How I Killed Margaret Thatcher by Anthony Cartwright

people walk past us to get on the coach, some of them singing, Wemb-er-ley, Wemb-er-ley .
    My grandad turns to me and says, Dyer know where I am?
    I don’t know what to say.
    I was born right here, on this spot, he says. This was the back room in our house, right here.
    He looks around like he has never thought about this before. There are clouds of blue exhaust coming from the coach. The castle is behind him. The house he lived in was knocked down years ago. My grandad has to step back onto the pavement as the coach starts to pull away.
    We wave to Johnny and Carlo. Steve and Paulie have gone. My grandad takes me for a hot chocolate in Beatties where we’re going to meet my mum.
    Wolves won the cup. Andy Gray scored when Peter Shilton and David Needham collided, leaving him with an open goal, and they held on to the end. When we got back from town, we listened to it on the radio in the kitchen in Crow Street, me and Ronnie ran in and out through the back door and up and down the gardens in excitement when we scored. We had a good side that year, came sixth in the league; played in Europe the next season. We all went to the PSV Eindhoven game, the floodlights glowing and lighting up the green of the pitch and the old gold shirts. My grandad told me about Honved, how he’d been there, how Wolves had been the best in the world.
    Again, it was my grandad who could see what was coming.
    But where’s this money from? he’d ask, and my dad and Johnny would shrug. A million pounds on a centre-forward here, a few million on a new stand there. Iss madness, he’d say.
    Doh worry abaht it, Dad.
    Stan Cullis day need millions of pounds.
    All right.
    And he had a team we’d stand in the rain to watch. We day need a fancy stand.
    Yome living in the past, Dad. Iss the way of the world.
    I can see that, and I can see what’s coming.
    He was right. The money wasn’t there. They went down the next year, got bought out and came back up, then down again and again and again. The ground fell apart. The papers got the obituaries ready: receivership, bankruptcy, liquidation. That was the language of those days. They’d beaten Honved thirty years before that; they were the best side in the world then.
    They should pack it up now, my grandad said when Johnny came in through the back door that time they lost to Chorley, part-timers.
    They was unlucky, Johnny said.
    Yer can say that again, son.
    Thirty years or more is what you need, I think, if you really want to destroy something; community, society, whatever you want to call it. It takes a long time for things to die.
    It’s what you planned for, if there was a plan. After the first shocks, keep the pressure up. Sell off what you can, every last scrap. Maintain this permanent crisis; turn the world upside-down. You rob from the poor you’ve made and give to the rich. And you keep going, unrelenting. The revolution is permanent, after all.
    Not everything dies, though. Some things linger on. The Wolves are still here, for one thing, resurrected. I take Joshua now and he loves it. Fight, fight , they sing, and You’ll never die, you’ll never die, to the tune of ‘The Red Flag’ .
    Margaret Thatcher starts shooting people during the World Snooker final. We are all watching it at my nan and grandad’s, Sunday afternoon going on Sunday night. Alex Higgins is our man. We love him. Everyone loves him. He plays fast and hits the balls hard. The other players stand and scratch their heads for ages and put chalk on their cues; Alex sniffs and jerks his head and knocks the balls around. Whenever I play snooker on the little table I got last Christmas I try and hit the ball on the side like Alex Higgins and send it swerving down the table. All the other players hit the white ball in the middle but Alex hits it on the side – check side or running side; one side or the other – and the balls thump into the pocket or creep in there gently