The gerbils do not, as a rule, watch the real World Cup. It runs alongside their own tournament like a strange parallel universe they mostly ignore on principle. But England were playing, and England is Griselda’s team by an accident of birth she has never fully forgiven her parents for, so the wireless went on in the HQ kitchen and everyone gathered whether they wanted to or not.
DRC scored in the seventh minute. A low cross, a scrambled finish, and Gertrude — who had been arranging seeds into a hopeful St George’s Cross on a side plate — dropped an entire sunflower seed onto the floor and did not pick it up, which is how Griselda knew it was serious.
“Seven minutes,” said Griselda, writing it down for no reason. “Seven minutes and we are already behind.”
“I haven’t put anything in brackets,” said Greta, who had put something in brackets.
Gwendoline began drafting a bulletin titled ENGLAND TROUBLED EARLY!!, deleted the exclamation marks, reinstated one, then sat on her paws to stop herself doing it again.
What followed was seventy-odd minutes of a very particular kind of suffering — the kind where nothing happens and everything happens at once. Gertrude ate a seed and then couldn’t remember eating it. Griselda re-filed the same piece of paper four times. Glory, who had been leaned in the corner since March, seemed to deflate slightly of his own accord, though this may have been a structural issue rather than solidarity.
Then, seventy-four minutes in, Harry Kane scored.
The kitchen erupted. Gertrude threw seeds into the air with no regard for cleanup. Gwendoline abandoned punctuation altogether and simply wrote KANE in letters so large they tore through to the next page. Griselda stood on her chair — a gerbil, on a chair, a full three inches off the ground — and had to be talked down by nobody, because nobody was in a state to talk anyone down from anything.
“I still think he’s a knob,” said Griselda, weeping freely.
“Obviously,” said Gwendoline, also weeping. “That’s not the point.”
Eighty-six minutes in, he did it again.
There is no adequate record of what happened next. Griselda would later describe it, in an internal memo she never sent, as “a loss of institutional composure from which we have not yet recovered.” Gertrude wept into a small commemorative bowl of seeds she had prepared in advance, in hope, without telling anyone. Gwendoline’s bulletin by full time read only KANE KANE KANE, HE IS A KNOB, WE LOVE HIM, in handwriting that grew less legible with each repetition. Greta unfolded her piece of paper, looked at what she’d written in the brackets, and put it away again without comment, which everyone agreed was the correct response to a scoreline she had somehow already known.
Glory did not move for the rest of the evening. He didn’t need to. Some victories the whole room wins for you.
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