There it is, the only sound that has ever mattered. Speed. Summer has not yet come to the suburb and the afternoons have not yet become endless. For an hour now he has been bowling in the concrete and wire cricket nets. Already the light is fading, and soon it will be too difficult to bowl, for the transition from half-light to darkness is still swift, like it is in winter. Not that he hasn’t bowled in the dark. Not that he hasn’t bowled when it has been so dark that he may as well have been bowling blind. Soon, this half-light will be gone, he will make the short walk home, and the best part of the day will be over.
Tomorrow he will once again return to that forgetful world of rhythm and speed, to the oblivion of bowling. At all other times of the day or night he is either looking forward or looking back, but not in the nets. In the nets time ceases to matter and it is only the fading light that tells him that somewhere out there in the everyday world time is, in fact, passing. The light, and the six o’clock bells of St Matthew’s tell him this. But, even so, those bells and that fading light both belong to another world. The sun sinks on other people’s days, the bells of St Matthew’s ring for other people’s ears. Not his. Not in the nets.
This is the part of the day that belongs to him entirely. And those instruments that measure the passing of time and the day, all those daily occurrences that mark the passage of the hours such as lunch, the last lesson and the seven o’clock news, don’t matter here. And when the last ball is bowled, when he steps back into the everyday life of the suburb, he always has the feeling of stepping back into some foreign world that was never meant for him and which has merely claimed him again for the time being.
As he walks home along the illuminated bitumen streets to his house, the ball still in hand, his school bag over his shoulder, he dwells on the summer that will soon be upon them — the cricket, the end of school and the long, warm evenings to come — and he is already looking forward to it all, just as, by the end of the summer, he will be looking back on it all. The time in the nets, that wasn’t time at all, is gone.
The lights of the golf-course clubhouse shine brightly to his left. Inside, their faces red from the sun, the last of the weekday golfers will be at the bar filling up as quickly as possible before returning home, not enough presence of mind left in them to know that the time for coming and going has already passed and that they are in that curious state of being drunk before they know it. He hears the occasional sounds of motor cars along the main road behind him, sees the bare frames of new houses popping up on the few vacant blocks that remain, while overhead an aeroplane drones across the suburb, its lights quickly fading into the darkness.
Beyond the golf-course clubhouse, the ghost gums, the ferns and the low pines that line the eastern fence of the course, stand silently watching everything — slow, steady growers in a puzzling world of speed.