The Crown, which had been three-quarters full of Spain shirts that night because everyone in Essex was suddenly a Spain fan, erupted, a noise like a furnace door blown open, AAARGHHH, and Raj was on his feet pointing at me and shouting "HOW, Sam, HOW," and Bald Tony was four booths along going full nose-tap, finger to nostril, slow knowing wink, and I sat there with my pint and my slip and a very straight face and tried very hard not to think about the seven and a half thousand pounds I was now carrying around in a Sports Direct bag-for-life with handles that had started to stretch.

Two days to the final.

The country went quiet, that week. You could feel it in the streets. The flags came down off the houses. The man-of-the-match talk dried up.

The whole island settled into the strange, hushed waiting of people who weren’t in it any more but couldn’t quite stop watching. Erol gave me chips three nights in a row on the house, "for being a Spain man, even if you don’t tell me why." Mum rang on the Saturday to make sure I was eating.

Raj kept ringing to check whether the universe had changed its mind about anything since the last time he’d asked. Even Dean, on my Friday shift, said nothing at all to me for an entire hour, which I’m fairly certain is the closest a man like Dean ever comes to feeling the change in the weather.

And then on the eleventh of July, the country sat down at half past seven in front of a billion plates of takeaway and a billion pints, and Spain played the Netherlands at Soccer City Stadium in Johannesburg, and we watched.

You know what kind of final it was. You know how dirty it got. Howard Webb the referee, the poor man, brandishing cards like a flustered bus conductor, whip, whip, whip, fourteen yellows in ninety minutes, a red, knees going into chests, De Jong trying to make Xabi Alonso’s ribs into a kit bag, Robben one-on-one and Casillas saving with his actual toe-end. Nil-nil at the break.

Nil-nil after ninety. The Crown so full you could not have got another body in there with a shoehorn, and the air thick with sweat and stale lager and please, oh please, oh please. My slip was in my left inside pocket.

The slip was for Spain to win, in extra time, by one goal to nil. I had not had the nerve to put it down at the proper odds you got for that result. I’d settled, in three separate bookies, for win in extra time, fifteen hundred quid spread out, at decent prices, careful man’s bets. Spain. Extra time.

A hundred and sixteenth minute.

Fàbregas slides Iniesta in. The whole Crown is on its feet by the time he’s taken his first touch, because everyone in the place can see it, the back of the net unfolding in slow motion before the ball has even left his foot.

The Dutch defender lunges. Iniesta is calm, calm as a man buying a paper. He takes one steady step inside, plants his right foot, whump, and the ball travels the way the future travels, in a perfectly straight line you cannot interrupt, into the bottom corner.

The Crown ceases to exist.

I can offer no other description. The Crown, as a place, as a concept, ceases to exist. There is only noise. Raj is in my arms and then off and on a table and then in someone else’s arms. Bald Tony has fallen off his stool and is openly weeping. There is a small woman I have never seen before kissing my forehead, twice, mwah, mwah, and disappearing back into the throng. A pint goes over the back of my neck. I do not care.

Nine thousand pounds.

That was the maths when the final whistle finally went and the noise began to come down enough to think, and I peeled myself out of the press of bodies and stepped out into the warm summer night with the smell of barbecue and sweat and Spain on me.

Nine thousand pounds, spread across the inside pockets of every coat in my flat by the morning. Plus a chunk of an octopus tenner that had quietly been correct about Spain in the final too, because of course it had. Lovely Paul. Patron saint of forty-quid time travellers.

I walked home alone. The streets had gone quiet in that long blue late-July way, and somewhere a few doors down somebody was playing Y Viva España out a kitchen window at the wrong volume, AY, AY, AY, and I walked past it and round the corner and let myself into the flat, where the bag-for-life was sitting under my bed already half-full of the careful man’s fortnight of winnings.

I tipped the rest in. Quietly. Like a thief.

Nine thousand pounds in a Sports Direct bag-for-life under my bed in a flat above a kebab shop in Essex.

I’ll tell you something honest. I didn’t feel rich. The opposite, somehow. I felt terrified, and I felt electric, and I felt, sat there on my carpet at gone midnight on the eleventh of July 2010 with my back against the bed and the bag a soft warm lump behind me, like a man holding the very small heavy beginning of an enormous thing.

The system pinged. Soft. White. The corner of my eye.

---

[SYSTEM] Nine thousand pounds. From forty. Inside six weeks.

[SYSTEM] All right, Samuel. You have my attention.

[SYSTEM] Acquisition window: open.

---

I sat there in the dark for a long time, the bag against my back, the city humming, brmm, brmm, outside, the streetlight working its slow yellow way across the ceiling of the same one-bedroom flat above the same kebab shop where two months ago I had been the saddest twenty-four-year-old in Essex.

Iniesta. Forty quid. Nine grand. A wonky T. A man on a milk crate. A magic-bean idea I hadn’t told a single living soul about yet, sat at the back of my skull, ready.

Tomorrow was a Monday.

Tomorrow was the morning I had been waiting for since the second I’d looked at Dean and not been allowed to quit.

And tomorrow, the very first thing on the agenda of the proud new ahead-of-the-world-by-exactly-one-move owner of approximately nine thousand pounds in cash, was going to be a small bit of personal admin.

I did not sleep. I lay there grinning at the ceiling, and I waited for Monday to start.