The Rules of Backyard Cricket (20 page)

So here she is, leaning on the bat for just an instant, him floundering, completely unsure of how to handle it. Did I teach her this?

Then she grins sweetly. ‘I'll get it, Daddy.' And she does.

While she's gone, I can't help needling him as he picks at the weeds under Mum's tomatoes.

‘Hits 'em pretty well, eh?'

‘I know,' he says defensively, because we're both well aware he doesn't know.

Later, back in the house and Mum's still in the kitchen. Still won't accept any help. Wally's looking at his watch, late now for the team meeting ahead of the Boxing Day Test. I'm facing the kitchen, he's facing me. Over his shoulder, I see Mum popping her head round the end of the row of books: once, twice, three times. The look on her face the first time is one of worry: by the third time it's naked panic. She's looking to my right, at Hannah, who's reading out the slips of paper from the crackers with their harmless dad jokes, unaware of the looks being directed her way.

After the third glance around the books, the panicked one, I call out to ask if she wants a hand. No, she replies breezily, but I'm going
anyway.

She's bent over in a cupboard, doing I don't know what.

I take her gently by the forearm and draw her up straight so she has to look at me. We can't be seen from the table. Her face is a wretched map of a confused land.

‘What is it, Mum?'

She waits a long time, turning over her options.

‘
Her
,' she whispers eventually, eyes darting towards the table.

‘Who?'

‘The little girl, darling.'

Tears spill from her eyes, from her wonderful, tired eyes.

‘I know we all love her…' Her hands are up, covering those eyes in surrender. ‘But
who is she
?'

I hold her close for a moment, taking in the shampoo smell of her hair, the food smells in the room. I'm not ready for the core of our world to crumble.

With my back to the opening that leads through to the table, I hear a faint noise and look over a shoulder to find Wally's standing there watching us. Mum's head is buried somewhere around my chest. She can't see him. I watch Wally's eyes for a long time and he looks straight back and it all passes between us.

He knows, he knows.

He understands, and now we can deal with it.

We don't, though. Life gets in the way, especially Wally's life. Cricket for him is a career, deeply entrenched.

For me, it's life with the circus: wanted here, surplus to requirements there. Dance on the highwire, then muck out the stalls. A decision's been made somewhere that I am no longer up to, or good for, the longer form of the game. Over four days, goes the medical
advice, I'm likely to suffer from swelling in the thumb joint, leading to loss of grip, leading to more damage, poor performance, and so on.

Whether that's true or not, I don't accept it. No one's done a test, and I've never complained to anyone on day two, three or four. The deadened joint doesn't hurt. It doesn't do anything.

Late in a long night with Craigo, we name the thumb Squibbly. I'm not sure which of us thinks it up, but it seems to capture the cartoonish horror of a dead thumb, the zombie neighbour of four perfectly good digits.

I have lost a measure of control over the bat, though I won't admit it to anyone else. But there's no one in professional sport who doesn't carry these things, at least not after a few years at it. And this is how the mutual deception grows up around injuries: the player won't say when something's gone chronic, and management will employ guesswork about physical failings to move the veterans along.

But at twenty-seven, I'm nobody's veteran. I can run between wickets as fast as anyone, and there's nothing wrong with my eye. If anything, the minuscule interactions that flow between me and the approaching ball are finer and more subtle than they've ever been. I know a good pitch from a bad one with a press of the fingertips. I can sense fatigue in the posture of a bowler. I can count fielders like a poker shark counts cards, understanding the prevailing odds to my offside and my legside having regard to who throws left-handed or right, who's carrying a hamstring, who's too lazy to chase hard.

I have all this in me, and yet it's useless as collateral in selection. They lean on their spurious medical reasoning and they consign me to fifty-over fixtures with riding instructions to swing big and keep it interesting. The sweetener is I get to play fifty-over cricket for my country, not just my state; but it's clear, if not explicit, that I will never play a Test. Not with a dodgy driving hand, and not with a chequered disciplinary record.
Be the showman,
I'm told.
Go out and entertain the
punters. That's you, isn't it?
I'm an orca in a pool, cutting frustrated laps. On the handful of occasions that I try to construct a careful innings, I'm taken aside and counselled.
No one came here to watch you look after your average
.

So I swing like a madman and run around screaming. Learn to slide in the outfield. I cultivate grudges against various fast bowlers because the crowd likes to see the opposition captains bring those bowlers on when I'm around. I get to travel more, though I'm no longer sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Honey is tiring of it, and she senses the rotten core of the whole enterprise. These are the dying spasms of a career, prone on the floorboards in a pool of blood.

Craig, on the other hand, sees nothing but blue skies in this change of circumstance.

He's been busy setting up a business he calls Wattle It Be, a touring fan club for the Australian cricket side. Ahead of every international tour he buys cut-price packages for people like himself: sweaty single males who like to drink and chant while they get sunburnt in front of sport. The whole concept is horrific, but it's a roaring success. He's turning people away. After two or three tours he works out that he can recruit a retired Test player to operate as a kind of figurehead and pub coach, offering special comments and war stories, and the not-quite-promise of access to the players.

As one of those players, I know there's a fair amount of effort devoted to ensuring Craig's touring parties never get that access. Craig himself does, but that's just part of his mystery. He's there after a session of play; at an official function; up the back of a press conference. Watchful, comfortable, like some kind of security expert. He looks like no one else in the room, almost irrespective of what that room might be—his physical bulk propped up by a wall. The bomber
jackets, the jeans crushed into accordion pleats either side of his groin. He wears his mobile phone in a holster on his belt. Even the team manager, who takes about a thousand calls a day, doesn't do that.

When things go well for me his joy is suffocating. He hugs me, leaves a hand stranded aloft in search of a high five, or starts pounding out applause until others feel obliged to join in. He has this skill for placing himself in vulnerable positions—like the hanging hand, the lone clapping—so that others will rescue him simply to alleviate the awkwardness. But despite that I appreciate it. Honey can't come on tour. I get to chat to Hannah by phone every few days, when the time zones and the homework and the ballet and swimming allow, but beyond that I have little in the way of close personal friendship to draw upon. Wally's there for the international games of course, but his demeanour in the dressing room is dour and fixated, and he and Craig seem like magnets with opposing charges these days. If Craig crosses the room, Wally veers away.

I can talk to Wally, in a limited way. He'll discuss the day's play, the sponsor commitments, the weather, the pitch, the opposition, even Mum's increasing confusion, but it's all a disembodied drone. Watching his eyes, I can still see him in there. But the pressure he places upon himself has sapped the life from our exchanges. I'm a fellow player, a colleague in this sweaty firm, and only distantly a brother.

One night I find him by chance in the carpark under the hotel that houses the national squad. He's got a rubber ball, flicking it fast and low against a cement wall and catching the rebounds with soft, agile hands. It's a lifetime habit of his and he can do it for hours. He doesn't hear me until I'm right next to him. Stops. Looks at me a moment then resumes.

‘Can't get any peace when I do this outdoors,' he mutters.

I drop into the spot that would be the slips fielder next to him, and without a word he angles his next throw so that it rebounds towards
me. Catching it with a dip to my left, I fire it back slightly harder than it came to me. He moves surely, cups it and returns harder again.

This is how we talk
, I'm thinking.

We're boxing sideways, watching the wall. Shuffling feet, feinting and whipping and darting. He's grunting now with the effort, runners squeaking on the polished concrete. I can feel his moves without looking at him. This one high, this one low. I'm snatching them one-handed, throwing with the wrong arm, underarming. His answer, as always, is relentless perfection. He wills me to get tricky with him and he just repeats, and repeats, and waits for my errors.

Finally one of mine hits a pipe fitting at the top of the wall and rolls away to come to rest under a car. I run to get it, come back to find him puffing, hands on knees. He takes a shot from his Ventolin and pockets my return throw. I get back in the lift, sweating in the bright light, and realise I haven't said a word to him.

And this is how I search for him every time I see him; employing the things we both know that no one else knows. Impersonating people we've laughed at, playing to his love of sarcasm. But most of the time, I'm reduced to winking idiocy. The moments falter and are lost.

No such problem with Craig.

A three-day exhibition match in Darwin—middle of the southern winter but a perfect thirty degrees—and Craig's busy blistering himself on the hill with a crew of diehards he flew up the night before. They're staying at the Casino too, he enthuses, when he finds me despite the exclusive high rollers' pass.

This is the night after the second day's play. They've given me the acting captaincy for this one, only because of someone's injury and everyone else's apathy
. I'm the captain of Australia!
I say to myself once or twice. But I'm not. There isn't even a team meeting. Our opponents,
a Northern Territory development eleven, have put up a better fight than anyone expected. Between our insipid performance and their desperation, the two sides are quite evenly matched.

Craig orders two cognacs—no one seems to pay in this bar—and settles in an armchair beside me.

‘You guys need to declare first thing tomorrow,' he says.

I smile indulgently. ‘Does that work better for your drinking buddies?'

‘It's not that. It's gonna rain in the late arvo. And when it rains here, it doesn't fuck around.'

I find myself laughing. ‘Mate, it's the middle of the dry season in Darwin. It's not going to rain until October.'