Lions

It's coming home

Bottles in hand. Bottles in the air. Some geeza has a bottle up his arse. England are in the final. Leicester Square is mayhem. It’s coming home to these streets, so everyone believes, so everyone sings.

You are draped in the St George. You wear it proud, not so much out of patriotism, more because of your love for the people. They too are in red and white, and today, for now, you are one people, and because you share the same dream, you share so much, nearly everything, it seems.

The back roads stink like piss. Empty tinnies and Tesco bags slip under foot. Flares turn the sky hazy. Lads are on top of bus stops, hanging from lampposts, standing on top of any surface they deem climbable, waving flags, chanting, a boisterous euphoria over everyone like this moment is all there ever was.

There are three lions on your shirts and there’s tens of thousands of you. Amongst all this, it’s difficult to imagine a future in which it doesn’t come home, because, surely, it belongs right here on these streets.

You are thinking back on the summer of beer gardens and barbecues. For the past month, you’ve been scattered across the city, seeing many friends in many places. Recent heartbreak threatened to stop you, but the boys kept winning and everyone kept believing and there was always room for you wherever you went. So, each game you wore the lions over your patched-up heart and lifted yourself out of the flat you’d been left alone in, going by bus and by train to wherever you were invited, wherever the phone calls and messages led you to, and on the way you counted up how many others had the badge on the chest and, man, how wonderful it had been to be part of something so vast.

In the present moment, at Leicester Square, the people sing the player’s names. They are singing for those who will soon step onto the Wembley pitch, the ones who glimmer with the faint notion of everything that we are and could be together.

To you it becomes so surreal. You are over-stimulated, the surroundings are dizzying, convulsing, pulsing, voices bellowing and the daunting sensation of knowing that today the story ends.

You wish you could bottle it, this vitality, this love that rages in the heart of little England today. You wish you could study it, understand it, speak to it, listen to it.

It can be ugly for those who don’t know. That geeza has pulled his trousers up now but the bottle he held between his arse-cheeks is on the floor and is being kicked about by beer-drenched three-striped trainers. You see the beauty in it. It ain’t pretty, bloody hell, it’s all so visceral, you can barely breathe, and that fella there has been sick all over his Stone Island jumper, and that bloke over there is yelling YOU CAN SHOVE YOUR FUCKIN PASTA UP YOUR ARSE. You laugh to yourself because he’s mates with the guy who had a bottle of Birra Moretti up of his.

It’s a bit awful, really, you know it is, but it is a marvel of its own. Not specifically that one geeza and his bottle, but all of it. All of this.

You wish that you could lose yourself in it like they can. They are so carefree, immersed in the moment in their entire being, living and breathing and singing it. You on the periphery only bear witness.

Yeah, the beer helps them along, maybe there’s some other substances involved, too, but you’ve never been one to get on it, and you’re a melancholic drunk these days, which ain’t really the mood for such a time as this, so you’re sipping from a can slowly.

You just watch and imagine this scene as footage in some future documentary about the day football finally came home. You are imagining turning to your children to say, I was there that day, and explaining to them what life was like in England that summer. It’s a beautiful dream, and all the more beautiful because you sense that you’re one of many millions who share it.

Your mates will be watching the game around here, somewhere central, but you’ve made plans to head east to watch it with your cousin. Catch you later, hopefully, you say, before you leave them at Trafalgar Square, and on your journey you have visions of what the scenes will be like here later if England are victorious. You’ll be back, if that’s the case, and you’re already hungry for the history that could be waiting for you all in the imminent future. But you know that anything can happen between now and the end. That’s football. That’s life.

You reach the location and find your cousin. The garden of the canal-side bar is already packed out. The evening air is fragrant with the scent of sun-lotion and cigarette smoke. Through the crowds, you can just about see the screen. You are in wonder, envisioning the millions of others around the country who are gathered in front of TVs. You see them in your mind’s eye: crowded into living rooms, perched on bar stools at local pubs, shoulder to shoulder at sports clubs, and all those people listening in on the radio in their cars and watching through their phones at work or at weddings.

It’s strange to you as you sip on a pint; the idea of this unity is at once true and only imagined. What would you see if you could be a fly on the wall, everywhere, all at once? You’re craving to know everything: where the people are watching the game and with who they are sharing these monumental hours with, what are their predictions, who are their favourite players, what drinks and snacks do they have to help them through it?

Shit, you’re tripping again, never mind all that, right now you’re right here in east London and your cousin is grabbing you around the shoulders, Come on, England! he says, and it’s kicking off.

In your head a nation leaps from seats and buries their face in their hands, millions at once cursing, yelling at the referee, chucking up wanker signs to the pixels on the telly.

Out of all the least important things in the world, football matters most, a professor once said, and you couldn’t stop yourself pondering on it for the rest of your life and in this moment presently.

Two hours pass in a blur. Only now you realise the sun has set away and the day has become dark. Penalties. It’s not only you who looks up to the night sky and sends prayers there.

The last of us steps up to keep the shoot-out alive. He places the ball on the spot and as he does you think about how these days seemed like they’d last forever. But now it’s sudden death, all or nothing. Finality waits at his feet.

Dread: that feeling in your chest. This summer’s dream made you almost forget the reality of how it is. He stands there beneath the floodlights, the arch, the billion eyes watching. A camera portrays him as he takes three sure steps backwards. Inhale. Exhale. A wipe of the nose. He’s focused on the ball and you know that he too is aware of the dream that everyone in all of England share. It’s within reach.

To you, in that swift moment before the kick, the football there on the spot resembles a crystal ball. You look into it and see two destinies. Only one can come true while the other is to be forever and always just a dream.

*

And so it happened that it went how you foresaw. Back then, misery was not enough for some people.

Long years have passed. Many a crowd have since gathered in Trafalgar Square waving flags and banners and their colours. But there has been no crowd like the one that would have been there that night.

You wonder whether your dream was ever meant to be. This England of your imagination, it was almost real for a little while, and, sometimes, when you remember to open your eyes, you see that it is still real, in moments. It’s just that the moments go so quickly, are forgotten so easily, as if it never mattered back then, as if it doesn’t matter right now, as if none of it had happened at all.

Even so, the past belongs to this present moment. Just as the future is the inheritance of the present. Yeah, it’s something like that. That’s why you often think back to that summer. Daydreaming that our fate could have been otherwise. What if?

Nah, the stars wrote it so that this is our future. This England is our inheritance. These headlines. All these stark questions and their vague rampant answers. Who knows, maybe it was always going to be like this, and no matter what had happened, everything would be just as it has become. But what if?

Back then, it was easy to sing that it’s coming home. You imagine that there was nobody in the land who didn’t know where home was while we sang together and there was no one who didn’t know what it meant. We didn’t need it to have come home to tell us so. We already believed it, it was right there in front of us, it was right there besides us, everyone knew, everyone felt it because, in those days, all were lions here.

That England, then. This England, now.

Still, you daydream.