On the day the suburb wakes to the death of Webster, Michael is contemplating the district club oval — a field so completely green and thick with grass that it could easily have sprung from a book and he, Michael, were about to step onto one of its pages. He pauses at the gate — his new boots in his school bag — and dwells on the curve of the white picket fence surrounding the oval before taking that first step into the world of the great Lindwall. For it is on playing fields such as these that he will find them all, those distant figures that fed his youth. And it is at this moment, before stepping over the gutter and onto the oval, that he appreciates, for the first time, the deeply thrilling private joy his father must have known when his dream was so close that he could almost see his name on the roster board of the Big Wheel drivers.
As he crosses the ground he is sure that all the speed that is within him could be released on grounds such as these.
At the nets he sees for the first time pitches that are neither concrete nor gravel nor sand nor dirt, but turf. He bends down on one knee to open his school bag and take his boots out. As he puts the new white boots on the grass, something turns his head and he feels the impulse to look about. When he does, he sees it, close up, for the first time. Speed. One moment he is holding his boots in mid-air, the next he has placed them on the ground. But in that time an anonymous white arm has whipped over and a dull red ball has covered the length of the pitch, soundlessly bouncing off the back of the nets. It is only a glimpse, and he has never seen speed close at hand before, but it is unmistakable. Whoever owns that anonymous white arm has the gift of speed. All around him heads are turning and watching closely as the boy runs in once more. Michael too. And as he watches the whole process this time — the run, the approach and the delivery — he realises it is not just the boy’s speed that is turning heads, it is the way he does it. An action too perfect to have been learnt. This boy has never studied anybody, Michael is sure of that. Why he is sure, he doesn’t know. But he is. Michael watches again and again, and every time it is the same — smooth, easy and perfect — too perfect to have been studied. The more he watches, the more he realises he is watching a natural. He has heard of naturals, those for whom everything falls into place because it is written into them. This action, this ease, this speed, are written into the arms and legs and back and brain of the natural. It is his gift and he is as unaware of it as a bird is of flying — or Kathleen Marsden of the brightness she brings with her. He is watching one of those for whom everything effortlessly falls into place — girlfriends, conversation, the prompt obedience with which a cigarette ejects itself from a soft pack with one flick of the finger. Life, he suspects, is full of naturals. And this bowler, whose speed is turning heads, does not have to look into books or photographs or films to see a picture of what he wants to become. He simply is. He simply does. And if you were to ask him how he does it, he would not be able to tell you. But Michael could. He knows he could, and he wishes so dearly that he couldn’t.
The boots glow on the glowing grass. The clock clock of bats and balls, the grunts, the comments of coaches and senior players carry across the nets and in from the curved lines of fieldsmen out on the ground. The first thing he notes is that the boots are heavier than his worn-out sandshoes, heavier than his school shoes. Heavier than anything he has worn. But heavy or not, these boots will give him feet, and as he picks up a ball from a metal bucket — a leather ball — a senior player directs him to a far net.
The natural is still turning heads and as Michael marks out the fifteen paces of his run he is determined to do the same. For if you don’t turn heads, you don’t have speed, and if you don’t have speed you have nothing and all the effort was for nothing. It has taken years to arrive at this point and as he stands at the top of his run he feels those years, and they are heavier than his boots. It has come down to this. To the next hour. If he is to turn heads, he must do it now.
As he stands ball in hand waiting to begin, all the wisdom of those years deserts him. The voice of the great Lindwall, the voice that tells him to begin slowly, to build speed gradually and not to overstretch at delivery, is nowhere to be heard as he starts his run to the crease. He hears none of their voices, all of those flickering figures in black and white who taught him. He is conscious only of the extra weight of his boots, of how slow and leaden his steps are, and of the need to push his legs, to lift his feet, to run fast. When he reaches his delivery stride he feels, for an alarming moment, as though his raised left leg, with the extra weight of the boot attached, just might continue on through the air and down the pitch without him. He is not even aware of where the ball has landed. Again and again, ball after ball, he is aware only of the need to push his legs. Faster than the time before, then faster again. But it is all wrong. More wrong than it has ever been, yet he seems powerless to stop it. Each time he releases the ball there is no sound of speed. Heads do not turn. And he determines, as he stamps back to the top of his run, that this time, with this ball, he will turn heads and everything will be as it should. The dream will meet reality, and somewhere in the northern distance of his suburb, life will come to a stop and everyone will be forced to agree that the boy has the gift of speed.
It is almost as though he hears the sound before he feels the pain. He hears it go off like the crack of a rifle at close range. And then the pain, as if, indeed, he has been shot in the back. And this pain is so immense, he knows immediately that the damage is as immense as the pain. This is not the dull pain of the past that everybody expects and that soon goes away. This is pain the likes of which he has never felt before, and he knows without question that something is wrong in a way that it has never been wrong before.
The ball tumbles from his hand and lands just a few feet in front of him, and he grasps his back as if preventing himself from snapping in two. It is not possible for him to stand alone without crumbling to the ground and soon he is being supported by arms, either side of him, and is being led from the training nets. It has all been both fast and slow — the long explosion of pain, the spectacularly slow tumble of the ball from his fingers, the creeping exit from the nets — and yet all over in a devastating flash. It is only then, as he is being led from the nets, the crack of the rifle shot still ringing in his ears, his face creased with the pain, that he notices for the first time that heads are turning.
Away from the nets he attempts to lie back on the soft, glowing grass. Someone is asking him where the pain is. He touches his lower back, then adds that it is everywhere. And as he is talking to these two senior players one of them suddenly points to his boots and says, what are they? And Michael replies that they’re his boots and the senior player says he can see that — but adds that they are batsman’s boots. Doesn’t he know that? They are not made for bowling and he should not be bowling in them. Michael nods and as he is nodding the player asks him what crook sold the boots to him and Michael says nothing.
Someone brings his bag. Someone else takes his boots off, and Michael feels the weight drop from his feet, instantly wishing he’d bowled in his sandshoes and cursing Webster’s ten-pound note. Soon the boots are in his bag and, in time, he is able to limp from the ground, slowly and uncertainly, every turn of the head, every step that he takes executed with the deliberation of an old man. He steps slowly over the gutter at the boundary, off the field and back onto the concrete race he had walked up less than half an hour before, when everything was still in front of him and the ground glowed in the late-afternoon sun, the way ovals glow in books.
That evening Michael is standing in his yard staring at the back fence. The white paint representing the three stumps is old now and the paint is an over-milked tea colour in the dull, orange light. The pain in his back is not so bad if he doesn’t move, but he forgets this and leans quickly, impulsively to his right to peak through a hole in the fence where the paling has cracked. Through the gap he can see the children in the house behind his playing in a portable, plastic pool, splashing and spraying water into the air, chasing each other around the lawn, their bodies twisting into all sorts of impossible positions then snapping back to normal with elastic ease. As he watches them tumbling in and out of the plastic pool, he feels old at sixteen. Nobody should feel old at sixteen. But the elasticity has gone from his body and he feels at that moment as if all his summers are over.
The sounds of the suburb crowd round him. Mrs Barlow is quiet, their house is quiet, apart from the occasional low coughing of Mr Barlow and their television floating through the opened windows and across the yard to where Michael is standing. Somewhere a flyscreen door slams just that little harder than it ought to. There is a sudden gust of canned laughter, a chorus of squeals in the night, the distant rattle of the city-bound train that always sounds empty. His summer is over, and he hears them all now, these distractions that he ought not to hear because there is nothing to concentrate on. And he suddenly feels not only absurdly old, but lonely. And not the kind of loneliness that makes him wish that Kathleen Marsden were still there. It is not that kind of loneliness — if he were to summon her up and have her stand with him now, he would not be any less lonely. This new kind of loneliness would still be with him, and his summer would still be over, no matter who was standing with him.