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Luke had pretty quick responses. Instead of giving him a black eye as I’d fully intended to do, he managed to leap sideways and roll until he was sitting on the ground a metre from where he’d started. He glared at me, rubbing his elbow that had taken the brunt of the fall, and swearing loudly.
The sight of him drained my anger away and I started laughing.
Luke gave a reluctant grin in return, then got to his feet, and dusted himself off.
“Well, at least we now know you can hit a ball, and you got some real power in it too.”
I could have kicked myself at his words. I’d let my anger take over and I’d almost given away far too much, Luke wasn’t stupid and any more displays of ability like that were going to make him suspicious.
“Just luck,” I said, “I usually miss it more times than I hit it.”
I would be very careful for the rest of the lesson to make sure I did exactly that.
We spent the next half an hour with Luke working on my stance and me trying not to fall into old habits where each of the stances he was trying to teach me just came naturally. Instead, I had to make a big effort to put my feet wrong, to hold my back wrong, and to move my arms all wrong too. It was actually harder work than I thought it would be and I could see Luke was flagging as well. He was close to giving up, but I didn’t want to do anything that might show my true ability again today, so eventually I suggested that perhaps I should send balls to him to hit instead? I could see he was pleased by that idea; after all, I was sure the only reason he had agreed to coach me was so he could get some extra tennis practice himself. So at least I was giving him some of that which would encourage him to continue with our lessons.
I lobbed the ball safely, slowly testing his strengths and weaknesses but without really putting much into it until he spun his racket with boredom and walked over to the net.
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate it, but can you make it harder to hit than that?” he asked, clearly assuming my throw was also pretty useless.
“Not a problem at all,” I said, feeling a shiver of enjoyment at messing with Luke’s head a bit. I picked up a ball and threw it off to one side.
Luke glared at me, “it has to at least land in the court!”
“Why didn’t you say so? You know I don’t know the rules,” I said, giving him a bland smile.
“I think you’d better look up the rules before our next session, otherwise I don’t think there’ll be any point in having one,” Luke said, his patience obviously having run out. He walked off the court and slipped his racket into its case.
I stood there for a moment, thinking it over. This could just be the end of it, which would be something of a relief, or I could make more of an effort. We’d come this far.
With that decision made, I walked over and stood beside him, and said in an earnest voice, “I’ll learn the rules, I promise.”
I could see the indecision in Luke’s face as he pondered it for a full minute, until he finally gave a silent nod, unzipped his racket again and walked back to the other side of the court.
After that, I put some effort into it, at least making it worth his while now and began to throw balls to him, keeping all of them on the court but each one gradually more and more challenging making him work to return them and letting him have a good practice session. By the end of it, he was smiling again, and I felt glad, which surprised me. For some reason, I felt pleased that he was pleased. He walked back to put his racket away for the second time but this time, he was in a good mood and his voice was friendly.
“That was excellent for me; did you learn anything just watching, do you think?”
“Definitely,” I said, trying to make it clear I was interested in another lesson.
“Great, let’s collect these up and call it a day,” Luke said, gesturing to the balls now lying all over the court.
I considered that activity for an extremely brief moment, but he was going to be out of luck there, I’d done my bit for the day by putting in effort, and certainly wasn’t going to give him any more than that.
“Yeah you do that,” I said, and walked away feeling quietly confident this was going to work out just fine.
~
THAT NIGHT WHEN I GOT home from school, I took my tennis clothes down to the washing machine in the utility room myself, rather than put them in my laundry basket. We had a housekeeper twice a week and she usually did all my laundry, but I didn’t want my mother to see them on the off-chance she went poking around, or checking up on Anita’s work or something. So, I put it all in the washer dryer and set the timer, checking it so I would know exactly when to come back and take it all out again. Thankfully, none of it required ironing so hopefully, I could just hang it straight back in my wardrobe and no one would be any the wiser.
It occurred to me that this deceit was going to get tricky as I had PE class three times a week, and that meant tennis with Luke three times a week, and washing my stuff three times a week!
Perhaps I should have been smarter about not using my actual practice tennis kit and instead just stuck to any old T-shirt and some shorts, but the ex-professional in me simply couldn’t abide that. If I was going to a tennis practice, then it had to be in my practice whites.
Once again, it occurred to me that this whole thing was probably a very bad idea. What on earth would my mother say if she saw my stuff in the washing machine? She’d think I was playing again and get all over-excited and over-controlling.
I just couldn’t handle her becoming a control freak again; it was just too much, and our relationship right now, where we barely spoke at all, was a lot easier to cope with than how things had once been.
Some people say negative attention is better than no attention at all, but those people didn’t have a mother like mine. Believe me, no attention at all is far better than being the centre of her attention. All I had to do was just continue to be a total failure at everything and she’d leave me alone.
We ate dinner together as usual in near silence. I sat with my own thoughts and she played at being a dutiful mother.
“Well, Camille, how was your day?”
“Fine,” I responded in my usual monotone.
“Did you do anything interesting today?”
“No, not especially.”
This was a standard dinner conversation and I knew it frustrated her, but she’d brought it on herself. I couldn’t give her an inch, or she’d take a mile. For the last eighteen months, since I had come home, I’d done absolutely nothing of interest and given her nothing to work with. She didn’t bother to push anymore because it didn’t change the answers she got.
“I have a new client, a gorgeous Georgian house in need of a total makeover,” she said, attempting again to engage in a conversation.
“That’s nice, congratulations,” I said, showing no change of expression.
I thought I heard her give a brief sigh, but I focused on my potatoes and refused to look over in her direction. There was silence after that, except for the scraping of forks and then when we were both finished, I rose and took the plates over into the kitchen to stack them next to the dishwasher.
“Thank you,” she said, as I left the dining room.
“And thank you for dinner,” I replied politely in return, before heading straight upstairs to my bedroom.
An hour later, I went back downstairs and collected my now clean and dry clothes. I wrapped my tennis whites in a towel and carried the whole lot back up to my bedroom where I re-hung up my tennis kit, careful to put it back in the rear of my wardrobe and then I sat down at my desk with my homework.
My life was extremely boring but that was the choice I was making right now. Boring was better because it gave my mother nothing to either take away or control; all that was left was my schoolwork and she wasn’t going to take that away. She might be controlling and manipulative and all of those things, but she wasn’t cruel or actually wanting to see me fail in life. It was the exact opposite, she wanted to see me succeed in everything. So, I did my schoolwork. I got good grades, not brilliant but then I was not that brilliant academically anyway, but good, good enough to be uninteresting - hardly worthy of comment. I mean, what you say when your daughter consistently gets a B? Well done, keep up the good work? It’s just about the right amount of grade to avoid any kind of comment at all. Could try harder?
That night as I lay in the bath, it was pleasant to feel I'd had a bit of a workout. My muscles were out of practice from being used at tennis and I could feel a very slight ache in my biceps. That was good and showed me I had at least vaguely used them that day, which was nice but probably not something I should encourage myself to enjoy. I didn’t want to slip back to old ways. After taking a long bath, I went to bed early. Yes, I was that boring. It meant there was nothing in my life that could be commented on, or taken away from me, or used against me, and I refused to ever give her that power again.
As I lay in bed that Wednesday night, I tossed and turned, unable to get to sleep. It had been a trying day for me, a lot of emotional ups and downs and once again, doing something I had sworn I never would. Namely tennis. But it wasn’t just the tennis, it was more than that, it was the interaction with a boy, and it was the strange pull I had felt to be friends with him. But friends were something I didn’t allow myself to have, not anymore.
Sometimes, I wondered if my stubbornness was hurting nobody but myself, but then I would just have to think back on my childhood and my early teens and remember every single battle I'd had with my mother for just the tiniest measure of independence. To say my mother was a control freak was understating it in the extreme. There was no area of my life she didn’t try to micromanage, and if I wasn’t an instant success at something, then I was expected to at least project the image of success.
It had all been too much and when I was fifteen, I'd had enough and it had all finally come to a head. I'd turned my back on everything she thought was important and turned my back on her, setting off for the Caribbean to live with my father. It hadn’t worked out; he was a nice guy, fun, but he wasn’t really interested in being a father. My life out on the island had lasted six months before I'd had to return home with my tail between my legs. She used that to come down on me harder than ever and that was when I quit everything. I changed everything about who I was and what I did so that there wasn’t a single thing she could take away from me anymore. She couldn’t control who I was friends with now, because I had no friends. I moved to a totally new school on my return, away from anyone who knew the old me. She couldn’t control what I spent my money on because I accepted no money from her. She couldn’t threaten to take away tennis if I didn’t do exactly as I was told because I didn’t play. I was not her performing monkey anymore. I had my independence and that was all I had. But it was a lot. If I had nothing else to show for it, then at least I had my own life back and she’d lost interest in me as I'd turned my back on everything she valued. So, it was a big deal for me to be playing tennis, yet also ridiculous that I should have to sneak out my tennis kit, then sneakily wash it and sneakily put it away. But there was no other way, I wasn’t giving her back that leverage to use against me.
But it had been quite something just to hold the racket again; it had been a startling moment to look in the mirror in the changing room and see a girl I'd thought was gone, wearing her tennis whites. And most of all, it had been liberating to spend time with a boy I didn’t even try to deny to myself I had a crush on.
Which brought me to the second reason I wasn’t sleeping. Luke.
Luke and I had a history, that was to say I had a history with Luke. At fifteen, I had just started discovering boys, I was at an all-girls’ school and consequently, we were all late developers on that front, but suddenly the unknown male of the species became much more interesting than he had hitherto been. And being out on the tennis circuit meant I actually came into contact with a lot more boys than most of my friends. Luke was one of those boys. He’d recently begun playing tennis and it had been immediately clear he had that elusive X Factor for the game. He had an affinity for the ball, he moved with grace, and he had a killer swing. It didn’t hurt that he also had a charming smile, handsome features and twinkling blue eyes. I'd been instantly smitten. Unfortunately, it seemed Luke was also a late developer, or far too focussed on his tennis career to notice me back. I had watched him from afar, smiled at him across the room, possibly even batted my eyelashes at him on occasion, he was my first serious crush and I was convinced it was only a matter of time before we were thrown into a situation that resulted in a romance. We’d eventually spoken once or twice, but nothing more than that had materialised.
Instead, I had been asked out by another boy who played tennis. George Miller was another rising star on the circuit, a year older than me and he very much had an eye for the girls around him. When he’d asked me out, I'd been flattered and instantly said yes despite my attraction to Luke. After all, there was no harm in a few dates with a different handsome boy, especially as it looked like it might be some time before Luke noticed me.
My mother, however, had not thought this was a good idea. She had expressly forbidden me to go on a date with George or any other boy. She was very strict about it and convinced dating would hinder my chances of success on the courts. I hadn’t listened to her; I was fifteen and couldn’t see what the problem was. So, I sneaked out. I went on the date with George and had an okay time, not brilliant but okay. He’d walked me back and said goodbye at the end of my driveway and I'd crept up to the house in the dark, prepared to climb in my bedroom window. Only I never got that far, as my mother was standing on the doorstep, arms folded, radiating fury. Her punishment had been severe. I think she probably realised now that she’d gone too far. In her over-controlling, she had locked me in my bedroom for two days and told me if I dated another boy again, that was the end of my tennis. She said she would never again pay for new equipment or coaching or drive me to various clubs and events and competitions. She knew how much I loved, lived and breathed tennis. But there was something I cared about more: myself.
My self-esteem and self-worth were low because she’d made me that way, but I wasn’t taking it anymore. That was when I declared she had no power over me because I was giving up tennis. She was livid and threatened me with everything she could think of, but in the end, she couldn’t physically make me do something I was refusing to do, just as she couldn’t make me continue eating, couldn’t make me go to school, couldn’t make me do anything, and couldn’t stop me when I withdrew all my savings and flew to Guadeloupe to live with my dad instead.
These days, we’d reached an uneasy truce. I behaved myself, and I did nothing she could punish me for. I went to school, I got my grades, I came home again. But that was as much as she got, as I didn’t give her any ammunition.
Until today... Today, I'd exposed myself to risk. Today I'd played tennis, and I'd talked to a boy I was pretty sure I still liked, a lot.