TURIN

 

A mob is a strange phenomenon. It is a gathering of heterogeneous elements, unknown to one another (except on some essential points such as nationality, religion, social class); but as soon as a spark of passion, having flashed out from one of these elements, electrifies this confused mass, there takes place a sort of sudden organization, a spontaneous generation. This incoherence becomes cohesion, this noise becomes a voice, and these thousands of men crowded together soon form but a single animal, a wild beast without a name, which marches to its goal with an irresistible finality. The majority of these men would have assembled out of pure curiosity, but the fever of some of them soon reaches the minds of all, and in all of them there arises a delirium. The very man who came running to oppose the murder of an innocent person is the first to be seized with the homicidal contagion, and moreover, it does not occur to him to be astonished at this.

Gabriel Tarde

The Penal Philosophy (1912)

 

THE FIRST PERSON to greet the group in Turin, there at the foot of the ramp, was a man named Michael Wicks. Mr Wicks was the Acting British Consul. He was about fifty—a tweed jacket, a Foreign Office accent, educated—and relentlessly friendly. Mr Wicks was almost always smiling, and he continued smiling even when he met the first one off the plane, an extremely fat boy called Clayton.

Clayton had a number of troubles but his greatest one was his trousers. In all likelihood Clayton will have trouble with his trousers for the rest of his life. His stomach was so soft and large—no adjective seems big enough to describe its girth—that his trousers, of impressive dimensions to begin with, were not quite large enough to be pulled up high enough to prevent them from slipping down again. Clayton emerged from the airplane and waddled down the ramp, clasping his belt buckle, wrestling with it, trying to wiggle it over his considerable bulk. He was singing, ‘We’re so proud to be British.’ His eyes were closed, and his face was red, and he repeated his refrain over and over again, although nobody else was singing with him.

Mick was not far behind. He had finished his bottle of vodka and was drinking a can of Carlsberg Special Brew that he had snapped up from the drinks trolley as he bumped past it on his way out. On reaching the end of the ramp, Mick was greeted by Mr Wicks. Mick was confused. Mr Wicks did not look Italian. Mick paused, started to utter something, in the puffy, considered way that characterizes the speech of a man who has consumed a litre of spirits in the span of ninety minutes. And then Mick belched. It was a spectacular belch, long and terrible, a brutal, slow bursting of innumerable noxious gastric bubbles. It was a belch that invited speculation: about the beverages, the foods and the possible quantities that had contributed to a spray so powerful that it seemed to rise endlessly from deep within Mick’s tortured torso. But Mr Wicks was unflappable. He was happy to view Mick as no different from any other tourist who had found the excitement of air travel a bit much to contain comfortably. Clearly a diplomat through and through, Mr Wicks was not offended. I don’t think it was possible to offend Mr Wicks. He just smiled.

The others followed. They were also singing—on their own or arm in arm with friends—and their songs, like Clayton’s, were all about being English and what a fine thing that was. Something had happened to the group shortly after landing; there had been a definitive change. As the plane approached the terminal, someone had spotted the army: it was waiting for them, standing in formation.

The army!

This was not going to be an ordinary passage through passport control: the plane was about to be surrounded, not by the police—you could see them clustered near the loading ramp—but by a troop of Italian soldiers. The soldiers were funny-looking, according to Mick, who was sitting next to me. Actually the phrase he used was ‘fuckin’ poofters’. They wore strange uniforms and brightly-coloured berets; the soldiers were not English—that was the point; the soldiers were foreign.

The effect was immediate: these were no longer supporters of Manchester United; they were now defenders of the English nation. They had ceased to be Mancunians; in an instant, their origins had, blotter-like, spread from one dot on the map of the country to the entire map itself. They were now English: English and, apparently, dangerous. People stood up, while the plane was taxi-ing, amid protests from a stewardess to sit down again, and, as if on cue, began changing their clothes, switching their urban, weekday dress for a costume whose principal design was the Union Jack. All at once, heads and limbs began poking through Union Jack T-shirts and Union Jack swimming suits and one pair (worn unusually around the forehead) of Union Jack boxer shorts. The moment seemed curiously prepared for, as if it had been rehearsed. Meanwhile, everyone had started singing ‘Rule Britannia’—sharp, loud, spontaneous—and they sung it again, louder and louder, until finally, as the terminal grew near, it was not being sung but shouted:

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!

Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.

When Britain first, at Heaven’s command,

Arose from out the azure main,

When Britain first arose from out the azure main,

This was the charter, the charter of the land,

And heavenly angels sung the strain:

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!

Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!

Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!

The Italians, too, had changed their identity. They had ceased to be Italians: they were now ‘Eyeties’ and ‘wops’.

This was what Mr Wicks greeted, a man whose friendly relationship with reality I found to be intriguing. After all, here he was, having decided to meet an airplane full of supporters who, having been banned from the match that they were about to attend, were about to wreak crime and mayhem upon the city of Turin. What could he have done? It is easy to say after the event: he should have informed the civil aviation authorities that this particular charter flight must not be allowed to land and that everyone on it should be returned to Britain. That was what he should have done. But on what pretext could he have done such a thing? Mr Wicks’s alternative—the only one—was to declare his faith in the humanity of what came out of the airplane, even though such a declaration meant overlooking so many things—like Clayton or Mick or the Union Jack boxer shorts worn as a tribal head-dress or the expression of unequivocal terror on the eight flight attendants’ faces or the fact that by eleven-thirty in the morning 257 litres of eighty-proof spirits that had been purchased an hour and a half beforehand had already been consumed. ‘Everybody,’ Mr Wicks said, still smiling, as everybody came zig-zagging down the loading ramp, ‘everybody is here to have a good time.’

Everybody was here to have a good time, and everybody agreed. But where was the man in charge? Mr Wicks asked after Mr Robert Boss of the Bobby Boss Travel Agency, but no one could help. No one knew his whereabouts. For that matter, no one knew where we’d be staying or where we might find our tickets for the match. In fact, most people, including myself, were so grateful to have found a plane waiting for us at Manchester airport and so surprised that it had conveyed us to Italy that we weren’t in a great rush to ask more questions, fearing that by looking too closely at what we had it might all fall apart. It was better—and, after so much drink drunk so fast, easier—to believe that somehow it would all work out.

Then from the back of the plane emerged an attractive, chirpy woman with the bouncy cheerfulness of an American cheerleader. She introduced herself—‘Hi, I’m Jackie’—and announced that she was in charge and that everything was going to be fine. Jackie turned out to be a police cadet who had abandoned her training because she decided that she wanted to travel and see the world instead. She had met Bobby Boss at a party. He offered her the world—and this job. This trip to Turin, in the company of 257 football supporters, was her first time abroad. Jackie was twenty-two years old.

Mr Wicks was concerned.

What do you do, I wondered, when your instinct is telling you to arrest everyone, and your sense of justice is telling you that you can’t, and your mind, thoroughly confused, is telling you to smile a lot, and then you discover that in place of the person responsible for your predicament you have instead a twenty-two-year-old police drop-out surrounded by 257 drunken boys on her first time abroad?

What would you do?

What Mr Wicks did was this: still smiling, he confiscated everyone’s passport (the appearance of an American one, I would learn, raising the momentary fear that the CIA was involved). Mr Wicks appeared to be thinking that he might want to control who was allowed to leave. He wouldn’t—Mr Wicks would simply want everyone to leave—but that was later. At the time, Mr Wicks was trying to limit the consequences of what, in his heart of hearts, he must have known he could not prevent. He had prepared an information sheet of useful phone numbers arranged with an ominous sense of priorities. The number of the British Consulate was first, followed by the numbers of the police, the hospital, the ambulance service and, finally, the airport. Another sheet was filled with a number of damage-limiting phrases in Italian (‘Will you get a doctor quickly, please?’), and it closed with the wishful imperative that, now in a foreign country, each member of the group was to conduct himself as an ambassador for Britain, not something that the Claytons and the Micks or anyone else needed to be encouraged to do: their sense of Britishness, irrevocably intact, was verging on imperial. Mr Wicks led everyone in a schoolmasterly manner through passport control and then gathered them together for an old fashioned locker-room pep talk—they were all to be on their best behaviour—concluding with the disclosure that he had arranged a police escort. It consisted of four motorcycles and two squad cars for each of the four buses that were waiting outside. All this intelligent and careful work revealed a man of great forethought. Yet you could see in Mr Wicks’s eyes—as he stood in the shade of the terminal awning, all that tweed and education waving to us, as one by one each bus pulled out for the noisy drive into the city—that he had failed. Something very terrible was about to happen, and it would somehow be his fault. There was the realization—his face seemed to convey the pain and the regret of it—that he had just granted freedom to a body of unusual beings, beings who should be treated in a humane fashion (fed, viewed, appreciated with affection) but who should never have been allowed to enter the city of Turin. Never. Not even on a leash. Or in a cage. And yet, optimist to the end, Mr Wicks was still smiling.

A police escort is an exhilarating thing. I felt it to be exhilarating. I didn’t particularly like the idea that I did, but I couldn’t deny that I was sharing something of the experience of those around me, who, their shouting momentarily muted by the deafening sound, now felt themselves to be special people. After all, who is given a police escort? Prime ministers, presidents, the Pope—and English football supporters. By the time the buses reached the city—although there was little traffic, the sirens had been turned on the moment we left the parking lot—the status of their occupants had been enlarged immeasurably. Each intersection we passed was blocked with cars and onlookers. People had gathered on every street, wondering what all the fuss was about, wanting to get a look, and several blocks ahead you could see more people, bigger crowds, more congestion. The sound of twenty sirens is hard to miss. Who in the city of Turin could not have known that the English had arrived?

The English themselves, moved by the effect they were having, started to sing, which they managed to do more loudly than the brain-penetrating sirens that heralded their entrance into the city. To sing so powerfully was no small achievement, although to describe the noise that emerged from the bus as singing is to misrepresent it. One song was ‘England’. This was repeated over and over again. There were no more words. Another, more sophisticated, was based on the tune of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’. Its words were:

Glory, glory, Man United

Glory, glory, Man United

Glory, glory, Man United

Yours troops are marching on! on! on!

Each ‘on’ was grunted a bit more emphatically than the one before, accompanied by a gesture involving the familiar upturned two fingers. There was an especially simple tune, ‘Fuck the Pope’—simple because the words consisted exclusively of the following: Fuck the Pope. ‘Fuck the Pope’ was particularly popular, and, despite the sirens and speed, at least two buses (the one I was in and the one behind us) succeeded in chanting ‘Fuck the Pope’ in some kind of unison.

I noticed Clayton. He was several rows in front. Somehow Clayton, like an unwieldy lorry, had reversed himself into a position in which the opened window by his seat was filled by his suddenly exposed and very large buttocks—his trousers, this time, deliberately gathered round his knees, the cheeks of his suddenly exposed and very large buttocks clasped firmly in each hand and spread apart. Just behind him was a fellow who was urinating through his window. People were standing on the seats, jerking their fists up and down, while screaming profanities at pedestrians, police, children—any and all Italians.

Then someone lobbed a bottle.

It was bound to happen. There were bottles rolling around on the floor or being passed from person to person, and it was inevitable that, having tried everything else—obscene chants, abuse, peeing—someone would go that much further and pick up one of the empty bottles and hurl it at an Italian. Even so, the use of missiles of any kind was a significant escalation, and there was the sense, initially at least, that bottle-throwing was ‘out of order’.

‘What the fuck did you do that for?’ someone shouted, angry, but not without a sense of humour. ‘What are you, some kind of hooligan?’

A meaningful threshold had been crossed. Moments later there was the sound of another bottle breaking. And a second, and a third, and then bottles started flying out of most windows—of each of the four buses.

I wondered: if I had been a citizen of Turin, what would I have made of all this?

After all, here I’d be, at the foot of the Alps, in one of the most northern regions of Italy, surrounded by an exquisite, historic brick architecture, a city of churches and squares and arcades and cafés, a civilized city, an intellectual city, the heart of the Communist Party, the home of Primo Levi and other writers and painters, and, during my lunch hour, when perhaps I, a Juventus supporter like everyone else, had gone out to pick up my ticket for the match that evening, I heard this powerful sound, the undulating whines of multiple sirens. Were they ambulances? Had there been a disaster? All around me people would have stopped and would be craning their necks, shielding their eyes from the sun, until finally, in the distance we would have spotted the oscillating blue and white lights of the approaching police. And when they passed—one, two, three, four buses—would my response be nothing more than one of fascination, as in the window of each bus, I would see faces of such terrible aggression—remarkable aggression, intense, inexplicably vicious? Perhaps my face would be splattered by the spray of someone’s urine. Perhaps I would have to jump out of the way of a bottle being hurled at my head. And perhaps, finally, I would have responded in the manner chosen by one Italian lad, who, suddenly the target of an unforeseen missile, simply answered in kind: he hurled a stone back.

The effect on those inside the buses was immediate. To be, suddenly, the target came as a terrible shock. The incredulity was immense: ‘Those bastards,’ one of the supporters exclaimed, ‘are throwing stones at the windows,’ and the look on his face conveyed such urgent dismay that you could only agree that a stone-throwing Italian was a very bad person indeed. The presumption—after all a window could get broken and someone might get hurt—was deeply offensive, and everyone became very, very angry. Looking around me, I realized that I was no longer surrounded by raving, hysterically nationalistic social deviants; I was now surrounded by raving, hysterically nationalist social deviants in a frenzy. They were wild, and anything that came to hand—bottles, jars of peanuts, fruit, cartons of juice, anything—was summarily hurled through the windows. ‘Those bastards,’ the lad next to me said, teeth clenched, lobbing an unopened beer can at a cluster of elderly men in dark jackets. ‘Those bastards.’

Everyone was now very excited. But no one was more excited than our bus driver. Amid all this, few people had noticed that our bus driver had been rendered insane.

I had been nervous about the bus driver for some time. Since entering the city, he had been trying to bring everyone to order. He could see what was going on in the large rear-view mirror above his head. He tried dealing with his passengers diplomatically: he had no reason to believe that they were, in any fundamental sense, different from others he had driven before. But his request for order was ignored. And so he remonstrated. He appealed with his hands, his face, his whole body, as if to say, ‘Please, there are laws and we must obey them.’ This time, he was not ignored, but the response was not the desired one. The entire bus, which had been singing something about the Falklands or Britannia or the Queen, started chanting in unison that the driver should fuck himself. They then changed languages and said the same, more or less, in Italian.

I did not think this was a good idea. I cannot begin to convey the strength of my feeling. After all, the driver was just trying to do his job. Our lives were in his hands. In fact, our lives were literally in his hands. And it was with those hands that he expressed his unhappiness.

What he wanted, I suspect, was to stop the bus and order everyone off. He’d had enough. But he couldn’t stop because he had three other coaches hurtling at top speed behind him. Nor could he go any faster because he had two motorcycle policemen in front. Unable to go forwards or backwards, he expressed his rage by going sideways: by swinging the steering-wheel violently to the left, to the right and then back again. Those lads perched atop the seats found that they were not perched atop anything at all. Very few of us were: so violent were the driver’s movements that most of the slippery vinyl seats were emptied. Jackie, our twenty-two-year-old caretaker, had stood up and turned, with school-matronly authority, to reprimand her unruly following, but when she opened her mouth a strange, incomprehensible gurgling came out and then she, like everyone else, was catapulted off her feet. The interesting thing about the driver’s rage was that the act of venting it seemed to increase it, as if expressing his anger showed him how really angry he was. His face started changing colour—it was now a very deep red—when he swung the steering-wheel again, and we lurched to the left, and then again swung it to the right, and back we tumbled. I feared, watching the terrible chromatic display across his features, that something was about to burst. I feared that his heart would seize up and, mid-way through another lurching swing of the steering-wheel, he would clutch his chest, leaving the bus to spin into the oncoming traffic.

And then: a rainbow. The streets, which had been getting tighter and tighter, opened, at last, on to a square: Piazza San Carlo. Light, air, the sky, and the bus slowly, undeniably, coming to rest. We had arrived.

More to the point: we were not dead, or, rather, I was not dead. We had survived the drive from the airport. As we were disembarking, the supporter ahead of me turned, just before stepping off the bus, and shouted at the driver: that had been completely out of order. And then, drawing deep from within his sinuses, he spat into the driver’s face, and missed, leaving a drooping wet, elastic ball dripping from his shoulder.

And so four coaches of supporters arrived to attend the match that they had been banned from attending only to discover that many people had got there before them. Where had they come from? The square was packed. As we pulled in, someone waved to us, one hand wild above his head, the other clinging to his penis, urinating into a fountain. There could be no doubt about his nationality, or, for that matter, any of the others’, familiar bloated examples of an island race who, sweltering under the warm Italian sun, had taken off their shirts, a great, fatty manifestation of the history of pub opening hours, of gallons and gallons of lager and incalculable quantities of bacon-flavoured crisps. They were singing: ‘Manchester, la-la-la, Manchester, la-la-la.’ They had the appearance of people who had been at the square, singing and drinking and urinating into the fountain, for many days. The pavement was covered with large empty bottles.

There was some confusion about where we were meant to be staying. Four hotels had been booked, and, while Jackie was trying to sort out who was meant to be where, flipping through the correspondence on her clipboard, she was interrupted by a terrible howl.

A woman dressed in black rushed out into the street and started wailing. Nobody could understand what she was saying, except the police—the police were everywhere—and five of them followed the woman back into one of the hotels. You could still hear her howling as she ascended the stairs inside. Jackie had stopped flipping through her correspondence and her face had assumed an uncertain shape. It was flattened as though she had been punched. It was a face—experiencing some kind of pre-verbal dread—that was trying to figure out how to express itself. You could tell that, although she didn’t know what would happen next, she should have a response prepared beforehand.

I don’t know how it had been done so quickly, but, shortly after arriving, several supporters had broken into the rooms on the hotel’s second floor. Within minutes, they had gone through eight rooms, popping open the doors, dumping drawers on the floor, turning out the closets, looking for cash, traveller’s cheques, airline tickets, jewellery. Only one supporter was caught—unable to resist lingering to make a long-distance phone call—and as the police reappeared, culprit in hand, Jackie marched up to him. Before her was a young man, ostensibly her responsibility, whose arms had been twisted behind his back by two policemen. Next to him was the woman in black. She was the manager of the hotel. She was no longer howling; she was also no longer honouring Jackie’s booking. Then there was Jackie’s clipboard, thick with correspondence, which, while all this was going on, continued in its failure to reveal where everyone was meant to be staying, even if the woman in black would accept them. And finally, diminishing the importance of her clipboard and the answers that it may or may not have yielded up, there was virtually no one else in sight. Room or no room, most supporters, having grown restless watching the party on the square, had vanished.

I spotted Mick who, ever vigilant, had discovered the place to buy cheap beer very cheaply, and who, ever generous, appeared with three two-litre bottles of lager, including one for me. Then Mick made for the middle of the throng, shouting ‘C’mon, you Reds’—red for the red of Manchester United’s Red Devils—and he, too, vanished, only his upturned two-litre bottle remaining visible above everyone’s heads.

The throng itself was something to behold. The flesh exposed was your standard, assembly-line, grey-weather English flesh—bright pink, therefore, and burning rapidly—except in this one respect: everybody had a tattoo. And not just a tattoo, but many tattoos. They had tattoos in the places where you expect to find them—on the forearms, say, or the biceps—and everywhere else as well: on their foreheads, or behind their ears, or on the backs of their hands. Some had tattoos up and down the full length of their backs. These were not ordinary tattoos; these were murals on the flesh. There was one fellow who was a billboard for Manchester United Football Club. Looking at him, you could only conclude that this was what he had decided his function in life would be; it was his career. Every centimetre of his back had been given over to variations on the satanic theme suggested by the team name. On the lower part of his back were two red devils. They were drawn in great detail, with tails, fangs, forked tongues and pitchforks. Above the pitchforks, climbing up the spine and fanning across it, was an abundance of flames. Above the flames, around the upper shoulders, were famous players from other teams: you could see that they were meant to be tumbling from the sky (the clouds climbed into the neck) on their way to the hell below. It was narrative art of a sort, and hard not to admire the commitment.

It was also hard not to wonder about the person who would do this to his body. Getting a tattoo is a painful experience, a hot needle poking its way across the surface of the skin, filling up the cells underneath with ink. The pain, however—the blood that comes bubbling up, the rawness—goes away; the result, until it fades in late middle age or is eradicated by surgery, lasts for ever. All around I saw metres and metres of skin that had been stained with these totemic pledges of permanence. In addition to the cinematic display on this one fellow’s back, there was a tattooed neck, encircled with the neatly proportioned letters, M-A-N-C-H-E-S-T-E-R U-N-I-T-E-D. There was a pair of tattooed nipples—they served as the eyes for the head of an especially ornate red devil (spreading across the chest and stomach). And there was a tattooed forehead imprinted with the name ‘Bryan Robson’, in honour of the Manchester United midfield player (and in the hope, perhaps, that Robson would neither be traded to another football club nor ever die).

I wandered round the square. I was not uncomfortable, mainly because I had decided that I wasn’t going to allow myself to be uncomfortable. If I had allowed myself to be uncomfortable then it would follow that I would start to feel ridiculous and ask myself questions like: why am I here? Now that the journey to Turin was properly completed, I had, I realized, done little more than gawk and drink. Mick had disappeared, although I thought I could pick out his bellowing amid the noise around me. Apart from him, however, I knew nobody. Here I was, my little black notebook hidden away in my back trouser pocket, hoping to come up with a way of ingratiating myself into a group that, from what I could see, was not looking for new members. For a moment I had the unpleasant experience of seeing myself as I must have appeared: as an American who had made a long journey to Italy that he shouldn’t have known about so that he could stand alone in the middle of what was by now several hundred Manchester United supporters who all knew each other, had probably known each other for years, were accustomed to travelling many miles to meet every week and who spoke with the same thick accent, drank the same thick beer and wore many of the same preposterous, vaguely designed, Top Man clothes.

What was worse, word had got round that I was in Turin to write about the supporters—a piece of news that few had found particularly attractive. Two people came up and told me that they never read the Express (the Express?) and that when they did they found only rubbish in it. When I tried to explain that I wasn’t writing for the Express, I could see that they didn’t believe me or—a more unpleasant prospect—thought that, therefore, I must be writing for the Sun. Another, speaking sotto voce, tried to sell me his story (‘The Star’s already offered me a thousand quid’). In its way this was a positive development, except that someone else appeared and started jabbing me vigorously in the chest: You don’t look like a reporter. Where was my notebook? Where was my camera? What’s an American doing here anyway?

There had been other journalists. In Valencia, a Spanish television crew had offered ten pounds to any supporter who was prepared to throw stones, while jumping up and down and shouting dirty words. At Portsmouth, someone had appeared from the Daily Mail, working ‘undercover’, wearing a bomber jacket and Doc Marten boots, but, he was chased away by the supporters: it was pointed out that no one had worn a bomber jacket and a pair of Doc Marten boots for about ten years, except for an isolated number of confused Chelsea fans. And last year, in Barcelona there was a journalist from the Star. His was the story that I found most compelling. He had been accepted by most members of the group, but had then kept asking them about the violence. This, I was told, just wasn’t done. When is it going to go off? he would ask. Is it going to go off now? Will it go off tonight? No doubt he had a deadline and a features editor waiting for his copy. When the violence did occur, he ran, which was not unreasonable: he could get hurt. In the supporters’ eyes, however, he had done something very bad: he had—in their inimitable phrasing—‘shitted himself’. When he returned to complete his story, he was set upon. But they didn’t stab him. He wasn’t disfigured in any lasting way.

The story about the Star journalist was not particularly reassuring—so great, they didn’t stab him; lucky reporter—and I made a mental note not to shit myself under any circumstances. Even so, the story revealed an important piece of information.

Until then, everyone I had spoken to went out of his way to establish that, while he might look like a hooligan, he was not one in fact. He was a football supporter. True: if someone was going to pick a fight, he wasn’t going to run—he was English, wasn’t he?—but he wouldn’t go looking for trouble. Everyone was there for the laugh and the trip abroad and the drink and the football.

I did not want to hear this. And when I heard it, I refused to believe it. I had to. The fact was that I had come to Italy to see trouble. It was expensive and time-consuming, and that was why I was there. I didn’t encourage it—I wasn’t in the position to do so—and I wasn’t admitting my purpose to anyone I met. I may not have been admitting it to myself. But that was why I was there, prepared to stand on my own with five hundred people staring at me wondering what I was doing. I was waiting for them to be bad. I wanted to see violence. And the fact that the Star journalist had witnessed some, that it had finally ‘gone off’, suggested I might be in the right spot after all.

Violence or no violence, mine was not an attractive moral position. It was, however, an easy one, and it consisted in this: not thinking. As I entered this experience, I made a point of removing moral judgement, like a coat. With all the drink and the luxurious Italian sun, I wouldn’t need it. Once or twice, facing the spectacle of the square, the thought occurred to me that I should be appalled. If I had been British I might have been. I might have felt the burden of that peculiar nationalist liability that assumes you are responsible for everyone from your own country (‘I was ashamed to be British’—or French or German or American). But I’m not British. Mick and his friends and I were not of the same kind. And although I might have felt that I should be appalled, the fact was: I wasn’t. I was fascinated.

And I wasn’t alone.

A group of Italians had gathered near the square. I walked over to them. There were about a hundred, who, afraid of getting too close, had huddled together, staring and pointing. Their faces all had the same look of incredulity. They had never seen people act in this way. It was inconceivable that an Italian, visiting a foreign city, would spend hours in one of its principal squares, drinking and barking and pecing and shouting and sweating and slapping his belly. Could you imagine a busload from Milan parading round Trafalgar Square showing off their tattoos? ‘Why do you English behave like this?’ one Italian asked me, believing that I was of the same nationality. ‘Is it something to do with being an island race? Is it because you don’t feel European?’ He looked confused; he looked like he wanted to help. ‘Is it because you lost the Empire?’

I didn’t know what to say. Why were these people behaving in this way? And who were they doing it for? It would make sense to think that they were performing for the benefit of the Italians looking on—the war dance of the invading barbarians from the north and all that—but it seemed to me that they were performing solely for themselves. Over the last hour or so, I could see that the afternoon was turning into a highly patterned thing.

It looked something like this: once a supporter arrived, he wandered round, usually with a friend, periodically bellowing or bumping into things or joining in on a song. Then a mate would be spotted and they would greet each other. The greeting was achieved through an exchange of loud, incomprehensible noises. A little later they would spot another mate (more noise) and another (more noise), until finally there were enough people—five, six, sometimes ten—to form a circle. Then, as though responding to a toast, they would all drink from a very large bottle of very cheap lager or a very large bottle of very cheap red wine. This was done at an exceptional speed, and the drink spilled down their faces and on to their necks and down their chests, which, already quite sticky and beading with perspiration, glistened in the sun. A song followed. From time to time, during a particularly important refrain, each member of the circle squatted slightly, clenching his fists at his sides, as if, poised so, he was able to sing the particular refrain with the extra oomph that it required. The posture was not unlike shitting in public. And then the very large bottle with its very cheap contents was drunk again.

The circle broke up and the cycle was repeated. It was repeated again. And again. All around the square, little clusters of fat, sticky men were bellowing at each other.

Near me was a Mick look-alike, a walrus of a fellow with a Wild Bill Hickock moustache. In the middle of his great billboard chest was suspended a tiny black object, like a piece of punctuation. It was a camera. He was wobbling slightly and, thus, with some difficulty, taking a picture. He was concentrating very hard. I couldn’t tell what he was photographing. It appeared to be his feet. I tried to make conversation of a sort.

I asked him why he was taking photographs. I was trying to work out why these people had to come all this way, at such expense, to do the things I saw them doing. Drinking large quantities of cheap beer. Endlessly singing English football songs. Photographing their feet. Couldn’t this sort of thing be done at home? After all, the match that evening would be on television.

He said that he was taking pictures so that he would have something to remember the trip by.

It’s a holiday, innit? he said.

I asked him if he could tell me where we were.

Italy, he said. We’re in Italy; and then adding, as though for clarification: Fuckin’ Eyeties.

I said, of course, of course, I knew we were in Italy. But did he know where in Italy?

Juventus, he said after a pause, suspecting a trick question. And then he added, again, as though to reinforce the authority of the statement: Fuckin’ Eyeties.

The city of Juventus? I asked.

Fuckin’ right, he said. Pause. Fuckin’ Eyeties.

I pointed out that Juventus was not the name of a city; it was the name of a football club—Juventus of Torino—but perhaps I failed to convey my point clearly enough. In any event, he was not representative: most people I met knew where they were. But he was typical in that, like him, everyone had a camera. People may have thought a change of clothing or a toothbrush was unnecessary, but no one came without a camera. The trip to Turin was about much more than football; it was a journey, an adventure, a once-in-a-lifetime thing: an excursion so special that everyone had to have snaps to commemorate it. I thought: this is a parody of the holiday abroad. Except that it wasn’t a parody. This was the holiday abroad. Their dads, they kept telling me, never had a chance to see the world like this.

And yet what was this world? Earlier, on the plane, I had watched a cluster of supporters looking at the photographs from the last trip. It seemed to be a routine, en route to the next stop on the European tour, to review the pictures from the last one. The pictures might have been from Luxembourg. On the other hand, they could have been taken in Barcelona. Or Budapest. Or Valencia. Or Paris or Madrid or even Rio or any one of the many foreign cities visited by the banned Manchester United supporters in the last couple of years. The point was: it didn’t matter. Each photograph, if not of a duty-free shop, depicted the same pose in one of three possible stages: three or four lads (frequently the same three or four lads) having (one) just avoided falling, or (two) on the verge of falling, or (three) having just fallen, flat on their faces.

Mick reappeared and pointed to the far end of the square, where a silver Mercedes was moving slowly through a street crowded with supporters, Italian onlookers and police. The driver, in a shiny purple track suit, was a black man with a round fleshy face and a succession of double chins. In the back seat were two others, both black. One, I would learn, was named Tony Roberts. The other was Roy Downes.

Roy had arrived at last.

No one had mentioned Tony to me before, but he was impossible to forget once you saw him. He was thin and tall—he towered above everyone else—and had an elaborate, highly styled haircut. The fact was Tony looked exactly like Michael Jackson. Even the colour of his skin was Michael Jackson’s. For a brief electric instant—the silver Mercedes, the driver, the ceremony of the arrival—I thought Tony was Michael Jackson. What a discovery: to learn that Michael Jackson, that little red devil, was actually a fan of Manchester United. But, then, alas, yes, I could see that: no, Tony was not Michael Jackson. Tony was only someone who had spent a lot of time and money trying to look like Michael Jackson.

There was Tony’s wardrobe. This is what I saw of it during his stay in Turin (approximately thirty hours):

One: a pale yellow jump suit, light and casual and worn for comfort during the long hours in the Mercedes.

Two: a pastel-blue T-shirt (was there silk in the mix?), a straw hat and cotton trousers, his ‘early summer’ costume, worn when he briefly appeared on the square around four o’clock.

Three: his leather look (lots of studs), chosen for the match.

Four: a light woollen jacket (chartreuse) with complementary olive-green trousers for later in the evening, when everyone gathered at a bar.

Five: and finally, another travel outfit for the return trip (a pink cotton track suit with pink trainers).

Later, during the leather phase, I asked Tony what he did for a living, and he said only that he sometimes ‘played the ticket game’: large-scale touting, buying up blocks of seats for pop concerts or the sporting events at Wimbledon and Wembley and selling them on at inflated prices. I heard also that he was, from time to time, a driver for Hurricane Higgins, the snooker star; that he was a jazz-dancer; that he had ‘acted’ in some porn films. His profession, I suspect, was the same as that of so many of the others, a highly lucrative career of doing ‘this and that’, and it wasn’t worth looking too deeply into what constituted either the ‘this’ or the ‘that’.

Roy Downes was different. Ever since Mick had mentioned Roy, I had been trying to find out as much about him as I could. I had learned that he had just finished a two-year prison sentence in Bulgaria, where he had been arrested before the match between Manchester United and Leviski Spartak (having just cracked the hotel safe) and that, ever since, people said he wasn’t the same: that Roy had become serious, that he never laughed, that he rarely spoke. I had heard that Roy always had money—rolls and rolls of twenty- and fifty-pound notes. That he had a flat in London, overlooking the river. That he saw his matches from the seats and never stood in the terraces with the other supporters, and that he got his tickets free from the players. That he was a lounge lizard: the best place to leave messages for Roy was Stringfellows, a basement bar and night-club on Upper St Martin’s Lane in London, with Bob Hoskins bouncers in dinner-jackets, and lots of chrome and mirrors and a small dance floor filled, on the wintry Tuesday night when I later went there (perhaps an off night), with sagging men who had had too much to drink and young secretaries in tight black skirts. (I was let in, stepping past the bouncers and into a bad black-and-white movie, having said—with a straight face—that Roy sent me.)

I couldn’t get anybody to tell me what Roy did. Maybe they didn’t know or didn’t need to know. Or maybe they all knew and didn’t want to say. After all, how many of your friends can pick a safe?

Actually I did know one other thing about Roy, but at the time I didn’t know that I knew it. I had told a friend about getting caught up in a football train in Wales, and he mentioned an incident he had witnessed that same month. He had been travelling from Manchester, in a train already filled with supporters. When it stopped at Stoke-on-Trent, more fans rushed into his carriage. They were from West Ham and, shouting, ‘Kill the nigger cunts,’ they set upon two blacks who were sitting nearby. My friend could see only the backs of the West Ham supporters, their arms rising in the air and then crashing down again, the two blacks somewhere in the middle, when he. heard: ‘They’ve got a stick, kill the bastards’—the stick evidently referring to a table leg that one of the blacks had managed to break off to defend himself. By the time my friend ran off to find a member of the Transport Police, there was blood on the floor and the seats and some was splattered across the windows. One of the blacks had had his face cut up. But it was the other one they were after. He was stabbed repeatedly—once in the lower chest, a few inches below his heart. A finger was broken, his forehead badly slashed and several of his ribs were fractured. The list of injuries is taken from the ‘Statement of Witness’ that my friend prepared, and on it are the victims’ names, meaningful to me only when I returned from Italy. They were Anthony Roberts and Roy Downes. Roy had been the one they were after, the one who had been repeatedly stabbed.

Roy’s car drove round the square, with him waving from the window like a politician, and disappeared. When I spotted him again, about an hour later, Roy was standing on one of the balconies, arms apart, leaning on the rail, surveying the supporters below. He was small but muscular—wiry, lean—and good looking, with strong features and very black skin. He looked, as I had been led to expect, grim and serious. What he saw on the square below him seemed to make him especially grim and serious. In fact he was so grim and serious that I thought it might have been just a little overdone. He looked like he had chosen to be grim and serious in the way that you might pick out a particular article of clothing in the morning; it was what he had decided on instead of wearing red.

It was not an opportunity to miss, and I bounced up the stairs and introduced myself. I was writing a book; I would love to chat. I babbled away—friendly, Californian, with a cheerful, gosh-isn’t-the-world-a-wonderful-place kind of attitude, until finally Roy, who did not look up from the square, asked me to Shut up, please. There was, please, no need to talk so much: he already knew all about me.

No one had told me to shut up before. How did he know whatever it was he knew? I suppose I was impressed. This was a person for whom style was no small thing.

Roy, at any rate, wasn’t having a lot to do with me, despite my good efforts. These efforts, painful to recall, went something like this.

After expressing my surprise that I was a person worth knowing anything about, I, bubbling and gurgling away, suggested that Roy and I get a drink.

Roy, still surveying the square, pointed out that he didn’t drink.

That was fine, I said, carrying on, cheerful to the end: Then perhaps, after his long journey, he might be interested in joining me for a bite to eat.

No.

Right, I said, a little tic I had developed for responding to a situation that was not right but manifestly wrong. I pulled out a pack of cigarettes—I wanted badly to smoke—while taking in the scene below us: there was Mick, standing by himself, a large bottle of something in one hand and a large bottle of something else in the other, singing ‘C’mon, you, Reds,’ bellowing it, unaccompanied, his face deeply coloured, walking round and round in a circle.

I offered Roy a cigarette.

Roy didn’t smoke.

Right, I said, scrutinizing the scene below us with more attention, pointing out how everyone was having such a jolly good time, to which Roy, of course, did not reply. In fact the scene below us was starting to look like a satanic Mardi Gras. There must have been about eight hundred people, and the noise they were making—the English with their songs; the Italians with their cars, horns blaring—was very loud. In normal circumstances, the noise was so loud it would have made conversation difficult. In my current circumstances, nothing could have made conversation any worse.

I carried on. Whatever came into my head found itself leaving my mouth, with or without an exclamatory Right!: I talked about football, Bryan Robson, the Continental style—in fact about many things I knew little about—until finally, after a brief aside about something completely inconsequential, I tried to talk to Roy about Roy. I don’t recall what I said next; actually I fear I do, which is worse, because I think it was something about Roy’s being both black and short and what a fine thing that was to be. And then I paused. The pause I remember precisely because at the end of it Roy looked at me for the first time. I thought he was going to spit. But he didn’t. What he did was this: he walked away.

With a slight swagger, hands in his pockets, Clint Eastwood had just strolled off and disappeared down the stairs and walked out of my story.

I wasn’t cut out to be a journalist.

I looked to Mick for reassurance, but I wasn’t reassured. Mick was an unfortunate sight. He had stopped walking in circles, folded up and fallen asleep. Everyone was singing and shouting around him, but he slept on, undisturbed and blissfully imperturbable, head resting on his forearm, his mouth open and loose. There was no point in waking him, even if it had been possible to do so.

It was time I met more people. I hadn’t got through to Roy. Maybe I would later. Maybe it didn’t matter. I had had so many I-am-not-going-to-think-about-why-I-am-here lagers that I didn’t care if people were going to talk to me. The choices were not complicated: either I would find myself in conversation; or I would find myself not in conversation.

I found myself neither in conversation nor not in conversation but looking into a particularly ugly mouth. I can’t recall how I arrived before this mouth—zig-zagging across the square—but once in its presence I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

In it, there were many gaps, the raw rim of the gums showing where once there must have been teeth. Of the teeth still intact, many were chipped or split; none was straight: they appeared to have grown up at odd, unconventional angles or (more likely) been redirected by a powerful physical influence at some point in their career. All of them were highly coloured—deep brown or caked with yellow or, like a pea soup, mushy-green and vegetable-soft with decay. This was a mouth that had suffered many slings and arrows along with the occasional thrashing and several hundredweight of tobacco and Cadbury’s milk chocolate. This was a mouth through which a great deal of life had passed at, it would appear, an uncompromising speed.

The mouth belonged to Gurney. Mick had told me about Gurney. What he hadn’t told me about was the power of Gurney’s unmitigated ugliness. It was ugliness on a scale that elicited concern: I kept wanting to offer him things—the telephone number of my dentist or a blanket to cover his head. It was hard not to stare at Gurney. Gurney was one of the older supporters and was well into his thirties. He was looked up to, I discovered, by the younger lads. I never understood why they looked up to him or what they hoped to find when they did. He was balding and unshaven and, having taken off his shirt, you could follow the rivulets of perspiration down his torso. He had been travelling for several days and was covered by a dark film that clogged up and discoloured the pores in his skin.

Gurney was another leader. How many leaders could there be? This was turning into a ruling party committee, but Gurney was different from the other putative generals in that his following was geographically specific. It was called the Cockney Reds—the ‘London branch’ of the Manchester United supporters. Like Roy, Gurney didn’t trust me, at least initially, but I was getting used to not being trusted. In Gurney’s case, I was grateful: more trusting and he might have proposed something unsavoury, like shaking my hand. His cockney followers were less suspicious. When I came upon them, they were in the middle of singing one of those songs (squatting slightly). They were in good spirits and, straightaway, started questioning me.

No, I wasn’t from the Express—I had never read the Express.

Yes, I was here to write about football supporters.

Yes, I know you are not hooligans.

What was I doing here, then? Well, that was obvious, wasn’t it? I was here to get very, very pissed.

And, with that, I had become one of them, or enough of one of them for them to feel comfortable telling me stories. They wanted me to understand how they were organized: it was the ‘structure’ that was important to understand.

There were, it was explained, different kinds of Manchester United supporters, and it was best to think of each kind as belonging to one of a series of concentric circles. The largest circle was very large: in it you would find all the supporters of Manchester United, which, as everyone kept telling me, was one of the best-supported teams in English football, with crowds regularly in excess of 40,000.

Within that large circle, however, there were smaller ones. In the first were the members of the official Manchester United Supporters’ Club—at its peak more than 20,000. The official Manchester United Supporters Club, started in the seventies, hired trains from British Rail—‘football specials’—for conveying fans to the matches, produced a regular magazine, required annual dues and in general kept the ‘good’ supporters informed of developments in the club and tried to keep the ‘bad’ supporters from ever learning about them.

In the second circle was the unofficial supporters’ club, the ‘bad’ supporters: the ‘firm’.

The firm was divided between those who lived in Manchester and those who did not. Those who did not came from just about everywhere in the British Isles—Newcastle, Bolton, Glasgow, Southampton, Sunderland: these people were the Inter-City Jibbers. Mick had mentioned them: they got their name from taking only the Inter-City fast commuter trains and never the football specials hired by the official supporters’ club.

The Inter-City Jibbers themselves were also divided, between those who were not from London and those who were: the Cockney Reds.

I remembered Mick’s account of being on the jib. I had much to learn, and most of it I would learn the next day on my return to England. But initially I was sceptical. How was it possible that so many people could travel on the jib? From what I understood about travelling on the jib, it meant not only not paying but actually making money as well.

Roars of laughter followed. Being on the jib was very simple, I was told, and involved no more than defeating the Hector. The Hector was the British Rail ticket-collector, and at the mention of the Hector, everyone started singing the Hector song:

Ha ha ha

He he he

The Hector’s coming

But he can’t catch me.

On the racks

Under the seats

Into the bogs

The Hector’s coming

But he can’t catch me.

Ha ha ha

He he he

The ICJ is on the jib again

Having a really g-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-d time.

There were tricks: passing one good ticket between members of a group, making the sound of endless vomiting while hiding in the loo, pretending not to understand English. It was Gurney’s ploy to engage the ticket-collector in a battle of wills, giving him everything but a ticket: a sandwich, a cigarette, the ash tray, his shoe, a sock, then his other sock, bits of dirt scraped from beneath his toe-nails, his shirt, the darkly coloured lint from his navel, his belt until—the final destination getting closer the longer the exchange went on—the ticket-collector, fed up, got on with the rest of his job. The ICJ had learned two principles about human nature—especially human nature as it had evolved in Britain.

The first was that no public functionary, and certainly not one employed by British Rail or London Transport, wants a difficult confrontation—there is little pride in a job that the functionary believes to be underpaid and knows to be unrewarding and that he wants to finish so that he can go home.

The second principle was the more important: everyone—including the police—is powerless against a large number of people who have decided not to obey any rules. Or put another way: with numbers there are no laws.

It is easy to imagine the situation. You’re there, working by yourself at the ticket booth of an Underground station, and two hundred supporters walk past you without paying. What do you do? Or you’re working the cash register in a small food shop—one room, two refrigerators, three aisles—and you look up and see that, out of nowhere, hundreds of lads are crowding through your door, pushing and shoving and shouting, until there is no room to move, and that each one is filling his pockets with crisps, meat pies, beer, biscuits, nuts, dried fruit, eggs (for throwing), milk, sausage rolls, litre-bottles of Coke, red wine, butter (for throwing), white wine, Scotch eggs, bottles of retsina, apples, yoghurt (for throwing), oranges, chocolates, bottles of cider, sliced ham, mayonnaise (for throwing) until there is very little remaining on your shelves. What do you do? Tell them to stop? Stand in the doorway? You call the police but as the supporters pour out through the door—eggs, butter, yoghurt and mayonnaise already flying through the air, splattering against your front window, the pavement outside, the cars in the parking lot, amid chants of ‘Food fight! Food fight!’—they split up, some going to the left, others to the right, everybody disappearing. (Later, I would travel to Brussels where a café-owner, confronted with the arrogance of numbers—in this case, a group from Tottenham who, after eating the café-owner’s food, drinking his beer and breaking his furniture, walked out without paying—responded in kind. He answered irrationality with irrationality, rule-breaking with rule-breaking, pulled out a shotgun hidden underneath the counter and shot a supporter dead—the wrong supporter, as it turned out; one who had paid his bill.)

Gurney and his crew had arrived in Turin by a large minibus that they had hired in London. The bus was called ‘Eddie’; the group was called Eddie and the Forty Thieves.

Forty Thieves?

They explained. Their adventures began in Calais. At the first bar they entered, the cashier was on a lunch break, and they popped open a cash register with an umbrella and came away with 4,000 francs. They carried on, travelling south and then along the French coast, robbing a succession of small shops on the way, never paying for petrol or food, entering and leaving restaurants en masse, always on the look-out ‘for a profit’. I noticed that each member of the Eddie-and-the-Forty-Thieves team was wearing sun-glasses—filched, I was told, from a French petrol station that had a sideline in tourist goods that, it would appear, also included brightly-coloured Marilyn Monroe T-shirts. All of them were wearing Rolex watches.

Most of the supporters on the square had not been on the plane. How had they got here?

They went through a list.

Daft Donald hadn’t made it. He had been arrested in Nice (stealing from a clothing shop), and, proving his nickname, was found to be in possession of one can of mace, eighteen Stanley knives (they fell out when he was searched) and a machete.

Robert the Sneak Thief had been delayed—his ferry had been turned back following a fight with Nottingham Forest fans—but he had got a flight to Nice and would be coming by taxi.

A taxi from Nice to Turin?

Robert, I was told, always had money (if you see what I mean), and, although I didn’t entirely (see what he meant), I didn’t have the chance to find out more because they were well down their list.

Sammy? (‘Not here but he won’t miss Juventus.’ ‘Sammy? Impossible.’)

Mad Harry? (‘Getting too old.’)

Teapot? (‘Been here since Friday.’)

Berlin Red? (‘Anybody seen Berlin Red?’)

Scotty? (‘Arrested last night.’)

Barmy Bernie? (‘Inside.’ ‘Barmy Bernie is inside again?’) Whereupon there followed the long, moving story of Barmy Bernie, who, with twenty-seven convictions, had such a bad record that he got six months for loitering. Everyone shook his head in commiseration for the sad, sad fate of Barmy Bernie.

Someone from another group appeared, showing me a map, with an inky blue line tracing its route to Turin. It began in Manchester, then continued through London, Stockholm, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Lyon, Marseilles and finally stopped here. A great adventure, not unlike, I reflected, the Grand Tour that young men had made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it had cost them—all eleven of them—a total of seven pounds.

Seven pounds, I exclaimed, understanding the principle. What went wrong?

They assured me they would be in profit on the return.

Another lad showed me his rail ticket to Dunkirk. The ticket had been forged and had then, once in Dunkirk, been altered to include Turin and validated with a stolen British Rail stamp (obvious jibbing equipment). This was getting interesting: I had become the audience for a kind of show and tell. When the next one appeared—as though in a queue—he told me how he and his mates had got here by hitch-hiking to Belgium and then hopping on a train. Everything had gone well, until they realized they were on the wrong train (always a little tricky confirming the destination with the Hector). They ended up finally in Switzerland—acceptable, as it was on the way to Turin—but it was one-thirty in the morning, there were no more trains, it was early April in the Alps, there was no place to stay and no money if there had been, and so they slept, huddled together for warmth, in a phone booth.

The circle of supporters who now surrounded me had grown to a considerable size, with one or two regularly disappearing and returning with cans of lager. I had ceased to be the CIA. I was no longer the hack from the Express. I appeared to have ended my tenure as an undercover officer of the British Special Branch. And I was starting to be accepted. I would learn later that I had earned a new status; I had become a ‘good geezer’. Yes, that’s what I was: a good geezer. What a thing.

I was also someone to whom people needed to tell their stories. There was an implicit responsibility emerging. I was being asked to set the record straight. I was the ‘repoyta’. I was given instructions, imperatives, admonitions. I was told:

That they weren’t hooligans.

That it was a disgrace that there were so many obstacles keeping them from supporting their team properly.

That they weren’t hooligans.

That the management of Manchester United was a disgrace.

That they weren’t hooligans.

Until finally I was telling them, yes, yes, I know, I know, I know: you’re just here for the drink and the laugh and the football, and, for the first time, despite myself, I wanted to believe it. I was starting to like them, if only because they were starting to like me (the irrational mechanism of the group at work, and I was feeling grateful just to be accepted by it). And it was true that no one had been violent. People had been loud, grotesque, disgusting, rude, uncivilized, unpleasant to look at and, in some instances, explicitly repellent—but not violent. And it was possible that they wouldn’t be. I had met thieves, villains and drunkards, but I had also met people with real jobs with real responsibilities: an engineer for British Telecom, for instance; a trainee accountant; a bank clerk. Their stories were not about crowd violence but about football: how no one missed a match and about the unrelenting tedium of the weekdays (no football) and the terrible depression that sets in during the summer (no football). It didn’t suit my purposes that everyone here should be nothing more than a fanatical fan of the game, but it was conceivable that there really would be no violence, that this was simply how normal English males behaved. It was a terrifying notion, but not an impossible one. After all, the domain of the male spectator has always been characterized by its brutish masculine excesses. Maybe these people were just a bit more excessive than what I was used to.

I was hungry and followed one of the lads across the square to a bar under the arcades. A table had been placed before the entrance to deal with the English supporters, and three or four older women, dressed in black in the Italian way, were running back and forth to the rear of the bar to fetch drink. There must have been about a hundred supporters, pressing against the table, shouting for service. Only English was spoken—the notion that they might have spoken Italian now seems ludicrous—and the English was highly abusive. People were pushing and grabbing, and every now and then someone went off without paying. One supporter had unzipped his shorts and was urinating through the doors of the neighbouring café, splashing the floor, as uncomprehending Italians jumped out of their seats to avoid getting wet. Police were standing nearby, watching, but were uncertain and hesitant.

I returned to the square. I spotted Roy, who appeared to be ‘working’ the crowd. Things had become louder and uglier, and you could tell that the Italians had become less indulgent and were no longer so amused by their English visitors. They did not look so friendly, and more of their cars were circling the square than before. Roy appeared to be acting as a moderator, regulating everyone’s conduct. It was not the role I would have expected of him, but there he was: helping the police, directing traffic or pushing away supporters who were blocking the streets and reprimanding those who had broken bottles or were behaving in a disorderly fashion.

The light was changing and the match would begin soon, but there was no suggestion that it was time to leave. I didn’t know how to find the stadium and would, in any event, take my cue from the others, but they seemed to have forgotten about the game. The faces around me had changed their shapes. They had become drunken faces, red and bloated, as if their cheeks had been puffed full with air. Somebody standing next to me—a tall badly sunburnt man wearing very little clothing—was trying to tell me something but I couldn’t make it out. He repeated it. Something had engaged his passions, and he was trying to make his point by poking me in the chest with his finger. His aim, though, was unreliable and he missed and was slow to recover and almost fell. His mate, who was also very tall, was swaying, shuffling his feet every now and then to keep his balance and looking fixedly at my left knee, as if for stability. He said nothing. He responded to nothing. He looked only at my knee. I was amused by the idea that if I turned and walked away he would fall. I stood there, my knee happy to keep him upright.

A young, brave Italian had walked to the centre of the square. Most Italians kept their distance and watched from across the street, but this one, a boy of fifteen or sixteen, had approached the group, intrigued by it, wanting to practise his English. He had three hesitant friends who remained about ten feet behind, while he tried to engage one of the supporters in his schoolbook conversation. He asked him if he was ‘Anglish’.

He wasn’t noticed, but then no one was noticing much of anything, until one lad turned and took him by the shoulder, not without affection. I couldn’t hear what was said—it was muttered softly but intensely, with the Italian boy’s face registering unease but not fear—when the supporter drew back his leg and slammed the Italian squarely in the crotch with his knee. The Italian boy buckled, swung round and curled up and was rescued by his friends who took him away, while looking back over their shoulders at the English supporter.

It was the first violence I had seen.

Somebody said that Robert had arrived and that his taxi had cost £250, and someone else asked if I knew anyone in England who was planning to record the match—Mick had just been arrested and was going to miss it. I couldn’t imagine Mick doing anything to get himself arrested—was it against the law to sleep on the pavement?—but I lost sight of my informant when I had to jump out of the way of a slap of brown liquid suddenly coming in my direction: the supporter who had been staring so fixedly at my knee had vomited.

The English songs were dying down—the supporters were strewn amid the cafés and bars and arcades—but the noise itself seemed to have increased. Most of it was now coming from the Italians. It might have been for no other reason than that the working day was over, and Juventus supporters—car horns blaring, their own chants beginning—felt compelled to drop by and see what the English looked like. And, by now, what they discovered was a sorry sight. Many supporters were still upright but wobbly and, like Mick when he was conscious (and before he was arrested), were singing to themselves. Many were also asleep, sprawled like some aged dead herd animal wherever they happen to fall. Several were bent double, in the familiar tortured posture—faces deep red, the muscles strongly delineated from the strain—of regurgitation. The water in the fountain was foully discoloured.

Someone walked by and casually mentioned that the buses would be leaving in a few minutes. So: there would be a football match after all. I wandered off in their direction, when I saw, standing alone in the arcade, the now very familiar figure of Mr Wicks, Acting British Consul. He was surveying the square, arms folded in front of his chest. Mr Wicks was no longer smiling. Mr Wicks seemed to have lost his sense of tolerance.

‘Has anybody,’ he said, angry, tense, ‘seen Mr Robert Boss?’

THE THING ABOUT reporting is that it is meant to be objective. It is meant to record and relay the truth of things, as if truth were out there, hanging around, waiting for the reporter to show up. Such is the premise of objective journalism. What this premise excludes, as any student of modern literature will tell you, is that slippery relative fact of the person doing the reporting, the modern notion that there is no such thing as the perceived without someone to do the perceiving, and that to exclude the circumstances surrounding the story is to tell an untruth. These circumstances might include the fact that you’ve rushed to an airplane, had too much to drink on it, arrived, realized that you are dressed for the tropics when in fact it is about to snow, that you have forgotten your socks, that you have only one contact lens, that you’re not going to get the interview anyway, and then, at four-thirty, that you’ve got to file your story, having had to make most of it up. It could be argued that the circumstances have more than a casual bearing on the truth reported.

I do not want to tell an untruth and feel compelled therefore to note that at this moment, shortly after coming across the very disappointed figure of Mr Wicks, the reporter was aware that the circumstances surrounding his story had become intrusive and significant and that, if unacknowledged, his account of the events that follow would be grossly incomplete. And his circumstances were these: the reporter was very, very drunk.

He could not, therefore, recall much about the bus ride apart from a dim, watery belief that there were fewer people in the bus this time and that, astonishingly, he had got the same bus driver. The other thing he remembers is that he arrived.

When the coaches of United supporters pulled up into the cool evening shadow cast by the Stadio Comunale, a large crowd was already there. The fact of the crowd—that it would be waiting for the English—was hard to take in at first.

It was especially hard for Harry. Harry was the supporter I found myself sitting next to. But then, Harry was having difficulty taking in much—of anything. Like so many others, Harry had enjoyed the long hot afternoon, and all about him there was that gamey smell that comes from perspiring without interruption for a very long, though interdeterminate, period of time. Harry had been drinking since five that morning and had, by his own estimate, five imperial gallons of lager in his stomach, which, every time he turned, rolled of their own accord. Harry had been busy. He had been one of those who had abused the bus driver on the ride into the city, and he had abused the bus driver on the ride to the ground. He had urinated on to a café table that had, in his inimitable phrasing, a number of ‘Eyetie cows’ sitting round it, and he had then proceeded to abuse the waiters. In fact he had spent most of the day abusing waiters—many, many waiters. Who could know how many? They all looked so much alike that they blurred into one indiscriminate shape (round and short). He had abused the Acting British Consul, the police, hotel managers, food vendors of every description and any onlooker who didn’t speak English—especially anybody who didn’t speak English. All in all, Harry had had a good day out, and then, in the full, bloated arrogance of the moment, he saw the following: thousands of Italian supporters converging on Harry’s coach. They had surrounded it and were pounding on its sides—jeering, ugly and angry. What right had they to be angry?

Do you see what they’re doing? Harry said to the bloke behind me, full of indignation. And then if there’s trouble, Harry said, they’ll blame the English, won’t they?

The fellow behind him agreed, but before he could say, ‘Fuckin’ Eyeties,’ the bus started to rock from side to side. The Italians were trying to push the bus, our bus—the bus that had me inside it—on to its side.

I had not appreciated the importance of the match that evening, the semi-finals for the Cup-Winners Cup. It had sold out the day the tickets—seventy thousand of them—had gone on sale, and at that moment all seventy thousand ticket-holders seemed to be in view. In my ignorance, I had also not expected to see the English supporters, who were meant to be the hooligans, confronted by Italians who, to my untutored eye, looked like hooligans: their conduct—rushing towards the coaches, brandishing flags—was so exaggerated that it was like a caricature of a nineteenth-century mob. Was this how they normally greeted the supporters of visiting teams?

We remained sitting inside the buses. The drivers weren’t opening their doors until more police arrived, and you could see the members of the carabinieri, just beyond the mob, pushing the Italian supporters out of the way until all four buses were encircled. They formed a cordon leading to the gate, and only then were we let out, escorted and then frisked by four different very young and very nervous policemen. All around us Italians were fighting to break through the cordon, shouting and gesticulating, their fingers forming the familiar upturned ‘V’. This was turning into a very peculiar experience.

It took a long time for the buses to empty and fill the area set aside for us, enclosed by a chain-link fence. All along the fence were more Italians, their jeering insistent. One tried to go over the top and the police ran up to him, pulling him down by his trousers. As the last English supporter made his way into the enclosure, we were told something that I found hard to believe: that, inside, there were no seats.

I realized that I had never been given my match ticket and now I understood why: it didn’t exist. Was it possible that a package tour had been arranged without tickets in the confidence that the authorities, afraid of English supporters on the streets, would somehow find a way of getting them into the ground? Bobby Boss, true to character, was not to be found.

And so we remained: standing, surrounded by a police guard and angry Italians, while somebody looked for a place to put the visiting English. At least I hoped somebody was doing that. At some point, during this long wait, the Italian supporters at the very top of the stadium—the top row that could overlook the grounds outside—realized that there was a gaggle of English below them. It must have been an exciting discovery: unlike their compatriots, they were not circumvented by a police cordon; they could—within the laws of gravity—do whatever they wanted. And they did. I remember the moment, looking up into the evening’s pink sky, and watching the long, long slow arc of an object hurled from far above as it came closer and closer, gaining speed as it approached, until finally, in those milliseconds before it disclosed its target, I could actually make out what it was—a beer bottle—and then, crash: it shattered within three feet of one of the supporters.

Distant muted laughter from up high.

I feared what would follow. An English supporter went down, his forehead cut open. A policeman looked on. He was at a loss about what to do, even though his choices seemed fairly obvious: he could help the injured supporter (an ethical impossibility, since the supporter was a violent criminal); he could send police into the ground to stop the miscreants above us (an ethical contradiction, since they were the ones needing protection); he could move the English supporters into a more sheltered position, which must not have occurred to the policeman because what he did was this: nothing. He continued staring blankly as more things rained down upon us. Eventually he became a target as well. Eventually we all became targets, helpless underneath a barrage that consisted principally of beer bottles and oranges. There were so many bottles and so many oranges that the pavement, covered with juice and pulp and skins, was sticky to look at and sparkled from the shattered glass.

Mr Wicks appeared, having arrived in an embassy car. He looked frantic and pale. As he hurried past, I heard him mutter, perhaps as a muted greeting, ‘Fucking Boss.’

Alas, Mr Wicks. He may have lost his friendliness but he retained his democratic principles to the end. He must have known that this was his last chance to prevent what he now knew was certain to happen. Was there any possible doubt? He had the police at his disposal; he had the perfect excuse—no seats! Wasn’t this the time to gather everyone together and bundle them back to England? But, no, Mr Wicks, the democrat, did this: alternating between English and Italian, he shouted first for the beleaguered Jackie, whom he found hiding behind a policeman—the missiles, despite Mr Wicks’s intervention, continued to fall from above—and demanded to know why there were no seats. He then shouted at the police officer in charge, dramatically pointing (the gestures, I thought, were impressively Mediterranean) to the ground around them with its array of objects recently shattered or smashed or squashed from impact. And then he shouted at one of the stadium stewards, who began shouting instructions to the other stadium officials, with the result that in very little time we were told that a space inside had been cleared to accommodate the English supporters.

When finally we were ushered through a tunnel that led to the ground, police in front and police behind, it became apparent that, while the English supporters may have been accommodated, their accommodation wasn’t in the most salubrious part of the stadium. We were heading for the bottom steps of the terraces, directly beneath the very people who had been hurling missiles at us while we waited outside.

I did not like the look of this.

I kept thinking of the journalist from the Daily Star, the one who ran off when things got violent. He emerged in my mind now as an unequivocally sympathetic figure. He had, the supporters said, shit himself, and it was worth noting that this phrase had now entered my vocabulary.

I was not, I found myself muttering, going to shit myself.

One by one, we walked from out of the darkness of the tunnel into the blinding light of the ground—the sun, though setting, was at an angle and still shining bright—and it was hard to make out the figures around us. There were not many police—I could see that—and it appeared that Italians had spilled on to the pitch in front of the terraces where we were meant to stand, separated only by a chain-link perimeter fence. Once again things were coming at us from the air: not just bottles and pieces of fruit but also long sticks—the staffs of Juventus flags—firecrackers and smoke bombs. The first one out of the tunnel, drunk and arrogant and singing about his English pride, was hit on the back of the head by an eight-foot flag pole and he dropped to the concrete terrace. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a Union Jack had been set alight, its flames fanned as it was swirled in the air. I saw this only out of the corner of my eye because I was determined not to look up at the Italians above me who were hurling things down, or down to the Italians below who were hurling things up. I had the suspicion that if I happened to make eye-contact with anybody I would be rewarded with a knock on the head. Also I didn’t want to lose my concentration. Looking straight ahead, I was concentrating very hard on chanting my new refrain.

I will not shit myself, I will not shit myself.

As we arrived at the patch of concrete allocated for us, television cameramen appeared along the edges of the pitch. They looked Italian (thin, not beer-drinking) and were squatting between the missile-throwing Juventus fans. There was also a number of newspaper photographers. They looked English (fat, clearly beer-drinking). The curious thing about both the television and newspaper men was this: they were only a couple of feet away from the masked, missile-throwing Juventus fans. They could see that the English supporters were being felled—several people were on their knees holding their heads. I couldn’t help thinking: it wouldn’t take much effort to grab someone’s arm, just as it was pulled back to hurl another pole or flare or smoke bomb or beer bottle; it would take even less effort to give one of them a little nudge; it would take virtually no effort at all to say a word or two urging these masked terrorists of the terraces to stop behaving in this way. Nobody did a thing. And while there is the old argument that to have done so would have been considered interventionist—participating in the event that they were meant to be reporting—for me, as one of the targets, such an argument was not very persuasive. They were not worried about getting in the way of the event. They were trying to create it: not only were they not stopping the masked, missile-throwing Juventus fans, but they were also not photographing them. It was images of the English they wanted.

They wanted the English tattoos; their sweaty torsos, stripped to the waist; their two fingers jabbing the air; the vicious expressions on their faces as they hurled back the objects that had been thrown at them. Italians behaving like hooligans? Unheard of. English behaving like English? That was interesting! I remember thinking: if the day becomes more violent, who do you blame? The English, whose behaviour on the square could be said to have been so provocative that they deserved whatever they got? The Italians, whose welcome consisted in inflicting injuries upon their visitors? Or can you place some of the blame on these men with their television equipment and their cameras, whose misrepresentative images served only to reinforce what everyone had come to expect.

Somehow the match started, was played, ended. And, while it could be said that there was no single serious incident, it could also be said that there was no moment without one. Several people were hurt, and one supporter was taken away to hospital. During the half-time break, when yet another Manchester lad was felled by a beer bottle, the English supporters, with a sudden roar, rushed to the top of the terraces, trying to climb the wall that separated them from the Italians. The wall was too high to scale, and the supporters ended up jumping up and down, trying to grab the Italians by their shoes until the police arrived to pull them away.

Police kept pouring through the tunnel, now wearing riot gear—moon helmets and blue uniforms instead of green—with obvious instructions to place themselves between each English supporter and everybody else. It was evident that the police continued to regard the English supporters as the problem, and they probably were simply by the fact that they were there. But they were not the only problem, which the police discovered after surrounding every English supporter and ignoring the Italians above them, who, in that uninhibited way that has come to characterize the Mediterranean temperament, continued to express their strong feelings: by the end it appeared to me that the police were being struck down more frequently than the English.

It was a peculiar setting for watching a sporting event, although, oddly, it didn’t seem so at the time. The day had consisted of such a strange succession of events that, by this point in the evening, it was the most natural thing in the world to be watching a football game surrounded by policemen: there was one on my left, another on my right, two directly behind me and five in front. It didn’t bother me; it certainly didn’t bother the supporters, who, despite the distractions, were watching the match with complete attentiveness. And when Manchester United equalized, the goal was witnessed, as it unfolded, by everyone there (except me; I was looking over my shoulder for missiles), and jubilation shot through them, their cheers and songs suddenly tinny and small in that great cavity of the Juventus football ground, its seventy thousand Italians now comprehensively silent. The United supporters jumped up and down, fell over each other, embraced.

But the euphoria was brief. In the final two minutes Juventus scored again. The exhilaration felt but minutes before by that small band of United supporters was now felt—magnified many times—by the seventy thousand Italian fans who, previously humiliated, directed their powerful glee into our corner. The roar was deafening, invading the senses like a bomb.

And with that explosive roar, the mood changed.

What happened next is confusing to recall. Everything started moving at great speed. Everything would continue to move at great speed for many hours. I remember that riot police started kicking one of the supporters who had fallen down. I remember hearing that Sammy had arrived and then coming upon him. He was big, well-dressed, with heavy horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like a physics student, standing underneath the bleachers, his back to the match, an expensive leather bag and camera (Nikon) hanging over his shoulder, having just come from France by taxi. I remember watching Ricky and Micky, the improbable pair I had met on my early-morning minibus in London, scooting underneath the stands, exploiting the moment in which the Italians were embracing, crushed together in their celebrations, to come away with a handful of wallets, three purses and a watch, got by reaching up from below the seats. And I remember some screaming: there had been a stabbing (I didn’t see it) and, with the screaming, everyone bolted—animal speed, instinct speed—and pushed past the police and rushed for the exit. But the gate into the tunnel was locked, and the United supporters slammed into it.

It was impossible to get out.

Throughout this last period of the match, I had been hearing a new phrase: ‘It’s going to go off.’

It’s going to go off, someone said, and his eyes were glassy, as though he had taken a drug.

If this keeps up, I heard another say, then it’s going to go off. And the phrase recurred—it’s going to go off, it’s going to go off—spoken softly, but each time it was repeated it gained authority.

Everyone was pressed against the locked gate, and the police arrived moments later. The police pulled and pushed in one direction, and the supporters pushed in another, wanting to get out. It was shove and counter-shove. It was crushing, uncomfortable. The supporters were humourless and determined.

It’s going to go off.

People were whispering.

I heard: ‘Watch out for knives. Zip up your coat.’

I heard: ‘Fill up your pockets.’

I heard: ‘It’s going to go off. Stay together. It’s going to go off.’

I was growing nervous and slipped my notebook into my shirt, up against my chest, and buttoned up my jacket. A chant had started: ‘United. United. United.’ The chant was clipped and sure. ‘United. United. United.’ The word was repeated, United, and, through the repetition, its meaning started changing, pertaining less to a sporting event or a football club and sounding instead like a chant of unity—something political. It had become the chant of a mob.

‘United. United. United. United. United. United . . .’

And then it stopped.

There was a terrible screaming, a loud screaming, loud enough to have risen above the chant. The sound was out of place; it was a woman’s screaming.

Someone said that it was the mother of the stabbed boy.

Someone said that it was no such thing, just a ‘fucking Eyetie’.

The screaming went on. It appeared that a woman had been caught by the rush to get away and swept along by it. I spotted her: she was hemmed in and thrashing about, trying to find some space, some air. She couldn’t move towards the exit and couldn’t move away from it, and she wasn’t going to be able to: the crush was too great, and it wouldn’t stay still, surging back and forth by its own volition, beyond the control of anyone in it. She was very frightened. Her scream, piercing and high-pitched, wouldn’t stop. She started hyperventilating, taking in giant gulps of air, and her screams undulated with the relendess rhythm of her over-breathing: it was as if she were drowning in her own high-pitched oxygen, swinging her head from side to side, her eyes wild. I thought: Why hasn’t she passed out? I was waiting for her to lose consciousness, for her muscles to give up, but she didn’t pass out. The scream went on. Nobody around me was saying a word. I could tell that they were thinking what I was thinking, that she was going to have a fit, that she was going to die, there, now, pressed up against them. It went on, desperate and unintelligible and urgent.

And then someone had the sense to lift her up and raise her above his shoulders—it was so obvious—and he passed her to the person in front of him. And he passed her to the person in front of him. And in this way, she was passed, hand to hand, above everyone’s heads, still screaming, still flailing, slowly making her way to the exit, and then, once there, the gate was opened to let her out.

And it was all that was needed. Once the gate had been opened, the English supporters surged forwards, pushing her heavily to one side.

I was familiar with the practice of keeping visiting supporters locked inside at the end of a match until everyone had left, and of using long lines of police, with horses and dogs, to direct the visitors to their coaches. The plan in Turin had been the same, and the police were there, outside the gate, in full riot regalia, waiting for the United supporters. But they weren’t ready for what came charging out of the tunnel.

For a start, owing to the trapped woman, the supporters came out earlier than expected—the streets were filled with Juventus supporters—and when they emerged, they came out very fast, with police trailing behind, trying to keep up. They came as a mob, with everyone pressed together, hands on the shoulders of the person in front, moving quickly, almost at a sprint, racing down the line of police, helmets and shields and truncheons a peripheral blur. The line of police led to the coaches, but just before the coach door someone in the front veered sharply and the mob followed. The police had anticipated this and were waiting. The group turned again, veering in another direction, and rushed out into the space between two of the coaches. It came to a sudden stop, and I slammed into the person in front of me, and people slammed into me from behind: the police had been there as well. Everyone turned round. I don’t know who was in front—I was trying only to keep up—and nothing was being said. There were about two hundred people crushed together, but they seemed able to move in unison, like some giant, strangely co-ordinated insect. A third direction was tried. The police were not there. I looked behind: the police were not there. I looked to the left and the right: there was no police anywhere.

What was the duration of what followed? It might have been twenty minutes; it seemed longer. It was windy and dark, and the trees, blowing back and forth in front of the street lamps, cast long, moving shadows. I was never able to see clearly.

I knew to follow Sammy. The moment the group broke free, he had handed his bag and camera to someone, telling him to give them back later at the hotel. Sammy then turned and started running backwards. He appeared to be measuring the group, taking in its size.

The energy, he said, still running backwards, speaking to no one in particular, the energy is very high. He was alert, vital, moving constantly, looking in all directions. He was holding out his hands, with his fingers outstretched.

Feel the energy, he said.

There were six or seven younger supporters jogging beside him, and it would be some time before I realized that there were always six or seven younger supporters jogging beside him. When he turned in one direction, they turned with him. When he ran backwards, they ran backwards. No doubt if Sammy had suddenly become airborne there would have been the sight of six or seven younger supporters desperately flapping their arms trying to do the same. The younger supporters were in fact very young. At first I put their age at around sixteen, but they might have been younger. They might have been fourteen. They might have been nine: I take pleasure, even now, in thinking of them as nothing more than overgrown nine-year-olds. They were nasty little nine-year-olds who, in some kind of pre-pubescent confusion, regarded Sammy as their dad. The one nearest me had a raw, skinny face with a greasy texture that suggested an order of fish’n’chips. He was the one who turned on me.

Who the fuck are you?

I said nothing, and Fish’n’chips repeated his question—Who the fuck are you?—and then Sammy said something, and Fish’n’chips forgot about me. But it was a warning: the nine-year-old didn’t like me.

Sammy had stopped running backwards and had developed a kind of walk-run, which involved moving as quickly as possible without breaking into an outright sprint. Everybody else did the same: the idea, it seemed, was to be inconspicuous—not to be seen to be actually running, thus attracting the attention of the police—but nevertheless to jet along as fast as you could. The effect was ridiculous: two hundred English supporters, tattooed torsos tilted slightly forwards, arms straight, hurtling stiffly down the pavement, believing that nobody was noticing them.

Everyone crossed the street, decisively, without a word spoken. A chant broke out—‘United, United, United’—and Sammy waved his hands up and down, as if trying to bat down the flames of a fire, urging people to be quiet. A little later there was another one-word chant: this time it was ‘England’. They couldn’t help themselves. They wanted so badly to act like normal football supporters—they wanted to sing and behave drunkenly and carry on doing the same rude things that they had been doing all day long—and they had to be reminded that they couldn’t. Why this pretence of being invisible? There was Sammy again, whispering, insistent: no singing, no singing, waving his hands up and down. The nine-year-olds made a shushing sound to enforce the message.

Sammy said to cross the street again—he had seen something something—and his greasy little companions went off in different directions, fanning out, as if to hold the group in place, and then returned to their positions beside him. It was only then that I appreciated fully what I was witnessing: Sammy had taken charge of the group—moment by moment giving it specific instructions instructions—and was using his obsequious little lads to ensure that his commands were being carried out.

I remembered, on my first night with Mick, hearing that leaders had their little lieutenants and sergeants. I had heard this and I had noted it, but I hadn’t thought much of it: it sounded too much like toyland, like a war game played by schoolboys. But here, now, I could see that everything Sammy said was being enforced by his entourage of little supporters. Fish’n’chips and the other nine-year-olds made sure that no one ran, that no one sang, that no one strayed far from the group, that everyone stayed together. At one moment, a cluster of police came rushing towards us, and Sammy, having spotted them, whispered a new command, hissing that we were to disperse, and the members of the group split up—some crossing the street, some carrying on down the centre of it, some falling behind—until they had got past the policemen, whereupon Sammy turned round, running backwards again, and ordered everyone to regroup: and the little ones, like trained dogs, herded the members of the group back together.

I trotted along. Everyone was moving at such a speed that, to ensure I didn’t miss anything, I concentrated on keeping up with Sammy. I could see that this was starting to irritate him. He kept having to notice me.

What are you doing here? he asked me, after he had turned round again, running backwards, doing a quick head-count after everyone had regrouped.

He knew precisely what I was doing there, and he had made a point of asking his question loudly enough that the others had to hear it as well.

Just the thing, I thought.

Fuck off, one of his runts said suddenly, peering into my face. He had a knife.

Didja hear what he said, mate? Fish’n’chips had joined the interrogation. He said fuck off. What the fuck are you doing here anyway, eh? Fuck off.

It was not the time or the occasion to explain to Fish’n’chips why I was there, and, having got this far, I wasn’t about to turn around now.

I dropped back a bit, just outside of striking range. I looked about me. I didn’t recognize anyone. I was surrounded by people I hadn’t met; worse, I was surrounded by people I hadn’t met who kept telling me to fuck off. I felt I had understood the drunkenness I had seen earlier in the day. But this was different. If anyone here was drunk, he was not acting as if he was. Everyone was purposeful and precise, and there was a strong quality of aggression about them, like some kind of animal scent. Nobody was saying a word. There was a muted grunting and the sound of their feet on the pavement; every now and then, Sammy would whisper one of his commands. In fact the loudest sound had been Sammy’s asking me what I was doing there, and the words of the exchange rang round in my head.

What the fuck are you doing here anyway, eh? Fuck off.

What the fuck are you doing here anyway, eh? Fuck off.

I remember thinking in the clearest possible terms: I don’t want to get beaten up.

I had no idea where we were, but, thinking about it now, I see that Sammy must have been leading his group around the stadium, hoping to find Italian supporters along the way. When he turned to run backwards, he must have been watching the effect his group of two hundred walk-running Frankensteins was having on the Italian lads, who spotted the English rushing by and started following them, curious, attracted by the prospect of a fight or simply by the charisma of the group itself, unable to resist tagging along to see what might happen.

And then Sammy, having judged the moment to be right, suddenly stopped, and, abandoning all pretence of invisibility, shouted: ‘Stop.’

Everyone stopped.

‘Turn.’

Everyone turned. They knew what to expect. I didn’t. It was only then that I saw the Italians who had been following us. In the half-light, street-light darkness I couldn’t tell how many there were, but there were enough for me to realize—holy shit!—that I was now unexpectedly in the middle of a very big fight: having dropped back to get out of the reach of Sammy and his lieutenants I was in the rear, which, as the group turned, had suddenly become the front.

Adrenalin is one of the body’s more powerful chemicals. Seeing the English on one side of me and the Italians on the other, I remember seeming quickly to take on the properties of a small helicopter, rising several feet in the air and moving out of everybody’s way. There was a roar, everybody roaring, and the English supporters charged into the Italians.

In the next second I went down. A dark blur and then smack: I got hit on the side of the head by a beer can—a full one—thrown powerfully enough to knock me over. As I got up, two policemen, the only two I saw, came rushing past, and one of them clubbed me on the back of the head. Back down I went. I got up again, and, most of the Italians had already run off, scattering in all directions. But many had been tripped up before they got away.

Directly in front of me—so close I could almost reach out to touch his face—a young Italian, a boy really, had been knocked down. As he was getting up, an English supporter pushed the boy down again, ramming his flat hand against the boy’s face. He fell back and his head hit the pavement, the back of it bouncing slightly.

Two other Manchester United supporters appeared. One kicked the boy in the ribs. It was a soft sound, which surprised me. You could hear the impact of the shoe on the fabric of the boy’s clothing. He was kicked again—this time very hard—and the sound was still soft, muted. The boy reached down to protect himself, to guard his ribs, and the other English supporter then kicked him in the face. This was a soft sound as well, but it was different: you could tell that it was his face that had been kicked and not his body and not something protected by clothing. It sounded gritty. The boy tried to get up and he was pushed back down—sloppily, without much force. Another Manchester United supporter appeared and another and then a third. There were now six, and they all started kicking the boy on the ground. The boy covered his face. I was surprised that I could tell, from the sound, when someone’s shoe missed or when it struck the fingers and not the forehead or the nose.

I was transfixed. I suppose, thinking about this incident now, I was close enough to have stopped the kicking. Everyone there was off-balance—with one leg swinging back and forth—and it wouldn’t have taken much to have saved the boy. But I didn’t. I don’t think the thought occurred to me. It was as if time had dramatically slowed down, and each second had a distinct beginning and end, like a sequence of images on a roll of film, and I was mesmerized by each image I saw. Two more Manchester United supporters appeared—there must have been eight by now. It was getting crowded and difficult to get at the boy: they were bumping into each other, tussling slightly. It was hard for me to get a clear view or to say where exactly the boy was now being kicked, but it looked like there were three people kicking him in the head, and the others were kicking him in the body—mainly the ribs but I couldn’t be sure. I am astonished by the detail I can recall. For instance, there was no speech, only that soft, yielding sound—although sometimes it was a gravelly, scraping one—of the blows, one after another. The moments between the kicks seemed to increase in duration, to stretch elastically, as each person’s leg was retracted and then released for another blow.

The thought of it: eight people kicking the boy at once. At what point is the job completed?

It went on.

The boy continued to try to cushion the blows, moving his hands around to cover the spot were he had just been struck, but he was being hit in too many places to be able to protect himself. His face was now covered with blood, which came from his nose and his mouth, and his hair was matted and wet. Blood was all over his clothing. The kicking went on. On and on and on, that terrible soft sound, with the boy saying nothing, only wriggling on the ground.

A policeman appeared, but only one. Where were the other police? There had been so many before. The policeman came running hard and knocked over two of the supporters, and the others fled, and then time accelerated, no longer slow-motion time, but time moving very fast.

We ran off. I don’t know what happened to the boy. I then noticed that all around me there were others like him, others who had been tripped up and had their faces kicked; I had to side-step a body on the ground to avoid running on top of it.

In the vernacular of the supporters, it had now ‘gone off’. With that first violent exchange, some kind of threshold had been crossed, some notional boundary: on one side of that boundary had been a sense of limits, an ordinary understanding—even among this lot—of what you didn’t do; we were now someplace where there would be few limits, where the sense that there were things you didn’t do had ceased to exist. It became very violent.

A boy came rushing towards me, holding his head, bleeding badly from somewhere on his face, watching the ground, not knowing where he was going, and looked up just before he would have run into me. The fact of me frightened him. He thought I was English. He thought I was going to hit him. He screamed, pleading, and spun round backwards to get away and ran off in another direction.

I caught up with Sammy. Sammy was transported. He was snapping his fingers and jogging in place, his legs pumping up and down, and he was repeating the phrase, It’s going off, it’s going off. Everyone around him was excited. It was an excitement that verged on being something greater, an emotion more transcendent—joy at the very least, but more like ecstasy. There was an intense energy about it; it was impossible not to feel some of the thrill. Somebody near me said that he was happy. He said that he was very, very happy, that he could not remember ever being so happy, and I looked hard at him, wanting to memorize his face so that I might find him later and ask him what it was that made for this happiness, what it was like. It was a strange thought: here was someone who believed that, at this precise moment, following a street scuffle, he had succeeded in capturing one of life’s most elusive qualities. But then he, dazed, babbling away about his happiness, disappeared into the crowd and the darkness.

There was more going on than I could assimilate: there were violent noises constantly—something breaking or crashing—and I could never tell where they were coming from. In every direction something was happening. I have no sense of sequence.

I remember the man with his family. Everyone had regrouped, brought together by the little lieutenants, and was jogging along in that peculiar walk-run, and I noticed that in front of us was a man with his family, a wife and two sons. He was shooing them along, trying to make them hurry, while looking repeatedly over his shoulder at us. He was anxious, but no one seemed to notice him: everyone just carried on, trotting at the same speed, following him not because they wanted to follow him but only because he happened to be running in front of us. When the man reached his car, a little off to the side of the path we were following, he threw open the door and shoved the members of his family inside, panicking slightly and badly bumping the head of one of his sons. And then, just as he was about to get inside himself, he looked back over his shoulder—just as the group was catching up to him—and he was struck flatly across the face with a heavy metal bar. He was struck with such force that he was lifted into the air and carried over his car door on to the ground on the other side. Why him, I thought? What had he done except make himself conspicuous by trying to get his family out of the way? I turned, as we jogged past him, and the supporters behind me had rammed into the open car door, bending it backwards on its hinges. The others followed, running on top of the man on the ground, sometimes slowing down to kick him—the head, the spine, the ass, the ribs, anywhere. I couldn’t see his wife and children, but knew they were inside, watching from the back seat.

There was an Italian boy, eleven or twelve years old, alone, who had got confused and ran straight into the middle of the group and past me. I looked behind me and saw that the boy was already on the ground. I couldn’t tell who had knocked him down, because by the time I looked back six or seven English supporters had already set upon him, swarming over his body, frenzied.

There was a row of tables where programmes were sold, along with flags, T-shirts, souvenirs, and as the group went by each table was lifted up and overturned. There were scuffles. Two English supporters grabbed an Italian and smashed his face into one of the tables. They grabbed him by the hair on the back of his head and slammed his face into the table again. They lifted his head up a third time, pulling it higher, holding it there—his face was messy and crushed—and slammed it into the table again. Once again the terrible slow motion of it all, the time, not clock-time, that elapsed between one moment of violence and the next one, as they lifted his head up—were they really going to do it again?—and smashed it into the table. The English supporters were methodical and serious; no one spoke.

An ambulance drove past. Its siren made me realize that there was still no police.

The group crossed a street, a major intersection. It had long abandoned the pretence of invisibility and had reverted to the arrogant identity of the violent crowd, walking, without hesitation, straight into the congested traffic, across the bonnets of the cars, knowing that they would stop. At the head of the traffic was a bus, and one of the supporters stepped up to the front of it, and from about six feet, hurled something with great force—it wasn’t a stone; it was big and made of a metal, like the manifold of a car engine—straight into the driver’s windscreen. I was just behind the one who threw this thing. I don’t know where he got it from, because it was too heavy to have been carried for any distance, but no one had helped him with it; he had stepped out of the flow of the group and in those moments between throwing his heavy object and turning back to his mates he had a peculiar look on his face. He knew he had done something that no one else had done yet, that it had escalated the violence, that the act had crossed another boundary of what was permissible. He had thrown a missile that was certain to cause serious physical injury. He had done something bad—extremely bad—and his face, while acknowledging the badness of it, was actually saying something more complex. It was saying that what he had done wasn’t all that bad, really; in the context of the day, it wasn’t that extreme, was it? What his face expressed, I realized—his eyes seemed to twinkle—was no more than this: I have just been naughty.

He had been naughty and he knew it and was pleased about it. He was happy. Another happy one. He was a runt, I thought. He was a little shit, I thought. I wanted to hurt him.

The sound of the shattering windscreen—I realize now—was a powerful stimulant, physical and intrusive, and it had been the range of sounds, of things breaking and crashing, coming from somewhere in the darkness, unidentifiable, that was increasing steadily the strength of feeling of everyone around me. It was also what was making me so uneasy. The evening had been a series of stimulants, assaults on the senses, that succeeded, each time, in raising the pitch of excitement. And now, crossing this intersection, traffic coming from four directions, supporters trotting on top of cars, the sound of this thing going through the windscreen, the crash following its impact, had the effect of increasing the heat of the feeling: I can’t describe it any other way; it was almost literally a matter of temperature. There was another moment of disorientation—the milliseconds between the sensation of the sound and knowing what accounted for it, an adrenalin moment, a chemical moment—and then there was the roar again, and someone came rushing at the bus with a pole (taken from one of the souvenir tables?) and smashed a passenger’s window. A second crashing sound. Others came running over and started throwing stones and bottles with great ferocity. They were, again, in a frenzy. The stones bounced off the glass with a shuddering thud, but then a window shattered, and another shattered, and there was screaming from inside. The bus was full, and the passengers were not lads like the ones attacking them but ordinary family supporters, dads and sons and wives heading home after the match, on their way to the suburbs or a village outside the city. Everyone inside must have been covered with glass. They were shielding their faces, ducking in their seats. There were glass splinters everywhere: they would cut across your vision suddenly. All around me people were throwing stones and bottles, and I felt afraid for my own eyes.

We moved on.

I felt weightless. I felt nothing would happen to me. I felt that anything might happen to me. I was looking straight ahead, running, trying to keep up, and things were occurring along the dark peripheries of my vision: there would be a bright light and then darkness again and the sound, constantly, of something else breaking, and of movement, of objects being thrown and of people falling.

A group of Italians appeared, suddenly stepping forward into the glare of a street lamp. They were different from the others, clearly intending to fight, full of pride and affronted dignity. They wanted confrontation and stood there waiting for it. Someone came towards us swinging a pool cue or a flag-pole, and then, confounding all sense, it was actually grabbed from out his hands—it was Roy; Roy had appeared out of nowhere and had taken the pole out of the Italian’s hands—and broken it over his head. It was flamboyantly timed, and the next moment the other English supporters followed, that roar again, quickly overcoming the Italians, who ran off in different directions. Several, again, were tripped up. There was the sight, again, of Italians on the ground, wriggling helplessly while English supporters rushed up to them, clustering around their heads, kicking them over and over again.

Is it possible that there was simply no police?

Again we moved on. A bin was thrown through a car showroom window, and there was another loud crashing sound. A shop: its door was smashed. A clothing shop: its window was smashed, and one or two English supporters lingered to loot from the display.

I looked behind me and I saw that a large vehicle had been overturned, and that further down the street flames were issuing from a building. I hadn’t seen any of that happen: I realized that there had been more than I had been able to take in. There was now the sound of sirens, many sirens, different kinds, coming from several directions.

The city is ours, Sammy said, and he repeated the possessive, each time with greater intensity: It is ours, ours, ours.

A police car appeared, its siren on—the first police car I had seen—and it stopped in front of the group, trying to cut it off. There was only one car. The officer threw open his door, but by the time he had got out the group had crossed the street. The officer shouted after us, helpless and angry, and then dropped back inside his car and chased us down, again cutting us off. Once again, the group, in the most civilized manner possible, crossed the street: well-behaved football supporters on their way back to their hotel, flames receding behind us. The officer returned to his car and drove after us, this time accelerating dangerously, once again cutting off the group, trying, it seemed to me, to knock down one of the supporters, who had to jump out of the way and who was then grabbed by the police officer and hurled against the bonnet, held there by his throat. The officer was very frustrated. He knew that this group was responsible for the damage he had seen; he knew, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the very lad whose throat was now in his grip had been personally responsible for mayhem of some categorically illegal kind; but the officer had not personally seen him do anything. He hadn’t personally seen the group do anything. He had not seen anyone commit a crime. He saw only the results. He kept the supporter pinned there, holding him by the throat, and then in disgust he let him go.

A fire engine passed, an ambulance and finally the police—many police. They came from two directions. And once they started arriving, it seemed that they would never stop. There were vans and cars and motorcycles and paddy wagons. And still they came. The buildings were illuminated by their flashing blue lights. But the group of supporters from Manchester, governed by Sammy’s whispered commands, simply kept moving, slipping past the cars, dispersing when needing to disperse and then regrouping, turning this way, that way, crossing the street again, regrouping reversing, with Sammy’s greasy little lieutenants bringing up the rear, keeping everyone together. They were well-behaved fans of the sport of football. They were once again the law-abiding supporters they had always insisted to me that they were. And, thus, they snaked through the streets of the ancient city of Turin, making their orderly way back to their hotels, the police following behind, trying to keep up.

‘We did it,’ Sammy declared, as the group reached the railway station. ‘We took the city.’

BETWEEN THE HOURS of one and two in the morning, the square was once again the interesting place to be. Many people were there.

There were the Italians. Twelve hours before, these same Italians had been generous and accommodating: they had been confronted by a body of unkempt drunken foreigners who littered the streets, urinated into their fountains and stole from the tills of their cafés and shops, and yet they would not be offended. They laughed; they were amused. These were the antics of an island race; the English, as everybody knows, are a mad people.

By the early hours of Thursday morning, the Italians had ceased being amused. I heard them as they approached the square, marching down the side-streets, chanting, or in their cars, holding down their horns, driving round the square, shouting angrily from their windows. The most frightening were the ones who were already here. I could see them but I couldn’t hear them. They stood, awesomely silent, in the centre of the square itself. I watched them from the entrance to my hotel—the supporters were inside at the bar—and I could make out their menacing silhouettes in the darkness. I was told that they had knives and bottles broken off at the neck and heavy sticks. They were waiting: at some point, the English would have to go home. The Italians were stretched from one end of the square to the other, row upon row. They didn’t move; no one among them was talking.

There were others on the square as well. There was the army. I didn’t know when the troops had been called in.

They had not been there earlier, when Sammy led us past the railway station—the police still trailing behind—and then into the hotel bar, which, I was surprised to discover, was already crowded with supporters. It was packed, and was humid and steamy and marked by a strong barnyard smell. I spotted Mick, sober now, who had spent several hours in jail, having inadvertently broken someone’s leg (in two places) during a disagreement, and was eager to learn of everything he had missed. I spotted Roy, who—such was the evening’s achievement—was talking not only like a normal human being but also in an animated and extrovert fashion: he was describing the run through the city to those who had not joined in. There was Tony—dressed elegantly for the evening—and Gurney, as repellent as ever. I was back among friends, and there was some comfort in that. The nine-year-olds must have gone to bed.

There was little talk of the match and no evident regret that the team would not be playing in the final—the fortunes of Manchester United Football Club had been obscured by the larger concerns of the evening and how the Italians had ‘shat themselves’. There was a sense of closure to the evening, an end-of-a-good-day’s-work atmosphere.

I got a beer and sat in a corner. The supporters were sprawled on the floor and propped against the walls, tending wounds, which, mainly to the hands, were bleeding and wrapped in T-shirts. Despite the exhaustion—the effort of wreaking mayhem on a major city was considerable—the gathering was alive, noisy with grunts and profanities. Their rudeness was their vitality, and these people were very rude; they were committed to rudeness, as though it were their moral banner. There were only two waitresses amid the four hundred or so supporters, and the women could not have had a worse working day. As one was delivering a tray of bottled lager—answering to the imperative of, ‘Oi, bitch, give us some beer’—a supporter pulled out his penis and wagged it in her face. Another one, paying, threw his money at her feet.

The supporters did not have a developed aptitude for meeting new people. They did not like people, apart from themselves. In fact, they didn’t like anything—much. I reflected on the values at the heart of their community. I composed a list.

Likes:

Lager in pint glasses.

Lager in two-litre bottles.

The Queen.

The Falkland Islands.

Manchester United Football Club.

Margaret Thatcher.

Goals.

Rolex watches.

War movies.

The Catholic Church.

Expensive jumpers.

Being abroad.

Sausages.

Lots of money.

Themselves.

That was the most important item: they liked themselves; them and their mates.

The list of dislikes, I decided, was straightforward. It was (over and above Tottenham Hotspur) the following: the rest of the world.

The rest of the world is a big place, and its essential inhabitant is the stranger. The supporters did not like the stranger. The stranger—shopkeepers, employees of the London Underground or British Rail, old men in your way on the escalator, people asking for directions, someone trying to get your vote, bus-conductors, waitresses, members of the Labour Party, people in the seat next to you, simply people in the way—was detestable. And there was no stranger more strange, and therefore no stranger more detestable, than the foreigner. The foreigner was the one they really hated (it was not admissible that they, being from England and now in Italy, might have been foreigners). The problem with foreigners was this: they were incomplete. For some reason, foreigners had never quite climbed all the way up the evolutionary ladder; there was a little less of the foreigner—especially foreigners of a dark complexion, not to mention foreigners of a dark complexion who were also trying to sell you something. They were the worst.

And then something calamitous occurred: the hotel ran out of beer.

It was the middle of the night, and the hotel had been emptied of its stocks of alcohol. No beer? The news was greeted with an incredulity that exceeded anything expressed so far. No hotel, no match tickets, no match: these were nothing compared to the announcement that there was no beer. With the news, everyone—the maimed, the drunk, the comatose—rose to his feet and charged the bar. This looked bad. The hotel manager appeared, conciliatory, offering orange juice. This made things worse.

As they surged forward, I dropped back. It would be safer, I thought, outside. And that was when I realized that the troops had been called in.

I had no choice but to notice the troops because the moment I stepped out one of them blocked my way with an automatic rifle, turned me round and marched me to the wall. The troops must have been gathering for some time. The carabinieri had failed; the riot police had failed; now it was the army’s turn. I suspect there were only about a hundred troops, but they represented an altogether different order of control: suddenly we were in a NATO exercise. The soldiers were wearing camouflage-green infantry uniforms and big heavy black shiny boots and carrying very authoritative-looking guns. They also had fifteen armoured personnel carriers and a tank. The tank was on the other side of the square, pointing in our direction. This was not a comfortable idea. I have had a gun barrel pointed at me, and I didn’t like it. I had never been at the end of a barrel of a tank, although it was probably because the barrel of the tank was pointed in our direction that the Italians on the square remained on the square.

I thought I would stay put for a while—the wall where I had been placed offered a reasonable vantage point from which to view events—and so I missed the expressions on the faces of the four hundred or so supporters as they turned from the counter of the bar they had been pounding and faced an army colonel flanked by eager soldiers with automatic weapons. The colonel ordered that the bar be vacated, and more soldiers rushed in—they were incapable of walking—and pushed everyone into a single file line.

Mr Wicks arrived.

I had expected him. He had been chasing around the city to bring us a little surprise—he left it in the back seat of his car—but knew everything that had taken place in the meanwhile. He knew what had happened after the match, about the angry Italians waiting in the dark, that the army had been called in, and even what the Italian newspapers were going to say in the morning—he had seen them.

Mr Wicks: I had grown fond of him and his faith in humanity. He had such high hopes for what had come out of the airplane in the morning. And now: he wasn’t angry or upset; he was resigned.

‘You lot,’ Mr Wicks said, shaking his head. ‘You lot really did it this time.’

The first armoured personnel carrier pulled up. It was a peculiar-looking contraption—something between a farm tractor and a World War Two tank, camouflaged for the tropical rain forest. A hatch opened, a small thing in the front, and out popped a soldier. He, too, was one of the eager ones and, on gaining his feet, he sprinted to the colonel standing by the hotel entrance. It was only then that I understood why these strange combat vehicles were needed. Only a few English supporters were staying at this particular hotel. Most were elsewhere—somewhere on the other side of the square; somewhere, that is, on the other side of the Italians waiting in the dark. One of the evening’s ironies had revealed itself: the Italian authorities were about to provide an armed escort to ensure that the United supporters got to their hotels without being maimed by angry locals out for revenge. The Italian army had been called out to convey the English to their beds, in groups of five, huddled inside an armoured personnel carrier.

There was one problem: few English supporters knew where they were staying.

In her way, Jackie had been trying to tell the supporters where they were staying since we arrived in Turin. The colonel by her side reassured her that this time none of them would slip away. Jackie, satisfied, gathered together the papers on her clipboard and proceeded to call out the names—loudly, clearly, imperiously—one by one. On hearing his name, each supporter was instructed to step forward and was then rushed away by two soldiers to a waiting armoured personnel carrier. The first vehicle was filled and drove off. And then the second. By the third vehicle, the supporters were well into one of their chants, urging the Pope to get fucked, but Jackie was not to be deterred. Jackie was in control at last.

Mr Wicks, meanwhile, had returned from his car, having fetched his surprise. It was Mr Robert Boss.

I was disappointed. I had got used to the idea that Bobby Boss didn’t exist; that he had been invented by the supporters, an elaborate laundering operation that allowed them to buy tickets, book hotels, even hire guides like Jackie so that they could then go about the business of doing what that they had been banned from doing.

But there he was: a fact, the man himself.

He was short, dumpy and balding, and wearing a white linen suit that would have flattered a man many times thinner. Although the evening had grown cool, Bobby Boss was perspiring heavily, and his suit, which was tight behind the arms, was sticking heavily to his back. His forehead was damp and clammy, and his skin had the quality of wet synthetic underpants.

Mr Wicks turned out to be something of a detective and had tracked down Bobby Boss in Turin’s most expensive restaurant—it was, Mr Wicks had concluded, Mr Robert Boss’s business to know where to find quality—and pulled him away before he could finish his meal. This was, I was told, the first time that Bobby Boss had seen the people on one of his package tours. It had not been Bobby Boss’s intention ever to see them; it was only his affection for pasta that had compelled him at the last minute to join the trip. The decision was being regretted; Bobby Boss did not look happy.

Everybody there wanted to ask him questions. They were trying to make him accountable for the damage and the injuries and the embarrassment. I wanted to ask him questions as well and decided that I would phone him when I returned. In my eyes, Bobby Boss was nothing less than evil, a wide-boy of working-class sport, a cowboy on the make, one of the little men who sells you more seats than he has to offer, wants more cash than there are receipts to show for it, an expert in securing a bit of this, a bit of that. Why had he told people there would be seats when there weren’t even tickets? I wanted to ask. Why, when the United supporters were banned, had he sold them a package to Turin? But when I phoned, I got the steady tone of a disconnected line. I tried Directory Enquiries. There was no Bobby Boss Travel Agency. I looked in the phone book for Bobby Boss, B. Boss, Robert Boss, R. Boss and tried each one. Bobby Boss, I concluded, had packed up and was into something else.

Jackie was reaching the end of her list, and the last armoured vehicle had rolled up to the front of the hotel. The Italians across the square had grown impatient: they would be heading home soon. The colonel had ordered his soldiers into formation. And Bobby Boss—his trousers clinging to the skin along the back of his thighs—was engaged in an intense conversation with Mr Wicks. I don’t know how he had done it but Bobby Boss had shifted the scrutiny away from himself. He was selling again; he was offering Mr Wicks a discount on a package tour to the next World Cup. He was prepared to throw in the hotel at no extra cost. Bobby Boss was trying very hard to get Mr Wicks to like him. But Mr Wicks was not buying.

The next morning, Mick was first to show up at the square. It was safe now—no soldiers or avenging mobs of Italians—and the atmosphere was distinctly subdued: the morning after the night before. By the time I arrived, Mick was well into an eight-litre bottle of red wine. I have since seen eight-litre bottles of wine—they are called Methuselahs—but I hadn’t seen one at the time. It was gigantic and unwieldy but, according to Mick, extremely good value. You had to admire his strength; his stomach must have been made of bricks.

I spotted Clayton. He had not brought a change of clothing and was wrestling with the same pair of trousers, now colourfully stained. I hadn’t seen him the night before: having passed out early in the afternoon, he had missed the match and had woken up this morning inside a cardboard box.

By eleven o’clock, most of the supporters had surfaced, and it was evident that, although our flight back was early in the afternoon, the day was not going to be very different from the one before. This was a prospect that was difficult to contemplate, but the fact was everyone had had a head start. The quantity of alcohol already in the bloodstream before anyone started drinking again was considerable: a few hours’ sleep wasn’t about to undo yesterday’s good work. And by the time the supporters reached the airport, they were spectacularly drunk—again. They came crashing out of the coaches, tripping over each other, singing loudly, zig-zagging as they roared into the terminal.

I was tired. I had seen enough. But I didn’t have a choice: I was going to see more.

When we finally got outside the terminal, one of the supporters passed out. He had just about reached the bus that was to take us to the plane when he dropped to his knees and fell on to his face, unconscious. The temptation must have been to leave him there. It didn’t seem sensible that, in his state, he should be allowed to fly: he was bound to get sick; he might have been very ill. None of this was as dangerous as allowing him to remain behind. Four soldiers lifted him up and heaved him on to the bus.

Meanwhile, Mick had started to act up. I don’t know what had happened to his eight-litre bottle of red wine. I fear that he had drunk it. He was on to lager now, ordinary can size.

Once outside, Mick had thought it would be amusing if he made a dash for the runway. He sprinted—a sight in itself—into the open territory of the landing-strip, and the airport was thrown into a panic. Someone started shouting in Italian, and ten or twelve soldiers bolted across the tarmac in pursuit of one very large English supporter in a state of dangerous intoxication. Mick stopped just short of the runway and waited for the soldiers, giggling and hooting and pointing his finger. He thought it would be more amusing if, once the soldiers had caught up with him, he then ran off in another direction. More panic, more urgent shouting, as Mick—from our vantage place by the terminal, a large dot in the distance—ran round in circles frantically chased by smaller dots in uniforms. When I returned to England, Mick was to send me a package of photographs that someone had taken after he had been apprehended by the soldiers. ‘I don’t remember,’ Mick wrote, ‘any of it happening. Isn’t that funny?’

On reflection, I can see now that there had been more people there than expected. I had recognized some of the nine-year-olds from the night before, and I did not think that they had been on the plane from London. I had spotted Roy, who I knew had not been on the plane. But I didn’t think much of it. I had other concerns.

My first one had been retrieving my passport. One of the younger supporters had been staring at it uncomprehendingly when it, along with his own British passport, was inexplicably delivered into his hands. The reason why it was in his possession and not mine was because of the perplexing pandemonium at passport control.

Once the supporters had passed into the terminal from the buses outside, they all made straight for the immigration desks. They were weaving and bobbing and swaying from side to side from the drink, but were nevertheless so purposeful that it made me think that the flight was about to leave. But this was not likely: we were early, and, besides, the flight was a charter: what was the hurry? There were cries for order, but they were ignored. I heard the voice of Mr Wicks, rising above the clamour, begging us to form a queue. Two officials were in charge of immigration and passports, and the normal procedure was to pass one by one between their desks. The supporters passed through them, but it wasn’t one by one: it was in packs of twenty. Turin is not a busy airport, and the two men would have never been confronted by such a crowd. There was a terrible crush, with people squeezing through sideways and pressed on top of each other. I saw younger supporters crawling on the floor on their hands and knees. One slipped through by going underneath one of the desks.

Once on the other side of passport control, the surge continued: the pack headed straight for the gate. The attendants collecting tickets for Monarch Airways were less protected than the immigration officers, who had desks to hide behind.

The stewardess standing in the door of the plane was next.

It was only when I found my place—suspecting that I was one of the few passengers sober enough to discover the correspondence between the number printed on his boarding pass and the one displayed above his seat—that I understood what had happened. It wasn’t simply the case that, once again, English supporters were behaving in a drunk and disorderly way. They were drunk and disorderly for a reason: I had just seen what it was to be on the jib.

I reached down to put my bag away and noticed that there was no room for it: there were two feet. I bent down and confirmed what I felt: there were indeed two feet. The two feet were attached to two legs, which were, as I bent down a little further, attached to an ordinary human body at the far end of which was a human face, a familiar one, that; with his forefinger brought to his lips, was telling me not to say anything.

I looked around the plane, which had grown exceptionally quiet: not, I then appreciated, because it was about take off but because it was about to take off filled with stowaways: they were all crushed underneath the window seats. I didn’t know how many there were. I started counting them—I got up to ten—when I realized who was in the seat next to me.

It was Roy, elegantly dressed in a light-blue cotton suit, a white waistcoat, Italian canvas shoes and a diamond ear-ring. I thought afterwards that I should have asked him how he got on the airplane—had he managed to get the Mercedes on board as well?—but I was so taken aback by the fact that he was sitting next to me that I couldn’t think of anything to say. For the duration of the flight I couldn’t think of anything to say. My luck, it seemed, had changed, and Roy, who couldn’t bear to look at me before, had also concluded, I learned later, that I wasn’t such a bad sort after all. Roy, too, had decided that I was a good geezer.

Matters on the flight, meanwhile, had become strange. The stewardesses were not supplying anyone with food or drink because they were refusing to walk down the aisle: the last one who tried was still shaken up following a wrestling match she had with Mick, who was now on to vodka, drinking it from a large two-litre, duty-free bottle. The wrestling match had ended up with the stewardess suddenly disappearing behind one of the seats, with her feet, rising above the head-rest, kicking in the air.

Matters had also become confused because there were so many people. Now that the plane had become airborne, the feet I found underneath my seat were no longer there, and the young man to whom they were attached was looking around for a place to sit. He was joined in this by many others. He explained to me that, with no way of getting back to England, he and his friends had decided to join us on our return flight. Although they didn’t have a ticket or a boarding pass, they had succeeded in sneaking on board, but then realized that as the flight was fully booked they would have to hide underneath the seats. It seemed fairly ingenious, but it raised doubts in my mind about the measures taken to stop hijackers. I was unable to express these doubts because by this time Roy was creating a bit of a stir. He had emptied one of his trouser pockets. In it there were three things: a large roll of twenty-pound notes; a key-ring, with a small silver knife attached to it (was the Mercedes on board after all?); and a brown envelope containing a large quantity of white powder that Roy proceeded to chop up. Many people had gathered around, with whom Roy, being a generous fellow, was sharing his white powder, now disappearing rapidly up one of the tightly-rolled twenty-pound notes.

When our plane was about to land, there was another problem. No one, from that wayward group often, really wanted to climb back underneath the seats, and thus, with a cavalier disregard for international flight regulations, many people were wandering up and down the aisle unable to find a place to sit as the plane descended. One person who was not wandering up and down the aisle was Mick. And that was because he was lying in the middle of it. Mick had abandoned his duty-free bottle of vodka, because Mick had become copiously ill.

Mick’s stomach was not made of bricks after all.

I got back to London at about eight o’clock that night, feeling tired and mean and nasty. I was gritty and hungover, and my mind was full of images from the night before. I was in a hurry to get home.

The escalator at the Marble Arch Underground station was not working. My train left in minutes. I bolted down the steps of the station; the stairs were long and steep. There was an old man and woman in front of me. The old woman was helping the man, but they were having trouble negotiating the stairs, taking one gentle step at a time. Both had canes. But together they were also taking up the width of the staircase. I was in a hurry. I started muttering underneath my breath: ‘Get on with it.’ And still they proceeded, step by step, frail and careful. I said it again: ‘Get on with it.’ And then something snapped and I shoved them forcefully aside, pushing them sideways with the flat part of my hand. I shot past and then looked back up at them.

‘Fuck off,’ I said. ‘Fuck off, you old cunts.’

Juventus went on to win the final of the Cup-Winners Cup, beating the Porto Football Club two-one at the stadium in Basle in Switzerland. The next season, Juventus was in the European Cup. In the first round, it played the Finnish team Ilves-Kissat and won six-nil. It won the second round, and in the quarter-finals played Sparta Prague: again a victory for Juventus. The semi-final was against Bordeaux. It wasn’t until the final that Juventus played an English team again, the first time since Manchester United visited Turin. The team was Liverpool; the stadium was Heysel in Brussels. Juventus won one-nil; the goal was a penalty kick. Before the match began, thirty-nine people died; six hundred were injured.