The Rules of Backyard Cricket (9 page)

People are running for the grandstand. I look at Craig, who looks back at me, momentarily unsettled. Then we both run after them.

Outside the world drowns in haze. The stumps are still out there, lonely sentinels. But the far boundary is gone. Punt Road is not only invisible from here but silent too, like someone stopped a printing press. We sit around in the dining room under the stern gaze of the old bearded gents. One of the officials comes over.

‘They're saying on the radio it's a dust storm. Topsoil blowing down from the Mallee. Take a couple of hours to clear, but they reckon no one should be outside till it's gone. So we're abandoning the match.'

Amid the chatter and complaints, he eyeballs me.

‘Well batted, son. Terrific.' He's looking over his glasses at me, like he really means it.

I find Wally in the dressing room, carefully repacking his gear.

‘Would've been nice to win it,' I venture.

‘We've made our point.'

I feel a surge of irritation at this. ‘Don't you want to bury those snobs?'

He thinks for a moment before responding.

‘Not really. It's rep cricket. It's there for people to get a look at us, and they got a look at us.'

Why doesn't he feel these things? He's placing a rolled-up towel
into each pad as Mum did for me. Which reminds me, my pads are on the floor where I left them.

Walking down the same flight of stairs I'd earlier used to go for a dart, I look at Wally with his bag slung over one shoulder, me with mine, and for a moment I could imagine autograph hunters awaiting us at the foot of the stairs. Passing through the gateway at carpark level, the light has brightened a little, though there's still a heavy haze that shrouds the canopy of the big trees.

There's a huddled group waiting for us, but they aren't autograph hunters.

The skipper of Eastern Suburbs, now dressed in brand-name track gear. Hundred-dollar gym shoes. He's gelled his hair and he's leaning casually on the bonnet of a car. Beside him, their keeper. Beside him, the sledger from short leg.

As soon as we emerge from the gateway, the keeper scuttles round us and seals off the exit. I hear Wally sigh in a way that says
this is going to hurt
. He puts his bag down, and I know he's not thinking right now about the thrashing that's imminent nor harbouring any concern for his kid brother's safety, but weighing the prospect of getting through this without having his gear smashed up before his eyes.

We've stopped walking. The skipper and the short leg have got up off the car bonnet and are advancing on us.

‘You fucking dirty bogan cunts.' That's the skipper, charmer of private-school mothers. ‘Did you try to backchat my friend here?'

He's looking at me. ‘Fuck, seriously, you're a weed. What were you thinking?'

Short Leg hasn't spoken. Suddenly he leaps forward and swings a punch at Wally, who's slightly closer. He staggers as he pulls up from the swing and extends a leg to try to kick Wally, who does the obvious and grabs the leg. They both tangle themselves faster than fishing line, but Short Leg's got the better of it and he's landing a few on Wally's
head as he clings on grimly. There's clothes tearing and scuffing sounds from dragging footwear. I'm cursing Wal's insistence on fighting fair—there's ample opportunity to grab his balls or bite him, but oh no, not Brother Wally. And I shouldn't be watching this because it means I'm not watching the skipper.

Next thing, I'm lying on the gravel, face up with a clanging sound in my right ear where he's hit me. I can't work out how it took me down so easily, and how the world is swinging and tilting. It makes no sense, and then I see him coming again and I know why. He's got a cricket bat.
Wally's
cricket bat, raised above his right shoulder and coming down.

I roll left and it smashes into the ground, but that only delays the inevitable, because he's got it golf-style beside my head now and he nine-irons me hard in the ear.

This one hurts. I squeeze my eyes tightly shut as he starts getting into my ribs with those expensive boots; again and again, grunting slightly with the effort each time. I watch him wind up the backswing for another kick when he's struck from the side with enormous force by a flying human who isn't any of us. From inside my private cloud of pain and disorientation I struggle to recognise the bulky stranger.

My new best mate, Craig Wearne.

The skipper's winded by the impact, lying on his side a few metres from me, gasping like a goldfish. And Craig has left my field of vision. He comes past again seconds later with Short Leg under his arm in a headlock. He's just trotting, calm and unhurried. His left fist is holding a ball of Short Leg's hair, and Short Leg is half-running and half-letting himself be dragged.

I find myself feeling quite sorry for Short Leg.

Craig's taking him to the same car on which he and the skipper were leaning. He lifts his captive out of the headlock and for a moment
holds his head with both hands at arms' length. Then he crashes the head down onto the bonnet, face first, so hard that the metal flexes in a loud
whoonk
.

Short Leg's resistance, such as it was, has ceased but Craig takes the head up again and brings it down again. This time he lets go, and Short Leg slides bloodily down the slope of the metalwork and slumps against the grille. The skipper's seen all this and is crawling to nowhere in particular, away from me and the blood on the car.

These are just impressions, dabs of paint. My head's spinning. Craig overtakes the skipper in a few bright steps and takes hold of him under both armpits, ramming him forwards and directly into the grille, just beside Short Leg. The sound is snapping plastic this time, and the meaty slap of the skipper's palms on the asphalt.

With the two of them bunched there as though the car had hit them, the happy man-child ambles back towards me. For a second I don't know what to expect—is he going to beat us all to a pulp? But his eyes fall slightly to my right. He picks up the fallen bat and weighs it with a lazy swipe through the air.

Then he turns towards Short Leg and the skipper, who still haven't moved.

I can't look. I have a rough idea how it's going to sound, but I can't look. As I bury my head I hear Wally's voice, faint and far away.

‘Don't.'

Wally's got up and is shuffling towards Craig with a hand extended.

‘Don't hit 'em. Thanks for, for…Don't hit 'em.'

The transformation in Craig is immediate: whatever animal trance had occupied him is gone, and he carefully helps Wally to sit down again, gathers the scattered gear and replaces it in the bag. The two Eastern Suburbs players find their feet, edging away. The keeper's nowhere to be seen.

I watch our saviour squat down before Wally, take him in both hands and look into his eyes.

‘You good?' he asks. ‘Okay?'

Wally nods faintly.

‘Remember this, mate,' he gives Wally a little shake. ‘Remember this. I'm your friend now. Anybody fucks with you, they're fucking with me.'

Grade Cricket

They're waiting at the lights. Indicator going
click-click, click-click,
brief orange flashes like snapshots of my situation. Sheet lightning in the darkness.

One shin bloodied.

The torn threads of the jeans leg standing to attention where the hole is.

A pair of ordinary brown shoes mobbed together under the cable ties.

The carpeted backs of the seats.

Could I rotate myself into a position to start kicking at the tail-light? Would it achieve anything, other than persuading them to stop the car and finish me off quickly?

In the middle of a string of hot days, January 1986, it's my turn to get up early and water and mow the pitch. I don't know how I got roped into this, why it has to be done at dawn. Wally's got some theory about water burning the grass if you do it in the middle of the day—I don't see why it can't be left until the cool change comes through and waters
everything. So I'm up, stumping around in thongs making breakfast. TV's on in the living room to get the team for the one-dayer in the evening.

Desiccated white bread toast and a smear of marmalade because I can't find the cereal. Toast's got me thirsty so I look for the milk, and there's the cereal. Mum's put it in the fridge again.

There's a female voice coming from the TV; the news, Florida.
Special bulletin,
she says. And then I hear the distinctive monotone of mission control.

Obviously a major malfunction.

They run it again and again, the urgent repetition of the footage blurring live images into recorded vision. I wander into the living room and see the curlicue of smoke in the sky, the Medusa's head. On the ground, people weeping, hugging. Americans, all of them born to witness. Five-minute monologues straight to camera, even as they weep.

I'm chewing the toast mechanically.

The eastern light creeps past the edges of the blinds and into the house. Outside, traffic is starting to move, thinned by summer's lethargy. They're running official shots of the crew, focusing on one woman over and over again—Payload Specialist Christa McAuliffe, a civilian mother of two, blown to smithereens on live television.

Mum's in the shower as I pass the bathroom door. She hums sometimes when she forgets herself. Large water goes
crack
on the tiles. Small water sounds like rain.

Out the back I run the handmower over the pitch. The stubble of dried grass spins out from the blades, whirls in the air for an instant, landing soft on my feet as I pass. They'd formed an arc, the astronauts. A beautiful parabola in the sky projecting them at impossible speed heavenward. And something failed. Did they fail? Or the machinery, the fine orchestra of milled steel and glass and cables and fluids, was
it that? Altitude and cataclysm. I've never considered their relationship before, certainly never heard of Icarus.

But as the wheel of the mower rolls over and flings the chopped grass at my shins, landing once again on the scar Wally gave me, I have a sense of consequence.

Later that same day Wally's at the wheel of Mum's dinged-up hatchback with his P-plates up and Mum issuing directions from the passenger seat. She takes us through the bottom half of the city and down past Albert Park Lake and the Junction Oval, between perfect rows of palm trees.

The sun's out over the Junction, and a groundsman's pushing a heavy roller over the centre wicket. Wally's got his window down and he's sniffing the air like a happy mutt. Grass cuttings.

Along Fitzroy Street and round past the Esplanade Hotel, where ten years later I will put my tongue in a bouncer's ear and he will repay me with two broken ribs. Into Elwood, the streets named after poets—Byron, Shelley, Keats. Mum's slowing as she checks street signs. She gets us lost twice, even though the map is on her knees and she's rotating it every time Wally turns a corner.

Eventually we wander down a bluestone laneway to a small tin shed with a peeling timber door. A hand-painted sign above the door reads:
Hope Sweeney, Bootmaker
.

The small man who ushers us in reminds me of Burgess Meredith in
Rocky
: the pugnacious creasing of the jowls, the big knotty hands. Hell, he's even got a cardigan on. He greets Mum like she's his daughter. The walls are covered in old shots of cricketers—Wes Hall, Ray Lindwall, Lindsay Hassett, even Dennis Keith Lillee. This man we've never heard of, who's currently dunking a teabag for our very own mum, is obviously Someone Important.

At first I think he might be one of Mum's barflies, but he's too vigorous for that. He's got a bulbous nose, but as far as I know all old codgers have bulbous noses.

He takes an A4 notebook from a pile on the bench, places it on the floor, says to Wally, ‘Find a clean page, son.'

His voice is pure backyard Strine. Not the Brooklyn patois I was half listening for.