Spinner (14 page)

Ken Hall yelled, ‘Watch out Maud. Likely to get your hand stepped on, you get too close to this kid. That's what happened to Hobbs.'

‘I'll take him.' It was the giant, Paul Hampton, who was leaning in from outside. ‘Come on out here, David. Best seats in the house.'

Outside the players' rooms were two rows of bench seats which were under cover, but which had a complete view of the ground. Jack Tanner looked over at him as he stepped out into the light. David made himself look back. ‘Morning, Mr Tanner.'

‘Morning, Mr Donald.'

‘Push yourself along the bench there, David,' said Hampton.

‘Yes, sir.' David sat on the empty bench seat, and Hampton plonked himself next to him.

‘Call me Paul. Or Ten Ton if ya like.'

‘Ten Ton?'

‘Hamp-ton. Ton. Ten Ton on account of I'm a big bloke.'

‘Ha. That's clever,' said David, smiling at the word play.

‘Not very clever. But it's stuck. Like the Christmas pudding.' He patted his stomach.

People started clapping, and David turned to see Bardsley and Johnson walking down between the seats to the gate that led onto the field.

Geoffrey Calligan looked up from his book and yelled, ‘See you fellows at lunchtime.'

The English team were out on the field, some jumping and others swinging their arms. A bowler was bowling
practice balls to another fieldsman, but David couldn't make out who most were. They were all a lot further away than he expected. The English team stopped their warm-ups to watch the Australian openers coming towards them. Looking at it from this perspective, it seemed unfair, as though two had to play against eleven.

Calligan called quietly to Tanner, ‘You might want to get padded up there, Jack.'

Jack Tanner turned to look at Calligan, then up at the doorway. David looked there too, in time to see Richardson in his pads looking anxiously out to the middle.

‘That's all right,' said Tanner loudly. ‘I don't want to sit around in me pads all morning.'

Bardsley waved his arms and trotted up and down on the spot, still all nervous energy. Johnson trudged. David didn't like the look of that. He knew they'd describe it as a bad sign on the radio. He looked to the bowler.

‘Who's that warming up with the ball?'

‘Proctor. Big bloke, eh?'

David nodded, squinting out towards the middle.

‘So, your first Test,' said Hampton.

‘Yes,' said David, ‘I've never seen one before.'

‘Seen one. Ha. I meant first yer played in. So you've never even seen a Test match?'

David saw Calligan was watching too. He just nodded, embarrassed. Then he noticed the crowd. They were hemmed in around them. There were a lot of empty seats, but thousands had gathered to see Australia and England play. Some people were looking his way. A man looked angry, his hat pulled low. A boy stuck his tongue out.

‘So,' said Hampton, ‘yer mum and dad out there?'

‘No sir, I'm an orphan.'

Johnson was taking guard. He would ask for leg stump from the umpire, David thought, recalling radio and newspaper reports.

David noticed Mr Hampton was looking at him. Mr Calligan and Tanner were too. He thought about what he'd said and tried to put them at their ease. ‘My grandad looks after me. He's in Dungarin. My Uncle Mike brought me. He's here.' David looked away from them, in case they were still unhappy with his answer.

Proctor was at the top of his mark.

‘Not much of a crowd, boys,' said Tanner.

David was glad for the change of subject.

‘Not much pleasure in spending three and six to watch your country getting walloped,' said Calligan.

‘Not much pleasure in being walloped for that matter,' added Hampton.

David couldn't even see Proctor's first ball. He ran in and performed a bowling action, and down the other end Johnson seemed to bend and duck, while his bat waved a little, and then the wicketkeeper acted as if he caught the ball. It was like a mime of cricket-playing. There were some ahs from the crowd, but evidently Johnson hadn't hit it, because the umpires had not moved. ‘Was that fast?' asked David.

‘That was fast,' said Calligan.

Johnson jammed down on the next ball, but was very rushed in his action.

‘Yorker,' said Hampton next to him.

The crowd made little noise. Things were tense.

It was quiet enough for them all to hear the nick Johnson got on the third ball. All six men who had been standing in a semicircle in slips jumped up shouting, ‘Howwwwww's
that!' Johnson turned and walked from the field, not bothering to wait for any umpiring decision.

‘Oh no!' yelled David with the rest of the crowd.

Hampton nudged David in the side. ‘As a player, we try not to barrack so much.'

‘Considered bad form,' added Calligan. ‘Not like the hardened professionals we are.'

‘So, don't go telling him it's his third duck in a row, either, right.' Paul Hampton winked at him.

David nodded.

Tanner got up from his seat, stretching casually, and strolled back into the change rooms. Richardson passed him going the other way, whistling ‘Waltzing Matilda'. He passed Johnson who was still on the ground coming in.

Someone from the crowd yelled, ‘And don't come back, yer useless mongrel.' Other jeers came too, as Johnson walked back through the gate and up the steps between their seats. He didn't look at anyone, just where he was putting his feet.

The jeers continued and David looked to the crowd again. Angry faces. There were ladies yelling too. A lady in a coat and pillbox hat with one yellow flower was screaming so much it seemed to David she would have killed Johnson right there and then, had she had him in her hands. An old man was yelling, and David saw that he had no teeth. His mouth was a black growling hole. Some people raised fists. The boy that David had seen before was looking back at him, and again he poked his tongue out.

David looked away, and focused on the white painted wood of the seats in front of him. But he could feel the crowd still, feel their angry cries finally ebb, as the Australian captain John Richardson reached the wicket. The silence
was tense, like the air in a thunderstorm charged with the power of the thunderclaps.

David felt for the first time the excitement of seeing the Test. Each ball bowled at the Australian batsmen brought gasps from the crowd, gasps David felt as his own.

Richardson was surviving rather than playing shots. Bardsley jumped and ducked and weaved as though dealing with a swarm of bees. Bardsley was having the worst time because he was facing the English fast bowler named Tudor. Proctor was very fast and very accurate, but Tudor was meaner. Many of his balls would follow Bardsley. He was hit on the chest and on the leg. The crowd gasped and winced, as though under attack themselves. When Bardsley skied one to mid-on, fending off another rising delivery, the crowd groaned in disappointment. Although he'd only scored fifteen runs, he had occupied the crease, and taken the shine off the new ball. Hampton said, ‘Got some guts, that boy.' Bardsley walked back to the players' area to scattered clapping.

Tanner strode to the gate, swinging the bat like a windmill. ‘Who the bloody hell are you?' yelled someone from the crowd. There was a roar of laughter David found very disrespectful. But Jack Tanner walked back to the fence, with his hand held out, and a big smile, ‘Name's Jack Tanner, from WA. How ya going?' There was a roar of laughter and approval. Jack doffed his Australian cap, to another cheer, then jogged out into the middle.

‘Jack knows how to get a crowd onside,' laughed Hampton.

‘Let's hope he can bat,' said Calligan.

David followed the example of the bowlers and clapped as Bardsley came back into the pavilion. ‘That Tudor is a right
bastard,' he said through gritted teeth, ‘right at me.' David thought he seemed to be about to cry. Bardsley thumped the side of a bench seat with his bat, making David jump.

Richardson and Tanner withstood the English fast-bowling attack. They had their moments of discomfort, but Richardson's tight defence and Tanner's more bludgeoning approach began to work. Once they saw off the tiring Tudor and Proctor, they started to score some runs.

Mr Johnson came out to sit in a corner of the players' area. Occasionally someone from the crowd would yell out to him that he should get a job. David wanted to explain that he had one. He was a mathematics teacher when not playing cricket. Someone else in the crowd knew this too because they yelled, ‘Hey Johnson, what's nought plus nought plus nought equal?' There was laughter from the crowd accompanied with quacking noises, and the Australian opener soon went back inside.

Hampton, or Ten Ton as David was learning to call him, talked about his family. He had two girls and a baby on the way. They were buying a house in Fitzroy, a suburb of Melbourne. ‘You see, the brewery likes having a bloke who is in the public eye, who looks like they like a drink. That's me. You'd think a brewery would survive hard times, wouldn't you? Nope. Half the blokes in the despatch area are for the chop.'

‘But you've got your cricket, Ten Ton?'

‘Yeah,' laughed the big man. When Hampton saw David looking he added gently, ‘I will just have to make sure I start taking some wickets then, shan't I?'

Towards noon, Maud McLeod and Ken Hall came out, both with their pads on. Hall looked around at the crowd. ‘Not
much faith in us then, eh?'

‘Seen better,' said Hampton.

Tanner hit a four from an Ostler delivery and the crowd applauded enthusiastically.

‘He goes all right, doesn't he,' said McLeod.

Hall glanced at the crowd, then shot a sly look back towards David. ‘Yer know what the crowd are gunna do when the kid goes out. They're gunna laugh for a bit, but then they're gunna tear the place apart. We're gunna be the biggest joke since New Broom cleaned up at Flemington.'

‘Leave it alone,' said Hampton. ‘Didn't pick himself, did he?'

‘As I understand it, maybe 'e did? With a bunch of burly helpers.'

David didn't know what to say about this. He had no proof that his uncle didn't have a hand in Ashleigh Hobbs' accident.

Hall wasn't finished. ‘And what the bloody hell's going on, picking a kid who no one's ever bloody heard of?'

‘Language,' warned Hampton.

‘It's a bloody man's game and I'll bloody use a man's bloody language.'

David was thinking about a speech about doing his best, or something about not minding swearing, but none of it came. ‘I'll just go inside,' he said instead.

‘An' don't stop there,' yelled Hall at his back.

‘I'll bloody dong you if you talk to him like that again,' said Hampton.

‘An' I'll help him,' added Calligan, ‘just for the pleasure of it.'

‘Just sayin' what we all think.'
There were more chairs inside the players' room with the big window and a large electric ceiling fan that made it cool. Johnson sat at a table writing a letter, and occasionally looking at the cricket. In the card room, a radio was on. Bill Baker and Bardsley were listening to the cricket as they played whist. They both looked up at him. Bardsley looked down straight away, but Baker stared as though David was a two-headed lamb.

David got a wooden chair from the card room and moved it into the room where Mr Johnson was. He put it against the wall near the card room door so that he could hear the radio but not be seen by the card players. Or the crowd outside. He closed his eyes and listened to the game.

The radio man thought that Tanner's fearlessness was a hopeful addition to the side. At lunch, Australia was two for a hundred and four. It was the best start they'd had in the Test series. Richardson was on thirty-two and Tanner on forty-three when they came in.

Someone had brought down trays of cold meats and salads, and the card table was turned into a dining table. Mr Scully arranged plates and put out bottles of barley water for the batsmen.

David sat in his chair outside the lunchroom door with his plate of cold meats and salad and listened to the men.

There was a lot of talk about the English bowlers and how Richo and Two Bob (as McLeod had nicknamed Tanner) were handling them. It was clear that both Proctor and Tudor were very dangerous, but that if they were seen off things could get reasonable.

‘Ostler's no mug, mind,' said Richardson.

Jack Tanner said, ‘Maybe we can go after the spinner.'

‘Better find someone we can hit,' said Baker.

‘Speakin' of spinners, Skip.' It was Ken Hall.

‘Oh, leave off Ned,' Hampton replied. Ned was Hall's nickname.

Maud McLeod chimed in. ‘You read the paper this morning? They still think Hobbs is playing. Even the radio is only talking about the surprise inclusion of another spinner. They don't know. They all think the kid is Ten Ton's nephew or something sitting out there.'

‘What's your point?' asked Richardson, testily.

‘Wouldn't want to be out there in the players' area when the public find out,' said Hall.

‘Is this what the card game's decided, eh?' commented Calligan.

‘How does it look? What does it say about us?' said McLeod.

‘This was not entirely my decision,' said Richardson. ‘It was made at the last minute and as a bit of an emergency. I'm sure we can get another spinner for the next Test or bring in our twelfth man. Anyway, how I handle it is my call. Isn't it? Ned? Maud? You too Tinker. I don't want all this bickering. Not now. How about we get a decent score for once, and give the big lads something to bowl at. Then we won't have to bowl the kid anyway. So—enough?'

David left his plate on his chair and went into the dressing room. He sat on the bench in front of his locker where the sign said Master Donald. He wished he had some photograph or letter or anything from home that he could put up there.