The Rules of Backyard Cricket

by Jock Serong

  So why is he retiring?

  He talks about completing the circle. Says he’s achieved what he set out to achieve, has left Australian cricket in better shape than he found it, and other such roll-the-credits clichés. But you don’t live as competitively as Wally and then one day just lift your foot off the pedal. Devoting himself to his charities? I don’t think so.

  He’s finishing up. A smile, a hand modestly raised in half-protest as the applause swells and fills the chamber. Hands are thrust forward. Cabinet ministers and rock stars; other veterans of the public gaze. As though each might ease his transition to the afterlife, these are the coins for his eyes, these pecks on the cheek and handshakes.

  He’s inching forward, coming down the wide steps, moving at glacial speed towards our table. The throng around him shows no sign of dispersing. Louise watches, looks away, sighs. He’s laughing politely at something someone’s said. She’s checking her phone. He accepts a glass of champagne from an outstretched hand, still shuffling gradually forward. Her face is awash in the phone’s bluish glow. Godawful triumphal music fills the room and a floor producer is throwing to a break and people are milling around, heading for the bar, streaming to the bathrooms. And I’d join the migrating hordes but I’ve already snorted every trace from my little bag in anticipation of the speaking gig.

  Now I can sense Louise looking at me, and for a second I’m reluctant to acknowledge this by returning her gaze. But I do eventually, and when she’s sure I’m looking and she’s locked me down firmly with her eyes much darker than I’ve ever noticed she says the words, or maybe just mouths them over the white noise.

  ‘It’s always been like this.’

  There’s a tiny smile of apology maybe, or resignation. I know she’s near to crying, and for a frantic moment I try to imagine why. Hannah? Wally and his perpetual otherness? The ceaseless pressure of her life, with its public requirement of practised grace overlaid on clashing tectonic plates of managerial bullshit and human crisis? It’s a wonder to me that she’s not curled up foetally in a stairwell somewhere, rather than looking, as she does, like a statue perfectly carved to reflect the dimensions of her tragedy.

  As I rise from the table there’s backs to slap and hands to grab, but nothing like the intensity of what’s going on behind me. I take the jacket from my chair and stab my arms into the sleeves as I push back through the crowd. Five minutes later I’m twenty-seven floors above the mayhem in my hotel room, hoofing scotch from the mini-bar like a dying man.

  So the 4.15 a.m. knocking is a surprise to me, but probably not to you.

  Loud, persistent, beyond ignoring. I reach the door, still in at least half the evening’s clothes, and it’s her.

  Louise, alone and hopping slightly to remain upright. My head’s swimming, not hungover yet, just not present.

  I bring her in, looking like a guilty man both ways down the corridor, and she mumbles something about the bar downstairs. She’d waited for hours and eventually got a text message from her husband’s manager to let her know he’d got a late flight back to Melbourne.

  She stares at me with frightening intensity.

  ‘C’mon,’ she slurs, holding the front of my shirt. ‘Fuckin tell me. You thing you know? Who the fuck is he? Fuck is he, Darren? Slept with him twelve years I dunno. Huh? You know? You ever…punch it out of him? Eh? The boys!’

  She makes an exaggerated, sarcastic salute to a grandstand located somewhere near the airconditioner. I can hear a faint hiss as her body shifts in the fabric of the scarlet dress.

  ‘Keefe boys! Fuckin jampions. Oohyeah. Jesus, whas in the minibar?’

  She bends down, staggers a second on one bare knee and a hand and swings the fridge door open. I’m watching her arse, because the animal in me never quite sleeps. She finds the half-bottles of white, takes a slug out of one and slumps against a cupboard with her wrists on her knees. As she swallows then exhales, the tears follow her breath down and over her chest, flaring red where her skin’s exposed.

  I’m not going to lie here and tell you I’ve been a moral man, but I want you to know that I’m struggling in this room, on this night. If I’m lecherous enough to be wrestling with certain desires at this point, faced with my own brother’s wife in a state of distress, having come to me in this hotel room; does that make me a bad man? What if I feel that charge in the air and somehow evade it? What does it matter anymore? Her husband isn’t here, doesn’t care; mightn’t find out anyway.

  Half-sleep and alcohol have got me running in deep sand. Louise can’t be another object of this endless bloody brother-angst. Yet she sits at the hub of our concentric circles, at the core of it all. And what does she think about it? I can’t form a coherent thought.

  The storm is passing. She’s gathering her breath as she looks up, and through the wreckage I know she understands what’s going on. She works her way onto one hand, one knee, finds her feet and totters towards me. Three steps, slightly taller than me in her heels. She reaches me, places a hand on each shoulder, eyes unfocused, but directed towards mine. And as she leans in, pulling me closer with the ends of her fingers, she takes back one hand and draws her hair behind one ear with a smile that says comfort, says trust. The world again, swirling inwards with all its permutations, a record playing backwards as consequence rushes to meet its cause.

  Then she trips slightly, at the last possible moment. I take her weight, ease her onto the bed and watch her curl there. With her long exhalation, the moment is gone. She closes her eyes, an earring lying on the edge of her cheek.

  Three hours later I can see her from the couch, tiptoeing through the door, her shoes held low in her left hand, stepping over the newspaper with a silent morning to the maids in the corridor. They look at her without surprise. Everyone knows who she is, and whose room this is not, but hotel cleaners have seen everything.

  Mum’s in a hospice by this stage. Louise did most of the organising. Nice place in Kew: third floor, peach walls and bluish pastel prints from the eighties. An aged-care facility, though she’s not old enough to belong in one. Aged care in such places is defined not by chronology but by the scale of indignity: incontinence, dribbling, weeping for ghosts and ultimately dying. If you’re twenty-two with a brain injury, or (like Mum), fifty-six and ragged with Alzheimer’s, you’re aged.

  We’ve been talking over hours, over days.

  To an unknowing observer, she would appear fine. She’s remembering Wally’s debut century for St John’s, his first innings on turf. I was furious at the time, comprehensively outshone with a miserable twenty-five or so. But she saw the day differently.

  ‘I was so proud of you both heading off on your bikes that day. I was tired, you know, and I’d see you come in from the fruit shop and you’d shower and change and go back out to play cricket all day in the heat and I remember thinking I wish I had that kind of energy. It leaves you at some stage, doesn’t it? You can’t feel it happening but it leaves you.

  ‘You both needed new gear for that game. Grown so much over the winter and I hadn’t even noticed. I’d got you these pads that were far too big because I thought you might get a couple of seasons out of them and I felt guilty sending you off with these pads, knowing they’d be flapping all over the place.’

  How does she know what it feels like to run between wickets in too-big pads? From obsessing about us. Watching us with forensic attention to detail.

  ‘But I sent you off in new pads, and Wally had the new bat, the Gray-Nicolls that he made the ton with.’

  ‘You didn’t see it, did you?’

  ‘No, I was back at work. But I rang the grandstand a couple of times from the phone in the bar at the Commercial. They’d give me updates.’

  ‘Shit, you missed out on a lot, Mum.’

  She seems baffled by this. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You worked so much to get us those things. I’m only realising it now. Bloody dreadful. Did I ever say thanks?’

  She makes a scoffing face, waves
my concern away with a frail hand. ‘I got a lot of pleasure out of knowing it was going well for you boys.’

  ‘But how the hell did you afford it? You must have had to go without all sorts of things.’

  She’s puzzled again. ‘No…no, I did better than the other girls.’

  She’s drifting.

  ‘It was a pub, Mum. Weren’t you all paid the same?’

  ‘Well downstairs, yes. But I did better upstairs.’

  The notion flies straight past me, kept separate by a locked door in my mind. Upstairs?

  ‘Anyway Mum, you did a great job. It never felt like we were missing out.’

  But she’s watching me now, a half-smile forming. ‘You didn’t know about upstairs, dear.’

  She’s pushing at that door.

  ‘No. What do you mean?’

  ‘I did some other things for the money, you understand.’

  ‘Mum, what are you…’

  ‘Gratifying the men.’

  Yuck. Oh Christ. Yuck.

  ‘Mum, don’t.’

  ‘Don’t be immature, honey. Goes on all the time. You need to know it. You’re old enough to know it. ‘

  ‘Mum, stop.’

  But she’s on a roll now and she’s not stopping. ‘Perfectly natural. The hotel was on the interstate highway. Lots of truck drivers, salesmen. Even policemen, if you can believe it.’

  ‘MUM, STOP IT.’

  ‘Oh come on, dear. There was no way I could support you two without a bit of cash work. I made too much at the pub to get the dole, but not nearly enough to pay the bills.’

  I’ve got my head in my hands now.

  ‘So we could only do it when we were working two-up in the bar. And never when I took you to work, by the way. You used to cook the thermometer, didn’t you? Used to get fevers of sixty degrees or more, you little scamp. Anyway, one girl would watch the bar and the other’d nick upstairs for a bit. I mean it wasn’t full lying-down sex of course. Didn’t have the time, for one thing. Usually it was just a quick handjob or a—’

  I try to block the sound of her with an anguished groan.

  ‘Oh you’re such a baby.’

  Now I’ve got my fingers in my ears but she’s so blithe she could be discussing the football.

  ‘The owner never knew. He only used one of the upstairs rooms as an office. The rest of them were empty, but they all worked off the same master key. Did it for years.’

  I’m looking out the window, wondering if she can be distracted. Nothing presents itself.

  ‘We even had the boys doing it in the end. The young ones. You know, some of the men have…preferences.’

  I’m up and heading for the door.

  ‘Of course, if it was anything too elaborate we’d have to send them down the road…’

  It takes me two weeks to get an appointment with her neurologist.

  He’s Dutch. Tall and very mild. He observes me drily while I explain what’s happened.

  ‘So what do you want to know?’

  ‘Is it true? What she told me?’

  He laughs lightly. ‘I don’t know.’

  Shuffles forward in his seat, fidgeting with a pen in one hand. ‘There’s two phenomena at work here: confabulation and disinhibition. The confabulist on the one hand is constructing patently false stories because the processes of memory and active cognition are muddled. That person is articulating something they imagined, but which they think is the truth. A non-malicious lie, if you like, simply making a new reality inside your head. Mm?’

  I nod. It seems to satisfy the Mm.

  ‘Disinhibition, on the other hand, can work in the other direction. Have you ever been very drunk, Mr Keefe?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve seen drunk people.’

  He misreads my smirk.

  ‘Yes, they can be quite a handful, can’t they? Well you know that “truth serum” thing about being drunk. It’s just the loss of inhibition that brings everything out. Now Alzheimer’s and other dementias can have a similar effect: the social conditioning that keeps the truths inside has been stripped away, and it all just tumbles out. So your mother may be inclined to invent things, but also to drop her guard about sensitive things.’

  ‘That’s not a lot of help.’

  ‘No, I imagine it isn’t. The best suggestion I can make is to gently examine your mother’s story and see whether it makes objective sense. Look for corroboration.’

  ‘Will she admit it to me if she’s lying?’

  ‘No, of course not. Because in her mind she’s telling you the truth. You’ll only distress her. Look outside her if the issue is really troubling you.’

  As I’m walking out the door he ventures an afterthought. ‘Your mother is an old lady, Mr Keefe. You could just let it go.’

  ‘She’s fifty-six,’ I snap back at him.

  But it really doesn’t matter.

  Despite his advice, I can’t let it go, and the temptation to take it up with Wally proves to be too much.

  I wait until mid-afternoon to call him because I’ve heard he’s in Dubai, from where the new barons run cricket. I can tell from his greeting that he’s distracted, tetchy. Good sense would be to ditch the planned conversation and just keep it social.

  But as we know by this stage of the car ride, I’m not a practitioner of good sense.

  ‘What is it?’ he demands.

  ‘Good thanks mate. And you?’

  ‘Darren, I’ve got people here. What do you want?’

  So he’s done with the niceties. Down to business then.

  ‘Do you think it’s possible Mum could have been a hooker?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Hooker. Prostitute.’

  ‘Darren, what the fuck are you talking about?’

  ‘Sex worker. Mum.’

  He releases a loud sigh of exasperation into the mouthpiece. ‘Where the hell have you got this idea?’

  ‘She told me. Says she used to turn tricks at the Commercial. Upstairs. For truckies.’

  He doesn’t reply, but I can hear him moving about, hear a door closing. His voice returns, lowered to a vicious hiss.

  ‘Listen you fucker. You’ve done enough to smear our family name over the last twenty years. Enough, you understand? You want to drag your own reputation through the shit, that’s your life. I don’t give a fuck. But you’re not traducing our mother’s character. And I’ll tell you something else. I’ve worked hard to build a reputation that’s the exact inverse of yours. I go through life making sure people understand that I’m not like you.’

  He’s waiting in silence because he wants that to sink in.

  ‘So I take it you don’t believe her.’

  ‘It’s not a question—’ he stops, realising he’s raised his voice. ‘It’s not a question of what I believe. It’s a fucking ridiculous story. Our mother is a decent person who made sacrifices to give us a life. You want to bring her down? You want to go talking to your media mates? Huh? Need another revelation to keep yourself in the news?’

  ‘No.’ He’s driven over me. The brute-rational bulldozer. ‘I just want to understand it. I really don’t understand those years.’

  ‘Yes you do. What you don’t understand is how you turned into such a fuckup. You had a good start, and Mum had everything to do with that. So leave it alone.’

  I can’t answer.

  ‘Are we done?’

  I still can’t answer.

  ‘Good.’

  Another time I turn up at the home, come out of the lift and take the left turn that leads to her door. It’s late afternoon, and someone must have left her door open because a bright square of golden light falls on the peach wall opposite the doorway. I’m stopped mid-stride in the sad corridor, because there are shadows on the bright square. Hands. Hands working themselves into shapes.

  A fierce-looking dog. A goat. Then a whole lot of fiddling around, the creatures half-emerging from the curl and stretch of fingers and then rearranging themselves. A short, fat rabbit becomes a came
l. The hands rest in camel pose for a moment as though satisfied with their work, then they drop away abruptly, and the square of light is just a projector screen after the slides are done.

  I round the final corner and there she is in bed, propped up and beatific, head still inclined towards the patch of light on the wall. The hands have retired to lie on her lap, over the fold of the blanket. I scan my childhood and realise it’s another thing I didn’t know.

  Her voice appears mid-sentence as though I’d been sparring with her all along.

  ‘You’re still not understanding it,’ she says. ‘You come to a point where dreams and memories just merge into one another. For all the good they’re worth, they’re the same thing.’

  I hate it when she talks this way, when she accesses some spooky zone of insight that cuts across her practical self and reveals someone else.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that knowing something happened, and thinking it happened, the difference doesn’t matter in the end.’

  I don’t want to grapple with this but I can’t help myself. ‘Isn’t that what photos are for?’

  She looks at me like I’m a child to her once more. ‘You can show me a photo, but photos aren’t proof of anything. Have you ever looked at a photo and felt that tugging feeling, that you want to climb back into that image? When you were young and beautiful? When you were doing something graceful?’

  The pointed look again. ‘Your playing days. The photo’s as elusive as the memory. Just ink on paper. It’s a rough estimate of a thing that might or mightn’t have occurred. God, I can scratch it off with my fingernail and it’s gone. You can’t climb back into those clothes or hear that song or kiss that girl. You can’t hold that child…’ She sobs briefly and starts chewing a nail. ‘…severed from now. Scary, isn’t it?’