A tennis court is a rectangle seventy-eight feet long and thirty-six feet wide. The service line is twenty-one feet from the net. The net is three feet six inches high at the posts and three feet at the center. It does not adhere to the principle of the Golden Ratio exactly, but has the same feel: the beauty, rightness, and calm of the rectangular box, in which drama and struggles take place, and people win and lose and triumph and fail, but in which you can also hide from life indefinitely, safe within the invisible four walls, surrounded by netting.
•
When I go down for my next session with Josh, he’s finishing what looks like a session on serving with Lucille. There’s a life-size cardboard cutout of Andy Murray standing in the receiver’s position in the opposite deuce court, which is not where it should be. Andy had to be moved down to the tennis center after the lifeguards and reception staff upstairs abused him so badly that his head had to be stapled back on to his body. But now he’s down here, people just hit balls at him until he falls over.
“I’ll tell Dan on you,” I say once Lucille has gone. Dan is very protective of Andy.
It’s a good session with Josh. My legs are almost completely better and my knees are responding to all the green-lipped mussel extract I’ve thrown at them, and all the foam-rolling I am now doing. I can chase down balls better and move more freely into my forehands and backhands. My topspin forehand is finally making sense. But I’m still having trouble with the drive volley. “Trust your strings,” says Josh. “You have the best strings in the world. Trust them.” The idea is to play across the ball horizontally with the racquet facing the same way throughout, just like a topspin forehand, but higher and with—seemingly—less pushing into the shot. After I fluff lots of them, Josh has a brainwave. “Try hitting up,” he says. This makes no sense. The ball is high and I want to bring it down into the court so I should hit down, right? But I do what he says and suddenly that’s it, that’s the shot. He jumps out of the way. “You hit that pretty hard!” he says. I do two more and then my brain freezes again and I can’t do it. This is the point where Dan would make me carry on, perhaps tying my arm to something or covering my racquet in a carrier bag. But we simply move on to the backhand for a while. It’ll come back, Josh says. But when?
Afterward we sit and chat. Josh is happy because he’s just got the wins he needs to go up to a 3.1. I’m still pleased with my victory over Cathy, but now I need ratings wins. And of course it would be nice to win a prestigious local tournament.
“Are you excited for the Walmer Open?” Josh asks.
“Yeah. I think so. A bit nervous.”
“Well, it looks like Lucille won’t be playing. That’ll open up the draw for you.”
“Why isn’t Lucille playing?”
“She’s been called up to play for the county over-35s and they have a match that week.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Yeah, apparently she beat someone—Karen or Corrine Cross or something—”
“Kerrin Cross.”
“Yeah, at the Spring Open. And Kerrin Cross plays for the county. She’s sixth in the country for over-35s or something.”
“Yeah.”
“And Lucille’s been playing Aegon for Canterbury, of course.”
Stuff goes through my head. I’m playing for Canterbury too! But not Aegon. I start to tell Josh about Sue Depledge and how a friend of mine who I almost beat almost beat her in the Canterbury tournament and how Sue’s tenth in the country for over-35s but the standard isn’t so high and that actually I could probably beat her or at least come close—
“Really?” Josh says, disbelievingly. He realizes how incredulous his tone is and says it again in a more neutral way, but the damage is done. We both laugh but I do feel a bit crushed. But then, what do I really expect? I can’t even hit a decent topspin backhand consistently yet. I lose most of my matches. I still have not mastered the drive volley I want so much or, of course, the high topspin forehand with which high-rated players annihilate low-rated players and which low-rated players need if they are to become high-rated players.
“I guess Lucille is really good,” I say. “Didn’t she play in South Africa?”
“She was in the top ten under-18s. She still hits the ball very nicely. I’d love to have seen her playing then.”
•
On Sunday I’m meeting my good friend Gonzalo at Polo Farm for a game. Gonzalo is Chilean. His family is in no way poor, but he is always struggling with visa issues and the awful policies of our ever more racist government. He did his undergraduate degree at Kent, then got a distinction in his MA in postcolonial studies, and then did the Contemporary Novel PhD program with me. He’s currently in an extension year trying to find a job that will give him Tier 2 visa sponsorship. If he can’t get it, he’ll have to go back to Santiago, where he hasn’t lived since he was a kid. He’s super-stressed trying to work all this out but never shows it. He turns up at Polo Farm in a cool band T-shirt and skater shorts. A large bandage covers a new tattoo he’s just had done.
How strange it is to step outside the tennis bubble I’ve been in and play someone “normal.” I know my serve is OK and I can win points off it when I need to, but it is quite thrilling to see a fit and healthy twenty-seven-year-old guy unable to return it at all.
“Oh my God, Scarlett,” Gonzalo says. “Your serve is monstrous.”
I hit an ace down the T that shoots off the line. Out of politeness I ask Gonzalo if it was in.
“I don’t know, man,” he says. “It was so fast I didn’t even fricking see it.”
We play the point again. As we play I notice something. I am beginning to be able to generate my own pace on the ball. That time I played Hari, my serve looked good but I struggled to play proper ground strokes off his slower balls. Here, I decided early that I’d just practice perfecting my topspin, rolling the ball over the net in that delicious way I now can. I do this down the line a few times and although it doesn’t feel like I am putting tons of power behind the shot, the topspin is what has the effect and the ball shoots off the court toward the back fence.
“Oh my God, Scarlett,” Gonzalo says again. “How am I even supposed to get to that?” I do it again. “That’s beautiful, man.”
•
On Wednesday, I play Paul Gregory in the Canterbury LTC box leagues, one of the reasons I joined Canterbury. You are put in a “box” with three other players and everyone in the box plays everyone else. It’s always singles, and is genderless—men can play women. The other exciting thing is that the matches count for ratings.
It’s taken a while to set up this game. I had to cancel our first arranged fixture because of my skin infection. Then Paul canceled the alternative because neither of us had realized we’d scheduled our game against England’s first match in the World Cup. Now here we are. It’s a beautiful sunny day with a touch of wind. I hadn’t been sure how to picture Paul from his texts, but he turns out to be a tall, athletic-looking man of around my age. We joke that today we are both “working from home,” and in fact he really does have a conference call to get back for later. I suppose I might write a paragraph or two for my tennis book.
We start knocking up and it is immediately clear that this man is coached. He has a nice contemporary style. Plenty of topspin, playing the ball early. Am I going to lose this? He’s a 10.2, which we all know means nothing, but I really, really don’t want a ratings loss here. He hits the ball hard. His volleys are crisp and clean.
We spin for the serve and he wins.
A 6–0 set is a curious thing. It moves so fast that it isn’t exactly clear who is doing what to whom, or even why one person is being so completely crushed by the other. I’m not sure how I do it, but I do take the first set 6–0. Paul hits the ball hard, but it often goes out. He double-faults. But it’s not just that he plays erratically and I play steadily; I hit a lot of actual aggressive winners myself.
During the second set Paul follows a weak approach shot into the net and I lob him: it’s a beautiful looping topspin forehand that circles over and over itself before falling just on the baseline and then hurling itself into the back netting. I’m so busy watching the ball that I don’t realize Paul has fallen over. He’s lost the ball in the sun and his footing with it.
“You OK?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says, picking himself up. “Just a graze.”
A couple of points later, he comes in off the same approach shot. He’s still into the sun. I still lob him.
“I see you went for the lob again,” he says on the changeover.
“I mean, you did come into the net,” I say.
I win the second set 6–0 as well. While we’re packing up afterward, Del walks past the netting.
“You win?” he says to me. I nod.
“Love and love,” I can’t help saying, even though Paul is listening.
Chatting to Paul while packing up, I discover that Nicholas Handley, the only other player in our box since Fin Murray said he was too busy to play, beat Paul 6–0, 6–0. And just like that my victory loses its sweetness, like a bruised section of an otherwise juicy peach. Paul asks me when I’m playing Nicholas, but it’s been even harder to arrange that game.
In Nicholas’s first text to me he said that as he has “a young family” he can only play on Sunday mornings. Could I play at 9:00 a.m.? Was he joking? I texted back that the very, very earliest I could play on a Sunday—a Sunday!—would be 10:00 a.m. Even then, I was thinking he’d almost certainly thrash me because it’d be so early and I’d be a little hungover. I could of course just not drink on Saturday night, but who does that? I relay some of this to Paul.
“I played him at 7:00 a.m.,” he says, as if that’s normal.
Good lord.
Paul hurries away for his conference call. I sit by the clubhouse drinking water and watching Tiegan Aitken. She’s being coached by Simon as usual, but someone else is there, serving at her. Maybe a parent? Tiegan is upset after fluffing a shot and she’s having a bit of a tantrum.
“Never let them see it,” the parent is saying. “Never let anyone see they’ve hurt you. Never give them the satisfaction of getting to you. So what do we put on? A neutral face. And what does a neutral face look like?”
Tiegan slams her racquet into the fence.
“No, Tiegs, it doesn’t look like that. Can you do me a neutral face?”
She’s scowling now. Crying. Hiding her face in her towel.
“Please?” says the parent.
Simon’s collecting balls near where I’m sitting. He comes over to me.
“Is everything OK?” he asks. “I saw what happened in your match.”
“I know,” I say, beaming. “I won love and love.”
“No,” he says. “I mean Paul. I saw him fall. Is he OK?”
“Er, yeah, I think so.”
“I saw you lob him again when he was facing the sun.”
“He was the one who came in off a bad approach shot.”
Simon walks off, unimpressed.
•
It’s the First Friday of Wimbledon and I’m meeting Margaret on the 8:11 train from Ramsgate. We’ll arrive at Victoria and then take the Tube to Southfields, from which it is a brisk fifteen-minute walk to the stadium. I’m a little bit afraid of crowds and terrorism and so on, but fuck it, I really want to go and see some live tennis.
I’ve packed gluten-free rolls with vegan sausages and mustard in them. At the moment I’m trying not to eat dairy, because I think this will help me lose more fat. I’m worried about spending all day sitting on my arse eating, though. I’m looking forward to watching tennis, but I’d much, much rather be playing.
On the train there, Margaret and I talk constantly. We talk about the players on the Herne Bay team, and why they always seem to win. Is Margaret ever going to stop playing for Herne Bay? We laugh about the time I went to play there in high winds when the only doubles partner available for the leisure center was Kofo and Margaret and her partner beat us love and love. Haha! Margaret talks about how reliable Josh is, and how Dan really needs to buck his ideas up and pass his Level 4 or else what exactly is the point of him? Poor Dan. I bring up the thing about Lucille being selected to play for the county. I talk about Kerrin Cross and Sue Depledge and the county rankings. I’ve become a bit of a nerd about the rankings.
“Oh God,” says Margaret, dismissively. “Those women aren’t really the top ten players in Kent. Everyone knows those rankings don’t mean anything. No one’s even heard of those players.”
“Really?”
“You want the best players in Kent, you’re looking at the real county players. People like Sarah Luckhurst, Sue Boffey. You won’t see them in the county rankings.”
“Is that because they mainly play doubles, though?” I say. “What about singles?”
Margaret gives me an intense kind of look.
“When you reach a certain age,” she says. “It really is all about doubles.”
“Right.”
“Although of course county matches do have singles as well, I think in the over-40s as well as the over-35s. But you’ve got to be a very strong player to even be considered.”
Wimbledon—the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club—is not at all what I expected. I’ve been brought up to be suspicious of big events that might catch fire or blow up or at the very least have wasps and long queues. As a family we simply never did the uncool, sheep-like things that normal people would consider a good time. Our idea of a good Saturday afternoon out was a trip to the alternative bookstore Compendium Books in Camden, or Dillon’s in Cambridge, where if I was lucky someone would buy me a terrifying book about children surviving nuclear war but then getting cancer and dying. We did stately homes and the occasional woodland walk. My mother went through a long phase of wanting to go and find forgotten women’s graves. I remember the pain of the stinging nettles as we hacked through the undergrowth toward Sylvia Plath’s headstone on a holiday in Yorkshire when I was fifteen.
But this is so nice! Wimbledon is airy, happy, light. People are actually having fun. Our tickets are for Court 2 and so we walk by the entrance to Centre Court and past the small show courts before we present our tickets to the officials. We sit there all day, four rows up, with a great view, watching every match that takes place. We miss the very start of Simona Halep against Lesia Tsurenko, which Simona wins 6–3, 4–6, 6–4. I love her style of play: aggressive and sleek. She is so strong and beautiful. She is exactly the same height as me. She wears Adidas and has a Wilson racquet, like me.
Margaret warned me on the train that watching “real” tennis was going to be a shock, because “real” players hit it so much harder and faster than we amateurs. But I am surprised to see that the tennis I’m watching is actually not that much different from the tennis I play. Am I deluding myself? Almost certainly. But there is something tantalizing about the fact that what we do recreationally is so close to what the pros do. We don’t do it quite as hard and fast, but we play the same length matches, in the same size rectangle, and with the same range of shots.
We watch a very long five-set game between Jerzy Janowicz and Lleyton Hewitt. At some point it rains briefly and we go to the gift shop, where Margaret opens a coffee table book of photographs and shows me a picture of herself sitting behind the scoreboard on Court 1 during one of Rafa’s matches.
Toward the end of the day we get large glasses of white wine and sit there in the evening sunshine as planes trail their white vapor behind them and birds fly lazily overhead. Super-skinny Agnieszka Radwańska has beaten Michelle Larcher de Brito 6–2, 6–0, and the final match of the day is a men’s doubles with Jamie Murray and some other dudes. I don’t really care about the tennis anymore. I’m just soaking up the lovely end-of-day vibes.
On the way back, we walk past the last matches being played on the unticketed courts. There are a couple of junior matches taking place. Barely anyone is in the audience, maybe twenty people watching each one. I think about Tiegan Aitken, and how many hours, days, weeks, and months of sheer hard work it would take her to get here. But once you’re here, no one really cares unless you’re one of the big names. You could be everything in your local club and nothing here. Apparently, minor WTA matches don’t get any audience at all. You could get to within the top fifty players in the world and you could play a match and still no one would care.
•
Inspired by Wimbledon, I have a quick ball machine session the next day. I feel amazing and inspired and light on my feet. But then Rod and I are off for a weekend with friends in London. I now can’t bear being without tennis for even two days. Make that one and a half, because I’m playing with Josh on Monday morning before I go to Devon to spend a few days with Mum and Couze.
Our friends Denis and Mary are lovely, and conversation is great, but I realize how much I feel like a child in these situations at the moment, wanting to jiggle and scratch and go and run around outside. At the height of my absorption with alcohol and food, I remember thinking about how great it was to not be a child anymore. As a child I was bored by dinner parties or Sunday lunches with the grown-ups. I could barely manage one course when we ate out, and never ordered pudding. Being a grown-up so far has meant drinking a lot and eating a lot and being very clever and saying outrageous things. Surely any child would want that, rather than the empty boredom of a Sunday afternoon with no sauvignon blanc or Picpoul to look forward to. But I’ve come full circle and I would genuinely now rather be at the gym, rowing back and forth, listening to Chiddy Bang, and preparing myself for tennis. I don’t even really like the feeling of being full and drunk anymore, especially not compared with the feeling of being fit and strong. It’s just taken a very long time to get here, and if I didn’t love tennis so much I would never have even begun the journey.
•
On Monday morning I turn up for my 9:00 a.m. session with Josh a few minutes early as usual. As soon as I open the double doors into the ITC I know something’s wrong. Dan’s unmistakable blue Head bag is lying there just outside the office. Fuck. Dan is never up by 9:00 a.m., let alone in the ITC. And he doesn’t come in until after lunch on Monday anyway, because he stays until 9:00 or 10:00 p.m.
Josh comes out of the office and gives me an oh, fuck look. Then he adds a barely perceptible little smile, like it’s an oh-fuck situation he’s actually going to enjoy.
It’s too late. We can’t hide what we’re doing. We slope off to Court 4 and close all the netting and sort of pretend we’re invisible—well, I do. Josh seems entirely unashamed. He does everything he can to make it obvious from a distance that I’m being coached, like standing on the same side of the net as me and feeding me balls from baskets. Graydon has the 10:00 a.m. slot as usual and so we chat for a couple of minutes while Josh goes to the office for something.
“You beaten him yet?” asks Graydon.
“What, Josh?” I laugh. “Yeah. Haha.”
“I’ve taken a few games off him.”
“Right.” I gather up my stuff. “You’re an actor, Josh said?”
“Yeah. And a screenwriter. Fucking brutal life.”
“Mm. I’m a novelist myself. Try and keep out of the world of screens.”
“You had anything published?”
“Er, yeah. Quite a lot.”
“You want to have a hit sometime?”
I shrug. “Yeah, sure.”
As long as this conversation continues, I don’t have to face Dan. But soon Josh comes back and I have to do the walk of shame across Courts 3, 2, 1. Dan is sitting at one of the round tables by the notice boards looking sad.
“You all right?” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “How was your coaching with Josh?”
“Um, good,” I say. “Of course, you know I like hitting with you best, right?”
He nods. Doesn’t meet my eye. His head droops a bit.
I don’t really know what to do. “So . . .”
He suddenly snaps back into being Dan. “Tomorrow 2:00 p.m.!” he says brightly.
“Oh, no, actually. Remember I said I was going to Devon?”
“Oh.” He sips some of his drink. “You gonna go to a local mix-in? I could come too? Imagine that. We could turn up and kill everyone at doubles, bang, bang, bang!”
“What, you’d come to Devon?”
“I was going to move there once. Did I ever tell you about that?”
“Where?”
“Totnes.”
“That’s where I’m going!”
“Cool!”
“OK, but my mother has banned me from bringing my tennis racquet. I’m not sure what she’d say about me bringing my tennis coach.”
“Hitting partner.”
“What?”
“And friend. Josh’s your coach now. It’s OK.”
•
In Devon I dream of tennis, as usual. Most nights I am plowing my way through some tournament or other. As I fall asleep I am hitting forehands over and over, perfect topspin winners down the line, crosscourt, and inside out. Up and over, up and over, until blackness takes over.
It’s the second week of Wimbledon. Yesterday we—Mum, Couze, and I—watched both Sharapova and Nadal crash out, then much of the Kvitová match was taken up with my mother describing to me how Couze recently managed to set fire to the salad drawer from the fridge. At some point I nipped out to the local gym and did a couple of circuits, some rowing intervals, and some experiments with a medicine ball.
Last night I dreamed of tennis as usual until something spooked me and I had to spend the rest of the night with a lamp switched on.
There’s a lot of tennis to watch today.
“I have watched tennis all my life,” says my mother mysteriously, before disappearing to her study to smoke and write reports on her psychotherapy clients.
I’ve been struck on this visit by how hard Mum and Couze still work, even though Mum’s sixty-six and Couze is in his seventies. Mum has all her clients, with their notes and emails and phone calls, and Couze has recently taken on a heavy workload at Goldsmiths, teaching an MA course and supervising various PhD students. He does it all much more thoroughly than me. He even speaks to his students on the phone. As well as all this, he is also on the editorial board for the journal Theory, Culture & Society. He had a Skype with his other editors on the morning before I arrived that went on for five and a half hours. I can’t remember the last time I did anything for five and a half hours, certainly not work. People see me as incredibly productive and an extremely hard worker, but what do I actually do all day? I drift around thinking about tennis, playing tennis, training for tennis, or doing things connected with tennis.
I still have a slight addiction to buying new stuff which I wish I could overcome. Yesterday I spent the morning in Totnes waiting for Mum to finish seeing clients and meet me for lunch. I bought two jackets, a pair of jeans, two T-shirts, and a dress. Having this new body is not helping in this respect. Stuff looks nice when I try it on and then I buy it. Even this morning, watching Simona Halep playing Sabine Lisicki, a part of me is coveting Simona’s white, skater-style Adidas skirt. I already have approximately £250 worth of Simona’s skirts. I also have her visors: the purple one and the white one.
My mother comes in. “Which one’s that?” she asks.
“Lisicki,” I say. “She was the finalist last year.”
“Your legs are nicer than hers,” Mum says.
She goes to the kitchen and makes a cup of tea and then comes back and starts reading the Daily Mirror.
“Did I mention that you were born during Wimbledon?”
“Yes.”
“You were a Wimbledon baby.”
“I know.”
Simona Halep plays an amazing second set, beating Lisicki in the end 6–4, 6–0. She is so strong and beautiful. Her hair is so shiny. Apparently she had breast reduction surgery to improve her tennis, which certainly captured the imagination of many of the aging perverts who follow the WTA Tour. Once she has finished celebrating, I switch over to find Eugenie Bouchard on the verge of beating Angelique Kerber.
“Your legs are nicer than hers, too,” says Mum.
Then it’s time for Andy Murray to play Grigor Dimitrov.
“I can’t watch,” says Mum, putting the Daily Mirror away.
Dimitrov serves first. Mum is howling before the first point is over. When Murray nets the ball she lets out a painful yelp. The next time, another one.
“He always does this.”
“Mmm.”
“I’ve always said. He always does this on that shot.”
“Mum, we’re like two points into the match.”
“Judy needs to give him a good talking-to. Or maybe what’s her name? That new female coach?”
“Amelie Mauresmo.”
“Or Kim. I do like her hair. ANDY!”
“He’s not really expected to break serve in the first game. Give him a chance.”
But poor Murray doesn’t really get any energy flowing at all and before long he’s trailing badly in the first set. Couze goes out to do some gardening.
“I told you so,” says Mum. “I can’t bear it. You see that weird man in the cowboy hat? I’m going to google him instead.”
She gets out her iPad. I can’t really complain. While Rafa was being beaten I was occasionally googling images of toenail fungus.
“See! I told you he was someone.” Mum waves her iPad at me, but I don’t really look.
Andy nets another ball.
“He needs his little bottom smacked.”
“Mum!”
“If he was my son I’d tell him, ‘You’re not too old to go over my knee.’”
“That’s seriously disgusting.”
“Hmm. I prefer Kim’s hair to Kate Middleton’s.”
“Yeah.” I can at least concede this.
“Do you think William chose the wrong one?”
I give Mum a vaguely WTF look. The players are on a changeover. The camera lingers on a retired rugby player.
“Why is it,” Mum says, “that the most disgusting, ugly, old sportsmen get the most beautiful young wives?” I don’t respond.
“Are you ignoring me?”
“I’m blocking you out.”
“What are you writing?”
“I’m writing down all the ridiculous things you are saying so I can put them in my book.”
“No! That’s so embarrassing!”
“If you think it’s too embarrassing to go in my book then it’s probably too embarrassing to say.”
After Dimitrov wins the match, and once Mum has gone back to the Daily Mirror, I start browsing seniors’ tournaments on the LTA site. Here’s a Grade 1 national seniors’ tournament. Grade 1. Frightening, and completely out of my league if it weren’t a seniors’ tournament, which it is, but it’s at the All England Club. Isn’t that—hang on, that’s Wimbledon! There is a seniors’ tournament at Wimbledon. At the end of August. And it’s open for entries now.
Above each tournament description on the LTA site is a word or two that tells you its category. British Tour; County Closed; Regional Tour; Match Play; Seniors. Most of the time the category doesn’t mean that much, unless it is County Closed, in which case you have to be from the right county to enter. Above the All England Club British Seniors Grass Court Championships entry, all it says is CLOSED. So that’s that then. Closed must surely mean Closed to the likes of me. Perhaps you have to be a member of the All England Club to play. It’s not clear. But for some reason I put the tournament on my watchlist anyway.
No one has yet entered the women’s singles over-35 or over-40 categories, but men are starting to enter in their age groups. I scrutinize some of these men. They seem to come from all over the country. There’s a 2.2 from Cheshire who is the current national over-40s champion. But there’s also a 9.2 from Middlesex with an average-to-good club player’s profile. I read the terms and conditions for the tournament but it doesn’t say anything about what “Closed” means. Eventually I think, Fuck it. I’m a novelist, I do embarrassing and awkward things for a living. I’ll just enter the tournament and then if it’s closed to me presumably someone will realize and throw me out. I got expelled from school. It was fine. I can be expelled from Wimbledon. I can take it. And it might make a funny little episode in my tennis book. It costs £38. And this is to play at Wimbledon. If you want to go and watch tennis at Wimbledon it costs £56 and involves a series of complex raffles and ballots that begin the previous September. This is awesome. Well, it will be until they throw me out.
•
Of course, I did bring my tennis racquet. It’s a lovely warm evening in Totnes. Around twelve people have come for the club night. It’s a great idea, to let visitors and would-be new members pay £5 per session. Last time I came to one of these sessions was that disastrous evening last September, when I didn’t know which side I should stand on or what I should do. I remember a woman, so frustrated, hissing at me to “cover the tramlines.” I was hungover, sad, in pain. No one wanted to play with me. I lost every single game I played.
Today I warm up in the gym. After I’ve finished, the fit-looking guy from the office follows me out and at first I think it’s to check that I did my induction or something, but in fact he’s seen me rowing and wants to know if I’m interested in joining his indoor rowing team. Perhaps he does this to everyone? But I know I’m a good rower so I allow myself to feel a bit chuffed and go over to the tennis courts feeling happy and excited. This time it will be different. I feel so at home now on a tennis court, in a tennis club, calling van in and van out and making guys try to ace me because it’s the only way they can be sure of a point on their serve.
Although suffering makes for a good narrative, for the next two hours there simply isn’t any. I feel at home with tennis people, on a tennis court. I know where to stand, what to do. I chat happily about Roger and Stan’s quarterfinal—the Swiss derby—and what a shame it is about Andy but how well Dimitrov did to beat him. I’m still not the world’s greatest doubles player, but these people take me seriously. I am one of them. I belong.
•
I’m signed up to play a seniors’ tournament in Nottingham beginning on July 16. Two events: ladies’ over-30 singles and ladies’ over-40 singles. At one point there were seven in the over-30 and four in the over-40 but suddenly Sue Depledge dropped out of both. Then someone else withdrew from the over-40. Then the organizer sent around an email suggesting that the two events merge. Then he did the draw and it turns out that I’m up first against the number 2 seed, a 5.2 who would have had a bye in the original lineup, leaving me to play an 8.1 in the first round. There is no compulsory consolation draw.
Since the over-40 singles was going to be played as a round robin, I have gone from a potential four or five guaranteed matches to only one. I have suggested that Lynn, the other over-40, and I still play our match, which I guess will be classed as a Grade 3 final. The organizer says that yes, we can do this, as long as we can find a convenient time and a court. Lynn is on the same side of the main draw as me in the over-30, which makes things look unnecessarily complicated. I could end up playing her twice. Or not at all. This is becoming too flaky.
I ask the organizer about the consolation draw and he says he’ll run one but can’t guarantee that others will enter it. I don’t really want to spend hundreds of pounds going to Nottingham to get beaten by a 5.2 and then stress about other matches that are not definite. I do want to be beating 5.2s in the nearish future, but I know I’m not ready yet. And of course I’d like an easy stab at a Grade 3 final, but even if I won it would feel a bit like I got the ranking points by slightly foul means. I’d go up in the Kent rankings beyond Lucille and into the top five, but it would not mean I’m better than her. It would not mean I am a county player. It would just mean I got lucky with math. On the Totnes-Paddington train I email the organizer to say I am pulling out, but we’ve barely reached Exeter before I have a change of heart and email him to say I’m back in again—as long as I can definitely play Lynn.
So I’m going to go to Nottingham on the cheap. Well, still First Class, obviously, although the advance tickets are only £21 each way. I know when I’m going but not when I am coming back, but I book my ticket for the afternoon of the final. And I seem to have found a £50-a-night hotel with a sauna, steam room, and pool. I am almost certain the pool will have dead bodies floating in it. I mean, £50 a night! But still, an adventure for the book and all that.
•
It’s my birthday on July 5, women’s finals day—I was a Wimbledon baby, as my mother is always pointing out. But I feel low the day before and low on my birthday. I can never think of anything I really want to do on my birthday. Last year Rod and I went for a macrobiotic picnic in Goodnestone Park Gardens and I thought about buying myself a tennis coaching session. The year before was my fortieth, which I spent feeling fragile and hungover at the Damian Hirst exhibition at the Tate Modern, watching flies buzzing around a rotting cow’s head. The year before, 2011, was when my brother Sam and I were in touch with Steve Sparkes again for the first time in over twenty-five years, but he was dying and, far closer to home, my beloved dog Dreamer was dying, and by the end of July it was all over. Sam and I never quite recovered from having to clean all the syringes out of Steve’s awful flat, and I found I just couldn’t get over Dreamer’s death, no matter how hard I tried. July always makes me sad now.
Each year I wonder if my father Gordian will get in touch on my birthday. Sometimes he does; more often he doesn’t. When I was a kid and it was still a secret about him being my father, he always bought me the best presents: one year a real Walkman, another year a massive expensive stereo. I told my school friends that he was my uncle/godfather and they thought I was lying because I could never get my story straight. I told everyone that my uncle/godfather was the manager of OMD but no one I knew liked OMD.
This year, he doesn’t get in touch.
Should I have texted him on his birthday in April? But to say what? All I want him to do is get in his car and come and see me here in Kent where I live in a beautiful house with my lovely partner. But he won’t and I don’t know why. At Steve’s funeral, Gordian talked about how his daughter Katherine had been talking all the time on holiday about wanting to see her sister: me. I want this too. Why can’t it just happen? But it never seems to. Is it because I’m not trying hard enough? Gordian’s not trying at all, but he’s neurotic and depressed and maybe therefore it’s up to me.
I must try harder. At everything.
The only thing I really want to do on my birthday is play tennis, but I have no one to play with. Dan and the rest of the mixed doubles team are in Gravesham, a long way across Kent, for an away fixture that I didn’t fancy playing on my birthday. So I end up at the leisure center with the ball machine. I can’t even hide away on Court 4 because our men’s team are playing Canterbury, which means that Lee is there, and Jon Wise, and Paul Gregory. Instead I have to go on Court 1, the most public court. I put my headphones on and turn Chiddy Bang up loud and ignore everyone.
For no definite reason I feel on the verge of tears the whole time I’m playing. I can’t get my backhand to go right. My forehand is so much better, but why isn’t it perfect? The ball machine sends a couple of balls short and I naturally use them as approach shots. I think I might practice some volleys, but I’m not that close to the net and—OMG. I just hit a drive volley! A real one, my racquet swishing through the air like a knife spreading butter. The ball machine spits out another ball and I try it again. Bang! The ball hits the baseline with so much force and topspin that it thwacks into the curtain with all the certainty of a definite winner. Quite a frightening winner. The next ball comes and I do it again. The next one I fluff. But over the rest of the session I hit so many drive volleys that when I finish my little finger is bleeding.
Rod’s brother Murray is here from Auckland, so we go out for dinner for my birthday and talk about tennis and books. Then we come home a bit drunk and watch Petra Kvitová thrash Eugenie Bouchard. It’s a beautiful, brutal game, made more pleasurable by how big-headed Bouchard was going into it, and how much she deserved to lose. The whole thing only takes fifty-five minutes.
On Sunday morning, Graydon texts to see if I want to play tennis later. I would have done, perhaps, but I’ve already been to the gym and am looking forward to flopping out in front of the men’s final all afternoon. I text him back that I’m planning to nurse my hangover in front of the tennis, which sounds a bit better than admitting to already having been to the gym. He texts back, You sound like a lager lout. I suggest playing on Thursday but he replies that he can’t plan anything that far ahead because he might get called for an audition. We agree to confirm on Wednesday.
On Monday night I manage to have a bit of a meltdown at the mix-in at Polo Farm. Judith has finished reading one of my novels. I’d recommended The End of Mr. Y, which everyone likes, but she’s read Our Tragic Universe, which only hard-core fans really love.
“To be honest,” she says, “and don’t take this the wrong way, but I did find it a little tedious in places.”
“Right. Well, thanks for being honest.”
Unlike a tennis score, a book can be read subjectively. Why is it that one person loved this novel enough to have a line from it tattooed on her collarbone, but for Judith it was simply “tedious”? And also, couldn’t she have lied or just not said she read it?
All evening I’m paranoid and touchy. I must have PMS. I believe that I’m being put on with weaker players as some kind of punishment, or because no one realizes how truly awesome I am. I should be playing with three strong men always. In my heart, perhaps I am a strong, athletic man, and that’s why I feel this way. Or maybe I’m just a baby. Judith puts me on with a terrible player against a guy who says he’s injured but who whacks the ball as hard as anyone, and then they all want to stay on for another game but I want to get to where the real action is, playing with Del and the better players on Court 5. I have a good set with an attractive woman of about my age named Karen against Debbie and another woman where we win 6–2. But then Del comes to play with me against Karen and Debbie and I’m not sure what’s going on because Del seems to be deliberately letting them win. Karen hits the ball hard at him. They flirt. It’s all very confusing. Somehow, Karen and Debbie beat us 6–2. Del keeps talking about what good players they are; how they should play together more often. He comments on my bright orange tennis top. It’s another thing I’ve bought from Simona Halep’s French Open collection. “Thanks,” I tell him, in a back-off kind of voice.
I’m not playing well at all. I’m tired, it’s getting dark, my blood sugar is plummeting. I miss a couple of easy volleys and flounce off back to the baseline. Del misses most things. I’ve seen him play against First Team men before and he is brutal. What the fuck is going on here? Eventually I notice that it’s 9:00 p.m., that we’ve been playing an hour longer than I thought. I say I’ve got to go home and leave them to sweep the courts. As I leave, Del comments yet again about how bright I look in my orange tennis top. I do my best not to snarl back. Afterward I feel ashamed. I am going to have to learn to control my sulks and temper tantrums or I’m not going to allow myself to come back.
I get home to find a well-spoken man named Rex on the phone. He says he’s calling about Seniors’ Wimbledon. I imagine he’s about to throw me out, but all he wants is for me to play in my correct age category, over-40, rather than in the over-35. In fact, I signed up for both. I signed up for everything I was eligible for. I feel as if I have committed something of an offense but it isn’t bad enough to be thrown out. In fact, he says he’s going to accept me—me!—although of course I haven’t done anything special apart from have the guts to enter something that looked so closed. Later I find out that “closed” in this context simply means that it is a national rather than an international tournament. So it’s closed to overseas players.
•
On Tuesday, I tell everyone about Seniors’ Wimbledon. Josh is beyond excited.
“Oh my God,” he says. “At last, I am actually coaching someone who’s going to play at Wimbledon!”
Dan gets all misty-eyed and begins a long, tear-jerking monologue about how far I’ve come and how I can’t ever have thought, when I first came to the Indoor Tennis Centre, that I’d end up playing in a Grade 1. Both Dan and Josh offer to come and support me.
The only person who isn’t impressed is Margaret.
“You should do it too,” I say to her, knowing how much she loves Wimbledon, how obsessed she is with everything about it. “I mean, you love going to watch tennis there, why not play? It’s literally thirty-eight quid. You get to go in the actual changing rooms and everything.”
“That’s not the point, though, is it?” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a Grade 1. It’s not for players like us. It’s for nationally ranked players.”
“Yes, well, I’m sure if enough of them sign up I’ll get thrown out,” I say.
But everyone else I tell is very excited, and no one listens when I say that all I did was press a button, that they could enter too if they really wanted to.
•
Tuesday evening I’m back in Canterbury for my first ladies’ match for Polo. I’m playing with Alison Meakin and our opponents are Knoll B, from Orpington. I hit with Alison to warm up and she complains that she won’t know what to do if there’s no pace on the ball. It’s the usual rant about dibbly-dobblers.
The poor old Knoll B team is a bit cobbled together. They don’t exactly whack the ball that hard, but Alison and I cope fine. We beat the first pair 6–0, 6–0. It’s my first proper double bagel in ladies’ doubles and I feel a little bad about it. When we shake hands over the net I say to Sylvia, the better of their two players and who was obviously having a bad day, that the score-line doesn’t reflect the actual match, and that they didn’t play that badly.
“I am disgusted with myself” is all she says.
The next pair go down 6–0 as well. At the next changeover they say things like, “Well, of course, we don’t really play tennis, usually. We were just roped in.” That, combined with my sudden obsessive need for Alison and me not to drop a game, gets them the next two. Then we close it out to win the second set 6–2.
Apart from the fact that I have not had my serve for the whole evening I’ve played well. I’ve sent some lovely little topspin rollers down the line behind the net player on the forehand side. In fact, I think I might like the deuce side again. Anyway, afterward I am happy. I’ve made an impression, perhaps. I help the stand-in captain fill in the result form. I drive her home. She can’t believe I’m forty-two, or that I’ve only really been playing seriously for a year. I wonder whether anyone will complain that I was too good, and whether Lucille would have dropped those two games.
•
I’m doing Pilates twice a week now, and I’m thinking of increasing it to three times. I’m playing tennis almost every day. On Wednesday I’m feeling tired and achy and tearful, I almost certainly do have PMS, but I play well with Dan that afternoon. Then I have a coffee with David Flusfeder and discover that his book launch clashes with Nottingham. I’ve also recently found out that it clashes with the graduation ceremonies of two of my favorite PhD students. I should withdraw, but I don’t.
I text Graydon in the evening to see if he’s on for tomorrow.
Can you do the morning? he texts back. I know you said afternoon, but I want to go kayaking.
I tell him I have Pilates in the morning. I explain that I have matches Saturday and Sunday and a tournament the following week, but what about Friday afternoon? No, he’s playing Josh in the morning and won’t want to play again in the afternoon.
Next week, then, he texts. I am disappointed. Now I have no tennis for Thursday or Friday. But on Thursday morning it’s raining and I guess kayaking is off because he texts me first thing to say he can play in the afternoon.
When I arrive at the leisure center just before three, Dolly is on reception, looking oddly glamorous.
“He’s already gone down, already paid. You don’t have to do anything,” she says.
“Your hair looks nice,” I say.
She fluffs it up a bit. “I washed it this morning. Anyway, that man, what’s his name?”
“Graydon.”
“Yeah, Graydon. He’s really excited about playing with you. He said so.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, and when I said the booking was for two hours he said ‘Even better’ with this kind of, well, look on his face. I think you’ve made an impression there.”
“Wow. Hope I don’t disappoint him.”
“You won’t.”
•
The tennis center is full of French kids sitting in circles gossiping. Some of them are playing a sort of tennis in jeans and sneakers. Graydon is talking on his phone to someone about an audition. We go over to Court 4. Jack Law is just leaving.
“Do you know him?” Graydon asks.
“Yeah, from the odd daytime session,” I say. “Do you go to those?”
Graydon makes a face. “I used to,” he says.
“But you’re too good now, right?”
I’d like to say that’s it’s only Graydon who brags for the next five minutes, but I am guilty too. I say how I used to play Lee but my winning easily each time was probably getting embarrassing for him. Graydon talks about playing with Josh. Says again that he takes a couple of games off him now and then. Aces him. I brag a bit about beating Paul Gregory in the box leagues.
“You beat a man?” says Graydon.
“I’ll beat you if you like,” I say. But this is not what happens.
We start hitting. I’m nervous, as I always am playing someone new who I suspect might be better than me. My grip is all over the place. I launch a couple of two-handed backhands skyward. A few nice forehands, though, and a couple of good volleys. Then the backhand again.
“Haven’t you got one of those nice hard backhands?” he says. “Hasn’t Josh taught you that yet?”
“Oh, he has,” I say, laughing. “But it still falls apart under any kind of pressure. I’m still transitioning from the one-hander.”
We play a bit more. I hit a better backhand.
“Good! That’s better,” shouts Graydon. I hope this doesn’t go on.
I’m really keen to experiment with playing from the baseline, rather than behind it, so I move in, looking to drive volley anything that’s long and wondering if I’m capable of half-volleys or doing anything at all with low balls that land at my feet. I dig a couple out and feel quite good about the resulting shots. A drive volley or two.
“Why are you standing there?” asks Graydon.
I laugh. “Oh, just pretending to be Eugenie Bouchard,” I say. “Even though I don’t really like her that much. Just trying to be a bit more attacking, you know?”
“Sorry?” he calls. “Can’t hear you.”
We move toward the net. I repeat what I said.
“I can go back to being Rafa if you prefer,” I say.
“You do like standing way back behind the baseline,” he says. “I talked about it with Josh. And by the time you hit the ball it’s so low. It’s around your feet.”
I sigh. “Yes, well, I hoped I wasn’t still doing that.”
“You are!” He demonstrates. “It’s like all the way down here when you hit it.”
“Right. Well, thus coming to the baseline.”
We sit down and have a drink. I ask him how he takes games off Josh. What’s his game plan? “Oh, I just wait for the unforced errors,” he says. From Josh? Right.
“The thing I like about hitting with you,” Graydon says, “is because the pace is so much slower I have much more time to think about my shots.”
We agree to begin playing points. Immediately Graydon’s whole style changes. I am standing behind the baseline waiting for his hard-hit crosscourt shots. But instead I get a drop shot, and then another one. Real men don’t play drop shots. I have never seen Josh play a drop shot, ever. Real men hit the ball hard and if they want a point they hit it past you. I admit I am angry about drop shots in general. But whatever. Graydon serves pretty big. His second serve is big too. When I do my second serve he just laughs. Which, OK, is sort of fair enough in a way, but also a bit rude.
“So this is the great Scarlett second serve,” he says, moving to the service box line to receive the next one.
I still win my service game. Then he wins his. We’re 1–2 and I’m serving at the other end. He’s a good receiver, that’s for sure. I’ve decided to go back to my harder, flatter serve, but it’s not working on him, and feeling embarrassed about my second serve means I just end up having to hit more of them. He attacks my first serve anyway. My second serves come back as drop shots. I get to deuce but then he breaks my serve and wins his to love. We change again.
“Are you going for winners?” he says. “Or are you just trying to get the ball back?”
“I think I’m just playing,” I say. Although he’s found another button to push.
“Go for your shots,” he says.
I’m still trying to be nice, and polite, and jolly, so I laugh.
“Yeah, sometimes I have to lose the first set before I do that,” I say.
All this is fair enough in one way, but he’s supposed to be the opponent. Opponents are supposed to be quiet. Opponents are supposed to win with dignity if they have to win at all. Opponents are supposed to respect you. I can’t imagine trying to give pointers to Sylvia after beating her 6–0 the other night. She was obviously a good player having a bad day. Why would I want to humiliate someone when I have won anyway? And Paul Gregory. I could have told him to hit the ball deeper, to be more precise, but he knows that. If I’d said anything at all to him I would have felt like an utter cunt.
I get one more game when Graydon is clearly too nervous to close out on his serve. Then we’re into the second set.
“So this is where you start really playing, right?” he says.
But I don’t. I can’t. I’m not enjoying this at all. He is a better player than me. He’s a better player than Dan. I’d like to be able to beat him, but I’m not good enough yet. He is also desperately competitive. He has worked out my weaknesses and is exploiting them. My second serves are still coming back as drop shots. Then finally he hits one that flops into the net.
“Can you try and hit your second serve a bit longer?” he says. “This is ridiculous.”
“Why don’t you hit your drop shot longer?”
My next first serve just misses the back line.
“That’s better!” says Graydon.
“Sorry?”
“That’s a better length.”
“That was my first serve,” I sigh. “Look, would you rather just hit? I mean I really think that this isn’t—”
“Go on,” he says. “Have your second serve.”
Of course it goes in the net. My poor fragile serve, which breaks down with even a mild compliment, let alone a set of outright insults, is now gone. I double-fault on the next two serves. I want to go home. For the next game I just think fuck you and I try to hit the hardest returns I can, but I just end up making my arm hurt. I am lost in the rectangle in which I usually feel so good, so right. Still, it’s OK. I don’t mind losing to a better player; I just wish there weren’t all these mind games. Is he doing it deliberately? He doesn’t have to. He’d be beating me without them. Just maybe 6–4 rather than 6–2. Although it looks as if he’s going to take the second set 6–0.
On the changeover, I’m not happy. But still he chats.
“Those balls I hit long,” he says. “It’s because, well, playing you is just so different from playing with Josh. I mean, when the balls are coming with basically nothing on them it means I have to generate all the pace myself. Then I end up overhitting.”
Did I just hear that right? I did. But I can’t storm off at 5–0 down.
“This is going to be the last game for me,” I say.
It’s only 4:20, but I can’t take any more. I pretend I need something in the office and so I go and stand in there until he’s gone.
“What was all that about?” asks Margaret.
“That man is completely insufferable!” I say.
But Margaret seems busy with her admin and so I leave.
Later that evening Graydon sends me a text message.
Did I upset you somehow? You seemed upset. And was I to infer that you didn’t want to play again?
I wait a few hours and then text him back: I guess I was a tiny bit miffed when you said how slow I play, lack of pace on the ball etc. A few too many comments/observations overall for me! But fair enough—you are a better player. I thought we were more evenly matched than we turned out to be. So I just thought you’d want to find someone else. No hard feelings though! I’ll look forward to your tennis documentary :-)
He texts back immediately.
Lol . . . I think it was my scary critical upbringing surfacing . . . so sorry about that. I’m also very thick-skinned in the sporting arena and forget that others might not be so (being an actor doesn’t help either . . . constant kick-backs and reminders about how mediocre you are).
Lol, I reply. I am the total opposite of all that!
Graydon clearly wants to carry on the conversation. I’m becoming uncomfortable. I mean, surely he knew this was not a date, right? That stuff he said to Dolly—I wasn’t supposed to take that seriously. Surely he knows I have a partner? Maybe not. He keeps texting into the evening, stuff about the film and TV industry and how it compares to books. He is making the point that everyone is brutal and we must all be quite thick-skinned by now, and I am saying that everyone in the book world is really quite thin-skinned. It’s one of those exchanges where he replies immediately and in depth and I take longer and don’t say very much. He’s actually a much nicer guy in text than he was playing tennis, but I’m still not interested. Eventually he says, Let me know if you want to hang out at any time. When I haven’t replied by the next morning, I get a message asking me to leave my half of the booking fee with Josh. When I get around to doing this, Graydon leaves me £3 change for the balls.
•
Saturday is our last Kent league mixed doubles of the season. Dan and I start a bit hesitantly against their first pair, Robert and Annette, but end up beating them 6–3, 6–1. We beat the next pair 6–0, 6–0. Afterward we whack the ball to each other for a bit, waiting for the others to finish. I rip one past Dan.
“Scarlett,” he says, in a whiny, put-on voice. “Can you just try to hit it a bit harder? Otherwise I think I might hit one long.”
Of course I’ve told him all about my exchanges with Graydon.
“You’re quite good. Have you ever thought about becoming a tennis coach?” I say back, which was what someone said to Dan once during a match.
The other team aren’t staying for tea, but we all hang around for a bit, chatting about Cheryl’s new house in France and the best strategy for a second serve. Someone’s put a moustache on Andy Murray. It’s quite realistic: bits of hair that someone found somewhere and stuck to his top lip with a piece of tape. While we drink tea, Adam is cleaning the cupboard and vacuuming the office. Dan takes pictures to prove he’s done it. Apparently Adam and Josh have been told off by Margaret for being such slobs. I ask Dan if he’s playing in the winter leagues with Hayley. If he is, I’m going to have to find someone else to partner me and start grooming them, but then suddenly Dan is asking Adam if he wants to play in our team. “Who would I be playing with?” Adam asks. “Hayley Palmer,” says Dan. “Good partner,” says Adam.
On Saturday night I dream of the box leagues match I’m playing against Nicholas Handley the following morning. We have both beaten poor Paul Gregory 6–0, 6–0 and since Fin Murray isn’t playing, our match is essentially the final of our box. In my dream I lose 6–0, 6–1. I’m up early with a bit of a hangover, eating primal cereal and drinking tea and forcing down some water with electrolytes. The electrolyte tablets do seem to stave off the lower leg cramps I was getting so badly in May and June. I drive off thinking that at least I can’t do worse than I did in my dream. At least I have a chance to do better in real life when the loss is in a dream.
Our match is due to start at 10:00 a.m. We’ve booked one of the indoor hard courts at Polo Farm because there’s a junior tournament taking place on all the outdoor courts. But when I arrive, it seems that the tournament is happening inside as well. Nicholas isn’t pleased. Simon Grieve comes over.
“What’s going on?” he says. “Apparently the system let you book a court regardless of the tournament?”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s for our box leagues match. It’s kind of a final.”
“Right.”
“It took ages to arrange,” I say. “But I suppose we can try and reschedule.”
“No,” says Simon. “If you’ve booked it, you’ve booked it. Just let us know when you’re finishing up.”
Simon gets a couple of kids to help take all the mini-tennis stuff off our court. “Enjoy,” he says.
Maybe this’ll be the time that Simon notices me? I guess they want the court back quickly, but this is not a quick match. We grind out the first set to 5–5 by, rather bizarrely, losing all our service games. I’m using a game plan again, hitting only to his backhand. He comes into the net a lot, but I lob him, just like I did Paul Gregory. I also play some nice forehands down the line, and my usual crosscourt winner. I manage to win a service game at last and then take the first set 7–5.
In the second set Nicholas seems to wilt a bit, and I take full advantage of this. He still loses his serve but I win mine. I’m hitting the ball hard, grunting loudly, generally making a spectacle of myself. I have no idea what I actually look like, but in my head I’m Sharapova, Kvitová, Halep. I want people to look at me and think She’s so good! I win the next set 6–1. Simon comes over but doesn’t say anything about our match. He just starts replacing all the mini-tennis stuff.
•
Josh is obsessed with tennis. He lives for it. I admire and envy his ability to focus all his energy and talent into this one beautiful and pure thing. Whenever I bump into him around the leisure center—as I often do, because like me, he is always there—he is walking fast with a focused, amused look on his face, as if he’s just played the most amazing prank ever. As he walks he plays air-forehands. His knees bend slightly, a bit less than they would if he was playing a real forehand, and he reaches in front of him and swoosh. And again: swoosh. It’s a lovely smooth reaching movement.
In the end, perhaps these imaginary forehands contributed more than anything else to my learning topspin. I explained it to Couze last time I was in Devon, and he was very interested, because he always loved ball games of any sort. I told him how you don’t hit the ball with the racquet in the way you’d imagine, like side to side. Instead, the action involves the racquet being held in front of you like an upside-down frying pan and simply moved from right to left, over the top of the ball. You don’t begin by looking at one face of the racquet and end looking at the other one. Instead, the racquet remains in the same flat, horizontal plane. The top of the racquet at the beginning of the shot stays the top of the racquet at the end of the shot. You never hit the ball exactly, you stroke it: the flat face of the racquet smoothing over the fluff on top of the ball. Josh’s air-forehand always looks as if he’s standing just slightly too far away from his favorite horse and is reaching up and over its flanks, running his hand over the horse’s sleek coat. Or maybe he’s dusting a shelf just above shoulder height but is again standing a little too far away, like something from a dream.
If you were to look closely at Josh doing this, you’d also see his right wrist as it falls down clockwise, loose and seemingly benign as he comes into the shot, then flicking powerfully counterclockwise as he rises up through it. His fingers are splayed to represent the tennis racquet and the whole thing moves in slow motion, wavelike, through the air. If he did it full speed it would look more like a violent slap, but instead it looks beautiful and serene, like the tide coming in, and in, and in.
•
If I were cool I would travel the country with one perfect tennis dress and a spare pair of knickers and I’d just wash everything in my hotel room each evening, no doubt like people used to in the good old days. But everyone knows you can never dry anything in an English hotel room. Also, I do have what I think is a perfect tennis dress but it’s new, and the problem with new clothes is that they might turn out simply not to work, to rub in the wrong place, to make me look fat.
I am trying to transition to white tennis clothes before Walmer, where white is mandatory, and Seniors’ Wimbledon, where I guess it will be too. But I feel odd in all white. I feel fat in all white. So I have lots of white tennis outfits that I have never worn and then one backup non-white outfit and also my new US Open Stella McCartney dress, which is a beautiful kind of gold-brown-nude. At home I would drive to a match in just my tennis skirt, but they are very short. In a taxi I definitely need to wear leggings underneath. In case the swimming pool hotel does not have dead bodies, I have taken my swimming stuff. My laptop, to write my book, even though I also have my iPad. Chargers. Ordinary clothes including stuff for if it’s hot and stuff for if it’s not hot. Two pairs of shoes. Seven pairs of socks. Then there’s all the food. There won’t be gluten-free bread in the hotel, so I have a loaf of that. Bananas. Apples. Peanut butter in squeeze packs. Crackers. Wraps. I could survive in the wilderness for a couple of weeks on what I have in my bag.
The hotel is really nice. It has a large air-conditioned gym, a swimming pool with no dead bodies in it, a sauna, a steam room, and a nice Jacuzzi. There’s one young guy with a couple of tattoos using the gym, then the spa stuff. He tells me how to make the Jacuzzi work properly, and how to get the steam room warmed up. The hotel staff couldn’t be nicer. My room isn’t massive, but it has a little step up to the door which I can use to do my eccentric calf stretches that, along with the electrolytes, seem to be the only thing preventing my awful, debilitating cramping.
All for £50 a night. The only slight problem is that I have arrived just at the beginning of a heat wave, which I love, but more so in my large Victorian house by the seaside. The sun shines into my hotel room all day. I hardly need the sauna.
Nottingham feels like a city of sport. And I belong! I do! My taxi takes me past Trent Bridge on the way to Nottingham Tennis Centre and I feel a new affinity with professional cricketers—sportsmen of all types. For some reason the affinity is with the men rather than the women. I don’t know why.
Nottingham Tennis Centre is impressive. It has a number of indoor and outdoor courts, including its own grass Centre Court with tiered green seating, where locals recently watched Nick Kyrgios beat someone less famous than Rafael Nadal, whom he then beat at Wimbledon. When I arrive there’s a national wheelchair tennis tournament taking place on the outdoor hard courts. It’s all very professional and snazzy. I find the organizer of my tournament, Peter Whitehead, and pay the remaining £1 of my entry fee because for some reason I was only charged £24 at reception.
But there are several snags. Because there’s no official consolation draw, there will be no rankings points for consolation matches. But worse, my over-40 final with Lynn will also only be a ratings match because you need to have more than five people in a draw for ranking points. My dreams are dashed. I should have gone to David’s launch like a true friend. This is my punishment. I go to the café and drink peppermint tea because they have no soya milk. I have not had any real caffeine since this morning. My first match is going to be at 2:30. I’m nervous, but excited.
At 1:30, I go to the locker room. I’ve never spent much time in locker rooms before, but it turns out that these are perfect places for stretching, talking on the phone, listening to music, being naked. They have free toilets. Showers. And a lot of privacy, since girls hardly use locker rooms. After I’m changed, I stretch and dance around, listening to Chiddy Bang. You can do this, I tell myself. You must do this. Since you have betrayed one friend, two PhD students, and at least one colleague in order to be here, you’d better win.
But as soon as I see my opponent, Sumitra, known locally as Sam or Sammie, and described by Peter earlier as “sort of Asian or summat,” it is clear that I won’t win. She has the body I am working toward. Indeed, she has been through that body and come out the other side. She is pure sleek lean muscle. Her legs look like something you’d find on a thoroughbred racehorse, except tiny. She is skinny, cool, exciting-looking. She is wearing Nike, with the same Asics shoes I wear. Today she is rocking them in grape. Tomorrow she will be rocking them in orange. She is, I hardly need to remind myself, a 5.2. I have never seen anyone like her in Kent, where all the county players look like they could double as rugby forwards or tea ladies.
Peter puts us on Centre Court. The sun is shining. It’s such a beautiful setting. There is only one spectator in the stands though: he is with Sammie. Could he be her coach? Her partner? He’s a lot older than her, but then of course my partner is a lot older than me. But he’s not here. I’m on my own. I wish someone could see me playing here. It’s so lovely.
Sammie is left-handed, which is a bugger, given that I am now programmed to keep hitting the ball to the backhand corner of a right-hander. This throws me, but it wouldn’t have been any different if she’d been right-handed. She thrashes me. I do take a couple of her service games to deuce, and win four of mine, but it makes no difference. It’s like playing Vanessa Brill all over again, except Sammie is a lot nicer. Of course, she’s also a lot older. I think she’s closer to thirty-five than forty, but even so. I didn’t know it was possible to be like that at our age. Her body! Her forehand! I want everything Sammie has so, so much.
Toward the end of the match I become aware that there is another spectator in the stands. He has a big camera and a tripod and he’s taking pictures of us. At least, I assume it’s both of us. Suddenly, here on Centre Court, I am not alone. I imagine the flash of one camera bulb and then two—not that you’d even need a flash because of the strength of the sun—and then dozens. I can hear thousands of rapt spectators gasp and sigh and now roar with delight as I play one, then two blistering topspin forehands crosscourt to Sammie’s backhand, saving a match point and pushing the score backward from advantage to deuce, and then forward to my advantage. I get the game, but it’s not enough. The final score is 6–2, 6–2.
Just before we shake hands at the net, Sammie presses a button on her sports watch.
“One hour forty-eight minutes,” she says. “One thousand and fifty calories.”
Oh, well, at least I kept her playing for a while. Does playing tennis really burn that many calories, though? It can’t possibly. If it did I’d look like Sammie, and I definitely don’t.
The photographer is here from Nike, apparently. Sammie—wait for it—models for Nike. Dear God. She is everything I ever dreamed of—or didn’t know was possible to dream of. Her partner is named John. I guess he’s in his early sixties. While the photographer gets Sammie to pose back on the court, John tells me that the match was much closer than the score-line suggests, which is kind and, I suppose, almost true. When she’s finished being photographed, Sammie asks me if I want a hit the next morning on the grass courts. Sounds good, I say. We exchange numbers.
Back at the hotel I get in the sauna and then have a swim. I see myself in the gym mirrors on the way out. I look like a wet, fat woman who is literally washed up. Over my dinner of chicken madras with vegetables and a large glass of red wine, I read the Andre Agassi book I’ve brought with me. It’s got to be the greatest tennis memoir ever written. The first scene is the best piece of sports writing I’ve ever encountered and ends with Andre Agassi and Marcos Baghdatis, having played the most difficult match imaginable, lying almost dead on adjacent massage tables in the locker room, holding hands.
After dinner it’s too hot to sleep, and it’s noisy outside with drunken guys coming out of a club, so I lie on the bed naked and drink water and read more until finally, at about 3:00 a.m., the curtains start to move in the faint breeze and I realize that at last outside it is silent.
Sammie picks me up the next morning at 11:30 in a very flash Land Rover. She is wearing Stella McCartney for Adidas. Not from this season, some much cooler season from another galaxy. The top is pink with STELLA MCCARTNEY FOR ADIDAS written on it in nonchalant italics. The shorts are yellow. She looks amazing. Why is she wearing Adidas when she’s some kind of brand ambassador for Nike? It’s uncertain.
When we get to the NTC, Alexandra Valokova is just finishing off what looks like a whitewash against Edwina Jackson. The final set is 6–0. The first was 6–1. Peter says a little grumpily that Sammie and I can’t hit on the grass courts now because there are too many matches going on. When I follow him into his office, he starts grumbling about Sammie and “people like that” demanding too much. What does he mean? Is he being racist? Something else? Sammie does kind of swan around like she owns the place, but why not? I mean, just look at her! Then Peter suddenly says that I could have a consolation draw match with Edwina now if she’ll agree to it, so I chase her on her way into the café. She’s thrilled to have another match, especially as I suggest it might be on Centre Court again.
I feel a bit like one of the eagles circling overhead, my prey in sight. It is extremely hot. Edwina looks a bit knackered. Surely, surely this means I’ll have a chance against her? All I want is a win, dear universe. Just one little teeny-tiny win. We are not assigned Centre Court in the end, but instead Court 3, which is round the back of Centre Court tucked away in a forgettable corner in front of some loud and dusty roadworks. It’s pretty grim, but never mind.
I win the toss and decide to serve. I imagine that Edwina won’t be so silly as to put me at the sunny end, since she’ll have to serve there next. Just to make sure, I say something along those lines. She shrugs. “I think I’d like to start at the other end anyway.” The stupid cow has just put me to serve in the sun! But I am the stupid one really. I should have chosen the non-sunny end and let her choose to either serve in it herself or give me the serve. But whatever, it’s too late now.
I feel like I should beat Edwina the way Alexandra just did, with crisp clean winners sparkling through the heat. And I do, more or less, until I am 4–1 up. But then we get into a few long, timid rallies that aren’t much better than the ones I used to play. We are fighting over deuces when I should be hammering her into the ground. The sun is much hotter now, and there is no cloud cover. Edwina is one of those players who loses track of the score easily, but then reacts badly when she finds out what it is, rolling her eyes as if I just decided quite randomly that it would be 40–love, rather than winning three points in a row completely fairly. This has begun putting me off to the extent that I am no longer reaching 40–love easily at all. In fact, I have started wishing this would end.
I lose the next game and it’s 4–2. Not a disaster, but I need to close this out.
In the next game she quickly gets to 40–15 on her serve. Blast.
“Forty fifteen,” I say, as she moves up to serve on the deuce side for the next point. She steps backward, clearly in a huff.
“Sorry, what’s the score?” she says, shaking her head as if to remove the unpleasant sound that has just entered it.
“Forty fifteen,” I repeat.
“What?” she says, shaking her head again and sighing as if I’d given her a large utility bill for a service she canceled three years ago. But she is in the lead and I don’t understand what’s wrong with her. I mean, what’s not to like about 40–15?
“I’m sorry,” I say, “but what exactly do you think the score is? Unless it’s game, I mean, I don’t even understand—”
A light flickers. “Oh,” she says. “Forty fifteen.” And then she wins the sodding game.
Behind us the machines whir and churn and dig up bits of road for Nottingham’s new tram line. It is loud and dusty and still so very, very hot. I thought this match would be easy but it isn’t. I start hating myself. I start tightening. Edwina is winning more points now, but because I am tightening, they are longer points and she is clearly tiring. After one long rally, she goes and stands by the fence for a minute or so. After another, she looks like she might pass out. I am finding these exchanges uncomfortably hot and tiring too, but I don’t let her see that. I jump up and down a few times so she is under no illusions about how fit I am, how much more I have left in my tank. After I win the first set 6–3, she retires.
I won! Yay. Also: I hate myself a little bit. But she’s an 8.1 and I don’t care. I finally have a qualifying win. At last.
I go to the locker room and have a shower. Then I go to the café and eat a baked potato with beans. I drink tea. I eat an apple. I watch a men’s match. I watch Lynn Coppell beating Emma Kingzett 6–4, 6–3. Lynn looks like a very strong opponent. Oh, well. I guess I’ll just use our game to practice something. Maybe I’ll go all-out aggressive this time, since it probably won’t matter.
Back in the locker room, I change into my next outfit: whites with a neon pink bra. I’m trying to feel energized for this afternoon, but I feel sort of nothing. I probably shouldn’t have come here at all.
And then I go out onto Centre Court and completely thrash Lynn.
I’m not 100 percent sure how I do it. I get eleven games in a row but then it hits me what’s happening and I can’t close out on my serve at 5–0 in the second. In the end it’s 6–0, 6–2. It’s a fantasy: the kind of perfect game you play in your head before going to sleep. I slip through the points like a knife through butter. Every time I want to play a perfect shot, I do. Crosscourt winner? Yup. Down the line? OK, then! There’s something magical about the whole match. It’s pure joy.
It’s different: I’m different. But how? What did I change? The main thing, I guess, is that I decided to go for my shots, to have fun, treat the game like a practice, and just hit the ball as hard as possible. I particularly attacked Lynn’s serve, on the basis that she should win her serve anyway and therefore I only needed to break twice to win the match. So, I thought, why not have fun trying to blast it?
I also tried to stay in my defensive V the way Josh told me. I’m not sure my attacking V was as well organized, but side-stepping diagonally meant that I got to most of her deeper balls. She whacked a few winners down my backhand side, but my movement around the court meant she was forced to take more risks on the angles and a lot of them went out.
I was inexplicably loose and relaxed. My muscles felt good. I just kept thinking that the match didn’t matter and I wasn’t going to win it anyway so I might as well have fun. And I did. I enjoyed it more than any other match I have ever played. As soon as I come off—feeling happier than I ever have after a game of tennis, possibly ever—I get a cup of tea and call Rod. Sweat drips down my phone.
“I won,” I tell him. “I won!”
“Congratulations,” he says, and I can hear the joy and pride in his voice.
“I can’t believe it!” I say.
“How did you do it? Were you aggressive?”
“Yes,” I say. “I think so. I don’t really know how I did it.”
Lynn drives me back to my hotel, which is lovely of her. Indeed, everyone here is lovely. I’m suddenly so glad I came. When I get back to the hotel I text everyone. Of course, I’ve been in constant touch with Josh all day. At one point he even sent me a video of him hitting forehands. Copy and repeat, his message said. Is he a little bit conceited sometimes? I don’t care. He now congratulates me and says that if I could get one more win against an 8.1, I could ask the LTA to bump me up to a 7.2 before the end of the season. So no pressure for tomorrow, then.
As soon as I’ve finished dinner, I go to my hotel room and start writing notes and trying to analyze what I’ve done. How did I win? What can I learn from this match that I could repeat? What could have made a difference? Was it the baked potato? The apple? The cup of tea just before the match? Was it because I wore white? I did my hair differently today: a rare ponytail. When did I last play in a ponytail? Maybe it helped somehow? My pink bra. My stretching session in the gym this morning. Playing another match first, but not a long one. The Destroyer, my beloved Destroyer, the racquet I know and feel is different from all the others, and not just because of the red heart dampener that is its only observable defining feature.
I literally have no fucking idea.
•
Sammie texts me first thing the next morning to see if I want a hit at the tennis club just around the corner from my hotel. It’s raining quite steadily. She picks me up, even though it’s a two-minute walk, and I’m glad not to get wet. Today she is in a white Mercedes. She is wearing another pair of Asics shoes I have almost bought: today’s are pink and blue. All her shoes, I learn, are Asics Speed Gels, like my green ones and my orange ones. I suddenly hate my chaste white shoes, bought because I thought I should have them for the grass season, because they are restrained, girlish.
With her pink and blue shoes Sammie is rocking the tiniest pair of shorts I have ever seen on a woman over fourteen and a pink Nike tank top that looks worn, loved, distressed in that perfect way I remember from when I was fifteen and wanted all my clothes to look like that—in some way, I still do. She is thin, she is beautiful. I have the biggest girl crush on her. And she’s so nice.
We start hitting. It’s great because we both hit hard, both accurately. One ball lasts forever. It feels like hitting with Josh. Unlike Josh these days, Sammie praises some of my shots and even compliments my ball awareness.
“You always know where it’s going!” she says. “I never know where it’s going!”
I point out that she did OK the other evening. We practice crosscourt on both sides and then Sammie suggests that we each serve a basket of balls to the other, who can practice her return. Sounds cool—but I’ve never done it before. It’s amazing! Waiting to return serve after serve I feel more focused and Zen-like than I ever have on a tennis court. I love this: the poise, the concentration. There is nothing in the world apart from me and the serves coming toward me. Breathe. Hit. Breathe. Hit. I return all her serves hard and unselfconsciously. There are no points here, only serves. But I realize at some point that many of these returns would have been winners.
Afterward we chat. She’s so friendly and open and lovely. We talk about upcoming tournaments and who has entered what. I go on a bit about Tunbridge Wells and Seniors’ Wimbledon. She’s worried about her ranking and rating because she hasn’t entered very much in the coming months.
“I’m still recovering,” she says, looking down at the dark green acrylic floor.
“Recovering?”
“Yeah. From chemotherapy.”
Fuck. How is that possible? I’ve never seen anyone look fitter or more healthy and strong. Fuck.
•
This afternoon I’m playing Emma Kingzett, whom Lynn beat so easily yesterday. Back at the hotel I have a chicken salad with fries for lunch. I only eat half the fries, but it’s too much. As soon as I finish, I know I have eaten the wrong thing. I should have had a baked potato, but the hotel doesn’t do them.
When I get to the NTC the rain has cleared and it is hot, very hot, and the cloud cover soon gives way to full sun. On Centre Court Alexandra Valokova and Maia Dunn are wrapping up a close match that Maia eventually takes on a tiebreak. I decide at the last minute to wear my new white Stella McCartney dress rather than my orange and blue skirt and top. My dress exposes a lot more flesh but makes me look more of a badass, I think. And it is grass season, after all. Maia is rocking a white Stella McCartney dress and looks awesome in it. I want to look like that too, although maybe not quite so intense. And I don’t want to attract insects. I slather on the sunscreen and hope for the best.
We are on Court 2, which is next to Court 3, which is where I had my disastrous start against Edwina yesterday. The roadworks have now moved on a little bit so they are exactly behind Court 2. The sun is blazing. I win the toss and choose to begin at the non-sunny end. I imagine that Emma will then give me the serve too, but she elects to serve into the sun. OK, I think. Your choice.
But then she wins her serve. And mine. And her next one. I was worried that she would come out a different player today and she has. But I have the Elbow and I have it bad. I can barely hit a forehand. I can’t serve. I keep thinking about how I’m not going to beat her love and love now. Surely the only headline worth having from a game like this is love and love. I keep trying not to think about the LTA and the possibility of going up to 7.2, which I want so much. Yesterday, on Centre Court, playing Lynn, I felt like a true badass. I came out hitting hard. I convinced her to lose. Everything I did screamed winner. But now I’m wondering if Emma thinks I’m an idiot, with my dress and my grunt. I think I’m so amazing but I can’t be because she is suddenly 4–1 up.
This set of tennis is possibly the least enjoyable I have ever played. It is so hot, and I like the heat, but our points are long and I am increasingly worried about heatstroke. I’ve just read about Andre Agassi vomiting into the courtside flowerpot at some hot tournament in the US and hallucinating through the last few games of his match. I do not want that to happen to me.
Emma plays like I played a few months ago. She plays a bit like Siobhan Clarke, but without the edge. Now I find myself also playing like I played a few months ago. Hit it! I say to myself in Dan’s voice. It doesn’t work. Hit harder! I try, which is what Andre Agassi’s father always said to him. But I cannot convince myself to loosen up. I stayed an extra night in the hotel for this match. I could have gone home a day early to Rod. Thoughts swirl like puke in a sink. The LTA. Josh. I want to be able to text Josh with another win. But soon, conversations begin in my head about my loss. How I will explain it. Hit it! I somehow claw my way back to 4–4, then 5–4. I am dripping with despair. Her serve isn’t that good but I have no return this afternoon, so we’re back to 5–5. Eventually we end up on a tiebreak that really could go either way. I feel like I am sweating blood when I eventually take it 11–9. If that isn’t winning ugly, I don’t know what is.
For the first game of the next set, her serve, which I win, I feel happy and calm for the only time in the match. I did it. I won a set. Surely she will now cave in and give me the second one, just like Nicholas did in Canterbury. I can breathe. I can hit forehands. But then she breaks my serve and it’s fucking game on again. What am I going to do? I know what I need to do. The problem is how to convince myself to do it. OK, I tell myself. If we stay out here for two hours plus, that means heatstroke. Do I need to grind a win out of this set? No. I only need to win a championship tiebreak. I don’t have an amazing record with those, although I won the last one I played. And I won the tiebreak in the first set here, which gives me tiebreak momentum.
So here’s what I am going to do. I am going to play totally recklessly, wildly, with no thoughts of winning. I am going to finish every point as fast as I can, win or lose. Even if I give this set away 6–1, I can go for it in the tiebreak. Are you listening, Self 1? Please cooperate. Are you in there, deranged monkey brain? This must make sense even to you. I try to unleash myself and quickly hit a couple of balls wide, but then I’m finding the lines and—for fuck’s sake, she’s getting everything back. These points are almost as long as the other ones were, but I’m winning them. I keep winning them until I am 5–1 up. She serves. I think—listen up, Self 1, pay attention, monkey—that I am four points away from a cold shower, a cup of tea, and a phone call to the LTA. Emma hasn’t won a service game for a long time, and her only game in this set is a break. But I can’t convince myself to hit hard on points this important, so she wins it. So now I am serving for the match. Guess what? I can’t do it. It’s 5–2 now. In my head I see 5–3, 5–4, 5–5, 5–6, 5–7. No. I am too hot. Please let this end. Please, please let me win.
I am not enjoying this match at all.
It’s 0–30 after my first two serves. I hate myself. I’m still four points away from a cup of tea. Maybe even more. Maybe I really am going to lose this match. Then Emma’s next deep ball falls just on the wrong side of the baseline. I’m almost 100 percent sure of this. As my finger goes up to indicate that it’s out, I suddenly doubt myself. Should I be calling it in? I honestly don’t know whether it was in or out. It was definitely more out than in and my gut said it was out so I am sticking with out. But if I was up 5–0, would I call it in? Are some of my calls therefore too kind? Or am I simply a disgusting cheat? I think she might challenge, but she doesn’t.
OK. 15–30. Three points from a cup of tea, cold shower, etc. Earlier, on a key point, I managed my ad-side ace. It was so close to being on the wrong side of the line that I was virtually serving again from the deuce side before she had a chance to call it out. It’s my best serve. I try it again now. It nicks the top of the net and lands on the wrong side. Second serve. Out. 15–40. On my serve. At 5–2. She wins the game.
I am sweating badly now. My towel is on my chair, but if there is another changeover it will mean she’s taken it to 5–4, which will mean I have to kill myself. I have to win with what I’ve got. An almost see-through dress, no liquid chalk on my hands, despair, gloom, desperation. She gets to 40–15 again. How the fuck is she doing this? Because she is the one now loose and going for her shots. I am floundering away playing badly from the back while she is playing well at the net. When she comes to the net, I put up easy smashes for her. When I come to the net, she passes me. But I can’t lose this set, not now. I know I said I was prepared to do it, but I can’t. So I accept that these last points are going to be long. I send her one way, then the other. Get her in her backhand corner and start sending rollers down the line: one she gets back, two she gets back, but the third is so beautifully placed that she can’t touch it. 40–30. Please let me win this point. Please. She hits a shot wide and it’s deuce.
I am two points from the match. Two very long points. I squander three match points before finally sending her off court with a backhand that she hits back for an easy volley into the open court, which I don’t miss. I’ve won. When we shake hands at the net, I tell her that was the hardest match I’ve ever played. Is that true? I guess I didn’t have cramp, which is something. No blisters, no injuries. The heatstroke has not yet begun. Nothing was stopping me winning except myself, and that’s why it was so fucking hard. And all credit to Emma—today she was not the player I saw going down to Lynn so easily the day before. She’s gracious, but I can tell she hasn’t enjoyed this match either.
Afterward, I should feel amazing. I don’t. Winning matches is great, but it also feels as if someone has given you a small, fragile bird to carry around all day. If you open your hands too much it will fly away, but close them too much and you will crush it. The bird is beautiful, valuable, but holding on to it is exhausting.
I go off to the locker room and get naked. This time I am not alone, but I find I like the gritty femaleness of the other bodies around me. We are strong sportswomen and we smell of sweat and toil and, in some cases, victory. Then I get the cup of tea I have been promising myself and go to watch Sammie beat Lynn 6–1, 6–1. Sammie misses a lot of shots and comes off saying she has played badly. She is a perfectionist, like me. I know exactly how she feels.
I sit next to Maia, who I’d assumed was some kind of protégé of Sammie’s but is in fact a 2.1 who hits with Sammie in her spare time. Is she also some kind of coach? Right now she’s filling in a kind of graph—dots in squares, a bit like a cricket scorebook—where she records every shot Sammie plays. And here is something else I realize I want: the nerdy absorption, the utter focus on tennis to the exclusion of all else. How simple life would be if you only loved one thing, and it loved you back. Didn’t Heidegger say something like that? Or was it Hegel?
Maia has a wrist support on that looks better than mine. I ask her about it.
“Tendinitis,” she says. She clocks my wrist support. “You got it too?”
“Something like that.”
“If I can’t stop playing and rest it I might be out for a year,” she says.
Imagine.
I love tennis. I love competing. I love playing the way I did yesterday. I felt strong, powerful, almost Amazonian. But I am so terrified of matches like the one I had today. I don’t want to play like that again, ever. But of course every time there is any kind of pressure on me there is that possibility. I need to learn to relax. Urgently.
After the match, I go for a drink with Sammie and John. He arrives to pick us up in a black open-top 1976 Porsche. When I get in, the car is full of brand-new-with-tags Nike tennis clothes in size XS. In the footwell there is a pile of fresh-looking packets of Wilson natural gut strings. I begin to say that I didn’t realize Sammie used Wilson strings but then I realize that these have been bought today, as a result of a conversation I had about strings with Sammie this morning. I start saying that if she wants strings like mine she should get Champion’s Choice Hybrid but then I realize that they are rich and they have a stringer who can turn a racquet around in a day, so it probably doesn’t matter that the natural gut strings break more easily.
Sammie is sweaty from her match, so we go to my hotel bar, which is anonymous and unglamorous. We get a table in the window. John asks what I want to drink. I can’t decide. I need something but I don’t want to drink too much. I ask for a gin and tonic but forget to ask him to make it a single.
“So, you’re an 8.2,” John says to me when he gets back. “You had fun being an 8.2, didn’t you, Sam?”
“Yes,” she agrees. “That was one of the most fun ratings.” She sighs. “Less pressure than now.”
“She’s on her way to 1.1,” says John.
“How do you do it, though?” I ask. “Like, you’re really good at winning matches. I’m stuck on 8.2. How do I get higher?”
“It’s all about lateral footwork,” says John.
“Right,” I say. “My coach says it’s all about defensive and attacking Vs.”
“Well, her coach says it’s all about side to side, not back and forward.”
“Scarlett has such good movement!” says Sammie enthusiastically. “And did I say she’s a writer? She’s writing a book.”
“How much coaching do you have?” John asks me.
“Maybe two or three hours a week? I have a hitting partner too.”
“I do five sessions with a tennis coach every week,” says Sammie.
“The head coach,” says John. “Fifty quid an hour. She also has personal training three times a week. And every day in the gym doing footwork, of course.”
“Amazing,” I say.
I calculate quickly in my head. That’s going to be more than £500 a week. Fucking hell. Then again, how far off that am I, really, with my travel and hotels and wrist supports and tennis dresses? Where will it get us in the end? We’re all going to get old; we’re all going to die. Even Sammie can’t stay young and ripped forever. Especially Sammie. What will happen when Nike stops sending her free clothes? And when will that happen? Is this a one-bingo-wing-and-you’re-out kind of situation? On the other hand, a part of my mind still yearns to know how I can get Nike to send me free clothes. I’m a bit fat, but sort of healthy?
I really enjoy talking with Sammie and John about tennis, but I’m also happy when they move on to a Thai restaurant and I am left alone to have a large glass of red and a beef madras with chips and a side of seasonal vegetables. I wonder what a real athlete would order from this menu and how far off I am. But I am not a real athlete. Or am I? Is Sammie?
Back in my room I ring Rod and bore him with every moment of my excruciating victory. I am bored with it myself. I should be able to blast a player like Emma 6–0, 6–0. I don’t know why it is so important to me to have to completely annihilate the opposition. I’m not sure it even comes down to being super-competitive, because I’m not sure I am. It’s more that I want to win without trying. Win quickly, cleanly, and decisively, then get the hell out of there. I want my wins to be pleasurable and easy, not painful and hard.
It’s still very hot but there are storms brewing. I need to have my hotel windows open, but tonight there are suddenly insects, lots of them, all gathered in a troublingly big cloud outside the bathroom window. They start coming in. Mosquitos, I think. Cellulitis. Soon they are on the walls, on the ceiling, little black dots everywhere. I cover myself in insect repellent and lie there on the bed with my skin and eyes burning, imagining waking up covered in mosquitos sucking my blood. I decide to ask reception if I can change to a mosquito-free room. But are they even mosquitos? I google images of biting and non-biting insects and I am none the wiser. I go on a BBC site that has a list of all insects and spiders in the UK that bite. There’s the false widow I’ve heard so much about, its shiny abdomen decorated like a muted Fabergé egg. I didn’t know that ladybugs bite. There is not a picture of my insect.
I switch off the light that is attracting them and lie down. My neck burns from all the insect repellent. There’s a party going on over the street. It’s loud: music and laughing. Fuck this. I sit up again and shop for tennis clothes on the internet until there are literally none I haven’t seen, and then read more of my Andre Agassi book. He’s having about as much fun playing tennis as I am. But he’s earning millions—and of course winning—and I am doing it simply because I love it. I do love it. I do.
But I know that unlike Andre, if I’d been sent to my local tennis center aged nine to play a guy for a $10,000 bet my father had made, I would have lost. There’s a part of me that still believes that if you want something hard enough you can achieve it: that if you believe in yourself, you are invincible. Perhaps all it takes is to win a couple of times to believe you’re a winner, and then you just carry on winning, because you believe you will.
So much of sport is what we believe. Do I believe in myself? As I throw the ball up to serve, do I believe it will be in? Be an ace? Sports rituals come about because people believe they help—like Nadal’s drink bottles, Sharapova’s dark stares at her racquet strings, or Steve Smith’s strange rituals between balls on the cricket field. Rugby players might be the worst for this: the goal kickers with their desperate chicken dances and awkward hair-grooming. Of course, if you believe something will help, it does: there have been many, many studies on the placebo effect. But the opposite is also true: there’s a lesser-known phenomenon known as the “nocebo” effect where cursed people obediently die, misdiagnosed people develop the relevant illness, and if Nadal’s bottles aren’t exactly where they always are, he will lose the point.
Back when I used to be into video games, I couldn’t play anything where you had to go through the game with one life and when you were dead you were out, like in a tennis tournament. High-pressure stuff in arcades where you’d put in your quarter and see how far you could get on it? Totally not for me, not with my nerves. Each GAME OVER meant starting from the beginning again, which I could not bear. I preferred games where you could shore up extra lives. If I had a new Super Mario game, the first thing I’d do was to gather ninety-nine extra lives, the maximum you could have. Only then could I start. But if I lost even one life, I’d get so worried and I’d become obsessed with replacing it, much more so than actually going on with the game.