It is December 21, 2013. I am forty-one years old and I am just about to play in my first tennis competition. I’ve been half-joking, or maybe let’s say three-quarters-joking, for the last few weeks that I am going to win this, the Indoor Tennis Centre Christmas Tournament Ladies’ Singles. I have read books (always the first thing I do), weight-trained, studied strategy, watched tennis matches on YouTube. Initially, maybe back in November, I told myself, and my partner Rod, that I was going to win. But I didn’t completely believe it, and as the thing approached I realized I was mad to think of victory, especially as one of the entrants—the favorite, in fact—was a teenage tennis star with a coach, supportive parents, and a string of victories behind her. When I looked at the list of entrants with my coach, Dan, he simply shook his head and said, “You’ll have trouble beating her.”
I’ve been playing tennis again for almost six months and I don’t understand why I am not better. I mean, I’m good. I know that. Inside my head I’m really, really good, but my inner picture has not yet translated to actual results. I’ve played a couple of disastrous league matches by now and become a regular at Dan’s Monday-night “Recreational Session.” These would be called club nights, except the Indoor Tennis Centre isn’t a club, as such: it’s a pay-and-play, council-run center that you can’t join, exactly, but it does have teams. The Reccy sessions are clique-y and weird and I occasionally cry when I come home after them. Hayley, Dan’s mixed doubles partner, is clearly his favorite. She hits the ball hard, and she knows how to do topspin. Then there’s a bunch of large, confident women who hit the ball extremely hard and occasionally do drive volleys. And on the next court Becky Carter has her weekly coaching session with Josh.
The first time I saw Becky Carter I almost passed out with jealousy. She walked into the tennis center with a racquet handle sticking out of her backpack and everything, everything, from the angle of the racquet handle, to her sexy-naïve smile, to her blonde hair done up in a scruffy ponytail, was so perfect I wanted to die. Everyone was so pleased to see her. She’d been out with some kind of injury and this was her first session back. She was wearing little shorts with a tight top that showed her flat, muscular stomach. When she started hitting the ball with Josh it was like some flying martial arts film. She almost seemed like his equal. I wanted to do what she was doing so much that my brain couldn’t understand that I wasn’t in fact doing it. Of course, she has not entered the Christmas Tournament. Why would she?
My first match in the Christmas Tournament is against Karen, who has, she tells me, just been to do her family’s weekly shop in Sainsbury’s. To prepare for today, I have spent the previous day in a spa, had a full-body massage and a steam bath, drunk only two small glasses of red wine in the evening—although admittedly while sitting on a very hard chair for a long evening of performances based on Dickens at the local theatre—eaten two eggs for breakfast along with my usual “primal cereal,” and done some visualization and, OK, a little bit of praying to the universe. I meant to meditate, but didn’t. I have, however, watched a lot of videos of Federer on YouTube. I love his backhand. It’s one-handed, like mine. I have read and reread The Inner Game of Tennis, probably my favorite tennis book. It tells you to let go, relax, breathe, and let the mysterious inner part of you it calls “Self 2” play the game while you distract your ego by trying to read the writing on the tennis ball as it comes over the net toward you.
My initial mistake is in thinking that the fact that I have done all this and Karen has been to Sainsbury’s means that I will win easily. I’m much more worried about Amie Tonkiss, the teenage tennis queen. But to be honest, I’m nervous as hell about the whole thing. I haven’t really thought through my strategy, but if I had to put it into words, it would be something like “Keep getting the ball back and wait for your opponent to make a mistake.” This is not the strategy I plan to take through my year of tennis (and at this moment I don’t yet know I am going to have a year of tennis, nor that this is going to take me to the very brink of existence and sanity), but it is my strategy, sort of, for the Indoor Tennis Centre Christmas Tournament 2013. The only problem is that this is clearly also Karen’s strategy. And she is just as patient and accurate as I am.
Another problem is that being careful and accurate is not much fun. There’s no pace on the ball as it just plomps over the net and plomps back. I hit the ball so much harder in practice, with my male coach. I know that inside I have a game that is more aggressive, in which I hit harder, deeper, ground strokes that will force a shorter ball, which I can use to approach the net. But when I half-heartedly try this, my approach shot is weak. Karen, a good doubles player, just lobs me.
Those two glasses of wine the night before have made me dehydrated. It’s too early for me. I don’t usually play tennis at 10:00 a.m. I like playing at approximately 3:00 p.m., which is when I have my weekly session with Dan Brewer, head coach at the Indoor Tennis Centre. I hit long and hard with him, but for some reason these rallies are leaving me gasping not just for water but for air. I’ve had way too much breakfast. The energy bars I brought with me are like 90 percent nuts. I can’t digest nuts in this situation! After one long tiring point, I think I am going to throw up. I bend down to pretend to tie my shoelace just to give myself a moment to breathe. I am tanking. I am, possibly, dying. I have the beginnings of a blister that means I won’t be able to walk tomorrow.
Karen wins the first three games. This is it. I am fucked.
My partner Rod is sitting at a green plastic table just beyond the tramlines, watching me play tennis for the first time ever. He is literally on the edge of his seat, although this isn’t a very close match so far. He said that watching me play tennis would make him feel a bit like he does watching New Zealand’s All Blacks, which is good. The other sport he gets very emotionally involved in is cricket, and at this point I’d rather be the New Zealand rugby team than its cricket team. But the All Blacks always win, or at least they have all the way through 2013, and here I am in what so far feels more like New Zealand’s historic cricketing defeat in 1955, when they were bowled out for 26 (and which traumatized Rod for life). But what can I do? Karen is just playing very steadily. The rallies are punishing and they are long. I’m getting the ball back, I’m keeping it in, but it isn’t working. I know I am better than this. Vague memories from childhood come wafting back. Was I always like this? Was I always better in practice than in matches and was that one of the reasons why . . . ?
After the third game changeover, I remind myself to do some basic things. Hit deeper, and more often to her backhand. Serve deep, too. Stay on my toes. I am still effectively a beginner and do not know even half the strategy I will know by the end of January, let alone what I will know by the end of next year. I have no second serve. No two-handed backhand. (I think my one-hander is pretty awesome, but the score-line begs to differ. Later in the year, Josh, my new coach, will just laugh at it.) But despite the better-in-practice thing, I do have a sort of history of winning singles matches. After all, I do have a natural ability for this beautiful game that I turned my back on so long ago, when I was fourteen and far from home, on a boarding school tennis court with Madonna hair and the wrong accent. I can see patterns in things. I “just know” where to hit the ball. I have recently beaten the local hard-hitter and queen-of-the-frightening-volley 6–2 in a practice game in which I definitely thought I’d be crushed. I thrashed a steady male club player 6–1. So why am I losing to someone who has just been round Sainsbury’s?
I don’t know how, but I take the next game. And the next one. Sometimes it’s just about deciding that you really want this thing rather than some other thing. I am going to win this tennis tournament, I tell the universe. And if I am going to win the tournament, I need to win this set, this game, this point. The universe sighs and I draw level, but then Karen wins the next game, taking her to 4–3. I take the next game, and the next one. It’s 5–4. I’m serving for the match, but I can’t do it. We’re level again at 5–5, and then again at 6–6. I had thought that if I could stay in it this long I would have some sort of advantage, given that I am more likely to be found in the gym than Sainsbury’s. Most people find even a few games of singles tough, let alone twelve very long games with multiple deuces. But no, Karen looks as fresh as when we began, while I still feel a bit vomit-y. I can’t remember the rules for a tiebreaker and neither can Karen but when we ask the organizer, Margaret, she reminds us that there are no tiebreakers in this tournament. Someone simply has to go two games clear.
Because this isn’t an official LTA (Lawn Tennis Association, Great Britain’s governing body for tennis) tournament, just a bit of fun (albeit with big shiny trophies), the changeovers are pretty relaxed. I go over to Rod. Still on the edge of his seat, he tells me to please finish it off. Can I perhaps hit the ball harder? Target her backhand? Hit more outright winners rather than waiting for her to make a mistake? Karen and I have now been playing for almost two hours. We have quite a big audience, which is usually good for me—I like to perform—except one of them is an old woman with a blanket over her knees who has a particularly loud cackle that has been putting me off. As I guzzle the horrible orange juice and water mixture recommended by my personal trainer, people say things about how long the game is and generally praise my grit and stamina.
“I don’t know how you’re doing it,” says someone.
“I think I’d die if it was me,” says someone else.
But I am used to long, drawn-out things. I have just finished writing a novel, my ninth. I’m on sabbatical from the university job that recently seemed to be tipping me into alcoholism and mild obesity, and for the last few weeks my routine has been to write in the morning and then play tennis in the afternoon or the evening. It’s like the perfect life. I have my weekly coaching session with Dan on Thursdays. I try to use the ball machine one day a week and then lift weights once or twice. I do have some grit and stamina. But do I have enough?
Back on court I lose a match point. I save a match point. Suddenly there are match points all over the place. We must be around 8–8 when one of my balls kisses the line and Karen calls it out. I’m pissed off but I know she is honest and nice, and if she saw it out, then she saw it out. Whatever. But it’s unfortunate because it takes the score to 30–40. Break point. But as I go back to serve, she calls to me. Perhaps it was in, she says. Now she thinks about it, she realizes she called wrong. On such an important point you have to be sure, right? Her honesty saves me. From there I go on to win 10–8.
I am exhausted but there is still a lot of tournament left to play, especially as I’m down to play mixed doubles as well as singles. People are buying sausages and chips from the café in the leisure center upstairs and bringing them down on shiny white paper plates. Tim, my doubles partner, buys me tea in a Styrofoam cup, which has to be my changeover drink in the next match, which I realize is starting immediately. But I know that I can’t win at doubles as well as singles. Since I came back to tennis in July, I have had the same two annoying injuries: knees and lower back, the same injuries all recreational tennis players seem to get. Neither has been too bad lately, but I have to pace myself. One of my calves is starting to cramp a little bit. I am the stronger player in what we jokingly refer to as the “Dream Team” but I can’t give myself to this. Tim suffers badly from match nerves, knocking balls into the net that he would kill in practice. We lose our first match but at least my tea is nice.
My next singles opponent is Netball Hannah. She has just been bagelled (lost 6–0) by Amie Tonkiss and she isn’t happy.
“I’m just so sick of being beaten,” she’s saying to Margaret and Dan. “I feel like such a bloody loser. I might just go home, to be honest. Why does everyone have to take it so seriously?” She looks at me. “It’s just a bit of fun, right?”
“Er, yeah.”
After I beat her 6–0, she does go home. Do I feel bad? Sort of. I’ve played my worst, slowest, most drippy tennis against her, which does make me feel pretty awful. I also have this strange new hunger in me: I would have felt like a loser had I dropped even one game to her. I am also convinced by the argument in The Inner Game of Tennis that you should go out and play your best every time, regardless of your opponent’s level of skill or expectations. I suppose there’d be the odd exception. Perhaps playing a child. Although when I was a child I played tennis against my stepfather, Couze, and he beat me 6–0 most of the time. Every point I won against him meant something. If I took a game to deuce, it was a big achievement. My biggest problem at that age was that I couldn’t bear the embarrassment of beating my friends, or random girls with names like Julie or Tracey, so I used to deliberately let them have points here, games there, until it was a more respectable 6–4. Although often this would go wrong and I would underestimate their actual ability and they would beat me.
A colleague of mine, feminist theorist Jan Montefiore, once told me about playing table tennis with one of her sons. “It was extraordinary,” she said. “I was winning by nineteen points and then he came back to beat me 21–19.” I remember thinking at the time how sweet this was, that she didn’t know what had really happened, but as I write it now I realize that of course she must have known. People always know when they are being controlled and manipulated, even if it is meant in kindness. I hate it when Dan plays down to me in our coaching sessions. It’s so unsatisfying. You never know if you have won a point on your own merit or because someone has taken pity on you. Luckily, Dan doesn’t do it very often. Indeed, he bagelled me a couple of days before this tournament, to teach me something—probably humility. I point this out to Hannah before she leaves. There’s no shame in it; it happens to us all.
“Yeah, well, just make sure you beat her,” she says, nodding at Amie Tonkiss.
Someone tells me that Hannah barely took a point off Amie.
But next I have to play Kofo. She hits the ball hard—much harder than anyone I’ve played so far—but she makes a lot of errors. Still, she rushes the net a few times, and so do I, and there are lobs and volleys and passing shots and a bit of cheering from the audience, which is nice. It feels as if she is winning more points than she is, but in the end I beat her 6–1 in something of a blur. Rod has gone home long ago, unable to take the cold of the tennis center for the whole day, but now I text him to tell him that I am playing in the equivalent of a final. Although it’s a round robin tournament, Amie and I are both unbeaten so far, so this will be the decider. In fact, if I win this—I won’t, but if I do—I will have beaten everyone.
Rod and I only live around the corner from the ITC, and so he arrives, breathless and excited, about four minutes later. The match that follows is somehow more of a blur than the last one. Amie blitzes me in the first game and I know my winning run is about to come to an end. I relax at that point—and then I win my serve. She wins her next one and I win mine. We are level, which is a surprise. And then, suddenly, I break her serve. The type of steady tennis that I will spend the next year trying to stop playing works against Amie. I return the balls and she tries to hit winners. Sometimes they work, but more often they don’t. I suspect she’s having an off day but, extraordinarily, I am beating her quite easily. Rod shifts in his plastic chair. He looks more like he is watching rugby than cricket, even quietly cheering from time to time.
I win, 6–2.
So I have won the ladies’ singles. I can’t believe how happy I feel. It’s definitely as good as publishing my first novel. Way better than my first kiss. I still have some doubles to play—against Amie and her father, which they win easily, and against Lee and the old lady with the blanket, which we do manage to win. Rod goes home to put a half bottle of champagne in the freezer. We will drink a further bottle of red in the local French restaurant afterward. When I tell him what it was like being given my trophy, he gets tears in his eyes and so do I.
It goes on the mantelpiece, right in the middle, and as I look at it there, I realize that at this moment, even with my new novel finished and my next promotion—the one that will make me a professor—almost due at the university, all I really want is another tennis trophy.
This is what is going to almost kill me.
•
The day after the Christmas Tournament I am in London for my new literary agency’s party. One of my best friends, the novelist David Flusfeder, has like me recently defected to this agency. We meet in a pub beforehand and I tell him about my win, and what it means to me. He’s not that sporty, but he gets it. After a couple of glasses of wine, he asks me whether I would rather win the Nobel Prize for Literature or score the winning goal in the FA Cup.
“You first,” I say.
“But there’s no question for me,” he says.
“What, the Nobel?”
“No,” he says, “the goal. I’d much rather score the goal.”
He doesn’t even play football, as far as I know. He’s more likely to be found in a casino in Las Vegas taking part in a poker championship.
“I don’t play football,” I say. “I’m not sure I even like it.”
“What about winning Wimbledon then?” he says.
Oh God. What indeed? What about that? Well, still the Nobel, right?
But when I ask people over the next few days and weeks, everyone—great feminists, choristers, academics, editors—chooses the FA Cup goal. A couple of them, Rod included, have to have it upgraded to the winning goal in the World Cup, but still choose the goal. But everyone in my family chooses the Nobel.
•
It is 12:45 p.m. on January 11, 2014. The match begins at 1:00 p.m. I am standing on Court 4 in the cold, hard, green emptiness of the Indoor Tennis Centre, entirely alone. I am wearing Stella McCartney for Adidas. I have painted my fingernails dark pink to artfully clash with my bright red shoes. I have taped my probably infected toe and put Band-Aids on the worst pressure points on each foot. My black Adidas bag is packed with knee braces, spare sweatbands, electrolyte pills, magnesium spray, arnica gel, more Band-Aids, chocolate, water, and more ibuprofen than you could safely ingest in a week. I have been warming up in the gym for the last half hour, listening to uplifting music, or my idea of uplifting music: mainly The The and clubby, drug-reference-heavy stuff from the early 1990s. I spent yesterday icing various parts of myself while reading a book called Think to Win. I have meditated, stretched, visualized. Sort of. I am ready to play tennis.
12:55. Still no one. I check my phone to see if someone has texted me to say the match has been canceled, but I’m pretty sure it has not. I arrange our two courts carefully. Eight plastic chairs altogether: two on either side of both ends of the net, with spaces left in the middle for where the umpires would go, if there were umpires. Once I finish scraping chairs around, the only sound left in the tennis center is from the kids in the park outside throwing rocks at the fire doors. At 12:59 there are faint sounds from the stairwell. It’s the away team, arrived from somewhere near Rochester. At least, I assume they are the away team. I have never seen any of them before. But I don’t really know who is playing on our team. They could even be our team, except there are four of them. I mumble things about water and toilets until our captain, Fiona, turns up. She has two tins of Head Championship balls pressed into her chest and a bag full of cakes and baguettes dangling from her wrist. She is also holding a piece of paper.
“I’ve got the match balls,” she says. “But this is the wrong form, apparently, and I don’t know how to fill it in.”
“This is the away team,” I say.
“Oh, hello,” she says. “Long journey?”
One of my favorite tennis books at this moment is Winning Ugly by Brad Gilbert. I just got it for Christmas and devoured it on my parents’ sofa between bottles of Vacqueyras wine and hot, frenzied games of table tennis. I read it on the train back, still drunk on my recent success, ready to slurp up anything, anything to do with tennis, my new love, my passion, my life. It was so good that when I got home, I read it again. I made notes. It explains in detail how to approach a competitive tennis match. It tells you what to pack in your bag, how to warm up, and why you should never serve first. It explains how many tennis racquets you should bring to a match and how they should be strung. It also cautions strongly against chatting with your opponents until after the match, but by the time we begin, everyone has looked at pictures of French Florence’s puppy and the away team have started eating the baguettes that are supposed to be for afternoon tea. I was put in charge of cheese and biscuits, and these are sensibly stashed in the fridge in the café upstairs. One of our team has some pâté and cold meats at the bottom of her sports bag. It is impossible to tell how long they have been there.
I also have a book on doubles strategy, which is fascinating, although almost entirely irrelevant when playing with someone you have never met, let alone practiced with. Is it weird of me to think that the normal thing for a team to do in this situation would be to turn up half an hour early, decide who is playing with whom, warm up, get a bit of team spirit going, rock the home advantage? If it were up to me, each doubles pair would not just have played together before but would have trained together, probably going halves on a few coaching sessions involving traffic cones and diagrams. If it were up to me, my partner and I would be playing the Australian formation. We would fist-bump after every point. We would wear matching outfits, perhaps with tiaras. OK, not tiaras, but we might have a theme song. And we would certainly have a mantra. The person at the baseline would call soft but clever instructions to the person at the net . . .
“Does anyone have a spare tennis racquet?” asks Fiona. “I’ve left mine at home.”
I have a spare tennis racquet. Of course I do. Brad Gilbert says you should always have a good spare (rather than your crappy ex-racquet) in case a string breaks during a match. This means I have two black Wilson 104 Blades, each strung at 55 lbs. (I have no idea what this means, but it looked good on the website.) Am I going to lend one of these racquets, my beautiful prized possessions, to Fiona? No, of course not. I am never going to let anyone touch these racquets apart from me. Venus and Serena use Blades. I bet they don’t lend their racquets to other people. Or maybe they do. Maybe when you go through forty-one restrings in two weeks, as Serena did in Wimbledon 2013, or crack open a newly strung racquet whenever there are new balls, as most pro players do, you feel differently about them.
Did I ever kid myself at the beginning of all this, when I bought myself a tennis coaching session for my birthday last summer, that I wanted to play “social” tennis? I think so. I think I told myself that tennis would be a good way to meet new people in this strange seaside town in which I have felt cold, exposed, and isolated, sometimes to the point of tears. But I’d forgotten how competitive I am, and how much I want to win. And I know that this is my last chance to do the thing I love, the thing that I was always best at, as well as I can. Do I want to play ladies’ doubles on a cobbled-together team and then sit down with the other players to eat cake and sandwiches afterward? Sort of. I mean, I definitely did when I started. Only two months ago I drove all the way to Bromley for my first-ever league match with a terrified partner—Netball Hannah—who admitted she was only really interested in the afternoon tea. When I started playing tennis again, only last July, the idea of playing in any kind of league felt impossibly thrilling. Like publishing a book (if you haven’t), or becoming a professor. Now what I want to know is which league, and with whom, and will the results affect my rating and my ranking? And I’d much rather it was singles than doubles. And if everyone could please, please just take it a bit more seriously . . .
Today I’m playing with Schoolteacher Hannah (different from Netball Hannah). We are playing Gemma and Linda from Somewhere-Near-Rochester. They are good but have not warmed up and are not used to this surface. We take the first set quite easily. I am nervous, of course, but also Gemma is so oddly beautiful that I’m having trouble concentrating. She has dark, shiny hair, piercing blue eyes, and a straight nose. Will this sound weird? Here goes anyway: She looks a bit like me. Perhaps fifteen years ago when I was younger, thinner, and prettier. She is wearing a proper tennis outfit—matching top and skirt. Everyone else apart from us is just wearing mismatched tracksuit bottoms and any old top, but she looks as if she has dressed up for this. Her arms are nicer than mine. She has a more beautiful forehand, which she plays early and with plenty of topspin. Oh, and she does that little kick with her right leg as she strikes the ball. She looks quite posh. I am almost falling in love with her—I mean, not really, but you know—when we change over before the third set tiebreak. They have just come back from 0–4 down in the second set to take it 6–4. I should stop looking at Gemma. I should hit the ball harder and more aggressively. I should stop thinking and let myself play . . .
This is when Hannah admits, to all of us, to sharing a bottle of wine with her husband last night and I, rather against what I think would be Brad Gilbert’s advice, admit to doing the same with my partner. It seems Linda has similarly indulged. But then Gemma pipes up, in a voice that certainly does not match her outfit, “I done two bottles of wine with my boyfriend last night.”
After this, of course they beat us. It is genius. It is beyond Brad. I am gutted. Then we beat the other pair 6–0, 6–0 and feel a bit better. Then we all sit down to have what’s left of the tea and Hannah tells me all about how she had to go to the back of beyond the week before to play with someone named Lucille who was apparently so good that everyone complained. I want to be so good that everyone—in fact, just one person would be fine—complains. But I am not that good. I was a child prodigy, sort of, but I have not played for years and years. I am trying to pick up where I left off on a remote school tennis court back in 1986, when I had hair like Madonna and an accent not unlike Gemma’s.
More pictures of the puppy are going around.
It is January 11, 2014. This, I have decided, is going to be my year of tennis. I am going to see how far I can get as a forty-one-year-old woman tennis player, and I’m going to write about it. It’s my new project. My new life.
•
Since I’ve started playing tennis again, I have realized that very few people play singles. It’s too hard, too intense. The local leagues only offer doubles matches. People are impressed when I tell them that I play league tennis, but I know the truth—doubles is for fat losers who can’t run. The next—and as far as I know only—local singles tournament is the Indoor Tennis Centre Spring Tournament. It’s different from the Christmas one. It’s rated as a Grade 4 on the LTA website, which means it’s county standard. That means that the person most likely to win it will be a county-level player, not me.
You sign up for the tournament on the LTA website. You need a BTM—British Tennis Membership—number to enter proper tournaments like this one. I should have a BTM number, and should have provided it at the few league doubles matches I have already played. I have filled out a form and Margaret has sent it somewhere. Nothing has happened. I have chased it, only to be told that these things are sometimes slow but it will come through eventually. Without the number I can browse tournaments on the LTA website but cannot enter any. I also cannot have a rating or a ranking. At this moment all I want in life is a rating and a ranking. I want numbers that tell me how good a tennis player I am, and then I want to devote my waking life—and maybe even my dreams too—into making those numbers better. I can get a BTM myself, instantly, by paying £25 on the LTA website. But I am not to do this, I am told, because if I just wait I can have the number for free.
And then one night I do it. Of course I do. It’s probably the best £25 I have ever spent. It means I can turn my life into a sort of video game. And fuck, I suddenly think, all those stupid years I spent playing video games because they were cheap and easy when I could have been doing this. I was younger and my muscles were looser and my reactions were faster but of course I had no money for shoes or lessons, and instead I had all those deadlines and panic attacks and cigarettes. Breathe. Yes, OK, though, the thing I did like about video games is also the thing I like about this. I am going to get a rating and then I am going to play other people with ratings and I am going to win or lose and my rating is going to go up or down and between matches I will power up and learn special skills and work on my sword and . . .
And I can enter the Spring Tournament. I will have my own “competition calendar.” I can’t remember the last time I was this excited about anything. Speaking in front of five hundred people at the Sydney Writers’ Festival last year, I just wished it would be over so I could go and eat oysters and drink wine, but things are different this year. This year I am going to be fierce and thin and a champion. But when I go on to the LTA website to enter the Spring Tournament, it tells me that I can’t enter online and have to do it at the tennis center. So I have to sheepishly admit to Margaret that I paid £25 to join the LTA—which I don’t mind, I stress, I don’t mind at all—but that it won’t let me enter the tournament. While she waits for the website to load so she can check what’s gone wrong, because you should be able to enter online, should be able to put the tournament in your “shopping basket” as if it were just another strategy book or sports bra from Amazon, I ask if it’s going to be another round robin like the Christmas Tournament. It can’t be, Margaret explains, because she is expecting around eighty people to enter. I guess that’s men and kids as well as women. But even so . . .
“It’ll be knockout, probably,” she says.
“So there’ll be like a draw, and seeds, and—”
“And a consolation draw,” she says. “So everyone who comes can play at least two games. I mean, otherwise it’s unfair on someone who draws the top seed in the first round.”
But what if that was me? How badly would the top seed in a Level 4 tournament beat me? Would it be bagels? Or would I—could I—beat her? What if one day I was her? Or am I supposed to just accept that now, at forty-one, I am never going to be a top seed, nor beat one? At this stage I have literally no concept of what a good player actually is. My life experience of sport so far has been scattered and inconsistent and largely free of any experience leading to hard knocks leading to actual knowledge. All I have are vague memories of my mother telling me I was good enough for Wimbledon. Being proud of those few points I took off Couze. The Middlesex thing. Oh, God, the Middlesex thing. And still, in this already aging millennium, still this feeling of if you want something badly enough and if you train for it and pray for it and, yes, pay for it, then it can be yours—anything, anything you want so long as you want it badly enough—and as yet I have absolutely no idea, no fucking idea that every single tennis parent and middle-aged wannabe in the whole country feels exactly the same way.
•
I was fourteen when I gave up tennis. It was 1986.
I’d gone to boarding school, which was where it happened. How to tell this story, which in itself is sort of like my whole life story? It was my dad who sent me to boarding school, but only after my other dad had gone to America to marry an heiress and begin the heroin habit that would slowly kill him. I’d only known who my “real” father was for a couple of years. Mum had had an affair, romantic and beautiful and tragic, with this tousle-haired, Gauloise-smoking, blue-eyed, Serge Gainsbourg look-alike back in the early 1970s. I was the result, in 1972. He was called Gordian, like the knot. He had a complicated, rich, Jewish mother, who’d escaped Hitler by riding a bicycle from Luxembourg to France. He had a beautiful, cool, tap-dancing sister. Mum’s then husband Steve agreed to bring me up as his own, but Gordian came to visit every week, when he wasn’t in the midst of a cocaine overdose or Valium meltdown or anxiety attack. Ten years or so later Mum had another affair, this time with her university lecturer, Couze, and one day we went to live with him and everything changed. It wasn’t long after that when I played tennis for the first time.
But for now, let’s skip to the last time.
I was good. Good enough that I’d been asked to play for Middlesex, or maybe train with them, or maybe just try out for them, back in 1984, during my first tennis holiday at the David Lloyd Centre in Hounslow. I couldn’t do it, of course, because we lived miles away, but still. In 1986 I was just back from another solo holiday, this time all the way to Mexico to stay with my new grandmother, Ruth, who wore caftans, made tuna mousse in smoked-glass bowls, and was obsessed with a flamboyant gay man named Patricio.
Say what you like about the posh European half of my gene pool, but they know how to do things properly. When the trip was being planned, I was asked what activities I did. Horse-riding (which Gordian had rediscovered in the ’80s rather as I have resumed tennis now) and, of course, tennis. So I had to take a riding hat and a racquet. There was to be some horse-riding with local children and—joy—tennis coaching several afternoons a week. The coaching was amazing. Hot, dripping hot, with fresh orange juice afterward, and sometimes spicy Mexican food. And I was good, hitting hard back and forth with the coach for a whole sun-drenched hour. Crosscourt forehands. Crosscourt backhands. Forehands down the line. Backhands down the line. Serving. Volleying. Points. I remember the coach commenting on my ability, perhaps asking me what club or team I played for back at home. Was I a player nationale, or regionale? But at home there was no national, regional, or even local club or team, never had been.
Why? I still don’t know.
Back at home the miners had finished striking, but Nelson Mandela was yet to be released. In 1987 a lot of our family energy would go into trying to get Neil Kinnock elected prime minister. We were always doing things to try to undermine Thatcher, like watching Spitting Image and going on demonstrations against whatever she was doing, whether it was closing pits, canceling free milk for schoolchildren, or inventing the new poll tax. Home was about trying to fit in at my local school, where girls my age were into horses and boys and no one played tennis. No one played any sport, not really, apart from football perhaps, but this was before the Premier League, when it was still muddy and real and sort of for thickos. Otherwise, sport was clean and healthy and airy but clearly for simple people who did not care that the world was gray and hard and full of poverty and racism and fascism and about to be nuked anyway.
And there was nowhere to play tennis most of the time. The grass courts near our house in Chelmsford had weeds growing on them year-round. The concrete courts were better, but some council official took the nets away in October and didn’t put them up again until April. I dreaded Wimbledon; at that time all it meant to me was that the tennis courts—my tennis courts—would be full for two weeks while people tried out their McEnroe moves or in some way tried to emulate whoever they’d just been watching on their tiny, possibly still black-and-white TVs. And playing tennis was expensive, perhaps £1.50 an hour. Although Couze and I always tried to dodge the inspector, we had to pay up if he did come round. It was also a treat, of course, and treats needed to be rationed, and I had homework to do and my brother to look after and given that the world was surely going to end when the US bombed the USSR . . . The only indoor tennis center I knew was in Hounslow, a good couple of hours away on the other side of London. The only coaches I knew were there too. Too far. Too hard. Too posh. Too exclusive. Not for the likes of us.
Tennis was my first love. Every other sport I ever played was with my eyes closed and the duvet stuffed in my mouth so I didn’t shout out its name, the name of my real passion, my soulmate.
Tennis.
Which I let go so easily. Which I just dropped. Why?
Here is what I remember. The Troellers—Grandmother Ruth and Gordian—decided to send me to boarding school. Or maybe my mother decided I should go to a private school and got them to pay for it. But that’s unlikely, since we were such devoted lefties who were, of course, quite against private education. So let’s say the Troellers decided. It was just after I came back from Mexico, after all. Ruth had found me common, as well as uncouth and unsophisticated and weird, with my Walkman, my Madonna hair, my turquoise espadrilles. She would talk seriously about my coming out, not as a lesbian but as a debutante, and she assumed my family owned a fax machine and that I would apply to study philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford or law at Cambridge. She was so elitist and stuck-up and posh! In a world where all good people were striving for equality and justice, she threw cocktail parties and insisted on reading Class by Jilly Cooper, not just to herself but out loud to me. I mean, it was funny, of course, but totally wrong. Gordian thought my school friends were common. They were! So was I, a bit. Or I wanted to be. At that time, I actually did want to be named Sharon or Tracey and live on a council estate and eat chips every night and drink Nesquik.
So they sent me to boarding school.
And that was where it happened. Again, my memory is hazy. I remember a hard outdoor tennis court and possibly some weak autumn sunshine. Was it the first time I’d played on these courts? Possibly. Why were we playing tennis in autumn? Who knows? Maybe it didn’t happen until the spring term, or even the summer term. I was having trouble fitting into my new school, full of mini Grandmother Ruths who assumed everyone voted Conservative and who talked of “plebs” and—worse—village boys, also known as VBs. The big thing at my boarding school was lacrosse, known as “lax.” The most popular girl in the form, Kate, and her sidekick Danielle, regularly played in the school’s second XI. Given that they both smoked, and were only in the fourth form, this was a big achievement. Kate was sometimes bumped up to the First Team. It was unspeakably glamorous.
Again, no one played tennis. Was that the problem? Or was it rather that everyone played tennis? Half of them probably had courts in their gardens at home and found the whole thing a big yawn, maybe something to do lazily with a brother or cousin on a summer’s afternoon. But here’s the dreadful thing: They were good at it. Good enough for me not to seem like a child prodigy, not to shine, not to dazzle. Especially since, on that afternoon, my first time playing tennis at this school, I was playing so badly.
What was the teacher doing? Perhaps something I found patronizing. Perhaps something I just thought was wrong. Perhaps we were doing lame, babyish forehand drills. Perhaps she had told me to grip my racquet differently, assuming I was a mere mortal, a simple child who hadn’t played much before. I hate being told what to do and always think I know best. This was true even when I was a fourteen-year-old outsider at a new school. Still, I now don’t remember exactly what was wrong with the lesson. What I do remember is that I choked. I froze. I got the Elbow. Just like Eugenie Bouchard in the first set of the Australian Open semifinal in 2014. Of course in that case the commentators knew what it was. She needed to settle down, breathe, relax into the match, they said. And by the time I watched that match I knew all about choking too, or thought I did, and had half a dozen books that addressed the subject and offered remedies for it. Not that any of them ever really worked.
But back in 1986 I didn’t know what was happening to me. I had no idea that this was a phenomenon, a thing that happens when you are nervous, when you desperately want to play well or win or show someone how good you are. I played one of the other girls, I can’t remember who, but I’m pretty sure she was not any kind of tennis prodigy. And she beat me. I didn’t even have to give her any points. I’m fairly sure that’s what happened, although I have no real memory of it, just the feeling of choking and being beaten and not being at all special.
And I gave up tennis. Whatever actually happened, I remember being there on those courts and feeling that I’d been wrong all along. Out there in the world of plebs? Yes, perhaps there I was good at tennis, but here everything was different. In this new world, this new life, for which I had even renamed myself Victoria—my middle name—because I was sick of having to explain Scarlett, I was not good at tennis. I was just average. My dream, such as it was, was over. When it came to choosing extracurricular activities I picked ballet and horse-riding. And for the rest of the time I threw myself into learning lacrosse, and how to smoke, and how to be good at dieting.
•
2014. It’s a murky January day and I’m having lunch on the seafront with David Flusfeder. The day before, my picture appeared in the local newspaper. In the picture I’m holding both my tennis trophies from the Christmas Tournament—the one they let me take home and the one that stays in the tennis center—and I look really, genuinely happy. I tell him that I have only won one trophy in my life before, a blocky, Lucite Elle Style Award for my novel Going Out. I remember feeling how random that all was and how winning was all down to the whims of the judges. I couldn’t bring myself to go to the ceremony because I didn’t have anything to wear and I vaguely disapproved of anything A-listy, so I made my long-suffering agent Simon go instead. I was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2008 but couldn’t do anything to get myself onto the shortlist. With tennis you train and then turn up with your racquets and your bag full of stuff and you win or lose points that everyone agrees on, that exist in the world and not just in someone’s head. I have recently realized that I am prouder of my small, cheap tennis trophy than almost anything else in my life.
“So I’m really going to go for it this year,” I tell David. “I’m going to totally throw myself into tennis and see how far I can get. I mean, I’m going to enter actual singles tournaments and have massages and stay in hotels and everything.”
I wonder if he’s going to laugh at me but instead he makes interested, even encouraging noises. I tell him I might even write a book about it, because that’ll give me an excuse to really do it properly—and, in the tradition of all such projects, take semi-stupid risks and embarrass myself in the name of research and “just write down what happens.” I explain that if I lose everything and look stupid then that’ll make quite a funny book, and if I win everything and feel amazing the book won’t be so good but who cares—I’d rather have another trophy than another book anyway. I didn’t realize then that there was a third, awful, option. I had no idea.
“You’re having coaching?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
“Have more. Do everything you can to win.”
“Sadly, I think ‘more’ is sort of frowned on.”
“Why? By whom?”
“The other people who go to the tennis center. People believe that you shouldn’t buy success. They’re always saying to me things like, ‘Wow, you’re really coming on. Dan must be an amazing coach.’ It’s like he’s the one who’s done it, not me, and anyone rich and stupid enough to fork out £25 a week on coaching would become as good as me.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I know. I mean it is, but also I think it’s because I’m basically a middle-aged woman, and what kind of middle-aged woman invests time and money in sport for herself and not for her son or daughter or whatever? I mean, what kind of woman seriously takes up a sport again at forty-one and then expects to actually go somewhere with it? I do worry that people are basically laughing at me.”
“Forget what these people think. Stop worrying about people judging you. You’ve got to go all-out to win and just don’t think about it. Get more coaching. Get as much coaching as you can possibly afford.”
•
Princess Helena College, 1987. We are not allowed to watch TV during the week, and can only watch a limited amount during the weekend where we have to sit around together—the whole fifth form, except for Claire Bolton, who will be practicing playing Chopin somewhere else—and watch something approved by the teachers. Mostly it is videos, and my fifth form is a blur of Footloose and Flashdance and other PG-13 films about finding yourself through dance and convincing the establishment that being young and taking risks is better than being old and boring and conservative.
My very favorite of all the films we watch is Dirty Dancing. Jennifer Grey’s character, known as Baby but actually named Frances, is going with her parents and sister to a holiday camp where rich chicks pay for dance lessons with hot young dudes. Desperate to be authentic and accepted, one night Baby makes her way to the staff quarters and sees them doing their real dancing—dirty dancing—not nice dancing, the inauthentic crap they have to do with the wrinkled, loaded, old women who have to pay to be looked at, touched, taken seriously. Jennifer Grey is thin, so thin. She is beautiful and misunderstood and intelligent. The hottest guy in the whole thing, dance instructor Johnny Castle, played by Patrick Swayze, is a working-class hero with a sassy, seen-it-all dance partner, Penny. They do the major shows together for the lamest tourists with the biggest bucks, but then it turns out that Penny is pregnant, and idealistic Baby wants to help—even though in the real world sometimes you can’t help—and gets her doctor father to save Penny after a botched abortion almost kills her. Now Patrick Swayze has no dance partner for a big show and no one can fill in for Penny because they all work, remember, unlike the lazy, rich holidaymakers. (It wasn’t Johnny who got Penny pregnant, by the way. We learn to be very suspicious about the easy assumptions the idiotic rich make about the noble poor.)
But the thing is, Baby does it.
She learns to dance, from scratch, so she can fill in for Penny.
I have only recently realized that I probably ended up basing my life on this film. I’ve always loved stories of hard work and miracles and anything being possible if you only try. As a kid, one of my favorite books was Tony’s Hard Work Day, which tells of a four-year-old boy who is not allowed to help repair his family’s new house because he is too small. What does Tony do? He goes off on his own and builds a whole new house! In a day! It’s such a good house that his family immediately abandons their old house and moves straight in.
But Dirty Dancing wasn’t just about Baby overcoming the odds to become a professional-standard dancer in just a few days. It was about her being chosen to do it, singled out, made special. OK, we are supposed to believe that she has no ability and that all she really has in her favor is time, because she is on holiday. At fifteen I just took it for granted that she was hot and young and thin. I was too, and so were my friends. All we needed was to find ourselves in a situation like that.
One scene shows Baby discovering that Johnny Castle doesn’t just teach dancing to the withered, alcoholic, over-made-up old crones at the holiday camp. He does extras too. Baby freaks out, of course, only to be told to grow up, because this is the real world. When I first watched this scene, surrounded by my rich, beautiful schoolfriends, all I saw was Baby, her lack of worldliness, her desire to be grown up. I saw myself in her. I’d never had a job, had only just started experimenting with black eyeliner, was still (just) a virgin. I simply did not notice the older women in the film, let alone imagine I could ever become them. Perhaps you’re not supposed to. As well as the crone who has to pay to be fucked, there’s the wife who doesn’t really understand the husband, and of course the many other recipients of Johnny Castle’s dance lessons, and they are all old and disgusting and they play it safe and don’t take risks and would never, ever be asked to fill in as anyone’s dance partner.
•
It’s a rainy Thursday in October 2013, and I turn up for my coaching session in even more strapping than usual. My knees are both so sore that I have ordered a new knee brace so I can wear two at once. I can hardly walk down the stairs. What the fuck am I doing playing tennis? But I’ve had three ibuprofen. I’m sure when they kick in I’ll be fine. Dan is at the reception desk when I arrive, joking around with the staff. Everyone is giggling, happy. Dan has this effect on people.
“What are you doing tonight?” he asks me.
“Why? I mean, nothing, but why?”
“Good. You’re playing tennis with me. I need a doubles partner.”
“OK.” Breathe. Don’t die. Breathe. “My knees are a bit crap at the moment.”
“That’s OK. I’ll do all the running for you. 7:00 p.m.?”
I am so happy I could vomit. Immediately a voice in my head points out that this is quite short notice and he has probably asked literally everyone else in the entire world, but it’s only 2:00 p.m. The match isn’t until 7:00 p.m. There are five hours’ worth of people he has not yet asked. This is one of the best, most exciting things that has ever happened to me. Dan thinks I’m good enough to play in a league doubles match with him. Oh, God. Oh, God.
The coaching session that follows is the best I’ve ever had. I’m hitting the ball hard and deep but keeping it in. A couple of my crosscourt shots are so good that Dan makes a kind of whistling noise. He hardly ever praises me. I feel amazing. He has me on the forehand side hitting crosscourt into the tramlines, because I’ll be playing forehand tonight. I am in training for something! It is real. I keep playing better than I ever have before. After the session is over, I rush home and tell Rod what has happened. I have a bath. Stretch. Eat scrambled eggs. I am so nervous I feel a bit sick. Apart from Bromley, I have never played a league match before.
We hit up with other members of our team. I feel like I am fifteen years old and trying to buy something cool from the Our Price record store in Chelmsford. Walking feels strange. Speaking feels strange. The others seem so relaxed, but I keep netting the ball or hitting it to the wrong side of the court. I’m sure it will stop when we begin playing, but it doesn’t. It gets worse. I am a disaster. An embarrassment. Why did I think I could do this? I fluff most of my shots, but Dan rescues the whole thing and we somehow win our first match, 6–3, 6–3.
“It should have been love and love,” he tells me in the break.
I take a deep breath. “Look, I’m really sorry I’m so nervous and . . .”
“You’ll be all right,” he says, not quite making eye contact.
The next pair are much better. The man intercepts at the net. It’s hard to get anything past him. Still, since we’ve won the first match, I’ve relaxed quite a lot. I even manage to hit a nice shot down the tramlines behind the man when he moves the other way to poach a ball he thinks is coming crosscourt.
“Shot!” says Dan. We fist-bump. This is fun, suddenly.
The ball comes to me on the forehand side. I hit a good lob over the volleyer. The server, the woman, has to run to her backhand side and try to get it back, but her shot is weak and it’s a very, very easy overhead for Dan to just . . .
Put straight in the net.
WTF? To me Dan is the Best Tennis Player Ever, but in this match he makes more and more errors. My confidence is going up and so, apparently, is his, but every serve he goes for is intended to be an ace. In one game he double-faults three times. He tries to poach at the net and misses. I can tell he’s tired. I guess he’s been coaching all day. He’s playing on the ad side, the left, because in doubles the strongest player always goes on the ad side. During one long deuce, though, I notice we are getting to advantage on my point and then back to deuce on his. Am I playing better than Dan? If so it’s only for a few minutes, but . . . I’m not exactly keeping track of the score but I know I’m suddenly enjoying this. Dan and I have never played together before and we won our first match and we’re doing OK against good opponents in this one. We fight for the first set but lose 6–4. That’s OK, right? We lose the next one 6–2.
Dan lies on the ground afterward, not meeting my eye.
OK. So.
He keeps lying there. I put my stuff away. He goes to the office.
When I get home I feel low, childish, sour. I tell Rod all about the matches and how well I played toward the end, but when I try to tell him how upset I am because Dan didn’t say anything to me afterward, he doesn’t get it. Maybe Dan was tired? Undoubtedly. He could have said thanks, though. He could have said I did well in my very first mixed doubles match ever. He’s my coach, right? I feel miserable all weekend. On Monday evening I go along to the club night that Dan runs.
“You know,” I say to him, “that was the first time I have ever played mixed doubles in my life. I mean in an actual match. And—”
He’s bounding along with a basket of balls.
“Well, you’re playing again on Thursday,” he says.
•
I recently left my literary agent. He was a nice person, a good friend. We used to go to polite places and I would drink wine while he had sparkling mineral water and talked about training for marathons. My new agent goes around in an anorak clutching grubby, suspicious-looking bags of books and vaguely menacing all the people who bother him on the Tube. He meets his authors in a variety of terrible dives ranging from YO! Sushi to sticky Soho pubs. He is always late. I once invited him for afternoon tea. “Tea? I do not drink tea,” was the response. He is one of the best readers I have ever encountered and represents all the most exciting authors in the UK, even though some of them remain so poor that they plead with him to get them in prison.
I’m not sure whether moving to him was the right choice, but it’s too late now. I did it on a whim. My long-term agent had taken too long to reply to an email and so I did one of those things I now often do when I’m angry: something random and unkind and completely undoable. I DMed David Miller on Twitter and suggested a coffee. We met at Paddington station and I felt like I was embarking on an affair and I didn’t care.
It’s January 2014. I have recently delivered my new novel and so we are meeting for dinner. Because I live in Kent and David is based in London, he has suggested meeting at a halfway point, in Ashford, where another of his authors set one of her novels. “No,” I’d said. “They have no wine in Ashford. And no food.” I’m still quite into wine and food. I suggest meeting in Blacks, my private members club in Soho. My current favorite wine at Blacks is called Cunto and costs £42 a bottle.
“Where does your train come in? St. Pancras?”
He knows a pub near St. Pancras, although “near” turns out to be over the other side of Kings Cross toward the Guardian building. It’s cold and raining, and this is too short a distance to get a cab or a Tube. The pub is busy but at least the wine is OK. David is forty minutes late, which means I have one glass of wine and then another and another. We walk in the rain to a restaurant on the Euston Road where the most expensive bottle of wine is £12.99 and everything comes with fries. I’m tired from work and tennis and a bit drunk. We should have gone to Ashford, but it’s too late. David wants to talk about the novel I’ve just delivered. He says he thinks it is all about love, which is true: it is. But I can’t get properly in the mood. In fact, I suddenly want to tell him about something different. I take out my iPad and bring up the piece about the Christmas Tournament from the East Kent Mercury. There’s a picture of me holding my trophy next to pictures of Amie Tonkiss and her father with their doubles trophy. I’m smiling broadly. My hair is scraped back. I’m wearing my best Stella McCartney white warm-up jacket, and I’m pleased that I remembered to put lipstick on for the photo.
David scans the piece. There is no expression on his face. Then he laughs.
“Hilarious that there’s another Scarlett Thomas in East Kent,” he says.
“That’s me,” I say.
“What?”
“That’s me.”
“That’s not you. You’ve got cheekbones.”
I roll my eyes. “I was playing sport. With my hair up.”
He takes my iPad again. Scrutinizes the story more closely.
“Look,” I say, waving my fingers. “Same color nail polish.”
He frowns. “But your face is so fat in this picture.”
I roll my eyes again. “OK. Look, I won this trophy last month. I’m forty-one. I think I could have been a great tennis player but I had nowhere to play seriously when I was a kid. Basically, I’m going to write a tennis book. I’m going to spend 2014 playing tennis and I’m going to see how far I can get. In a year. As a forty-one-year-old. And I’m going to find out whether I would rather have been a tennis player than a novelist—”
He nods. Sighs. “All right,” he says. “OK. How far could you go?”
“Sorry? What, do you mean like in tournaments?”
“Could you, in theory, get to Wimbledon?”
“In a year, no. At my age, no. In theory, though, yes. Sort of.”
“You could get to Wimbledon?”
“Anyone could get to Wimbledon. It’s one of the good things about the LTA system. If I went out now and just won all my matches, eventually my rating would get higher and then I’d get into better tournaments and eventually, yes, there’s no reason—well, apart from all the obvious ones—why anyone couldn’t get to Wimbledon.”
Like Baby with her dancing, and four-year-old Tony with his house.
“Anyway, I’m going to get massages and stay in places like the Leicester Hilton and, I don’t know, try to see a part of the world that most people don’t get to see. Are there other fortysomething women out there trying to do sport at a high level? Who are they? What are they like? And what about me? Can I do it? What will it feel like to win?”
David frowns. “Travelodge,” he says.
“What? No way, I’m—”
“It’ll be a far better story if you stay in a Travelodge.”
•
Did I really never play tennis in all those years, between giving it up at fourteen and taking it up again at forty-one? Of course I played. There was always a racquet in the back of a cupboard, and always a new boyfriend to beat. I could beat people, even in those wilderness years, because I am fast and good with a ball, and something of those coaching sessions in Mexico stayed with me forever. But it was nowhere near enough. There was the day when a good friend whose major flaw was misogyny (which didn’t apply to me, of course, just all other women) told me of a fight he’d had with his soon-to-be ex-wife, where he’d said that any man could beat any woman at tennis, and she’d said all right then, let’s play, and he’d gone out and thrashed her. He said she’d deserved it. Come on then, I’d said, I’ll beat you now. And I did. With horrible shots and underspin—underspin!—but really just by being able to play the ball in places where he wasn’t. The ball would come and I would visualize what I wanted to do with it, and then it would go out or in the net. But I still got more points than he did.
In 2007 I had a bestseller for the first time and so I took my mum on holiday to Gozo. After a few days I got bored lying around in the sun (and felt fat, always worried about feeling fat) and I so desperately wanted to run, I wanted to hit something, I wanted that thrill of competing, even if not in a real competition. So I booked a coach and got a really shit racquet from behind the hotel desk. I wore a beach wrap and espadrilles. I looked utterly ridiculous. I didn’t care. You could be quite good, the coach said in broken English. Let me show you how to . . . But I didn’t want to be shown how to. In these precious sixty minutes, dwindling all the time to fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven, just like life, ticking down, receding, all I wanted to do was play tennis. I just wanted to hit the ball. I didn’t care how.
When I got back from Gozo I joined the Canterbury Tennis Club. I could afford it, and the £25 Slazenger racquet that I later used for my first session with Dan. After my first mix-in session, the best player there wanted to chat with me. I’d played a couple of—I’ll say so myself—pretty awesome shots as part of my rusty, slightly humiliating performance, and assumed that he wanted to talk to me about that. But no, he just wanted to show me his photographs, which became more explicit once all the other players left. When I realized I was on my own at the wrong end of a sports club in the rangy Kent countryside, with this guy showing me pictures of a woman who was by then not only topless but bottomless too, I left and never went back. I wasn’t so upset about the photographs—it wasn’t the first time this kind of thing had happened to me—but more that my shots were so crap. I would never, ever get back whatever it was I’d had as a kid, that I maybe never even had anyway. It was really over this time.
•
January 2014. It’s less than two weeks until my Leicester tournament. My train tickets have arrived. I have booked a room in the Leicester Hilton, which has a gym, swimming pool, and sauna. I’ve been stalking my opponents on the LTA website, finding out what year they were born and what other tournaments they’ve played. This is not helping at all. Someone I could play against has a national ranking of thirteenth in her age group. What will it be like actually playing one of these people? I start planning my coaching and hitting sessions for the week beforehand. I am organized, focused. I send an email to the tournament organizer asking if he can put me in touch with any local coaches so I can have a hit on the surface for an hour before the tournament begins. He sends me the number of someone named Dave. Before I leave, I particularly want the ball machine for a couple of hours on Sunday, but the courts in the Indoor Tennis Centre are all booked up for tournaments and matches.
“But since you’re free on Sunday,” begins Margaret.
This time I have to bring cold meats.
We are playing Bearsted IV. They turn up grumpy from the journey and wet from the storm outside. They are wearing fleeces that say things like MAIDSTONE HARRIERS or simply BEARSTED LTC. The whole thing is supposed to begin at 2:30 but there is a kids’ mini-tournament that’s running over and, on Courts 3 and 4, the slap, slap, thwack of two regional boys’ under-16 semifinals. I’ve already been down that end of the tennis center by accident and I watched the boys for a few minutes before the umpire glared at me and made it clear I should leave. These boys play the kind of tennis I want to play. They serve hard, wallop the ball around the court, and fling their tennis racquets at the wall when they make a mistake. They are focused. They are grunting. One of them does it loud, like Nadal. He is beautiful.
I have my period. And a hangover.
Bearsted IV are being passive-aggressive about the time delay. They let us know that even though they are not enforcing a penalty (which I think might be a set in their favor), they could. Despite the period and the hangover, I have been to the gym and warmed up as usual. Five minutes on the bike followed by twenty minutes of stretches and running on the spot and pretending to be Victoria Azarenka. But now, in the vast unheated space of the Indoor Tennis Centre, I am freezing again. Margaret is trying to free up another court. When we do eventually get Court 3, we are delayed further because the nets are set up for singles rather than doubles. Once we take down the singles sticks, the net sags to a ridiculously low height. Hannah and I start trying to find both the winding thing for making the net go up and down and the measuring stick to make the net the right height.
Bearsted IV’s first pair are tutting and sighing. I have period pains. I am now on six ibuprofen a day pretty much every day, because if it’s not period pains it’s my knees or my lower back. We get the net the right height. I arrange the chairs and get out my small pink Lucozade and my large Evian and consider pointing them at the court like Nadal does, but don’t. We begin hitting up. I tell myself to touch my back with my racquet as I finish each forehand. To leave space between me and the ball. I pose like the Statue of Liberty after each backhand. They have won the toss and decided to serve. Their serve is by far the weakest aspect of their game, but a lot of people choose to serve first just because it is what big men with big serves do. It is what Pete Sampras would have done. We take the first game easily.
I am serving next. Last time I played Dan I really worked on my serve, trying to outthink him, trying to make something happen. In the heat of contest, I developed a lovely new serve out wide to the backhand on the ad court, but I can’t serve that here because Hannah’s head is in the way. In doubles there is always someone or some part of someone in the way. It is one of the things I most hate about it. I have never really bothered to work on that doubles serve where you go out really wide to get the angles. I usually just aim for the T and try to baffle the opposition with a choice of two serves: spin or no spin. Anyway, today my serve has deserted me. In one game we get stuck on deuce for about thirty-five minutes. Hannah has to get back to Sandwich for a dinner party at 6:00 p.m. We begin to worry. But then my serve comes back and we win the first set easily, 6–2.
I am volleying well, feeling confident and happy at the net. I even play a couple of really good overheads. I am fast and aggressive, but my ground stroke game feels wrong. I just keep plonking it back to the baseline player and trying to avoid the one at the net. And they have clearly decided to step it up in this set. They match us game for game until we break them and I serve for the match on 5–4. I find I am horribly nervous through the two match points that we lose, one to a double fault. I keep thinking This is match point, and it doesn’t help. We lose my service game, which means we’ve gone from match point to having to win another two games to take the set 5–7. But this doesn’t happen. Instead, we end up on a tiebreak at 6–6.
Kent Slazenger Inter Club Leagues matches are decided on the best of three sets, but the third set is always a championship tiebreak, which is first to ten points. This means that if we lose one tiebreak, we will have to play another immediately. And after we lost two match points! If Bearsted IV’s first pair win one tiebreak, the momentum will go with them and we will lose the next one as well. This dreadful thought stays with me until we are 0–5 down and I decide to do something about it. I’m not sure exactly what changes. I hate losing; I think that is the main thing. Suddenly I am much more aggressive. I am following everything I play into the net and swatting away the returns. Hannah is playing well too. We are particularly good with her keeping it steady at the back and me slamming them away at the front. We make it to 5–5 and all the momentum is back with us. They win one more point but we take the tiebreak 8–6 and the set 7–6 and the match 2–0.
Our other pair have beaten their other pair easily and have been sitting around in the cold for about an hour, watching us play. Bearsted’s other pair are also cold. And bored. And hungry. One of them is a woman of about my age. The other looks like a picture-book granny. She has a gray perm and a velour tracksuit the color of an inflamed hemorrhoid. I am toweling down after finishing our first match and preparing to move my stuff to Court 2. It is customary, and polite, to let the away team stay on their courts.
“Have you got a biscuit or something, love?” asks the older woman.
“Sorry?” I say.
“It’s just that it’s ever so late, and we’ve been waiting ever such a long time.”
“Um.”
“I think I might be feeling a bit dizzy. It’s just so late, and—”
“I’ve got a Dairy Milk you can have if you like,” I offer. I always have spare Cadbury Dairy Milks. I’m not sure that giving one to the opposition would be something Brad Gilbert would approve of, but I feel sorry for this poor old woman who is clearly unable to walk to the other side of the room and get a chocolate bar from the machine. Or, in the long wait she has just had, to discover the café upstairs.
“Oh no, dear. Not if it’s out of your own personal supply. What’s that under there?” She points under Hannah’s chair to a Sainsbury’s carrier bag filled with cake.
“Cake,” I say. “For afternoon tea. But I haven’t got a knife to cut it with. Are you sure you don’t just want a Dairy Milk?”
“You shouldn’t have to give us something of your own.”
“But we buy the cake anyway. And, in fact, the whole afternoon tea. So it’s pretty much all ‘our own.’”
“I only want a biscuit.”
“OK, well, I’m sorry, but we just don’t have any biscuits.”
“I had a banana at lunch time, but now I just feel a bit dizzy, and . . .”
For goodness’ sake. If you want biscuits that much, surely you bring your own? I wouldn’t dream of going anywhere to play tennis without at least 1.5 liters of water and several Dairy Milks just in case. You never know what you’re going to find when you go somewhere to play tennis. Although look at me, who has only ever made it to one away game ever. But if even I know this, you’d think that this old bird, who has clearly been around the block a few times, would remember to stick some cookies in her bloody handbag.
Hannah and I don’t exactly say it, but we know we are about to double-bagel these two. It’s now 5:00 p.m. We agree that we’ll have this match finished within an hour. Improbably, though, Bearsted IV’s second pair win the first game. Neither moves her feet much; the older lady not at all. The younger woman plays every forehand with the kind of underspin I last saw in Central Park, Chelmsford, Essex, in the 1980s. The older woman plonks everything. Whatever you hit to her she plonks back with an accuracy that quickly becomes unnerving. These two also love lobbing. And volleying. Anything that involves standing still they do really well. I don’t mean that in an entirely disparaging way; after all, it’s working. A couple of times Hannah waits for the underspin forehand to bounce so she can get a really good swing at it, only to find she is swinging the wrong way and the sneaky little thing has crept under her racquet. In West Indian cricket I believe a similar ball is called a rat.
On the first game changeover, I go to update the score. Every court has its own small scoreboard on a stick with numbers you flip over. The first time I played with Dan I was impressed by how properly he did everything, including keeping the score updated. When it doesn’t seem appropriate to pretend I am Azarenka, Serena, Sharapova, Federer, or Nadal, I sometimes pretend I am Dan. Apart from anything else, updating the scoreboard helps passing spectators know what’s going on. But it’s useful for everyone to know the score. And it shows you care. It is just another one of a thousand small things you can do to transcend the mundane, like performing hamstring stretches properly and drinking water on changeovers. But it’s also something that other players sometimes resent, because it involves Taking Everything Too Seriously. As I start flipping the numbers over, the older woman comes and literally breathes down my neck. I can smell cookies. Someone must have found some biscuits.
She’s got quite a low voice. “You the little scorer then?”
“I’m not sure I’d put it quite like that,” I say.
We lose another game. Then another one.
On the next changeover she comes up to me again. “Doing your little scoreboard, are you?”
“I think you’ve already pointed that out.”
When Novak Djokovic played Fabio Fognini in the 2014 Australian Open a few days before this, one of the commentators observed that there is no intimidating tactic that you are not allowed to use against your opponent in tennis. I begin to think that even Fognini could take lessons from this old dear. All he really did was throw his racquet into Novak’s court and make a joke about Monte Carlo.
I give up on the scoreboard. I sit with a towel over my head instead.
On the next changeover it’s 2–5. Hannah and I keep shaking our heads and saying what a change of pace this is after the last match, and how we need to get used to the deadly underspin, and how when we do it will be fine, but we need a plan before that. On the last changeover I suggested we hit deeper, but it didn’t make any difference. Now I suggest we poach more at the net. I don’t know if the old woman heard us, but the first time I try it the ball whistles past me down the tramlines.
“Saw what you were trying to do there, dear,” she says, chuckling. I almost think I hear her add “with your little tactics.” This is awful. This is a tennis nightmare. This is the kind of dream you are grateful to wake up from. Over on Court 4 the under-16 boys are still thwacking away with beauty, grace, style, and power. I think that if one of them were to glance over here now he’d just see a load of old women playing shit tennis. There would be nothing to distinguish me (or Hannah, although I sense this kind of observation would not bother her as it does me) from the others. Should this matter? Probably not. But I know I am a better player than the people who are beating me. I am up on my toes. I am sweating. I have matching sweatbands! Not just that. I am fitter. Stronger. All my strokes are better. So what the fuck is going on?
We lose the set.
In the break Hannah suggests that as we are going to lose this match anyway, we should probably use it to practice our volleys or some other part of our games. Lose the match. I gulp. She’s right. If we keep playing like this we are actually going to lose the match. And then I realize that if I lose this match, if I lose to a moonballing grandmother who has not even removed her tracksuit top, I will have to give up tennis forever. I have a coach. A personal trainer. Fifteen books on tennis strategy. Why am I not beating these people? It’s not as if I am not talented. I mean, I am talented, right? I certainly was when I was a kid. I’m never going to be as good at doubles as I am at singles, but even so. I breathe. Glance over to Court 4. One of the under-16s is flinging his racquet at the wall. He has passion. I should fling my racquet at the wall too, but I don’t.
They win another game.
Fuck this. OK. All right. What is the universe trying to tell me here?
And as soon as I ask, I know. Swing through my shots. Finish with the racquet touching my back. Grunt. I made a list just last night of the things I would always try to do in competitive situations and not just in practices. I have done none of these things today. When the old biddy plonks the ball to me, I plonk it back. When she moonballs it to one corner, I moonball it back to another corner. Why am I letting her dictate the play? I go to the gym two or three times a week and I lift weights and I get muscles that I then do not use. I have coaching where I learn to hit shots that I also do not use. Why? Why do I freeze so much in matches that I can’t hit the ball properly on my ground strokes? It’s not even nerves anymore. It’s a weird combination of embarrassment, habit, and politeness. After all, if some nice old lady has just hit you a tennis ball, you automatically hit it back. Don’t you?
But she isn’t that nice, and I’ve had enough of this. This time when she serves, I attack it. I take my racquet back and swing properly at the ball, pulling the racquet up and over the ball to create as much topspin as I can. I finish with the racquet over my head. I grunt. All these things are slightly staged. I realize I am forcing myself to grunt rather than it being a natural effect of hitting the ball harder. Nevertheless, I have hit the ball harder. The ball whizzes to the baseline and the old woman can’t even touch it. She looks like she has swallowed a fly. On the next point I do the same thing. She loses her serve to love. It’s simple, when you think about it. I am hitting the ball harder and suddenly I am winning points. And games. Hannah does her bit too. My power combined with her accuracy works. It works well.
We win the set 6–1.
“My dinner party—” begins Hannah, looking at her watch.
“We’ll just win the championship tiebreak and then you can go,” I say.
I go and update the scoreboard to show we have won the set.
“Like doing it more when you’re winning, don’t you,” says the old woman. “Your little scoreboard.”
“Yes,” I say. “I suppose I do.”
We win the championship tiebreak.
•
I tell Dan that I’m playing in a tournament, a real one. To warm up for the Indoor Tennis Centre Open. It’s in Leicester, I tell him. It’s a Grade 5. He looks it up on his iPhone.
“Carpet,” he says. “I love carpet.”
“Is it really weird?”
“It’s really fast. Like grass.”
I think of the grass courts in Chelmsford. They were the exact opposite of fast.
“But it can’t be that different from acrylic, though, right?”
He makes a face. “You need a game plan,” he says.
•
On January 24, 2014, I watch Nadal and Federer playing in the semifinal of the Australian Open. I’ve never really watched much tennis before. When I was a kid, big televised tennis matches meant the courts in Central Park would be free because all the local tennis fans would be at home watching, not playing. During big tournaments was the only time you could really get a free court. I would climb up to my tree house and confirm that the courts were empty, then Couze and I would hurry through the park, hoping that the ticket inspector was also watching tennis on TV. After I abandoned tennis, I couldn’t look it in the eye again for quite some time. For years, I’d simply change channels if it was on TV. Until now, actually.
It’s strange to admit this, but the first time I saw Rafael Nadal play in a match was quite recently: the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals, which governs men’s professional tennis circuits) final against Djokovic in November 2013. I’d read David Foster Wallace’s account of him—well, him in relation to Federer—before that, and listened to the other players in the first league match I played saying that even though Nadal was sort of attractive they wouldn’t be able to bring themselves to, well, you know. And the first time I saw him I couldn’t get over just how weird he actually was, tugging on his underwear and tucking his hair behind both ears and touching his nose before every point. I couldn’t work out why people loved him so much.
Since then I’ve read Rafa’s autobiography and his tics don’t seem weird at all. In fact, I totally identify with quite a lot of his general anxiety: the fear that his mother might die if she forgets to switch off her fire at night; a terror of driving anywhere or losing control in any situation at all. The thing I never had was an Uncle Toni. If I ever did find myself as a kid watching a tennis match on TV, my mother would simply say, “You could do that. You’re better than them,” even if it was Martina Navratilova or John McEnroe playing. When Rafa was eight years old and forgot his bottle of water for a match, Uncle Toni made him play without water to teach him a lesson. Now, walking down the street in New York, Uncle Toni does not let Rafa walk in the middle of a group of three. “What makes you think you’re so important, so special?” he apparently asks. He also usually tells Nadal he’s going to lose, and that his opponent is so much better than him that if he does win it will only be because of luck.
Before I read the book, and before I really watched Nadal play, I thought I would love Federer more. And at the beginning of this match I almost think I do love Federer more, with his elegant one-handed backhand and delicate, subtle volleys. But there’s Nadal at the other end, described by my new agent as a “huge piece of cow” and by David Foster Wallace as Dionysus to Federer’s Apollo; war to Federer’s love. Well, I have always been more of a Dionysus type of girl, but it’s not just that. It’s his inside-out forehand. His lasso finish. At first I don’t get it, because he’s left-handed and I’m not, but then I do. This is pure passion. This is beautiful. Federer might be elegant with his hair just so and his white shorts and his socks pulled up. Nadal is dirty. Gritty. Real. He has to bandage every one of his fingertips on his left hand because his extreme western grip means they will blister otherwise. Sweat pours off him all the time. This is how I want my tennis to be. Did my mother overdo the praise when I was a kid? Undoubtedly. I look at Nadal’s forehand and I want it, and I’m not going to stop until I get it, however ridiculous this is. I don’t want the Nobel Prize for Literature or the FA Cup goal. I want something better. I want that forehand.
•
I am on my way down the stairs to the Indoor Tennis Centre for my 2:30 lesson with Dan. It’s the last one before my very first real tournament in Leicester. I’m hoping that we’ll practice the pattern of play we worked out last time, where I hit an approach shot into my opponent’s backhand corner and then rush up to the net to volley away the weak return.
“Just the person I wanted to see.” It’s Margaret, coming down the stairs behind me. I wonder what it will be this time, how far I will have to drive or what I will have to bring, but it’s not that. It’s not about a match.
“Did you set your own rating on the LTA website?” she asks me.
“Yes.” Shit. “Did I do it wrong?”
“Well, you made yourself an 8.2. That’s quite high.”
“Well, they gave you some choices and I said what I could do and that’s what it came out as. Is there a problem?”
“Well, kind of.” Margaret laughs. “You’ve now made yourself too high to play with Hannah in the Aegon league.”
The Aegon league is the one where you can play singles. I didn’t know until recently that you also have to play doubles. You go off in a team of four and play one singles and one doubles. I am haunted by doubles, which I increasingly do not like playing. But I’ve made a bit of a thing about the Aegon league, emailing and generally pestering Margaret about it. Ideally, I want to captain the team.
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, you see, in the Aegon league it’s all done on ratings. As it stands, you’ll be the highest. Well, I think maybe Becky’s an 8.2. But Becky and Lucille have to play as the first pair and I’m not sure that’ll work now.”
I’m not sure why Becky and Lucille have to play as the first pair, but whatever.
“Well, I’m sorry if I’ve messed everything up.”
We have reached the tennis center. The familiar cold, hard green of it. Dan is there with a basket of balls. It is 2:30. All I want to do is hit a ball. Show myself that I can still do it, that I will be able to do it on Sunday in Leicester. A 6.1 has just entered the tournament, which frightened me even before this conversation. If 8.2 is high, then what is 6.1 going to be like?
“I think Lucille is a 10.2,” Margaret says.
“But I heard that she’s an amazing player. Shouldn’t she have a higher rating?”
“Well, yes, but she never plays singles, so . . .”
If she never plays singles, how does anyone know what her rating should be? But there are those descriptions on the LTA website. A 10.2 can just about keep an easy, slow rally going. A 9.2 can just about get a serve in. One of the things that made me choose 8.2 was because on this rating you can force errors with your serve. My tomahawk serve often makes people hit the ball back into the net. But of course people do get stuck with ratings that don’t reflect their ability. Poor Dan has not played a tournament that affects ratings and ranking for years and is also stuck with a 9.2. If Dan is a 9.2, then the rest of us should be in the twenties. But it only goes down to 10.2, which is supposed to be for real beginners.
“I’m just not sure that my rating should change because Lucille’s is wrong.”
“The other problem with an 8.2 is of course that you’ll end up against all the best players,” Margaret points out.
Surely that’s what I want? Or if not that, then at least a chance to get into better tournaments, which is the main thing a higher rating gives you. A higher rating means being closer to Wimbledon, to my agent’s dream.
Margaret continues, “When I played in the Aegon league last year I just ended up being thrashed by 6.1s all the time. And then you’ve got county players.”
Ah, the mythical county players. The stories people tell around the tennis center often involve someone accidentally playing a county player and being totally bagelled, even though no one here really calls it that. Or a county player enters a tournament that is supposed to be For Local People and thrashes everyone. I’d love to play against a county player. Especially if I could do it twice in a tournament for approximately £15. I now pay £50 a week for Dan to bagel me again and again and again. I learn an awful lot from it. Of course, what I’m really aiming for is to be a county player, like I almost was when I was twelve. Oh, and with a forehand like Nadal’s.
“One time,” Margaret says, “I was playing this county player and there I was in the corner hitting forehand after forehand and she just kept hitting them back to me and I kept hitting them back to her until then—”
“Then she smacks it down the line?”
“No, then suddenly she hits a ball about twice as fast as the others.”
“Amie Tonkiss is a 7.2,” I say. “And I know she was probably having an off day at the Christmas Tournament, but I did beat her.”
“Yes, but that was only one set. Real matches are over three sets—”
“But I beat her 6–2. And I think I would have done the same over another set.”
This is becoming weird. I was told I wouldn’t beat Amie Tonkiss, and I thought I wouldn’t beat her, and she beat everyone else in that tournament except me, but I did beat her. I won. But now it’s as if that was some kind of freak result and because I shouldn’t have beaten her on some level, I didn’t. It’s as if it doesn’t count.
Actually, every person I have played at singles in this tennis center, in this vast green rectangle, every single one apart from the Level 3 coaches, I have beaten. I beat everyone I played in the Christmas Tournament. On club nights I have beaten Cheryl 6–2, Tim 6–1, Lee 6–0, Carolla 6–0. I played a couple of sets with Cheryl just after Christmas, 6–2, 6–1. I am not so conceited that I am not totally surprised every time this happens. And I am not such an idiot that I think I’m going to go out there and have the same sorts of results against 6.1s, or even other 8.2s, or all the 10.2s and 9.2s out there who are hiding their ability behind the wrong numbers, like two-bottles-of-wine Gemma (a 10.2 apparently) and the mysterious Lucille. I have been prepared, for weeks now, to go to Leicester and get quadruple-bagelled over my two matches. I have yet to take a game off Dan. But I have had him at deuce a couple of times recently, and once at 30–0. Hayley Palmer, Dan’s official doubles partner, for whom I seem now to be the regular reserve, is an 8.2. Hayley and Becky (also an 8.2) would both give me a good game at singles, I know that. I am actually terrified of the day I end up playing Hayley, because I think she might 7–5 me. But I don’t think she could bagel me. Same with Becky, although I feel more terrified of playing Becky.
“Most people,” Margaret says, “start at 10.2 or 9.2 and work their way up.”
“Look, I am sorry,” I say. “Really. But the LTA site just said to be as honest as possible about your abilities and the descriptions of 10.2 and 9.2 just didn’t seem to match up. But I really am sorry if I’ve messed everything up. Honestly, if you think it would be best to just leave me out of the Aegon team then I really don’t mind.”
“No! Don’t be silly.”
I begin my coaching session ten minutes late. Am I really that much worse than I think I am? Have I so overestimated my abilities that I just come across as deluded and ridiculous? But I have a trophy! I was in the local paper! Even though people didn’t think I could have beaten Amie or that I should have beaten Amie, I did beat her. I did. But only over one set, says Margaret’s voice in my head. Real matches are . . . Fuck. Is this what it’s going to be like during my tournament? Every time I think I can do it, will Margaret’s voice materialize in my head and tell me I can’t? I whack the ball really hard to Dan, tears forming in my eyes. I’m not that bad! We keep hard-hitting rallies going for ten or twenty shots and the mistakes that end them are not all mine. This time I take Dan to advantage in one game, and 40–30 in another. But I still have not won a game off him. Not that I really expect to—or, on some level, really want to.