The World is Not Like This – Cannell’s Guide to Battrick: Part 2
The world is not like this. You can come to Kropotkin Park in one of two ways. You can see Kropotkin Park in two ways. Empty, on a rise at the bend in the river, at the last navigable point before the rapids, industrial sheds left jumbled by a receding tide, an office block and wharves, slack water. No more than that. But come on a match-day. 
Come on a match day by river, on a launch from the city, on a river taxi manned by skinny barefoot boys. Join the array of craft jamming the water, drawn in from the hinterland. The descendants of the first settlers of Spicy, Osbornes, Armstrongs, Douglasses, some Elliots and Telfers, some carrying produce with them – wool, sheepskins, whole lambs hung dancing with garlic and bright peppers, half oil-drums filled with coal. Indians tired of working off their indenture, with children and brass pots. A few Lebanese, coming to trade in barges, their women hawking trinkets in the crowd or baking bread on stone ovens. Skiffs poled by thin ancients jostle to disgorge visitors at the small dock, who queue along the wrought-iron railing to enter the ground.
The other way to come, some say the better way, is the road from the town. Once it passes the tanneries this ‘road’ becomes a rutted track. There are few cars, there is nowhere to park. So the approach resembles a flight from a war, vehicles apparently abandoned on the road-side, on the track-side, blocking the entrances to fields. A stream of walkers fix their eyes on the flag, where a black and red flag flies, the motto ‘Noli me tangere’ picked out in silver thread. Low hedges, stunted trees, market gardens by the road, often protected from hungry opportunists by farmers lads with wooden clogs, handy with cudgels. The track drops along one of the sheds and, as you reach the corner, then rises into a huge courtyard behind the turnstiles of the Brausen Arch.
Pass through the bars, the stalls selling food, walking uphill. Float with the crowd as you breast the rise and, at the top, as if it were in the crater of a volcano is a green oval, the daily toil of John Brosnihan.
The groundsman doesn’t have an office; he appears to live in a shed at the side of the ground. Inside the light’s diffused, diaphanous, iron instruments and utensils hang on pegs on the wall, mowers lurk in the shallows, the air is dusty. There’s a bench, with yellow papers on it, a stool and a cot.
Paul Cannell has an office, the only one in the office block, which is a stand on which Brausen has waggishly had painted trompe l’oeil windows. Cannell’s office is at the back of the stand, behind a short fence. It has a kind of loggia, on which he can be seen sometimes during matches, smoking a cigar and pacing or sitting with his chair tilted back, his head resting on the outer wall of the office, holding a drink.
Only Brosnihan and, more often, his assistant Lanza, visit the office socially. New players sign contracts on the low table in front of the huge leather sofa, battered and worn while Cannell sits behind, or on the oak wood table that serves as a desk. Old players are summoned for praise, advice or reprobation, rarely more than 1 visitor at a time. Sometimes they leave, and walk directly to town without looking back.
Everyone who pays a visit to the office, from the traders requesting permits, travelling salesmen in shoes shined or scabbed to the youngest trainee has an opinion on the one picture in the office.
It is, as you can see, of two people; neither of them is Cannell. Some think they have seen her dining with Cannell at La Berna. Some think the man is familiar, a Turk perhaps? Nobody leaves the office without experiencing a peculiar unease, a feeling of carnality.
Some visitors notice Cannell’s library, Lanza can tell you about the books, if you asked him what they are he would answer, “J-C Onetti, ‘A Brief Life’, William Gaddis ‘The Recognitions’, a collection of poems by Derek Walcott, two books by V.S. Naipaul and a volume of poetry by an Englishman with the unlikely name of Basil Bunting and another, of sonnets by an American called Tuckerman.”
The office door is always open when Cannell has a guest, he hooks the foot of hat-stand in front of it. When it’s closed, he may be working on another doomed project to train a batting spinner; dreaming an all-rounder with an undetectable googly and an unplayable top-spinner. You have to imagine that, from time to time he looks at the back of the door where Lanza has pinned a handwritten paper that he took from the desk. It says:
The Muslims talk of seven heavens high,
Immortal Dante describes seven hells.
But if hurl myself down seven wells
I’ll be no more. Not under earth or in the sky.
I thought of spirits sitting on a bough
Watchfully waiting for an infant birth
They could possess and once more live on earth.
Too many people, too few spirits now.
These seven shells I gathered on the strand
I’ll hurl against a rock; thus understand
By divination how to die. Should just
One break, I’ll hang. Two – shoot myself. If three
It’s poison, four drown, five dive. If it be
Six – electrics. But seven – live I must.
