You can only start at the beginning if you know what the beginning is, but maybe this will do. It’s a Wednesday in July 2013. I’ve arrived at the Indoor Tennis Centre for a tennis lesson. I last had a tennis lesson when I was fourteen, far away in the sweltering heat of Mexico, not long before I gave up playing seriously forever. I have just turned forty-one. I am wearing blue cotton Adidas shorts and a striped cotton tank top I hope doesn’t make me look fat. I won’t wear cotton for very long in this story—indeed, I will have to move on to “performance” fabrics quite soon—but it is how I begin. I have an old tennis racquet that cost about £25 from a funny little shop in Canterbury. The coach is a large, cheerful guy who is bouncing around teaching some kid, with brightly colored hoops and targets everywhere. He is running so late I almost say something—almost, but not quite. I am trying not to feel intimidated. This place is huge. Serious. Professional. Everything’s green and smells of rubber or acrylic. There is a bulletin board with team lists printed on it. Ladies 1. Mixed 1. Ladies 2. Imagine . . . But I don’t let myself. Not yet.
My turn, at last. I have no idea how much is wrong with the way I hit the ball. My whole technique is modeled on the way the cool older guys used to play at the local hard courts in Chelmsford when I was a kid. Flat, low, skimming the net. Nowadays everyone plays the ball earlier, harder, with topspin. But I don’t yet know any of this. I am just pleased that I can hit the ball at all, that I can keep a rally going with this coach.
I stand a long way behind the baseline, waiting for the ball to come to me. It flies through the air (spinning over and over itself, although I cannot yet read spin), then bounces: beautiful, poetic, mathematical, as if all the laws of the universe were distilled into this one simple movement. It hits the ground, arcs, peaks, and then begins to drop. It’s at the very last moment that I hit it, trying to remember what I learned all those years ago about “following through.” I’m fast around the court, and I get to every ball, but I don’t yet realize that this coach, Dan, is playing easy for me, playing down to me, because at this moment for him I am some random woman who has come along to maybe improve her game enough to be allowed to play with her husband, or her slightly better friend, or to join some social tennis club.
Of course my ambitions are greater than this, my ambitions that will soon build and eventually collapse like a vast, terrifying avalanche. At this moment, though, I just want to impress him. Embarrassingly, bizarrely, I want him to declare that he’s never seen anyone so talented in all his years of coaching and . . . I don’t know. Ask me to come back? Ask me to train for one of the teams? Just to praise one of my shots would be a start.
On the next court a younger, thinner blond coach is feeding balls from a basket to a dark-haired woman who keeps laughing and missing her shots. I am better than her, I think. I am not the worst person in here. Their session ends before ours, and the blond guy grins and apologizes as he walks behind me with his basket of balls and his beaten-up old Dunlop racquet with the leather grip that I will later learn makes his fingers bleed when he plays in tournaments. The woman follows him, still laughing. Dan calls to her, something like, “How did you get on?” and she says, “Oh, I beat him again and he just can’t handle it.” It’s pretty clear that he has let her win. Is this what coaches do with ladies who have £25 to spare for a lesson with them? Immediately, a yearning begins in me. One day I’m going to beat one of these coaches for real. I want to face one of these guys as their equal. I want them to want to hit with me.
A year or so later, when I am training for Seniors’ Wimbledon, hitting with Dan as a friend, as his mixed doubles partner, he will look at me and say, “Did you have any idea, on that first day you came in here, that first session you had with me? Did you even think that you’d be here, that you’d have achieved all of this?” Of course I did—sort of—but I won’t say that. By then I’ll be thinking that whatever I achieve isn’t good enough, and I’ll be wracked with doubts and terrors and problems with my forehand, with my desperate need to win.
As I leave after that first session with my cheap racquet in my cheap bag, walking up the stairs feeling happy and complete in some way I haven’t experienced for a long time, aching to play again as soon as possible but with various muscles beginning to go into spasm, I realize that someone’s running up the stairs behind me. It’s the blond guy. The other coach.
“You were hitting the ball nicely down there,” he says.
“Thanks,” I say. And then: “I’m Scarlett, by the way.”
“Josh,” he says. “See you again soon, I hope.”
He passes me, and carries on running to wherever he’s going.