The Rules of Play

by Jennie Walker

  Alan knows. He knows where Selwyn is—Selwyn phoned him. He knows the loss-adjuster is my lover, and maybe has known ever since he first saw him that time in Edinburgh. He knows that Agnieszka is going through a difficult time, and probably even the details too, though I’m sure he doesn’t want to. He knows pretty well everything. He may even have been to school with the three-card-trick man. If I ever did forget the loss-adjuster’s phone number, all I’d have to do is ask him. He should be the umpire, not me.

  I blink, and see Alan wearing that wide-brimmed white hat. He is tossing a coin. No, I want to tell him, there must be a better way, we need more time. But you only get so much time before the show moves on.

  Unless I am pregnant. In which case there’s a new member of the cast, a tiny loss-adjuster who’s one quarter Spanish. Or a whole different show.

  I have a sudden feeling of vertigo, as if I am high up on one of those cranes from which they take the aerial shots that show the players as just tiny white dots on the green field. I reach for a chair and sit down. Alan looks at me without expression. I breathe deeply, as I did with Agnieszka only minutes ago, and then I pull the chair closer to my book-rearranger, my knower of the alphabet and all the rules, this man without whom Selwyn would not have been. ‘Alan, what are we going to do?’

  He does that thing with his hands, linking and reversing them and pushing them out in front of him.

  Then he says some obvious things, arranged in paragraphs and sub-sections, as if he’s a committee, but they probably do need saying and he’s by far the best person to say them. He says that this is surely not, vis-à-vis me and him and the loss-adjuster, an uncommon situation. In general. He actually does use that word, ‘vis-à-vis.’ He mentions Alex and Lyn, and Jamal and Sarah, and Kirsten and Robin, he doesn’t need to go on. So people have been through this before, are doing it all the time, and there are models, but that doesn’t mean any one of those models is best for us. Assuming that the loss-adjuster and I love each other—

  A tiny pause here, two commas instead of one, in case I want to interrupt. And I do want to interrupt: how dare he assume we love each other? Why can’t I just have, what do they call it, a ‘fling,’ like everyone else? But instead, I go to the fridge to get some apple juice. There isn’t any.

  —we should probably separate. And Selwyn—

  ‘Selwyn,’ I say, coming back to the table. ‘It’s such an absurd name. It’s for someone who’s much older than sixteen. You should be called Selwyn and Selwyn should be Alan. No wonder he’s confused and doesn’t know what he wants. You know companies—big companies— spend millions of pounds on branding consultants and market research before they name a new product and we laugh at them but at least they’re making an effort, putting a bit of thought into it. If you’d bought a pint for a deaf man down the pub and asked his advice you’d have done better than Selwyn.’

  The fridge makes its fatuous grumbling noise, re-cooling.

  Alan says that it wasn’t like that at all and that I know it. Selwyn was the name of Annie’s father and was the only name possible and was the right one, the name she needed her child to have—Annie, that is, Alan’s first wife, whose own name has not been spoken in this kitchen for a very long time, who died of some awful illness when Selwyn was barely a year old and who was already ill at the time of his birth and knowing she was going to die. It’s almost certainly true that I did know this before but any information I’ve ever had about Annie has been accidentally-on-purpose mislaid in some ancient and leaky storage device that can never be upgraded. A little bit because Annie was Alan’s first and possibly only true love but mainly because illness is something I back away from, don’t want to know about. It doesn’t disgust me—I can clean up vomit, blood, shit, any other discharge the human body is capable of, as efficiently as the most seasoned and crusty nurse—but it does remind me: that I have only one inning, two if I’m lucky. Even colds, even glue ear.

  Now Alan is telling me about sheep-farmers and a place in Wales that Annie’s family came from, his throat and tongue negotiating the double ells with a noise that reminds me of when you push a clockwork toy that’s stuck. He is also speaking, of course, in that premeditated voice, the one he uses to explain reverse spin, to explain anything or everything, the one that suggests he’s concealing something. ‘Yes, I know it’s lipstick. It’s there because Caroline—Caroline, you know? In human resources—she didn’t get the promotion and she was pretty upset, in quite a state, falling all over the place, I had to take her down and get her a taxi . . . ’ But truly, I’ve never really believed there has been a Caroline. Though at times I might have wanted there to be, both for his own sake and for mine. And if he wasn’t speaking in that voice he wouldn’t be him. It’s like that blockheadedness of Harvey that only makes Agnieszka fonder of him.

  ‘Alan,’ I say. ‘I didn’t mean to say that, about Selwyn’s name. It just came out. What I meant was’—more double commas—‘was that I love Selwyn as much as you do, as much as anyone can love him, and if we’re going to talk about separating then we need to talk about exactly who gets separated from who and how and where and it’s messy. It may be to you but to me the answer’s not obvious.’

  Alan thinks about this. Although it’s possible he’s thinking about the cookery books or something else entirely. ‘By the way,’ he says, ‘I put the washing in. But I forgot the apron.’

  I look towards the back of the door where the apron is hanging, a thin black winding sheet, both stripes and stains invisible in this murk we’re sitting in. In this bad light. ‘Next time,’ I say.

  Alan is stroking the cat, which is still sitting on the arm of his chair, listening in. Stroking quite hard, obsessively, though he’s probably no longer aware he’s doing it, and because the cat is moulting, by now there’s a loose ball of cat-hairs at the base of its spine, at the end of Alan’s stroke. I make a bowl shape with my hands and offer it to him. He picks up the cat-hairs and drops them into my hands. I’ve no idea what it means but this is the most imaginative and intimate thing we’ve done together for ten years.

  BOREDOM, SKILL , PLAY, work. You knead or stir and bring a finger or spoon to your tongue to check the seasoning, and if a pencil sharpener accidentally gets swept into the mix it should still turn out all right. But sometimes even for the experts it is hard not to let one taste— desire; duty—overwhelm the others.

  I go to Selwyn’s room and lie down on his bed and think of him walking away from me along the pavement to the loss-adjuster’s flat—he didn’t turn to look back, it was I who did that—and I look for my phone and call a cab.

  Friday | Saturday | Sunday | Monday | Tuesday

  Mesopotamia is now Iraq. On the seat, in the cab on my way to the loss-adjuster’s, there are some pages from yesterday’s newspaper. Not the cricket, thank God, but the inside pages, where I read about an Iraqi man who took his wife, who had been housebound for three weeks, out to the market for an ice cream. As they passed some children playing football on a patch of waste ground two cars drew up and men took guns from the boots of the cars and shot the children. The men got back in their cars and drove off, leaving the children dead or dying on the ground. The onlookers, witnesses, those who stood by, rather than go to help the children, rushed home, got their own guns, and began firing—Sunnis at Shias, Shias at Sunnis. Only when their ammunition was running out, about a couple of hours later, did they start picking up the children.

  I feel loose, hollowed out, sick. I rest my head against the cab window. The traffic at this hour is light but there are still people on the pavements, walking, waiting, arguing, flirting, making decisions. Buy one, get one free announces a sticker in a shop window. Other colors and designs available—please ask inside.

  I HAVE A key. The loss-adjuster is awake when I arrive. Without me, he has no cause for early nights. He is reading.

  Selwyn is asleep on the sofa, under a duvet, and the loss-adjuster is sitting in the armchair, his book in his lap. Thi
s room I have come into is a remote place I might have invented, but not these two people in it. I sit on the floor, my back against the chair, my head against the loss-adjuster’s leg.

  He carries on reading, aloud. It isn’t Dickens or Aristotle, nor is it a book about some wizened, Wisden-ed cricketer.

  ‘If, while travelling, the countryside possesses any significance at all for you, then going from Russia to Siberia you could have a very boring time from the Urals right up to the Yenisey. The chilly plain, the twisted birch-trees, the pools, the occasional islands, snow in May and the barren, bleak banks of the tributaries of the Ob . . . ’

  Selwyn stirs on the sofa, scrunches up. The fetal position. Sound travels—I’ve read this, and believe it— into the womb: Mozart, traffic noise, a book being read aloud.

  I feel safe here. I am on the right road. The only wind is the loss-adjuster’s voice. I begin to untie his shoelaces.

  ‘There is little space between the banks of the Yenisey. The low billows strive to outstrip each other, jostle each other, form spirals, and it seems odd that this Hercules has not yet washed the banks away and drilled a hole through the bottom . . . ’

  I have nothing, now, to say. I have stopped thinking.

  ‘The power and enchantment of the taiga lie not in titanic trees or the silence of the graveyard, but in the fact that only birds of passage know where it ends. Over the first twenty-four hours you pay no attention to it; on the second and third you are full of wonderment, and by the fourth and fifth you are experiencing the sensation that you will never manage to emerge from this green monster . . . ’

  I rub my face against his trouser legs and look up at his lips, their tiny indefatigable movement along the path of words. Down here on the forest floor, beneath the canopy of branches, the air is damp and breathy.

  ‘According to the tales of the coachmen, in the taiga live bears, wolves, elks, sable and wild goats. When there is no work at home the countrymen living along the highway spend whole weeks in the taiga shooting game. The art of the hunter here is very simple: if the gun goes off—thank God; but if it misfires—do not ask the bear for mercy . . . ’

  Not mercy, no, it’s not mercy I want or am asking for, though I can see that if Selwyn woke he might decide that’s what I’m doing, kneeling before this man’s feet to remove his shoes, moving up and further in to usurp that book.

  Which surrenders unconditionally.

  And before I know it I’m on the bed and the bear is upon me and I’m lashing out, biting, punching, beating him off and pulling him into me as hard and deep as I can. Before I know it I’m riding him, bucking, gripping hard on the folds round his neck, behind his arm-pits, the flab on his hips, sweating, thrashing, slabbering, grunting, bleeding from cuts and from scratches, being knocked against the trees. Because this has to be first, and if it isn’t then I have to make it so. Before any knowledge at all, before any rules or white lines or the barest inkling of what is or is not fair play.

  THE LAWS OF cricket were codified in 1744, Selwyn once told me, at the tag end of a Googling session. I was emptying shopping bags at the time, putting a cereal packet on the shelf. The eighteenth century again: they hanged people for stealing a loaf of bread, and they wrote down the laws of cricket, and women who read books wore blue stockings. Me, I have been alive only since the end of the 1960s. So many things I have not noticed, taken account of, that have been here around me for much longer than me, a way of putting it that doesn’t quite make sense. And yet I noticed, and have remembered, that.

  And the time I mentioned Franco and Selwyn thought I was talking about the man who runs the cappuccino place down the road, and then someone from Big Brother, and then some boy singer who only eleven-year-olds and mothers could possibly be interested in. He seriously had no idea who Franco—the Franco—was. He was about twelve, he was becoming curious and had come down to the kitchen for something to eat or to see what kind of game Alan and I were playing. (Alan was once amazed that I’d never heard of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and had only the vaguest idea about Jim Callaghan, but that’s, somehow, different.)

  The period before we come on the scene—all that time, for instance, in our parents’ lives before us, before they even knew each other, what can they have been doing?—is dead ground. We can’t see it from the window we’re looking out from; we have to go up in a helicopter, or creep out of the house at night. But things grow there. Weeds. Shrubs. Strange little hardy flowers.

  Selwyn’s phone calls to Alan—those grew there, in the dead ground before I arrived. Small, deep purple flowers on long stems, growing in the crack between the pavement and a wall, footsteps going by, oblivious. Between the time Annie died and the time I arrived, when Selwyn was five, there was just Alan and Selwyn. A few Agnieszkas and Brancas and Tatijanas passing through, but just the two constants, and between them something must have pollinated. Then I came along and Selwyn and I looked at each other and sprouted all kinds of gaudy blooms, but there was still that other plant, still is.

  So whose team is he on? This boy who so wants me at home yet turns on the pavement and walks away. Whose team am I on? This is not, surely, an unprecedented example of human behavior. Somewhere in the journals there must be a word to describe it, that encompasses these matters—the batsman who heads back to the pavilion even though the umpire has not given him out; or, conversely, who refuses to leave the pitch after he’s been clean bowled; the bowler who keeps on bowling after his over is over; the fielder who picks up the ball and, rather than throwing it back to the wicket-keeper, tosses it into the crowd—a word coined by an Austrian psychoanalyst or an Australian cricket correspondent.

  ‘HOW DO YOU spell that?’

  ‘Dombrowski. It’s not hard.’

  The big woman at the desk turns pages in a box file, running her finger down lists, while answering the phone with her other hand and somehow also managing to wave to someone going out of the door behind me. It is these women—immovable, Ganesha-like, with four hands and enormous ears and placid eyes—who hold these places together, who stop them flying apart to the ends of the earth.

  I have come to Agnieszka’s college to speak with her, because it cannot wait—to tell her how sorry I am that I have not paid attention, how grateful I am to her for arranging the cricket game on Sunday, which was something she did only and without one jot of self-interest to divert and perhaps amuse me and make me more gentle. I am already late. I am always late, and always impatient, things that make no sense together, that shouldn’t even belong in the same sentence. This is what happens, I think, in the second innings.

  Agnieszka is in a class, the big woman tells me, at the same time as changing another student’s course from hairdressing to hospitality management on her computer screen and ordering more paper for the photocopier. She will be out in twenty minutes.

  I turn to the notice-board, the rooms to rent for non-smokers and the DVD-players for sale and the drummers needed, and then see through a glass door a room with chairs and tables. I go into this room and sit down on a sofa beside a low table littered with sandwich wrappers. It’s far too warm in here, the air stale and clammy, but as I look to see if there’s a window that can be opened I become aware that I’ve been asked a question.

  In front of me there’s a boy who in some ways is like a younger version of Selwyn—pink cheeks, and no sign that he’s started to shave—but in other ways not at all: he’s neat, he wears glasses, he doesn’t know the meaning of doubt and all his grades are A.

  ‘Coffee?’

  I must have smiled because he’s putting money into a machine and bringing me something brown and hot in a paper cup.

  ‘No, really, you shouldn’t,’ I say, taking the scalding cup from his hands and reaching quickly for the table, and he shrugs and tells me it’s nothing, it’s cheap, and I immediately realize I am in the room Agnieszka calls the bar, the room where Harvey sits. This very sofa.

  The boy sits down opposite me. He has mistaken me for an
other student, or perhaps a teacher—but this is not a mistake, I am a teacher. The invention of vulcanized rubber, the hydrogen balloon. And I am completely familiar with this clammy air, and with these lovely strangers who move around me in their outer-space clothes, with their tattoos in unexpected places and their seething hormones and their gangly legs that will not fit under the table. Dutch, Chinese, other Poles, and the bashful or grumpy English. Bears, wolves, elk, sable and wild goat.

  Not one of them, I realize, has any interest in cricket. They are too carefree, or knotted. It is not on their syllabus.

  England began today at 24 for 3—these are numbers that for no logical reason have stuck in my head, like those numbers from Selwyn’s website, the eight spiders and the eleven-year-old pope (for whom they would have had to have made a special child-sized crown, or whatever does go on a pope’s head). If they score another 263 runs, they will win; if seven of their batters get out, they will lose; if they play each ball just to stay alive and not die the game will have been for nothing, except pride.

  The boy wearing glasses is speaking to me: ‘So after two years I will be earning . . . ’ But there is Agnieszka at the door, her face oddly blank, showing no surprise to see me here.

  ‘O Agnieszka’—the vocative, it just comes out, as if this college teaches Latin. And then nothing, because there is so much. ‘Agnieszka, please, I’m so sorry—’

  She sits beside me on the sofa. A man with a stubbly beard moves his cycling helmet to let her in. She is not happy at all, and nothing I had intended to say will make her so. She has been with Harvey to visit his mother.

  ‘She is so small,’ she says. ‘Like a baby, but her hair is white. And she never . . . ’ Agnieszka flutters her eyelids.

  ‘She doesn’t have a man?’

  ‘No, not like that.’ She closes one eye, then opens it and closes the other.