The Rules of Backyard Cricket

by Jock Serong

Perhaps as insurance against this ugly inevitability, I buy Mum a cheap disposable camera, and she clicks away at everything she sees: the Camden market, a double-decker bus tour, me pulling faces at the Buck Palace guards. There are even times I can look to the stands from third slip and see Mum’s bright colourful presence, flanked by tour employees, perched in her seat and lifting the camera to secure proof of the world.

  She’s confused occasionally, but provided I’m nearby she remains mercifully free of genuine distress. Some nights I take her out for dinner—pubs mostly, because she sees them as synonymous with the London of her imagination—and other nights I prop her up in front of her telly with room service and leave instructions with that night’s minder that she’s to be gently rescued if she strays.

  The minder shifts are shared between three youngsters with whom I have an understanding: I look the other way when they slouch behind the pillar and smoke: they studiously ignore my companions and my physical state when I come and go during the night. Looking out for Mum didn’t seem, at the time, to be too much trouble to them.

  At the start of the tour I’d got myself a little hatchback from a hire company and started driving at night. Just loops of the city at first, then further and further out, to Cambridge, even to Stonehenge. Mostly it’s the distraction of dealing with the unfamiliar surroundings, but it’s the lights on the dashboard too. Life. Another way of resisting the dark.

  Tonight, having worded up the front desk team to keep an eye on Mum, I’m climbing into the hatch for my most ambitious nocturnal tour yet, out to Weymouth on the M3, when I hear footsteps approaching on the dark street outside the hotel.

  To my surprise the feet belong to Tully Welsh, casually waving a key at his own car, which lights up and beeps as it locks. Welsh has been appointed tour manager: several summers ago, he was the object of Wally’s ambition, and therefore the best man at his wedding. I haven’t forgotten it.

  He’s in a lemon polo and slacks with a striped canvas belt. It’s midnight and he looks like he’s off to play golf. The coif stands high and proud, apparently made of a single piece of some polymer-based material.

  His mode of dress, his hair and even speech, all of it is calibrated to career success. We, the team, are a project for him. That’s no bad thing if it means the tour runs smoothly, but it doesn’t breed loyalty.

  He heads for the passenger side.

  ‘Where are we off to, Daz?’

  ‘I like to go for a drive some nights. Where are you off to?’

  ‘Coming with you.’

  He jumps in, studiously searches for the belt and buckles up. I haven’t even got in yet.

  ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘We need to talk.’

  I shrug and climb in. I’m not a loner. The aim is to keep the darkness at bay, and even Tully Welsh is good for that. We talk shop until we reach the Chiswick Bridge and the city’s edge is behind us. Bigger sky now, even in the dark. Trailers loaded with sculls on the bank of the Thames, and looking downstream I can see a blue-and-white pub, lit yellow in the night. I take a left and nose through the side streets before I find it, block letters on the façade: The Ship.

  Welsh is after something and I don’t know what it is. I get us two beers and sit him in the corner, try to flush him out. ‘You ready to talk yet?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  ‘Well, I’m not asking you to, but you did get in the car.’

  Welsh sighs deeply. ‘How’s your mum?’

  ‘She’s fine Tully. How’s yours?’ The poor schmuck looks deeply awkward and part of me wants to prolong it. ‘Come on. What’s it all about?’

  ‘Mate, you know what it is. Same thing it always is. Discipline.’

  These talks are tedious at the best of times. I’ve had a few of them, and Welsh is not going to be one of the great practitioners of the art of bollocking.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  He takes a gulp then lowers his voice. ‘You’ve been on tour four weeks. Played three games.’

  ‘Not my fault. Put me in the side if you don’t like it.’

  ‘You know I don’t control that. You’ve had a lot of time on your hands, Daz, and you’ve used it to draw attention to yourself.’

  I’m about to flare, to defend the indefensible, when he lifts a cautionary palm to stop me. ‘You smacked an opposition player at the pub after the launch party—’

  ‘He’s an arrogant shit, Tully, you know that as well as I do.’

  The hand goes up again. ‘You’re very lucky we were able to keep that quiet.’

  ‘Keep it quiet? Mate, tell the world. Tell ’em I’m not gonna stand there when he calls our only Aboriginal player a coon. I didn’t ask you to brush that under the carpet.’

  ‘You don’t think it through, Daz. You’ve not only risked a frenzy in the local papers, but you’ve armed them with a sledge against you, and against him, for the rest of the tour. Now they know it fires you up.’

  He waits a moment.

  ‘And if that was the end of the list, I’d probably agree with you and we wouldn’t be having this discussion. But there’s the photograph at the dance party, you’ve been pissed more than once in public, they’ve got you smoking in the dressing room on the TV.’

  ‘Little things…’

  ‘We already knew you’d hired the car…’

  ‘Not a crime. I have a licence, you know.’

  ‘You set your pubic hair on fire in a taxi.’

  ‘It grows back.’

  ‘Burned your thumb for a bet at another pub…’

  ‘I can’t feel it Tully. It’s a party trick, c’mon.’

  ‘…fraternising with that bogan, the guy with the cheer squad.’

  ‘Craig? He’s completely harmless.’

  ‘Maybe he is, but what’s he doing in the rooms the whole time?’

  For the first time I’m genuinely surprised. ‘I don’t know. You tell me. I thought he must know someone in management.’

  ‘You’ve had girls coming and going…’

  ‘Don’t try to parent me.’

  ‘I’m trying to protect you.’

  ‘From what? I’m delivering what your bosses wanted from this tour—I’m making runs and doing the clown prince thing.’

  He seems done for the moment, which is good because it means he hasn’t got wind of the laundry-truck incident last week. If he hasn’t raised it now, it seems I’ve got away with it. A thought occurs to me.

  ‘Why’d they send you to give me the lecture? I would’ve thought it’s Wally’s job.’

  He sighs expansively.

  ‘We would’ve. They wanted this addressed last week after the festival photo. But we couldn’t find Wally at the time and I haven’t had a chance since.’

  ‘Not like Wally to go missing.’

  ‘No. That’s your schtick.’

  My complacency grows. There comes a night when I peck Mum on her dry cheek and leave her to EastEnders and a pork roast with instructions to remain in bed. She smiles sweetly as I disappear. Dinner with a publicist, followed by a bar and a club. Sex is at her place, given my parenting role at the hotel, and after whiskies and pills it’s all a bit disorienting. I wait till she’s asleep and ease myself out of the unfamiliar bed. Finding my pockets empty I’m forced to rummage through her fallen handbag for the purse and lift myself a few notes for the taxi ride. It’s better than waking her.

  So then there’s trouble finding a cab, trouble explaining the way home, a short altercation over the fare, and by the time my bellhop friends have let me into the hotel it’s nearing three.

  ‘Mum good?’ I ask as I saunter/stagger past.

  ‘Haven’t seen her all night,’ is the reply from the junior member of the team, young Ben.

  Excellent. Full degustation for wee Daz and no repercussions. Up in the lift, down the corridor and past Mum’s door, I’m surprised to find it ajar. I can hear the TV and so I head in to switch it off, assuming she’ll be sound asleep.

  She’s
not there, of course.

  Rumpled bed, lamp still burning. A paperback copy of Emma face down on the quilt. My fucking muddled head won’t clear, won’t focus.

  My room? No. I check a few other doors, all of them locked. A voice or two in protest from behind them. Fuck.

  The lift. I study the buttons: there’s a gym and pool floor, and my heart jolts to a picture of Mum floating face down in a swirling white cloud of nightie amid the blue glow of the underwater lights. The lift takes an eternity and so does swiping the bloody card to get in there.

  Nothing. Just the steady hum of the filter.

  No one in the gym, the toilets. Fuck, fuck.

  The damn lift descends at its own pace and I race back to her room to try the closet. Why didn’t I think of the closet? Nothing but a few rattling hangers and her coat, the one she brought because she thought it would be just right for Hyde Park evenings. Okay, wherever she is, she isn’t in a coat.

  Back down to the lobby and a short and fierce interrogation of young Ben. He looks mortified and clueless in equal measure, but has reserves of common sense and I’ve all but expended mine on good times tonight. He darts behind the counter and produces a set of keys, runs me to the hotel courtesy bus with its swirly gold cursive on maroon and we’re squealing over the polished concrete and out into the darkened streets.

  I’m making stupid deals in the passenger seat with a God I don’t believe in. Just bring her back. I’ll be good. I’ll be good. It was a nightie, wasn’t it? Could she be both confused enough to wander out at night, and also sufficiently organised to get dressed beforehand? Ben cuts spiral laps around the hotel block, widening out each time—he’s smarter than I gave him credit for.

  One lap, two, and at a bus stop halfway round the third lap, there she is, arms bare in the nightie, deep in conversation with two girls who look very post-club. Ben hits the anchors and a second later I have the old girl in my arms.

  ‘Hey, honey, what are you doing out?’ she asks, genuinely amazed to find her boy at a bus stop. The girls seem unsure of the situation.

  ‘She’s my mum,’ I tell them. Ben hovers behind me.

  ‘I am!’ She beams. ‘Look—’ she stretches out her right hand next to mine and proffers both to the girls. ‘We’ve got the same fingers!’

  They assess Mum and me and the minibus for a moment longer, and one of them says, ‘Why’s she on the street?’

  ‘She’s really cold,’ says the other, and indeed I can feel Mum shivering even as she hugs me.

  I mumble an apology and a thank you and shuffle with Mum under my coat back into the velour surrounds of the courtesy bus. They’re probably going to ring the cops on me and right now I don’t care. Get Mum to bed, lock the fucking door and drop a Serapax.

  God can go to hell.

  A week after that, four weeks into Mum’s stay, I start to realise I’m out of my depth as a personal carer. The cricket does actually demand a level of concentration, and a lot of time, which come at the cost of withdrawing both from Mum.

  In only two more weeks the tour will be over anyway, and I’ll have to end this business of crowded streets and thin sunlight, tiny cricket grounds with their skewed histories and oak trees, all of it. The pubs, the freedom at night, the eccies. Damn, the eccies. It’s going to cost me a fortune to keep this routine up at Melbourne prices.

  I get the team travel agents to book Mum a flight back and I pack her off with assurances I’ll see her in a couple of weeks. I arrange a bag of excess cricket gear to send back with her.

  ‘What’s this for?’ she asks, as I drop it on her trolley at the check-in counter.

  ‘It’s so I can dodge the excess baggage, Mum. These days we need three of these bags to play internationals.’

  She rolls her eyes as the bags disappear down the chute towards immigration. I walk her in silence through to the security gate where she kisses me on the cheek and makes a worried frown at the doors. She’s holding one of my hands, not ready to let go.

  ‘You look after yourself,’ she says. ‘Stop these late nights, Darren. They’re not good for you.’

  ‘Aw, come on Mum, I’ll be home in a couple of weeks.’

  The frown lights into a smile like forever ago. ‘I love you, boyo.’

  It stabs me, stabs me straight through the heart. ‘Love you too, Mum.’

  She releases my hand and turns away reluctantly.

  I’m doing a ridiculous movie wave as I watch her slender shoulders disappearing between the doors, trailing her little carry-on case over the tiles. Somewhere behind the ordinary walls to our left, a conveyor belt carries her luggage, her carefully selected coats and socks and thermals and an unmarked sports bag, labelled in her name, with its set of left-hander’s pads, its two pairs of gloves and its three cricket bats: the two Gray-Nicolls with the white rubber grips and the Stokes & Carville with its red grip, its hollow centre and its one point seven kilograms of pink ecstasy tablets, each stamped with a tiny shooting star.

  Exile

  My nostrils are burning from sucking in air. My nose isn’t quite clear—in part a legacy of having it broken once by Wally, and maybe the takeaway from twenty years of cocaine abuse. Each inhalation whirls and deviates over small piles of rocks inside there.

  I’ve switched my attention to the gaffer tape, but it doesn’t give at all. I try cartoonish smiles and frowns, but the muscles that should carry out these movements are clamped in position by the tape.

  When I can distract myself from the gag it stops bothering me. But the instant I start to think again about my breathing, I get panicky. I suppose if I suffocate as a result of being gagged, I’m doing better than I’m likely to do at the other end of this car journey. And that might even cause some chain-of-command problems for the people in the front: damaged goods on arrival.

  Death by gaffer tape. Suitably pathetic.

  There’s a photo you can find if you go through the Sydney Morning Herald’s archives: me in the rooms at the SCG, propped on a bench with my back to the lockers. In my whites, barefoot. I’ve got that scuffed and saturated look you only get after a long day on a hot ground, but more than that, my whole physical demeanour screams defeat. I’ve looked at it long and often—head in hands, hair poking exhaustedly through my fingers. Tangles of strapping tape on the floor. And no one within reach of the contagion. You can’t tell how a photo is cropped unless you’re the creator or the subject, so let me tell you that change room was packed: players, support staff, families and hangers-on, even Craig. But either side of me it’s just discarded gear and timber benches.

  We’ve lost the one-day competition in embarrassing style. I’ve made a duck. Big fat blob. And before the bails have hit the ground, the Board have got a press release out.

  Director of Cricket Operations, Tully Welsh, told a media conference on Tuesday afternoon that management had been dealing with disciplinary issues surrounding Darren Keefe for several years. This has included offers of counselling and welfare inputs to address his issues. However, he has failed to observe the standards expected of him.

  The Syntax of the Living Dead. Who writes this drivel?

  Welsh described the situation as extremely disappointing. ‘The Board has high expectations of its players and staff: we expect them to uphold certain standards. Victorian players and staff receive education on the Code of Conduct on a regular basis. We have attempted to offer Darren multiple forms of welfare and support in recent times. Again and again, however, he has fallen short of the standards expected of a senior player. Darren’s failure to address these issues has left us with no other choice but to take this course of action: accordingly, Mr Keefe’s contract is terminated forthwith.’

  So let’s see: the ‘multiple forms of welfare and support’ was Welshy gate-crashing my drive out to Weymouth last year. The ‘education on the Code of Conduct’ was a yellow sticky note affixed to a stapled sheaf of papers, on which was scrawled PLEASE READ. It all feels predetermined, because it is.

&n
bsp; I’ve been cleaned up by a very good delivery tonight, but others have dropped catches and tried ridiculous shots. It doesn’t seem fair of them to play the ill-discipline card when today was a comprehensive team failure. I’m not the oldest guy in the side, and most of the time I’ve been in form. Not like the old form, not the days of great plunder. But I’ve adapted to my weakened grip: changed my game to do away with the big hitting and just live on a bit of chip and run. Yes, there’s been trouble along the way, but minor stuff, silly stuff, and not recently. Jesus, I’ve even done the pointless recovery sessions at the beach, shivering like a twat with my arms folded across my tits.

  The players in the rooms that day, they have their various reasons to shun me. The younger ones have their own friendships, and also the political smarts to avoid me like a turd underfoot. No debt to a broken-down troublemaker. The older one—and as I say there is only one—can’t even make eye contact for fear he’ll be next. So him I understand. But longevity, experience, craft…these things have to count for something. Don’t they?

  Instinct and love. That’s what inspired all those hours against Wally. Then I’d wanted to be in this side, then that side, then the side that selects the best from those sides. The pursuit was relentless and it all led to this place. No matter how carefully a player might try to consider the reality of retirement ahead of its occurrence, it’s a blindside, and a savage one, when it hits.

  There are other changes that take place around the same time.

  Little things at first.

  A routine trip to the physio to get a bit of work done on Squibbly’s knuckle. But at the counter the pretty girl says cash or card? and I do a little double-take because there’s always been some clacking on the keyboard and a smile and a thank you, that’s fine.

  ‘The, ah, the Board picks that up…’

  This must be how it feels when the family cash card fails at the checkout. People on the waiting-room couches trying to look without looking. She makes a show of double-checking but she already knows the deal.