The Stars' Tennis Balls

by Stephen Fry

  Babe dropped his eyes to the chessboard and set up a high-droned mumble over the pieces.

  ‘Ah, and you’d try a semi-Slav on me, would you, you whore-master dog? I know a few ways to beat that . . .’ What a master of the slurred babble, you are, Babe, he added to himself.

  ‘You sit here,’ Martin said to the young man.

  Speaks to him in English, by Christ! In God’s own blessed English tongue. Martin’s tortured approximation of it, I allow, but English none the less.

  Babe almost gave away his interest by sitting up and looking across in their direction.

  Calm down there, the Babe. There’s many a reason for Martin to be speaking in English. The boy may yet be Finn, Flem or Hollander. No certainty that he’s a Brit from Britland. It don’t pay to go leaping to conclusions. The lingua franca of all ritzy international institutions is English. Spoken in every high class bank, brothel and lunatic asylum from here to the Balkans.

  The young man had sat down and was now trying to stand.

  ‘I say sit,’ said Martin, angrily pushing him down. ‘You sit, you stay.’

  Why don’t you speak, boy?

  Babe’s eyes were flicking from one chessman to another, his fingers pulling at his loose lips. No one would suppose that he knew that any world existed outside the sixty-four squares in front of him, certainly it would be impossible to guess that all his attention was on this awkward new arrival into the world of the sun-room.

  Martin moved about, looking at the other patients while his patient fretted on his plastic chair.

  ‘May I go now please?’ the young man whined at last.

  Angels and ministers of Grace defend us! More than a Brit. English! English as a maypole! English as torture! English as hypocrisy, pederasty and the Parliament of Fowles! Five wee words, but I can parse them and strip them of their code as easy as all thank you.

  May I go now, please? Privately educated. A good school too, none of your minor drosses. Top drawer top three or I’m a fool, and I have never been that, as God is my whiteness.

  F3, bishop-g2, castle short . . .

  Winchester, Eton or Harrow?

  Advance the c pawn, sacrifice him later for space on the queen’s side . . .

  Not Winchester, I believe. Too polite.

  Exchange the bish for his knight and the black squares are mine . . .

  Eton? I think not. Doesn’t quite have the carriage. That would never quit an Etonian, not even here. That leaves us Harrow. Semper floreat herga.

  ‘Babe, I’ve got someone for you to meet.’

  Martin stood over the board and spoke in Swedish.

  ‘Don’t want to meet anyone,’ Babe muttered in the same language, clumsily enacting an exchange over the board and letting the pieces topple over. ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘Never mind what you want, old man. His name is Thomas. You can teach him to play chess.’

  Ned bent down and picked up a black bishop from the floor. Babe snatched it back and banged it on the board without looking at him.

  ‘Sit down and play at chess,’ Martin ordered Ned. ‘This is Babe. He is our oldest guest. Here before Dr Mallo even, is that right, Babe?’

  ‘Here before you were a watery drop of seed down your sinful father’s leg, you miserable perverted gobshite cunt,’ murmured Babe resetting the white queen with great care.

  ‘What’s that? What he saying?’

  ‘He says that he has indeed been here a long time,’ said Ned. ‘Look, Martin, do I have to talk to him? Can’t I please go back to my room? Or be on my own at least?’

  ‘You talk,’ said Martin. ‘I come back lunchtime. Sit down. You talk. You play chess. Be nice on each other.’

  There was silence at the table for almost a minute as Babe set up the pieces and Ned sat down and concentrated on looking miserable.

  Over Babe’s shoulder he could see a lawn that sloped down from the sun-room. At the bottom was a line of trees, whose thickness suggested the possibility of a river. There were other patients outside, sitting on benches and walking. That all this was possible amazed him.

  The brightness of the room and the smell of other people mingled with the sour odour of sunlight on vinyl were intoxicating to Ned. He could feel Martin’s distrustful eyes upon him somewhere so he did not allow himself to appear eager for conversation, instead he slouched sulkily and glared down at the chessmen as if they were enemies.

  What the old man, Babe, if Ned had heard right, had said right under Martin’s nose had thrilled him beyond imagining. He had called him a miserable perverted gobshite cunt and trusted to the slur in his voice and speed in his delivery to obscure the meaning. He might be a mad and ugly old man, but he was certain to be more entertaining than a lonely room.

  ‘That’s the ticket, old son,’ said the old man suddenly. His eyes were down on the table and he spoke in a mumble, but the words came clear to Ned’s ears. ‘You’ve worked Martin out. The more browned off you look, the better he likes it. Don’t talk back to me right off, rest a hand on your chin to hide your lips and keep that spoilt, petulant look going. You do it to a turn.’

  Ned’s heart began to beat more quickly. He put his elbow on the table and pushed his mouth into the upturned cup of his palm.

  ‘Are you English?’

  ‘Devil a bit I am.’

  ‘Is Martin looking?’

  ‘Standing there with a cup of coffee in his hand gazing at the back of your head with a frown on him like an angry turd-wasp. Turned down his bedroom advances, did you, lad? No, no. There’s no call to go pink. He tries it on with all the new patients. Are you going to make a move? You’re not going to tell me they didn’t teach you chess at Harrow?’

  Ned gasped and could not stop himself from looking up.

  Babe was plucking his lips and staring down at the chessboard as if nothing had been said. He mumbled through his dribble in a sing-song. ‘It was wrong of me to spring it onto you like that. I’m a devil of a show-off and you’ll have to forgive me. But if Professor Higgins can do it, why not the Babe? Eyes down and make a move, you pampered Asiatic jade.’

  Ned pushed forward a pawn and resumed his previous position, hand concealing mouth. ‘How could you possibly know? I mean . . . not that I am, not that I did go there. Have you been looking at Dr Mallo’s records? You’ve overheard me speaking to him?’

  ‘Calm yourself right down, young Thomas. Let’s not be rushing like a bull at the gate of a china shop. Or any kind of bull at all, whether at a gate, in a shop, or rising from the sea to rapine and lust. You’ll get used to my mad ways with metaphor and allusion in time. Just remember this, if we manage ourselves aright here today and for the next few days as well, then Martin there will leave us be and happy enough in himself to do so. He knows me for a mad old, strange old, harmless old, comic old, disgusting old man, but you he does not trust or like. He and Rolfie, they see it as their job to protect this institution from the foolish liberal credulity of the good Dr Mallo. If you have been allowed out to socialise, it’s because of the new girl who came visiting yesterday, or am I wrong?’

  ‘No, that’s right!’ Ned breathed.

  ‘Well now – dear God, you’ve a lot to learn about chess, young monkey. Have you never heard of a fork? – well now, I thought that must be so. She had reformer and new broom stitched into her milken breasts. Mallo and the staff will be madder than the maddest amongst us to have her interfere. If you’ve not been out to talk to us yet, there’ll be a reason and they won’t like being overruled by a liberal doxy with modern doctrines about her. Who put you away in this place?’

  Ned was silent.

  ‘You not want to talk about it? I’ll never force you, boy.’

  ‘No, it’s not that. It’s just that I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, how long have you been here?’

  ‘I . . .’ Ned did not know what to say.

  ‘Easy to lose time. Do you have an inkling of the date it was when you were last a free man?’


  ‘It was July the thirtieth. But I was ill . . . I thought all kinds of things. I shouldn’t really be thinking of that time. It holds me back. Dr Mallo told me that I had to forget all those associations, they are delusions . . .’

  ‘Delusions are the one things you may trust in here. July thirtieth, eh? And what year?’

  ‘Nineteen eighty,’ said Ned, excitement beginning to build in him, ‘and what’s more Thomas isn’t my name. My real name is . . .’

  ‘I don’t want to know. Not just yet. If they’ve changed your name, you don’t want to be heard telling me the old one. Make a move, go on. Make a move now. Try and get that poor bishop out of the shit, if you can.’

  Ned looked down at the chess pieces swimming beneath him.

  ‘I can call you Babe?’

  ‘Certainly you can call me Babe, and what pleasure it will give me to answer to the name spoken in a voice so fine and so true. And the first thing that Babe will do for Thomas, when we have convinced our keepers that it was their idea to force us together, is he will teach him to play a proper game of schach, écheques, shachmatyin, chess, scacchi . . . call it what you will, for you’ve a dismal idea of it at the moment, you young lummock. Checkmate with knobs on.’

  ‘I never really knew much more than the rules, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I shall set the pieces up again, and you will turn away. Droop all languid like a listless lily in Lent. You’re bored with me and you find me osmically offensive, which is to say you think I stink like the stinkiest stinkweed that was. But before you turn away, answer me something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How long is it that you believe you’ve been here?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know the year now, but it must be . . . I don’t know. Three years? Four?’

  ‘It is ten, Thomas my friend. Ten years next month.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not so loud! And keep your eyes ever cast downwards. Today is, by the Grace of God, the eighteenth of June in the year nineteen ninety.’

  ‘But it can’t be anything like . . . it can’t be that long! That would make me twenty-seven years old. That’s impossible!’

  ‘I hate to be the one to tell you, Thomas, but you look nearer thirty-seven or forty-seven. There’s grey mixed in your hair by the temples and those eyes of yours do not contain at all the look of youth. Ah now, he’s glaring over at us. Turn and look away.’

  Martin came towards Ned, a meanly sarcastic smile on his face. ‘This was quick game. You no good for chess? You letting mad old man beat you?’

  Ned shook his head.

  ‘I don’t like him,’ he said, gesturing towards the mumbling Babe. ‘He smells.’

  ‘You come and play and talk with Babe every day. Every day one hour longer. Is good for you each.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘No but. No but. You make complaint and I have you two together all the time. Share room maybe? You like that? You like share your room with smelling old man?’

  ‘I won’t,’ said Ned, outraged. ‘I won’t! You can’t make me!’

  *

  Over the next eight weeks Ned went to his room with small scraps of paper hidden about him. On them were written all the chess theory, attacks, defences, gambits, combinations and endgame strategies that Babe knew. His course of instruction began with games played by Phillidor and Morphy and masterpieces of the romantic age, games that, like paintings, had titles: titles like The Evergreen, the Two Dukes and the Immortal. Ned was moved from these towards the age of Steinitz and the modern style, then to an understanding of a positional theory called the Hypermodern that made his head ache. Next came an induction into opening play and counterplay whose language made Ned laugh. The Caro Kann and the Queen’s Indian, the Sicilian and the French Defences, the Gioco Piano and the Ruy Lopez. The Dragon variation, the Tartakower and the Nimzowitch. The Queen’s Gambit Declined and the Queen’s Gambit Accepted. The Marshall Attack. The Maroczy Bind. The Poisoned Pawn.

  ‘We shan’t be friends until we can play a game of chess together. You have it in you to play a decent game. Everyone has it in them to play a decent game. It’s nothing but memory and a refusal to think of yourself as a mental rabbit. If a soul can read and write, a soul can play a game of chess.’

  There was so much Ned wanted to ask Babe, but any questions were waved aside over the board.

  ‘Chess lad. Pressing lidless eyes, we will play a game of chess. Your move, and watch your back rank.’

  Dr Mallo had paid a visit to the sun-room during Ned’s first week there and ordered Babe away for a turn on the lawn.

  ‘I want to talk to my friend Thomas. I shall not move the pieces,’ the doctor had assured Babe, who shuffled away mumbling oaths into his beard.

  ‘So, how are you finding it, Thomas?’

  ‘It’s a little strange,’ said Ned uncertainly. ‘He’s a very peculiar man and I don’t really understand much he says. He can be very rude, but as long as I don’t talk too much he doesn’t seem to mind me.’

  ‘Have you talked to any other patients, I wonder?’

  ‘I try to sometimes,’ said Ned. ‘I don’t know which of them speak English. I upset that man over there yesterday by taking a chair that was next to him and he swore at me in English.’

  ‘Yes, that is Dr Michaels, a very unhappy man. You will never derive much sense from him I fear. Unstable, but not dangerous. I am pleased, Thomas, that you are able to sit out here. And Babe is not –’ Dr Mallo looked down at the chessboard with what Ned could instinctively tell were uncomprehending eyes, ‘– Babe is not curious about you? He does not load your mind with questions?’

  ‘He doesn’t ask me anything,’ said Ned in a disappointed voice, ‘except when I’m going to make a move or why I bounce my knees up and down under the table.’

  ‘Ha! I ask, you understand, because it is so important that you are not encouraged into more fantasy concerning yourself. If anyone were to ask who you were and what is the nature of your illness . . . ?’

  ‘I don’t know what I would say, Doctor. I would tell them that my name is Thomas and that I am getting better. I prefer not to talk about myself.’

  ‘Quite so. He plays a good game of chess, Babe?’

  Ned shrugged.

  ‘I think not, you have a checkmate in four moves if you look closely,’ said Dr Mallo rising and taking his leave with a brisk and satisfied nod of his head.

  ‘Mate in four moves, my arse and the arse of every man here!’ Babe had hissed under his breath when Ned reported the conversation to him. ‘The bullshit of the man, the fraud and fakery of him. If you don’t move up your h-pawn you’ll be the one to be mated and in one move, never mind four.’

  ‘When can we talk of anything except chess, Babe?’

  ‘When you have beaten me.’

  ‘But that’s never!’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. I’ve written out the Nimzo-Indian for you today. You’ll love it.’

  As the weeks passed, Ned found himself becoming more and more obsessed by their games. He fell asleep each night with the diagonal tensions and energetic force-fields exerted by each piece pressing against his mind. Chess and the power of each man on the board dominated his inner life. He began to replay positions easily in his head, without having to picture the whole board. His questions, now solely confined to chess, began to please Babe.

  ‘Ah now. You’re confusing strategy with tactics there. That’s a thing that reminds me of my old lessons in military training. The strategy, you see, is the battleplan, the Big Idea. We will win the battle by taking that hill. There’s your strategy, to take the hill. How do we take the hill? Ah now, there’s your tactics. We might soften her up with artillery and follow through with an assault by armoured troops. We might bombard her from the air. Perhaps we will pretend to deploy around another target altogether and fool the enemy into thinking that we don’t care a damn about the hill. By night we send in our special forces, knives in their teeth and boot-black on their fac
es, to take our hill by stealth. There’s any amount of tactics and all at the service of the one strategic idea. You follow me?’

  It was only later that Ned, all absorbed in the detail of chess, turned his mind to the remark ‘my old lessons in military training’. A man of Babe’s age had probably fought in the war. The Second World War. When Ned had first asked him if he was English, Babe had replied ‘Devil a bit I am,’ which Ned took to mean an emphatic negative. Babe’s voice however, in accent and delivery, was very English indeed, a rich fruity and deliciously old-fashioned sounding English that reminded Ned of old wireless broadcasts. The way he spoke, though, his choice of words and the strange spin he put on familiar phrases, that was somehow not very English at all. It had a stage Irish, or Hollywood pirate quality to it. One day he would discover more about him.

  Meanwhile, two months into his training, Ned had an exciting week ahead of him. He had, for the first time, drawn a game. Babe had been the one to extend his hand across the board to make the offer which Ned, in his excitement and with the scent of victory in his nostrils, had turned down. Babe then forced an exchange of queens and rooks and the game petered out into the draw which it was always destined to be. But Ned had been playing black and to draw as black was always a positive result. The game of chess is so delicately balanced, Babe had explained, that the advantage of the first move is enough, in tournament play, to ensure that the majority of victories go to the player with the white pieces. Ned knew that this result with black was therefore a turning point.

  The following day, Babe playing black had won easily and Ned, furious with himself, made assiduous plans that night to do something magnificent the next day.

  He fell asleep with an idea in his mind that he should try the Winawer variation of the French Defence, which some instinct told him Babe did not enjoy playing. He awoke with a fully formed sense of how to win implanted in his mind. The plan involved not only the absolute chess of the game but psychology too and when Rolf, whose duty day it was, led him out to the sun-porch, he was already looking grouchy and underslept.