Fantastic Stories from the Mind of Graham Spiers: Papillon

I’d been months on Devil’s Island in French Guiana after Lawwell’s Great Purge towards the end of last season. Anyone remotely suspected of not being completely on-message was rounded up and fetched up somewhere around here in one of many penal colonies. I’d obviously been mistaken for someone else when the Stasi grabbed me one night as I was toodling down Byres Road after an evening of debauchery with the Pacific Quay CSC in the Chip where we celebrated our diversity by singing about IRA bombing campaigns. They zipped and hooded me and I saw nothing but the blackness of the hood until days later when I was bundled off a boat in the arid heat of late morning and bundled into a camp where I was eyed up most salaciously by some hairy Frenchmen. It wasn’t all that bad then and within two weeks my arse was on first name terms with most of them.

I was kept there from April till now and admittedly I did fret at first about my new column at the Herald being written by an African immigrant cleaning lady but it seems that no one has noticed and my new job is safe for the time being in spite of the exodus of small business advertisers since my arrival.

By the middle of the summer everything changed with a new arrival. Word had spread amongst my lusty friends and I heard tales of a man who had escaped from every other penal colony and was now being brought here to the inescapable Devil’s Island; the Frogs called him Papillon which is French for moustache – no, don’t argue, I’m Graham Spiers, I’m always right. I always got a laugh in the dining hall when I pointed this out and it’d always end with me being clapped on the back as the filthy old felons pinched my cheeks and told me I stank worse than them and they’d not showered for eight years.

So when Papillon arrived there was a great crowd gathered at the gates watching as the tiny boat that brought him disappeared into the horizon and the clank of chains got closer as the guards dragged our new guest up from the jetty. A great murmur went up as they got closer so I pushed my way to the front and goggled at Papillon – it was Graeme Souness!
‘I’ll be seeing you later, loser’ he said as he winked at me on his way past. And I did. For a month he kept his own counsel, staying out of trouble and allowing me to accompany him on his trips to the cliffs, unguarded since they were so deadly and unforgiving, where he’d gaze for hours at the sea. I used to lay a short way from him, down wind on his orders and wonder what he was thinking. Later he’d tell me of how he’d been brought to the region alone, Donald Findlay having been secreted from Lawwell’s dungeons by Mr Mojo Risin’ shortly after the end of the season.
‘We’d never have got him out if Lawwell hadn’t been distracted by all the talk of a tainted title and been spending all his time on the phone to newspaper editors throughout Scotland, warning them of dire consequences should the phrase be used again. While his eye was off the ball Mo Johnston got in and saved Donald. They didn’t have enough time for me’ he said quietly, still studying the waves.
‘I was in three camps before this but broke out of them all. See, Spiers, I have to escape, I have to get back to Scotland because the very existence of Rangers is at stake and I am needed there.’
Of course he didn’t know about Charles Green at this point because we’d been gone since May but I felt that even if he did then he’d still be itching to get home, who wouldn’t? My bawdy Crapauds (French for darlings and I should know, I’m Graham Spiers) were all very well and good but I longed for the light summer evenings at the Drake watching Neil Lennon become progressively pished until he passed out on a girl’s tits or puked under the table or something equally awful. Curiously I often see newspapermen in there observing these antics but does it ever make the rags? Does a bear shit in the woods? Does Lawwell carry a whip?

Eventually, Souness was so well behaved that the guards figured his reputation was mere camp gossip and so they began to give him more freedom to roam the island – there was no way off after all or so they thought. Then one day I found him by his cliff with a huge bag of tied reeds full of coconuts. ‘I’m off Spiers, you coming?’
‘Eh?’ was all I cold manage in response as he threw the bag over the edge and followed it into the sea. I ran to see where he’d gone and could see his sack of coconuts floating in the waves but no sign of Souness. He’s gone, I thought but eventually he broke the surface and moustache spluttering, climbed onto his sack and began to float off into the distance. You see, all that time he’d been studying the tide and biding his time. He knew when to get into the sea to be taken away from the island by the pull of the sea itself. As I marvelled at his ingenuity, I heard him in the distance shouting as he lay on his back on his makeshift craft and although he didn’t know it at the time, his cries echoed those of tens of thousands of Rangers fans at home as their club by this time had been pulled back from the brink of extinction. Gazing at the sky, Souness was shouting ‘I’m still here you bastards!’