The Rules of Backyard Cricket (39 page)

By rolling over and changing my angle, I can now get my flattened left hand inside the back of the seat. Fingers and palm dart about, painting me a picture: flat springs, padding. I can visualise the pattern of curving wires. Pinching with the good thumb and a forefinger, I can
pluck out little scraps of the padding foam, and before long I've dug my way through the full thickness of the seat, about a foot up from the floor of the boot. I think about that height for a moment and I figure my tunnel would be located at roughly shoulder-blade height for a person sitting in the back seat. But I still don't know which side Back Seat Guy is sitting on, and there's only one way to find out. I press gently against the cloth at the back of the hole I've made. It feels firm. The snoring drones on. I poke hard and there's an abrupt snort.

‘Bout time you clocked on, fuckhead.'

The voice is from the front seats, but it isn't Craig's. The reply comes from much closer to me, sleepy and gruff. I remember the voice. It's the skinny one, Meth Man.

‘Fuck you. We there yet?'

‘Ten minutes. Anything from the boot?'

‘Nothin.'

Silence for a moment. Then Meth Man's voice again, whiny.

‘When do we get fuckin paid?'

There's no answer at first.

‘Huh?' he whines.

‘You know how it goes,' responds Craigo. ‘He's paid a deposit, and I'm holding that. Not
on
me, obviously. When the job's done, he hands over the balance, and you get paid. Got a problem with that?'

It seems Meth Man doesn't, but I do. If Craigo had his worries about the match fixing and needed to find out what I knew, then that's all covered off. He's done the work himself, and got the answer. So who's paying here? Who's
he
?

Within seconds, the snoring resumes. I start the process again on the other side of the divide between the seats. This is the passenger side, and it's wider than the other side where I made the first cavity. This time I can cut the covering fabric more cleanly and pull it away from the backing board, revealing the tops of the staples. By jamming
the tip of the shard under each staple, I can wiggle them free one by one, until the whole right side of the seat backing comes free without a sound.

Once again, I start digging away at the padding, flicking the lumps behind me until I've made a fist-sized hole. When I reach the fabric on the cabin-side of the seat, I stop for a moment. It's clear there's no one sitting on this seat, but I need a little think. I could cut open the fabric and get a hand through into the interior of the car, but what would I do then? I have no way of knowing where the back seat recliner latches would be. And I can't very well feel around like Thing from
The Addams Family
until I accidentally pat Meth Man.

So I retreat for a moment and cradle the sticky, insensible form of Squibbly while I reconsider.

The latch that drops the back seat has to be connected to some sort of mechanism within the seat. So the answer is not to access the latch, but to find the mechanism. I start randomly picking at the foam, taking a pinch at a time, thinking all the while about those ten minutes and how fast they're ebbing away. I'm a hopeless, banged-up Houdini, unpicking padlocks while I slowly drown.

When I've emptied the near side of the seat without result, I start working towards the far edge. Almost all the way to the wheel arch, my fingers close around something unfamiliar: a plastic tube like electrical conduit, running vertically from top to bottom of the seat.

Pick, pick, pick.

At the top, the tube ends at a plastic box of some kind. I imagine the seat latch is contained within it.

More picking.

I've revealed the whole area around the tube and the box. Although the tube is one piece of plastic and is unlikely to be broken open without a lot of noise, the box is made of several pieces, clipped together somehow. The ends of my fingers are registering the fine
seams where the pieces join together. I crowd as many fingernails as I can along the seam and heave downwards.

Shit
. Broken nail. And to no effect.

Taking the tube in both hands, I pull my weight over towards the corner. Crowded up against it, I can apply a little more weight to the task. And sure enough, leaning on a bunch of burning fingertips, I can feel the plastic start to give way. I release the pressure for fear it'll snap. Now I can slip the shard into the gap that's appeared, and pry away, the fingers of both hands now curled like whacked spiders' legs by cramp.

If I was briefly ambivalent about living and dying, that time has passed. Now I can feel it, the beginnings of a desire to solve the puzzle, shooting in synaptic pulses from my pounding chest all the way out to the fingernails that are currently responsible for my fate.

And it won't happen fast enough. I can't pull harder, can't risk the noise. And every time I get a good purchase on the tiny edge of the plastic, the car lurches from side to side, pressing me into the corner and then pulling me away. Left, right, left, right…it can mean only one thing.

They're in the hills.

In the end, physics does what I don't dare to try. Just as I've got a four-finger grip on the edge of the plastic, easing a little pressure into it, the car swings violently to the left and I'm ripped away from my work, sucked towards the driver's side with my fingers still jammed in the gap—inside the little plastic box, inside the back seat. The plastic gives way with a loud
snap
.

‘Fuck was that?' I hear from somewhere in the car.

‘Came from the boot,' is the reply, much nearer, from Meth Man in the back seat. Edge of concern in his voice.

‘Just round the corner anyway. Fuck him.'

‘I could pop him through the seat.'

‘Don't be a fuckwit. You're not firing a gun in the car.'

Meth Man's got his ear pressed against the seat, listening for me. I can tell because I can feel the rounded lump of his head against the back of my hand. I feel like punching him hard in the scone. So tempting—the surprise, the stinging wonder of the one you don't see coming.

But no time for that.

Inside the box is what I expected to feel: the spiral steel wire that controls the seat release. It's guitar-string taut and hard to grip. The car lurches, and I flail hopelessly in the dark to grab onto something: I only succeed in jamming my right hand in the tail-light cavity again. Struggling for something to secure against, the hand closes around the electrical wires that led to the globe.

Answer.

I rip at them, caring little now about noise. They come free from their moorings, about a hand's length of wire. The car swings again, flopping me over onto my other side, conveniently facing my work again.

I want to live because I want to beat these morons. To my great surprise, I want to win.

I wrap the globe wires with their soft insulation around the steel of the seat wire, winding them tight until they grip the big wire firmly. Wrapping the rest of the wires around my hand, I start to heave upwards. Immediately, there's the sound of a spring twanging against a latch somewhere deep in the base of the seat.

No time to take stock now. Meth Man must be upright, because the car's last couple of lurches have brought me back to face the seat, and I can feel no pressure from the area where his head was. I rotate ninety degrees so I can crouch with both hands prepared against the seat back. The pain from the shot knee is like a volley of deafening, discordant music.

The car keeps swinging from side to side.

I have nothing left to do and no other chances. Just this chance. Right now.

I press the foot of the good leg against the metalwork near the tail-light and spring forward, crashing through the back seat and into the cabin of the car. I see the headlights on trees, the blips of colour from the dashboard display. Two large, dark blank shapes which are the backs of the two front seats. In my peripheral vision is Meth Man, just inches to my right, starting to move.

But I'm looking straight ahead, at one thing only.

The handbrake.

The forward momentum has carried me all the way to the handle, resting between the two front seats. Time compresses as I land on the flattened back seat, right hand outstretched. First stab at it misses by a mile but the second one doesn't.

There's shouts, exclamations, panic.

I rip the handle upwards with everything I've got left. I can hear the ratcheting sound of the handle coming up, the squeal of the tyres, and then Back Seat Guy is on me, with an elbow driven deep into the ribs of my back, right where they'd smashed me with a pool cue an eternity ago. The force of the blow has finished what my desperate dive started, pushing me deep into the narrow space between the front seats, wedging me in there with the handbrake handle, seconds ago the most important object in the universe, now stabbing painfully into my armpit.

Meth Man hasn't got a chance to get any more blows in, because Craigo, who is indeed at the wheel, is now fighting the car, over-correcting as it gyrates madly across the road. My only view of his world is out the driver's-side window, just past his gut, and he's way too preoccupied to give me a thought. The trees change plane, ripping towards the right edge of the window, then blurring towards the left.
The rest of my body is weightless now, floating above the seats and drifting left, as the car leaves the road and I'm watching tree trunks, not canopy, then canopy not trunks, then starry sky, and grass and sky and grass and trunks again.

There are thuds and cracks and bangs and small glassy tinkles and cusswords, silences and metal screeches, all of it closer together and closer still, telling me we're gaining speed not losing it and no one's minding anyone anymore, each enveloped in their own terror and my neck whips despite the confinement and my head bangs hard and my back bends in a way it shouldn't and I see Craigo's head smack blunt against the glass, so hard I can hear his brain slosh and that's it from him and I get one white hot jolt from the knee and then we're turning over and I can feel gravity taking me up towards the roof lining and there's a long, long silence like something's going to happen and then it happens.

The flat punctuation of impact, too giant to process. It's probably accompanied by a great cinematic
bang
but the force, not the sound, owns the instant.

I'm crushed against Craigo's left hip—climbing into the pocket of his jeans. He's come towards me, I've come towards him, and the dashboard has punched forward on both of us. There's takeaway food containers around our heads. The stereo has broken free of the plastic console and speared diagonally forwards like a half-brick on a building site, tearing into my scalp.

Then it's over. The world is still. The dimensions of the car are no longer what they were. A suffocating sort of reality, entrapment in multiple directions.

So I wait, and I listen. Ticking engine, leaking fluid somewhere. A wheel spinning above us, elliptical, bearings crushed and grinding. Breathing, short and crackled, from the back. No words, but a thin whistling sound. I've got no way of getting my head around to see what
state he's in, but it doesn't sound good. I can't tell what's gone on in the passenger seat either.

Craigo I can see, in a way. He looms all around me, the wide bulk of his chest. Above an odour that could only be blood I can smell him, meaty man; no surprise given I'm lodged in his armpit now. His face bulges at me, caught in a grunting instant, eyes open and thoroughly dead. His head is looking where heads shouldn't, back over the rear of his shoulder, pressed there by the caved-in roof. No more Mister Nice Guy.

My feet are free. I can wave one foot in open air, though the other one, being dependent on the shot knee, won't co-operate. By tiny measures, I start to retrieve my arms from under my chest. My right hand is still clenched on the handbrake handle. My elbows are working fine, and so are both shoulders, but I can't get the arms free from their padded cell between the seats.

It's while I'm working in this problem that I see Craig's phone, wedged between his hip and the upside-down seat. It's not illuminated, and might be as dead as Craigo for all I know, but it's a finger-length away. I work it free and clutch it in my fist as I wriggle.

So I shrug my way backwards, grinding various exposed parts of my body over the jewellery box of shattered glass. None of it matters anymore. I've got my legs free now and one foot, out in the open air for the first time tonight, has found the stump of some small plant. I hook my toes under a branch and work the leverage it affords; hips then chest emerging through the shattered rear window until my main task is pushing the slumped bulk of Meth Man off myself. He's wet and heavy but offers no resistance.

As my shoulders come free, skin tearing on the window's ragged edge, I roll my eyes back to where I've come from. The mangled arse-end of Babyface is within reach, the pockets of his cargo pants. I slip my fingers in, rummage and retrieve my licence card. My head's left a
slick of blood over the white roof lining, enough blood, I think, that I ought to be concerned. There's a stoned kind of fog descending over me and I'm sure the two things are related.

I'm out now and among the bush, the wet leaves and grasses in the darkness, an alien intruder in the forest. I want to rest here, cool and quiet, among the slugs and insects. Broken man beside a broken car. The towering spars of the eucalypts up there somewhere, stars above.

Stars above.