The Rules of Backyard Cricket

by Jock Serong

  ‘Don’t say crap,’ says Mum. She pushes the biscuit crumbs into a little pile on the laminex with the side of one finger. ‘Was there two in it?’

  ‘Yeah, I called it,’ says Wally. ‘Kid was on the ground, no one was even watching it.’

  By now I’m sensing no one’s much interested in the moral issue. Mum’s cricket purism obscures all else. ‘You know if the ball goes to point, sometimes that’s the striker’s call, not the non-striker’s…’

  ‘Yeah, but he was just standin’ there like a stunned mullet.’

  ‘Was the kid all right? The keeper?’

  ‘Yeah,’ scoffs Wally. ‘He came back when we were fielding. Had a black eye, couple of stitches. He was kinda bragging about it and telling everyone he nearly got the catch.’

  Another gulp from the glass.

  ‘The coach gave you a telling-off about running?’

  ‘Yeah,’ we chorus simultaneously.

  ‘We’d better find you another team I think.’

  And so our competitive debut teaches me two things: one, the Keefe brothers are so far in front of our peers at the game that we’re wasting our time among them, and two, if you want to feel sorry for people, you’re going to get left behind.

  I smash another Salada into my mouth and turn on the TV. Nestled in the couch, I can feel a tightness in my calves from the running, the warm sting of sunburn across my neck. Kids in other houses would be talking about the Keefe brothers right now, about how the eight-year-old hits the ball like a dad. How they were far too good for anyone.

  Later that night, lying in the bunks in the darkness, Wally tells me he will one day captain Australia. I laugh at him, like always. But privately, after I hear his breathing turn to snores, I wonder if anything might be possible.

  The Firsts

  I’m running my fingernails lightly over the underside of the boot lid. Just tracing a line.

  Who would tear their finger-ends to stumps trying to claw their way out of a box? And why won’t I?

  The exhaust smell’s getting stronger, making me sicker. Lifting the clumped hands towards the roof of my crypt, I can feel the contours of the metal, the lining material.

  It’s Poe. Mum used to read us Poe. Scared the pants off me—I’d wind up in Wally’s bed whimpering. Poe wrote stories about people being buried alive, and this, in metal and carpet, is the modern equivalent. Entombed in a moving vehicle on a freeway. Buried alive at ninety-five.

  It’s the summer at the end of form two. We’ve got jobs, both of us, with the greengrocer in Barkly Street who is somehow connected—I don’t recall how—to the Italian lady around the corner whose nebuliser saved Wally.

  On Saturday mornings we get in there around six and help unload the truck that’s come from the markets around the corner. Within weeks we’ve learned where to stack everything in the displays, where to toss the leftover stuff and what to put in a box for Mum. Wally decides this is the perfect opportunity to enact a training diet, and uses his first couple of pays to buy a blender for the fruit.

  We shuffle between the chill air of the refrigerated truck and the storeroom behind the shop, heaving the shallow waxed boxes. The men work around us, swear at us from time to time, but there’s an underlying affection to it all. Their bellowing is as much a part of the place as the slippery floor and the intoxicating smell of fruit.

  We’re out by ten with a box of fruit each on our bike carriers. Once we’re in the door at home, there’s an hour available to us to eat, to change and get on the bikes to wherever the day’s game is taking place. Mum cuts sandwiches or makes a foam cooler of drink if she’s not getting ready to work a shift. She talks tactics as the big knife works through a watermelon and the chunks are lined up on the clingwrap.

  These are the easy Saturdays, uncomplicated and pure. There are girls to watch, sly eyes and giggling, nothing more. Neighbourhood girls, girls from school. Unspoken, our shared strategy is to look the other way and try for heroism of a kind we can’t yet identify. We’re cricketers. It’s terribly serious.

  Around the time school breaks up for summer, we get a letter from the association asking us to take part in the Eastern Suburbs versus Western Suburbs Schoolboys Carnival.

  I can still see the envelope, the official typeface with our names on it. The envelope’s wet and limp from lying in a pool of leaked rainwater in our letterbox—December’s been unseasonably cold and wet.

  Mum’s chopping carrots with the radio tuned to 3DB.

  She takes the knife and slips it carefully through the top of the envelope, removes the letter and reads it aloud, a satisfied smile at the corners of her mouth. This qualifies as representative cricket, Mum says. Mum thinks like Wally does where ambition is concerned: we’re serving a long apprenticeship for the rarest of careers: her boys will be professional cricketers, and it’s her mission to ensure this occurs.

  We’ve been playing for the St John’s First XI, among grown men with moustaches and mullets, for a couple of years by now. Mum took action immediately after our debut with All Saints, marching us into a junior training session at the bigger club, one under each arm, demanding to know who was in charge.

  As we climb through the ranks the challenge never seems to grow: the bowling is quicker in the higher grades, but our reflexes are easily keeping pace. The muttering from the close-in fieldsmen is more explicit, more sexually directed, but we’re so confident that their insults are wasted.

  By a special resolution of the club’s match committee, it’s agreed that we can play for the seniors at twelve and fourteen provided we wear helmets at all times when batting. We’re the youngest brothers ever to receive First XI caps.

  Those caps, symbolising our elevation into a grown-up world, somehow become the centre of a childish squabble. We manage to turn everything into a battle between us, but this one leaves a scar.

  I’ve wandered out to the backyard at Fernley Road one morning, drawn by the sound of the handmower, the whirring and zinging of blades. Wally’s making a brisk pace up and down our pitch, shaving maybe half an inch off the grass, leaning to one side to check that he’s drawing a straight line down the edge of the pitch. The tiny bristles of new growth stand proud after last night’s watering and fertiliser pellets. He’s in his school uniform, using up the last half-hour before he jumps on his bike to head off to class.

  With his First XI cap on.

  The chocolate brown with the gold hoops, the gold and blue crest front and centre. The idiot.

  ‘Don’t have to wear that, you know,’ I tell him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The cap. Don’t have to wear it. You’re just mowing the pitch. No one can see you.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ he shrugs. ‘Wear it if I want.’

  ‘It’s a quarter to eight. It’s Tuesday morning. You’re not playing cricket till Saturday. Duh.’

  ‘Why’s it bother you?’ He shoots me a shit-eating grin. It annoys me more than it should.

  ‘You’re such a fucking idiot.’ I step forward from near the back door, make a lunge for the cap. He rears back.

  ‘Whoa, little guy…’

  He knows that fires me up.

  ‘Fuckwit.’

  This time I make contact, manage to pluck the cap by the edge of its peak. I flick it away Frisbee-style before Wally can react. We both watch it arc through the air. It gets more lift than I’d intended, and sails over the fence into the Apostouloses’.

  His face turns to thunder. ‘Go and get it.’

  ‘Make me.’

  This is pathetic, but I’m committed now. He advances menacingly, still wheeling the mower. ‘Fucking go and get it.’

  ‘Or what? Gonna tell Mum?’

  He revs the mower at me, lifting it slightly off the ground at the end of his swing. The blades spin, spraying me lightly with cuttings, which land on my cold bare feet.

  ‘Don’t be stupid Wally.’ I’m looking sideways, looking for an exit, but he’s got me against the fence.

&n
bsp; ‘Looking for Mum to save you, little guy?’

  His face is lit by fury. He pushes forward again with the mower. Jerks it at me, watching my feet.

  I dive to my left but the grass is deep there, and still damp with the overnight dew. My right foot slips out as I jump, and it shoots forward.

  There’s a loud poong, like you hear when you hit a stick with the mower. But it’s not a stick, it’s the outside of my foot, my toes. It’s flesh, soft and pink, and there’s enough of it stuffed into the blades that it jams them up, and for a frozen instant we both stare at the helix of sharpened metal, the foot caught hopelessly within and the pearls of fat under the sliced flesh, butter-yellow in the seconds before the capillaries fill and gush blood.

  Some of it’s shock and some of it’s pain but I’m screaming and he’s instantly sorrowful and concerned, winding the blades backwards, trying to extricate the foot. He’s only making it worse, the top of the foot bending further and exposing more flesh, the red gash growing and spilling more blood down over the steel and onto the grass, where it’s forming a sticky pool. Now he’s looking up, looking at me, at my presumably ashen face. He’s winding the wheels again, back and forth, back and forth. Then he’s running into the house to find Mum.

  I’m on my back all this time, propped on both elbows, hopelessly caught. Aside from the pain and the rage, I can feel a gnawing sense I asked for this. But who the hell escalates a petty squabble that radically?

  Wally Keefe does.

  Cannot back down. Cannot lose.

  He’s contrite afterwards, after the casualty doc’s put fourteen stitches in the foot and given me a tetanus shot in the arse, and after Mum’s delivered Wally a frightening shout-down. Odd kind of contrition, though. It’s not the phony kind that kids often display when they’ve been put up to it by adults: go and say sorry to your brother. This is genuine, but weirdly disconnected.

  ‘I’m sorry Darren,’ he says, standing gravely by my bed. ‘That was a serious error of judgment. It will never happen again.’

  Assuming you’d reasonably expect that it will never happen again—does anybody get deliberately rammed by a handmower twice in a childhood?—‘error of judgment’ is a profoundly cold assessment. In his blind rage, he nearly severed three of my toes.

  He also costs me a month of cricket. Once that month of bored abstinence is over, the season passes in predictable rhythm.

  Each week the opposition captain questions why St John’s are fielding two children in their firsts. A short exchange usually follows, which finishes with the other skipper shrugging and walking off. We walk out to bat, weathering a burst of ridicule from the slips and the two or three blokes they’ve dropped in close to try and terrify us.

  Wally bats higher, and by the time I come in he’s normally cleared out the close fielders through a combination of dangerous hitting and an icy stare that unsettles grown men when they see it on the face of a fourteen-year-old. The field is shuffled back to a safer range, then it goes back even further as the skipper sends everyone out to defend the boundaries. We no longer even call our runs, relying on instinct and a meeting of eyes. Confusion results for the fielding side—no one knows we’re running until we’ve already run.

  In the evenings we analyse over drinks with Mum, or sometimes she’ll take up a deckchair in the backyard, beer in hand, watching us knock a few around while the mozzies descend. The taped ball feels light after a real cricket ball delivered at pace.

  So on a Tuesday in February we get the day off school for the representative match.

  The game is scheduled for Punt Road Oval: neutral ground, and nearly as good as playing on the MCG. We get the train there because Mum’s got to work as usual. Wally wants to travel in his whites. I flatly refuse and wear a tracksuit. Eventually he relents.

  It’s hot—December dried out into an endless arid northerly off the Mallee, bringing streams of floating dandelion seeds from far away. It’s so hot that Brunton Avenue is sticky as we cross with Sunnyboys from the kiosk at Richmond Station. The stifled roar of the city fills the gaps between the traffic sounds. As I cross, watching for traffic and also watching Wally’s shoulders ahead of me, I feel a random pang for a father. Why this happens halfway across Brunton Avenue in the sun I cannot say. Would I call him Dad? What did I call him back then?

  Dad, Dad.

  Wally’s shoulders in his Crystal Cylinders shirt. Wally will be a dad. He understands responsibility.

  On the north side of the road the roots of the giant liquidambars have pushed the footpath up into ridges. As we enter the ground I realise this will be the first time we’ve played to a grandstand. There’s no one in it, but that’s immaterial. Out in the middle, there is complex equipment: motorised sprinklers, mowers, heavy rollers. There’s sight-screens at both ends and a scoreboard. Again, they haven’t opened it up for our little show, but there’s a scoreboard.

  The outfield’s billiard green: no bare patches, no flowers. The things that are painted white—the sightscreen, the pickets around the boundary—are so white it hurts. The hoses and the boundary line are white. The entire playing surface is perfectly flat and level. And in the middle of the ground, across that wide carpet of perfect grass, the holy of holies.

  A turf wicket.

  We’ve both spotted it the instant we cross the concrete bleachers, and we don’t exchange a word as we climb over the boundary fence and walk to the middle. It’s slightly scuffed, having been used the previous weekend for a district game, but they’ve rolled it, watered it, repainted the creases. The stumps stand sentinel at each end in perfect symmetry.

  On my hands and knees, I press four fingertips into the surface. It’s hard and waxy, almost as unyielding as concrete. It smells wonderfully of cut grass. I look at Wally, who’s also pressing the surface, but from a stooped position.

  He looks back and smiles at me in an unguarded way, a generous way.

  ‘This is gonna be so good,’ he says.

  In the shade of the grandstand, a couple of association officials stand around, studying clipboards. Two uniformed umpires—another first in our cricketing lives—are perched on the benches. They’ve got crests on their shirt pockets, and they’re good and fat, as cricket umps should always be. Take it from me, you don’t trust the skinny ones.

  An official wanders up. Balding, no discernible chin. Long nose, topped with a schoolmaster’s thick glasses. This is 1983, remember—the plastic frames are so big they reach halfway down his cheeks.

  ‘The Keefe brothers, no doubt,’ he smiles. ‘We’ve heard so much.’

  He extends a hand to each of us.

  ‘Now,’ looking from Wally to me and back again, ‘You’d be Wally. Congratulations son, you’re skippering Western Suburbs.’

  Wally smiles modestly. This honour is the most natural thing that could’ve befallen him.

  The association boffins have all sorts of ideas about the batting order, who they want bowling and in what sequence. Wally takes it all in, nodding and pointing at the clipboard now and then. He laughs politely at their witticisms. This is the beginning of Wally’s career-long habit of easy sycophancy with officialdom. As I watch, I’m torn between the desire to interrupt and offer my thoughts, to be a part of this earnest exchange, and the stronger urge to stick a wet finger in Wally’s ear.

  Wally wins the toss and elects to bat. Ten minutes later he’s out there opening our innings, and I’m lounging in one of the plastic chairs regaling the boys with a few tales about how they do things in the Eastern Suburbs. Up to this point, I’ve never been there.

  The pattern of things is much like always. No one can get through Wally’s defences. Not an edge, not a swipe, not a chancy lofted shot. He exudes permanence, even as wickets fall around him. He defends a lot: stretching into technically perfect shapes that look like fencing. He is very still, stiller than I’ve ever seen him. He is, for the first time, imposing.

  Rifling through my bag to get padded up, I can tell that Mum’s bee
n in it. The pads have been strapped neatly around the bat, and inside each of them is a rolled-up bathtowel. A Granny Smith in the bottom of the bag. Spare socks.

  It’s eleven. She’ll be mopping out the bar at the Mona Castle, rolling in the new kegs.

  Twenty minutes later I’m standing in the middle with Wally, who’s unbeaten on forty. I’m not going to ask him how the bowlers are, because I can see. The wicket’s clearly not treacherous.

  ‘You right?’ he asks vaguely, and I nod and wander to the striker’s end.

  They take a while setting the field. Their skipper has a smug look which to me says either he’s already played a lot of representative cricket or he’s accustomed to running things. He’s clean-looking, new shoes. He stands only metres away, arranging everything as though I’m not there. He even talks about me as he does so.

  ‘No, come straighter. He won’t hit wide through there.’

  Then he gestures to the guy standing at deep backward square. He’s tall, and I recognise him as one of the opening bowlers. Skipper winds him right in until they’re standing side by side.

  ‘Come in to short leg, mate. Right under him, please.’

  And so this big lummox squats down almost within reaching distance of my bat, watching me. And as soon as his skipper’s moved back to slips, he starts on me. As I scratch out my guard:

  ‘Fucking peasant.’

  I tap my bat gently on the turf as the bowler reaches the end of his walk back and turns to run in.

  ‘Dad on fucking welfare, mate?’

  The bowler’s almost all the way in towards me and I wait until he’s just about to leap into the air, then pull away and raise my bat. The bowler staggers to a belligerent halt. I point my bat at Short Leg in accusation.

  ‘Good one, cockhead,’ I mutter softly.

  He swings immediately towards the square leg ump. ‘I’m sorry ump, but there’s some very ugly abuse being directed at me by the batsman,’ he says, mouth full of private-school plums.