The Last Move

An original short story written for Revision Library.

[1] The Trentbridge Schools' Chess Championship final had come down to a single board, in a hall that still smelled faintly of floor polish from the summer holidays, and the two players sitting opposite each other were, for once, not strangers at all. Dominic Asante had known Yusuf Rahman since Year 3, when they had swapped their first careful moves across a battered chess set in the school library at lunchtime, and in six years of matches neither boy had ever managed to beat the other more than twice in a row. Now, with the county trophy propped on a table by the door and thirty spectators pressed into rows of creaking plastic chairs, Dominic stared down at the board and felt something twist uncomfortably in his chest that had nothing to do with the position of the pieces. On the table between them, the digital clock ticked its red numbers downward like a small, patient countdown to something neither of them was ready for.

[2] He had wanted this, hadn't he? For three years Dominic had watched older pupils lift that same trophy at the end-of-year assembly, and he had promised himself, quietly and more than once, that one day it would be his turn to walk up onto that stage. Yet sitting here now, with Yusuf's knight hovering uncertainly over a square, Dominic found that the wanting had curdled into something heavier, something closer to dread. Winning would mean watching his best friend lose in front of the whole school, in the hall where they had eaten lunch together nearly every day since they were seven. Losing would mean six years of near-misses ending exactly where they had always ended: one place short, forever the second name on the runners-up list.

[3] It happened on Yusuf's thirty-first move. Reaching across the board to steady his water bottle, his sleeve brushed the head of his bishop, tipping it half an inch sideways before he snatched his hand back, horrified. Under the strict tournament rules pinned to the wall behind them, any piece a player touched had to be moved, if a legal move existed, whether the touch had been deliberate or not. Dominic saw immediately what Yusuf, still flustered, had not yet worked out: that bishop had exactly one legal move available, and it would fatally weaken the wall of pawns protecting Yusuf's king. He could call the arbiter over right now. He could win, cleanly, by the letter of the rules, and nobody watching would think any less of him for it.

[4] For a long moment Dominic simply looked at his friend across the board. Yusuf's ears had gone faintly pink, the way they always did when something embarrassed him, and his eyes were fixed on the clock rather than on Dominic, as though he already knew what was coming and had decided to face it without flinching. Dominic thought of every lunchtime in the library, every game that had ended in a handshake and an argument about whose turn it was to put the pieces away, and he understood, with a small, uncomfortable jolt, that some kinds of winning were not actually worth having. The silence between them stretched thin as wire, and somewhere behind him a chair creaked as a spectator leaned forward, waiting.

[5] 'Take your time,' Dominic said eventually, nodding at Yusuf's water bottle rather than at the board. 'I didn't see anything.' It was, strictly speaking, a lie, and both of them knew it, but Yusuf's shoulders dropped half an inch in relief, and he settled back into his chair and began, properly this time, to think. What followed was not a gift, and Dominic was careful to make sure of that: he played every remaining move as sharply as he knew how, hunting for every advantage the position honestly offered him. In the end it was Yusuf's own quiet, careful defending, not Dominic's mercy, that turned the game around fourteen moves later, and when Yusuf's knight finally forked Dominic's king and rook, the win belonged entirely to him.

[6] Dominic shook his friend's hand across the board, and found, to his own surprise, that the twisting feeling in his chest had finally loosened into something almost like relief. He watched Yusuf walk up to collect the trophy, hands still faintly trembling, and thought of the battered library chess set, missing one white pawn and half a knight's ear, that had started all of this back in Year 3. Somewhere between that first careless game and this one, Dominic realised, he had stopped needing to be the name at the top of the list, and had started needing, instead, to still recognise his own reflection in the mirror on the way home. It was not, he decided, walking out into the cool evening air, a bad trade to have made.