I am sitting in a redbrick building in the East Midlands refreshing the LTA “Player” page over and over again. Fault, it keeps saying. Sorry. The latest ratings run is due and I know that once it is complete I will, for the very first time ever, have a national and county ranking for tennis. I know my rating will not change this time. I have not even beaten one person with a higher rating than me, let alone the three required, so I will remain an 8.2. But I have some ranking points for reaching the final of the consolation draw of the David Lloyd Narborough Way2Play tournament last week. Twenty, to be precise. What does twenty ranking points get you? It’s the kind of thing my mother gets impossibly excited about. Will I now be number 1 in the county? Unlikely. The country? Mother! Mum is here, in her superior double room next door, but I won’t tell her I am doing this. I will keep secretly refreshing the page until I have confirmation of the place I now am. Somewhere to say, This is where I am now, and then, That is where I am going. But not to anyone else. Not yet.
I am at Ragdale Hall, a world-renowned destination spa, on a midweek break for two. Mum finished writing a book not that long ago and I promised her a spa as a treat. It’s supposed to be a treat for me too, and I have come to see it as part of my preparation for the Indoor Tennis Centre Spring Open. I will play tennis each morning and be massaged each afternoon. I will do circuits in the gym and warm my muscles in the sauna. I intend to feel a bit like Nadal, but without the neuroses.
Eventually the LTA page refreshes properly, and the ratings run is complete. In my age group (40+) I am number 21 in Kent and 311 in Britain. Without taking my age into account, I am 75th in Kent and 1,690th in Britain. I am both delighted and bewildered. Of course it means nothing, I tell myself. So few women over forty even play singles, let alone travel to tournaments to play singles. But I decide that by the end of this year I want to be number 1 in Kent in my age group. In the end, this might be about who plays the most tournaments. Well, so be it. Game on.
•
Normal British people do not look better in dressing gowns with no makeup and their hair scraped back. They may feel more relaxed like that, but I do not feel relaxed watching them. The fact that I hate myself a bit for feeling like this is also not relaxing. They laugh. They cough. They distract me from my mindfulness book. I particularly hate watching them eat. I imagine spending all day in a dressing gown that smells of lunch and has gravy stains from dinner. It costs £3.50 to rent a dressing gown at Ragdale Hall, a sum surely easier to add to the cost of a room for the night (approximately £175) than charge on an item-by-item basis, involving attaching off-putting paper seals around each dressing gown. I am on my second one after inadvertently wearing the first one to lunch. I can’t stand for anything to smell of food, apart from food. And only when I am eating it. I want to feel like an athlete at a training camp but instead I feel like an aging fat woman trying to avoid smelling of gravy.
Another problem with my fantasy training camp is that I haven’t been able to book any tennis. A perfunctory email ten days before our arrival told me that as the regular coach was on holiday, Ragdale Hall would not be able to offer me tennis during my stay. My response, that there surely was more than one tennis coach in Leicestershire and would they like to find one or should I, had simply been ignored. WTF? I have the money. I have the time. I have a tennis court to play on. About a week before we traveled here, I emailed a coach from a tennis academy in Loughborough. He was too busy but referred me to someone else who never replied. I need to be better with the telephone. Communication with coaches is never going to happen by email. But they’ve all presumably got iPhones, right? And want to make money?
This is the kind of thing I get cross about, and sometimes it’s better to let go, but on my first morning at Ragdale Hall I spot a sporty, efficient, senior-looking person manning (literally) the Treatments Desk and swoop on him. Ben is sorry to hear about my problems and says he will do his best to find me someone. I tell him what I told the Treatments booking lady two weeks ago: I’d like to play tennis on each full day I am here. Fat chance, I know, especially as we are already midway through Monday morning. But I go off to the gym to do my circuits feeling oddly hopeful. With good reason: I’m only twenty minutes or so into my workout when Ben comes to tell me that a coach will be here at 11:00 a.m. And can do all week.
Matt the tennis coach is probably in his fifties. He is a stout man in a red puffer jacket and wool gloves. I’m pleased he’s shown up at all: it looks like it might snow. He says most people don’t cancel, whatever the weather. He’s a gentle guy who plays the wrong sort of tennis for me—soft, spinning, subtle. But he has arms, and a tennis racquet, and I can use him to lower myself into that long, warm, escapist bath that tennis has become. As long as I am playing, I don’t have to think about anything else. Right now I yearn to hit the ball more than I yearn to do anything.
What is happening to me? Of course, I have no idea yet that anything is; well, nothing serious. I think I’m in love, and it’s a pure happy love that will never betray me. My love is for tennis and I want to play it as often as I can. I know that tennis has always done this to me: it was my very first addiction (actually, third—I had a real thing about those gumball machines that gave you gum and a toy when I was about eight, and I also could not stop myself playing Manic Mechanic games when I was about ten). But I have no idea how deadly this will become. No idea that I am already a mouse in a lab experiment that presses its little lever for another shot of cocaine, again and again, never even eating, never doing anything else ever again.
That first day with Matt, I love the fact that I am playing tennis, just like I always do, but hate almost everything else. I feel clenched and tight. My forehand hasn’t been out since Dan did a video analysis last Thursday and showed me how late I still hit the ball. My forehand is therefore back under construction. Wonky, unstable, wrong. My backhand is the same dependable one-handed backhand I’ve had since I was twelve. I hate being criticized, but it turns out I also really hate being praised. Matt praises much more than Dan, but it is clear he has such low expectations of a middle-aged fat chick like me. I know I can do a lot better than he expects. My poor serve has also died since it was videoed, but Matt thinks it’s pacy and powerful. “Most ladies” he knows who play in leagues would have trouble with it. And I haven’t even yet done a good serve! He likes my backhand. Everyone likes my backhand. I wish someone liked my forehand.
•
Between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. is a bad time in the thermal spa. All the new arrivals have, after their long car journeys, simply stripped and entered. No showering first. Which is sort of what I did, I suppose, now I think about it, but I’m sure I am cleaner. After my massage on Tuesday I go to the Color Flow Cave, basically a steam room with a fake crystal on the back wall with new age music playing and fluorescent light strips that change color along with the music. I like the Color Flow Cave because it is the hottest of all the steam rooms, but this time when I open the door it is cool and smells of feet. All thermal spa facilities smell of feet when they are switched off. The fact that it isn’t working has not stopped some of the new arrivals. They sit there, not even aware that they are not having a good time. I look around for what’s wrong. There’s no steam. You can see people too clearly. As I turn to go out, one of the new arrivals asks what’s up. I tell him I don’t think it’s working. He stays where he is.
Here is how Ragdale Hall makes money. You pay a reasonable amount for an “all-inclusive” four-night break. £735 buys you a superior double room for four nights, breakfast on a tray (which we’ll come to), buffet lunch, use of all facilities, unlimited exercise classes, three-course dinner, and two cups of tea. The food is very good, especially the dinner. Each dish is labeled with one, two, or three “windows” that denote how calorific it is. Of course, you pay for your wine. You pay a supplement of £10.95 if you want the beef fillet. If you have a cup of tea that is not one of your free ones, it’ll be £1.60. A gin and tonic is £6.50. At any moment that you agree to pay for anything extra, a little receipt is immediately produced and you have to sign it.
There is cake everywhere. And fat women, the ones much fatter than me, who probably fell for the exotic fruit skewer (one window) as their inclusive pudding, are paying extra to eat it. I don’t eat wheat, of course, so have no cake. But I do buy a box of Valentine’s Day chocolate truffles (£6.50 for six) and eat my way through those. The place is packed. I can’t find out how many bedrooms there are, but I would guess there are over two hundred. One of the reviews on Tripadvisor compares the place to a cruise liner. Another suggests it’s more like an old people’s home. It is incredibly busy. There are residents, day guests, and locals. The locals use the place as their leisure center. It seems to employ about five hundred people.
I complain about everything. I complain about the supplements, that my wine is too warm, and that there’s no one at one of the bars when I want to be served. I complain that my four-ounce glass of champagne is flat. I complain that my first massage is too light, so light it’s actually irritating, like being tickled by someone who does not even fancy you. The second one is too intense. I don’t like being massaged by women. I don’t like waiting for anything. I am sarcastic. I do that thing where I smile and say something that sounds nice but isn’t, like “I wonder whether it would be possible to have a glass of champagne that comes from a bottle that has been recently opened and is served in a glass that’s actually clean.” I expect I look stupid trying to be assertive in my dressing gown, but I don’t care.
“I’m not sure I like Scary Scarlett,” my mum says over dinner.
“For God’s sake,” I say grumpily. “I’m not that scary.”
My mum has been calling me Scary Scarlett ever since I emerged from a bout of therapy that made me individualistic and quite a bit more combative than usual. It was the same therapist who’d introduced me to A Course in Miracles. I would say something about feeling guilty for not switching my engine off while waiting in a car park, and how sad I’d felt when a man had tutted at me, and the therapist would say that maybe that man needed to be angry that day and my doing something to annoy him had therefore actually helped him. Also—and this was her response to pretty much anything—it has already happened, so it does not matter. Everything in the universe has already happened. It’s a Tralfamadorian way of seeing time. So it goes. Do what you like: it won’t change anything. And the universe loves you anyway. However much of a massive cunt you are, the universe loves you anyway.
“And besides,” I say to Mum now, “it’s not like you don’t benefit from me being like this. I got you a superior room, and a better breakfast, and a new dressing gown.”
“I know,” Mum says. “But couldn’t you be nicer about it all?”
“It doesn’t work when you’re nice,” I say. “And I’d rather be aggressive than passive-aggressive. It’s more honest.”
One of the annoying things about this is that I’ve always had to have fights on behalf of the family, sometimes literally. Mum and Couze actively encouraged me to punch a racist girl in the park when I was about ten. I’m the one who has to phone up and shout at people. Recently some guy in a van swore at my mum over a maneuver on the country lanes near where she lives, and I was the one who had to ring the company and demand he be sacked. “I am going to stay on the line until you can tell me why you think it acceptable for one of your employees to verbally abuse a woman on her own,” I said to the man who answered the phone. “Or until you promise me that you are going to sack him.”
We manage to get off the subject of my scariness by talking about tennis. Mum wants to know how I played today and whether Matt was astonished by my skill. I mumble about my shots being under reconstruction and Matt being more of a hitting partner than a coach, really.
“You were a Wimbledon baby,” Mum says. “You’ve got tennis in your blood. Did you know that your grandma played tennis?”
“What, seriously? Not your mum?”
“Yep. She had trophies. A long line of them on the mantelpiece.”
“When did she play?”
When I think of Grandma, I think of a stout Geordie woman who loved cigarettes and nail varnish, would crush wasps between two fingers, and who had possibly been a nurse in the war. After the war she traveled the world with her RAF husband and my mum had a pet monkey. Then they became alcoholics and my mum had to go into foster care for a while.
“When she was a schoolgirl, I think.”
“Really? Why did I never know this?”
Mum shrugs.
“Anyway, who was playing when I was being born?” I ask. I was born at 4:00 p.m. on July 5, 1972. All I have really known about this before is that “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles was on the radio, and also that the actual sun came out. But Wimbledon is always happening on my birthday, so I don’t know why it has never dawned on me that it therefore must have been going on while I was actually being born.
“I don’t know,” says Mum. “I was a bit busy.”
Later I look it up. It was a good year for tennis. The ladies’ singles final had Billie Jean King beating Evonne Goolagong, and the men’s singles had Stan Smith beating Ilie Nastase. Billie Jean King won £2,400 and Stan Smith won £5,000. It’s hard to work out what day everything happened. There was a lot of rain that year. The men’s final was on July 9.
“Can you remember when I first played tennis?” I ask Mum, but she can’t.
“Any desserts for you ladies?” asks the waiter.
The other thing that’s annoying about being here is being referred to all the sodding time as “ladies.”
•
The next day Matt has plenty to say about ladies himself. It’s extremely windy and he wants to teach me drop shots.
“A good shot for ladies’ matches,” he says.
“Can’t we just hit?” I say. But he’s planned a whole session around drop shots and playing in the wind and I don’t want to hurt his feelings. I have come to this session imagining that I will ask Matt to make me hit my forehands higher like Azarenka, or even Becky Carter. But whatever. We can do drop shots.
Doing something I am not invested in has its advantages. I forget to be nervous. I hit the ball better. It feels free and playful. At one end the wind is such that you smack the ball and it virtually becomes a drop shot anyway. From the other end a drop shot is more than likely to go long. There are different strategies at each end. The wind somehow means I can relax and learn and have a laugh. Matt teaches me a backhand drop shot, for use into the wind against someone I’ve pushed back with the previous shot. I have never learned a backhand drop shot. It comes easily because I already have such a good backhand slice. “I like your backhand,” Matt says again. “It’s really very good.” And my backhand drop shot does come more easily than the forehand. How does this make me special? asks a voice inside me. I need to be special. But what if my need to be special is ruining my game? In the sauna later, I will tell Mum that I love tennis more than writing, more than wine, more than almost anything. But do I love it more than being special?
Then, as it begins to sleet lightly, we do volleys. I love volleying. I actually win our little game of serve-volley, 11–9. Then Matt comes in to the net and we volley back and forth, quick and fast. He seems surprised by how confident I am. Only the “top ladies” at his club, he assures me, would feel at all comfortable doing what I am doing. I’m not sure whether to find this complimentary or just patronizing.
•
Later that evening I fetch the remains of yesterday’s bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape from the kitchen. It’s a long walk from here back to where my mother likes to sit, near the door to the smokers’ area, and I do get some funny looks. No one else is walking around the spa with a half-empty bottle of red wine. But then no one uses the tennis courts either. And no one approaches the gym the way I do either, doing proper circuits and using the actual weights. I feel alive. Here we are, me with my wine and Mum with her fags, talking about how to incorporate mindfulness into tennis and life. Mum has suggested that I consider using mindfulness to help me—she was watching me play with Matt from the window, it turns out, and she was surprised to see that I wasn’t completely thrashing him. Also, she wonders, what kind of second serve am I doing? Is it a kicker? She thinks it might not be “heavy” enough.
“I don’t even know what that means,” I say. “Where do you get this stuff from?”
“I’ve been watching tennis since before you were born,” she says.
“Just not during.”
“No. Anyway, I do think mindfulness is the answer.”
“I’m not arguing,” I say, grumpily. Mindfulness used to be my sort of thing. I’m the hippie in the family. But recently Mum has done a course on it and now she’s the expert. “It’s not like I don’t try.”
“I could lend you a book on it.”
“I already have a thousand bloody books on mindfulness,” I say. “But thank you anyway. And The Inner Game of Tennis. Do you know about that?”
“No. What is it?”
The Inner Game of Tennis explains that you have two selves: Self 1 and Self 2. I tell Mum that Self 1 is your controlling, petty, clenched little conscious self that is driven by ego and does everything wrong because it thinks too much. Self 2 is the unconscious wise thing that quietly controls everything in the background. It’s like the difference between the ego and the higher self—or, in another sports psychology book, the chimp and the human (or, perhaps more accurately, the computer). I have come across this idea a lot in my reading over the years. It’s part of the Hindu philosophy I’ve encountered while doing yoga, the Buddhism I’ve drifted in and out of over the years, and even some of the forms of Christianity I’ve encountered, although usually that’s more about a trinity than a duality.
But it’s the same message anyway: Relax. Stop trying. Embrace paradox.
“And then you can become number one in the country!” Mum says. “And, who knows, maybe even the world.”
•
I had a fun dinner with the writer Naomi Alderman last weekend and I’ve saved up some snippets from that to entertain my mother. For example, I tell her, there are people out there who write fan fiction, which is like—OK, she knows what fan fiction is—but anyway there is a kind of fan fiction called Johnlock, in which Sherlock from the BBC series and his sidekick John Watson have sex. It is all written by women. Why? asks Mum. I shrug. To express their sexuality. To be feminist in the new way. We get to talking about feminism in the new way—all that stuff about checking your privilege, and the recent debates over who on the spectrum of female is the most authentically female, and Mum tells me about how Spare Rib magazine was always on the verge of closing down because the women who wrote for it were too busy competing over who was the most oppressed.
Back in my room I think about the conversation I had with Naomi over breakfast the morning after the dinner. She is now working at Bath Spa University, recently taken on as professor. Professor! And she doesn’t seem that far into her thirties. I have been working my way up to a chair for the last ten years, rather in the way I plan to work my way through tennis rankings now.
Naomi has made a million-selling app and been involved in advertising. I’ve just written books (she has also written books). Over gluten-free bagels that morning I began to tell her what I hate about my job. When I started explaining that I rarely read first novels now because they remind me of student work, which I have grown to hate, and how I clock-watch during seminars and really don’t care if any of my students (save a small handful) get published or, really, whether they live or die (this isn’t strictly true but I’m trying to set the mood), Naomi declared me burnt out. Maybe she was right.
She offered to put me in touch with a guy high up in an advertising firm who apparently bought copies of my novel PopCo for all his employees and told them that this was the kind of company he wanted them to be. Last year I went through a phase of wanting to leave the university and work in TV, but I couldn’t find the way in. Could I work in advertising? Not sure. Probably not. PopCo was my anti-capitalist book. Who would do that? Then Naomi made the e-introductions and then the advertising guy got in touch to tell me he loved my books. I have, so far, done nothing. It’s late here, but he’s in America, where it is not late. I’m a bit drunk. I email him saying I want to do something more “stimulating and evil” than work in a university. I tell him I’m bored with my job and looking for something else. I tell him I love his showreel. Not thinking, I use my University of Kent email account to send the message.
•
Thursday morning is bright and clear and cold. I have developed a sore throat overnight. I rarely get colds, especially at this time of year. Is it because of playing outside so much in the wind and sleet? But Matt seems fine and he does it all the time. Reluctantly, I ask to cut the session short and do only an hour, despite having booked an hour and a half. We warm up, and Matt says I’m hitting the ball better than he’s seen me so far. That’s good—I’m trying to focus on my breathing. I’m trying a kind of yoga-mindfulness-tennis. I breathe in as the ball approaches me and out as I hit it. As I breathe out, I make a little noise. It’s my grunt! At last! Except that I have to cough immediately afterward. I am pretty sick of playing tennis in the Midlands in the winter now. We do some patterns of play and I open up spaces in which to hit the ball, but I still do it hesitantly, politely. Matt wants to know why I still refuse to finish off a rally with a killer ground stroke. Why, he asks, do I freeze whenever we play a point? I don’t know. I wish I knew. I am timid, safe, and comfortable when I want to be hard, fast, dangerous.
I don’t know how to articulate this to anyone, and maybe I never will—maybe I don’t actually want to win. Maybe I just want to keep hitting the ball. I mean yes, of course, I want to win the point, and the game, and I want another trophy more than anything in the world. Almost. But I sense that there is a deep, deep part of me that doesn’t want to crush my opponent, that wants this game to be beautiful and cooperative and long, and somehow to the death, but with no winners and no losers, just a pure sense of eternity. I bury this feeling.
On the way home I buy another fluorescent yellow bra from JD Sports at St. Pancras station. It’s the kind of thing you could wear to be hard and fast and dangerous. I imagine wearing it with a little tank top and tight shorts, and my abs looking like Becky Carter’s.
That evening at home I am thinking about my timidity for the thousandth time when the answer comes to me. I am playing tennis as I live life. For example, I have hung on to this teaching job for a lot longer than I should have done because it pays the mortgage and I don’t want to be poor again. Although these are good reasons in a way, they are not valid. I have skills and savings. I could be doing something riskier that I enjoy more.
The day I felt best about my tennis was when I relaxed and had a laugh with Matt and the wind meant that a lot of shots didn’t matter. It’s the same with Dan. Why am I so intense? Why can I not just pretend that there is a wind that means mistakes don’t matter? I am embarrassed to hit it hard. Embarrassed to grunt. Natalia Lozano just grunted immediately. That’s how she plays her shots. Why do I feel embarrassed and weird about paying someone £25 an hour to teach me tennis when it costs £68 to have a rubbish fifty-minute massage, or £50 for the same amount of weird therapy? I want so much for people to like me and give me trophies that I am afraid to do anything.
Something in me makes me want to hit the ball back to people nicely and calmly until it is completely safe to make a winning move. I don’t tend to make winning moves socially either. I don’t mean that I don’t win, but I don’t take risks. I have generally waited for someone to say they love me before admitting I love them too. The idea of putting myself on the line, being rejected, hitting the ball out and having to begin the next point . . .
Instead of going along to play a tennis match with my identity intact, I go looking for an identity. I go to be validated, confirmed, loved. I want to impress everyone so much that I can’t move. Earlier today, playing Matt in the cold and the wind, with my lungs crackling underneath my Adidas jacket and my silk scarf, why didn’t I hit out? I had nothing to lose—I was probably never going to see him again. In my defense, the shots took a lot of setting up and I didn’t want to fuck them up. But so often I did anyway, by hitting lamely into the net, or hitting the ball so weakly he could not only get it back, but get it back for a winner.
•
Am I burnt out? I begin compiling a list of all the things I have come to hate about the University of Kent, the place I used to love so much (and will come to love again). On Fridays I teach in Rutherford Cloisters and have my lunch in the Rutherford dining room. What I really hate about this dining room is that the view of the cathedral—the whole point of this vast hall with its impressive picture windows—is always closed off with screens. In theory, these protect the small area of seating where they have occasional official dinners, or where visitors might be seated on Open Days. But in reality, every day the screens are there and there is no one sitting behind them.
What I particularly hate about this is that everyone seems simply to accept it. Everyone accepts that if there is a nice view it should be sealed off. It must surely be for VIPs or First Class ticket holders. It must certainly be Kept for Best. But these kids, the ones squashed onto all the other tables with no view of the cathedral, are now spending £9,000 a year to come here, and the only real selling point we have is that view of the cathedral, which they close off and no one cares or complains. I have started taking my baked potato behind the screens and sitting there on my own looking at the cathedral. If someone tries to eject me, I think, I will refuse to go. I will make them call the Master of Rutherford to personally escort me out of here, and then I will ask him why this area is permanently closed off. And even then, maybe, I will refuse to move. Maybe then they will sack me and this blip in my life will be over.
I keep thinking of other ridiculous ways I could get sacked. I get a lot of parking tickets on campus; indeed, another thing I hate about my employer is that it gives me parking tickets. I cannot easily park near my office, and even if I get to the car park at 8:55 a.m. it is already full. I now almost always park on the double yellow lines almost right next to my office, on the principle that if I am going to have to pay £15 to park here for the day, I may as well get the best spot. I was once so busy that I completely forgot to pay a parking ticket. Like other official bits and bobs, it went into one of my in-trays and died there alongside all sorts of far more shaming things—requests to read books, review books, endorse an entire spiritual system from India, sign blank stickers, marry someone in Wisconsin, and so on. Eventually a pro-vice-chancellor wrote to me threatening disciplinary action if I didn’t pay it, so I did.
But what if I hadn’t? Eventually they would have had to sack me. It would have been thrilling and hilarious. I could just not pay the two outstanding parking tickets I have now and wait to be sacked. It would be kind of a Dada act. I could go to the tabloids, except I probably couldn’t be bothered. I never heard back from that advertising guy. I wonder if the University of Kent intercepted the email, and whether I might get sacked for sending it. But when I check, I find it went off fine. I read it through again. It does not read like I was drunk. Not at all. Should I have described his industry as evil? But it is. And I said so in PopCo, the book he liked so much. Perhaps I shouldn’t have admitted to being bored by teaching creative writing. But I am, I am!
I have actually come to hate teaching creative writing. Can creative writing be taught? was one of the more provocative questions I was asked in my interview, ten years ago this spring. Can it be marked? Of course it can, I proclaimed at the time. Everyone knows that adjectives and adverbs are bad. So you teach the students not to use them and then if they do you give them a low mark. It was all very sleek and scientific and modern. But how tired I now am of hating adjectives and adverbs.
I’ve started wondering what the point is, really, of teaching creative writing. Of all the students I have ever taught, only one has written a book I would pay to read. OK, make that two. But only two, in ten years. My osteopath and soon-to-be close friend, Charlotte, once asked me how many of my students have had their books published. To date? None. (As I write now, this has risen to five.) I tried explaining just how competitive and difficult it is to succeed with the kind of writing I teach. It would be like Dan expecting his students to make it to Wimbledon. But then why does anyone who isn’t going to make it to Wimbledon take lessons? Tennis, gardening, cooking. There are plenty of things people can enjoy without needing to become internationally acclaimed for them. But I am unhappy with my students unless they are at least reaching for that level.
Why? I don’t know. But I’m not sure creative writing is the same as sport or gardening or cooking. I don’t have to cook a Michelin-starred meal for my friends to enjoy it. It can just be some good food cooked simply. And of course I can play tennis with people of a similar ability. But no one enjoys the efforts of beginner writers. And writing is not something that can be quickly performed, like a piano sonata, or shown off easily like a new herbaceous border. This is one of the frustrating things about it. In order for the transaction to work, someone has to read what you’ve written, but in the current literary climate, it’s hard enough to persuade people to read good books. Bad ones—really bad ones—don’t stand a chance.
A mediocre student once asked me in all seriousness how she could prevent her awful SF series from being pirated—like, actually stolen from her hard drive and shared against her will. “What?” I said. “You mean someone distributing your book in a way you don’t want and you don’t make any money out of it? Ha ha! Welcome to publishing.” The idea that anyone would ever want to read her work, of their own free will, was highly, highly fanciful, I told her. I explained that her work was so bad that no one was ever going to pirate it, and if they did she should be grateful. Pirating was actually one step up from her having to pay people to read her work, which was in fact what she was doing now by being in a creative writing MA program.
I said all that in a nice way, of course.
Does Nadal hate beginner tennis players? I hope not. It goes without saying that if I ever met Nadal and he gave me a few tips on my forehand, I would certainly not try to convince him that my forehand is actually better than his. That “it’s all subjective.” That a low, scooping, club-player’s forehand, hit close to the body and low over the net, is more beautiful or effective than his slap-thwack topspin forehand, or Federer’s, or Serena’s. But students of creative writing are just as likely to scorn the greats as look up to them. They are all taught to Question Everything. This also now tires me out. Can’t they fucking just shut up and get on with it?
Hitting a ball perfectly, beautifully, reading it and catching its arc and sending it back over the net to precisely the point we want—or, sometimes, to an even better place chosen by some more unconscious part of ourselves—this is within the reach of most tennis players. Perhaps you have to be Rafa to do it for four or five hours straight, but all fairly good players will do it at least once an hour.
Whatever this is, this merging with the universe and sending a ball perfectly back through the cosmos in ways that a robot could never, ever do and a computer could never, ever explain, it is above and beyond language. It can’t be told; it can only be felt. To try to get beyond language, to shut it up for a while so that our brain waves can settle, so we can relax and focus, while using language itself, is near impossible. Only the very greatest of writers can use language in this way, to turn in on itself and go beyond itself and twist us up and away from ourselves like a diver kicking back up to the surface. But any kid can do it with a bat and a ball. And how many of these poor kids have been told to put down their ball and pick up a book? “It’s so good to see him reading. I don’t care what it is.” Why? Why is reading good? Why is it better than hitting a ball?
My dog, Dreamer, whom I still miss so much, understood human language quite well, but she had the same feeling about balls that I do, and she read them deeply and profoundly. If you threw one, she would retrieve it, wherever it went. On a sunny afternoon in a new garden, she would happily unearth every ball that had ever been lost there, tennis balls worn down to sad gray rubber, deflated kid’s footballs, the occasional rugby ball too, which never quite did it for her. If you threw a ball for her—tennis balls were her favorite—she would run after it, wait for the bounce, and launch herself, perfectly and beautifully, so that she would meet the ball at the apex of its arc. It would enter her mouth at the exact most sublime and satisfying moment, when the flight of the ball and the semicircle of the dog coincided with absolute mathematical precision, and then she would land as gracefully as if I’d just been watching a flawlessly executed dance move.
She also used to like waiting at the top of a hill, or a flight of stairs, for a human below to throw a ball up to her. The game now was to catch the ball perfectly (some of this depended on the throw, and you could see her disappointment when it wasn’t up to scratch) and then either roll it down the hill in a perfect line, or drop it on the stairs in such a way that the ball would hit every single stair in exactly the same way all the way down. Her sleek black head would nod in satisfaction. Bounce, bounce, bounce. Then she would wait for it to be thrown up again. And they say animals don’t feel pleasure. It was the same for her as it was for me.
Sometimes we forget that nature is all circles and arcs and parabolas, and the equations that make these things into beauty. Nature is one massive ball game, and we humans ruin it all with our emphasis on success and failure and progress and the inability of language to express anything important at all.
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After work the next day I do two hours of singles with Lee. I like playing Lee. He’s my age, sexy, and my type, but I don’t fancy him at all (and I don’t think he fancies me either). He’s a traveling salesman who recently lost a lot of weight and is almost as obsessed with tennis as I am. He’s got a nice smile and a good sense of humor. As with so many guys I meet, I see him as my mate, just like one of my brothers or their friends. My best cricket buddy ever was a guy from Pakistan named Mudassar. People don’t seem to understand that in sport it is possible for men and women to genuinely be just friends. I don’t know why that’s the case, but it is. Mind you, I have male publishing friends as well. And academic ones. Maybe I just like guys. Anyway, Lee’s a good laugh, and he usually comes to the Monday night sessions with Dan. And I always, always beat him.
I still have a killer sore throat, but I decide that this is it. Really. If I can’t play every shot like I mean it today, I may as well shoot myself. I focus on my breath and do it. And it’s amazing. Some shots don’t work, of course, but I feel better about myself and the whole game. Less anxious. If I lose this point, there is the next one. If I lose this game, there is the next one. The breathing really helps. Focus on the breath. And my serve is so much better since watching some Nadal clips with Matt on the freezing cold Leicestershire court yesterday morning. Rock back onto back foot. Breathe in. Throw the ball high. Exhale loudly—I surprise myself with my grunt here—and whack it. It goes pretty fucking fast. And I’m sure it looks a whole lot better. I still haven’t really experimented with taking the ball earlier, but the breakthrough on the serve is enough for me today. Breathe out on the bounce. Let it all go. Breathe in on the toss. Breathe out and unleash. Loud and strong.
From now no one is going to see my B game. I am ashamed of it. I will only play my A game. It feels amazing. Letting go and going for my shots is definitely the way forward. And I don’t care if I lose, as long as I play my game.
I beat Lee 6–3, 6–1.
And then I decide I am going to leave my job and become a yoga teacher.