The Rules of Backyard Cricket (29 page)

After dwelling on it all for another four months, the coroner delivers her findings.

She reads, eyes down, in a monotone. The judgment is in the words, not the inflection. Next to me in the gallery, Mum sits in a skirt and jacket that she probably would've preferred to be unveiling as mother of the groom. She's grief stricken. In the car on the way in, she's been blaming everyone but me.

‘Well, these girls will throw themselves at sportsmen, won't they.'

I tell her I don't think that's much of a justification. And besides, I haven't been a sportsman for some time.

‘All I'm saying is they know what they're getting into,' she hisses.

Now she sits stoic among the wreckage of her son's reputation as people examine her for traces of emotion. Her hands are laid neatly on her lap, but they're trembling. At first I think it's the stress. But the top one appears to be pressing down on the bottom one to contain it.

Tremors. Through my distraction, I realise I need to talk to someone about that.

The coroner finds that I was present when the substance was purchased or otherwise obtained, and when it was administered. She finds I most probably had no active role in the girls' decision to take the substance. She takes particular care to single me out for refusing to give evidence on the grounds I might incriminate myself, noting simultaneously that it's my right to do so but that it's my own conscience I have to grapple with. She concludes that Emily Weil died by misadventure, having been administered a toxic quantity of a controlled substance, causing respiratory failure and eventual death.

The substance can't have been controlled very effectively if a delusional man-child and two hyped-up kids can get their mitts on it in a nightclub.

The coroner refers the matter of my involvement to the police, and by late July I'm facing charges of using and possessing a controlled substance, to wit, pentobarbital.

I'm inclined at first to fight the charges. There's enough money sloshing around to pay for the sharks, even though the owners of Globe confirmed within hours of my discharge from the hospital that I was now on indefinite leave, to enable me to get all the help I need. I take this as a boning.

But Wally works his way into the mess: phone calls here, coffees there. I would say it's his permanent role in our family, being the titular CEO of the enterprise. But it's also his permanent role to be the face of Australian cricket. It does him and the sport no good to have me
staggering perniciously around on the public stage. Another instinct reminds me that nothing from my brother comes freely: he's either repaying a debt he perceives he owes me—or he's setting up a debt to call in later. It's the way of all politics, as I'm starting to learn.

The advice, he tells me, is to let the charges go through. Look as sorry as hell and cop it. Despite the gravity of the outcome, according to Wally's best bureaucratese, the penalty could be quite minor. They're not saying you killed her, he assures me. They're saying you took drugs with her and she died. I think about the Weils. I doubt the distinction would mean very much to them.

So Wally arranges a fantastically dreary barrister to come along to court one bleak Tuesday morning and say a little piece about me, what a decent man I am. How it's hurting me, how I've changed.

We cram into an interview room adjacent to the court, streaked with the scuff-marks of a thousand other miscreants. The barrister goes through it all, glossing over the squalid bits and looking for redeeming features, which we both know are morbidly outweighed by the squalor. He has a complete copy of the prosecution brief, and I thumb through the photo book, reconstructing a night I barely remember. Handbag contents, my wallet and phone, the hospital carpark, tyre marks. Then, working backwards in time, the front door of Moss, an image of an alleyway I don't recognise, tin and timber fences stretching away towards a vanishing point.

The photo is in there because it shows a spray of vomit on the fence and the ground. Indeed, the following photo is a close-up of the same thing. How many people vomit, let alone piss, fuck, shoot up or even take a shit in laneways behind nightclubs, I wonder. It's hard to know what such an image could prove.

Tin fences.

I stare a little harder at the photo. And there, on the right, I can see a spot where the timbers run horizontally, forming a rough
capping above the tin fence. And on the horizontal timbers, a series of hand-painted black letters.

I have to squint to make out the name, but there's no doubt.

Hope Sweeney, Bootmaker
.

He's long gone by now, I imagine. But his grim scepticism about the graceless prodigy who was Darren Keefe, that outlives him.

An hour later in the courtroom, the magistrate calmly points out that I'm yet to cough up the name of the person who supplied the drugs, and that doing so might be seen as evidence of contrition, but my learned counsel is all over this. He produces a report from a toxicologist to say that the stuff we'd taken, thanks again Craigo, causes severe amnesia in most cases.
Of course he'd name such a person
, says the barrister over the top of his notes.
He wants to see this dreadful stuff taken off the streets as much as the rest of us. But he literally can't remember.

The magistrate sighs in a tired way and says things about my public profile, my diminished status as a role model to children, my lack of maturity for a middle-aged man. He says he must impose a penalty that reflects the need for general deterrence, as if there are queues of people thinking about behaving like me. He makes clear that he's not penalising me for Emily Weil's death, but for possessing and using the drug that killed her. He fines me two grand and puts me on a bond.

And there it is: my reckoning with society is complete. Brisk, efficient and entirely devoid of any proper sense of damnation.

But of course, that belongs on the streets and in the living rooms of the nation, where a fallen sportsman of any hue is a sinkhole for righteous indignation.

At his insistence, I meet Wally at a café in the CBD. About the
public side of things
, as he delicately puts it.

My brother turns up in a suit and sunglasses, his half-hearted camouflage. But he is unmistakeably himself—the set jaw, the square posture, his tendency to duck-walk. People crane their necks as they pass, particularly when they see that he's talking to me. The bad brother. He deserves credit for meeting me out in the open, for allowing some of the stain to rub off on himself.

Three seats at a table by the window, a sugar dispenser and napkins in a stand. We order and while he waits he carefully works through the whole thing. I'm leafing through the sports pages of a curled breakfast-shift tabloid while he talks, reading the form guide through a coffee ring. The inattention bothers him, I can tell.

He wants to know how I met the girls, who their families are. How did they recognise me, or didn't they? What was the drug? What's the last thing I remember? I can't help feeling he's assembling something, some kind of Meccano assault vehicle for unspecified later deployment. I remind him that these are the very matters I was coached not to talk about under the counsel of the lawyers he hired for me.

Just as Wally turns the topic to the person he wants me to meet, said person appears. Corpulent, blood-red in the face, silver hair. Maybe fifty-five, with a half-sneer pre-formed under the moustache on his slabbish face. He looks like one of those hideous political operatives. He's eating a banana, for fuck's sake. I check Wally as though this is his first-ever practical joke.

‘Really?'

‘Yep. Really. You want help here, we do it my way. Alan's been doing reputation management for the Institute of Sport and he helps out with Cricket Australia from time to time. He's got some stupid people out of some nasty scrapes.'

I shake the boneless mass of his hand. ‘Thank God I'm neither stupid nor nasty.'

The great oaf almost purrs with pleasure, and I can see that my
early resistance is part of some inbuilt checklist he encounters with all his clients. The Kübler-Ross of public shame, with me stuck at denial.

The coffee turns up. It's scalding hot and milky. Wally pushes his across to Alan, untouched. He gets up and excuses himself, leaving me and the oaf to get to know each other.

‘So,' he begins. ‘Let's cast an eye over your particular shitstorm.' He sheafs through some papers with the air of a bored factotum.

‘You've no-commented the police, which is good. Exercised the privilege against self-incrimination in court and blamed your lawyer outside court, which is also good. You were seen throwing a frisbee at St Kilda beach during the first weekend of the coronial hearing, which is bad. Photo in the
Herald Sun
wearing a T-shirt with the word
schadenfreude
emblazoned across it, which is also bad. Do you actually think through the implications of these things?'

We both decide it's a rhetorical question.

‘You're yet to talk candidly about what went on, and to some extent you're prevented from doing so by the very real risk you'll put your foot in it. I don't ever want to know who gave you that horse juice, but they'd be feeling tetchy about their customer right now.

‘Despite all that, we'll need you to do a confessional. On tabloid TV, someone soft. We'll train you up for it. Shed a tear or two, make it clear you want to set the record straight once and for all, yada yada. There's
shitloads
of money to be made if you do this right. You understand me? Shitloads.'

Wally never asked me who gave me the drugs. Why wouldn't he ask me that?

‘What about the girl's family?' I ask.

The oaf is clearly baffled. ‘What about them?'

‘Can I approach them? Try to apologise personally? Check how they feel about me doing media?'

‘
Ohhhh
. Sorry, I get you now. No. That would be a fucking stupid thing to do.'

‘Don't patronise me, you fat fuck.'

The insult washes over him without a ripple. ‘You need a prepared statement. To stop you ad-libbing in front of microphones.'

He opens his computer and fiddles around for a while. Because Wally had been sitting opposite me, he's plonked himself in a chair almost beside me, and now that Wally's gone he's uncomfortably close. I watch the screen as he clicks his way through his various rabbits and hats. A list of folders:
assault, bust-up/creative, bust-up/management, bust-up/partnership, chemical leak, financial default, hit and run, infidelity, sexting
…

‘Here,' he says. ‘Post-sentence.'

‘What are your qualifications?' I can't help asking.

He takes out a cigarette and lights it, drawing thoughtfully. ‘None of your business,' he exhales.

‘Well, do you know what you're doing?'

He turns the computer so it's facing me directly. ‘Go on then, you run it.' He waves a hand at the keyboard and ashes the smoke, just a touch prematurely. ‘It's not about age anymore, Darren. Not about fame either. You're on the scrapheap, and I'm the recycling guy.'

I watch him sullenly. I'm reflected in the glass door behind his head: deepening valleys forming an arch from the base of my nose, the softening shape of my jaw. There are little silver hairs growing out of my ears. I've taken to snipping them in the bathroom mirror. Men with silver hairs in their ears do not belong in nightclubs. Rampant virility is behind me now and I misused it. Oh fuck, is this all there is?

And the clincher arrives, as I watch this turd working the mouse with his slug fingers. He turns the screen back to face himself.

‘Now how do you want it?' he asks. ‘I can do sullen and wounded, slightly defiant, ambivalent, sincere or grovelling.'

This is unbelievable. ‘Sincere.'

‘Okay. Good choice. How's this?…
aware of my status as a role model…became vulnerable to these influences once I was removed from the disciplinary structures of…what was this one? Oh yeah, first-class cricket… sorry to anyone I may have hurt or offended…Horror and revulsion at my involvement in these tragic events…
You like?'

‘What about
Please respect my family and their need for privacy at this difficult time
?'

‘That's for the bereaved.'

‘
Obviously have a long way to go to regain the public's respect
?'

‘Yeah, I can put that in.'

He finishes typing and snaps the laptop shut. Then, tucking it back into a bag, he leans back and squints into a pull on the cigarette, studying me.

‘What?'

He bares his teeth to hiss out the smoke, offers me a hand. ‘Cool. We're on. Consider me your misrepresentative.'

I ignore the hand. He ignores the gesture.

‘How do you feel?'

‘What do you care?'

He smiles maliciously. ‘Oh I
don't
care. It's just that I need to know, so I know how much truth I've got to work with.'