Fourth Horseman Read Online Free PDF Page B

partners in the first class. They clicked instantly, and after the second class they exchanged telephone numbers and arranged to meet during the week. Javed went to a different school but he lived on our side of town and he had a bike as well, so it was easy for the two of them to get together. Alex went to Javed’s house first and discovered that they had more than aikido in common. Javed’s bedroom walls were papered with posters of cricketers, and he was one of the county’s best batsmen in his age group. The next time they met up, Javed came to our house, and for a few weeks that autumn he practically moved in.
    We were lucky to live where we did, even though we sometimes grumbled about it being too far from town. My mum’s mother had been born in the house and handed it over to my parents when they married, on the condition that they took out a mortgage on it so Mum’s parents could buy a house in Ireland. If we’d had to buy it from scratch it would have been way out of our league, not only because the house was large and very desirable, but because it stood on three and a half acres of gardens, orchards and paddocks. We had been given a pony when I was small by Dad’s nutcase of a sister, who lived in Scotland. The pony was beautiful to look at and not at all bad for a young child to ride, but it was practically impossible to catch. Faced with that constant frustration, my ‘horsy’ phase was very short, and we passed the pony on to a nearby riding school for peanuts. He is still there, as far as I knew, and is still practically impossible to catch. As soon as he was gone Mum had his paddock ploughed, re-seeded and rolled into a cricket pitch. From the time I was eight and Alex was six we had been playing family cricket matches.
    During the summer we had bigger matches, involving as many friends and neighbours as we could muster, and once a year we had a huge, chaotic match between Mum’s team and Dad’s team, which was known as the Family Row. Mum invited her old cricketing mates, and Dad had found a few handy players among his friends and colleagues as well. There was no limit to the number of people who could play, so we invited friends, cousins, neighbours, school-friends—anyone who would come. The only real rule of the Family Row was that neither side was allowed to win, so it was a real fun occasion. It went on for two days, and in the evenings we had parties. It was one of the highlights of every summer.
    When Javed first saw our pitch he looked as if all his birthdays had come at once. We’d had some rain and the outfield was a bit soggy, but we played a short match just so he could have a taste of it. Mum was well impressed with his batting. She told me later that she could see him going a long, long way. There was room for improvement in his technique, she said, but his strength was that he watched the ball right on to the face of the bat. She didn’t say any more. She was, as ever, tactful about the accident that had broken my elbow, and the reason it had happened. But I did ask Javed once, a while later, what his secret was and he told me with no hesitation.
    ‘The first part is waiting,’ he said. ‘My father told me there’s only one ball in a game of cricket and that’s the one you’re facing. It doesn’t matter what has happened in the past. The ball that’s coming at you won’t be like the last one or the next one, so you don’t predict. You wait and see, and you don’t make any decisions until it has left the bowler’s hand. If you can, you even wait until it has hit the pitch. Then you decide what to do.’
    ‘No one can think that fast,’ I said.
    ‘That’s the other bit of the secret,’ he said. ‘Don’t think. Act. If you start thinking you’ve had it, because you’re right, no one can think that fast.’
    I thought about it and I had to admit it made some sort of sense. The best catches I ever took were ones that came too fast for me to think about.
    ‘But how