Fiddle City

by Dan Kavanagh

  The match was one of those uneven, end-of-season bouts between differently-motivated sides. Athletic needed to win if they were to have any chance of lifting themselves out of the bottom three in the table; City didn’t need the points, and were already turning their thoughts to next season. This ought to have given the advantage to Athletic, but it didn’t: they were fretful, wound-up, over-eager; they pressed too hard and left themselves open at the back; two players would often go for the same ball in their keenness to do something, anything. City, on the other hand, with only their win bonus to worry about, were more relaxed; they tried a few little tricks, but didn’t worry if they failed to come off. One side was jumpy and frantic; the other ambitious but lethargic. The midfield became clogged, and for all Athletic’s anxious bustle they never troubled the City goalkeeper. The most effective piece of action in the first half came from the coppers: perhaps they were as bored as most of the spectators. On a given signal, twenty of them suddenly sprinted up the Layton Road terrace, burst their way into the phalanx of yobboes, made a path to its centre and stood there, four deep and five across, watching the game and chatting up the yobboes. Duffy laughed a bit at this. It was obviously a new tactic since his days in the Force. Just standing there, in the middle of the boot-boys, watching the game and gassing away. Not trying to be nice to the yobboes—that wasn’t the point; just embarrassing the hell out of them for ten minutes or so. Then the coppers eased themselves away and went to look elsewhere.

  The first half was what Melvyn Prosser would have called a bow-wow. City were clearly the more skilful side, but weren’t too bothered either way; Athletic didn’t seem to have any ideas about attacking except to win throw-ins and occasional corners, tactics which City had clearly seen before. At half-time, as Cilia Black took up her song from the beginning again, Duffy moved across to the fringe of the yobboes. They looked young to Duffy: very young, very unhealthy, and very tough. He saw lots of grey skins and pimples and unformed faces; yet he bet most of them would run Mr Joyce closer at arm-wrestling than he had done. None of them wore a rosette, or a badge, or anything indicating support for Athletic. Hair: short. Height: normal. Special characteristics: zero consumption of yoghurt and health foods.

  Duffy picked out a largish youth wearing a Union Jack T-shirt and sidled up to him. He decided not to start by praising the skills of Brendan Domingo.

  ‘Playing rubbish, aren’t they?’ he said casually.

  Union Jack didn’t reply.

  ‘You wiv … the Movement?’ he tried next. This got a reply.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘You wiv the Red White and Blue? You going down Tower Hill next week?’ A couple of those nearby were now listening to the exchange.

  ‘Haven’t seen you down this end before.’

  ‘Name’s Des.’ He was getting through a lot of names this week, he thought.

  Union Jack, Duffy noticed, had a gold stud in his left ear. But there seemed little chance that he was a regular at the Alligator.

  ‘Haven’t seen you down this end before.’

  ‘You going down Tower Hill next week?’

  There was a long pause. Three of the yobboes on the step below had turned round and were staring at Duffy. Union Jack was ignoring him, and gazing down at the pitch. Finally he found something to say.

  ‘I don’t fink it’s good for your elf, standing ere.’

  Duffy retreated.

  The Layton Roaders seemed to enjoy the second half more. Waddington, City’s tubby left-back, tried a long-range shot and nearly hit the corner-flag. ‘OOOOOOH, WANKY-WANKY, WANKY-WANKY-WANKY-WANKY WA-DDING-TON; OOH, WANKY-WANKY, WANKY-WANKY-WANKY-WANKY WA-DDING-TOM.’ The referee failed to give a penalty when an Athletic midfielder tripped over his own feet in sheer excitement at getting in the opposing area, ‘KILL THE REFEREE, KILL THE REFEREE, EE-AI-ADDIO, KILL THE REFEREE.’ Brendan Domingo took a lofted ball from the wing, killed it on the inside of his knee, let it roll down his calf, and laid it off swiftly to give Danny Matson’s replacement a scoring chance. ‘BRENDAN IS A FAIRY, BRENDAN US A FAIRY, BRENDAN IS A FAIRY.’

  With ten minutes to go, and the City fans setting up another chant of ‘GOING DOWN GOING DOWN GOING DOWN’, Athletic fiddled a corner. Short to the near post, headed on, headed out, turned back, miskicked, headed back in, not cleared, twenty-one different players to choose from, and Brendan, off-balance, toe-poked it home from about five yards out. The City fans were silent; the Layton Roaders were silent; Duffy, despite his promise to Jimmy Lister, decided not to draw attention to himself; there were a few claps and squeaks from the main stand, repeated at about the same volume when the public address announced the scorer’s name. Move on, Duffy whispered to Domingo, move on; this lot don’t deserve you.

  Ten minutes later, Athletic had gained victory and three points; when news of the other matches came through, it was confirmed that they were out of the bottom three. They were still in the bottom four, but looking at the points won and the games to play, it meant that at least the future was in the side’s own hands. If they got the results, they’d stay up, no matter what the other teams did.

  Jimmy Lister was still smiling when Duffy wandered into his office.

  ‘Good result,’ said Duffy.

  ‘The lads did the business. They did the business. What more can you ask?’

  Danny Matson, who could handle coming to the games if not going to The Knight Spot, was sitting in a chair by the Boss’s desk and smiling too.

  ‘Big Bren came good just when we needed him.’

  Big Bren and ten other damp-haired players had the biggest smiles of all.

  ‘Hey, Boss,’ Brendan shouted across the room, ‘I hope you saw how I planned the whole movement.’ Everyone laughed.

  ‘I’m proud of you, lads,’ said Jimmy Lister. ‘Never stopped battling. Full ninety minutes. Real team effort. Proud of every one of you.’ And he went round the room slapping the players and punching them playfully.

  ‘Hey, Boss, OK if I have a few beers tonight?’ shouted Brendan.

  ‘You can have as many halves as you like,’ said the Boss.

  Brendan had quite a lot of halves that evening. Duffy had a tomato juice followed by a low-alcohol lager. Well, he’d never been a Saturday-night raver; or at least, not Saturday night rather than any other night. What about Carol, though, he wondered, as he divided their boil-in-a-bag cod dinner into two portions. Maybe she wanted to be taken out on a Saturday night?

  Later, as Carol was falling asleep and Duffy lay tucked up with her, he got another erection. He held his breath. She stirred slightly, and moved her bottom a little.

  ‘Duffy,’ she murmured, ‘is there anyone else in this bed apart from the two of us?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ he answered. He was feeling—almost hearing—a slow, fat, deadly drop of sweat begin to trickle down his temple.

  ‘Then I must be dreaming,’ she said, and slipped off into sleep.

  Brendan Domingo, despite the opinion of the Layton Road yobboes, was not a fairy. Brendan Domingo, like Duffy, had an erection. Whether this was a good idea or not, he wasn’t to know at the time.

  Half-time

  ‘SHHH,’ WENT GEOFF BELL; and the whole team obeyed.

  Bell was not one of the Reliables’ star players. He was heavy in the leg, didn’t train enough, and secretly preferred rugby. He also wore glasses, but left them in the dressing-room, which was a handicap; he’d tried contact lenses, but they irritated his eyes a lot, and he was afraid of losing one on the pitch. They used to tell him that if he could get used to lenses he might develop into a player with vision, like Maggot; but they didn’t really mean it.

  Geoff Bell usually occupied a loose, freeish position in midfield. It was free because however many instructions you gave him, he never managed to follow them. It was a mystery why he ever wanted to play the game. It was a mystery to opponents why the Reliables ever bothered to pick him; but then opponents never saw the Reliables more than once a season,
and they normally assumed Bell was a last-minute substitute. Bell was never a last-minute substitute. If it was a home game, his was the first name to be pencilled in; if it was an away game, his was the first to be left out.

  Home matches were always played at the recreation ground, and the Reliables, partly by being so reliable, were routinely allotted pitch A, alongside their own small changing-hut. There were two tiny rooms, three showers and a toilet. According to a long-established and friendly ritual, the two sides would retire to the hut at half-time, where the away side would find in its room a small tray bearing six halved oranges, a packet of chocolate wholemeal, four pints of milk and half a bottle of whisky. At first some of the teams were suspicious about the whisky, but most of going to make anybody’s game woozy; it was simply a nice gesture, and it made teams look forward to playing the Reliables at the recreation ground.

  Partly it was a nice gesture; but it also ensured that opponents didn’t decide that the macho thing to do at half-time was stay out on the pitch and get in some shooting practice.

  Geoff Bell was crouched on a bench with his hands pressed tight to his ears. Anyone would have thought he was sunk in gloom at the memory of his first-half performance. Anyone who thought that would have been wrong. For seven of the fifteen minutes that half-time occupied, the home dressing-room was entirely silent. Then Geoff Bell sat up, took out an earphone and said, ‘Right. Got it.’

  The other ten waited attentively. This was Bell’s moment of importance, and he played it for all it was worth; he was dry, authoritative and irrebuttable.

  ‘Right. For a start they know they’ve got the skinning of our right-back. Sorry about that, Tommo; the winger says he’s got you on toast. Second, they think that someone called Phil, who I think must be that ginge, has got the complete run of the midfield, but they want him to push a lot further forward in the second half. They say it’s all very well walking over the midfield but it’s no good unless it puts you in business on the edge of the penalty area. They’re not very impressed by my play; in fact I think I caught the phrase “complete wanker” at one point.’

  The other ten laughed. This was just like Geoff. He could easily have edited that bit out, but he seemed to have some curious determination to tell everything that went on. This made them not mind so much when he didn’t tone down some of the comments about the rest of them.

  ‘Maggot, there was also a bit about you.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Ken Marriott hopefully.

  ‘Yes, they say they think you’re a psycho.’

  ‘Oh. Didn’t they say anything about my vision?’

  ‘Just that you’re a psycho and that the first three times you get the ball in the second half they’re going to give you a whacking.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘They think that only Barney—at least, I think that’s who they must mean by the bald smarmy one—sorry about that, Barney—is any threat to the defence. They say he’s a bit slow but turns nicely for a fat man, and might have pinched one right on the whistle if they hadn’t closed him down in time.’

  Barney smiled. He didn’t mind being called fat and smarmy in the least as long as they had picked him out as the most subtle and venomous operator amongst the Reliables.

  ‘Anything about me?’ said Duffy.

  ‘They said they think you’re a terrific keeper, very fast, very brave, reflexes like a cat and a lovely pair of hands. The only thing stopping them give us a real hiding.’

  Duffy grinned to himself with quiet pleasure; until he noticed that all the others were grinning with very noisy pleasure.

  ‘Sorry, Duffy, nothing at all.’

  ‘Oh, well.’

  ‘They’re pretty confident they’ve got the beating of us, but they’re going to play it fairly quiet for the first ten minutes or so, apart from stomping on our psycho, that is, and then push a couple more men forward for quarter of an hour to see if they can nick another goal, and then whatever happens they’ll pull them both back again. One will be wide on the right, the other one I think is the big centre-back who’s going to be allowed to come forward whenever he feels like it. That’s about all. Oh, and they said that someone they call the young lad—I guess that must be you, Karl—looks quite sharp, but they think he’s a bit out of his depth at this level of the game.’

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said Karl French. ‘They’re only a pubload of wankers.’

  ‘Just passing on what the man said.’

  ‘Which one said that,’ asked Karl, ‘which one? I’ll bloody do him, second half.’

  ‘Just voices, voices,’ said Bell.

  ‘Quite,’ said Micky Baker, captain and left-back of the Reliables. ‘For a start, you won’t do anyone, Karl. That’s not the point of the whole thing. That just undoes everything. Now, quickly, lads, we’ve only got a couple of minutes, so concentrate.’

  Barney checked that the door was quite shut, and Micky gave his instructions.

  ‘First, we’ll swap our full-backs over. I was thinking I’d have to take that winger of theirs anyway. OK Tommo? I’ll follow him, and if he switches wings, we switch. You take my chap, he’s a bit less tricky. Always tries to go on the outside, too; I think he’s only got one foot. Next, we don’t give Karl the ball for ten minutes.’

  ‘Come off it,’ said Karl.

  ‘No, I’m serious. You didn’t get much of a sniff in the first half, so they don’t know what you can do. We know what you can do. So for the first ten minutes while they’re keeping it tight, we keep it tight, and any ball that comes to you, you get rid of fairly quickly. Then, when they push the extra men forward and are only watching out for Barney, who they think is a bit slow anyway, we try to get the two of you forward quickly on the break. Anyone gets the ball midfield, look up and try and spot Karl, whip it up to him quickly and let him run at them. Give them the shock of their lives if he does the business on them.’

  Karl grinned. ‘I like it.’

  ‘Now, what else?’

  ‘What else?’ said Maggot. ‘What else? They’re going to beat me up, that’s what else.’

  ‘No they’re not,’ said Micky soothingly. ‘We can’t stop them trying—I mean, not without letting on that we’ve been eavesdropping—but we can give them a bit of their own back. Every time they have a dig at you, we clobber the ginge.’

  ‘That won’t make me feel better,’ complained Maggot.

  ‘No, but it’ll stop the ginge, which has to be priority number one.’

  ‘You’re a hard man, skipper.’

  ‘Come off it, Maggot, we won’t let them do anything too bad to you.’

  ‘They want to destroy my vision,’ said Maggot mournfully.

  ‘Shut up, Maggot,’ most of the team counselled. Micky Baker unscrewed the cap of the home team’s half-bottle of whisky and, as was the custom, offered the first gulp to Bell. ‘Nice work, Geoff.’

  Duffy grinned across at Bell. It had been Duffy who’d first suggested him for a place in the Reliables. Geoff was a sort of friend, though more of a business associate—someone to run to for advice on the technical side of things. Geoff Bell was good with machines, and cameras, and recorders, and electricity, and all the things that Duffy was bad with. His expertise, however, wasn’t quite so great when it came to estimating the distance that a spheroid object of known weight would travel when struck by his own boot; and for the first couple of games Duffy had watched with some embarrassment as terrible things kept happening in the vicinity of Geoff Bell.

  ‘Still struggling with his form, is he?’ asked Micky Baker after Bell’s fourth game.

  ‘Well, you know how hard it is coming into a strange team playing a different system,’ Duffy replied defensively.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose it must seem like a strange system to him—kicking the ball along the ground to someone on your own side and then trying to get it into the opposite net.’

  Even Duffy had thought Bell lucky to get a fifth outing with the Reliables. On that occasion they were four-ni
l down at half-time and Bell sat with his head in his hands, apparently absorbing the various reproaches that were flying around. In fact, he was listening on an earphone to the small bug he’d placed in the visiting team’s dressing-room. Suddenly he upped and told them the whole of the opposition’s plans—and their predicted result of eight-nil.

  At first the Reliables hadn’t known how to react; but given that they were four-nil down and carrying this joker in midfield, they decided that the only thing they could do was treat it all as a giggle. So they had a good laugh, and then they thought, Well, if this mad passenger of ours really has found out this stuff for us we may as well try using it. They went out for the second half in rather a humorous frame of mind, and they came back in rather a serious frame of mind, having reduced the deficit to four-two and come very close to squeezing a third goal. Then they sat down and had a think, and decided that since other sides were always doing things which weren’t quite in the spirit of the game—like including the odd cowboy to inject a bit of class—why shouldn’t the Reliables have their own little way of doing things? It wasn’t as if they were breaking rules on the pitch, or bribing the ref. A few of them felt uneasy about it at first, but they soon got used to it; and the fact that they didn’t play Bell away from home (where you normally just stood shivering on the pitch at half-time) made it all seem more acceptable. It became a jolly part of the home-game ritual, along with the oranges, the milk and the whisky.