‘How was cricket practice?’ Gordon asked, his eyes on the penholder. You couldn’t talk to Ben and look into his eyes. ‘They’re like dogs,’ the paediatric psychiatrist had said of Ben’s type of attention disorder. ‘They’ll only look at you while you’re not looking at them.’ When he heard this, Gordon felt sorry for the doctor. The man clearly didn’t know dogs.

‘Wait, what?’ Ben gave his all-purpose response. With Ben, if you were banned from repeating anything you said, or if he was banned from repeating everything he said, the sum total of your communication would be zero.

‘How was cricket?’

‘Good.’

Another all-purpose response. A maths test he flunked, a school musical in front of a thousand people, an all-time surf, a shit surf, a date … Ben would assess each, supremely non-judgemental, as ‘good’.

‘Get a bat?’

‘Wait, what?’

‘Did you get a bat?’

Ben mumbled something.

‘What?’ Gordon said.

‘They ran out of time.’

‘Get a bowl?’

‘What?’

‘Did you get a bowl?’

Ben mumbled something.

‘What?’ Gordon said.

‘Some, at the end.’

‘How’s your catching?’

Ben, everyone knew, couldn’t catch tinea in a public shower.

‘What? Um, good.’

‘It’s a long season ahead, I’m sure you’ll get more of a go.’

‘What? Oh. Yeah, hundred percent.’

Ben adored his cricket, which Gordon thought, just quietly, was a more clear-cut symptom for his diagnosis than was revealed by any of the psychometric testing they had put him through. This cricket season showed no sign of varying from his other five years in the one team St Pat’s could muster. Ben was listed in the team sheet as ‘bowler’, which meant that he wasn’t permitted to bat. If he ever bowled, it was in junk time when games were either well won or lost. Which meant Ben was a specialist fielder, except that fielding, more than batting or bowling, was his Achilles heel. He didn’t like dirt or foreign matter on his hands and had a particular sensitivity to pain in his palms or fingers, so he had no hope of stopping a hard cricket ball. He had a strangely uncoordinated throwing motion that propelled the ball forty-five degrees off course. If his team had twelve players available, despite an official rotation policy, Ben was frequently twelfth man. Gordon’s secret definition of a successful day of cricket was that Ben finish without becoming aware that the other boys were giving him shit. Yet Ben wouldn’t miss a practice or a match, which, aside from infuriating Kelly when it was her turn to drive him across Ocean City on a Saturday morning and sit for six hours until the pointless exercise was over, was, in Gordon’s view, an open-and-shut clincher for his type of Asperger-ish, ADHD-ish, non-specific, nameless disorder-ish Thing.

‘You doing homework? Need any help?’

‘Wait, what?’

‘How’s your schoolwork going?’

‘What? Good.’