The boys celebrated like the men they watched on television. The Bluebird crew were soon upon Ben, who was trying to capture it all, put it in a bottle and keep it, every last microsecond. He would remember looking over the top of all those cheering faces to the distant and strange sight of his grandfather brandishing a manila folder. He would remember the murmur that arose among his mates as Joel and Jai lowered him to the ground. Zane Dwyer was discreetly pestering him to put the magic stick in his kitbag. But not even a guilty conscience could save Ben when Joel, spotting the ghostly white Gray-Nicolls-shaped patches unveiled by the peeling Puma stickers, stopped Ben’s heart in his mouth.

‘Oi, that’s me fucken Gray-Nic!’

Ben would remember it as something akin to a rear-end crash, the worst moment in his life zooming up behind the best. Zane was trying to bluff Ben’s way out of it, telling Joel he was ‘full of shit, let the kid take the glory, who cares whose bat it is, we won, didn’t we?’

This was only briefly the worst moment in Ben’s life before it became the second-worst. This was a real high-speed pile-up. The worst came next, when, finally back on his feet, looking for his dad, shaking his embarrassed face free of his grandmother’s hugs and his mum’s kisses and his dad’s mates’ hair-ruffling, his eyes travelled over the crowd to the eastern horizon, past the cricket pavilion towards Bluebird Beach, where the perfect blue sky on this most perfect day was smudged by a line that looked like the smear of a filthy finger.

‘Wait, what?’ Ben said, and, because he was the hero of the hour, everybody followed his gaze.

SACRIFICE

Sacrifice

You read it here last. Kelly promised to whack it on his gravestone. ‘Even when you die,’ she’d often rebuked him, ‘you’ll be the last to know.’

While Ben had run towards him across the cricket ground, mute with panic, his cricket bat pointing at the sky to the east, Gordon thought his boy must have had a premonition. Or perhaps he knew something. No, these thoughts came later. At the time, Gordon was drowning beneath one thought:

Lou.

The last to know, and the last to think things through.

Lou.

A blur of action. He was in the back seat of his car and Ben was speeding after Kelly and Norma from the cricket ground to Bluebird Beach. Ron was insisting, even in this altered universe, on giving Ben driving tips, telling him to accelerate into roundabouts. Ben, fresh off this stunning achievement on the cricket field, then accused of stealing the bat with which he achieved that success, was fixed on a pillar of smoke rising from the south headland of Bluebird, a pagan signal that might reconcile his confusing opposites.

Gordon was insentient.