Bananas At Dawn

JPBean and John Cooper Clarke prepare to duel...

York Opera House, November 2010

A bit of light reading...

Gatty, son of a goalkeeper
By JP Bean
At the age of thirty seven, Gatty's mother retired from mud-wrestling and became a goalkeeper. Gatty, who had no interest in sport, said the only difference it made to him was a bit less slime on the bottom of the bath.
One o'clock, on the dot, every Saturday saw her leave the house, her boots dangling proudly round her neck, while Gatty had to clean up the fish and chip papers, wash the pots and light the fire, ready for her return at tea-time. Woe betide him if a roaring blaze did not greet her.
‘What you been doin' all afternoon, you idle cretin' she would demand.'A woman's entitled to her home comforts.'
‘Sorry Ma.’
‘You will be.’ Gatty ducked, just in time, the slipstream from a haymaker lifting his newly gelled hair. A rush of self-satisfaction swept over him. Not so long ago he'd have been knocked across the room and spent the next three days applying raw liver to a shiner.
Off he would scuttle to the Chinese for her tea. ‘I'm famished. Get me five quid's worth in a big bird's nest.’ Stuffing her bulldog features with chow mein and noodles, his mother related the high­lights of the afternoon's match.
Gatty nibbled quietly as the epic events were thrillingly recount­ed. Goalmouth scrambles and high crosses from the wing; full backs who didn't know their arses from their elbows; thirty yard shots finger-tipped over the bar, and fearless dives to snatch certain match-winners from the toe-caps of opposing strikers.
Very few of these Great Moments In Goalkeeping got as far as Gatty's eardrums. He had mastered the technique of presenting a passably interested facial expression, while employing his mental faculties on unrelated matters. Usually he re-lived his own Saturday afternoon thrills. For while his mother was pacing the goal line and flinging herself about the six yard box, Gatty was down the town. Shoplifting.
He would later say he'd not been a serious shoplifter, he'd only done it for laughs, but on the second day of the football season he chortled his way out of John Lewis with four top-of-the range television sets. All four went out through the fire exit, to be eagerly received by a man Gatty knew only as Albert, who swiftly transferred them to his own strategically parked, but untaxed and uninsured, van. This Albert, whose criminal record ran to eighteen pages, told Gatty that the reason he didn't legalise his vehicle was because it would have been hypocritical when he used it so much for villainy.
The first Saturday in November there was a cold snap in the air. Gatty's mother left the house reeking of liniment and shortly afterwards Gatty went to the Army Stores and purloined forty-eight woolly hats. He took them straight home and that tea time when he fetched the Chinese he wore on his head a dark green woolly hat with a light green bobble on top.
‘Take that stupid titfer off’ his mother barked, as she warmed the cheeks of her muscular bum on the mantlepiece. ‘It reminds me of your stupid father.’ Long ago Gatty senior had left - in a woolly hat and a bruised condition. Gatty had not seen his father since he was seven, and rarely heard from him.
As the football season rolled on and the pitches became churned up and then rock hard, Gatty's mother came home increasingly bad-tempered. ‘It were hell out there this afters,’ she announced in mid-February. ‘Stoke that fire up, fetch a Chinese and run my bath.’
‘Right Ma.’ Gatty didn't argue. She might no longer be a star of mud-wrestling, but she hadn't lost her skills in that science. Too many times he'd been forearm smashed around the living room, double-drop-kicked over the washer and ended up with his nose in the coal scuttle and the rest of his body painfully twisted into a half­nelson. ‘Right Ma’ he said, looking lively.

Not only the pitches were getting harder. Shoplifting was too. Gatty, a young man in danger of becoming a victim of his own success, was now too familiar to the city's store detectives for his own good. From the moment he got off the bus outside the Town Hall they latched onto him. By the time he'd ambled along one side of the High Street, picking up a few items in Boots and then putting them down again, trying on a jacket and changing his mind in Marks and Spencer, twiddling a few knobs in Currys, he had a retinue of undistinguished, plainly-dressed nondescripts - all trying hard not to be noticed as they weaved in and out of each other's stores like a conga at a wedding reception. After putting up with it for several weeks, Gatty retired from shoplifting. He took up armed robbery instead.
His mother never knew what he did while she was bravely guarding the goal mouth. She never asked and if she had he wouldn't have told her. He would have said something like ‘Oh I did a bit of tidying up and then I trimmed my toenails’ and she would have sneered back something like ‘About all you're good for, you pathetic wimp.’ She had a way of saying ‘pathetic’, it took a good half minute for that one word to fully spew forth. But of course this dialogue never occurred, due to the weekly Great Moments In Goalkeeping slot over the Chinese.
She had no inkling either of the £36,220 which had accrued in Gatty's building society account - £36,215 of it stolen at gunpoint from five other building societies that wished to remain anonymous to avoid the bad publicity. The odd £5 had lain in the account since it was opened in Gatty's name by his father, the day before he left in his woolly hat and bruised condition.

In the course of less than a football season Gatty had gone from a shoplifter to an armed robber. Even the van man, Albert, who, by his own admission, had more form than a Derby winner, was impressed. ‘Gatty lad,’ he said, an unmistakable hint of awe in his voice, ‘You've gone up a league.’
The tools of his trade were basic - a black stockinged mask, a hold-all to carry the swag and a 9 millimetre Luger bought with the proceeds of shoplifting. His first couple of outings were a disappointment - both times the cashier pushed money over the counter without him needing to fire the gun. Next time out he put a couple of bullets in the ceiling anyway, and he felt better for it.
Shoplifting seemed very tame by comparison, but nothing changed on Saturday teatimes. He knew she kept talking, kept boasting, because he could see her lips moving as he ate his Chinese and planned his next job. Afterwards, dutifully, he'd still wash and wipe the pots and make her a second mug of tea, just like he always had.

By the night before the Cup Final, Gatty had grown blasé about relieving building societies of their assets. Now he had seven accounts in false names. It was a long way from forty-eight woolly hats. And, when he thought about it, further still from stoking the fire, washing the pots, clearing away the fish and chip papers, and being swatted around the house like a bluebottle.
His mother was sitting in her armchair, her big, callused feet on top of the television set. She put her mug down and began rubbing the palms of her hands together. ‘Look at them,’ she said. ‘They've saved some goals they have.’ She started to catalogue the glories of her season yet again - penalties saved, high balls punched to safety, vicious long-shots stopped on the line.
For once, Gatty seemed mildly interested. ‘I was wondering Ma ... he said.
Her jowls tightened. ‘Yes?’
‘What's the best shot you've ever stopped? Do you know?’
She punched the air. ‘Do I? Do I .... ! Boxing Day ... a peach of a banana shot from their number seven ... off the side of his foot ­ musta been travellin' at ninety mile an hour... But I stopped it!’ She sat back, her eyes closed, returning to the moment.
Gatty reached into his pocket for the Luger, pointed it at his mother's head and pulled the trigger. ‘Stop this,’ he said.

First published in London Magazine, 1994