The Rules of Play by Jennie Walker

congealed orange mess into the bin. As I bend I’m aware of the stern, yellow, Old Testament presence of Wisden on the worktop, looking over my shoulder. The Lord thy God is a jealous God.
    It’s two o’clock. Except that Agnieszka told me to be home at this time, and I am, and nothing is happening, it’s numbers that hold the world together, if sometimes a bit loosely. If I shop for some gloves I expect most of them to come in pairs and with five fingers for each hand, and the temperature can’t be minus 50 degrees Celsius or I wouldn’t be out shopping at all. Two plus two does equal four, otherwise the supermarket could be delivering three radishes and forty-nine packets of rolled oats and charging me £798 and I’d have no cause for complaint. Any one number is what it is because of other numbers—they hang together, so that in the end E does equal mc 2 and we walk upright and most of the time we don’t have to think about them. It’s when they don’t hang together—5,000 hungry people fed by five loaves and two fishes, with twelve baskets of leftovers—that we need to start worrying.
    I take it on trust that someone has checked all the numbers in Wisden with a calculator and that they do hang together, but the sheer number of numbers in these pages is terrifying. This is a parallel universe in which good and bad, heroism and solid worth, are defined numerically. Also-rans don’t get a look-in, the ‘criteria for inclusion’ being 15,000 runs, 1,000 wickets, 500 ‘achieved dismissals,’ or 10,000 runs and 500 wickets, or . . . Divinities include the ones with most runs (B. C. Lara, West Indies, 131—232—6—11,953—400— 52.88—34—48—164: presumably the biggest number) and most wickets (S. K. Warne, Australia, 145—40,705— 1,761—17,995—708—25.41—871—37—10—57.4— 2.65: take your pick). A man called G. Allott squeaks in because he managed to score 0 runs in 101 minutes. There are thousands upon thousands of numbers here, and I am becoming dizzy. If I take just one of them away, will they all come tumbling down? Like G. Allott, I much prefer my numbers in small quantities, or even singly, like grapes. Such as the apparently random but unarguably exact numbers which Selwyn once recited from some off-the-wall website: the age of the youngest pope (eleven), the number of spiders eaten by a human being over the course of a life (eight), the number of newborn children given each day to the wrong parents (twelve).
    Two-thirty, and just when I’ve noticed that the cat has gone from its chair and am thinking I may have shut it in the bedroom when I closed the door and it will pee on the bed, Agnieszka rushes through the door, grabs me by the hand and leads me out to the car. Alan is already there, in the driving seat, and I sit beside him. He is wearing that expression he has for when we are late and it’s my fault—even though, this time, it isn’t my fault— which is entirely different from the one he has for when it’s his fault. From behind, Agnieszka places a scarf around my eyes and ties it tightly. I am being kidnapped. I wonder how much ransom they will demand, how much the loss-adjuster will pay to get me back.
    It’s not unpleasant, being driven blindfold, sealed in my unknowing, though I’m sure it would be different if anyone other than Alan was driving. If we are seen by anyone we know, he is sure to have some thoroughly plausible explanation. I have been training my eyes to count bricks, and have overdone it. I have been staring too long at the sun.
    Maybe twenty minutes later we stop, and the scarf is untied. We have arrived at the park, a place I haven’t been since the days of grazed knees. Another whole generation is here, with their high-spec turbo-charged buggies and their curious hairstyles and their colorful new vernacular. They are waving at me.
    ‘This is Tomas, this is Alessandra, this is Marek, this is Jadwiga, this is Gino, this is Fang,’ says