How long must guilt last? When I was a boy, aged about 10, I had a football that I kicked around for years, with my mates, with my brother or all on my own, dribbling aimlessly about or booting it against a wall. This ball conferred upon me some status, for it was what we used to call a caser, which is not a word I’ve used for a good 40 years. A caser meant it was a proper football, with a rubber bladder on the inside and leather on the outside. This was as opposed to a very cheap plastic sphere that blew around in the wind, or one made of thicker plastic and fashioned to look like a caser. The latter was more respectable than the former, but it wasn’t, you know, a caser.
I had this ball for a long time, progressing from being able to do only five keepy-ups, to as many as perhaps 10. Yes, I was that gifted. This was the 70s, at the dawn of which decade Adidas had come up with its Telstar ball for the 1970 World Cup. It was made of 32 leather panels, consisting of 12 black pentagons and 20 white hexagons. My caser was modelled on that caser. It was probably a present from my grandad, but I don’t remember what it looked like when it was new, only how it looked when it was old, when the panels were neither black nor white, just brown, having had all the colour kicked out of them.
By then, I wanted a new one, a shiny new ball, probably the Tango that Adidas made for the 1978 World Cup, which had, intoxicatingly, 12 fewer panels. But my mum said no. She said that my ball was perfectly OK, and I could only hope for a new one when it was unusable. She had a point. My caser, though a deeply uninteresting uniform brown, was still round enough and hard enough for football purposes. For what might have been hours, days, weeks or months – I don’t remember – I kicked the poor thing around with ever greater vigour, hoping to hasten the end of its useful life. Eventually, I spotted a loosening of some stitching, through which could be glimpsed a bit of bright orange bladder.
No, my mum said: it’s still fine. Further furious kicking ensued, yielding no dark joy of deflation. So I’m sorry to say that I did something terrible. I took my loyal, loved, then unloved caser somewhere quiet, and plunged a penknife into the bit of exposed bladder. To this day I can hear the sound my poor old ball made as it gasped its last – actually it was less of a gasp than a sigh of sheer sorrow and disappointment. I’d let my mum down, I’d let myself down and I’d let my caser down, in more ways than one. I lost all thought of the shiny new ball. I burst into tears and ran to my mum.
The awful irony is that it was my tears of shame that led to me escaping punishment for my terrible crime. Mum thought I was crying for my burst ball, which I was, but not in the way she thought. The price I paid was, honestly, a lifetime of guilt. I think it was because I got away with it. If I hadn’t, I would have been punished and my sin would have been somehow atoned for. If she’d seen what I had done I would doubtless have got a sound thrashing – actually, when she reads this, a sound thrashing may yet ensue – and the matter would have been dealt with.
As it was, I got a new ball, which I could never bring myself to love like the old one, and also a little, orange-coloured stain of shame on my soul that I can’t ever shift. Just about serves me right, as my mum will tell me any day now.
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
