It’s coming up for nine o’clock and it’s dark and quiet in the ITC. Dan and I are about to start stenciling my freshly strung Juice racquet. I have two of these racquets now, but I broke a string in the original one just last week. I was worried it wouldn’t be ready in time for my tournament in Bath this coming weekend. Dan never quite does things when he says he will. Once I found him lying on the floor of the tennis office dreamily eating a sandwich while his phone rang and he ignored it. It was a man about a racquet, he told me then. Always some person hassling him about stringing their racquet. This week that person became me.
But he’s done it, at long last. He’s written down the tension he’s used (50/58) and he’s also put a small “2” sticker on the inside of the frame so I can identify which of the two racquets this is. He’s also put a dampener on the strings: a little red Wilson heart. The whole thing looks beautiful. Before last month I’d never had a racquet professionally strung before.
“You want to try it out then?” he asks. “Before we put the stencil on?”
Some men’s doubles game is finishing up on Court 4. There’s no one on Court 1. I don’t have actual tennis shoes on, just a beaten-up old pair of Nikes.
“Really? I don’t have the right shoes.” Dan is always the one telling me to never, ever play tennis in the wrong shoes.
“You’ll be all right,” he says. “You must want to know how your new strings feel.” He beams at me: a wide, innocent smile.
Of course I do. And yep, they are amazing. The ball seems to roll off the strings with more bite. More oomph. While we’re hitting, some guy walks into the tennis center—probably another man about a racquet. Dan notices him and slams his customary “end of rally” big forehand over the net. The only trouble is that I reach it and hit it back for a crosscourt winner on his side. The man looks at me and smiles and gives me a small, appreciative nod.
•
I browse the tournaments on the LTA website almost every evening now, sitting on the sofa in the conservatory with my iPad on my knees. Plants go unwatered. I haven’t gardened for ages. Everything exists in two rectangles: the tablet on my knees, and a tennis court. I’m definitely no longer entering anything organized by any outfit with a name like Quest4Fitness or Way2Play. I still want proper, dignified tournaments. Grade 4 or above. But of course they keep being canceled.
The Grade 3 tournament in Bath looked a bit frightening, but I had no choice after the Grade 4 was canceled. Perhaps it’s not surprising no one wanted to play in it in the end, given the confirmation email:
In the case of the women, due to us having less courts on the Saturday than we originally had, we are most likely to play their competition on just the one day, Sunday the 23rd. If we do this, the matches may be short sets, depending on numbers, but each player is likely to get three matches on the day rather than two.
All this is subject to withdrawals and a final decision will be made after the WD.
The men will play a knockout and (compulsory) consolation event over both days (normal sets).
So I signed up for the Grade 3. Why not? There was every chance it would get canceled as well. I’ve also signed up for a tournament in Sutton that starts on April 16. It’s a women’s Grade 3 that is running as part of a general Grade 2. I’m not 100 percent sure what that means, but I’ve paid £25 and been accepted into the draw. My competition calendar is looking promising at last.
The only problem is that I’ve booked the Bath tournament so late that by the time it’s confirmed, there’s nowhere to stay. I’ve basically got to choose between an expensive spa hotel at £300 a night, or a single room in the awful hotel my mum and I ended up in when I took her to Bath for a break last year. I’d booked a nice place above a pub but when we got there they’d made a mistake and we ended up in the appropriately named Pratt’s, which was at least close to the station.
I choose Pratt’s. It’s what a yoga chick would do, right? And maybe the universe will reward me with a win if it sees I am being humble and meek. It can’t be as bad as it was last time.
My actual calendar is also looking more interesting than usual. The week before the Bath tournament we’ve got Alan Hollinghurst coming to talk at the Creative Writing Reading series on Tuesday, and then I’m doing a student’s viva with Blake Morrison on Thursday. I’m not that worried that I’m now turning things down to fit in all my tennis and training sessions. Can I have drinks with David and Amy? No, because I’ve got to go and pick up my restrung racquet. Can I go to Kuala Lumpur for a literary festival? Of course not.
Alan is here to talk about his Booker Prize–winning novel The Line of Beauty, among other things. I’d read The Line of Beauty the year before, mainly because my colleague and friend Amy Sackville said she loved it. I’d never really contemplated the aesthetic life before reading that book. I’d been brought up to value simple, minimal things. Hippie style. Shabby chic. After reading The Line of Beauty I went to Fenwick in Canterbury and bought Wedgewood teacups and saucers and started wearing more makeup and booking more hair appointments. It added to a similar feeling I’d had—but hadn’t known exactly what to do with—when I’d watched my first Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film in 2010. Life could be glamorous, beautiful, indulgent. I didn’t have to be the sulky vegan who went to the Groucho Club in a duffel coat with no makeup on, as I had around 1999. Why not eat a beautiful pudding? Why not drink a large glass of gorgeous, ruby-colored wine? It was the first time I’d thought of indulgence as a viable lifestyle choice. The only downside was that it hadn’t done much for my waistline, which was a shame because I wanted to be an aesthetic object as well as leading an indulgent aesthetic life.
Two years on it’s still a conundrum. My personal trainer is very frustrated with me. If I was doing what he tells me, I’d be losing weight. But I am not losing weight. I am staying exactly the same weight. I’ve maybe lost a couple of pounds, but nothing to write home about. My newish “primal” diet almost works. And chocolate ice cream is almost primal, right? As long as there’s no wafer. In the Goods Shed restaurant in Canterbury, where we have all our Creative Writing dinners, they give you a little shortbread biscuit with ice cream. But you can always just leave it.
All our Creative Writing dinners are glorious and outrageous in some way, but the one with Alan is particularly memorable. These feel like the last decadent days of higher education, and we order one of the nice wines, and steak, and quails’ eggs. I soon bring the conversation around to tennis, and soon we’re evaluating male tennis stars. Alan and I find we are big fans of Rafa; David Flusfeder and Dragan Todorović go for Djokovic. Amy says Boris Becker is more her type.
“It’s Rafa’s face,” says Alan. “All that beautiful, twisted concentration as he raises his racquet to serve.”
“Do you think he does that when he comes?” I ask.
“Oh yes,” says Alan, with a little sigh. “Definitely.”
On goes the debate. It gets dark outside. We order Chapel Down Bacchus, cheese boards. You might think Djokovic the more convincing winner, with his strict diet and his upright, robotic style. But anyone in their right mind would rather go to bed with Rafa, right? A definite yes from Alan, and from me. A big ew from Amy. Isn’t it Rafa who is still obsessed with his mother, and who lets Uncle Toni tell him what to do? Djokovic is into real women of his own age and likes gambling and lives in Monte Carlo. Djokovic would probably be, objectively, better in bed, certainly if it was all about following instructions and having sex goals. But all that sweat and passion and complicated glory you’d get with Rafa? It would be no contest.
•
I’m sitting by the Keynes College duck pond with Blake Morrison, trying to work out what to do about the PhD we’re about to examine. It’s good, but the narrative lines are uncertain. We like the student, but want her to take something valuable from the experience: we’re just not sure what this should be. After the viva I have lunch with Blake. It turns out he’s a tennis player too. I tell him about my Bath tournament that’s coming up this weekend. He tells me about his club in Blackheath. He started going just once a week, he tells me, but now he goes three or four times. He enters tournaments too—just the club ones for now. We agree that I’ll go and play with him sometime soon—maybe with me giving a talk at Goldsmith’s or something.
We gossip about the publishing world while drinking large glasses of Picpoul. I talk about Alan Hollinghurst’s reading, mention our shared love of Nadal. Blake and I compare notes on our agents: David Miller is driving me mad. We keep arranging to meet but then he pulls out at the last minute. He’s passionate and wonderful, but also infuriating. I want to do a book deal for my tennis book, but someone’s stalling. Blake is interested to hear about my tennis book—he teaches life-writing, after all. He tells me about a student he had who did something similar with golf: he set some goal about improving his handicap or qualifying for a particular tournament and then dedicated his life to it. This seems to be something that lots of people are doing. We agree it’ll be a better story if it goes wrong somehow. At about 3:00 p.m. my phone vibrates. It’s a text from Dan. Can I play mixed doubles with him tonight? Of course. I even leave the last couple of millimeters of wine in my glass.
On court, I am relaxed and happy. This is where I belong now. We’re playing Ash—the village where I used to live. They’ve struggled to get a team together. I recognize one of the women from Ash Physiotherapy, and there’s a guy named Richard that Dan and I have played before, although he had a different partner then. Richard is very competitive. We beat him then, and he vowed we’d never beat him again. Tonight, his regular partner couldn’t play, and so he’s got his wife to fill in. She’s not very good. She’s easy to lob, easy to pass. Beating them feels mean, somehow, but this is a league match and we have to. There’s an awful moment near the end where we call the score as 40–0 and she queries it. Her husband says, “No, love, we haven’t won a point this game,” and she insists on us going back through the points in the game: The ace I served against her. The passing shot Dan played behind her. The volley she missed.
“We did get a point,” she insists. She has tears in her eyes.
“Just leave it, love,” says Richard, not looking at anyone.
We thrash the other pair too. It’s becoming a habit now. The only annoying thing is that I’m still standing in for Hayley. She’s a member of this team, not me.
•
I’ve found the yoga teacher-training course I want to do. It’s not that far away, and the next one runs in the autumn. I could take early study leave, perhaps, and just focus on qualifying. There are also courses you can do in India. You can just go and blast your way through a program there in a month or even less, but I’m not sure I want to be away for that long. I need to be here, playing tennis.
I need two references to be accepted for the course. I can get one from Lorraine, my old yoga teacher, but I also need one from my “current” teacher. This is a problem—I don’t have one. I do Pilates now, not yoga. My current Pilates teacher is Emma, who I don’t think approves of yoga. She certainly doesn’t approve of big, dangerous, stretchy movements. Why exactly do I want to teach yoga anyway? I remind myself that I’ve been doing it longer than Pilates and it’s a more obvious fit with the guys I want to work with. Pilates is too fiddly; there’s too much focusing on your pelvic floor muscles and clenching your buttocks. It’s too embarrassing. I want to get the guys doing the Warrior and the Cosmic Dancer.
Emma is one of the few women I’ve had a proper crush on. The first one was my friend Clare’s sister Rachel when I was about fifteen. Then there was that girl in London—what even was her name? Zoe, that’s right—a kind of druggy Becky Carter, with long, unwashed blonde hair and no makeup ever. Zoe smelled of weed and sweat and periods. I used to take the bus from Hackney to Surrey Quays on Sundays to smoke dope with one of my university friends, John, and she’d be there. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be her or be with her. We were in a fashion show together, because John’s boyfriend was a fashion designer. We wore rubber knickers and I felt fat as usual, much fatter than her. But I must have been really thin then.
After the last show we walked into McDonald’s on Oxford Street, still in our rubber knickers, and I asked the whole shop, “So who’s going to buy me a Big Mac then?” Some random guy did, and we laughed, and then I never saw her again. The only actual girlfriend I ever had, when I was eighteen, was an ethical vegetarian, and so was I, off and on. But I sometimes ate Big Macs back then too.
Emma is thin and tall with a beautiful Roman nose and a mad shock of black hair. She only ever wears Pilates clothes: for her this means unironed cotton tops that definitely don’t go with her leggings. She’s firm—in body and spirit—but kind, and has the sort of attention to detail that makes her one of the best Pilates instructors around. She’s got a cool dog named Bertie and loads of tattoos.
The first time I met Emma, when I thought I’d have to give up tennis because of my back and my knees, I filled out a questionnaire on which I said my highest ambition was to play recreational tennis a couple of times a week. What a fucking sap I was then. Now I have a foam roller and a core and nothing can stop me.
I’m not going to tell Emma that I’m doing yoga as well as Pilates. She doesn’t need to know. My schedule is filling up in a most pleasing way. Each week I now have two or three coaching sessions with Dan, as well as the Monday night Reccy session and the Wednesday night team training session. Before each of these I do about half an hour in the gym. I have Pilates on Tuesday mornings and now I’m going to be doing yoga with Loretta on Thursday evenings.
Loretta occasionally used to cover for Lorraine. Our old yoga class was in a primary school hall in Ash. There were usually squashed peas on the floor, and toward Christmas there’d be a full nativity scene with papier-mâché Mary and Joseph and donkeys. Lorraine’s class was full of laughter, but Loretta’s was always more serious. We stretched a lot. I am not a very stretchy person. And there was always something a bit punishing about her classes too. But I know she’s a good teacher, and Lorraine likes her. And she’s got one space in only one of her oversubscribed classes.
It’s five miles down the road in Sandwich, in St. Clement’s Church Hall. I put the postcode into Apple Maps and Siri manages to get me to a parking space by a big wall next to a dark and frightening graveyard. I chuck my phone in my yoga bag, zip up my hoodie, and set off. What’s the worst that can happen in a deserted graveyard at 7:00 p.m. on a late-winter evening? I jump about six feet in the air when my phone loudly tells me, “You have reached your final destination.” Fucking thanks, Siri.
St. Clement’s Church Hall has a high ceiling, a hatch through to a kitchen, and old enameled radiators with teacups underneath the knobs to catch the drips. Everything is painted in that pale green ’70s hospital color. The radiators gurgle away as we lie there clutching our thighs—calves if you can reach, which most people can but I can’t—and pulling our legs toward us. I’m already worrying about the residential part of the yoga course. I’ve stuck to my semi-primal diet for a while now: I don’t eat any kind of grain, and I don’t eat gluten. Although I was a vegan for quite a long time and even wrote books about it, I eat a lot of steak now. What on earth am I going to eat there? It’s all going to be lentils and brown rice, surely?
I guess I am really not a yoga chick. But could I become one? I could go vegetarian again, perhaps. I know they go as far as fish at the place I’ll be doing the course. Obviously it doesn’t matter: I can eat whatever they have, and then go back to my usual way of eating when I get home. That would be the normal approach, but it is not absolute enough for me. For years now I’ve thought that there is One True Way—the way humans were designed to eat and live—and all I have to do is find it. I don’t like my eating to be random at any point. It has to follow food rules. If I am not bound by food rules I may as well be flying through the air, naked. Is it time for new food rules? If I am to be a yoga teacher then maybe I’ll need to align myself more with grains, with brown rice, with oats and soya milk, all the things the primal movement thinks are not just bad for you but actively poisonous. But maybe the primal movement is wrong.
My quest for the One True Way of eating—for the ultimate set of food rules—means I swing back and forth between eating styles, sometimes several times over the course of a week. I can think myself back into grains at a moment’s notice. How lovely and chewy and carby they are. How cheap. How humble. Each grain of brown rice is actually a cosmic seed that contains its own universe—but of course this is also why the grain of rice doesn’t want to be eaten. Does the pig want to be eaten? Discuss. Although I have to say I have hardly ever eaten pork or bacon. Even at my most carnivorous, I just think pigs are too intelligent and beautiful to be zapped in some horrific slaughterhouse.
I drive into work on the last day of term still a bit sore from the league mixed doubles match the night before, thinking about my diet as usual. It’s been the same all term, and I’ve even developed a little theory. On the carby, porridgy mornings I feel sleepy and slow but a touch more loving. On the primal days I am quicker, sharper, but more cruel. It’s as if carbs are Dan and protein is Josh, although I don’t know yet quite how cruel he will be. I never need the radio or podcasts on my drive to work. I’m my own forty-minute radio program: “So, civil war has broken out and you are wandering the fields—yes, these ones you’re driving past now—with nothing more than a backpack with some writing stuff and maybe a nice bottle of wine. There are no shops. You are, possibly, smeared with mud and wearing a bandana. What would you eat?” I look beyond the windshield and see the last of the winter greens in the fields. There are rabbits around here. Deer. Fish in the sea. This is the stuff it’s natural to eat. Maybe not so much the cows, but they are there too, for now.
So I should eat meat and vegetables tonight. Will this give me enough energy for my match the next day? This is the part that doesn’t quite always add up. On a primal diet I can lose fat, but I lack oomph. The options play around in my mind—I love planning my next meal in my head. And tonight of course I’m going to be in Bath, and I’ve got a tournament beginning tomorrow.
So here I am. The winter is almost over and the sun is shining and I’ve got one more class to teach and then that’s it, maybe for the rest of the year if I do get study leave. And that means I really can devote the rest of this year to tennis. I can train like a professional—I have the money and the time. Nothing can stop me. Suddenly, I can feel my muscles under my clothes. They are firmer than ever before. I feel sleek, like an animal. In that instant, I feel the closest thing to enlightenment I have ever experienced. This is what I’m meant to be doing! I park on campus and get out of the car. The world looks different, suddenly: brighter, more vivid. Then I realize that one of the lenses has fallen out of my favorite sunglasses. I actually don’t care that I mistook this for enlightenment. I just laugh.
•
August 2013. I’ve only had a handful of tennis lessons by this point and I’ve already got a terrible back from hitting the ball. I’m in Devon to spend a week looking after my mother, who is due to have an operation on an ovarian cyst. While I’m here I’m also going to see Mum’s osteopath, because the one back home, the one I saw before I discovered Charlotte, was so mean to me. I can’t give up tennis now. It already feels like one of the most important things in my life. The osteopath at home pretty much told me to give up. I was forty, after all. What should I expect? I was forty, with a sedentary job and a back like a cab driver’s, and I deserved everything I got. I should give up exercise, get fat, and die.
We arrive at Torbay Outpatients at 9:00 a.m. Mum is taken away to be assessed and put in the blue gown they have to wear. I sit in the waiting area and wait for her to come back.
The people opposite are laughing about something. I don’t know what: the man looks on the point of death. He’s missing most of his teeth and is wearing a Hells Angels T-shirt. He’s a bit like my original father Steve might have been, had he lived a bit longer. His wife is large and cheerful and wearing a thin flowery top. She looks as if she’s about to stand up.
“Don’t leave me,” he says to her. “I could be dead in half an hour.”
“You’ll never die,” she says. “You’re indestructible, you.”
He laughs. Wheezes. Touches his chest.
“He’s got a defibrillator in there,” she says to me. “Went off forty-three times in twenty-four hours once. Stupid thing.”
“Felt like I was dying each time,” says the man.
“Sounded like a sodding gun being fired,” says the woman. She stands and picks up her handbag from the chair next to her.
“Don’t leave me,” he says again.
She shakes her head. Tuts. “I’ve got to walk the bleeding dog, haven’t I? Our dog Rex,” she says to me, “is blind and epileptic. Has about two fits a day. Can’t see where he’s going. Walks into all the furniture. They’re as bad as each other, the dog and him.” She nods at her husband. “What I have to put up with.” She shakes her head.
“What if they don’t want to operate?” he says. He looks at me. “Last time they refused to operate because of my defibrillator.”
His wife rolls her eyes. “I’ve told them, all you need is a magnet to go on it and that’ll make it stop. When the defibrillator went wrong once he electrocuted everyone who touched him, including a French nurse—and the poor dog.”
“Oh well,” says the man, “if I die, enjoy the bungalow.”
“We’re moving, you see,” she says. “On Wednesday.” It’s Friday now.
“So I’m off home to walk the sodding dog and then pack all the sodding boxes.”
“The bungalow is our dream home,” says the man. “But I’ll probably die before we ever get in there.”
“Always moaning,” she says. “Right, I’m going. Shall I order the coffin when I get in?”
“You joke,” he says, “but you’ll regret it when I actually go.”
“I think I’ll get Pete to knock something up in particleboard,” she says.
Once she’s gone the man falls silent. I’m reading a book on the paleo diet by Robb Wolf. I think this might be the most important book I’ve ever read. It is telling me how to be healthy, and this is imperative to me right now because I am never, ever coming to a place like this to be operated on. I am never going to be those people. Never. I would actually rather die.
My mother has told me I can’t leave, so I end up sitting in the waiting room for seven hours. For the first few hours I’m happy enough reading my paleo book, and it’s making a big impression on me. I haven’t eaten meat (apart from chicken, which was my dog Dreamer’s absolute favorite) for years. Am I going to have to eat meat to do this? I believe in the science. I’ve already read Wheat Belly, and this is more of the same, all about how our addiction to sugar leads to weight gain, prediabetes, and early death.
After lunch I become aware that the waiting room is filling with teenage girls and their boyfriends. Many of the girls are crying. One of them refuses to come into the building at all, and her boyfriend comes to ask for help from one of the receptionists. Most of them are wearing tracksuit bottoms and T-shirts but also a lot of makeup. Has Teen Vogue just done a feature on what to wear on a hospital date with your boyfriend? I try to focus on my book.
“They say I’ve got to take my makeup off before they’ll do it,” says one girl, coming back into the waiting area and talking to her boyfriend.
Another girl gets up to leave.
“I can’t do it,” she says. “I’m sorry.” Her boyfriend hurries after her.
I don’t believe it. So I’ve got to sit through the abortion clinic. Fucking thanks, Mum! This is my very, very worst nightmare. I avoid anything to do with abortions—news stories, books, films. Because in 1988, this was me. In those days you stayed in overnight and they did it in the morning. No one’s boyfriend came. Well, mine certainly didn’t. He was revising for his law finals and pretending it wasn’t happening.
I was the youngest on my ward, and no one felt sorry for me. In fact, the nurses seemed to openly judge me—which didn’t at all fit with my Little Red Schoolbook childhood and my private-school sass and the idea that you could fuck whoever you wanted—boy or girl!—and that if you got pregnant it was bad luck but your choice and an incredibly feminist, rite-of-passage thing to have an abortion. All the best people had abortions! All the girls in the films I watched had abortions. Penny, the sassy pro dancer Baby would have turned into had she stayed on at Kellerman’s Resort, had an abortion. It was no big deal, right?
Except that the judgy nurses dosed me up with weird vaginal suppositories designed to make my cervix open to make the operation easier the next day, and I ended up having a miscarriage, alone in a hospital bathroom, at 4:00 a.m. I was sixteen. The hours before that I spent vaguely praying for forgiveness, knowing I was slowly killing this thing inside me that I’d come to love in a way I didn’t understand.
But I can’t think about it. I won’t think about it. I will do everything I can to avoid thinking about it. Even now, if there’s an abortion story line in a film or TV show, I switch it off. If there’s a picture of an embryo in the newspaper, I hide it. Years ago, some do-gooder who had something to do with my grandma—the one with the tennis trophies—told a gruesome story that ended with a girl being brought an embryo on a silver platter and I walked out and cried and wouldn’t speak to anyone for days.
Now, in the hospital, I just burrow deeper into my book.
What is it about diet books? I find them so comforting, so very gripping. They work on me in the way thrillers do on other people, except they begin with the answer and then move on to the method. The diet book formula I like best is where some guy was an athlete in college (always guys, always American—this stuff is as specific as porn) or even the army, but has started getting old and fat. His father (occasionally mother) has died from something that could have been prevented by a better diet. The dude has set out to examine the science and, with only knowledge and his bare hands, has constructed a formula for invincibility, always something on the spectrum from “only eat brown rice” to “never eat brown rice.” It’s a superhero narrative—the bite of the cursed arachnid—but the best kind: the kind you can actually live. I love the feeling of giving myself to it 100 percent. The dreamy, fantasy feeling of being the case study that worked. Karen from New Hampshire who lost an incredible fifty kilos all because she gave up gluten, or sugar, or all carbs, or meat, or dairy, or anything from the family Solanaceae. Karen who became immortal.
Later that week in Devon, while Mum recuperates in bed, I go to a mix-in session at the local tennis club. I’m hungover, as usual, and I haven’t eaten carbs all day. The day before, I sat in a dark restaurant in Totnes, trying to hide from wasps. I ordered chicken wings—the first time I had ordered actual meat in a restaurant for years and years. They were delicious, but I couldn’t eat them. I felt like a ravenous beast: uncivilized, unpoetic. I was eating the remains of something that used to fly. Its actual wings. Then a wasp came—it had somehow found me at the back of the restaurant—and I ran away.
I talked to Dan last week about coming to this mix-in session. I’ve looked it up on the website: visitors can pay £5 to join in. “I love going to mix-ins at tennis clubs when I’m on holiday,” he said. “I just turn up and don’t tell them I’m a coach or anything.” It sounded quite glamorous when he talked about it, something from the film that everyone wants to be the star in, where you walk around by day unassumingly, wearing something anonymous like a hoodie, and then it turns out you’re a martial arts star, or one of those amazing Korean dancers from TikTok, or a tennis sensation. I once read a book of my brother Sam’s—probably Christopher Pike; we loved those—where someone in a small town is a secret author. Imagine that, I’d thought, when I was about twenty. What a dream. But when you’ve achieved one dream and found it disappointing, isn’t it natural to want a different one?
Obviously, I have fantasized about arriving at Totnes Tennis Club in some humble disguise, with no hint of my brilliant ground strokes and my new knowledge and then blowing them all away. I have a coach. I’m not a beginner anymore! But at this point I have yet to even take a point off Dan, and I’ve barely ever played doubles. I’ve played no league tennis at all.
It’s a complete, total disaster. It’s all doubles, of course. I’m the person no one wants to play with. I’m put with the stronger players to “even things up.” Everyone has to take their turn at playing with me, the shit one. They tut and bark instructions to “cover the tramlines!” when I let shots go past me down the line. I have no idea how this game works: where to stand, what to look for. I get lobbed, people volley balls into my face. It’s fucking terrible. I’m not a prodigy; I’m just shit.
“With great power comes great responsibility.” That’s what Peter Parker decided after he got bitten by the radioactive spider that would turn him into Spider-Man. Is the inverse true? What do you do when it turns out you have no superpower? With no power comes great irresponsibility? Perhaps.
•
Back in Canterbury I’m wondering if I’ll have time to buy new sunglasses before getting on my train to Bath. All I have to do before that is teach my last class of spring term 2014. It’s inexplicably great, perhaps because I won’t have to teach again until the end of September—or, if things go according to plan, the beginning of January. I’m now going to be able to focus purely on tennis, and my tennis book, and not bother about all this silly teaching, which I hate. (I do hate it, right?)
Still, it’s a really good class. Everyone’s relaxed. They all have good projects. Even Steph, who said she had no interest in narrative nonfiction and didn’t like any of the reading they’d been given, had finally come up with an excellent idea for a project. Granted, it was sort of my idea.
“Tell me something—anything—you like,” I’d said in our emergency tutorial a couple of weeks before. “Something you feel passionate about.”
“I don’t know,” she’d said. “I don’t know if I like anything. I definitely don’t feel passionate about anything.”
“A film, a book?”
“I do love Wuthering Heights,” she’d admitted eventually. “It’s my favorite novel. I’m obsessed with it.”
“So go to Haworth,” I’d said. “Recreate something from the book. Walk the moors. Even if it goes wrong it’ll be interesting.”
Initially she said she couldn’t get the time off work and wouldn’t be able to afford it anyway. But the week before the end of term, she’d actually done it. She’d taken the train to Haworth and stayed in a B&B and then walked the moors. On her own. It’s her presentation this week, and we’re all blown away by what a coherent, entertaining project this is. She’s gone from being the worst student in the class to being one of the best.
“When I said I was going to walk on the Yorkshire moors on my own, my parents were worried I would die,” says Steph, with a new sparkle in her eyes.
“When I said I was going to Dungeness, my mother seriously thought I was going there to kill myself,” says Matt. He’s presenting this week as well. He’s another weak student who’s pulled something amazing out of the bag.
I look around the room and I’m so proud of them. And we’ve actually had a laugh this term. I used to overprepare, fuss over what I was going to teach, worry about the students too much. This term I have taken the most laid-back approach possible. After all, I’ve been more interested in my tennis book and my tournaments and my coaching sessions. And I’m giving all this up, right? So when the students ask me when the deadline is for their final assignments, my response is, “How am I supposed to know? Look on the website.” When one of them says they have trouble completing projects, I shrug and say, “Great. One less thing for me to mark.” Each week I’ve gone in with my cup of tea, sat back in my chair, and told them: “Entertain me. Talk about the reading in an interesting way. I’m contributing nothing.” And they have. It’s probably the best class I’ve ever had. My lack of engagement has allowed them to relax somehow. The lack of expectation has made it possible for people to shine. Huh.
I’m feeling dreamy and blissful anyway, for some reason I can’t fathom. Is it all the meditation and yoga? Everything seems happy and funny and light. And today I don’t even get a parking ticket, despite being on the double yellow lines as usual. I drive straight from my class to the Canterbury train station, where I park in one of the commuter spots that no one will need until Monday and then get on the train for London. At Paddington I get a small bottle of white wine from M&S and it’s the most delicious thing ever, sitting in my First Class seat on the train drinking wine with a tennis tournament ahead of me, and almost a whole year of tennis still in front of me.
Obviously, I know I’m going to lose. I’ve talked to Dan about it. In our session on Wednesday, I asked him how I was going to beat eighteen-year-old girls who’ve played about 300 tournaments each. He’d shrugged. “You’re not,” he said. “But you might learn something.” That session was one of the best I’ve had with Dan. I even served an ace, my first one against him. And when we played a set I even took it to 4–3 before he won 6–4. I was one point away from going 5–3 up! Gradually, slowly, I am getting somewhere. And anyway, results don’t matter. I love the feel of my tennis racquet in my hands, the rasp of my new strings, the chalky smell of the grip, and especially the way my breathing sounds when I’m on my own in the ITC, surrounded by the green of the acrylic courts.
•
Pratt’s Hotel really is a joke. It’s only a couple of minutes’ walk from the train station and right by Yak Yeti Yak, the Tibetan restaurant where I’m planning to have dinner. I try to be amused by the chintzy, floral, ancient dayroom that looks like a residential home for the elderly in which everyone has recently died. I try to tell myself that it’s humble to sleep in 50 percent polyester sheets, with a sanitary-napkin pillow. I’m an athlete. I’m really doing this. I bet beds in the Olympic Village were like this. Don’t those athletes have to share rooms? Humble is good. Brutal is good. It’s all fine. And it’s super cheap, less than £300 for two nights. The other hotel I was looking at had a spa, but I haven’t got time for a spa anyway, and it was £350 a night.
I’ve booked two nights because I still have no idea when I’m playing. My first match is at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, and the final is on Sunday. It is extremely unlikely I’ll make it to the final, but you never know. I’ve hit some awesome shots against Dan lately. And I was a child prodigy. Maybe everyone else will die except for me and the one person I could possibly beat.
I’ve been looking at the Yak Yeti Yak menu on the train. I’ve been there only once before, despite coming to Bath quite a lot. It’s my mum’s favorite weekend-break destination, and Rod and I came here for a sad, alcohol-infused ten days not long after Dreamer died. On that trip, I couldn’t stop drinking and crying. The only thing that made life worth living was my first glass of wine of the day. I’m so glad I don’t live like that anymore. Yak Yeti Yak is the kind of place my ex-vegan self would have loved. It has lentil dishes galore, but that stuff is poison, right? It certainly always makes me bloated. So what’s left? Meat and vegetables. I still have some lingering vegetarian food rules, though. Lambs and ducks are too cute to eat. Pigs are too intelligent. That leaves beef or chicken, and I am always drawn to beef and then feel guilty for eating it, even after all these years.
What would a real athlete eat? I’ve no idea.
I order a single gin and tonic and a beef stir-fry. My drink has barely any alcohol at all, but is nicely sweet. Fizzy. My stir-fry is nice, but has a lot of onions and not enough chili. I ask for more, not sure whether I sound like a total dick. I enjoy my cauliflower with peas. I’m reading Serious by John McEnroe, the book held open by the salt cellar on one side and my phone on the other.
Back in my tiny hotel room I am busy, so busy. I have to meditate and stretch and set out my clothes for the next day. I have to speed-read parts of books I have bought recently, called things like You’re Trying Too Hard. What I really need to do is try much harder to try less hard. Then, maybe, I could win? My first match is at 10:00 a.m., but I’m not quite sure how far away the university campus is. The tournament is being held in their “Sports Training Village,” which sounds glamorous and terrifying. They’ve said “outside” but no more than that.
I can still taste onions when I wake up the next morning, too early, to a dark rainy day that looks deep, rich, and moody, but is obviously not good for playing tennis outdoors. Breakfast is not until 8:00 and I have a cab booked for 8:45, so after a brief meditation the first thing I do is shower, but I can’t get it right. The flow is a tiny trickle. It would be like being pissed on, although by someone with quite a weak bladder, if the water was warm. It isn’t. OK, this is not the most expensive hotel in the world, but it’s the same price as a Travelodge and the last time I stayed in one of those there was hot running water. I haven’t got the energy to complain, and I don’t need all that angst before my first match. I wash as best I can, tell myself McEnroe would have had it worse in the 1980s, and get dressed.
I am there much too early, as always. The only address I have is for the Sports Training Village, so I get the taxi to drop me there. At the reception they have never heard of the tournament I have entered. I tell them it’s a Grade 3. They don’t know what that is. They realize I can’t possibly be there for the inter-schools indoor tournament they are running on their warm, glitzy indoor courts, but they just don’t think they have any other tournaments running. They are confused. I’m inevitably a bit of a dick. Is it nerves? Undoubtedly.
“All I know,” I say, “is that I am signed up for a tournament and the postcode is here. You must have some idea of roughly where I might be supposed to go?”
Nope.
Eventually I find a phone number at the bottom of the confirmation email. I get through to a man with a Somerset accent who tells me that it is indeed the outdoor courts, and these are to be found half a mile back down the road. A pleasant ten-minute walk, he assures me.
It’s raining. My massive black Wilson bag is heavy. I’ve bought it specially for this tournament. It’s a bit like the one I was so impressed with at Leicester, but more up-to-date and snazzy. It can fit nine tennis racquets and has Thermoguard protection that not just keeps your drinks cold, but protects your racquets’ string tension from extreme temperatures. It’s also—usefully—waterproof.
I arrive at the outdoor courts disheveled and frizzy but miraculously still early. So early, in fact, that there’s no one else there apart from an old bloke in a battered red Adidas cap. He’s organizing his big bucket of balls.
“Hello,” I say. “I’m here for the tournament? Scarlett Thomas?”
“Oh right. Lady from the phone? Bit early, aren’t you? The girls won’t get here for another hour. I’m Bob, by the way.”
“Right. Hello! But I think my first match is at nine thirty?”
“Yeah, we’re all very relaxed here, love. I’d go and get a coffee if I were you.”
There is nothing around us apart from the tennis courts and Bob’s shed. There’s the road, some grassy banks, a field.
“You’ll get a nice cup of coffee back at the training village,” he says.
“Yeah, I just walked from there.”
“Great facilities up there. They’ve got a Grade 1 in there today.”
“Exciting.”
“And the men’s Grade 3 of course.”
“Of course.”
“So anyway, I’ll see you back here at about half ten? You’re playing Vanessa Brill, I think. Nice girl. Good player. But then they all are.”
He looks me up and down. What’s he seeing? He realizes that my green shoes are punky and irreverent, right? And my leg warmers are for my poor stiff calf muscles, and—
“You played a Grade 3 before?”
“No,” I say. “I’ve only just started playing tournaments, to be honest. I’m actually writing a book about it. I—”
“You might find a Grade 3 a bit taxing in that case.”
“Well, I tried for the Grade 4, but it was canceled.”
“You’ll enjoy playing with the girls. Nice crowd. Just try your best.”
“OK.”
“Right! See you in a while, then.” He turns to go back into his shed.
“OK. Um, my bag’s really heavy. Can I leave it in your shed?”
“Sure.”
“And is there any chance of hitting up with someone?”
“You can hit up with the girls when they get here. They always have a hit-up together. Elle’s playing too. And the twins.” He says this as if I should know these people. As if everyone knows them. Obviously I’ve stalked them on the LTA website. They are all between fourteen and nineteen and have ratings of between 4.1 and 5.2. What the fuck am I doing here? I trudge back up to the training village, telling myself that at least it’s not raining any more.
•
I am now so ancient I can’t tell how old individual young people are. The ones at the Sports Training Village could be anything between fourteen and twenty-two. The girls have amazing arses. There’s the odd fat one that probably plays in goal, but mainly these are tall, slim, pert, slightly sulky young people. I looked like that once. I hated myself. I hated my flawless skin. I hated my body, the way it did what I wanted it to do. I wanted to be older, wiser. I wanted confidence. I wanted interesting flaws. I didn’t want to play sports or win at anything. I wanted to be able to walk into a record shop and know what to say to seem cool. I wanted to be Baby, but after she’d become Penny.
Why did I not appreciate my skin and my hair? Why did I not appreciate my sleek veal-calf arms and my hairless nipples and my unlined face and my cute little B-cup boobs? Everyone says I look really young even now, and I always laugh and say something about expensive face cream. But compared to the people here, who are genuinely, authentically young, I look about 150. My boobs are DD now. Not even the fat goalkeepers here have DD boobs.
Back then I wanted so badly to be a grown-up. And now I am. Yay.
I stand out a little in the big, bright canteen. I’m obviously not anyone’s mum, so what am I doing here? Objectively, my tennis outfit could seem a touch comical: my black Adidas skirt, black leggings, leg warmers, and green shoes look quite glam at the Indoor Tennis Centre, but here the whole thing looks like a dare or a parody. I wear my hair in a single plait, because that’s what Victoria Azarenka does, but my hair is not as thick as hers and the overall effect is to make me look uptight, like a pompous, aging lapdog with a stiff pomaded tail. Thank God I have dispensed with my matching set of black Adidas sweatbands (one for my head, two for my wrists) and now only wear one wristband and a black Adidas cap. My stuff is all black Adidas, but feels a bit matchy-matchy. The kids here are happy mixing Nike with Adidas and New Balance. Their limbs are bare, sleek, beautiful. They sit on the floor as if they have never had lower back issues or a tight knee. No one has their hair in a plait.
My gluten-free toast breakfast has left me a bit sugar-crashy, even though that’s not supposed to happen on a primal diet. Are you supposed to eat gluten-free toast on a primal diet? Perhaps not. It’s always the same when I have breakfast away: I want eggs, sausages, and bacon but I don’t eat those because pigs are intelligent and pink and sweet. And do athletes eat bacon? Unlikely. Athletes eat oatmeal. I eat oatmeal from time to time now too. It gives me energy, but it’s a fuzzy, hazy sort of energy. Porridge is supposed to stick to your ribs and last. With me, it goes straight to my brain and leaves me feeling empty and tearful.
Or do I feel tearful for some other reason?
I buy a cup of tea and ask if they have any gluten-free food here.
“No, sorry,” says the busy young guy behind the counter, looking beyond me to one of the teenage girls in the queue I’m holding up. “Next!”
•
Vanessa Brill might be the sulkiest teenager I’ve ever encountered. She even makes Becky Carter seem friendly and animated. She’s beautiful, of course. And she’s the opposite of me in every possible way. We do have the same hair, but hers is loose and natural. Mine is not just plaited, but stuck through the hole in my new cap like I’m some perky summer camp leader from the 1980s. I am weighed down by all the things I need to play tennis: my sports drinks and my sweatbands and my schedule and my ibuprofen and my anorak in case it rains and extra shoes and extra laces and energy bars and motivational books and notes on how I should play my forehand.
She’s wearing cropped Nike leggings and a little tank top. She hasn’t even bothered to put on tennis shoes—she’s wearing Nike Frees that are certainly in fashion, but definitely not good for your feet and ankles. But then she’s small, like 100 percent willowy muscle and perfect tendons: she’s never going to break. She has a massive tennis bag, but it’s battered and old. I don’t want mine to get rained on again, even though it’s supposedly waterproof. She chucks hers on the grass. It’s seen some action, unlike mine. Cute childish keyrings dangle from it. She’s too young to drive, to have sex, to drink alcohol.
Her mother is about my age. “Oooh, hello,” she says to me, glancing at my shoes. “We haven’t seen you before.”
“No,” I say. “Er, hi.”
I am saved from having to say anything else (like what?) because a car pulls up and a couple of girls get out with their mothers. These must be Elle and Natalie. They both have bags like Vanessa’s. They have similar-but-different outfits. Tiny tank tops, cropped leggings, unsuitable shoes.
“Come on, you can hit up with the girls,” says Mrs. Brill. “Vanessa!”
Vanessa doesn’t make eye contact with me. She doesn’t want to have to talk to an old person, let alone play tennis with one. But she does what her mother tells her: she drags herself to the end of the court and then starts blasting balls at me while Elle and Natalie warm up on another court. I can hear the odd giggle coming from them.
“Oh, haha!” I say, fluffing a return. “Sorry. Not quite warm enough yet.”
While Vanessa continues nuking balls at me, the Kondratowitz twins, Monika and Joanna, turn up. They are tall, dark haired, striking looking, perhaps a bit older than Vanessa and the others. They start hitting up together. The mothers all have the same blow dry and highlights. They stand together and talk about the traffic, and the tennis season, and their daughters’ GCSEs. They clearly bump into each other often. Their voices lower and I realize someone’s asking about me. Who am I? Why am I here? Bob approaches and fills them in a bit. I hear the phrase Grade 3 and then Grade 4 or 5 would be better: I told her. Vanessa has come into the net and is waiting for some overheads, but I manage to fluff them all. I can’t even hit a weak ball into the air now. Really, though, Bob’s right: Why am I here?
While talking to Bob, Vanessa’s mother realizes that Vanessa and I are actually playing each other next, which means we shouldn’t be hitting up together. She hustles her daughter back off the court. It starts to drizzle. Bob looks up at the sky and says we may as well get on with it—and we won’t need a warm-up as we’ve already knocked up together. I haven’t practiced my serve, but it doesn’t really matter. Fifteen minutes later, I’ve lost the first set 0–6.
Vanessa’s game plan is to hit the ball hard, with topspin. If I’m serving, she simply hits my serve back for a winner, either down the line or crosscourt. On the rare occasion I do manage to return one of these balls, she’s there at the net to swat it away. She does this sulkily, as if this ball is a little fly that’s annoying her. But there’s no actual aggression in her play. It’s all simply inconvenient: me, the ball. The only time she’s at all animated is when she does something wrong. Even then it’s a weird little giggle in the direction of her mother. She acts as if I do not exist. I almost wish I didn’t. In the second set I manage to get one game, but only because she serves four double faults. She finds this particularly hilarious. At the end, her mother has to remind her to shake my hand. She still will not make eye contact with me.
Our whole match has taken thirty-nine minutes.
“Should have been love and love,” I hear her mother saying to her.
Good God. I sip one of my drinks. Put my towel away. Go over to Bob’s shed. I want to know about the consolation draw. Who knows? Maybe I could win my next match? I just have to hit out more, try to be more composed and aggressive and work to my game plan—
As I approach the shed, I can hear Vanessa’s mother talking to Bob.
“Look,” she’s saying, “I’m sorry, but Vanessa’s used to playing long, tough matches that last three hours. This is ridiculous. She’s barely warmed up. She’s ready to go back on court now.”
She sees me. “No offense,” she adds.
“No problem,” I say. “I sincerely hope that Vanessa has a very long, tough match next.”
Bob tells me that the consolation draw matches will start after lunch, so I walk back up to the training village, drizzle mixing with my tears.
OK. What exactly am I doing here? I’ve left Rod at home and I’ve come to Bath why? I know I tend to travel when I feel at all bothered about something. I did it when Dreamer was ill. I still feel guilty about that. During some of her last days she was at the vet on a drip while I traveled to Cardiff for my mum’s graduation ceremony for her PhD, and then onto Gloucester for Steve’s funeral. Mum and Couze, Sam, Gordian, and Rod and I stayed in the same haunted hotel where Sam and I had met Steve just a few weeks before, after not seeing him for twenty-five years. He’d looked so tragic and wrecked in his thin nylon tracksuit.
Mum complained about the ghost in her room and flirted mildly with Gordian. Apart from us, only Steve’s ex-girlfriend Heather and her parents came to the funeral. It was so sad. Even the celebrant didn’t show, and Sam and I had to conduct the service ourselves. At that time, as long as I had a train ticket and a hotel booking, I was fine. Before Dreamer got ill, before everything went wrong, I sometimes stayed in Canterbury on the wilder nights of the Creative Writing dinners. I even managed to get a free night at the Falstaff once because my previous room had an eerie green light and scufflings inside the walls.
Being on the road means you never have to settle anywhere: you never have to stop, never have to think. Is that what I’m doing again now? Replacing my life with an absurd tennis tour? What exactly am I not thinking about? The answers come immediately. My age, my weight, my relationship with alcohol, my pathetic slump into the mid-list, my alcoholic agent, the age of my partner, the fact that the now-or-neverness of having children has resolved into neverness, which is fine, totally fine.
If I’d had that child, back in 1988, he or she would now be older than Vanessa Brill, older even than the Kondratowitz twins. He or she would have been twenty-six this year. I could conceivably be a grandmother. At this moment, I certainly feel like one. My legs and back ache. I need some carbs.
In the canteen I get a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea and phone Rod. I can’t help it: I cry down the phone to him about how terrible I was, about the rain and my poor forehand and my awful serve. He’s so nice. He reminds me to hit the ball hard. Am I hitting it hard enough? Of course not. He says he misses me. I miss him too. It’s only just after I hang up that I realize that Vanessa Brill and her mother are sitting at the next table and can hear everything I’m saying.
I have to get out of here. I leave the canteen and wander around the inside of the facility. It’s really impressive. The tennis courts are awesome, beautiful dark gray acrylic—my favorite surface. There are lots of matches going on, some from the inter-schools thing, some from the Grade 1. I wonder where the Grade 3 men are. I watch a mixed doubles match, with kids of about thirteen or fourteen. They’re a nice jumble of ethnicities. They all play with style, with proper verve. They joke around with each other. The boys try to show off with their trick shots and they don’t work out and everyone laughs. I want to hang out with them, but I can’t. I’m old, older than their parents. I find the loos and pee as much as I can (there are no toilets back at the outdoor courts) and go back for my consolation draw match against Monika Kondratowitz.
At least she speaks to me. I learn that she’s in the early stages of a medical degree at Cambridge, where she plays tennis for their First Team. She’s intelligent, mild, and a really, really good player. I realize I have no hope of beating her, but I decide to use this match to try to work on my first serve. As a result of this, I fuck up a lot of them and have to do a lot more second serves than usual. This turns out to be my secret weapon: Monika can’t return my second serve! This is, of course, because it’s so shit. It’s shittier than anything she’s ever seen. It’s so slow, and lame, and short that at first she’s simply standing too far back for it. Then when she comes forward, she over-hits it. I manage to get a couple of my service games to deuce and win a couple of others. In the end she beats me 6–2, 6–2. It sounds bad, when you hear a score like that. But to actually get four games off a player in a Grade 3? I’m slightly proud of myself.
Meanwhile, Vanessa Brill doesn’t quite get the long, tough game she deserves. My match with Monika takes an hour and thirty-nine minutes, but Monika’s sister Joanna beats Vanessa 6–3, 6–2 in only fifty-nine minutes.
So that’s it. Another tennis tournament. I get a taxi back to my hotel. I think I can claim all this on expenses (it’s research for a real book, after all), but I still feel glad that I went for the cheap option. But why didn’t I win something? That was the deal, right? Even this stupid hotel was supposed to be part of a bargain. If I could stay in a shit hotel and win, then that would be worth it. But to stay in one and lose? That was not the deal. Would I have felt even more ridiculous standing out there in the cold with those schoolgirls knowing I’d paid £700 for a hotel and roughly £100 for my train and let’s say £75 per day on food, making the whole trip around a grand? Undoubtedly.
Back at the hotel I do grown-up things. I get a gin and tonic, for a start, which sets me up for the second-worst shower I’ve had this year (the worst was this morning) and the third-worst I have had in my life (which involved me being electrocuted during it). I cry on the phone again to Rod. Then I do my hair and makeup and put on leggings and an anorak and set off into the heart of Saturday night in Bath. As an eighteen-year-old I might not cut it, but I think I look pretty OK for forty-one. Young guys in rapey rugby shirts won’t look at me, but the older ones with nice shoes will. And women will. Not that I give a shit, of course, but it’s nice to not be entirely invisible.
I’m looking for a bar, somewhere to have a cold glass of white before dinner. And here’s the thing. I don’t have a fifteen-year-old arse but I do have some sass. At fifteen I would never have contemplated walking downstairs, by myself, into the most intimidating, neon-lit bar I can find. I do it. I do something Vanessa Brill could not possibly do. I walk to the bar and smile at the barman. He smiles back. What wines do they do by the glass? A Sauvignon and . . . He looks. A Chablis. On special offer. He’ll bring it to me. I get a table by the window overlooking the river. The barman flirts with his eyes. He is Gallic looking. Late twenties. It means nothing. I have traveled the world, loved complicated men, lectured hundreds of people, written ten books. I have worked in places like this, in London. I want to think something like Up yours, Vanessa Brill, but I don’t. I want to, but I can’t. I still wish I was living her life, her clean, unsullied, pure, winning life.
Sunday: I have a whole day to fill. My train isn’t booked until Monday morning. I couldn’t travel today in case I got to the Grade 3 final, which is being played this afternoon between Joanna Kondratowitz and Elle Baker, the 1 and 2 seeds. Ideally I would have afternoon tea at the Pump Room, but I also want to go to the Thermae Spa, and the times I can book my treatment clash with afternoon tea. So instead I go to the Pump Room for morning coffee. I like it when there’s a pianist playing. It’s elegant, perfect. But there’s no pianist today.
Bath is mainly famous for Jane Austen, and the place is already full of Janeites in full eighteenth-century costume, recreating Austen novels while drinking Coke with ice and lemon. The few men dressed up as Darcy seem certain to get laid. On the next table from me, a lesbian in an anorak reads an article in one of the Sunday papers. The headline is HOW TO SPOT A PSYCHOPATH. Her partner looks a bit put out that she’s being ignored. I am the only person alone. I argue with the server because they don’t do gluten-free scones at this time of day and end up ordering an early lunch I don’t really want.
The Thermae Spa in Bath is always a treat, though. I’ve been here before with Rod, and he particularly liked the sequence of the whole thing: you start off downstairs in the floatation pool, then upstairs to the steam rooms, each of which smells of something slightly different: peppermint, thyme, etc. Today I try to ignore the fact that the peppermint room is a bit too hot and the lavender one smells a bit off. I’ve booked the cheapest, shortest treatment, called Kraxen Stove, which involves sitting in a “traditional alpine hay chamber.” In the end I feel like I’m locked in a room with burning hay. Is hay even gluten-free? I begin coughing, perhaps beginning to suffocate. Why is everything wrong all the time? Why can’t I just enjoy something? I imagine how I would feel right now if I’d just won a match at a Grade 3 tournament. God, I’d give anything for that: the intense rightness of the feeling of winning. Why has this come to me so late in life, the realization that it feels so great to compete and win? Surely, surely if I want it enough I’ll be able to get it? I just have to work out the right things to do, and then do them.
I finally make it to the open-air rooftop pool, where I find a spot to float in the steaming water on my own, contemplating the early evening mist as it curls itself around the rooftops and spires. The abbey bells are ringing as the sky drains of color. This is perfect. It is possible. I’ll get there. I know I will.
I have a glass of wine in my dressing gown and then get dressed and go for a wander around the shops. My favorite boutiques are gone, swept aside by the new rules of the hyper-capitalist, hedge-fund nightmare that runs the British high street in 2014. I still need a new pair of sunglasses, so on a whim I go into Sunglass Hut. They have the most perfect pair of Prada mirrored aviators. They cost the same as one night in the posh spa hotel. I buy them, while “Ray Charles” by Chiddy Bang plays in the background. On the way home I download a couple of Chiddy Bang albums. This is the soundtrack that will carry me thought the rest of the year: music that is bright, irreverent, and punky-cheerful. All surface, no depth. Like me.