The Rules of Backyard Cricket (38 page)

He watches me for some time, assessing what I might think of this insight, then shrugs. ‘Corrupting people, it's kinda fun but it's not where the money is. The money is in fuckwits like you. The ones with the information.'

His eyes have taken on a hooded quality, focused on a point somewhere beyond my left shoulder.

‘Fuck me,' I grunt. ‘You're a match-fixer?'

‘Not really. You don't want to be the one with your arse on the line. I'm a broker. Just buy and sell information. About fuckwits like you.'

He wipes some imaginary lint off his front.

‘Do you know I heard the Pope the other day going on about corruption in sport. The fucking
Pope
. Goes to show, doesn't it? Sport goes to the heart of everything. If you can reach inside it and fuck with its innards,
you're actually messing with society,
Daz. How 'bout that. Bigger than drugs. Bigger than hookers and porn, because people shy away, they can smell the desperation. But the same people will go on consuming sport long after they know it's rotten to the core. They're insatiable. And it levels people like me with people like you. Cos you can play it, see, or you could. But I can
play
it. And I can keep playing it long after your thumb takes you out of it, or some other guy's knee goes, or his back goes. It's a whole-of-life career for me.'

He shifts his bulk in the chair slightly.

‘So what we need to do, Daz…' he reaches out a hand, palm upwards, and Babyface hands him an automatic, ‘is make sure we have a clear idea of what you've been up to.'

He points the gun at me from his slouched position about six feet away. Sights me down the short barrel as though he's at a carnival booth. ‘Have you made a statement?'

‘No.'

‘Got a subpoena?'

‘Nope.'

There's a loud bang and it takes me a moment to work out what's happened. Smoke. Craigo withdrawing his extended arms. He's shot me. Fucking hell, he's shot me, and in the filaments of a blown second I
can't work out where. I crumple downwards over my right leg and find it's through my knee, through the armchair. There's big fluffy wads of cotton around my foot like he's shot a stuffed toy, but the blood running down my shin confirms it's me, even before I register the pain.

The pain turns up now, oh yes. Great roaring waves of it. I imagine I'd clutch at the knee if I had free hands, but I don't. There's tears in my eyes, for God's sake. I look up at Craigo, and find him staring coolly back at me. The gun is resting on its side on his huge thigh, still pointed my way. A haze of smoke in the air between us.

‘Now don't be a fucking idiot, Daz. I know you got served. I know your date. I know you've been to see a lawyer.'

I'm racking my brains, even as the knee threatens to rob me of the capacity for clear thought. This has never been a strength of mine, the ability to run inventory over my past conduct so I can be sure of a position. Craigo knows it. That's why he's pushing me. He's right about both things—I got served and I saw a solicitor. But I'm sure I didn't tell anyone.

‘So I'll go back to the first question,' says Craigo. ‘Have you been interviewed?'

I'm trying to compose a reply but Craigo gestures vaguely to Meth Man.

‘Check his knee, will you?'

Meth Man approaches, standing squarely in his own puddle of piss, and grabs hold of my thigh. With his other hand he cups my shattered knee and finds the hole. Then he slides his grubby fucking finger into it and wiggles it around, leering at me as he does it. I can feel bone moving. A tendon pulls taut under the probing finger. I don't know if it hurts as much as he probably imagines, but the shock of it is enough to make me retch. The shock, and the notion that he might be finding this somehow sexual. He withdraws the finger after three or four hideous chemical breaths and wipes it casually on my thigh.

Craig hasn't moved. He's seen this, done this, before.

‘Is there a statement, Daz?'

He picks up the gun again, points it at my other knee. Meth Man puts his fingers in his ears this time.

‘Yes.'

He lowers the gun. Looks at me inquiringly.

‘I met some people in an office, Docklands. Gave them a statement.'

‘Did they give you a copy?'

They'd frisked me on the way out. They were very uptight about me not retaining anything that might identify them.

‘No. Nothing went in or out of that room.'

‘All right, so what did you tell them?'

So I start explaining to him about the statement, the things I'd thought were important to the Royal Commission, knowing now that I'd been miles off the mark. I'd told them the TV network often requested we string things out a bit towards the end of the short-format games; that we were positively encouraged to tamper with the ball provided we kept it discreet. I'd told them I was once asked by a player, since deceased, to get myself stumped at a particular stage of a particular game, and that I'd fucked it up and hit the ball out of the park. I'd told them that I'd got a much closer look at the culture once I moved into TV; that commentators would routinely check with the players in advance about tactics; that we'd report back to the network with batting orders and bowling changes so they could tailor their advertising to the appearances of the big names. I'd told them about the organised doctoring of pitches to suit particular bowlers, not as some sort of informal pact between a groundsman and a local official, but as an ongoing program that involved men in suits on Skype hookups, almost none of them cricketers.

I'd told them about the seminars in which the production team
were encouraged to understand the game as a product, and not as a contest at all. The spruikers and management types who explained how the product could be ‘optimised' with an eye to a thing they called ‘maximal peak viewer penetration'. I'd admitted the whole thing is a reality show on grass. I'd told them about the time I watched a cowering franchise captain in a Twenty20 game being berated by an executive producer for instructing his most menacing fast bowler to bowl a conservative line on off-stump. The guy was trying to make legitimate cricket. The producer was making prime-time telly. I'd told them my own house was not entirely in order on things moral and legal, but that one thing I'd never done was throw a match.

At first Craigo's listening with interest. Then his eyebrows start to rise on his forehead. Then a smile appears at one corner of his mouth, spreads and pushes his hamster cheeks out towards his ears. Then he's laughing, slapping his thigh in a slightly alarming way with the hand that's holding the gun. The baby-faced guy's taken up another couch and a home interiors magazine, ignoring us completely.
I've just been shot, you big turd. At least feign some interest.

‘So you're saying you haven't mentioned me at all?' Craigo looks like a weight's been lifted.

‘What was I going to say? I didn't know what the hell you'd been up to.'

He sighs elaborately as the laughter turns to reflection. ‘Turns out we were both feeding on the same carcass. But I was making money, eh.'

He's fiddling with the gun, still smiling to himself. A well-fed man of forty-two, receding slightly at the temples, spreading at the waist. He'd have enough money lodged in betting accounts, fed through companies, to do whatever he wants. Dress better, for one. Buy a holiday pile among the finance barons at Portsea. He could swindle some poor grid girl or nightclub hostess into bearing him a
family, stand around with a takeaway coffee in his mitt watching his fat kids trying to play soccer. He'd love that. He's got the charm to pull it off and the wits to stay ahead of prosecution. So why is he stuck in this perpetual man-child bullshit? The open-all-hours micromanagement that others could take care of. The suburbs are swarming with aspirants to his role: the car rebirthers, pill wholesalers, standover merchants and mixed martial artists, itching to graduate. As in any industry, the rookies must have their time, and the journeymen must evolve.

But not Craigo.

The only logical answer must be that he's trapped. Trapped like me, stuck in a loop of denial about the dull decline of ageing. I've been a performing parrot, a larrikin everyman. He's been a plywood cut-out villain. Most of my income-producing activities have been approximately legal, but aside from that we're no different. His pleasures, as mine, have been ephemeral. Nothing has lasted or accumulated, other than the money. Nothing can be satisfying in reflection, because there's no one to reflect with.

He's just put a round through my knee, but I pity the poor schmuck.

Craigo finishes laughing and gives a nod. Meth Man appears from my right with the pool cue, eyes wide with intent. He takes a giant backswing as he lines up my head.

The next moments are like music from a scratched disc. Fragments, passages, severed or blurred just as they promise to acquire meaning. I know I‘ve been carried by the two lackeys. I know I've been dropped heavily. I'm aware I'm in a car boot, as I can smell the strong auto rubber of a spare tyre.

Ah well. So. Doesn't matter.

But then the footage rectifies itself momentarily, comes good in terrible clarity. Craig is above me, one hand on the boot lid, looking down.

Could I plead with him? No, I could not. His face tells me I'm already dead as far as he's concerned. The others must be taking their seats in the car, because presently I feel the springs rock a little then hear the doors slam. He looks down again, lighting a smoke with his other hand. Drags on it, pulls it free. From a pocket he removes a roll of black gaffer tape. Roadie tape. Tears a length of it with his teeth and reaches down to press it over my mouth.

‘You do know what happened to Hannah?'

His words are the first thing that's struck me with any force since the bullet. It's the framing of the sentence, as much as it being such a surprising thing to say. You
do
know. Not inquiring as to whether I might know, nor assuming that I actually do, but implying that I
should
know.

‘Sydney. Your stupid lob when you were supposed to be stumped. Everyone did their dough on that deal, you know.
Everyone
.'

His face changes in a tiny way. Those eyes narrow a little and the eyeballs trace a vague circle around the inside of the boot as he brings the lid down.

Oh God.

I'm
what happened to Hannah.

Release

I've been asleep at some point, dreaming my way through these things.

The boot. The dark. The pain and the looming end.

We must be coming to the end. The physics have changed. We're going slower, and I'm being pressed from side to side: head against one mudguard, feet against the other. It's colder. There's very little discussion in the car—just occasional directions.
Left here. Don't take that exit.
Of course they wouldn't risk the sat nav. They've probably turned their phones off altogether. Craigo is no longer his ebullient self. Maybe he's reflective.
Isn't life funny. I'm off to bury my childhood bud Dazza.

Just like when I was fiddling with the tail-light, I can feel half an instinct to have a go. Do something, anything, to disrupt the sad and inevitable progression of things. Another part of me is deep in fatalism. We're nearly there, and this part won't hurt as much as the previous part did. It's absurd: escaping would be nice, but I'm not really fussed.

At least one of them must be seated in the back, as there were three present for the kneecapping. I'm fairly sure Craig would be
driving because it's his style to take charge. So it's one of the others I can hear snoring. For a ridiculous instant I'm tempted to thump the back of the seat to get him to shut up. In the midst of that idea I raise a fist and then remember with some surprise that it's free.

My hands.

I'd forgotten about them, must've fallen asleep right after I got them loose. Squibbly's a sticky mess, but of course he doesn't hurt. The rest of my left hand hurts. I flip it over and feel where it was lying. My fingers close around the big shard of the tail-light casing, like a prehistoric stone tool digging into the heel of my hand. My kingdom for someone to stab.

Then a tiny idea forms.

I rub the palm of one hand against the vertical surface of the back seat. It's lined with carpet and feels like it's backed with board of some kind. It doesn't take me long to trace my way to the edge of the board, where one section of the split-fold rear seat meets the other. I dig my fingertips into the fabric until I find the slim groove where it's been tucked over and stitched in. Then I take to it with the shard of plastic. At first, nothing happens, and I stop for fear that the scratching sound is audible. But the snoring continues and the rhythm of the car hasn't changed.

I slash downwards again, pulling at the edge of the covering with my other hand. This time it gives a little, and I can jam a fingertip into the opening I've made. I poke around and find there are staples, and I've pulled three of them out. I yank down harder and another three pop out. The sound of the tearing is slightly louder, so I have to wait again to see if I've been heard.