Sinister: Eighth Wonder

[P F]

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 Chaussée. 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 Troussé 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 Troussé 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;
Troussé’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.





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