He might be a wanker, but Padre Pio is always with us for one reason and one reason only: he is game. In Belfast you might be the biggest windy-licking, back-stabbing, touting, double-crossing, thieving, hooding, joyriding wee bastard, but if you’re game then all will be forgiven. Once you prove you’re game, you get respect … and maybe fear.
Game is what we need on this glorious day – because we are the Red Army. This will be the greatest day ever in the history of Cliftonville Football Club, the side that for far too long has been watched only by gaggles of old boys clutching flasks of tea with tartan blankets wrapped around their bony, withered legs. For we are the new Red Army. We are the Zulus who have appeared on the top of the hill. We are on our way to Windsor Park for the Irish Cup Final, and we all need to show that we are game, and there is none more game as Padre Pio McCann.
A group of older Reds supporters once dared him to go on his own to Windsor Park at our last home match against Linfield. We are barred from playing our greatest rivals at our Solitude home for ‘security reasons’, which is a total fucking injustice. But to make this dare special, they challenged Padre Pio to sneak into the blue end of the stadium. So there we were, just a couple of weeks ago, freezing our balls off on the Spion Kop, where we will stand for the final later this afternoon. At half-time, a brick shithouse of a hooligan from the New Lodge took out his binos for a squint into the North Stand to clock the top boys in the opposition’s ranks. Suddenly, he sees our own boy, right there in the middle of a sea of the Orange scummers. A blue-and-white scarf with thin red lines was tied around his scrawny neck and he was joining in the chorus of ‘Dirty Fenian bastards, yiz dirty Fenian bastards’. There he was, Padre Pio, packed right up at the end of the Linfield support, being held back from us by the thick black-and-green lines of the RUC riot squad. Now for me that was, and will always remain, well and truly game.
My cousin’s nostrils are still flaring and his fists are tightening as Padre Pio shouts out, ‘Alex Higgins – one! Ruin’s ma – three times a week!’
In a fair dig, Rex Mundi would easily win, but Padre Pio doesn’t know the meaning of that word ‘fair’. This is because he makes up for being a stumpy wee cunt by being prepared to do absolutely anything in a fight. Padre Pio was and always will be bladed up. Even as a kid, in the slimy primary schoolyard, he shoved the pointy end of a protractor up into the arse of a spud-head twice his size who had knocked his shite in earlier that day. That resulted in him being expelled from St Columba’s and placed into a secure ‘education centre’ set up for the simpletons and psychos that no normal school would keep on their rolls. Even though he became an absent figure at my school, we remained close, and nobody went near him or me in the street. He had a reputation for carrying razors, flickies, Stanley knives and even screwdrivers wherever he went. I once saw him rip open an Orangeman’s face with a penknife at a bus stop near Lord Hamill’s burger bar after the Prod had grabbed me by the arm and had the audacity to ask if we were Taigs. Later, when he reached the Lagan, where he chucked the knife into the bilious-coloured water, Padre Pio announced, ‘God made Catholics, the Armalite made them equal and this blade made us two fearless fuckers.’
I’m worried now that he’s secreted steel up the sleeve of his army coat and that it’s going to be plunged into Rex Mundi’s shiny new biker jacket. I’m even more worried that if we are trapped in here by Bruce Lee, we will never get to the match on time. But then I remember that on the way through town, Padre Pio had gone into Littlewoods’ off-licence to swipe a bottle of QC. Bloodshed could be avoided with the promise of fortified wine.
‘Let’s go into the bogs and knock back that hooch you stroked before Bruce Lee over there kicks off,’ I suggest to him.
Enveloped in the stench of eye-stinging bleach, a truce is eventually reached. They take it in turns to gulp down belts of the wine that looks like the colour of an oul man’s polluted prostate piss. Outside, Bowie’s ‘Boys Keep Swinging’ blasts from the jukebox. Somebody out there, amid the rows of spides with their middle shades and steel-tipped brogues, has taste. Whoever keeps putting that song on repeatedly with its high hat drum beat start and dissonant electro ending doesn’t know that he is doing it for me. For it propels me back to last summer, to her, to a time I thought I had finally escaped Padre Pio, to the months before I joined the Red Army.
The Bowie track only reminds me now that I am trapped with him here once again, unable to free myself from his tentacles, yet not wanting to be ungrateful for all that he has done for me since we were small boys cowering in a slippery schoolyard, terrified that the bigger brutes in hand-me-down skinner jeans and Wrangler jackets would turn their malevolent attention on to us. Yet they never did because Padre Pio pulled out a blade and threatened to slit the fucking throat of the first fucker that came anywhere near us. No one ever did. Even after he was expelled and even after I passed the Eleven-plus exam, the sarcastic quips and jealous threats from peers never amounted to anything because they knew they could never turn their back on Padre Pio without risking the spear of cold steel up their holes.
My father could never understand why we were ever friends in the first place and used to call us the ‘Hitler–Stalin Pact’. Padre Pio first took shit from the other kids because at the start of the Troubles his father had fucked up a sniper attack. Two of his fellow Provos were captured while he blew south on the run, leaving his son, wife and mother on their own back up north. He never returned, and Dad swore that he had ended up in Canada, married in bigamous circumstances to a woman from Quebec. Of course, this was something you would never dare mention to Padre Pio. My family came from the other side of the fence. We were Hackney Wicks, Five-Card Tricks, Sticks: the Official IRA. Padre Pio and I were never supposed to be friends, but there you go.
Now he is extending his hand out to my cousin and giving up the last belt of QC to him as a peace offering. In turn, Rex takes out a plastic money bag from one of his zipped side pockets. It contains a pile of what looks like rabbit poo droppings.
‘Don’t skin up yet, Rex,’ Padre Pio says, sniffing the fetid air. ‘Wait till we get to my cousin Trout’s house and then we can get stoned. We can smoke his stuff instead and keep yours for Windsor. Let’s get outta here. This kip reeks of keek.’
When we go back into the pool hall, Padre Pio takes out a cylindrical pile of ten-pence pieces and feeds the Asteroids machine. He becomes transfixed with his mission to destroy the threat from the flying debris of the stars. Rex Mundi and I go over to the jukebox where a tall lanky punter wearing a three-quarter-length, grey-blue RAF coat has just put on ‘Boys Keep Swinging’ for the umpteenth time. I recognise him from The Harp, The Pound and Good Vibrations record shop. I am surprised to see he is one of us in his red-and-white barred scarf. We have spoken before in Terri Hooley’s shop in Great Victoria Street while flicking through the boxes of singles and albums, searching for left-field bands such as Television, Magazine and Cabaret Voltaire. We didn’t speak about Cliftonville, the Red Army and all the associated aggro of the season. Good Vibes wouldn’t have been the place for such a discussion.
‘What do you think of “Jimmy Jimmy”, the new Undertones single?’ I ask him.
‘Aye, O’Neill did well there, Ruin,’ Lanky Balls replies.
Rex Mundi butts in. ‘I think it’s fucking shite. Punk’s not dead, it’s fucking decapitated, mate.’
Lanky Balls surveys Rex Mundi’s Mohican and biker jacket with the painted image of the Devil as a goat inside a pentagram on the back of it.
‘If punk is dead then why do you still look like that?’
‘Because I’d no other clothes when I came here, mate. I’m thinking of shaving my head when I get home to Brighton and robbing some of my English grandad’s braces. The skinheads are coming back this summer.’
Lanky Balls drops ten pence into the jukebox and the jackbooted crunch of marching men introduces the Sex Pistols’ ‘Holidays in the Sun’.
‘This was when it used to be good, mate,’ Rex Mundi says.
‘Yeah I know, but punk died when they let that pantomime junkie Sid Vicious take over the Pistols,’