The park run was thinning out that week, on account of it being July and proper warm, but she was still there.

The Determination of 18. Doing her drills by the bandstand. The ponytail. The whole apparatus.

I had, by then, graduated by the system’s grudging permission off the grass and back onto cautious tarmac, the loaded squats at home up to forty kilos by the end of the week, the knee no longer kicking off about corners so long as I didn’t try to be clever on them. The system pinged me one evening as I came up the path past the bandstand, all business:

---

[SYSTEM] Week five. Left knee, sixty-eight percent integrity. Tarmac approved. Try not to be a hero.

---

I tried not to be a hero. Mostly.

We had progressed, by the start of that week, from nods to a single small upgrade. The water fountain incident.

It happened on the Tuesday evening. I came round the path slap, slap, wheeze, sweat dripping into both eyes, just as she was finishing her cool-down by the fountain, and I went to step round her and she said, without looking up, "Go on. You’ll faint else."

Three words.

Three actual words, out loud, addressed at me, from the woman with the Determination of 18.

I, in my devastating wit, said, "Cheers."

The panel, of course, still said Unknown.

"Cheers" is what I said. Cheers, like I was thanking a barmaid for a pint of lemonade. I drank from the fountain. She finished her stretches and jogged off down the path. The whole exchange lasted nine seconds. I replayed it in my head approximately four hundred and twelve times on the bus back to the flat.

Sometimes a man’s first instinct, when offered a piece of bread, is to bite his own tongue. I have always been one of those men. It’s nothing to be proud of.

In a previous life, by the way, that biting-the-tongue thing had been my entire approach to women, full stop, right up until a wildly improbable evening years from now when, by an accident I had no immediate plans of explaining to anybody on a Dagenham bus, I had somehow, somehow, ended up engaged to a woman whose backside is the single most persuasive argument I have ever encountered in favour of the existence of an attentive God.

Karen. Bloody Karen.

Twenty years old, my Karen, that very summer, the second summer I was now sat in.

Twenty. Somewhere off west on a warm July evening, in some particular item of clothing she would not now remember owning, in possession of a body the design committee of which deserved a small and quiet award.

The thought of her elbowed its way in through the back of my head the way it always did the second I had a quiet five seconds, and I shoved it back out the way you shove a cat off a kitchen counter. Gently. Because the cat is yours and you love her. But not now, Karen, not now.

I had four days. I had a final. I had a magic-bean idea and a club bleeding out in Essex. I had absolutely no business spending the back seat of the 364 bus daydreaming about a woman who would not, by any timetable I had access to, be ruining my life again for a very long time yet.

If at all.

That was the bit I still could not quite settle in my chest. Whether the quiet pattern of my old life still ran under my feet at all, now I’d put forty quid on a Swiss midfielder and a magic football panel into the corner of my eye and a bus driver into an emergency swerve back in 2026.

Whether it had all slipped sideways the second I’d opened my young eyes again, and Karen was now either going to find me one day by an accident of the universe both of us would have to wait on, or she wasn’t going to find me at all, and there was no schedule on it anywhere any more, just open road and an open question.

The system, when I’d half wondered about asking, had stayed quiet on it. I had the very strong impression it was not its department.

I shoved the thought away again. Gently. Not now, Karen.

I had a tenner on Paul the Octopus.

Not a serious tenner. Not a careful-man tenner.

A lovely tenner. The whole world had been laughing for two weeks about a German aquarium octopus picking match winners by climbing into one of two glass boxes with a flag stuck on the lid, and Paul, bless him, was, by the time the semis came round, eight from eight.

I went into Smiley’s with the parrot in the cage and asked the woman behind the counter if she’d take a novelty bet on a cephalopod, and she narrowed her eyes at me and said, "Are you taking the piss, love?" and I said "no, I’m being deadly serious," and she made a phone call, and then she very seriously wrote PAUL THE OCTOPUS TO BE CORRECT on a slip in biro, at very generous odds because she had not the foggiest what she was doing, and I gave her my tenner and folded the slip into my pocket and walked out laughing.

There are some things you do not bet on for the money.

The first semi-final, Uruguay against Netherlands, was on the Tuesday night. Three-two to the Dutch. I had a quiet thirty on the correct score in the Coral, came home with three hundred and eighty quid, and ate it in the form of a chicken biryani from the good place because by then I felt I had earned a chicken biryani from the good place.

The second semi, on the Wednesday, was Germany against Spain.

Puyol, on a corner, on sixty-three minutes, thump of a man with hair like a Spanish lion off a kit man’s shaved head, and the ball was in the German net before the goalkeeper had finished his first step.

One-nil.