by Jock Serong
‘Ooh,’ says the physio. ‘That’s not good.’ He’s holding the hand as if it might try to escape. ‘We’ve got to get you off.’
He puts a hand on the small of my back and continues to carry the smashed hand carefully in front of himself. I shuffle forward obediently, no bat, one glove, muttered profanities. Our number-ten batsman is jogging out towards the middle. From the corner of my eye I see Federal calmly take his chains back from the ump and replace them around his neck.
I can hear scattered applause as I head up the concrete race to the rooms, where there’s an unspoken tension between concern for me and concern for the game, now precariously balanced with two part-time batsmen at the crease and another thirty-three runs to find. I take an icepack and gingerly place it over the thumb, then slump into a seat at the big window, swatting the physio away like a blowie. Craig appears out of nowhere—he’s managed a few times lately to scam his way into the rooms. I don’t begrudge him doing it, but I do wonder sometimes at how porous these change rooms have become.
Craig plonks his arse down next to me. Through the haze of agony I see that today’s monogrammed polo is brought to you by Werribee Precision Exhausts. He grabs the hand and examines it.
‘Fuck,’ he says.
‘Yep.’ There’s blood dripping from the nail bed.
Craigo exhales loudly through his hairy nose and looks at his feet for a moment, then from side to side. ‘Bastard,’ he says.
‘Yep,’ I agree.
‘I can have his legs broken.’
‘What?’
‘Federal. I can have him fucked up. I know people.’
‘Jesus, Craigo.’
‘I can make it happen, completely untraceable.’ He looks me deep in the eye. ‘No one does this to Darren Keefe.’
‘Mate,’ I grunt, ‘that’s a fucking terrible idea. Please don’t do that.’
There’s two ambulance officers marching into the place like they own it. Porous rooms, like I said. Craig tries to shield me but he gets two rubber-gloved hands on his man-boobs, and against his protests they shove him in a corner and drag me out.
It’s a Rolando’s fracture—comminuted fracture of the base of the first metacarpal…possible compromise of the nervous and vascular supply.
This is what one tired-looking doctor is telling another one. He’s maybe thirty, neat haircut, bony cheeks. They’ve given me something in a drip in the back of my other hand, something that’s dulled me. The doctor’s conscious I’ve been listening, and speaks in the exaggerated tones reserved for the simpleton.
‘It means you’ve broken your thumb, Mr Keefe,’ he smiles. ‘Right down here in your hand.’ He gestures on his own hand.
‘I didn’t break it. Big Fed broke it.’
The doc smiles again, like I’ve successfully recited the eight-times table.
‘Of course. So we’ll need to put some wires in to secure it back where it should be. We do that under a general. Now, have you taken any drugs of any kind in the last, say, seven days?’
I think hard.
‘You look really tired, doctor. Do they make you do terrible shifts here?’
‘I’m fine. Now, any drugs?’ His pen hovers over a clipboard.
‘Christ, I’m an athlete.’ I look down at the lumps of my body under the hospital sheet, the pinnacles of my toes. ‘This thing’s a temple you know.’
‘So no drugs?’
‘Just a couple of beers last night.’
‘Good.’ He ticks something. Puts a condescending hand on my belly. ‘How’s the pre-med? Feeling relaxed?’
I nod serenely.
‘We’re going to anaesthetise you in a moment, and when you wake up you’ll be in post-op and hopefully’—he pats my guts—‘we’ll have that thumb all sorted out for you.’
The other doc has boobs under that gown and they’re wonderful. I give her a wink and she responds with a thin medical smile before tweaking something on a machine beside me. She’s set a trail of fluid in motion down the plastic line that leads into my hand.
Lights out.
Two days later I’m off to the surgeon’s rooms in Windsor.
Wally’s driven me there. Wally and Louise. They’re worried I shouldn’t be driving on painkillers. Waiting in traffic, I unload something that’s been bugging me.
‘Wal, do you think Craig could organise a hit on someone?’
Wally’s eyes in the rearview mirror. ‘What, like a gangland hit?’
‘Yeah. Paid job. Break their legs, whatever.’
Louise stifles a giggle. Wally laughs out loud.
‘Mate, he can barely organise breathing in and out. He’s probably the most harmless person I know.’
‘You remember those kids he took on after the rep game at Richmond? That wasn’t harmless.’
‘We were teenagers. And he didn’t organise it, he just did it. Why are you asking, anyway?’
‘Well, imagine it. It’s a funny thought, the big guy going all Don Corleone.’
Inside, the surgeon’s wearing a lovely charcoal suit, chair swivelled, looking at X-rays. There are photos of his very clean-looking family on the bookcase behind him. I’m looking at the giant white bundle of my bandaged hand, wrapped into an exaggerated paw shape, like a polar bear’s mitt.
Surgeon drops the X-rays, looks at me. ‘You lied to me about the drugs, Darren. Your bloods came back: methamphetamine and cocaine.’
‘Oops.’
‘It’s not my job to police what you put in your body. I take it nobody dope tests you in state cricket. But you lie to a surgeon, you run the risk of not waking up from the anaesthetic. Is that clear enough for you?’
‘Absolutely, doctor. Thank you.’
‘The bone will knit over a period of weeks,’ he says, unwrapping the polar paw. ‘But what concerns me is the main nerve leading down your thumb. It was trapped in the pinching motion when the ball hit the end.’
He’s reached the end of the bandage and now he peels some medical tape off the hand. Underneath is said smashed-up thumb tip, all purple and black and ballooned, but now there’s a long incision, almost from knuckle to wrist, with a row of blue stitches intersecting it. He takes a needle from a tray and pricks the end of the thumb.
‘Can you feel that?’
We both know the answer, but lying to doctors has become second nature.
‘Clear as a Yucatan sinkhole.’
‘Just yes or no, thanks. How about this?’ He moves the needle a little further down the thumb. Nothing. His eyes narrow.
‘This?’ He’s moved all the way down to the knuckle now.
‘Ouch,’ I venture.
‘I hadn’t touched you that time. You’re not feeling any of this, are you?’
‘When’s it going to wear off?’ I ask him.
For the first time, he looks a tiny bit less than infallible. He sighs. ‘I don’t know. We have to wait and see. I’m going to have the rehab people test it every couple of days, and if we don’t get an improvement in sensation in’—he clicks a pen and starts jotting notes—‘a month, I’ll send you to a microsurgeon. We’ll look at opening up the canal for the nerve a little more.’
Now he’s wrapping the hand again like we’re all done and dusted.
‘If you head down the hall to Sue, she’ll plaster it for you. Six weeks.’
All of a sudden, I can feel the panic rising. ‘But…when can I bat again?
He’s standing at the sink, washing his hands like Pontius fucking Pilate as he calls over his shoulder, ‘I’m not sure. We just have to watch it for a little while.’
He dries his hands.
‘Hey Darren,’ he calls mildly. ‘That was a marvellous knock. Well done.’
When the cast comes off, there is no return of sensation, no answer to the prick of the needle. The thumb will only make a vague curl, won’t close with its neighbours to form a gripping hand.
Reflecting on that now, lying here with so much of me punctured, cut and broken, it’s hard
to recall the magnitude of this problem, but it had the potential to mean the end of everything.
So I go under again, this time for a decompression.
The results are delivered to me on a Friday afternoon by a GP on retainer with the state team. He strains for the right tone as he reads off the computer screen, choosing to look at it, not me. In a sidelong monotone he delivers the news that is no news at all: the nerve is irretrievably shot and will not heal.
‘There’s a guy in America who’s pioneering a technique which might or might not be helpful and I’m not saying I’m recommending that but I know you want to hear all your options…’ And some other stuff I’m not even listening to. I’m curled in a defensive ball within myself.
The thumb is permanently stuffed. I’ve lost the ability to grip anything—a cricket bat, for example—with my left hand.
The Vics keep me on contract. Seeing as the season’s over, they can watch developments in the off-season to work out if I can still bat. I spend the winter swimming, running and lifting weights, buy a mountain bike and start exploring the Yarra trails out of Richmond.
In August, five months after the Shield is handed to Queensland following a tense nine-run victory, Federal Collins is attacked in a laneway behind a Brisbane nightclub by two unidentified men. He is remorselessly beaten and ultimately loses the sight in one eye. He never plays professional sport again.
England
The car’s slowing, and as it slows there’s a clang as the wheels pass over a metal speed hump. Next I feel a series of short, tight turns. Then they turn the music up very loud. We’re stationary for a couple of minutes, then we roll forward, then we stop again. I can smell cooking fat.
The cheeky bastards are getting takeaway. So I do the obvious—I can’t yell for help so I start kicking the crap out of the inside of the boot with my good leg. They turn the music up further, and I realise how futile this is—they’re all yelling and laughing in the car now, and all I’ve done is increase the attendant’s desire to move this carload of lunatics out of the place.
The car starts to roll again and cruises slowly forward. There’s crunching gravel. I really didn’t want to hear crunching gravel.
The car stops, lifts a bit as someone leaves their seat. A door slams. Within a second or two I can hear the boot lid being unlocked. I drop the holy shard again, as deep under my hip as I can get it.
Light streams in and there he is, burger in his left hand, chewing.
He surveys me for a moment as though I am a sack of potting mix or an overnight bag. Then he slams a fist down into my face with his whole weight behind it. For a second all I can see is a blinding flash of light. Pain becomes the world again. He grunts with the impact, straightens himself up and shuffles his jacket back onto his shoulder, takes another bite.
Something has come adrift in my mouth. My lovely white teeth. Two of them.
‘Don’t be a fucking idiot mate,’ he says, with burger bulging in one cheek. He pulls a slice of pickle out of the bun and flicks it away. Slams the lid.
Five years into his Test career, Wally is newsworthy mostly for not being newsworthy.
An unselfish contributor to team culture and a ferocious competitor, but someone whom the public finds unknowable. No tantrums, no binges, nothing inexplicable. Personal vendettas, lecherousness and racism have simmered away just below the surface of the sport for so long that no one knows how to take a level-headed professional with no apparent vices.
In Pakistan, he visits a women’s shelter then an orphanage. In Britain, he bows for the Queen. In New Zealand, he stands respectfully before a terrifying haka and attends an Anzac service. In the Caribbean he plays cricket on the beach with the local kids.
That’s the public face.
To me, there’s irony in these gestures because I’ve had his fingers in my eyes so many times, seeking with all his will to blind me. I’ve had his snot on my cheek as he pressed his head into mine, trying to employ a fifth point of pressure when both hands and feet were not enough to punish me fully. And yet I don’t resent him extracting what he can from those moments. He’s there, after all. I admire him more for it.
He’s home each Christmas; Mum, to my eye, increasingly less so, although he refuses to see it. She insists on cooking for him, burns everything and fusses dreadfully, consumed by a thousand little rituals she’s invented to hide behind.
But by the third Christmas—’97, I think—everything collapses.
It’s me and Honey, Wally and Louise and Hannah in the summer-lit back room at Mum’s. The kitchen’s separated only by a low servery, bisected by the sill of a cutaway wall. On top of the sill she’s arranged a row of cookbooks bookended by a large plaster owl. We’re sitting all martial and neat in our positions, paper crowns from the crackers on our heads, waiting for Mum to present the dessert. The roast’s been a success—no charring this year. Louise has rifled through the old Bing Crosby vinyl, then followed up with Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr and Sinatra. She’s trying to explain to Hannah who all these guys were. Hannah does that screwy face kids do.
I’m fiddling with my thumb joint, feeling it click when I roll the knuckle, wrestling a different kind of pain. We’re a small family, always were, especially once Dad was gone and our three-cornered world was all there was. And here, at the peak of our togetherness, we amount to this: one stretched marriage, a de facto relationship, a child and a worryingly muddled matriarch. That’s all. It’s like we’re waiting for the rest of the family to come through the door. We’re vulnerable to dissolution in a way that I know families aren’t meant to be. I want to hold each of them, beg them not to leave.
Straight after the roast, Wally and I duck out the back with Hannah. It’s an unspoken assumption that she gets to bat. I’ve been over the day before, to drop off the meat from the butchers and mow the pitch, making sure everything’s just so. Hannah’s first flamboyant shot on the legside sends the ball into Mum’s new crop of tomatoes. The smell rises from the foliage as I scoop the ball out. She’s got basil in there too. Companion planter.
Wally seems surprised by Hannah’s ability, her easy acquaintance with the rules. He’s even more surprised when she thrashes at his long-forgotten leg-spin, lifting one delivery out of the backyard and into the Apostouloses’. This tweaks a sadistic instinct of mine—if it was me and him, and I’d hit that shot, I’d lean on the bat and tell him to go get it because it’s not my fault he’s dishing up shit. He’d flare at that, and there’d be a fist-fight within seconds.
So here she is, leaning on the bat for just an instant, him floundering, completely unsure of how to handle it. Did I teach her this?
Then she grins sweetly. ‘I’ll get it, Daddy.’ And she does.
While she’s gone, I can’t help needling him as he picks at the weeds under Mum’s tomatoes.
‘Hits ’em pretty well, eh?’
‘I know,’ he says defensively, because we’re both well aware he doesn’t know.
Later, back in the house and Mum’s still in the kitchen. Still won’t accept any help. Wally’s looking at his watch, late now for the team meeting ahead of the Boxing Day Test. I’m facing the kitchen, he’s facing me. Over his shoulder, I see Mum popping her head round the end of the row of books: once, twice, three times. The look on her face the first time is one of worry: by the third time it’s naked panic. She’s looking to my right, at Hannah, who’s reading out the slips of paper from the crackers with their harmless dad jokes, unaware of the looks being directed her way.
After the third glance around the books, the panicked one, I call out to ask if she wants a hand. No, she replies breezily, but I’m going anyway.
She’s bent over in a cupboard, doing I don’t know what.
I take her gently by the forearm and draw her up straight so she has to look at me. We can’t be seen from the table. Her face is a wretched map of a confused land.
‘What is it, Mum?’
She waits a long time, turning over her op
tions.
‘Her,’ she whispers eventually, eyes darting towards the table.
‘Who?’
‘The little girl, darling.’
Tears spill from her eyes, from her wonderful, tired eyes.
‘I know we all love her…’ Her hands are up, covering those eyes in surrender. ‘But who is she?’
I hold her close for a moment, taking in the shampoo smell of her hair, the food smells in the room. I’m not ready for the core of our world to crumble.
With my back to the opening that leads through to the table, I hear a faint noise and look over a shoulder to find Wally’s standing there watching us. Mum’s head is buried somewhere around my chest. She can’t see him. I watch Wally’s eyes for a long time and he looks straight back and it all passes between us.
He knows, he knows.
He understands, and now we can deal with it.
We don’t, though. Life gets in the way, especially Wally’s life. Cricket for him is a career, deeply entrenched.
For me, it’s life with the circus: wanted here, surplus to requirements there. Dance on the highwire, then muck out the stalls. A decision’s been made somewhere that I am no longer up to, or good for, the longer form of the game. Over four days, goes the medical advice, I’m likely to suffer from swelling in the thumb joint, leading to loss of grip, leading to more damage, poor performance, and so on.
Whether that’s true or not, I don’t accept it. No one’s done a test, and I’ve never complained to anyone on day two, three or four. The deadened joint doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t do anything.
Late in a long night with Craigo, we name the thumb Squibbly. I’m not sure which of us thinks it up, but it seems to capture the cartoonish horror of a dead thumb, the zombie neighbour of four perfectly good digits.
I have lost a measure of control over the bat, though I won’t admit it to anyone else. But there’s no one in professional sport who doesn’t carry these things, at least not after a few years at it. And this is how the mutual deception grows up around injuries: the player won’t say when something’s gone chronic, and management will employ guesswork about physical failings to move the veterans along.