The Stars’ Tennis Balls

‘I want you to build me a time machine.'

‘What?’

‘I want you to build me a time machine and to go back twenty years into the past.'

‘I–I don’t understand.’

‘Really? Yet it’s so simple.’ said Cotter. ‘And it’s the only thing that will save you. All I want you to do is to go back to the day when you, Ashley Barson-Garland and Gordon Fendeman planned the destruction of my life. Go back and rewind the tape. Reverse your decision.’

Rufus turned dazed eyes on him. He was hallucinating. On the very day he had determined to give up coke, the drug had visited upon him some insane psychotic nightmare.

‘You don’t remember?’ Cotter went on, removing his sunglasses and staring him in the face. ‘You don’t remember planting dope in the pocket of my sailing jacket? You don’t remember standing in an alleyway in Knightsbridge giggling as they led me away? Go back and make it all unhappen. Do that for me and I’ll pay off the Suleiman brothers and more. I will set you up in idle luxury for the rest of your pitiful and disgusting life.’

‘Ned? Ned Maddstone?’ Rufus leapt up from the sofa. ‘Jesus, it is. It’s you. I don’t fucking believe it.’

‘But somehow I don’t think it can be done, can it? I know a little about physics and a little about technology. Something tells me that a time machine is wholly beyond your powers to invent.

‘Christ, man, where have you been? What happened to you?’

‘Get away from me,’ Cotter took a step backwards as Rufus once more clawed desperately at his jacket. ‘How dare you even think of touching me?’

‘This is a joke, right? You’re winding me up. It’s your idea of revenge. To get me shit scared. Fucking hell, man…

‘You’ll find out about shit scared,’ said Cotter. ‘You’ll discover that it’s more than a phrase. You’ll find out too that there’s something worse than fear. Something called dread.’

‘You’re not serious,’ Rufus almost laughed at the look on Cotter’s face. ‘I mean come on, we were kids! We didn’t know what we were doing. Anyway, you were kidnapped, it was in all the papers. That was nothing to do with us. Jesus, man…

‘My father died. My father. He clung on for six months unable to speak or move. He died in an agony of fear and guilt, believing that his only son had been kidnapped and killed because of him and his work. An honourable, decent man who gave everything he had to his country. A man incomparably above you in quality and greatness. He died because of what you and your friends did to me.’

Rufus looked round in terror at the sound of car brakes squealing in the street below. Cotter moved towards the door and replaced his sunglasses.

‘I just want you to think of me as they start work on you. I want you to think of a frightened and bewildered child who had everything taken away from him because of your spite and envy.’

Rufus had scrambled behind the armchair and stood now in the middle of the floor clutching his money.

‘They know about the fire-escape,’ said Cotter. ‘They are certain to have it covered.’

‘NED!’ screamed Rufus.

Cotter let himself out of the door.

‘MADDSTONE!’

Cotter went quickly up one flight of stairs and looked down the stairwell as three men came running up to the second floor. He saw a flash of bright silver as one of them transferred a gleaming metal knife from one hand to the other. Inside the flat he heard Rufus still screaming his name, over and over again.

The door slammed shut and all screaming stopped.

Five minutes later the door to the flat opened and the three men emerged. One carrying a black bin-liner. They said nothing as they descended the staircase.

Simon waited for the sound of their car being driven away before he crept down and entered the flat.

Rufus was lying on the floor in a spreading pool of blood that had already reached the extreme edges of the carpet. On the coffee table ten feet away from him, his legs had been neatly laid, one beside the other, like bouquets recently delivered by a florist.

‘Dear me,’ said Simon. ‘Legless again, Rufus.’

Rufus stared up at him. ‘Fuck you,’ he hissed. ‘Fuck you to hell.’

Simon looked down and shook his head. ‘Phew!’ he said with distaste. ‘I was right wasn’t I? Now you do know the meaning of shit scared. I pity the person who finds you. Let’s see, your cleaner comes on Monday, I believe. Maybe I should spare her sensibilities and warn the police. An anonymous tip-off perhaps … you’re an expert in those, aren’t you? As a matter of fact you’re very lucky, do you know that? They say that it is quite pleasant to bleed to death. I dare say you won’t be feeling much pain. The effects of shock can be merciful. Not a word I have much use for, of course.

As he left, Rufus shouted after him. His voice came out huskily and over the next hour, as the life flowed out of him, he tried to console himself with the thought that Simon must have heard every word.

‘I was right about you from the first, Ned fucking Maddstone,’ he had called after him. ‘You were always an arrogant fucker. I saw through you from the very beginning! Fuck you, Ned. Fuck you. You deserved it. Whatever it was, you deserved it.’

Simon flicked out the latch and closed the door, leaning against it until the lock snicked home. Rufus’s words had not, in fact, penetrated the hammering in his own ears. He went slowly downstairs and out into the cold air.

Ned, trembling with exhilaration, looked up at the night sky. The stars winked down at him.

‘Four!’ he whispered, and winked back.

The Barson-Garland Page was turning out to be something of a saccиs d’estime. Taking a cue from the regular columnists on the rival evening paper, Ashley found that he had a gift for tediously obvious opinions expressed in a formulaic polemical style that exactly suited the kind of brain-fagged commuter most ready to confuse polysyllabic misanthropy for intelligent thought. London’s appetite for trenchant attacks on ‘Political Correctness’ seemed to know no bounds and Ashley was happy to feed it. He had in abundance that peculiar journalistic gift of stating all the prevailing bourgeois prejudices in a language that represented itself as ‘maverick’, ‘daring’ and ‘unconventional’. Nor had the heroic failure of his Private Member’s Bill done anything to harm his growing reputation as one who dared to speak up for ‘Common Sense’, ‘Decency’, ‘Standards’ and the deeper feelings of the ‘Silent Majority’ and his beloved ‘Instincts of the British People’. Whispers were growing within the Party. Barson-Garland was achieving more for the Conservatives from the back benches than leading figures were managing from the front. His name had been openly mentioned by the BBC’s senior political correspondent as a contender in any future leadership election. Things were moving along well.

Simon Cotter had not been able to help him with his Bill, but had expressed his sympathy in an orotund style very like Ashley’s own.

‘I have no doubt that governmental access to net traffic is ultimately inevitable,’ he had agreed. ‘The imperatives of financial security, public morals and systemic virus protection will make the idea irresistible in time. I cannot be seen to endorse it, however. I’m sure you understand that for commercial reasons I must place myself on the side of the civil libertarians. When the time does come, I suspect that you will play some part in its implementation and I want to assure you that you will have our full cooperation here at CDC. In the meantime, I wonder if I can talk to you about something else? As you may know, we have recently acquired the London Evening Press. My editor is on the lookout for a good regular columnist. Does the idea appeal?’

The idea – and Cotter’s elegant (to Ashley’s mind) manner of phrasing it – had appealed greatly and Barson-Garland had waxed great. On the back of his new found success as a Common Sense Tribune of the People, he had recently embarked upon a series of live television debates. Armed with a microphone and a bank of experts, victims and unbelievers, he stalked the studio like a grand inquisitor, probing moral and ethical issues to their depths: a Great White Oprah, an intellectual Jerry Springer, a Moral Montel for the New Millennium.

The first programme, under the title of ‘The Failure of Feminism’ had gone exceptionally well and he was currently preparing the next. His producer had told him that it was essential, in television, to put your heaviest artillery in the second programme in a series.

‘If the first is good,’ she had said, ‘the second must be better. Those who missed the opening episode will have been told about it by their friends or read reviews in the papers. They will tune in to number two in their droves, so let’s make it a stormer.’

It was to be entitled ‘The Threat of the Net’ and a stormer it would certainly be. Parents whose children had run up impossible phone bills or had met unsavoury perverts through chat room friendships, musicians whose royalties had been threatened – all had been lined up and were ready to accuse the defenders of the net, the authors of software that allowed mass music copyright infringement, the service providers who failed to filter repulsive news groups, the credit card companies, the irresponsible online medical services, the whole internet establishment. One of the programme s researchers had built a bomb by using information readily available on the web, another had bought drugs and yet another – and this would surely constitute one of the most sensational exposés in television history – had been posing as a twelve-year-old for six months and was planning, live, to meet another apparent minor whom the programme had deduced (by linguistic analysis) to be an adult. A hidden camera would record the whole scene and police were standing by to make an arrest.

On the day of transmission, Ashley appeared to be the only one with a cool head. A group of parents had found themselves having supper in the studio canteen next to a man whose laptop displayed repulsive photographs of dead bodies and mutilated limbs. The parents had screamed and accused the producers of insensitivity, stupidity and deliberate manipulative wickedness. Ruffled feathers were smoothed when it turned out that the offending laptop belonged to a reporter who was researching Angolan landmines for a completely unconnected programme. The reporter in question, who had gone off to join the supper queue, was severely reprimanded for leaving his computer unattended. The father of the child who had opened the laptop was persuaded against legal action and relative calm was restored.

By the time Ashley made his opening address, the studio was crackling with tension.

‘Cyberspace, the final frontier …' he began, standing in the centre of the studio. ‘We have sought out new worlds and new civilisations. We have boldly gone where no man has gone before and what has been our reward? An explosion in crime, gambling, pornography, exploitation, video-gaming and vice – a good old- fashioned word for a bad old-fashioned evil. No laws stand between a seven-year-old child and the corruption of his innocence. We are told nothing can be done about this. Is that true? Is there no such thing as political will? Are we already victims of the machine? Or is it just possible that humanity, as it always has, still retains the power to say No? Is it too late to decide simply to walk away?

‘Against the anarchy and degradation represented by the slimier corners of the net stands one institution: ancient, kindly, wise, noble, but apparently powerless in the face of man’s lust for technology … we call this institution The Family. What a pitifully small thing it seems when ranged against the colossal vested interests and