What if Baby in Dirty Dancing had never gone home? What if she’d decided to stay at the holiday camp with Johnny and Penny and Billy and done her dance training and become one of them? She’d never feel awkward carrying a watermelon ever again. Now she’d actually be one of the insiders, a professional dancer, someone who knows rather than someone who has to learn. An old hand. A regular. One of the crowd. Part of the gang.
Think about it: Baby has two choices. She can turn into her conservative parents and begin the slow decline into the hideous hag who has to pay to be fucked, to be touched, for anyone to dance with her. Or she can become an honest proletarian. A dancer. Someone who works with their body, not with their mind. And then people will like her for who she is, and she will be real and earthy and true.
•
I have a routine now when I go to the leisure center. I pay for my tennis lesson at the desk, and then I go down to warm up in the gym. Everything hurts all the time, but I’m hoping that yoga is going to help this as well as my mind. I run a little on the treadmill. Lift a couple of weights. Row a bit. I’m becoming a regular at the leisure center, but that doesn’t mean I speak to anyone. The blonde woman who works in the gym is named Sue, I know that. We sort of nod at each other, but that’s it. There was one awkward time when I was on the treadmill last thing on a Sunday, and Sue was vacuuming around me and wiping down all the machines. I felt sort of humiliated on her behalf and so I tried to thank her for everything she was doing, for keeping the gym so clean and nice, and it came out wrong and ever since then I’ve been even more convinced that she hates me.
I’ve been coming to this gym for the last two years, and I have watched Sue the gym instructor transform from a woman of about my shape but perhaps a bit more so into a svelte, trim fitness chick. This happened around a year ago and then stopped, reversed, and now she is back to where she started. It’s been fascinating. My body has barely changed at all in that time. Whatever I do—and in the last few years I’ve tried running, swimming, and now tennis—I remain at around 150 lbs. and around 32 percent body fat. Almost eleven stone, and a lot of it blubber. Why? I’m not a couch potato. I try really, really hard to stay in shape. Even when I gave up drinking, between September and December 2013, I didn’t lose any weight. None at all.
Perhaps because I’m always so pissed off about this, I’m a gym menace. I scowl at anyone who is using a piece of equipment I want until they get off. I sigh and frown a lot. I take over both of the blue mats in front of the mirrors for my yoga practice. They have MTV on all the time, and I like to turn it down. They have speakers around the cardio area and the weights room and I go and find the volume knobs and fiddle with them until the sound of cheerful R&B no longer breaks through my headphones and disrupts the solid wall of ’90s club music and melancholy indie tracks from my past: The The, the Smiths, Blur, SL2, A Guy Called Gerald, the Ragga Twins. One of my favorite things is to put on “The Death of a Disco Dancer” and just burn through something in a haze of weird intensity. Later it will become the track I run fastest to. I’ve always loved relentlessness, and that blur of chemicals you make inside yourself as you do something over and over and over again. At this point I still can’t run properly, but I like the rowing machine, and I can churn out twenty-five minutes or so on the elliptical.
Lately, though, I’ve been watching the screens more often, sometimes even taking my headphones off to hear what’s going on on MTV. There are two songs I particularly like. One is “With Ur Love” by Cher Lloyd. Four years later, editing this, I’ve just watched the video on YouTube and it’s a bunch of inoffensive sweet young people in cheap clothes making a cheap silly video with some forgettable fat guy in a bad sweater as the love interest. But when I first see it on the screen in the gym in 2014, something about it makes me want to cry: with joy and frustration and deep, deep yearning. I want to be her, Cher Lloyd, with her skinny torso and her little skirt and her gold bow necklace, bouncing through the streets proclaiming her love for the guy in the bad sweater. There are lots of balloons. The whole video is the exact opposite of the middle-aged, fat, pointless feeling I have. This is fresh, young, spring-like, where I am rotting, autumnal, over.
The other one is “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen. It’s pure pop music, the kind of thing I would have liked when I was fifteen and at boarding school. In our fifth-form common room we played the Beatles and World Party, but on a Saturday morning we’d sometimes go to the twins’ house in the village and watch the chart on MTV. The video we all liked then was “Joe le Taxi” by Vanessa Paradis. I’ve just watched it again now for the first time in thirty years. Did she really look cool then? Huh. How intriguing. I used to look like that, just with browner hair and no gap between my teeth. And we all wore baggy sweaters like that. I have never looked like Carly Rae Jepsen, with her dark fringe and cute pigtails and little shorts. None of this bothers me now. But then, in the gym in 2014? I would have killed to be sixteen again and in a pop video and thin. I pleaded with the universe for it, and when the universe said “no,” it felt like bereavement, like unrequited love, like complete and total failure.
I took it out on tennis balls. I wanted to hit them harder not just because it would make me a better player, and because everyone would watch me and say the kinds of things about me that they said about Becky Carter. I just wanted to hit something and hit it hard; if possible, the Head Pro balls with the blue lettering on them. Dan and I would pick them out of the mixed baskets until we had a whole basket of good ones. Later he’d start saving the old match balls for me. Josh, though, by the time I defected to him, would sometimes open a whole new tin for our session. The hiss of the new tube of balls. The metallic sound of the top of the can being ripped off. The hope, always, at the start of a new session, that I was going to be good today. No, great. That I was going to be great today.
Today, a sultry, hot Sunday in July 2018, I watch the “Joe le Taxi” video a couple more times. The weird thing is, I sort of am that. I don’t look fifteen any more, of course, but that’s how I dance: I mean, exactly. I couldn’t do it at fifteen, so maybe that was something I wanted then. Well, I got it. I’ve got the hair too. How very strange. If you’d asked me what Vanessa Paradis looked like in her video for “Joe le Taxi” before I watched it again, I would have had her with dark hair and a French girl fringe—Carly Rae Jepsen, basically. But in fact, she has my hair: blondish, beachish, long. That sexy, knowing look? Of course I now see there’s something a bit pedophilic about the whole thing, but again, I couldn’t do that when I was fifteen. But now that’s just 101 stuff. I mean, now I can do that whenever I want. Maybe it’s not that bad being a grown-up after all. But it’s certainly taken me a while to get here, because it seems I’ve had to redo some of my childhood first. Not that I did it right this time, either.
•
The Indoor Tennis Centre ball machine is covered in the greenish-yellowish semi-fluorescent dust of the hundreds of tennis balls it has spat out and slowly killed. After Christmas, when the leisure center was open but none of the normal tennis sessions were running, I had this machine out three or four times. Eventually the leisure center receptionists began just leaving it in the corner for me. It’s supposed to cost £15 an hour, but it’s only worth it if you can keep it out for at least a couple of extra hours without anyone realizing. If you hit a ball into its mouth, it takes about half an hour to mend it. And its remote control doesn’t work. You have to set it up, start it, and try to run back to the other side of the court before it’s used up more than a couple of balls. It’s likely that the remote’s batteries have simply run out, but no one thinks to change them. I’m not even sure anyone ever rents it apart from me.
Today, a week before the Spring Open, it’s Margaret who walks down to the ball machine’s cupboard and unlocks it for me. She’s the main gatekeeper here and she never fails to let me know it.
“So you’re on until four,” Margaret says. It’s about ten past three now.
“Yeah, I usually just stay on for a couple of hours if no one else has the court booked,” I say.
Margaret raises her eyebrows. “Oh you do, do you?”
I don’t see what’s wrong with this, but I’ve obviously made a faux pas. Margaret plugs in the machine.
“So I heard about your match against Bearsted,” she says. “Made a bit of a meal of that one, didn’t you?”
I sigh, shrug, half-smile. “We got there in the end.”
“Should have finished them off more easily though,” says Margaret.
“Yeah. Well, I think Hannah had her mind on her dinner party,” I said. And me? I should say something about me, too, so it doesn’t sound as if I’m blaming Hannah, but I don’t. I should say I was timid and pathetic and—
“They complained about Becky again,” says Margaret.
“What, that she’s too good?”
“Yep. We can’t even send Lucille to these matches any more. It’s not fair.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen Lucille,” I say. “She doesn’t ever come to anything.”
“No, well, she’s busy with her kids. But she came in a couple of times when they arrived from South Africa. Got the ball machine out, had a couple of buddy hits with Josh. Honestly, it was something else. Seeing the way that she hit the ball . . .” Margaret shakes her head with admiration, something I have not seen her do very often. “It was hilarious really, some stranger coming in off the street—not even wearing sports stuff—and then hitting the ball like Serena Williams. We all just stopped and watched her.”
“Right.”
I want to cry. That was supposed to be my story. That was supposed to be me. I was supposed to be the woman who came into the tennis center one day, having been a child prodigy. I was supposed to be the one everyone stopped to watch. The one who’s too good to play against old ladies in velour tracksuits. But I’m not. I thought that’s who I was but in fact I’m just normal: a nobody with a low, scooping forehand and a one-handed backhand and no drive volley at all.
“You know she was top ten in South Africa?”
“What, Lucille? Really?”
“Yep. As a junior.”
“Wow.”
•
At my next session with Dan he’s kind of sulky. He has this shot that infuriates me. It’s a backhand drop shot, similar to the one I learned at Ragdale Hall but have not practiced since. He pushes me behind the baseline with a forehand down the line, deep to my backhand, which I return weakly, crosscourt. Dan then turns his body to play a normal two-handed backhand, which tells me to stay back, but at the last minute he takes one hand off and slices it so that the ball loops and drops just over the net. I’m really fast, but my knees still aren’t great and so I don’t make it to a lot of these drop shots.
“Dan!” I say after he does it again. “Stop it.”
During the next point he does it again. Afterward I go up to the net to retrieve the ball, and he comes to get one from a serve he fluffed earlier.
“That is such an annoying shot,” I say.
“Yeah, well,” he says, his eyes fixed on the floor.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Hang on—something is. What is it?”
He frowns. “I bet you can’t get the ball machine to do that shot.”
“What?”
“Your new friend, the ball machine.”
“Wait—are you jealous of the ball machine?”
Dan’s big eyes flick to mine and then down to the floor again.
“Not seriously though?” I say. “I’d rather play more with you but it’s just you’re busy and booked up—”
“I’m not that busy. I’m not that booked up.”
By the end of this conversation, we’ve agreed that I’ll have three sessions a week now, not two. But not, of course, until after the Spring Open. Everything is stopping next week for the Spring Open. It’s all anyone is talking about in the ITC.
“So you’re going to win, right?” I say to Dan.
“Nope,” he says cheerfully. “Josh’s going to win. But it would be nice to get through the first round.”
•
The Indoor Tennis Centre is closed all week because of the Spring Open. The kids are playing during the day, and the adults in the evening. The men begin on Monday and the women on Tuesday, so what I imagine following is something like a mini grand slam where everyone has a match day and then a rest day and then another match until perhaps all the finals are played on Friday. I imagine a little audience like in the Christmas Tournament. Faint smatterings of applause.
My first match is scheduled for Tuesday at 5:00 p.m. and I need to practice before that. As the Indoor Tennis Centre isn’t open for coaching or ball machine sessions, on Monday I go off to the Canterbury Indoor Tennis Centre for a session with the only coach they have available: Luke Green. I tried for their head coach, Simon, first. The woman on the phone sounded surprised when I requested him. Simon? Really? Don’t I know that Simon only really coaches the serious county players and the people who enter tournaments? But I have entered a tournament! It’s not enough.
Inspired by the Tim Parks book about meditation, Teach Us to Sit Still, which I’m teaching in my Writing and the Environment module for the first time this year, I have been up since 6:20. I have done my yoga and meditation—well, some. I have realized that I’ll need to get up even earlier if I want to get in anything like a full session before waking Rod at 7:30. But I have done some. And—whisper it—it is working. Shh. Don’t jinx it, don’t spoil the flow. But the breathing is working. The yoga is working. Deciding to leave the university is working. Something is working. I no longer care if I win any more matches or trophies. I just want to breathe in and out calmly and hit the spinning, looping, beautiful yellow ball with power and focus and depth and passion, making my new grunting noise as I do so.
Or am I just fooling myself? I don’t know. But here’s what happens when I meet Luke: I hit the ball cleanly and properly and hard. I grunt from the beginning with no shame at all. In fact, I feel pretty fucking cool. I confide in Luke that my backhand is feeling a little neglected what with all the work on my initially weaker forehand. He says he has had the same problem. WTF? He’s a nice young guy, cheaper and far less qualified than Dan. He is not intimidating in any way. He takes me seriously. He does not bark instructions at me. I hit my shots. Do a bit of work on the backhand. This is a good laugh.
We start playing points. He comes to the net and I send up an overhead, which he approaches with remarkable poise and ambition but then fluffs. “Oh no,” he moans. “You’ve found my weakness.” I point out that the overhead is surely everyone’s weakness, and we laugh again, and it’s very relaxed. I serve very well. I mean, I know I still don’t throw the ball high enough, but I’m now getting 80 percent of my first serves in, and they’re fast. I keep worrying that it will disappear, this new, wonderful serve. But it doesn’t, it hasn’t. So far. Luke is perfect to hit with. He’s not the greatest player, but he has some lovely shots. I don’t know how much of his A game I’m seeing; I actually suspect quite a lot. When the lights go out, we are 40–40, 3–2 to him. The lights do go out at the Canterbury Indoor Tennis Centre. When your hour is up, they plunge your court into darkness. Why? I remember hating this last time I played here, sometime in 2007. That’s right, after that guy showed me those photographs I did go back just a couple more times. When an older man asked me to hit with him one day, I really thought it was because he thought I was fast and he liked my forehand. When the lights went out, he asked me to dinner. And it was after that that I never went back.
On the way home from Canterbury this time, I feel fantastic. It’s stopped raining for the first time in what feels like weeks, the sun is out, and the countryside is slick with its shiny new wetlands. Ducks float on what used to be a small village green in Littlebourne. Near Worth, the swans now have a vast lake to swim on. Other birds seem to be arriving from everywhere. This used to be a field with cows in it. Now it looks like the Lake District, or somewhere in Kerala.
I have another session with Luke booked for the following morning, Tuesday, the morning of my match. I waver and then decide to go. After all, that’s what the pros do, right? They warm up with a hit in the morning before their match, then have a light lunch and a massage. Andy Murray eats sushi. Rafa eats pasta, often with fish, but never meat (he says it makes him feel “heavy” before a match). Djokovic doesn’t eat gluten or dairy: he starts his day with oats and then has a vegan or fish salad for lunch. They spend all day hitting and eating right and going to the gym. I know copying them is not going to take me to Wimbledon, but surely it’s not too much to ask for it to help me win the Spring Open?
My session with Luke doesn’t have the novelty of the first session, and I am tight and nervous because of my first match later that day. My serving and net-play are both still looking good though, and I wonder with Luke about trying more serve-and-volleying. In his opinion this would be a good option for me and play to my strengths. We work on it a bit. I fluff a lot of the approach shots, but it’s fun. I can feel a blister developing. I did the Bow during my yoga session this morning and I think I’ve twinged my back. I ring up Tor Spa in Ickham to see if their male masseur can do me a recovery massage tomorrow, but they are fully booked because the schools are on break.
Back at home I eat lunch and nervously await the time when I can begin getting ready. I am to be at the Indoor Tennis Centre at 4:45. I will do a quick warm-up and stretch in the gym beforehand, which means leaving home around 4:10. This means I should begin getting dressed at about 3:45. This means I should eat my scrambled egg and banana around 3:20. I find myself stuck for an hour before then with nothing to do. Well, nothing related to this evening. A voice in my head points out that most serious forty-one-year-old women would not have the luxury of spending the whole day preparing for a tennis match. Images of virtuous women who never wear eyeliner and rarely eat lunch flood into my mind. There’s one changing a baby. Another on the phone. Another having a meeting. I quickly blast a few replies to emails that have been bothering me in the hope of wiping out these images. They flicker, but remain.
•
The lights seem somber and serious in the Indoor Tennis Centre when I arrive at 4:45. All the nets are thrown open and all the courts are set up for singles. Margaret has become neutral and cold, the way she does during tournaments. (At least I hope it’s that and not that she suddenly hates me.) There are some other women standing around nervously. Margaret gathers us all together.
“We’ve got the courts until 10:00 p.m.,” she says. “So I’m hoping we can get it all done and dusted today.”
Good God. Really? Hang on, wait, that means three full matches in five hours. Part of me is excited at the thought of so much tennis, but mostly I feel disappointed. Yet again, a tennis tournament is something to be “done and dusted,” to be got through as quickly as possible, as if it were a trip to the dentist, an overdue spring clean, or a spot of weeding. I have had this week marked in my calendar for ages. I have cleared my diary. I have been massaged, coached, fitness-trained. I have stretched. Meditated (sort of). But am I prepared for five hours of straight tennis? Is anyone? Apart from Amie Tonkiss, here with her mum and dad, the other players are all around my age. I made a decision not to stalk these players too heavily on the LTA website before the tournament, but I remember dates like 1985, 1973, 1971, and 1965. The other women look sporty but not excessively so. More than one of them is carrying an extra couple of stone that she probably doesn’t want.
With all the effort I put into training and coddling my body you’d think I’d be one of the fitter players here. But of course I have my problems. The main one is the amount I sweat, because this leads both to blisters and cramps. Of course I already have the beginnings of a blister on the ball of my left foot. I have covered it with a Compeed, but I know from experience that over a short period of time the sweat glides the plaster off the blister and then rubs it against it. But it’s OK: I usually manage to forget all but the worst blisters once I’m wrapped up in a game. Nadal apparently has his feet partially anesthetized before matches so he can’t feel his blisters, which seems like a good idea.
I should conserve energy, and my skin, but I remember at least one of my books saying how important it is to warm up, and after all it’s what Djokovic and all the others would do. So when a nice woman named Sharon asks me if I want to hit with her, I do. I’m shit, but I tell myself it’s nerves. Afterward I feel a bit knackered, and my blister is worse.
I’m playing Siobhan Clarke from Kent, 8.2. She’s chatty and friendly and, since I’ve dispensed with Brad Gilbert, I am too. Siobhan says she’s never played in a tournament before, and so I take charge, looking after the match balls and bossing her through the practice—“We’ll do some volleys now, and then warm up our serves”—and explaining the format of the match. I am sweet, warm, friendly. She spins her racquet (I thought I was in charge!) and I choose rough, as always. When it comes up smooth, I choose to serve. Screw you, Brad! I will serve because I want to be ahead in the game. I won’t receive, however tactical it might be. But a few minutes later something feels wrong. I call her back over.
“You actually won the toss,” I say to Siobhan. “Sorry about that.”
How odd. I am so nervous that I just assumed I won the toss.
She offers to spin again, but I tell her she definitely won fair and square.
She chooses to serve.
Siobhan has a nice, high ball toss. In fact, both the other 8.2s here have beautiful tosses. Still, for some reason I am imagining an easy-ish victory over this nice person who has never played in a tournament before. I quickly go 0–30 up in the first game. Good. I imagine plowing my way on through the main draw after I win this. How cool it will be not to be pushed straight into the consolation draw! Who will I meet next? 30–15. On the next point I go to the net but Siobhan has a good lob. 30–30. On the next one she comes into the net and it seems she has a good overhead too.
She takes the first game. Bugger.
My service game goes to deuce, and then she wins that too. Hers goes to deuce and then she wins that. She is 3–0 up. But that’s OK, right? I’ve come back from here before, What’s happened here is that I have encountered another pusher. Like Karen Bayliss. Like Sally Foster. Siobhan is, however, a very good pusher. And I’m being a bit of a pusher as well, to be honest. We have these very long rallies during which I mainly hit down the middle or to her backhand and then when I try to do something risky, either I win the point or I lose the point at a ratio of around 40–60 in Siobhan’s favor. She is a good net player too. If she gets to the net, she wins around 80 percent of the points. I am not making anything happen. I’m waiting and she’s waiting and she’s better at it. Most of our games are going to deuce and then she’s winning them.
As I serve to save the set at 1–5, I feel about as low as I ever have on a tennis court. I am forty-one years old. I am past it. A complete fucking deluded idiot. I have put time into training for this, with my stupid massages and taking myself so seriously and clearing my sodding diary, and here I am being totally thrashed. This ridiculous project would only make sense if I were a much, much better tennis player. If I were Lucille, who I can see now playing a powerful topspin forehand on Court 1. Or Becky Carter, with her leg flying up behind her and people complaining that she’s too fucking good. I remind myself again that no one has ever complained that I am too good. Because I’m not. I’m shit, shit, shit. Still, I throw the ball high and breathe in. I serve beautifully, desperately, and Siobhan can’t get it back. It’s my first ace. But then on the next serve my calf cramps and I can’t return Siobhan’s return. On the next one it cramps so badly I almost fall to the floor. Who knew how involved a calf could be in a serve?
I lose the first set 1–6.
Rod’s been watching, but I can’t even catch his eye. 1–6. Fuck.
It’s not just the cramp; I have been trying to ignore the fact that my blister is also getting worse. And something new: my arms are rubbing against my fluorescent yellow bra and chafing. I absolutely hadn’t thought of this. And, not thinking I might be playing three matches, because what kind of idiot plays three matches in one evening, I only packed one spare kit. It’s a different bra and top but the same scenario, where the top is thin and light and the bra more substantial. Apart from changing my clothes, what do I even do about chafing? Last time I had it was when I used to run, and something similar happened with a tank top I liked but had to abandon. I have never had it playing tennis. I wish I had a sensible short-sleeved top, but I don’t. On the first set changeover I slip on my other top, although of course I can’t change my bra until the match is over and I can go to the changing rooms.
But these are not really the reasons I am losing. I am losing because I’m playing this silly pushing game and not hitting out. Again. I am becoming sick of myself. I am bored with myself. I bore myself. Je m’ennui. I try to tell myself that I really have nothing to lose now. The match is as good as lost anyway so I have to try—please—to bring out my A game. I try to look at it all objectively. I am grunting, which is good, and I am hitting the ball a bit harder, but I am still not going for ground stroke winners. I’m not moving my opponent around the court. Indeed, more often than not I am simply hitting the ball back to her, scared to risk a winner, hoping she will fluff it. Why? She doesn’t fluff it. She doesn’t hit the ball that hard, but she does hit it accurately. She is waiting for me to fluff it, which I obligingly do.
In the first game of the second set I am more comfortable in my new top, but still worried about my cramping leg and my blister. Siobhan wins the first game. What is wrong with me? I’ve decided to hit out but I am still not doing it. I have decided that I don’t care, that I am going to play wild and abandoned and violent, and I cannot make myself do it. Am I just going to give this to her, 6–1, 6–0, and then go home, cry, and give up tennis? Every one’s a winner, I think. Every one’s a winner. That drill with Dan where I try to hit every shot for a winner. My favorite drill, because it gives me permission to hit out. Every one’s a winner, baby. The song starts going through my head. I start hitting the ball harder, going for my shots, trying to play winners. If I am going to lose, I think, I am at least going out in style. Fuck this. Fuck it all. Finally, my conscious brain, my ego, Self 1, whatever the hell it wants to be called, gives in and I win a game. Then another one. My strategy remains simply this: to try to hit every single ball for a winner, not caring if it actually goes out. As for the pain, I remember one of the descriptions of the challenges of meditation in Tim Parks’s book. “Pain, pain, not my pain.” I think Parks was fairly disparaging about this at the time, because some fat guru was saying it during a bad meditation session, but it stuck in my head. Pain, pain, not my pain. Yes.
I go 4–1 up. This is amazing! I even do the odd little fist pump to myself. Poor, cold, stressed Rod gives me encouraging looks. This is working. I can do it. Excellent. And then it begins again. The thoughts come back. I could take this set 6–1, which would be nice. Symmetrical. Then we’ll be playing a championship tiebreak for the third set. If I went into that with the momentum of winning the second set, I could do it. Then I’ll be back to working my way through the main draw. I wonder who I’ll play next?
Before I know it, the score is 4–4.
Stop thinking! Play your shots.
I get the next game and am serving for the set on 5–4.
A voice in my head says YOU ARE SERVING FOR THE SET!!! Thanks.
My leg cramps. My brain cramps. It’s 5–5.
Every time I get ahead or think I might win, my game closes around itself protectively. I tighten up. This is stupid.
At 6–6 Margaret comes over and reminds us about the tiebreak format.
Why can’t I do this? My leg is cramping badly now, and my blister hurts, and I feel stupidly sad and alone and not at all like a winner. The thought of going through one tiebreak and then, immediately, another . . . it’s just rather tiring. I am not thinking like a champion. Maybe I’ll never be a champion. I let a couple of points slip away too easily, then concentrate and get a few back, but Siobhan really, really wants this, and I’m not sure I deserve it, and after all, what kind of idiot hits out in a tiebreak, which should be all about being careful and precise? When will I learn?
I lose the tiebreak 5–7.
Siobhan runs—yes, runs—to the net, holding out her hand. I limp over. She is exuberant and chatty and hopes my leg is not too bad and I congratulate her but then, really, babe, this match is over. She wants to keep chatting. I just want to die. She’s happy. I’m sad. When Rod comes over to kiss me, I feel like a twelve-year-old who has just failed an exam. I apologize to him for not winning. Where did that come from? He says how much better I played in the beginning of the second set. I know, right! And then I went back to losing because it felt more comfortable.
As usual, I have been part of the longest match so far. This is because I am a timid moron who cannot finish a point. Others are well into their second matches by now. Margaret wants to know whether Siobhan and I are ready to carry on after a ten-minute break. Sure, why not? I have Sharon O’Reilly, 8.2, to play next. She’s the nice woman I warmed up with earlier. Sharon is also chatty and friendly and I’m going to lose the match anyway so I remain chatty and friendly too. Sharon is a bit pissed off that the 10.2 she drew in the first round was Lucille, currently blasting her way through the 6.1, Kerrin Cross. Still, Sharon’s just beaten 9.2 Kofo 6–0, 6–1, which I guess she’s pretty happy about. I have a bye for my second round, because a player withdrew at the last minute. This late withdrawal has left three of us short of our third match. But I know the player and would have beaten her easily, so I don’t feel too bad about going straight through to what is therefore the consolation draw final with Sharon.
Another consolation draw final. Whoop.
Rod goes home to get me a packet of mango and a fresh bottle of Evian and two short-sleeved T-shirts. I have already gone through all the fluid I would need for a whole afternoon of doubles and it pours straight out of me again as sweat, taking all the minerals in my body with it. Thanks, biology! Upstairs I buy another bottle of Lucozade and, after feeling oddly attracted to it, a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. Of course. It’s the salt my body needs to keep the fluid in. As I walk away from the vending machines another part of my right leg starts to cramp, just above my knee.
I limp to the changing rooms and strip everything off. I put on fresh knickers, leggings, tennis skirt, and bra. My top feels clammy but I won’t have a new one until Rod gets back. But the rest of me feels a lot better with a change of clothes. The final, horrible step is to peel off my socks and inspect the damage to my feet. As I thought, the Compeed has migrated around the ball of my foot, taking some skin with it. I peel it off. As usual, it has stuck to the worst part of the blister, so I am peeling off flesh along with glue. What do I do now? I’m too sweaty for another blister plaster, and the same things will only happen again anyway. All I can do is put on a fresh sock and hope for the best. It hurts when I put my foot down. But what can I do?
We are playing on Court 4. Lucille has beaten Kerrin and will go into the final of the main draw. The other semifinal is between Siobhan Clarke and Amie Tonkiss. They are warming up on Court 1. I wish Amie luck via her father as I walk past, and we have a brief chat about my match. I hope Amie beats Siobhan. I want grit and power and passion to win out over passivity and being sensible, not just in my own game but in everyone else’s. But today I know I am going to keep on losing and so nothing much matters. I just want it to be over quickly. I want to hit a few nice shots, of course. I always love playing. I’ll use the opportunity to practice something. Not my serve. For the sake of my calf, and my blisters, this can’t be too taxing. When I win the toss I elect to receive, not for tactical reasons, but because I want to give my poor calf a rest for as long as I can. And my blister really hurts. I basically just want to stand still for as long as possible.
Sharon hits the ball with a lot more power than Siobhan. Her game suits me far better than Siobhan’s, because it is harder, faster, more the way coaches play. More, I suppose, what I’m used to. And because she is taking more risks, she makes more errors. But none of that matters, because I am in pain. I have to go for more winners myself, because I don’t want to protract the points. I also—and I hate myself a little bit for this—do a few pusher things because it is clear Sharon does not like them. If I play it short, for example, she is as likely to hit it long as she is to hit a winner. But most of the time I hit it harder. I think I am going to lose and so I hit it harder. And then I start to win. I think I’m about 5–1 up in the first set when I properly notice that I am winning. Then a new phrase comes into my head: Win, win, not my win. It simply seems so incongruous that I would be winning that I don’t believe I am. I take the first set 6–2. All I am capable of thinking, as I chew on my changeover mango, is WTF?
I relax even more in the second set. I remember reading about a doubles pair who were one set up in a match when one of them got injured. They deliberately gave away the second set on the basis that it was easier to win the ten points needed for the championship tiebreak that would decide the third set than to win all the points needed for a normal second set. Their gamble paid off. So, I think, it doesn’t matter if I don’t win this set. I can rest. Come back in the championship tiebreak or, to be honest, even not at all. I am still pretty gutted about losing to Siobhan, and my calf hurts, and my blister is agony, and I think I also have PMS. Win, win, not my win. Loss, loss, not my loss. I am interested to see what Sharon does in this set. After all, I fought back in the second set of my last game. But Sharon is on her third match and I think some of the fight has gone out of her. Not by any means all of it—indeed, in the last games of the set she seems to adopt an all-or-nothing strategy that leads to some blistering shots and improbable rallies in which we both play well. But her strategy finally loses her more points that it gains. At one point I become aware that I am winning points off my second serve because she prefers the power of my first serve and over-hits her return of the second. But I couldn’t live with myself if I decided to serve second serves all the time because of this. And I’m winning anyway.
Win, win, not my win.
I am winning anyway.
Dan has been lurking around for the whole evening, but has mainly stayed hidden in the office. I have just finished serving to go 5–1 up in this set when I notice him sitting at the far end of the hall watching the game. Sometimes I get more nervous when Dan watches. But I have lost all shame this evening. I decide to win this in style. I go 0–40 up. The penultimate point has it all: volleys, overheads, low-percentage returns, scrambles to and from the net. But I get out of position and Sharon blasts one down the line. 15–40. OK. Could she come back from here? She could, she could. She could win the whole match from here. Concentrate. But then she double-faults and the game is mine. I have actually won this, 6–2, 6–1. I don’t feel like a winner, don’t feel like I’ve tried quite hard enough. Feel a bit that Sharon lost the game more than I won it. Wish I had a more beautiful, powerful, earlier forehand.
Win, win, not my win.
When we shake hands I say how much I enjoyed the game, and how tired she must be after all this tennis. Of course I don’t mind chatting after this match because I have won. She says something about my injuries and I don’t want her to feel bad so I tell the truth, which is that having them as a distraction was probably helpful in some way. I tell her I really enjoyed her style of play, with that bit more pace coming onto the ball, and she says that this is something she’s been trying to work on. I am tired, full of salt and glucose, and I definitely have PMS. And so I can’t help hating myself a little bit because I suspect that I just took advantage of someone else who was trying to hit out and swing through her shots. In a way I feel like I just beat myself. Twice.
Still, I’ve just won another consolation draw final! I wonder if there’s some sort of trophy. Dan nods approvingly as I walk past the office to go up the stairs to leave the ITC. I can barely manage it, but the sweet feeling of victory pushes me to the top. Just.
The next day I obsessively check the results of the tournament. I want to see it all written down. Because I won something! I actually won something. I—
When the results come through, I realize that what actually happened was that I came fifth out of eight. Well, seven. I basically came third from last. Only two people played worse than me. So I didn’t really win anything. Lucille won.
But I got a few ranking points for beating Sharon. I did.
And I can’t walk properly for five days.