The Rules of Backyard Cricket (32 page)

On the night I manage to silence the room by talking of the awe in which I held him as a child, the dreamlike state we both emerged from, the jousting and punching and the heckling and the endless repetition of the same series of physical acts to tune them to perfection. I tell them that seeing this as a grudge, seeing it as disharmony, is to fail to understand how brothers operate. I tell them it took two of us for one of us to emerge fully formed in the world. A sacrificial anode, drawing the corrosion away from finer machinery. A second vehicle, pilfered for parts. I tell them I understand my place in the world as that lesser being and that it doesn't trouble me, but in fact fills me with pride.

I tell them about the day of his asthma attack and how it felt. I am standing at a podium in this vast stage and when I look down I am looking at a few sheets of white paper, blinding in the technical light. When I look up I see a dimmer glow, a sand-scattered ocean floor, those faces in their hundreds. And no one is speaking. I have them, I have all of them for this moment. The eyes look back at me as I remember him going white, going silent.
This is a thing you didn't know about your captain, a thing he carefully hid from all of you
.

He's at the front table, looking up at me in his tuxedo. Composed, dignified, still. Somewhere between man and middle-aged man. His mouth is a fixed line of authority and calm. A mouth I punched many times, a mouth I watched that time, gaping for air, reaching for life. I can't tell from up here whether he desperately wants me to shut up, or whether he's comfortable with me trawling through such things. Louise is beside him in a scarlet gown that lends itself to the occasion. She's reaching over his shoulder towards a waiter—not listening, I'm sure—pointing delicately to her glass. A flash of jewellery. Her hair. A refill.

I free them from the silence with some laughter. This is a man, after all, who once rang me from Karachi in the middle of the night to complain to me that a regional newspaper in Quetta had got his batting average wrong (by zero point oh three), and needed to be reminded that there was a military coup going on. A man so impervious to sledging that it was often left to me to tell close-in fielders to shut up, even when it was him at the striker's end. A man so particular about his health that he used to carry around a tiny square of paper with his blood type, asthmatic status and a history of all known illnesses written in minute script. Once, when he had it out to show someone, I whipped it from the palm of his hand and ate it.

When I'm finished I call for him to come to the stage and I watch him walking towards me, strong and centred. He smiles generously as he reaches me and shakes my hand, and says something in my ear,
quite loudly, which I can't hear at all over the applause that's covering my exit, his entrance. I nod enthusiastically and do a little point and laugh thing. Our eyes are dancing frantically, trying to find each other as our bodies pass.
Are you in there?
his eyes are asking, and so are mine.

We never connect.

I flow on down the vast steps from the stage and take my seat at the front table next to Louise. There's handshakes and laughter at the table, and she puts an affectionate hand on my thigh as she congratulates me. I can see their ring on her finger, aglow in the half-dark. Her hand is shaking slightly. She smells of chardonnay.

Wally's reached the podium, waited for the applause to subside and thanked me. There's kind words about my free spirit, my example of living for the moment, my capacity for fun. All of these things, I know and the room knows, are euphemisms for my inability to keep a lid on it. He swiftly moves on to wider themes. And as I listen to his summation of an entire career, I sense no pathology, no wear and tear. There's Hannah, of course. But if Hannah was going to break him, he would be broken by now. For someone with such obvious resilience—a facet in which the public can see what I see—the passage of time would ease the pain, not compound it.

So why is he retiring?

He talks about completing the circle. Says he's achieved what he set out to achieve, has left Australian cricket in better shape than he found it, and other such roll-the-credits clichés. But you don't live as competitively as Wally and then one day just lift your foot off the pedal. Devoting himself to his charities? I don't think so.

He's finishing up. A smile, a hand modestly raised in half-protest as the applause swells and fills the chamber. Hands are thrust forward. Cabinet ministers and rock stars; other veterans of the public gaze. As though each might ease his transition to the afterlife, these are the coins for his eyes, these pecks on the cheek and handshakes.

He's inching forward, coming down the wide steps, moving at glacial speed towards our table. The throng around him shows no sign of dispersing. Louise watches, looks away, sighs. He's laughing politely at something someone's said. She's checking her phone. He accepts a glass of champagne from an outstretched hand, still shuffling gradually forward. Her face is awash in the phone's bluish glow. Godawful triumphal music fills the room and a floor producer is throwing to a break and people are milling around, heading for the bar, streaming to the bathrooms. And I'd join the migrating hordes but I've already snorted every trace from my little bag in anticipation of the speaking gig.

Now I can sense Louise looking at me, and for a second I'm reluctant to acknowledge this by returning her gaze. But I do eventually, and when she's sure I'm looking and she's locked me down firmly with her eyes much darker than I've ever noticed she says the words, or maybe just mouths them over the white noise.

‘It's always been like this.'

There's a tiny smile of apology maybe, or resignation. I know she's near to crying, and for a frantic moment I try to imagine why. Hannah? Wally and his perpetual
other
ness? The ceaseless pressure of her life, with its public requirement of practised grace overlaid on clashing tectonic plates of managerial bullshit and human crisis? It's a wonder to me that she's not curled up foetally in a stairwell somewhere, rather than looking, as she does, like a statue perfectly carved to reflect the dimensions of her tragedy.

As I rise from the table there's backs to slap and hands to grab, but nothing like the intensity of what's going on behind me. I take the jacket from my chair and stab my arms into the sleeves as I push back through the crowd. Five minutes later I'm twenty-seven floors above the mayhem in my hotel room, hoofing scotch from the mini-bar like a dying man.

So the 4.15 a.m. knocking is a surprise to me, but probably not to you.

Loud, persistent, beyond ignoring. I reach the door, still in at least half the evening's clothes, and it's her.

Louise, alone and hopping slightly to remain upright. My head's swimming, not hungover yet, just not present.

I bring her in, looking like a guilty man both ways down the corridor, and she mumbles something about the bar downstairs. She'd waited for hours and eventually got a text message from her husband's manager to let her know he'd got a late flight back to Melbourne.

She stares at me with frightening intensity.

‘C'mon,' she slurs, holding the front of my shirt. ‘Fuckin tell me. You thing you know? Who the
fuck
is he? Fuck is he, Darren? Slept with him twelve years I dunno. Huh? You know? You ever…punch it out of him? Eh? The boys!'

She makes an exaggerated, sarcastic salute to a grandstand located somewhere near the airconditioner. I can hear a faint hiss as her body shifts in the fabric of the scarlet dress.

‘Keefe boys! Fuckin jampions. Oohyeah. Jesus, whas in the minibar?'

She bends down, staggers a second on one bare knee and a hand and swings the fridge door open. I'm watching her arse, because the animal in me never quite sleeps. She finds the half-bottles of white, takes a slug out of one and slumps against a cupboard with her wrists on her knees. As she swallows then exhales, the tears follow her breath down and over her chest, flaring red where her skin's exposed.

I'm not going to lie here and tell you I've been a moral man, but I want you to know that I'm struggling in this room, on this night. If I'm lecherous enough to be wrestling with certain desires at this point, faced with my own brother's wife in a state of distress, having
come to me in this hotel room; does that make me a bad man? What if I feel that charge in the air and somehow evade it? What does it matter anymore? Her husband isn't here, doesn't care; mightn't find out anyway.

Half-sleep and alcohol have got me running in deep sand. Louise can't be another object of this endless bloody brother-angst. Yet she sits at the hub of our concentric circles, at the core of it all. And what does
she
think about it? I can't form a coherent thought.

The storm is passing. She's gathering her breath as she looks up, and through the wreckage I know she understands what's going on. She works her way onto one hand, one knee, finds her feet and totters towards me. Three steps, slightly taller than me in her heels. She reaches me, places a hand on each shoulder, eyes unfocused, but directed towards mine. And as she leans in, pulling me closer with the ends of her fingers, she takes back one hand and draws her hair behind one ear with a smile that says comfort, says trust. The world again, swirling inwards with all its permutations, a record playing backwards as consequence rushes to meet its cause.

Then she trips slightly, at the last possible moment. I take her weight, ease her onto the bed and watch her curl there. With her long exhalation, the moment is gone. She closes her eyes, an earring lying on the edge of her cheek.

Three hours later I can see her from the couch, tiptoeing through the door, her shoes held low in her left hand, stepping over the newspaper with a silent
morning
to the maids in the corridor. They look at her without surprise. Everyone knows who she is, and whose room this is not, but hotel cleaners have seen everything.

Mum's in a hospice by this stage. Louise did most of the organising. Nice place in Kew: third floor, peach walls and bluish pastel prints
from the eighties. An aged-care facility, though she's not old enough to belong in one. Aged care in such places is defined not by chronology but by the scale of indignity: incontinence, dribbling, weeping for ghosts and ultimately dying. If you're twenty-two with a brain injury, or (like Mum), fifty-six and ragged with Alzheimer's, you're aged.

We've been talking over hours, over days.

To an unknowing observer, she would appear fine. She's remembering Wally's debut century for St John's, his first innings on turf. I was furious at the time, comprehensively outshone with a miserable twenty-five or so. But she saw the day differently.

‘I was so proud of you both heading off on your bikes that day. I was tired, you know, and I'd see you come in from the fruit shop and you'd shower and change and go back out to play cricket all day in the heat and I remember thinking I wish I had that kind of energy. It leaves you at some stage, doesn't it? You can't feel it happening but it leaves you.

‘You both needed new gear for that game. Grown so much over the winter and I hadn't even noticed. I'd got you these pads that were far too big because I thought you might get a couple of seasons out of them and I felt guilty sending you off with these pads, knowing they'd be flapping all over the place.'

How does she know what it feels like to run between wickets in too-big pads? From obsessing about us. Watching us with forensic attention to detail.

‘But I sent you off in new pads, and Wally had the new bat, the Gray-Nicolls that he made the ton with.'

‘You didn't see it, did you?'

‘No, I was back at work. But I rang the grandstand a couple of times from the phone in the bar at the Commercial. They'd give me updates.'

‘Shit, you missed out on a lot, Mum.'

She seems baffled by this. ‘What do you mean?'

‘You worked so much to get us those things. I'm only realising it now. Bloody dreadful. Did I ever say thanks?'