The gerbils didn’t stay up to watch England play Mexico.
It was so obviously going to be a thrashing that would kick England out of the real World Cup, that they all went to need instead of seeing the kickoff at 2am.
Gloop was working the night shift in case any patrons woke and wished for a drink, but she didn’t even turn on the television, until at 3am she saw the score flash up on a phone: 2-1 to England. She assumed she was dreaming. And then she turned on the TV in the snug just as Harry Kane scored a third from the penalty spot.
Mexico had there own penalty to bring the score to 3-2, but then one of the England players was sent off for a nasty foul. Playing with only 10 men and with Mexico having two-thirds of the possession, Gloop was sure England would screw up, Mexico would equalise and there would be extra time and the usual defeat in the penalty shootout.
Eleven minutes of stoppage time were added to the full 90. It was agony. Until the final whistle blew and England had done it. 3-2 to face Norway.
The Serious Scandinavians had helped Norway row to a magnificent victory over Brazil. What should have been a Brazil vs Mexico quarter final would now be Norway vs England.
Gloop did not wake the gerbils.
This was, she would later maintain under close and repeated questioning, a professional decision and not a moral failing. The Gerbil World Cup Handbook on Night Operations (Section 4, Subsection C: “Patron Disturbance, Justifiable and Otherwise”) was unambiguous: a bartender on night shift does not leave her post, and she certainly does not go bursting into burrows at 3:47am shouting about penalties. Gwendoline had drafted that subsection herself after an earlier and largely unrelated incident involving a false alarm about the sticker album.
So Gloop did what any gerbil of principle would do. She poured herself a small, commemorative thimble of dandelion cordial, sat very still in the empty snug, and watched Harry Kane’s penalty go in with the composed, glassy-eyed dignity of someone who has just seen a miracle and has nobody to tell.
She did, however, write it all down. Every detail. The eleven minutes of stoppage time. The sending off. The Mexican penalty that made it 3-2 and nearly stopped her heart. She wrote it in the Night Log, in handwriting that started off neat and had entirely fallen apart by the final whistle, ending in a single line, underlined three times like it might not be true if she only underlined it twice: ENGLAND HAVE DONE IT.
But the second Griselda arrived for the 6am changeover and read the Log, all pretence of calm procedure evaporated in about four seconds flat.
“ENGLAND ARE THROUGH,” Griselda bellowed, in a voice that had never once been raised in four tournaments, and she was out from behind the bar and hammering on burrow doors before Gloop had even capped the cordial.
It was pandemonium within minutes. Gwendoline burst out mid-hair-curler, already composing a bulletin aloud before she’d found paper, hitting eleven exclamation marks by the second sentence. Gertrude appeared clutching an entire sunflower-seed reserve she’d clearly been saving for something, took one look at the Log, and simply upended the lot onto the table in a gesture that needed no translation. Greta was already there. Greta was, infuriatingly, always already there.
Someone produced bunting. Nobody asked where the bunting had come from — there was always bunting, the same way there was always a spare marching band’s worth of enthusiasm on standby for exactly this kind of occasion. Within the hour there was a full processional forming outside HQ, Glory bobbing at the front looking, as ever, faintly astonished to have been inflated at all, and Gwendoline had upgraded the morning bulletin into what she was now calling, with no sense of proportion whatsoever, THE MIRACLE OF THE ELEVEN MINUTES.
By breakfast there was a musical.
Nobody had planned the musical. It simply arrived, fully staged, the way the Taylor Swift wedding parade had arrived, the way the Tunnel Appreciation Spectacular had arrived — as though joy in this gerbil world could only be metabolised through immediate large-scale theatrical production, with everyone in a role and Gertrude on seeds and Griselda, despite herself, conducting.
Norway, they agreed, between verses, would be a magnificent final act.
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/england-v-mexico