A little over a hundred miles to the west of the suburb in the old gold town of Ballarat, Frank Worrell is alone in his hotel room. His team has just completed a country game, a pleasant jaunt. The night is hot, hotter than the suburbs. His players are either asleep or quietly drinking downstairs. He hears nothing. His hand is under his head and his eyes are fixed on the window in front of him as the lights of the town, one by one, are soaked up by the country darkness.
On the table is the selected poetry of WB Yeats. It is not his copy. The book was given to him before he left for this tour by a silver-haired, elder statesman from Trinidad; one of those who had fought long and hard to deliver the captaincy to Worrell. Worrell is Barbados born. The islands of his West Indies are scattered. It is cricket that draws them together. Cricket that prompts someone to reach across the islands, across the waters, with the gift of a book. It’s a game, of course, but this summer they have been playing more than cricket. This summer nothing could go wrong, which is why Frank Worrell has been alone all summer and why he will remain alone until it finishes. It has fallen to him to ensure that nothing goes astray, that events do not turn bad. He must not only be as good as those who have gone before him, he must be better. It was with a puzzling wink in his eye that this elder statesman from Trinidad gave Worrell the gift of his book. When he first looked into it the book fell open at the poem that has been his companion throughout the summer. And from the moment Worrell opened the book he understood the wink, for there was a marker on its page. It is the place he goes back to on nights such as this, when he cannot sleep. Even though he has read the poem so often now that he has committed it to memory, he has, over the summer, found reassurance in reading it on the page.
It is an old book, one that has been lovingly read over the years. Worrell is a writer and a reader, and the point of the poem his benefactor had selected — to stand him in good stead — is not lost on Worrell. The trick this fly has, of being able to walk on water, is not so miraculous for a fly. It is the surface tension that allows the fly to take its dainty steps across the stream. It is the surface tension that supports it, while the sheer weight and mass of the watery currents swirl beneath it. It is not so miraculous an act for a fly to perform, but to think like a fly walking on water, day after day, night after night, is another matter. One day, when the summer is over and the games are all done, Frank Worrell will relax and he will relinquish the loneliness of his captaincy, and when he does that he will know what it all took from him. He will know what the cost was, for even now he suspects that the cost will be high. That the strength that is required to think in dainty long steps that do not break the surface tension is immense, and, once that strength is spent, it is spent forever. It is a way of getting through what must be got through, and it can only be done once. Just as it is a way of doing things that can only be done alone.
Now, on this hot Saturday night, the summer coming to a close, he is beginning to feel the weight of his loneliness, and for the first time all summer he is beginning to ask himself how long he can sustain this mental trick. He is aware of being tired in a way that he has never been tired before, a tiredness so deep he can’t conceive of ever being the same again. When he returns to this book, to this poem, it is the sustaining reassurance of the words on the page that he seeks, the reassurance that the trick, the trance, can be sustained for a few weeks more, until the weight of these days will fall from him and he will know the cost.
His eyes linger on the page. The night is still. The town dark. In the warm, thick night, a passenger train on the last part of its journey rattles down towards the restless suburbs of the city. Frank Worrell closes his book, the book that has given him a place to go when a place to go was needed. He closes it now, perhaps for the last time and prepares for sleep, for the morning, and the trick of thinking in light, long-legged steps.