The Rules of Play

by Jennie Walker

  We stare at each other until I have to force myself not to look away, because Agnieszka is so much stronger, prettier, more vulnerable and more intelligent than I’ve allowed her to be. ‘Ah,’ I say. ‘She doesn’t blink?’

  Agnieszka nods vigorously. She blinks at me quickly, with both eyes, and I blink back and we grin. Then she becomes serious, because she is trying to describe to me something which clearly was very strange to her. It seems that the mother led her around the house and showed her a lot of brand-new and expensive objects: the TV, of course, but then a camera, and a case of champagne, and a statue of a fish that flies—‘A dolphin?’ ‘Yes, doll-fish’— and in the kitchen some complicated gadgets which I can only assume, from Agnieszka’s descriptions, must have been a blender and an espresso machine, or possibly an ice-cream maker.

  ‘Like a shop,’ says Agnieszka. ‘Like Harold’s.’

  ‘Harrods.’

  ‘Yes, like Harold’s. And then Harvey, he takes me to his mother’s desk and he shows me some papers and he explains what is this.’ She takes an envelope from her bag and offers it to me. Inside is a voucher for two people to stay in a time-share apartment in Spain for two weeks in November.

  I begin to understand. ‘So she’s won all these things?’

  ‘Yes, yes!’ says Agnieszka. ‘They are prizes. She does competitions. I tell this to Harvey, and he says no, she wins competitions.’

  ‘Well, someone’s got to win them,’ I say. I don’t mean to be this enthusiastic. Someone with the patience to cut out the side panels from cereal packets with all their virtues randomly listed and renumber them in the only correct order and fill in the dotted line after ‘I buy this stuff because . . . ’ Because, because, because—always the right reason, and never in more than ten words. I like sex with the loss-adjuster because . . . But this does explain the pen, the deep-sea diver’s watch, the tickets to the musical, the vouchers for the hotel. The lifetime’s supply of cans of soup. The crosswords. Jingles, I’m thinking, riddles, anagrams, acrostics, and how impossibly beyond this good Polish girl’s experience all this must be, but she hasn’t finished yet.

  ‘Harvey,’ she says. ‘He is sitting . . . ’ She shoos the man with cycling helmet off the end of the sofa—he doesn’t stand a chance, in the face of her need he is putty—and scrunches herself up like she’s inside a cardboard box. She holds this pose for a long time, as if we are playing charades and I must guess the answer, the title of a film, or a book. But I cannot guess.

  The boy with glasses and pink cheeks, the boy who knows no doubt and might even be able to help me here, has vanished. Already he will be earning more than me.

  ‘So I say to this mother, him too?’ Agnieszka is sitting up again, but looks as if she’d prefer to be still inside a box. ‘She smiles at me like we are speaking about some private thing—you know, woman thing, not for men— and she says, a newspaper for children, many years before. She goes to her desk, she shows me. The pages are yellow. With pictures, and words in bubbles coming out of their mouths—’

  ‘Cartoons.’

  ‘—and she promises to look after him and the priest, he signs.’

  ‘The priest?’

  ‘Or lawyer, she says. Or teacher or magistrate. What is magistrate?’

  I’m not terribly sure. ‘A judge,’ I say. ‘In a court of law.’ A kind of umpire, but sitting down.

  ‘But priest is best, she says.’

  ‘I doubt that very much.’

  ‘And Harvey, now he has gone to the toilet, he does not like this talking.’

  ‘No.’ I’ve said this before but now I mean it. This is a horrible, horrible story. ‘Agnieszka, are you sure you’ve got this right? You’re saying that Harvey’s mother won him in a competition? That he was the prize?’ This must be a mistake, a mistranslation from Agnieszka’s Polish understanding of what she has been through.

  She ignores me. I am dim, thick, pea-brained.

  ‘We wait. Long time. No man can piss this long, really, I know this. His mother, she says nothing, I hear in the kitchen the fridge making noise—’

  I know that noise. Only last night. A rattling, like its stomach is churning, as if it had a body and even a soul, which it doesn’t. It’s pathetic.

  ‘—so I go to the toilet door and listen, then his mother comes too and she bangs on the door very loud and Harvey shouts to us go away, go away, and I am thinking is he speaking to his mother or to me, this silly boy.’

  She looks at me, as if I’m still supposed to know the answer and it’s obvious, I’m just pretending to be stupid. The title of a film, or a book.

  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 . . .

  Bad light. Bad light. Bad light.

  Heads or tails?

  Heads.

  She starts to cry.

  I let her. Selwyn did not cry, I did not cry, and it needs to be done. And somehow she needs me to be with her, in this public room with its stew of indifference and mildly curious stares, so she can do this. So let her. For however long.

  THERE WILL BE a time, if I want there to be a time, when Alan and I will be sitting comfortably together on the sofa watching men dressed in white play cricket on TV. That man’s already had his turn at bowling, I will be thinking. It must be someone else’s turn now.

  Why do they get runs for that? The batter didn’t even hit the ball.

  And then: ‘But the fielder caught it, I saw him— why’s the batter still there, why’s he not out?’

  Alan will look at me. Perhaps he has explained this to me before, and I’ve forgotten. I’m trying, I have been trying, I will be trying. It was not a stupid question.

  He will still be looking at me. He is being patient, but needs me to know that he is being patient, that I am a person he has to be patient with.

  ‘No ball,’ he will say. And then will quietly elucidate the rule about the bowler’s front foot and where it must or mustn’t be when he releases the ball. Again the deliberate voice, and again, although it serves no purpose and I have no good reason to entertain it, I will have the nagging suspicion that he is making all this up as he goes along; that everything he has told me so far is a fairy tale, or an ingenious parody or piece of satire; that he is deliberately misleading me or testing me for some purpose I cannot guess.

  Though I never doubted him, as I never doubted the loss-adjuster, when he told me that he loved me.

  Explain, please. Even if it changes nothing. And don’t tell me that you haven’t got the time, or that I can only learn it by doing it, even though both may be true.

  ANOTHER SOFA .

  I am walking away from Agnieszka’s college and towards the Tube station where the gypsy does his trick, which is not the nearest Tube station but I feel a need just now to see that man, even if only to know that he is still there; and besides, I have no money. I have left my handbag in the college, among the sports bags and paper cups and take-away cartons in the room they call a bar, or in the loss-adjuster’s car, when he drove me to the college, or perhaps even before that, in his flat. How easy it is, when you’re not trying, to cast yourself adrift.

  It will be a long walk. There are hours left in the day. I have passed an Italian restaurant where a man and woman were sitting at a table eating spaghetti—skillfully, politely, not dribbling it down their chins, and in silence. And now I pause in front of a shop selling sofas where another couple—young, late twenties—are trying out the chairs and sofas displayed in the front window. He sits in an armchair, stretches out his legs. She watches, arms folded, then sits at one end of a sofa. He joins her. Without a TV in front of them they’re at a loss; both look sideways, behind, at other models. She gets up and goes over to the chair he was sitting in before, runs her hand along the fabric. The salesman hovers, deferential, attempting to deduce which one of them makes the decisions, which one of them pays. This furniture is expensive; it is an inve
stment, intended to last many years.

  You could do a game-show like this: have couples choosing sofas, and the audience has to predict which couple will stay together longest. It might seem obvious— moving and speaking as one, as against tripping over each other’s words and feet—but in fact often I think they’d get it wrong.

  My mobile rings, in my pocket. I had thought it was in my handbag.

  The loss-adjuster, who never phones, has my bag, which I never lose.

  This is barely a conversation.

  ‘We were going on a journey,’ he adds.

  ‘We were?’

  ‘You remember. If, while travelling, the countryside possesses any significance at all for you . . . ’

  ‘The countryside? No.’

  ‘Not the English countryside.’

  ‘I know. It’s a translation.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve never . . . This journey—where’s he going to?’

  ‘Siberia. A prison camp.’

  I laugh. It’s not exactly a bed of roses.

  We could talk about Selwyn, but that would be unfair, to use him as a distraction. There is a long silence in which I can hear the loss-adjuster’s breathing, and feel it too, on my skin. Inside the shop the woman is walking towards the door, the man following, glancing back at the sofa. The salesman is looking directly towards me, a sour expression on his face, as if it’s entirely my fault he hasn’t made a sale. And then I tell the loss-adjuster to skip to the end and read the description of the prison camp—the freezing cold, the bare wooden huts, the slop buckets, the brutish guards who deal out punishments on a whim—and I say I could be happy there, with him.

  I WALK ON, beneath a sky that earlier was clear but now has clouds in it, bumping each other along. It will rain, perhaps. Is there enough moisture in the air to make the ball swing, if that’s what moisture does? God knows.

  Certainly the experts don’t. Or at least, they differ— sitting safe in the studio, paid their flat fee whether they get it right or not, dispensing predictions and advice in their solemn or eager voices. Bell is seeing the ball well today, they say, he looks to have settled in for a big score—and next ball he’s clean bowled. And then the horrible wisdom of hindsight—he should never have played that shot, he should have waited for the next over—which isn’t wisdom at all. Besides, how can anyone trust a man who wears a red-and-yellow tie with a pink shirt?

  Pace yourself, they say. Build your innings by stages—ten runs, and then the next ten runs, don’t try to win the match in one day.

  I have never been good at taking advice. I listen, and it all sounds sensible, but then I realize they’re talking to me and it makes no sense at all, it bears no relation to life as I am experiencing it, which is a kind of quivering chaos shot through with threads of baffling significance.

  There are some days, I admit, which are so perfect they seem to have been composed by Scarlatti; but many more days that are written by a monkey at a typewriter. And there are odd days when, just going about my normal routine, I notice an abnormally high number of pregnant women, or people wearing new shoes. Today it is the turn of tramps and beggars: three of them—no: five, six—between the sofa shop and the Tube station. Their begging technique is useless (surely someone should offer training?): they mumble, they don’t make eye contact. They are bulked out with layers of ancient clothes. I think they are retired umpires down on their luck, still encumbered with the cast-off jumpers of bowlers who have worked up a sweat and then forgotten to retrieve them. Or perhaps they’ve made one too many bad decisions, and they’ve been sacked.

  Without umpires, where would bowlers hang their hats and jumpers? They’d simply drop them to the ground, like Selwyn does around the house: school tie on the draining board, jeans on the stairs, boxers and socks in the shower room. I bend and gather, bend and gather, like a reaper in a painting by Millet.

  Enforcing discipline: another thing I have never been good at.

  But no one could call me lazy. If a batsman scores a hundred runs and scoots the length of the cricket pitch for every one of them he will have run—wait—about one and a quarter miles. Not much, considering—I mean, considering that sometimes they just smash the ball out of the field and don’t bother to run at all, and they have breaks for lunch and tea, and if they time it well they get a night’s sleep halfway through. Me, I have scored at least a double century today, more than Mithali Raj, while no one was looking, and every one of those runs I have walked.

  When I get to the Tube station my legs shut down, their job done. To those moving around me, who find my stillness an obstruction, I must look like a tourist, lost. I am not a tourist, I live here; and I am not lost, I am simply taking account of—basking in—this pause before I pass through the barrier and go down the escalator to one of the two platforms. A man in a tearing hurry bashes my elbow with his laptop bag as he grabs an Evening Standard, fumbles for change and then turns to the back page: England were 107 for 5 at lunch. I become aware that someone’s watching me, and I know before I look round it’s the card-man, the gypsy, standing with his big hands by his upturned box.

  He’s alone, without his stooge who wears glasses and brings in the punters. There’s something we have in common, this man and I, and I think I recognize what it is: he too is a person for whom Sunday-night TV plays are as alien a phenomenon as Korean folk dancing. There’s a code the characters speak in (most of the lines—the actors also—are from other TV plays, slightly rearranged) that excludes us; and they seem to beat each other up and have sex in the same strange code. We are baffled by the way these plays are at once both implausible (for me) and predictable (for Alan, who has worked out who the murderer is within the first half hour). Some might say the same about cricket, but at least cricket doesn’t pretend to be realistic.

  The card-man steps forward and offers me the three cards, slightly grubby. Although I know I would win, that I could touch with my finger the queen of spades even if I stood blindfold while he shuffled the cards like a concert pianist performing some show-off virtuoso piece, I decline. Instead, I ask him a question you might ask someone you’ve known for years, and who knows you better than you do yourself. ‘Can you lend me some money?’

  From inside his jacket he takes a wad of notes, more hard cash than I have ever seen in any man’s or woman’s hand. This is real money, not some flimsy bit of plastic: enough to put Selwyn through college, enough to replace Mr Chidambaram’s entire stock of fashion fabrics. He peels off five twenty-pound notes. I shake my head. He gives me two five-pound notes and puts the rest back in his pocket before I can refuse again.

  We look at each other, not as if we’re waiting for something to be said but then he speaks anyway. He tells me they’ve just come back on the field after tea at 199 for 7. ‘Eighty-eight more runs to win, three wickets to lose,’ he says, in his deadpan voice that tells things how they are.

  I turn and enter the Tube station. A poster warns me to be careful on the escalator: last year there were thirty-nine injuries, two fatalities. These insistent, random, exact numbers. The twelve newborn children being given each day to the wrong parents (although who is to say they are wrong?). Selwyn, shouting at me from his computer screen his distracting but compelling facts: ‘Mum, get this.’ A goldfish kept in a dark room will turn white. A polar bear’s skin is black. The youngest pope was eleven. If you are stuck in quicksand, lie back, spread yourself wide, and raise your legs slowly. On average, left-handed people die nine years earlier than right-handed people.

  But the loss-adjuster is not average.

  SOMEWHERE IN THE south of England a sixteen-year-old boy playing for his school Second Eleven waits for the ball to come on to him, takes half a step back and with a last-second swivel of his wrists sends the ball speeding over the grass between two fielders; and he knows, this boy, he just knows that however many more matches he will play, however many years he will live, never again will he hit the ball with such sweet prec
ision. On a parched and dusty maidan in the outskirts of Karachi a nine-year-old boy spins the balls towards his older brother’s friend, whose arm-locks are vicious and painful; the ball floats in the air long enough for the older boy to stride forwards and grin in anticipation before missing it completely. In the nets of a junior academy in Perth, Western Australia, a man places a coin on the spot where a seventeen-year-old bowler must pitch the ball, and the boy walks solemnly back to the start of his run-up. On a gritty sloping road in Kenya a long-legged boy sprints downhill after the bouncing ball, swerves in mid-air to avoid a motorbike, falls headlong on the ground and comes up with the ball in his hand and blood streaming from his elbows and knees. On a beach in Kingston, Jamaica; in an alleyway in Ahmadabad, with a broom handle used as a bat; in the basement of a multi-storey car park in Hunslet, West Yorkshire, while the rain teems down outside; in a back yard in Johannesburg, against a wicket chalked on a breezeblock wall. Sometimes sisters may be allowed to field but generally what I see is a boy, a boy, a boy, a boy. In a corridor overlooking the maidan in Karachi a girl carrying a tray of food—bread, tea, cakes, I can only imagine—pauses at a window to watch the young spinner’s next ball. Her face comes only just above the bottom of the window frame. From somewhere further inside the building an impatient voice calls out her name, and she turns and is gone.

  THE LOSS - ADJUSTER ’S SMILE is not sheepish. It’s goatish.

  I want them both, the sheep and the goats, and if I can’t have them then a way has to be invented. It’s called civilisation, the progress of.

  A Hundred-and-One Great Inventions.

  I want to be this batter, and that bowler, not either/ or, and right now I have easily enough strength to do this. An all-rounder, yes, and more than that: an all-rounder who can play for both teams. I don’t care who’s umpire but I trust the dark-skinned man more than the other one. He has something Mesopotamian, Sumerian, about his features. Something aquiline.

  He shakes his head.