The Sound of the Ball

Every night at ten, just as Kieran Lewis pulled down the shutter on his shop, he heard it.

Thud. Thud. Clang.

A basketball. On the court behind the parade. Somebody on their own, shooting in the dark under the one floodlight that still works.

Kieran is thirty-four. Tall, lean, always moving. He owns the shop on the parade — has done for eight years — and if you’ve lived round here any length of time, you’ve been in it. He knows everybody’s name and everybody’s usual. He lets the older ones pay at the end of the week. He’s put up posters for lost cats and missing bikes and the community centre’s summer fun day. When somebody’s short, he looks away while they count their coins. People come in for milk and leave with a bit of advice, a bit of a laugh, a bit of whatever they needed that day.

Everybody thinks Kieran’s got it together.

He’s just got very good at hiding the bits that don’t.

The shop was struggling. Rent up, prices up, customers spending less because they had less. There was a folder under the counter he didn’t open any more. There were nights he stayed late doing the accounts over and over, like the numbers might change if he looked at them enough times. There was a tiredness in him that sleep didn’t touch.

He stayed late most nights, if he was honest. Not because there was so much to do. Because going home meant sitting in the quiet, and in the quiet, the worry got loud.

Thud. Thud. Clang.

It had been going on for weeks. Always the same time. Always one person. Kieran would hear it as he locked up, and for some reason it bothered him. Not the noise. The loneliness of it. Who shoots hoops on their own at ten o’clock on a school night?

One Thursday, instead of walking to his car, he walked round the back.

It was a kid. Sixteen, maybe. Tracksuit, trainers, breath steaming in the cold. He was good — proper good, the kind of good that only comes from hours and hours. He saw Kieran and stopped, the ball tucked under his arm, wary.

“Alright,” Kieran said. “Don’t mind me. Heard you from the shop.”

“Am I too loud?”

“No.” Kieran looked at the hoop. “Your elbow’s out on the jump shot.”

The kid frowned. “You play?”

“Used to.”

He didn’t know why he said it. He hadn’t picked up a ball in over fifteen years. But the kid threw it to him, and his hands remembered before his head did. He bounced it twice, felt the grain of it, and shot. It went in off the backboard. Not pretty. But in.

The kid grinned for the first time. “Not bad for an old man.”

“Watch it.”

His name was Deji. They shot around for twenty minutes without talking much. Then, sitting on the low wall with the ball between his feet, Kieran asked, “Bit late to be out, isn’t it?”

Deji shrugged. “Mum works nights. Flat’s empty. Too quiet.” He spun the ball on his finger. “Out here, it’s just me and this. I don’t have to think.”

Kieran looked at him for a long moment. Flat’s empty. Too quiet. I don’t have to think.

He knew that sentence. He’d been living inside it for months.

When he got home that night, he didn’t turn the telly on to drown things out. He went to the cupboard in the hallway and pulled out a box he hadn’t opened in years. Old trainers. A team photo, sixteen-year-old Kieran in the back row, grinning. A notebook full of things he used to write — bits of poems, lyrics, a letter he never sent. A younger version of himself who believed evenings were for something other than just getting through.

He sat on the hallway floor and went through it all. It took longer than he meant it to.

“I don’t want to spend my life just getting through it,” he said to the empty flat. It was the first honest thing he’d said out loud in a long time.

The next afternoon, on his break, he sat down next to Samuel on the bench.

Samuel had been getting his paper from Kieran’s shop for eight years. He’d watched Kieran grow tired the way you’d watch a tree lean, slowly, a little more each winter. He hadn’t said anything. It wasn’t his to say. But when Kieran sat down, he folded the paper and waited.

“The shop’s in trouble,” Kieran said. Just like that. “I haven’t told anyone.”

Samuel nodded. “How long?”

“About a year.”

“That’s a long time to carry something on your own.”

“Everyone needs me to be alright. I’m the one who sorts things.”

Samuel looked at him steadily. “And who sorts you?”

Kieran didn’t have an answer.

“What do you think happens,” Samuel said slowly, “if you keep going exactly like this?”

Kieran thought about it. The folder under the counter. The late nights. The quiet. “I break,” he said.

“And if you don’t keep going like this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well.” Samuel unfolded his paper again. “That’s a better answer than the first one.”