The Rules of Backyard Cricket (33 page)

She makes a scoffing face, waves my concern away with a frail hand. ‘I got a lot of pleasure out of knowing it was going well for you boys.'

‘But how the hell did you afford it? You must have had to go without all sorts of things.'

She's puzzled again. ‘No…no, I did better than the other girls.'

She's drifting.

‘It was a pub, Mum. Weren't you all paid the same?'

‘Well downstairs, yes. But I did better upstairs.'

The notion flies straight past me, kept separate by a locked door in my mind.
Upstairs
?

‘Anyway Mum, you did a great job. It never felt like we were missing out.'

But she's watching me now, a half-smile forming. ‘You didn't know about upstairs, dear.'

She's pushing at that door.

‘No. What do you mean?'

‘I did some other things for the money, you understand.'

‘Mum, what are you…'

‘Gratifying the men.'

Yuck. Oh Christ.
Yuck
.

‘Mum, don't.'

‘Don't be immature, honey. Goes on all the time. You need to know it. You're old enough to know it. ‘

‘Mum, stop.'

But she's on a roll now and she's not stopping. ‘Perfectly natural. The hotel was on the interstate highway. Lots of truck drivers, salesmen. Even policemen, if you can believe it.'

‘MUM, STOP IT.'

‘Oh come on, dear. There was no way I could support you two without a bit of cash work. I made too much at the pub to get the dole, but not nearly enough to pay the bills.'

I've got my head in my hands now.

‘So we could only do it when we were working two-up in the bar. And never when I took you to work, by the way. You used to cook the thermometer, didn't you? Used to get fevers of sixty degrees or more, you little scamp. Anyway, one girl would watch the bar and the other'd nick upstairs for a bit. I mean it wasn't full lying-down sex of course. Didn't have the time, for one thing. Usually it was just a quick handjob or a—'

I try to block the sound of her with an anguished groan.

‘Oh you're such a baby.'

Now I've got my fingers in my ears but she's so blithe she could be discussing the football.

‘The owner never knew. He only used one of the upstairs rooms as an office. The rest of them were empty, but they all worked off the same master key. Did it for years.'

I'm looking out the window, wondering if she can be distracted. Nothing presents itself.

‘We even had the boys doing it in the end. The young ones. You know, some of the men have…preferences.'

I'm up and heading for the door.

‘Of course, if it was anything too elaborate we'd have to send them down the road…'

It takes me two weeks to get an appointment with her neurologist.

He's Dutch. Tall and very mild. He observes me drily while I explain what's happened.

‘So what do you want to know?'

‘Is it true? What she told me?'

He laughs lightly. ‘I don't know.'

Shuffles forward in his seat, fidgeting with a pen in one hand. ‘There's two phenomena at work here: confabulation and disinhibition. The confabulist on the one hand is constructing patently false stories because the processes of memory and active cognition are muddled. That person is articulating something they imagined, but which they think is the truth. A non-malicious lie, if you like, simply making a new reality inside your head. Mm?'

I nod. It seems to satisfy the
Mm
.

‘Disinhibition, on the other hand, can work in the other direction. Have you ever been very drunk, Mr Keefe?'

‘Oh, I've seen drunk people.'

He misreads my smirk.

‘Yes, they can be quite a handful, can't they? Well you know that “truth serum” thing about being drunk. It's just the loss of inhibition that brings everything out. Now Alzheimer's and other dementias can have a similar effect: the social conditioning that keeps the truths inside has been stripped away, and it all just tumbles out. So your mother may be inclined to invent things, but also to drop her guard about sensitive things.'

‘That's not a lot of help.'

‘No, I imagine it isn't. The best suggestion I can make is to gently examine your mother's story and see whether it makes objective sense. Look for corroboration.'

‘Will she admit it to me if she's lying?'

‘No, of course not. Because in her mind she's telling you the truth. You'll only distress her. Look outside her if the issue is really troubling you.'

As I'm walking out the door he ventures an afterthought. ‘Your
mother is an old lady, Mr Keefe. You could just let it go.'

‘She's fifty-six,' I snap back at him.

But it really doesn't matter.

Despite his advice, I can't let it go, and the temptation to take it up with Wally proves to be too much.

I wait until mid-afternoon to call him because I've heard he's in Dubai, from where the new barons run cricket. I can tell from his greeting that he's distracted, tetchy. Good sense would be to ditch the planned conversation and just keep it social.

But as we know by this stage of the car ride, I'm not a practitioner of good sense.

‘What is it?' he demands.

‘Good thanks mate. And you?'

‘Darren, I've got people here. What do you want?'

So he's done with the niceties. Down to business then.

‘Do you think it's possible Mum could have been a hooker?'

‘A what?'

‘Hooker. Prostitute.'

‘Darren, what the fuck are you talking about?'

‘Sex worker. Mum.'

He releases a loud sigh of exasperation into the mouthpiece. ‘Where the hell have you got this idea?'

‘She told me. Says she used to turn tricks at the Commercial. Upstairs. For truckies.'

He doesn't reply, but I can hear him moving about, hear a door closing. His voice returns, lowered to a vicious hiss.

‘Listen you fucker. You've done enough to smear our family name over the last twenty years. Enough, you understand? You want to drag your own reputation through the shit, that's your life. I don't give a
fuck. But you're not traducing our mother's character. And I'll tell you something else. I've worked hard to build a reputation that's the exact inverse of yours. I go through life making sure people understand that I'm not like you.'

He's waiting in silence because he wants that to sink in.

‘So I take it you don't believe her.'

‘It's not a question—' he stops, realising he's raised his voice. ‘It's not a question of what I believe. It's a fucking ridiculous story. Our mother is a decent person who made sacrifices to give us a life. You want to bring her down? You want to go talking to your media mates? Huh? Need another revelation to keep yourself in the news?'

‘No.' He's driven over me. The brute-rational bulldozer. ‘I just want to understand it. I really don't understand those years.'

‘Yes you do. What you don't understand is how you turned into such a fuckup. You had a good start, and Mum had everything to do with that. So leave it alone.'

I can't answer.

‘Are we done?'

I still can't answer.

‘Good.'

Another time I turn up at the home, come out of the lift and take the left turn that leads to her door. It's late afternoon, and someone must have left her door open because a bright square of golden light falls on the peach wall opposite the doorway. I'm stopped mid-stride in the sad corridor, because there are shadows on the bright square. Hands. Hands working themselves into shapes.

A fierce-looking dog. A goat. Then a whole lot of fiddling around, the creatures half-emerging from the curl and stretch of fingers and then rearranging themselves. A short, fat rabbit becomes a camel. The
hands rest in camel pose for a moment as though satisfied with their work, then they drop away abruptly, and the square of light is just a projector screen after the slides are done.

I round the final corner and there she is in bed, propped up and beatific, head still inclined towards the patch of light on the wall. The hands have retired to lie on her lap, over the fold of the blanket. I scan my childhood and realise it's another thing I didn't know.

Her voice appears mid-sentence as though I'd been sparring with her all along.

‘You're still not understanding it,' she says. ‘You come to a point where dreams and memories just merge into one another. For all the good they're worth, they're the same thing.'

I hate it when she talks this way, when she accesses some spooky zone of insight that cuts across her practical self and reveals someone else.

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean that knowing something happened, and
thinking
it happened, the difference doesn't matter in the end.'

I don't want to grapple with this but I can't help myself. ‘Isn't that what photos are for?'

She looks at me like I'm a child to her once more. ‘You can show me a photo, but photos aren't proof of anything. Have you ever looked at a photo and felt that tugging feeling, that you want to climb back into that image? When you were young and beautiful? When you were doing something graceful?'

The pointed look again. ‘Your playing days. The photo's as elusive as the memory. Just ink on paper. It's a rough estimate of a thing that might or mightn't have occurred. God, I can scratch it off with my fingernail and it's gone. You can't climb back into those clothes or hear that song or kiss that girl. You can't hold that child…' She sobs briefly and starts chewing a nail. ‘…severed from now. Scary, isn't it?'

A clock grinds away somewhere. People talking in the corridor.

‘Some things happened when we were awake, and some of them happened when we were asleep. In the end, they're just images that you make up in your mind when you're sad, or sentimental. Or lonely. Oh honey, lonely. Once you've got no plans left, all you've got is memories and dreams. They're made of the same stuff. You stop worrying about the distinction, love.'