Prize night
Jeremy Clarke
It seems to be the season for the West Ham football hooligan memoir book launch. Last week it was Bill Gardner’s autobiography, Good Afternoon, Gentlemen, the Name’s Bill Gardner, cowritten with Cass Pennant. Sharon made me take her to this one. She enjoys London accents and the company of men who use their fists, so a roomful of ex-West Ham hooligans having a jolly-up at the South West Ham Working Man’s Club, and Frank Bruno expected to turn up, was right up her alley.
She’s told Trev, whom she’s seeing again, that she was going to her mum for the weekend. But he’s gone through her inbox and seen a text from me about going up to London, and he’s gone bananas. When she gets in the car her eyes are puffy and she’s still trembling after the row. And she’s lost without her mobile, which is her entire life really, which broke when she threw it at Trev.
We get to London and she revives a little. A nip of gin swigged from the bottle on the north circular and a single-skin joint and she’s fighting fit again. We park near the club and she changes in the car. She wriggles into this long, black, skintight sparkly number, slit to the hip, then steps into a pair of high-heeled shoes so pointed and dangerous-looking that you could probably hijack a plane with them. We go in. There’s about 300 people inside the club, chaps mostly, the majority of them, as Sharon quickly observes, gone to seed. It’s a lively do, though, a proper booze-up, as working-class East End as a plate of whelks, with plenty of singing.
We’re just in time for the raffle. The great Bill Gardner himself is about to make the draw. Sharon likes a raffle and makes me buy tickets, which I do in the nick of time. Bill holds out the bucket and I pop in our duplicates — a late entry. When I was 14 years old, Bill Gardner was a living legend, a hero. Where most of my friends had posters of Bobby Moore on the wall, or of Geoff Hurst, I’d have had one of Bill Gardner if I could. I say hello to Bill after all these years, and he asks me how I am. Something I hadn’t realised before is that in spite of his notoriety Bill Gardner is an exceptionally nice man.
Bill picks a ticket from the bucket and announces the prize-winning number over the microphone. It’s one that I’ve just bought for Sharon. The silly sod has forgotten to shake the bucket. I can see Sharon at the back of the room, on tiptoe, waving her winning ticket. She passes between the rowdy tables, curtsies to Bill as if he’s royalty, good girl, and Bill hands her a huge bottle of nasty-looking Liebfraumilch. But it’s as she turns to leave the stage that she gets her main prize of the evening: a 6'4" West Ham football hooligan with stab wounds to prove it, wide shoulders and film star looks. ‘Excuse me, love,’ he says, bumping into her on purpose. ‘Are you the stripper?’ And that’s it. Straightaway she’s got a hand inside his blazer and is feeling his pectorals, and the next time I look round she’s got the love light in her eye and she’s climbing all over him.
Once she’s come to their attention, though, one or two of the wives present aren’t too taken with her. They think she’s an undercover policewoman. ‘What station are you from then, love?’ says one, when Sharon asks for a light.
At the end of the night, I look round and Sharon’s gone and no word left. I can’t drive home because her handbag, purse and change of clothes are in the car. So I leave a note on the windscreen and walk around the corner and get a room for the night in the hotel at West Ham football ground. The next morning, at 11 o’clock, I’ve checked out again and I’m sitting on a leather sofa in the lobby waiting for her to either turn up or call.
Starting shortly is a wedding reception for 900. It’s a Hindu wedding and a triumphal arch of cream-coloured silk decorated inside with cream and scarlet flowers has been erected in front of the hotel. A trio of gorgeously dressed, self-consciously beautiful women — they could have been Indian princesses — passes under the billowing arch and enters the lobby. And right behind them — Sharon, dress flapping open indecently, make-up ruined, hair like standing corn after a gale, taking two steps forward and one to the side.
She slumps down next to me, removes a shoe and rubs the sole of her foot. Then she has an announcement to make. ‘Jerry,’ she says. ‘I’ve lost my knickers.’ This, I’m afraid, is quite a serious matter, the amount of money she spends on them.
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