The Rules of Backyard Cricket by Jock Serong Page B

charged now, perfect stealth, and I’m inside her, a secret place inside a secret place, her fingertips tracingelectricity on my shoulders, and the world is ours alone for those golden fleeting minutes.
    I suppose it ends with Emma in the way that teenage things usually do. One of us just forgets we owe anything to the other and moves on. At that age you understand that everything is alluring and everything passes. The colours are brighter, the music hurts like it’s real. No one stays together long.
    So Emma gets me through maths until my own selfishness or maybe hers undoes our arrangement, costing me a mid-year fail in year eleven and sealing the deal. I’m not repeating year eleven. I’m not going to be one of those nineteen-year-olds who finishes school with a driver’s licence and a fiancée, for God’s sake.
    All this time, our new mate Craigo hovers in the wings. He has a way of placing himself side-stage in our lives, just there, just in the background. Emma’s departure inches him into the frame without me even noticing it’s happening.
    We’re standing in a nightclub queue, each of us clutching the birth extract certificates we’ve made out of blue ink and craft glue.
    Mum doesn’t know we’re here. She knows Craig, but never inquires about his life. It’s a surprising intuition of hers: Craig seems born of nowhere and no one. His garrulous nature subtly pushes any discussion of his origins into the background. So Mum thinks I’m staying with a kid from school I nominated, a reliable one. I don’t know what Craig told his parents, whether they’d care, or even whether they exist.
    We’re both wearing Doc Martens and op-shop trench coats. I can hear The Cure thudding out from deep within the building. There are girls in the queue dressed like women, heavy makeup to put a few years on their eyes. Craig’s disappointed Wally hasn’t come, but it never feels like I’m second-class company.
    I don’t want the conversation to come around to school, but somehow it does.
    ‘It’s a waste of time,’ he’s saying. ‘Keating left school at twelve and he’s the fucking treasurer.’
    Like a moron, I correct him. ‘I’m pretty sure Keating was fourteen.’
    ‘Well you’re sixteen. What the fuck’s holding you up?’
    Craig’s been working for the bookies at Flemington since he left school at the end of last year. He’s a lackey of some kind, talks in turf dialect, laced with old-bloke terminology. We had a thing in the fifth , got a rails run . He even affects the trackside nasal twang, like he’s holding a pair of binoculars under the brim of a trilby. He’s verifiably a teenage kid with fistfuls of cash, bursting with impatience for adulthood, generous and secretive in equal measure. For my sixteenth birthday he buys me a top-shelf Gray-Nicolls bat. I check with Wally—he confirms with horror that it would be worth three hundred dollars, but it certainly didn’t come through his position at Brewer’s.
    Craigo shrugs it off when I ask, and I begin to wonder. Has he bought me a bat, or has he got me a bat? The difference is slight, but carries a tiny edge of moral uncertainty.
    Those moments of doubt are only fleeting. Being the objects of Craig’s fixation makes us proud and confirms us in our belief that we’re something special. It’s the Big Guy who sets us on the paths of our own typecasting. Wally as responsible, grave: a leader. Me as a force of nature: a talented freak with no mooring.
    It’s tough getting the leaving-school idea past Mum.
    She has a belief—I’m not too self-absorbed to see it—that me being in school is a form of insurance against a fate like hers. But where self-absorption takes over is in my unshakeable belief that I’ll do better. I know that a buffer of education might have saved my undoubtedly clever mum from having to pour beer for rheumy old bastards. But I don’t accept the third plank of the syllogism. I’m convinced it won’t happen to me.
    So