The Rules of Backyard Cricket Read Online Free Page B

Whether they fought, even. Whether despite all this there were moments of bliss. At some stage he must have come up with the dopey idea that renting wasn’t enough, and that in order to sail his little ketch of family out of the fog he’d have to buy a house. Would Mum have passively agreed? She was more forceful than that, but maybe passivity was her mode before she became a single parent.
    I picture an agent with massive sideburns reassuring them of their own great potential. Showing them the houses they could afford; explaining their shortcomings. Driving past the ones out of their reach, dismissing those too in a voice just above a stage whisper, as being for management-level couples. Go-getters. And Dad, taking the bait, asking him to stop the car.
    So Mum put her name next to his on a mortgage that was spectacularly beyond their means . How else do you get anywhere? I imagine him saying.
    But what if it was Mum who said it? What if it was Mum who loaded them both up?
    They moved into Fernley Road in March 1969, and the repayments immediately started to bite. How do I know that? Because in my regular fingering through their belongings, I found a file with all the bank’s correspondence: the stern warnings, the official threats, the beginnings of recovery action as they missed one repayment after another. Dad emerged from his midlife cave for long enough to find himself a new job at the munitions plant in Footscray.
    Heavily pregnant with me, Mum somehow started working in pubs: the Commercial in Yarraville, the Mona Castle in Seddon, the Prince Albert in Williamstown. She took buses between shifts whileDad had the family Zephyr parked in the lot at the factory. None of it made sense. Yet they clung to the house.
    I’m intrigued by this other side of Mum’s life, the pub side. Wally isn’t. He consciously avoids it, as though it diminishes her to think of her in subservience to strange men. Occasionally she works a day shift that coincides with me being off school sick, and she takes me along and perches me like an exotic bird on a stool. The illness is treated with an endless stream of chips and post-mix lemonade. The framed pictures, the illicit adult smells of cigarette smoke and old beer. The races on a radio somewhere. Old men with flat-football faces, straining to listen, betting slips clutched in spotty hands.
    The thermometer governs all of my phony fevers. Mum jams it in my mouth then rushes away to berate Wally about homework and make his lunch. Alone in the bunk, I’m holding it under the reading lamp. The searing-hot globe has burned me more than once and, if I don’t get it right, it will shoot the mercury up to indicate a life-threatening fever. I need it to say sick but not malarial. When Mum’s footsteps return, I whip the warm glass tube back under my tongue and look sorrowful. We’ll get through this together, Mum. I know I’m brave. Take me to work with you.
    Seeing the world from what I presume to be its centre, I fail to notice that Mum’s happy to go along with the charade. Maybe it’s comforting for her to take a talisman of her home to whatever bar she’s working. Remind the world of men that she’s someone’s mother.
    She’s an uncommon bartender, even from my small and simple perspective. I have no other bartenders to compare her to, I know. But she’s not buxom and flirty, not mean and defeated. Something else: dry, caustic, wise. She runs a very tight bar. There’s no muscle to back her up—she’s often said since that the pubs she worked were running on autopilot, owned by absentee investors. Mostly, she seems to find pubs where the regulars are old and frail. But from time to time, neverseen by me, the balance must break down and their wilder instincts take over.
    The façade of control is strengthened by her ability to absorb sporting trivia. It’s obvious to me now that this is a mark of an intelligent woman consigned to a menial job, but she absorbs the commentary