a forty fourth story...'better than ___'

You’ve fancied her for ages, but actually acknowledging this makes you feel eleven years old all over again.  And there’s a game on – your team is playing.  And it’s not just any game, no, it’s against them.  The best moment of your life came when your team was playing against them, and while avoiding defeat against them can bring an enormous flood of relief, winning brings a kind of ecstasy you just don’t experience anytime, any place else.  It was four years ago, the best moment of your life: three minutes left on the Anfield clock, the league to play for, a late corner, flicked on at the near post, a poke of that long leg of his – the bloke who’s now at Sunderland – a connection, the sweetest connection and WOOSH! To infinity and beyond! (at least for a tumultuous minute, before you remembered you still had the slowest one hundred and twenty seconds in human creation to endure)..

..‘I didn’t know you were a football fan’, she says, as your eyes are drawn from the screen to her, to the screen and back again; your personality tugged from one extreme to the other – the sensitive, interested, intelligent young man and the monomaniacal, obsessive compulsive football supporter. ‘Yes, I’m afraid so’, you find yourself apologising, thinking at the same time, if we ever become bedfellows, you’ll have to get used to the fact there’s no I in threesome. 

‘I think I could get into football’, she continues, smiling up at you as you bob this way and that as your team attacks, as if it’s really you weaving in and out of the opposition defenders.  ‘You could?’, you reply half in hope, half in the knowledge that getting into football is a damaging psychological activity that will end up affecting your central nervous system far more emphatically than any form of new fangled amphetamine, not to mention having a deleterious effect on any potential relationship.  

‘Yes, my father used to play.  He was a defen---‘.  ‘AARRGH’ She is cut off, mid-sentence as you grab her shoulders, completely by surprise, completely unintentionally: the opposition keeper tips a swerving shot from your man, your boy, onto the cross bar and out for a corner. ‘Oooh’, she exclaims, but luckily, luckily for you, you feel the shock leave her body and she relaxes. 

But while, in the normal course of events, you might put your arm around her and offer a pseudo romantic apology, this, THIS COULD BE THE MOMENT.  ‘Oops’, you say instead, flashing a lunatic grin at her and turning your full, and I mean FULL attention back to the screen.  Your boy is placing the ball in the corner circle and your man, THE MAN, Van The Man, is lurking in the six yard box.  He’s a ghost, he has all the stealth and ruthlessness of an assassin from the very top of the Assassin’s Fucking Guild.  You’re super-glued to the screen.  Pupils as big as buttons.  You’re sensing the adrenalin building in your stomach, you know your boys are capable of Great Comebacks.  You recall once again the GREATEST MOMENT OF YOUR LIFE, you think to yourself: to hell with the girl, she can go hang..if..IF..please, pretty please, your team scores at this moment.  This moment I shall hereby remember and cherish for the rest of my life, you think – if, if, if we score. 

~

Then everything happens very quickly, the cross..the movement across the opposition defender, the diving header..YESSSSSSSSS! FUCKING YEESSSSSSSSSS! UNBELIEVAALBLE! The boys, the boys, the boyZ! Brief visions of you as Kenneth Branagh playing Henry V flare in your minds eye.  ON ST CRISPINS DAY! 

YESSSSSS.  Van Persie.  R O B, V I P, Van Persie is the man for me - it’s a silly chant you made up yourself, but what do you care? You’ve done it, you’ve done your bit for the boys.  You bask in victory, beautiful, sweet, warm, delicious, delectable victory. 

~

..About five, perhaps six hours later, when the trip is over, the realisation strikes that the girl your future happiness could, in real, every day life depend on is no longer with you, and that you’ll have to explain later, in a quiet and intimate moment, in some more welcoming public drinking establishment (maybe one of those ones with an expensive wine list, and Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the loos), using all your philosophical nous, why you went AWOL and ignored her for the rest of the evening; why your team scoring a winning goal against them is better, far better than sex, better than sex on your wedding night, your honeymoon, better than being at the birth of your first child. 

Better than flying to the moon.