by Ron Elliott
David went back to his seat to watch the rocks, the wandering jobless and the big trees as they neared Toodyay. He wished they weren’t going to Perth.
In the end they didn’t.
They got off in Northam and Uncle Mike carried his bag up to one of the Northam hotels. They went in the main door and down a passage. The bar was noisy with harsh laughter and men’s voices as they passed and went up some stairs. His uncle took a key out of his pocket and unlocked the door to a room.
Inside was a lumpy double bed, with an old quilt and a big chipped wardrobe. ‘Home sweet home,’ said his uncle as he opened the wardrobe doors to put David’s Gladstone in. There were clothes hung up and some cricket bats lying on the bottom.
‘There’s a farm show here, David. It’s like the Royal Show in Perth, with rides and animals and vegetables. There’s a show at the side. What the Americans call a sideshow which is full of games of skill and chance, where a man with a bit of blather and a good trick can make some money.’
David didn’t say anything. He sat on the bed and smelled the coldness of the room.
His uncle went on, ‘So, I’ll go get us some food, and tomorrow we’ll go to the Northam Regional Show, and show you off.’
Before David could ask what he meant his uncle yelled, ‘Think quick. Live grenade.’ A cricket ball was coming towards him and he just caught it before it hit his chest. ‘Much better,’ smiled his uncle before leaving the room.
David looked down at the ball. It was new and all leather.
David went to the double doors that led out onto the veranda to look through the curtains. There was a man further along, leaning over the rail and looking at the street. David could hear a motorbike coughing up the road. It went past and away. Things got quiet again.
David put the cricket ball up to his nose and smelled its newness. He went over to the wardrobe and looked in, seeing that there were five cricket bats and some more, older cricket balls. He cupped the new cricket ball in his hands, squeezing gently to feel its firmness. He tossed it from hand to hand, spinning it in gentle arcs. Then he lay down on the bed, rested the ball under his chin, and thought about nothing.
It was late, and the sun’s light was already at the veranda doors. Uncle Mike was asleep next to him on the bed. With his eyes closed and his mouth open his magic was gone. He had a puffy face, with little lines of blood on his nose and at the top of his cheeks. He had a small scar near the temple of his right eye.
David eased off the bed and sat at the small table where his uncle had left a cold pork pie on a plate. David bit into the pie, looking at his uncle’s back. On the floor next to the bed were his boots and socks.
David needed to go to the toilet, but finished the pie first as he thought about his uncle’s limp. He eased forward on the floorboards and across the mat to the side of the bed. He looked down at his uncle’s feet. He only had four toes on his right foot. The little one was gone and so was a big piece of foot, leaving a dip in the sole there and a smooth but lumpy pink scar.
David looked under the bed but there was no chamber pot. He put on his boots, tucked in his shirt and took his brand new cricket ball from his pillow.
The corridor was quiet. The rooms had numbers except on the door of one near the stairs. That sign read Bathroom. But when he turned the knob the door wouldn’t open. A deep voice grunted, ‘Oi, I’m ’ere.’
David went down the stairs of the sleeping hotel. He looked into the bar. It was empty. Stools were upside down on the bar and on some other tables. It smelt of old beer and cigarette smoke. He heard a pot bang further down the corridor towards the back of the hotel and he went down there. He smelt stove smoke and heard a cook or someone in the kitchen, getting things going he supposed. Back on the farm, he would have done his chores by now. He’d be just sitting down to breakfast before riding to school.
By the kitchen door was the open back door of the pub. There was a large cleared area behind, where horses could be watered and bullock teams turned. There were empty hitching rails and troughs by the back of the hotel. Some trucks and a motor car were parked out there so David went over between two of the trucks to piss on the wheel, which was the right thing to do under the circumstances of being caught short. He looked around as he stood there.
He was not only at the back of the hotel but at the back of the town, it seemed. Up past the hotel, were the backs of some shops and then the backyards of some houses. Not much was moving. The river was just down the slope a little and he could see some smoke there, which he supposed was where the town Abo camp was. Dungarin used to have a mob of Abos every winter, but they’d been moved on, Nell had said. David’s grandad gave them some salt and sugar for chopping wood just as he tried to give some food and water to anyone else who was passing through.
He did up his pants feeling the weight of the cricket ball in his pocket. He looked over to behind the hotel again. There were some packing cases by the back steps. David looked at the cricket ball. There was nothing so beautiful as a new cricket ball. It was shiny and round and precious ... and usually no good at all to a spin bowler. A ball spun much more easily off the pitch when it was scuffed and battered. It swung and drifted and dipped in the air as its rough and torn edges dragged it this way and that. An old ball was a good ball for a spin bowler. But to David, a new ball was a precious ball; he wanted to keep it new forever and yet, at the same time, he couldn’t wait to bowl it and see it spinning, bright and red and glinting through the air.
David found an apple box, which was just about the right size for some wickets, and dragged it up near the back of the hotel, so the foundations would act as wicketkeeper. He turned and he paced out the twenty-two feet for a pitch and dragged the toe of his boot across the dirt to make the line of the crease. He stepped on from that to the couple of paces of his run-up and turned to look at the packing case. He looked at the ball, and started to spin it from hand to hand.
‘A murmur has run through the crowd here at the Melbourne Cricket Ground,’ said David in his smoothest wireless voice. ‘Richardson has tossed David Donald the new ball. Longford seems to be licking his lips at the prospect of spin in the first over of the second Test.’ David stepped in and bowled a flattish delivery which hit the dust in front of the box and went straight on, clipping the edge of the makeshift wicket.
David grunted. If he’d bowled that ball in that way to Longford it would have disappeared back over his head and probably over the boundary. David kicked away some of the dust so the ball could grip on more solid ground, and then he started experimenting with his fingers and flight, so he could get some movement and variation from the new ball. Finally, he started to get the ball to spin and dive and dart to the left and right of the wicket. He even got a couple to make the whirring noise as the ball spun in the air before it bounced.
Giggling made him turn. There were a couple of Abo kids near the trucks.
‘What?’ said David.
‘You keep missin’,’ said one.
‘I’m trying to,’ said David.
The kids looked at each other with secret smiles, then started giggling again, before the bolder one turned finally and said, ‘Well, you bin pretty good den.’
David smiled too. ‘You wanna bat?’
And so the little game started.
By breaking off a board from one of the other cases they made a manageable bat. One of the kids batted while the other retrieved the ball and tossed it back to David.
David’s first ball dipped under the wildly swung ‘bat’ and hit the stumps in the middle. His second was a shooter that jumped off the pitch and over the bat to hit the top of the stumps. There was giggling from the fieldsman and wonder from the batsman. David’s next ball spun down leg. The fourth spun past the edge towards slips.
The fieldsman picked up the ball, turning it to see if there was some visible trick before throwing it back to David. ‘Let ’im hit it?’ said the fieldsman.
‘I can’t,’ said David.
The batsman looked disappointed.
‘It touched your bat,’ explained David.
The fieldsman grabbed up the ball and smiled past David before launching the ball over his head. David turned. Another Abo kid was now there and he caught it.
David held out his hand.
The new kid looked at the ball. Then threw it over David’s head towards the batter. David turned in time to see the batter hit the ball off through extra cover. The fieldsman ran off towards the ball, laughing. And then the kid who’d thrown it to the batter started to race him to the ball too.
David smiled and looked back to the batter to share that smile, but he was running off past him and around the trucks. David looked back to the kids who’d nearly reached the cricket ball with a bad feeling growing. One of them picked the ball up and held it towards the other boy. The batter ran up to them, and all three boys turned and ran off towards the river.
‘Hey, that’s my ball!’ yelled David. He was just about to set off after them, when his uncle’s voice stopped him.
‘You won’t catch ’em,’ said Uncle Mike from the top veranda. ‘And even if you do, you won’t get it back if you go down there.’
‘Thievin’ Abos.’
‘Don’t say that around me, David.’
‘Everyone says it. They stole my ball.’
‘If you ever fall through the bottom of the world, the Abos will look after you. It’s one of their failings, never judging nor refusing someone in trouble.’
David looked up at his uncle, then off to the river, completely confused again. It was true that his grandfather was always polite. But no one else in Dungarin was. And here was his Uncle Mike speaking up for them.
‘You should have let him have a hit.’
‘No.’
His uncle looked at him a moment, then shrugged. ‘Come on then. Seeing as we’re up at sparrow’s fart, we might as well get up to the show. There’ll be free eggs and milk and we need to get about twenty or thirty cricket balls.’
‘Twenty or thirty! What for?’
But his uncle had gone, and David had to hurry inside.
CHAPTER FIVE
David had never seen so many people. He carried Uncle Mike’s cricket bag into Northam’s football and cricket ground. There were tents. There were brand new tractors with their spiked metal wheels bigger than a man. There was livestock: chooks and cows and horses, sheep and dogs. He saw a bull with a chest as wide as a cow was long.
David closed his eyes. He could smell bread baking and cow dung and horse sweat and wheat dust and smoke all mixed together. There was hammering. And quiet talk. Ladies’ voices. Bits of laughter. He heard ducks. There was a cow somewhere across the other side of the oval complaining that it was long past milking time.
He got a fright when a hand was suddenly shaking his shoulder.
‘You part horse or something, boy? Sleep standing up.’
‘I was listening.’
‘Keep moving is my motto. Here. Get this into ya.’
Uncle Mike had a battered tin cup of milk. He took the cricket bag, and handed David the still-warm milk. He had a half-loaf of bread, and David took that too and bit into it.
‘Come on,’ his uncle ordered, as he turned and started through the stalls and tents. ‘I’ve got an idea for a spot in sideshow alley.’
‘Why?’ called David, hurrying after. His uncle didn’t say. He moved through, nodding to people and calling greetings as he went.
‘I know where I need to be at lunchtime, love,’ he said to an old lady setting out cups, and she giggled.
‘So, this looks like about the best little nag in here. She running in the race this arvo?’ he called to a farmer pulling a pregnant cow.
People laughed and smiled and nodded to him. David noticed that you could barely see the limp when his uncle strode through in this way, carrying the cricket bag over his shoulder, being everyone’s friend. And then the people’s eyes would drift to David and he’d have to look down to not see them.
When they left the produce area things began to change. At a little outside bar, a man was shovelling sawdust off a wheelbarrow and spreading it around the rough wood plank tables. There was a big tent with colourful paintings of boxers. There were stalls where you threw hoops over things to win a doll, and others where you threw darts and lots of shooting galleries with little pellet rifles and little metal planes and the shapes of helmeted German soldiers’ heads.
The people began to change too. There were no women here. The men hadn’t shaved. Their clothes were older and unwashed. And their eyes looked more careful, like when his uncle looked at his cards on the train. They were like the men you passed on the road to town, the men who came to the farm looking for work at the farm. There was something hungry and hurt about them.
Uncle Mike changed too. He didn’t call out here. He whistled something tuneless and nodded and winked, but he didn’t say anything, and David soon stopped looking around, just watching his uncle’s back as they moved through.
Until they came to the coconut shy. There was a man with one arm, setting things up.
Uncle Mike nodded to the man’s arm, and said, ‘At least you brought your nuts back all right, eh?’
‘An’ I still got a good fist on this arm too, you bastard,’ said the man, stepping up as though about to hit him.
‘That’s the ticket, cobber,’ said his uncle, as if the man had said ‘top of the morning.’
They looked at each other a moment, the one-armed man glaring and Michael smiling.
‘I had a bit of a holiday in Egypt, then played up in France,’ said Uncle Mike.
‘Gallipoli,’ said the man without any emotion at all.
‘Gotta laugh.’
Neither man did laugh but they both nodded to each other. His uncle said, ‘I got a business proposition. Flat rate or percentage?’
The men started whispering seriously.
David noticed a little hessian bag on the ground. It was not much bigger than a man’s wallet. It weighed about as much as a cricket ball but had the feel of a loosely packed sack of gravel.
‘Throw it.’
David looked up. His uncle was pointing at a coconut resting on a bench.
He put on a caller’s voice. ‘Step right up and have a go. Knock off the coconut and win a prize. Come on sir, let’s have a look at that throwing arm.’
David aimed at the coconut and threw, missing by a good few yards.
‘So out of fielding and bowling, what would be your best thing, you reckon?’
‘I’m not very good at fielding.’
‘Too right. Well, we won’t put fielding into the equation then.’
Michael paced out twenty-two good strides, dragging his boot across the dust. Then he went to the cricket bag and got three stumps and knocked them in near the back of the tent. He stood in front of the stumps and played some invisible shots and David realised if you played most shots except the drive, you’d hit the sides of tents on either side and behind, just like cricket nets.
Then he got the side of a tea-chest and some paint from behind the next stall and came to David. ‘Time for you to draw up our sign.’
‘Me?’
‘Yep. Gotta have a sign. Um, let’s see. Win a pound. That oughta get them in. I reckon we’ll charge a sixpence for three balls. Once they see that it’s a kid bowling, they’ll be lickin’ their chops. Sixpence is a fair bit, but ... well, we’ll see how it goes.’
David looked at the wood and the paint brush then back at his uncle. ‘Win a pound?’
‘Yep. I’ll go see if I can find some old cricket balls.’ He looked at the ground. ‘And a mat. Gott
a give you a fightin’ chance.’
So David worked carefully on his sign trying to get the letters to come out right, as he considered his uncle’s plan, which he guessed had him bowling at people and them giving his uncle money. No matter how long David thought about the plan he could not find the sin in it.
When Uncle Mike came back he had two big strips of coir matting over his shoulder and a hessian bag. He dropped the bag and old cricket balls came spilling out like overripe apples. He laid them in front of the wicket, ‘To give you something to spin on.’
David said, ‘The thing is, Uncle Mike, I don’t think this is going to work.’
‘Is that what you been thinking?’
‘Yes, sir. I figure you’re thinking if I don’t get them out, you have to give them their pound.’
‘Whoa, boy. That’s makin’ it a bit hard on us. No. I was thinkin’ that if they hit you back over your head, that’d be tempting enough for them. It’s a pretty big gap here. Fancy their chances and put in their sixpence. They get three chances at ya.’
‘But I won’t have seen them bat before.’
‘You think any of them will be able to bat worth a damn?’
‘But I have to see someone bat, to work out what their weaknesses are.’
‘Not this time, David.’ His uncle came over to him and went down on one knee. ‘You see we know what they’re going to do. If they block you or just keep you out or pad up then they’ve wasted their sixpence. The money is in the slog. They want to hit you and they want to hit you in that direction there.’ He pointed to a big tent about fifty feet away. ‘Most of them are going to see a little kid—you—and they’re going to see that juicy slow cricket ball floating through the air, like an apple ripe for the eating, and they’re going to plant their front foot, and close their eyes, and swing the bat like an axe. Their weakness is you because they’ve never a seen a bowler so good. And their weakness is themselves because they’re hicks and they won’t be able to bat. And there’s all their mates giving them the “oh aye”. And there’s that pound making ’em lick their chops. The only thing you gotta remember is to keep varying your deliveries, because some will watch you for a while and take a punt on where the ball might land.’