Show Him Inside

by George Best, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The tennis ball had been yellow once. By September it was the colour of a smoker's ceiling and bald on one side, and Bernard Lomax kept it in the right-hand pocket of his anorak with his keys and a tube of Polos.

He took it out at the front gate. He put it down on the pavement, pushed it with the inside of his left foot, walked after it, and pushed it again. It was four hundred and ten yards to Hassan's for the paper, measured with the trundle wheel his grandson had brought home from school, and four hundred and ten back. Left foot only. Inside, outside, the sole to stop it. When it ran into the gutter he went and got it with his left. When it rolled under a parked car he got down on one knee, which took a while, and fished it out with his hand, and that was a fault, and he went back to the last lamp-post and started again from there.

At the corner of Lowndes Lane, before he crossed, he stopped it on the edge of the kerb. Not near the edge. On it: the ball sitting on the lip of the stone, half of it out over the road, and his left sole resting on top. He held it there for a count of three. Then he picked it up and crossed with it in his hand like anybody else, because he was seventy-one and he was not daft.

He had started in February. Pat had watched him go off the first morning from the front-room window, and when he came back with the Express under his arm she said, "What was that?"

"Practice."

"For what?"

"Wednesdays."

"Bernard," she said, "you've had one foot for seventy years," and went back to the crossword.

It had been terrible at first. The left foot didn't know where the ball was. It knew there was a ball, roughly, and it went out to it the way a hand goes out for a light switch in a strange house, and it hit it on the toe, or the ankle bone, or missed. The ball went into hedges. It went under the wheels of a Deliveroo bike, and the lad on the bike said something through his helmet that Bernard was glad he didn't catch. On the third of March it went down a drain grid outside the Methodist church and he had to go home and get the barbecue tongs. Twice he walked into the lamp-post outside number forty-two, which had a dog bin bolted to it, because he was looking at the ball and not where he was going, and the second time Mrs Kavanagh at forty-two came out in her dressing gown to see if he was all right.

He was all right. He went back to the last lamp-post and started again.

By Easter it took him nineteen minutes to Hassan's and back, which was eleven minutes longer than it took with the ball in his pocket, and the faults were down from thirty-odd to nine. By June it was fourteen minutes and two faults, and he'd stopped looking at the ball. He looked at the pavement ahead, at the cracks and the wheelie bins and the dog bin, and the ball was just there, a bit in front of his left foot, where he had put it. He couldn't have told you when that started. One day it hadn't been there and the next day it had.

Between the start of August and the middle of September he did the kerb at Lowndes Lane forty mornings running without the ball dropping into the road. He knew it was forty because he wrote it on the calendar in the kitchen, a little mark in biro in the corner of each day, and Pat looked at the marks and didn't ask.

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Wednesday was walking football, ten till eleven, in the sports hall at the community centre on Gorton Road. Four pounds, which went in a biscuit tin with a picture of Blackpool Tower on the lid. The hall had badminton lines in green and netball lines in red, and at each end a semicircle in blue tape, six metres from the middle of the goal, that Keith Openshaw had laid himself with a tape measure and a length of string, because the painted ones were the wrong size and Keith had read the rules. Nobody but the keeper went inside the blue. That was the rule. You could put your toe on the tape. You couldn't put your toe over it.

There were climbing ropes tied back against the wall bars, and the floor smelled of the stuff the caretaker put down on Mondays, and when twelve pairs of trainers turned on it at once it sounded like a field of birds.

Gwen Thorley refereed, in a fleece, with a whistle on a bootlace. She had done the school crossing outside St Mary's for nineteen years and she held her hand up to stop play exactly as she had held it up to stop a bin lorry. Nobody argued with the hand. Running was a free kick. Both feet off the floor at once was running. Gwen could see daylight under a heel from the far end of the hall.

Bernard played on the right. He always had. For twenty-two seasons of Sunday mornings he had played right-back for the Crown, on the pitches by the river where the goalmouths were mud from October to April, and twice a season the Crown played Heaton Mersey, and Heaton Mersey had Les Ackerley on the left wing.

Les had a left foot and nothing else. Everybody in the league knew it and Bernard knew it best. You showed Les inside. You stood a yard off his outside shoulder and gave him nothing down the line, nothing at all, so that if he wanted to go anywhere he had to come inside onto his right, and his right was for standing on. Bernard had done it to him maybe forty times in twenty-two years. Les had got past him on the outside twice. Bernard could have told you the dates.

Now Les was sixty-nine, and his hips had gone, and in walking football he played at the back. And for three years, every Wednesday, Les stood a yard off Bernard's outside shoulder and gave him nothing down the line.

He'd learned it off Bernard. He gave it back with interest.

So when the ball came to Bernard on the right, which it did, because Keith liked to keep it wide, he looked down the line, and Les was there, and he looked inside, and inside was his left, and he passed it back to Keith. Keith said, "Good, Bernard. Keep it simple." Keith said that most weeks. He had a laminated sheet in his kitbag called Pass and Move that he'd printed off at the library.

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That Wednesday the score was one each after twenty minutes, Bernard's lot in the orange bibs and Les's lot in the blue. Keith kept the score in his head and announced it after every goal in the voice of a man reading the shipping forecast.

Bernard had touched the ball nine times. He'd passed it back to Keith seven times and inside to Tony Halliwell twice. He hadn't used his left.

He'd been watching Les's feet.

When Bernard had the ball, Les's weight sat on the foot nearest the touchline. It always did. He was ready to shut the line if Bernard went down it, and he'd been ready for three years, and nothing had ever come down the line. A man gets comfortable. By the fifteenth minute Les was standing with his hands on his hips between plays, and when the ball came out to Bernard he didn't take them off.

The tenth time, Bernard dawdled.

It was a dull ball off Tony, nothing in it. Bernard let it come to him and took it on the inside of his right foot and then he didn't go anywhere much. He went towards Les at the pace you'd walk behind a hearse. Les came to meet him at the same pace, a yard off the outside shoulder, hands off the hips now but no hurry about it.

Bernard went slower.

There's no slower than walking, Keith used to say, when somebody complained the game was slow. There is, though. There's dawdling, and there's walking, and in this hall the difference between them was the only gear a man had. So Bernard used the bottom gear. He let Les settle into it. He let Les's feet start to match his feet, step and step, the two of them coming together across the green badminton lines like an old couple on the prom.

Then he dropped his right shoulder down the line.

He didn't do anything else. Just the shoulder, and a little shift of the hip with it. Les had watched that shoulder for three years of Wednesdays, and every time it dropped the ball had gone back to Keith. His head knew that. His body didn't. His weight went down onto the line foot, all of it, to shut the line, the line that Bernard had never gone down in his life.

Bernard took the ball inside with the outside of his left foot.

It was a small touch. It was the touch that took the tennis ball round the base of the lamp-post outside number forty-two, past Mrs Kavanagh's dog bin, every morning since June. The ball went across Les's front, a foot from his planted boot, and Bernard walked after it. Not dawdled. Walked, properly, heel and toe, all the legal pace there was, and after the hearse it looked like a man catching a bus.

"He's running!" Les said. "Gwen! Gwen, he's running!"

"He's walking, Leslie," said Gwen, and did not put her hand up.

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He came to the blue tape with the ball on his left foot and nobody in front of him but Mick Sowerbutts.

Mick was the blue team's keeper. He was a big, soft, careful man who had driven a milk float and then a minibus for the council, and in goal he spread himself in his semicircle like a bloke protecting a buffet. He'd faced Bernard in this hall perhaps a hundred and fifty times. He had seen him shoot perhaps thirty. All thirty had been with the right foot, and most of them had gone to Mick's left, because that was the way a right foot falls when it's swung by a man with a bad back.

Mick went down early to his left.

He didn't dive. Nobody dived in walking football; at their age you'd be a month getting up. He crouched. He went low and leaned, his big gloves out, his weight already in the left-hand corner waiting for the ball to arrive there.

Bernard didn't shoot.

He stopped the ball on the tape. Not near it. On it: the ball sitting on the blue line, half of it in the semicircle and half of it out, and Bernard's left sole resting on the top. His right foot was planted beside it, outside the blue, where it was allowed to be. He looked down at the two of them, the ball and the tape, and for a moment it was Lowndes Lane at twenty past eight with the Express under his arm.

He held it there.

Mick could have come for it. Half of it was his. He looked at it, and at the foot on top of it, and you could see him think about coming, and about Gwen's hand, and about what a sole on a ball does to a man's fingers. He stayed where he was.

Behind him the whole hall was coming back. Nobody could run, so they all walked, as fast as walking went, arms going, faces fixed, ten men and a referee hurrying across a polished floor without hurrying, like a congregation leaving a church that's caught fire. Somebody's trainers shrieked. Keith was shouting from the halfway line, "Hit it! Hit it, Bernard! Just hit it!"

Mick Sowerbutts, in his crouch, looked at Bernard's foot on the ball. He looked at it for a long time. Then he straightened up a bit, because a man can't stay leaning for ever, and as he straightened his weight came back to the middle, and then, because Bernard still hadn't moved, it came a little bit to his right, to see what Bernard would do about that.

Les arrived at Bernard's left shoulder. He couldn't tackle from behind. He couldn't come round in front without going inside the blue. He stood there with his hands on his knees and his breath going.

"Go on, then," Les said.

Bernard dropped his right shoulder.

Mick went with it. Back to his left, the old corner, the right-foot corner, the place he'd been taught by thirty Wednesdays. He went with his whole body and his gloves and his soft careful heart.

Bernard took his sole off the top of the ball and side-footed it with the inside of his left into the other corner. Along the floor. Not hard. It didn't need to be. It went over Mick's planted right boot, close enough to clip a lace, and it rolled into the bottom of the net, and the net was one of the old ones with a hole in the corner the size of a fist, and the ball went through the hole and out the back and on across the hall, and stopped against the wall bars under the climbing ropes.

Nobody said anything.

Then Keith, from halfway, in the shipping-forecast voice: "Two–one."

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He didn't score again. He touched the ball another fourteen times and passed it eleven, nine times back to Keith, once inside to Tony, and once, near the end, with the outside of his left foot, across the whole width of the hall to a lad called Darren who had only joined in August and who had never had a pass from anyone in his life that he hadn't had to fetch. Darren hit it with his first touch and it went in off the post.

Les didn't show him inside again. Les showed him nothing. He stood square in front of him with his weight on both feet and his eyes on the ball, and he didn't put his hands on his hips once. That was all right. Bernard didn't need him to show him anything. He just passed it.

They lost four–three, in the end. Mick saved one off Tony with both knees and his stomach at once, and sat down after it. Keith announced the result and then took the blue tape up off the floor in long strips, rolling it round his hand, because the caretaker had complained about the floor.

At the biscuit tin, Les was counting out his four pounds in coins. He put them in one at a time.

"February?" he said.

Bernard looked at him.

"I've seen you," Les said. "From the bus. With your little ball. I thought you'd lost your marbles."

"February," said Bernard.

Les put the lid back on the tin, and looked at the lid, at Blackpool Tower, as if there was something on it he wanted to read.

"Twenty-two years," he said, and looked down at his right shoe as if it owed him money.

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On Thursday it rained. Bernard put his hood up and took the tennis ball out at the front gate, and pushed it with his left, and walked after it. The pavements were dark and the ball went heavy and slow, and he had to lean into his touches to move it, and he got to the corner of Lowndes Lane and stopped it on the kerb for a count of three and picked it up and crossed.

There was somebody outside Hassan's.

He was in a flat cap, with the rain running off the peak, and he had a tennis ball, a new one, still bright, still furry, the green of a highlighter pen. He was pushing it against the bottom of the shop's front step with his right foot. Only his right foot. It came back off the step and ran away from him every time, wide, towards the bus stop, and every time he went and got it with his right.

Les Ackerley lived on the far side of the A6, the best part of a mile.

Bernard didn't say anything. Neither did Les. Bernard put his own ball down on the wet pavement with his left foot on it, and waited until Les's right foot went to fetch his, and then he went past him on the outside.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum Nōnās Octōbrēs (4 October 2026), ā Georgiō Bestō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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George Best, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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