It had been two years since they’d been on the court together. ‘Go have a hit with your father,’ his mother would invariably suggest when he visited, and Logan would make up an excuse. The subversive idea had begun to creep up that he might just never play again. It felt like treason and yet who would care, who would even notice?
Their mother would notice.
Since his father’s operation, Logan had begun doing odd jobs around the family home, whenever he thought he could get away with it without his father getting angry. He slid in and out like a ninja. Change a light bulb here and there. Get up with a chainsaw and cut back the overgrown branches around the tennis court.
He couldn’t work out how his father felt about it. ‘You don’t need to do that, mate,’ he’d said last time he’d caught Logan changing one of the court lights. He clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’m not dead yet.’
That day Logan had a hangover and his father actually did look to be in far better health than him, ruddy-cheeked and clear-eyed, yet another doubles trophy on the sideboard.
Later that same day his father had asked about how his ‘career plans were progressing’ and Logan, who had no particular career plan except to stay employed, had felt himself squirm like a kid. His father seemed to always be observing Logan’s life the way he used to observe his tennis. Logan could sense Stan’s desire to call him to the net, to point out his weaknesses, to explain exactly where he was going wrong and where he could improve, but he never did criticise Logan’s life choices, he just asked questions and looked disappointed with the answers.
The slam of his car door sounded loud on the quiet street. He could hear the twitter of magpies and the sarcastic caw of crows from the bushland reserve that backed onto his parents’ tennis court. It reminded him of the rhythms of his parents in conversation. His mother chattering, his father’s occasional deadpan response.
Logan didn’t go inside. He walked straight down the side of the house to collect the ladder from the shed, past the drainpipe where they all had to stand to practise their ball tosses. A hundred times in a row, day after day, until they all had ball tosses as straight and reliable as a ruler’s edge.
He wondered where his parents were, how long he had before they returned, and if his father would be angry or relieved to see this particular job done.
Troy wanted to pay people to help out their parents. A gardener. A cleaner. A housekeeper.
‘What . . . like a team of servants?’ said Amy. ‘Will Mum and Dad ring a bell like the lord and lady of the manor?’
‘I can cover it,’ said Troy, with that very particular look he got on his face when he talked about money: secretive, ashamed and proud. None of them really understood what Troy did but it was clear he’d landed on a level of impossible wealth that you were only meant to land on by working really hard at your tennis. Somehow Troy had gone ahead and found another way to drive the fancy car and live the fancy life, and now he played tennis socially, with bankers and barristers, and without, it seemed, any hang-ups, as if he were one of the private school kids who got private lessons at Delaneys not because they had talent or a love of the sport but because it was a ‘good life skill’。
Their father never once asked Troy about his career plans.
Logan opened the shed and found the bucket, gloves, scraper and ladder. Everything was in its place. His friend Hien said the first heartbreaking sign of his own father’s Alzheimer’s was when he stopped putting his tools back in the right place, but Logan’s dad’s shed looked as pristine as an operating theatre.
Even the glass of the shed’s small window sparkled, revealing the Japanese maple at the side of the tennis court that was just beginning to leaf up for spring. In autumn the leaves turned red-gold. Logan saw himself as a kid searching through a soft crunchy carpet of leaves for a rogue tennis ball, because tennis balls cost money. He saw himself storming past that tree the day he first lost against Troy, the same day his father told him to watch Harry Haddad demonstrate the kick serve that Logan hadn’t yet mastered, and maybe part of him already knew he never would master: he simply didn’t have that instinctive understanding of where the ball needed to be. He was so worked up that day he threw his racquet as he walked towards the house, almost hitting some poor kid waiting for her lesson, who had to jump aside with a little squeak of fear.
That was the day Logan understood that his younger brother might be better than him and also, more importantly, that Harry Haddad was a prodigy, and had something essential and wonderful that all the Delaney children lacked.