A Bottle of Southern Comfort
A 10 minute read
Thursday April 13th 1989: I give my ticket for the FA Cup Semi-Final match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest to a friend. He buys me a bottle of Southern Comfort in return.
Friday April 14th 1989; My friend books his train tickets and spends most of the evening in the pub boring us all rigid with his pre-match excitement. It’s like being with a toddler on Christmas Eve. Later that night I smoke some weed and get monumentally drunk, alone, on the bottle of Southern Comfort he bought me.
Saturday April 15th 1989; I crawl out of bed at around 1pm with a head full of mining dwarfs and a mouth full of camel scrotum. By 3pm I’m watching the match at another friend’s house, with a few others I don’t recognize, already on my third cold beer. Thirty minutes later I’m sitting on the kerb outside, with drying vomit between my feet, crying tears that feel like they’ll never stop.
My friend never came home.
I haven’t drunk Southern Comfort since, it brings with it memories too clear for me to bear. The TV images ran through my dreams for weeks and months afterwards and I have sporadic nightmares right up to this day.
In the nightmare I had most often I am standing, head to one side, chest pressed against a solid wall of rubber that is metres thick. I can see no people around me, I am completely alone. Something is pressing against my back, soft as a pillow but relentless. It feels threatening, but at the same time strangely comforting. The pillow pushes into my back like there’s a truck behind it. I can hear my ribs creaking under the pressure, moments away from cracking and splintering. As my vision gets cloudy and tiny fireworks start going off inside my eyes, I realise my feet are not touching the floor. I am suspended, pushed relentlessly into this massive block of rubber, losing consciousness as my ribs bend and creak.
And then I wake. Often I’m sobbing.
In the other recurring nightmare I’m lying on my back, staring at the sky. It is shockingly blue, with just the smallest of hazy clouds moving across it. I am conscious, but incapable of moving or speaking. My eyes are open but I cannot blink. A voice says “This one’s still breathing” before another says “No, he’s already dead”. It’s hard to explain why, but I know the second voice has more authority than the first. Then there’s a zipping sound, and the body bag I’ve been lying in closes over me and everything goes black.
I am often sobbing when I wake from that one too.
And yes, this all sounds very melodramatic doesn’t it? It isn’t like I went through any of it. I didn’t experience the panic, the terror, the fear of dying as I was crushed against the metal barrier. And although what was televised that day was bloody awful, TV images in those days were pretty poor quality and didn’t really get across the full horror of what was happening. But I think a combination of what was shown live on the telly, reading about it in the years afterwards, looking at the graphic images taken from the pitch, following the bereaved families campaign for justice, and a mind prone to vivid imagination and extensive overthinking has almost made me feel that I was there.
Whatever, on April 15th every year, exactly one week before my birthday, I become sullen, irritable and tearful. I am difficult to be around. I feel guilty. I feel that the wrong door opened, that the wrong door closed. I sometimes feel I am living someone else’s life. That I died that day and yet somehow live on in my friend’s head, controlling a body that isn’t mine. It’s weird, and yes I probably should be over this by now, but my mind has other ideas so I just let the little fucker have its day of misery because I don’t know how to stop it doing that.
Please
Boycott The Sun newspaper - Do some research - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-47697569 - Support Liverpool FC as your second team
Don’t let football rivalry excuse ignorance and hate