Page #23 & 24 of “OUT OF IT” a novel by Michael O’Leary

“Baffled, bemused and beguilded indeed Dennis! And I thought that Morrison himself was deep in some mystery when he walked back to the dressing room. It almost seemed he was singing or talking to himself – one could imagine him doing a self-jig or some similar dance had his leg not been crook.”
“Yes! The words mystery and Morrison seen to be very closely linked in this game. And look at Hemi disappearing down the player’s tunnel as though he were entering Dante’s Inferno. He’s crossing himself in the Roman tradition and whipping his very back with what appears to be a large rosary.”

The Malone listened empathy and sorrow and each stroke he saw hit Baxter’s back was a memory of his life with the Maureen Moana and their children marked his and hers, a life which he knew he would never live again…. They had not been married two months and she was expecting. Then they had not been married eight months, they realised upon close inspection what the situation was, they then got married. “You carnt be too carful these daze,” the Malone had thought. “Shotgun?” Murphy, in his enquiring way, had asked “Double barrel – we’re having twins,” Malone had retorted with his fingers crossed, not realising the prophetic nature of his nature. “Better luck next time” the Murphy had said after the birth of one single child. And so it was, that not long after nine months, after the birth of the first Malone child, two twins were born. “Hopefully, ta, the sam farther – never like the case bein’ now at this moment contested in the very courtroom I was born at the address of the Emerald Isle whence I cam from” said the Murphy, who had had a life-long interest in the law, you know! For was this not the sam Murphy run foul a the law in the Mercantile Gehenna and him a lawyer. “You’re a liarwyer” the judge had said accusing him a not tellin’ the truth….
Malone’s Murphy Memories were interrupted by the noise of the roaring applause for the next Out of It batsman. Oscar Wilde strode out onto the field with the confidence and arrogance of a man who has nothing to declare or fear but his own genius as a batsman.

Here comes a great man the Malone thought. He had forever thought this of the Wilde Irishman and it forever had him thinking of the greatness of the Gaelsand of one and all of his race, and of one in particular it that’s the case. Mango O’Brien he was by name known. He was the reason that Malone and his pregnant wife had been able to buy their very house in New Lynn and he was the reason that should P.S.M. not be able to return to the great domestic life of a lifetime that he knew his family would survive. For, and let it be said, had not Mango O’Brien and his Polynesian wife and their several children, had they not all lived together in a Zeppelin moored only several feet above the ground on the corner section which was next door to where the newlywedded Malone’s house on the one side and the railway line on the other. The fact that no-one would but this house for fear and prejudice enabled the unprejudiced and fearless Malone family to buy a perfectly good, respectable suburban dwelling for a very low and acceptable price indeed.
Mango and Malone and Marisia and Maureen and all the more several children had become a close whanau by the time that the Malone got off the train one evening after the work in time to see the O’Brien Zeppelin casting off from its moorings and sail away into the arms of Rangi. “Where did the man go?” was the question on New Lynn’s lips. Anyway, the small compensation for the Malone family’s grief over the loss of their true friends was that the day after the Zeppelin had soared into the heavens and beyond, the house prices in the immediate area had soared also, thus providing in the form of material and financial security what they now obviously lacked in emotional and spiritual nurture since the half whanau had headed skyward. “See you in Heaven!” he called and crossed himself as the wonderment of invented palagi imploded into the sky above!

“ and it’s not often you see Lance Cairns give away an extra run from a no-ball John.”
“quite true Dennis, but the umpire, I think, is a bit worried about the bowler’s making a hole just at that particular point at the Railway end of the crease. I notices that Mr Woodhead spoke a couple of time to Ewen Chatfield and that must have been what it was all about.”
“Interesting, John, to see Cairns brought back into the New Zealand team, and I believe it has something to do with the fact that the Out of It Number Nine, Herman Goering, is in such good form.”