The Year My Life Broke
Author: John Marsden
Date: 2013-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Young Adult; Realistic Fiction; Childrens; School; Contemporary
Description: From the mutli-award winning and bestselling author of the Tomorrow series. "Australia's king of young adult fiction" The Australian You move into the most boring street in the most boring town in Australia. Tarrawagga is a hole. Its only ambition is to be a crater, and it has every chance of getting there. The last thing you expect is to have action all around you, dangerous strangers in the backyard and bullets flying past your ears. At your new school, everyone thinks you're the biggest loser in Grade 6. Little do they know. When they realise the truth, teachers and students alike are in fo
Publisher: Macmillan Australia

About The Year My Life Broke

You move into the most boring street in the most boring town in Australia. Tarrawagga is a hole. Its only ambition is to be a crater, and it has every chance of getting there.

The last thing you expect is to have action all around you, dangerous strangers in the backyard, and bullets flying past your ears.

At your new school, everyone thinks you’re the biggest loser in Grade 6. Little do they know. When they realise the truth, teachers and students alike are in for the shock of their lives.

Funny, gripping and full of surprises, The Year My Life Broke could be the most real book you read this year.

Contents

Cover

About The Year My Life Broke

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Acknowledgements

About John Marsden

Also by John Marsden

Copyright page

To Kris, the light of my life.

We drove to Tarrawagga in the second-hand Accord that Dad got at an auction. It wasn’t the same as our groovy black Audi that the receivers had taken. The Accord was crap. The seats had burn marks and the air-con didn’t work. It came with an ashtray chock-a-block with cigarette butts. The way the engine smoked, it could have been hooked on cigarettes. It coughed like it had lung cancer.

So why did we have to shift to Tarrawagga? Ask my parents. It wasn’t my idea, that’s for sure. Our new house was as bad as the Accord. The first time I saw it was the day we moved in. My grandfather had bought the place a few years back to rent to people and now he was renting it to us. I hated it. For one thing, it stank about as bad as the Accord. For another, it wasn’t much bigger than a car. It was about a quarter the size of our old place. But at least I finally got my own bedroom, after eight years sharing with Callan. Smaller house, more bedrooms, who would have thought?

I got first choice of rooms, because I’m the oldest. I picked the one that looks out onto the back garden. One of the best things about that was watching Pippa’s tantrum when I chose it. Mum and Dad think she’s always so perfect that it’s quite satisfying when they see her as she really is. This tantrum was about a record – three days – but it got boring after a while. After about two minutes actually.

The thing is, though, my room had paint peeling off the walls, Callan’s had holes in the ceiling and Pippa’s door stuck so hard I had to open it for her whenever she wanted to go in. The bathroom smelt the worst, really mouldy, and the whole house was grubby.

Mum and Dad said I could paint my bedroom, when they got some money again. I figured that would be when I was about fifty. I hoped we wouldn’t be staying that long.

Our new backyard was big, which was something. The lounge room was small but Dad said he might extend it in a few months. I hoped we wouldn’t even be staying that long. The walls of the kitchen were greasy, but at least we got a new microwave, ’cos the removalists dropped the old one. One of them tried to carry it under his arm, with about six other things, but he fell off the back of the truck. So, bit of a bonus there. If I’d known you could score new stuff that easily, I would have tripped them up while they were carrying the TV.

After a couple of days I started to take some notice of the houses around us. They weren’t much better than ours. The one across the road was the worst – they had two ginormous dogs, the size of horses. Great Danes, they were called, and they spent all day prowling up and down the fence barking at people. I crossed the street whenever I got near them.

Just about every time I looked at the place next door, the police were there. That worried me a lot. Were our neighbours big-time crims? What were they doing? Growing drugs? Was it the local Mafia headquarters? How many bodies were buried in their backyard? It made me nervous.

You couldn’t see over the fence very easily, because of all the bushes and trees and stuff on our side, so I couldn’t see what they were up to. I heard a girl’s voice a few times, and she sounded about my age, but I figured if her parents were crims, she wouldn’t be easy to get to know.

On the other side was a house that seemed empty, but I couldn’t be sure about that, because of the high fence between them and us. There were two front windows, one on each side of the door, but the blinds were always down, so it looked like a face with closed eyes.

Going to school on the bus I’d try to work out why a house would sit empty like that. Was it for sale? Nuh, no big sign saying get in quick – opportunity only knocks once, like the house opposite the school. Was it someone’s holiday house? Excuse me while I laugh like a cracked kookaburra. You wouldn’t go to Tarrawagga for a holiday. The biggest attraction in Tarrawagga was a park down the end of our street, about half the size of a basketball court, with two swings, a climbing frame and a slide that dumped you in a sandpit decorated with dog crap.

Was the house deserted, abandoned? Well, maybe, except it was well looked after. Someone must have mown the lawn every couple of weeks, I guess while I was at school, ’cos I never saw it happening. But their lawn looked better than ours, and the garden was always weeded and stuff.

Once in a while I felt like there were people in that house. I don’t know, I just felt like there was activity there, life. I’d think I heard voices. But I never saw anybody.

When we moved to Tarrawagga I’d hoped we’d be in a street with lots of kids, kids my age who I could play with. Struck out there but. You could stand on the footpath and look to the right and on a good day you’d see an old white-haired Vietnamese man walking at a metre a minute on his way to the shops, and if you looked to the left you’d see this blonde-headed lady with three kids all under the age of one and a half, crying and screaming and whingeing. And sometimes the kids were crying and screaming and whingeing too.

Going past you, about ten times a day, was a huge lady who seemed a bit NQR and who drove around on a ride-on mower. From the first time she saw us she always wanted to talk to me and my brother and sister but she cackled more than she talked, so we didn’t have a lot to say to each other. One time she ran out of petrol just along from our place and my dad drove her to the servo to get fuel. He said he had to make her stub out her cigarette when he put the fuel in her tank, because she kept leaning over to watch while he was pouring it.

Secretly I would have liked a go on her ride-on, do a bit of Formula One up and down our street, but I didn’t think that was going to happen, and I wasn’t going to ask the lady for any favours.

Our house was bad enough, but I could have put up with it. For me the real problem was Tarrawagga. You know they call some towns real holes? Well, Tarrawagga was the hole that the other holes fell into. It was the kind of town that gave holes a bad name. It was 40 k’s from the city . . . 40 k’s and forty years. If you’ve ever had a piece of chewy in your mouth for a week and a half, you’ve got the taste of Tarrawagga. The streets all had the look of roads that had nowhere to go. They just ran along in straight lines until they lost interest. There were the messy old streets, like ours, and they were bad enough, but a couple of blocks away were the new ones, and they were like daytime TV. Houses built by robots, robots on Ritalin. Some were dark red brick and some were medium red brick and the rest were light red brick, except for a few weird, wacky, way-out ones that had cream bricks. Boy, some people live dangerously.

Each house had a double garage at the front and, believe me, the garage doors were the most interesting part. Some had signs stuck in the front lawns saying things like mayfair home decoration or allen’s auto-electrical, and that was the only thing that made one house different from the next one.

Riding past these places on my bike was like riding an exercise bike at a gym: nothing to look at, nothing to smell, nothing that came running out at you, barking and bouncing and wagging its tail. If they had dogs they’d been put under the Stupefy spell. These people wouldn’t have had goldfish, because goldfish are too hard to control. Even the snails had fled, long ago. The only things that moved were the lawnmowers. Half the lawns were artificial, but the only way you could tell the artificial lawns from the real ones was by the lawnmowers.

I was trying my best to be positive, but I did say to Mum one day, ‘This place is as boring as baked beans.’ She just gave me a look and said: ‘It’s always about people, Josh. Get to know some people, then it won’t be so bad.’

I just wanted to be back in Abernathy, and I hated that we’d lost our money. I didn’t like being poor.

Get to know some people, yeah, sure! That wasn’t easy. The kids at school were all in their groups by the time we arrived, ten days into first term, so they didn’t want to know me. My first day I sat next to a kid called Nirvana. Weird name, but he seemed OK, even if he only spoke three words to me all morning. ‘Yeah’, ‘no’, ‘dunno’, that was it. At recess he nicked off to play cricket. I wanted to follow him but I also didn’t want to look desperate, so I ended up going in a different direction. My teacher’s name was Mr Barnes and he was on playground duty. All he said to me was, ‘We have quite a high turnover here, Josh, so the kids aren’t always that friendly at first, because they don’t necessarily expect you to stay long.’

Friendly! These kids were about as friendly as European wasps. I wandered around trying to look like I was totally cool being on my own. The same thing happened at lunchtime. At my last school, Abernathy, I’d been kind of a leader, I guess, so it felt funny to have no-one wanting to play with me. Eventually I did drift over to the cricket, and stood watching. I can’t help myself, I love sport so much that I can’t keep away. Especially cricket. And suddenly a kid called Marty, who I think was in one of the other Grade 6 classes, hit a classic on-drive straight towards me. Came like a rocket. All of these kids yelled at me to stop it. But I was too angry about being at Tarrawagga, and too angry at the way they’d been treating me. I just stood and watched the ball go past.

And it was weird, I became invisible. A moment ago they’d been shouting at me and I’d been the centre of attention. Then their faces went blank and they turned away and waited for another kid to get the ball. He came running past me like I didn’t exist. I’d been half expecting that they would yell stuff like, ‘Loser!’, ‘Why didn’t you stop it?’, ‘Pathetic!’ But there was nothing like that. These were the kids who were serious about sport. You could tell they wanted to be good, same as I did. When I ignored the ball they lost all interest in me. I was immediately put in the basket of ‘not interested in sport, not interesting to us’.

I watched the game go on, wondering what I’d done. Like, I’d just expelled myself from the group I’d most want to hang out with. I knew one of the main reasons I’d been popular at Abernathy was that I was good at sport. I stood there wondering what people would think of me if I was a sporting loser. It wasn’t too late but. I could still get in with the group. If I hung around the game for long enough, another ball would come my way. A spectacular stop, a one-handed catch, a sharp run-out, and they’d take some notice of me. But I didn’t do it. In a way it was like I’d suddenly started an experiment. Without planning it, I was testing to see what would happen if I didn’t rely on my usual way of making friends. What if I was one of the losers of the playground, one of the outsiders? What if I had to rely on, I don’t know, just my personality and stuff?

A second ball fired past me, this time hit by a kid called Rolf. Again I watched it go, and watched a kid chase it down. As he came back he muttered, ‘Thanks for stopping it.’

‘It was going too fast,’ I said, hardly able to believe that these words were coming out of my mouth. He must have thought it was too pathetic to be worth a reply, because he didn’t say anything.

They had some pretty good players. Rolf was a classy batsman, especially to anything wide of the off stump. He wasn’t too good against short balls though. Marty was a hard-hitter. Nirvana was pretty good on the off and hopeless on the leg. A boy named Michael bowled really fast and a girl named Shelley bowled fast off-spin and was accurate. Most of the kids playing were boys, but there were three or four girls.

Back at Abernathy they would have started training for the interschool games by now. They’d be missing me. I would have been captain if I’d stayed there. For three years I’d been captain of the Abernathy Tigers, who played on Friday afternoons – U10s, U11s and U12s. I’d been picked for the rep teams as soon as I was eligible – for two years now, and I’d been vice-captain of Southern Districts Under 12s last year.

The bell rang for afternoon school. I walked away from the cricket, kicking at the dirt. What had I done? What did I care anyway? I’d never wanted to come to this stupid school, never wanted to move to Tarrawagga, never wanted to leave Abernathy. I didn’t care if I never made any friends. It didn’t matter how many people I got to know in this dump: Tarrawagga was a hole. Its only ambition was to become a crater, and it had every chance of getting there.

The Mafia kid from next door, the girl I’d heard a few times, dropped in a couple of weeks after we’d unpacked. When I say ‘dropped in’, I mean she dropped in. I was in my room, on my bed reading, because I’d been kicked off the computer after Callan made up some bogus story about needing to do research for a school project. Callan doing homework? Couldn’t my parents see through that? Callan doing homework was about as likely as a dog having kittens.

Anyway, I was on my bed reading and I don’t know why but I looked up and through the window I saw a little streak of movement in the backyard. ‘Cat?’ I thought, but then I got another view and realised ‘Kid.’ It wasn’t Callan because I’d just seen him on the computer, and it would have taken a four-wheel-drive and a winch to get him off that.

So I headed out the door, pretty fast, to see what was going on. Sure enough, there was a girl about my age down the end of the yard. I realised that the first movement I’d seen was her dropping off the top of the fence. She just stood there looking at me, like she owned the place.

‘What are you doing?’ I said, suspicious, but not too aggressive. I didn’t want her to send her Godfather and cousins and uncles after me but on the other hand I didn’t want her thinking she could just trampoline over our fence any time she got bored digging graves in her own backyard.

‘Nothing very interesting,’ she said. She didn’t look too bothered but she didn’t sound too tough either. ‘Just getting my ball. Sorry.’ She laughed, so I don’t think her apology was too sincere.

‘Oh well,’ I said, not sure that I could do much with this. ‘If it’s just your ball . . .’

But I had to be sure, in case she was planting drugs or burying bodies in our garden. ‘Where is it?’ I asked, looking around.

‘Stuffed if I know,’ she said. ‘It went a fair way I think.’

She looked to her left and I looked there too and before I knew it we were both searching through the forget-me-nots. We found the ball pretty soon. It was one of those hairy red ones that are like a cross between a cricket ball and a tennis ball.

‘Are you playing cricket?’ I asked as she headed back towards the fence. That didn’t seem like a very Mafia or drug-boss thing to do.

‘Yeah, just with my dad.’ She got up to the top of the fence in one quick jump, like she’d done it plenty of times before. As she straddled the top she asked me: ‘Do you want to play? You can if you want.’

‘Nah, it’s fine, thanks anyway.’

‘Whatever.’ She shrugged and dropped down the other side, out of sight. Already I was wishing I’d said yes, but I was still worried about the cop cars parked outside their house, and I didn’t want to get involved. I went inside, back to my book. But at dinnertime I asked my parents, ‘What is it with the people next door?’

‘What do you mean?’ my father asked. I was a bit surprised, because he said it aggressively.

‘Well, how come the cops are there all the time?’

To my surprise he jumped up. ‘What do you mean?’ he said again. He looked really fired up. ‘Are they there now?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, worried and puzzled at the same time. How come he hadn’t noticed the police cars there? And was it such a big deal? I’d been kind of kidding myself about the drug bosses and Godfathers, because I didn’t imagine people like that hung out in Tarrawagga, but maybe it was true.

‘How often have you seen them?’ he asked. ‘When was the last time?’

‘I don’t know. Um, I saw them yesterday. They’re there all the time.’

He marched off to have a look and I followed while everyone else sat at the table staring at us like we’d cracked. Only trouble was, when my father got to the back room he turned right instead of left. He headed for the window, but I said, ‘Not that way. Not that side. The other house.’

He looked at me like he agreed with the other three about my sanity. ‘What are you talking about?’ he said.

I pointed back over my shoulder. ‘The house on that side. There’s cops checking them out every other day.’

His shoulders sagged, and he walked back past me, laughing, relaxed. ‘You turkey. They live there.’

I followed him back to the table. ‘Who do?’

‘Two police officers. They’re brothers. One’s a sergeant and the other’s a senior constable. They share the house.’

‘Oh.’ I did feel like a turkey. ‘What about the girl?’

‘Harriet? Have you met her? She goes to your school and I think she’s in Grade 6. She’s Lenny’s daughter, she lives there too, most of the time, when she’s not with her mother. Lenny’s the younger brother, the senior constable. He and his wife are divorced.’

‘Oh.’

He seemed to know a lot about them. I hoed into my lasagne. I needed to readjust my thinking. And I did as good a job on that as I could, but a long time after I’d finished I still had a question. How come my dad reacted that way when he thought I meant the other place? It was like I’d been suspecting the wrong house. Maybe there was something dodgy about the other one instead? The way my dad headed for the window, it was like he wouldn’t have been surprised to find that empty-looking house swarming with the Drug Squad, the Homicide Squad, the CSI guys and a couple of SWAT teams. Maybe my dad was a cop keeping an eye on the place? Maybe my mum was? Their real jobs used to be financial adviser and property broker, both working for Antelope Investments. And look where that had got us. Into a scummy house in scummy Tarrawagga. Any job would have to be better than those. I would have settled for at least one parent as an undercover agent.

We had PE at school once a week, with a teacher called Mr Surrey, and right from the start I didn’t like him. The first five minutes of the very first class was a disaster. We started by playing dodgeball and I was one of the people he put on the outside, to be a thrower. I threw all right, hard and fast, right into Mr Surrey’s face. It wasn’t my fault! He was bending over picking up a ball and never saw it coming. It would have hurt though. He jumped up holding his face, then yelled, ‘Who did that?!’

Considering everyone was staring at me in horror it was pretty obvious. I put up my hand, he bawled me out, then sat me on the bench for the whole lesson while he walked around holding an icepack to his face and glaring at me.

Second PE lesson: I had a sprained ankle from jumping out of the biggest tree in our backyard at home. But when I told him that I couldn’t run or do exercises he bawled me out again. ‘I saw you walking into school this morning,’ he said. ‘You weren’t limping then.’

Well, maybe he’d been looking at the wrong person, because I’d been limping all morning like an amputee, and PE’s the last subject I’d be trying to skip. Anyway, he made me do all these runs, even though my ankle hurt like crazy, and he kept yelling at me to go faster.

The third lesson, he put me with a girl called Amanda, and we had to take it in turns to skip. While we were waiting for Mr Surrey to blow his whistle I held the rope by one end and started whizzing it around, getting faster and faster. Unfortunately, just as it reached terminal velocity I lost my grip and it flew out of my hand and hit Amanda. ‘Oh BEEP,’ I yelled. I’d better not say what the word was but it started with S and ended with T and it wasn’t shoot. Or shut or sheet, although it was pretty close to both of those. Mr Surrey went off for the third week in a row. He put me on the bench again, then at the end of the lesson called me over for a talk. Personally I’d rather be yelled at. ‘You are a disruptive influence,’ he told me, while I stood there with my head down, trying to look ashamed. ‘You’ve been nothing but trouble since you came here. I expect everyone to follow the rules, blah blah look at me when I talk to you blah blah blah don’t like your attitude blah blah blah get out of my sight.’

Now I have lots of faults, I’m sure; well OK, not that many, but I must admit if I do have one it would be that I’m stubborn and I’ve got a bit of a temper. After three lessons Mr Surrey-style I decided I wasn’t going to make any effort in PE at Tarrawagga. He hadn’t seen me in action during any of those classes and it was obvious that he thought I was a PE loser. OK then, I’d be a PE loser. It fitted with the way I’d been acting at recess and lunchtimes, not joining in any sports. So from then on, when we had cricket in PE I held the bat like it was a tennis racquet and popped up catches that a Grade 1 kid could take with his eyes shut. In basketball, every pass I made got intercepted, mainly because I signalled them ten seconds before I threw them. When we had softball I missed the ball by a metre and went out for three strikes every time. It didn’t take long for other kids to start moving away from me on the bench. Mr Surrey looked my way less and less often and before long I was spending fifty minutes out of every fifty-five-minute lesson doing nothing.

I gradually became a bit of a smart alec, like, making sarcastic comments when Mr Surrey made a mistake, which was often. This helped him love me heaps. One day he started the lesson by saying, ‘Some of you need to have more self-confidence in your team mates,’ and I said, ‘What about self-confidence in ourselves – should we have that too?’ and he went red in the face and glared at me and told me to run four laps, which I thought was a bit of an overreaction. So when I got back from my four laps and he told me to fetch the bats I ignored the fact that he’d set the oval up for softball and came back with a bag of cricket bats.

Just stuff like that.

In a way I didn’t mind that I wasn’t getting anything from PE, even though it used to be my favourite subject. But the truth was, I hated that school more every day. I missed Abernathy so bad it hurt in my heart. I missed Joey who was so funny you couldn’t eat lunch while he was talking in case you choked on your cheese sandwich. I missed Pho, who gave us boys advice about how to chat up girls and how to ask them to go with you . . . and how to drop them when things didn’t work out. I missed Muzza, who could play every sport like a star and loved it as much as I did. Between us we’d taken Abernathy to the top, for both cricket and footy, which may sound like bragging but it’s true.

Tarrawagga was so scummy and boring. The most exciting lesson of the week was doing a worksheet on commas and full stops. Maths was like, page 37, questions 1, 2 and 3. Homework: questions 4 and 5. Next day, page 38, questions 1, 2, 3 and 4. Homework: questions 5 and 6. Next day . . .

We had assembly once a week, in a big hall, and it was usually just teachers making announcements about lost property and behaviour at the bus stops and how there was too much rubbish around the school. But then one day this kid called Red O’Hearn got up and went out the front. People paid more attention straight away, because it wasn’t often that kids spoke at assembly, but also because he was a good guy and everyone liked him. I actually didn’t get why he wasn’t school captain, but apparently he got in too much trouble with teachers.

Red was another of the kids who played sport regularly and I wouldn’t say he was a natural but he gave everything about 146 per cent. Didn’t matter what the sport was, he went for it. Mr Surrey loved him. Anyway, he made a pretty radical speech. It went something like this: ‘Listen, I know this school doesn’t exactly have the greatest rep around the district . . .’

Right away Ms Krishnananthan, the principal, looked like she was going to jump up and cut him off, but she couldn’t really do that, so she made a face like someone who’s swallowed a cockroach. A live one. But Red was facing us, with his back to her, so he couldn’t see that. He just kept on going.

‘Not many of us have been here all the way through, for seven years, but I have, and so has Nirvana, and so have Amanda and Shelley and Rolf. And you know what? Every year we’ve been beaten by every other school at everything. And I’m sick of it. So we want to change that. We’ve got these big cricket and netball games coming up soon, and we want to piss on the . . . sorry, sorry, I mean . . .’

Too late. Ms Krishnananthan was on her feet and most of the teachers looked like they’d all suddenly swallowed cockroaches. On the other hand the kids were pissing themselves . . . sorry, I mean, laughing a lot, especially some of the little ones, who were probably having real bladder control problems they were so hysterical. It took at least a full minute to calm everyone down and the whole of that time Red was talking to Ms Krishnananthan, except she was doing the talking. He just stood there, and his face matched his name. Now I knew why he hadn’t been chosen for school captain.

At last Ms Krishnananthan came to the microphone. ‘That was a most unfortunate moment,’ she said. ‘I don’t find it at all amusing that one of our students would use such language, especially in front of the younger children. And I’m sorry that some of you apparently thought it was funny. However, Redmond has apologised profusely and I am going to allow him to finish his remarks, on the condition that he chooses his words with much more discretion.’

She gave Red the microphone. It took him a while to find his rhythm again but he eventually got back on track. ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry about that, I’m really sorry, Ms Krishnananthan, and teachers, I’m just not used to this talking in front of everyone and I’m not too good at it. Anyway, the thing is, what I wanted to say, I’m proud of this school, I reckon it’s all right, we’ve built it up from just a couple of demountables and look at it now, we’ve got the new oval opening in a few weeks and it’s a beauty, and we’re gunna play the kids from Maxwell on it, in front of pretty much everyone from the district, the mayor and the members of parliament, and you know what’s gunna happen, we’re gunna get thrashed like we always do, and so what I reckon is we should get off our bums, sorry, our behinds, and work our butts off and make sure we don’t get thrashed. So we’re gunna have training every day, before school and at lunchtime, and even after school if we can do it, and I’m gunna take the cricket team with Mr Surrey, and Amanda’s gunna take the netball team with Ms Robbins, and between us we’re gunna see if we can make the kids from Maxwell go home with their tails between their legs, so that’s all I’ve gotta say except everyone should have a go, because a team’s only as good as its weakest player, so we need to make our weakest players as good as we can get ’em.’

Then he sat down, as everyone clapped and clapped. It was a good speech and I sat there feeling a bit ashamed of the way I’d pretended to be so hopeless at sport. Coming from Abernathy I couldn’t see Tarrawagga the way Red saw it, but I could imagine how he’d feel, watching it grow, even if in my opinion it had just grown from a little hole to a big one.

I thought, ‘Stuff it, maybe I should give up being stupid about sport. Maybe I should have a go.’

At lunchtime they were sorting out all the kids who volunteered for the cricket and netball teams. Quite a few turned up, inspired by Red’s speech. I saw the girl who lived next door to us, the cop’s daughter, Harriet. She was in Grade 6, same as me, but the other class.

Red and Rolf and Mr Surrey were organising the cricketers and I walked up to them, feeling pretty nervous to tell the truth, because it wasn’t going to be easy to explain how I’d turned from hopeless to pretty handy in one morning. I had the feeling that Mr Surrey, for one, wasn’t going to be impressed. But I needn’t have worried. He took one look at me and said, ‘Thanks for coming, Josh, but we’re not that desperate.’

Red shot me a look like even he thought that was harsh, but he wasn’t going to stick up for me to Mr Surrey. Who would? Why should anyone bother? I just walked straight away, but then Mr Surrey called my name again and I stopped and turned around to see what he wanted. Maybe he realised he’d gone too far and wanted to apologise. Instead he said, ‘We might want someone to go around in a chicken suit selling raffle tickets, Josh. I’ll let you know.’

A couple of kids laughed and I turned around and kept walking. I knew my face was burning. I’d scored four centuries for Abernathy last season, and one for Southern Districts, and I’d taken 5 for 11 against Northern Suburbs in a rep game. Now the best offer I could get was to wear a chicken costume. Even if it was my own stupid fault, it still hurt.

Red came looking for me when I was at the bus stop after school. We only had about sixty seconds before the buses left, and he wasn’t on my bus, so it had to be a quick conversation. He said, ‘Hey, thanks for turning up at lunchtime, Josh, but I guess we’ve got enough people.’

‘No problem,’ I said.

‘Sorry about what Surrey said. He can be a real bastard if you get on his bad side.’

‘Doesn’t matter. I muck around a lot in PE so I guess I deserved it.’

‘Hey, you know, I was thinking, I play for a club, South Tarrawagga, and on Wednesdays we have a coaching clinic for, like, new players, you know, beginners and all that. You want to come? I help out most weeks. Kids improve quite a lot – you can see them getting better . . .’

Final calls were being made for the buses and we were both getting personal invitations from teachers to climb aboard. I felt awful for having deceived Red about my cricket. He was a nice kid.

‘Oh look, thanks, I gotta go, I’m not that bad really, but thanks, um, I’ll let you know . . .’ And I ran for my bus.

We were watching a 20/20 match on TV that night when I started whingeing about PE. Pippa was standing in the doorway. She’d just been whingeing too, about the fact that we were watching cricket. I didn’t think she was listening while I was complaining about Mr Surrey to Mum and Dad, but suddenly she looked at me and said, ‘All my friends at Abernathy called you the Meathead.’

‘Pippa!’ Mum said. ‘That’s not very nice. Apologise to Josh.’

‘What do you mean they called me the Meathead?’ I asked. I was pretty angry.

She shrugged. ‘I’m just telling you, that’s what they called you.’

‘But what did they mean by it?’ Dad asked.

Pippa shrugged again. ‘They meant he was just a meathead. All he does is play sport, talk sport, eat, breathe and live sport. He’s never interested in anything else.’

‘That’s not true,’ Mum said, but kind of automatically. I wasn’t sure if she believed it.

I knew it was stupid to let anything Pippa said upset me. Mum and Dad were always telling me to ignore her. That wasn’t easy though. When it came to upsetting people, she was a professional. When it came to upsetting people, she was the Princess of Painful. But I’d never heard of kids at Abernathy calling me the Meathead, and it did get to me. Cricket, sport – they weren’t the only things in my life. I liked reading and I’d read the whole Harry Potter series twice. I liked drawing and painting in art and I especially liked ceramics when we’d done it last year for a week with a visiting potter at Abernathy Primary. I was mad on Lego and I’d built a whole fleet of battleships and destroyers and stuff.

But yeah, cricket was the thing I was into most. Since when had that been a crime? I knew I was fairly good at it and I dreamed of playing for Australia one day. So did a million other kids, of course, but I was dead serious about my cricket, and until everything went wrong and we had to move to Tarrawagga I’d trained four afternoons a week and played two games every weekend.

Pippa went off to her bedroom again – she spent a lot of time in there these days; she’d kept to herself much more since we’d had the big financial wipe-out. After she’d gone, Dad said quietly, ‘Don’t worry about what Pippa says, Josh, she’s hurting quite a bit still, and she wants to share the pain around.’

Mum just looked at him, then said to me, ‘My friends and I used to be called the Cube by the other girls when I was at school.’

‘The Cube?’

‘You know what a cube is . . . a whole lot of squares stuck together.’

It took me a minute to get it, then I laughed.

My parents were decent people. I knew the truth about what happened when Antelope crashed. I knew my parents had the choice of grabbing every dollar they could get, and running for it, like Mr Martini and Mr Wilkins. Instead, they’d put all their money into it to try to prop it up. Despite what people yelled at us and said about us online, I knew my Mum and Dad had done the right thing. I was proud of them for that. They lost most of their friends, who didn’t understand what had happened – and didn’t even try to understand – and we ended up poor, but I didn’t care.

One friend who still kept in touch though was Mark Watley, my coach from Southern Districts. Mark had played twelve games for Tasmania before he snapped his Achilles. He was good. And funnily enough the very next day after Pippa told me about the Meathead thing, cricket came back into my life. When Dad got home from work he told me how he’d run into Mark. ‘He asked where you were playing,’ Dad said, ‘and when I said “nowhere” he was a bit shattered. They’re picking the rep teams soon. Seems like you’re in the North Central zone now. Mark’s got a mate, though, who coaches an Under 14s team for Cypress. He says you should sign up for them. You’d get good coaching and he feels you should be playing Under 14s.’

‘Cypress? What’s Cypress?’

‘It’s a club not far from here. About eight k’s. They play Saturday mornings. Mum or I could get you there, no worries.’

‘Under 14s? They’d be a lot bigger than me.’

‘Mark thinks it would be good for you. You’d get more competition. He’s given me the coach’s number. I’ll ring him after dinner if you want.’

I did want. Meathead or Vegehead, I was hungry for cricket. I needed to get out there and play decently again, instead of all the mucking around I’d been doing at school. I wanted it so badly I would have walked to Cypress every Saturday for a game. I would have walked backwards.

‘OK, I guess. I don’t mind.’

I heard Dad’s conversation with the coach. His name was Wally. It seemed like Mark Watley had already rung him, because Wally was keen to have me. Training was on Fridays and games were like Mark had said, on Saturdays. My dad told him I’d be there Friday. I felt great when I heard that. I scoffed dinner in about six mouthfuls then asked for more. ‘Gee, Josh,’ Mum said. ‘What’s got into you? You’ve hardly eaten a thing the last few months.’

It was true, my appetite seemed to have gone away. I didn’t know whether it was Tarrawagga or the school or both. Maybe it was Antelope. My tummy was filled with sadness since everything had gone wrong, and there hadn’t been much room for food.

Just four days later I was at my first training session for the Cypress Under 14s. I had played a few Under 14s games before, when Abernathy Tigers were short of players. And when I saw the Cypress kids, they didn’t seem so big. Maybe I was catching up height-wise. Anyway, I didn’t feel I was playing with giants any more.

We started in the nets and after a while Wally chucked me a ball and told me to bowl. The batsman was a big fat kid with long hair that he had to keep brushing out of his eyes. But he knew what he was doing and, geez, when he hit a ball it stayed hit.

It felt so good to have a cricket ball in my hands again. My first delivery had six months of frustration and hunger in it. It wasn’t that short but it just about took the big kid’s head off. ‘Holy crap,’ he said. The second one took his middle stump out and sent it spinning backwards. He got a thick outside edge on the third one and in my imagination it flew into the safe hands of someone who would have been at first slip.

He hit the fourth one so hard it just about took my head off. ‘Holy crap,’ I said, and he laughed. I had to run about fifty metres to get it back.

I got my revenge a bit later when I got him again, bowled, with a yorker. Then it was my turn to bat and that was harder. I was pretty rusty and two of the bowlers were genuinely fast. I reckon I faced three overs before I got one perfectly in the middle and felt that sweet sensation of bat and ball clicking together, and saw the ball race away into the distance.

Wally put me straight into the team, because they were missing three kids for the game the next day. So I fronted up in the morning, with my whites white and my pads cleaned and my bat sanded and oiled. I’d found a few hairline fractures in the splice of the bat, but Dad and I coated them with superglue, so it looked like I’d get at least one more season out of it. That was lucky; we couldn’t afford a new one.

We were playing a team called Pipertown, and we won the toss and batted. I went in when we were 5 down for 46, and I had big plans to knock up a fast hundred and save the day for Cypress. Unfortunately I got out third delivery I faced. The ball moved a little and my feet didn’t move at all. It was a really clumsy bit of batting. As I left the crease to begin the long walk back, a Pipertown player at square leg said to me, ‘Go back to kindergarten, kid.’

I reached the line of deckchairs under the trees, feeling embarrassed and angry. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Wally said. ‘It’s a while since you’ve played, so Mark told me. It’ll come back to you.’

We got out for 88. When their innings started I waited till the boy who’d made the kindergarten joke came in to bat, then asked our captain, a kid named Jonah, if I could bowl.

At the start of the next over Jonah threw me the ball. The kid from Pipertown had just hit three fours in a row. I marked out my run-up, gave the umpire my hat and came in with a burning feeling in my heart. It was just like in the nets the day before. The ball reared up like a cobra, only this time the boy tried to hook it. He got a top edge and the ball lollipopped high into the air. It seemed to take a minute and a half to reach the height of its long climb, then it descended slowly into the safe hands of our wickie. Pipertown were 3 for 70.

I got another wicket in my third over but at stumps they were 5 for 116. These matches went for two days, so they’d finish their innings the next weekend. I went home in my best mood since we moved to Tarrawagga. Getting a duck didn’t matter so much; at least I was playing cricket again. I was even nice to Callan and Pippa. We played in the backyard and when they batted I gave Callan two chances and Pippa three before they had to go out.

When I batted I smashed a ball from Callan a bit too hard, and it went flying next door, into the cops’ place. Six and out. Now the situation from a few weeks back was reversed. I was the one who had to get over the fence. I could have gone to their front door and knocked but after Harriet had hopped over our fence I figured I had the same rights. I just hoped they wouldn’t shoot me.

Their backyard was much better for cricket than ours because it was mostly bare grass. Ours had too many plants and flowers. All that stuff got in the way. I could see the ball straight off, right against their chook shed. Pretty good shot, if I say so myself, even though it had got me out. I headed for it, trying not to look too guilty. But the situation from our place continued to reverse itself, ’cos through their back door came Harriet. She must have seen the ball come over; in fact she got to it before I did and picked it up and chucked it to me.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Is your name Harriet?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Mine’s Josh.’

‘Yeah, I figured that.’

I thought I might as well keep reversing things so I asked, ‘You wanna play cricket with us?’

‘Yeah, OK.’

She went to the back door, opened it and yelled into the house, ‘I’m going next door to play cricket.’

Someone yelled back and then a cop came out. He was just wearing a police shirt and trousers but he still looked like a cop. ‘G’day,’ he said to me.

‘G’day.’

‘You from next door?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You must be Cameron’s son.’

‘Yeah, I’m the oldest. I’m Josh.’

‘G’day, Josh.’ We shook hands. He was the first policeman I’d ever talked to. He seemed all right. He turned to Harriet. ‘Be back by six o’clock, OK?’

‘OK.’

Harriet and I got over the fence while Lenny watched. I felt a bit self-conscious, like we were doing something illegal. That’s the effect cops have on you I guess. But Harriet seemed good. Turned out she was an OK bowler. But she wouldn’t bat. ‘I get minus scores when I bat,’ she said. ‘And I hate it. I hate everything I’m not good at.’

She got me out with a faster ball when I tried to hit her into the middle of next week. Callan stumped me. ‘You should be in the school team,’ I told her.

‘I might get in,’ she said. ‘Surrey said I’m close. How come you’re not in?’

I was gobsmacked. Somehow I’d forgotten that I might have blown my cover by playing backyard cricket. Luckily Callan was too far away to hear. ‘Not good enough,’ I muttered.

She gave me a look, like, ‘What kind of idiot do you think I am?’ I guess policemen’s kids are pretty hard to fool. I went red. I didn’t know what to say. We were sitting on the swing seat guzzling water.

‘Oh well,’ I said. ‘I don’t really try all that hard at school. Especially PE.’

‘Why not?’

‘I dunno, just started off bad with Surrey, so I couldn’t be bothered trying . . . Plus, I don’t know, I wanted to see what would happen if I . . . if I . . .’

‘If you what?’

And suddenly it all came out. Stuff I sort of didn’t even realise about myself. A flash went off in my brain, like someone had taken a photo of what was in there and the photo was getting printed through my mouth. Slightly weird really.

‘It’s just . . . sport. That’s all anyone knows about me. They think I’m a sport meathead. It’s like I’m this prize horse or something. You know how some people are with their cars, they polish them up and take them to shows, I’ve got this uncle, Uncle Will, he’s got a ute, an FPV F6, a Falcon, same as the highway cops use, anyway he takes it to ute musters and wins all these awards and people stand around saying how great the ute is but you know what? Uncle Will never uses the car for anything ordinary, he just keeps it for the musters. And that’s like people are with me and sport. They look at me when I’m playing cricket and tell me I’m great or whatever but I don’t know what would happen if I wasn’t out there performing. Who would I be then? Would people like me? Would I have friends? Well, so far, the way things are going at Tarrawagga, I’d say they’d treat me like a total reject.’

I said the last part with a bit of feeling, as I was pretty worked up by all the lousy stuff that had been happening, but then as I sat there and Harriet just looked at me I added, ‘I really do like sport, you know, I actually love it, but sometimes I wonder if that’s all I am, a sports machine.’

‘Yeah, maybe it’s like being a policeman’s daughter, you know, the other kids treat me like I’m a bit weird. Especially if their dad or their mum’s been in trouble. I never know whether kids just look at me and see “cop’s daughter” or what. I’m always careful who I hang out with, who I play with and what I say. Got burnt a few times in Prep.’ She laughed.

‘Your dad let you come over here though, no fuss.’

‘Yeah, but that’s because of the security check on your mum and dad.’

It took me a moment to register what she’d said, then I got the full impact. ‘The WHAT?’ I stood up. ‘They did a police check on us?’

She went a bit red. ‘I don’t think I was supposed to say that. See what I mean? Any time you open your mouth you can step on a mine and blow your leg off.’

‘What do you mean, they did a police check on us? Who did? Your dad? Your uncle? The CIA?’

‘There was a reason.’

‘What reason?’

She looked me straight in the eye.

‘I can’t tell you that.’ She glanced towards the fence. ‘I think I better go now. It must be nearly six o’clock.’

As she headed for the fence I called out, ‘Hey, no telling anyone I can play cricket, OK?’

She called back over her shoulder, ‘Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me.’

‘Really?’ I wanted to say. I could only hope she’d keep my secret better than she’d kept the one about the police check.

I went back inside and lay on my bed, thinking about the security check. I knew what it would be though. There was only one possibility. That bloody Antelope. It had wrecked our lives. For the millionth time I wished my parents never had anything to do with it. Now it seemed like the cops were watching us, and this girl already knew my life story.

Of course Antelope hadn’t just wrecked our lives: it had messed up a few thousand other people’s as well.

We got the last four Pipertown wickets for 50 – they had one player away, but so did we. I bowled a few overs without getting a wicket, but I did take a catch at mid-off. So, they led by 74, which meant the game would be a draw unless they knocked us over quickly for the outright. And we started real well. A run-out off the first ball. Cypress had some good players but the openers weren’t crash hot and their running was terrible. Sometimes they looked like they were playing ‘What’s the Time, Mr Wolf?’

It didn’t improve much from there and I went in at 6 for 54, about the same as the week before, except that Wally had dropped me in the order after my spectacular duck. This time I was determined to concentrate on every ball. I remembered how Don Bradman had batted: ‘Never hit the ball in the air.’ That eliminated the chance of getting caught and getting caught is the way most batsmen get out.

So I just defended and defended and defended, getting my right elbow high in the air and playing the old forward defensive for ball after ball. I got sledged a fair bit by the Pipertown kids but at least the one who’d made the smart comment from square leg last week didn’t have so much to say. Then I nearly got trapped LBW. I played outside the line of a ball from a girl who bowled medium pace but this time got more swing than I expected. I thought I’d managed to just graze it with the bat but you couldn’t have expected the umpire to hear that, or notice any deflection. I stood there staring at him in that hypnotised way that I know never looks good but it’s hard not to do it. Seemed like about three minutes before he shook his head and said, ‘Just a fraction high, I reckon.’

I was glad they didn’t have DRS. But it made me realise that I couldn’t keep blocking till stumps. The bowlers were too good and the cordon of fielders was getting closer. I had to play a bigger range of shots. And the very next ball was too tempting to ignore: nicely pitched up, just outside off stump, exactly where I like them. I did a bit of a shuffle, unlike in the first innings where I hadn’t moved my feet at all, and suddenly the close-in fielders were ducking for cover and the ball was across the boundary and into the trees. My first six since before Christmas.

I didn’t go crazy and try to hit every ball out of the ground but I did get a lot of confidence from that shot, and I pulled the last ball of the over to square leg for four. I could feel my form coming back like blood through my veins. I hit five off the next over and then four, eight, nine . . . I wasn’t keeping track of the score but after a while I knew I must have been close to fifty, and sure enough, there was a lot of clapping from under the trees halfway through the next over when I ran a single, and the umpire said, ‘Well played.’

By then though we’d lost two more wickets and with only ten players that meant we were down to our last batsman, a girl called Penny. I had no idea of the score or the time but I thought we should get as big a cushion as possible, so I went for it. Pipertown were getting tired, so it wasn’t that difficult. I hit anything I could and tried to keep the strike, and we made it through about five more overs before Penny got bowled. Just clipped her leg-stump, and that was the end of the innings. We headed back to Wally and the deckchairs, where I found that I was 99 not out. Like they say, cricket’s a funny game: zero one week and 99 the next.

We’d made 199, to my surprise, which meant that we were 125 in front, so we were well and truly safe from losing outright. Wally was rapt, even though we’d lost on the first innings. I was pleased too. Deep down I’m not that confident and every time I fail at cricket or anything else I think, ‘Maybe this is the end, maybe I’ll never get it back.’

Funny, every time I do well, I don’t think, ‘Maybe this is the end of all failures and from now on I’ll be a shining star.’ I guess that’s what Mr Barnes means by ‘self-talk’, which he often goes on about in class.

I went home feeling good but things were pretty dead back there. Dad was at work again. He’d got a job with a bloke called Will, who had a Jim’s Mowing franchise. Dad never used to work weekends but that was another thing that had changed since Antelope crashed. Mum was over at Gran’s; Callan was at a friend’s and Pippa was at a friend’s too, but about five minutes after I texted Mum that I was home Pippa came through the door.

‘Geez, what took you so long?’ she said.

‘I thought you were at a friend’s.’

‘Samantha? Don’t ever insult me by calling her a friend. As soon as Mum texted me that you were home I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.’

I remembered then that Mum had said something about my looking after Pippa once I was through with cricket. I didn’t want to listen to her bitching about her friends though. It was her favourite hobby. Mum often said Pippa was nine, going on nineteen. Now she slumped onto the sofa and turned on the TV, going straight to some show for six-year-olds. So was she six or nine or nineteen? It was too confusing.

I wandered into the back garden, leaving her to watch her dumb cartoon. Callan and I had started building a tree house a couple of weeks earlier so I got three more planks up into the branches, with a bit of pushing and pulling and balancing. But I couldn’t be bothered doing any more. I climbed up and sat there watching these thousands of ants racing along the trunk. It was like an ant freeway. I don’t know what they were doing, as I couldn’t see them carrying any food, but they seemed like ants on a mission.

After a while I sat back against a branch and looked down the line of other people’s yards. Not in the direction of Harriet and her dad and uncle – you couldn’t see much that way because of the trees and bushes in our place – but the other way, past the house with the closed eyes. At least in this part of town the yards were different, even if most of them were boring. The one three places down had a bunch of old cars that the guy was repairing, but he was taking so long that the weeds had grown higher than the cars. Another place had chooks, and another one further along had pens for their dogs – blue heelers, they looked like.

My eyes wandered back to the place next door, the silent, empty house. As I gazed at the middle window, a tiny flicker caught my eye. I guess it’s like a cricket oval with a seagull on it. You notice the seagull a lot more than you notice the 15,000 square metres of grass. Already I was so used to this house being still that I would have noticed a mosquito landing on a window sill. I focused on the movement. For quite a while there was nothing more, and I started thinking, ‘OK, I must have imagined it.’

These side windows were like the front ones; blinds down, eyes closed. I kept staring at the middle one until my eyes watered, then I made to look away. As I did, the blind moved slightly sideways and I saw one jigsaw piece from a face. Not much more than an eye looking out, looking around. Anything else was covered by the blind, which was now twisted and warped a bit by whoever was behind it.

I had the impression that the eye hadn’t seen me. I froze to the tree so that I wouldn’t attract attention. I felt scared, like I was seeing something I wasn’t meant to be seeing.

But after a couple of moments the blind fell back into place and the house was still once more. I didn’t feel frozen now. A kind of tingling started spreading through my body. Maybe it just meant that my blood was circulating again. It took a few minutes before I could get out of the tree. I climbed down awkwardly and ran into the house. Pippa was still watching the cartoon channel, like nothing had happened. I don’t think she’d even moved. I nearly said, ‘Did you see anything just now? Did you feel anything?’ but it was pretty obvious she hadn’t and didn’t, and I thought I’d better not scare her. She’s kind of easily scared, even though she pretends to be so tough. She hates moths, for example. I think she believes that thousands of killer moths are out there, waiting to suck her blood or inject their vicious venom into her veins, or both.

Anyway, I went and shut the front door and the back door, locking them, then I sat on the couch and watched cartoons with Pippa, but every ad break I got up and had a little look through the windows, just to make sure there were no zombies or serial killers or ghosts or killer moths prowling around. I was pretty pleased when Mum got home from Gran’s.

That night at dinner I said to Mum and Dad as casually as I could, ‘What’s the story with the place next door?’ pointing with my fork to show that this time I wasn’t talking about where Harriet lived.

I thought they would have said stuff like, ‘What are you talking about? There’s no story. What do you mean, story?’ but to my surprise they didn’t. Dad stopped pouring tomato sauce on his sausages, Mum stopped eating, and they stared at me. Dad said quietly, ‘Why do you ask?’

I said ‘Is it haunted or something?’, but with a little laugh, to show that I didn’t really believe in haunted houses. But the expressions on their faces made me nervous. Up till then I’d thought that being scared by the eye was just me being stupid. You know how they say some kids have overactive imaginations. I didn’t think the adults would take my question seriously. But they looked like they might take it seriously seriously. Suddenly I remembered how my dad had turned right instead of left when he’d gone out the back door that time. I put down my fork.

‘Well, is anyone living there or what?’

‘Well, have you seen anyone living there?’ Dad asked, real casual-like.

‘Not exactly seen,’ I said. ‘But what I seen today, I mean saw, was an eye.’

‘Oooh,’ Pippa said. ‘How do you mean an eye? Like, just lying on the ground?’ She sat there with her knife and fork sticking up in the air, staring at me.

‘No, ’course not. Looking out a window.’

‘Was it attached to a body?’ Callan asked.

‘Er . . . or . . . ar . . .’ Pippa said, or something like that. She didn’t seem to like the idea of random body parts floating around the neighbourhood.

‘I don’t know. All I could see was the eye. Peeping out from behind a blind.’

Mum and Dad looked at each other. ‘Look,’ Dad said. ‘It’s a bit tricky. All I can say is that if you kids see anyone in that place you have to stay quiet, OK? You mustn’t talk about it, especially at school. And if anyone asks you questions about the house, come and tell me or Mum straight away.’

He’d gone really grim! I thought, ‘Maybe I had the wrong place all along – maybe that’s the Mafia house.’ But then I thought, ‘Would the Mafia have their headquarters so close to where two cops live?’

I asked: ‘What if you or Mum aren’t home?’

‘Well, go into Lenny and Luke’s place, next door on the other side, and tell them. Don’t waste any time though. Make sure you tell them straight away.’

‘You’re scaring me,’ Pippa whined.

Mum looked at Dad. ‘Wish we’d never moved here,’ she said.

Dad shrugged. ‘What choice did we have? Anyway, what’s the risk? Like your father said, driving to work every day’s a lot more dangerous than living here.’

I couldn’t believe how full-on this was getting. Seemed like the house with closed eyes was spooky beyond my wildest dreams. That night, lying in bed trying to sleep, having my own room didn’t seem such a great idea after all.

At school, cricket and netball had become the main activities for everyone in grades 5 and 6 – that is, everyone who could stand up without falling over. As this apparently didn’t include me I found myself more of a reject than ever. Most kids had practice every day. A lot of them whinged about it but I wouldn’t have minded.

Instead of playing cricket I wandered around looking for something to do. One day when they were short of parents to help in the canteen, I got pulled out of the queue and asked to serve behind the counter, which was fun, and then one of the teachers saw me helping the Prep kids at the canteen and signed me up to hang out in their playground sometimes, to look after them. She said I was good with little kids. It was lucky she never saw me with Callan and Pippa.

I didn’t mind, but – it was something to do, and they did crack me up sometimes with the stuff they said. One very serious little guy called Franklin came up to me one day and pointed at a boy called Marley, and said, ‘Josh, Marley just said the F word.’

I was pretty shocked but I said to him, ‘You better tell me exactly what he said, Franklin.’

‘He told me I was an idiot.’

‘An idiot, huh. Whoa, that’s pretty severe.’ I called out to Marley, ‘Hey Marley, stop calling people idiots. That’s a bad word.’

What I really wanted to say to Franklin was, ‘Kid, you got a serious spelling problem,’ but I didn’t think that would be such a good idea.

Then the very next day a girl called Kitty came up just like Franklin had, and whispered, ‘Josh, Rachel just said the R word.’

I went through all the rude words I could think of and not one of them started with R, so I had to ask her, ‘Kitty, what’s the R word?’, thinking, ‘Now I need a five-year-old to teach me how to swear.’

She looked around to make sure no-one was listening, because obviously the word was so toxic that she couldn’t risk other kids being exposed to it. Then she whispered, ‘Arse.’

She definitely had a spelling problem.

But there were days when I got sick of Preppies grabbing me or chasing me around or wanting me to admire the fact that they could put one foot in front of the other . . . I’d look across at cricket practice on the old oval and my mouth would water and I’d sigh and go back to holding a skipping rope so that these little kids could get fitter and better coordinated and maybe one day grow up to be good at cricket and netball and stuff like that . . .

Mr Barnes organised a trial game of cricket between Tarrawagga and a school from the city called Bromwich Primary. It was on a Tuesday and I knew Mr Surrey didn’t work on Tuesdays. So I figured I’d grab my chance for a day off and I asked Mr Barnes if I could go as scorer. I knew Mr Surrey would have said no – even if the match was in hell he wouldn’t have let me go – but I got on OK with Mr Barnes, most of the time.

‘Do you know how to keep score in a cricket game?’ he asked.

‘Oh yeah, I did it a few times at my old school,’ I said, trying to look serious.

‘We’ve never taken a scorer before.’

‘I’d be really useful. You and the kids in the team could concentrate on the game better. And I am good at maths.’

‘Well, I guess it’ll be OK, as long as your parents sign the consent form, of course.’

Bromwich Primary reminded me of Abernathy: old buildings, lots of trees along the street, big houses with heaps of flowers and stuff. Like our old house before we lost our money. The game wasn’t at the school though, it was at a park down the end of the street. It was a pretty big oval, with a turf wicket. Our kids lost the toss but the Bromwich captain wanted to field for some reason, so he sent us in. I opened the score book and went to work. I did six dots in the first over, and three more in the second over, and then suddenly I got busy. KABOOM! Wicket, dot, wicket. Two wickets for no runs. Marty and Michael both taking off their pads, looking angry and frustrated. Great.

Red went in and for the first time I found myself seriously barracking for Tarrawagga. I’d hated the school from the first day but you can’t stay in a place forever without finding a few things that aren’t too bad. Somehow hanging out with the five-year-olds had made me feel more a part of Tarrawagga. I felt kind of protective towards those little critters and that made me want the school to be a good place for them. Besides, it was just plain embarrassing to be associated with a bunch of losers, and at two for nothing Tarrawagga were looking like serious losers.

Red settled in fairly well, and at the end of the third over scored our first runs, with a sweep that wasn’t too well timed but got 2. He and Shelley were batting and they survived two more overs before she went LBW for 5. That put Rolf in, and I felt a bit more confident with him and Red at the wicket, because they were our best batsmen by far. Unfortunately though a minute later I had to write a zero beside Rolf’s name as he walked back again, clean bowled for a golden duck.

Apart from a kid called Nathan who went in at number nine and scored 11, no-one except Red got double figures. We had five ducks. Sundries got 6, which made them our third-highest scorer. Red was 16 not out, and our total was 43. I suppose it could have been worse, considering at one stage we were 8 for 26.

The Bromwich innings started and I found myself busy again, but for the wrong reasons. The Bromwich openers were scoring so fast that I thought they’d pass our score in the first five overs. I was so busy that I didn’t take any notice of a boy standing in front of me watching the game until he shifted a bit to his left and blocked my view. Then I called out, ‘Excuse me, can you move please, I can’t see.’

He turned around to answer and we both did a double take. I didn’t know his name but he obviously knew mine, because he said, ‘Josh! What are you doing here? How come you’re not playing?’

I took a quick look to find Mr Barnes, and luckily he was busy talking to the teacher from Bromwich.

‘Well . . .’ I said, ‘the thing is, I’ve, um, pulled a muscle. So I’m just scoring.’

‘Wow, bad news for you, good news for us.’

He was a nice kid; he’d played a couple of times for Southern Districts when I was vice-captain. I glanced down at the list of names the Bromwich scorer had given me and recognised his straight away: Angus Beatty. He was batting at number four.

‘What are you doing at Tarrawagga?’ he asked. ‘Have you moved or something?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, wondering if he hadn’t even heard about Antelope. It had been in all the papers, and on TV.

I decided to be honest about the cricket. I was a bit sick of lies.

‘Look, Angus,’ I said. ‘I made that up about the pulled muscle. To tell you the truth, I’m not actually playing. They don’t know I can play cricket. I didn’t want to be in the team so I just never got involved. Please don’t say anything to them, OK?’

He shrugged. ‘OK. Pretty funny though. If they only knew! God, they could’ve used you today.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s kind of a crap school and the PE teacher’s a real mongrel.’

It ruined the morning because I spent my time worrying that Angus would say something to his coach who would say something to Mr Barnes, or one of our team would hear the Bromwich kids talking, or Angus would tell one of our players.

The morning was in ruins from a cricket point of view as well, because Bromwich were way too good for us. Our kids had nothing to show for all that training they’d done. Bromwich declared at 2 for 100, then got us all out in the second innings for 31, even worse than the first. Outright defeat. Ouch. It was a pretty quiet bus trip home.

At least I was getting my cricket fix twice a week by training with Cypress and playing for them. I was going OK too, considering it was Under 14s. My batting average was 70.6 and I had 17 wickets at 11.8. I even got two Saturday afternoon games in the Under 16s, when they were short of a player, and I scored 61 for them one week, and 26 the other.

Then came a Saturday morning when things changed slightly. I never knew who we were playing from one week to the next, especially when the games were at home. I didn’t care, it didn’t matter to me. This particular Saturday was a home game, but I was late; Mum dropped me off on her way to the optometrist with Callan, and because he was so slow getting out of bed I missed the start of the match.

When we got there I ran across to Wally. He just said, ‘’Bout time. We’re batting, so you can pad up and knock a few balls around with Chris. I’ll probably put you in next.’

Looking at the batsmen in the middle I could see that they were our openers, so we hadn’t lost any wickets. And these days I normally batted number three.

Chris and I hit balls to each other to warm up, until after about ten minutes I heard shouts from the pitch and Wally yelled, ‘OK, Josh, you’re in.’

I set off on the long walk. It wasn’t until I reached the centre and took guard, then got ready to face my first ball that I looked at the bowler. I also realised why he was standing staring at me instead of starting his run-up.

The bowler was Red.

I stared right back at him, in horror. This couldn’t be happening. I really liked Red, respected him even. The last thing I wanted was to have him know I’d double-crossed him and everyone else at Tarrawagga. What was he doing here anyway? I remembered then that he played for South Tarrawagga, so maybe they were in the same comp as Cypress. But this was Under 14s!

I thought, ‘OK, I’ll hit a really pathetic shot and get out first ball, so he’ll still think I’m hopeless,’ but I knew that wouldn’t be fair on my team. And anyway, I was already busted. Not only would he know that I must be better than average to be in the Under 14s, but also I was batting number three, and no coach puts a dud batsman at number three.

Besides, any serious cricketer gets a good idea of what a batsman’s like simply by the way he comes in, takes guard, checks the field placements, settles himself for the first ball . . . you just know right away whether he’s going to be a tough nut or a pushover, or somewhere in between. By now I’d played so much cricket that I arrived at the crease like I was coming home. I felt confident in that little rectangle, and anyone as smart as Red would have picked that up in the blink of an eye.

The umpire looked around, frowning, wanting to know where the bowler had gone. Red shook himself, dropped his head and began his run-up. I knew right away that I was in for a lethal delivery, something truly venomous. Well, I got that right. I think it might have been the fastest ball I’d ever faced. And it was a sandshoe crusher, a yorker, the kind of ball that’d break your foot if it landed where the bowler was aiming.

It was a brutal piece of bowling but I had to admire it. Somehow I moved fast enough to smother it with my bat and keep it out of my stumps. It dribbled away towards gully. I straightened up, looked at Red and said, ‘Good ball.’ The slips guys were applauding like they’d just seen a hat-trick or something. Red grunted at me – I think he said, ‘Like you’d know,’ – got the ball, and walked back to his mark.

The next one came at the same speed but was a full toss, heading right for my groin. I played it with a quick foot shuffle, elbow up, dead-straight bat, and again it dribbled away. A better batsman than me might have done more with it, but I was just pleased to survive.

I hadn’t been paying much attention when I came in so I didn’t hear the umpire tell me how many balls Red had left, but I hoped he was near the end of his over. I had too much pride to ask the ump now, because it would look like I was scared. I was scared, but I didn’t want Red to know that. I took guard again, trying to look pleased and confident, like I couldn’t wait for the next exciting ball.

This one was at least predictable, a bouncer aimed like I had a cross on my forehead and Red wanted to hit it dead-centre. I swayed my head back and let it go whistling by. It was too fast for the wicketkeeper and went flying down to the boundary for four byes.

The wicketkeeper muttered, ‘He’s gunna kill you,’ as he waited for the throw.

‘He’s gunna kill you if you keep giving away extras,’ I muttered back.

The next one was just a great delivery, a super-fast ball on a perfect length that was either going to trap me plumb in front LBW or knock my middle stump out – and smash it into matchsticks. I reckon I did well to get my bat to it. I got a thick outside edge, and it ricocheted towards second slip. I jerked my head around to see its fate. The kid at second slip got a fingertip to it but couldn’t hold it. He swore, danced up and down waving his fingers, then dropped to the ground, holding his hand and swearing some more. The ball went down to the boundary for another four. The umpire bustled over to the kid on the ground, and the South Tarrawagga players all gathered around him. All except Red, who took his jumper off the umpire and walked away to fine leg without looking at me. It was the end of the over.

I didn’t go visit the kid who’d hurt his hand but the coach came on with an icepack. ‘We’d better get it X-rayed,’ he said, and they walked him off.

‘Sorry, mate,’ I called after him, but he didn’t answer. I wouldn’t have either.

I only faced the last ball of the next over but hit a cover drive and ran three. Big mistake, as this meant I had to face Red again. In he came, steaming like a chain smoker on a foggy day. The ball screamed past me, pretty much as fast as the ones in his previous over: another dot in the score book, but I felt that if I could survive a bit longer he’d have to slow down. I blocked the next couple, then got a streaky single past point, which of course meant I was suddenly up at his end of the pitch, standing right next to him. He might have been steaming but he gave me a look from out of the Ice Age. I couldn’t help noticing that the next ball, to my partner, Dylan, the big kid I’d bowled to in the nets the day I’d joined Cypress, was a lot slower than any of the ones I’d got. Even so, it was too good for Dylan, who edged it straight to the keeper and trudged off without waiting for the umpire.

I waited, leaning on my bat, while everyone congratulated Red. ‘This is the best I’ve ever seen you,’ I heard one kid say.

Lucas was the new batsman and he got a single off the first ball. That gave me the strike for the next over, and a new bowler. The ball seemed like a friendly red apple after the hand grenades I’d been getting from Red. I had a bit of fun and hit a few boundaries. Then it was Red again. I figured this would be his last over, and he’d be getting tired. I figured that sooner or later there’d be one I could hit. I blocked the first four, but finally it came, the second-last ball of the over. It was a slower one that pitched short and was somewhere round middle and leg. With a squirt of joy running through my body I lifted it high and wide of the square leg fieldsman. One bounce and over the ropes. I peeked at Red but he had already turned around and was marching back to his mark.

That was his last over and with him out of the way I hit quite a few. But I remembered Mark Watley, the Southern Districts coach, saying that a good player will always find a way to get involved in the game. I was batting with Sophia, just a couple of balls after Lucas had been stumped. I was on 72 and at the non-striker’s end. She hit a good hard crisp shot to mid-on and called me through for a single. I was backing up a fair way, so I didn’t think there’d be a problem. But I hadn’t processed the fact that Red was fielding at mid-on. Even so, he was pretty deep. I jogged down the pitch without any thought of him.

A metre short of the crease I was travelling pretty comfortably when all three stumps were suddenly smashed out of the ground, by a ball travelling at the speed of a bullet. It was a total horror show. I nearly dropped my bat, but recovered, swerved to my right and kept running. No point hanging around to see the celebrations.

Wally told me about it afterwards. ‘He came in like a greyhound, Josh, picked it up and threw it, all in a split second. Phenomenal fielding. Don’t know why he didn’t throw to Sophia’s end though. Must have thought that’d be too easy.’

Between our innings and theirs I was coming out of the toilet block when suddenly there was Red. Before I could say ‘Good bowling’ or ‘Good fielding’ or ‘Well played’ or any of the polite things you’re meant to say to each other he grabbed me round the throat. ‘You *!@%***#@*,’ he said, ‘You *&%$#*%*# %$&*&@#$% &**&#%$@**,’ along with a few other words that I don’t even have symbols for on the keyboard. Some of the mildest things he said were that the cerebral material between my ears had been replaced by the stuff you find on the footpath where people have been walking their dogs, and that from my neck up I actually had a penis instead of a head. I must have looked pretty strange to him.

I tried to say something, but I had no chance. Red was red all right: he was seeing red, and he was red in the face, and he was keen to see red stuff coming out of my eyeballs and ears and nose. Luckily, before he could do too much damage, his coach called his name, and at about the same time Wally called me, so we both had to go. All I could gasp was, ‘I’m sorry, Red,’ in a strangled voice, but I don’t think he even heard me.

We went out to start fielding. Red was opening their batting, and I was hoping like mad that I wouldn’t be given the ball. Luckily Jonah threw it to Lucas. But as time went on and Red was still in I knew my luck would run out sooner or later. Sure enough, the moment came when halfway through an over Jonah told me, ‘You’re next.’

‘Oh, Jonah,’ I whined. I decided to try the same excuse I’d used at Bromwich. ‘I think I’ve pulled a muscle or something.’

‘What are you talking about? You just sprinted fifty metres to get that ball back.’

‘Yeah, that’s when I pulled it.’

‘Bullcrap.’

It was hard to argue with Jonah, partly because he was from New Zealand and weighed about a hundred kilos and looked like his main ambition in life was to do a haka on your head. When you haven’t quite turned twelve yet, and you’re in an Under 14s team, you’re an easy target. At the end of the over I took the ball like a good little boy.

I could feel Red’s eyes burning into me as I began my run-up. I bowled an absolute shocker, a long hop, which he promptly smashed to the boundary. It was a bit different from the fiery ball Red had bowled me at the start of my innings. My second was a wide. My third was a no ball, which he hit for another four. My fourth, or the second if you didn’t count the ones that didn’t count, was a full toss which he hit for another four.

Jonah, who was fielding at mid-off, muttered, ‘What are you doing?’ But I didn’t mind that as much as I minded the look of contempt from Red as I stood at my mark, ready to start running in again. ‘Bugger this,’ I thought, ‘he’s not the only one who can bowl with a bit of venom.’

In I came, and let one go that reared up and would have broken his nose if he (a) wasn’t wearing a helmet, and (b) hadn’t moved his head out of the way just in time. There was applause from the slips and the wicketkeeper, and even Jonah grunted, ‘That’s better.’ Red looked a bit warier as I came in for my next ball.

From then on, it became a duel, with him batting better than I’d ever seen him, and me bowling with everything I had. I guess it was a draw: I got him in the end, when Sophia caught him on the boundary, but by then he’d scored 80, beating me by eight runs.

At the end of the morning, we went around shaking hands like we were meant to, but Red just turned his back and walked away when I tried to shake his.

‘He could at least have asked me why I did it,’ I thought, but the problem was that I wasn’t sure of the answer myself.

That afternoon I was home alone with Callan. Mum and Dad were both working and Pippa was at some dance class she’d joined. Callan and I were doing a bit more on the tree house. We’d been really slack about it for weeks and now I wanted to get it finished. From time to time I glanced at the place next door, to see whether the eye would reappear. I kind of wanted it to, and I didn’t. It was disturbing and exciting at the same time.

At one point I looked over there, looked back at the nail I was hammering, bashed it with the hammer, looked back at the place next door, and to my astonishment, as if by magic, a kid was standing in the yard looking at us. I don’t know how he had appeared in, like, three seconds. I’d say he was maybe ten years old, skinny, with black hair but a very pale face, like he’d been in the house all his life and never seen sunlight before.

Then a big burly-looking man in a suit came out of the back door. He looked up at us too, and said something to the kid. It was obvious they were talking about us. The kid nodded, quite enthusiastically, and the man went to the door again and said something to someone I couldn’t see. The next moment another man, who looked like the twin brother of the first one, came out. I heard a woman call from inside, and the kid just nodded again.

From being completely deserted for so long, suddenly this house had a cast of thousands. The second man came over to the fence, looked at me and in a quiet voice said: ‘Are your parents home, Josh?’

He knew my name! My stomach gave a lurch. This was way weird. ‘No,’ I said, but Callan interrupted and said, ‘Yes they are, Dad is,’ and pointed to the driveway. I looked across, and he was right: the Accord had just pulled in.

The man climbed the fence, dropping into our backyard. What the hell? I looked at Callan in amazement, but he was no help. The man ignored us and went down the side of the house to where Dad was getting out of the car. Dad didn’t seem too surprised to see this guy walking down our driveway, and that was surprising. They talked for a few minutes. I looked at the kid next door. He was still standing there with the first guy. Then Dad and the second man came over to our tree.

‘Hop down for a sec,’ Dad said to Callan and me. ‘I need to talk to you both.’

We scrambled down, and stood facing them. Dad looked kind of awkward. He nodded at the place next door and said, ‘OK, boys, here’s the situation: they’ve got a kid staying at the moment who’s got no-one to play with. He’s ten years old, and his name . . . well, he’s got a nickname, and it’s Woody. So you can just call him that.’

‘So you want us to play with him?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, but here’s the thing, don’t go asking him any questions, OK? Nothing about him or his family or what school he goes to, that kind of stuff. And he’s not allowed out the front. He’ll have to get over the fence . . . and go back the same way.’

‘Weird,’ said Callan, who always says what he thinks. He didn’t seem too bothered though. Me, I was stunned. I felt like I’d landed in a TV show. The biggest mystery in my life before was who took the twenty bucks out of the top of my wardrobe at our old house. The obvious answer was Callan, but he was at a school camp at the time. The next most obvious answer was Pippa, but she couldn’t reach that high, even standing on a chair.

Anyway, two minutes later the kid had been handed over the fence by the two big guys and we were standing under the tree looking at each other. Woody seemed nervous and so did Callan now, but I was ready to pass out. Because I’d seen something that Callan hadn’t – when the two men were helping Woody, I’d seen a gun in a holster under the jacket of the guy on our side of the fence.

I’d never seen a handgun before but I’d watched a lot of movies, so I knew what they were like.

‘Er, Dad,’ I called, just as he was heading into the house, ‘can I ask you something?’

‘Sure, what?’

‘I’ll come over there.’

I tried to walk at normal speed but it wasn’t easy. ‘Dad, that guy’s got a gun,’ I whispered, as soon as I was close enough.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I imagine they both do.’

I gaped at him.

‘Look, Josh,’ he said. ‘It’s OK. Later, I’ll tell you as much as I can. But not now. For now, just do what I’ve asked. It’ll be all right, believe me. Those guys are fine; you can trust them.’

I still stood there staring at him. He added in a whisper: ‘OK, I’ll tell you this much. They’re both cops. I’m not even meant to tell you that, but you’ve got a right to know. Now is it OK?’

‘I . . . I guess so,’ I stammered. Suddenly we seemed to be surrounded by cops.

‘Good. Just play with the kid. He needs a break.’

It’s kind of hard to play with anyone, let alone a kid you’ve never met before, when you’re under orders to do it. But I went back to him and Callan, and asked him, ‘Do you play cricket?’

He shook his head. That ruled out my first twenty choices. He helped matters a bit though by saying, ‘Are you building a tree house? Can I help?’

I gave a sigh of relief. ‘Sure,’ I said.

The three of us headed back up the tree. It wasn’t until we got up there that I realised the man who’d climbed over the fence, the man with the gun, was still in our backyard, leaning against the fence, watching us. That really put me off. I wondered what would happen if Callan or I said something mean to Woody. Would the guy shoot us?

Woody didn’t say a lot but he was pretty handy with a hammer, and willing enough with a saw, even if it took him a long time to cut anything. He worked on the decking while Callan and I got on with the cabin. It was a pretty ambitious tree house. The cop with the gun helped a few times by passing up bits of wood, and even made a suggestion about cutting joints into the ends of the planks, which meant the job was going to take a lot longer but it would be much better.

We spent more than an hour in the tree. Woody gradually warmed up, and even made a few jokes. I’d say he got on better with Callan than with me. Poor kid, he actually laughed at Callan’s jokes, but he was probably desperate for friends.

Then Dad brought out some sandwiches and a bottle of Solo. He’d never ever done that before. We hoed into it but as soon as we’d finished, the cop with the gun said it was time to go. Woody just got up and said, ‘See you,’ and over the fence he climbed, on his own this time.

As soon as they were back inside their house Callan and I went after Dad with the questions. But he wasn’t too keen on answering. Callan hadn’t seen the gun so he wasn’t as interested as me in interrogating Dad. He just thought it was weird that these people were living next door and Woody was being watched so closely and we weren’t allowed to ask him anything.

I thought it was all beyond weird and I remembered the police check on us that Harriet had told me about, and I wondered if it was all related. A few weeks earlier I’d never spoken to a cop in my life and now here I was living in Cop City.

On Monday morning at school I was a man with a mission, and my mission was to find Red before he got to Mr Surrey. I didn’t know what I wanted to say; I just knew I had to track him down.

I got a glimpse of his back on the way in from the bus stop so I ran and caught up with him as he reached his locker. ‘Red,’ I gasped, ‘we have to talk.’

On American TV shows that line always seems to work, but it didn’t work for me. Red turned away, shoved his stuff in his locker and headed down the corridor towards the assembly hall without looking at me. I tagged along beside him, still carrying my bag, trying to think of what to say next.

We got into the assembly hall but we were so early the teachers hadn’t even arrived, so we weren’t meant to be in there at all. But we both ignored that. Red went down the front, trying to get away from me, but at the same time still trying to pretend I wasn’t there. ‘Red,’ I said again, ‘please just let me explain.’

He jumped up on the stage and stood there looking down at me. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Explain. You’ve got one minute.’

I jumped up beside him and he immediately walked to the other side. ‘Forty-five seconds,’ he said. Suddenly we were like actors in a play. The trouble was, I didn’t have a script. It was about ten minutes since I’d first seen him and I still couldn’t think of a single word to convince him that I wasn’t a complete dickhead . . . which was very close to one of the things he’d accused me of being.

‘Geez,’ I said. ‘You’re making this difficult.’

It wasn’t much of a line but it seemed to trigger a bit of a reaction in him. ‘I’m making it difficult?’ he asked. ‘What have I done? Everyone knows this is the crappiest school in the whole crap universe and we get treated like crap by everyone and we get totally smashed by every other school in every sport you can think of and in my last year when we finally get a decent oval I try and do something to give us a chance to actually win a game of cricket and here you are, the best cricketer in the school, and you won’t even pick up a bat or a ball to help. So what have I done that’s so wrong?’

I stood there burning up with embarrassment because I knew he was right. I had been a complete dickhead. So I said that.

‘Yeah, I’ve been a complete dickhead,’ were my exact words.

‘You can say that again,’ he said.

Always wanting to be the comedian, I had to fight very hard not to immediately say ‘I’ve been a complete dickhead’ a second time. Instead I swallowed, then opened my mouth, not quite sure what was going to come out. I just hoped it would be words, and luckily it was.

‘I didn’t want to come here,’ I said. ‘My last school was pretty good and I had a lot of mates. We kicked butt at most sports, and yeah, I did OK. I was gunna be the cricket captain this year. Maybe even school captain. And I was booked in for St Andrew’s College next year. Then my mum and dad lost all their money in this company they worked for. Antelope Investments, it was called. You might have seen it on TV. It went belly up. We lost our house and everything. So we had to move here. Now we’re living in a rental place my grandpa owns, and I’ll tell you the truth, ever since we got here I’ve hated everything about Tarrawagga. So I wasn’t going to give a rat’s arse whether we beat other schools or not. But now . . . well, I kind of . . . admire . . . the way you’ve got everyone trying so hard at cricket and netball, to beat Maxwell and all that. I’d really like to start training with you guys. And to get in the team if I’m good enough.’

He laughed. ‘Yeah, you’d probably scrape in all right.’ Then he added: ‘Did you know I’m Aboriginal?’

‘Nuh.’

‘Well, I am.’

I didn’t know what that had to do with anything, so I didn’t answer. He said: ‘When we were at Bromwich the other day, this kid tried to tell me you were a cricket stud and I thought he was being funny.’

That would have been Angus. I’d kill him next time I saw him.

‘So can I come to training?’ I asked.

‘Far as I’m concerned. It’s really up to Mr Surrey though.’

‘That’s not good. He hates my guts.’

‘Yeah, maybe a bit. He’s not that bad but. Thing is, at least he cares about this school. For a long time we had teachers same as you – they didn’t want to be here, they hated the place, they just wanted to be at rich posh schools in the city. But there’s a few of them now, they don’t take the first transfer they get, they stay here. I know for a fact Mr Surrey’s been offered jobs at much better schools than this one.’

‘THANK YOU, REDMOND.’

We both jumped a metre or so. It was like the voice of God, booming around the hall. Not that I’ve ever heard the voice of God. But this was a huge voice that filled the place. We looked around in shock, trying to find where it was coming from.

‘That you, Mr Surrey?’ Red asked.

‘YES,’ said the voice. Then, a bit more quietly: ‘Up here, in the sound box.’

We looked up, and there he was. He stepped out of the sound box, closing the door behind him. ‘I came in to fiddle around with the audio, before tonight’s play,’ he explained, in his normal voice. He sounded so quiet, after being on the microphone. ‘I wasn’t expecting to hear a live drama while I was doing it. But it was very helpful in getting the sound levels right.’

‘You mean we were on the microphones?’ Red asked.

‘Every word you both said was amplified nicely.’

My face must have matched Red’s name. I groaned. Did I have to make a complete mess of everything? And what exactly had I said about Mr Surrey? I couldn’t remember, but I knew it was bad.

‘So, Josh, am I to take it that you’re a bit of a cricketer after all?’

Red laughed. ‘He can do everything. He got 72 against us on Saturday, in the Under 14s, and I was bowling the best I’ve ever bowled. The only way we could get him was to run him out.’

‘Thanks to you,’ I said.

Mr Surrey came down a few steps. ‘And I gather you’re willing to lower yourself to play for Tarrawagga now?’

‘It’s not lowering myself,’ I said. His tone made me angry. Did he always have to be so sarcastic? ‘Anyway, I offered to before. You said I could wear a chicken suit.’

‘Your offer was fraudulent,’ he said. ‘You withheld vital information.’

That word ‘fraudulent’ got right up my nostrils. People had used it about my parents. I knew I was in the middle of a major anger management episode. I struggled to control myself.

‘OK,’ I said, trying to speak really slowly. ‘Fair enough. I admit I’ve been acting like a bit of a low-life since I got here. But now I’d really like to play for Tarrawagga.’

He stood there staring at me. I was sure he was about to measure me up for the chicken suit.

‘It’s not very fair on the kids who’ve been training all this time if you just waltz up and walk straight into the team,’ he said.

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘But if a new kid turned up today who was good enough to get in, I guess you’d take him.’

‘That’s different,’ he said. He looked at Red. ‘What do you think, Redmond?’

I was a bit shocked. Not many teachers would ask a kid’s opinion like that. I crossed my fingers. After all, it was less than 48 hours since Red had tried to strangle me outside a toilet block.

Red looked up at the ceiling. It was a few seconds before he answered.

‘I reckon everyone’s entitled to a second go,’ he said.

Mr Surrey thought about that for a while. Teachers and kids were coming into the hall for assembly. Finally he nodded. ‘All right,’ he said.

Seemed like I was in the team.

My first lunchtime practice was embarrassing. I rocked up as soon as I could, but walked into an earthquake of laughter. ‘Ohmigod, look what’s here,’ was the only comment I actually heard, among all the noise. I didn’t know what to say. One thing for sure, I didn’t want to make a speech to every kid explaining how in one weekend I could go from someone who didn’t know which end of the bat to hold to someone who could hit a ball that went vaguely where I wanted it to go.

It turned out that I didn’t have to make any speeches, because I didn’t have to do anything. Mr Surrey put me in the outfield, where I mooched around drawing patterns in the dust with my toe. Like Red, I couldn’t wait to get onto the new oval, with its beautiful surface of fresh grass. The old oval, which we were using for practice, had a surface like the Simpson Desert.

I had to field a couple of balls, which I stopped easily enough, throwing them in without any fuss. I was pretty keen not to stand out. It was halfway through practice the next day before Mr Surrey finally decided I could come in from the dunes. Suddenly he beckoned me, and pointed to the non-striker’s end. I ran over, grabbed a bat and took up my position. Rolf was at the other end. He blocked a couple of balls, then hit an easy single.

I jogged down the pitch. The ball was chucked back to the keeper and he lobbed it over my head to the bowler. I took guard. My moment of truth had arrived. Every member of the team who thought he or she had a sense of humour was enjoying a good time at my expense. You couldn’t even call it sledging, because they didn’t take me seriously enough to sledge me. They were just entertaining each other with comments like, ‘Get him a piano – he’d have a better chance of playing that’, ‘Get a car, see if he can drive’ and ‘Have a look at the back of the bat, Josh – it might have instructions.’

The only exception was Harriet, who was fielding at leg slip. When I looked around I caught her eye. She wasn’t saying anything. She just had a little smile, like someone who’s seen something funny that no-one else has noticed.

I turned back to face the bowler. I tried to concentrate on the ball. Lately, after a comment from Wally, I’d been working on my follow-through. I’d been trying to exaggerate it a bit, to make sure I really did follow through properly on every shot. So I thought about that as the bowler, Mike, came in. It was a medium-pace delivery, slightly outside off stump, and I wanted to prove a point, so I danced down the wicket and lifted it over Mike’s head, over mid-off’s head, over the fence and onto the roof of the shed of the organic garden. But the main thing for me was to make sure the bat ended up where it was meant to go, over my left shoulder. At the end of the shot I checked its position and thought, ‘Yep, happy with that, good follow-through, that’s what I wanted.’

Only after that did I notice the silence. I glanced around. Kids were looking at me and at each other. They kind of looked worried, almost, like the world had just turned up the wrong way. Finally Marty said in a strange voice: ‘Have you been taking lessons?’

‘Are you on drugs, Josh?’ Shelley asked.

Harriet finally piped up from leg slip. ‘Guess he’s just a natural,’ she said.

I grinned and turned back to face the next ball. It was a long time coming. People had gone a bit mental. They were laughing and whooping and acting like they were at a disco. The next ball was so wild that I let it go. I think Mike had lost his head. The next one was a full toss; I hit it for six and that was the end of the over.

For the rest of that day and for the next few days I was like the local freak show. Kids didn’t know how to treat me. They’d put me in a box, the way everyone does, the way I did often enough to other people, and now I’d suddenly torn my way out like I was the Incredible Hulk. The whole thing made me really uncomfortable, and I was glad when a week or so passed and they gradually got used to the new me.

Red and I hung around a lot together talking about how we could improve the team. I don’t think Mr Surrey liked me any better than before but he gave us room to try stuff with the other kids, and I used some good training exercises I’d learned from Mark Watley. Gradually you could see it starting to come together. Even so, and even though I didn’t know how good Maxwell was, we were still a long way from being world beaters. The best thing was that as time passed you could feel a bit of spirit growing. Kids stopped laughing when someone made a mistake and started encouraging each other instead. And the fielding got pretty sharp, which is always a good sign. We played one more practice game, against Ravensburg, and it went a bit better than the one against Bromwich. Rolf got 60, Red 47, I made 39 and Shelley 31. We declared at 7 for 190, and got them all out for 180. It was a good game, I took a few wickets and we played really well in the last half-a-dozen overs, when it looked like they might make the runs.

And then it was time for the big one, the opening of the new oval, in front of all the VIPs and parents and visitors, where we had to hope that we wouldn’t suffer an embarrassing pulverisation at the hands of Maxwell.

The afternoon before the game Woody came over to play again. This was the fourth time he’d been allowed into our backyard, and each time he’d been escorted by one of his bodyguards – if that’s what they were. I was so confused. I had no idea. Sometimes I wondered if he’d committed a serious crime, but because he was too young to go to jail they kept him in an ordinary house. Didn’t seem likely – he didn’t seem much like a serial killer – but it was the best I could come up with.

Woody was always quiet, but he was OK, and ever since the first visit he’d got on quite well with Callan. That says a lot for his patience. We’d finished the tree house, so this particular afternoon we mucked around in that for a while. Then I got the bat and ball and we played cricket. The cop seemed to like cricket. He joined in, bowled for a while and then fielded. He was pretty good too!

Woody, on the other hand . . . well, he’d said he didn’t like cricket, or didn’t play, I couldn’t remember which. We’d played twice before, not for long, and he’d gone all right, but this time he was hopeless. I was bowling really slowly, but I still got him out three times in four balls. The third time he started crying, standing at the crease holding the bat, with tears running down his face. I was used to Callan and Pippa chucking tantrums when they got out, and claiming it was unfair, but this was different. He wasn’t complaining about anything; he was crying for no reason. He looked like someone who thought life was crap, had always been crap and would always be crap.

The cop was kind to him and said, ‘Maybe it’s time to go home now, Woody.’

He said, in between sobs, ‘It’s not home and my name’s not Woody; stop calling me that.’

The cop looked at Callan and me with an expression that said, ‘You weren’t meant to hear that,’ and he took Woody by the arm and led him away, not over the fence like they normally did, but down our driveway and up the driveway of the house next door.

‘Sheez,’ said Callan, ‘what gives with that kid? And how come he always has a cop with him?’

I was a bit shocked. ‘How do you know they’re cops?’

Callan shrugged. ‘Woody told me a week ago. Anyway, it’s obvious. They look like cops, they talk like cops, they act like cops. What else they gunna be?’

Trust Callan; that kid always called it like he saw it.

But I was worried that Woody had been talking so freely to Callan. I didn’t know if Callan could be trusted to keep a secret for more than five minutes. I didn’t mention it to Mum and Dad, which may have been a mistake, but I can’t see how it would have changed anything.

Pippa and Callan went off to bed sometime between 8.30 and 9 pm, with Mum saying like she did every night: ‘It’s too late for children their age; they should have been in bed an hour ago.’

I got sent off at about 9.15. It was just like any other night, except that I didn’t feel a bit tired. I lay there thinking about Woody, and worrying about the game against Maxwell. Poor Woody. What was his real name? What was going on in his life? And the cricket, would I make any runs tomorrow? Or get out for a golden duck? Would Tarrawagga get humiliated or would we actually win something for once?

I stared at a book about sharks for fifteen minutes without reading more than three pages, then Dad came and turned out my light. I lay in the darkness, still wide awake. I wasn’t only thinking about Woody and the game against Maxwell. It was all the stuff going on in my life, with my mum and dad and everything. Since we’d lost our money I hadn’t slept too well. And tonight didn’t seem like it’d be an exception.

I heard the TV go off, and Mum and Dad going to bed. More time passed. I shut my eyes for a while, then opened them again. I gazed out through the window.

I’d set up my bed to face the back lawn, because I liked the view. The moon must have been out, because I could see the trees and the tree house. I saw a possum run along the top of the fence between our place and where Woody was staying. It got almost to the end, trotting along casually, minding its own business. Then suddenly it crouched down and froze, staring into our backyard. I looked where it was looking, expecting I might see a cat maybe, or another possum.

But what I saw sent my body prickling all over. I broke out in prickles from head to foot. A man was moving from one tree to another. If he hadn’t moved I wouldn’t have seen him, because he was dressed in really dark clothes. When he stopped again and stood by the tree that held our cubby I had a lot of trouble making him out.

My skin kept crawling like I had goose pimples running up and down me in waves. I felt paralysed, especially in the lungs. I wanted to do something brave, something heroic, because I knew he must be there for a bad reason, but I couldn’t move.

When I took my next breath, which could have been two minutes later, my mind slowly started working again too. As far as I could tell the man hadn’t moved. I eased myself out of bed, shivering as soon as my feet touched the floor. It wasn’t a very warm night, but I felt like I was in an igloo at the South Pole. I tiptoed out of my room and ran like a fox down the corridor to my parents’ room. I raced to Dad’s side of the bed and shook him by the shoulder.

‘Dad! Dad! Wake up.’

‘Grmph, hurrumph grrr whaddya want? Go away.’ Then suddenly he was awake. ‘Josh! What’s wrong? Are you feeling sick?’

‘No, Dad, there’s a man in our garden. I think he’s watching the place next door.’

‘You sure?’ But already he was getting out of bed, much faster than I had. He went into the kitchen, towards the window, me following, but he stopped at a safe distance. ‘Where exactly did you see him?’ he whispered.

‘Under the tree house.’

‘Can’t see anything. Wait a minute, they gave me a number.’

He went to the fridge, and felt around for something. The light was about the same as in my bedroom.

‘Got it,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

We went down the corridor to the phone. He lifted it like it was a hand grenade, but he was just trying to be super-quiet. Mum came out of their room.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Josh thinks he saw a man in our backyard, watching the place next door.’

‘I did see him,’ I said, a bit indignant. We were talking in whispers, and my dad was pressing the numbers on the phone, but I think he got the wrong ones, because he muttered, ‘Bugger,’ and started again. This time it seemed to work. He only had to wait a moment and someone answered. I was surprised that it was so quick, in the middle of the night. I could hear the voice clearly; it was a man.

‘Sergeant Munro.’

‘It’s Cameron Smith, from next door. My son is pretty sure he just saw someone in our backyard, watching the house . . . your place.’

There was no answer. It sounded like the phone had been put down. I could hear some people murmuring, then suddenly the sergeant was back on the line. This time he sounded like he was whispering too, but he had a big hoarse voice so it was a pretty loud whisper.

‘Dial triple-O for us, would you, mate? Just tell them the address and what your boy saw.’

Then the phone was hung up.

My dad was starting to shake now. He looked like he did the night we found out we’d lost all our money. Something in Sergeant Munro’s voice was pretty scary. Me, I’d been shaking for about four minutes. Plus I had an extra worry all to myself. What if I’d been wrong? What if I’d imagined it? I was causing a major crisis here, and it might just have been me having a bad dream.

My father rang triple-O and asked for the police. When a woman answered he said as fast as he could: ‘My name’s Cameron Smith; I live at 22 Brisbane Street, Tarrawagga, and I’ve been asked by Sergeant Munro to call you and tell you there’s a problem at number 24.’

‘So, number 24 Brisbane Street? Sergeant Munro? Just a sec.’

It took way, way long before she came back on again. Must have been at least thirty seconds.

‘What sort of problem?’ I could hear her say.

‘We’ve seen a man in our backyard, watching the place.’

‘Just a minute.’

I was grateful to my father for saying that ‘we’ had seen a man. It was like we were in this together.

We stood waiting for the woman on the phone again. I felt so helpless. Mum put her arm around me. A moment later there was a sound like a firecracker going off, except it was louder. It seemed to come from just one spot – not like thunder – but then it spread around the back of our house. It had to be from next door. I’d never heard a gunshot, except in movies, but I was pretty sure I’d heard one now. My mother screamed but cut herself off after about a half-second. The Great Danes across the street started woofing so loudly that our windows shook. I came out in goose pimples all over again. My father stared at me. I heard the woman on the other end of the phone start to say something but my father interrupted her, saying, ‘We just heard a shot.’

I could hear the woman yelling at someone. I could guess what it was: ‘Get the hell over to Brisbane Street, Tarrawagga.’

Suddenly there were more shots, at least three, maybe four. They seemed to come from a couple of different places this time. Now my mother really did scream. My father yelled ‘More shots’ into the phone, threw it to Mum and said, ‘I’m going over there.’

‘What, are you crazy?’ Mum screamed.

‘They’ve got a kid there.’

I realised he meant Woody. Or whatever his name was.

The next thing Dad had left the house.

‘Oh, God,’ Mum moaned. ‘How I hate this place. Why’d we ever move here?’

I could have said, ‘Come on, Mum, just get to know some people, then it won’t be so bad.’ But I didn’t. Maybe I was getting smarter as I was getting older.

Crouching low, I ran to the window that had the best view. It was at the corner of the kitchen. I think I was in a state of shock, but I wanted to see that my dad was all right. I expected my mum to call me back but when I looked around I could see her going down the corridor. I think she was checking on Callan and Pippa. I didn’t know if she still had the phone. I peeked out the window, just in time to see my father do a kind of roll over the top of the fence and drop down the other side. I had the terrible thought that I might have seen him for the last time. I thought I’d be safe if I snuck out the back door and used the corner of the house for cover, so I did that. As soon as the night air hit me I started shivering worse than ever, but most of it was fear I think.

The Great Danes across the road were going crazy. I hoped they didn’t get out, or if they did they’d know that I was one of the good guys. I hunched down and snuck along the wall. Suddenly a man yelled, ‘Over there,’ from the yard next door. Then there were two more shots, both from the same place, it sounded like. The shots were much louder out here, and I began to think that it was really not a good idea for me to be outside. ‘Brendon’s down,’ a man shouted. I edged quickly back towards the door again. Then I heard running footsteps coming down our driveway. I peeped around the side and saw my father going flat chat, like the Great Danes were after him. He was carrying something heavy. Someone heavy. It had to be Woody. My dad gets asthma and he was breathing like a donkey. I put my head down and raced towards him. I heard a shot, horribly close. It sounded a bit like the lid of a dumpbin being smashed shut. Another man yelled ‘Got him!’

‘What are you doing?’ my dad gasped. ‘All right, take him and get inside.’

I put Woody, who didn’t seem to be moving, over my shoulder and carried him, even though my legs were going all wobbly, but my dad supported him from behind, and that helped. Woody didn’t move at all and I wondered with terror and horror if he was dead.

We got inside and my dad slammed the door. I dropped Woody onto the couch, a bit heavily, but I couldn’t carry him any longer. Suddenly my mother was there. ‘What’s happening?’ she asked in a strange half-strangled voice, like she had asthma too.

‘Don’t worry, I think it’s over,’ my dad said.

My mum took one look at Woody and went out to the kitchen. My dad turned on the little lamp. Woody was so white it was like he had no colour at all. I couldn’t see any blood though, so I thought maybe he hadn’t been shot. My dad started patting his face and saying, ‘You’re all right now, don’t worry, you’re all right.’ My mum came back with a face flannel and a bowl of water and wiped his face, very gently. ‘Get a doona for him, Josh,’ she said, and I scurried out of the room and got one from the hall cupboard. There was a hammering on our front door. I jumped about a metre. But a voice came through the door: ‘Are you there, Cam? It’s me, Lenny.’

My dad went to the door and opened it. Lenny seemed to know we had Woody, because he said straight away: ‘Is he OK?’

I thought my dad said, ‘I’d say he’s shot, big time.’ For a second my stomach dropped away like I was in a lift going up at a thousand k’s an hour. Then I realised he’d said ‘shocked’.

My dad brought Lenny in and they had a look at Woody. Lenny ran his hands over him and Woody pushed him away, but pretty feebly. So at least he was alive. Lenny said, ‘Yeah, like you said, Cam, shocked I reckon, but no wonder. There’s an ambulance on the way,’ and as soon as he said that I realised I could hear sirens in the distance, loads of them, like every emergency vehicle in Tarrawagga was heading to Brissie Street.

Soon the street was full of the wailing and moaning of sirens. They even drowned out the Great Danes. The flashing blue and white lights through the window made our living room more like a disco. But we had to wait about ten minutes until the police gave the all-clear before the ambulance guys could come in. When they did, a funny thing happened. They tried to put Woody on a stretcher but he cried and wouldn’t get on it. ‘How about you walk out there with us then?’ they suggested. They were very gentle with him.

‘No, no,’ he cried, but they kept insisting. Then he pointed at me and said, ‘Only if Josh comes.’

The main ambulance guy was quite an old man, little but tough-looking. ‘Are you Josh?’ he asked me.

‘Yeah.’

‘Can he come with us then?’ he asked Mum and Dad. ‘One of you can come too if you like.’

So that’s how I came to have my first ever ambulance ride, through the night, with Mum and Lenny and Woody, a kid I hardly knew. To my disappointment the ambos didn’t use their siren, but we still got to the hospital pretty quickly. Woody wouldn’t let me out of his sight, so I sat with him while we waited for a doctor. A nurse brought us some Lego, and we played with that, making a plane and an aircraft carrier, although I thought it was strange that half an hour earlier we’d been dodging bullets and now we were playing Lego.

Eventually the doctor came hurrying in, and checked Woody out. ‘You’re not doing too badly,’ she said, ‘but I think it’d be a good idea if we kept you in overnight.’ Two cops arrived to replace Lenny and to guard Woody, and the nurse gave him a sleeping tablet or something, because about three minutes after he took it he went out like a light and started snoring. By then it was 2.30 in the morning, and I didn’t need a pill – I was ready to fall down on the hospital floor and go straight to sleep.

Lenny took us to the hospital car park and put us in his cop car. Pretty cool way to go home. I begged him to use his siren, but he was as tight about it as the ambos had been. At least he let me go in the front seat.

On the way home I asked him, ‘Who’s looking after Harriet?’

‘Harriet? She’s at her mum’s for the whole week. Thank God. I’m glad she missed this.’

So I was in great shape for the game against Maxwell. Mum drove me to school at about ten o’clock, ’cos the game wasn’t meant to start until 10.30. Callan and Pippa had caught the bus as usual. To my total and utter amazement, in spite of the shots and yelling and running around, they had both SLEPT THROUGH THE WHOLE THING. It didn’t seem possible.

We really got to school too early though. The speeches to open the new oval were just starting and, geez, I had no idea it took so many words to open an oval. Two different members of parliament, the mayor, the principal Ms Krishnananthan, the oldest ex-student of Tarrawagga Primary, someone from the Education office, a guy from Rotary (because they had paid for some trees) and the two school captains. By the time they’d finished I thought it’d be time to mow the thing again, ’cos the grass would have grown so long while they were talking.

But eventually the two politicians cut a ribbon across the main gate and Mr Surrey announced that the cricket and netball would start in ten minutes. The old man who’d been at Tarrawagga in 1925 or 1808 or whenever it was grabbed the microphone and said, ‘Make sure you beat them, boys, I’ve never seen us beat Maxwell yet.’ I don’t think he’d noticed that the school was now co-ed and we had girls.

About half the crowd wandered off to watch the netball while the other half stayed for the cricket. I grabbed my cricket bag and went over to join the team. I was a bit worried when I saw how nervous they all were. Some of them didn’t look much better than Woody had at two o’clock that morning. I wanted to psych them up, but I didn’t know how, plus I was stuffed from the night before. But Red took charge and gave the best speech I’d heard all day. It was about twenty words long. ‘Kick their butts back down the freeway to Maxwell,’ he said. ‘This is our oval and we want them off it.’

We grinned. Mr Surrey said, ‘That’s not really the sort of attitude we want to encourage, Redmond,’ but I don’t think anyone took much notice.

Harriet was in the team, replacing a kid called Adam, who’d broken his arm on the trampoline. It had been between her and Nirvana for the last place, but she’d got the gig. ‘Did you hear about the action in Brisbane Street?’ I asked her.

‘No, what?’

‘I’ll tell you later.’

Red went out to shake hands with the Maxwell captain and toss the coin. He came back looking a bit annoyed and said, ‘We’re fielding,’ so I guessed he’d lost the toss.

We jogged out onto the oval to lots of clapping from the crowd. I hoped it wasn’t the last time they’d be clapping us today. The Maxwell batsmen marched out, looking spick and span. Red took the ball and marked his run-up. The game began.

I love the start of a cricket match. Dunno why, just love those first few overs when everything’s fresh and new and you don’t know what to expect. My loving this one didn’t last very long but. The Maxwell captain hit Red’s fourth ball straight to me, where I was fielding at mid-wicket. It came right at my chest, and I dropped it. They could have been 1 for 0. Red put his hands on his knees and stayed bent over for a minute, then went back to his mark without looking at me. I squatted on my haunches and chewed a piece of the nice new grass, thinking that I wouldn’t blame Red if he wanted to use me to fertilise it.

That was pretty much my only contribution for the first hour. The new oval had a scoreboard, so I could see what my mistake cost Tarrawagga. When we stopped for drinks, at about twelve o’clock, Maxwell were 0 for 83.

Mr Surrey came on to give us a talking-to while we stood around looking like a bunch of losers. ‘Get your heads up,’ was the first thing he said. Then he made a few suggestions, most of which were quite useful. He did know a bit about cricket. We trudged back to our positions. On his way off the oval with the esky Mr Surrey stopped to talk to me. ‘What’s wrong with you, Josh?’ he asked. ‘You look like you’re half-asleep. And as for that catch you dropped . . . a baby could have caught it.’

‘Uh, I had a late night,’ I said lamely. ‘Didn’t get to bed till real late.’

It was the wrong thing to say, and I knew it as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

‘Well really,’ he said. ‘The night before the most important game of the year, maybe the most important game ever played here at Tarrawagga, the match we’ve been training for all term – well, some of us have – and you can’t even get to bed on time. That’s exactly why I didn’t want you in the team.’

I yawned. I didn’t mean to be rude; I just couldn’t help myself. He gave me a look that could have scorched the grass, and stormed off the oval.

Things were not going well.

At the end of the next over Red chucked the ball to me. Normally I’d have been on earlier, but maybe he’d seen what Mr Surrey had seen: that I wasn’t in the best shape. Plus he might still have been disgusted by my dropped catch. But one thing Mr Surrey had done was motivate me. I was good and angry when I took the ball. I thought Mr Surrey should at least have given me a chance to explain myself. He was always looking for an opportunity to have a go at me.

Even so, I couldn’t find my length, and I had seven runs taken off my first three balls. I was often a bit of a slow starter when I bowled, but this was ridiculous. The fourth ball was no better. A rank long hop. But wouldn’t you know it, sometimes you get lucky. The batsman went to smash it through the covers but he must have been overexcited, because instead of smashing it, he edged it to Shelley at second slip. Bingo! I was suddenly surrounded by excited Tarrawagga players all congratulating me for one of the worst balls I’d bowled all year.

But my fifth ball, now that was a ball I could be proud of. It just came out right, a scorcher that flew straight at the stumps. One person who wasn’t expecting it was the Maxwell captain. Seeing I’d come on fairly late in the morning and seeing my first four balls were pitiful he probably thought I was easy pickings. Way too late he went to jam his bat down on it but already his stumps were looking more like a piece of modern art than a set of cricket stumps. He looked around with his mouth open, like he couldn’t believe it, but it was time for him to go, and he went.

I was on a hat-trick, which I spoiled by bowling a no ball. Trying too hard, I guess. But that gave me one more ball, and I got the length I wanted, and a bit of movement and took out leg stump, sending it spinning through the air. Three for 94. Not exactly a winning position, but better than 0 for 86, which had been the score at the start of the over.

That was the end of my success for a while. But we got a run-out two overs later, when a Maxwell kid went for a single that wasn’t there. Shelley took a wicket in the over after that, then Red got two in one over, just before lunch. So our mood was a bit better as we got our sausages from the barbecue. Maxwell were 7 for 121, and as Red said, if we could get the last three wickets cheaply we’d be in with a good show.

I don’t know what was in the tomato sauce but it worked better for Maxwell than it did for us. Marty dropped an easy chance, almost as easy as the one I’d dropped, and Nathan, our wicketkeeper, missed a stumping when he fumbled the ball. Rolf bowled a couple of overs of rubbish and suddenly the batsmen were belting us all around the ground. I came on again and got hit like everyone else. Finally Harriet spun them both out, but by then the damage was done. Maxwell were 9 for 209. I got the last kid for a duck, and they were all out for 211.

You could tell by the way people avoided our eyes when we came off the field that they thought it was all over, and we were done for. Marty and Michael padded up, looking a bit sick. I sat under a tree, feeling woozy, like an afternoon nap would have been nice. I closed my eyes and did actually doze off for a few minutes. When I opened my eyes again Marty was taking off his pads and I saw the score on the board. Two for 12. Ouch.

A shadow came over me. It was Mr Surrey. He stood there, hands on hips, glaring down. ‘Good to see your level of interest in the game, Josh,’ he said. ‘Let me know if the crowd gets too noisy and I’ll ask them to stop clapping.’

He stalked off. ‘You weren’t up in the middle of the night with bullets flying around you,’ I thought. But before I could spend any more time replaying the action from last night Shelley called, ‘You’re in next, Josh.’ I looked across at the wicket. Red and Michael were batting. I got up and found my pads. At least my nap, short as it was, seemed to have refreshed me. I was feeling better than I had during the Maxwell innings.

I got Harriet to bowl to me so I could warm up but she managed only one ball. As she got ready for the second one I heard a huge yell from the direction of the wicket. ‘Geez, Mr Surrey, I thought you were going to keep them a bit quieter,’ I said. I was thinking of taking another nap. I didn’t really say that; in fact I didn’t say anything, because Mr Surrey was talking to Ms Krishnananthan. He had his back to the game, so I don’t know why he was complaining about me not being interested.

I hadn’t had time to feel nervous about going in. I set off for the centre, passing Michael, who was storming past, thumping his bat into the ground with every step. ‘It didn’t carry,’ he muttered. I hate it when batsmen do that. It’s so distracting.

Halfway to the wicket Red met me. Great. Another distraction. ‘They’re pretty quick,’ he said. ‘But we’ll be right.’ I don’t know why he wanted to tell me that. It didn’t make me feel any better. I took guard, still not sure whether I was completely awake, but when the first ball came thundering down, I woke up all right. It was fast. I shouldered arms but at the last moment realised it was cutting in and likely to take my off stump. There wasn’t time to do anything. I whipped around and watched it graze past the stump by a millimetre. There was a groan from the wicketkeeper and slips. How humiliating would that have been: bowled first ball without offering a shot. I stepped forward and patted down the spot where the ball had bounced, just for something to do. The wickie told me, ‘Don’t worry, mate, you can do all the gardening you want in a minute. But it won’t be here.’

There was a lot of giggling from the slips and the umpire at square leg called out, ‘That’s enough; we’re not having any sledging, thanks.’

I was grateful to him but I tried to put it out of my mind and prepare for the next ball. It came at me like lightning too, one of those awkward ones that keep swinging right into your body, like they’re following you. I got up on my toes and managed to kill it. That was the end of the over.

I had a chat with Red in the middle of the pitch. ‘The other kid’s not as bad,’ he said. ‘But they’re both pretty quick.’

‘Looks like they’re changing bowlers,’ I said.

They were, and maybe it was lucky for us, because the new kid wasn’t too accurate. He was a spinner, but he kept dropping them short. Red hit him for three fours. I survived the next over from the super-fast bowler, and scored three off the last ball, then hit the spinner for four fours, just to go one up on Red. That was the last we saw of him but at least he’d given us some confidence and let me get settled.

I noticed that they had no-one fielding at fine leg. When the quick kid came on again I got to face him after Red took a single off his first ball. I just spooned him away down there for four, and did that twice more before they moved a fielder to cover it. For the first time I looked at the scoreboard: 3 for 61. It was a long way from 211, but it was better than 3 for 15.

I figured they’d give their star bowler a rest now that we were hitting him more easily, but they obviously relied on him a lot, because they kept him on. We didn’t have any more overs like the three where we’d scored 40, but we started picking up runs. Red was quick between the wickets, so we got quite a few singles and twos.

We stopped for drinks, with the score on exactly 100. Despite my little nap I was pretty tired. In any other match I probably would have been out half a dozen times by now, but I felt like I couldn’t afford to fail in this one. I’d been concentrating so hard I was going cross-eyed.

At 3 for 100 we still had a long way to go. But at least we had a chance. The kids who brought the drinks out were really excited. They seemed to think we already had it in the bag. I knew better. Given the choice of 211 all out or 3 for 100, I’d have taken 211 every time.

First ball after drinks, Red went. He tried to sweep, the ball just popped up, and the wickie raced around and caught it. I swore to myself. Red stamped off, looking disgusted. It was a soft dismissal, but classic situation, getting out after a break. Happens all the time.

Rolf came in. He hadn’t bowled well, but he was pretty reliable with the bat. He’d failed against Bromwich, but so had most people, and he’d made 60 against Ravensburg. But he was the last of our good batsmen. We had a long tail. Next after Rolf would be Nathan, and although he was a good wicketkeeper he was a nervous batsman.

What Rolf did was actually pretty dumb. He hoicked the first ball for six. It was a great shot and the crowd loved it. The first six to be hit on the new oval. He’d made history. But I didn’t like the look on his face. ‘Oh no,’ I groaned to myself. ‘Please don’t try to do it again.’

He tried. This was a fuller ball, pitched on leg stump. He jumped out to it, missed it completely and was stumped.

People always say cricket’s a team game. I didn’t know about that. Seemed to me most of the sports they called team games got dominated by a couple of players. If you had two or three stars, it made all the difference. Not just cricket; same for netball, football, basketball . . . as long as you’d got those couple of stars you could get away with at least half your team wandering around doing nothing. I knew I was quite good at cricket and sometimes I’d been one of those stars. But it was easier at Abernathy, where they were so used to winning that they didn’t get too upset when they lost, because they knew that they’d win next week, and the week after that, and the week after that. They had four trophy cabinets in the front reception place: three were full and the fourth had only one empty shelf.

It was similar in a way playing for Southern Districts, because the team didn’t matter: you were playing for yourself. Those games were trials for state selection, so no-one really cared which team won. And Cypress was just a bit of fun. Only now, trying to get Tarrawagga to win something for about the first time in history, was I in a game that mattered. Really mattered. As Rolf trudged off I told myself, ‘Well, Josh, if you ever wanted to be a star, now’s your chance.’

But it wasn’t really about me being a star or a black hole or something in between. It was about a word that teachers like Mr Surrey use all the time, until you’re sick of hearing it. Responsibility. Yep, that was it. I had to make myself responsible for this walking disaster called the Tarrawagga Primary School cricket team and somehow hold it together till we could make another 106 runs. We were exactly halfway to the total we needed for a win, and we’d lost all our best players.

I did something I’ve never done before, and that is walk out to meet the new batsman. I’d never done it before because I don’t like it when people do it to me. I hadn’t liked it when Red did it. I reckon it interferes with your concentration. Makes it harder for you to get ready for your innings. But I was too scared of what Nathan might do. I said to him: ‘Just block every single ball, Nath. I want you still here in two hours, get it? Two hours. You try to hit a six like Rolf, and I’ll break a stump over your head.’

He was only a little kid, Nathan. He was in Grade 5, but he looked even younger. At least he was quick on his feet, and he was smart. Now he stared at me like I was Jack the Ripper having a bad day. ‘Yeah, that’s pretty much what Mr Surrey said,’ he whispered.

I headed back to the non-striker’s end, hoping I hadn’t made him any more nervous than he already was. If he got out first ball we were well and truly gone.

Nathan blocked the first ball he got, and the second, and the third, even though it was a full toss. That was the end of the over. I went straight up to him. ‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘Perfect. Now I’ll try to keep the strike till the fifth or sixth ball, so be ready to run a quick single late in the over, OK?’

‘OK,’ he said. He looked slightly more relaxed, as if getting through three deliveries had given him confidence. Three deliveries! I needed him to get through a hundred.

I scored two twos but I couldn’t get the single I wanted off the last balls, so he would have to face at the start of the next over. We had another chat mid-wicket; basically me just making encouraging noises. He blocked the first ball of the over again, but he hit it a bit harder this time, and it rolled into the covers, to a slow fieldsman. I was already backing up halfway down the wicket, so I yelled, ‘Yes!’ and raced towards Nathan. He gazed at me in shock then took off like a startled hare. The fielder fumbled the ball and Nathan made it. I think he might have made it anyway, but I was grateful for the fumble.

I hit a four and another two, then got a single off the second-last ball, meaning Nathan only had to face one ball. Unfortunately he hit it too well and called me through for a single. We had the next mid-wicket conference. He groaned, ‘I know, I’m sorry, Josh, I lost my head.’

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘You’re going fine.’

And he hit another single off the first ball of the next over, so that put me back on strike.

He lasted about ten overs all up, which was pretty good for him. Finally he got given LBW. It was a dodgy decision; I reckon it was pitched outside leg stump. Nothing anyone could do about it though. We were 6 for 161. Fifty runs needed for a tie, 51 to win.

Shelley came in. She’d been dropped down the order since Bromwich. It had worked when we played Ravensburg and she made 31. It didn’t work this time. She stayed for four overs but she played and missed at least six times. She had amazing luck. I was trying to get the strike but mostly I had to stand and watch from the other end. Then she swung wildly at a slower delivery and got nowhere near it. I watched in agony as the ball nicked the bail on her off stump. For a moment nothing happened, then the bail fell gently and quietly to the ground. Shelley’s luck had finally run out. Seven for 173.

Eight for 176, as Muzza played a sucker shot and was caught in the gully. Nine for 183, as Dougie came and went. While he walked off, head hanging, the umpires had a little chat. Then one of them said, ‘Last two overs.’

I couldn’t believe it. I knew the game had to finish at five, but somehow that had gone out of my head. We were in an impossible situation. Twelve balls, one wicket standing, and we needed 28 just to tie. Right then I would have grabbed a tie with both hands and fallen to the ground kissing the grass of the new oval.

Harriet was the new batsman. I remembered how she hated batting, how she wouldn’t bat when we played in the backyard. No wonder she was at number 11. I went and met her, as I’d done for everyone since Nathan. Having broken my rule once I’d now given it away completely. ‘Keep your head on,’ I told her. ‘Have a bash if it looks hittable, but don’t go crazy.’

She looked at me calmly. ‘I’ll do the best I can,’ she said.

‘Cool,’ I said. ‘So will I.’

Dougie had got out at the end of the over, so I was facing. The bowler came in, and I waited, heart pounding. The ball went down the leg side and I gambled on it being called a wide, and let it go. The umpire hesitated, and looked at me. I stared back at him, kind of daring him not to call it. He spread his arms. Bonus. That was one less run we had to get. And still twelve balls to go.

I swung at the next and mistimed it but got two. I was too tired to calculate the run rate we needed but I knew it was more than two from each ball. The boundaries on the new oval were pretty big and I wasn’t sure that I could hit many fours. And we needed fours.

I hit the next one hard and it went quite a way towards the boundary but stopped before it got there. We ran two but Harriet called for a third, which meant I was no longer on strike. I watched, heart thumping, from the bowler’s end, as she played and missed at her first ball. I glanced at the scoreboard. I might have been tired but I could still figure out the number of runs we needed. Twenty-three, with nine balls left.

To my horror Harriet took an almighty swing at the next delivery. She got an edge to it, the wickie dived across, missed it, and it raced down to the boundary for four. I raced almost as fast down the wicket, to tell her again not to go crazy. She looked a little less calm now. ‘Yeah, that was a bit close,’ she said. ‘But hey, we got four. That’s my first ever four.’

‘Congratulations,’ I said.

And she was still on strike. She connected with the next one quite well and we got a single, but that made life more complicated, because I had to try to keep the strike, and this was the last ball of the over. I needed a one or a three. I went for the big hit through the covers, looking for three, but mistimed it completely and it dribbled pathetically down the wicket. ‘Come on,’ Harriet screamed, racing towards me. I ran like a fox past her, deliberately blocking the fieldsman, and made my ground. Only one run, but at least I’d kept the strike.

For the last over they brought back their star bowler. Breathing hard I did the calculations. We needed 17 to win. I saw Harriet coming down the wicket and I went out to meet her. ‘Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you,’ she said. ‘Mr Surrey said to just block everything and go for the draw.’

‘He what?’

It had never occurred to me to go for the draw. The draw? After all that excitement? It seemed so weak. The crowd were chanting and yelling. Most of them were on our side. It was the noisiest support I’d ever had in a cricket match.

I hesitated. ‘What do you reckon?’ I asked Harriet.

‘Let’s go for glory,’ she said. ‘It’s only a game. If we win we’ll be heroes.’

I gulped. What did she mean, it was only a game? Where had she been during Red’s inspiring speech during assembly?

‘If we lose, Mr Surrey’ll come after me with an angle grinder.’

‘What’s an angle grinder?’

‘Not now.’

The height of the ball was unpredictable on the new wicket. The first one of the new over kept low and I hit it square of the wicket for two. The next one was an attempted yorker, but it swung just wide of off stump. I went for the drive, and I swear, I’ve never felt anything so sweet as the click of that ball coming off the middle of my bat; have never seen anything so sweet as that ball racing to the fence. Four runs. Now we had to get 11 off four deliveries. But the third one was a more successful yorker. I did well to keep it out of my stumps. Harriet came down the wicket again. ‘We have to get a four off every ball, pretty much.’

‘Thanks for the maths lesson.’

I waited for the next ball. I had to remind myself to breathe, as the bowler came striding in. He pitched it pretty short, obviously hoping it would take off my head. But it bounced lower than anyone could have expected, coming through somewhere between my waist and my chest. With a glorious sense that at last I had something I could slog, I pulled it through square wicket, remembering my follow-through. It went soaring into the distance. The fieldsman on the boundary raced around, arms outstretched. The ball seemed to be flying forever. There was screaming from the crowd as the fielder got closer and closer. He got there, and leapt for it, but it was a few centimetres above the tips of his fingers. Over the boundary, for six.

I wanted to dance around the oval waving my bat. But we still had five to get, from two balls. At least now it wasn’t mission impossible.

I waited for the next delivery, knowing we had to get some runs from it. I couldn’t hope to hit another six. This guy was a pretty good bowler. It was well pitched up but this time flew higher than I expected. I tried to cut it and managed to hit it fairly hard, but with the thick upper edge of the bat. It went straight back towards the bowler, which wasn’t part of my plan. He grabbed at it as he followed through, and he might have got a finger to it but he couldn’t stop it. The ball sped away. ‘Run,’ Harriet and I yelled at each other at the same time. We took one and came back for another. As we passed I said to her, ‘Two’s enough.’ I got in safely but I was running so hard I took a few metres to pull up. Suddenly there were screams from the spectators, and to my horror I heard Harriet screeching, ‘Run, Josh!’

I looked around. She was halfway down the pitch coming back for the third. I couldn’t believe it. I thought of shouting ‘No!’ at her but she had such a look of determination – no, make that desperation – that I realised nothing would stop her. I wheeled around and took off with maximum acceleration. If I was running like a fox before, I was running like a rabbit now. I thought, ‘Maybe this is why they call tail-end batsmen bunnies.’ I could see the fielder about to pick up the ball. As I got close to the popping crease I flattened down, with my bat out way in front of me. With more than a metre to go, I knew the fieldsman would be throwing about now. There was no point looking at him any more. All I could see were those three precious stumps, my castle of safety if I could get there. I dived and did a massive slide along the pitch. Nothing touched the stumps but suddenly I felt a smash to my right forearm. My first thought was that I’d been shot. Maybe I was remembering last night. Then I realised what had happened. The fieldsman, who was a big guy, had thrown the ball with all his strength. He’d missed the stumps and got me.

I let go the bat and kept sliding, grabbing at my arm. I crashed into the stumps. Pain was storming up and down my arm. I tried to sit up, among the wreckage, but I felt giddy. I screamed as the pain got worse, ten times worse. I might have blacked out for a moment; I’m not sure, but it seemed like Mr Surrey and Red and about a hundred other people were surrounding me and I didn’t know where they had come from. Harriet was there too, saying over and over, ‘Ohmigod Josh I’m so sorry.’

‘Take it easy, Josh,’ Mr Surrey said. ‘Try to sit up.’ I did but the pain engulfed me again and I yelled. It was like someone had just kicked me right on the same spot. I sat there in fear as Mr Surrey checked it out. I was worried that he’d give me a Chinese burn or something to make sure I wasn’t faking. But he was actually quite good, holding my arm firmly but gently and looking at my fingers. He asked me to wriggle them, but I could hardly move them.

The fieldsman’s face appeared in front of me. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said.

‘No worries,’ I muttered.

The umpires started moving the crowd back, which was good because I needed some air in my lungs. ‘Look,’ Mr Surrey said, ‘I’d say it’s probably broken, Josh. I don’t like the angle of it and I don’t like that you can’t move your fingers. But we won’t know for certain till we get you to hospital. Do you reckon you can stand up?’

‘I think so,’ I said.

I struggled to my feet. Red picked up my bat. ‘Bad luck, Tarrawagga,’ one of the umpires said. ‘You got very close. Well done.’

Red looked devastated. Harriet looked stunned. ‘Do you mean we lose?’ she asked.

‘Yes, ’fraid so,’ said the umpire. ‘If a batsman retires hurt, as Josh has to do, he can come back in later, when someone else gets out. But unfortunately you’ve run out of batsmen. Anyway, he wouldn’t have been able to come back with a broken arm.’

‘But that’s not fair,’ Harriet said. ‘They broke his arm and now they benefit from it.’

‘Sorry, but that’s the rules.’

‘Come on, Josh,’ Mr Surrey said. ‘Red, can you bring his bat? Congratulations, Maxwell, well played. Nathan, run and get an icepack from my esky. Josh, I’ll hold your arm to support you as we walk along.’

But Harriet interrupted him. ‘Listen, Josh,’ she said. ‘Do you reckon you could just stay here for the last ball? We only need two runs.’

I had to think for a minute. Yes, that was right, one ball to go, we needed one to tie, two to win, and . . . and Harriet was on strike. That was a bit of a problem. The other problem was that I couldn’t run. I’d just taken three steps away from the pitch, and each one sent a jarring pain through my arm that had me crying out. Harriet must have figured that too, because she came over and whispered in my ear, ‘Don’t worry, you won’t have to run, I’ll hit a four.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Mr Surrey said.

I looked at his face, then at Harriet’s, then at Red’s. It was Red who made my mind up for me. When he heard Harriet’s suggestion a light came back into his eyes. To be honest, I knew the light would only last two minutes, but I also knew we couldn’t just give up so tamely.

‘I’ll be his runner,’ Red suggested.

‘We’re playing international rules,’ the umpire who’d explained about retiring hurt said. ‘No runners for an injured batsman.’

‘That’s true,’ Mr Surrey said.

I ignored both of them. ‘I’m staying,’ I said.

The umpire frowned and said: ‘You can’t let an injured player stay on the ground, where he’ll risk further injury.’

‘Is that a rule, or just your opinion?’ Harriet asked. She said it pretty rudely, but on the other hand this umpire came from Maxwell, and he seemed pretty anxious to get us out of there. His face went red.

‘It’s a statement of the obvious,’ he said.

‘No-one can make me retire hurt,’ I said. ‘I’m not hurt. I feel fine. I’m choosing to stay out here. To keep batting.’

‘You’ve got a broken arm,’ the umpire said.

‘Are you a doctor?’ I asked. Seemed like Harriet’s rudeness was infectious. But the longer this took, the worse the pain got. I could hardly stay on my feet.

It took a few minutes, but eventually all the spectators, including Mr Surrey, had to go, leaving Harriet and me out there. ‘Are you going to be all right?’ Harriet asked me.

‘Just get on with it,’ I croaked.

Considering that she’d only ever scored one four in her entire cricket career, I thought her chances of getting another one were about as good as my parents’ chances of getting our money back from Antelope. But I wanted to encourage her. As she walked off towards the batting crease, I called out, ‘Don’t forget to dance.’

She looked back at me, as she marched down the pitch. ‘What? Dance?’

‘You know what I mean. Use your feet.’

‘Oh.’ She looked like she’d never heard such a weird idea before. ‘Oh. OK, I’ll dance.’

She arrived at the batting crease. She took strike. The fielders were all on their toes. The crowd was so silent you could have heard a gumnut fall. The bowler came in. I was standing well away to the side, so he wouldn’t bump me. He let fly. It was a delivery pitched on off stump, just a little full but quite a good length. Harriet danced out of her crease, got her front foot to the pitch of it, and with her head nicely over the ball, with a big backswing and a perfect follow-through, hit the prettiest shot I’d ever seen. It went far, far into the distance, over the fieldsman’s head, over the ropes, over the fence, further than the six Rolf had hit, further than the six I had hit. It landed on the roof of Mr Surrey’s car. They told me later that it made quite a dent. But by then I was swaying like a ship in a storm, and they had to get a stretcher to take me to the ambulance.

Like Woody, I was kept at the hospital overnight but next day I was back at school, with my arm in plaster. All the kids were talking about the game. Our netball team had lost 61 to 34, so most people were more interested in talking about the cricket than the netball.

Red had the scores. Harriet had made 11, I’d made 129, but everyone knew who the hero was. Harriet was surrounded all morning. My parents told me I had to come home at lunchtime, because of my arm, so I hardly got to see her. But she popped up just as I was getting into the car. ‘Hey, thanks for the advice yesterday,’ she said.

‘What advice?’ I asked.

‘To dance. Best cricket advice I’ve ever had. I never really got what Mr Surrey meant when he said “use your feet”. But “dance”, yeah, I got that.’

‘No worries. Hey, good shot by the way.’

‘Yeah, wasn’t bad, was it? Probably never do anything like it again but. Speaking of dancing, you want to come to my brother’s birthday party?’

‘You’ve got a brother?’

‘Yeah. He lives with my mum though. Won’t have anything to do with my dad. It’s his eighteenth on Saturday, and I’m allowed to have one friend my own age. What are you like at dancing? Can you do it with a broken arm?’

‘I’ve never tried. But I’ll give it a go.’

She grinned at me, and I grinned back and got in the car. ‘Who was that?’ my mother asked.

‘My first date, I think,’ I replied.

We drove home. Mum put me on the couch with a blanket and the remote control. ‘When are you going to tell me about the other night, and Woody and that?’ I asked.

‘When Dad gets home,’ she said.

He came back early, to my surprise, just after four o’clock.

‘How’s it going, champ?’ he asked.

‘What are you doing home?’ I asked. ‘I’m going good.’

‘I wanted to see how you were. That was a nasty break.’

‘It was a pretty wild 48 hours,’ I said, then did a bit of quick maths in my head. ‘Well, 36 hours more like.’

‘Yes, it was, wasn’t it? I guess you’d like to know what it was all about.’

I turned off the TV, and waited.

‘When your grandpa offered us this house,’ he said, ‘he warned us that we’d have to go through a security check. Of course we wanted to know why. It turns out that a couple of years ago the police looked at the house next door as a possible safe house. Before they signed the contract, they did a security check on Grandpa, and no doubt on the neighbours on the other side as well. Obviously everyone tested out OK, because they went ahead and bought the place.’

‘What’s a safe house?’ I asked. I thought I knew the answer, but I just wanted to make sure.

‘It’s a house the police use for hiding people. Sometimes they’re vital witnesses in big court cases, who have to be protected. Sometimes they’re people who’ve been targeted by criminals. Maybe a couple of attempts have already been made to hurt them, and the police are worried that the criminals will try again.

‘Anyway, the government paid Grandpa a small retainer, that’s like an allowance, every month, on condition that he kept them informed about who was living here, and that he agreed not to rent the house to anyone who’d couldn’t pass a security check.’

Mum had come into the room by this stage, and she joined in. ‘Your dad and I talked about whether this was going to be a safe house for us, never mind the safe house next door, but we had a chat with Lenny and Luke on the other side, and they reassured us. They said it was hardly ever used, and there’d never been a problem.

‘They also explained that police only keep safe houses for a couple of years, and then sell them again, so this one was probably nearing the end of its life.’

‘So,’ I asked, ‘did they choose it for a safe house because there were two policemen on the other side of us?’

‘Apparently not. Lenny said he thought that probably made it more attractive to them, but it wasn’t a major factor. Anyway, as you know, some people were brought here a few weeks ago. We don’t know anything about them except that there were three: a mother, and her mother, and the boy you were told was named Woody.’

‘He said that wasn’t his name,’ I remembered.

‘True, it wasn’t, not even his nickname. It seems that one of the police officers made it up on the spur of the moment, when they realised he needed a name if he was going to play with you and Callan.’

‘So, was he a witness in a court case?’

‘No, no, not the boy. Either his mother or his grandmother, we don’t know which.’

‘We’ll have to keep an eye on the newspapers,’ Mum said. ‘No doubt it’ll be in there sooner or later.’

‘So what’s Woody’s real name?’

‘We don’t know that either. You can understand, the lives of these people depend on no-one knowing anything about them. Although someone found out where this family was, hence the attack on them.’

‘Was anyone hurt? Was anyone shot? How’s Woody?’

‘Woody’s fine; like we thought, his main problem was shock. He’s out of hospital and back with his mum and grandma. They’ve been moved to another house, not surprisingly. But one of the policemen was wounded and one of the gunmen was killed.’

‘He was killed? How many gunmen were there? Is the policeman going to be OK?’

‘There were two gunmen and, yes, the policeman was shot through the shoulder, and is no doubt in a lot more pain than you are today, but he’ll be OK in the long run.’

‘Did they arrest the other man?’

‘Yes, they got him.’

‘Why did the cops want Woody to play with Callan and me?’

‘They checked it with us first, of course. The poor kid was going mad stuck in that house all day and night. He wasn’t allowed to go to the shops, wasn’t allowed to go for walks, wasn’t allowed to go to the playground. He had no other kids to play with, no-one his own age he could even talk to. You really made a difference to him, and the police are very grateful to you – you and Callan.’

‘Probably had vitamin D deficiency, poor kid,’ my mother said. ‘Being in that house all the time. He looked pale enough.’

I couldn’t think of any more questions. It seemed hard to believe that here in this boring street in boring Tarrawagga we’d had the most amazing and exciting and scary experience of my life.

Then I thought of one more question. ‘Are we going to keep living here?’

‘Yes. They won’t be using the place next door as a safe house any more, for obvious reasons. It’ll go on the market in a week or so. And we still can’t afford to move.’

‘What do you think about that, honey?’ asked my mum. ‘I know you don’t like the school very much.’

I shrugged. ‘The school’s all right. Tarrawagga’s a hole. But I can live with it.’

‘So you’ve got to know a few people, huh?’ Mum asked, in a kind of teasing voice. ‘One person in particular maybe?’

I ignored her. Picking up the remote control I turned the TV back on. I wondered when Harriet would get back from staying with her mum. I should have asked for her phone number.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Alex, Charlie, Harry, Wilson, Oliver and Fletcher. As long as you guys are around, I’ll never run out of stories.

About John Marsden

John Marsden grew up in three states of Australia, but not all at the same time. (He’s big, but not that big.) He now lives in Victoria, where he continues to age with each passing minute. One day, barring miracles, he will be dead.

John loved school so much that he started his own. Or, to put it another way, he hated school so much that he started his own so that other kids wouldn’t have to go through the suffering he experienced. The school, called Candlebark, is in a beautiful forest near Hanging Rock. It is pretty much compulsory for Candlebark kids to climb trees, roll down hills, play with sticks and wallow in mud.

Candlebark, which began in 2006, is John’s proudest achievement.

John has also published more than forty books, including Tomorrow, When the War Began, which was made into a highly successful movie. Among his other hits are Looking for Trouble, Staying Alive in Year Five, Creep Street and Cool School. John is one of Australia’s biggest selling and most awarded authors.

Also by John Marsden

So Much to Tell You

The Journey

The Great Gatenby

Staying Alive in Year 5

Out of Time

Letters from the Inside

Take My Word for It

Looking For Trouble

Tomorrow . . . (Ed.)

Cool School

Creep Street

Checkers

For Weddings and a Funeral (Ed.)

This I Believe (Ed.)

Dear Miffy

Prayer for the 21st Century

Everything I Know About Writing

Secret Men’s Business

The Tomorrow Series 1999 Diary

The Rabbits

Norton’s Hut

Marsden on Marsden

Winter

The Head Book

The Boy You Brought Home

The Magic Rainforest

Millie

A Roomful of Magic
the tomorrow series

Tomorrow, When the War Began

The Dead of Night

The Third Day, the Frost

Darkness, Be My Friend

Burning for Revenge

The Night is for Hunting

The Other Side of Dawn
the ellie chronicles

While I Live

Incurable

Circle of Flight

First published 2013 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000.

Copyright © Jomden Pty Ltd 2013

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available
from the National Library of Australia
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

EPUB format: 9781743514443

Typeset by Post Pre-press, Queensland

Cover design by Seymour Designs

Cover images: Getty Images

The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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