The Rules of Backyard Cricket (11 page)

I discuss this earnestly with my fat turf-accountant mate. He assures me it's a piece of cake, the living out of home business, and he will find us a place. Somewhere a little closer to the great dormant dreamscape of the Eastern Suburbs.

We're deep into spring by the time he turns up with a rented trailer to collect my single bed and milk crates full of LPs. He's recently acquired a newish Commodore with a spoiler and mags, and the interior feels just like the nightclubs he likes. He's building a habitat around himself. This impression falls away a little, however, when we reach the destination—Cubitt Street, Richmond. It's a forgotten industrial laneway running north from the garment factories of the riverbank to the cluster of railway tracks that run out to the suburbs. Trams rumble in the distance. Aside from our place, a small timber cottage with its door on the street, there's a cluster of dark terraces across the road, screened and fortified with shards of broken glass in the cement and huge sheets of steel over the entrances.

I point it out as we draw up outside our future abode.

‘Dennis's joint,' says Craigo. ‘Don't think we'll drop in for a beer.'

As he backs the trailer, tongue-poking with concentration, I realise that our place has a little fortification of its own—a roller door to one side of the house, concealing a short driveway and a garage. It's not the sort of place you'd leave a car on the street.

In the first few weeks Mum visits often, bringing roast chooks and taking away my washing in baskets. It stings me occasionally when
I see her struggling to let go. Wally's transition into adulthood is more staged, more structured and painless. Mine is a rending of the fabric—I just left—and it's simple maths. The population of the Fernley Road house has dropped by a third.

But as the days go by she turns up at Cubitt Street less and less often. She doesn't like the place. Never says so, but you can sense it. She's seen a thousand losers and petty crooks, and she's looking at Dennis's joint out of the corners of her eyes when she comes and goes. Never sees
him
, thank God. He's a sight—short, fat, covered in blurry blue-green ink and heavyweight gold chains. Yellow eyes, carnivorous grin. Craigo disconcerts Mum sometimes, but Dennis is like Craigo dipped in hell.

Gurgling motorbikes turn up across the road deep in the night. There are fights, squealing tyres, even occasional gunshots. When they have parties over there, they manage to do it without a trace of festivity: it's grim and lewd, like dogs fucking. Each time the police visit, someone turns up on the fortifications afterwards with a welding rig to improve the barriers. Craigo reckons they've got an escape tunnel out the back onto the tracks.

I'm coming to a new understanding of the Big Guy through living with him.

There are aspects of his daily routine that are surprisingly spartan: he will eat only muesli for breakfast, hoofing it down between gulps of black coffee. His room is impeccably clean. He reads newspapers obsessively, reassembling their various component sections afterwards and stacking them by the kitchen door. Every week on a Friday afternoon he walks down to the old Italian nonna's place and gives her the stack. She thinks he's a good boy. The newspapers go on her tomato patch or something. He returns with jars of pomodoro, sometimes dried fruit.

He's tuned the kitchen radio to some classical station. If he can
chance upon some opera while he's tooling around with the nonna's sauce, then that's about the happiest he ever gets. Given that Pacino's
Scarface
is running on almost constant loop on the VCR, I should be more alert to the nascent gangster fantasy: the opera, the charade of being a
good boy
for a nonna. Easy in retrospect, isn't it?

But the thing with Craigo, the thing that keeps you coming back, is that he's a giver. He gives me the Commodore because he's upgrading to a Skyline. Low-slung, darkened windows, and an air intake hump in the hood. The Big Guy has to pour himself in there, but once inside, it's his cave. The interior smells of his aftershave, and there's an array of membership and special parking stickers along the edge of the windscreen.

The Big Guy's found a job at a place called Corporate Vehicle Solutions, a hire-purchase joint for fleets. I can't imagine anything more boring. The racing caper I could relate to: hell, he was probably trading coded handshakes with some heavy characters, which is Craig's idea of fast times. But the car leasing crew is a bunch of fried-food-eating, bomber-jacket-wearing good-time guys sitting round in a badly fitted-out shopfront in Keilor, working the phones. Within a few short years, the advent of the internet will fill the days of such journeymen with online casinos and endless porn. But in the late eighties, it's hard to imagine what they do with their day once they've made their handful of useful phone calls.

The race-track inflection disappears from Craigo's speech within days of him taking up his new role, in its place something more unctuous. He's happier than ever, which in turn makes him even more tactile. And he still holds Wally in a kind of awe. On his rare visits to our place, Wally shares his views about the national side, about business and politics. The Big Guy laps it up, but Wally never stays long, never overindulges.

Although Craig knows lots of girls, none of them could be
formally termed a girlfriend. So I remain the chief object of his outsize affection. Sometimes he attacks me with a bearhug for no reason at all.

When September rolls around I shuffle between Richmond and Altona. Training for the district squad is Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, with optional extra fitness work on Wednesdays. Wally, you may have guessed, is a regular at the Wednesdays. I'm sporadic.

Mum comes to every day of every game, sometimes even to training. The pubs tend to roster the young kids on weekends to save on penalty rates, so her work rarely gets in the way. She likes to stand alone in the empty bleachers on the far side of the ground, marking the scorebook I bought her for her birthday; her sunhat on, head bowed over her work.

My club career with Altona follows an inevitable progression. Brought in from local cricket at sixteen with a fair bit of advance publicity, I'm like an allergen to the older blokes.

First practice session, they wait for me to start putting the pads on and then move themselves into my net: hard-faced men, much older, not looking to enjoy their Saturdays but eyeing a career. They mark out a longer run-up, charging in with renewed energy and aiming relentlessly for my head. The lazier ones don't have the backbone to bowl bouncer after bouncer, so they lob it flat and full, eye-height. They don't understand, any of them, that I was raised on cheap shots. Time after time, I hoik their deliveries into the net, over the net, even through the net. Now and then I catch a top edge and the ball rockets over the top and out into the carpark. When this happens, I like to lean on the bat and smirk as they trudge off to retrieve it. Once in a while they land a blow, and there's always a half-hearted apology or the suggestion that the ball might've slipped out of the hand.

But again, they don't know the history. In private, surrounded by the house and three paling fences of our backyard, Wally would follow up a stinging blow with a spray of invective.

I've worn black eyes for years. These dilettantes don't know the first thing about mental disintegration.

Which leads me to an odd thing about Wally. He's come to Altona with every bit as much advance publicity as I have, yet nothing changes when he turns up to bat. No one gets fired up. They bowl the usual assortment to him, nod politely when he scoops up their ball in his gloved hand and flicks it back to them.

He is denatured by batting.

As he waits, he's a helmeted statue, silent and implacable. I've never seen him brush a fly in that state. They could wander over his face, even up his nostrils and he wouldn't know. It seems like languor if you don't know what to look for. But it's the invisible building of energy and focus to a point of detonation, a form of biomechanical perfection only revealed in slow motion. Deadened eyes that don't squint or blink. Hands that follow the shortest path to the tiny point in time and space where contact will occur. Not an application of bodily force, but a harnessing of other forces.

When he misses a shot, as he rarely does, he raises a hand to stop the next bowler from running in, then swishes through phantom repetitions of the motion until he feels he's found the error and corrected it. Nobody minds him doing this. There is a complete absence of spite in his interactions, though he seethes with competitive intensity. Observers interpret his failure to fire up under provocation at the crease as evidence of phenomenal self-discipline, but that's inadequate. He
cannot
react: sledging him is as pointless as conversing with someone in headphones.

That's how he operates in public. In the backyard, he's vengeful, savage and petulant.

In September, we hear about the tied Test in Madras: Dean Jones's double century in forty-degree heat, forty-five-degree heat—the numbers keep growing. I've heard they had to give him a transfusion
from a coconut. Wally's contorted with scorn.

‘Do they even
have
coconuts in Madras? And why would you get a transfusion from one if they did?'

‘Dunno,' I reply lamely, ‘heaps of people are sayin it.'

He slaps his thigh in derision. ‘It's called an urban myth, dickhead.'

This is during one of our net sessions at Brewer's Sports. I look around and ensure there's no one else in the shop, then I charge straight at him and throw him to the ground. He's still laughing while I try to get a hand free to hit the smug bastard.

Three minutes later, a lady with two small boys has entered the shop and Wally's standing behind the counter smiling politely with his hair all over the place and one ear bright red from being crushed in my fist only seconds before. I'm standing slightly off to stage right, breathing hard and rearranging my shirt.

The woman looks askance at us, but leaves a tennis racquet for restringing.

One night at Altona, as dusk softens the colours of evening training, we're called over from the nets to the empty seats, where a girl not much older than us is waiting. We're introduced by a club official: Amy Harris is from the local paper, a cadet journalist sent to do a story on the school-age prodigies playing first-grade for Altona.

Her brown hair's pulled back into a tight ponytail. No makeup. She's tall and athletic-looking, dressed for work, not display. I like her immediately. She snorts when Wally tries to impress her by quoting from C. L. R. James: ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?'

‘I dunno,' she counters. ‘What
do
they know?'

Wally's crestfallen, and I'm left with an opening to field the next few questions. She's done her research, even knows somehow about Mum and Dad. Her questions to me are all angled at my character; Wally's are all about his cricket. It takes me a while to latch onto this,
but like an idiot I play extravagantly into her hands.

‘See, I don't think there's much public interest in purists,' I say. ‘Cricket's getting shorter and faster, and people don't want to see the ball gliding along the ground. They want action. Drama. That's what we bring. Bradman is dead.'

Wally's looking at me with unconcealed horror. He tries to take the conversation back. ‘Everyone brings their own approach of course,' he says stiffly.

But she ignores him. Instead, she's spurring me on. ‘Do you have the potential to play for Victoria?'

‘No doubt at all.'

‘For the country?'

‘Pretty likely.'

‘And you, Wally? What are your ambitions?'

‘I'd rather let my batting do the talking.'

She snorts again. ‘That's a cliché, isn't it?'

‘It's the truth.'

She's writing in a spiral-bound notebook as we talk. The plastic biro hovers momentarily. She chews the other end of it lightly as she forms the next question.

‘Do you two get along?'

‘Of course we do,' snaps Wally angrily, just as I'm saying, over the top of him, ‘Mostly.'

Faint smile.

‘I'm going to make a note in my diary to talk to you two at the end of the season, and again this time next year. Would that be okay?'

I find myself agreeing enthusiastically. Wally's more circumspect. The photographer, who's waited just beyond her left shoulder, now pushes forward to get his shots. I look straight down the barrel, aping the boorish invincibility of Botham. Wally looks away over the ground, towards the scurrying players in the soft light.

The next day, the image appears across half a page, strangely beautiful. Wally's face is all shadows and dreams, his decision to look away cloaking him in remoteness. I'm captured by his image for so long, wondering if I really know him at all, that it takes me a while to see myself. No mysticism there: I look dumb and aggressive. And the story appears under a headline I should have seen coming.

Bradman is Dead
.

State

More lane markers thirrupping under the tyres.

Consciousness ebbing, the past playing out in living colour as the blackness in the boot consumes me. The world I left behind. Lost in time; discarded by a series of choices. The things I can't retrieve.

My fingers have chanced upon another shard of the tail-light. I can't tell if it's from the lens or the plastic backing—cornea or retina. It's triangular, a matchstick in length. I can tumble it from finger to finger, though I can't fully grip it because of the pressure of the cable ties. If I stretch my hands downwards, I can make the tip of the shard reach the cable ties and rub them lightly.

But I'm not sure that should be my priority. The tape over my mouth is driving me insane. It's irrelevant to releasing my bonds, though, and there's only so much effort I can apply. I don't know where to start.