especially the aggro between Brighton and their hated rivals Crystal Palace down at the Goldstone Ground, where their serious rucking made those old warring mods and rockers out to be a bunch of fairies. Padre Pio’s eyes would widen as Rex relayed the derby day damage; how his older brother Mick nearly blinded a Palace fan with diluted ammonia squirted from a water pistol.
Cliftonville FC are to play in the final today in yellow tops and blue shirts, and this is already seriously pissing off Padre Pio. When he clocks a group of fans wearing home-made, paper mache, stove-pipe hats, painted with yellow and blue hoops, he explodes.
‘Yiz look like a bunch of fucking Southampton fans in 1976, ya wankers,’ he roars out the window as our taxi passes Divis Tower. ‘Fucking clowns. Total fucking clowns. I didn’t recognise one of them, Ruin. Did you? Not a single one of them. Dressed up like bastard Southampton fans from 1976, and I bet not one of them has had their legs splashed with somebody else’s piss inside the Cage at Solitude!’
‘Too fucking right, mate,’ I fire back as quickly as possible to placate him.
But on he goes, ranting and raving against a newly found bunch of enemies to berate. ‘I bet ya not one of them wankers ever went down to Glenavon or Portadown or had darts thrown at them on the Shore Road when we played Crusaders.’
‘Too fucking right, mate,’ I repeat, while suddenly remembering the afternoon, not too long ago, we went down to Castlereagh Park to watch Cliftonville play Ards.
We had been too late for the official club coaches and opted instead to jump on a commuter bus full of coffin-dodging pensioners decked out in their greys and creams. When we met at our rendezvous point not far from the spot where I saw firemen shovelling bits of bodies into sacks seven years earlier on Bloody Friday, our group decided to hide our colours. Anybody carrying Cliftonville scarves shoved them into their parkas or tied them under their jerseys. The Ulsterbus was heading into the hun heartland of East Belfast, so we had to keep our heads down. Our safety pact lasted all of five minutes. As the bus crawled up Albertbridge Road, PP had one of his occasional kamikaze notions. When we reached the traffic lights at The Albert Bar, Padre Pio pulled a scarf out of one of the younger kid’s pockets, put the red-and-white bars up against the window and started hammering. Two oul boys pinting outside ran into the pub, and before the lights hit amber there was a mob gathered outside armed with snooker cues and pool balls. The windows imploded. Within seconds, clear glass turned into hundreds of shattered fragments, some flying through the air like missiles. I hit the deck and lay on my stomach, only looking up eventually to see three middle-aged bare-chested men trying to yank open the rubber flaps of the automatic doors with pool cues. But they were either too tubby or too pissed to force their way on board. The OAPs inside had been holding up their Co-Op shopping bags to their faces as if they were going to shield them from the flying glass. The driver put the gears into third and moved swiftly onto the Newtownards Road with a large crowd in pursuit. If they had reached us, there would have been a lynching. But as I lay there on the floor, all I could think about was Sabine. She had grown up not too far from here, further up at the posher end of the Newtownards Road, and there I was, going to die in a bus at the grimier end of it.
I had almost hoped, in a brief, self-pitying death wish of a moment, that they would find me cut to pieces near the Connswater River, and she would read about it in the papers before weeping, wailing and feeling sorry for everything that she had done to me. It was the laughter that shook me out of my martyrdom fantasy; it was the demonic, sniggering, spittle-filled laughter from the very back of the bus. Padre Pio had his feet dangling out of the broken window and his body reclined horizontally along the seat. His face convulsed with laughter, and a thin trail of blood and saliva trickled down the side of his mouth.
‘Look at your face Ruin, just look at your fucking stupid face,’ PP cackled.
Instantly, as if he himself had summoned them up from my own pores, pin pricks of pain pulsed and rippled all over my cheeks. When I put my hands to them there were micro fountains of blood bubbling up from the skin. As I tried to clear my face with the back of my hands, Padre Pio started abusing the elderly passengers, reminding them about Airey Neave’s recent ‘up and under’ demise. Then he began conducting an insane orchestra of insult-songs all the way to the peninsula, singing and chanting to the tune of ‘Those Were the Days My Friend’ that ‘we’re gonna burn yer town, we’re gonna burn yer town, we’re gonna burn, we’ll burn your Orange hole down.’
Now we are on the road again, this time up the Falls, on Irish Cup Final day. There is only one thing on PP’s mind this afternoon and it is not victory over Portadown. It is not about putting one over all the Prods of various hues who will turn up at Windsor just to see Cliftonville defeated. It will not be about our team lifting the cup in the club’s one hundredth-anniversary season. Padre Pio simply wants to be the first one onto the Windsor turf. He wants to be seen on TV dodging the peelers and the security men, avoiding the missiles that will rain down on him from the North Stand. He wants the world to see that he’s game.
At the Royal Victoria Hospital, the oul bird leans across the cab and rattles the glass with a coin. The driver breaks suddenly. She gets out, pays the cabbie and then looks back in disgust at us.
‘I really hope yiz win today, but yiz are still going to hell, ya bunch of weirdos,’ she croaks.
PP leans out and hollers, ‘Just you go in there and get your bag plumbed in.’
The taxi is barely across Broadway, which is cordoned off at the bottom near the motorway by a line of battleship-grey RUC Land Rovers and a bottle-green wall of cops in riot gear, when the driver stops again. Our new fellow passenger is a wino in a pork-pie hat and old black Crombie coat. The neck of a brown bottle is sticking out of one of its pockets. There is a pencil-thin film of dried brown liquor caked above his upper lip and his eyes are bleary. When the cab passes by a mural close to Beechmount showing the head of a black man being squashed over a lemon juicer and the words above it, ‘Don’t squeeze a South African dry!’ the wino fishes the bottle of Mundies out of the Crombie and tilts it towards the disappearing wall mural.
‘Fuck you, Sambo cunt,’ he rasps, before guzzling back the wine.
He continues to down the Mundies while moaning about his plight. ‘See they’ve banned it from the Provie and the Sticky clubs because of this Apartheid thing. So I have ta drink my Mundies on the streets now. They won’t even let me take it into the hostel.’
When we ignore his protests he changes the subject. ‘Here lads, who’s playing up at Casement Park today? That’s some crowd going up the road. Any of you lads got a spare feg or a couple of shillings even? I got robbed in Castle Street earlier.’
‘I’m not giving you anything for being a silly old racist cunt,’ Rex Mundi pipes up while attempting to roll another joint in the back of the cab.
‘Ach Jesus, lads. Give me a chance. I defended this district once, you know.’
This produces gales of laughter from us, but the wino suddenly has a serious face on.
‘It was nineteen hundred and sixty-nine, not that long ago. A few of us were out that day and we did our bit. We stopped the Orangemen burning people in their beds. Then in nineteen hundred and a seventy-one there were a few of us left taking on the British Army down in the Lower Falls too,’ he says, taking another swig of the South African hooch.
‘Oh aye, grandad,’ PP interrupts. ‘Just like nineteen hundred and sixteen when we beat the Brits!’
Padre Pio then swivels around, drops his trousers and Y-fronts and spreads his arse cheeks apart right in front of the wino’s face, close enough for the oul boy to peer right up his chocolate alley.
The
