The Rules of Backyard Cricket (35 page)

‘They can't keep her like this.'

‘Like what?'

‘Like
this
,' he gestures angrily towards the bed. His suit and hair are immaculate. He is a man at the peak of his personal authority, staring at something he cannot possibly control.

‘It's not a care problem. She'd be like this if she was at home, or in a hospital, or in fucking Borneo, pal.'

‘Don't get smart with me. Look at her.'

I've looked at her, hour after hour, for weeks. What I see is the patient body working by increments towards its own conclusion. Terminal decline. Can't fight it, can't change it.

Wally stands up abruptly. Starts pacing. His voice is clenched to a fierce whisper. ‘She's got no quality of life. She'd be hating this.'

He turns his back on Mum and me, plants both his elbows on the high windowsill, stares out at the baleful sky. The backs of his legs are outlined the same way in suit pants as they once were in whites.

He drags a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end. He remains perfectly still at the window for a long, long time as the afternoon darkens. The ceiling light isn't on; the gloom descends. By the time he turns to face me, his entire expression has changed. There are blotches of red on his throat and the bags under his eyes are starkly apparent.

He walks past the end of the bed, takes the other guest chair and puts it against the door. He leans over Mum. Gently slides the second pillow out from under her head.

I still haven't caught on.

He stands above her holding the pillow by its ends, looking at her with a heart full of hell. And I still haven't worked out what he's doing.

Then he lunges forward and presses the pillow over her face. Pulls the ends down over the sides of her head with his mouth pressed in a grim line of determination. I'm transfixed by a squiggled vein in his temple, the sinewed ferocity of his hands. He'll break her neck before he suffocates her.

It takes me an eternity to move.

Then I'm on him, round his ribs, trying to get enough purchase to swing him over the far side of the bed. But his weight is forward, his balance perfect, and I can't get him to budge. He's moved his grip so his elbows are pinning the pillow and his hands can grasp the metal crossbar over the bed. And while I'm looking at that I see the big red alarm button and slap it with one palm.

It lights up but there's no audible sound.

He's still going. It's been so long now.

I punch him hard in the jaw and he slackens, has to regather. I hit him again in the ribs and this time he straightens up, a knee either side of Mum on the bed and gives me one back, catching me in the side of the throat. I grab his wrist on the downswing and pull him towards me. He doesn't move until my weight falls to one side and the collective mass of both of us is too much for him. There's a huge crashing of furniture as we take out the bedside drawers and the chair I was on a moment ago. His fingers again in my eyes, and a lamp on top of us. I can feel the hot bulb near my cheek.

Then there's other noises, changes in the weight on me. The cavalry are here, two big islanders in orderlies' shirts. They heave away at Wally until they've separated us, drag him out of the room and down the corridor, from where I can still hear him yelling. A young female nurse has appeared and is tending to Mum, who remains in unconscious suspension but appears to be breathing.

The nurse hisses at me furiously, ‘What the hell's going on?'

I'm gathering my breath, can't respond.

She's still muttering. ‘Fucking Keefe boys. Everything they say's true, isn't it.'

In the midst of these bewildering days, a headline appears:
Fall of the House of Keefe
.

I don't need to look at the by-line—it's Amy Harris.

She charts our rise, subtly paralleling it with her own ascent through the ranks.
I was a cadet journalist when I was first sent to profile two unknown sporting prodigies from Melbourne's gritty western suburbs.
She talks cricket with confidence by now. Explains Fed and Squibbly and treads gently through the loss of Hannah. She commends Wally on his professionalism and dedication, defends him against the allegations that he was boring or mechanical, rationalising that his dour approach was exactly what Australian cricket needed at the time—was what the Australian
people
needed at the time, because none of us can differentiate our sporting fortunes from our real ones. She charts my countless acts of idiocy, pausing to reflect on the untold damage left behind after Emily Weil.
An unmitigated disaster.
No argument there.

Then come the paragraphs that must have caused migraines in legal: my association with
a known organised crime figure, Craig Wearne
. His colourful career, his remarkable good fortune in evading prosecution for anything. The stultifying effect that friendship had on my playing career, his extraordinary access to state and national players and his links to Asian bookmaking syndicates.

Asian bookmaking syndicates
? When?

There's a row of mug shots to emphasise that Craigo has chosen some highly inadvisable friends. Two of them are no longer with us.

And here I am: shortly to become the third of Craigo's friends with
(deceased)
under my photo.

She mentions that close observers believe I am trying to pull
away from the pernicious influence of this ‘small-time gangster', but that the damage was done long ago.

All of these things I can bristle about, but they're more or less accurate. Then comes the part I really didn't see coming.

It has been widely known but not reported until now that Pamela Keefe, the mother of these vastly different brothers, has battled dementia for many years. She is now close to death in a Melbourne hospice. The relevance of this news? Simple: the major moderating influence in Darren Keefe's life is no longer there to protect him from himself.

Throughout his various troubles, Darren has pulled off a series of soft landings, in part due to Pamela's efforts on his behalf, and in part through the influence wielded by his highly decorated brother. Now there is only Wally to fill that role, and there are signs, since his release from the world of cricket, that he is tiring of the responsibility.

And who could blame him—particularly after Darren's conduct at the testimonial event following his brother's retirement. Anonymous onlookers have commented that Darren remained deep in conversation with Wally Keefe's wife, the well-known charity CEO Louise Arnold, throughout Wally's valedictory speech, and that he left the room with her. Both were said to be intoxicated, Keefe in particular being described by one onlooker as ‘an improbably frequent visitor to the bathroom' that night. This newspaper is in possession of statutory declarations from two eyewitnesses who report seeing Louise Arnold leaving Darren Keefe's hotel room just after 7 a.m., shoes in hand.

Three heroic women have propped Darren Keefe up all these years: his mother, his former long-term partner Honey Nicholson, and his sister-in-law Louise Arnold. You could say he has a heroine habit.

And this latest incident, after all of the odium that has littered his public record, may well be his greatest betrayal.

I read it over and over, the first time racing ahead, unable to accept that she is going to do what she does. The second and third
times, I'm looking for some other interpretation. After that, I'm thinking about the legal implications. I'm smart enough to know the idea here is that I sue them for libel and they defend it, and then build sales on the ravenous media interest that would attend the fracas. A dignified denial from Wally only buries me further. They can't lose.

I can't believe the scale of my misjudgment about Amy Harris. There were times along the way when I felt I was doing her a favour talking to her. Hey look, you've got access to the Keefes. And this is how she repays me.

That's what I'm thinking as I sit there reading the paper. What I think now, crumpled here in the boot of the car, is that her assessment of the night with Louise was an incorrect but reasonable inference, and the rest was a sterile lancing that was long overdue.

The winter is the end of Mum. It seems fitting. She represented summer to me all through the years in which memory has edited out the winters.

She stops late one night; just ceases to be. The only perceptible sign of death is her gradual cooling. This great engine of love, ground to a halt.

Her eyes are closed, the thin eyelids wrapped papery over the orbs and mapped by capillaries. Her mouth is set in a gentle curve that over my remaining days I will construe as a smile.

The staff at this place have never had much time for the Keefes—even Wally, since the incident. And now, with Mum lying newly deceased in her wretched bed, a thin man in a nursing-home uniform stands tentatively in the doorway with a folded plastic lump under his crossed arms. He's just present enough that after a while I look at him properly. Blue plastic. It's a body bag, fuck him. He's standing there with a body bag.

We send her off on a midwinter Wednesday, brittle and harsh, from a brick veneer funeral joint on a main road. It looks like a motel, like there'd be a bistro nestled among the landscaping somewhere. A sign saying
Vacancy
.

A brief Catholic service, short and uninspired, a product bought out of a catalogue. Then we're standing around, the three of us, working one another quietly for conversation on the damp ground. Louise is beautiful in a charcoal suit and skirt, solemn and contained. Grief is her constant companion: a day like this is her natural context. I can feel the chill coming up through my shoes as we stand by the grave and watch them lower the casket. I know that casket's over-generous, because in the end there was so little of her, as though the departing memories took the flesh off her bones as they went.

Looking around, I'm shocked at how little her life amounted to. The sun in her eyes, that easy capacity for love. The patient dedication, the humour and the toughness. She was such good company; where the hell is everybody? Maybe this happens to all of us: despite the thousands of hands we shake, cheeks we kiss, quiet favours we bestow, you wind up with a handful of gloomy stragglers by the hole.

And here in the dark, living through my own hearse ride, I can picture the human trash in the front of the car, the lot I drew for graveside company. They'll be smoking and flicking butts on my battered corpse as it disappears under shovelfuls of earth. Drinking beer maybe, cans carefully thrown in the hole because you can't be too careful with DNA; standing aside to piss and watching the steam rise in the headlights as I go under.

Mum mightn't have got the numbers, but at least she got some love.