The Rules of Backyard Cricket (17 page)

Another season. A home game in Melbourne, but the players get the option of a hotel room near the MCG, and Honey and I take up the opportunity.

We've talked and talked, as the city faded to silence and even as it awoke itself in the small hours. Like me, she's capable of lying awake all night worrying about the shape of the universe. So we had each other to annoy. When she fell asleep, I turned the bedside lamp on to push back the dark a little. Little thoughts and worries. Tiny dancing bears that I stop with a pill.

The dawn comes quiet. I leave Honey to whatever place she's gone to, transfixed, as I dress by the brown curve of her thigh, lit soft in the baby glow of a summer day through the gauzy hotel curtains. The early hum of traffic. Someone tipping a bin far below in the alley. Leaning in close to her cheek, I listen to her breathing. Confident, unconcerned.

This will be a Day Among Days.

Everywhere I look I see perfection. I feel it. Even my bare feet on the carpet are feeding me the ticklish static of fate. My body feels fine: not a twinge, not an ache. I plonk myself on the carpet and stretch the hamstrings. Leaning forward, legs apart, I push my hands along the floor, pulling at the muscles behind my shoulders. They spring back in response. I push the hands a little further and a grunt escapes me.

‘Goo'luck.'

Her voice is smoky with sleep.

Because it's a lifetime habit and one of the ways in which I'm most like Wally, I open the coffin and run a hand through the gear: in the long compartment, three sets of pads for a lefty: buckskin, recently scrubbed and whitened by Max the property steward. One pair's still slightly damp from yesterday's sweat. Two bats, new grips on each—again, Max's hand, like one of Santa's elves while I downed a beer in the dressing room. A box, greasy and adorned with two random pubic
hairs; two thighpads, again, one of them damp. The damp one's the lucky one.

Rolled up in a white towel, four pairs of batting gloves with the pad on the left thumb. Another little ritual of mine is to take the small rubber thimbles out of the thumb of each left glove. I've never understood the point of them: they take away the tiny sensations you get through the thumb, and they make your hands more bulky. The pile of discarded thimbles is on the benchtop. I interrupt my audit of the coffin for just long enough to pinch the air out of a couple of them and use the suction to stick them to my forehead. Good to have a sight gag in reserve in case your winsome bedfellow wakes in need of a laugh. The effect, I confirm in the mirror, is like a lightly sunburnt baby goat.

Little cloth bags in the outside pockets of the coffin. One contains sunscreen, zinc, Vaseline, Aerogard, glue and scissors. The other is more specifically medical: painkillers, anti-inflammatories, tape; needles for lancing blisters. These are the superstitious relics of a long career in grade cricket. The big grounds have all this stuff on tap. Even the umpires carry it in their pockets, but my vestigial self-reliance persists.

There's a brown paper envelope they gave me the night before the game that contains guest passes to the ground, a timetable and a few badly spelled briefing notes. The Queensland side, their averages, strike rates; probably dietary requirements. I couldn't say precisely what the notes cover because I haven't read them. What do I need briefing notes for? Bowl the fucking ball at me and I'll hit it.

She's stirring. I drop a guest pass in her open handbag, lean down and place my fingers lightly for a moment on her forehead. I don't expect her to turn up.

The airconditioner is grumbling into life now.

At breakfast in the bistro (another bistro, another eight-slice toaster), I can feel eyes on me. It's the fate of state cricketers to be perpetually half-recognised. We're the backbenchers of cricket—elected but not anointed. A kind old lady in the lift appears to recognise me, but it turns out she wants to let me know I've left the thimbles on my forehead and I look like a twat. My word. She said ‘dill'.

The eyes in the bistro, however, are real.
It's him. Who? Keefe. Next big thing. Ninety-seven not out overnight. If he keeps going the Vics could win the final.
At one table, the newspaper has the back page facing outwards and there I am, taking up three-quarters of the page on one knee, smashing Wehnderfer to the cover-point boundary. Big Hans is slightly out of focus in the background of the shot, stooped in his follow-through.

When the occupants of the table have wandered off, I scuttle over and collect the paper.

Starting at the back, I read all about the game. With more tea left in the pot, I flip over and work my way into the paper from the front.

Five pages in, a one-column court report from Amy Harris. Pitbull Freer is back on the streets; he lost the appeal she told me about but he's out on parole now. A little cloud darkens my sun. Should I be worried? Wouldn't he have better things to do with his liberty? Would he even know I once spent a few vigorous hours with his special friend? His photo, like mine, is taken with a long lens but for different reasons. He's outside some restaurant: the corded neck with its chains, the spikes of the tatts reaching forward of his ear, pointing towards his tiny eye, set deep behind the cheekbone like a fighting dog.

Pitbull. More apt than I'd realised.

The waiter comes over and tells me there's a phone call. When I take the receiver and hear the scratchy noise, I know that Louise is holding the phone to Hannah's ear. So I wait patiently for her little voice.

‘Mum says you have a very big day,' she says carefully. ‘I hope you bat for a long time, Daddle hey guess WHAT Wednesday is the first day of school and I'll be in grade one Daddle and that means I get a desk with Charlotte and I can play cricket with the grade twos cos they don't like preps but now I'll be a grade one but I can get em out anyway cos I can do that ball you know that ball I got you out with at our place when it went under your bat? Daddle?'

‘Yes, mate. That's a yorker.'

‘Yorker! And we're allowed on the big playground at lunchtimes this year but not at little lunch or after school and we get to go on the tramps if you got a teacher watching and how many runs do you haf to make?'

‘What do you mean, mate?'

‘You know, to get in the Test team with Dad?'

‘I don't know, mate. Hopefully not many more.'

‘Anyway I hope you do…yep I AM Mummy,
wait
…so…love you bye.'

Like all kids, she lacks a sense of the wind-up towards ending a call, and has just crashed the receiver back on the cradle. Gone.

She turns out to be the only one willing to go straight to the issue at hand. Everywhere I go this morning, people maintain a distance, like I'm busy defusing a bomb or something. But there are no nerves. I'll clear the ton with ease and I'll do a whole lot more than that.

In the dressing room, there's a brief team meeting in which the talk is about everything else but me. We're five down and we need 289 runs to take out the final, to take delivery of the Sheffield Shield.

First ball of the day, I watch Dave Pemberton in his sweatbands limbering up. I watch him like I will circle him on a plain and then tear a bloody piece out of his flank with my tusks. Long, smooth approach, upright delivery stride. Hands aligned parallel through an invisible vertical plane.

There's a faint chatter of applause as the ball is delivered. Straight and full on middle stump and I chip it out easily enough.

Second ball, my certainty about the ton nearly brings me undone. I take a wild swipe at a loose one outside off, and succeed only in getting a thick edge on it. The ball flies just over second slip and is gone. About three seconds later I hear it hit the advertising hoardings; the
clang
of hard leather on tin.

The hundred.

My batting partner Phil Herring runs down the pitch and clamps me in a hug. Our helmets bash together. There's a ripple of polite applause among the Queenslanders, and a gentle shorebreak sound from the grandstands. Clutched in the arms of Herro, somewhere mid-pitch in the centre of the MCG, I've got 956 runs for the season and a century in what is likely to be Victoria's winning Shield final. I'm averaging fifty-four, with daylight between me and the next-best number-four batsman in the country. In two weeks' time they'll announce the squad for the Ashes in England this winter, and there is nothing on the face of the earth that can prevent me getting the nod.

I break away from Herro's hug and salute the stands with a raised bat. Yes, thank you kids and pensioners. Thank you junior office workers, skiving off your Friday so you can drink piss in the sun. Thank you empty plastic chairs in your multiple colours to fool the news-viewing public into thinking there's people here. Thank you ground staff, who have to be here anyway, and thank you stoners tugging on quiet spliffs high in the northern stand. This one's for none of you. This one is entirely for me.

And then they bring ol' Feddy on. For some reason, they didn't use him in the previous innings, or indeed in this innings until now.

Federal Collins. Pride of Antigua, and the fastest bowler I never saw. A man so introverted he makes men of few words sound like gossip girls. Some burr of anger is buried between the great shoulders.
He takes the ball from the skipper as though he should have had it all along—no ‘Thanks skip', no ‘Can I have a third slip?' Nothing.

The keeper and slips are standing so far away I can barely see them.

Fed walks out to the end of his run and drops a plastic marker disc, windmills his arms through one quick warm-up and just starts running in.

As he gathers speed, I have a brief second to regret that someone else hasn't borne the brunt of his impatience. He's six foot four standing still. I know this because I've looked up into his eyes at social functions, and I'm six foot. In his delivery stride, leaping off that left foot and airborne as he passes the umpire, he's at least seven foot two. And as that right arm whips over his ear, the clutched ball streaking like sunlight through a thrown glass of claret, I swear that giant hand is topping out at, I don't know, eleven, twelve feet in the air.

The problem with such a high release is not so much the angle it comes down from, but the resultant angle at which it rears up off the turf. A ball pitched on a reasonable length suddenly becomes a spitting, hissing bastard of a thing that wants to get into your throat.

I know from long experience the barely detectable dropping of a bowler's eyes, the sinking of the lead shoulder, that tell you it'll be a short one. It's there too in the angle of the wrist holding the ball, the knuckles tipping forward to retain it for an extra millisecond. And from years of dodging microwaved tennis balls, I have an instinct for unnatural bounce.

The eyes drop: a jolt of adrenaline.

So I'm already half-ducked when it enters the space–time continuum fuckery that causes a cricket ball to become invisible. At first it's in his hand, then it isn't there at all, and then—apparently—it's streaking at about a hundred miles an hour through the space where my head was. But I'm squatting on my haunches by now, wondering
if I couldn't take a job with Craigo at the leasing joint where things happen a lot slower.

It sails harmlessly past me. At some point I grab a single, leaving Herro to take strike and deal with the rest of Federal's demons.

He's got a great eye, Herro. Eye like a dead fish. But he's also got an unfortunate tendency to put his body in the way if he's not confident his bat will do the job. Squat, powerful, thick-limbed, he's a generous target. He wears two short ones in the ribs, with his bat (the very object that should be taking the punishment) held aloft, out of harm's way. Both times, the ball makes a hollow tympanic thud that reminds me fondly of belting tennis balls into ol' Sambo the fat staffy.

I'm about to wander down the pitch to offer support when Feddy finally finds his voice. Watching the gasping batsman from the end of his follow-through, he grabs the underarmed return throw from the slips and turns to me. Then he says, in the bassest of basses: