The Rules of Backyard Cricket (2 page)

Although…wait.
Insufferable—
in case I forget later.

But I still worship the guy. I know it doesn't make sense.

I no longer remember where this ritual came from: the bat, the tennis ball, the twelve metres of shorn grass. There's a line somewhere in any childhood. Before the line, all knowledge and habit is contributed by adults. How to eat with a fork, wash your face, wipe your bum. On the other side of the line, the magpie child starts to gather and collect from everywhere. How to swear. How to kiss a girl. Where you go when you die.

Backyard cricket must have been absorbed on the parental side of that line. We've been doing it ever since I can remember, and I can remember back to about three. But who taught us the rules? Who showed us how to mow the strip, to play a cover drive, to bowl a yorker? Who explained the dozens of tactical options, the physical vocabulary? It must have been Dad, but I don't have the memory. It saddens me that I don't.

Ground Zero is the stumps, represented by the severed foot of an apricot tree. In life it had sprawled out to about twenty feet of blossoms, leaves and fruit, open enough at its centre that we'd made a platform in there. Too basic and rickety to call it a treehouse, but serviceable enough for various kinds of warfare and for hiding when any shit had gone down.

The tree bore so much fruit that a large proportion of it—even beyond the harvest taken by us and the birds—just disintegrated on the lawn. For years after the tree was gone it would deliver painful reminders of its existence in the hard stones left by the rotted-down fruit under our bare feet. Its fate was a common one for a stonefruit tree: it started to rot and split down the middle, oozing shiny globes of sap. The plywood platform that had sheltered pirates and cowboys and bank robbers began to lean on a crazy angle, and with every gale we'd find new branches fallen on the grass.

But the fruit kept coming in staggering quantities, so it seems no one had the heart to deal with the problem—and of course, that no one can only have been Mum. It wasn't as though Wally and I were ever going to take to the thing with pruning saws. I'm pretty confident we never affected any kind of chivalry for Mum. Anyway, we liked the old tree, especially when it thrashed drunkenly in the wind and we could hear its tortured wooden squeals from our beds.

But eventually the platform became too dangerous, and Mum appeared one day with the chainsaw. We'd been kicking the football, and suddenly she was there at the side gate with this forestry-grade monster she'd borrowed from a neighbour. A huge, ravenous-looking thing: teeth on a chain bolted to a motor.

I can still see her, paused at the gate with one hip slightly a-kilter, projecting an inner awareness of how cool she suddenly appeared. She had her massive imitation Dior sunglasses on, probably in lieu of protective goggles, and her hair pushed back behind a paisley bandana.
Wally dropped the footy. There could be only one purpose for her appearance and, although it was going to cost us our lair, it was going to be good.

It took her a couple of goes to get the saw started. Then it coughed and caught, there was a squirt of blue smoke and she held it up with a satisfied look round her mouth. She gave it a rev, then another as she eased it into the bark. Sawdust swirled around her and settled in her hair. She worked the blade horizontally into the trunk, weaving the saw in and out, squinting behind the Diors; I can still see the veins running down her biceps. There were two loud
crack
s as the timber gave way, and the entire weight of the tree settled onto the bar of the chainsaw, choking the chain and killing the motor. She stood back for a moment, indecisive, with a hand on her hip.

Then she did the best thing I ever saw her do.

She jumped up from where she stood, hooked her hands on a low-hanging limb and hung there like a gibbon, yanking at it. She swung through the air a couple of times, kicking freely with her bare feet—the girl we'd never known her to be—and the tree reacted with a few more fibrous pops. Then down it came, apricots thudding and rolling all over the place, Mum lost completely under the canopy of leaves. We could hear her under there, shrieking with laughter, cracking twigs in her efforts to climb out.

The foot of the tree was cut off square except for a jagged horn of timber on one edge, where it had stretched and snapped. The chainsaw had fallen out by this stage and Mum took it up again, working the cord and the choke until it spluttered into life once more. With a sweep of the snarling arm the splinter was gone. We raked and scooped and brushed for an hour or more, the brittle afternoon sun of autumn picking up the gold among the leaf litter.

By the time we cleared the whole mess away, a squared-off stump stood in the middle of the lawn, roughly equidistant from the three
paling fences. Wally disappeared into the garden shed and emerged with a tape measure. She'd cut exactly at bail height, twenty-eight inches by nine. We watched her saunter off, twigs in her hair, the chainsaw resting on that same cocked hip. Accident or design? As with most things Mum did, the line was blurred and she wasn't saying. But forever after the stump was our stumps.

And in the current memory, the stump is an arm's length behind me as I stare down my brother. The bat in my hands is an SP, as used in Tests by England captain Tony Greig. He's tall, implacable, patient. All the things I'm not. The dog at our feet is Sam, a grossly obese staffy. The lawn's kept down by an ancient handmower that's always been there. Razor sharp blades made to look innocuous by rust. It didn't come from anywhere and it'll never go anywhere.

Those deep shades of autumn are last year now, when we were smaller. Here in high summer, where my memories crowd more, sunlight is a scatter of bleaches and reflections. At backward point there's a banksia. At extra cover, a holly bush where Sam likes to shit. At mid-off, a bare patch where nothing, not even grass, grows. It's lightning fast if you send a drive through there. Off drive I mean. I assume you're keeping up. I'm a lefty.

Mid-on's the vegie patch, never grows anything but tomatoes this time of year, stinging nettles along the back. Dirty bare feet in there come out red-welted. Midwicket is the shortest boundary, formed by the Apostouloses' fence. Directly behind those palings, separated by a spindly pittosporum, is their kitchen. If you really middle a pull shot—wrap the handle around your ribs and smack that ball sweet off the end of the blade—it makes the finest sound hitting the timbers out there. I can only imagine how it sounds at the Apostas' kitchen sink.

Fine leg is into the corner, towards the crappy asbestos outhouse that contains the second dunny and the laundry. Something about the plumbing in there; there's a smell even when no one's been.

Keeper and slips are automatic: the big sheet of trellis that Mum put up to grow climbing roses. Snick it onto the trellis on the full and you're gone. Hit the dog and it makes a hollow thud.

Sam's a random element in all this, wandering around sniffing the air. Occasionally he lies on his back and does that thing fat dogs do when they wriggle around just scratching the bejesus out of their backs. You can't shoo him away. You have to get on with it no matter where Sam is located, and you can't hit him. Hit him and you're gone. If Sam decides he wants to stop and eat a bee off a clover flower right in the middle of the pitch, you play around him. In future years, under greater pressures, I sometimes wonder if Wally and I learned to stare through distraction because we had to play around a fat dog.

So you've got Sam acting as a sort of close-in fieldsman at large. But then you also have inanimate fieldsmen you can place yourself when you're bowling: the metal rubbish bin, the little tripod barbecue, the two swans made out of painted tyres. When I'm on the attack I like to have all of them crowded round the bat so close that it's actually hard to bowl through them.

In this memory there's insect repellent in the air. Mum's been out with the blue can. She never says anything when she's focused like this: just presses her mouth into a firm line and does the necessary. Economy of movement. We've both frozen in position and scrunched our eyes shut. The can hisses; her bangles tinkle as she sprays the stinging fumes, greasy on the skin.

The ball in Wally's hand is a Slazenger tennis ball we pinched from the proddie church tennis club, because in those days tennis balls could only be purchased new as a set of four in a vacuum-sealed can, unattainably expensive.

We figured out we could sit in the primary school playground just over the far end of the tennis court and wait for the pennant ladies to sky one. The ladies knew we were waiting there and we knew they
knew, but they were never going to catch us, not with two Malvern Stars leaning against the cyclone wire and at least a twenty-second head start.

While waiting for this particular ball, I'd got us a deck of Extra Milds: the shiny gold pack, the cellophane with the little tear strip. ‘And a box of matches and a packet of Juicy Fruit, thanks. For Mum.' Eyeballing the guy as the guy eyeballed me and we both reflected for a moment on the nature of truth. So the brother and I sat there in the shade, enveloped in a bitter blue cloud, arguing over who was doing the drawback. We were both coughing—me because I was doing the drawback, and him because it was some kind of weird habit of his.

The yellow stain in the middle of the filter is called a pig root, I explained to him. It's not cool. People will think you don't know what you're doing. You're eight, he came back. You actually
don't
know what you're doing. Throughout his adult life, Wally will say ‘actually' when he's getting all shrill and emphatic. Besides, he went on, pig rooting is what dogs do. Pretty sure it's what pigs do, I said, and he punched me in the arm with one knuckle out for extra bruise. I squawked and spluttered smoke.

The ladies watched disapprovingly, but by and by their lack of interest in other women's kids took over and they resumed their gentle lobbed exchanges.

Our vigil continued: every ball they produced from under their knicker elastic was a pending addition to the stocks at Fernley Road. Like I said, they knew it; we knew it.

Thwock. Thwock
. Birds chippering somewhere up high. A lawnmower droning away. Planes in an empty sky. And if you listened closely, the crackle of the smouldering tobacco as we pulled it to a red hot glow.
Thwock, thwock-thwock
…
Poong!…
that's a mis-hit, and over it comes. Gaffers in mouths, squinting, we reel it in and hit the road. At ten, Wally can bounce a tennis ball along the road while he rides, although he's
carefully ditched the cigarette for fear of being reported by neighbours.

Morally, to him, the theft of the balls was excused by sporting necessity: a matter of subsistence. He could rationalise it that way, and liberating the odd Slazenger from the ladies was a whole lot different than, for example, badging their cars. Which was something I did without regret.

And right there you have an essential distinction between the Keefe brothers. I would do these things for the sheer joy of it. Busting free, sending my blood roaring in the knowledge I'd flouted the rules and disappointed expectations. The problem for me is that the more times you do it and the more you get caught, the lower the expectations become. Correspondingly, the lesser the thrill.

I'm surprised at you
, the teachers would say. But they weren't.

The previous term I'd been caught watching the girls doing handstands in the area of the yard reserved exclusively for the girls to do handstands (which I think owed more to the Brothers' voyeurism than to any desire to afford the girls privacy while they inverted themselves). For this I was caned, which in retrospect must've been a double payoff for the Brothers.

I'd cheated on tests (detention), burned centipedes with a magnifying glass (caning), thrown a bolt-bomb on the road near the bus stop (caning) and fed a paper clip into a powerpoint (electrocution
and
caning). Most recently, I'd clean-bowled a grade-four during recess and, when he refused to vacate the crease, I'd spontaneously waved my dick at him. The timing was poor: Brother Callum was standing directly behind me as I did it, confirming that if you chant the Litany of the Saints often enough, the Holy Ghost will grant you invisibility.

Brother Callum (Calumn?) was an Irishman of the ancient kind with a temper that seemed to channel centuries of rage. His chief responsibility was teaching us obscure prayers in a viscous Donegal
brogue that left us guessing dangerously when we repeated the lines back to him. The metre ruler awaited any transgression. Only the Mother Church could conceive of a torment so exquisitely weird as ordering eight-year-olds to recite forgotten chants back to an armed sadist who couldn't pronounce them in the first place.

So you can picture my horror when I saw the batsman's eyes looking back at me—past me and my pecker—over my shoulder to Brother Callum. I was still turning and simultaneously restuffing my shorts when he pounced, crushing me in a headlock that shut off the sun and silenced all sound. The next bit I have trouble describing, such was the intensity of the pain, but those watching told me later that Callum drove two or three punches into the top of my skull, his big pewter rosary ring leaving lumps on my head that I could still find with my fingertips at fifteen.

He was grunting something, yelling something as he did this, but between the oxygen deprivation and the tortured dialect, I was never going to hear what it was. Eventually he dropped me and I slumped to the asphalt, dazed and bleeding.

The school must have rung Mum. She was down there within the hour, barely long enough for the nurse to clean up the wounds. I was made to wait for her on the steps of the school, and as her car pulled up I felt a rush of shame and anger and also tears and I can still see her coming towards me, her face a shifting landscape of fury and love and insight. She'd read the whole thing by the time she reached me, wrapped me in a hug that smelled of her, one that I never wanted to leave.