The Stars’ Tennis Balls Read Online Free

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. . 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.
    Americans don’t have this trouble do they? With names and the implications of names. The one Ashley, in fact, who might be said to have had a touch of class was American. Ashley in
Gone With the Wind.
So classy that they called him Eshley. In the film, Leslie Howard never even
tried
to give him an American accent. Leslie
and
Howard. Two disgusting names for the price of one. But then Leslie Howard wasn’t English. He was Hungarian and to him no doubt, fresh off the boat, Leslie and Howard seemed posh.
    The word ‘posh’ is right out. Unsayable.
    But
seemed.
Seemed posh. There’s the rub. What people
think
is smart is so far from what actually, Ashley, is. You might think silver fish knives would be pretty bloody pukka, but fish knives of any kind are an absolute no. You might as well put doilies round them and abandon all hope of social pretension.
    But it isn’t
about
social pretension.