The Gift of Speed

by Steven Carroll

  Everything he would one day need is in this shop. To be a proper cricketer — like the cricketers in the books and newspapers, in magazines and on the television — he would need to look like one. And everything he would need to acquire that look is in this shop. All the other shops are inferior, they sell inferior goods. But here everything is as it should be.

  It is a busy shop, but a quiet one. Nobody speaks loudly. People rarely speak above a whisper, as though they were in an art gallery or a library. And from time to time, the crisp, dry, quiet voice of Hassett himself can be heard as he slowly moves about the shop inquiring if his customers need anything or if he can help them in any way. And when he isn’t speaking to his customers he is talking cricket — with players, old and new, visiting the shop — in that voice Michael knows from the radio. Here the air is crowded with talk of cricket, by those who not only know their cricket but know how to talk about it. Michael knows his cricket, but he keeps quiet here and listens and watches.

  Hassett is not a big man nor is he loud. Every time Michael visits the shop Hassett seems to look more like a writer than a cricketer, like someone who has made his name with a pen and typewriter instead of a bat and pads. Like someone who has spent the years tapping out words, not runs, someone who amassed books not centuries — someone who might even find a cricket ball, hurled at sufficient pace, a trifle disconcerting as they might say in the types of books and plays he imagines Hassett, the writer, writing. And so, every time he visits the shop, he has to stop and pause and reflect on the fact that this slight, jovial man with the crisp, dry commentator’s voice was once the captain of Australia. That this slight, jovial man with the writer’s way about him has actually faced the great Lindwall, and the Englishman Trueman, whom you might call Fred, or Freddie, depending on Trueman, and depending on the day. And not only faced them, but gently clipped them all around the paddock, as they say on the radio, which always amuses Michael because he plays on paddocks. Indeed, there are times when it crosses Michael’s mind that if he didn’t know, and if he were asked to pick from the customers and staff who the onetime Australian captain was, he would not give the slight, jovial Hassett a second thought. The same Hassett whose favourite line of inquiry is ‘Are you right there, boys?’ whenever anybody lingers long over the autographed bats.

  Then his voice is nearer and it occurs to Michael for the first time since entering the shop that he might actually speak to him. Michael does not want to be spoken to, he does not even want to be observed, and so he slips away to a corner of the shop and waits for Hassett to go back to the counter where he will resume his conversation with a man his own age about a game they both played many years before — yet which they both clearly recall in all its detail. Detail enough for stories and laughter. It is only then, when the quiet, inquiring voice of Hassett has returned to the front of the shop, that he lifts his head and sees them. Bowlers boots.

  He smells the leather of the soles, notes the shiny white leather of the uppers, catches the glint of the metal spikes. These are the boots of a bowler who plays on turf. Turf. Michael plays on sandy gravel pitches that are little more than short footpaths, or grounds that are no more than mown thistle and weed, or on concrete pitches covered in matting. He has never played on turf, but he knows that that is where the best of cricket is played and that the bowlers who play on turf wear boots such as these. That is what the spikes are for. They dig into the ground and they give a bowler feet to bowl with, for if your feet aren’t underneath you where they ought to be you can’t bowl. But boots like these give a bowler feet. And with the feet come the legs — because everybody knows that you bowl with your legs. The arm rolling over, and the delivery of the ball — that is the last part of a long, complex process. Bowlers run — and they run with their legs. The great Hall runs ten miles a game. It is the running that gives you what his science teacher calls momentum. That’s a good word. He likes that word. It’s almost as good as speed. But not quite. Speed is his favourite word. There is no better word in the language. The very sound of it tells you what it means. And momentum too. Momentum is the messenger of speed. When a bowler has momentum you know that speed isn’t far away. Momentum, velocity, speed. All good words. And it all starts with the legs. But in order to have legs you’ve got to have feet, and in order to have feet you’ve got to have boots like these. And as he stands there he can imagine what it is to bowl with these boots, can almost imagine the snug feel of his feet inside them. He can imagine what it would be like not to lose everything just as you were about to deliver it, as he does on the sandy, slippery pitches in the paddocks that he plays on. The smooth, perfect action of the great Lindwall makes sense when you look at boots like these, because he doesn’t have to worry where his feet are. Not on turf. And not in boots like these.

  He has seen turf once. Seen the entrancing green and the sparkling white lines of turf. Seen the white picket fences and the deep green clubrooms of a ground where they play cricket as it is played in books. But only once. Michael bowls in tennis shoes. Everybody does. And as Michael stands before these boots, contemplating the difference between boots and tennis shoes, he becomes increasingly aware that there is an entirely other world of cricket out there, just waiting to be played. The shop always brings this world a little closer. In this shop he sees leather cricket balls, cream shirts and sleeveless sweaters. But it is to the boots that he returns because it is the boots that give you feet, and without that, everything else — the shirts, sweaters and trousers — are mere decoration.

  Throughout the time he has been standing in front of the boots, Michael has been aware of the radio playing softly in the background. It is the First Test and the final day of the game, but by the early afternoon it is clear that the situation is hopeless. The great Hall is bowling with speed and laughter. Then the radio tells him that Hall stops bowling and Michael loses interest. As he leaves the shop he eyes the boots one last time.

  On the train he watches the late-afternoon sun pour itself into the corners of the North Melbourne rail yards and remembers walking across the soot-blackened footbridge with his father to the workshops one morning, although he has long forgotten the reason for his being there at all. He watches the same sun melting onto the rooftops of Kensington and Newmarket — old suburbs, old houses, squashed together in rows. He knows the stops by heart after years of taking the dusty red train to and from the city. Then he watches the same sun yet again settle onto the rooftops of Essendon and all the suburbs that follow, and soon he sees the flour mills of his suburb glowing in the distance like the medieval towers of a medieval town, and all the houses become flat and square and dull and he knows he is nearing home.

  During the last part of the journey, he takes a pamphlet from his pocket. It is from the district club and was sent to all the local teams. It is asking for the best young players from each club to attend a special training session, a clinic, where they can be coached and observed. Michael has had the pamphlet for a week now and looks at it every day, studying its every detail. This is where it begins, where dreams stop being faraway things, the stuff of other people’s lives, and start to enter the daily world of what you do. This is how someone begins to live a dream. They open a pamphlet one day, suddenly know what needs to be done and set about doing it. That’s what they all did, the greats, they didn’t wait to be showered in dreams. Dreams, he knows, can be lived because ordinary people go out there into the world and live them. These are the ones for whom dreams are simply the things you do.

  He has weeks to wait before the date stated on the pamphlet. Between then and now — in this red, dusty train carriage, pamphlet in hand, watching the egg-yolk sun, orange and scarlet, melting down onto the high walls of the flour mills — he will run and bowl every day, until he is barely aware that his body is performing a function. Until he is so concentrated on the task at hand that he forgets his concentration and is no longer aware of the sounds of the world around him, when he enters another dimension of living al
together in which the passage of time and the bleating of cars and trains and people belong to another, lesser world. When there is no need to be thinking of yesterday or tomorrow, or the day before or the next year, because time will have collapsed into the single moment of delivery when his arm rolls over and it all works out.

  But to do this he will need feet, and to have feet he will need the boots he saw today.

  The house is empty and warm from the day’s heat. And quiet, the way a house that has been vacant all day is quiet. The lounge room is clean and tidied, old magazines and newspapers neatly stacked under the coffee table. In the kitchen Michael switches the small plastic radio on and sound enters the house for the first time that afternoon. Immediately, the house is transformed. The voices on the radio are excited; raised voices on a normally quiet station. They are using words such as ‘extraordinary’ and ‘speechless’ and ‘unbelievable’. And then, because they can find no other words with which to express this thing that so excites them, they repeat themselves and the words ‘extraordinary’, ‘speechless’ and ‘unbelievable’ burst from the radio once more and fill every corner of the house which, like Michael, is stirring to the news that something extraordinary has indeed happened.

  It is then that Michael hears the word ‘tie’ — again and again. The commentator is repeating the word, almost with a question mark after it, for it seems to Michael that there is disbelief in his voice. In all their voices, for there seem to be many commentators and they all seem to be talking at once. And it is then that he hears another word — ‘historic’. The word ‘historic’ is now joined with the word ‘tie’ and the phrase ‘historic tie’ is uttered. The commentators have been so stirred by the events they have witnessed that it takes them a long time to form simple phrases.

  Soon they calm down and are able to speak more complex sentences. And soon, Michael is being told that this was the greatest game ever played — and it is Michael who is listening with disbelief. He is leaning over the radio in the kitchen, leaning against the bench upon which the radio sits, and slowly taking in the news that this has been the greatest game of cricket ever played — and he missed it.

  He can’t believe that while he wandered slowly back to the Flinders Street Station through the city, while he stopped for one of the ice-cream thick shakes for which the station is famous, while he sat on the train and watched the sun melt onto the rooftops of Kensington and Newmarket, Essendon and Ascot Vale, and while he ambled back past the flour mills and along the Old Wheat Road — that this thing, this extraordinary event was unfolding without him. He missed it. And now he is being told that, mathematically, the chances of anybody — any of ‘us’, says a commentator — witnessing an event such as this again are infinitely small. And all the time, as the voices of the commentators and the occasional sounds of the small crowd at the ground enter the kitchen and fill the house, Michael stays bowed over the radio.

  He has no memory of leaving the kitchen but he must have because he is now standing in the backyard staring at the glow of the evening sun, at the peach, plum and lemon trees and the shimmering gold-plated leaves of the passionfruit vine on the fence. Somewhere out there, a thousand miles to the sub-tropical north on the Brisbane pitch, this thing had happened and the day has been transformed into one of those days that is remembered. One of those days about which people talk and have quite specific memories — what they were doing and when and where. Just as Michael will always recall that the events of this day took place without him.

  10.

  Gannon

  In the evening Michael emerges from his room after having devoured all the news of this game of games, to find a short, square man standing in the kitchen. He is almost as wide as he is tall. He is wearing black golfing trousers, a dark-blue cardigan and has the tanned face of a regular mid-week golfer. His hands are plunged deep into his pockets and his feet (as if he is about to drive an imaginary golf ball) are planted firmly on the floor. He looks perfectly at ease in somebody else’s house. He puts his glass down on the circular table as if the kitchen were his. And when he turns to Michael, his wide, meaty hand, with its short square fingers extended towards him, it is as if he is welcoming the boy into his own home. Michael shakes the hand of this short, square man and the strength is unmistakable. His hand is hard, metallic, like the machines in Webster’s factory.

  Michael wants to return to his room but his father insists he stays, that he sit and drink and talk with the old man and his mate, Gannon. Michael notes again how quickly someone his father meets at the club bar becomes a mate. The boy wavers, his father repeats his invitation. Normally, he would shrug his father’s drunken insistence off and go to his room anyway, but there is a guest in the house and he feels compelled to stay. And it is then that their guest, once again giving every impression of inviting the boy into his own house, points to a spare place at the table and Michael sinks onto the new, green vinyl chair.

  The kitchen clock tells Michael that it is nine-thirty. It is still warm. His father and his guest have been at the golf course all afternoon and at the golf-course bar all evening. His mother is away overnight in the country as she sometimes is. Not that Michael cares about these nights now. He doesn’t have to wake in the dark any more, sit by his father’s bedside and explain to him what day it is, what roster he is on or who his fireman is. Not now. But his father, during these times when Rita is absent, makes a point of being the first to rise the next morning. Partly to prove to himself that he still can — and could if required to — and partly to reassure both himself and the household that he wasn’t really that drunk the night before.

  Their faces are sweaty from the afternoon sun and the evening’s drinking, and the beer they have drunk continually pops out in beads of perspiration on their foreheads. Their guest is an ex-policeman. A detective. Michael’s father and this man have been drinking all evening and when the golf-course bar closed his father invited the man home, as he always does because he never knows when the night is over. The man, this Gannon, asks Michael a few preliminary questions and Michael asks about being a detective because he has never met one before. All the time his father, with the faraway stare of the drunk, looks on with the kind of smile that readily converts to a sneer.

  ‘You see all sorts of things that most people don’t,’ their guest says. ‘Meet all types.’ He nods, and he clearly doesn’t mean the types that the likes of Michael would care to meet.

  He offers an example and on one of their new, vinyl chairs he leans forward with a cold stare, and a flat, matter-of-fact tone to his voice that creates an attentive silence in the kitchen that is different from all the other silences Michael can remember. He talks, he talks. Quietly, matter-of-factly. Michael doesn’t move, nor does his father, whose drunken smile has slowly drained from his face. It is possibly a minute since Gannon started talking, possibly five. His hand, which seems to have expanded in the course of the conversation, is reaching out across the table as if clutching a melon. He is illustrating a point. It is not a melon. It is, in fact, the back of a man’s skull. One of those types whom the boy would not have met and would do well not to meet. One of those types he has had memorable dealings with in his past life as a detective. In front of them this Gannon then paints a vivid picture of a brick wall, made from the sort of rough, grey bricks that have recently become quite fashionable, and which, in fact, Gannon confesses he contemplated using for his own house. Michael knows the kind of bricks he is referring to and as he watches their guest’s hand he feels those bricks pressed up against his own forehead, nose, cheeks, mouth and chin. The whole of his face is suddenly pressed into those bricks and he knows what comes next. He is, therefore, not surprised when Gannon’s hand begins its slow descent, and that imaginary face pressed deep into that imaginary brick wall descends, unresisting, with Gannon’s hand.

  ‘I was talking to him the whole time, you understand,’ he adds, in that flat, matter-of-fact voice he would no doubt have used at the time. ‘And w
hen I’d finished my little talk and we’d run out of bricks and words, I’d left half his face back there on the wall.’

  He pauses for a moment and lets it all sink in.

  ‘We couldn’t touch him, you see. But we knew he was our man and the point had to be made. You understand?’

  Their guest is now staring intently at Michael, waiting for a response, and Michael nods. But this man, this Gannon, keeps staring at the boy, not fully convinced by, or satisfied with, the nod he has received.

  Ten minutes before, Gannon had the vague eyes of the drunk. Now he doesn’t. He has been sobered by the tale. Sobered by violence. And Michael knows that this man is as at home with violence as he is with other people’s kitchens. Gannon sits back for a moment, pours himself a drink and savours it as if it were the first of the evening.

  A silence follows as he drinks, and Michael’s father covers that particular kind of silence that people such as Gannon bring with them with a description of Gannon’s house.

  He’s no longer a detective — he doesn’t say what he does now — but he lives on two acres of land to the north of the suburb; a new double-storey house in which he lives with his wife, his beautiful daughter, and his swimming pool. And even as he listens, Michael is idly wondering how an ex-detective manages to come by a mansion with a swimming pool. He does not know much about wages or salaries, but he does suspect that policemen don’t live in mansions as a rule.

  Gannon then extends an invitation to Vic and Michael that they visit his house, swim in his pool, and meet his wife and daughter.

  ‘But don’t get any ideas, young man,’ he adds.

  At first Michael doesn’t understand, then he realises that Gannon is referring to his beautiful daughter and Michael quickly assures him that he hasn’t got any ideas. He says so in the same matter-of-fact tone that Gannon uses, so that he won’t get the wrong idea. Michael has been learning about irony at school. His teacher calls it a weapon. But Michael can tell that Gannon has no time for such weaponry. He can tell that in the eyes of the Gannons of this world, irony is for the weak. And so when Michael says that he hasn’t got any ideas he says so in a way that ensures there can be no misunderstandings and that he doesn’t come out sounding smart. Gannon lives in the simplified world of violence, he brings its basic laws with him wherever he goes, and he doesn’t expect them to be contradicted.