We are about to fly home from Venice. I’ve been eating wheat and I feel weird. It started a week ago with a little pastry from a shop just over a little bridge by where we were staying near St. Rocco. But it has ended with a full-on sandwich and pastry binge at the airport. OK, not a “binge” exactly: I don’t do that. It’s basically one and a half miniature pastries and three and a half little sandwiches with protein fillings. But I feel all wrong inside.
I’ve been avoiding gluten for the last few months because I seem to feel better when I do. But when we got to our hotel last week, it became clear that this was going to have to go on hold: breakfast was all freshly cooked bread and pastries. Even if there had been gluten-free bread, I wasn’t going to have it. I’m not that crazy. For the first few days I felt OK, and wondered if my food intolerances—like everything else—are in my head. But now I feel wheated out: bloated, sleepy, grumpy. I’m the seven dwarfs all at once, or maybe the seven deadly sins.
Does it even matter?
Just this morning I stood in St. Rocco looking at Tintoretto’s Crucifixion and I felt something important. For the first time ever I properly understood that what Jesus is telling us is that the body doesn’t matter. This life doesn’t matter. Put yourself in the hands of the universe and get somewhere else. Get out of this place, with its inequalities, its cruelties, its winning and losing. On the way up the stairs in St. Rocco I slightly strained my calf, and as I stood looking at the vast painting, it throbbed and pulsed with pain. See how fragile we are?
The weather is stormy and I sit in the premier lounge at Marco Polo airport watching lightning miss planes by inches. How much alcohol should I drink? If Jesus were here . . . but of course Jesus would not be in the premier lounge at Marco Polo airport. For the next few hours I try to play the “What would Jesus do?” game. But would Jesus really go on a getaway to Venice? Would Jesus cry because he had to go on a bus in a thunderstorm for five minutes? Would Jesus, when faced with a barrier attendant at St. Pancras who asks to see his railcard, first argue that since other people don’t have to show their railcards when going through the normal barriers, it does not make any sense to single out only the people with the most luggage who need to go through the wider barriers, and then eventually tell her to fuck off? If Jesus played tennis he would win all the time. But I bet Jesus would not play tennis. Jesus would have better things to do.
But of course one of the reasons—or are these becoming excuses?—for playing tennis in the first place is spiritual. Forget winning and losing. Sport is about endurance, patience, doing your best. It’s about being a good competitor. Breathing. Achieving flow. Getting in the zone. It’s about using the body to leave the body behind. Transcending the self. But I am not transcending the self. I am so bogged down in my own ego that I think I might be on the verge of going under. I have started equating winning with being loved and accepted. I take everything personally, even the good stuff. When Dan texts me to say he can play with me on the Saturday after I get back, I’m thrilled. I can’t wait to get on the court. The beautiful green acrylic and the echoes and the zip and thud of the ball. But I’m also really pleased he has remembered and is not cross about the Josh thing.
I love tennis with Dan when we listen to music and just hit. I also like playing points with him. But anything that looks like a drill makes me feel like a baby, especially as he’s not even my coach anymore—not that he knows this, of course. I am becoming bad at taking instruction from him. And Dan really overdoes it in our first session back. I tell him I want to learn a two-handed backhand, partly to distract him, and partly to cover up the fact that I have already done the basics with Josh. I really just want to whack the ball back and forth, but instead we have long conversations about grips and footwork. But I guess it’s fine, and I feel guilty about the whole Josh thing anyway, and my backhand is coming on. Dan is not, I don’t think, suspicious. I have a session booked with Josh for Monday morning at 9:00 a.m. Josh and I both know Dan isn’t even out of bed then, so he doesn’t need to be told just yet.
At the end of the session we’re picking up balls from the back of the court. We’re kind of chatting about the Canterbury Open—officially called the Advantage RedCourt East Kent Junior and Adult Championships. It’s a Grade 4 that I’m definitely going to enter. It’s essentially the next big local tournament after the Spring Open. And the next one after that will be the Walmer Open in August, which doesn’t carry LTA ranking points but everyone plays in anyway.
“I think I’m going to join the club at Canterbury as well,” I say. “What do you think?”
Dan picks up a ball and uses his racquet to slam-crash it into the black curtain at the back of the court.
“You going to play for Polo?” he asks. Canterbury Tennis Club is based at Polo Farm.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
Dan bends down to pick up a particularly battered green ball. “We could join together,” he says. “Have some hits on clay. That would be good.”
“OK . . .”
“Of course, it wouldn’t be right if any money changed hands. It would be just, you know, just as friends.”
He doesn’t meet my eye when he stands up. We both know this is a big deal. And then he does look at me. Flashes me a little shy smile.
“So?”
“Um, oh, yes! Of course. That would be amazing!”
Wow. Fuck. OK. Someone as good as Dan wants to play with me for fun, for free, as a friend. I am childishly thrilled. Of course this is what I’ve been hoping for ages, but I never knew how, or even if, it might happen. Even though I don’t seem to be able to win any actual matches, I do seem to be improving.
•
Of course, I am the organized one, the one with money and resources and willingness to fill in forms in the name of tennis. So by the next afternoon, I have rung the membership secretary of Canterbury Tennis Club and I’m going down for a practice hit (and I think to be vetted) the following day. The Membership Secretary, Judith, is the same as last time I played here, but I doubt she’ll remember me. In those days I was so rubbish I might as well have not even existed. Now I have a ranking and a rating and everything.
The practice hit goes well, I think. Judith puts me on with her and two other mild-looking ladies who look startled when I grunt and try to poach at the net and hit crosscourt winners. After I hit a few nice topspin shots down the tramlines, I am put on to play with a tall, freckled builder named Del. He’s probably in his late fifties or early sixties, but has the vibe of someone who has been a member of this club for at least a hundred years. We play two other men, recreational players of about my age with paunches and the haunted looks of those who at this moment should really be working, shopping, looking after a toddler, pouring Chardonnay for a harassed wife.
For some reason I don’t know, we’re playing the best of eight games, but the other groups’ games go on and so therefore we do too.
In the end we beat them 8–0.
Afterward, Del wants to know where I’ve come from. I tell him I play in the leagues for the leisure center and he seems impressed.
“You should play for us,” he says. “You should play for the ladies’ First Team.”
Before I leave, I fill in the form for membership and leave it with Judith. She says I can come in the next day to pick up my key fob and get my password for the computer booking system. I ask for a second form.
“My mixed doubles partner wants to join as well,” I say proudly. “Maybe you know Dan Brewer? He’s a coach at the leisure center.”
Judith shakes her head, but gives me another form anyway.
Dan isn’t in a hurry to fill it out, though. It sits on his desk for days, seemingly lost in a pile of sandwich containers and kids’ report forms. As a member of Canterbury LTC, I can have a guest—I think a maximum of three times a season—as long as I put £5 in the tub in the clubhouse. So the first time we play, Dan is there as my guest. Not that you’d think so, though. Dan seems to know everyone. He stops and chats with a guy named Chuck, and then someone named Steve. Simon, the head coach at Canterbury, is hitting balls to a tiny wiry dark-haired girl of about eleven, and when they stop for a break, he comes over and says hello to Dan, who doesn’t introduce me. In fact, both of them ignore me. Dan seems mildly stressed and unlike himself.
Never mind. Eventually we go onto our court.
“Wow. It’s, like, grainy,” Dan says of the artificial clay.
“You have played on it before, right?”
“Nope,” he says. “Do you really have to sweep it?”
“Yep. With real brooms. So you know Simon, then?” I say, noticing that Dan keeps glancing over at him.
“Yeah, I’m like . . .”
“What?”
Dan lowers his voice. “Don’t say anything, but I’m really scared of him. I literally can’t play badly while he’s watching.”
“He’s not watching. He’s coaching that girl.”
“Do you know who that is?”
“No. Who?”
“Tiegan Aitken. He coaches her all the time. For free. She’s going to be like number one in the country. She’s number one in county juniors at the moment.”
I feel unspeakably jealous all of sudden.
My dream. My dream. It’s not that it was even unattainable: people are living it all around me. It’s just that I never got to live it. Well, all that can still change, right?
When we start playing, it’s terrible. Dan clearly doesn’t want to be shown up playing with a recreational lady, so he slams the ball wildly all over the court while making unamusing banter and generally showing off. Two courts away from us, Simon shows no signs of noticing. I know this, because of course I’m trying to show off too. What if Simon did notice me, like, properly? He’s already turned me down for coaching, yes, but that was before he knew who I was. I imagine playing one of my perfect backhands down the line, or the crosscourt forehand winner that Dan always complains about, and Simon noticing and then talking to me afterward and offering to train me for international seniors’ competitions or whatever would interest him most. I get so lost in my fantasy that I don’t look around for ages and when I do, he and Tiegan have gone.
After that, Dan settles down too and we have quite a nice hit, although he thrashes me in the first game we play for points.
I’ve noticed that when we cross at the net after the first game of a set, when it’s customary to just change ends without sitting down, Dan never goes first. I assumed it was politeness, but today I sense something more.
“You go,” I say, stepping aside and gesturing.
“No, you.”
“Why won’t you go first?”
“It’s just a thing I’ve got,” he says. “If I cross the net first, something bad’ll happen.”
“What, you’ll lose?”
“No. Something worse.”
In the next drinks break, I tell Dan about Luke Green, the coach here who I only hit with, of course, fucking up so many of his serves and overheads. I say that Luke hits the ball in the net way more often than Dan does.
“Tosser,” says Dan, jealously.
“Dan,” I chide.
“And you’re sure he doesn’t actually coach you? It’s just hitting?”
“Of course. I told you.”
This is very sweet in its own way, but does not make me inclined to bring up Josh, which I really have to do soon, before we are found out.
Dan takes the first set 6–1, which is kind of depressing. But I remind myself that Sharapova came back from that against Halep in Madrid last week. Nadal will do the same thing against Andy Murray later today, although obviously I don’t know that yet. I focus on my game plan—hit deep to his backhand at all times—and actually get ahead in the next set, 4–3. Dan takes the next two games and although I get a point away from making it 5–5 he takes the set 6–4. I’m happy with that.
Dan is off to see Steve Davis performing in Ashford and is running late, so I agree to take his completed membership form down to the office. It’s a miracle that he’s remembered to do it at all. Obviously on the way I read it. I want to see what he’s written in the part where you have to describe your standard of play. I expect him to have put something like AWESOME TENNIS COACH in capital letters, or at least to have said something about being head coach at both the Indoor Tennis Centre and Folkestone. But instead it’s rather modest: “9.2, reasonable doubles player, currently playing in Kent and East Kent leagues.” But then he is modest, unlike me.
•
I’ve suffered from anxiety for most of my life. It got a lot worse after the abortion, but I’d be lying if I tried to blame it all on that. I can’t exactly blame my family complications either. When Mum and Gordian sat down with me when I was twelve and told me Gordian was my father, I was dazed and kind of pleased. Finally, something interesting had happened to me! I was probably most affected by Mum’s breakup with Steve when I was nine. When we first moved to Chelmsford I would lie in bed and imagine fires and floods and other natural disasters. I made the family do fire drills and felt thankful that we didn’t have those double-glazed windows that people couldn’t escape from. I would usually go to sleep terrified that something bad was going to happen overnight and I would never wake up. But even before that I’d been quite a timid child, afraid of the dark, ghosts, being on my own.
My anxiety has come and gone over the years. I’ve learned that I am worse if I have too much caffeine, alcohol, and sugar, and also, of course, when I am stressed. After we moved to our current seaside town in 2010, I was worried it was a mistake. It was just a bit too far from the university—a forty-five-minute drive that I would do too early with wet hair to try to beat the traffic and get a parking space. I was full-time then, running Creative Writing at Kent. This sounds grander than it was. Creative Writing occupies its own unique little space in the university—semi-independent but part of the School of English. It was like the professional equivalent of being a teenager who’s been given a small allowance. Every time a big decision needed to be made, someone else had to do it—often someone who wasn’t even as senior as me, but occupied a big admin role in the wider School of English.
Soon I developed a psychological problem with one part of the road into work: a long straight narrow section on which people drove a bit too fast. Eventually, I would shake and cry whenever I had to drive down it—or worse, my vision would blur and I’d be convinced I would pass out. What if I completely lost it and drove onto the wrong side of the road? What if I did it when a big lorry or bus was coming? What if I did it on purpose, in a terrible moment of madness? What was wrong with me? It was then that I signed up for the sessions with the transpersonal therapist who got me thinking about A Course in Miracles and being loved. It helped to unleash Scary Scarlett, but it genuinely enhanced my spirituality too. My thing with the road faded in the end and I felt a bit better. Reducing my hours and not being Director of Creative Writing helped even more, and led me to wonder whether giving up the university altogether would be better for my mental health.
Now, I’m not sure what tennis is doing to it.
The following Sunday is our first Aegon away match in Maidstone. We’re playing a team called LA Fitness Ladies. I imagine big boobs and high-cut rainbow-colored leotards. I plan a long circuitous route that will take about two hours but at least doesn’t involve motorways. Like my mother, I never drive on motorways. I completely freak out if I find myself on one: like the scene in Clueless, but not funny. My neck goes numb, then my arms, then my vision starts to blur.
Somehow, I don’t feel right the whole way to Maidstone. When I drive across a bridge over the M2 (the very motorway I’m specifically not driving on), I get a sudden vertiginous urge to throw myself off it. I think that if I had to stop here and contemplate the void below, I’d find it so painful I’d have to throw myself in. It’s basically vertigo, but on a motorway bridge. What the fuck? Until recently, all my anxieties have been about things outside myself. A fire, an earthquake, a plane crash. I used to insist on driving everywhere myself because I didn’t trust other drivers of any sort. But what happens if you can’t trust yourself? What if the problem is inside you, not outside? But the feeling passes quickly and I don’t think about it again for a while.
It takes ages to get to Maidstone the way I’m going, but it is a beautiful hot day, and I’m listening to cheap pop music on Heart FM, and once the anxiety about the motorway bridge passes, I feel pretty good. I love playing tennis in the heat: it’s one of my strengths. While visiting teams visibly wilt and complain that they feel faint in the ITC, I seem to be a pure machine running only on Evian water. I sweat like Nadal, like some kind of permanent spurting fountain, and then I simply replace all my fluids. It’s fine; pleasurable even. Later, when everything goes wrong, one of my theories about what’s wrong with me will be dehydration, and then I’ll realize that I should put a pinch of salt in my water, or a fizzy pink electrolyte tablet. But now? I do none of that.
LA Fitness is quite hard to find, and Siri isn’t much help. I drive around the one-way system a couple of times before realizing I have to go under an old Victorian railway bridge and into an industrial estate and then down a narrow concrete lane. It’s all cheerful, light and plastic inside, like a kind of dry swimming pool. There’s a brightly lit bar and some glossy suburban mothers and a couple of sulky teenage girls.
Fiona is waiting for me. She’s with Jane, the captain of LA Fitness Ladies.
“Well, it’s just us,” Fiona says.
“What do you mean?”
She shrugs. “Margaret literally couldn’t find anyone else to play. She didn’t even tell me. She phoned Jane.”
Jane nods. “That’s right.”
“But why didn’t we cancel?” I say.
“It’s not fair to cancel altogether,” says Jane. “I mean, the girls want a game. And we’ve made a lot of afternoon tea.”
For God’s sake. I’m fuming. Maidstone is not exactly around the fucking corner. With only two players we can’t win or even draw. We should have just canceled and given LA Fitness the points. Of course, I never ended up captaining this Aegon team: Margaret decided to captain herself, which is fair enough. And somehow Becky ended up playing for us as well—at least, she’s apparently down for this game but can’t play. And Margaret has apparently been roped into working at the ITC and no one else was available, not even Kofo or Karen or Hayley.
“Margaret thought we’d want the games too,” says Fiona. “I mean, I bloody don’t. It’s my husband’s birthday today.”
“Yeah, and I’ve got to go to a dinner party in Faversham later. I could have done without this.”
Jane puts the two teenage girls, Lucy and Gabby, on against Fiona and me. We have to play singles first, then the doubles. My opponent Gabby is fifteen years old and a 5.1. This isn’t what I came here for. Although I suppose as an 8.2 I would have probably had to play her anyway, because I’m the highest rated in my team. But what’s a 5.1 doing in League 2 of Kent Aegon Team Tennis? Maybe League 1 is full of 2.1s and 1.2s. Unlikely, though, given that players of that standard would be playing national tournaments. Given the circumstances, it would be fairer and more fun for me and Fiona to play the older women. LA Fitness Ladies has won anyway. But no.
Gabby has beautiful pale blue eyes, high cheekbones, and shoulders made entirely of right angles. Oh, well. I’ve been here before. I don’t even need to give myself permission to lose, as it seems inevitable. I begin tight and embarrassed and still a bit annoyed because it would have been so much more fun to play the older women on the team. This is Vanessa Brill all over again. Gabby’s mother is watching, but there are other people too. A brother? Her father? They clap her good shots and call her Gabs. Everyone loves her. No one loves me. I have become an extra in Gabs’s life. Except she is having trouble returning my first serve, and not because it’s rubbish, either. If I hit to her forehand she kills it, but her backhand is not so strong. I keep to my game plan and play to her backhand as often as possible. In the end it’s 6–1, 6–1. But I am pleased that the two games I get are my service games and I win them properly. I am quite happy with my serve. I managed to return her serve well. I got good depth on a lot of my shots. And I am really loving playing in the heat, as I knew I would. But otherwise this is fucking depressing and so, so pointless.
Before we begin the doubles, the parents open a bottle of Chardonnay. They stand there in the shade, glasses of wine in hand, as the girls thrash us 6–0, 6–2. There is no shade on these courts, not even a tiny bit to stand in when we change ends. It doesn’t take long, but by the time we’ve finished, the parents are on to a second bottle of wine. After the match is over, we go into the bar and they, and the non-playing members of the team, order more wine, rosé this time. Afternoon tea is laid out on one of the low round tables in the bar area. It’s 100 percent wheat: cakes, sandwiches, pretzels.
“Oh God, I’m really sorry. I should have said I was gluten-free,” I say.
Jane glowers at me. “Those cakes are homemade,” she says.
“Come on,” says Fiona. “We’ll have to try and eat some of it.”
So I sit there eating Victoria sponge cake while Gabby’s and Lucy’s parents congratulate them and ask them about their training and their GCSEs and no one says anything to me at all.
•
I think Rod’s a bit pissed off with me. Why wouldn’t he be? After all, I am now obsessed with tennis to the exclusion of all else. We did manage a holiday, but I spent the whole thing reading tennis books, missing tennis, and thinking about going back to tennis. Which is why I’ve agreed to this dinner party I don’t want to go to, with his friends in Faversham. The deal is that we don’t stay long and he drives. There will be nice people there: Abdulrazak Gurnah and Denise Narian are good friends, and I always love seeing them. Then there’s Lyn Innes and Martin Schofield. I’m opposite Martin. Everyone’s into my tennis adventure, and I’m happy to talk about it. One great thing about tennis is it means I’m not socially awkward anymore. I always, always have conversation.
This evening, though, I’m fucking knackered. Yes, I do have my usual chilled post-exercise buzz, but it increasingly now flattens too quickly into exhaustion, into a state where I can only just keep going without knowing exactly what fuel I’m running on. But wait, I do know: it’s alcohol. After a couple of glasses of white wine, I feel a bit more sparkly, but when I go into the downstairs loo I’m sure everyone can hear me yelp as I try to sit on it to pee. It’s my knees. They are so tight and achy. And my quads. And my hamstrings. And my calves. My arm feels a lot better, though.
When I get back, Martin’s saying something about Laurence Goldstein, a colleague from another department in the university. I instinctively cue up my favorite Laurence story, although there are lots. My second favorite is from when I was on an appointments panel with Laurence for a lectureship in philosophy and we’d just finished reading the harrowing story of one applicant: a single mother who’d been disabled after a car accident and then found she had cancer.
“Well, she’s going to be a right whinger,” said Laurence into the awkward silence, with his perfect comic timing. It was exactly what you can’t say, what you’re not supposed to say, but what everyone’s thinking. And because Laurence was so kind and gentle, he could get away with saying things like that—just throwing a bit of honesty out there and seeing what came back.
But my favorite Laurence story is from just after the university decided to shut down the Center for Divination, a part of the Religious Studies department.
“They should have seen it coming,” said Laurence, with a cheeky grin.
Laurence joined the university the year after me, in 2005. He’d had a world-renowned academic post in Hong Kong just before that and had joined Kent as a professor. Being a novelist and, as I was at that time, a cricketer means you make all sorts of unusual connections around the university. I knew people from the Business School, Computing, Anthropology. One of my closest cricketing friends, Mudassar Iqbal, was working on a computer program that could predict the effects of certain viruses and hormones in the body. I think I first met Laurence because I was trying to get him to play on the staff cricket team. Or maybe it was because he, as a paradox-solving polymath, also roamed the university meeting new and different people and wanted to talk to me about paradoxes. He set up a Centre for Paradox and for a while four of us would meet and talk about how paradox was important in our particular disciplines. I planned to talk about paradox in Hamlet but never quite got around to it. In those days I was younger and more enthusiastic about the university. I wanted to know people, do things, be someone.
I haven’t seen Laurence for months, but he recently sent me a book through interoffice post about sport that I haven’t got around to reading yet. Last time I saw him he talked about how he wished he could swap the years he spent training as an elite cyclist for extra time to think about philosophy and Wittgenstein. I argued at the time that sport is pure philosophy: it means actually living, properly striving and struggling. I probably declared that it is Nietzschean; Dionysian.
“Yes,” Martin is saying, across the dinner table. “It’s an inoperable brain tumor.”
“What?” I say. “Laurence? Not really?”
“Oh yes,” says Martin in his smooth, don’t-care, dinner-party voice. “He’s expected to die at any moment.”
On the way home I try to cry, but I’m too shocked. When I do cry it’s not for Laurence exactly—it hasn’t completely sunk in, and I’m not even sure I believe it’s that bad—it’s for me, and for what I’ve lost. I used to be a real part of the university. I knew people. I played for the staff cricket team. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but I had no idea I’d disconnected to quite this extent, that a dear professional friend could be this ill and me not know about it at all.
The next day an email goes around saying that Laurence has died.
•
In my office I sit there, drained and hungover, thinking about Laurence. I’m also trying to write an email to Dan confessing that Josh is now my coach. I can’t do it. Should I cancel my next session with Josh? Then again, it’s not as if Dan will stop playing with Hayley Palmer because I’m jealous of her. And what about that time he laughed and joked with her at the Monday session and more or less ignored me? But I know that it’s not the same. Anyway, Dan and I are playing together in the Canterbury tournament. It’s all settled. We’re going to enter the mixed doubles part of the tournament together! But can friends claim total exclusivity? Isn’t it a bit unreasonable that Dan should want me to hit with him and only him? Although, again, I know this isn’t the case. Dan doesn’t care who I play with as long as it isn’t other coaches. And of course, the other thing is that I am lying to Dan. I am telling him it will only be a hit with Josh, when in fact I want Josh to secretly teach me things. Is it noble to be going this far to spare Dan’s feelings or am I simply trying to make myself feel better? I feel fourteen years old again, in a bad way.
After work I go to Polo Farm for a hit with Luke. He’s in a bit of a weird mood today and talking about how he wants to stop doing cardio and start doing more CrossFit and weightlifting: how he needs to put on muscle. He’s quite a skinny guy, but athletic-looking and attractive. I’ve been thinking that part of my yoga-teacher role with men might be to coach them on their fitness goals a bit, so I’m interested in what Luke’s trying to do. I also try to reassure him.
“I mean, you already look like something from a feature in Men’s Health,” I say kindly. Who wouldn’t want that, right?
“Yeah.” He looks a bit tortured. “Ideally I want to look like someone on the cover. Like, in fact actually be the guy on the cover.” Right.
We hit outside on clay and then play some points. Surprisingly, I beat him 4–3. It’s a miracle, especially as the usual conversation in my head starts when I am 3–1 up. I imagine telling Rod, and Dan, and now Josh as well, that I beat a twenty-four-year-old male coach at Polo Farm. Of course, the more I do this, the more I lose points and games, but Luke only gets it to 3–4 before our time is up. Can I only beat people who are falling apart in some way? Luke is clearly struggling with something. He serves double faults galore and hits the ball wide and I get many, many points for free.
“Oh well,” he says afterward. “At least I’m trying to play my game.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Anyway, it’s not important who wins.”
“I’m just trying to practice for the tournament, really,” he says.
“Yeah, me too.”
“I’m playing a 9.2 in the first round,” Luke says. “So I should beat him easy.”
“Always watch out for 9.2s,” I say.
“It’ll be all right as long as he’s not a pusher,” says Luke. “Or a dibbly-dobbler.”
“Yeah. Fuck. I hate that.”
“It’s impossible to play against them.”
“Yeah, but I guess really good players don’t have any problem with them.” It sounds worse than I mean it to, but it’s true. If being a dibbly-dobbler really made you unbeatable, then it’s the kind of tennis Andy Murray would play. Evolution would mean that people would focus on developing that style, if it was really the most unbeatable.
“True,” says Luke. “The key is not being dragged down to their level.”
•
It’s finally Monday, May 26, the first day of the Canterbury tournament. I’ve entered everything: the women’s singles, which has seven entries; the mixed doubles, which has three entries; and, with Siobhan Clarke, the ladies’ doubles, which has six entries. I’m not on until tomorrow, but Siobhan is playing this evening. Also, the other two mixed doubles pairs are going head-to-head and I decide it will be fun to watch them. I’m so excited by this idea of a real tournament that will take place over a whole week. Rod’s interested too. He’s going to come and we’ll make an evening of it somehow.
When Rod and I arrive, Luke Green is just about to play a guy named Lloyd Daniels. I know he’s from Sandwich because just before they begin he shouts, “Come on the Sandwich!” half to himself and half to what must be his doubles partner, who is sitting watching him. Lloyd’s fiftyish; the partner, Stuart, is a bit younger. The sky is a whitish gray and a steady mizzle is falling on all the players. Lloyd must be the 9.2 that Luke was talking about. He’s hilarious. He keeps up a constant dialogue with himself and the few spectators. What a talent! he declares as he serves a double fault. You goof! he says when he hits the ball in the net. He calls himself a gimp, an idiot, a buffoon. Also, he keeps going on about his lunch, experiencing it all over again. He does not move his feet but has a surprisingly robust forehand and quite a penetrating one-handed backhand. Luke has another psychological collapse and loses 6–3, 6–4, after which he storms off.
The next match I’m interested in is Siobhan Clarke versus Sue Depledge. Forgive me, I think as it gets going, but please say I don’t play like that! It’s pure dibbly-dobbly tennis, the ball moving slowly in the half-light, moonball after moonball after moonball. On the next court over I can see Teele Annus, the twenty-three-year-old top seed for the women’s singles and one half of the mixed team Dan and I will face on Thursday, warming up for her first mixed match. This is more like it. Proper shots. She moves her feet. Her left arm does not dangle uselessly by her side when she plays her nice topspin forehand. She’s young, blonde, and Nordic looking. Quite hot. A proper player. She’s a 6.1, but looks better than that.
Sue Depledge eventually beats Siobhan after a long, boring battle. Sue wins the first set pretty easily, 6–2, like a cancer taking hold. But Siobhan is good at fighting back and takes the second set 7–5, like a big dose of radiotherapy. The championship tiebreak in lieu of a third set is like a long bout of chemo that goes to 10–7. But poor Siobhan loses her fight. She looks like she’d rather be dead. When she comes off court she’s all smiles until Sue goes to get in her estate car to drive home.
“God,” says Siobhan. “I hate it when people take the pace off the ball.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “So hard to play against dibbly-dobblers.”
Sue is a middle-aged woman with a focused, intense look about her. Is it just her lack of pace that means she wins? When I get home I look her up on the LTA website and discover that she was born in 1967 and is a 7.2. Astonishingly, she is the number 10 player over forty in the whole country! How the actual fuck is that possible? I’m sure she’s an extremely lovely person, but cutting-edge power tennis she is not. Maybe it was just the rain, or where I was sitting, or some weird combo effect with Siobhan, but actually, she looked pretty awful.
Instead of thinking that her stats mean that these rankings mean nothing and are not worth achieving, I immediately start plotting my own route to the top. I mean, this is totally doable, right? If she’s number 10, then I could easily get to number 5, right? I wonder how long it would take me. And then I could push on into the top three. Could I be the top player in my age group in the country? The world? OK, probably not the world, but I could be disciplined and focused and I’d never, ever have to prove myself again. I’d always have tales of my glory for dinner parties and book events. I’d never have to wait for a book review to tell me I’m worthwhile: I’d have numbers to do it for me. Real, concrete, beautiful numbers. And that sweet, sweet emotional combination of victory and happy tiredness all the time.
Tuesday afternoon, and it’s raining steadily. As Rod and I set off, we wonder whether there’ll be any tennis at all, or whether the tournament may have moved inside. But when we get to Polo Farm, the clay courts are all steamed up with bodies and heavy, fluffy tennis balls. Lina and Carol from Canterbury come off after beating Sara and Gaye from Sandwich. Siobhan has come to watch me, which is nice of her. She’s wearing a fluffy pink sweater with a heart on it and carrying a copy of Closer magazine. I’m to play Sarah Philips, 9.2, a solid Canterbury club player. I’m told she’s not expected to win anything but has just entered because she loves the club, and there are never enough women for the Open Women’s Singles.
We’re given a tube of balls and sent to Court 1. The floodlights are on and it’s still drizzling at 6:30, when we begin. Sarah’s less nervous than me and takes the first two games but then I come back, and after a lot of wet, cold rallies we’re playing a tiebreak for the first set. I save a set point against me by serving an ace down the T into the ad court, which feels pretty cool. I get myself to 6–5 but can’t close it out. What’s wrong with me that I can’t do this? Why can’t I just keep serving aces? I am developing a thing about tiebreaks. Sarah takes it and—fuck, fuck, fuck—we’re into the second set. And I’m a set down. Crap. Crapola. Crapadoodledoo.
In the break, Rod looks at me and gestures that I should hit out more. No shit, Sherlock.
We go back on. I decide that I’ve lost now and I don’t care and then I relax and as usual that’s when my best tennis comes out. I take the first three games easily. I’ve been serving well throughout, but now Sarah really can’t return my serve to the deuce side. And if she moves slightly wide to receive it, I blast it down the T. She comes back for two games but somehow I manage to close out the set and take it 6–2. This is more like it. Why couldn’t I have done that in the first set? Anyway, I’m clearly the stronger player. This is amazing. All I have to do is take my momentum into the tiebreak and win.
But alas, in my last service game of the second set both my calves began to cramp and are getting steadily worse. In the break I glug water and eat some crisps and ask for a bit of extra time, but it’s getting really dark now—we’ve been at it for almost two hours. This is ridiculous. Why a fucking injury, now? I tell myself I can’t possibly win, especially as it turns out I’m cramping so much I can’t serve or run at all. But of course if I do win I’ll be into the next round—the actual semifinals—with some ranking points, playing Teele Annus. And I am the stronger player, but I can’t think that. I can’t think I’m going to win, or I will lose.
While I wrestle with myself, someone finds some tokens and puts on the floodlights. In the milky orange light a confused bird starts to sing, out of place, out of time. Like me, I think.
I lose the tiebreak 8–10. On the last couple of points I am in agony. At one point I fall to the ground clutching my leg, not for drama but for real. I literally cannot move. When we shake hands at the net, Sarah apologizes, because she can see how injured I am. Give me the victory then, I think in my head. You know I deserve it. But of course that isn’t how this works. On the way home I feel so sad and deflated. I won more real games—twelve, to Sarah’s eight—but managed to lose two tiebreaks and with them the match. Was it because of my cramp? Would I have fucked it up anyway? At some point in the match I realized that if I lost I’d have to play Siobhan Clarke again, which I really don’t want to do. But now I am.
Still, when I get home around 10:00 p.m., wet and cold, I quite enjoy the process of unpacking my bag and throwing the things I’ll need for tomorrow into the washing machine and starting the whole thing again. I lost today but I’ll win tomorrow, right? I’ll make a game plan and it’ll be fine. I have my forehand. My serve. My muscles. My fitness. My calves will be OK. I’m still in a tournament!
Before bed I check out everyone else’s scores. Lloyd the buffoon lost 6–3, 6–1 to the top seed, Graham Hunt. Their match had been taking place on the court next to mine and at one point I’d wondered from his jolly commentary if he was actually winning. Meanwhile, Meredith Willicombe-Lang, the strong-looking Black girl I last saw beating Charanya Ravi in the first round at Leicester, got a walkover because the second seed, Allessia Cuomo, didn’t show up.
Wednesday. I have not seen the sky for days. Rod and I are going to Laurence’s funeral before Rod drops me off at Polo Farm and goes back for the wake. I’ve got to play doubles with Siobhan. I can’t let her down.
Rod told me once about a theory that at each funeral you attend you are actually reacting to the one before. Perhaps this explains why I completely fall apart as soon as I walk in to Laurence’s. I didn’t even cry at Steve’s funeral. Why? Was it because I was so busy worrying about Sam and helping him to run the whole thing? Afterward, we had to clear out Steve’s squalid house in Gloucester where everything was filthy and broken, syringes strewn all over the floor. Amidst the horror was a battered copy of The End of Mr. Y, and a hardback of my follow-up, Our Tragic Universe. I didn’t know how to process this. I still don’t. It turned out that Steve had been so proud of me that he’d always kept up the fiction that I was his daughter.
And then sixteen days later Dreamer died and I never got over it.
At Laurence’s funeral, “Penny Lane” by the Beatles is playing. The place is packed. I’m given a funeral program with a picture of Laurence on the front. I simply can’t believe this man is dead. I can’t believe that I have got so out of touch with the university that I didn’t even know he was dying until the day before it happened. The last time I saw him I was in a hurry and didn’t even really say hello. I never thanked him for the book he sent me. I was a bad friend.
I can’t stop crying. It’s uncontrollable. I’m crying for Dreamer, for Steve, for my whole past, and my present, and my weight that won’t move and my stupid cramping calves and everything that went wrong in my childhood and every tennis match I’ve ever lost.
As the service goes on, I calm down a little and start wondering if I am a good mourner, if I am winning at mourning. Has anyone noticed how much I am crying? If so, will they know how genuine it is? Should I cry more to make sure? No, but that’s stupid, because that isn’t genuine anymore. I wonder if anyone will notice that Scarlett Thomas, the famous novelist, is here crying at the funeral of a man most people wouldn’t realize she knew quite well and deeply understood, a man who always made her laugh, whose irreverence was a beautiful light shining through the university. I try to stop thinking these thoughts, but I somehow can’t. Everything I do is a competition. Everything I do is a performance. Everything I do has a commentary.
And then I’m back at Polo Farm, still clutching a shredded tissue and with all my eye makeup gone, stepping out in the gloom to play doubles with Siobhan against Sarah Philips and Elaine Povey. I can’t do this. I am too sad. My body feels heavy. I’ve had no time to warm up. I haven’t eaten enough. I haven’t had any ibuprofen. My hand hurts. I can hardly hit a tennis ball and I don’t even care. We lose the first set quickly, 1–6. That’s OK. I told Siobhan we were going to get annihilated. I mean, this is my home turf, and I sort of know these players. I’ve heard they are good. And Siobhan and I have never played together.
But somehow, as the set has gone on the games have got longer and my ibuprofen has kicked in and Siobhan is serving really well and it gradually dawns on me that she can play doubles. In fact, she’s rather good. We take the first game in the second set, then the next one. I’m playing on the ad side, which I like. Usually the stronger doubles player goes on the ad side, because there are more backhands, but because Hannah Martin is left-handed I always play on the deuce side with her, and also, of course, with Dan. Anyway, this is a chance to practice my inside-out forehand, which is very cool. It’s when you are on the ad side of the court trading crosscourt backhands but your opponent sends a slower, weaker, less-angled one that you are able to step around, as if you’re stepping out of the way of someone about to walk into you on a busy street, and hit as a forehand instead. You still hit this crosscourt to their backhand, but with the strength and speed of a forehand. It’s more or less guaranteed to be a winner, or set one up.
I use Josh’s new western grip—shake hands with the racquet as every kid knows how to do, but then keep turning my wrist to the right until it feels odd—and keep my elbow up. It doesn’t matter, as we’re going to lose this match anyway. I start attacking Elaine’s serve, which freaks her out. I play aggressive forehands low to her backhand when she is at the net. She fluffs them all, then gets frustrated with herself, which means I do it more. I smash some balls away at the net. We’re on fire—we take the set 6–4. All-out aggression is actually amazing.
Time for another championship tiebreak. Rod arrives, looking fragile and beautiful in his old anorak. If I lost him, it would be—I would be—it has started to rain again. My thoughts start to drizzle steadily along with it. We are 7–3 up in the tiebreak when I realize that if we win this, we’re in the final. And I thought we were going to be wiped out so easily. Of course, this is exactly when we stop winning points. I double-fault and then spin a couple of easy backhands into the net. Siobhan, perhaps picking up my bad vibes, or maybe with nerves of her own, fluffs a couple of volleys. Somewhere in all this we get another point, but they get their momentum back and win 10–8. I really, really hate championship tiebreaks. And I don’t understand why the most innocent thought of winning makes me lose.
Still, I’m relaxed going straight into my ladies’ singles match with Siobhan in the first round of the consolation draw. We’re both feeling pleased with our very first doubles performance. I’m loving the powerful feeling my forehand is giving me. My game plan with Siobhan was to go all-out aggressive against what I thought might be steady, dibbly-dobbly play. But in fact she is aggressive and therefore making mistakes, so I play with a bit more “controlled” aggression. Am I the one dibbly-dobbling? No. Well, I’m trying not to go that far. I hit hard and deep to her backhand and manage to win a few good points with my down-the-line forehand. A few times I follow a short ball into the net but she passes or lobs me. I remind myself that I should go into the net off one of my own approach shots, not hers. I realize I’m winning more points from the baseline, so I camp out there.
My calves are still not recovered and feel 60 percent at most, and as a result I don’t really have my first serve. It’s raining harder and there are little insects everywhere, swooping and dipping in the sodium lights. My Adidas tights are annoying me; I wish I’d worn my Falke ones. I somehow take the first set 6–3. It should have been 6–2, but I couldn’t close out on my serve and had to break hers instead. But it’s fine, right? I’m winning so easily, after all. To make her feel better on the changeover, I say I prefer playing her to Sarah because she hits it harder and more aggressively. Why the fuck did I say that? I worry that she’ll do her old trick of taking the pace off the ball now, but surely it doesn’t matter because I am on fire.
She wins the next set 6–0. I’m not even sure how she does it. Rod says that I was the one who stopped playing so aggressively. That’s not how it felt. Siobhan certainly played a whole lot better, but how? Afterward I don’t even know whether she took the pace off the ball or not. It feels like some kind of voodoo or a hex. Rod keeps saying that to him it seemed that she was playing more strongly and I was the one who backed off. Why did I stop hitting the ball hard? My legs felt bad, I know that. But not so bad I couldn’t play. Did my thoughts do it again? I’d told myself to win the first set if I wanted to avoid a championship tiebreak and then I’d done it. It simply didn’t occur to me that I could win a first set and then lose the second. I’d been thinking instead how obvious it is now that I am better than Siobhan, that all my hard work and coaching has paid off, and that the Spring Open was just an anomaly, or a painful but necessary step on the road leading here, to a 6–3, 6–2 (maybe) victory and another match against maybe Sue or Meredith and some ranking points.
This is ridiculous. Any thoughts of winning at all and I lose. What is so wrong with me that I seem to have to reach an egoless higher state of calm and detachment before I can win anything? Other people can win without having to achieve enlightenment first. Why can’t I? Presumably Sarah wanted to win, thought about winning? Siobhan clearly really wanted to win. I doubt they spend too much time meditating and reading The Inner Game of Tennis. Or maybe they do, and the reason I lose is because I underestimate everybody. Why can’t I just win once? Please? Is it that I want it too much, or not enough? Do I feel guilty about winning? Not worthy of it? Or am I just not good enough? If I had a few more winning shots? Am I just unlucky? Cramp in one match. Playing after a funeral. Drinking too much. Not drinking enough. Playing on clay. Playing on carpet. Playing on macadam. Did I have enough protein before this match? No, I didn’t have any. I’ve recently given up dairy products. Should I have had some?
When I get home, I check the scores from the other matches. Luke lost in the consolation draw against a 10.2 opponent, 6–0, 6–1. And he lost his doubles too. Why is seeing someone do worse than you so comforting? Is it a bad thing? Maybe not. I respect Luke, and I know he’s a good player. If he can fuck up this bad then anyone can. It’s just one of those things. But I still feel like a complete loser. How can I not win even one match? How is it possible that with all my training and dedication I am probably going to come last in a local Grade 4?
Oh well. There’s always the mixed doubles.
The mixed doubles is a round robin and both our matches are on Thursday. The first one, against Teele Annus and Matt Brears, is at 4:00 p.m. At last, the sun has come out. I’m looking forward to winning a match at last. Not the first one obviously, but the second one, against Sara Fairclough and Joseph Sevier from Sandwich. We’re playing that today as well, right after the first match.
At ten to four Dan has still not arrived and I’m starting to get worried. The nice thing about doubles is you have a partner to warm up with and talk to and have a hit with before you go on—if you’re not rushing from a funeral, that is. Dan isn’t rushing from a funeral. Where is he? A few minutes later I get a text saying he’s running late from his Level 4 training day. Of course—that’s what he’s been doing. At ten past four he rolls in like a wounded hero, all droopy and pathetic, talking about having gotten up at 5:00 a.m. to get to his course. Then he sees Nick, a coach he knows, and bounces off to have a quick banter with him. Then he’s back, and Teele and Matt are there, and he somehow isn’t quite meeting my eye.
Right. Now Dan is sucking up to Matt Brears. Why? He’s joking with him as if I didn’t exist. I look at Teele, but she’s gazing off into the distance. No one wants to talk to me, not even my mixed doubles partner. I feel like someone’s mum. It seems that Matt and Teele play for the University of Kent First Team, but when I try to ask Dan about how he knows Matt, he ignores me. WTF? I feel like I’ve gone to youth club with my older brother and don’t know what to say to fit in. Or worse, that this is my son and his friends and I am just completely invisible and irrelevant. It would be nice to have some banter with Dan myself because I’m actually quite anxious about this match. I’ve played with really good women before, but this will be the first time I’ve played competitively with a guy who’s so strong.
We warm up with Teele whacking balls at my head at 300 miles per hour. I deal with it fine, but is it really necessary? She wins the warm-up, anyway, by about a bazillion points. We start playing. Dan serves first—his big, bold serve—and we win the game. This isn’t so bad! Then it’s Matt to serve, because the man always serves first, because the man is always better (except when Victoria Azarenka plays mixed and she goes on the ad side and serves first because she’s better than her mixed partner, which I have always found so, so cool). I stand well back and prepare myself for the huge first serve I’ve seen in the warm-up, but instead I get a spinning second serve that completely throws me. I mean, I can’t even get to it because I’m standing back so far. What the fuck? This little twat thinks I can’t handle his first serve? Maybe he’s right, but I’d like the chance to try. And surely if you’re going to play a second serve out of kindness you should tell the person to expect it? Otherwise, maybe it isn’t so kind after all.
Just this small act breaks me psychologically. They are all laughing at me. They all think I’m old, pathetic, rubbish. My serve is a joke compared with all theirs. Teele has an amazing but bizarre kicking first serve that goes so wide it’s irretrievable. Dan gets annoyed because I can’t return it. He suggests I stand out wider, but of course when I do that, she blasts one down the T. At least in this game I am not troubled by thoughts of winning. I don’t even keep score. I try to make little in-jokes with Dan but I get nothing back, so I stop. Teele and Matt win 6–2, 6–0.
Our next opponents are Sara Fairclough—the one with the big topspin forehand and her own court in Sandwich and today wearing a yellow pleated Stella McCartney skirt I rather like—and Joseph Sevier, whom I have never met. Dan goes back to normal once Teele and Matt have gone and we start hitting together. He’s making more mistakes than usual, though. He must be tired—turns out he actually got up at 4:00 a.m. to go to his Level 4 course. We agree that we’ll take out whatever frustration we feel about Teele and Matt on Sara and Joseph. Dan says there’s a trophy for coming second, which we will surely do. We take the first set comfortably enough, 6–4. I’m playing quite well, which is making up for some of the mistakes creeping into Dan’s game. There are a lot of them.
In the next set, he completely falls apart. I haven’t seen him implode quite so spectacularly before. Why is he doing this? These are beatable opponents, for goodness’ sake. Don’t we want that trophy? But Dan is on fire, and not in a good way. He serves double faults while going for ridiculous aces; hits the ball out or in the net when going for clear winners. At one of the changeovers I tell him we can win if he only puts 80 percent, or even less, into his shots. He carries on giving 120 percent. We lose the set. I can’t take another championship tiebreak. Somehow we lose that too.
So that’s it. I lost everything. Literally everything.
I go home and cry and drink wine. I look up Stella McCartney’s current tennis clothes online, but I don’t deserve any of it because I am a pathetic loser.
•
On Friday I go for my session with Josh, who is lovely and reassuring.
“I basically lost every single match,” I admit to him. “I feel like a complete failure. I don’t know what to do.”
“You just need to play much more aggressively,” he says.
This means taking the ball earlier, inside the baseline. It means continuing to try to get the elusive attacking forehand. With lots of topspin.
“Will I ever get it?” I ask. “I mean, should I just give up?”
I will get it, Josh says. But I have almost a year of bad habits to overcome.
“What you’ve done with Dan this last year,” he says, grimacing. “I don’t mean this to sound bad, but it has set you back. You’d have been better off not doing any of it, to be honest.”
“Right.”
“He’s not even a good mixed partner for you, really. How late did he turn up this time?”
“Only ten minutes. But then he acted like a dick.”
“You see?”
“I don’t know why he has to show off all the time. We should have won against Sara and Joseph. It would have been easy.”
“He’s just holding you back,” says Josh.
•
On Saturday I go to Walmer cricket ground to throw some balls down for Rod. He’s nervous about playing cricket again after last year’s shoulder operation and wants to practice his batting. Here, out in the open, in the bright green of the freshly mown pitch, I feel like an invalid. I can’t bend my knees properly. Everything hurts when I run just a short distance to field the ball. I used to play cricket easily; now I can’t. If I get down on the grass, it takes ages for me to get back up again, because I am just so stiff. I feel as if I am held together by rust. Can I do anything apart from play tennis?
The next day I go to the ITC to play with Lee. He is anxious because Liverpool looks like they are going to lose the Premier League. “You can be Liverpool,” I say to him when we begin. “I’ll be Man City.” It’s supposed to be a joke, but after I say it I feel like a bitch.
Anyway, after I beat him 6–2, 6–1, I do feel slightly better, but my lower legs are now like concrete. Later, at home, I stand in front of the mirror and properly look at my feet. My right foot barely has an arch but the left arch is so collapsed it looks ridiculous. I pull out the orthotics I hate so much. I’m not 100 percent sure why I hate them. Maybe it’s because of all the barefoot running books I’ve read. After all, once you’ve got the primal/paleo thing down, then the next step is to sleep in the dark, then go barefoot, then go wild. This lifestyle appeals to me so much. Just before I did my ethnobotany course in 2010 I read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. What a gripping, brilliant book! It confirmed what I have since read in all my paleo books: the agricultural revolution was a disaster for humanity. We’d have been better off—in health terms at least—by staying as hunter-gatherers.
Of course, then there’d be no poetry. No Shakespeare. No tennis.
I have to do something about my calves, though. Maybe the orthotics are the answer. Maybe civilization isn’t so bad? I put them in my tennis shoes before going to Polo Farm the next evening for the mix-in session. Of course, you’re supposed to build up to orthotics—start with five minutes, then ten, then fifteen. But does anyone really do that? I wear them for three hours straight, but it’s only doubles on clay. By the end of the evening I’m becoming grumpy. I want to play beautiful, smooth, seamless, fast tennis. I want it to be transcendent and perfect and hard. But it takes me until about 9:00 p.m. to be put with the men’s group I want to play with. I’m on with Richard, against Del and a guy I’ve never seen before named Dan. I serve an ace, which Dan calls out. Then he moans about my second serve being too shit.
“For fuck’s sake,” I say to Richard, a bit too loudly. “He doesn’t want it fast, doesn’t want it slow. Is he Goldilocks or something?”
Am I a little bit slower with the orthotics? Maybe slower is better than completely stopped due to cramp. Afterward I feel a bit worse in my right knee but a bit better everywhere else, except for the two new mosquito bites I suddenly seem to have on my left leg. I already have one on my right leg that is a bit red and swollen. I must remember insect repellent when playing outside in the evening, especially at Polo Farm, where the air is now a constant puff of rural smells and strange little insects.
Before I leave, Carol Bye comes over and asks me if I can play mixed doubles the following evening for Canterbury. It’s in the East Kent league, and she’s checked and I am eligible to play for Canterbury because I haven’t yet played for the leisure center this season. All my matches have been in the Kent league, which is different.
“Sure,” I say.
“Great. You’re playing in Sandwich. You’ll be with Nick Greenway. 7:00 p.m. start.”
•
The next day I have a coffee with Margaret. She wants to know about teams for the winter season, which confusingly starts in September. I say I want to play with Dan if possible, but I don’t know what’s happening with him and Hayley Palmer. Hayley doesn’t even seem to like tennis that much anymore. On the way to Bearsted a few weeks before, we got chatting about it and she said she’d more or less given up on tennis. She said she preferred running, which you can do on your own, without all the gladiatorial pressure, the horrors of winning and losing. But she’s somehow still on all the teams. That away match was the one we had to win to get into the league final, but I honestly now can’t remember who won or lost. I just remember being scared of Hayley, and then leaving my quilted Barbour jacket behind in their changing rooms and never asking for it to be returned. I wonder where it is now.
Margaret and I chat about the French Open and gossip about the local leagues. I’d assumed Margaret was gay but in fact it turns out she is in love with Rafa. She even has a picture of him on her phone. Can you be gay and in love with Rafa? She starts telling me about all the times she’s seen him at Wimbledon, how she once sat so close she got hit by a bead of his sweat when he shook his head near her.
“Have you got Wimbledon tickets?” she asks me.
“No.”
“You didn’t get any in our draw?”
“Nope.”
“And not in Canterbury’s?”
I shake my head.
“Well, do you want to come with me?” she asks. “I’ve got a spare ticket for the first Friday.”
“Really?”
“Yes, we’ll make a day of it. You’ll have to bring sandwiches though. The way you do Wimbledon is you sit down in your seats and don’t get up again for seven hours. It’s the only way.”
What about thrombosis? But I don’t say this.
“Thank you,” I say. “What do I owe you for the ticket?”
“Nothing. You can come as my guest.”
•
I’ve bought a new gadget off Amazon. It’s a little digital thingummy that you put on the end of your tennis racquet that gives you stats on your shots. You can find out whether you’re hitting flat or with spin, how fast your serve is: all sorts of things. It turns out that the mystery woman I saw Dan with the other Sunday when I was playing with Hari is named Tatiana. He coaches her at Folkestone. Apparently she’s too shy to play matches and always gets the yips on her serve. She also has one of these gadgets. In fact, Dan told me, you can set up a projector and see your stats in real time if you really want to. That’s what Tatiana does sometimes. He says her name dreamily, with a little sigh afterward.
We have no projector, so I just play as well as I can for the session and resolve to look at my stats later once I’ve installed the right app on my iPhone. I love stats, so I can’t wait.
In our drinks break I tell Dan I’m playing mixed for Canterbury tonight, against Sandwich. He’s jealous, of course, but I point out that his mixed partner in this league is Hayley anyway, so.
“Right, well, I think that might change next season,” he says. “I’m going to talk to Margaret.”
“OK.”
“I want to know everything,” he says. “Who you play with, who you play against, the scores, literally everything.”
“Sure.”
For the rest of the session we play points. I’m level with Dan at five games all when Josh comes in. He’s setting something up for his after-school kids’ session, but he doesn’t take his eyes off my shots. He doesn’t do any of the embarrassing things that Dan does, like call out advice—and this isn’t just because he’s my secret coach. He even looks slightly impressed. I’m encouraged by his belief in me and so I manage to draw 6–6 with Dan by the time the session is over. As I leave, Josh gives me a little nod.
When I get home I can’t wait to check out my stats, but they’re disappointing. I’m not as fast as I thought, and even worse, all my forehands are deemed “flat.” There isn’t any sign of any topspin at all. What the fuck? Maybe the gadget is just broken, or wrong. It must be wrong. I package it up to return to Amazon.
At quarter to seven I arrive at the Sandwich tennis club. There are three macadam courts, two together and one on its own. There are portable toilets and lots of greenery. Even the birds seem to be green. Are those actual parakeets overhead, squawking in the dusk? They are. Sandwich is such a strange little town: a combination of super-rich golfers, international scientists, and the extremely elderly. Its proximity to Pfizer makes it feel more metropolitan than most small towns in the UK. Although Pfizer is closing down later this year, it’s going to become a big science park.
Nick seems like a nice guy. Tall and lean with good focus. Probably a runner.
“What side do you want to play on?” he asks me.
I shrug. “I play both,” I say.
“Which do you prefer?”
“Honestly? The ad side. But I usually play deuce in mixed, so.”
He puts me on the ad side.
Our opponents are Phil and Bonita, and Stuart and Gemma. I recognize Stuart from the Canterbury Open. He was Lloyd Daniels’s men’s doubles partner. He’s about my age, stocky, fit-looking, and friendly. At last, a couple of matches that I can win easily. It’s not that these are bad players, they’re not at all. But Gemma’s rusty and Stuart is nervous and Nick is just the kind of steady doubles player I need. I’m getting to know some standard doubles plays now. The moonball over the head of the volleyer that draws the baseline player out wide. The sneaky shot down the tramlines. The whole thing is so enjoyable. I feel sorry for Sandwich, though. We win all our sets against them either 6–1 or 6–2.
The only problem is the mosquitos. I hadn’t realized, but Sandwich, with its big river and all the greenery, is notorious for them. I keep reapplying repellent, but I’m not sure it’s working. The main problem are the bites I got last week in Canterbury, which still seem a little bit itchy. After we finish playing I sit down on the wooden bench and text Dan. We won! I say. I played on the ad side!!!
Of course, he doesn’t reply.
He definitely got the message, though.
In our session on Wednesday he has plenty to say about it.
“If I played against you and you were on the left I’d blast you with aces on your backhand side.”
“Right.”
“Why would this Nick guy want the lady on the left?”
“Maybe he’s not a sexist dickhead?”
“I’d annihilate you if you played on the ad side against me.”
“Yeah, you said that.”
Today we work on serves. I’m given a basket of balls and told to practice throwing the ball higher, which is an issue for me. My throw is way too low. Dan videos me in secret and I think I’m watching a real tennis player for quite a few seconds before I realize that the athletic-looking woman with the amazing shoulder muscles on his phone is me. But he’s still being weird about my match. He doesn’t seem at all happy that I won. And this thing about me playing on the left has clearly bothered him. He keeps going on about it.
“If you had ten chances with this serve,” I say. “You know, this ace that you say you’d blast me with if you encountered me on the ad side? How many do you think you’d get?”
“Ten,” he says.
“OK,” I say. “Let’s do it.”
Forty or so serves later he gives up. Of course the odds are in my favor. I know a big serve is coming, and I know it’s going to be to my backhand. I hit some nice returns as well as edging and netting a few. But I get my racquet on all of them.
On Friday, Josh asks me where I think my level is, compared with Dan.
I shrug. Um and ah a bit.
“I think you’re the same level,” says Josh. “And soon you’ll be better.”
On Saturday, I wake up and find my body fat at under 30 percent for the first time in years. 29.8 percent! I want to run around with my knickers on my head. I feel so inspired. Are things finally starting to work at last? There’s no tennis today, so I go off and have a great session in the gym. But that evening while Rod and I are watching the amazing women’s final of the French Open, with Sharapova just edging it against Simona Halep with the most beautiful, powerful ground strokes, despite double-faulting all the time and looking like she might cry at any moment, my insect bites from last week start to really hurt. When I look, I see that these weird circles have developed around all three bites. All night my leg itches and burns. The next day I have a large, angry rash on my left ankle. In the Guardian the next day, Kevin Mitchell describes Sharapova’s performance as the “vortex of suffering.” My ankles feel a bit like that too.
On Sunday we have our next Aegon fixture, at home, against Tunbridge Wells Ladies. I’m playing with Margaret, and Hannah Martin is playing with Fiona. And of course we are all playing singles, too. I’m up first playing against a nice woman named Catherine Kirwen—Cathy—a fifty-year-old 9.1. Somehow, she’s their highest-rated player, although apparently Sarah Luckhurst is pretty fearsome. Cathy’s friendly and chatty, and I am too. I’ve completely dispensed with all of Brad Gilbert’s advice.
Josh and the young assistant coach Adam have been playing a men’s doubles, and they are having their afternoon tea right by where I’m playing. I do love an audience. I’m channeling Sharapova and thinking that if I am going to get beaten I’m going to do it in style, with my own vortex of suffering. Kind of dark, gothic, sexy tennis. Why not? Hannah and Fiona have been bagelled, or as good as, while Cathy and I have been wrapping up our first set, 6–3 to her. Fuck it, I think as we begin the second. I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m going to go for the lines and hit as hard as I can.
Cathy moves me around the court a lot, but I am fast and I am fit. She isn’t going to break me down. In fact, I am possibly fitter than her? What happens if I move her around the court a bit? What happens if I just—yes—blast a ball down the line when she’s not expecting it? We trade service games and then, on 2–2, I break her serve and then win mine. This is all it takes for me to go 4–2 up. Josh is leaving, but miming at me to text him my result. No one is expecting me to win, of course—no one here ever wins in Aegon singles, apart from Josh—but he wants to know the final result and how close it was.
Cathy wins the next game, so it’s 4–3 to me. On the changeover she asks me where I got my skirt. It’s actually the same one Simona Halep has been wearing in the French Open: it’s purple, with orange shorts underneath. I’m wearing skirts with no leggings fine now, just like Halep and Sharapova. And although Halep is my favorite player on the tour this year, it’s Sharapova that I continue to channel as Cathy and I go back on court. That beautiful, tragic desperation. Standing with my back to my opponent, looking at the black curtains, trying to compose myself before I serve. The only thing putting me off is that my insect bite rashes seem to have started to ooze green stuff. When I look more closely, it’s tennis ball fluff stuck to the hydrocortisone cream I put on this morning. I win my service game.
I feel loose and relaxed. Aggressive, sharp. It’s 5–4 to me and Cathy’s serving. I am really going for it now: I blast my returns of serve past her and my balls kiss the lines hard and I keep thinking of Sharapova. I play every shot for a winner. Remarkably, many of them are winners. My grunt gets louder. The remaining men are sitting having their afternoon tea and if any of them glance over, I want them to see me fierce and strong and winning. I want them to hear me winning. I do little fist pumps. I turn my back on Cathy and check my strings before she serves. It’s hot and I love it.
I win the second set 6–4.
As we go into the championship tiebreak, I am determined to keep my momentum going. It doesn’t matter if I lose. Everyone else has lost. I don’t at this point know Cathy’s rating, but I assume it’s higher than mine. The final score is another 10–8, but this time to me. To me! The first thing I do is call Rod, sweat and melted makeup dripping onto my iPhone, and tell him all about it. Then I text Josh. When I come back, it turns out Margaret has lost one and one to Sarah Luckhurst, even though her match seemed to be going on for a long time. She starts talking about all the deuces they had. Fiona and Hannah talk about their losses, how hard the opposition hit the ball, how we had no chance with them. They all look at me, and I realize that I am now supposed to say something about my loss, that I am supposed to complain about something too.
“I won my match,” I say quietly.
“Sorry?” says Margaret.
“I won,” I repeat. You won? they all say. It’s the same when I give Margaret the score. I have to say it a couple of times before it sinks in that I did actually win my match. But I did. I won.
•
I’ve been playing a lot of tennis lately. So has Josh. On Monday morning we’re both complaining about being knackered. It’s 9:00 a.m. and we’re still having sessions in secret.
“But at least we both won our matches,” he says.
“Yeah.”
We’re talking about singles of course. In the doubles, Margaret and I lost love and one.
Josh’s coaching sessions are hot and grueling. He feeds me balls that I hit down the line again and again and again. We do fast volleying sessions at the net.
“Next time can we maybe do two hours instead of one?” I say.
“Sure,” says Josh.
One hour of tennis is just never enough for me now.
At around 9:45 a man comes in and starts warming up vigorously, running around in little circles and hitting a ball against a wall like something from a sketch show. He’s clearly anxious to get on. He even helps pick up the balls from my session. I’m just getting my bag together to leave and I hear Josh saying, “You seem full of energy this morning, Graydon!” and Graydon saying back in a kind of North London drawl, “Yeah, that’s because I didn’t do any fucking drugs last night.”
An hour later Josh texts me to say he’s exhausted already: so much for starting the week so virtuously at 9:00 a.m. It’s like having a friend. A normal one who actually remembers to text me. I really feel like an insider at the ITC now.
I’m off to work to do some admin and I stop at the Canterbury Sainsbury’s on the way in. They have a good pharmacy there, and I’m far too busy to go to the doctor. My rash is now very red and very big and has started up on the other leg too, around the other mosquito bite. It’s itching and burning like wildfire. I can’t touch it. I feel a bit ill, too. The pharmacist says it’s a fungal infection caused by the mosquito perhaps having been on a cow pat or something equally gross just before landing on me. He gives me cream and antihistamines, but by the end of the day I feel so bad I don’t even consider going to tennis. When I try to imagine throwing a ball up above my head and then hitting it across the net, I just can’t do it. I feel so exhausted all of a sudden. I go home and have a terrible night’s sleep with my legs hanging out of the bed. They are so very hot, and so very itchy. It really is as if they are on fire.
Awake in bed, I keep thinking about my win against Cathy. I find myself haunted by a feeling that I didn’t really win, that it was a mistake. It was very close, after all. Did I cheat? That wide serve she did on the ad side. It was out, and I called it out, but what if it was in? What if I saw it wrong? Since I won on a tiebreaker, there were only two points in it. Does that mean if I made two wrong line calls in the match that I didn’t really win it? Then again, she called some close ones out too. There was the point we had to replay because she wasn’t sure, but I was: I knew my shot was in.
I thought it would be great to finally be able to tell people that I have won something, but it turns out that most people are more interested in loss. I guess that’s what I teach all the time: how much more drama there is in suffering, how no stories are happy. Who wants to read about happy characters? And telling happy stories isn’t as much fun either.
•
On Tuesday I cancel Pilates and tennis and go back to Canterbury in search of my old homeopath Elaine, whom I haven’t seen for a long time. I can’t concentrate on anything at all, so I go in much earlier than I have to and walk around Fenwick, my favorite local department store, feeling like a zombie. I wonder if I’ll be asked to leave because my legs look so dreadful. I hadn’t intended to try anything on, and I can’t bear the thought of anything going near my leg, but there is quite a nice dress that would only involve me removing the top half of what I’m wearing. OMG. I have lost weight. In the changing room mirror I see an athletic-looking woman with really a very nice bum, firm or firm-ish in places that were not firm before. I realize for the first time that although on the scales I have moved what seems only very slightly from around 153 lbs. to 149 lbs. (give or take) and from around 34 percent body fat to just under 30 percent, my body shape really is changing. I am so happy I even forget the burning in my legs for about two minutes. In the end I don’t buy the dress, but because of it, not me.
Elaine doesn’t like the look of my rash. She thinks it’s cellulitis, a serious bacterial infection of the skin and the tissue beneath the skin. Unusually for a homeopath, she tells me to go to the ER or urgent care immediately. It’s now too late for the trial and error sometimes needed to get the correct homeopathic remedy. I almost certainly need antibiotics before this gets even worse, before I end up in the hospital. All this from three little mosquito bites.
When I get to urgent care, I explain what happened to a nurse who can’t believe it, has never seen anything like this before. She calls in another nurse—the one who gave me the dressing for my toe months ago. She’s dyed her hair blonde. Neither of them know what it could be. Spiders, maybe? The town has apparently had an infestation of false widows in the last few years. But isn’t it too early for spiders? Anyway, I was out in the open, not rooting around in a basement or a shed.
The nurses admire the patterns formed by the rash. On the left leg in particular the rash has formed something like a ring around the original bite, as if it were a tornado or crop circle. And it’s spreading by the minute, down my leg toward my ankle. On my right leg the crop circles have merged and my skin is becoming more and more purple and swollen. They don’t have a doctor at urgent care, so I’m sent down the hill to a GP who gives me antibiotics, strong steroid cream, and two types of antihistamine. What if these don’t work? Then it’s the hospital, for an antibiotic drip. But they do work, and quite quickly. By the next morning the itching has reduced and by the afternoon it is gone. But the ghost of the rash will stay on my legs for weeks. Perhaps it’s all a coincidence, but I won’t feel quite right again for almost three years.