The Rules of Backyard Cricket (12 page)

If there's a corner that you turn at some point, mine was New Year's Eve 1989.

I mean, that's not strictly true because you turn corners all the time. Life is comically pointless and composed almost entirely of corners, like a go-kart track.

On the last night of 1989, when the Berlin Wall's been disintegrating for months, attacked by frosty-looking Germans in dark anoraks, David Hasselhoff is inexplicably there. Exploiting it as his personal contribution to the downfall of the Soviet bloc.

I'm on a mustard-coloured corduroy couch with Craig when Hasselhoff appears on the telly in the world's most bizarre jacket—imagine the Fonz's black leather motorcycle jacket, but with pulsating waves of tiny light globes all over it—and he's standing on the Wall (‘Christ, the Wall!' screams Craigo. ‘People get shot for lesser jackets!') singing a vaguely freedom-themed big-hair anthem, like the song itself could break concrete. Maybe it could, the way he sings.

Craig and I have been on the bongs for a couple of hours by this stage and it's more than we can take. The pipe
du jour
is a china dragon with a snarly mouth and flared wings. You pull on the top of his head, and the cone goes in a little mount in the region of what would presumably be a dragon's lumbar spine. Craig's roaring with laughter, his belly wobbling up and down as his hand fumbles around for some kind of handbrake on the hilarity and he snorts as he struggles to get air in. A thrashing foot takes out the bag of Twisties, the china dragon and four or five stubbies on the coffee table.

And still the Hoff is yowling. The crowds below him are rapturous at first but as the same dirge-like verses loop over and over they visibly tire of him. Someone lobs a firecracker at him, and he ducks it mid-chorus.

Craig has sensed the mood of impatience in Berlin: he leans forward and kills the telly, turns to me with the last vestiges of a
chuckle dying round his cheeks. ‘I gotta go get something.'

There's a jangling sound as he scoops up his car keys.

‘Can't it wait? It's, what, two a.m.'

Since we've rented the Richmond place together, we've had a loosely synchronised life. He works for the leasing company by day, while I train and annoy Wally at the shop. Then he disappears at night and I sometimes tag along to clubs and bars, but more often I leave him to his other life, whatever it is. Every so often it comes down to these Nights of the China Dragon and VB in front of the box. The ritual is a particular favourite of his. So the idea of him wanting to run errands at this hour is a little perplexing.

‘Coming?'

‘Where?'

‘Just gotta get something. What's this, the Spanish Indecision?'

I'm too stoned to argue and quietly intrigued about what Leasing Boy might be up to.

‘Relax, you fat fuck. Bring the Twisties.'

We're going to Doveton, apparently. In the dark interior of Craig's Skyline, we're locked in one of those long silences that car travel and cannabis can produce. Every few minutes an idiotic smile spreads over my face.

Later we're deep among tilt-slab factory walls, the wrappers of two burgers at our feet. Craig's counting off numbers and names along a concrete apron.
WM Ready Panel Works
,
Permafilm Industrial Coatings
,
Aquarium Supplies Ltd.
He brakes gently outside U-Store Self Storage and jumps out, sorting through his keys before a huge roller door.

‘Whose place is this?' I ask.

‘Just some guys from FLS.'

‘They do a lot of business pre-dawn?'

Craig finds the key and hauls the door up, ignoring me. Down a narrow corridor, we come to a smaller roller-door. Inside, a miniature city of office equipment: copiers, printers, faxes, computer terminals. There's a lot of polystyrene packaging and stacked cardboard.

Against one wall is a piece of machinery I don't recognise. It's not electronic.

‘What's that?'

Craigo's already on one end of it, lifting from the floor. ‘Grab the other end, will you?'

We haul the thing out of the storage bay and into the back of the Skyline. On the way home, he tells me it's a pill press.

Yeah, I know.

Well, I do now. At the time, I truthfully didn't have the slightest notion of what that meant or why someone would want one.

‘Remember the pills we had at Pulse, the night you'd made that ton against Northcote? Well that's MDMA. The kids are calling it ecstasy. You make it in a garage for nothing and sell it for fifteen bucks a pill. Almost pure profit. Cut it with ketamine, it's even cheaper.'

‘What's ketamine?'

‘You don't wanna go into that. Put it this way, it's to do with horses.'

‘So,' I probe, feeling the giggles wear off, ‘the thing in the back?'

‘I'm going into business with some guys,' he says.

I feel a tug of sadness at these words.

I get it, I get it—he's already been in business for some time. I've looked the other way because I prefer my version of Craigo, the affable fat man, mister dependable. Buying and selling for mates, moving a few things. Harmless, gormless. These ‘guys' feel like an infidelity to me. Fair enough, he's been drifting away from Wally for years. But that's more Wally's fault. I've been staunch.

I'm sullen on the way home, sluggish and silent.

The pill press shifts with a clunk as we swing onto Punt Road; a blind corner, as it happens. We're deep into the turn, committed, when we both see the lights. A dozen cops with witches hats and a queue of cars.

Breath-testing station.

I look at Craigo, who's looking at the road, assessing options. He appears shrewder and harder than I've ever known him. He rolls conservatively into the queue and we wait in silence, until a young officer approaches his window with the breatho in his hand.

‘Had any alcoholic drinks tonight sir?'

‘I have,' smiles Craigo. ‘Had a couple an hour or two ago.'

‘One continuous breath until I say stop, thanks.'

Craig blows. The cop holds the device and he's looking. Looking in the back. The device buzzes, but the cop's not looking at it. He's still looking in the back. Craigo's got a hand on the transmission. The cop returns his attention to the breatho.

‘Do you have far to go?'

He's a junior conny, this bloke, trying to muster a senior voice. The queue ahead's inching forward.

‘No, no, couple of hundred metres. Why?'

The car in front is clear to go but it hasn't left.

‘You're just under. What's your address? I…er…' He shoots one more look in the back. ‘You better give me a look at your licence, mate.'

The car's cleared the breatho station and it's just us now. Us, with a dozen cars queued behind and I'm pressed into the seat as Craigo punches the accelerator. In a second, we've cleared out and left the roadblock in a cloud of smoke. My heart's hammering.

Out the back window, past that fucking press, there's cops running all over the place. Car doors opening and closing. Suddenly I'm in Craig's lap because he's thrown the car left and raced up a side street. Cult on the stereo, very fucking loud. ‘She Sells Sanctuary'. I
crash into the passenger window as he swings right down an alleyway.

‘Will you do up your fucking belt?' he yells. ‘You'll get us both in trouble.'

I can hear sirens now but there's no sign of lights. They're well behind, and Craigo's still snaking through the narrow lanes of Richmond, bottoming the Skyline out in the bluestone dips at the crossroads.

The streets again become familiar to me and he slows, crawling to a stop in our drive. In seconds he's out and the roller door's closed, the car completely concealed. I wonder now at what a goose I've been—is this why he chose the place?

We jump out and he's straight round the back, hauling the pill press out. As we heave the thing onto the front step, I can't help myself.

‘Craigo you dumb fuck, you've gotta go back. They're gonna have your plates.'

He looks at me, looks back at the car.

‘No, mate. They're gonna have that guy's plates.'

I look back at the Skyline, at the rego it didn't have yesterday.

Stolen.

It's a restless night, as I'm sure you'll appreciate.

I leave Craigo banging and crashing in his room and try to catch a couple of hours before dawn. I'm normally okay doing this. In fact, I've scored big runs doing this. But this time I'm just chasing sleep and I wake up foggy and depressed. Craigo tells me it's the hydroponic dope. Skunk, he says, nasty herbover. I'll get us some good bush stuff.

In the middle of this exchange the phone rings: Wally, saying a letter turned up at Mum's yesterday, and it's a VCA envelope.

Over at Mum's place, I see the familiar Nissan parked in the drive. Louise, Wally's girlfriend of six months, perhaps even more morally
constipated than he is. Louise is studying community development at the Footscray Institute. Wants to be an aid worker in Tibet. I trust they're having sex—Christ I hope for his sake they're having sex—but she won't move in with him because she thinks it wouldn't be
special
then. I've never heard her say this, of course—what I've heard is Wally reporting it in this smarmy tone like he's explaining it to an eight-year-old. I don't even know where to begin with my exasperation: getting lectured on sexual ethics by a man with almost zero miles on the clock, or just her general appropriation of my brother. Her taking liberties with my family.

Parking in our driveway, for instance. First a bunch of ‘guys' take up occupation inside my best friend's soul like some alien life form, and now Wally has become Occupied Territory.

He greets me at the door, big grin on his face. We sit around the kitchen bench; me, Mum, Wally, and Louise, who is wearing some sort of ethical hemp. Wally's got his arm around her as I rip into the VCA envelope. He seems proud.

I read through the letter. It's only short, and when I'm done I read it again to let the good bits sink in.

I'm in the state squad.

I'm twenty, I'm the leading run-scorer in Victorian district cricket and I'm in the state squad. I can go to their office in Jolimont, collect my uniform and sign a contract this week. Blue cap. Tours, sponsored gear. They're going to pay me to play cricket.

I study Mum intently, searching for any sign of what this means for her. Her eyes are happy, above the sad crease that always runs from her cheeks to the sides of her mouth. At forty-one, she's spent more of her years looking after us than she has living a life of her own. She likes Louise, trusts her; she knows Wally's found a kindred spirit.

At the moment Louise is fiddling with her purse on the kitchen bench with her long, clean fingers; Mum jumps up and starts fussing
with the kettle. I watch her flip the switch and boil it twice before she gets round to the teabags. As she makes tea I'm looking at the little routines of her kitchen, the neat pile of papers, the other pile with the clippings she's cut about Wally and me.