The Rules of Backyard Cricket (14 page)

‘I'm not someone who turns off the recorder, Darren. But you seem a nice guy. So I'm going to say this to you once: I've got a keen interest in Craig Wearne, and so have a number of other people.
You
, Darren, you are someone who should not have a keen interest in Craig Wearne.'

I'm floored. ‘What are you talking about?'

‘You heard of Pitbull Freer?'

A hot jolt of alarm spreads through me. I don't know if she can detect it, but she's watching me closely.

‘Everyone has. He was on the front page of the paper.'

‘Yep, and he's about to be again. The Court of Appeal just granted him leave to appeal his conviction. He could be out in two weeks. How does that make you feel?'

I laugh, but she knows how the news makes me feel. How the hell does she know?

‘I'm fine thanks.'

She shrugs. ‘And I don't have to tell you anything more. Like I said, this is further than I'd normally go.' She runs a finger over the tape recorder, presses ‘record' again. Flicks her hair back.

‘So, how's your fitness going into the season?'

Gestation

I've lost count of the number of times I've dropped the little shard of plastic.

I chose to work on the cable ties rather than the gag, only because I couldn't think of any way to rip the tape off without my hands free.

The trick to working the shard is like that thing you see Vegas card sharks doing with a gambling chip, rolling it from knuckle to knuckle until it lodges between Squibbly and forefinger like a plectrum. I'm sure it would be a lot easier if I wasn't slumped on top of my hands, and if Squibbly had any feedback to offer, but of course he doesn't. Again and again, the shard rolls across the tangled knuckles, only to tumble out halfway across. And each time that happens, I spend an eternity feeling around on the prickly synthetic carpet of the boot's floor, trying to locate it again.

It's keeping my mind off things, this little game. But I have to assume the people in the front aren't going to let me play all night.

It all comes to pass exactly as we expected: Wally gets picked by late February, and for the duration of that summer it's me in at four and him at number five for the state side.

The previous summer was a lean time for the side. There was a coaching blow-up, a players' walkout, a home-ground redevelopment necessitating temporary training facilities, and a dozen other minor shitfights that collectively sapped morale and plunged the side to the bottom of the table.

But we arrive after the deluge, Wally and I. New coach, new blood, an air of determination. The side becomes a formidable unit. And it happens within weeks—there's no process of forging, of grafting towards something. It's just
wham
, success. And just as suddenly we're recognisable, in a way members of a losing team can't be.

Once the initial glow of state selection wears off, the real world asserts itself. For me, this means school visits, clinics. I don't know how many kids' arms I have to hold up straight over these seasons.
Make a windmill, Joshua
. The money's good, or good enough to keep up the rent on the Richmond house, clubs on the weekends, a new set of wheels through the Big Guy.

For Wally, his natural tendency towards the monastic intensifies.

He's now a graduate in sports science with a diploma in business administration and a master's degree in sanctimonious bullshit. Nutrition has become his chosen battleground: he demands that the squad staff have everyone pinch-tested for fat.

He's gone vegetarian, does yoga, runs long-distance. He and Louise have put a deposit on a house and then installed tenants in it because, God help me, ‘it's tax-effective'. She's running the Melbourne office of a global charity, and is one of the only people I know who has a mobile phone. Needless to say, Craigo is another.

But the differences between Wally and me don't amount to much in the statistics. And cricket is above all else a dance of numbers. At
one in our willingness to crush our opponents, it's only at the end of a day's play that our lives diverge: his to puritanism, mine to the piss.

Four weeks before the final match of the season, I'm asked to turn up to a radio show promotional thing. It's mid-week, Valentine's Day in fact, and I'm suspended in space between a hangover and a training session, unenthused. Team polo shirt, runners, the official Victorian team slacks. Neat, short hair with woolly undergrowth sprouting down the neck. Back then, it was the day-off uniform. Appropriate, prestigious. Now, you see a photo and you laugh.

I wander up to reception at the radio station and they buzz through to the publicity department for someone called Honey. This'll be good, I think. Honey from Publicity.

But when the door swings open and Honey from Publicity enters, she's not at all what I expect. Short, dark, lit up by a smile that seems real. She takes a strand of hair between her fingers and sweeps it behind an ear as she shakes my hand. Just for an instant I forget my name.

The phone rings again behind the reception desk, and after a brief exchange, the receptionist looks up at me and pushes the phone receiver in my direction.

‘It's for you,' she says. ‘Your mother.'

When I take the phone and hear her voice it's clear that something's up. Something's different. She's worried, maybe, but elated, too. Tense. She runs through a few pleasantries while I wonder what she's up to. Yes, Mum, I'm doing a radio interview. Yes, I remembered it's Valentine's Day. No, I don't have anyone to take out tonight. It
is
a lovely day outside, Mum, yes. Eventually I have to pull her up, while giving Honey, who's standing at a polite distance, an apologetic look.

‘So…I'm about to go on air, Mum.'

‘Oh.' Long pause. ‘Well, look. It's about your brother, Darren. He's gone and got Louise pregnant.'

A delicious feeling sweeps over me. Mister Organised. Mister Controlled. Miss Career-Focused.
Hilarious
.

‘Oh Mum, that's just lovely,' I say, barely containing my misconceived delight.

‘It's not,' she says sharply. ‘And don't be a smart-arse. I'm surprised it wasn't you, frankly.'

Her voice changes to a more plaintive tone. ‘They're just bloody kids. Christ, what was he thinking?'

‘Ah, they can get rid of it. Can't be that hard.'

‘We won't be talking like that,' she says fiercely. ‘We will
not
be talking like that.'

I mumble my way through a confused sort of apology, and end the call by promising to give him a ring.

As I hand the receiver back to the receptionist, I'm conscious that I had no reason at all to sneer. It
could
have been me and any one of a number of girls. Of course it wasn't my place to suggest a termination. Sometimes I'm amazed by my ability to open my mouth and just hear my own unedited thoughts fall out.

‘Sorry about that,' I mumble to the waiting Honey. ‘My brother's pregnant.'

‘Really?' she replies, wide-eyed with amusement.

She leads me into the studio, leaves and returns with a glass of water. They sit me at a console, put the cans on my head and the panel lights up. A pallid announcer with a Winfield baritone does his pre-fab hocum then introduces me.
Victoria's new star batsman
, he says.
Big hitting bad-boy
, he says.

Wally and Louise are having a baby.

A long glass wall lines one side of the studio, over the announcer's shoulder. Through it I can see the couches of the green room, a couple of large speakers no doubt transmitting our studio. A separate door to the green room opens soundlessly, and from where I sit I can
see Honey enter. She plonks down casually on the arm of a couch and watches us, gives me a tiny smile. Her hand rises from her lap and wiggles a little wave. A feeling more complicated than lust is rising within me.

The announcer's going through the motions. Favourite ground (no one likes to hear a Victorian say it, but it's the 'Gabba), scariest fast bowler (Fed Collins), is it true you and your brother fight like cat and dog? (no, complete nonsense), and then the opening I've been looking for.

‘Okay Darren, seeing as it's Valentine's Day, who's your dream date?'

I look directly at the window. ‘That's easy. It's Honey from your publicity department.'

I can see her mock-shrieking, burying her head in her hands. The DJ loves it; looks over his shoulder and throws an unrequited high five towards her. Later, she gives me her home phone number, written in neat black pen on the back of a RAD FM business card. She tells me this is the most embarrassing day of her life, and that I owe her dinner.

And though I desperately want to repay that debt, I carry the card around for days before I can summon the courage to call her.

So it falls to me to explain how things change over the next two years of my life. How I hit a still point, where the better side of me is given air and water and light.

Honey Nicholson plays an ingenious hand early on.

She holds me in suspense, willing captive to the belief that she's preoccupied, barely finding time for me. She fails to ring for days, then calls and apologises, or turns up late at night, sweeping away my feigned sulking with her soft hands and her mouth. She's smart enough to stay away from cricket, keeping our interactions on her own
terms and within reach of her many strengths.

I blow up from time to time—please don't go thinking this is an epiphany. A few all-nighters; half a dozen vehicular mishaps. There are those close to me who find the prospect of a stable, dependable Darren Keefe alarming, and they set about doing all they can to upend me. Spiked drinks and other attempts to start little prank wars, astonishing sexual invitations, emotional manipulations.

In October, Craig convinces me to head out with a crew of the state cricketers to celebrate the birth of little Hannah Keefe, the tiny pink niece-blob I've been cradling at the hospital during the afternoon. The warm blankets on my forearms, the miniature squeaks of her breath, the new light that radiates from Louise: all of it is rewiring me in subtle ways I can't place.

She has paperskin hands, Hannah Keefe, and they clutch my little finger. Her half-seeing eyes are trained towards warmth.

God. I'm an uncle. I'm anuncle. I'm a nuncle.

You're not the same these days,
the boys slur that night. I laugh and throw beer on someone. There's a fight with security, staccato conversations with cricketers of the suburban park kind who demand to talk, who skitter and twitch unpredictably behind their speed-fouled eyes. They might be fine. They might also strike from behind for no other reason than to see if they can take down Victoria's number-three batsman. They evaporate along the way and there's a walk through a park somewhere in St Kilda, I think alone, then another nightclub.

Searing jabs of sound and thuddery bass I can't distinguish from my heartbeat. Blades of light cutting into my eyes, people swaying like marine growth, no sign of the walls, where are the walls. A kebab, Hindi music with a cab driver, coins spilling everywhere from my discarded jeans, face-first collision with an empty bed. I've thrown up somewhere, I can taste it, but I don't know where.

The spinning sensation, the tinnitus. The bedside lamp, burning
hot and constant until dawn, keeping the dark at bay. I'm afloat on an anaesthetic river of tequila, lit from inside. Like a paper lantern drifting downstream.

Honey's smart enough to stay away from nights like this.

Honey's got a career, principles. She warms more and more towards Louise, talks to her in female asides that, far from disconcerting me, sound like unimpeachable intimacy. She minds the baby, and does it with ease. The baby is a little sun, the centre of our universe. We talk about her when we're alone. We wonder if that's normal.

Honey darts out when summoned by Louise for comfort, for the howling, clenching nights of mastitis. Often neither Wally nor I am around, called away interstate by the game. But Honey doesn't see her role with Louise merely as an extension of her relationship with me. She's from a big family and feels no burden in these duties. Takes no credit for them either.