The Rules of Backyard Cricket by Jock Serong

Author:Jock Serong
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2016-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

The tour contract allows me free flights for a member of my immediate family. Due to some anachronism that dates back to the days of bespectacled gents puffing on pipes, Honey didn’t qualify, being a de facto. There was a time when she would’ve come over anyway and that time has passed, and there’s no point blaming the rules. So the only person I can bestow the perk upon is Mum.

We’ve started talking about her condition—we still call it ‘the condition’ because none of us is quite sure what it is—and when I bring up the idea of her coming over Mum swings from thrilled to reluctant and back again as she simultaneously imagines sitting in privileged seats at Edgbaston and getting lost in a London tube crowd. I assure her I can help. Inside, I see it as a kind of therapy.

There are moments when I think I’d be burdened by trailing a little old lady around behind me, but the reality is she’s a middle-aged woman in fine physical health. It’s an easy mistake to make as I listen to her on the phone; her elisions between adamant and addled. Thank you very much dear, she says. I’ll think about it.

Wal and I have both got powers of attorney over Mum. Mine is a concession Wal grudgingly made after realising he was almost never in a position to get things done domestically. The short, terse conversation about that one was resolved in a compromise: I’d have a medical power of attorney provided he kept control of her financials.

Anyway, I get off the phone and make a note to call her GP when the clinic opens (see the little responsibilities I’m starting to wrangle?). Dr Eliza from down the road—Mum’s personal physician for twenty years that I know of—is surprisingly permissive about the whole thing, right down to faxing scripts for various drugs to my hotel so I can replace them in the event that Mum loses hers. She suggests I have someone take her to the airport and collect her from the other end, and a week later I’m standing in arrivals waiting for her to emerge.

That ennui that creeps over regular travellers, you forget it’s there until you see someone for whom flying’s still a source of wonder. Standing in wait, I can’t summon any memory of Mum ever being on a plane, let alone travelling overseas. Tired clumps of passengers wander past, searching the room and finding love, or at least a driver; and then she appears in the doorway, wheeling her luggage and beaming as she scans the crowd. A flight attendant follows closely behind her, as I’d requested. I rush forward to Mum and press her close, squishing her glasses up over one ear and drinking in the smell of her. Even stricken as she is, she somehow makes it all right.

In a cab down to the hotel, she’s craning her neck to take in the Englishness, a quality I’ve long since stopped seeing. Ooh, she marvels.

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