CRICKET

Cricket

What Benjamin Grimes couldn’t tell anyone, more than he couldn’t tell them how often he wanked or who he thought about while he did (seven to eleven times a week, Japan Ned, Tonsure Man, occasionally Dog’s wife Sally, briefly the six-time state champ and back to Japan Ned), was that he still believed he would play cricket for Australia.

The awake part of his brain-life knew this was impossible. At cricket practice, baking in the outfield of Father McInally Oval, fluffing yet another catch, not bowling or batting because he needed to be saved from himself, Ben had enough self-awareness to keep private his conviction that he would one day wear the Baggy Green. But there was a more exciting part of his brain-life that felt like the climax of a movie. Everyone—the school, the beach, the whole country—is standing at the Ocean City Cricket Ground waiting for the next batsman … and down the steps of the historic Members’ Stand strides Benjamin Grimes, number three for Australia. He has seen it and felt it and smelt it and heard it, down to the last detail. He has been there. It just remains for the world to catch up.

‘Grimy, what ya doin, ya spaz?’

Ben returned from playing for Australia to see his teammates glaring at him and Coach Stoyle in teapot stance. Ben ran to where the ball rested in the gutter and hurled it back to the pitch. Or halfway, which was as far as he could get it. Daniel Abottemey, anticipating Ben’s hopelessness, came to fetch the ball before underarming it with a snap of his wrist to Mr Stoyle, who caught it one-handed, as if they needed to put on a demonstration of hand-eye coordination to reassure themselves that they were not Ben Grimes, and furthermore that Ben Grimes was only allowed here because it was school policy to hand every willing cricketer a place in the Firsts, given that there were only twelve cricketers across years nine, ten, eleven and twelve in these benighted days for the gentlemen’s game.

Centre wicket practice continued, far from Ben. Daniel shouted orders to bowlers and batsmen. Mr Stoyle, in his permanent uniform of polo shirt and shorts over absurdly muscular calves that Ben had occasionally imagined wrapped around his neck, murmured tactical intimacies to Daniel. Cricket was a cerebral sport. Even out here in the lowlands of deep fine leg, floating out of position so that you could get some shade from the Father McCarthy eucalyptus grove, you had to use your brain.