The Stars' Tennis Balls

by Stephen Fry

  Anyway. Oxford. I can’t bear either that I’ve got to come back here in September while you’ll be as free as a bird. For two pins I’d forget the whole thing and apply to Bristol and be with you. It’s not that I’m really so stuck on Oxford, it’s just that I know it would break my father’s heart if I didn’t go. His great-great-grandfather was at St Mark’s and every Maddstone since. There’s even a quad named after us. You might think that would make it easier for me to get in, but actually it doesn’t work like that any more. I’ll actually have to do better in my entrance exam than virtually anyone, just to prove that I’ve got in on merit not on family name and connections. It would mean so much to him. I hope that doesn’t sound chronically pathetic. I’m his only son and I just know how much he’d love coming to visit me and walking round the colleges and pointing out his old haunts and so on.

  I wish you could come and visit me here. Suppose next term I smuggle you in as a new boy? All you’ve got to do is squeak and look pretty, and you’re very good at that. No, not pretty – you’re beautiful of course. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen or ever will see. (You are very good at squeaking though.)

  I love your letters. I still can’t believe all this is true. Has it really happened to us? Other boys here have girlfriends too but I’m certain it’s not the same for them. They show their letters around and make a great show of drooling publicly over them. That must be a sign that it’s really no more than a joke to them. And it isn’t a joke for us, is it?

  You mention that strange thing about Fate and how it was that our school group was at the Royal Academy and how, if we hadn’t been, we probably wouldn’t have gone into the Hard Rock Café. That is such a completely weird thought. But then, when you came up to our table there were I think seven of us and why was it you looked twice at me? Apart from the fact that I’m such a moron that I was standing up. I really hate to disillusion you on that, by the way, but it wasn’t politeness that made me stand up. I saw you and I stood up. It was like a sort of instinct. This must sound completely crazy – it was as if I had known you for ever. What’s more, if I think about it, I could swear that I knew you were going to come out of that swing door. I had been feeling funny all day. Feeling different if you know what I mean, and by the time we got into the restaurant after sweating around the gallery for two hours and walking half a mile down Piccadilly I just knew something was going to happen to me. And when you started coming towards us (you patted the front of your apron and checked your ear for a pencil in the funniest way – I can remember every detail of it) I just leap to my feet. I nearly shouted out, ‘At last!’ and then you looked up into my eyes and we smiled at each other and that was it.

  But you must have noticed the other boys there. Most of them surely taller and better looking than me? Ashley Barson-Garland was there, who’s twenty times funnier and twenty times brainier.

  That reminds me . . . I did something completely awful this morning, in Biology. It’s a bit complicated to describe and I feel awful about it. It’s not something for you to worry about, but it was odd. I read Barson-Garland’s diary. Part of it. I’ve never done anything like that before and I just don’t know what came over me. I’ll tell you all about it when we meet.

  When we meet.

  When we meet.

  When we meet.

  I just CANNOT stop thinking about you. All kinds of wicked things start happening to me.

  Before I was born my father was a District Commissioner in the Sudan. I remember him telling me once that young men arriving from Britain used to go about in ironed khaki shorts and sometimes, if they happened across one of the beautiful Nubian women who went around bare-topped, or often entirely bare, they would have to turn and face the wall or just sit down on the ground there and then, where they were, to cover the fact, as my father puts it, ‘that they had become a little excited downstairs.’ Well, just imagining you reading this letter, just knowing that these words will soon be in your eyes, that gets me a little excited downstairs. A lot excited downstairs.

  So when I say that I’m thinking of you and thinking hard, you’ll know what I mean. Well, I’ve gone and made myself blush now. I adore you so much that I hardly know what to do with myself except laugh.

  I love you to the power of everything, plus one.

  Ned X

  Ned never knew why he had done such a sly and terrible thing. Perhaps it was Fate, perhaps it was the Devil, in whom he believed sincerely.

  He had slipped the book from Ashley Barson-Garland’s bag, dropped it onto his knees and opened the first page before he was even aware of what he was doing. His right hand lay on the desk and pretended every now and then to slide backwards and forwards through Advanced Cell Biology.

  Lowering his eyes to his lap, he began to read.

  It was a diary. He did not know what else he had imagined it might be. It looked at least four years old. He believed that it was its age that had first attracted him to it when he had seen it peeping from the bag. He had seen Ashley carry this book with him everywhere and that had intrigued him.

  None the less it was very strange that he should have done such a thing. Ned did not like to think of himself as the kind of person who was interested in other people’s diaries.

  It was difficult to read. Not the handwriting, which was very small, but clear and strong: Barson-Garland’s style was – how should one put it? – opaque. Yes, that was an intellectual’s word. The style was opaque.

  With each line that Ned absorbed, the drowsy buzz of the classroom fell further and further away into the background, until he was entirely alone with the words and a vein that throbbed quick and guilty in his neck.

  3rd May 1978

  Didsbury

  Firstly, it has to be the accent. If you get that right, you’re close to them. You’re halfway there. Not just the accent, mind, the whole delivery. Note the way the voice comes out of the mouth, note too the mouth’s limited aperture, the line of the lips, the angle of the head, the dipping of the head, the tilting of the head, the movement of the hands (hands, not arms, they are not Italians after all) and the direction of gaze.

  Remember how there used to come a hot buzz of blood to your face on the bus every time you heard your name spoken by them? You believed for one heart-jump of a moment as they repeated and repeated your name that they were talking about you. You truly believed that inexplicably they must know you. They had recognised you as one of their own, displaced by some tragic turn of fate. The very first time on the bus, do you remember, they kept mentioning your name? Maybe you were going to be friends. How excited you were! They saw it in you. That thing you have. They spotted it. That indefinable quality of difference.

  Then you twigged. It wasn’t you they were talking about. They had no idea you existed. Theirs was another Ashley altogether. An amusing Ashley . . .

  That’s SAY funny, Ashley.

  Ashley, that’s a RAIL hoot.

  Despite the initial bump of disappointment that had jolted you like an electric shock when you realised it wasn’t you they were talking about, it still gave you a little glow of pride and connection. Made you walk with a bit of a swing for a day or so, didn’t it? Maybe your name, the name you hated so much, the name that shamed you, that you had believed to be so middle class, maybe, if one of them shared it with you, maybe it was an all right name after all. Could it be that ‘Ashley’ was, in fact, upper middle class, or even – you never know – aristocratic?

  Which one of them was Ashley, though? It was absurd, but you caught the name bandied so often that for a shining day or two you wondered whether they could all be Ashleys. Then you considered the possibility that Ashley might be a general name they used for ‘friend’, their counterpart of the ugly ‘mate’ that you heard every day in your concrete playground, just streets away from their stone quadrangle? But then you twigged again.

  There was no Ashley. Ashley did not exist. There was only an actually.

  That’s so funny, actually
. Actually, that’s a real hoot.

  Can you actually, can you actually, Ashley, have ever really believed that they might have been talking about you? Did you seriously think that their lazy glances might actually, Ashley, have so much as taken you in? Sometimes your face may have been in the way of the arc of their gaze, but could you have truly believed that your identity, or even your face, ever actually, Ashley, registered?

  Yet they registered on you. Oh, how they registered. You looked at their skin and their hair and wondered how it could be so different from our skin and hair. From ordinary people’s skin and hair. Was it a genetic gift? You noted the signature patch of flush on their cheeks, a hot scarlet, brighter by far than the dusty crimson bruise that stained the cheeks of the boys at your school. You noted too, on some, such pallor and translucence of complexion that you wondered if it might be their diet. Or the diets of their mothers while they still swam in the womb.

  What burned into your mind most deeply of all of course, was the Flag. The Flag of the Blest. Their Flag. The flop. The flopping fringe. The fringe that flopped. The Flop Fringe Flag. And how it made you ache. What a great hole grew inside you when you gazed upon the Flag. Like a Frenchman, far from home, catching a whiff of Gauloise. Like an Englishman lost in Asia to whose ears there suddenly floats the opening music of The Archers. Because always, deep down, you did feel that their flag was really your flag too. If it weren’t for the terrible mistake. And the hole that grew in you, the great ache you felt was not envy, or covetousness. Actually, Ashley, it was loss, it was exile. You had been banished from your own, all on account of the Terrible Mistake.

  And you only ever shared a bus with them, what, five times? Six at most. You watched them climbing aboard and swinging themselves to the back seat, sometimes a hand would push down on your headrest and the proximity of that hand to your head would send you dizzy and you would try to eat the air around you, so deep was your hunger for what they were. For what they had. Breaking rules, probably. Skipping into London out of school uniform. The beautiful, the ridiculous uniform of tailcoats and striped trousers discarded in favour of sweaters and cords. The Flag flying, free to flop without constriction from boaters and top hats.

  On the last day, the day before the Move North, you retrieved a boater from under the seat, didn’t you? He didn’t realise at first that he had come onto the bus wearing it. They teased him and laughing he had skimmed it down towards the driver in mock self-disgust. You nearly opened your mouth to tell him it was lodged under the seat in front of you as he passed on his way out, but you kept silent. Ashamed of your North London vowels. You retrieved the boater and you kept it. A shallow straw hat with a ribbon of blue. And afterwards you wore it, didn’t you? In your bedroom. You’re wearing it now. You are wearing it now, aren’t you, you cheap, you creepy, you sad . . . And it doesn’t work, does it? Your hair is too coarse to flop like a wild Tay salmon or a swatch of Savile Row suiting, your hair bristles, like a bog brush, like a suburban doormat. In fact, you aren’t wearing J. H. G. Etheridge’s boater (note the three initials . . . class), J. H. G. Etheridge’s boater just happens to be On Your Head. Just as this diary is On The Table and this table is On The Floor. The floor isn’t wearing the table, the table isn’t wearing the diary. There’s a gulf, a great gaping gulf of difference. And it is this gulf, this gulf that . . . that’s why so often you jerk off into this straw hat, isn’t it? Isn’t it, you miserable lump of nothing?

  *

  How did the Terrible Mistake happen? The terrible series of mistakes.

  How could your consciousness be the issue of his commonplace seed and her dull egg? Birth was the first terrible mistake. The transmigration of souls might explain such a mix-up on such a vast scale. In a previous incarnation you were one of them and now a trace memory lingers to torture you. You are a foundling perhaps, or the bastard by-blow of a ducal indiscretion, farmed off on these woeful people you are obliged to call your parents.

  Firstly the name. Ashley. Ashley. ASHLEY. Write it and say it how you like, it just won’t do. There’s a beery, panatella reek of travelling salesmen in tinted glasses and sheepskin car coats. Ashley is a PE teacher: Ashley says ‘Cheers, mate’ and ‘Wotcher, sunshine’. Ashley drives a Vauxhall. Ashley wears nylon shirts and cotton/polyester mix trousers that are sold as ‘leisure slacks’. Ashley eats dinner at lunchtime and supper at dinnertime. Ashley says ‘toilet’. Ashley hangs fairy lights around the double-glazed window frames at Christmas. Ashley’s wife reads the Daily Mail and puts ornaments on the television. Ashley dreams of tarmac driveways. Ashley will never do anything in the world. Ashley is cursed.

  Mum and Dad gave you that name.

  Don’t say Mum and Dad.

  Mama and Papa, with the emphasis on the final syllable. Mamah and Papah. Well, perhaps not. That might over-egg the pudding. (Note: Always pudding, never ‘dessert’ or, heaven help us, ‘sweet’. . .) ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ is better.

  Mother and Father gave you that name. And the criminal part of it is that, as a name, it’s only just off. Roy or Lee or Kevin or Dean or Wayne, they’re the real thing. Echt Lumpenproletariat. Dennis and Desmond and Leonard and Norman and Colin and Neville and Eric are revolting, but they are honest. Ashley, though. It’s a Howard or a Lindsay or a Leslie kind of a name. It’s nearly there. It seems to be trying to be there. And that, surely, is the saddest thing of all.

  Americans don’t have this trouble do they? With names and the implications of names. The one Ashley, in fact, who might be said to have had a touch of class was American. Ashley in Gone With the Wind. So classy that they called him Eshley. In the film, Leslie Howard never even tried to give him an American accent. Leslie and Howard. Two disgusting names for the price of one. But then Leslie Howard wasn’t English. He was Hungarian and to him no doubt, fresh off the boat, Leslie and Howard seemed posh.

  The word ‘posh’ is right out. Unsayable.

  But seemed. Seemed posh. There’s the rub. What people think is smart is so far from what actually, Ashley, is. You might think silver fish knives would be pretty bloody pukka, but fish knives of any kind are an absolute no. You might as well put doilies round them and abandon all hope of social pretension.

  But it isn’t about social pretension. It’s about the ache.

  Look, some males grow up with a feeling that they’re in the wrong body, don’t they? A woman trapped inside a man.

  Isn’t it possible then that some people might grow up, as it were patricians imprisoned within plebeian bodies? Knowing, just knowing that they have been born into the wrong class?

  But it isn’t about class. It’s about the hunger.

  Oh but Ashley, you poor sap, can you actually believe that you’re supposed to be of their world? Don’t you know that it’s a world you can only be born into?

  But that’s so unfair. If he wanted, a man can become American. He can become Jewish. He can, like Leslie Howard, make himself not just English but a symbol of all that England ever stood for. He can become a Londoner, a Muslim, a woman, a man or a Russian. But he can’t become a . . . a . . . nearly said gentleman there, didn’t you, but what is the word? An aristo, a nob, a public school toff . . . a one of them. You can’t become one of them, even if you feel yourself to be one of them in the deepest pit of you, even if you know in your innermost knowing self that it is your right, your destiny, your need and your duty. Even if you know that you could do it better. And that’s the truth. You would carry it off with so much more style. Carry off the ease that belies any sense of anything at all having to be carried off, if that isn’t too baroque. Carry off that natural, effortless taking-it-all-for-granted air. But the opportunity has been denied you because of the terrible mistake of your birth.

  *

  The Move North, that was another nail in the coffin. Another element of the Terrible Mistake. Your dad died and Mum got a job teaching at a deaf school in Manchester. Dad had been an officer. In the RAF, it grieves you to admit, not in a smart army reg
iment. He never flew, so there was no romance to him. But at least he had been an officer. Be honest now, he was compelled to enter the service as a humble Aircraftsman. He wasn’t ever officer class. He had to work his way up through the ranks and Lord that burns you up, doesn’t it? Then he died of complications from diabetes, a rather bourgeois, not to say proletarian disease, and you, your mum and your sister Carina moved north. (Carina! Carina, for God’s sake! What kind of name is that? All very well to say that the Duke of Norfolk has a daughter called Carina. There’s a world of difference between saying, ‘Have you met the Lady Carina Fitzalan-Howard?’ and ‘This is Carina Garland.’) You moved away from Old Harrow and the proximity of them, their tailcoats, top hats, blazers and boaters. You were twelve years old. Slowly you have become infected by a northern accent. Not obvious, just a trace, but to your sensitive, highly attuned ears as glaring as a cleft palate. You began to pronounce ‘One’ and ‘None’ to rhyme with ‘Shone’ and ‘Gone’ instead of ‘Shun’ and ‘Gun’, you gently sounded the ‘g’s in ‘Ringing’ and ‘Singing’. At school you even rhyme ‘Mud’ with ‘Good’ and ‘Grass’ with ‘Lass’. Fair enough, you would be beaten up as a southern poof otherwise, but you have trailed some of that linguistic mud into the house with you. Not that your mum noticed.

  And then this afternoon happened.

  She brought some of her deaf kids home for tea this afternoon. After they had gone you said that good God, they even signed in a Mancunian accent. You thought it a good joke. Mum bridled and called you a snob. That was the first time the word was ever said openly. It hung in the air like a fart in a teashop. I pretended not to hear, but we knew that something deep was up because we both blushed and swallowed. I made a fuss of doing up my shoelaces, she became fascinated by the teapot lid.