If Ben was the regular twelfth man, Zane Dwyer was number eleven in the pecking order. Ben was the talentless cricket tragic, clinging to this team with invincible enthusiasm, while Zane was in cricket as a more or less permanent detention. With his history of delinquency and crime, coming from a well-known family of ‘unfortunates’, Zane’s participation in cricket was Roman Catholic educational charity in action. The teachers, unable to cane him as they had been educated to do, subjected him to a virtual house arrest of compulsory extracurricular activities to stop him consorting with fellow criminals. Assuming there were no criminals in the cricket team.

Whereas Ben was forever hoping to get a turn, Zane was usually avoiding it. But cricket did offer certain opportunities to Zane, such as the one he was sharing with Ben now.

‘Oh no, that’s Jai’s!’

Ben was staring dry-mouthed at the youth-size Gray-Nicolls bat Zane was sliding out of his unbranded nylon carry bag.

‘Joel’s,’ Zane corrected him, eyes flickering.

‘Same diff. You nicked it?’

‘Joel hardly uses it, he’s always borrowing Daniel’s Spartan,’ Zane said, putting on a Daniel voice, which he made interestingly effeminate. Zane was on his knees, rummaging in his bag. Ben felt drawn into some dark enterprise.

‘They’ll kill you.’

‘They won’t even catch me,’ Zane’s voice said from the depths of his bag. He came out with a grin, a handful of Puma stickers and a Stanley knife. Sitting cross-legged with the bat across his knees, he began digging at the edges of the Gray-Nicolls stickers.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Ever heard of rebirthing?’ Zane said. ‘New Puma bat, all yours for eighty bucks.’

Zane’s hatred for the ‘ruling class’, as he called the more popular boys, was so ferocious that he would take any risk to spite them. This included promising Ben he would ‘fix your little problem’ of never getting a bat. Ben had only thought Zane would punch someone, not steal Joel’s Gray-Nic.

‘Are you nuts? They can literally expel us!’

‘Nobody’ll know,’ Zane assured him. He had the Gray-Nicolls face sticker off, and flipped the bat to work the red stripe off the back. ‘Your cricket heroes do this all the time. They pocket a million bucks a year to use some Indian brand, and what they really use is their old bat, just change the stickers.’

Zane loved to impart his worldly knowledge of adult fraud. He always had some story about famous people being hoaxers. Zane intended his cynicism to give Ben a kind of armour against the bullshit that was thrown at him. If everyone was living a double life, Zane said, everyone was equally vulnerable.