East Side (Great Lost Project No. 2)

Around the time MDK was hitting the buffers, I embarked upon a project which was my first stab at real writing. I suspect it would have been around the same time as Euro ’96, because every lad in my year was obsessed with football and it reached its apogee during that wonderful time when it felt like we were truly part of the zeitgeist. Gazza, Three Lions, penalties…looking back, what a brilliant time those three weeks were. Then it was back to the same old stuff.

East Side (not a working title, but I suspect the real title which is lost to history was something like ‘Football Story’) was an attempt to tie in football, politics, eastern European culture and violence. I think I had watched ID at this point, the film where Reece Dinsdale’s copper infiltrates a gang of hooligans in an attempt to bring down the generals behind them, and ends up going native and losing his mind.

The plot of East Side centred on a unit which belonged to Interpol, and they were responsible for stopping football based violence before it tore places apart. The reason it was set in eastern Europe was that it was at that time still brushing the dust of Communism off itself, and seemed to me a bit lawless and scary. I worshipped a magazine, Total Sport, which had an article in an early issue about the indiscriminate hatred between Red Star and Partizan Belgrade, itself linked to the influence of a war criminal known as Arkan. I didn’t know it at the time, but I assumed the Czech Republic and Slovakia must have felt the same way to go their separate ways in the 1990’s, so that’s where East Side was going to take place.

I was also under the influence of a book I had borrowed from Aldridge Library, called On Leaving a Prague Window. The fly-leaf spoke of jazz, cobbled streets, secrets and murky characters, like a Nick Cave song. When I tried to read the book I found it incredibly dull, but the setting was great.

The story was that during a game of football between Czech Republic and Slovakia, an uprising by the away fans saw the Czech Prime Minister abducted and taken back to a small village in the wilds of the mountains, leading to a build-up of troops and tension between the two former partners. The football unit were the ones leant on to crack the case, and it involved infiltrating the gang of thugs that had perpetrated the violence.

This project is also notable for the first time I began to research a work. All of my other attempts had either been pastiches of something I’d read or watched a thousand times, or I’d never had to think about because I knew those worlds so well. East Side led back to Aldridge Library, where they sorted me out the address of the Slovakian Tourist Board. A request for information was returned with a huge deluge of material – travel guides, festival itineraries, maps, leaflets. A covering letter even detailed what the small village I’d randomly picked as the bolthole looked like. I was slightly embarrassed.

Again, the book didn’t make it beyond the first chapter because it was shit. I didn’t know how to write, I didn’t know what was going to happen, and I didn’t even know what my characters looked like. I only recall one: the boss was an American, looked like David Schwimmer and was called Ross Green, which the observant reading will note is a cross between two character’s names from Friends.

I guess it’s a great lost project because it was the first idea I had that was all mine and had some meat to it. I remember sitting there, at my sister’s 386 PC, listening to Cast and writing away, inbetween looking at the dirty bits I could find on her copy of Encarta. I’d like to think there was somebody in Bratislava who received my fifteen year old’s letter asking for more information on their beautiful country, and thinking that an author was going to put it on the map so quickly. 

To the whole of Slovakia, I’m sorry. But at least you avoided a massive set-to with your neighbour.