Ball! Ball!

Chris was the sweetest kid. He always had a gummy smile for everyone.

His parents had the house next to ours. When they moved in, my mother was involved in some arguments with them on account of Chris’s shouting during the night. Those council-house walls were badly made and very thin, and her bedroom was on the other side of the wall to his. I could hear it too, but it was muffled by the time it reached my room.

Once, the shouting was so loud that my mother called the police; she thought Chris was being abused. This became the source of some animosity between the two families; the Brookers felt aggrieved, and rightly so, as it turned out.

Chris was the same age as me. He didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and nor did I. Apart from his smiles when our families’ paths crossed out front, I had nothing to do with him until one sunny summer afternoon in the school holidays.

I was playing football in the back garden against imaginary opponents – the lonely games of an only child. A shot of mine hit the rusting lawnmower sitting in the middle of the patch of earth and dead grass that passed for a lawn. The ball rebounded and sailed over the high wooden fence separating us from the Brookers.

I muttered some choice vernacular I’d picked up from my mother when she was annoyed, and was in the process of plucking up the courage to ask for the ball back – having to speak to the Brookers was far from an appealing prospect, and I knew my mother wouldn’t even countenance the idea – when I heard it: a loud, gruff chortling. Moments later, the ball came sailing back over.

“Ball! Ball!” came a voice from the Brookers’ garden. I’d just retrieved my ball and should have been loath to relinquish it again, but something about the innocent joy in the tone of the voice made me put my reluctance to one side; I returned the ball with a kick. It was a matter of seconds before it came back, accompanied by more chortling and “Ball! Ball!”

The exchange went on for several minutes until I heard Mrs Brooker calling, not unkindly:

“Chris! Come on in. Tea-time.”

There was more chortling, receding, then disappearing at the closing of a door.

Later, when my mother asked who’d won my imaginary football match, I told her about what had happened. I could tell that she was interested, though she feigned indifference.

I asked her if I could play with Chris; all my friends were from school and didn’t live very close to us. She wouldn’t let me play with the other boys down our street.

“No, it’s best not,” she said, as if that were enough. But I was beginning to get a personality, so I didn’t swallow everything she said.

“Why not?” I asked, fixing her with a stare that I hoped would show I wasn’t going to be fobbed off.

“Just because,” she said – the classic justification for most of her rules and orders. Perhaps it was the weakness of her non-argument; the next day I went ahead and disobeyed her.

The wooden fence ran the length of the back garden on the Brookers’ side, flush with a lower, chain-link fence that was standard council issue. At the bottom, that fence joined another that ran along the bottom of the gardens of all the houses in our road – the boundary between us and the private estate beyond. It would have been impossible to scale the wooden fence, but I saw that I could climb over the chain-link fence at the bottom, into the garden of one of the private houses, then hop over into the Brookers’ garden, circumventing the wooden fence.

I made sure Chris was there by deliberately kicking the ball over, getting it back, then taking it and climbing into his garden.

As soon as I’d landed, Chris came up and pointed to the ball under my arm.

“Ball! Ball!” he chortled, his thick tongue lolling out.

I kicked the ball up the garden – much better tended than ours – and Chris chased after it, picking it up and running back to drop it at my feet, like a well-trained dog.

“No, like this,” I said, and showed him where to place his standing foot and swing with the other.

His first kicks were hopeless; we laughed like drains. He persevered, and within a few minutes we were passing the ball to each other, after a fashion, Chris chuckling all the while.

His mother came out of the back door and stood staring at us.

“Sorry, Mrs Brooker,” I said, pausing the game. “I was just…” I didn’t know what to say.

Chris was unfazed.

“Mum!” he shouted, kicking the ball into the roses and chasing after it.

“That’s all right, love,” Mrs Brooker said, addressing me. Her voice was gentle but weary-sounding. “Would you like some lemonade?”

She didn’t wait for my reply but disappeared into the kitchen, returning almost immediately carrying a tray with lemonade and some home-made biscuits. I got the impression that she might have been observing us at play for some time.

Chris carried on practising his new skill while his mother and I watched on.

“I think he likes you,” she said.

“That’s good,” I said.

I was very young and not well-versed in diplomatic small-talk.

As I sipped the lemonade and nibbled on a biscuit, I caught Mrs Brooker staring at me. She had a strange look in her eyes.

“So you’re James,” she said. “Your mum must be very proud of you.”

“Dunno. Suppose,” I said, blushing.

She smiled faintly at that, then appeared to make a decision.

“You can come and play any time,” she said. “Come round the front way.”

She went over to Chris now and folded him in her arms, giving him the warmest hug I’d ever seen and whispering to him. They went in, Chris grinning from ear to ear as he passed.

“Bye bye!” he said with a parting chortle.

I was left alone in the garden. I took the ball and returned home, the front way. My mother saw me coming down the path.

“Where you been?” she asked. I could sense the anger in her voice, though she never raised it to me.

I thought of inventing a story but went for something half-true.

“I kicked the ball over next door.” I showed her the ball as proof.

“You speak to them?” she wanted to know. Now I was truthful.

“Yeah. They’re nice.”

“What about … him, the boy?”

“He’s nice. We had a game of footy.”

She frowned at that and dropped the subject. Later, I was in my bedroom and heard her talking to someone. I peeked out through the curtains and saw her chatting with Mrs Brooker over the front fence. I couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying, but they seemed to be getting on.

The next morning, as she was clearing up the breakfast things, she said:

“You going next door to play?”

I nodded vigorously. I hadn’t been planning to go and was surprised at the tacit permission.

“Can do,” I said, jumping up from the table. Just as I was leaving, she called me back.

“Here. One for you and one for Chris.” And she handed me two Mars bars.

Chris and I spent a lot of time together – football, cricket (he was hilariously hopeless at that too), hide and seek, cowboys and Indians... I don’t think we had a single coherent conversation, but we understood each other pretty well through the common language of play.

They were good times … until we received a newcomer at home. My mother had met Ray at her bingo night. He was mostly friendly to me, though it always felt forced, and it was only when my mother was around. I wasn’t very keen on him, but that was mainly because he wasn’t my father. Still, I didn’t make it hard for my mother, and she seemed happy enough.

One rainy day, Chris was round our house, being loud while we played table football. Ray was trying to watch the racing on the TV and shouted through to my mother, who was in the kitchen.

“Hey, you wanna get this mong to keep it down?!”

My mother came through and hustled us out into the garden, despite the rain.

It was the first time I’d seen Chris looking morose.

“Bad! Bad!” he said. I had to agree with him. At the first opportunity, I shared our misgivings with my mother.

“You mind your own business,” she said. “And that goes for your mate, too.”

I didn’t want to push it because she was right: it wasn’t really my business. Chris and I kept out of Ray’s hair from then on, and a couple of weeks later, he became another of my mother’s exes. I didn’t tell her ‘we told you so’, but I think she got the idea.

Summer ended and with it my brief relationship with Chris; in September, he went off to his special boarding school, I went back to mine and my regular friends. I didn’t forget him, though, and was looking forward to his coming home at half-term.

Then one weekend, I was in the back garden and a ball sailed over the fence, landing near me. I could hardly contain my excitement and returned it, but it didn’t come back. I did the manoeuvre I’d used that first day and hopped into the Brookers’ back garden, only to find that it wasn’t Chris who’d sent the ball over.

“Hello, James,” his mother said. “Come and have some lemonade.” She had it set out on a small table in front of their garden bench.

“Where’s Chris,” I said, sitting down next to her. She ignored my question.

“You’ve been a good friend to Chris.” She ruffled my hair.

“Is he okay?” I asked, worried now.

“Yes, he’s fine – still at school,” she said. She turned to look at me. “I just wanted to let you know that we’re moving.”

I processed that for a couple of seconds.

“Close?” I wanted to know.

She shook her head sadly.

“Up north. Mr Brooker’s family’s from there, you see. His brother – Chris’s uncle – knows someone who works at this very good school, and they’ve found Chris a place, so…”

She left the rest hanging. I was young but I could figure out that if Chris was going to be in a new school, then his parents would want to be near him.

“So Chris isn’t coming back here?”

She ruffled my hair again.

“I’m afraid not, love.”

“All right,” I said, getting up, the lemonade untouched.

I could feel tears coming and I wanted not to be there when they did.

Mrs Brooker got up at the same time and folded me in her arms, like she’d done with Chris the day I met him.

“Thank you, James,” she whispered.

I half-wanted to escape the embrace, but at the same time, I wanted to remain enveloped in her warmth. Eventually, she released me.

“Go on now. You’d best be off,” she said, starting to clear away the lemonade. As I moved away to go back home, I heard her make a soft, strangled sound.

To my shame, I never made the effort to contact her or Chris, although she’d left their address and the address of Chris’s school. But I did see Chris once more.

I grew up, went to university, got a job in my home town, my mother died, I met Barbara. I’d had a number of girlfriends, none of them for very long. Barbara felt different. We’d been together for around three years and occasionally touched on the subject of marriage, but I’d always had a problem with commitment.

Then by chance we were in the Lake District on holiday and passed through the town where Chris’s school was. I told Barbara and she insisted we visit. I hadn’t the slightest hope that Chris would still be there, but when we asked at reception, we discovered that he was.

We found him sitting on a bench in the garden with a carer. He looked ill and very weak, but his face lit up when he saw me.

“Ball! Ball!” he croaked, that gummy smile still there.

We laughed then, though my laughter was tempered with sadness and regret that I hadn’t been a more faithful friend.

He got up, unsteady on his feet, hugging me clumsily. I introduced him to Barbara and if anything, his smile broadened. He hugged her too.

“Bar! Bar!” he chortled, like the seven-year-old Chris.

We spent the afternoon with him, with lemonade and biscuits for refreshments. There was nothing much to say, and anyway, conversation was as difficult as ever. But the lulls weren’t uncomfortable, and I enjoyed sitting in the late summer sunshine with an old friend.

When we were leaving, I promised Chris I’d keep in touch – though he wouldn’t have understood the concept. And I did make the effort this time; I phoned the school a week later to find that Chris had passed.

Barbara was exceptionally supportive while I grieved, which was one of the factors that led me to commit finally. The other, of course, was Chris’s at-first-sight affection for her; he was always a good judge of character.

We got married the following spring, and two years later we had our first child. I didn’t have to work too hard to convince Barbara about the name we should give him.