by Jock Serong
Then I’m asked to return a phone I’ve had on ‘promotional loan’. A nightclub membership ‘lapses’ though I’m unaware of it having had any kind of term.
A handful of tiny gestures of sympathy. The feeble kind of support that will later be perfected by Facebook. One or two former players pick up the phone, wanting to talk as much about their own tortured passages into retirement as about anything I’m experiencing.
I head down to the MCG one fateful Thursday, park the car in the ample space that characterises domestic cricket, and wander through the eucalypts to the grandstand. Deep under it, at the dressing-room door, there’s a security guy. Shorter than me but a lot heavier. Ten years younger and dressed in black, scowling.
‘How are ya mate.’ I reach for the door handle beside him. He shuffles across slightly and taps my hand away from it.
‘Can’t go in there. Players’ area.’ His mouth barely moves.
‘That’s cool,’ I say. ‘I’m a player.’
‘Nah mate.’
Don’t make me do this mate. I smile. I wrestle with those words, the ones you never want to use because they signify all kinds of defeat. I nudge forward.
He stops me.
Here it comes.
He’s got a hand on me.
Here it comes; I’m gonna have to say it.
Yep, I’m saying it.
‘Do you know who I am?’
‘Nuh.’
Christ. He actually doesn’t.
I’m reasonably accustomed to doing this routine outside a nightclub with a small crowd in the queue. This, this corridor under a grandstand in the middle of a weekday afternoon, is an away game for me.
‘Darren Keefe. I’m a former player. I’m…shit, I’m Darren Keefe, mate.’
‘Sorry Darren. Secure area.’
He’s specifically enjoying the feeling of making me feel no longer famous. He’s itching for a confrontation. And so am I.
‘Understand you have a job to do mate, but you’re embarrassing yourself here. Of course I’m allowed in.’
As I’m talking I slip a hand round behind him and knock loudly on the door. He shoves me violently in the middle of the chest.
‘Didn’t you hear me Mr Keefe? I need you to move back from the door…’
‘Not interested in your needs, number twenty-two.’
The door opens inwards and the puzzled face of the team property steward peers out. We both try to get the first words in, but the bouncer wins.
‘I’m sorry sir, this gennleman knocked on the door. I’m asking him to leave.’
No one’s ever called the property steward—Max, I think it is—‘sir’. I give him a good-humoured shrug like can you believe this tool? and make a move forward. The bouncer’s hand comes up again, blocking my path. Max looks pained.
‘Well, mate, if he’s asked you to go, I guess…’
Oh for fuck’s sake.
The bouncer’s oozing vindication and I feel like smashing him. I feel like smashing fucken Max, whose apologetic look is only inflaming me. This must be the point when wall-punchers punch walls, but I’m accustomed to looking after my hands. And so, God help me, I throw a punch at the security moron.
I know, I know.
He catches my fist easily between his hands in a clapping motion and drives a knee into my groin. And that’s all it takes. I’m on the ground at his feet whimpering as the nausea spreads through my whole being, balls-outward to the fingertips.
Max hurriedly shuts the door. Number twenty-two waits a decent while before hauling me up by the back of the shirt and working me down the corridor with an arm behind my back and one of his knuckles pressed excruciatingly into the side of my neck.
And just like that, I’ve been evicted.
I am an outcast.
No testimonial match. No invitation to the end-of-season gala. The enjoyment of privileges is directly proportional to the pain of having them withdrawn, and I make mental lists of those who’ve crossed me. I rehearse vengeful sound-bites for interviews but no one calls. There’s speculation in the press that the game’s administrators are keen to mark a new dawn, start afresh and so on. Cutting me loose is apparently a motif of the New Professionalism.
After weeks of invisibility I find myself profiled in a weekend liftout magazine. Not Darren Keefe the force of nature, the crowd favourite, but Darren Keefe the ‘troubled star’: wayward brother of national sporting icon Wally Keefe. ‘Beleaguered’—Christ, that’s only a short step from ‘disgraced former’. The piece is written for the non-sporting reader and does not carry Amy Harris’s by-line, but it contains plenty of things I’ve only said to her.
Like for example a throwaway comment to the effect that, like Peter Pan, I’d taken a long time to grow up. The story repeats that assertion verbatim, along with the observation that Peter Pan is not a redemption tale—that in fact the character never does grow up.
Also verbatim is an exchange I once had with Amy. She’d commented that I’m very close to my mother, and I’d agreed. Why then, she’d asked, don’t you hold all women in the same sort of respect you have for your mother? I’d fumbled my way through some sort of an answer, but we both knew it was the question, not my answer to it, that mattered.
During these weeks, the gear sits in bags in a spare room, old sweat and sunscreen atomising into the room’s stale air. The first time I go in there to get something else, I see the bags slumped there, and just look at them without composing a thought. The second time I sit down, take a few things out, handle them. Things that have been the detachable parts of me. I can see them now for their functional ugliness, but over as much of my life as I can remember, the shapes and small noises of these things—gloves and pads and other objects in yellowing shades of white—were integral to me. I take a selection of stuff and give it to the local cricket club to auction off.
The third time I go in, I’ve got three generous lines up my nose and I’m twitching. I pick up a bag and throw it in the car, head for Brewer’s.
I book myself a net and a ball machine, wander in there under the fluoro tubes in an ordinary baseball cap and a T-shirt, unnoticed and lost in my thoughts. I want to feel the rhythm of repetition.
I set the machine for a bland line and length on middle stump. Dial in a hint of outswing, quickish medium pace.
The yellow balls streak through the air, one after another, and one after another I drive through the same arc and deposit each ball in the same square metre of the net. The hollow detonation of bat on hard plastic ball echoes around the tin and wire whalebelly of the Brewer’s nets, precisely every ten seconds. My shoulders are warming up. Stretching, striking, following though, I find I can swing with my eyes closed. Next I adjust my stance by a handspan towards off and start whipping the deliveries across my body towards the legside, targeting one square in the netting.
It should be Wally throwing ’em down. Brewer’s is all about him, the places he stood and worked. I’d take his feigned outrage and obsessiveness over a machine any time.
These were once the rhythms of my days, the pincer formed by my right arm as upper jaw and my left as the lower, the bat held light but firm in its apex. Exhaling steadily, blowing not puffing, as the movement is executed. Long years of coaches watching those physics, me watching footage, swinging through that arc again and again. When it hurts, when it doesn’t, when it’s boring, when it brings me comfort and when it’s solely for the entertainment of roaring summer crowds. Through that arc, again.
I’m sweating now, breathing harder. Every ten minutes I scoop the balls and put them back in the hopper.
I know it’s all done now.
It’s nothing in the end but muscle memory. Synapses and fibres subjected to enough repetition will reproduce the same effect on cue and without conscious intervention. That source code is buried in my body and will persist until the very end. Until they take me out of this boot and shoot me in the head.
But that day in the nets I knew. From that point
forward, none of it had any practical function.
Craigo says I’ve got it all wrong. In the sun-drenched resort pool bar of his mind, retirement is the best thing that could have happened.
We’re at a dance party in Byron when he lays it all out for me: the two oldest men in the place, plonked on our arses on the lawn under a giant inflatable Chairman Mao. We exist outside of the communal thrall around us, though Craigo has done his best to medicate us both. He’s wearing scallop-leg tennis shorts from the seventies, a polyester shirt with nauseating geometrics all over it, huge mirror sunnies and a terry-towelling headband. He is beyond ridiculous, has entered another realm that might even be cool.
I struggle to hear him over the thudding bass, which only makes me feel older.
‘You can’t afford to keep playing,’ he’s insisting. ‘There’s all sorts of stuff waiting for you—TV, radio, a book. Shit, I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to get to this point.’
He’s thinking celebrity appearances for his booze tours, which, if I’m to live to old age, sounds like a terrifying way to spend the next fifty years. He can see me thinking this.
‘You need to be realistic about who you are, mate. You’re not Wally. You’re not going to be part of the club. Ever. Not a coach, not a selector, not an administrator. And fuck ’em mate, who wants that? You’re the people’s sportsman, the guy who can hit a ball out of sight and still front up for beers afterwards. You’re a naughty boy, and the public love a naughty boy, cos he’s the guy living out all the shit they can’t get away with. They’ve got wives and Saturday morning sport and home loans and they look at you and you set ’em free…can you see it mate? You set ’em free.’
He pats the dome of his gut.
‘You need to trade on that, my friend. Don’t be something you’re not.’
The Fall
The top right corner of the gaffer tape is not quite stuck on. A tiny triangle, about four millimetres on each side, pokes free from my cheek where it never quite adhered.
It’s teasing me.
My hands want so desperately to take hold of it and pull. The thought of ripping it free, hauling in great heaves of air, even this boot air—it’s almost like sex. The relief would be incalculable. Thoughts curled into a tight fist around the problem, the solution comes to me spontaneously.
I press my cheek against the carpet as hard as I can, so hard that the fibres make stinging little impressions in my skin. Once, twice, three times there’s no effect. But after a couple more attempts, the corner of tape grips the carpet and tears away from the skin just a little.
I repeat the process and it tears a little further. The triangle of freed tape is now about an inch along each side. I press down again as hard as I can. I want the adhesive to grab the carpet as firmly as possible. Then I pull my face away like a lion ripping flesh from a carcass.
The tape tears this time, tears in a straight line, leaving the little triangle of tape stuck on the carpet.
I want to cry, but I fear if I do the flow of snot will drown me.
On Saturday November 13, 1999, Wally is on tour in India, two Tests into a three-Test series blighted by disharmony and poor performances. Louise is at home in Kew with Hannah, or at least I assume she is.
And I’m at the strippers in King Street with Craigo.
He calls me quite unexpectedly during the afternoon. As though he knows I’m cut adrift these days, especially these Saturdays. That’s always been his talent, the ability to appear from nowhere with a straightforward solution for some absence or hankering in your life. Craigo, like nature, abhors a vacuum.
So he turns up in a gleaming coupe—I’ve given up trying to identify them—laughing and wanting hugs. His new sunglasses make him look like John Goodman, simultaneously menacing and comical. His things in the centre console, a random sampling of the Big Guy’s world—CDs from American west coast stadium rockers, paperclips, a Zippo, more sunglasses, mints, a roll of black roadie’s tape, business cards from one-bogan computer businesses, radio stations and nightclubs. Pens. Nail clippers. Panadeine.
He sees me rummaging as we roll towards the city, gives me a slightly paternal frown. I tweak the stereo until it gives us Bryan Adams and he’s happy again.
When we reach the club, I watch with amusement as Craigo passes up two perfect parking spots directly in front. He hovers in the left lane next to the vacant spots, looking up, looking down, then revs away muttering, ‘Nah.’ He passes up another space, a free one since a construction crew have removed the meter, and his anxiety mounts. Eventually he parks a block away.
Now I know what you’re up to in these moments, old friend. Context is everything.
He checks his watch once he’s heaved himself from the driver’s seat and feeds coins into the meter. The machine spits out a printed receipt which he carefully places near the air vent on the driver’s corner of the dashboard. The robust happiness resurfaces as he waddles beside me down the empty street, scorched dry by the long summer.
He’s greeted at the door with more hugs, copious backslapping. He gives his bomber jacket (Matson Rebuilds) to the girl behind the reception desk. The car keys in the pocket jangle loudly as he drops the jacket on the counter. The only things he keeps with him are his wallet and phone.
I grab the drinks and a table side-stage, nod to a couple of barflies who’ve recognised me. Craigo is no sooner seated and two gulps into his scotch than he’s up again and wandering around the room, greeting people. The girls are on, the music is thumping and he’s still at it. It’s over the top, even for him, and more than a little awkward for me, sitting there sipping away at a beer on my own.
After an hour of this—me watching the girls, Craigo entertaining the room—he finally settles and dumps his phone on the table between our drinks.
‘Anything wrong?’ I holler over the music.
‘No mate, great!’ he mouths.
The young thing, stage name Desiree, is winding herself around a pole, eyes cold.
I’m bored. Despite myself, I’m bored.
Craig’s looking at his watch.
The phone rings.
I can still see his face, from the cheery Ellow? through the long silence that follows. I see that face rearranging itself into something darker.
‘When?’
His eyes dart to me. ‘Why don’t they know?’
He rises in his seat. ‘Where’s Louise?’
A name that doesn’t belong in this air. Craig’s standing now, reaching out a hand almost unconsciously in my direction. It hovers over the table; a finger curling, beckoning me, though his gaze is still directed to some point halfway between him and the dancer. Time is slowing down.
He’s taken me by the arm to pull me up and we’re running between the tables. People are staring. Craig brushes a bouncer aside, sweeps a hand past the front desk to collect the jacket, keys jangling again as he hits it running. The phone’s still pressed to his ear and he’s barking short responses.
‘No.’
‘Coming now.’
‘Yep.’
‘Yep.’
He cuts the call as we’re running along the footpath, pockets the phone and looks at me. His breath is short.
‘Hannah’s missing.’
‘What?’
‘Missing. Gone.’
His jacket’s flapping all over the place.
‘When?’
‘An hour ago. Someone got into the house. Hit Louise. Took off with Hannah.’
He’s looking sidelong at me, gasping for air, rumbling and lurching all over the place. I can’t compose a question to ask him; the shock has robbed me of speech.
We reach the car, throw ourselves in and he reverses out so violently that a passing vehicle has to take evasive action.
‘W-where we going?’ I finally stammer.
‘Wally and Louise’s.’
‘Who rang you?’
‘Police. They couldn’t find you. They’re at the house. Louise is—like�
�she’s not hurt but she’s a mess.’
By now I’m seeing Hannah’s face, the gravity of the situation scrambling my mind and tearing at my heart. How could someone steal a perfect and perfectly blameless child? To what end? Is this the random selection of some predator? Is it something to do with Wally’s fame? A mistake! Yes! She just wandered off…and will return tired and sorry in the morning.
‘Has someone told Wally?’
‘They can’t find him. I’m sure they’re doing everything.’
It’s still hot outside and despite the roar of the aircon on full, I lower the window and look at the passing houses. Someone somewhere has her. For reasons that would already be playing out, too terrible to contemplate. The awful possibilities fill everything.
Craig is driving feverishly, punching at the gearstick, swooping past slower vehicles, forcing roars and rubbery squeaks from the car. We both know there’s no point in it. Whatever has been done is done, leaving only the dread that chokes the day.
At the Kew house, there’s roadblocks on the street. Media and police cars. It’s well after sunset now and there are lights on extendable arms pointed at the house, bathing the whole place in a welter of savage white halogen.
We’re ushered through the concentric rings of people who are there to secure nothing at all, concerned with an absence, not a presence. At the door there’s a tight cluster of men in suit pants and shirts. We’re stopped, quizzed. Craig’s taken aside. Eventually they let me through but Craig’s made to wait, despite his protests.
I push down the hall past whispering people.
No signed pictures, no framed memorabilia. There’s almost no trace that a professional athlete lives here. No sign of cricket beyond a neat row of yellow Wisden spines in a bookcase—Wally’s thing for history and rules. It bespeaks his bitter distaste for sentiment, his nagging aspiration for social advancement.
Louise is sitting at the kitchen table, hair backlit by a table lamp. Traces of Hannah’s life are everywhere: her school photos on the fridge, a drink bottle with her name written near the neck. Her handwriting. And outside the back door, near the dog’s water bowl, her runners placed neatly side by side, waiting.
