The Rules of Backyard Cricket

by Jock Serong

  Mid-on’s the vegie patch, never grows anything but tomatoes this time of year, stinging nettles along the back. Dirty bare feet in there come out red-welted. Midwicket is the shortest boundary, formed by the Apostouloses’ fence. Directly behind those palings, separated by a spindly pittosporum, is their kitchen. If you really middle a pull shot—wrap the handle around your ribs and smack that ball sweet off the end of the blade—it makes the finest sound hitting the timbers out there. I can only imagine how it sounds at the Apostas’ kitchen sink.

  Fine leg is into the corner, towards the crappy asbestos outhouse that contains the second dunny and the laundry. Something about the plumbing in there; there’s a smell even when no one’s been.

  Keeper and slips are automatic: the big sheet of trellis that Mum put up to grow climbing roses. Snick it onto the trellis on the full and you’re gone. Hit the dog and it makes a hollow thud.

  Sam’s a random element in all this, wandering around sniffing the air. Occasionally he lies on his back and does that thing fat dogs do when they wriggle around just scratching the bejesus out of their backs. You can’t shoo him away. You have to get on with it no matter where Sam is located, and you can’t hit him. Hit him and you’re gone. If Sam decides he wants to stop and eat a bee off a clover flower right in the middle of the pitch, you play around him. In future years, under greater pressures, I sometimes wonder if Wally and I learned to stare through distraction because we had to play around a fat dog.

  So you’ve got Sam acting as a sort of close-in fieldsman at large. But then you also have inanimate fieldsmen you can place yourself when you’re bowling: the metal rubbish bin, the little tripod barbecue, the two swans made out of painted tyres. When I’m on the attack I like to have all of them crowded round the bat so close that it’s actually hard to bowl through them.

  In this memory there’s insect repellent in the air. Mum’s been out with the blue can. She never says anything when she’s focused like this: just presses her mouth into a firm line and does the necessary. Economy of movement. We’ve both frozen in position and scrunched our eyes shut. The can hisses; her bangles tinkle as she sprays the stinging fumes, greasy on the skin.

  The ball in Wally’s hand is a Slazenger tennis ball we pinched from the proddie church tennis club, because in those days tennis balls could only be purchased new as a set of four in a vacuum-sealed can, unattainably expensive.

  We figured out we could sit in the primary school playground just over the far end of the tennis court and wait for the pennant ladies to sky one. The ladies knew we were waiting there and we knew they knew, but they were never going to catch us, not with two Malvern Stars leaning against the cyclone wire and at least a twenty-second head start.

  While waiting for this particular ball, I’d got us a deck of Extra Milds: the shiny gold pack, the cellophane with the little tear strip. ‘And a box of matches and a packet of Juicy Fruit, thanks. For Mum.’ Eyeballing the guy as the guy eyeballed me and we both reflected for a moment on the nature of truth. So the brother and I sat there in the shade, enveloped in a bitter blue cloud, arguing over who was doing the drawback. We were both coughing—me because I was doing the drawback, and him because it was some kind of weird habit of his.

  The yellow stain in the middle of the filter is called a pig root, I explained to him. It’s not cool. People will think you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re eight, he came back. You actually don’t know what you’re doing. Throughout his adult life, Wally will say ‘actually’ when he’s getting all shrill and emphatic. Besides, he went on, pig rooting is what dogs do. Pretty sure it’s what pigs do, I said, and he punched me in the arm with one knuckle out for extra bruise. I squawked and spluttered smoke.

  The ladies watched disapprovingly, but by and by their lack of interest in other women’s kids took over and they resumed their gentle lobbed exchanges.

  Our vigil continued: every ball they produced from under their knicker elastic was a pending addition to the stocks at Fernley Road. Like I said, they knew it; we knew it.

  Thwock. Thwock. Birds chippering somewhere up high. A lawnmower droning away. Planes in an empty sky. And if you listened closely, the crackle of the smouldering tobacco as we pulled it to a red hot glow. Thwock, thwock-thwock…Poong!…that’s a mis-hit, and over it comes. Gaffers in mouths, squinting, we reel it in and hit the road. At ten, Wally can bounce a tennis ball along the road while he rides, although he’s carefully ditched the cigarette for fear of being reported by neighbours.

  Morally, to him, the theft of the balls was excused by sporting necessity: a matter of subsistence. He could rationalise it that way, and liberating the odd Slazenger from the ladies was a whole lot different than, for example, badging their cars. Which was something I did without regret.

  And right there you have an essential distinction between the Keefe brothers. I would do these things for the sheer joy of it. Busting free, sending my blood roaring in the knowledge I’d flouted the rules and disappointed expectations. The problem for me is that the more times you do it and the more you get caught, the lower the expectations become. Correspondingly, the lesser the thrill.

  I’m surprised at you, the teachers would say. But they weren’t.

  The previous term I’d been caught watching the girls doing handstands in the area of the yard reserved exclusively for the girls to do handstands (which I think owed more to the Brothers’ voyeurism than to any desire to afford the girls privacy while they inverted themselves). For this I was caned, which in retrospect must’ve been a double payoff for the Brothers.

  I’d cheated on tests (detention), burned centipedes with a magnifying glass (caning), thrown a bolt-bomb on the road near the bus stop (caning) and fed a paper clip into a powerpoint (electrocution and caning). Most recently, I’d clean-bowled a grade-four during recess and, when he refused to vacate the crease, I’d spontaneously waved my dick at him. The timing was poor: Brother Callum was standing directly behind me as I did it, confirming that if you chant the Litany of the Saints often enough, the Holy Ghost will grant you invisibility.

  Brother Callum (Calumn?) was an Irishman of the ancient kind with a temper that seemed to channel centuries of rage. His chief responsibility was teaching us obscure prayers in a viscous Donegal brogue that left us guessing dangerously when we repeated the lines back to him. The metre ruler awaited any transgression. Only the Mother Church could conceive of a torment so exquisitely weird as ordering eight-year-olds to recite forgotten chants back to an armed sadist who couldn’t pronounce them in the first place.

  So you can picture my horror when I saw the batsman’s eyes looking back at me—past me and my pecker—over my shoulder to Brother Callum. I was still turning and simultaneously restuffing my shorts when he pounced, crushing me in a headlock that shut off the sun and silenced all sound. The next bit I have trouble describing, such was the intensity of the pain, but those watching told me later that Callum drove two or three punches into the top of my skull, his big pewter rosary ring leaving lumps on my head that I could still find with my fingertips at fifteen.

  He was grunting something, yelling something as he did this, but between the oxygen deprivation and the tortured dialect, I was never going to hear what it was. Eventually he dropped me and I slumped to the asphalt, dazed and bleeding.

  The school must have rung Mum. She was down there within the hour, barely long enough for the nurse to clean up the wounds. I was made to wait for her on the steps of the school, and as her car pulled up I felt a rush of shame and anger and also tears and I can still see her coming towards me, her face a shifting landscape of fury and love and insight. She’d read the whole thing by the time she reached me, wrapped me in a hug that smelled of her, one that I never wanted to leave.

  She ran gentle fingers though my hair, felt the cuts and took me by the hand. Her face was white, her lips clenched. Fury had won but it wasn’t directed at me. She flung open the glass doors and rained hell on everyone in sight.

&n
bsp; Brother Callum. Jesus, he must be long gone. He clearly has haunted me till the day I die, though.

  Anyway, we’re back home, sun’s still shining.

  I wanted to tell you about showing the ball: a particular ritual that must be observed by the bowler before any recommencement of play.

  First let me say that upon our return from the proddie tennis courts I would of course be bowling because I am the younger, and the role of the younger is to feed deliveries to the imperious elder.

  But to the ritual.

  First you have to declare who you are. You don’t just lob the ball down using your own action and personality, you have to be someone. Lillee, Holding, Bob Willis…Doesn’t matter who it is, but you have to nominate and then you have to impersonate their run-up and action, follow-through, the lot. The great benefit of this arrangement is that you can select a bowler who fits with the conditions and your mood: the gentle guile of Derek Underwood if it’s hot and you can’t be stuffed; the silent menace of Andy Roberts if you’re carrying a grievance. Failure to adopt a persona when bowling attracts no particular penalty, but it’s poor form.

  The most formal bit is showing the ball.

  We picked up somewhere, maybe on late-night coverage of Wimbledon, the moment when a tennis player taking new balls must hold them aloft briefly for their opponent to see. In tennis, it’s common sense: the new ball will look different and bounce differently, and therefore it would be unsporting to make the change unannounced. Equally in the backyard, where there’s an even greater variance between one ball and the next, to launch a fresh pill without some declaration would violate an unspoken code of decency. You’ve probably already discerned that decency, like the February grass, was thin on the ground in the Keefe backyard. But this was bipartisan. Ball etiquette was fundamental.

  Balls turn grey when left for months in the sun. Tennis balls can be split by impacts, or by the dog’s exploratory jaws—and a split ball will bounce either higher or lower depending how it lands. Balls can be taped—all over to make them heavier and more painful on impact, or half-taped to simulate the swing of a real leather cricket ball. In times of high conflict the ball might not be a ball at all—it could be a piece of fruit or a small rock. So we placed a simple constraint on our own deviousness: show the ball to the batsman prior to play, or any wicket taken thereafter would be declared null and void.

  Of course, this created the opportunity for even greater conflict. A cunning batsman, having noted the bowler’s failure to show the ball, would swing with cavalier disregard, aiming at windows, trying to bullseye the metal bin, the swans or even the dog, in confident assumption of immunity. Once dismissed, the batsman would lean smugly on the bat and shake his head. Voices would be raised, equipment thrown. Unless Mum intervened, it would end in a red-faced tangle with fingers in eyes and gappy milk teeth sunk into soft flesh: an itchy, grunting wrestle that never produced a clear winner.

  But there was one strategy that got around the apparent full disclosure of showing the ball.

  We were among the first in the neighbourhood to own a microwave oven. It was a Philips CuisinArt. To this day I don’t know what inspired the old girl to make such an esoteric purchase. We weren’t remotely affluent, and this gadget was the province of rich people.

  However, that was no concern of ours. Overnight, a technology had entered our lives that could bring slabs of congealed pie back to life so we could consume them at tongue-blistering speed. You could dry wet sneakers in it, melt a brother’s GI Joe—or doctor a tennis ball.

  It’s relatively simple, I suppose. The ball goes on the turntable and the air inside expands: ergo, if you overdo it, the ball explodes. If you get it just right, however, you wind up with a ball that will bounce to incredible heights, making it virtually unplayable off a good length. But like the moral payoff in a Greek tragedy, once the magical powers are spent, your ball is flat, listless and liable to be smacked all over the place. Ten minutes of preternatural spring and the ability to hit your opponent’s body repeatedly without effort. After which, if you haven’t managed to get him out, revenge will be a slow and painful business. Such is the counterweight to any exalted state of being, as I would find out much later on.

  And it would be me, time after time, who would misjudge the axis between glory and humiliation, revelling in my temporary ascendancy rather than effecting the dismissal. And on more than one occasion, when I had turned my mind to the central issue, scattering his stumps or luring him into the false shot that would bring the inanimate fieldsmen into play, he’d casually lean back on his bat and laugh at me. In my impetuous rush to get from kitchen to pitch with a newly cooked ball, I’d failed to make the necessary disclosure before delivering.

  The neighbours comment euphemistically to Mum that her boys are ‘very spirited’ or ‘remarkably competitive’. It’s impossible for us to see that we’re forming an obsessive antagonism, an entanglement placental in its depth.

  I know Wally deeper than biology. His frame, his posture, his voice and movements. That dry, chipping cough of his, the one he issues all the time, whether he’s sick or well. The way his eyes dart and I know he’s switched mentally from derision to anger; and equally, when and why he’ll laugh uncontrollably; when his strength will give out in a fight, where he’ll try to hit first.

  I know his ribs—hell, I’ve aimed at them enough. I know how the sun burns him in late spring: a glow over his shoulders, blisters bursting and flaking on his nose.

  I can recruit him from a conversation with adults, from his homework or from his perch on the toilet. I can claim him from in front of the TV or when he’s half-asleep. One look, a nod towards the back door and he’s out there, because he wants to beat me as much as I want to beat him.

  From the day—lost now in the Kodachrome blur—when we take up backyard cricket, we are an independent republic of rage and obsession. Our rules, our records, our very own physics. Eye-to-eye and hand-to-hand combat. By the time we emerge into the world beyond the paling fences, it surprises us to learn that anyone considers this a team sport.

  Mum

  The bulb idea has come to nothing.

  It burst easily enough when I squeezed it, but into fragments so tiny and delicate that none of them were any use. And the effort of popping the globe drove quite lot of the shards into poor old Squibbly.

  I gave it a go, fumbled around for a while for the biggest pieces of the bulb that I could find. But it was like trying to scoop up thick guacamole with a thin chip: every time I sliced, the fragment broke into a smaller fragment.

  Squibbly is bleeding rather a lot, and I’m tired. There’s so much to explain, but my blood’s like cold oil. I’m suspended in space here, between wakefulness and sleep, maybe even consciousness and death, and I fear the gag will suffocate me if I doze off.

  A world apart from the world in here. The dark side of a frozen planet.

  Mum is the centre of our solar system, the single deity in whom all powers are vested.

  Looking back, she’s not yet thirty, although to our eyes she’s more than halfway to being an Old Person. Dad’s just a void into which we tip our speculation. He might have done this, or that. His presence is lost in the haze of our pre-school years; tall, scruffy, and downcast. When I look for him in the dark I see the hollows round his eyes, his moustache, the pilling where his stubble has worn away the neck band of his jumper.

  Mum came from a fabled place called the Eastern Suburbs, a faraway land on the other side of the city. We hear the names on the news sometimes, and I argue with Wally about which suburbs are Eastern. We can work out some of them from the footy: Hawthorn, Richmond, St Kilda, South Melbourne. The others count as western suburbs. It’s much later that I realise Collingwood, on our side of a divided universe, is actually north of Melbourne, not west.

  It was Mum’s fate to fall in love with a footballer.

  Dad was someone’s friend’s brother, or someone’s brother’s friend. In the oral history of our
family Mum was Mum—defined by her own presence. Dad, however, was defined by his connection to Mum. A guy who knew someone who knew Mum. Apparently he was a savant in footy boots—all the intellectual spark of wet cardboard, but freakishly light-footed; wired with a spooky intuition for where the ball was and where it needed to go. But these skills are, by definition, not transferable and it seems Dad struggled on any surface that wasn’t grass.

  A year in with Mum and she’d alienated her family, dropped out of school and gone to live with him in Footscray, busy gestating Brother Wally. They eloped to Glenelg. Civil ceremony. No family, a handful of friends.

  Footy didn’t work out for Dad—he did an ankle. The club paid for a reco but he’d lost his trademark ability to bank laterally out of trouble at speed. And the elopement had its consequences. Wally and I never knew our paternal grandparents because Dad was gone so early in our lives. We never knew our maternals either: they’d turned their backs on Mum.

  It meant too that our childish fascination with our own genetics could only take us one layer deep. We had Mum’s hair, thick and somewhere between blonde and brown. We had her light scatter of freckles. But where her bones were fine and sharp, ours were thuggishly stout. Did we have Dad’s ankles? Was it a design fault that had caused his downfall anyway, or just a divot in the earth somewhere?

  Their first home was a Commission rental in Footscray’s backstreets. The house is still there, in the ironically named Gallant Street. Dad took a full-time job in a warehouse, shuffling through his day and into his evening. Home at night, grinding his molars at the squawking of baby Wal, he’d chug his way through the beers until he fell asleep in his armchair. I see Mum perched in the chair beside him, breastfeeding Wally and watching her young husband descend. Not violent; not raucous or randy. Just sinking slowly like a man half-asleep in a parachute.