Free The Rules of Backyard Cricket by Jock Serong Page B

born to witness. Five-minute monologues straight to camera, even as they weep.
    I’m chewing the toast mechanically.
    The eastern light creeps past the edges of the blinds and into the house. Outside, traffic is starting to move, thinned by summer’s lethargy. They’re running official shots of the crew, focusing on one woman over and over again—Payload Specialist Christa McAuliffe, a civilian mother of two, blown to smithereens on live television.
    Mum’s in the shower as I pass the bathroom door. She hums sometimes when she forgets herself. Large water goes crack on the tiles. Small water sounds like rain.
    Out the back I run the handmower over the pitch. The stubble of dried grass spins out from the blades, whirls in the air for an instant, landing soft on my feet as I pass. They’d formed an arc, the astronauts. A beautiful parabola in the sky projecting them at impossible speed heavenward. And something failed. Did they fail? Or the machinery, the fine orchestra of milled steel and glass and cables and fluids, wasit that? Altitude and cataclysm. I’ve never considered their relationship before, certainly never heard of Icarus.
    But as the wheel of the mower rolls over and flings the chopped grass at my shins, landing once again on the scar Wally gave me, I have a sense of consequence.

    Later that same day Wally’s at the wheel of Mum’s dinged-up hatchback with his P-plates up and Mum issuing directions from the passenger seat. She takes us through the bottom half of the city and down past Albert Park Lake and the Junction Oval, between perfect rows of palm trees.
    The sun’s out over the Junction, and a groundsman’s pushing a heavy roller over the centre wicket. Wally’s got his window down and he’s sniffing the air like a happy mutt. Grass cuttings.
    Along Fitzroy Street and round past the Esplanade Hotel, where ten years later I will put my tongue in a bouncer’s ear and he will repay me with two broken ribs. Into Elwood, the streets named after poets—Byron, Shelley, Keats. Mum’s slowing as she checks street signs. She gets us lost twice, even though the map is on her knees and she’s rotating it every time Wally turns a corner.
    Eventually we wander down a bluestone laneway to a small tin shed with a peeling timber door. A hand-painted sign above the door reads: Hope Sweeney, Bootmaker .
    The small man who ushers us in reminds me of Burgess Meredith in Rocky : the pugnacious creasing of the jowls, the big knotty hands. Hell, he’s even got a cardigan on. He greets Mum like she’s his daughter. The walls are covered in old shots of cricketers—Wes Hall, Ray Lindwall, Lindsay Hassett, even Dennis Keith Lillee. This man we’ve never heard of, who’s currently dunking a teabag for our very own mum, is obviously Someone Important.
    At first I think he might be one of Mum’s barflies, but he’s too vigorous for that. He’s got a bulbous nose, but as far as I know all old codgers have bulbous noses.
    He takes an A4 notebook from a pile on the bench, places it on the floor, says to Wally, ‘Find a clean page, son.’
    His voice is pure backyard Strine. Not the Brooklyn patois I was half listening for.
    Wally starts leafing through the pages. Around us are piles of rolled-up fabric and materials, spools of thread, sewing machines, hammers and abstract cut-out shapes. The tumble of these things is just short of chaotic, a busy man’s light-handed organisation.
    Wally doesn’t appear to have noticed his surroundings at all. He’s still flipping the pages of the notebook, each of which has a traced pencil outline of a foot on it. Inside each foot, in sharp, spiky cursive, is written the name of the foot’s owner, and his special requirements. Charlie Griffith, calfskin, removable stops. Bruce Laird, ankle boot, rubber lining.
    And then a page with only two-thirds of a foot on it, a giant foot. Joel Garner, long stops for wet grass. Kangaroo hide. The top third of the foot, toes included, turns