41-Love, page 23
My calves are still not recovered and feel 60 percent at most, and as a result I don’t really have my first serve. It’s raining harder and there are little insects everywhere, swooping and dipping in the sodium lights. My Adidas tights are annoying me; I wish I’d worn my Falke ones. I somehow take the first set 6–3. It should have been 6–2, but I couldn’t close out on my serve and had to break hers instead. But it’s fine, right? I’m winning so easily, after all. To make her feel better on the changeover, I say I prefer playing her to Sarah because she hits it harder and more aggressively. Why the fuck did I say that? I worry that she’ll do her old trick of taking the pace off the ball now, but surely it doesn’t matter because I am on fire.
She wins the next set 6–0. I’m not even sure how she does it. Rod says that I was the one who stopped playing so aggressively. That’s not how it felt. Siobhan certainly played a whole lot better, but how? Afterward I don’t even know whether she took the pace off the ball or not. It feels like some kind of voodoo or a hex. Rod keeps saying that to him it seemed that she was playing more strongly and I was the one who backed off. Why did I stop hitting the ball hard? My legs felt bad, I know that. But not so bad I couldn’t play. Did my thoughts do it again? I’d told myself to win the first set if I wanted to avoid a championship tiebreak and then I’d done it. It simply didn’t occur to me that I could win a first set and then lose the second. I’d been thinking instead how obvious it is now that I am better than Siobhan, that all my hard work and coaching has paid off, and that the Spring Open was just an anomaly, or a painful but necessary step on the road leading here, to a 6–3, 6–2 (maybe) victory and another match against maybe Sue or Meredith and some ranking points.
This is ridiculous. Any thoughts of winning at all and I lose. What is so wrong with me that I seem to have to reach an egoless higher state of calm and detachment before I can win anything? Other people can win without having to achieve enlightenment first. Why can’t I? Presumably Sarah wanted to win, thought about winning? Siobhan clearly really wanted to win. I doubt they spend too much time meditating and reading The Inner Game of Tennis. Or maybe they do, and the reason I lose is because I underestimate everybody. Why can’t I just win once? Please? Is it that I want it too much, or not enough? Do I feel guilty about winning? Not worthy of it? Or am I just not good enough? If I had a few more winning shots? Am I just unlucky? Cramp in one match. Playing after a funeral. Drinking too much. Not drinking enough. Playing on clay. Playing on carpet. Playing on macadam. Did I have enough protein before this match? No, I didn’t have any. I’ve recently given up dairy products. Should I have had some?
When I get home, I check the scores from the other matches. Luke lost in the consolation draw against a 10.2 opponent, 6–0, 6–1. And he lost his doubles too. Why is seeing someone do worse than you so comforting? Is it a bad thing? Maybe not. I respect Luke, and I know he’s a good player. If he can fuck up this bad then anyone can. It’s just one of those things. But I still feel like a complete loser. How can I not win even one match? How is it possible that with all my training and dedication I am probably going to come last in a local Grade 4?
Oh well. There’s always the mixed doubles.
The mixed doubles is a round robin and both our matches are on Thursday. The first one, against Teele Annus and Matt Brears, is at 4:00 p.m. At last, the sun has come out. I’m looking forward to winning a match at last. Not the first one obviously, but the second one, against Sara Fairclough and Joseph Sevier from Sandwich. We’re playing that today as well, right after the first match.
At ten to four Dan has still not arrived and I’m starting to get worried. The nice thing about doubles is you have a partner to warm up with and talk to and have a hit with before you go on—if you’re not rushing from a funeral, that is. Dan isn’t rushing from a funeral. Where is he? A few minutes later I get a text saying he’s running late from his Level 4 training day. Of course—that’s what he’s been doing. At ten past four he rolls in like a wounded hero, all droopy and pathetic, talking about having gotten up at 5:00 a.m. to get to his course. Then he sees Nick, a coach he knows, and bounces off to have a quick banter with him. Then he’s back, and Teele and Matt are there, and he somehow isn’t quite meeting my eye.
Right. Now Dan is sucking up to Matt Brears. Why? He’s joking with him as if I didn’t exist. I look at Teele, but she’s gazing off into the distance. No one wants to talk to me, not even my mixed doubles partner. I feel like someone’s mum. It seems that Matt and Teele play for the University of Kent First Team, but when I try to ask Dan about how he knows Matt, he ignores me. WTF? I feel like I’ve gone to youth club with my older brother and don’t know what to say to fit in. Or worse, that this is my son and his friends and I am just completely invisible and irrelevant. It would be nice to have some banter with Dan myself because I’m actually quite anxious about this match. I’ve played with really good women before, but this will be the first time I’ve played competitively with a guy who’s so strong.
We warm up with Teele whacking balls at my head at 300 miles per hour. I deal with it fine, but is it really necessary? She wins the warm-up, anyway, by about a bazillion points. We start playing. Dan serves first—his big, bold serve—and we win the game. This isn’t so bad! Then it’s Matt to serve, because the man always serves first, because the man is always better (except when Victoria Azarenka plays mixed and she goes on the ad side and serves first because she’s better than her mixed partner, which I have always found so, so cool). I stand well back and prepare myself for the huge first serve I’ve seen in the warm-up, but instead I get a spinning second serve that completely throws me. I mean, I can’t even get to it because I’m standing back so far. What the fuck? This little twat thinks I can’t handle his first serve? Maybe he’s right, but I’d like the chance to try. And surely if you’re going to play a second serve out of kindness you should tell the person to expect it? Otherwise, maybe it isn’t so kind after all.
Just this small act breaks me psychologically. They are all laughing at me. They all think I’m old, pathetic, rubbish. My serve is a joke compared with all theirs. Teele has an amazing but bizarre kicking first serve that goes so wide it’s irretrievable. Dan gets annoyed because I can’t return it. He suggests I stand out wider, but of course when I do that, she blasts one down the T. At least in this game I am not troubled by thoughts of winning. I don’t even keep score. I try to make little in-jokes with Dan but I get nothing back, so I stop. Teele and Matt win 6–2, 6–0.
Our next opponents are Sara Fairclough—the one with the big topspin forehand and her own court in Sandwich and today wearing a yellow pleated Stella McCartney skirt I rather like—and Joseph Sevier, whom I have never met. Dan goes back to normal once Teele and Matt have gone and we start hitting together. He’s making more mistakes than usual, though. He must be tired—turns out he actually got up at 4:00 a.m. to go to his Level 4 course. We agree that we’ll take out whatever frustration we feel about Teele and Matt on Sara and Joseph. Dan says there’s a trophy for coming second, which we will surely do. We take the first set comfortably enough, 6–4. I’m playing quite well, which is making up for some of the mistakes creeping into Dan’s game. There are a lot of them.
In the next set, he completely falls apart. I haven’t seen him implode quite so spectacularly before. Why is he doing this? These are beatable opponents, for goodness’ sake. Don’t we want that trophy? But Dan is on fire, and not in a good way. He serves double faults while going for ridiculous aces; hits the ball out or in the net when going for clear winners. At one of the changeovers I tell him we can win if he only puts 80 percent, or even less, into his shots. He carries on giving 120 percent. We lose the set. I can’t take another championship tiebreak. Somehow we lose that too.
So that’s it. I lost everything. Literally everything.
I go home and cry and drink wine. I look up Stella McCartney’s current tennis clothes online, but I don’t deserve any of it because I am a pathetic loser.
•
On Friday I go for my session with Josh, who is lovely and reassuring.
“I basically lost every single match,” I admit to him. “I feel like a complete failure. I don’t know what to do.”
“You just need to play much more aggressively,” he says.
This means taking the ball earlier, inside the baseline. It means continuing to try to get the elusive attacking forehand. With lots of topspin.
“Will I ever get it?” I ask. “I mean, should I just give up?”
I will get it, Josh says. But I have almost a year of bad habits to overcome.
“What you’ve done with Dan this last year,” he says, grimacing. “I don’t mean this to sound bad, but it has set you back. You’d have been better off not doing any of it, to be honest.”
“Right.”
“He’s not even a good mixed partner for you, really. How late did he turn up this time?”
“Only ten minutes. But then he acted like a dick.”
“You see?”
“I don’t know why he has to show off all the time. We should have won against Sara and Joseph. It would have been easy.”
“He’s just holding you back,” says Josh.
•
On Saturday I go to Walmer cricket ground to throw some balls down for Rod. He’s nervous about playing cricket again after last year’s shoulder operation and wants to practice his batting. Here, out in the open, in the bright green of the freshly mown pitch, I feel like an invalid. I can’t bend my knees properly. Everything hurts when I run just a short distance to field the ball. I used to play cricket easily; now I can’t. If I get down on the grass, it takes ages for me to get back up again, because I am just so stiff. I feel as if I am held together by rust. Can I do anything apart from play tennis?
The next day I go to the ITC to play with Lee. He is anxious because Liverpool looks like they are going to lose the Premier League. “You can be Liverpool,” I say to him when we begin. “I’ll be Man City.” It’s supposed to be a joke, but after I say it I feel like a bitch.
Anyway, after I beat him 6–2, 6–1, I do feel slightly better, but my lower legs are now like concrete. Later, at home, I stand in front of the mirror and properly look at my feet. My right foot barely has an arch but the left arch is so collapsed it looks ridiculous. I pull out the orthotics I hate so much. I’m not 100 percent sure why I hate them. Maybe it’s because of all the barefoot running books I’ve read. After all, once you’ve got the primal/paleo thing down, then the next step is to sleep in the dark, then go barefoot, then go wild. This lifestyle appeals to me so much. Just before I did my ethnobotany course in 2010 I read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. What a gripping, brilliant book! It confirmed what I have since read in all my paleo books: the agricultural revolution was a disaster for humanity. We’d have been better off—in health terms at least—by staying as hunter-gatherers.
Of course, then there’d be no poetry. No Shakespeare. No tennis.
I have to do something about my calves, though. Maybe the orthotics are the answer. Maybe civilization isn’t so bad? I put them in my tennis shoes before going to Polo Farm the next evening for the mix-in session. Of course, you’re supposed to build up to orthotics—start with five minutes, then ten, then fifteen. But does anyone really do that? I wear them for three hours straight, but it’s only doubles on clay. By the end of the evening I’m becoming grumpy. I want to play beautiful, smooth, seamless, fast tennis. I want it to be transcendent and perfect and hard. But it takes me until about 9:00 p.m. to be put with the men’s group I want to play with. I’m on with Richard, against Del and a guy I’ve never seen before named Dan. I serve an ace, which Dan calls out. Then he moans about my second serve being too shit.
“For fuck’s sake,” I say to Richard, a bit too loudly. “He doesn’t want it fast, doesn’t want it slow. Is he Goldilocks or something?”
Am I a little bit slower with the orthotics? Maybe slower is better than completely stopped due to cramp. Afterward I feel a bit worse in my right knee but a bit better everywhere else, except for the two new mosquito bites I suddenly seem to have on my left leg. I already have one on my right leg that is a bit red and swollen. I must remember insect repellent when playing outside in the evening, especially at Polo Farm, where the air is now a constant puff of rural smells and strange little insects.
Before I leave, Carol Bye comes over and asks me if I can play mixed doubles the following evening for Canterbury. It’s in the East Kent league, and she’s checked and I am eligible to play for Canterbury because I haven’t yet played for the leisure center this season. All my matches have been in the Kent league, which is different.
“Sure,” I say.
“Great. You’re playing in Sandwich. You’ll be with Nick Greenway. 7:00 p.m. start.”
•
The next day I have a coffee with Margaret. She wants to know about teams for the winter season, which confusingly starts in September. I say I want to play with Dan if possible, but I don’t know what’s happening with him and Hayley Palmer. Hayley doesn’t even seem to like tennis that much anymore. On the way to Bearsted a few weeks before, we got chatting about it and she said she’d more or less given up on tennis. She said she preferred running, which you can do on your own, without all the gladiatorial pressure, the horrors of winning and losing. But she’s somehow still on all the teams. That away match was the one we had to win to get into the league final, but I honestly now can’t remember who won or lost. I just remember being scared of Hayley, and then leaving my quilted Barbour jacket behind in their changing rooms and never asking for it to be returned. I wonder where it is now.
Margaret and I chat about the French Open and gossip about the local leagues. I’d assumed Margaret was gay but in fact it turns out she is in love with Rafa. She even has a picture of him on her phone. Can you be gay and in love with Rafa? She starts telling me about all the times she’s seen him at Wimbledon, how she once sat so close she got hit by a bead of his sweat when he shook his head near her.
“Have you got Wimbledon tickets?” she asks me.
“No.”
“You didn’t get any in our draw?”
“Nope.”
“And not in Canterbury’s?”
I shake my head.
“Well, do you want to come with me?” she asks. “I’ve got a spare ticket for the first Friday.”
“Really?”
“Yes, we’ll make a day of it. You’ll have to bring sandwiches though. The way you do Wimbledon is you sit down in your seats and don’t get up again for seven hours. It’s the only way.”
What about thrombosis? But I don’t say this.
“Thank you,” I say. “What do I owe you for the ticket?”
“Nothing. You can come as my guest.”
•
I’ve bought a new gadget off Amazon. It’s a little digital thingummy that you put on the end of your tennis racquet that gives you stats on your shots. You can find out whether you’re hitting flat or with spin, how fast your serve is: all sorts of things. It turns out that the mystery woman I saw Dan with the other Sunday when I was playing with Hari is named Tatiana. He coaches her at Folkestone. Apparently she’s too shy to play matches and always gets the yips on her serve. She also has one of these gadgets. In fact, Dan told me, you can set up a projector and see your stats in real time if you really want to. That’s what Tatiana does sometimes. He says her name dreamily, with a little sigh afterward.
We have no projector, so I just play as well as I can for the session and resolve to look at my stats later once I’ve installed the right app on my iPhone. I love stats, so I can’t wait.
In our drinks break I tell Dan I’m playing mixed for Canterbury tonight, against Sandwich. He’s jealous, of course, but I point out that his mixed partner in this league is Hayley anyway, so.
“Right, well, I think that might change next season,” he says. “I’m going to talk to Margaret.”
“OK.”
“I want to know everything,” he says. “Who you play with, who you play against, the scores, literally everything.”
“Sure.”
For the rest of the session we play points. I’m level with Dan at five games all when Josh comes in. He’s setting something up for his after-school kids’ session, but he doesn’t take his eyes off my shots. He doesn’t do any of the embarrassing things that Dan does, like call out advice—and this isn’t just because he’s my secret coach. He even looks slightly impressed. I’m encouraged by his belief in me and so I manage to draw 6–6 with Dan by the time the session is over. As I leave, Josh gives me a little nod.
When I get home I can’t wait to check out my stats, but they’re disappointing. I’m not as fast as I thought, and even worse, all my forehands are deemed “flat.” There isn’t any sign of any topspin at all. What the fuck? Maybe the gadget is just broken, or wrong. It must be wrong. I package it up to return to Amazon.
At quarter to seven I arrive at the Sandwich tennis club. There are three macadam courts, two together and one on its own. There are portable toilets and lots of greenery. Even the birds seem to be green. Are those actual parakeets overhead, squawking in the dusk? They are. Sandwich is such a strange little town: a combination of super-rich golfers, international scientists, and the extremely elderly. Its proximity to Pfizer makes it feel more metropolitan than most small towns in the UK. Although Pfizer is closing down later this year, it’s going to become a big science park.
