The trains in to London on a Saturday night are no carnival machines. Dark platforms, loudly ticking clocks and orange numbers: sparse aisles of dirty, empty seats littered with tattered right-wing pages, sprinkled with people leaving youth behind, stretching down the arrow of redundant light. Perhaps the true kids and party people are in town hours earlier, shopping, drinking all through the breezy afternoon, spilling from football grounds and surfacing in the centre at six. I walk into the past, down Endell Street (I saw David A. Stewart on a roof on TV the other day: he lives in the toad hospital): to the bar where no-one has heard of us. Underground: the Kaiser with his lollies, Capybara with her panda eyes (that can�t be right), Starry with her head ticking through grate JOkeZoR about sweetZoR. My editor is the 5-minute DJ, playing TV themes. I give him a home-made record. Bronze harmonies bounce off a low ceiling. It�s all in the production, la. We drink beer from a dumb waiter. The radio plays cowboy songs so stupidly. We all watch the flowers fall, she wears them and we all dream. I tell my editor my fish-finger story. It lacks punch. I don�t think he wants to publish it. � They are just Bowie followers, he opines. The Cure without the success. We stand against another wall and tear the posters down, talking about the great Chauss�e. She is not fully realized, I protest: we�re given too scant reason to go with the narrator�s adoration. - Well, says my editor � there are a couple of pages. Campbell plays grinding rhythm & blues. Thank goodness! We try to sing along, but some of those verses have always been obscure. It is, though, their �Bigmouth Strikes Again� � that much is clear. Captain Marvel is asleep: it�s 10pm after all. But the Cabbage is here, down in the earth. This is the point: the nub. We gather round him and his contact machine: Professor Paulo, others and I, to hear about tomorrow�s match. It�s more than a rumour. Yes, I shall be there, I say, though we seem to be preparing with the Sheringham method. Jonnie #5 � he sounds, come to think of it, like a character from the Boss - for time #1, a Tim Sherwood of the disco floor. He escapes injury for one night only. He thinks of our peaks against Fulham and Chelsea, our troughs. He knows what he�s on about. I tell the Kaiser that if he wants to be Tarrico tomorrow, I want to flog him. My editor gets the Cabbage to slip �Like A Daydream� from its yellow sheath. It hisses into pure action while I�m still waiting for a drink to come from the waiter, the butler. This is as good as the disco gets. It takes a lolly to dance to it. �The Model�: it�s like �The Royal Tennenbaums�. Cazza plays a platter about Maggie Thatcher. I look at the lyrics on the sleeve: they�re not as poor as they could have been. I suppose the idea is to be topical. The rest is silence. Outside they turn the match into a picnic. Make a picnic of it. The purists are suspicious. But it sounds apt. I wait with my editor at the bus stop. We talk about the flowers and the radio. � They are just Bowie copyists, he explains. The Cure without the French. Who is more important, he asks � Bowie or McCartney? We disagree. We fail to see our buses going by. The day dawns blue and sweet. I read Heaney: bells and raindrops, loosed screens and straight walks. *Sunday*, he says. The trains are sunny. I read Graham Greene on the book-web. London Bridge: the descent, the empty spaces, the halls where the tubes and people come and go. Roy Hodgson, justifying his achievements. He reads literature both contemporary and classical, they say. They�ve always said this: when will someone make more of it, properly interview him on the pleasures of Italian fabulism? The tube security in bright cheery blue: the crowds of energy: an entrance closed: the streets, the flows, the individuals with their belligerence and desire. It�s always the same, coming in off this train, too: the place is as it was the first day I walked into that bookshop over the road and flicked through volumes on Paul Gascoigne and D.H. Lawrence. The spring light over Camden, and this only March. The highways and turnings: quiet impressive roads, high pastel houses, the lovely church, the symbolism of the English Folk school. At the top of the hill a gang of three, their heads turned away from London. Archel is a poet, I�ve heard, who used to top the List Crush List (Crush). The boy Walton joins us: I wonder whether he exemplifies sinister. In a good way. They don�t want my fish. They don�t even believe it�s fish. A stranger arrives atop the hill. He gazes with cautious eyes at the horizons, like Clint Eastwood � but with a football. He uses it as a seat. The Kaiser thinks he may be �ILE scum�, and he is half-right. It�s Dr C: an encounter to note. Notebooks out, eirenists. We share a packet of peperami, 80-20. I want to revive the peperami. There is no need: Chu, also arrived, is eating them too. The Doc has driven. He *is* driven. Hopkins shows in a red shirt. Cabbage shows in a shirt from Singapore. Perhaps they have all gathered in advance to plot their downfall, I mean, our downfall. I ask Hopkins about a building on the skyline. - That�s the Stephen Trouss� Institute for Contemporary Madness, he says. We discuss its possible occupants. Names are named. ILE head downhill. Cazza gathers his boys. The boy Apps has brought shirts for all sinister to wear. Cazza, like the pinefox, fears ILE. But he stresses the strengths that sinister FC have: - Youth and speed. I think he means it. Five to four. On the great plain where the sky changes slowly overhead, all warm up. Jonnie#5 gets so warm he burns. He can�t play. I am sorry, given his allegiances; the poor fellow. At the last, as though there had been all the time in the world � for in fact there was � my editor strolls down the hill and dons his black and white shirt. Jim is here too, and Dr Sean: the solidest of pros. Black and White United, indeed. Only Stuart Murdoch is lacking. (No - not only.) ILE: Cabbage, Dr C, Hopkins, g, jel, Trewartha, Nick the Dastoor Sinister: the Kaiser, the lad Walton, the Boy G, Dr Sean, Jim, Apps, Nick the dandy. Sinister have many substitutes. We hold our fire. Some of us could have crossed over and evened up the numbers. But we didn�t come to play for ILE. Why? I don�t know. Something keeps us on sinister�s side, even though we be ILE regulars. We are forever walking into the past. 20 minutes are played each way. The match is tough, serious, not easy for anyone. There are no walkovers, no shooting gallery, no gross gaps between the teams. Commitment is total, energy is expended everywhere. ILE have good players: Hopkins is good in goal, plays 38 minutes longer than he�d announced. The Doc is a veteran of competition: he can�t help himself urging his team together, telling them to talk more. (If ILE talked, what would they say? �Robot Sausages: Classic or Dud?�) g � lower-case g � seems a strong player, a tough guy, not easily beaten. But somehow, sinister do have their beating. Perhaps it�s the style of players: sinister possess enough playmakers, dribblers, flair boys to make the difference. Within about 5 minutes it�s 3-0 to sinister. Walton and the boy G are devastating, all skill and incision. By half-time, with Trouss� and the pinefox alternating as black and white TV referees, it has reached 4-0: and this pressure game has an unexpected vibe to it. ILE have a chance in the second half, because the pinefox joins the sinister team as a substitute. If they can�t score now, with me playing against them, they never will. They don�t. It is their best spell, as the Doc will say: but the scoreline keeps them at nil. Our lads even claim later that ILE never had a shot at goal. Can this be true? I�d like to remember more of the game itself here. I can�t pull much together. I know that Apps, Walton and G were terrific: and that when Cazza returned to the fray, looking for a needle match in a haywain, he scored at least one bruised peach of a goal, maybe two. The final score, at 4:48, is improbable: Sinister 8-0 ILE. Some say this is fair reflection. I can�t see that: the ILE kids worked hard. But the score is real, and anyone on sinister should raise their rum and Ribena a moment to toast our star players. The Doc shakes our hands and heads home to Fulham, or wherever. He may take revenge one day. David Moore has arrived, chronicler and photographer. He savours the red Cabbage. Moore brings news to cheer: Liverpool have beaten Chelsea 1-0 with a last-minute goal. The details Moore then deploys suggest a week�s football homework. Sinister hang about for another game against ourselves. This is a 4-1 or something. Stevie G plays Hollywood balls. At the Hollywood Bowl, as McCartney once said. The walk away from the sun, from the grass, the air, is as slow as Paul Gascoigne on the road to Burnley. Jeremy tells me of how he and Shearer spent �100 a night on parties. That�s how cheap Scotland is. Into the Eagle. Cazza wants to talk men of the match. I�ll give the boy Walton the award for the big game; Trouss�s passing wins it for the second. - Apps is our Roy Keane. Cazza says that the victory is significant: youth and hope against � what? I can�t remember � age and despair? ILE, he says, is unfriendly. Perhaps it depends. - I know tomorrow�s gonna taste like cake, says an old LoveSpitLove song. Today tastes like cake too: chocolate cake for Dmitra. We don�t know her so well. We don�t like Lionel Trilling so much, we decide, says Moore. We like *Don Allen.* No wonder he got to be editor. The kids list best-ever sinister posters. Were YOU on the list? I�m not telling. Cazza talks about Cults. Someone names his opposite. Someone names the pinefox�s opposite, too, but I don�t think I understand this one. People come and go, talking on the telephone, falling for the flowers. The sprightliness of �the� [Grateful] Dead, how everyone likes �Passionate Kisses�, the lack of sex in Ulysses, the contrasting abandon of Pynchon, the Clinamen. The drinks. Nicky D buys some. My editor talks about �The Royal Tennenbaums�, naturally. It�s like �The Model�, and the pinefox�s family. I should make some kind of effort to see this picture. Someone steals half the bar�s possessions. Fingers are pointed at the space where a vagrant was. They disperse into darkness, looking for cars, cigarettes, buses, telephone cards, dangerous spilled takeaways. Alone again in the middle of the street, amid the crowds and the thieves, under the night. And so we beat on, full-backs against the run of play, borne back ceaselessly into our own half. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Movies - coverage of the 74th Academy Awards� http://movies.yahoo.com/ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+