The Rules of Backyard Cricket

by Jock Serong

  But at twenty-seven, I’m nobody’s veteran. I can run between wickets as fast as anyone, and there’s nothing wrong with my eye. If anything, the minuscule interactions that flow between me and the approaching ball are finer and more subtle than they’ve ever been. I know a good pitch from a bad one with a press of the fingertips. I can sense fatigue in the posture of a bowler. I can count fielders like a poker shark counts cards, understanding the prevailing odds to my offside and my legside having regard to who throws left-handed or right, who’s carrying a hamstring, who’s too lazy to chase hard.

  I have all this in me, and yet it’s useless as collateral in selection. They lean on their spurious medical reasoning and they consign me to fifty-over fixtures with riding instructions to swing big and keep it interesting. The sweetener is I get to play fifty-over cricket for my country, not just my state; but it’s clear, if not explicit, that I will never play a Test. Not with a dodgy driving hand, and not with a chequered disciplinary record. Be the showman, I’m told. Go out and entertain the punters. That’s you, isn’t it? I’m an orca in a pool, cutting frustrated laps. On the handful of occasions that I try to construct a careful innings, I’m taken aside and counselled. No one came here to watch you look after your average.

  So I swing like a madman and run around screaming. Learn to slide in the outfield. I cultivate grudges against various fast bowlers because the crowd likes to see the opposition captains bring those bowlers on when I’m around. I get to travel more, though I’m no longer sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Honey is tiring of it, and she senses the rotten core of the whole enterprise. These are the dying spasms of a career, prone on the floorboards in a pool of blood.

  Craig, on the other hand, sees nothing but blue skies in this change of circumstance.

  He’s been busy setting up a business he calls Wattle It Be, a touring fan club for the Australian cricket side. Ahead of every international tour he buys cut-price packages for people like himself: sweaty single males who like to drink and chant while they get sunburnt in front of sport. The whole concept is horrific, but it’s a roaring success. He’s turning people away. After two or three tours he works out that he can recruit a retired Test player to operate as a kind of figurehead and pub coach, offering special comments and war stories, and the not-quite-promise of access to the players.

  As one of those players, I know there’s a fair amount of effort devoted to ensuring Craig’s touring parties never get that access. Craig himself does, but that’s just part of his mystery. He’s there after a session of play; at an official function; up the back of a press conference. Watchful, comfortable, like some kind of security expert. He looks like no one else in the room, almost irrespective of what that room might be—his physical bulk propped up by a wall. The bomber jackets, the jeans crushed into accordion pleats either side of his groin. He wears his mobile phone in a holster on his belt. Even the team manager, who takes about a thousand calls a day, doesn’t do that.

  When things go well for me his joy is suffocating. He hugs me, leaves a hand stranded aloft in search of a high five, or starts pounding out applause until others feel obliged to join in. He has this skill for placing himself in vulnerable positions—like the hanging hand, the lone clapping—so that others will rescue him simply to alleviate the awkwardness. But despite that I appreciate it. Honey can’t come on tour. I get to chat to Hannah by phone every few days, when the time zones and the homework and the ballet and swimming allow, but beyond that I have little in the way of close personal friendship to draw upon. Wally’s there for the international games of course, but his demeanour in the dressing room is dour and fixated, and he and Craig seem like magnets with opposing charges these days. If Craig crosses the room, Wally veers away.

  I can talk to Wally, in a limited way. He’ll discuss the day’s play, the sponsor commitments, the weather, the pitch, the opposition, even Mum’s increasing confusion, but it’s all a disembodied drone. Watching his eyes, I can still see him in there. But the pressure he places upon himself has sapped the life from our exchanges. I’m a fellow player, a colleague in this sweaty firm, and only distantly a brother.

  One night I find him by chance in the carpark under the hotel that houses the national squad. He’s got a rubber ball, flicking it fast and low against a cement wall and catching the rebounds with soft, agile hands. It’s a lifetime habit of his and he can do it for hours. He doesn’t hear me until I’m right next to him. Stops. Looks at me a moment then resumes.

  ‘Can’t get any peace when I do this outdoors,’ he mutters.

  I drop into the spot that would be the slips fielder next to him, and without a word he angles his next throw so that it rebounds towards me. Catching it with a dip to my left, I fire it back slightly harder than it came to me. He moves surely, cups it and returns harder again.

  This is how we talk, I’m thinking.

  We’re boxing sideways, watching the wall. Shuffling feet, feinting and whipping and darting. He’s grunting now with the effort, runners squeaking on the polished concrete. I can feel his moves without looking at him. This one high, this one low. I’m snatching them one-handed, throwing with the wrong arm, underarming. His answer, as always, is relentless perfection. He wills me to get tricky with him and he just repeats, and repeats, and waits for my errors.

  Finally one of mine hits a pipe fitting at the top of the wall and rolls away to come to rest under a car. I run to get it, come back to find him puffing, hands on knees. He takes a shot from his Ventolin and pockets my return throw. I get back in the lift, sweating in the bright light, and realise I haven’t said a word to him.

  And this is how I search for him every time I see him; employing the things we both know that no one else knows. Impersonating people we’ve laughed at, playing to his love of sarcasm. But most of the time, I’m reduced to winking idiocy. The moments falter and are lost.

  No such problem with Craig.

  A three-day exhibition match in Darwin—middle of the southern winter but a perfect thirty degrees—and Craig’s busy blistering himself on the hill with a crew of diehards he flew up the night before. They’re staying at the Casino too, he enthuses, when he finds me despite the exclusive high rollers’ pass.

  This is the night after the second day’s play. They’ve given me the acting captaincy for this one, only because of someone’s injury and everyone else’s apathy. I’m the captain of Australia! I say to myself once or twice. But I’m not. There isn’t even a team meeting. Our opponents, a Northern Territory development eleven, have put up a better fight than anyone expected. Between our insipid performance and their desperation, the two sides are quite evenly matched.

  Craig orders two cognacs—no one seems to pay in this bar—and settles in an armchair beside me.

  ‘You guys need to declare first thing tomorrow,’ he says.

  I smile indulgently. ‘Does that work better for your drinking buddies?’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s gonna rain in the late arvo. And when it rains here, it doesn’t fuck around.’

  I find myself laughing. ‘Mate, it’s the middle of the dry season in Darwin. It’s not going to rain until October.’

  ‘It’s gonna rain.’ He suddenly looks serious, leaning forward to tap me on the knee. I can hear the ice cubes clink in his tumbler. For no accountable reason, he’s making me uneasy.

  ‘So what?’

  He reaches into his jacket and produces a wad of printer paper. Swirls and numbers and graphs. Drops them in my lap.

  ‘What are these?’

  ‘Weather forecasts. Metro, long range, short range, a private one and a rural website one. And I arksed a blackfella.’ He seems to think this seals it. ‘It’s gonna rain.’

  ‘Okay, it’s gonna rain. It’s an exhibition match for fuck’s sake. So what?’

  ‘Nonono, you hafta take it seriously Daz. Every game matters. If it doesn’t matter to you, it probably matters to someone else. You’re in control, Daz. This one’s yours
. Show some leadership.’

  He takes his cognac and wanders off across the room, plays the roulette for a while. The last I see of him, he’s deep in conversation with a man who approximates his size and posture, but is Indian. Craigo’s probably just sold a busload into Mumbai for next year.

  The following morning dawns bright blue like the days before it and I ignore his advice completely. At three p.m., and needing only fifty runs to win, we watch a giant thunderhead settle over Darwin and unload three inches of rain on the city. Play is abandoned and Craig doesn’t talk to me for a month.

  The tour to England changes everything.

  It’s announced a few weeks after the Darwin match, and no one’s more surprised than me. The national side apparently needs me, needs a fast gatherer of unsubtle runs. Strictly for limited-overs cricket, they specify. Not the Tests.

  The money’s better, and I convince myself this is a late bloom in my career. The gentle light of the northern summer agrees with me: it recalls Mum reading us The Wind in the Willows, that verdant buzzing insect meadow and riverbank reverie. But I arrive in the British Isles as a fully formed adult, with even more fully formed appetites, and it’s Pimms and lemonade, straw boaters, blazers, picnic rugs and afternoons laced with sensuality.

  Overtaken by such moments and still vaguely aware that I’m in both the twilight of my career and the peak of my physical condition, I drink it all in deeply—the afternoons in the sun at the community events we’re invited to, the pubs, even the music festivals. I’ve rediscovered ecstasy—a little after the majority of the drug-using populace, I concede—but this summer in England it’s everywhere, and so are Blur and the Gallaghers and Supergrass and the Poms have thrown out the spectral John Major and embraced Tony Blair and everything’s so cool and new and possible.

  It’s hard, in the grip of this fervour, this whatever it is, to hold a steady line on what home means.

  Not that I really try.

  I call Honey regularly, but the calls have adopted a routine quality: How’re you going? Good. How are you going. Yeah good. It’s nobody’s fault, but I don’t have the concentration span for this. There are girls around the team as there will always be girls around teams, but now the high-season chloroform strips all accountability.

  At first it’s just a dance here, a kiss there. But we’re moving all the time, never more than two or three days in a place, and there’s no longer a need to extricate myself or even explain. I’m raving, night after night in the city nightclubs, suffused with indiscriminate pill-driven love for everything up to and including Craigo, who is not accustomed to having his embraces returned with interest.

  We keep talking, Honey and I.

  I can’t tell what’s getting back to her but something must be, because she’s more distant all the time. This works corrosively on my patience: there’s no brotherhood in Wally, and Mum’s deteriorating fast. Conversation with her is a patchwork of ideas and loose strands, often lapsing into glum silences. It’s raw and confusing and it hurts—Wally and I both depend on Louise to get to her when the district nurse can‘t. I’m grateful she’s not wandering. I’ve heard that’s next.

  So I don’t have time for Honey’s are you still taking the echinacea? One fateful night I take a call from her while there’s a girl in the hotel room, giggling and weaving her hips. I’ve got a finger to my lips, barely suppressing my laughter, turning away so I can concentrate on the call, but Honey knows I’m not there. She knows I’m not there and she knows someone else is. Just as the hotel-room girl takes her top off, does a silent shimmy on the bed, Honey tells me she’s been at Louise’s place to give her a break because Hannah’s got mumps and our mum lost her car.

  With nauseous immediacy, I know it’s over.

  The executioner is one of the tabloid dailies. They’ve snagged a one-in-a-million shot: the hired photographer at a coastal music festival turns his camera to the crowd for an overview of the sweating, bouncing mass and catches me dancing shirtless, sunburnt and grinning idiotically behind a cigger, with a girl under each arm. They’re in bikini tops; I’m out of my mind. The picture is picked up, predictably enough, in the Australian press under headlines such as Your Sports Funding Dollar at Work and You’ll Keefe: Cricket’s Bad Boy Lets Off Some Steam. Honey doesn’t ring. I know it’s time to face it.

  Her voice is tight and restrained. I can imagine she’s rehearsed all this.

  ‘So you’re obviously not coming home to me, then.’

  ‘I guess not, hey.’

  ‘What a waste. What a…what a massive waste. Can’t you see what you’re doing?’

  ‘I s’pose.’

  ‘You’ve lost me Darren. You probably think that’s nothing much. But all this fooling around, this…fuck. Found yourself some drugs over there, huh?’

  I don’t answer.

  ‘So that’s a yes. You’re just, you’re throwing your career away and making a public spectacle of yourself, and it reflects on me. You know that? They ring me up asking for comment. And what am I supposed to say? That you’re a fucking idiot?’

  Faint static on the line. Distance. Cicadas outside in a street tree.

  ‘People expect me to be like this.’

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake. That’s the weakest thing you’ve ever said. Grow up.’

  More silence. The cicadas have stopped.

  ‘So this is it then?’

  ‘This is it.’

  There’s more; there’s accusations and explosions of rage and even grief. I’m sitting on another hotel bed when all this takes place, only this time there’s no company, and by the time the conversation ends with her hanging up in tears, I feel about as low as I deserve to feel in counterbalance to the highs of the past few weeks.

  I slam the phone down on its cradle and sigh into my hands. It is a waste, an exchange of the lasting things for the passing things. I wonder if it’d be different if Fed hadn’t smashed the thumb. But I don’t think that ball changed my essential character.

  I dial Craigo’s number as I’m flipping channels on the TV. There’s a one-dayer on, Bangladesh versus Sri Lanka. Somewhere dusty. No answer from Craigo. Maybe his tourists need a booze mentor for the evening.

  I dial Wally’s number as an alternative to staring at the walls.

  No answer there either.

  The tour contract allows me free flights for a member of my immediate family. Due to some anachronism that dates back to the days of bespectacled gents puffing on pipes, Honey didn’t qualify, being a de facto. There was a time when she would’ve come over anyway and that time has passed, and there’s no point blaming the rules. So the only person I can bestow the perk upon is Mum.

  We’ve started talking about her condition—we still call it ‘the condition’ because none of us is quite sure what it is—and when I bring up the idea of her coming over Mum swings from thrilled to reluctant and back again as she simultaneously imagines sitting in privileged seats at Edgbaston and getting lost in a London tube crowd. I assure her I can help. Inside, I see it as a kind of therapy.

  There are moments when I think I’d be burdened by trailing a little old lady around behind me, but the reality is she’s a middle-aged woman in fine physical health. It’s an easy mistake to make as I listen to her on the phone; her elisions between adamant and addled. Thank you very much dear, she says. I’ll think about it.

  Wal and I have both got powers of attorney over Mum. Mine is a concession Wal grudgingly made after realising he was almost never in a position to get things done domestically. The short, terse conversation about that one was resolved in a compromise: I’d have a medical power of attorney provided he kept control of her financials.

  Anyway, I get off the phone and make a note to call her GP when the clinic opens (see the little responsibilities I’m starting to wrangle?). Dr Eliza from down the road—Mum’s personal physician for twenty years that I know of—is surprisingly permissive about the whole thing, right down to faxing scripts for various drugs to my h
otel so I can replace them in the event that Mum loses hers. She suggests I have someone take her to the airport and collect her from the other end, and a week later I’m standing in arrivals waiting for her to emerge.

  That ennui that creeps over regular travellers, you forget it’s there until you see someone for whom flying’s still a source of wonder. Standing in wait, I can’t summon any memory of Mum ever being on a plane, let alone travelling overseas. Tired clumps of passengers wander past, searching the room and finding love, or at least a driver; and then she appears in the doorway, wheeling her luggage and beaming as she scans the crowd. A flight attendant follows closely behind her, as I’d requested. I rush forward to Mum and press her close, squishing her glasses up over one ear and drinking in the smell of her. Even stricken as she is, she somehow makes it all right.

  In a cab down to the hotel, she’s craning her neck to take in the Englishness, a quality I’ve long since stopped seeing. Ooh, she marvels. Look at those dear little shops. She was tougher than that once, tougher than words like dear. Back at the hotel, I take her through the lobby and up to the room I’ve reserved beside mine. Mercifully, she lets me take the luggage.

  Knowing I have a full schedule of games over coming days, I find her a scorebook (‘Reception? Darren Keefe, room 119. Can you find me a cricket scorebook?’) and I even recruit a handful of junior tour officials to keep an eye on her when I can’t.

  The arrangement plays out beautifully: when there’s time to kill I’ve got something to do other than indulge myself or berate myself. This is the nearest I’ve ever been to living as a parent—ironically of my own parent. It puzzles me when I think too hard about it: corridors of paradox that lead nowhere. I’m trying to make memories for someone who will shortly forget.