Stephen Fry - The Stars’ Tennis Balls

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 tail coats 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 Cohn 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.