I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want – an adorable pancreas?
– Jean Kerr, The Snake has All the Lines
If somebody says ‘I love you’ to me, I feel as though I have a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? ‘I love you, too’.
– Kurt Vonnegut, Wamperers, Foma and Granfallons
A scene from the movies that has always struck a chord with me is one of the opening scenes from The Crying Game where Jody (Forest Whittaker) tells Fergus (Stephen Rea) the story of the scorpion and the frog. It goes as follows. A scorpion wants to cross a river but he can’t swim, so he goes to a frog, who can, and asks for a ride. The frog says, ‘If I give you a ride on my back you’ll go and sting me!’ The scorpion replies, ‘It would not be in my interest to sting you, since as I’ll be on your back we both will drown.’ The frog thinks about this logic for a while and accepts the deal, takes the scorpion on his back and braves the waters. Halfway over he feels a burning spear in his side and realizes the scorpion has done him after all. As they both sink beneath the waves, the frog cries out, ‘Why did you sting me, Mr Scorpion? For now we both will drown.’ The scorpion replies, ‘I can’t help it. It’s in my nature.’
While I have always believed, deep down, that I’m essentially a decent human being, there have been times, I must admit, when I’ve done things I’m not particularly proud of. Joanne springs to mind. We met, when we were seventeen, at a club called the Link near her home in Orpington and went out together for the best part of five years. Jo invested hugely in the relationship and was always a rock of support as my career shifted from the hairdressing salon to the building site to the football field. Kind, decent and affectionate, Jo believed she had found her Mr Right, a man who would provide the love and stability she’d never had as a child. But, as Jody reminds us in The Crying Game, there are two kinds of people in life: givers and takers, scorpions and frogs. And in the summer of ’84, just when she thought she had a giver on board, just when she wanted him to make a commitment, Joanne was stung.
I should have explained that I didn’t want to settle down, that I was too immature to sign a contract with one person for the rest of my life. Honesty was the least she deserved after five years of love and companionship. But a scorpion does what’s in its nature when confronted with difficult decisions. He spins her a yarn about needing space. He tells her he’s going to Portugal on a short break with his mates. He assures her everything will be fine and that he’ll call as soon as he gets back. But already, before he even leaves, his eye is roving. To the source of the giddy laughter, rolling across the bar. To the pretty blonde, in the circle of friends, having a good time. To Sarah . . .
Sarah Jane Boost was a regular at the Bull and though I’d noticed her there several times, with a group we called ‘the under-fives’ because of how young they were, we had never actually spoken. I invited them to join us for a drink, and Sarah and I paired off at the end of the night to a disco bar near Eltham, and began dating regularly when I returned from Portugal and ended my relationship with Joanne. Sarah was seventeen, five years younger than me, and worked in the city as a runner in the Stock Exchange. She was good-looking rather than stunning, but what really set her apart was the unique sense of humour she inherited from her mother, Pauline. On the day she first invited me home, there was a ribbon across the gate, and her parents emerged with scissors as we stepped from the car. A few weeks later, we were shopping one afternoon in the High Street in Bromley, when Pauline spotted us from a bus stop across the road. I was just about to wave hello when she turned to the other commuters and started gesturing in my direction.
‘Look,’ she gasped.
‘It’s him,’ she gasped.
‘Over there!’ she gasped.
‘It’s Tony Cascarino!’
And they all looked across and started scratching their heads: ‘Tony who?’ It was embarrassing.
Sarah, thankfully, wasn’t quite as abrasive and could really make me laugh. We used to bounce off each other like a double act and Sarah was always the life and soul of the party when we were out. After a few months, we started living together and the next two years were the happiest of our lives. In hindsight, when I think about it now, this was probably because essentially nothing had changed. Although, technically, we were living together, when you added up the time we spent in each other’s company, we were still living separate lives. On weekdays, while Sarah was either working late or out with her friends, I was either training or playing cards or out with mine. One day, about a year after she’d moved in, I was watching telly in the front room of the house, when it suddenly dawned that we had never actually sat in the room together. Or spent time, other than sleeping, together in the house. But what did it matter, when we were happy? And we were happy. And in November of ’87 we became engaged.
Why? I don’t know. It certainly wasn’t planned. There was no candlelight dinner. I did not go down on my knee. It just seemed a logical progression. We were living together and getting on well and came home from an afternoon’s shopping with two rings, like a million couples before us. I can’t honestly say we were head-over-heels in love but then, how honest can I be, given the bitterness that now divides us and everything that’s happened since? Hindsight isn’t always 20/20 vision. Of course we were in love. We had to be in love. We did the things lovers do. We had a song, ‘You and I,’ our own love anthem, written for us specially by Stevie Wonder.
So what was I doing, gazing out on a south Dublin graveyard, six weeks before I was due to be wed? I was acting the scorpion, that’s what. I was doing what scorpions do, when it’s late and they’ve had a drink and a good-looking lady scorpion offers them the chance to flex their tail. But though I certainly enjoyed the moment, the aftermath wasn’t fun. Sarah called me at the hotel next day.
‘So, what did you get up to last night, then? Have a good time?’
‘Naah, not much, just went for a drink with a couple of the lads.’
It was the first time I’d been with anyone else since we’d met.
I slept in my mother’s house on the night of Friday, 8 July, and awoke next morning and stared at the ceiling. Later that afternoon, I would walk down the aisle with Sarah but my brief encounter in Dublin was still bothering me. Was I doing the right thing?
‘Forget about it, Tony, it’s just big day nerves. Everyone feels that way.’
‘Bollocks! You cheated and you know it! You’re not even married but you’re already playing the field.’
‘It was just a one-off, a last-minute fling.’
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘It won’t happen again.’
‘How could you do that to someone you purport to love?’
‘I do love her!’
‘Of course you do.’
‘And anyway, I was still a single man.’
‘Fine, you’re right, I’m sure Sarah will understand.’
Having lived through the misery of my parents’ split, I did not want my marriage to go the same way, and that my mother and sister also harboured doubts added to my anxiety. Neither Mandy nor my mother had ever really taken to Sarah and though they’d never said anything, I suspected, deep down, that they were worried I was making a mistake. But there was a side to Sarah that never came out in public: a warm, generous and sensitive side they had never seen. And any doubts I had about the wedding weren’t about Sarah at all; they were about me.
I lazed around for a while after breakfasting with Mum, then slipped down to the Bull with my best man, Peter Cappuccio, for a lunchtime drink. Most of the friends I had grown up with were there and five pints later – ‘You have to be fit to drink’ – we were all in flying form. I was still without a tie for my suit, so we made a frantic dash to Bexley and found a reasonably presentable match, then showered, changed and raced to Chislehurst, where Peter got me to the church on time. Sarah, meanwhile, was taking everything in her stride. When I enquired, later, ‘What the bleedin’ ’ell kept you?’ she informed me with a grin that when the chauffeur had arrived, she’d invited him to join her for a whisky and cigar on the lawn. A touch zany perhaps, but the girl definitely had class. The reception went well. Sarah’s family were Millwall supporters and with most of the team present, a great night was had by all. Between signing autographs and talking football, I hardly saw Sarah until the last dance. But the last dance was nice. They played our song.
We honeymooned in Paris and Corsica and before the end of the trip we were haggling like we’d been married for years. It was mostly harmless stuff. In Paris, Sarah threw a wobbly when I suggested we stay in our hotel room and ignore the lure of the city to watch the Tour de France . . . which, I suppose, was fair enough. And in Corsica, while I was content to sit in the lobby each evening playing Trivial Pursuit, Sarah wanted to paint the town . . . which would have been fair enough had there been a town to paint! Unfortunately, the resort we had chosen was beautiful, but remote. But there were some good moments too, and we returned home looking forward not so much to the ‘challenge of our new life together’ but to just carrying on where we’d left off. With her doing her thing and me doing mine. With the training and the cards and the games and the restaurants and the waking on Sunday morning/afternoon – ‘Hi, I’m Tony,’ ‘Hi, I’m Sarah’ – bombed from Saturday night.
And for fourteen months, that’s mostly how it was. My first season in Division One went brilliantly. I buried a ghost and (twice!) put the ball past Neville Southall at Everton; replaced Frank Stapleton as Jack’s first choice and hit the post at Anfield, my childhood theatre of dreams. Things were happening for me. I was playing the best football of my life. My star was in the incline. And then, Michael was born.
What if we were born with the ability to record every single moment of our waking lives? What if we retained crystal-clear images of every face we’d ever seen from the moment we opened our eyes? What if we remembered the exchanges between our parents when we were screaming late at night? Who changed us. Who wouldn’t. Where we lived. How we slept. Our first conscious thought. Would we ever speak to our fathers again? I’m not sure Michael would.
He was born on Friday, 22 September 1989. I remember it because it was a Friday and the following afternoon we beat Sheffield Wednesday at the Den and I scored my third goal of the season. I remember it because it was four months after we had beaten Hungary in a World Cup qualifying game in Dublin and I had cheated on Sarah again. I remember it because two weeks later I scored a goal against Northern Ireland and was playing so well that Alex Ferguson offered £2 million for me at Christmas. I remember it because he was born at a time in my life when I was infected with the disease of ‘me’. My feelings. My needs. My world. Me.
Michael brought responsibility I didn’t want to know about. Michael was Sarah’s idea. She had lost her job in the 1989 Crash and was spending more time at home, and a baby seemed a logical progression. Sarah made all the sacrifices. Michael’s birth changed nothing for me. I continued driving to the card school after training and continued staying out late with my mates and continued to do whatever made me happy. That’s when the arguments really started. I was, according to Sarah, a horrible selfish bastard. I denied it, of course, and fought my corner, but there was no defence.
Six months later, in March 1990, we moved north to Birmingham, when I accepted an offer to play for Aston Villa. For me, it was the shot at the big time I’d been waiting for. For us, it was the chance to start again. We bought a nice house in Sutton Coldfield and cut adrift from the card school and the other temptations of London, and we began to spend time with each other again. My first six games for Villa weren’t hectic but relations with Sarah definitely improved. The World Cup finals were just around the corner, the summit before the fall . . .