One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel by Julian Cope

Author:Julian Cope
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780571270439
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2014-06-16T23:00:00+00:00

34. THE HALLAM TOWERS POST-MORTEM

8.30am, Monday June 12th, 2006

Monologue to Anna at Iloi, overlooking Lake Omodeo

Disaster night in Sheffield felt like a bomb had hit it, especially once all the chartered coaches and trains and minibuses had inhaled their grieving red masses and ferried them off down their respective motorways. Locals on the city streets there were none, all locked away behind closed doors, wringing their hands at the civic shame brought down upon their heads this day. The sole life-forms that remained in the city centre were shell-shocked packs of hollow-eyed out-of-town business boys, who – too late to check into any of Sheffield’s now-bulging hotels – roamed the streets far too drunk to drive the hundred-odd miles home, but still done up in their best Lager Lout threads. Poor fuckers. They all looked like their jeans and red footy shirts would explode at midnight, all of them stranded miles from work left bereft in their business grey. Knowing how hard it was for Yeh-Yeh to get out as much as the rest of us, him being a magistrate and all, our little gang – all now brimming over with love for the Sanctity of Life – recognised in the haunted expression of each red-shirted man who passed us in the night, the plight of our own little magistrate had he – after an experience of today’s magnitude – been left to fend for himself in late-night Glasgow, Hamburg or some other rum city centre. Yeh-Yeh would need help! Shit, therefore these poor fuckers need help!

And so we enacted an idea. All of us eager after the brown bath episode to squeeze the best possible deal out of the Hallam Towers, and several of us – me, Rob Dean, Stu, Have-a-laugh and Yeh-Yeh – each in possession of a vast thirteenth-floor room with a view to the Peak District, we put the word around Sheff that the only wake in town was our wake. Come all ye Faithful, come all ye Fucked Up. Myself and Have-a-laugh being the only well dressed amongst us, i.e.: perpetual black clothes, the pair of us decorated my bedroom by tying black socks and t-shirts around the appropriate furniture points, thereby creating a special room of peace and quiet, a Room of Gloom wherein anyone who had suffered genuine losses could just fall to pieces in silence. Yeh-Yeh being cultured and a bit jittery about others invading his territory, we piled all of our personal belongings into his room, and kept it locked. Doughy as usual saved his money by kipping, or intending to kip in the back of ‘Wash Me #1’. What were the other four rooms to be used for? Forgetting. A whole night of forgetting. Then we waited. Will they come? Will the word get out to those who need it most?

They came. Slowly at first, but with the passing hours scores of The Appalled drifted through our open doors, sought sanctuary through our open doors. Liverpool fans, Forest fans, even

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