An hour later, while Rita is sitting in the house looking out the lounge-room window, Vic is on the fairway, and Kathleen Marsden is in a shaded corner of the Home gardens, Michael is in an overcrowded car driving to the match. He is nauseous. The drive always brings him to the point of vomiting. It’s not just the sweet smell of chewing gum, the hot plastic seats and the car exhaust. Five passengers are crowded into the tiny Morris Minor. Apart from the driver — a young churchmember who organises Sunday Bible classes — everyone is in their cricket whites, their bags and bats on their knees. Michael sits next to the rear window, his head half hanging out, the breeze fanning his face.
They are driving to a large park next to a river. Old trees line the boundary that runs alongside of the river and there is shade under those trees. It is a ground he enjoys playing on, green and even, the way grounds in all the cricket books are — not the dusty paddocks he is used to. On such grounds he can imagine cricket being played as they play it in books and on television. Trees shade the boundary, the field is mown regularly and the lawnmower leaves circles of pleasant green where it has been, the whole ground ringed with shades of green, radiating from the centre to the boundaries like the rings of a tree trunk. The approach to the wicket is even and smooth and Michael knows he will be able to bowl without the fear of falling over in potholes.
With his head half out of the window and the breeze on his face, Michael thinks of the ground to which they are travelling and the more he thinks of it the less he notices the sweet, sickly scent of the chewing gum that fills every corner of the car despite the windows being down. The more he thinks of the ground the less he notices the hot plastic seats, the occasional exhaust belched up from beneath the car, and the less he hears the talk around him and the motion of chewing jaws.
But in spite of all this he is soon listening to the driver — the young man who organises Sunday Bible classes, whose nose is small and pointed and whose hair is smooth and flattened with oil. Michael is listening because he heard the word ‘Russia’. The driver is talking about fences. They have, he says, barbed-wire fences to keep the people in. And as the houses and nature strips and lawns pass by in a blur, the driver continues to talk of barbed-wire fences because these are the types of fences found in Russia. Everybody in Russia wants to leave but they are stopped by these fences. The car is silent, everybody’s jaws have ceased their relentless chewing, everybody is listening to this talk of fences and barbed wire.
‘I don’t know if it’s that bad,’ Michael says almost to himself as he looks out the window. But he isn’t, he is speaking to the car — or, more accurately, to the driver. As soon as he speaks, a different kind of silence settles over the car. It is different from the attentive silence that filled the car when the driver was speaking — that silence was similar to the silence of Sunday classes, when this young man talked about the New and Old Testaments, lessons Michael never listens to because he only wants to play cricket. The silence that fills the car after Michael has spoken is the sort of silence that follows when somebody has said the wrong thing, when people realise that although someone may be one of their number, they are not one of them. It is a silence that excludes him. After a long, thoughtful pause, the driver speaks.
‘So, you don’t think it’s that bad?’
‘No.’
He doesn’t really know if it is that bad or not, but the driver drags the comment from him and Michael will gladly say it again just to see his nose betray the most minute of twitches.
There is no other response from him though, and they drive on in silence to the ground where old trees line the boundary and provide shade. This second silence lasts the whole way to the ground. This second silence, Michael notes as block by block, brick and weatherboard houses clatter by, completes his banishment.
He is content to be banished. Banishment is fine. They talk a lot at the club about playing for the team. But Michael has never played for the team. He has no time for teams. His cricket is personal. He has never told anybody that every time he steps out on the field he plays for himself and not the team because it is not the done thing. He plays in a team because he has to in order to play at all, but he has never played for a team. He is a bowler, and bowlers — he is convinced — go it alone. And so, Michael plays for himself — and for speed. For it is speed and speed alone that will one day lift him out of his street, his suburb and this whole sickly world of chewing gum and plastic seats.
Larwood played for his team and look what they did to him. Only mugs played for the team. He wants to talk further about this, but keeps his thoughts to himself as the car approaches the ground, and the dark, cool shadows of the trees that line the boundary come into view.