Stephen Fry - The Stars’ Tennis Balls

Simon left the room and crossed the landing as directed. As he passed the stairs he noticed that the stair-lift had moved from the bottom of the staircase to the top. A half open door caught Simon’s eye and he pushed it open and went in.

Alone and immobile, Oliver Delft’s mother sat on a wheelchair facing a window that overlooked the Square. Simon came and stood beside her. Her eyes rolled up towards him. It seemed to Simon that her face was capable of showing some expression, for he thought he detected a gleam of surprised pleasure.

‘Philippa Blackrow,’ he whispered. ‘How strange to meet you. I’m Ned Maddstone. Do you know that you are responsible for the destruction of my life? Do you know that because of you I spent twenty years imprisoned in an insane asylum? Twenty years because of you and your cunt of a son.

Breath hissed and bubbled from Philippa’s lungs and he could sense the strain in her as she tried to mobilise her sagging cheeks and drooping mouth into some shape that might move towards speech. Saliva ran from her lips and her clawed and wasted hands shook like dried leaves in a storm.

‘I was to have delivered a letter to you. From your Fenian friends. Of all the people in the world, it was your son who intercepted it. That is how cruel fate can be. To protect you and to save his own worthless skin he hid me away to rot amongst the mad for ever. And now I have come back. I am much crueller than fate. I thought you should know that. Infinitely more cruel. They tell me that inside this lifeless carcass your mind is fully active. Now it has something to ponder on for the rest of its days. Goodbye.’

The last picture of Philippa that Simon took away with him was of a mother down whose withered cheeks tears were flowing. He did not see, as he flushed the lavatory and crossed the landing to return to Oliver, that her mouth was trying to force itself into a smile and he could not know that the tears dropping from her eyes were tears of joy.

Albert banged into the house and called out from the bottom of the stairs.

‘Mum! Dad! Where are you?’

Only after he had yelled three times and heard no reply did he realise that Gordon and Portia would be out picking up his grandfather to bring him back for supper. That was the very reason for Albert leaving work so early, but the horrors of the tube journey had banished all such thoughts from his mind. He stormed angrily into the kitchen at the sound of the phone, swung his bag viciously onto the kitchen table, not caring if he cracked the screen of his laptop and pushed the phone off its hook, letting the receiver dangle down and bang against the wall. Java the cat wound around his ankles and he kicked him away.

‘Shit,’ he yelled. ‘Shit on everything. Shit you all. Shit, shit, shit.’

Breathing heavily through his nostrils, he took the newspaper from his jacket, sat down at the table and read the article for the twelfth time. Java sat coldly in the corner, ignoring him with great dignity.

A coffee scandal was brewing in the world of ‘ethical trading’ this morning, when it was revealed exclusively to the London Evening Press that Gordon Fendeman, founder of Café Ethica and darling of New Labour and the eco-conscious chattering classes, had cheated an entire African community out of their land rights and destroyed the way of life of a whole people in order to start up his business. The so-called ‘co-operatives’ that Café Ethica claims to be supporting were actually, according to sources on the ground, bussed in from a tribe two hundred miles to the east of the plantation. Sources say that this was the result of a corrupt arrangement made between Fendeman (41) and the local government, which is composed entirely of the rival, majority tribe.

These disclosures will rock the rapidly expanding world of ethical commodities and cast fresh doubt on New Labour’s business judgement. Only two weeks ago, the Prime Minister in a speech to the City referred to Fendeman’s enterprise as a ‘beacon of light that led the way to new ways of trading with the Third World’, words which he must now be bitterly regretting.

Reports say that Fendeman, who is married to art historian Portia Fendeman, struck a deal in 1998 with the minority tribal leaders, who turned down a lucrative offer from a worldwide consortium in order to do business with Fendeman’s new company. They were led to believe that a deal with Café Ethica would be in their best interests, offering profit sharing, improved working conditions and the promise of a secure future for their people. They were horrified to discover that the terms of this contract in fact allowed Fendeman to evict them from land they had owned for countless generations and replace them with workers from another part of the country. These displaced people now face a future of starvation, disease and homelessness in a country where their tribe has few enough rights.

Fendeman’s personal profits from the local government deal that kicked these people off their land and from the growing sales of Café Ethica products have been calculated to exceed one million pounds a year. Comment, Page 12.

The ‘comment’ on page twelve was unspeakable, just unspeakable. Albert felt that his whole world was crashing down around him. It seemed impossible to separate the various strands of his despair.

His father. How could such a thing be written. How dared they? It must be lies. He knew his father too well to believe anything else. But it would hurt him so deeply. He was a proud man. Whatever the outcome, mud would stick.

His work: for five months, Albert had been toiling away in the field of Ethical Trading. He had broken new ground and achieved great things. He was proud of what he was doing and how it would help the world. Something like this, however deeply untrue it so manifestly was, would dwell in the mind of the public for ever. The consumer’s hand would start to close around a product whose labelling contained the word ‘ethical’ and then draw back as if stung. ‘Oh yes,’ they would say to themselves. ‘Wasn’t there some nasty fuss about these types of companies? Better stick to Nescafé.’ And all that good work would be undone.

Simon: The London Evening Press was his newspaper. He was a busy man, of course. Albert had never seen a man with such a capacity for work and detail. Only yesterday, in a wine bar, Albert had been boasting about him to his friends. He had used the very word ‘detail’ time and time again in describing Simon’s awesome abilities. It was the quality that always marked out the great: their grasp on detail. And that was the problem. Albert could not imagine for a moment that Simon, however busy he was, could ever have been unaware of the LEP’s attack on Gordon. He must have known. But if he had known then how could he have allowed it? Not to warn Albert, not to take him aside and break the news. The same friends that Albert had talked to when raving on and on about him had been cynical. ‘Believe me,’ one of them had said. ‘No one makes that kind of money without being a complete son of a bitch deep down.’ ‘You’re wrong, so wrong!’ Albert had insisted. But a memory returned to him now of the strange sensation he had felt standing next to him while they watched the public destruction of Ashley Barson-Garland on television. There had been nothing in Simon’s expression that Albert could pin down, but none the less he had been aware of a feeling. An atmosphere. Intense waves had radiated from Simon that Albert had tried to push to the back of his mind. It had been like smelling fear, or sexual desire, or guilt, yet it had been none of those things. It had been something else. And the rumours that had flown throughout the company. Cosima? Acting independently? Getaway! She couldn’t take a pee without Cotter’s say-so, let alone appear on TV. Albert had dismissed all that as office gossip. Maybe though, maybe there was something about Simon. If Albert inspected his feelings honestly, maybe… maybe what he had smelt that night had been cruelty.