Huts 49

I was convinced I’d caught malaria or something. The sheets on my bed were sodden with sweat and wrapped around me like barbed wire, leaving only enough space for the fire alarm in my over inflated head. I was going to die.

We laughed. Me and Ga-ga. He was my best friend-kinda-cousin, because his dad was my uncle and his mum was my aunt, because they were adults. I was well related. We’d combined forces and had more plastic soldiers than ants in a nest. And we’d covered ourselves in glory around the folds and corners of the carpet around the electric fire. Uncle George even moved his ankle so that I could hide two or three sniper Red Indians with tomahawks behind it.

The good thing about Uncle George’s house was they had a telly. Uncle George would turn it on and pull open the doors and we’d all wait, even Ga-ga’s sisters, until it heated up. But when they saw it was wrestling they’d wander away to play with their dolls. If a Red Indian was killed it would have to lie on the carpet on its rectangular plastic side. It might squeak out of the side of its mouth, Achtung, which was Red Indian for ‘I’m dead’. But we’d need to watch Uncle George’s feet in case he didn’t know and stood on the alive Red Indians, because he got awful excited when the belly wrestler was on. One big belly V’s another bigger belly. You always knew who the baddy wrestler was because people booed and a granny with a rolled up brolly’d always attack him.

By that point we’d usually sneaked away to be bad ourselves. As Ga-ga said there was no point in having little sisters if you couldn’t make them cry. We’d switch doll’s heads, or sometimes we’d leave them headless, just the little plastic hole or stump, sticking out like a teat, crying out for the kind of attention long blond hair, curling coy black eyelashes and tanned plastic legs never could. Because that was all little sisters got. Christmas. A doll. Birthday. A doll. There was a lot of doll interbreeding in the dark cupboard, which tasted of damp, beside the girl’s beds. My mate Ga-ga. I’d have told him my secret. Hangover? I knew how the dolls felt when they got their heads ripped off.

I’d manfully drunk Coke waiting to get on the supporter’s bus. I took my seat at the back of the bus as Big Jas belted out every verse of The Soldier’s Song, and some he just made up, as we bleated along and beat out time with our boots, so that the green and gold Double- Decker was rocking even before we were moving.

‘Here,’ said Ga-ga, ignoring the kind of benevolent Song’s of Praise smile I had on my face and handing me a can of Tennent’s Export.

I didn’t want to offend him, because of his coat. It was all smug black leather; the kind of coat that stamped Nazi, Black and Tan or the IRA on the wearer. It meant I’m a serious person. Not to be fucked about with. And he was older and bigger than me; nearly had a moustache and a natty black IRA berry, with a silver sickle badge, instead of a Celtic hat. He had enough to worry about with a name like George Divine on a Celtic bus, without me adding to his woes. But I held my hand up anyway.

‘Nah,’ I said, ‘it’s a bit too early for me. And I don’t really drink that stuff.’

‘Here, huv this then,’ said Ga-ga, hauling a full bottle of Eldorado out of his little jacket pocket, like a magician on his day off.

‘Nah,’ I said, ‘I can’t be bothered.’

The bus was moving and Ga-ga was bouncing up and down trying to get some kind of plastic penny whistle song going with his usual level of success.

‘Here,’ have a can, said Ga-ga again. There was a name for this short-term memory loss on the ward. It was called being a right pain in the arse. But when he looked at me as if I wasn’t a real Irishman I had to take a little swig.

There were no party songs on the way back. Just the kind of dull incomprehension that swallowing more cans and fortified wines couldn’t even help decipher. There was only one thing to be done, but we couldn’t work out what it was between us. There were angry mutterings of sack Jock Stein. Get rid of Billy Mc Neil and John Clark. Somebody said something about wee Jinky, but that was taking it too far. If there was going to be a funeral, it was whoever said anything about Jinky.

The supporters bus dropped us right outside the door of The Horse and Barge and tooted his horn, as if in fair well, or as a sign that he was a bastardin’ Hun bastard.

‘C’mon’ said Ga-ga, adjusting his beret, grabbing my arm and pulling me to the front when I wanted to be at the back. ‘We’ll show the bastards how an Irishman behaves’.

I didn’t want to remind him that his Irish accent was a sham. He’d lived beside me for most of his life. As Ga-ga barged open the pub door I heard a massive roar of derision. I could almost see Barry Ferguson standing pint in hand, gloating for all he was worth and then gloating some more.

I slipped unnoticed to the back of the advancing throng and walked up towards Bluebell woods. I would probably have been better off dead. The only thing to be done was to bury my head in my blanket and wait for it all to go away.