The Rules of Play (4 page)

Not matches, exactly. Rubbing two sticks together was more Bobo’s thing; matches didn’t arrive until the middle of the nineteenth century. By which time cricket had been up and running for two hundred years, longer, and you have to ask: why?

What’s it for? What does it do or provide that couldn’t be done or provided by some other and much simpler means? Without cricket, would the history of the world have been different?

There’s both a serenity and a dizziness to these questions, and I like the mix. A lighter, more abstract version of what happens when I think about the loss-adjuster. At the micro level too: how different would English summers be without slip fielders? If there were five or nine balls in an over and not six? If the loss-adjuster was right-handed and not left-handed?

‘ I ’M GOING TO look for Agnieszka’s pen,’ I say, pushing all my unfinished food in Alan’s direction. ‘I think I’ve seen it somewhere upstairs.’

I have no idea where the thing is. Besides, this is Selwyn’s job, not mine: looking for lost pens, and finding them. I just want to get away. Not that anyone will notice my disappearance: I am not needed, superfluous. Selwyn doesn’t want to talk to me, Alan decides our social life, Agnieszka’s moral welfare has been taken out of my hands.

I knock on Selwyn’s door and go in: absence, and the duvet massed into a heap where I left it only makes the absence more obvious. I wander into our room and sit on the bed for several minutes fiddling with the alarm clock before I realize where I need to be: somewhere small and cramped and black.

There is a cupboard under the stairs: you can’t stand up, the light bulb doesn’t work, hanging from nails are musty old coats and a pair of binoculars and the chain-and-leather lead of a much-loved dog that died in agony under the wheels of a removal van. It is a dungeon, a place of bondage and punishment, and it’s where Agnieszka finds me. I have tripped over a heap of rubber boots and have fallen awkwardly on something hard and sharp and screamed to high heaven.

The door opens, light floods in.

Agnieszka hauls me upright. She is very strong—an essential qualification, when we took her into this house. She could pick up Selwyn with one hand, she could drag a mattress out to the garden to air after a bed-wetting incident with no more effort than if she was carrying a bag of peanuts. I imagine that she comes from a family of farmers or lumberjacks, not office workers. Her eyes are shining—she is excited to be helping, this is some kind of emergency fieldwork for her childcare course. But then I see she is not looking at me at all. She is looking beyond me, at something in the cupboard. And now she is pushing past me, shoving the coats aside and dragging out her prey from behind a defunct upright hoover— a cricket set, bat and wooden sticks in a plastic bag, smaller than I’d remembered but then so many things and places in one’s past, when revisited, appear to have shrunk.

‘Oh,’ I say, closing my eyes to deal with the shock of memories surging in, a time when Selwyn was just eight or nine years old.

To begin with all was good will and enthusiasm. Alan said that Selwyn had a natural talent. I laughed. A natural talent for swimming, I could understand. Or running. Or drinking wine or telling jokes or sex. All these are normal, rational human activities, and I can see why God might enjoy scattering at random a few especially gifted individuals—to set some standards, to give the rest of us something to live up to. The government would call them beacons of excellence. But for cricket—which may well be the most over-designed of all human activities, and is neither normal nor rational—surely no one can have a
natural
talent.

Alan did persevere. He got together a group of maybe half a dozen boys of Selwyn’s age in the park on Sunday mornings. I watched from an outdoor table at the café as he demonstrated the cover drive, flailing his bat towards a scampering squirrel. I watched him hold the ball in his hand and give it a sudden twist, as if he was shutting off the water mains. That café served a very good home-made lemon cake. But over the summer the group fell away. By late July only Alan, Selwyn and Rashid remained, and to Rashid’s bowling Alan had no answer, which was all the more humiliating given how slowly and languidly Rashid sent the ball towards him. The cricket set found its home at the back of the cupboard under the stairs, as I have too.

Back in the kitchen, Agnieszka and Alan chatter merrily over their new prize. Alan takes out the bat and poses in the batter’s correct stance; because the bat is for an eight-year-old he’s bending over more than seems comfortable, as if he’s stooping to look for a coin that’s rolled underneath the cooker. Agnieszka examines the stumps and the tiny bits that go on top as if she’s just unpacked a flat-pack shelving kit and there are pieces missing, or too many pieces. Again I am superfluous.

But apparently not.

As I start to clear the takeaway cartons from the table Agnieszka looks up at me and then runs from the room. Seconds later she reappears in the kitchen doorway, holding her hands behind her back. She beams; and whatever is coming next, I know she means well. Suddenly one hand thrusts forward and offers me a black Waterstones bag. ‘For you.’

Inside is an enormous yellow book:
Wisden’s Cricketers’
Almanac
.

‘Oh, Agnieszka, thank you,’ I say. ‘
Wisden
.’

‘Wisdom.’

‘Of a kind, I suppose.’

‘No, it’s the best. There is nothing other to compare with this. For longer than a hundred years. Really, this is the Bible.’

The book is so heavy I have sat down. It weighs in my lap. I check the last page number: 1,664.

‘Read this tonight, please,’ Agnieszka says. ‘And tomorrow, at two o’clock you must be here. Not late.’

Friday | Saturday |
Sunday
| Monday | Tuesday

‘Love.’

‘In general, or in particular?’

‘In particular. You?’

‘Ants. Oh, and hanging, shooting, drowning or poison.’

‘Are you asking me to choose?’

NOTHING HAPPENS, MUCH. Then something does. Then nothing again, or—rarely—something else. Then nothing, and so on and so on until it becomes hard to perceive any difference between nothing and something.

To break the rhythm, to introduce a little visual diversity, the camera sometimes cuts to close-up shots of the spectators, magaziney girls with big breasts or men dressed as carrots. Today, it has twice homed in on a man in a wheelchair wearing black glasses. He is staring at the players with absolute concentration, and even before the camera moved back a smidgeon so you could see his white stick and his guide dog, I knew he was blind.

For perhaps 95 per cent of the time, for those who have no strong interest in what they are looking at, it is dull. Even Alan can’t convince me that watching the bowler walk back to the place where he starts his run-up makes for edge-of-your-seat viewing, or the times after each over when they all move to different positions and start again from the other end. The effect, I suppose, is to make the fun bits—like when the batter really smashes the ball, or someone leaps in the air and falls flat—more exciting, worth waiting for. Yesterday someone complained about the ball so they brought out a box of other ones and the umpire offered the box to the players to choose from. The strawberry cream? The walnut truffle? No one ever chooses the nougat, I don’t know why they bother.

I think of Alan and me sitting at the kitchen table having one of our fumbling arguments, with Selwyn as spectator. It doesn’t matter what it’s about: do we go by Tube or take the car, do we really need a new computer and why not second-hand, how much can you still like someone if they believe in God or send their children to private schools. When one of us is on top form, it might be diverting. When both of us are, it’s entertaining, for us too. If it’s a flat pitch and the ball isn’t turning and we’re just going through the motions, he walks out. ‘Selwyn, come back!’ Alan pleads. ‘Why don’t we . . . ’

Alan doesn’t approve of boredom. It makes him feel guilty. This is because he’s not good at it. So he devotes enormous amounts of energy to doing battle with it: making lists and plans, being better at his job than his colleagues, cleaning his shoes, getting up early on holiday so we can fit in the flea-market and the ice-cream place before the transport museum. And, yes, watching cricket. Because I’m better at being bored, the fact that I find pretty well all of the above boring (although I did unexpectedly enjoy the transport museum) hasn’t mattered, much. He used to worry about Selwyn not being ‘stimulated’ enough, but a lot of the time that was because he was jealous of Selwyn for being even better at boredom than me, or for not seeing it as a problem, or for not being bored at all.

Ants—an obvious, indeed hackneyed example. I’m sure Selwyn isn’t the only child who has spent an enraptured two hours watching ants drag a couple of breadcrumbs or a scrap of apple peel across the draining board, along the wall, up between the window frame and where the draught excluder’s come loose, down again, through the jagged peaks and vast crevasses of the patio and down into a black hole. The leaders, the laggards, those who are doomed. Diversions, heavier loads, new obstacles put in place. Calculated floods. While I watched him from where I was sitting, as he watched the ants, and Alan fretted that if we didn’t set off
now
for wherever we’d intended to go there’d be nothing to see when we got there. Wordsworthian, this: the natural world, all those vivid sense impressions. Not that nature need have anything to do with it. Screwdrivers were magic. A wet afternoon would enable Selwyn to discover exactly how many different parts the hoover was made up of, and the wonderful properties of accumulated dust: how it adheres, how it hangs in the air and disperses. Or the tripod for Alan’s camera, or his desk lamp, which by the extreme mercy of a usually non-existent beneficent god was unplugged at the time. (‘The un-making of things can have as creative results as the making of them: discuss’—a question I’d include in my History of Science exam, if they ever went back to setting exams.) Nor, I believe, when Selwyn was walking home with Rashid from primary school, same route every day for years, were they bored or silent: they debated passionately whether it would be better to die from too much heat or too much cold, and the gloriously many different ways of committing suicide.

But it’s different now. He sits in front of a computer game on a flat screen—and this
is
boring, because he knows how these games will end, or at any rate the people who make them do: they’re finite, and fixed. They don’t even have the appeal of sport, which is that even when one team is much better than the other, you never know for sure what’s going to happen next, and nor do the players. By five o’clock all the probabilities could be overturned. And cricket, which allows for the influence of an almost infinite number of variable factors within its Byzantine structure—even I can see this—has class. Alan watching cricket is Alan watching the ants track across the patio, choosing one and following its crazy course, choosing another.

Boredom is what Selwyn has now, and has had for the past year. He lies on his bed with his arm across his forehead like some pallid Victorian poet dying of consumption or permanent writer’s block. He can’t even be bothered to flush the loo, because that tempestuous cascade of water that sends your turds spinning like upturned boats no longer holds any interest. He avoids me, he doesn’t meet my eyes. Boredom is what he drags around with him, parades, wears like a suit of armor. Blank eyes, or eyes rolled upwards in disgust. Slack stance, grudging walk. Where he’s headed he doesn’t seem to know or care, any forward movement just an excuse to kick aside a Coke can or bottle that happens to be in his path. You wouldn’t want him on your team: he’s not interested in playing any game, still less in being any good at it. He is, Alan would say, out of form: his shambling, angst-ridden trudge is exactly that of a batsman who keeps missing the ball or hitting it straight to a fielder, or that gangly bowler who can’t even throw the ball—not that difficult, surely—in the right direction.

And if being
in
form—your body brimming with life and confidence, alert to everything around you, your timing spot-on and your jokes all funny—equates with being in love, then Selwyn has clearly fallen out of love. With me. He no longer chases me around the kitchen with a water pistol, or puts grapes in my cup of tea. He doesn’t ask me where rain comes from, or why you can’t pee and sneeze at the same time. He no longer rushes to my bed on my birthday clutching a hand-made card with a sellotaped pop-up frog that falls out when I open it— instead, he dutifully proffers a shop-bought card with ‘love’ in some fancy typeface that mocks the real thing. I have become a type and not an individual, a representative of a category, an off-the-peg mother.

I HAVE A déjàvu. As I am telling the loss-adjuster that Selwyn has phoned and is safe, as the loss-adjuster is reaching to draw the curtains more closed—either because he doesn’t want anyone else except me to see him naked, or to reduce the glare of sunlight on the TV screen—it suddenly comes to me that I have lived this moment before: this room, this light, this exact stance or posture of this exact man with his grey-streaked hair, his so-so stomach, his tortuous knees, shelf of his hip, wit of his eyes, spread of his hands, with this exact distance between us.

It cannot be. It passes.

And then, as he bends to switch off the TV, it comes again—not so sharp, more an echo, a confusion. The Indians are batting again, as they did two days ago and surely they have had their turn?

‘Second innings,’ says the loss-adjuster. ‘They bat, the others bat, then the first lot again.’

‘
Again?
’

‘Five days . . . ’

‘And again and again?’

‘Just twice.’

‘Oh, so it’s like that play by Samuel Beckett.’ Except that you can see the Beckett in one evening.

This changes everything. It’s not like life at all, unless you believe in reincarnation.

You get a
second chance
.

Everything you did wrong first time round you can now do right.

Or vice versa. But different, anyway.

MATCH ANALYSIS , BRIEFLY continued.

. . . Or—to the contrary—Selwyn is out of form because
I
don’t love
him
enough.

But I do. If he’d let me.

God, that’s weak. Agnieszka is right:
if
clauses are tricky and best avoided, there’s something shifty about the whole mix of tenses. It’s hardly Selwyn’s fault that I happen to have fallen in love with someone else, which does tend to change the focus of one’s attention. That I’ve suddenly changed from being a dependable workhorse bowler into a flash devil-may-care batter. That
I’ve
become the adolescent, and he quite rightly isn’t too happy about being asked if he’d mind being understanding and worldly-wise and middle-aged.

Confusion all round. Which is why I’m groping for something to hold on to, and for some reason fix on a memory of Selwyn aged about seven eating a plate of spaghetti, the sauce all over his face and the long white strands looping from his mouth. And then I think of spaghetti Westerns, and then cowboys and Indians, and I feel a sudden huge sorrow for the Indians, who had everything stacked against them and were never allowed to win.

‘HERE?’

‘Further out. Stop—yes, there.’

‘And now?’

‘Closer.’

It’s as if he knows already. He has, I admit, a natural talent. You move in, I remember, with the bowler, a few paces, alert.

‘I’m—’

‘Yes.’

‘You know, seeing you’re left-handed, maybe we should change—’

‘We could—’

We do. Continuous movement, the full repertoire of classic strokes along with some improvised ones too, unhurried. We are finding, or stumbling upon, new positions. Fine leg. Gully—gully is good. Slip and slip and slip. Deep backward. There are muscles and other bits being exercised I never knew I had. Some of these positions may be structurally unsafe but surely this is how technology advances—the cantilever bridge, new techniques of drilling for oil.

Afterwards, I look at the map of positions that Alan made for me, the star chart. So many of the points are clustered around the narrow strip at the center which he has shaded in. I find a pen on the loss-adjuster’s desk and start to join up the dots.

THIS LITTLE , LITTLE place, no room to swing a bat, the size of a generous grave: the lift, in which I go up to my lover and down from my lover. It is modern, functional, smooth, with a dull shine to its surfaces. Sometimes, when I enter, there’s a smell trapped in the air, the spoor of a previous occupant; more rarely, there’s another occupant in person, and we scan each other in a practiced way, wary but not unfriendly, like dogs passing; the glance I give myself in the mirror is more knowing but not more intimate or lingering. I press the button for 4 or for G, and there’s a little
ping
as the lift arrives—a tiny coming, a mini-orgasm, yes, but what it reminds me of more strongly is the bell that sounds at the fairground stall where you test your muscles by striking with a hammer. (Then get to choose your prize: a bow and arrow, or an inflatable parrot. The bow and arrow.) In the order of things my passage in this lift barely registers—it’s like the lumbering plod or nonchalant stroll of a batsman from the pavilion to the field of play, and later back again, not a part of the game itself—but nowhere else do I feel more observed, even if only by myself.

In the street, checking my watch, heading towards the Tube station, no one watches me at all, even though this walking-upright business is something I seem to need to re-learn. I have spent so much time horizontal— and yes, on all fours—that I think I may be evolving backwards. My legs are loose; they have forgotten how to support me. Between them (I am grinning like a six-year-old going down a water slide, I know I am) I can feel the loss-adjuster still inside me.

SELWYN HASN’T COME home yet. Or has come and gone. The emptiness of the house is almost tangible; certainly more substantial than I feel myself to be. Somewhere a clock ticks, and the silver disk on the electricity meter slowly revolves. But I don’t need the excuse of checking to see in which bedroom a light has been left on: today I am an invisible intruder—even the cat coiled on its chair doesn’t trouble to open its eyes—and have a ghost’s licence.

Selwyn’s room: a mess. But at least it was
his
mess, before I started making my semi-automatic attempt to tidy up on Friday night. Now the mess is no one’s. It’s as if—which is odd, because I didn’t feel this when no one knew where he was, so why should I feel it when I do know?—he’s already moved out, gone off into the life he’s suddenly discovered is his own, and what’s left is just the brittle casing of his time as caterpillar.

Natural wastage. Butterfly now, seeking only to feed and mate. Or moth, crashing against a 60-watt lightbulb.

On to Agnieszka’s room, where I haven’t been since the night six months ago when I could bear the sound of her sobbing no longer and went in to comfort her, prepared— looking forward—to jointly wail against the perfidiousness of men, only to find that the cause of the upset was her college tutor’s suggestion that she should delay taking some exam until later in the year. Then it was dark, and I saw nothing; now it is bright, the light through the Velux window good enough to take photographs by. And indeed this room, exactly as it is, could be featured in
House & Garden
or
The World of Interiors
. The bed has been made by the chambermaid of the year; the textbooks and work folders have been arranged by an efficient PA; even the make-up, the tweezers, the tampons, the intimate stuff, looks as if it’s straight from the shop, placed by the props manager. Clothes are in cupboards, knick-knacks in rows, God’s in his Heaven / All’s right with the world! How do those lines go on? Something about ‘the bats’ sleek sisterhoods.’