41-Love, page 15
On court, I am relaxed and happy. This is where I belong now. We’re playing Ash—the village where I used to live. They’ve struggled to get a team together. I recognize one of the women from Ash Physiotherapy, and there’s a guy named Richard that Dan and I have played before, although he had a different partner then. Richard is very competitive. We beat him then, and he vowed we’d never beat him again. Tonight, his regular partner couldn’t play, and so he’s got his wife to fill in. She’s not very good. She’s easy to lob, easy to pass. Beating them feels mean, somehow, but this is a league match and we have to. There’s an awful moment near the end where we call the score as 40–0 and she queries it. Her husband says, “No, love, we haven’t won a point this game,” and she insists on us going back through the points in the game: The ace I served against her. The passing shot Dan played behind her. The volley she missed.
“We did get a point,” she insists. She has tears in her eyes.
“Just leave it, love,” says Richard, not looking at anyone.
We thrash the other pair too. It’s becoming a habit now. The only annoying thing is that I’m still standing in for Hayley. She’s a member of this team, not me.
•
I’ve found the yoga teacher-training course I want to do. It’s not that far away, and the next one runs in the autumn. I could take early study leave, perhaps, and just focus on qualifying. There are also courses you can do in India. You can just go and blast your way through a program there in a month or even less, but I’m not sure I want to be away for that long. I need to be here, playing tennis.
I need two references to be accepted for the course. I can get one from Lorraine, my old yoga teacher, but I also need one from my “current” teacher. This is a problem—I don’t have one. I do Pilates now, not yoga. My current Pilates teacher is Emma, who I don’t think approves of yoga. She certainly doesn’t approve of big, dangerous, stretchy movements. Why exactly do I want to teach yoga anyway? I remind myself that I’ve been doing it longer than Pilates and it’s a more obvious fit with the guys I want to work with. Pilates is too fiddly; there’s too much focusing on your pelvic floor muscles and clenching your buttocks. It’s too embarrassing. I want to get the guys doing the Warrior and the Cosmic Dancer.
Emma is one of the few women I’ve had a proper crush on. The first one was my friend Clare’s sister Rachel when I was about fifteen. Then there was that girl in London—what even was her name? Zoe, that’s right—a kind of druggy Becky Carter, with long, unwashed blonde hair and no makeup ever. Zoe smelled of weed and sweat and periods. I used to take the bus from Hackney to Surrey Quays on Sundays to smoke dope with one of my university friends, John, and she’d be there. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be her or be with her. We were in a fashion show together, because John’s boyfriend was a fashion designer. We wore rubber knickers and I felt fat as usual, much fatter than her. But I must have been really thin then.
After the last show we walked into McDonald’s on Oxford Street, still in our rubber knickers, and I asked the whole shop, “So who’s going to buy me a Big Mac then?” Some random guy did, and we laughed, and then I never saw her again. The only actual girlfriend I ever had, when I was eighteen, was an ethical vegetarian, and so was I, off and on. But I sometimes ate Big Macs back then too.
Emma is thin and tall with a beautiful Roman nose and a mad shock of black hair. She only ever wears Pilates clothes: for her this means unironed cotton tops that definitely don’t go with her leggings. She’s firm—in body and spirit—but kind, and has the sort of attention to detail that makes her one of the best Pilates instructors around. She’s got a cool dog named Bertie and loads of tattoos.
The first time I met Emma, when I thought I’d have to give up tennis because of my back and my knees, I filled out a questionnaire on which I said my highest ambition was to play recreational tennis a couple of times a week. What a fucking sap I was then. Now I have a foam roller and a core and nothing can stop me.
I’m not going to tell Emma that I’m doing yoga as well as Pilates. She doesn’t need to know. My schedule is filling up in a most pleasing way. Each week I now have two or three coaching sessions with Dan, as well as the Monday night Reccy session and the Wednesday night team training session. Before each of these I do about half an hour in the gym. I have Pilates on Tuesday mornings and now I’m going to be doing yoga with Loretta on Thursday evenings.
Loretta occasionally used to cover for Lorraine. Our old yoga class was in a primary school hall in Ash. There were usually squashed peas on the floor, and toward Christmas there’d be a full nativity scene with papier-mâché Mary and Joseph and donkeys. Lorraine’s class was full of laughter, but Loretta’s was always more serious. We stretched a lot. I am not a very stretchy person. And there was always something a bit punishing about her classes too. But I know she’s a good teacher, and Lorraine likes her. And she’s got one space in only one of her oversubscribed classes.
It’s five miles down the road in Sandwich, in St. Clement’s Church Hall. I put the postcode into Apple Maps and Siri manages to get me to a parking space by a big wall next to a dark and frightening graveyard. I chuck my phone in my yoga bag, zip up my hoodie, and set off. What’s the worst that can happen in a deserted graveyard at 7:00 p.m. on a late-winter evening? I jump about six feet in the air when my phone loudly tells me, “You have reached your final destination.” Fucking thanks, Siri.
St. Clement’s Church Hall has a high ceiling, a hatch through to a kitchen, and old enameled radiators with teacups underneath the knobs to catch the drips. Everything is painted in that pale green ’70s hospital color. The radiators gurgle away as we lie there clutching our thighs—calves if you can reach, which most people can but I can’t—and pulling our legs toward us. I’m already worrying about the residential part of the yoga course. I’ve stuck to my semi-primal diet for a while now: I don’t eat any kind of grain, and I don’t eat gluten. Although I was a vegan for quite a long time and even wrote books about it, I eat a lot of steak now. What on earth am I going to eat there? It’s all going to be lentils and brown rice, surely?
I guess I am really not a yoga chick. But could I become one? I could go vegetarian again, perhaps. I know they go as far as fish at the place I’ll be doing the course. Obviously it doesn’t matter: I can eat whatever they have, and then go back to my usual way of eating when I get home. That would be the normal approach, but it is not absolute enough for me. For years now I’ve thought that there is One True Way—the way humans were designed to eat and live—and all I have to do is find it. I don’t like my eating to be random at any point. It has to follow food rules. If I am not bound by food rules I may as well be flying through the air, naked. Is it time for new food rules? If I am to be a yoga teacher then maybe I’ll need to align myself more with grains, with brown rice, with oats and soya milk, all the things the primal movement thinks are not just bad for you but actively poisonous. But maybe the primal movement is wrong.
My quest for the One True Way of eating—for the ultimate set of food rules—means I swing back and forth between eating styles, sometimes several times over the course of a week. I can think myself back into grains at a moment’s notice. How lovely and chewy and carby they are. How cheap. How humble. Each grain of brown rice is actually a cosmic seed that contains its own universe—but of course this is also why the grain of rice doesn’t want to be eaten. Does the pig want to be eaten? Discuss. Although I have to say I have hardly ever eaten pork or bacon. Even at my most carnivorous, I just think pigs are too intelligent and beautiful to be zapped in some horrific slaughterhouse.
I drive into work on the last day of term still a bit sore from the league mixed doubles match the night before, thinking about my diet as usual. It’s been the same all term, and I’ve even developed a little theory. On the carby, porridgy mornings I feel sleepy and slow but a touch more loving. On the primal days I am quicker, sharper, but more cruel. It’s as if carbs are Dan and protein is Josh, although I don’t know yet quite how cruel he will be. I never need the radio or podcasts on my drive to work. I’m my own forty-minute radio program: “So, civil war has broken out and you are wandering the fields—yes, these ones you’re driving past now—with nothing more than a backpack with some writing stuff and maybe a nice bottle of wine. There are no shops. You are, possibly, smeared with mud and wearing a bandana. What would you eat?” I look beyond the windshield and see the last of the winter greens in the fields. There are rabbits around here. Deer. Fish in the sea. This is the stuff it’s natural to eat. Maybe not so much the cows, but they are there too, for now.
So I should eat meat and vegetables tonight. Will this give me enough energy for my match the next day? This is the part that doesn’t quite always add up. On a primal diet I can lose fat, but I lack oomph. The options play around in my mind—I love planning my next meal in my head. And tonight of course I’m going to be in Bath, and I’ve got a tournament beginning tomorrow.
So here I am. The winter is almost over and the sun is shining and I’ve got one more class to teach and then that’s it, maybe for the rest of the year if I do get study leave. And that means I really can devote the rest of this year to tennis. I can train like a professional—I have the money and the time. Nothing can stop me. Suddenly, I can feel my muscles under my clothes. They are firmer than ever before. I feel sleek, like an animal. In that instant, I feel the closest thing to enlightenment I have ever experienced. This is what I’m meant to be doing! I park on campus and get out of the car. The world looks different, suddenly: brighter, more vivid. Then I realize that one of the lenses has fallen out of my favorite sunglasses. I actually don’t care that I mistook this for enlightenment. I just laugh.
•
August 2013. I’ve only had a handful of tennis lessons by this point and I’ve already got a terrible back from hitting the ball. I’m in Devon to spend a week looking after my mother, who is due to have an operation on an ovarian cyst. While I’m here I’m also going to see Mum’s osteopath, because the one back home, the one I saw before I discovered Charlotte, was so mean to me. I can’t give up tennis now. It already feels like one of the most important things in my life. The osteopath at home pretty much told me to give up. I was forty, after all. What should I expect? I was forty, with a sedentary job and a back like a cab driver’s, and I deserved everything I got. I should give up exercise, get fat, and die.
We arrive at Torbay Outpatients at 9:00 a.m. Mum is taken away to be assessed and put in the blue gown they have to wear. I sit in the waiting area and wait for her to come back.
The people opposite are laughing about something. I don’t know what: the man looks on the point of death. He’s missing most of his teeth and is wearing a Hells Angels T-shirt. He’s a bit like my original father Steve might have been, had he lived a bit longer. His wife is large and cheerful and wearing a thin flowery top. She looks as if she’s about to stand up.
“Don’t leave me,” he says to her. “I could be dead in half an hour.”
“You’ll never die,” she says. “You’re indestructible, you.”
He laughs. Wheezes. Touches his chest.
“He’s got a defibrillator in there,” she says to me. “Went off forty-three times in twenty-four hours once. Stupid thing.”
“Felt like I was dying each time,” says the man.
“Sounded like a sodding gun being fired,” says the woman. She stands and picks up her handbag from the chair next to her.
“Don’t leave me,” he says again.
She shakes her head. Tuts. “I’ve got to walk the bleeding dog, haven’t I? Our dog Rex,” she says to me, “is blind and epileptic. Has about two fits a day. Can’t see where he’s going. Walks into all the furniture. They’re as bad as each other, the dog and him.” She nods at her husband. “What I have to put up with.” She shakes her head.
“What if they don’t want to operate?” he says. He looks at me. “Last time they refused to operate because of my defibrillator.”
His wife rolls her eyes. “I’ve told them, all you need is a magnet to go on it and that’ll make it stop. When the defibrillator went wrong once he electrocuted everyone who touched him, including a French nurse—and the poor dog.”
“Oh well,” says the man, “if I die, enjoy the bungalow.”
“We’re moving, you see,” she says. “On Wednesday.” It’s Friday now.
“So I’m off home to walk the sodding dog and then pack all the sodding boxes.”
“The bungalow is our dream home,” says the man. “But I’ll probably die before we ever get in there.”
“Always moaning,” she says. “Right, I’m going. Shall I order the coffin when I get in?”
“You joke,” he says, “but you’ll regret it when I actually go.”
“I think I’ll get Pete to knock something up in particleboard,” she says.
Once she’s gone the man falls silent. I’m reading a book on the paleo diet by Robb Wolf. I think this might be the most important book I’ve ever read. It is telling me how to be healthy, and this is imperative to me right now because I am never, ever coming to a place like this to be operated on. I am never going to be those people. Never. I would actually rather die.
My mother has told me I can’t leave, so I end up sitting in the waiting room for seven hours. For the first few hours I’m happy enough reading my paleo book, and it’s making a big impression on me. I haven’t eaten meat (apart from chicken, which was my dog Dreamer’s absolute favorite) for years. Am I going to have to eat meat to do this? I believe in the science. I’ve already read Wheat Belly, and this is more of the same, all about how our addiction to sugar leads to weight gain, prediabetes, and early death.
After lunch I become aware that the waiting room is filling with teenage girls and their boyfriends. Many of the girls are crying. One of them refuses to come into the building at all, and her boyfriend comes to ask for help from one of the receptionists. Most of them are wearing tracksuit bottoms and T-shirts but also a lot of makeup. Has Teen Vogue just done a feature on what to wear on a hospital date with your boyfriend? I try to focus on my book.
“They say I’ve got to take my makeup off before they’ll do it,” says one girl, coming back into the waiting area and talking to her boyfriend.
Another girl gets up to leave.
“I can’t do it,” she says. “I’m sorry.” Her boyfriend hurries after her.
I don’t believe it. So I’ve got to sit through the abortion clinic. Fucking thanks, Mum! This is my very, very worst nightmare. I avoid anything to do with abortions—news stories, books, films. Because in 1988, this was me. In those days you stayed in overnight and they did it in the morning. No one’s boyfriend came. Well, mine certainly didn’t. He was revising for his law finals and pretending it wasn’t happening.
I was the youngest on my ward, and no one felt sorry for me. In fact, the nurses seemed to openly judge me—which didn’t at all fit with my Little Red Schoolbook childhood and my private-school sass and the idea that you could fuck whoever you wanted—boy or girl!—and that if you got pregnant it was bad luck but your choice and an incredibly feminist, rite-of-passage thing to have an abortion. All the best people had abortions! All the girls in the films I watched had abortions. Penny, the sassy pro dancer Baby would have turned into had she stayed on at Kellerman’s Resort, had an abortion. It was no big deal, right?
Except that the judgy nurses dosed me up with weird vaginal suppositories designed to make my cervix open to make the operation easier the next day, and I ended up having a miscarriage, alone in a hospital bathroom, at 4:00 a.m. I was sixteen. The hours before that I spent vaguely praying for forgiveness, knowing I was slowly killing this thing inside me that I’d come to love in a way I didn’t understand.
But I can’t think about it. I won’t think about it. I will do everything I can to avoid thinking about it. Even now, if there’s an abortion story line in a film or TV show, I switch it off. If there’s a picture of an embryo in the newspaper, I hide it. Years ago, some do-gooder who had something to do with my grandma—the one with the tennis trophies—told a gruesome story that ended with a girl being brought an embryo on a silver platter and I walked out and cried and wouldn’t speak to anyone for days.
Now, in the hospital, I just burrow deeper into my book.
What is it about diet books? I find them so comforting, so very gripping. They work on me in the way thrillers do on other people, except they begin with the answer and then move on to the method. The diet book formula I like best is where some guy was an athlete in college (always guys, always American—this stuff is as specific as porn) or even the army, but has started getting old and fat. His father (occasionally mother) has died from something that could have been prevented by a better diet. The dude has set out to examine the science and, with only knowledge and his bare hands, has constructed a formula for invincibility, always something on the spectrum from “only eat brown rice” to “never eat brown rice.” It’s a superhero narrative—the bite of the cursed arachnid—but the best kind: the kind you can actually live. I love the feeling of giving myself to it 100 percent. The dreamy, fantasy feeling of being the case study that worked. Karen from New Hampshire who lost an incredible fifty kilos all because she gave up gluten, or sugar, or all carbs, or meat, or dairy, or anything from the family Solanaceae. Karen who became immortal.
Later that week in Devon, while Mum recuperates in bed, I go to a mix-in session at the local tennis club. I’m hungover, as usual, and I haven’t eaten carbs all day. The day before, I sat in a dark restaurant in Totnes, trying to hide from wasps. I ordered chicken wings—the first time I had ordered actual meat in a restaurant for years and years. They were delicious, but I couldn’t eat them. I felt like a ravenous beast: uncivilized, unpoetic. I was eating the remains of something that used to fly. Its actual wings. Then a wasp came—it had somehow found me at the back of the restaurant—and I ran away.
