by Jock Serong
But the thing with Craigo, the thing that keeps you coming back, is that he’s a giver. He gives me the Commodore because he’s upgrading to a Skyline. Low-slung, darkened windows, and an air intake hump in the hood. The Big Guy has to pour himself in there, but once inside, it’s his cave. The interior smells of his aftershave, and there’s an array of membership and special parking stickers along the edge of the windscreen.
The Big Guy’s found a job at a place called Corporate Vehicle Solutions, a hire-purchase joint for fleets. I can’t imagine anything more boring. The racing caper I could relate to: hell, he was probably trading coded handshakes with some heavy characters, which is Craig’s idea of fast times. But the car leasing crew is a bunch of fried-food-eating, bomber-jacket-wearing good-time guys sitting round in a badly fitted-out shopfront in Keilor, working the phones. Within a few short years, the advent of the internet will fill the days of such journeymen with online casinos and endless porn. But in the late eighties, it’s hard to imagine what they do with their day once they’ve made their handful of useful phone calls.
The race-track inflection disappears from Craigo’s speech within days of him taking up his new role, in its place something more unctuous. He’s happier than ever, which in turn makes him even more tactile. And he still holds Wally in a kind of awe. On his rare visits to our place, Wally shares his views about the national side, about business and politics. The Big Guy laps it up, but Wally never stays long, never overindulges.
Although Craig knows lots of girls, none of them could be formally termed a girlfriend. So I remain the chief object of his outsize affection. Sometimes he attacks me with a bearhug for no reason at all.
When September rolls around I shuffle between Richmond and Altona. Training for the district squad is Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, with optional extra fitness work on Wednesdays. Wally, you may have guessed, is a regular at the Wednesdays. I’m sporadic.
Mum comes to every day of every game, sometimes even to training. The pubs tend to roster the young kids on weekends to save on penalty rates, so her work rarely gets in the way. She likes to stand alone in the empty bleachers on the far side of the ground, marking the scorebook I bought her for her birthday; her sunhat on, head bowed over her work.
My club career with Altona follows an inevitable progression. Brought in from local cricket at sixteen with a fair bit of advance publicity, I’m like an allergen to the older blokes.
First practice session, they wait for me to start putting the pads on and then move themselves into my net: hard-faced men, much older, not looking to enjoy their Saturdays but eyeing a career. They mark out a longer run-up, charging in with renewed energy and aiming relentlessly for my head. The lazier ones don’t have the backbone to bowl bouncer after bouncer, so they lob it flat and full, eye-height. They don’t understand, any of them, that I was raised on cheap shots. Time after time, I hoik their deliveries into the net, over the net, even through the net. Now and then I catch a top edge and the ball rockets over the top and out into the carpark. When this happens, I like to lean on the bat and smirk as they trudge off to retrieve it. Once in a while they land a blow, and there’s always a half-hearted apology or the suggestion that the ball might’ve slipped out of the hand.
But again, they don’t know the history. In private, surrounded by the house and three paling fences of our backyard, Wally would follow up a stinging blow with a spray of invective.
I’ve worn black eyes for years. These dilettantes don’t know the first thing about mental disintegration.
Which leads me to an odd thing about Wally. He’s come to Altona with every bit as much advance publicity as I have, yet nothing changes when he turns up to bat. No one gets fired up. They bowl the usual assortment to him, nod politely when he scoops up their ball in his gloved hand and flicks it back to them.
He is denatured by batting.
As he waits, he’s a helmeted statue, silent and implacable. I’ve never seen him brush a fly in that state. They could wander over his face, even up his nostrils and he wouldn’t know. It seems like languor if you don’t know what to look for. But it’s the invisible building of energy and focus to a point of detonation, a form of biomechanical perfection only revealed in slow motion. Deadened eyes that don’t squint or blink. Hands that follow the shortest path to the tiny point in time and space where contact will occur. Not an application of bodily force, but a harnessing of other forces.
When he misses a shot, as he rarely does, he raises a hand to stop the next bowler from running in, then swishes through phantom repetitions of the motion until he feels he’s found the error and corrected it. Nobody minds him doing this. There is a complete absence of spite in his interactions, though he seethes with competitive intensity. Observers interpret his failure to fire up under provocation at the crease as evidence of phenomenal self-discipline, but that’s inadequate. He cannot react: sledging him is as pointless as conversing with someone in headphones.
That’s how he operates in public. In the backyard, he’s vengeful, savage and petulant.
In September, we hear about the tied Test in Madras: Dean Jones’s double century in forty-degree heat, forty-five-degree heat—the numbers keep growing. I’ve heard they had to give him a transfusion from a coconut. Wally’s contorted with scorn.
‘Do they even have coconuts in Madras? And why would you get a transfusion from one if they did?’
‘Dunno,’ I reply lamely, ‘heaps of people are sayin it.’
He slaps his thigh in derision. ‘It’s called an urban myth, dickhead.’
This is during one of our net sessions at Brewer’s Sports. I look around and ensure there’s no one else in the shop, then I charge straight at him and throw him to the ground. He’s still laughing while I try to get a hand free to hit the smug bastard.
Three minutes later, a lady with two small boys has entered the shop and Wally’s standing behind the counter smiling politely with his hair all over the place and one ear bright red from being crushed in my fist only seconds before. I’m standing slightly off to stage right, breathing hard and rearranging my shirt.
The woman looks askance at us, but leaves a tennis racquet for restringing.
One night at Altona, as dusk softens the colours of evening training, we’re called over from the nets to the empty seats, where a girl not much older than us is waiting. We’re introduced by a club official: Amy Harris is from the local paper, a cadet journalist sent to do a story on the school-age prodigies playing first-grade for Altona.
Her brown hair’s pulled back into a tight ponytail. No makeup. She’s tall and athletic-looking, dressed for work, not display. I like her immediately. She snorts when Wally tries to impress her by quoting from C. L. R. James: ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’
‘I dunno,’ she counters. ‘What do they know?’
Wally’s crestfallen, and I’m left with an opening to field the next few questions. She’s done her research, even knows somehow about Mum and Dad. Her questions to me are all angled at my character; Wally’s are all about his cricket. It takes me a while to latch onto this, but like an idiot I play extravagantly into her hands.
‘See, I don’t think there’s much public interest in purists,’ I say. ‘Cricket’s getting shorter and faster, and people don’t want to see the ball gliding along the ground. They want action. Drama. That’s what we bring. Bradman is dead.’
Wally’s looking at me with unconcealed horror. He tries to take the conversation back. ‘Everyone brings their own approach of course,’ he says stiffly.
But she ignores him. Instead, she’s spurring me on. ‘Do you have the potential to play for Victoria?’
‘No doubt at all.’
‘For the country?’
‘Pretty likely.’
‘And you, Wally? What are your ambitions?’
‘I’d rather let my batting do the talking.’
She snorts again. ‘That’s a cliché, isn’t it?’
/> ‘It’s the truth.’
She’s writing in a spiral-bound notebook as we talk. The plastic biro hovers momentarily. She chews the other end of it lightly as she forms the next question.
‘Do you two get along?’
‘Of course we do,’ snaps Wally angrily, just as I’m saying, over the top of him, ‘Mostly.’
Faint smile.
‘I’m going to make a note in my diary to talk to you two at the end of the season, and again this time next year. Would that be okay?’
I find myself agreeing enthusiastically. Wally’s more circumspect. The photographer, who’s waited just beyond her left shoulder, now pushes forward to get his shots. I look straight down the barrel, aping the boorish invincibility of Botham. Wally looks away over the ground, towards the scurrying players in the soft light.
The next day, the image appears across half a page, strangely beautiful. Wally’s face is all shadows and dreams, his decision to look away cloaking him in remoteness. I’m captured by his image for so long, wondering if I really know him at all, that it takes me a while to see myself. No mysticism there: I look dumb and aggressive. And the story appears under a headline I should have seen coming.
Bradman is Dead.
State
More lane markers thirrupping under the tyres.
Consciousness ebbing, the past playing out in living colour as the blackness in the boot consumes me. The world I left behind. Lost in time; discarded by a series of choices. The things I can’t retrieve.
My fingers have chanced upon another shard of the tail-light. I can’t tell if it’s from the lens or the plastic backing—cornea or retina. It’s triangular, a matchstick in length. I can tumble it from finger to finger, though I can’t fully grip it because of the pressure of the cable ties. If I stretch my hands downwards, I can make the tip of the shard reach the cable ties and rub them lightly.
But I’m not sure that should be my priority. The tape over my mouth is driving me insane. It’s irrelevant to releasing my bonds, though, and there’s only so much effort I can apply. I don’t know where to start.
If there’s a corner that you turn at some point, mine was New Year’s Eve 1989.
I mean, that’s not strictly true because you turn corners all the time. Life is comically pointless and composed almost entirely of corners, like a go-kart track.
On the last night of 1989, when the Berlin Wall’s been disintegrating for months, attacked by frosty-looking Germans in dark anoraks, David Hasselhoff is inexplicably there. Exploiting it as his personal contribution to the downfall of the Soviet bloc.
I’m on a mustard-coloured corduroy couch with Craig when Hasselhoff appears on the telly in the world’s most bizarre jacket—imagine the Fonz’s black leather motorcycle jacket, but with pulsating waves of tiny light globes all over it—and he’s standing on the Wall (‘Christ, the Wall!’ screams Craigo. ‘People get shot for lesser jackets!’) singing a vaguely freedom-themed big-hair anthem, like the song itself could break concrete. Maybe it could, the way he sings.
Craig and I have been on the bongs for a couple of hours by this stage and it’s more than we can take. The pipe du jour is a china dragon with a snarly mouth and flared wings. You pull on the top of his head, and the cone goes in a little mount in the region of what would presumably be a dragon’s lumbar spine. Craig’s roaring with laughter, his belly wobbling up and down as his hand fumbles around for some kind of handbrake on the hilarity and he snorts as he struggles to get air in. A thrashing foot takes out the bag of Twisties, the china dragon and four or five stubbies on the coffee table.
And still the Hoff is yowling. The crowds below him are rapturous at first but as the same dirge-like verses loop over and over they visibly tire of him. Someone lobs a firecracker at him, and he ducks it mid-chorus.
Craig has sensed the mood of impatience in Berlin: he leans forward and kills the telly, turns to me with the last vestiges of a chuckle dying round his cheeks. ‘I gotta go get something.’
There’s a jangling sound as he scoops up his car keys.
‘Can’t it wait? It’s, what, two a.m.’
Since we’ve rented the Richmond place together, we’ve had a loosely synchronised life. He works for the leasing company by day, while I train and annoy Wally at the shop. Then he disappears at night and I sometimes tag along to clubs and bars, but more often I leave him to his other life, whatever it is. Every so often it comes down to these Nights of the China Dragon and VB in front of the box. The ritual is a particular favourite of his. So the idea of him wanting to run errands at this hour is a little perplexing.
‘Coming?’
‘Where?’
‘Just gotta get something. What’s this, the Spanish Indecision?’
I’m too stoned to argue and quietly intrigued about what Leasing Boy might be up to.
‘Relax, you fat fuck. Bring the Twisties.’
We’re going to Doveton, apparently. In the dark interior of Craig’s Skyline, we’re locked in one of those long silences that car travel and cannabis can produce. Every few minutes an idiotic smile spreads over my face.
Later we’re deep among tilt-slab factory walls, the wrappers of two burgers at our feet. Craig’s counting off numbers and names along a concrete apron. WM Ready Panel Works, Permafilm Industrial Coatings, Aquarium Supplies Ltd. He brakes gently outside U-Store Self Storage and jumps out, sorting through his keys before a huge roller door.
‘Whose place is this?’ I ask.
‘Just some guys from FLS.’
‘They do a lot of business pre-dawn?’
Craig finds the key and hauls the door up, ignoring me. Down a narrow corridor, we come to a smaller roller-door. Inside, a miniature city of office equipment: copiers, printers, faxes, computer terminals. There’s a lot of polystyrene packaging and stacked cardboard.
Against one wall is a piece of machinery I don’t recognise. It’s not electronic.
‘What’s that?’
Craigo’s already on one end of it, lifting from the floor. ‘Grab the other end, will you?’
We haul the thing out of the storage bay and into the back of the Skyline. On the way home, he tells me it’s a pill press.
Yeah, I know.
Well, I do now. At the time, I truthfully didn’t have the slightest notion of what that meant or why someone would want one.
‘Remember the pills we had at Pulse, the night you’d made that ton against Northcote? Well that’s MDMA. The kids are calling it ecstasy. You make it in a garage for nothing and sell it for fifteen bucks a pill. Almost pure profit. Cut it with ketamine, it’s even cheaper.’
‘What’s ketamine?’
‘You don’t wanna go into that. Put it this way, it’s to do with horses.’
‘So,’ I probe, feeling the giggles wear off, ‘the thing in the back?’
‘I’m going into business with some guys,’ he says.
I feel a tug of sadness at these words.
I get it, I get it—he’s already been in business for some time. I’ve looked the other way because I prefer my version of Craigo, the affable fat man, mister dependable. Buying and selling for mates, moving a few things. Harmless, gormless. These ‘guys’ feel like an infidelity to me. Fair enough, he’s been drifting away from Wally for years. But that’s more Wally’s fault. I’ve been staunch.
I’m sullen on the way home, sluggish and silent.
The pill press shifts with a clunk as we swing onto Punt Road; a blind corner, as it happens. We’re deep into the turn, committed, when we both see the lights. A dozen cops with witches hats and a queue of cars.
Breath-testing station.
I look at Craigo, who’s looking at the road, assessing options. He appears shrewder and harder than I’ve ever known him. He rolls conservatively into the queue and we wait in silence, until a young officer approaches his window with the breatho in his hand.
‘Had any alcoholic drinks tonight sir?’
‘I have,’ smiles Cra
igo. ‘Had a couple an hour or two ago.’
‘One continuous breath until I say stop, thanks.’
Craig blows. The cop holds the device and he’s looking. Looking in the back. The device buzzes, but the cop’s not looking at it. He’s still looking in the back. Craigo’s got a hand on the transmission. The cop returns his attention to the breatho.
‘Do you have far to go?’
He’s a junior conny, this bloke, trying to muster a senior voice. The queue ahead’s inching forward.
‘No, no, couple of hundred metres. Why?’
The car in front is clear to go but it hasn’t left.
‘You’re just under. What’s your address? I…er…’ He shoots one more look in the back. ‘You better give me a look at your licence, mate.’
The car’s cleared the breatho station and it’s just us now. Us, with a dozen cars queued behind and I’m pressed into the seat as Craigo punches the accelerator. In a second, we’ve cleared out and left the roadblock in a cloud of smoke. My heart’s hammering.
Out the back window, past that fucking press, there’s cops running all over the place. Car doors opening and closing. Suddenly I’m in Craig’s lap because he’s thrown the car left and raced up a side street. Cult on the stereo, very fucking loud. ‘She Sells Sanctuary’. I crash into the passenger window as he swings right down an alleyway.
‘Will you do up your fucking belt?’ he yells. ‘You’ll get us both in trouble.’
I can hear sirens now but there’s no sign of lights. They’re well behind, and Craigo’s still snaking through the narrow lanes of Richmond, bottoming the Skyline out in the bluestone dips at the crossroads.
The streets again become familiar to me and he slows, crawling to a stop in our drive. In seconds he’s out and the roller door’s closed, the car completely concealed. I wonder now at what a goose I’ve been—is this why he chose the place?
