The Rules of Play (2 page)

I slide down on the sofa. During the second break I look round and see that Agnieszka has joined us, watching from the doorway. I can feel her bewilderment gathering, like an itch at the back of my neck, and eventually it breaks. ‘What is happening?’ she asks, echoing my own question of only a few minutes before, but Alan takes her question as referring specifically to the fact the game has been interrupted while the umpires and the batters stop for a chat in the middle of the field.

‘The batsmen are being offered the light,’ Alan says.

‘Which light?’ Agnieszka asks.

‘Well, that’s the point,’ Alan says. ‘There isn’t much light at all, it’s getting dark, and if the umpires think the batsmen can’t see the ball very well they give them the option of stopping now and calling it a day.’

The players are going off the field. The umpires are picking up the wooden sticks.

‘So now we can eat?’ Agnieszka says, and I know what’s going to come next: the salt and pepper grinders as the umpires or the batters or the wooden sticks, our glasses being moved around, Alan speaking slowly in words of one syllable, Agnieszka asking him to repeat these words and how to spell them. But there will be learning and enlightenment without me having to talk at all, I will simply absorb.

So it happens.

Each team has eleven players. One team sends in its first two people to bat and the other team tries to get them out. This is simple, after all, and because Agnieszka is looking serious and not flustered I know that she too is enlarging her understanding of the world. The ways in which the batters can be got out are manifold: bowled, caught, leg before wicket, stumped, run out. From a slight hesitation in Alan’s voice I can tell that these are not the only ways, but he doesn’t want to confuse us, not yet. The batters’ job is to hit the ball and run between the sticks of wood before the other side can get it back, or hit the ball out of the field. They score runs. When one batter is out another one comes in, until they’ve all had a turn. Then the other team bats.

Agnieszka asks if the referee has a whistle, like in football.

Alan explains about the umpires.

‘What happens if the ball hits one of these men?’

He draws in his breath.

‘And on TV,’ Agnieszka continues, ‘I saw a bird on the field, I think a seagull. What happens if the ball hits the seagull?’

Alan says the bird would fly away before it was hit.

‘But is the ball a hard ball? If it hits the seagull, would the seagull get killed?’

Alan thinks it would.

Agnieszka shivers. I say the food is good, which it is, chicken and tomatoes and some kind of beans, which we are eating with bread, but Alan says it was meant to be hotter than this, next time he will put in more spices than the recipe says.

‘Can girls play cricket?’ Agnieszka asks.

‘They can,’ says Alan. But for some reason not many of them choose to.

‘When girls play cricket, do the referees must also be girls?’

Alan pours more wine into his glass and looks at the ceiling.

‘Really,’ says Agnieszka, ‘I know this is trouble, but if no one asks questions then all is ignorance and darkness.’

I touch her arm, but immediately she stands up and starts to clear the table. I notice that she has pushed all her chicken to the side of her plate and half-hidden it under a slice of bread: she is apparently going through one of her vegetarian phases, which come and go, and which Alan—and I too, sometimes—tends to be slow on picking up on, because she doesn’t like making an issue of it. I follow her into the kitchen, spoon the remaining food from the serving dish onto a plate for Selwyn and look round for somewhere to place it. Agnieszka takes the plate from me and puts it into the oven. She tells me to go and rest.

I DON’T WANT to rest. This mood I was in when I came into the house, when I told Alan his apron needed washing, is back on me. I go upstairs to Selwyn’s room and knock on the door. I go in and sit on his bed. Clothes everywhere, the smell of socks, the little green standby lights on his TV and laptop still on. There’s broken glass on the carpet beside his desk. I was sixteen too, once upon a time. I start to look for his mobile phone. Selwyn is often out but usually phones to say when he’s coming back and if he wants supper keeping, or if he’s staying over at a friend’s.

Really, I am happy, I am loved.

Agnieszka shouts from downstairs that she is going out, and the door slams behind her.

No footsteps, no traffic even. The house is completely silent. I begin to make Selwyn’s bed, first shifting the duvet so I can pull the sheet to the sides, and there is the black controller thing that he uses for his computer games, like a dead beetle on the pillow. Now tidying his room seems completely the wrong thing to do, so I stop, leaving the duvet in a heap, and go down to the kitchen.

Alan is sitting at the table, making a map of the solar system. I guess that he’s been talking with Agnieszka, while doing the washing up, about astronomy, or some new planet they’ve discovered. I sit down opposite him, watching his pencil move across the paper, until I notice that the names he is writing in are not those of the planets.

‘Alan—’

‘Look, these are the fielding positions. I think I’ve got most of them. Do you want to see?’

First slip. Second slip, third slip—there are a lot. In fact there seem to be far more than eleven. Square leg. Gully. Midwicket. Point. Long off, long on.

‘These are for a right-handed batsman, of course. But for a left-handed one they just switch over.’

I notice that when he talks to me in this very determined, very rational way, it’s like he’s the one who’s been cheating and he’s making it all up as he goes along. ‘
We
had to finish the presentation for Monday. For the shoe people,
you know? I’m sure I told you. And we couldn’t get the figures
until Tokyo closed.
’

We look at each other encouragingly.

‘Like when you’re looking in the mirror,’ he says.

‘Oh?’

‘When they switch over, I mean. For a batsman who’s left-handed. Like when you look in the mirror and your right becomes your left—’

‘Does it?’

I look towards the patio doors, where my reflection appears in the dark glass as if I’m outside, looking in from the garden. I raise my left foot.

‘I was making it for Agnieszka,’ Alan continues. ‘She seems really keen.’

‘It’s lovely, Alan. I’m sure she’ll—’

‘But if you—’

‘No, I couldn’t. This is Agnieszka’s—’

‘Go on, take it.’ He pushes this map across the table towards me. ‘I can easily do another.’

Fine leg. Third man. Silly mid-on.

His right hand moves towards me and then circles the outside of the map. ‘When they’re further out, they’re generally called
deep
. And further in,
short
.’

‘Yes.’

‘These are just the
possible
positions, of course. They’re not all used at the same time. It depends who’s batting, and how the bowler is bowling. So that’s why there’s so many of them.’

‘I was wondering about that.’

‘It’s yours. Please.’

He gets up to find another piece of paper, for a second solar system. A parallel universe. For a moment I think of asking him to mark North, then I fold my map into four and hold it.

‘Are you busy tomorrow, by the way?’ he asks.

‘If there’s anything—’

‘No, nothing we need. And we’re going out tomorrow night, remember? Jamal and what’s-her-name. It’s just that I’ve got these tickets for the cricket for tomorrow, for Selwyn and me, and if Selwyn’s not around then I thought, Agnieszka?’

‘Perfect.’

‘But if you’d rather—’

‘No. I’ve already got her map.’

He looks at me, checking.

‘I mean it, Alan. You go with Agnieszka. It’ll be really special for her.’

I take the pencil from his hand and walk over to the worktop to sharpen it with a kitchen knife.

LATER, IN THE bathroom. Selwyn’s toothbrush is still here. And there, higher up, lying on top of the cupboard for medicines and spare razor blades and six-year-old half-used bottles of tea-tree shampoo for hair lice, is his mobile phone.

What happens if the ball hits the seagull?

No wonder Agnieszka’s questions annoy Alan: they are ones that need asking. If no one gets a batter out, does he go on batting for five days? If the umpire makes a decision that is obviously wrong, does everyone still have to obey him? If everyone agrees, can you change the rules? What happens if the loss-adjuster has a terrible car accident and loses both legs, or if I forget his telephone number?

Friday |
Saturday
| Sunday | Monday | Tuesday

A
boy goes missing and who can blame him? He doesn’t
mean
to go missing.

He is sixteen years old and his clothes are falling off him and his father is at work in an office that he used to think was important and his step-mother is with her lover and downstairs is a girl who used to be the au pair and is somehow still here, after so many years, as a constant reminder that his bottom used to need wiping. He is sitting in his room and he is watching TV: someone hits someone else and the second person hits the first person back. He’s so bored that he feels he’s been sitting in this room his whole life, staring at men hitting each other and old posters of Bart Simpson dating from the time it was exciting to say words like ‘bum,’ and waiting for other people to stop talking and pay him some attention, and everything else has been a dream. Or else this is the dream and he is in it, and something has to break—
loudly
, and into lots of pieces—for him to wake up. So he starts throwing balled-up socks at the beer glass on his desk that holds his old pens and he hears his step-mother’s voice: ‘What if everyone started throwing socks at beer glasses?’ This is familiar: what if
everyone
picked their noses in public or shouted out swear words or put their hand inside their trousers and scratched? But they wouldn’t. Or at least, not all at the same time.

Then his step-mother apologizes for speaking to him the way she did and this is sad, almost as sad as the way his parents spend years of their lives fussing about his table manners or whether he’s cleaned his teeth or his toenails need cutting or he’s getting enough vitamin A or B or Q and then suddenly they stop, they ignore him completely, as if the whole family thing has just been a game to pass the time, like throwing balled-up socks. Although after they’ve dropped out of the game they still insist, when they bother to notice that he’s still around, that the rules apply to
him
, and that his vitamin levels are the most important things in his life.

So the boy walks out of his house and catches a bus into town and when he gets off he sees a small crowd of people gathered on the pavement up a side street. They are watching something happen and they are very quiet and then they are all talking and excited and then they go quiet again. The boy walks towards these people and because they are coming and going and moving around, and because they are slower than him and there are spaces that he can move into but they can’t, pretty soon he’s near the front.

A man wearing a flat leather cap is doing the three-card trick on an upturned box. A punter puts money on the box and the man shows him three cards and then places them face down and shuffles them, fast, and the punter points to the one he thinks is the queen of spades and he’s wrong, and the man pockets his fiver. But there’s a man wearing glasses in the crowd who sometimes gets it right—which encourages others to lay down their money and lose it.

The boy puts a five-pound note on the box. The man looks at him and smiles but his eyes don’t. The man shows the cards and the boy nods and then holds his breath, shutting out everything around him, as the man moves the cards around in a flurry. When the man stops the boy points to the queen of spades.

He’s right, he knows he is. But the card man cheats. He picks up, not the card the boy is pointing to, but the one next to it, and he shows the two of diamonds and shakes his head and the boy’s fiver has already disappeared. And before the boy can say or do anything about this other things are happening around him. ‘
Police!
’ The crowd is dispersing and the man has kicked over the box and is quickly walking away, his hands jammed down hard in his pockets, with the other man wearing glasses beside him.

The boy follows them. They turn left, and when the boy reaches the corner he sees that they are running.

At the next junction two men separate. They are both wearing black jackets, dark trousers. The boy follows the card man—he thinks it’s the card man, but he isn’t nearly so sure as he was about the queen of spades. He runs down a street of shops that are closed and then a street of much taller buildings with balconies overhead and washing hanging out and then he turns another corner and for a moment he thinks the man has escaped, the street is empty and silent and all he can hear is the pounding of his own heart. But his eyes catch a sudden movement next to a lamp-post about twenty yards away and there the man is, glancing back.

The boy starts running again. A dog springs out of a doorway and snaps at his heels but he ignores it. This movement, he begins to understand, is good, much better than throwing balled-up socks. He could go on for ever. It doesn’t matter now whether he’s chasing anyone or not, and the money doesn’t matter either.

The boy follows the man across a street, not bothering to look out for traffic. Then one more corner, a short road between closed garages and warehouses, and suddenly the boy is out in the open, at the edge of a wide road with busy traffic, two lanes on each side and low metal barriers on a strip of dirty grass in the middle. The man runs across the first two lanes, just in front of a row of cars that are picking up speed after being stopped at a red light, and skips over the barrier. By the time the boy crosses the cars are travelling fast, a horn sounds loudly and far too close and a car brakes and swerves.

At the barrier the boy stops. His head is buzzing, his whole body trembling. The man has disappeared. He could have gone either left or right. He could have doubled back at the traffic lights. More likely he’s somewhere in the rough ground on the other side of the road with tough, spiky bushes and a row of parked trucks against a wall. By now it’s too dark to see. The boy has been running for hours.

He grips the metal barrier as trucks thunder past, just inches away, blowing waves of dust and hot exhaust fumes in his face. He feels that he’s been shuffled and lost, and has been lost for some time now, much longer than tonight. He thinks it’s probably a natural condition, which the rules of the family game are there to disguise, and now he’ll have to get used to it. But if it involves running, it will be okay. He has expended a huge amount of energy and has passed over into somewhere new. He has the feeling that he’s just run a race, and because there’s no one in front of him he must have won. He deserves a prize, a medal with a ribbon at the very least, even if he doesn’t have a bedroom wall to hang it on.

THIS IS THE story I tell my lover. I’m lying down, again, which is why it goes on a bit. This is the story I tell the loss-adjuster, for that is his job, and I hope to God he’s good at it.

‘Where did the three-card man come from?’ he asks.

‘I passed one on the way here. Round the corner from the Tube station.’

‘He’s a gypsy, I suppose?’

‘I imagine so.’

‘You imagine. Could be a lot worse.’

‘I don’t want to go there.’

‘Don’t.’

‘He’s stayed out one night. He’s done this before, he was staying over at a friend’s, he’s probably fine. I can still choose.’

‘Good choice.’

‘Mmm?’

‘Yes?’

‘What’s the score?’

‘You really want to know?’

‘I couldn’t give a fuck.’

‘180 for 2. India were all out for 198. Have you done anything? Called the police?’

‘Alan called them this morning. I made him.’

‘Because you think if it comes from a man, they take it more—’

‘But they do, don’t they?’

I LIE WITH this loss-adjuster not making love. It’s a thing that lovers are for.

And then we do, because it’s another thing they’re for, and I want to. I can still choose.

Afterwards, which is in fact a lot later, I sit with my knees up looking out of the window. The loss-adjuster, I think, has an inkling to turn on the TV, but I’m not going to tell him he can. I’m busy.

‘What are you doing?’ he asks.

‘I’m training my eyes.’

‘How do you train your eyes?’

‘By counting the bricks in that wall.’

‘How many?’

‘I get up to nineteen and then I lose track, so I start again. But the next time I only get up to twelve, and the time after that it’s down to three. It’s not going well.’

If I turn to him he will see that I’m crying. When I turn to him. When he makes me turn to him.

IT ’ S RAINING . THE players are off the field. They don’t want to get their white trousers muddy. Alan will have seen the forecast, will have taken an umbrella, will be holding it over Agnieszka who actually
likes
the rain and would prefer to be getting wet. If you turn on the TV, the game you are seeing is not the game you at first think you are seeing but the recorded highlights of another, previous, historic game. You can probably tell, if you know about these things, how long ago this game was by tiny differences in fashion: the boots, the bagginess of the clothes, the peaks of their caps.

So: how the loss-adjuster and I met.

I was at a translators’ conference in Edinburgh. (I have two jobs, both of them small, one of which is translating from the Spanish. My father was Spanish. But that can keep till another rainy day.) He too was at a conference, for loss-adjusters, at the same hotel, and because his conference was even more tedious than mine he decided to pay mine a visit. He arrived in the middle of a session and sat in the row behind me; and though I didn’t turn round the notes I was taking became illegible, and then stopped altogether. On the transparently ridiculous grounds that he wanted to learn more about translation as a form of neo-colonialism, he suggested we have dinner. Which, given how little we ate, went on for a very long time. Loss-adjusters earn more than translators, and he had a room at the hotel. I phoned the people I was staying with, friends of Alan who lived in Edinburgh, and told them not to wait up.

We walked and talked and lay down. Except for the weather and the traffic and the tall grey buildings, it was bucolic: we were shepherds somewhere remote, or shepherd and shepherdess. I had a dictionary, he a calculator. Poems are what get lost in translation, he translated losses into finite figures. One bright and blustery afternoon we were sitting out at a café by the docks in Leith and I wanted to show him a story I was translating. As I took the folder from my bag the pages fell out and were blown up among the gulls and out over the edge of the quay. The loss-adjuster jumped up and began to chase after them, stumbling and grabbing at what the wind tore away. He looked as though he was being attacked by a swarm of bees or his house was burning down and he was trying to save the one thing important to him, except that the thing was mine and it wasn’t important at all, and besides I had saved the file.

On the Friday evening Alan came up from London to spend the weekend with me. We went out for a meal: Alan, me, Alan’s friends, and the loss-adjuster came too and kept ordering more wine. He got into a fight with two men at the next table who he said were laughing at me, or staring, or anyway something that he decided was offensive. Almost certainly something very small, like the color of their ties. He stood up and told them to apologize. He was gripping a chair, hard, in order to stand up, and I remember praying he wouldn’t let go. When one of the men told him to sit down and stop making an idiot of himself, the loss-adjuster hit him. The woman at our table, the wife of Alan’s friend, had a giggling fit.

A month later he wrote to me. His handwriting— oddly old-fashioned and impersonal—was that of someone who’d been taught at school how to hold a pen properly. He wrote that he was surprised by how easy it had been to hit someone, to throw a punch; his hand didn’t hurt at all, though doubtless it would have been different if he’d been sober. He wrote that he was going on a business trip to Spain, and as he didn’t know any Spanish and the phrase books he had looked at weren’t helpful, perhaps I could provide him with translations for some essential sentences.
I am lost. Do
I have to change trains? Please give me directions to your
bedroom.

HE DOES HAVE a name—it might even have been pinned to his jacket at the conference hotel—but I don’t want to use it in case it breaks.

I MUST HAVE dozed. The dream that’s with me in mid-flow when I wake up has something to do with the story whose pages blew away on Leith docks, except that the loss-adjuster is in it and the sentence I’m knitting my brow over, trying to fit the words to the rhythm and balance, is an exquisitely formal little piece of work. It reminds me of being on the top floor of the V&A, looking at those polished brass instruments for finding where you are in the middle of the ocean. They have tiny coiled springs and cogs that slot together so perfectly you could become hypnotized watching them and scales marked in minuscule units of measurement, but they are trained on the stars, or the horizon. ‘
If the loss-adjuster had not been so
continuously something, I would surely have something to
something something.
’

The eighteenth century: I think I am a bluestocking. My father would have been proud. (The loss-adjuster unrolling my blue stockings, his fingers light on the mesh . . . )

What has woken me is the sound of the loss-adjuster chuckling. ‘Look at this,’ he says.

On the TV, men in bright yellow jackets are running across the cricket field. A bomb? An injury?—but the loss-adjuster finds it funny. Then the camera shows why: ahead of the men in yellow, almost in the middle of the field, is a naked man. Now he’s on the center strip, the area of almost brown earth, and he’s jumping in the air, his penis bobbling. The camera immediately cuts away to the dark-skinned umpire, who is looking down at his watch.

I stare hungrily, impatiently, because it was only a moment, two seconds of fame at most, that the camera granted the naked man, but it was enough. This isn’t a man at all. It’s Selwyn.

I swallow hard. Relief—that he’s there, and visible. I get up from the bed and start dressing, hurriedly. The TV shows a gang of at least six yellow-jacketed men dragging Selwyn off the field.

‘Where are you going?’ asks the loss-adjuster.

‘Where,’ I ask him, ‘do they take him now, that man?’