The Rules of Backyard Cricket Read Online Free
Author: Jock Serong
gadget was the province of rich people.
However, that was no concern of ours. Overnight, a technology had entered our lives that could bring slabs of congealed pie back to life so we could consume them at tongue-blistering speed. You could dry wet sneakers in it, melt a brother’s GI Joe—or doctor a tennis ball.
It’s relatively simple, I suppose. The ball goes on the turntable and the air inside expands: ergo , if you overdo it, the ball explodes. If you get it just right, however, you wind up with a ball that will bounceto incredible heights, making it virtually unplayable off a good length. But like the moral payoff in a Greek tragedy, once the magical powers are spent, your ball is flat, listless and liable to be smacked all over the place. Ten minutes of preternatural spring and the ability to hit your opponent’s body repeatedly without effort. After which, if you haven’t managed to get him out, revenge will be a slow and painful business. Such is the counterweight to any exalted state of being, as I would find out much later on.
And it would be me, time after time, who would misjudge the axis between glory and humiliation, revelling in my temporary ascendancy rather than effecting the dismissal. And on more than one occasion, when I had turned my mind to the central issue, scattering his stumps or luring him into the false shot that would bring the inanimate fieldsmen into play, he’d casually lean back on his bat and laugh at me. In my impetuous rush to get from kitchen to pitch with a newly cooked ball, I’d failed to make the necessary disclosure before delivering.
The neighbours comment euphemistically to Mum that her boys are ‘very spirited’ or ‘remarkably competitive’. It’s impossible for us to see that we’re forming an obsessive antagonism, an entanglement placental in its depth.
I know Wally deeper than biology. His frame, his posture, his voice and movements. That dry, chipping cough of his, the one he issues all the time, whether he’s sick or well. The way his eyes dart and I know he’s switched mentally from derision to anger; and equally, when and why he’ll laugh uncontrollably; when his strength will give out in a fight, where he’ll try to hit first.
I know his ribs—hell, I’ve aimed at them enough. I know how the sun burns him in late spring: a glow over his shoulders, blisters bursting and flaking on his nose.
I can recruit him from a conversation with adults, from his homework or from his perch on the toilet. I can claim him from in front of the TV or when he’s half-asleep. One look, a nod towards the back door and he’s out there, because he wants to beat me as much as I want to beat him.
From the day—lost now in the Kodachrome blur—when we take up backyard cricket, we are an independent republic of rage and obsession. Our rules, our records, our very own physics. Eye-to-eye and hand-to-hand combat. By the time we emerge into the world beyond the paling fences, it surprises us to learn that anyone considers this a team sport.
Mum
The bulb idea has come to nothing.
It burst easily enough when I squeezed it, but into fragments so tiny and delicate that none of them were any use. And the effort of popping the globe drove quite lot of the shards into poor old Squibbly.
I gave it a go, fumbled around for a while for the biggest pieces of the bulb that I could find. But it was like trying to scoop up thick guacamole with a thin chip: every time I sliced, the fragment broke into a smaller fragment.
Squibbly is bleeding rather a lot, and I’m tired. There’s so much to explain, but my blood’s like cold oil. I’m suspended in space here, between wakefulness and sleep, maybe even consciousness and death, and I fear the gag will suffocate me if I doze off.
A world apart from the world in here. The dark side of a frozen planet.
Mum is the centre of our solar system, the single deity in whom all powers are vested.
Looking back, she’s not yet thirty,
However, that was no concern of ours. Overnight, a technology had entered our lives that could bring slabs of congealed pie back to life so we could consume them at tongue-blistering speed. You could dry wet sneakers in it, melt a brother’s GI Joe—or doctor a tennis ball.
It’s relatively simple, I suppose. The ball goes on the turntable and the air inside expands: ergo , if you overdo it, the ball explodes. If you get it just right, however, you wind up with a ball that will bounceto incredible heights, making it virtually unplayable off a good length. But like the moral payoff in a Greek tragedy, once the magical powers are spent, your ball is flat, listless and liable to be smacked all over the place. Ten minutes of preternatural spring and the ability to hit your opponent’s body repeatedly without effort. After which, if you haven’t managed to get him out, revenge will be a slow and painful business. Such is the counterweight to any exalted state of being, as I would find out much later on.
And it would be me, time after time, who would misjudge the axis between glory and humiliation, revelling in my temporary ascendancy rather than effecting the dismissal. And on more than one occasion, when I had turned my mind to the central issue, scattering his stumps or luring him into the false shot that would bring the inanimate fieldsmen into play, he’d casually lean back on his bat and laugh at me. In my impetuous rush to get from kitchen to pitch with a newly cooked ball, I’d failed to make the necessary disclosure before delivering.
The neighbours comment euphemistically to Mum that her boys are ‘very spirited’ or ‘remarkably competitive’. It’s impossible for us to see that we’re forming an obsessive antagonism, an entanglement placental in its depth.
I know Wally deeper than biology. His frame, his posture, his voice and movements. That dry, chipping cough of his, the one he issues all the time, whether he’s sick or well. The way his eyes dart and I know he’s switched mentally from derision to anger; and equally, when and why he’ll laugh uncontrollably; when his strength will give out in a fight, where he’ll try to hit first.
I know his ribs—hell, I’ve aimed at them enough. I know how the sun burns him in late spring: a glow over his shoulders, blisters bursting and flaking on his nose.
I can recruit him from a conversation with adults, from his homework or from his perch on the toilet. I can claim him from in front of the TV or when he’s half-asleep. One look, a nod towards the back door and he’s out there, because he wants to beat me as much as I want to beat him.
From the day—lost now in the Kodachrome blur—when we take up backyard cricket, we are an independent republic of rage and obsession. Our rules, our records, our very own physics. Eye-to-eye and hand-to-hand combat. By the time we emerge into the world beyond the paling fences, it surprises us to learn that anyone considers this a team sport.
Mum
The bulb idea has come to nothing.
It burst easily enough when I squeezed it, but into fragments so tiny and delicate that none of them were any use. And the effort of popping the globe drove quite lot of the shards into poor old Squibbly.
I gave it a go, fumbled around for a while for the biggest pieces of the bulb that I could find. But it was like trying to scoop up thick guacamole with a thin chip: every time I sliced, the fragment broke into a smaller fragment.
Squibbly is bleeding rather a lot, and I’m tired. There’s so much to explain, but my blood’s like cold oil. I’m suspended in space here, between wakefulness and sleep, maybe even consciousness and death, and I fear the gag will suffocate me if I doze off.
A world apart from the world in here. The dark side of a frozen planet.
Mum is the centre of our solar system, the single deity in whom all powers are vested.
Looking back, she’s not yet thirty,
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