The Rules of Backyard Cricket (15 page)

At work, Wally is outstripping me in everything but flamboyance. His attitude to practice, his obliging way with the media. His ease with the authorities. He mounts performances on the field with monotonous consistency, until his results make an undeniable case for Test selection. Everyone is talking about his
temperament,
like he's a show dog. Wally Keefe will roll over. Wally Keefe will not snarl or bite. Behold his glossy coat: Wally Keefe could be a future national captain.

One columnist says he'd pay to watch Darren Keefe because something amazing might happen, but he'd bet the house on Wally Keefe, because the necessary
will
happen. Journalists love the potential clichés we suggest: Cain and Abel, Jekyll and Hyde, Noel and Liam. They know intuitively that we represent something latent on every suburban lawn where a newspaper lands. We are the inseparable
siblings every parent worries for: good boy, bad boy. Total connection and fratricidal rage.

The selectors are in no doubt. In the December of his second state season, just weeks ahead of the Boxing Day Test, Wally is selected for the national side. There is no ugly backyard stand-off between us over the promotion, although my numbers are narrowly better than his. He's on a plane to a training camp within hours of the call from the chairman.

He's in. I'm not.

We're at Mum's for Mother's Day. Wally's about to go on tour to England to defend the Ashes. They've swept him into their world, and there's no higher sporting assignment for an Australian.

Which is why I consider my position to be one of rare privilege. Because I have a hard, shiny taped ball in my hand, and Australia's number-four batsman a very short twelve metres away, down a pitch I mowed. I know every inch of its surface. I've strained a net across two garden stakes behind the stumps so we don't have to go retrieving missed balls.

Mum's inside with Louise and Honey, playing with the baby. They'll be fine for an hour or more.

Australia's number four. He has his own personal physiotherapist and frequent flyer points, but I've got the ball.

He faces up with his usual poise, his weight seemingly on neither foot but on both, his chin slightly raised so his jaw is parallel to the ground. His front elbow high, bottom hand loose.

There's a weedy patch in the grass short of a length, just outside off. I dart the ball hard into it and the bounce rears up like a whipping snake, bends past his outside edge high up, around shoulder height. He fends at it; retreats at the last possible instant. It hangs for a
second in the net where it hits, then falls to the ground. He scoops and returns.

He's in a good shirt, sleeves rolled up. Bare forearms, bare hands. Bare fingers. I'd love to hit those fingers.

He's smiling unaccountably. I've just beaten him outside off and he's smiling.

So I flip the ball over and bend it the other way. Lulled into a false assumption, he fends outside off again, and this one curves back in sharply and finds his ribs, hard enough to elicit a little
oof
that he wouldn't want me to hear.

He smiles again. ‘Nice one. Didn't see that coming.'

It must've stung like a bastard. So why…?

‘You all right?'

‘Yeah, never better. You want a bat?'

No, I don't want a bat. I want to see you bent double in excruciating pain.

‘Nah, you're right. Stay there.'

I straighten the next one up and he picks it correctly. Defends strongly. Next one's a careless half-volley. He steps forward and strokes it elegantly into the vegie patch. I can hear broad-bean stalks snapping in there as the ball rips through them. I'm fishing around in the pea straw with one hand to find the ball when he calls from behind me.

‘Hey, I've asked Louise to marry me.'

He was talking to my arse. I spin around.

‘I said I've asked Louise to marry me.'

No room for a show of emotion here. Keep it cool.

‘Oh yeah. What'd she say?'

He laughs like I'm an idiot.

‘Yeah. We're doing it. Fifteen June—it's the Saturday night before we fly out for the tour. You free?'

Of course I'm free. It's that or two-dollar shots at Chasers with Craigo.

‘Um, probably. I'll have to check.'

‘Great.'

From that moment forward, I start rehearsing my speech.

About how we've always been inseparable. About how I wasn't sure if there was room in our relationship for this outsider, but that she won us over with her charm. I'll skite about how I still think she throws like a girl. I'll remind the room that Wally's a very ambitious guy, and that she may have to prepare herself for the role of Cricket's First Lady. Then I'll pull it right back. Seriously, I'll say, I'm proud of my brother, my proxy father, his advice not always welcome but invariably right. And I'll say I love him and I wish them both every success in life. And the girls in the room will go
aww
, and I'll smile bashfully before I sweep out my arm and invite him to the microphone. Hug him and slap his back in the virile way that defuses the awkwardness of man-hugs.

A week later, Wally and Louise come over to Mum's place for a meeting, the first in a series to discuss the draft running order they're putting together for the day. Yes, a running order. They've got copies for me and Honey and Mum. The baby gurgles and makes little grunts as we get down to business.

Page one, invitation list. I scan down fast. Familiar names, familiar names. No Craig.

Page two, the running order itself.

Five lines down,
Best Man's speech: Tully Welsh
. I'm staring at it dumbly like it's a typo. ‘Who's Tully Welsh?'

Louise throws Wally a look:
We've discussed this. Remember how we decided you'd handle it?

‘He's the player development manager at Cricket Australia.'

‘Best man?'

I'm trying desperately not to betray any emotion.

Wally sighs. ‘It's political, okay?'

No way, brother. Not that easy. ‘So, how long you known him?'

He rolls his eyes. ‘There isn't, like, a legal minimum, Darren.'

‘Yeah, but how long?'

Mum's frowning. ‘Stop it, you two.'

Louise exhales and tries to move us along. ‘So I was thinking we could do the cake straight after the bouquet throwing? Darling?'

As my third season in the state side winds to a close, Honey and I move in together and my single life in Richmond becomes a couple's life in South Melbourne. Just a plain, rented terrace, but it works as a moated citadel against all my baser associates. Craigo won't come near the place and doesn't trust Honey, a feeling she plainly reciprocates.

I can walk to the market to buy—ha!—fruit. We have dinner parties, not parties. I even find myself cursing when the kids with their P-plates take the roundabout too fast. I look back in wonder that I lived across the road from a heavyweight gangster for four years.

Louise brings little Hannah over every few days. They live in Kew now, she and Wally and the toddler. But Wally's increasing absences leave her in a strange kind of limbo, one she chooses to fill by wandering the cafés of South Melbourne with Honey and, less often, with me. Hannah can't say ‘Darren', and chooses to replace the word with
Daddle
. Every time she does it, Louise corrects her with an embarrassed smile. But the little girl favours me in everything. When she's fed, she's fine in the presence of the women but will kick and squall for me if I'm in the house.
Daddle do! Daddle do!
Louise shifts her strategy slightly by coaching Hannah to say ‘Uncle'. This works for a while—she reverts to ‘Uggle', and even develops a singsong chant about
Uggledaddle
. On the rare occasions that Wally's
in town, he sits through these antics in tight-lipped silence.

Louise has risen in the development hierarchy in close parallel with Wally. To me, their lives are a sad, repetitive carousel of commitment. I'm sparing you the details of their wedding day because it felt so much like both of them were playing to a crowd, discharging obligations in everything from the invitation list to Tully Welsh's role as best man, to the name-checking in the speeches. The pay-off is, the gifts are extravagant. Not just toasters and glassware but art, electronics, even furniture. Never mind their vows to each other; it feels as though they've formalised a pact with their respective careers.

Even on maternity leave, Louise is harassed by calls from the aid organisation she works for. Federal budget cuts, trouble in Zambia. Spats over expense spreadsheets, media releases and bank managers. Her version of saving the world sounds deeply bureaucratic. And Wally isn't there. Over the summer he's become a face on the television, stripped of personality. He's a man who smiles and offers soundbites in airport terminals, wheeling his giant bags on trolleys. Even to me, the man inside him seems buried under platitudes.

But Hannah? She's a delight; a raucous, slapsticking show-off with a talent for the ridiculous. When her mangled speech and funny faces don't work, she'll disappear and reappear with something on her head: underpants, a box, a pillowcase. She tumbles and dribbles and jabbers her way through the giant world, grabbing at everything with her warm, sticky fingers. I can watch her for hours. Sometimes her antics remind me of Craigo when he's drunk—the staggering gait, the emotional outbursts, the need to be hugged. It fascinates me watching her eat. She shovels food in as fast as she can, frequently missing her head altogether.

She runs on love as much as food, but is far more delicate in the way she consumes it. She will stroke an adult ear to savour its velvety surface, then carefully compare the feel of her own. She likes to kiss
faces: her mother's, Honey's, her hovering father's, and mine. She will look carefully over the available terrain before deciding the perfect place to position the kiss; left of the nose, high on the brow, out wide on a cheek. Despite her voracious attack on everything under the sun, kissing is done delicately. This tiny
peck
is yours alone in the universe.

Under Honey's influence, my game improves out of sight. Not the instinctive stuff, but the stuff that comes from being fitter, more alert. Like sleeping a full night before a game and cutting down the pharmaceuticals.

In three years, I make so many runs that the only thing preventing me from following Wally into national selection is the ongoing success of the national side itself. And that can't last forever.

Honey and I start telling people we're
trying
, an active expression for the passive reality that we've stopped trying not to conceive. Hannah doesn't know what a large part she plays in my decision to go along with the program. She's in prep now, a tiny human in her school tunic, carrying an oversize bag on her back like some comic turtle. Louise is making the cross-town trip to South Melbourne day after day in search of—what? Sisterhood with Honey? Family for her daughter? She's fraught and exasperated so much of the time.