The Rules of Backyard Cricket (3 page)

She ran gentle fingers though my hair, felt the cuts and took me by the hand. Her face was white, her lips clenched. Fury had won but it wasn't directed at me. She flung open the glass doors and rained hell on everyone in sight.

Brother Callum. Jesus, he must be long gone. He clearly
has
haunted me till the day I die, though.

Anyway, we're back home, sun's still shining.

I wanted to tell you about showing the ball: a particular ritual that must be observed by the bowler before any recommencement of play.

First let me say that upon our return from the proddie tennis courts I would of course be bowling because I am the younger, and the role of the younger is to feed deliveries to the imperious elder.

But to the ritual.

First you have to declare who you are. You don't just lob the ball down using your own action and personality, you have to
be
someone. Lillee, Holding, Bob Willis…Doesn't matter who it is, but you have to nominate and then you have to impersonate their run-up and action, follow-through, the lot. The great benefit of this arrangement is that you can select a bowler who fits with the conditions and your mood: the gentle guile of Derek Underwood if it's hot and you can't be stuffed; the silent menace of Andy Roberts if you're carrying a grievance. Failure to adopt a persona when bowling attracts no particular penalty, but it's poor form.

The most formal bit is showing the ball.

We picked up somewhere, maybe on late-night coverage of Wimbledon, the moment when a tennis player taking new balls must hold them aloft briefly for their opponent to see. In tennis, it's common sense: the new ball will look different and bounce differently, and therefore it would be unsporting to make the change unannounced. Equally in the backyard, where there's an even greater variance between one ball and the next, to launch a fresh pill without some declaration would violate an unspoken code of decency. You've probably already discerned that decency, like the February grass, was thin on the ground in the Keefe backyard. But this was bipartisan. Ball etiquette was fundamental.

Balls turn grey when left for months in the sun. Tennis balls can be split by impacts, or by the dog's exploratory jaws—and a split ball will bounce either higher or lower depending how it lands. Balls can be taped—all over to make them heavier and more painful on impact, or half-taped to simulate the swing of a real leather cricket ball. In times of high conflict the ball might not be a ball at all—it could be a piece of fruit or a small rock. So we placed a simple constraint on our own deviousness: show the ball to the batsman prior to play, or any wicket taken thereafter would be declared null and void.

Of course, this created the opportunity for even greater conflict. A cunning batsman, having noted the bowler's failure to show the ball, would swing with cavalier disregard, aiming at windows, trying to bullseye the metal bin, the swans or even the dog, in confident assumption of immunity. Once dismissed, the batsman would lean smugly on the bat and shake his head. Voices would be raised, equipment thrown. Unless Mum intervened, it would end in a red-faced tangle with fingers in eyes and gappy milk teeth sunk into soft flesh: an itchy, grunting wrestle that never produced a clear winner.

But there was one strategy that got around the apparent full disclosure of showing the ball.

We were among the first in the neighbourhood to own a microwave oven. It was a Philips CuisinArt. To this day I don't know what inspired the old girl to make such an esoteric purchase. We weren't remotely affluent, and this gadget was the province of rich people.

However, that was no concern of ours. Overnight, a technology had entered our lives that could bring slabs of congealed pie back to life so we could consume them at tongue-blistering speed. You could dry wet sneakers in it, melt a brother's GI Joe—or doctor a tennis ball.

It's relatively simple, I suppose. The ball goes on the turntable and the air inside expands:
ergo
, if you overdo it, the ball explodes. If you get it just right, however, you wind up with a ball that will bounce
to incredible heights, making it virtually unplayable off a good length. But like the moral payoff in a Greek tragedy, once the magical powers are spent, your ball is flat, listless and liable to be smacked all over the place. Ten minutes of preternatural spring and the ability to hit your opponent's body repeatedly without effort. After which, if you haven't managed to get him out, revenge will be a slow and painful business. Such is the counterweight to any exalted state of being, as I would find out much later on.

And it would be me, time after time, who would misjudge the axis between glory and humiliation, revelling in my temporary ascendancy rather than effecting the dismissal. And on more than one occasion, when I
had
turned my mind to the central issue, scattering his stumps or luring him into the false shot that would bring the inanimate fieldsmen into play, he'd casually lean back on his bat and laugh at me. In my impetuous rush to get from kitchen to pitch with a newly cooked ball, I'd failed to make the necessary disclosure before delivering.

The neighbours comment euphemistically to Mum that her boys are ‘very spirited' or ‘remarkably competitive'. It's impossible for us to see that we're forming an obsessive antagonism, an entanglement placental in its depth.

I know Wally deeper than biology. His frame, his posture, his voice and movements. That dry, chipping cough of his, the one he issues all the time, whether he's sick or well. The way his eyes dart and I know he's switched mentally from derision to anger; and equally, when and why he'll laugh uncontrollably; when his strength will give out in a fight, where he'll try to hit first.

I know his ribs—hell, I've aimed at them enough. I know how the sun burns him in late spring: a glow over his shoulders, blisters bursting and flaking on his nose.

I can recruit him from a conversation with adults, from his homework or from his perch on the toilet. I can claim him from in front of the TV or when he's half-asleep. One look, a nod towards the back door and he's out there, because he wants to beat me as much as I want to beat him.

From the day—lost now in the Kodachrome blur—when we take up backyard cricket, we are an independent republic of rage and obsession. Our rules, our records, our very own physics. Eye-to-eye and hand-to-hand combat. By the time we emerge into the world beyond the paling fences, it surprises us to learn that anyone considers this a team sport.

Mum

The bulb idea has come to nothing.

It burst easily enough when I squeezed it, but into fragments so tiny and delicate that none of them were any use. And the effort of popping the globe drove quite lot of the shards into poor old Squibbly.

I gave it a go, fumbled around for a while for the biggest pieces of the bulb that I could find. But it was like trying to scoop up thick guacamole with a thin chip: every time I sliced, the fragment broke into a smaller fragment.

Squibbly is bleeding rather a lot, and I'm tired. There's so much to explain, but my blood's like cold oil. I'm suspended in space here, between wakefulness and sleep, maybe even consciousness and death, and I fear the gag will suffocate me if I doze off.

A world apart from the world in here. The dark side of a frozen planet.

Mum is the centre of our solar system, the single deity in whom all powers are vested.

Looking back, she's not yet thirty, although to our eyes she's more than halfway to being an Old Person. Dad's just a void into which we tip our speculation. He might have done this, or that. His presence is lost in the haze of our pre-school years; tall, scruffy, and downcast. When I look for him in the dark I see the hollows round his eyes, his moustache, the pilling where his stubble has worn away the neck band of his jumper.

Mum came from a fabled place called the Eastern Suburbs, a faraway land on the other side of the city. We hear the names on the news sometimes, and I argue with Wally about which suburbs are
Eastern
. We can work out some of them from the footy: Hawthorn, Richmond, St Kilda, South Melbourne. The others count as western suburbs. It's much later that I realise Collingwood, on our side of a divided universe, is actually north of Melbourne, not west.

It was Mum's fate to fall in love with a footballer.

Dad was someone's friend's brother, or someone's brother's friend. In the oral history of our family Mum was Mum—defined by her own presence. Dad, however, was defined by his connection to Mum. A guy who knew someone who knew Mum. Apparently he was a savant in footy boots—all the intellectual spark of wet cardboard, but freakishly light-footed; wired with a spooky intuition for where the ball was and where it needed to go. But these skills are, by definition, not transferable and it seems Dad struggled on any surface that wasn't grass.

A year in with Mum and she'd alienated her family, dropped out of school and gone to live with him in Footscray, busy gestating Brother Wally. They eloped to Glenelg. Civil ceremony. No family, a handful of friends.

Footy didn't work out for Dad—he did an ankle. The club paid for a reco but he'd lost his trademark ability to bank laterally out of
trouble at speed. And the elopement had its consequences. Wally and I never knew our paternal grandparents because Dad was gone so early in our lives. We never knew our maternals either: they'd turned their backs on Mum.

It meant too that our childish fascination with our own genetics could only take us one layer deep. We had Mum's hair, thick and somewhere between blonde and brown. We had her light scatter of freckles. But where her bones were fine and sharp, ours were thuggishly stout. Did we have Dad's ankles? Was it a design fault that had caused his downfall anyway, or just a divot in the earth somewhere?

Their first home was a Commission rental in Footscray's backstreets. The house is still there, in the ironically named Gallant Street. Dad took a full-time job in a warehouse, shuffling through his day and into his evening. Home at night, grinding his molars at the squawking of baby Wal, he'd chug his way through the beers until he fell asleep in his armchair. I see Mum perched in the chair beside him, breastfeeding Wally and watching her young husband descend. Not violent; not raucous or randy. Just sinking slowly like a man half-asleep in a parachute.

This is what I feel, what I glean from interrogating Mum. I can't know enough of him to care about him as a person, but I care a great deal about the idea of a father. A dad. So I collect the little clues she leaves. I go through private drawers sometimes, searching for his identity. I build him painstakingly from these twigs and straws, but the shape he takes always feels hollow.

I imagine she wondered how long he'd last, whether he'd end it with some horrendous flourish. Gas himself in the car, perhaps—the most suburban of exits.

Wally and I pass the house sometimes on our bikes, both trying to look at it without the other seeing. The Gallant Street house: behind its nature strip, a modest brick veneer off a government plan. It would've
had a big backyard, we figure, after riding around the corner to assess the depth of the blocks.