The Rules of Backyard Cricket (5 page)

Vera flicks a switch on the box and the machine hums into life.
She uncoils the plastic tube and finds a clear facemask on one end, which she places over Wally's mouth and nose. For a long, agonising moment, nothing at all happens. Then his chest rises, falls. His fingers uncurl.

She holds the facemask in position while Mrs Aposta goes to a telephone on the other bedside table and calls an ambulance. She's made to repeat herself, over and over. Now I can see that a Greek woman in late-seventies Altona would have suffered this indignity many times a day. Once she's satisfied with the call, she hangs up and dials another number, says my mother's name hesitatingly and, realising she's got her on the first try, explains what's happened.

‘No, Missus Keefe, he fine. He resting. I call ambulance to make sure. I meet you there, yes. Yes. Good. Yes.'

She hangs up, looks at me solemnly and says, ‘You be good boy, run home and get he pyjamas and toot-brush. Put in bag and run back here, yeah? Quick, before ambulance come…'

I take one last look at him before I leave, the steady swell and fall of his chest, the colour coming back to his face. He raises a thumb, feebly.

When the ambulance has come and the men have done their thing and they've carted Wally off to hospital, Mum and I follow in our car. Mum's thrown her hair back into a half-arsed bun and packed a bag. I see Wally's Bradman book go in, from the desk next to the bunks. He loves that book.

In the hospital he's sitting up in bed, looking perfectly fine. It's Mum who looks like she needs a doctor.

She unpacks his things, helps him into the pyjamas while he wriggles with embarrassment, and then climbs onto the bed as I get up on the other side of him. This terrifying day, like all of our days, must end with a book.

Mum, in her halo of old pub tobacco. I'm picking the dried blood
from the stubbed toe. I'm picking my nose. Mum drones through a few pages before falling asleep mid-sentence.

I look at Wally and he's asleep too. It's just me and two valves on the wall with hard blank signs that say OXYGEN and SUCTION.

For the next week I refuse to be separated from him for any reason.

Club

It's pointless, this. Clinging to memories. Rewinding them, replaying them. But it's compulsive: I feel them rushing forward to be counted, the people and occurrences whose very existence depends on me recalling them.

The dark, the prickling carpet. The small clanks and knocks of loose things in the compartments. I'm a child again, I'm myself again, the whole self without all the punctures and bruises. The self I was before everything became so tawdry.

I'm thinking about love, because this place is a vacuum where love does not exist. It can be summoned into recollection, turned over in the hands and examined, but it cannot exist.

It's the night before our first game for All Saints Parish CC. Mum's lined it up—we've heard her on the phone to the club secretary.

They're really very good…

No, both of them…

He's a lefthander. Yes, it's very young but I can assure you, that won't be a problem
.

Tough as nails, our mum. Wally's a sure thing at ten, but the old girl has to tell them I'm nine, and even then she has to beg. Their lowest level is under-twelves, kids who tower over me. We've done the two net sessions ahead of the opening round, and neither of us is even slightly troubled by the bowling. There's a transition to be negotiated, from taped tennis balls to hard plastic balls and the protective equipment that goes with them. In my hunger I can only see this change in a positive light: when I hit the plastic missiles, they rocket away from me twice as hard.

What gets it over the line with me being underage is, the coach knows I can hit. He finds out the hard way—chatting to a parent when I smack a straight drive into his shins, eliciting a full-volume
fuck!
and a lot of irate hopping. He won't be forgetting me.

In the bunkroom, we're each engaged in the rituals of pre-match preparation. Noises from the top bunk, twangs from the little springs that form a roof over me. Wally's doing his stretches.

‘You're not gonna pull a hammy,' I tell him.

There's no response, other than grunts.

‘You're ten, idiot. No one even does stretches in the under-fourteens.'

The grunting from above stops momentarily.

‘So what are you doing?' he says.

‘Nothin. Just relaxing.'

Which is mostly true. I've got the bat in my bed, but that's routine. I'm staring at the McDonald's team poster on the wall: the Benson and Hedges World Series Cup, a three-cornered stoush between Australia (moustaches), the West Indies (beards) and England (I don't even care). They sit and stand in their bleacher rows in the burgers-and-cigs promotional shot, front row (keepers, spinners and batsmen)
with fists neatly clamped on their knees, back rows (the quicks) with hands behind backs, exactly the way we're drilled in school photos.

Wally's gone quiet. He's got his bat in the bed too, I know. It's a Gray-Nicolls, the plain one with the red stripe down the back before they started making one-scoops (like Clive Lloyd, the Big Cat, used) and double-scoops (Hookesy). I've been enduring weeks of Wally's knocking-in rituals; the patient tapping of the bat's face with a rubber mallet the sports store lent him. The pinpricking of the timber so the linseed oil seeps in better. I can smell the linseed now. If he gets it on the linen Mum's going to explode.

‘What are you doing up there?'

‘Lying straight.'

‘Why?'

‘So I don't get any cricks.'

I feel a stab of panic. Should I be doing this?

‘What's a crick?'

‘It's when you lie crooked, like when you sleep with your head on one side and you wake up and your neck's all stiff.'

‘That's the dumbest thing ever. I'm not going to do that.'

‘Fine. Didn't ask you to.'

Despite this, I spend a few minutes getting myself in a position in bed from which I can watch the poster but ensure no part of my body is disarranged in any potentially crippling way.

I'm still looking at the poster. To my eight-year-old eyes, these cricketers are Men.
Men
. Tough, resourceful, but other-worldly.

I wonder if Dad plays cricket. I forgot to ask him.

Tomorrow I will take on whatever Our Lady Help of Christians Laverton can throw at me. I will hook and pull and cut and drive, and lean nonchalantly on my bat handle as my shots hurtle past faraway boundary cones. Tomorrow, hair will appear on my forearms. Sharp catches will no longer sting. My voice will drop and I will use it
sparingly and without emotion. Unless, of course, I am appealing for a leg before.

Tomorrow, I will join their ranks.

Wally clicks his light off. I leave mine on.

If he comes back, I'll ask him.

It dawns bright and hot, as I'm sure all those days did. Statistically of course there must have been cloudy ones, rainy ones—probably more then than now—but memory's discarded them. There's a thing about dawn on such days. It smells clean and promising, the dew on warming grass, the house silent and close.

We're sharing a bag of gear; two bats but one pair of pads. I get gloves because I'm a lefty, and the communal kit at All Saints will have right handers' gloves. Mum will have gone without something to make this happen, but I'm not wired to consider it.

She's whited our sneakers the night before, left the coloured stripe at the heel unpainted as she knows we like it, and she zincs our noses before we leave. Lastly, she solemnly presents us with our new caps, shaking our hands and patting our shoulders. Sponsors and dignitaries will perform the same ritual in coming years, and it won't compare. I can still see her now, just lingering a moment as we try to get to our bikes. She's watching us, feeling something.

We ride down to the oval, elated, swerving great loops as the sun begins its arc. Wally's tucked the right leg of his whites into the sock so the chain won't grab the hem, and I've loudly mocked him. This of course disallows me from doing the same, and by the time we get to the LA Reid Memorial Oval, my right hem is all chewed up and streaked with black.

None of the kids in our side or theirs goes to our school, but they're all older and they've been taught to shake hands.

Someone tosses a coin, we bat, and Wally's opening. I'm batting number six: I'm the smallest kid in the team, and it's made clear that I should count myself lucky I'm not number eleven. I sit on a concrete step outside the grotty-looking clubrooms and plonk my head in my hands, supported on two knees. I can feel tears stinging my eyes.

The greedy eyes of a seagull bore into mine. It watches me, cawing at half volume. Do you realise I'm making my debut here, you stupid bird? Mum will come down shortly with a polystyrene cooler of red cordial and her big sunglasses on, before she nicks off to work at the pub. And I'll be sitting on this concrete step watching Wally bat with some idiot.

I study Wal closely as he strides out across the mown grass, the patches of yellow daisies. The other kid's a bit shorter and quite fat. He's got a helmet, first one I've ever seen, with a big sci-fi-looking perspex faceguard. He's talking to Wally. I know my older brother well enough to know he's not listening. The fielders wander around trying to decipher their positions.

A plane drones faintly across the sky.

They're settling in their spots as the other kid takes guard. He asks for two centres and then tries to scratch the mark with his shoe which is, of course, impossible on concrete. The keeper points out the stick of chalk behind middle stump, so now he has to take off a glove and painstakingly draw a line on the pitch. It's supposed to represent the line the ump gave him between the middle stump behind him and the one at the other end, but it looks to me as though he's forgotten about that during the charade with the scratching and the chalk. This is confirmed moments later when the opening ball of the match—the first, glittering red new ball I've ever seen firsthand—takes out his off stump as he theatrically shoulders arms. The impact makes a woody
doonk
and the bails spin through the air like shrapnel from an explosion.

I watch him trudging back towards us, trailing the toe of his bat. The bees circle out of his way.

Past the opposition's jubilant huddle I see Wally leaning on his bat, entirely unmoved.

The umps are standing together at mid-off, deep in conversation as the next batsman frantically buckles his pads on, caught short by the sudden wicket. I didn't mention, did I—the umps are the two coaches. Ours is Mr O'Flaherty, a strange little man.

Strange.

He doesn't run, but sort of skips. His smile is birdlike. He watches everything intently. He watches us. At first I think it's his attention to technique, but he's not watching our shot selection. He's watching
us
. At the second net session, Wally mistimed a hook shot then gave me a look of horror as O'Farty darted into his net and took up a position behind his back, arms wrapped over Wally's shoulders and sharing his grip on the bat. His peculiar little belly was pressed into Wally's shoulder blades, and there they remained, like the mating bears in the
National Geographic
, while he called for several more balls to be sent down.

Here's O'Farty in the bright sunshine of Saturday morning, standing swaybacked like a cartoon character, hands on hips and lips pursed in sour disapproval. He pushes his comb-over down on his scalp as the breeze lifts a single strand.
Cricket is a game for gentlemen
, he told us on Thursday night.
At All Saints, we are all the best of chums…say it!

Sullen silence.

Say it!

A mumbled repetition of his words floated back as we sat cross-legged on the grass.

And nothing should get between a gentleman and his chums.

O'Farty heads back to his position behind the bowler's stumps as the next batsman reaches the pitch. The kid bowling has paced out a
giant run-up. He's been watching too much Lillee. In he charges, and new kid gets a nick through slips.
Nobody can take a slips catch in junior cricket
, Mum reckons.
So have a fling when it's outside off. If you nick it, you're safe as houses.
How right she is. The ball streaks down to third man. New kid crosses through for a single and Wally's got the strike. He puts his bat on the chalk line, confirms he's a mile off middle, and sorts it out with the ump. Then he settles down over his bat and waits for Laverton's opener to huff his way through that marathon run-up.

He pitches it in the dust beside the concrete and Wally watches it roll through to the keeper with a look of disdain. He wanders down the pitch and flicks a clod of dry dirt off the surface with his bat. It looks cool: I make a mental note to copy him.

Fourth ball is on his pads. Wally remains perfectly still, apart from his arms and bat, which swing a whipping half-circle around his body. The crack of perfect contact resounds around the agapanthus beds on the boundary. The ball bounces once on the field and comes straight to me where I sit outside the change rooms. People are cheering. Wally hasn't moved. I take a quick look at the ball in my hand, gleaming a mysterious blood red in its coat of varnish. The centre of the sphere is embossed like a gravestone with gold lettering: