The Rules of Backyard Cricket (37 page)

And so our family continues to disappear. Dad, so long ago. Honey, because I pushed her. Then Hannah, Mum, now Louise: our fucked-up family tree turns out to be deciduous, and it's mostly the women who've fallen to earth.

It's down to me and him. And when this car reaches its destination, it will be down to him alone.

He's survived us all. Wally Keefe, captain of Australia and family of one.

Cornered

They come for me in the early evening, which is of course contrary to type—supposed to be in the dead of night. Maybe they figured I'd be out then, given the media's portrayal of me as a lecherous insomniac.

I'm in Geelong, having agreed at the last minute to come over and do a sportsmen's lunch. This is not as much of an imposition as it might sound. They pay well and it's the softest room imaginable: the usual war stories, then questions from the floor—
what's it like to face Warnie? Who's the best sledger you've ever heard?
At the end, I sign some merch and they auction it off. There's no Craig at this one, no stifling embrace. Just handshakes all round, an offer of dinner or a bar somewhere, game over. They've sent a cab to collect me, and put me up in a nice apartment.

Which is where I currently sit.

I'm trying to install a pirated copy of Windows in a laptop.

I got the computer months ago, through nightclub mates who knew someone who was ‘moving some units'. Why did I need a new computer? Because some fucker broke into my apartment and stole
the old one. Jemmied the door, turned a few things over and took the computer. Also took some of Wally's Test stuff—a jumper and a bat that I was keeping to sell in the event of a financial rainy day. Oh come on, he wasn't using it.

Aside from what they pinched, they left only one calling card. Took me ages to notice it. On the fridge door I'd collected photos over the years: teams, parties, public occasions, girls. The black backgrounds of flash shots at night. The fridge is clad in black and brown like a Doberman, with sparks of colour here and there like the dog rolled in confetti.

In the middle of the clustered photos, because the older images were at the centre, was a photo of me and Wally taken in the change rooms after one of our very rare appearances together for the state team. Arm in arm, triumphant. I can give you all the records we broke that day; highest partnership by two brothers in the history of Shield cricket, highest one-session total, highest season total (me) and fastest hundred against Western Australia (Wally). Two red, glowing faces, two blazes of teeth. My arm around his shoulders, lockers behind us, the blue vees on our jumpers forming a
W
.

Some unseen hand had burnt this photo.

Two scorch marks tapered upwards across the print, the distinctive teardrop shape of an applied cigarette lighter. His face gone. My face gone.

The pigments of the print bubbled and crazed into frozen rainbow droplets at the margins of the burn. My eyes scanned across all the other shots, looking for more damage, wanting the pattern of that damage to tell me something about who and why. But the shot of me and Wally was the only one torched.

So that was the night I lost the computer, and here I am trying to reload my new one.

Which is when they turn up.

They've come in through the locked carpark entryway, two blokes who don't smell good. My first reaction is to wonder how they've got in without me hearing anything.

Heavy one and a light one, but not exactly panthers, either of them. One minute I'm trying to type an eighteen-number string into a box, squinting like a fool at the screen on my knees, the next there's these two lumbering slobs in the room, one at each of the two doorways leading out.

They close in.

I don't know the room well enough to plan an escape. I look furtively at the window, one of them sees me doing it and then without a word he hits me with something, swift and blinding across the left side of my head. No idea what it is—do they still have ashtrays in these places? But the sound inside my skull is like breaking glass, and my vision is a billion swimming points of light.

The blow leaves me kneeling against the wall. One flank's exposed to the heavy guy, who aims a huge kick at my ribs. Now I'm down on all fours making a desperate
wh…wh
sound, trying to get some air. The other guy's got a pool cue and he's smashing the computer, coming down on it again and again, as though furious that it won't disintegrate into flying shrapnel.

I look up at the guy who's attacked me: he's wiping his nose with a finger. Baby-faced, thirty-odd, hair in a neat, nerdy kind of Lego Man clump. But his mouth's a piggy dint, the forward thrust of his short lips making his nose look snouty.

Bodybuilder's shoulders, big sloping trapezoids that nearly connect his ears to his torso. Loose T-shirt, cargo pants, cut short to reveal the tatts on his calves. Runners, ankle socks. He's wearing some sort of shithouse men's cologne. Lynx or something. The peanut.

The other one's shorter, scruffier, nastier. Got a meth look about him; straggly beard, deep, pitting acne scars, lanky black hair. Thin
and furious, like he should be chasing a huddled woman pushing a pram. Oh God, tracksuit pants. Of course.

Two thugs in a hired room. How randomly horrible.

Two or three others.

Dots to join here somewhere. But not yet.

The air's returning in short gasps but it hurts like hell to pull it in. Babyface has hit me with a pool cue too, I can now see. He's swooshing it lazily through the air as he steps towards me. He brings the cue down across the middle of my back, dropping me to the ground, completely prone. He stands above me a moment or two and I feel the inevitability of all this. All the things that led to this. These cheap louts don't understand their role as the consequences of my sins, but that is what they are.

He's dropped a knee on my head, just where the jaw meets the skull. My face would look hilarious right now. Once he's satisfied I'm completely immobilised, he goes through my pockets, finds my wallet and peels out the driver's licence. He flicks the wallet away, hasn't even looked for cash, then holds the licence up against my face and checks for a moment, apparently unconcerned that the face under his knee doesn't now look much like the one on the card. The licence goes in his back pocket.

This isn't a garden-variety burg, because Meth Man's smashed the one electronic asset of any value. It's punishment. A B-grade contract hit. But surely it comes with a message of some kind, a parting insult, an explanation?

He produces a bag of cable ties, plucks a couple out and then stops, sticks them in his teeth and unbuckles my watch. Lovely titanium Longines, presented to me at the Vics' Team of the Century night. He stuffs it in the pocket where the cable ties came from and rips the ties onto my wrists, one looping under the other, so tight I can feel my pulse in the heel of my hand.

‘Gis a hand.'

The first words anyone's spoken since these two appeared. Meth Man joins him and together they drag me by the bound hands towards an armchair in the next room.

Who are they? I'm scrambling for a connection. Who have I offended? Okay, who have I offended
most
? Pitbull Freer? Christ, it'd be a bit overdue. Would the Weil family pay someone to do this? No, that's ridiculous. Maybe they're debt collectors. I genuinely have no idea who I owe money.

I'm neither limp on the floor nor quite walking, but pedalling my feet slowly in an effort to make the dragging into something conscious and deliberate. They pile-drive me head-first into the armchair, and for a second I can smell the upholstery. Cut moquette, Mum liked that. My arse is in the air, and buried as I am in the heavy fabric, I take a second to think it all through. It's just the head and the ribs at this stage. There's undoubtedly worse to come, but they haven't killed me and there must be a reason for that.

The pain's so bad I can't roll myself into a sitting position, but Meth Man does that for me, taking one leg of the jeans I'm wearing and one of my ears as handles, pulling me round into an approximate slump in the chair. I'm pointed now at Babyface, and he's seated opposite me, dialling a phone.

‘Mate. Yep. Ready when you are.'

He hangs up and pockets the phone. I want him to engage me in some sort of banter, want to work out what I'm dealing with. But he's staring vacantly into space now. Meth Man is walking around the room, smashing things at random. A hole in the middle of the telly. A print on the wall, a scattering of neat looking objets d'art, all trashed with a short vicious swing of his pool cue. He tosses it aside as though the exercise bores him.

Then he walks towards me.

I can feel my pulse bass-drumming in my neck. He's looking at me in a disjointed way, a little unfocused. Then he reaches into his tracky dacks and pulls out his dick. Even Babyface now looks disconcerted. Meth Man inhales, shuffles slightly closer and starts to piss on the floor, just in front of my feet, swaying the stream of urine from side to side with a wave of the pallid-looking slug. Exhales loudly. Waits for the flow to falter and expire, then shakes a drip or two off the end and stuffs it back in the trackies.

‘Fucking pig,' says Babyface.

Meth Man doesn't respond. I can hear a car pulling up in the carpark outside. They both look at the door. Babyface goes to open it. He greets someone without fanfare, someone I can't see because of a dividing wall in the hallway. The someone trudges in heavily, appears in the room, large and slow in a bomber jacket and jeans.

Craigo.

He seems genuinely sad to find me in the chair. ‘Shit, Daz. You look awful.' He looks to the other two. ‘He didn't give you any trouble?'

Nup,
someone murmurs.

‘All right. Okay. Can I—' he indicates Babyface's chair politely before sitting himself down with a sigh. Settles his hands on his lap, then wrinkles his nose in displeasure.

‘Smells like cat's piss in here.'

I try to laugh but the ribs get me and I wind up grimacing.

‘C'mon mate, doesn't hurt that much, does it?'

‘Get him to do it to you then.'

He laughs at that. Easy and relaxed. I haven't seen the Big Guy for a few years now, but he's grown into the role. Whatever the hell he's been doing, he's ascended to senior management.

‘What are we going to do with you, Daz?' he asks, sadly.

‘Good question, Craigo.' My left eye's closing.

‘You know why we're here, don't you.'

‘Got a, a general idea I deserved a beating; but no, mate. Not a clue.'

He smiles again, quite menacing now. Gone is the gormless lug he once was. ‘Take a guess.'

‘Really?'

He smiles again, this time like he's toilet training a small child. ‘Go on. Give it your bestest guess, Daz.'

‘The rhapsody thing?'

‘Emily Weil? No, not at all. I'd say that was one of your better efforts. I know you didn't squeal. What else?'

I've been a naughty boy, off and on, but I can't see how any of it relates to Craigo or his interests.

‘Did I owe you some rent from when we lived together?'

The laugh again.

‘No. No no no. Come on. Try harder.'

‘Have I fucked up something you're doing? Something I haven't realised?' I can't believe I'm being made to think up my own confession, or that I'm trying so hard to please him.

‘Oh no mate. I think you're perfectly aware of what you're doing.'

‘I'm
doing
, like on an ongoing basis?'

He nods slowly.

‘Something you've promised to do, Daz. You can stop dancing around it. The Burrowes Royal Commission.'

It takes me a long moment to process this.

‘Match fixing? This is about
match fixing
?'

I can't believe what I'm hearing, but he's still nodding slowly. I feel like laughing despite it all. ‘What the fuck do you care?'

‘Oh I care, ol' boy. I care a great deal.'

‘I—I…firstly I didn't know you were involved, and secondly, kinda follows from that, I don't know anything that could drop you in the shit.'

‘Oh yes you do. You know a great deal more than you realise right now. Tell you what, have a little think about a few things that didn't go your way during your career. Or think about a few things that
did
, when they shouldn't have.'

I look back. I think of the litany of dropped catches around me, the people who did things I knew to be sharply below their normal standards. Discordant errors that were blamed afterwards on tiredness, or the lights, or a fly, a seagull. I think of my accidental swipe in the Sydney game, and the charity gig that won me the sixty grand, the night I killed a perfectly innocent girl. He's still looking at me.

‘Ever get the sense of a guiding hand in all that?'

‘I thought you just hung around the team cos you were a loser.'

He snorts contemptuously. ‘If I were you, I wouldn't taunt me. I hung around,
Daz
, so I could learn everything about you, your game, your team-mates, the pitch, the tactics. Injuries—the shit you guys talked about, all those boring,
boring
hours in the rooms, “Blah blah blah I'll need an op on the knee in six months.” “I'm not doing the India tour cos Jacinta's rooting the pool boy…” Worth a fortune to various vested interests. I'd got at plenty of 'em, your so-called mates. I won't give you names, but as a rule you aim for the veterans who are carrying injuries, feeling a little shat off at the system. Rookies are so idealistic.

‘But
if
—' he narrows his eyes—‘if you can get your hands on a promising player really early on, compromise 'em before they have anything at stake…Well, that's the duck's nuts. A player who sells you their soul early on is an asset for life. See, if you manage 'em properly, they can
never get out
.'