The Year My Life Broke

by John Marsden

  It was true, my appetite seemed to have gone away. I didn’t know whether it was Tarrawagga or the school or both. Maybe it was Antelope. My tummy was filled with sadness since everything had gone wrong, and there hadn’t been much room for food.

  Just four days later I was at my first training session for the Cypress Under 14s. I had played a few Under 14s games before, when Abernathy Tigers were short of players. And when I saw the Cypress kids, they didn’t seem so big. Maybe I was catching up height-wise. Anyway, I didn’t feel I was playing with giants any more.

  We started in the nets and after a while Wally chucked me a ball and told me to bowl. The batsman was a big fat kid with long hair that he had to keep brushing out of his eyes. But he knew what he was doing and, geez, when he hit a ball it stayed hit.

  It felt so good to have a cricket ball in my hands again. My first delivery had six months of frustration and hunger in it. It wasn’t that short but it just about took the big kid’s head off. ‘Holy crap,’ he said. The second one took his middle stump out and sent it spinning backwards. He got a thick outside edge on the third one and in my imagination it flew into the safe hands of someone who would have been at first slip.

  He hit the fourth one so hard it just about took my head off. ‘Holy crap,’ I said, and he laughed. I had to run about fifty metres to get it back.

  I got my revenge a bit later when I got him again, bowled, with a yorker. Then it was my turn to bat and that was harder. I was pretty rusty and two of the bowlers were genuinely fast. I reckon I faced three overs before I got one perfectly in the middle and felt that sweet sensation of bat and ball clicking together, and saw the ball race away into the distance.

  Wally put me straight into the team, because they were missing three kids for the game the next day. So I fronted up in the morning, with my whites white and my pads cleaned and my bat sanded and oiled. I’d found a few hairline fractures in the splice of the bat, but Dad and I coated them with superglue, so it looked like I’d get at least one more season out of it. That was lucky; we couldn’t afford a new one.

  We were playing a team called Pipertown, and we won the toss and batted. I went in when we were 5 down for 46, and I had big plans to knock up a fast hundred and save the day for Cypress. Unfortunately I got out third delivery I faced. The ball moved a little and my feet didn’t move at all. It was a really clumsy bit of batting. As I left the crease to begin the long walk back, a Pipertown player at square leg said to me, ‘Go back to kindergarten, kid.’

  I reached the line of deckchairs under the trees, feeling embarrassed and angry. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Wally said. ‘It’s a while since you’ve played, so Mark told me. It’ll come back to you.’

  We got out for 88. When their innings started I waited till the boy who’d made the kindergarten joke came in to bat, then asked our captain, a kid named Jonah, if I could bowl.

  At the start of the next over Jonah threw me the ball. The kid from Pipertown had just hit three fours in a row. I marked out my run-up, gave the umpire my hat and came in with a burning feeling in my heart. It was just like in the nets the day before. The ball reared up like a cobra, only this time the boy tried to hook it. He got a top edge and the ball lollipopped high into the air. It seemed to take a minute and a half to reach the height of its long climb, then it descended slowly into the safe hands of our wickie. Pipertown were 3 for 70.

  I got another wicket in my third over but at stumps they were 5 for 116. These matches went for two days, so they’d finish their innings the next weekend. I went home in my best mood since we moved to Tarrawagga. Getting a duck didn’t matter so much; at least I was playing cricket again. I was even nice to Callan and Pippa. We played in the backyard and when they batted I gave Callan two chances and Pippa three before they had to go out.

  When I batted I smashed a ball from Callan a bit too hard, and it went flying next door, into the cops’ place. Six and out. Now the situation from a few weeks back was reversed. I was the one who had to get over the fence. I could have gone to their front door and knocked but after Harriet had hopped over our fence I figured I had the same rights. I just hoped they wouldn’t shoot me.

  Their backyard was much better for cricket than ours because it was mostly bare grass. Ours had too many plants and flowers. All that stuff got in the way. I could see the ball straight off, right against their chook shed. Pretty good shot, if I say so myself, even though it had got me out. I headed for it, trying not to look too guilty. But the situation from our place continued to reverse itself, ’cos through their back door came Harriet. She must have seen the ball come over; in fact she got to it before I did and picked it up and chucked it to me.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘Is your name Harriet?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Mine’s Josh.’

  ‘Yeah, I figured that.’

  I thought I might as well keep reversing things so I asked, ‘You wanna play cricket with us?’

  ‘Yeah, OK.’

  She went to the back door, opened it and yelled into the house, ‘I’m going next door to play cricket.’

  Someone yelled back and then a cop came out. He was just wearing a police shirt and trousers but he still looked like a cop. ‘G’day,’ he said to me.

  ‘G’day.’

  ‘You from next door?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You must be Cameron’s son.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m the oldest. I’m Josh.’

  ‘G’day, Josh.’ We shook hands. He was the first policeman I’d ever talked to. He seemed all right. He turned to Harriet. ‘Be back by six o’clock, OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  Harriet and I got over the fence while Lenny watched. I felt a bit self-conscious, like we were doing something illegal. That’s the effect cops have on you I guess. But Harriet seemed good. Turned out she was an OK bowler. But she wouldn’t bat. ‘I get minus scores when I bat,’ she said. ‘And I hate it. I hate everything I’m not good at.’

  She got me out with a faster ball when I tried to hit her into the middle of next week. Callan stumped me. ‘You should be in the school team,’ I told her.

  ‘I might get in,’ she said. ‘Surrey said I’m close. How come you’re not in?’

  I was gobsmacked. Somehow I’d forgotten that I might have blown my cover by playing backyard cricket. Luckily Callan was too far away to hear. ‘Not good enough,’ I muttered.

  She gave me a look, like, ‘What kind of idiot do you think I am?’ I guess policemen’s kids are pretty hard to fool. I went red. I didn’t know what to say. We were sitting on the swing seat guzzling water.

  ‘Oh well,’ I said. ‘I don’t really try all that hard at school. Especially PE.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I dunno, just started off bad with Surrey, so I couldn’t be bothered trying . . . Plus, I don’t know, I wanted to see what would happen if I . . . if I . . .’

  ‘If you what?’

  And suddenly it all came out. Stuff I sort of didn’t even realise about myself. A flash went off in my brain, like someone had taken a photo of what was in there and the photo was getting printed through my mouth. Slightly weird really.

  ‘It’s just . . . sport. That’s all anyone knows about me. They think I’m a sport meathead. It’s like I’m this prize horse or something. You know how some people are with their cars, they polish them up and take them to shows, I’ve got this uncle, Uncle Will, he’s got a ute, an FPV F6, a Falcon, same as the highway cops use, anyway he takes it to ute musters and wins all these awards and people stand around saying how great the ute is but you know what? Uncle Will never uses the car for anything ordinary, he just keeps it for the musters. And that’s like people are with me and sport. They look at me when I’m playing cricket and tell me I’m great or whatever but I don’t know what would happen if
I wasn’t out there performing. Who would I be then? Would people like me? Would I have friends? Well, so far, the way things are going at Tarrawagga, I’d say they’d treat me like a total reject.’

  I said the last part with a bit of feeling, as I was pretty worked up by all the lousy stuff that had been happening, but then as I sat there and Harriet just looked at me I added, ‘I really do like sport, you know, I actually love it, but sometimes I wonder if that’s all I am, a sports machine.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe it’s like being a policeman’s daughter, you know, the other kids treat me like I’m a bit weird. Especially if their dad or their mum’s been in trouble. I never know whether kids just look at me and see “cop’s daughter” or what. I’m always careful who I hang out with, who I play with and what I say. Got burnt a few times in Prep.’ She laughed.

  ‘Your dad let you come over here though, no fuss.’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s because of the security check on your mum and dad.’

  It took me a moment to register what she’d said, then I got the full impact. ‘The WHAT?’ I stood up. ‘They did a police check on us?’

  She went a bit red. ‘I don’t think I was supposed to say that. See what I mean? Any time you open your mouth you can step on a mine and blow your leg off.’

  ‘What do you mean, they did a police check on us? Who did? Your dad? Your uncle? The CIA?’

  ‘There was a reason.’

  ‘What reason?’

  She looked me straight in the eye.

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’ She glanced towards the fence. ‘I think I better go now. It must be nearly six o’clock.’

  As she headed for the fence I called out, ‘Hey, no telling anyone I can play cricket, OK?’

  She called back over her shoulder, ‘Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me.’

  ‘Really?’ I wanted to say. I could only hope she’d keep my secret better than she’d kept the one about the police check.

  I went back inside and lay on my bed, thinking about the security check. I knew what it would be though. There was only one possibility. That bloody Antelope. It had wrecked our lives. For the millionth time I wished my parents never had anything to do with it. Now it seemed like the cops were watching us, and this girl already knew my life story.

  Of course Antelope hadn’t just wrecked our lives: it had messed up a few thousand other people’s as well.

  We got the last four Pipertown wickets for 50 – they had one player away, but so did we. I bowled a few overs without getting a wicket, but I did take a catch at mid-off. So, they led by 74, which meant the game would be a draw unless they knocked us over quickly for the outright. And we started real well. A run-out off the first ball. Cypress had some good players but the openers weren’t crash hot and their running was terrible. Sometimes they looked like they were playing ‘What’s the Time, Mr Wolf?’

  It didn’t improve much from there and I went in at 6 for 54, about the same as the week before, except that Wally had dropped me in the order after my spectacular duck. This time I was determined to concentrate on every ball. I remembered how Don Bradman had batted: ‘Never hit the ball in the air.’ That eliminated the chance of getting caught and getting caught is the way most batsmen get out.

  So I just defended and defended and defended, getting my right elbow high in the air and playing the old forward defensive for ball after ball. I got sledged a fair bit by the Pipertown kids but at least the one who’d made the smart comment from square leg last week didn’t have so much to say. Then I nearly got trapped LBW. I played outside the line of a ball from a girl who bowled medium pace but this time got more swing than I expected. I thought I’d managed to just graze it with the bat but you couldn’t have expected the umpire to hear that, or notice any deflection. I stood there staring at him in that hypnotised way that I know never looks good but it’s hard not to do it. Seemed like about three minutes before he shook his head and said, ‘Just a fraction high, I reckon.’

  I was glad they didn’t have DRS. But it made me realise that I couldn’t keep blocking till stumps. The bowlers were too good and the cordon of fielders was getting closer. I had to play a bigger range of shots. And the very next ball was too tempting to ignore: nicely pitched up, just outside off stump, exactly where I like them. I did a bit of a shuffle, unlike in the first innings where I hadn’t moved my feet at all, and suddenly the close-in fielders were ducking for cover and the ball was across the boundary and into the trees. My first six since before Christmas.

  I didn’t go crazy and try to hit every ball out of the ground but I did get a lot of confidence from that shot, and I pulled the last ball of the over to square leg for four. I could feel my form coming back like blood through my veins. I hit five off the next over and then four, eight, nine . . . I wasn’t keeping track of the score but after a while I knew I must have been close to fifty, and sure enough, there was a lot of clapping from under the trees halfway through the next over when I ran a single, and the umpire said, ‘Well played.’

  By then though we’d lost two more wickets and with only ten players that meant we were down to our last batsman, a girl called Penny. I had no idea of the score or the time but I thought we should get as big a cushion as possible, so I went for it. Pipertown were getting tired, so it wasn’t that difficult. I hit anything I could and tried to keep the strike, and we made it through about five more overs before Penny got bowled. Just clipped her leg-stump, and that was the end of the innings. We headed back to Wally and the deckchairs, where I found that I was 99 not out. Like they say, cricket’s a funny game: zero one week and 99 the next.

  We’d made 199, to my surprise, which meant that we were 125 in front, so we were well and truly safe from losing outright. Wally was rapt, even though we’d lost on the first innings. I was pleased too. Deep down I’m not that confident and every time I fail at cricket or anything else I think, ‘Maybe this is the end, maybe I’ll never get it back.’

  Funny, every time I do well, I don’t think, ‘Maybe this is the end of all failures and from now on I’ll be a shining star.’ I guess that’s what Mr Barnes means by ‘self-talk’, which he often goes on about in class.

  I went home feeling good but things were pretty dead back there. Dad was at work again. He’d got a job with a bloke called Will, who had a Jim’s Mowing franchise. Dad never used to work weekends but that was another thing that had changed since Antelope crashed. Mum was over at Gran’s; Callan was at a friend’s and Pippa was at a friend’s too, but about five minutes after I texted Mum that I was home Pippa came through the door.

  ‘Geez, what took you so long?’ she said.

  ‘I thought you were at a friend’s.’

  ‘Samantha? Don’t ever insult me by calling her a friend. As soon as Mum texted me that you were home I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.’

  I remembered then that Mum had said something about my looking after Pippa once I was through with cricket. I didn’t want to listen to her bitching about her friends though. It was her favourite hobby. Mum often said Pippa was nine, going on nineteen. Now she slumped onto the sofa and turned on the TV, going straight to some show for six-year-olds. So was she six or nine or nineteen? It was too confusing.

  I wandered into the back garden, leaving her to watch her dumb cartoon. Callan and I had started building a tree house a couple of weeks earlier so I got three more planks up into the branches, with a bit of pushing and pulling and balancing. But I couldn’t be bothered doing any more. I climbed up and sat there watching these thousands of ants racing along the trunk. It was like an ant freeway. I don’t know what they were doing, as I couldn’t see them carrying any food, but they seemed like ants on a mission.

  After a while I sat back against a branch and looked down the line of other people’s yards. Not in the direction of Harriet and her dad and uncle – you couldn’t see much that way because of the trees and bus
hes in our place – but the other way, past the house with the closed eyes. At least in this part of town the yards were different, even if most of them were boring. The one three places down had a bunch of old cars that the guy was repairing, but he was taking so long that the weeds had grown higher than the cars. Another place had chooks, and another one further along had pens for their dogs – blue heelers, they looked like.

  My eyes wandered back to the place next door, the silent, empty house. As I gazed at the middle window, a tiny flicker caught my eye. I guess it’s like a cricket oval with a seagull on it. You notice the seagull a lot more than you notice the 15,000 square metres of grass. Already I was so used to this house being still that I would have noticed a mosquito landing on a window sill. I focused on the movement. For quite a while there was nothing more, and I started thinking, ‘OK, I must have imagined it.’

  These side windows were like the front ones; blinds down, eyes closed. I kept staring at the middle one until my eyes watered, then I made to look away. As I did, the blind moved slightly sideways and I saw one jigsaw piece from a face. Not much more than an eye looking out, looking around. Anything else was covered by the blind, which was now twisted and warped a bit by whoever was behind it.

  I had the impression that the eye hadn’t seen me. I froze to the tree so that I wouldn’t attract attention. I felt scared, like I was seeing something I wasn’t meant to be seeing.

  But after a couple of moments the blind fell back into place and the house was still once more. I didn’t feel frozen now. A kind of tingling started spreading through my body. Maybe it just meant that my blood was circulating again. It took a few minutes before I could get out of the tree. I climbed down awkwardly and ran into the house. Pippa was still watching the cartoon channel, like nothing had happened. I don’t think she’d even moved. I nearly said, ‘Did you see anything just now? Did you feel anything?’ but it was pretty obvious she hadn’t and didn’t, and I thought I’d better not scare her. She’s kind of easily scared, even though she pretends to be so tough. She hates moths, for example. I think she believes that thousands of killer moths are out there, waiting to suck her blood or inject their vicious venom into her veins, or both.