The Rules of Backyard Cricket

by Jock Serong

  Louise is upright, elbows on table and chin on fists. She’s been crying but she isn’t now. There’s a welt over her left eye, extending diagonally back into her hair. In the centre of it a dressing’s been affixed, and there’s a small spot of blood in the centre of that. Her left eyebrow is swollen and there’s blood in the eye, giving her a strangely combative look.

  Her eyes—the red one and the white one—follow me. I can’t imagine what physical contact is appropriate—a hand on the shoulder? A hug? Her demeanour does not invite touch. So I sit there, half looking at her, half trying not to.

  People come and go—detectives, mostly. They keep their voices low, don’t smile or laugh. They’re combing their way through everything, using little stepladders and lights, photographing, brushing. All of them wear bright blue disposable gloves, as though fearful of contamination by grief.

  Louise is still watching me but there’s barely any recognition there. I’m conscious that two of the male detectives have moved closer, looking at random objects but apparently waiting to hear us talk. I watch one of them long enough to make eye contact. He retreats a little.

  ‘Should you be in hospital?’ I venture.

  She shrugs, infinitely uncaring.

  ‘What do they know?’

  ‘Not much,’ she begins slowly, quietly. ‘Rang the doorbell and I just opened the door, like a fool. They had’—she waves a hand over her face distractedly—‘balaclavas. We’d just been for a…a swim.’

  Her face begins to crumple. ‘She hasn’t got anything warm.’

  The tears flow like she’s bleeding them. Her face is veined with the pressure. Her breath hisses forwards as she sobs. I can’t even begin to think how much pain she’s in.

  My thoughts are taking on strange shapes, turning on me like they just noticed me in a crowd. And their mood is turning ugly. I was at the strippers. I was at the strippers with a no-good friend who works part-time as a gangster I think, but I don’t really know. I was drinking beer in a dark room with a whole lot of failed humans while a handful of girls—empowered or disempowered, I don’t know—took their clothes off for our gratification. Outside the sun burned down on the rest of the world while Louise took Hannah swimming, a mother and her daughter engaged in the happy cocoon of their rituals, while I was ogling someone else’s daughter.

  Someone came here and did this to my family. While I watched the strippers.

  After a long time her weeping subsides, and she goes back to staring, the wakes of the tears shining across her cheeks.

  ‘Wally?’

  ‘They’ve found him,’ she responds, absently. ‘Hyderabad. There isn’t even a fucking Test in Hyderabad. I mean, what was he—?’

  ‘Could’ve been anything,’ I offer feebly.

  ‘Yeah, anything with him.’ There’s a nasty edge of sarcasm in her voice that’s new to me. The anger is unmistakable in her eyes. Two rings on the third finger of her left hand. A green stone, sunlight sparking in it. A child has been torn from her mother. Something elemental has been severed.

  ‘They’re putting him on a plane.’

  There’s movement among the nearby cops: a woman’s whispering to the two suited men. After she breaks off from them, one leans forward.

  ‘Mrs Keefe, we’ll be telling the media that you and your husband will not be paying a ransom under any circumstances.’

  She suddenly looks hopeful. ‘Has there been a demand?’

  ‘No. I’m telling you this because we may have to make some preparations. Now we do want you to have money ready, because what we tell the media and what we’ll do might be two different things. Could you get access to a large amount of money quickly?’

  ‘What’s a large amount?’

  He rolls his eyes, searching for a random figure. ‘A million dollars?’

  ‘No,’ she says firmly.

  ‘Couldn’t you mortgage this place?’

  Seems like a good idea to me. Four bedrooms, a pool, views over the city. Wally would be making a fortune.

  ‘It’s already mortgaged. To its limit,’ says Louise, enunciating each word coldly.

  ‘What?’ The detective is visibly shocked. ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask Wally.’

  The detective wanders off to relay this news.

  ‘Where will you stay?’ I ask, again seeking to push back the silence.

  She shoots a look at the nearby huddles.

  ‘They say I have to be guarded until Wally’s back.’ She snorts disdainfully. ‘Watched.’

  ‘Who on earth—?’ I begin, but she cuts me off.

  ‘Don’t.’ Her fingers splay into hard white stars like she’s pressing them on an invisible screen between us. ‘I don’t know. I can’t imagine…’ And then, curiously: ‘I just don’t understand this life.’

  The media interest over subsequent days is unrelenting and predictably divorced from reality. The police are working on a theory, they say. The police have a suspect, they say. The police have no idea, they say. They hold hopes the girl is being held, alive, for ransom. There has been no contact as yet from anyone claiming to have the girl. There have been claims which they’re seeking to verify. There have been claims that have proven to be callous hoaxes. Illustrated liftouts in the daily papers suggest everything from a serial killer to a paedophile ring to an international conspiracy. Her school photograph becomes a permanent fixture behind the shoulders of the city’s newsreaders. There is an aerial shot of their neighbourhood in one newspaper; I can see the pitch that Hannah and I mowed and rolled together, a pale scar on the vivid green of the landscaped garden.

  No stone, however awful, is left unturned in the lather of their speculation.

  Perhaps one stone.

  In the free-association vacuum of their ideas, they note Louise is thought to have a history of depression. She was once investigated by an international body (she in fact gave evidence to a Dutch inquiry into NGO employment practices). No one goes so far as to say she is a person of interest or that she is ‘helping police with their inquiries’, but nor do they take care to exonerate her or pay any heed to her obvious distress. Meanwhile, Wally is accorded gravity, sympathy, respectful distance. The notion of questioning his absence from his family, and simultaneously from the team, never occurs to anybody. I don’t disagree he’s blameless, but I’m struck by the lack of critical thinking when it comes to a man like him.

  Craig gives a statement to the investigators explaining our afternoon at the Fillies Bar. It all checks out and he’s left alone, which for a man with his recreational pursuits must be a considerable relief, but he disappears for a while anyway.

  Wally rings me in the middle of the night, eighteen hours after I walked into his house. The detectives have allowed me to sleep in the spare room there, once they’ve satisfied themselves that I had no role in the incident. Their preference is for everyone to clear out completely, but as Louise has refused to leave they grudgingly agree I should be there with her until Wally arrives.

  It twists the blade inside me: she wants to be here when they bring Hannah home.

  Wally’s call comes from Singapore, where for these last few hours I imagine he remains a figure of no public interest. He’s awaiting the last leg of his flight home and wants me to get him from the airport.

  Entering the cavernous building, it’s immediately clear that there’s been a tip-off: a black and silver knot of photographers and equipment completely obscures the entryway from the arrivals hall. A call goes up from among them and a few spin around to get their shots of me arriving. A few more rush forwards with microphones, their voices cancelling each other, a formless blur ricocheting off tiled surfaces.

  I look over their heads: the board indicates the flight is yet to land. And so I spend an awkward half hour seated on a café bench, flicking away journalists while we all wait for the main game. Darren Keefe, alone on a bench with his despair. I don’t want to give them the pleasure but I don’t have a choice.

 
; Eventually the mob rises and clamours as the first passengers come through. I’m so accustomed to footage of Wally in airports, pushing his trolley loaded with equipment bags, that at first I don’t recognise him with only hand luggage. He’s well dressed but not in team gear, his head slapped and pulled by the long-haul drag. Exhausted and depressed, without concealment.

  His eyes swivel, looking for me. The cameras crunch one after the other, flashes firing from outstretched arms. The yelling is obscene. Wally! Any news? Have you had a ransom demand? How are you feeling?

  That last one stops him in his tracks. He searches the scrum.

  ‘Who said that?’ he asks.

  Woman in a suit, dressed and made up for television. The cameras now turn to her. She loudly announces herself and her network. Wally’s baleful eyes fix upon her.

  ‘How the fuck do you think I’m feeling?’

  His venomous stare holds her as her mouth opens and shuts.

  There’s stunned silence for several seconds before the roaring begins again: none of these people has ever seen Wally Keefe uncomposed, unrehearsed. In the last frame of the silence I manage to call, and he finds me by voice, veers my way. We move through the pack towards the exit, the shape-shifting mass re-forming itself around us, a shoal of mackerel cut by two sharks. Wally pays no heed to them, nor to me. His head’s down, pushing grimly forward.

  We run in front of a rolling taxi which lurches to a halt, cutting the pack from behind us. Their numbers thin as we scurry into the carpark building and across the carpark floor. I unlock the car and Wally throws the small bag in the back seat. He slumps into the front, slamming the door behind him.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ he says quietly.

  ‘Are they telling you anything?’ I ask.

  ‘Police? No. They don’t know, or they’re not saying. You?’

  ‘Same, really. I think they’ve genuinely got no idea.’

  We drone south down the freeway, both of us staring straight ahead. I can see out of the corner of one eye that he’s trembling slightly.

  ‘You all right?’

  He’s studying his phone, hands bouncing all over the place.

  ‘I’m fine, all right. Just…fucking fine.’

  I decide not to push him any further. He makes three calls while we’re driving. One to Louise (‘Yep. Me. Twenty minutes.’), one to the police to tell them he’s headed for Kew and one that I’m guessing is to team management, about retrieving his gear from India. He finishes by ordering someone to ‘get the fucking media off my back’. There’s a barely contained fury about him, from his frantic rubbing at his swollen eyes, to the tone of his calls, even the way he’s sitting. It’s been a long, long time since he and I have engaged in the combat that framed our childhoods—the blue over my state selection was probably the last decent tangle we had. I’m remembering now that Wally’s response to emotional pressure is to lash out.

  And there are others out there who don’t even know, given his carefully controlled image, what Wally is capable of.

  Somewhere around Mickleham Road a hatchback pulls alongside us and lingers just long enough in parallel that Wally and I both look across. It’s a rental: the guy driving it gives us a guilty glance, then the back window comes down and some idiot points a camera at Wally. Big, professional lens. Wally looks around inside the car and finds the coffee mug I was using on the way out to pick him up. With his other hand he stabs at the armrest until he finds the window switch. Down goes the window and he hurls the mug at the hatchback, striking it directly in the centre of the driver’s window. Mug and window shatter completely, revealing the driver’s shocked face, the glittering shards of glass on his shoulder, as the hatch drops speed and retreats.

  I’m left staring straight over the top of the steering wheel at the freeway ahead. Wally and Louise are being subjected to an intensity of suffering that I can’t experience because I’m not a parent. Watching them is pure helplessness. I want to clutch at him, to find my beloved brother in his sorrow, there beneath his rage.

  Outside the house the cops have set up a card table on the front path, stationed by the most junior of them, a kid with no stripes writing on a clipboard. At either end of the garden, motionless figures dressed in black. Helmets, heavy boots. Rifles, for God’s sake. Wally’s eyes are wandering over the scene, as if determining which side of his personality to engage.

  ‘Don’t come in,’ is all he says as he steps out of the car.

  I don’t want to come in. I don’t want any further part of this. The presence of the men in black is feeding a restless animal in my mind. Whoever’s got Hannah is not a lone freak, a street-roaming predator. Whoever’s got Hannah orchestrated this for a reason, and they’re an ongoing threat.

  As the weeks wear away, Wally and Louise gradually shift from bewilderment to insistence that Hannah will be found. A handful of the boldest journalists point out that the lack of a ransom demand, particularly in the case of someone as famous as Wally, is surely a bad sign. One openly suggests: ‘It is likely the police are investigating a homicide, despite the poignant refusal of Hannah’s parents to accept that reality.’

  The journalist in question is Amy Harris.

  I’ve refused to take her calls throughout. I assume Wally has done the same. I know viscerally that she’s right to hypothesise in this way, but I’m not going to assist her. Within hours she’s being pilloried by other commentators, some bizarrely suggesting such speculation is ‘un-Australian’. Australians, of course, being known for their restraint when speculating.

  Wally and Louise take to wearing purple wristbands (‘Hannah’s favourite colour’) with ‘HOPEFORHANNAH’ stamped in them. People buy them from a newspaper website out of…what, solidarity? I don’t understand it. I feel guilty not wearing one.

  If Honey was still part of my life, she’d be urging me daily to talk to her about it. She sends me discreet texts, warm and supportive. But I don’t want anyone’s sympathy. It’s misdirected when applied to me, to the dead cavity within me. I can’t backfill it with talk.

  I have a persistent feeling Wally isn’t talking to Louise about it, beyond the show of unity they contrive for the cameras. The rest of us, crippled and strangled by the horror of it, will also endure by staying silent.

  The certainty settles over me, accumulating day after day like a blanket of ash. Hannah’s not trapped or held, reaching out to us across some formless void, willing us to find her. Hannah’s dead.

  Among the countless offers of support, I start to find the beginnings of some career opportunities. I greet them with an enthusiasm that is cheap, cynical and also desperate. I’m using more and more coke to get through the days; find myself turning up to meetings with fingers all over my nose, twitching like a fallen bird.

  A cable channel called Globe Sports offers the best terms—all they want from me is night-time commentary of some pretty inconsequential one-day cricket. Good money, no great effort from me, and the rest of my time is my own. The role is a perfect fit for both parties. I’m both the garrulous court jester and the wounded emissary of the Keefe clan. Only on television can these contradictory personas converge. When I offer my schtick, an eyebrow or a smirk, the panellists laugh twice as hard because…well, you know.

  I stumble once or twice, but the weight of public sympathy is such that it’s almost impossible to alienate myself. One morning I’m part of a live weather cross to a breakfast TV program—the foreshore barbecue launch of some health initiative, people in message T-shirts, balloons, donation tins. I’m just about to go live with the weather guy when this pest appears out of nowhere and starts abusing me. I’m only catching some of the words over the various community-oriented noises around me, and fuck knows what his point is—some sort of conspiracy—but he uses the word Hannah.

  Crystal clear and no mistaking it. I look directly at him—he’s standing about twenty feet away, and I see him smirking, aware of the power of that word. For a few seconds I wait to see if I am mist
aken, or if he’s going to back down. I am not, and he doesn’t.

  So I charge him.

  Just run headlong at the bastard and collect him around the middle. There’s an audible oof as we collide, then we’re both on the ground and I’ve got a forearm across his throat, choking the life out of him. He’s going purple, his eyes bulging and—I imagine—gradually haemorrhaging into the dark recesses of his ugly head. I want the fucker to die, and I don’t care that dozens of people are watching us and there’s cameras everywhere. I want him to die by my hand, right here.

  Eventually the crowd intervenes and I’m hauled off him, still trying to stomp his balls as we’re being separated. He chokes and splutters, takes an eternity to get to his feet. They drag him one way and me the other. The live cross is cancelled, obviously.

  But here’s the illustration of my newfound identity. It’s reported that night that I was approached and insulted by a renowned serial pest, and that I acted under extreme provocation. And the network, as rapacious and grubby as any other, ‘has elected not to broadcast the incident, which was captured on camera, out of respect for the Keefe family’s privacy’.

  The job with Globe is just about perfect, though perhaps not entirely fulfilling. They fly me to domestic games: eight or ten international one-dayers for the season, along with a handful of domestic fixtures, some exhibition games. Easy.

  I can carry out the role with all manner of intoxicants on board. The best combination is a couple of lines and some champagne. Yes, I’m looked at askance in various stadium bars, ordering the bubbles while I fuck around with my feral beak. But I tell you, it works: getting loaded makes life less of a chore. Management know I’m doing it, but they also know they’d be running on four flat tyres if I didn’t.

  The arrangement works fine for about two years. I get my teeth done, on the producer’s advice. Little place in South Yarra, espresso while you wait in their renovated terrace-house lounge room. Espresso is probably what turned my teeth beige, but I’m not complaining. By the time they’re done, my smile flashes in the blue shades of a glacier.