The Rules of Backyard Cricket Read Online Free Page A

although to our eyes she’s more than halfway to being an Old Person. Dad’s just a void into which we tip our speculation. He might have done this, or that. His presence is lost in the haze of our pre-school years; tall, scruffy, and downcast. When I look for him in the dark I see the hollows round his eyes, his moustache, the pilling where his stubble has worn away the neck band of his jumper.
    Mum came from a fabled place called the Eastern Suburbs, a faraway land on the other side of the city. We hear the names on the news sometimes, and I argue with Wally about which suburbs are Eastern . We can work out some of them from the footy: Hawthorn, Richmond, St Kilda, South Melbourne. The others count as western suburbs. It’s much later that I realise Collingwood, on our side of a divided universe, is actually north of Melbourne, not west.
    It was Mum’s fate to fall in love with a footballer.
    Dad was someone’s friend’s brother, or someone’s brother’s friend. In the oral history of our family Mum was Mum—defined by her own presence. Dad, however, was defined by his connection to Mum. A guy who knew someone who knew Mum. Apparently he was a savant in footy boots—all the intellectual spark of wet cardboard, but freakishly light-footed; wired with a spooky intuition for where the ball was and where it needed to go. But these skills are, by definition, not transferable and it seems Dad struggled on any surface that wasn’t grass.
    A year in with Mum and she’d alienated her family, dropped out of school and gone to live with him in Footscray, busy gestating Brother Wally. They eloped to Glenelg. Civil ceremony. No family, a handful of friends.
    Footy didn’t work out for Dad—he did an ankle. The club paid for a reco but he’d lost his trademark ability to bank laterally out oftrouble at speed. And the elopement had its consequences. Wally and I never knew our paternal grandparents because Dad was gone so early in our lives. We never knew our maternals either: they’d turned their backs on Mum.
    It meant too that our childish fascination with our own genetics could only take us one layer deep. We had Mum’s hair, thick and somewhere between blonde and brown. We had her light scatter of freckles. But where her bones were fine and sharp, ours were thuggishly stout. Did we have Dad’s ankles? Was it a design fault that had caused his downfall anyway, or just a divot in the earth somewhere?
    Their first home was a Commission rental in Footscray’s backstreets. The house is still there, in the ironically named Gallant Street. Dad took a full-time job in a warehouse, shuffling through his day and into his evening. Home at night, grinding his molars at the squawking of baby Wal, he’d chug his way through the beers until he fell asleep in his armchair. I see Mum perched in the chair beside him, breastfeeding Wally and watching her young husband descend. Not violent; not raucous or randy. Just sinking slowly like a man half-asleep in a parachute.
    This is what I feel, what I glean from interrogating Mum. I can’t know enough of him to care about him as a person, but I care a great deal about the idea of a father. A dad. So I collect the little clues she leaves. I go through private drawers sometimes, searching for his identity. I build him painstakingly from these twigs and straws, but the shape he takes always feels hollow.
    I imagine she wondered how long he’d last, whether he’d end it with some horrendous flourish. Gas himself in the car, perhaps—the most suburban of exits.
    Wally and I pass the house sometimes on our bikes, both trying to look at it without the other seeing. The Gallant Street house: behind its nature strip, a modest brick veneer off a government plan. It would’vehad a big backyard, we figure, after riding around the corner to assess the depth of the blocks.
    It’s impossible for me to know whether my parents still talked in those days, whether Dad had retreated into glum silence.