The Rules of Backyard Cricket (6 page)

KOOKABURRA—VCA APPROVED—5½ OZ.

I am in love.

I toss it back to the fieldsman and watch Wally smash it to the boundary twice more before Lillee ends his over and retreats to fine leg. Wally hasn't looked up, hasn't acknowledged anyone in the world.

The kid bowling from the other end isn't really up to it. His face is a tangle of reluctance. One look at him and I know what his schoolbag would smell like.

He waddles in and bowls off the wrong foot, rolling his head with his arm as though they're connected by one giant tendon. He looks like he's learning freestyle. The results are much like last over: the
kid batting with Wally gets dollar signs in his eyes as the swimmer lobs one high in the air. Down the pitch he charges, and misses it in a whoosh of flailing bat. The keeper has time to snatch at the ball twice before he finally gloves it, and he still makes the stumping. He whoops and runs around the stumps towards the bowler to celebrate. His shirt's out and flapping in the sun. Mum told us never to let our shirts hang out.

Second drop charges straight out there and moments later he's back, having run himself out at the bowler's end. At least it puts Wally on strike, and he doesn't waste the opportunity—waiting for the swimmer's looping deliveries to bounce, then swatting them tennis-style from overhead. The violence of his swings amazes me.

Now it's me wrapping my legs in the club's pads, velcroing my wrists into my batting gloves. For a while I stare down the back of my bat towards the grass, my nose resting on the tops of the gloves. I can smell the timber and rubber of the bat handle. The clamour of another wicket comes to me, and I'm up and walking out there.

I'm aglow. The world feels still and quiet. Wally is the most dependable presence in my world, even if he's dependably annoying. And he's out here in the middle: where I want to be.

Now I'm looking down at that chalk line. Now I can see my feet placed either side of the crease, and looking up I see the circle of fielders closing around me. They're all looking at me, trying in their childish ways to sledge me.

Hey, who brought the club mascot.

Don't hurt him, Doggy.

This one's yours too, Doggy.

It doesn't matter at all. I can see the bowler at the far end of his Dennis Lillee run, shuffling the ball from side to side. He flicks his fringe, waits.

Mr O'Farty is explaining to me that the bowler will be bowling
right arm round the wicket, something I didn't realise they do in real cricket. I can still see the faraway ball in his hand and I just want the thing. I want him to bowl it.

He runs in and steps up into his delivery stride, the whole world silent but for those skipping footsteps and his breath, and he flings it and I can't believe it's a nude half-volley outside off stump, after all those taped balls and microwaved balls and assaults with sticks and wrestles on the ground and here I am in real cricket and I plonk a foot forward down the pitch and drop onto the other knee and give it everything and I get it a split second off the bounce and squarely in the middle of the bat and I can't even feel the contact I've hit it so sweetly. I've wrapped the bat in its follow-through over my right shoulder and the ball is somewhere out past cover with a kid half-heartedly strolling after it but it's gone, it's gone, clattering into someone's timber fence.

At the end of the over I wander down the pitch to Wally, who is standing there mid-track like he's brought my lunch to the grade two room.

‘Did you see that?' I squeak.

‘Don't stuff it up,' he says. ‘We've got all day, and the bowlers are shit.'

‘You told on me last time I said shit.'

Wally ignores me and points his bat vaguely back at the other end. ‘This guy's just lobbing it. Real slow, doesn't spin. But it bounces pretty high.'

And he's right. The ball is rapidly getting chewed up by the concrete, and it now looks all shaggy and pink. The first couple bounce over my shoulder and the keeper, pale and pudgy, has to leap up and glove them over his head. I'm not going to let him bounce another one of these farcical deliveries past me, and when he does it again, I swipe at the thing somewhere near my ears and succeed only in getting a thick edge on it.

For a second I have no idea where it's gone, but then I'm conscious of a second noise. A sort of tempered
crack
.

I look back to see that my nick has shot straight into the keeper's eye, and there's already blood running down his cheek from a split in his eyebrow. He's squealing, looking at me in outraged self-pity like I meant it. He shakes his keeping gloves off and puts his hands to his face. The blood leaks through his fingers and onto the white cuffs of his long-sleeve shirt. The colours, under the bleaching sun, are so beautiful I find myself transfixed for a moment.

And now there's another noise—Wally's thundering down the pitch yelling at me to run. The ball's ricocheted off the keeper's face and out to point, where the fielding side seem momentarily to have forgotten it.

I take off as directed by Wally. The last thing I see as I leave the crease is three perfect drops of blood on the grey-white concrete.

By lunchtime, Wally and I have retired on thirty, then come back in again after the other wickets have fallen, finishing on eighty-two not out and fifty-nine not out respectively. Towards the end, Wally has started farming the strike to prevent me catching up with him. I'm tempted to run him out.

Someone's mum has provided lunch. Jam sandwiches, squashed and warm. Cheese sticks. Apples and bananas. We are the toast of the All Saints under-twelves, and for the first time in my life, older kids want to talk to me, want to ask me what I think. This is unprecedented of course, as Wally would no sooner seek my opinion than volunteer that it was him who put the Lego man in the gas heater. As I bask in the warm glow of celebrity, O'Farty approaches.

Wally moves imperceptibly closer to me.

‘Now lads,' he begins. ‘Very proud of you. So proud.'

His face squishes into a sort of joyful cat's bum squint, like he's bitten a lemon and somehow loved it.

‘But.'

Now he's spat the lemon.

‘I was saddened by your display of poor sportsmanship out there.'

I'm immediately baffled. No one had even got close to getting us out. No one had had anything to appeal for.

‘Darren, you struck that poor boy on the face. He's gone off to the hospital for stitches. But you didn't even look back at him, you just took off running. And you, Wally, you were possibly worse because you're older and you called him through. You should know better.'

The Brothers Keefe are dumbstruck. Wally finds his voice first.

‘But there was two in it. 'Snot my fault they weren't looking.'

‘No amount of runs or wickets should ever replace common decency, you two.'

He has his hands on our shoulders. I'm developing doubts about his version of common decency by now. The hands move to our hair, ruffle it. I've got my face down in confusion, and I observe that he has an odd-shaped, pouchy groin.

‘Next time, your priority should be to ensure that he's all right. Now put in a big effort in the field and play like men, not boys. Eh?'

My face is hot with embarrassment. Other kids are staring at us, trying to eavesdrop as they chew like Herefords on the spongy white bread.

We watch him skip off, with his strangely light-footed gait, into the pale green sea of the field.

‘That man,' declares Wally, ‘is an idiot.'

Home that night, cheese and crackers after enduring a bath with Wally. All Saints have won the game by, I've lost count, by a lot. Winners are
grinners, Mum chirps as she gets out the special glass platter that crackers always go on.

It's pine stools at the kitchen bench, the last of the day's sun making golden squares on the wall.

We get a Tab Cola to share while she flips the lid off a bottle of beer with a little
fft
and pours it into a special glass with a gold rim. I know from my pub days that she never drinks at work, not even a knockoff when she's done. The drinkers would assume she's a teetotaller. Never at work and never, until now, something she does with us. I take this as further evidence that something massive has shifted today. A door has opened into a new realm.

She slides open the second drawer, under the bench next to her stool. Out comes the ashtray, one of her tiny personal totems. Fine china with sparrows on it. A flat rim with the four little dips where the cigger lies.

She wants to know about footwork, running between wickets. Wally answers all the questions with his phony man-voice on. Until, mouth deliberately half-full of biscuit, I ask Mum about the keeper, about O'Farty's lecture.

She blows her smoke high towards the kitchen fluoro, aiming at the silhouettes of dead insects.

‘Did you do it deliberately?' she asks, after a thoughtful pull at her beer.

‘No. It was an edge.'

‘It was,' concurs Wally. ‘It was a crap shot and he had no control over it.'

‘Don't say crap,' says Mum. She pushes the biscuit crumbs into a little pile on the laminex with the side of one finger. ‘Was there two in it?'

‘Yeah, I called it,' says Wally. ‘Kid was on the ground, no one was even watching it.'

By now I'm sensing no one's much interested in the moral issue. Mum's cricket purism obscures all else. ‘You know if the ball goes to point, sometimes that's the striker's call, not the non-striker's…'

‘Yeah, but he was just standin' there like a stunned mullet.'

‘Was the kid all right? The keeper?'

‘Yeah,' scoffs Wally. ‘He came back when we were fielding. Had a black eye, couple of stitches. He was kinda bragging about it and telling everyone he nearly got the catch.'

Another gulp from the glass.

‘The coach gave you a telling-off about running?'

‘Yeah,' we chorus simultaneously.

‘We'd better find you another team I think.'

And so our competitive debut teaches me two things: one, the Keefe brothers are so far in front of our peers at the game that we're wasting our time among them, and two, if you want to feel sorry for people, you're going to get left behind.

I smash another Salada into my mouth and turn on the TV. Nestled in the couch, I can feel a tightness in my calves from the running, the warm sting of sunburn across my neck. Kids in other houses would be talking about the Keefe brothers right now, about how the eight-year-old hits the ball like a dad. How they were far too good for anyone.

Later that night, lying in the bunks in the darkness, Wally tells me he will one day captain Australia. I laugh at him, like always. But privately, after I hear his breathing turn to snores, I wonder if anything might be possible.

The Firsts

I'm running my fingernails lightly over the underside of the boot lid. Just tracing a line.

Who would tear their finger-ends to stumps trying to claw their way out of a box? And why won't I?

The exhaust smell's getting stronger, making me sicker. Lifting the clumped hands towards the roof of my crypt, I can feel the contours of the metal, the lining material.

It's Poe. Mum used to read us Poe. Scared the pants off me—I'd wind up in Wally's bed whimpering. Poe wrote stories about people being buried alive, and this, in metal and carpet, is the modern equivalent. Entombed in a moving vehicle on a freeway. Buried alive at ninety-five.

It's the summer at the end of form two. We've got jobs, both of us, with the greengrocer in Barkly Street who is somehow connected—I don't recall how—to the Italian lady around the corner whose nebuliser saved Wally.

On Saturday mornings we get in there around six and help unload
the truck that's come from the markets around the corner. Within weeks we've learned where to stack everything in the displays, where to toss the leftover stuff and what to put in a box for Mum. Wally decides this is the perfect opportunity to enact a training diet, and uses his first couple of pays to buy a blender for the fruit.