All Quiet on the West Ham Front

You could see it from a glorious, sunlit mile off. Poetry was set in motion and destiny manifested, or something of that ilk, nature and reckoning happened on that sunny Summer afternoon anyway. 

Ade crossed an inch perfect ball to Toyoh. The intelligence and insight that Ade displayed in that moment was a true delight to behold. He put the ball right where Toyoh was going to be. It was in the exact spot it needed to be. There was telepathy between the two players and magic as well. The ball was in space, and that space gave Toyoh the time he needed to run onto it, draw his foot back and hoof the bloody ball like he wanted to kill it. Dead. That ball knew it had been kicked and kicked with a vengeance. It screamed away from that warrior’s boot and kept going in a panicked arc until it was captured in the back of the net.

The keeper was nowhere. Which was to say he did a noble job ad acquitted himself as well as he might in the circumstances of an unstoppable, once in a lifetime shot like that. He leapt and very nearly got his fingertips to that sweetly placed ball, but he missed it by half an inch. And in this game, a fraction of an inch was a mile. Half an inch made a world of difference, as the actress once said to the forlorn and crestfallen bishop.

Bob watched all of this with a building anticipation. This anticipation of Bob’s had been kept in check for the entirety of his life, and now it was at last about to have its day, it was uncertain that it knew quite what to do. His liquid was simmering and his whistle was about to blow for the very first time. This was it. This was thegoal. This was the game. Victory and the cup awaited. After years in the barren desert of mid-league obscurity, his team, the team he had been a life-long supporter of, this team would no longer be the middle aged spinster bridesmaid. This was their wedding. They were going to win!

Champions!

He could almost taste that sweet aroma of victory. A heady cocktail of fresh cut grass, superstar’s sweat and the hot breath of a multitude of fans conveying stale cigarettes, fast food and lager. His tears were queuing up patiently in the tunnels beside his eyes and he was all set for the single most important moment in his life. The bestest and most happy and triumphant time of his life.

The waiting was over.

This was it.

Before the keeper could scoop the ball up from the back of the goal, the whistle calling time on the game went.

And the crowd went wild!

As one, the fans rose to their feet. It wasn’t quite a jump. Gravity eased off and they slipped gracefully upwards, arms splayed out and mouths opened in a roar that would be heard half way across the city, if not the world.

Bob sat there and watched in stunned silence.

The stunning part was that the silence was not his. It was a silence that was completely out of place. It had no ticket for this game. It did not belong. He sat and observed the scene exploding all around him and there was not a sound. Not a single sound. The absence of sound was appalling. This was not mute on a remote control. That mute button only worked on the speakers on the TV. There would still be the sound of the fat dog snoring and in the background the fridge whirring and whining. There would also be the sound of the traffic that came through two panes of glass regardless of the noise preventative qualities the double glazing salesman eschewed six years previously. There was always a gentle cacophony of sound in the quiet calm that was so often mistakenly called silence.

No, this silence was different class. This was not low volume, this was turned all the way to zero on the dial and the amp was switched off and unplugged for good measure. Even then, this silence beat the noise of the resting state of the dormant amp and speaker. There were Sheiks in the middle east who would pay top dollar for this silence, only to rue the day they ever forked out for it. This wasn’t a sound that anyone would willingly subject themselves to. There was an absence here that surrounded a soul and suffocated it and would never cease in pressing home its complete and comprehensive lack.

This silence hurt. 

This silence was loss.

The silence was a vacuum and Bob wasn’t breathing anymore. He couldn’t breathe. He was frozen in the moment and the moment slowed around him as his eyes grew as wide as they would go and those queueing tears missed their cue and plopped out of his face unnoticed. 

Bob was a witness in an invisible sound proofed booth. He was no longer a part of the delirious scenes of joy around him. He sat and watched in a state of shocked numbness as history was made. The history he had dreamed of and waited for since he’d been a small boy and his father had brought him to his first ever match and ignited the flame of his lifelong love affair with this hallowed football club. Here was the dreamed historic outcome that he hadn’t dared believe was possible.

He was there in the stadium and yet he wasn’t. That continuing silence isolated and imprisoned him. His mind was a block of ice as his uncomprehending glassy eyes stared out past the crowd. Bob sat there for an age as the crowd moved excitedly in a staccato slow motion dance around him. His shocked, blank mind keeping him imprisoned and aloof at the scenes around him made bizarre and unreal by the total lack of soundtrack.

But deep inside he was fighting for all he was worth. He wanted this. He deserved this. And so he clambered over questions of why this was happening and he successfully passed those nonsensical obstacles. After that, the absolute silence was not so bad and not so debilitating. He remembered himself and he remembered the principle of wallpaper. Live with something long enough and you don’t notice it. He knew that principle well enough. He’d been married for over forty years,. Him and Sylv had perfected a dance which ensured their paths never quite met anymore. Even in the bedroom there was an invisible divide in their marital bed that had kept them apart for the past decade or more. He’d stop counting the years after the first few. They’d swapped habits of indifference for their previous habits of intimacy in silent and complicit agreement, never once questioning the validity or direction of their actions. Ignoring the holes in the empty nest where the love gradually eked away leaving them strangers in their own lives.

Now Bob remembered another important thing and that was what was important. So much of life was lived in the noise, and in that noise the small things made themselves look impossibly big. 

What was really important here? 

This.

The moment.

Everything and everyone around him!

They’d won!

His team had won at last, and against the form book, against the run of play and against everyone’s expectations, especially the fan’s. To be a fan of this team was to settle for second best because that was the best you were ever going to get. 

Bob imagined that the silence he was experiencing right now was the sister of the despondent silence the away fans were drowning in. Their team had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. They had lost to the constant losers.

Bob smiled as the enormity of the moment prevailed. He smiled a smile that was a whole story in itself. The story of a lifetime of patiently waiting for a happy ending, but never quite expecting it to happen. Not to him. Not to Bob.

We never think it will happen to us.

But here it was.

The happy ending.

Bob smiled, allowing himself to enjoy the moment for what it was, and the ominous silence afforded him that time before tapping him on the shoulder and making itself known to him once more.

There was another important factor to this moment of Bob’s and now at last, he attended to it. 

The silence was indeed complete and all encompassing. Bob could not even hear himself and the silence of his silence was brutally deafening. The sound of air travelling along his congested airways was no longer there. The extra weight Bob had invested in over the years had meant that a half snore or a snort was always a breath or three away. His lungs had to pull hard to gather the oxygen they needed and there was a rasp and a rattle in every inhalation, more as the used air was expelled forth through all the uncared for clutter.

My heart, Bob thought as the truth of the matter caressed him with ice cold and bony fingers. He could not hear it beating. He could not feel it moving in his chest.

He was not moving.

He could not move.

The last thoughts Bob ever had were.

I think I might be dead.

And.

We won! We bloody won! Champions at last! Never thought I’d see the day…

Bob had those last two thoughts and he had them in that order, rounding his life off with an elated blast and a giggle of a smile that spoke a thousand words when the celebrating wave of fans ebbed and those around him saw him sitting inexplicably peacefully in his seat. An oasis of impossible calm in a sea of triumphant chaos.

The very first thing that every fan who saw that smile surmised was that Bob died happy, and that he died happy knowing that the team he’d supported all of his life, through thick and thicker, had at long last found a bit of the thin. They all thought that Bob checked out happy in the knowledge that his team were champions at last.

No one would ever know the truth of it.

That Bob had died as Toyoh’s foot had connected with the ball. He died in that exact moment as though Toyoh had brutally kicked his chest and ruptured the heart that chugged, chuffed and laboured in his chest.

And yet Bob had been afforded a few seconds more than his allotted time here on this Earth.

Perhaps God really was a West Ham fan after all.

Or it may have been that Death was too busy watching that glorious and unexpected goal to do his job properly and swipe his scythe to cut Bob’s cord of life.. A welcome and much needed distraction as he plied his trade in the oppressive, omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient silence of the infinite.