I only came to full consciousness last Saturday morning when an errant fist from a snuggling Eaglet landed (accidentally)(with force!) straight on the globe of my right eye. It would have been before 7am. The blow triggered a kind of fireworks display in front of my eye, after which the eyelid of my closed (recovering) right eye delivered me a large, iridescent unfinished loop. This loop persisted for some minutes. It looked a lot like a capital C trying to lie down. Within ten or fifteen minutes, the image had closed itself into a complete circle and after an hour or so the light was completely gone. I searched suspiciously for it all day, closing my eye from time to time to see if it could be found … lurking. But only a dull headache remained.
I had a feeling of dread about going out to the big stadium with the bright lights. It felt like going off to the wedding of two people you just knew shouldn’t be together. You fill the hip flask and hope there is someone good to dance with.
Roosy had said during the week that, given the hoodoo, it was time to do things differently. So I decided to approach the adventure from the unusual place of complete despondency. I am usually optimistic and then brave in disappointment. Tonight I would be pessimistic and dignified in victory. It occurred to me that I was just like Odysseus, setting out to fight a war that he didn’t believe in.
* * *
Toby and I arrived at Sydenham just after 6pm for the long day’s journey into night … or out to Homebush. Track work. No trains. Buses replacing trains to Redfern. Our shuttle bus, drenched in the condensation of warm passengers on the umpteenth wet night in a row, snaked its slow, slow journey up King Street – that’s King Street on a Saturday night. We arrived at Redfern at 6.50pm.
A Homebush express arrived and departed. Out through the almost equinoctial pitch dark of early evening, it wound its way, its invisible way. We could have been on a train to anywhere, except for the unmistakable black and white of a foursome of ladies on the seats in front of us, their certain, smiling mouths full of bucked teeth, their tidy bandanas knotted around their necks.
We missed kick off.
We crossed the paved wilderness between the station and Stade Australie to the sounds of rising and falling calls. They didn’t sound friendly. It was like arriving at the wedding as a friend of the bride and realising it was mostly the groom’s mates, that you’d have to pay for your alcohol and it might not make it any more bearable. We crossed the threshold of Gate O. Would a big wooden horse fit through here?
We continued, my clogs clopping on the now deserted concrete slab of the ‘outers’. Aisles 140, 139, 138, 137. A Record. A television. Swans 0.1 Collingwood 3.1. Clop clop clop. Aisles 136, 135, 134, 133, 132, 131.
Into the battle. A quick cheerio to the troops and it was heads down. Collingwood were moving it fast. Kieren Jack answered with a goal. Collingwood kicked out again but Jack replied with another. It was like getting to the wedding and realising that there were possibly enough odd souls to at least make conversation for the night. And the dialogue continued for much. By the third quarter, it was looking like the marriage might just make it after all. It was looking like the battle might be won.
Then Mattner made that tackle and Teddy gave away that 50 metre penalty and Neon Leon kicked that goal and, with ten minutes still on the clock … it was over. The momentum was broken, the red and white top stopped spinning, the fragile balance of will and effort tipped by interruption, it wobbled it’s way to a halt. With each goal that followed, the black and white army leapt to their feet, their too tight guernseys revealing their pasty tums as they raised their arms into the air. It was like the bride had been insulted but the men were too pissed to notice or care and they just kept dancing with themselves. Wheel in the horse and let’s go home.
* * *
Patrick had arrived, during the second quarter, directly from a dress rehearsal of Dido and Aeneas with Nigel, the lighting designer for the opera and a card carrying Swans member since 1997, bless him. They had driven out ‘for convenience’ but had been forced, by Simon and Garfunkel, into a faraway car park which required … yes, a shuttle bus.
We took our places in a long queue for the shuttle bus that would take us to P5. Plenty of people, no buses.
‘Well how far away is P5? Couldn’t we just walk?’ pleaded Toby. There’s nothing worse than delays after defeat.
‘It’s 2.5km.’
‘Well how long would that take us? 8 km an hour … so what’s that? 20 minutes?’
It started to rain.
Water and heaviness. Three bodies under two umbrellas, the loss, galavanting Pies leaping like sailors, clicking their heels in the air, unfussed by the rain, tempers fraying over sparse buses and queue jumping. We concoct a plan to import a team of Russian hit men to face Adelaide next week – a 6 foot 6 terminator with one training session under his belt, squeezed into the Number 40 jumper of the 5”10 third gamer, Nick Smith, possibly armed threatening his way from one end of the field to the other. They must have had one of them in the Odyssey. They say, men in battle cry out for their mothers before death. The Russians were our same last gasps.
The bus for P3 and P4 came. The P3 queue flooded our own. A marshal was waving his red light saver, screaming at the driver:
‘You are NOT going to P3 and P4. You are going to P4 and P5. ‘
‘Well where’s P3?’ asked a woman.
‘Before P5.’ said the marshal.
They are not going to put a second team into western Sydney, are they?
The bus that came went round and round. Not even Nigel’s iPhone could decipher our non progress. He held it in his hand and, master of lights, tracked the white ones flying by in the dark – P something? To me, they looked just like the echoes of my battered eye that morning. They looked just like black and white neon. The windows became so fogged that the outside world slowly became nothing.
A tired two year old practised his goal umpiring manoeuvres. A pesky Pie intermittently roared hoarse from the front of the bus (to the tune of We Wish You a Merry Christmas).
‘You wish you had Daisy Thomas, You wish you had Daisy Thomas,
You wish you had Daisy Thomas, In your football team’.
He was no siren. Fellow journeymen and women fought over whose umbrella should be hurled at him. And the bus went round and round, circling P5 according to Nigel’s GPS, which we zoomed and zoomed and repositioned in incredulity. The bus lost in space and time, like one of those buses exiting the solar system in a younger reader’s sci-fi novel, its quest the mythical land of P5.
‘Next stop Hornsby!’ came a dry cry from the back.
It was just like leaving the wedding in a car with some strangers and realising that the driver was drunk.
We did finally make it to P5. And out of P5. We made it down Parramatta Rd and back to Sydenham to pick up the car and back to the city for Nigel and back to Toby’s and back to South Street and headlong into bed sometime early Sunday morning. Our odyssey was complete. Although we still don’t know it we’re going to get the bride, the prize. We have to fight the suitors in Adelaide next week.
The extended travels of Round 12 may be over, but we are only just over half way home.
Happy Tipping!
... and as for that one journey that IS ending, see below ...
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