Ten minutes to go! Four goals needed by Carlton! Tell you what, it is eeeLECtric up here in the commentators’ box. Will the Swans hold on? Or can the Blues work a miracle? And most importantly, the question we’re all asking: who’s going to do it for them?!

‘Capello,’ murmurs the cameraman from his workstation, his own surveillance skyscraper tilting down over the SCG. Peering through the lens, he follows the sleek number 5 guernsey. Oscar Capello to lead Carlton’s charge against Sydney. He’d read the headline that morning. Wondered over toast if it really merited the front page or if The Herald was just having an uneventful week.

Number 5 leaves the ground to rest, so he focuses instead on the future Mrs Capello down in the members stand. He feels the urge to zoom even further so he can trace the waves of her hair. But he resists.

#

‘If we beat Sydney we’re third. Second if the Hawks win, top if Collingwood get booted by over five goals.’ These are the words she’s photocopied from Oscar, so that she can present them when she’s required. But she can’t just recite them, oh no; she has to infuse them with adrenaline, and over the top of that she has to know the specific brand of distaste to use when mentioning other teams. Collingwood, for instance, she must treat like the devil. She doesn’t know why.

On top of this she has to spend the week looking almost as excited for Game Day as Oscar. Bloody pumped, she exclaims. Gives herself over to the reporters in the same neat little package week in, week out. Bloody pumped.
Which she is, in a way. Victory sex with Oscar is platinum.

From her lofty seat in the members stand, it all stretches down before her. The casual fans, the boundary fence, the ground, and finally the players – lit up like a television screen at night. In the lull of action there’s a hush around the stadium. She pretends that she’s tapped the mute button at the top of her remote. The thought of it almost turns her on. If she squints at Oscar, who’s returning on-ground, she can transform him into just a few pixels, she can make him less existent than his front-page portrait.

She crosses her legs, folds the paper in her lap. Takes a sip of her latté.

Then, when she is bored of her digital daydream, she opens her eyes back wide. Blinks away the headlines and statistics. The pixels multiply, converge, gather colour, gather tone. In the return to clarity she sees Oscar smile and the fans in front of her bubble over – ‘That’s the look, he knows what to do! We’re gonna come back!’  – but for her the grin’s not the game-changer so much as the way he looks when he watches cartoons. She leans forward into the image and must accidentally hit unmute, because here comes the crowd. Here comes the Oscar who still cackles at SpongeBob SquarePants but there goes the Carlton captain with that famous smirk, who is both real and unreal, hers and the nation’s, and there goes the goal umpire, the flags, the banners, the hope.

Supportively, she claps.

#

Sydney’s swan mascot is captured on screen, thrusting its wings up to the sky, shaking its head. The cameraman follows it around the boundary, pretending he’s filming for a nature documentary. That was what he’d dreamt of as a kid. He imagines the man inside the suit, sticky with sweat, and announces to an invisible audience: ‘The male swan is in need of hydration.’

Leaning back into his chair, he looks up to the real birds; watercolour blots on blue paper. First he sighs in longing. Then he frowns.

Birds don’t always have to follow their instructions, he supposes.

But today it’s like they’ve forgotten they ever had any.

#

The umpire steels himself for yet another torrent of abuse.
‘It was a high tackle,’ he repeats. ‘It was above the shoulder.’ His knees are growing weak – he can feel the bones groaning every time he runs. He’ll be forty-five next month. Retirement is waiting for him with a beer and a hug. It seems a bit shameful to admit it, but God Almighty, he needs a hug. He needs it like Carlton needs these last three goals.

There are times, however, when he is leaning down beside a pyramid of limbs and he can feel the desperation dripping onto the grass, and the crowd is roaring for his decision, the proper one, the one he can make, and he makes it now, spreads his arms like an eagle and shoots air through the whistle. No-one complains. No-one flips the finger, no-one accuses him of being blackmailed.

In the moments before Capello kicks another, the umpire looks up at the sea of navy and white, red and white, and thinks himself loved.

#

On occasion, when the cameraman’s job seems a little too simple – ‘Follow Capello around; yes, sir’ – he likes to listen to what’s happening on other radio stations. People forget all too easily that other things happen whilst AFL happens; that a man with a scrap of oval leather cannot stop the world.

Absent-mindedly, he fiddles with his earpiece. And the report from Taronga Zoo: there’s really no point today, everyone. Almost all the animals are refusing to emerge from their enclosures, even when enticed with treats.

The cameraman glances up once again at the strange birds. Then his gaze shifts down to the carpark, and he’s momentarily transfixed by the outline of a sprinting dog. It hurls itself across the scene of cars; never stops, never slows, just carries on flinging itself inland.

#

Oscar Capello sweats buckets, but on the inside he is perfectly composed. The field is laid out before him like the maps Generals stand around in war movies; he sees the players as figurines he can move at his will. The ball is a bullet, obviously. His arms aren’t called guns for nothing.

He’s had team strategies implanted in his mind like battle plans, and after a couple of chaotic minutes, in a heartbeat of stopped play, the strategies stretch out in rapid lines over the ground. One by one, they hit brick walls. They vanish until only one is left. Oscar blinks and the lines are gone; only instinct is left.

There is a pack, there are fast handballs, and all at once there is the ball, the oval bullet, shiny red leather between his palms. As he begins to run he can see himself filling the enormous stadium screen. His own personal mirror. And so he and the digitalised Oscar Capello lunge for the edge of that screen and for those goal posts stretching up like flagpoles. They shoot the bullet ball through the middle, they feel the trembling thunder in the stadium, watch the goal umpire swish the two white flags in confirmation – but why would you stop there, why wouldn’t you attach them to the flagpoles, raise them to the top – why wouldn’t you find a man with a bugle and make him play?

#

In his breaks the cameraman fixates on the shoreline. The water’s lower. The certainty of it blares like an alarm in his head but over the top he can still hear his wife: Stop being paranoid.

It’s just the atmosphere of the game. It is an unbelievable tension, after all; the rumble of the fans has never shaken his entire workstation before.

He goes back to work.

#

The boy takes his excitement and tries to stuff it inside his scarf with the rest of him, but seconds later it tumbles back out in words. Dad, we’ve got thirty seconds left to get one goal! His Dad roars back his exhilaration, raising the plastic cup of beer to his lips. His three mates do the same. The boy leans over the boundary fence, smashing his hands on the electronic billboards, and this time his excitement gurgles out in a laugh.

He stands up when play starts, sits down when it stops, does it so quickly and so many times, like his seat is a trampoline. He is up when Capello takes the ball, barely a few metres away. KICK IT explodes from half the stadium, MISS IT erupts from the other half; the boy contributes his own high-pitched GO CAPPA and repeats it, louder and louder until Capello kicks the ball, just as the siren blasts. The world pulls itself into a ball of heartbeats and eyes. It holds together.

And then, when the umpire declares a goal, it unfurls itself and comes alive.

Before his Dad can stop him, the boy follows the thousand others who have climbed the fence and flooded the field. Swerving through the labyrinth of running legs, he finds the tree trunk thighs of the players and then, somehow, Capello himself.

#

It’s the money shot; the surge of the fans onto the ground, something the AFL only allows when the euphoria becomes bigger than the people themselves.

It’s the career-maker.

The ultimate test of reflex, especially in the fingers.

But the cameraman’s hands are perfectly still.

So are his arms, his legs – his whole body apart from his eyes, which are open towards the horizon. The irises alternate between shrivelling in a whimper and bulging like an enormous silent scream.

There is the voice of his boss in his ear. What are you doing? He hears it but not how he’s meant to; instead of engineering a slow, dramatic birds-eye sweep across the ground, he ignores the camera completely and begins to shriek down at the fans, We’re all going to die! and someone screams back up, Mate, what team are you even going for? and so instead his hands grapple for the edges of the machinery and he pulls it, twists it further than he’s meant to, so it is almost off the stand and he’s half supporting the weight and it is so close so close so close, the biggest screen is showing his footage, it is showing the roof and the beginning of the carpark and the near dist-
#
Seamlessly, the screen clicks over to a new image. Framed by the limbs of his teammates and the colours of his supporters, Oscar Capello lifts up a boy in a slightly-too-big Carlton scarf. Bending slightly to accommodate, the captain settles the young fan down on his shoulders, keeping a loose hold on the ankles. The boy waves to his father in rapture.

Jess Miller is a city slicker who just happened to be born in the country. A lifelong bookworm, musician and BBC addict, she has fallen in love with her current city of Adelaide, where she will undertake her Bachelor of Creative Arts Honours in 2015. She has been published on the radio and in Empire Times, and in 2010 was shortlisted for the Somerset National Novella Writing Competition. Jess aspires to set her first novel (a magic realist work-in-progress) in Adelaide, Edinburgh and New York–mostly so she has an excuse to go there.