The Rules of Backyard Cricket

by Jock Serong

  There’s shouts, exclamations, panic.

  I rip the handle upwards with everything I’ve got left. I can hear the ratcheting sound of the handle coming up, the squeal of the tyres, and then Back Seat Guy is on me, with an elbow driven deep into the ribs of my back, right where they’d smashed me with a pool cue an eternity ago. The force of the blow has finished what my desperate dive started, pushing me deep into the narrow space between the front seats, wedging me in there with the handbrake handle, seconds ago the most important object in the universe, now stabbing painfully into my armpit.

  Meth Man hasn’t got a chance to get any more blows in, because Craigo, who is indeed at the wheel, is now fighting the car, over-correcting as it gyrates madly across the road. My only view of his world is out the driver’s-side window, just past his gut, and he’s way too preoccupied to give me a thought. The trees change plane, ripping towards the right edge of the window, then blurring towards the left. The rest of my body is weightless now, floating above the seats and drifting left, as the car leaves the road and I’m watching tree trunks, not canopy, then canopy not trunks, then starry sky, and grass and sky and grass and trunks again.

  There are thuds and cracks and bangs and small glassy tinkles and cusswords, silences and metal screeches, all of it closer together and closer still, telling me we’re gaining speed not losing it and no one’s minding anyone anymore, each enveloped in their own terror and my neck whips despite the confinement and my head bangs hard and my back bends in a way it shouldn’t and I see Craigo’s head smack blunt against the glass, so hard I can hear his brain slosh and that’s it from him and I get one white hot jolt from the knee and then we’re turning over and I can feel gravity taking me up towards the roof lining and there’s a long, long silence like something’s going to happen and then it happens.

  The flat punctuation of impact, too giant to process. It’s probably accompanied by a great cinematic bang but the force, not the sound, owns the instant.

  I’m crushed against Craigo’s left hip—climbing into the pocket of his jeans. He’s come towards me, I’ve come towards him, and the dashboard has punched forward on both of us. There’s takeaway food containers around our heads. The stereo has broken free of the plastic console and speared diagonally forwards like a half-brick on a building site, tearing into my scalp.

  Then it’s over. The world is still. The dimensions of the car are no longer what they were. A suffocating sort of reality, entrapment in multiple directions.

  So I wait, and I listen. Ticking engine, leaking fluid somewhere. A wheel spinning above us, elliptical, bearings crushed and grinding. Breathing, short and crackled, from the back. No words, but a thin whistling sound. I’ve got no way of getting my head around to see what state he’s in, but it doesn’t sound good. I can’t tell what’s gone on in the passenger seat either.

  Craigo I can see, in a way. He looms all around me, the wide bulk of his chest. Above an odour that could only be blood I can smell him, meaty man; no surprise given I’m lodged in his armpit now. His face bulges at me, caught in a grunting instant, eyes open and thoroughly dead. His head is looking where heads shouldn’t, back over the rear of his shoulder, pressed there by the caved-in roof. No more Mister Nice Guy.

  My feet are free. I can wave one foot in open air, though the other one, being dependent on the shot knee, won’t co-operate. By tiny measures, I start to retrieve my arms from under my chest. My right hand is still clenched on the handbrake handle. My elbows are working fine, and so are both shoulders, but I can’t get the arms free from their padded cell between the seats.

  It’s while I’m working in this problem that I see Craig’s phone, wedged between his hip and the upside-down seat. It’s not illuminated, and might be as dead as Craigo for all I know, but it’s a finger-length away. I work it free and clutch it in my fist as I wriggle.

  So I shrug my way backwards, grinding various exposed parts of my body over the jewellery box of shattered glass. None of it matters anymore. I’ve got my legs free now and one foot, out in the open air for the first time tonight, has found the stump of some small plant. I hook my toes under a branch and work the leverage it affords; hips then chest emerging through the shattered rear window until my main task is pushing the slumped bulk of Meth Man off myself. He’s wet and heavy but offers no resistance.

  As my shoulders come free, skin tearing on the window’s ragged edge, I roll my eyes back to where I’ve come from. The mangled arse-end of Babyface is within reach, the pockets of his cargo pants. I slip my fingers in, rummage and retrieve my licence card. My head’s left a slick of blood over the white roof lining, enough blood, I think, that I ought to be concerned. There’s a stoned kind of fog descending over me and I’m sure the two things are related.

  I’m out now and among the bush, the wet leaves and grasses in the darkness, an alien intruder in the forest. I want to rest here, cool and quiet, among the slugs and insects. Broken man beside a broken car. The towering spars of the eucalypts up there somewhere, stars above.

  Stars above.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been unconscious. It’s still dark, but the soundscape differs, the random percussion of the dying car a distant memory. I can sit up, woozy but stable.

  The car’s bent around the base of a great eucalypt, the trunk slicing into the bodywork right where Craigo’s driver’s door once was. The land climbs and falls sharply away from where the car is, and even in the dark I can see the trail of smashed undergrowth where we’ve crashed down from the road. I sit against a crumpled door, the shot knee crackling as the leg extends. The engine makes an occasional dying tick, and I can still hear Meth Man groaning faintly.

  So I got my wish. I’m out and breathing the secret peppermint air of the night. But I don’t know what someone like me does next. Do I ring the police? Do I find the yellow light from some fire-lit living room on the hillside and wander to the door, all smashed and gory? Just like it’s always been, I’m whimpering for company. I want a light in the darkness, someone to come to me and resolve this. Set things right.

  That someone would’ve been Mum, ordinarily. We’re still children while we have parents. Christ love, what on earth’s happened here? But it can’t be her, so the next stop is obvious.

  I fish Craigo’s phone out of my pocket.

  The screen lights up blue-white in the soft darkness of the bush. Everything around me becomes blacker. His home screen is a grainy shot of a stripper on a pole. Of course it is. I start entering the number, slowly, patiently, my fingers shaking at the ends of their jangled neurones. One after the other, the ten digits known only to a handful of people, the number every journalist in the land would once have killed for, still jealously guarded. The one that I am specially entitled to know, by reason only of my birth.

  Wally. His name appears, and I feel the first visceral jolt as I read it on the screen. Such a carefully protected number, and yet it’s saved into this phone.

  What? Why?

  They haven’t spoken in years.

  Craig’s phone smells of his aftershave. The line rings once, rings again. Then a sterile click and Wally’s voice, speaking before I get a chance to identify myself. He doesn’t sound sleepy. He’s alert; quiet, measured. A faraway human across the void. His voice is my voice in timbre and range, but with a different life overlaid. The boy I held and wrestled, betrayed, abused and idolised. And loved despite everything.

  ‘You’re late. Where is he?’

  The words I’d meant to say catch in my throat and collapse into a choked, soundless cry. I jab at the phone, as if the possibility of undoing those words might depend on my reflex.

  But the words are said now, and nothing can ever unsay them.

  For a long, long time I sit there listening to the nocturnal bush, the distant high sound of the forest’s moving canopy. The blood drying in my eyelids, sticking and cracking with each blink. The groans from the car fading and slowly disappearing. Dawn will be here soon and the world i
t illuminates will be nothing like the one that died last night.

  There are two ways to understand what’s just happened. Avenue One: this was to be revenge for Louise, with Craig as nothing more than external contractor. Bizarre, misguided, ugly; but more palatable than the alternative.

  Which is that Wally was in it all along with Craig as his dirty and dispensable front man. Revenge for Louise, in that scenario, represents a bonus but not the main game. Or was it revenge for Hannah? Could it really go back that far? Could he be that bent, that he lost his fortune and then his daughter over a spot fix? A tepid day-nighter in Sydney, all those years ago; a wild swoosh in the flare of the lights and it would lead him to do these things?

  Any explanation redefines my world. Nothing can remain the same, knowing how far he was willing to go. And any explanation leads to the same conclusion: that I was kept alive in order to be brought before him, to answer for my failings, or seek absolution at his feet. I see with terrible clarity how much he wanted to be the author of that moment.

  After I’ve done enough thinking, I drag myself back to the driver’s window and reach inside again. Ol’ Craig would never be seen without a lighter, one of the many props he deployed to ingratiate, to weave his gangster aura. I fumble around between the splintered bark of the tree and his broken chest. My fingers trace over the sharkskin stubble of his cheek, cold now; down over his collar and across the bomber jacket, another signature of his. Round the metal press studs and hunting over the lining. Craig and his mortal ribs split like kindling under one side of my hand, the lining under the other.

  A pocket. Hard metal in the pocket, a Zippo embossed with a Harley logo.

  By the light of the buttery flame, I study the deep lacerations in Squibbly, my poor stupid shredded thumb. My desperate efforts to leave my DNA in the tail-light cavity have turned out to be not such a good idea after all. Best I was never here.

  The flames are licking through the vehicle now, hungry for fuel. They curl through its tight spaces in their search, pausing and taking grip where they meet sustenance. They’ve found the upholstery, the roof lining, the clothes and the bodies, and they roar lustily as they feast. They’ve found the tree at the centre of the wreck. A human head appears in silhouette against the eye-stinging core of the flames, charring and falling slightly aside under its own weight. Tendrils of new fire streak outwards from the dead car, over the leaf litter of the silently watching forest.

  I shuffle as close to the blaze as I can bear, and carefully toss the phone into its heart. Turn my back on the warmth, dragging the bad leg through the twigs and leaves. I know you’re coming. You’d never leave a task unfinished.

  I start to search for a hiding place.

  The Forest

  Those headlights swinging now on the road above are bound to be you because who else would be out here at this hour?

  I’m furled into a hollow under a fallen log, a place for wounded animals. Hidden from the light but close to its source: I’ve been transfixed while I was waiting by Craigo’s hand protruding from the inferno, fat palm upturned, pleading; white as a marble Caesar.

  The sound of a car door by the roadside up there. Heavy steps down the slope. Cracking twigs, the rustle of sprung branches from above and behind me. You’ll be edging down the car’s flattened track, drawn by the flames. Left foot forward, the stance that gave you balance.

  You emerge into the irregular glow and now I can see you. Looking side to side into the darkness, a guilty man. Or a man calculating. City shoes, neat chinos. And I’m thinking: how can this play out? I hide from you now, wait for you to give up, then drag my useless leg out of the bush and we both live out our days with this night between us? Maybe the public scrutiny would keep me safe.

  You’d have an awful lot to explain, for a man with a public cross-examination looming. Will the inquiry reveal what you are? For the first time in my life I realise I don’t know who that person is.

  Look at you now, shielding your eyes from the heat as you peer into the wreckage of the car at the char-grinning crims. Flinching at hot metal. Looking for me, hunting. Your body betraying the difference between checking if I survived and ensuring I didn’t.

  Your body, the way you move. All our wrestling, our gouging, our fanatical need to climb over each other and out into the world.

  There will be no wrestling, no gouging this time.

  I went back to that moment, Wally. While I was waiting for you I thought about that terrible day with the book, the one you got from Dad. Either given to you or just left, I never knew. Bradman’s Art of Cricket, the grass-green cover with black-and-white pictures of the Don in high pants, executing a front-foot square cut and a straight drive so perfect it looks like the bow of a ship cutting the sea wide open. The great man’s signature on the title page. I can still see you fanning the pages, looking for a detail here, a nuance of technique there. It lived on your desk at the end of the bunks, never moved by Mum, never touched by me, except on rare occasions and only with your grudging consent.

  I knew what it meant to you. I knew how it lived inside you, how it guided you after he left. A light in the dark. Your lips murmuring the words silently in your bed, night after night.

  That’s why I went for it that day.

  There had been a regulation fight over nothing much. Whatever it was, you’d exerted your dominion painfully and also, this time, humiliatingly, in front of some kid who’d come over after school. From memory there was blood streaming from my nose. With Mum away at work, there was no one to appeal to, no one to prevent the inevitable escalation. The kid stood there in shocked silence as I ran to our room, shamed and enraged. Took the book in my hands, the first thing I saw, and slammed it on the surface of the desk. Again. Again. Tore the glossy photographic plates from the spine one by one. Paused only to tear the pages I’d removed into even smaller pieces, to watch them fluttering around my feet.

  You must have taken crucial seconds to work out where I’d gone, what I was doing, because I’d ripped my way through the Don’s carefully ordered chapters—Batting, Bowling, Fielding, Keeping, Captaincy—and the book was all but destroyed by the time you found me.

  And I can still see your face as you stood in the doorway of our room. I’d prepared myself for more violence and I knew it would hurt. You, applying every ounce of your will to vengeance. I was fine with that, I suppose. But what I saw—your slack mouth, your horrified eyes, your grief—was something I hadn’t anticipated.

  You rushed forward, ignoring me completely. Took the shreds of paper in your cupped hands, swept them up and stared at the pile. Fretting, reaching for the smaller scraps further out, then weeping, tiny wounded sounds issuing from deep within you. Flipping the broken book open to place the pages back where they should be, tears falling on the creased-up photographs. The Don and his plain timber bat. And I had no idea where to look, what to do, and so in my hopeless way I walked out of the room and cried as well, somewhere else.

  Unthinking me, destroying something precious.

  The last time I saw you cry.

  And now I finally understand it was the beginning. The beginning of my clumsy habit. Of your refusal ever to care again.

  I’m standing now, sort of. It’s taken a while. I must have grunted with the effort of getting up because you turn to the sound. Your hands are by your sides; you’re unarmed, of course. I don’t imagine you’re acquainted with the shop-floor grubbiness of hands-on violence at your level of management. Unless it’s the only option left.

  After a long look that assesses the state of me, the busted, feeble state of me, your eyes are searching the ground between us and they’ve found what they were looking for. A branch, thick as a human arm and about the length of a bat. Slight bulge at one end where a knot has kinked the timber into a heavy club, split fibres spiking out at the break and, Wal, doesn’t the splintering remind you of our apricot stump?

  You’re holding that timber low and relaxed and I can’t outrun you, can’
t even walk, and more than anything, more than the fear, I’m curious. Are you the man who’d use that lump of wood, or the man I’ve believed in all these years?

  Your eyes never leave me but they’re not seeking a connection and the answer’s delivered swiftly, swung from low to high, right handed, catching me under the ear.

  Massive, so big I can’t even call it pain. So big that I know I’ll never get up once I fall. And I’m crumpling, collapsing: knees and hip and face no hands and tiny curls of bracken in my eyes and the warm glow of the fire turning towards me now but my belly’s cold and I’m seeing it all askew, a camera tilted sideways.

  The second one, you lean forward to deliver it flat, grunting with the effort, and there’s a sound inside my skull like something large coming apart. Pain ebbing, sound changing and past me go your feet, business shoes on twigs. Always with the business, Wal, never time to talk; off to see Craigo, throw the branch onto his pyre and out into the dark, away up the hill without a look back. Busy man, Wal. Busy busy.

  Eyes unfocusing turn the firelight to summer sun on your shoulders, twelve years old and the centre of my world. Ashes swirl in the heated air landing soft around me snowflake shreds of Bradman. I’m so sorry, Wal.

  Acknowledgements

  Darren Keefe’s various troubles will, unfortunately, be familiar to anyone who takes a close interest in professional sport. His temptations and failures are not unique to cricketers, although I looked to cricket to build a world around him as a character. I knew the game from playing it as a kid and from watching it as an adult, and fortunately it is a sport that has built up around itself a wealth of great journalism and literature. Among the books I read as I developed this story were Christian Ryan’s wonderful biography of Kim Hughes, Golden Boy, and two detailed examinations of corruption in sport—Ed Hawkins’ Bookie, Gambler, Fixer, Spy, and Declan Hill’s The Fix. On cricket itself and the mysterious hold it has over so many of us, I read Buzo and Grant’s essay collection The Longest Game, and C. L. R. James’s classic Beyond a Boundary.