The world will hear of this woman, and, through her beauty, they will hear of us. But they will all know that she isn’t really one of us, her name will tell them that. From her name they will know — as surely as everybody else gathered in the front garden knows — that her beauty comes from a place other than here; and in their hearts, the rest of the world will wonder if this place can produce a thing of beauty all by itself. All agree, as the most beautiful woman in the world fades from the television screen, that their pride is lessened. In the darkness, those invisible figures somewhere out there in the rest of the world will see this woman of now-famous beauty and quietly notice that the seeds of her beauty lie elsewhere.
The men in their white shirts, in their golf shirts, the women in their floral dresses or their summer slacks, all return to their drinks — their squat beer mugs, their bright red, lipsticked glasses and their cigarettes. His mother switches the television off. Their talk continues. Soft, then loud with laughter, then soft again. Then a friend of his father’s — a driver who takes the big passenger trains to the border and back again — swings round on his seat and notices Michael sprawled in his corner of the garden, where he’d been sprawled all night, and asks him what he is doing there. And Michael says ‘nothing’, because he isn’t doing anything, and his father’s friend nods as the whole gathering turns to face him: his father with a pleased, drunken beam across his face, his mother with a quiet smile, the rest of the gathering eyeing the boy slowly, all knowing full well that ‘nothing’ wasn’t quite the word.
Then his father’s friend speaks to him again.
‘Well, come on. What do you think?’
Michael is confused, with everybody now staring at him.
‘About what?’
‘What do you think?’ his father’s friend grins. ‘Is she beautiful?’
Michael shrugs, wondering if it shows, this loathing of them all and their stupid questions.
‘How should I know?’
‘Well, do you fancy her?’
Michael’s mother speaks up.
‘He doesn’t think like that.’
‘Oh, doesn’t he just?’ the wife of his father’s friend says, leaning back in an easychair. ‘He gave me quite a kiss — that boy of yours — when we got here.’
There are smiles and quiet laughter, and with the television off they are now watching Michael. He turns his head away and sees their cat perched on a neighbour’s roof, indifferent to everything, and he is filled with an admiration for the cat that he can’t muster for anybody or anything else around him.
‘Is she one of us or not?’ his father’s friend continues.
Michael says he doesn’t know, perhaps a little too quickly. Then he rises from the lawn and says that he is going for a walk. Where to, his father asks, and he says he doesn’t know. His father’s friend suggests that he doesn’t seem to know much tonight and someone else says leave him alone. The last voice he hears, as he steps out onto the street, is his mother saying don’t be long.
As he is leaving he sees the white, ghostly figure of his grandmother drifting across the lawn to the party, that faraway look in her eyes that is often there, as if in her mind she’s living in another time. The party of friends has turned towards her and is transfixed by the sight of this late guest drifting towards them in the night. She has a chamber-pot in her hand. It is her way. When she empties the chamber-pot, she stops and talks to whoever is around, in whatever room of the house she may find herself, before returning to the room that was once his. His father is immediately uncomfortable, Michael can tell that from his face, for his father is never sure what his mother will say. She is a woman who likes an audience and who says things in public that make his father uncomfortable. Michael watches as his grandmother sits at a vacant chair, how she adopts the stiff-backed posture of a queen of somewhere or other, soaks up the greetings of his father’s friends and immediately takes the stage as the unease settles into his father’s features. Michael hears the words ‘happy’, ‘hot’ and ‘New Year’. Then he hears the word ‘Menzies’ and watches, fascinated, as, stiff-backed in her chair, like royalty that was never summoned to the throne, she prepares to speak.
‘Ah,’ she says, pausing and looking round at everyone, judging her moment, knowing full well they are now hanging on her word. ‘Menzies, that giant, immovable tree, whose’ — and here she smiles sweetly — ‘shall we call it shadow or shade, hangs over us all.’
She has them, this grandmother of his who likes an audience, with her sweet old lady stare and her faraway eyes that don’t miss a thing. Michael leaves behind a shifting, moving, talking, group portrait. He moves away, slowly, under the darkness of his street, the front yards and houses all around him bright with porch lights, improbably placed lampshades and televisions flickering in the shrubbery. As he passes the houses of the street he instinctively falls into the ritual of his daily roll-call, as he would if going to or returning from school.
As the names of the houses automatically roll off his tongue, he tries to remember if he has ever asked that question: if they are our names, or their names. At the end of the street, just before the dip in the road that leads down to Bedser’s, he turns to take in those distinct squares of light that represent each of the houses in the street. Each of them open to the night, but closed in with fences and gates. He continues walking and thinks of the Home and what Kathleen Marsden might be doing right now. If he went to the Home and softly called her name from the garden, would she hear? And if she heard, would she answer? And if she did, what would he say?
And then, somewhere in the country darkness of the hills and paddocks beyond the suburb, he swears he can hear music. Metallic music, island music. Rolling inexorably towards the suburb and his street, its very nature announcing that it comes from faraway places, where things are done differently.
As the music mounts, as its waves of sound roll irresistibly through the darkness, he knows that it brings with it those faraway places, and that, once here, a part of those faraway places will always stay behind. That from this point on there will be a before and an after, and this summer will be the boundary line by which such befores and afters will be measured.
17.
Joe Solomon’s Cap
It is like being washed down a drain. Once you are in the middle of the crowd there is no going back, and Michael — feeling as though he has no more substance or motive power than a chewing gum wrapper — is swept on to the turnstile where a man in a grey dustcoat takes his ticket and spins him into the dark, concrete caves of the ground where everybody still seems sleepy and slow from their New Year’s parties.
One long thoroughfare circles the entire ground. Occasional shouts, laughter and cries bounce sharply from wall to bare concrete wall, just above the constant, swirling hum of the crowd. Already, mid-morning, there are drunks propped up against the walls of this city-within-a-city, and the toilets are jammed with people. As Michael and the crowd flow by, the sour scent blows over them, mingling with the smells of pies, hotdogs and spilt beer. All around him people walk with small transistor radios pressed to their ears, and the static and crackle of a thousand tiny speakers floats on this dark, humming river.
It is only when he sees the white number 12 on the bare concrete wall, that he gathers the will and strength to break from the flow, stepping over the butts, empty cigarette packets and discarded food scraps that have already begun to carpet the walkway, and up into the glare of the hot, morning sun. It is almost like being born for it is only at this point that Michael comes alive. The cool, cavernous darkness is washed away by the glare of the sun and Michael narrows his eyes as he looks up. And then the moment that never ceases to take his breath away, that sudden wave — not even a wave, the swell under the heart that passes through him every time — as the bright-green expanse of the playing field is suddenly spread out before him. Every time, he lingers just that bit longer than the crowd will tolerate, and he hears the complaints behind him as he pa
uses at the top of the stairs and takes in the green wonder of the place. Here the world opens out. Here the world is wide again. Here, whatever it is that he rolls up into a red leather ball and hurls down a narrow pitch as fast as he possibly can, is released.
Michael stumbles out into the day and allows the crowd behind him to spill into the seats and the standing-room sections of the arena. He dwells on the playing field, the smooth, green wonder of the thing. It is smooth and green like the pop-up cardboard games of Test Cricket in the shops or the playing fields on the covers of books; as smooth and unreachable as the playing fields in dreams, yet only a few yards away. Here the world opens out, here the world is wide again. Here the small eyes of the street, the chattering houses, the eyebrows that are raised all around him whenever his practice ball snaps into the back fence and resounds around the neighbourhood like a rifle shot, fade into insignificance. He sits in the only place on earth to which he knows he can bring his dreams and be certain that the place will take them in.
The heat is everywhere. Soon the ground will fill, but not even the crowd will absorb the heat. The sun is already high, and the clear invisible heat that is all around them hits the concrete paving at Michael’s feet then rises up at him again because the sun hits you twice here. There is no breeze, no fresh air, just the same air, heated twice, moving round the ground, past the scoreboard, the shaded stand of the members, and back to the outer again. The trick is to forget the heat. When the white-hatted umpires and the players stroll out onto the wide green disc of the oval he concentrates on putting names to them all. The morning, the midday, the early afternoon all pass slowly.
Then, in the mid-afternoon heat, Michael takes his eyes off the game for a moment and everything becomes strangely quiet. Puzzled, he wonders how it is that so many people can make so little sound and so little movement. His eyes sweep the ground behind him, beside him, in front of him and back again, but he can neither see movement nor hear sound. It is a moment that needs explaining — that second that Michael’s eyes left the ground and were not watching the play. As much as he looks for the reason in the crowd it isn’t there. For in that second in which he took his eyes off the playing field, the cap of Joe Solomon fell from his head at the completion of a stroke, landed upon the stumps, and dislodged a bail. One bail, silently shifted from its groove at the top of the stump, fell — that’s all it takes. Quite possibly everybody in the ground saw this except Michael. Michael heard only the silence of the crowd and saw only its stillness. At the same time, the crowd had witnessed only Joe Solomon’s cap fall onto the stumps, but had no idea that it had collectively held its breath for a split second, become utterly still and silent and united in its breathlessness — only Michael saw that. The crowd, numbered later that day at 65,372 people, witnessed the fall of Joe Solomon’s cap with great alarm and sadness. And the silence that occasions the fall of Solomon’s cap and the subsequent dislodging of the bail, is a silence of deep concern. The eyes of the crowd move from the fallen cap — now lying on the ground as if having fallen in battle — to the Australian captain. He can, this crowd collectively knows, do one of two things: he can do the right thing, or he can do the wrong thing. And the crowd, in that overwhelming silence that so puzzles Michael because he has missed all of this, is holding its breath waiting to see what the Australian captain decides.
As Michael turns back to the playing field, now realising that the reason for this overwhelming silence is to be found out there, he hears the silence break. From the outer to the members, from the stalls to the dark, cool caverns of the numbered bays where even the drunks were quiet and still for that split second, the crowd is as one. And the one, crushing wave of sound it releases is as strange in Michael’s ears as the silence that preceded it. This is not a happy sound. This is not the sound of spontaneous celebration which erupts from the crowd whenever a wicket falls. These are boos. All around Michael, this crowd is booing and jeering, and it is only when he stands with the crowd and follows the eyes and outstretched arms of those around him, that he realises they are booing the Australian captain. He had two choices, and now Michael stands in silence and watches as the crowd tells him that he chose badly.
For the rest of the afternoon the Australian captain lost his first name, in the same way that Jardine and Larwood lost theirs. He was, in the mind of the crowd, no longer Richie Benaud or even Richie, as he might have been referred to in more affectionate moments. He had simply become Benaud — and he stayed that way all afternoon.
On the orange, gravel path that leads out of the railway station and down into the Old Wheat Road, the world becomes small again. The boos and hisses of the afternoon still swirl round in Michael’s head, just as, earlier that day, they had swirled round the vast, concrete stage of the MCG. Had he examined the faces in the crowd more thoroughly, he might well have seen variations of Mr Younger, Bruchner, Barlow and Webster — faces as familiar as those he sees daily in the street — all transformed by the moment. For that crowd had not only booed the Australian captain — they had done something far more serious — they had deprived him of his Christian name. They had denied him his citizenship for the afternoon, turned him into the other side, and turned the other side into theirs.
Michael is not someone who cares for the crowd. He doesn’t have the gift of getting on with the crowd, unlike his father. It is a gift that Michael doesn’t want. But today he saw and heard another crowd. That vast, concrete stadium they all shared that afternoon, it occurs to him as he strolls down the Old Wheat Road, is a place where the Bruchners and the Barlows and the Youngers and the Websters of this world can be bigger or smaller than they really are. And today when they rose from their seats as Joe Solomon’s cap had so carelessly fallen from his head, onto the stumps, to dislodge his off bail, they rose like a people whom the summer had opened up. The summer, the music, tin drums and those surnames and place names that spoke of faraway lands, had opened up something in this crowd to the extent that they could make the other side theirs.
Michael stops at the top end of his street and absorbs the sights and sounds of the houses preparing for the evening. The world is small again, everybody back inside their houses. But for a short time that day, the careless hat of Joe Solomon had moved this quiet suburban world in ways that it hadn’t counted on being moved when it woke up this morning. It had nudged their doors so that, even if they couldn’t be called open to whatever is out there in the great world, their doors were — for a short time at least while the Australian captain was deprived of his Christian name — ajar.
Part Three
Monday, 16TH January 1961
18.
Frank Worrell Alone
He does not hear the noise of the crowd or the chat of his team. With his pads on, his gloves and bat by his side, Frank Worrell sits perfectly still in the team room looking out onto the ground. He hears none of the excited sounds around him. No one speaks to him. He is padded up, the next to bat, and he is concentrating on what he must do. So utterly concentrated that he is perfectly still and deaf to everything around him. So still, in fact, that he might be meditating, or even in a trance.
Throughout the tour he has learnt to think like a fly walking on water. He has learnt to walk upon the surface tension of the moment without breaking it. His mind is utterly concentrated. Frank Worrell is almost somewhere else. His body is in his seat overlooking the playing field of the Sydney Cricket Ground but his mind is elsewhere. His eyes, unblinking, look beyond the spectacle in front of him, and his head is turned slightly to one side as if receiving a communication from far away.
As he sits and waits for his time to stand and take his place on the playing field, he is contemplating the perfect stroke. He is not a person given over to too much contemplation of such matters, especially not during this tour, but at this moment he is dwelling on an image of perfection. A player is resting on one knee after completing the perfect cover drive. He sees the stroke in slow motion, the ball approaching, the front
foot of the batsman advancing down the pitch, the moment of impact, the follow-through, and the right knee of the batsman coming to rest on the pitch as he watches the ball disappear. It is, he knows, a contemplation of the ideal, a moment that lives only in the mind, in that world of ideals that exists somewhere out there beyond the possibilities of this actual world.
At least, that is how he first sees it. But as he sits, in perfect stillness, he realises that the player is not anonymous, a stranger or a photograph of some famous figure from the past forever lodged in his memory. No, what he realises, with a jolt, is that he is watching an image of himself. And with this comes the feeling that although the stroke had not yet descended from the ideal to the actual world, it might soon do so. The part of Worrell’s mind that was aware of events out there on the playing field has ceased paying attention, and Worrell is now utterly oblivious to the actual world. His mind moves on silence. The world around him is still and mute while he is in contact with this other one. He sits, impassive, convinced that an event that has already been played out is moving towards them all, and an act complete in all its intricate details is simply waiting for its time to enter the world of action on the wide, green playing field in front of him.
If he were a poet he might call this inspiration. A writer, he speculates, has such moments and then writes them down. The writing is an attempt to recover the moment of inspiration in which everything that is to be written arrived, complete in its detail. It may take a day, a year or a decade. Frank Worrell has only today.
When the world returns and he is once more conscious of everything around him, he tells no one. He is not that kind of person. Not the kind to talk when talk is not required. Besides, Frank Worrell is alone. He has been alone all through the summer and he will stay that way until the summer ends.
The Gift of Speed Page 8