt he had a deadline and a features editor waiting for his copy. When the violence did occur, he ran, which was not unreasonable: he could get hurt. In the supporters’ eyes, however, he had done something very bad: he had—in their inimitable phrasing—‘shitted himself’. When he returned to complete his story, he was set upon. But they didn’t stab him. He wasn’t disfigured in any lasting way.

  The story about the Star journalist was not particularly reassuring—so great, they didn’t stab him; lucky reporter—and I made a mental note not to shit myself under any circumstances. Even so, the story revealed an important piece of information.

  Until then, everyone I had spoken to went out of his way to establish that, while he might look like a hooligan, he was not one in fact. He was a football supporter. True: if someone was going to pick a fight, he wasn’t going to run—he was English, wasn’t he?—but he wouldn’t go looking for trouble. Everyone was there for the laugh and the trip abroad and the drink and the football.

  I did not want to hear this. And when I heard it, I refused to believe it. I had to. The fact was that I had come to Italy to see trouble. It was expensive and time-consuming, and that was why I was there. I didn’t encourage it—I wasn’t in the position to do so—and I wasn’t admitting my purpose to anyone I met. I may not have been admitting it to myself. But that was why I was there, prepared to stand on my own with five hundred people staring at me wondering what I was doing. I was waiting for them to be bad. I wanted to see violence. And the fact that the Star journalist had witnessed some, that it had finally ‘gone off’, suggested I might be in the right spot after all.

  Violence or no violence, mine was not an attractive moral position. It was, however, an easy one, and it consisted in this: not thinking. As I entered this experience, I made a point of removing moral judgement, like a coat. With all the drink and the luxurious Italian sun, I wouldn’t need it. Once or twice, facing the spectacle of the square, the thought occurred to me that I should be appalled. If I had been British I might have been. I might have felt the burden of that peculiar nationalist liability that assumes you are responsible for everyone from your own country (‘I was ashamed to be British’—or French or German or American). But I’m not British. Mick and his friends and I were not of the same kind. And although I might have felt that I should be appalled, the fact was: I wasn’t. I was fascinated.

  And I wasn’t alone.

  A group of Italians had gathered near the square. I walked over to them. There were about a hundred, who, afraid of getting too close, had huddled together, staring and pointing. Their faces all had the same look of incredulity. They had never seen people act in this way. It was inconceivable that an Italian, visiting a foreign city, would spend hours in one of its principal squares, drinking and barking and pecing and shouting and sweating and slapping his belly. Could you imagine a busload from Milan parading round Trafalgar Square showing off their tattoos? ‘Why do you English behave like this?’ one Italian asked me, believing that I was of the same nationality. ‘Is it something to do with being an island race? Is it because you don’t feel European?’ He looked confused; he looked like he wanted to help. ‘Is it because you lost the Empire?’

  I didn’t know what to say. Why were these people behaving in this way? And who were they doing it for? It would make sense to think that they were performing for the benefit of the Italians looking on—the war dance of the invading barbarians from the north and all that—but it seemed to me that they were performing solely for themselves. Over the last hour or so, I could see that the afternoon was turning into a highly patterned thing.

  It looked something like this: once a supporter arrived, he wandered round, usually with a friend, periodically bellowing or bumping into things or joining in on a song. Then a mate would be spotted and they would greet each other. The greeting was achieved through an exchange of loud, incomprehensible noises. A little later they would spot another mate (more noise) and another (more noise), until finally there were enough people—five, six, sometimes ten—to form a circle. Then, as though responding to a toast, they would all drink from a very large bottle of very cheap lager or a very large bottle of very cheap red wine. This was done at an exceptional speed, and the drink spilled down their faces and on to their necks and down their chests, which, already quite sticky and beading with perspiration, glistened in the sun. A song followed. From time to time, during a particularly important refrain, each member of the circle squatted slightly, clenching his fists at his sides, as if, poised so, he was able to sing the particular ref
rain with the extra oomph that it required. The posture was not unlike shitting in public. And then the very large bottle with its very cheap contents was drunk again.

  The circle broke up and the cycle was repeated. It was repeated again. And again. All around the square, little clusters of fat, sticky men were bellowing at each other.

  Near me was a Mick look-alike, a walrus of a fellow with a Wild Bill Hickock moustache. In the middle of his great billboard chest was suspended a tiny black object, like a piece of punctuation. It was a camera. He was wobbling slightly and, thus, with some difficulty, taking a picture. He was concentrating very hard. I couldn’t tell what he was photographing. It appeared to be his feet. I tried to make conversation of a sort.

  I asked him why he was taking photographs. I was trying to work out why these people had to come all this way, at such expense, to do the things I saw them doing. Drinking large quantities of cheap beer. Endlessly singing English football songs. Photographing their feet. Couldn’t this sort of thing be done at home? After all, the match that evening would be on television.

  He said that he was taking pictures so that he would have something to remember the trip by.

  It’s a holiday, innit? he said.

  I asked him if he could tell me where we were.

  Italy, he said. We’re in Italy; and then adding, as though for clarification: Fuckin’ Eyeties.

  I said, of course, of course, I knew we were in Italy. But did he know where in Italy?

  Juventus, he said after a pause, suspecting a trick question. And then he added, again, as though to reinforce the authority of the statement: Fuckin’ Eyeties.