Big Jonah, an avalanche of superlatives from the radio commentator, as he skirted the bristling white sideline, invisible on the stretch of flat green between our car and the Hutt River but for the nation's mind's eye. My gaze fixed and blurred on the tree line where the grass met the water. Down by five, twenty-five minutes into the second half. Only God knows.
My father and my uncles on Sea Goon, a modest whitewashed leisure boat that spent most of its days in my aunt's Titirangi driveway, listening to a mid-eighties game from Twickenham in the middle of the night on the Hauraki Gulf. Pissing off the side at half time, Dad went overboard. He surfaced to find his brother-in-law standing above him with the last of the first bottle of Johnnie Walker.
'He's fallen in the water,' said my uncle.
'Politics should stay out of sport,' said the Prime Minister five years earlier, as rural conservatives nodded in agreement and ensured his re-election a year later. Bare-handed protestors clubbed on the street that led from my secondary school to parliament as another nation's apartheid threw an ugly light on a country that had lied, claiming it was a utopia of racial equality.
London, thirty years later, mid-morning, a game on TV from Eden Park. The conspiratory, private quiet of the City inside the Roman wall on a Sunday, when it was the property only of those of us who found our flats within its limits. Nowhere is quieter than the streets of EC4 on an autumn weekend and I couldn't bear it. What if they lost? I wanted to leave, walk the silent streets, listen to the city's pause as Dusautoir and Trinh-Duc took it to 8-7.
8-7 it remained.
I don't care about rugby.
Screaming in the eight-hundred-quid-each cheap seats at Twickenham four years later, all black everything, undeterred by the encroaching bronchitis, resident mastitis, or the disgruntled Wallaby fans one row below. It was Halloween. It was sweet.
Lip-bitten silence about the result the next time around.
I've worn the fern in anger too.
None of it is about rugby. It's about us. We forge stories about who we are on little boats on the Hauraki Gulf or in flats overlooking the Otago Harbour, at bus stops on Courtenay Place and driving on State Highway Twenty under the Dominion Road overpass, one last night at the bottom of the world, and this is the manuscript. My vision crossed and blinked and my eyes focused on Taita Drive, the river to the west and Hutt Valley bungalows to the east, and big Jonah scored, levelling the game with twenty-three minutes left to play.
I'm caught up in the moment, awaiting the conversion from the sideline into a Lansdowne Road northerly. Perhaps not even God knows. I don't remember if he got it. We drove away into the night. We would forget it ever happened.