The Stars’ Tennis Balls

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 chess man 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 ye 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.’