The Rules of Backyard Cricket Read online

  ‘I loved this book. Jock Serong is a natural.

  He engages you with a vivid recreation of boyhood

  in 1970s Australian suburbia, while letting the

  darkness seep in page by page until you find yourself

  in the grip of an intense thriller. A compellingly

  told story, and a timely one too. Behind the Keefe

  brothers are hints of all the light and shade and

  sparkle and scandal and mythological creations of

  modern sport. And Serong reminds us that those

  creations all grew out of a family backyard.’

  MALCOLM KNOX

  ‘Three pages in, I was sure Jock Serong had written

  this book just for me. Thoughts I’d had since childhood.

  Then, a story of the love and hate within families,

  of the failures of masculinity, in a cricket context

  rendered with technical precision. Brutal, perceptive,

  uncomfortably funny, occasionally breaking into poetry.’

  GEOFF LEMON

  ‘What happens in the backyard doesn’t stay

  in the backyard. Wally and Darren Keefe are

  the Australian cricket dream gone sour.’

  GIDEON HAIGH

  Jock Serong is a former lawyer and editor of Great Ocean Quarterly. He writes feature stories in the surfing media and lives on the southwest Victorian coast. He is the author of Quota, winner of the Ned Kelly Award for First Fiction, 2015. The Rules of Backyard Cricket is his second novel.

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House, 22 William Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia

  The Text Publishing Company (UK) Ltd

  130 Wood Street, London EC2V 6DL, United Kingdom

  Copyright © 2016 by Jock Serong

  The moral right of Jock Serong to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in 2016 by The Text Publishing Company

  Cover design by W. H. Chong

  Page design by Jess Horrocks

  Typeset in Minister by J&M Typesetting

  9781925355215 (Australian paperback)

  9781911231035 (UK paperback)

  9781922253798 (ebook)

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Creator: Serong, Jock, author.

  Title: The rules of backyard cricket / by Jock Serong.

  Subjects: Cricket players—Fiction.

  Suspense fiction, Australian.

  Dewey Number: A823.4

  THE RULES OF BACKYARD CRICKET

  The Boot

  The broken white lines recede into the blackness behind us as we hurtle forward.

  Do you remember this?

  I knew it in childhood; this feeling of the irretrievable past slipping away behind the car. These things, gone and unrecoverable.

  Cars on the other side of the divided highway are fading embers that spear into the dark. We thurrump over the cats’ eyes, changing lanes. I look out every time I feel this cue, the markers and the slight shifting of weight, wanting to communicate with those sleepy, indifferent drivers. They have their own reveries. Night-time lives suspended between origin and destination, just like mine. I want to talk to them; I know they wouldn’t want to talk to me.

  Maybe I had an inkling of this as a tired child in the back seat. Maybe I recognised that something was ebbing away into the night. Back then there were antidotes to the melancholy: the promise of a warm bed; a wide, expanding future. The sadness now is uncontained. It sweeps over me in waves. It wants to drown me.

  I’ve always slept with the lights on, fending off an indefinable sorrow in the night. Even when I lit it up, with stimulants and willing companions, it watched me scornfully, knowing it had me at bay. That melancholy? it said. It’s just a taste of the vast, immeasurable silence that awaits. A speck on a pebble in a galaxy that’s dust in a supercluster.

  I can’t see much. Just the narrow tunnel of vision directly behind the car. I’ve managed to get my hands up in front of my face and bring my fingers together, unruly mob that they are. I’m wedged towards the rear corner, driver’s side, so close I can smell the hot plastics of the tail-light. I’ve felt my way to the back of the bulb, squeezed and twisted until it came free. And as it fell it revealed the light, the view, the road.

  I’ve had my eye up against that tiny opening for—well, for how long? I don’t know. They took my watch, along with so much else.

  The hands are reluctant dance partners but they can’t move away from each other. Like it or not, they will have to waltz. The cable ties are drawn taut around both wrists, cutting into the flesh. Well out of reach of any finger. The feet, from whom I’ve heard nothing lately, must be in a similar predicament; more cable ties around the ankles, drawn so tight that the malleoluses are pressing into each other. A bizarre and exotic pain that surely wasn’t contemplated by my tormentors, a happy accident of sadism: two small hammers, banging it out. You’re wondering how I knew that word, the Greek one about the hammers? Physios. I’ve spent a lifetime listening to physios.

  My breath is hissing in and out of my nose, my mouth tightly taped.

  I’ve been thinking for some time about bringing Squibbly into play. I’m not, in general, given to nicknaming my own body parts but I’ve made an exception for the thumb of my left hand: the kernel of my genius and also my Achilles heel. Mangled, knobbly and dead. Squibbly won’t mind being pressed into service because it’s all the same to him. And although it seems futile, equally, it seems unsporting not to try.

  So now I’m jamming him into the hole at the back of the tail-light and pulling as hard as I can. It takes a moment or two, and I have to suspend my whole weight from the bound hands to make it happen, but Squibbly finally gets enough purchase to break open the light fitting. There’s a loud snap, and I’m looking out through a bigger hole at the wide open theatre of night.

  The car slows. They’ve eased back to listen.

  I wait in perfect silence, and presently the pace picks up.

  The other fingers register stickiness, and I know that I’ve slashed up Squibbly in the process, but neither of us minds. He is, as always, a dumb and obedient martyr to the cause.

  There was a kid once, I read somewhere, abducted and stuffed in a car boot. Just like me, though probably innocent of anything. She had the good sense to bite off a crescent of fingernail then unscrew the taillight globe and drop it in, so that if ever the authorities searched the car later on—whether in pursuit of her murderers or upon her rescue—the DNA would tie the crime to the vehicle. Such a detached response to impending death. I’m not sure why I’m drawn more to the genius of the idea than the central question of whether the child was rescued.

  So I’m more or less resigned to this.

  It’s a moral counterweight to the things I’ve done. It seems a shame and more than a little vulgar. But there would have been undignified aspects to cancer or heart disease too. No one’s giving me sponge baths or feeding me puree through a tube.

  They’ll torch the car, I suppose. These people have a strong sense of genre. It’d be inappropriate not to torch the car.

  The trip from Geelong to the western suburbs of Melbourne is about fifty minutes, and half of that must have elapsed by now. I’ve assumed we
’re headed east, towards Melbourne, though they didn’t say. Anyway, the road would be quieter, driving west. I’ve been lying on my left side, which is the way they threw me in. My left arm, trapped under me, is numb. My left leg is too, although there’s an unnatural buzzing coming from my right knee, like the humming of a powerful stereo before the music starts.

  It’s nothing like the movies, being shot.

  There’s no great explosion of agony. I didn’t hop about grimacing and going Ugh! Ergh! or swipe fretfully at the air or hiss curses through clenched teeth. There’s something more pressing about taking a round through the kneecap. A feeling of wrongness.

  My right knee has a hole in it. Not cavernous, but large enough to admit, say, a finger. One of them, not the one who fired the gun, actually stuck his finger in there at one point. Under that hole there’s a slurry of shattered bone floating around like the shaved ice in a half-drunk caipirinha. There’s another, bigger hole out the back, strings of tendon and ligament hanging from it. I know because I saw them. It’s not bleeding much. I can only assume the shot missed the major plumbing.

  It buzzes for some strange reason, reverberating up through my thigh and into my hip. If they pull me out of here before the coup de grâce—and it’s quite likely they won’t bother—there’s going to be a white-hot moment when that leg hangs straight again and all the smashed bits slice and grind against one another. In respect of that development, I’m electing not to get ahead of myself.

  Apart from that, it doesn’t matter much whether they get me out of the car. I’m lying on a shovel. Down near my feet I know there are two large paper sacks of quicklime, and it’s more than a little confronting to be snuggled up against the means both of interring your corpse and dissolving it.

  The shovel can be read either way. Or is it a spade? I’ve never been clear on the difference. Again, a fan of the genre would have them lighting black-market cigarettes and training handguns on me while I dig my own grave. But efficiency would suggest a short volley of fire, straight into the boot, and then firing up the car. I can’t dig in this state. It’d be comical. Who wants to sit around all night getting lung cancer and waiting for a cripple to entomb himself?

  I’ve contemplated this once or twice. My death, I mean. And I always thought when the hour came there’d be clarity. Perception, through the limestone-filtered water of total mental acuity, of the pebbles on the bottom, the tiny invertebrates scuttling in between.

  A poignant end. A sorbet after the greasy business of living.

  But no. To my sad surprise, whether you’re crawling home from Christmas with the aunts, or waiting to be shot dead and incinerated by gangsters, the Geelong Road turns out to be just as boring.

  The Backyard

  The first and only choice: do I accept this as my fate or do I keep fighting it?

  The air, filtered through the tape over my mouth, tastes faintly of exhaust. Slow suffocation by carbon monoxide might be as good as I can hope for. Either way, I have a feeling I’ll be in here for a while.

  So while we’re waiting I’ll take you through it. The sequence of events, some predestined and some entirely of my own creation, that put me in the boot.

  You’re seated on a plastic-strip beach chair in a suburban Melbourne backyard. Fernley Road, Altona. It’s 1976. February, late on a Tuesday afternoon.

  Two small boys, shoulder-lit by the late sun of daylight saving, are playing cricket.

  The smaller one, batting, is me.

  Darren. Daz. Dags. Scrawny, short, cheeky grin and a thick clump of mustard-brown hair. I’m in school uniform, the small grey squares of a grade two. I’m red-cheeked with defiance but grinning. Standing my ground because I’m being accused of cheating. My reflex in such situations, then and now, is to deny everything then laugh it off. Dimples deep, teeth out. Lean on the bat. Point at the bowler’s crease, tell him to get back to work. Later, I’d see Viv do that and I’d swear he stole that move from me.

  My accuser, casting thunderstorms my way with ball in hand, is my older brother Wally.

  Grade four, older by nineteen months. About four inches taller at this stage, and undoubtedly stronger. If it comes to blows I will lose. Wally is my idol, and yet my inverse in all respects other than our shared obsession with cricket. He is a purist and a respecter of rules, a methodical, ambitious bore with an insistent need to take everything—and I mean everything—literally. You’ll get the hang of him as we proceed, so I won’t start piling up adjectives just now.

  Although…wait. Insufferable—in case I forget later.

  But I still worship the guy. I know it doesn’t make sense.

  I no longer remember where this ritual came from: the bat, the tennis ball, the twelve metres of shorn grass. There’s a line somewhere in any childhood. Before the line, all knowledge and habit is contributed by adults. How to eat with a fork, wash your face, wipe your bum. On the other side of the line, the magpie child starts to gather and collect from everywhere. How to swear. How to kiss a girl. Where you go when you die.

  Backyard cricket must have been absorbed on the parental side of that line. We’ve been doing it ever since I can remember, and I can remember back to about three. But who taught us the rules? Who showed us how to mow the strip, to play a cover drive, to bowl a yorker? Who explained the dozens of tactical options, the physical vocabulary? It must have been Dad, but I don’t have the memory. It saddens me that I don’t.

  Ground Zero is the stumps, represented by the severed foot of an apricot tree. In life it had sprawled out to about twenty feet of blossoms, leaves and fruit, open enough at its centre that we’d made a platform in there. Too basic and rickety to call it a treehouse, but serviceable enough for various kinds of warfare and for hiding when any shit had gone down.

  The tree bore so much fruit that a large proportion of it—even beyond the harvest taken by us and the birds—just disintegrated on the lawn. For years after the tree was gone it would deliver painful reminders of its existence in the hard stones left by the rotted-down fruit under our bare feet. Its fate was a common one for a stonefruit tree: it started to rot and split down the middle, oozing shiny globes of sap. The plywood platform that had sheltered pirates and cowboys and bank robbers began to lean on a crazy angle, and with every gale we’d find new branches fallen on the grass.

  But the fruit kept coming in staggering quantities, so it seems no one had the heart to deal with the problem—and of course, that no one can only have been Mum. It wasn’t as though Wally and I were ever going to take to the thing with pruning saws. I’m pretty confident we never affected any kind of chivalry for Mum. Anyway, we liked the old tree, especially when it thrashed drunkenly in the wind and we could hear its tortured wooden squeals from our beds.

  But eventually the platform became too dangerous, and Mum appeared one day with the chainsaw. We’d been kicking the football, and suddenly she was there at the side gate with this forestry-grade monster she’d borrowed from a neighbour. A huge, ravenous-looking thing: teeth on a chain bolted to a motor.

  I can still see her, paused at the gate with one hip slightly a-kilter, projecting an inner awareness of how cool she suddenly appeared. She had her massive imitation Dior sunglasses on, probably in lieu of protective goggles, and her hair pushed back behind a paisley bandana. Wally dropped the footy. There could be only one purpose for her appearance and, although it was going to cost us our lair, it was going to be good.

  It took her a couple of goes to get the saw started. Then it coughed and caught, there was a squirt of blue smoke and she held it up with a satisfied look round her mouth. She gave it a rev, then another as she eased it into the bark. Sawdust swirled around her and settled in her hair. She worked the blade horizontally into the trunk, weaving the saw in and out, squinting behind the Diors; I can still see the veins running down her biceps. There were two loud cracks as the timber gave way, and the entire weight of the tree settled onto the bar of the chainsaw, choking the chain and killing the motor. S
he stood back for a moment, indecisive, with a hand on her hip.

  Then she did the best thing I ever saw her do.

  She jumped up from where she stood, hooked her hands on a low-hanging limb and hung there like a gibbon, yanking at it. She swung through the air a couple of times, kicking freely with her bare feet—the girl we’d never known her to be—and the tree reacted with a few more fibrous pops. Then down it came, apricots thudding and rolling all over the place, Mum lost completely under the canopy of leaves. We could hear her under there, shrieking with laughter, cracking twigs in her efforts to climb out.

  The foot of the tree was cut off square except for a jagged horn of timber on one edge, where it had stretched and snapped. The chainsaw had fallen out by this stage and Mum took it up again, working the cord and the choke until it spluttered into life once more. With a sweep of the snarling arm the splinter was gone. We raked and scooped and brushed for an hour or more, the brittle afternoon sun of autumn picking up the gold among the leaf litter.

  By the time we cleared the whole mess away, a squared-off stump stood in the middle of the lawn, roughly equidistant from the three paling fences. Wally disappeared into the garden shed and emerged with a tape measure. She’d cut exactly at bail height, twenty-eight inches by nine. We watched her saunter off, twigs in her hair, the chainsaw resting on that same cocked hip. Accident or design? As with most things Mum did, the line was blurred and she wasn’t saying. But forever after the stump was our stumps.

  And in the current memory, the stump is an arm’s length behind me as I stare down my brother. The bat in my hands is an SP, as used in Tests by England captain Tony Greig. He’s tall, implacable, patient. All the things I’m not. The dog at our feet is Sam, a grossly obese staffy. The lawn’s kept down by an ancient handmower that’s always been there. Razor sharp blades made to look innocuous by rust. It didn’t come from anywhere and it’ll never go anywhere.

  Those deep shades of autumn are last year now, when we were smaller. Here in high summer, where my memories crowd more, sunlight is a scatter of bleaches and reflections. At backward point there’s a banksia. At extra cover, a holly bush where Sam likes to shit. At mid-off, a bare patch where nothing, not even grass, grows. It’s lightning fast if you send a drive through there. Off drive I mean. I assume you’re keeping up. I’m a lefty.