The stadium announcer had not finished reading the result before the stands erupted.
England. Two. Panama. Nil.
The noise was extraordinary. Seventeen thousand gerbils on their feet at once produces a sound that is less like cheering and more like a weather event, and the Gerbil World Cup Stadium — capacity seventeen thousand four hundred, though the four hundred were a matter of ongoing administrative dispute — had not heard anything like it since the Tunnel opener, and before that, not since the infamous seed shortage of the third tournament, though that had been a different kind of noise entirely.
The flags went up. There were a lot of flags. Several gerbils had brought flags for teams that were not England, on the grounds that they had not expected to need England flags at this stage, and were waving them anyway with complete commitment. A gerbil in row G was waving what appeared to be a beach towel. It had a dolphin on it. She did not care. She was waving it in great sweeping arcs and shouting.
In the lower tier, a coordinated group who had arrived together and were wearing matching scarves — England scarves, notably, which meant they had planned this, which meant they had believed, even when believing had seemed administratively premature — had linked arms and were bouncing in a way that was causing some concern to the gerbils immediately in front of them, who had also linked arms and were also bouncing, and the concern was therefore mutual and also irrelevant.
The inflatable banana appeared in block twelve. It always appeared. Nobody owned it. Nobody had ever owned it. It simply manifested at moments of sufficient emotional intensity, and this qualified.
An elderly gerbil in the front row who had attended every tournament since the first and who had been observed, during the Morocco result, sitting very still with her programme folded in her lap, was now standing on her seat. She was extremely small. She was making an enormous noise. The gerbils around her had created a small protective perimeter, partly out of concern and partly because she was waving her programme and had already made contact twice.
In the corporate hospitality section, where the elephant shrews sat in their official referee capacity and were required to maintain professional neutrality at all times, three of the four elephant shrews were also on their feet. The fourth was on her feet too but was looking at the ceiling and therefore technically had not seen anything.
The scoreboard flashed. England 2-0 Panama. England 2-0 Panama. England —
The roar went up again, as if the number required repeating several times before it could be fully believed, which it did, and it was, and the Gerbil World Cup Stadium shook with the particular joy of a crowd that had been hoping for something and had been given it, and was not yet done being grateful.
The inflatable banana completed a full circuit of block twelve.
Nobody knew how.
It was confirmed that Scotland hadn’t qualified, but the gerbils were too happy to care.
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