Among the Thugs

by Bill Buford

The city of Juventus? I asked.

  Fuckin’ right, he said. Pause. Fuckin’ Eyeties.

  I pointed out that Juventus was not the name of a city; it was the name of a football club—Juventus of Torino—but perhaps I failed to convey my point clearly enough. In any event, he was not representative: most people I met knew where they were. But he was typical in that, like him, everyone had a camera. People may have thought a change of clothing or a toothbrush was unnecessary, but no one came without a camera. The trip to Turin was about much more than football; it was a journey, an adventure, a once-in-a-lifetime thing: an excursion so special that everyone had to have snaps to commemorate it. I thought: this is a parody of the holiday abroad. Except that it wasn’t a parody. This was the holiday abroad. Their dads, they kept telling me, never had a chance to see the world like this.

  And yet what was this world? Earlier, on the plane, I had watched a cluster of supporters looking at the photographs from the last trip. It seemed to be a routine, en route to the next stop on the European tour, to review the pictures from the last one. The pictures might have been from Luxembourg. On the other hand, they could have been taken in Barcelona. Or Budapest. Or Valencia. Or Paris or Madrid or even Rio or any one of the many foreign cities visited by the banned Manchester United supporters in the last couple of years. The point was: it didn’t matter. Each photograph, if not of a duty-free shop, depicted the same pose in one of three possible stages: three or four lads (frequently the same three or four lads) having (one) just avoided falling, or (two) on the verge of falling, or (three) having just fallen, flat on their faces.

  Mick reappeared and pointed to the far end of the square, where a silver Mercedes was moving slowly through a street crowded with supporters, Italian onlookers and police. The driver, in a shiny purple track suit, was a black man with a round fleshy face and a succession of double chins. In the back seat were two others, both black. One, I would learn, was named Tony Roberts. The other was Roy Downes.

  Roy had arrived at last.

  No one had mentioned Tony to me before, but he was impossible to forget once you saw him. He was thin and tall—he towered above everyone else—and had an elaborate, highly styled haircut. The fact was Tony looked exactly like Michael Jackson. Even the colour of his skin was Michael Jackson’s. For a brief electric instant—the silver Mercedes, the driver, the ceremony of the arrival—I thought Tony was Michael Jackson. What a discovery: to learn that Michael Jackson, that little red devil, was actually a fan of Manchester United. But, then, alas, yes, I could see that: no, Tony was not Michael Jackson. Tony was only someone who had spent a lot of time and money trying to look like Michael Jackson.

  There was Tony’s wardrobe. This is what I saw of it during his stay in Turin (approximately thirty hours):

  One: a pale yellow jump suit, light and casual and worn for comfort during the long hours in the Mercedes.

  Two: a pastel-blue T-shirt (was there silk in the mix?), a straw hat and cotton trousers, his ‘early summer’ costume, worn when he briefly appeared on the square around four o’clock.

  Three: his leather look (lots of studs), chosen for the match.

  Four: a light woollen jacket (chartreuse) with complementary olive-green trousers for later in the evening, when everyone gathered at a bar.

  Five: and finally, another travel outfit for the return trip (a pink cotton track suit with pink trainers).

  Later, during the leather phase, I asked Tony what he did for a living, and he said only that he sometimes ‘played the ticket game’: large-scale touting, buying up blocks of seats for pop concerts or the sporting events at Wimbledon and Wembley and selling them on at inflated prices. I heard also that he was, from time to time, a driver for Hurricane Higgins, the snooker star; that he was a jazz-dancer; that he had ‘acted’ in some porn films. His profession, I suspect, was the same as that of so many of the others, a highly lucrative career of doing ‘this and that’, and it wasn’t worth looking too deeply into what constituted either the ‘this’ or the ‘that’.

  Roy Downes was different. Ever since Mick had mentioned Roy, I had been trying to find out as much about him as I could. I had learned that he had just finished a two-year prison sentence in Bulgaria, where he had been arrested before the match between Manchester United and Leviski Spartak (having just cracked the hotel safe) and that, ever since, people said he wasn’t the same: that Roy had become serious, that he never laughed, that he rarely spoke. I had heard that Roy always had money—rolls and rolls of twenty- and fifty-pound notes. That he had a flat in London, overlooking the river. That he saw his matches from the seats and never stood in the terraces with the other supporters, and that he got his tickets free from the players. That he was a lounge lizard: the best place to leave messages for Roy was Stringfellows, a basement bar and night-club on Upper St Martin’s Lane in London, with Bob Hoskins bouncers in dinner-jackets, and lots of chrome and mirrors and a small dance floor filled, on the wintry Tuesday night when I later went there (perhaps an off night), with sagging men who had had too much to drink and young secretaries in tight black skirts. (I was let in, stepping past the bouncers and into a bad black-and-white movie, having said—with a straight face—that Roy sent me.)

  I couldn’t get anybody to tell me what Roy did. Maybe they didn’t know or didn’t need to know. Or maybe they all knew and didn’t want to say. After all, how many of your friends can pick a safe?

  Actually I did know one other thing about Roy, but at the time I didn’t know that I knew it. I had told a friend about getting caught up in a football train in Wales, and he mentioned an incident he had witnessed that same month. He had been travelling from Manchester, in a train already filled with supporters. When it stopped at Stoke-on-Trent, more fans rushed into his carriage. They were from West Ham and, shouting, ‘Kill the nigger cunts,’ they set upon two blacks who were sitting nearby. My friend could see only the backs of the West Ham supporters, their arms rising in the air and then crashing down again, the two blacks somewhere in the middle, when he. heard: ‘They’ve got a stick, kill the bastards’—the stick evidently referring to a table leg that one of the blacks had managed to break off to defend himself. By the time my friend ran off to find a member of the Transport Police, there was blood on the floor and the seats and some was splattered across the windows. One of the blacks had had his face cut up. But it was the other one they were after. He was stabbed repeatedly—once in the lower chest, a few inches below his heart. A finger was broken, his forehead badly slashed and several of his ribs were fractured. The list of injuries is taken from the ‘Statement of Witness’ that my friend prepared, and on it are the victims’ names, meaningful to me only when I returned from Italy. They were Anthony Roberts and Roy Downes. Roy had been the one they were after, the one who had been repeatedly stabbed.

  Roy’s car drove round the square, with him waving from the window like a politician, and disappeared. When I spotted him again, about an hour later, Roy was standing on one of the balconies, arms apart, leaning on the rail, surveying the supporters below. He was small but muscular—wiry, lean—and good looking, with strong features and very black skin. He looked, as I had been led to expect, grim and serious. What he saw on the square below him seemed to make him especially grim and serious. In fact he was so grim and serious that I thought it might have been just a little overdone. He looked like he had chosen to be grim and serious in the way that you might pick out a particular article of clothing in the morning; it was what he had decided on instead of wearing red.

  It was not an opportunity to miss, and I bounced up the stairs and introduced myself. I was writing a book; I would love to chat. I babbled away—friendly, Californian, with a cheerful, gosh-isn’t-the-world-a-wonderful-place kind of attitude, until finally Roy, who did not look up from the square, asked me to Shut up, please. There was, please, no need to talk so much: he already knew all about me.

  No one had told me to shut up before. How did he know whatever it was he knew? I
suppose I was impressed. This was a person for whom style was no small thing.

  Roy, at any rate, wasn’t having a lot to do with me, despite my good efforts. These efforts, painful to recall, went something like this.

  After expressing my surprise that I was a person worth knowing anything about, I, bubbling and gurgling away, suggested that Roy and I get a drink.

  Roy, still surveying the square, pointed out that he didn’t drink.

  That was fine, I said, carrying on, cheerful to the end: Then perhaps, after his long journey, he might be interested in joining me for a bite to eat.

  No.

  Right, I said, a little tic I had developed for responding to a situation that was not right but manifestly wrong. I pulled out a pack of cigarettes—I wanted badly to smoke—while taking in the scene below us: there was Mick, standing by himself, a large bottle of something in one hand and a large bottle of something else in the other, singing ‘C’mon, you, Reds,’ bellowing it, unaccompanied, his face deeply coloured, walking round and round in a circle.

  I offered Roy a cigarette.

  Roy didn’t smoke.

  Right, I said, scrutinizing the scene below us with more attention, pointing out how everyone was having such a jolly good time, to which Roy, of course, did not reply. In fact the scene below us was starting to look like a satanic Mardi Gras. There must have been about eight hundred people, and the noise they were making—the English with their songs; the Italians with their cars, horns blaring—was very loud. In normal circumstances, the noise was so loud it would have made conversation difficult. In my current circumstances, nothing could have made conversation any worse.

  I carried on. Whatever came into my head found itself leaving my mouth, with or without an exclamatory Right!: I talked about football, Bryan Robson, the Continental style—in fact about many things I knew little about—until finally, after a brief aside about something completely inconsequential, I tried to talk to Roy about Roy. I don’t recall what I said next; actually I fear I do, which is worse, because I think it was something about Roy’s being both black and short and what a fine thing that was to be. And then I paused. The pause I remember precisely because at the end of it Roy looked at me for the first time. I thought he was going to spit. But he didn’t. What he did was this: he walked away.

  With a slight swagger, hands in his pockets, Clint Eastwood had just strolled off and disappeared down the stairs and walked out of my story.

  I wasn’t cut out to be a journalist.

  I looked to Mick for reassurance, but I wasn’t reassured. Mick was an unfortunate sight. He had stopped walking in circles, folded up and fallen asleep. Everyone was singing and shouting around him, but he slept on, undisturbed and blissfully imperturbable, head resting on his forearm, his mouth open and loose. There was no point in waking him, even if it had been possible to do so.

  It was time I met more people. I hadn’t got through to Roy. Maybe I would later. Maybe it didn’t matter. I had had so many I-am-not-going-to-think-about-why-I-am-here lagers that I didn’t care if people were going to talk to me. The choices were not complicated: either I would find myself in conversation; or I would find myself not in conversation.

  I found myself neither in conversation nor not in conversation but looking into a particularly ugly mouth. I can’t recall how I arrived before this mouth—zig-zagging across the square—but once in its presence I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

  In it, there were many gaps, the raw rim of the gums showing where once there must have been teeth. Of the teeth still intact, many were chipped or split; none was straight: they appeared to have grown up at odd, unconventional angles or (more likely) been redirected by a powerful physical influence at some point in their career. All of them were highly coloured—deep brown or caked with yellow or, like a pea soup, mushy-green and vegetable-soft with decay. This was a mouth that had suffered many slings and arrows along with the occasional thrashing and several hundredweight of tobacco and Cadbury’s milk chocolate. This was a mouth through which a great deal of life had passed at, it would appear, an uncompromising speed.

  The mouth belonged to Gurney. Mick had told me about Gurney. What he hadn’t told me about was the power of Gurney’s unmitigated ugliness. It was ugliness on a scale that elicited concern: I kept wanting to offer him things—the telephone number of my dentist or a blanket to cover his head. It was hard not to stare at Gurney. Gurney was one of the older supporters and was well into his thirties. He was looked up to, I discovered, by the younger lads. I never understood why they looked up to him or what they hoped to find when they did. He was balding and unshaven and, having taken off his shirt, you could follow the rivulets of perspiration down his torso. He had been travelling for several days and was covered by a dark film that clogged up and discoloured the pores in his skin.

  Gurney was another leader. How many leaders could there be? This was turning into a ruling party committee, but Gurney was different from the other putative generals in that his following was geographically specific. It was called the Cockney Reds—the ‘London branch’ of the Manchester United supporters. Like Roy, Gurney didn’t trust me, at least initially, but I was getting used to not being trusted. In Gurney’s case, I was grateful: more trusting and he might have proposed something unsavoury, like shaking my hand. His cockney followers were less suspicious. When I came upon them, they were in the middle of singing one of those songs (squatting slightly). They were in good spirits and, straightaway, started questioning me.

  No, I wasn’t from the Express—I had never read the Express.

  Yes, I was here to write about football supporters.

  Yes, I know you are not hooligans.

  What was I doing here, then? Well, that was obvious, wasn’t it? I was here to get very, very pissed.

  And, with that, I had become one of them, or enough of one of them for them to feel comfortable telling me stories. They wanted me to understand how they were organized: it was the ‘structure’ that was important to understand.

  There were, it was explained, different kinds of Manchester United supporters, and it was best to think of each kind as belonging to one of a series of concentric circles. The largest circle was very large: in it you would find all the supporters of Manchester United, which, as everyone kept telling me, was one of the best-supported teams in English football, with crowds regularly in excess of 40,000.

  Within that large circle, however, there were smaller ones. In the first were the members of the official Manchester United Supporters’ Club—at its peak more than 20,000. The official Manchester United Supporters Club, started in the seventies, hired trains from British Rail—‘football specials’—for conveying fans to the matches, produced a regular magazine, required annual dues and in general kept the ‘good’ supporters informed of developments in the club and tried to keep the ‘bad’ supporters from ever learning about them.

  In the second circle was the unofficial supporters’ club, the ‘bad’ supporters: the ‘firm’.

  The firm was divided between those who lived in Manchester and those who did not. Those who did not came from just about everywhere in the British Isles—Newcastle, Bolton, Glasgow, Southampton, Sunderland: these people were the Inter-City Jibbers. Mick had mentioned them: they got their name from taking only the Inter-City fast commuter trains and never the football specials hired by the official supporters’ club.

  The Inter-City Jibbers themselves were also divided, between those who were not from London and those who were: the Cockney Reds.

  I remembered Mick’s account of being on the jib. I had much to learn, and most of it I would learn the next day on my return to England. But initially I was sceptical. How was it possible that so many people could travel on the jib? From what I understood about travelling on the jib, it meant not only not paying but actually making money as well.

  Roars of laughter followed. Being on the jib was very simple, I was told, and involved no more than defeating the Hector. The He
ctor was the British Rail ticket-collector, and at the mention of the Hector, everyone started singing the Hector song:

  Ha ha ha

  He he he

  The Hector’s coming

  But he can’t catch me.

  On the racks

  Under the seats

  Into the bogs

  The Hector’s coming

  But he can’t catch me.

  Ha ha ha

  He he he

  The ICJ is on the jib again

  Having a really g-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-d time.

  There were tricks: passing one good ticket between members of a group, making the sound of endless vomiting while hiding in the loo, pretending not to understand English. It was Gurney’s ploy to engage the ticket-collector in a battle of wills, giving him everything but a ticket: a sandwich, a cigarette, the ash tray, his shoe, a sock, then his other sock, bits of dirt scraped from beneath his toe-nails, his shirt, the darkly coloured lint from his navel, his belt until—the final destination getting closer the longer the exchange went on—the ticket-collector, fed up, got on with the rest of his job. The ICJ had learned two principles about human nature—especially human nature as it had evolved in Britain.

  The first was that no public functionary, and certainly not one employed by British Rail or London Transport, wants a difficult confrontation—there is little pride in a job that the functionary believes to be underpaid and knows to be unrewarding and that he wants to finish so that he can go home.

  The second principle was the more important: everyone—including the police—is powerless against a large number of people who have decided not to obey any rules. Or put another way: with numbers there are no laws.

  It is easy to imagine the situation. You’re there, working by yourself at the ticket booth of an Underground station, and two hundred supporters walk past you without paying. What do you do? Or you’re working the cash register in a small food shop—one room, two refrigerators, three aisles—and you look up and see that, out of nowhere, hundreds of lads are crowding through your door, pushing and shoving and shouting, until there is no room to move, and that each one is filling his pockets with crisps, meat pies, beer, biscuits, nuts, dried fruit, eggs (for throwing), milk, sausage rolls, litre-bottles of Coke, red wine, butter (for throwing), white wine, Scotch eggs, bottles of retsina, apples, yoghurt (for throwing), oranges, chocolates, bottles of cider, sliced ham, mayonnaise (for throwing) until there is very little remaining on your shelves. What do you do? Tell them to stop? Stand in the doorway? You call the police but as the supporters pour out through the door—eggs, butter, yoghurt and mayonnaise already flying through the air, splattering against your front window, the pavement outside, the cars in the parking lot, amid chants of ‘Food fight! Food fight!’—they split up, some going to the left, others to the right, everybody disappearing. (Later, I would travel to Brussels where a café-owner, confronted with the arrogance of numbers—in this case, a group from Tottenham who, after eating the café-owner’s food, drinking his beer and breaking his furniture, walked out without paying—responded in kind. He answered irrationality with irrationality, rule-breaking with rule-breaking, pulled out a shotgun hidden underneath the counter and shot a supporter dead—the wrong supporter, as it turned out; one who had paid his bill.)