The Rules of Backyard Cricket

by Jock Serong

  Then come the paragraphs that must have caused migraines in legal: my association with a known organised crime figure, Craig Wearne. His colourful career, his remarkable good fortune in evading prosecution for anything. The stultifying effect that friendship had on my playing career, his extraordinary access to state and national players and his links to Asian bookmaking syndicates.

  Asian bookmaking syndicates? When?

  There’s a row of mug shots to emphasise that Craigo has chosen some highly inadvisable friends. Two of them are no longer with us.

  And here I am: shortly to become the third of Craigo’s friends with (deceased) under my photo.

  She mentions that close observers believe I am trying to pull away from the pernicious influence of this ‘small-time gangster’, but that the damage was done long ago.

  All of these things I can bristle about, but they’re more or less accurate. Then comes the part I really didn’t see coming.

  It has been widely known but not reported until now that Pamela Keefe, the mother of these vastly different brothers, has battled dementia for many years. She is now close to death in a Melbourne hospice. The relevance of this news? Simple: the major moderating influence in Darren Keefe’s life is no longer there to protect him from himself.

  Throughout his various troubles, Darren has pulled off a series of soft landings, in part due to Pamela’s efforts on his behalf, and in part through the influence wielded by his highly decorated brother. Now there is only Wally to fill that role, and there are signs, since his release from the world of cricket, that he is tiring of the responsibility.

  And who could blame him—particularly after Darren’s conduct at the testimonial event following his brother’s retirement. Anonymous onlookers have commented that Darren remained deep in conversation with Wally Keefe’s wife, the well-known charity CEO Louise Arnold, throughout Wally’s valedictory speech, and that he left the room with her. Both were said to be intoxicated, Keefe in particular being described by one onlooker as ‘an improbably frequent visitor to the bathroom’ that night. This newspaper is in possession of statutory declarations from two eyewitnesses who report seeing Louise Arnold leaving Darren Keefe’s hotel room just after 7 a.m., shoes in hand.

  Three heroic women have propped Darren Keefe up all these years: his mother, his former long-term partner Honey Nicholson, and his sister-in-law Louise Arnold. You could say he has a heroine habit.

  And this latest incident, after all of the odium that has littered his public record, may well be his greatest betrayal.

  I read it over and over, the first time racing ahead, unable to accept that she is going to do what she does. The second and third times, I’m looking for some other interpretation. After that, I’m thinking about the legal implications. I’m smart enough to know the idea here is that I sue them for libel and they defend it, and then build sales on the ravenous media interest that would attend the fracas. A dignified denial from Wally only buries me further. They can’t lose.

  I can’t believe the scale of my misjudgment about Amy Harris. There were times along the way when I felt I was doing her a favour talking to her. Hey look, you’ve got access to the Keefes. And this is how she repays me.

  That’s what I’m thinking as I sit there reading the paper. What I think now, crumpled here in the boot of the car, is that her assessment of the night with Louise was an incorrect but reasonable inference, and the rest was a sterile lancing that was long overdue.

  The winter is the end of Mum. It seems fitting. She represented summer to me all through the years in which memory has edited out the winters.

  She stops late one night; just ceases to be. The only perceptible sign of death is her gradual cooling. This great engine of love, ground to a halt.

  Her eyes are closed, the thin eyelids wrapped papery over the orbs and mapped by capillaries. Her mouth is set in a gentle curve that over my remaining days I will construe as a smile.

  The staff at this place have never had much time for the Keefes—even Wally, since the incident. And now, with Mum lying newly deceased in her wretched bed, a thin man in a nursing-home uniform stands tentatively in the doorway with a folded plastic lump under his crossed arms. He’s just present enough that after a while I look at him properly. Blue plastic. It’s a body bag, fuck him. He’s standing there with a body bag.

  We send her off on a midwinter Wednesday, brittle and harsh, from a brick veneer funeral joint on a main road. It looks like a motel, like there’d be a bistro nestled among the landscaping somewhere. A sign saying Vacancy.

  A brief Catholic service, short and uninspired, a product bought out of a catalogue. Then we’re standing around, the three of us, working one another quietly for conversation on the damp ground. Louise is beautiful in a charcoal suit and skirt, solemn and contained. Grief is her constant companion: a day like this is her natural context. I can feel the chill coming up through my shoes as we stand by the grave and watch them lower the casket. I know that casket’s over-generous, because in the end there was so little of her, as though the departing memories took the flesh off her bones as they went.

  Looking around, I’m shocked at how little her life amounted to. The sun in her eyes, that easy capacity for love. The patient dedication, the humour and the toughness. She was such good company; where the hell is everybody? Maybe this happens to all of us: despite the thousands of hands we shake, cheeks we kiss, quiet favours we bestow, you wind up with a handful of gloomy stragglers by the hole.

  And here in the dark, living through my own hearse ride, I can picture the human trash in the front of the car, the lot I drew for graveside company. They’ll be smoking and flicking butts on my battered corpse as it disappears under shovelfuls of earth. Drinking beer maybe, cans carefully thrown in the hole because you can’t be too careful with DNA; standing aside to piss and watching the steam rise in the headlights as I go under.

  Mum mightn’t have got the numbers, but at least she got some love.

  The wake is at Wally’s.

  The house is bright and civil, as always. A house where no one leaves a phone bill on the bench, no one writes reminders to themselves on the wall. It’s a big house for the two of them, but they must entertain all the time—clients, benefactors, politicians. A gleaming coffee machine squats on the counter like something medical. Pipes and tubes and beakers. Polished expanses of marble benchtop. White on white, artful fruit in a bowl.

  How far we’ve come, Brother Wally.

  A handful of Mum’s old friends, couple of Wally’s cricket mates, the one or two survivors among the nicotine-stained regulars she was feeding beer while we were in primary school. It’s catered: food’s small but exquisite, handed around by girls in black aprons.

  When I’ve thrown back a few champagnes—Mum loved the stuff but always denied herself the extravagance—I wander back up the hallway towards the front door and take a left between the bedrooms, heading for the bathroom. Piss into the immaculately white, advertisement-grade toilet and take a line off the vanity.

  Tidying up and regarding myself in the mirror, I pull the cupboard door open a little, and the angle reflects the hallway, the door to Hannah’s room. The wooden lettering still in place spelling her name in lolly-shop calligraphy, backwards in the mirror. A cold draft of grief extinguishes the rip of the coke. A gaping hole in the world. Outside of myself, I step forward and push open the door. The room, untouched, smells clean and cared-for. Her posters, her sporting gear. Her bat, the one we duelled with in the backyard at Mum’s. A hand-drawn chart above her desk with a homework timetable: Term Three, 1999. The lamp she read by. CDs in a row on a shelf above the bed-head. Oh Christ.

  ‘It’s nearly eleven years.’

  I spin around and there’s Wally in the doorway, watching me.

  ‘She’d be twenty now.’ He breathes a dry laugh. ‘Driving; probably finishing uni.’

  He looks older in here, emptied somehow. He rests his forehead on the door jamb, regards his shoes. ‘The
counsellor doesn’t like us keeping the room this way. I think I’m ready to pack it up, but Louise…’

  ‘What happened to her, Wally?’

  His head jolts upright, his eyebrows raised. ‘Hannah?’ Drops his head again. ‘That’s why the room’s like this, because it doesn’t make sense. This is Kew. Warm, safe corner of a terrible world. We don’t have any idea what goes on out there. I can try to imagine it, but then I reach a point where I don’t want to imagine it happening to Hannah.’

  ‘Have you let her go?’

  He dwells on this for a moment.

  ‘At a logical level, yes. But I go through times I think she might walk through the door. Is that what you want to hear, that I’m hanging on?’

  ‘Just asking.’

  A faint nod. ‘Never leaves you. Feels like, like everything that happened somehow comes back to me. Even though Louise was the one doing all the parenting.’

  ‘The story wasn’t true, you know.’

  His eyes meet mine. ‘What story?’

  ‘The one in the paper, Amy Harris. About me and Louise.’

  ‘Oh, that one. Yeah, I know. Lou told me. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘What are you going to do about her drinking?’

  Normally he’d flare at such a question. But he’s all punched out.

  ‘What am I going to do? Mate, she’s not going to listen to me. Or you. Numbs the pain I guess, and most of the time she’s under control. Worst stuff’s within these walls. Doesn’t get out.’

  He wanders past me, sits on the swivelling chair at Hannah’s desk. Spins slowly from side to side. The gesture looks oddly disrespectful to me. But taking it as an invitation to do likewise, I sit myself on the edge of the bed.

  ‘The inquiry starts this week.’

  I nod.

  ‘It’ll be a nest of fucking vipers.’

  ‘Why?’ I’d never considered it anything more than a political stunt, a minor diversion from the government’s poor polling. Wally sighs.

  ‘Well, I was there. You were there—some of the time. You can make anything look bad if you talk to the right people, the wrong people. There’s been fools punting on cricket since time began, and they’re not going to stop. Doesn’t mean the game’s rooted, or that we’re all on the take. Just another way people enjoy their sport. Some play it, some watch it, some punt on it.’

  Faint squeaks as the chair rotates. I’ve never felt so clearly that Hannah is dead. Her ghost pervades everything in this room.

  ‘I mean, you were never…’ He’s fishing for reassurance.

  ‘Yeah I was. Remember that day-nighter in Sydney, ’95? Rowan Cooper asked me to get myself stumped and I accidentally hit it out of the park. You were fucking furious.’

  He seems to be straining for recollection, wants me to see that.

  ‘Oh that,’ he laughs eventually. ‘I don’t think they’re interested in that sort of shit. That was a juvenile prank. I think they’re after bigger fish, somehow.’

  ‘Felt pretty fucking big at the time. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you so angry.’

  He eyeballs me, management-style. ‘I’m sorry, okay. I’m sorry I did that to you.’

  He’s picked up a Hello Kitty hole-punch from the desk, is idly squeezing it.

  ‘You been subpoenaed?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, yeah,’ he replies. ‘But only because I’ve been a senior player through all those years. There’s no suggestion, of course…’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Not yet. I don’t know, you might be right. I’m small-time.’

  ‘You were always closer to Craig than I was.’

  ‘Yeah, but maybe they’ll just go direct to Craig. I still can’t help thinking that despite all the carry-on, he’s just a big stupid bogan. Have you asked him if he’s been called?’

  ‘You kidding? I don’t think I’ve even got his number these days.’

  He slaps his knees, a habit of his that indicates the end of a discussion. He starts to get up, but fixes me once more with a deeper look. ‘Okay, so you’re not talking to them.’

  ‘I’m not saying that. I haven’t been asked to talk to them. I dunno, I’d probably talk. Trying to get my life together, Wally. Do the responsible thing. But like I say, I haven’t been asked.’

  He moves back to the doorway, stops momentarily. ‘Yeah, but I’m hearing you. You haven’t got much to offer them anyway.’ He flicks the light switch on, flicks it off. Gestures to the doorway.

  ‘You done?’

  The conversation bumps around in my mind for a few of the sad weeks after Mum’s funeral, as my former teammates start to receive subpoenas. Then the coaches, industry people, a few well-known crooks. The media are talking about massive revelations, and a sport rocked to its foundations. Everyone’s paranoid. No one talks.

  It’s around this time I start to receive the text messages.

  Blocked number. Muddled, usually late at night, in no apparent order. Sometimes they look as though they’ve been typed by an over-large finger that trips several keys in reaching for the right one. There’s never any numbers or symbols: the sender never leaves the first alpha screen. Sometimes they look like a code, or a madman’s ramblings. They don’t make any sense.

  Not until the one that arrives in the early afternoon on the Friday before Wally’s due to give evidence. I’m in a hotel in Sydney, bright yachty view across to Cremorne Point. I’m looking out at the sunlight chattering on the surface of the harbour. Looking back at the screen. Standing there like an idiot in my underpants and socks, shirt on the ironing board. About to put on the suit to call a game that evening.

  Clear typing this time, no fumbles. It says:

  Matthew 18:15–20.

  I don’t have any friends who are religious. Well, I wouldn’t, would I? And as far as I know, I don’t have any enemies who are religious either. But I was sufficiently brutalised by Brother Calumn to recognise a scripture verse, and this thing looks to me like scripture. I scout around until I find the Gideon Bible in the bedside drawer. Flip through the virginal tissue of the pages, print smell fanning back at me.

  Kings, Psalms, Daniel, Zechariah…

  Matthew. With a finger down the column I find it quick enough.

  If your brother sins against you, go and point out their fault, but do it alone. If he listens to you, the matter is at an end. If he does not, take one or two others with you, so that every matter may be established in the presence of those witnesses.

  It nags at me for the rest of the day, through the evening under the lights and across a succession of beers and a gram of crank at an Oxford Street bar afterwards. What have I done to my brother? Or what has he done to me? And who cares enough to send this?

  We rationalise the inexplicable because we don’t like it occupying that infirm ground in our hearts. So I laugh it off, shooting tequila with a couple of fuzz-cheeked Navy cadets. Do-gooders and happy clappers have tried to redeem me before, proselytisers. Try saying that after a brace of firewaters. Not their business. It’s my ongoing project and I’m doing my best, I tell myself as one of the sailors flames his lower lip on a burning tequila shot.

  Then comes the day it all changes fundamentally. Headlines aren’t typeset anymore, but if they were, they’d choose the giant font for this one.

  Wally’s fronted the inquiry and refused to testify on the grounds he may incriminate himself.

  Louise

  Having ungagged my mouth, I feel a surge of liberation within the wider reality of confinement.

  I take to the cable ties with renewed enthusiasm, able to breathe deeply and grunt now and then with the effort. Fingers down and wrists bent, I can apply pressure to the ties with the fragment of tail-light lens, though it’s impossible to measure my progress.

  To stop my hands cramping, I make six firm passes at it, then rest and count to ten, try to pull my clenched fists outwards a couple of times. And somewhere around forty-eight attempts, the cable
ties give up.

  My pectoral muscles are burning with newfound cramp at the shock of these free-swinging arms, but now I have hope—and two major advantages.

  Now I have hands.

  The divorce is handled with trademark cold precision.

  An email appears on my phone at 7.32 on a Friday night, just after the ABC news has gone to air and just before the footy starts. Match of the round: a preoccupied public. Bullseye.

  The message has obviously gone to a mailing list, the identities obscured. It says:

  You may be aware that Louise and I have struggled with our relationship over recent years, due to a variety of pressures in our lives. We do not need to recount to you the enormous trauma we have endured over the loss of our darling daughter Hannah. You are receiving this email because you have been close to us through these years, and we thank you for your loyalty and your support.

  However, these pressures have become more than we can bear. Despite the best efforts of both of us, we are no longer able to remain married to each other and have decided—amicably—to separate. We intend to continue supporting one another in all our endeavours, and we remain deeply respectful of each other and proud of each other’s achievements.

  We plan to say nothing further than this publicly. We will be notifying media outlets by press release immediately after you receive this email. We would be grateful if you would maintain your loyalty to us by refusing all media requests, although we are willing to discuss the matter privately with each of you in due course.

  Thank you.

  I can imagine her face during the drafting. A meeting room somewhere, the management company maybe. Alan the PR grub smirking away throughout, jabbing at that laptop of his.