41-Love, page 24
Nick seems like a nice guy. Tall and lean with good focus. Probably a runner.
“What side do you want to play on?” he asks me.
I shrug. “I play both,” I say.
“Which do you prefer?”
“Honestly? The ad side. But I usually play deuce in mixed, so.”
He puts me on the ad side.
Our opponents are Phil and Bonita, and Stuart and Gemma. I recognize Stuart from the Canterbury Open. He was Lloyd Daniels’s men’s doubles partner. He’s about my age, stocky, fit-looking, and friendly. At last, a couple of matches that I can win easily. It’s not that these are bad players, they’re not at all. But Gemma’s rusty and Stuart is nervous and Nick is just the kind of steady doubles player I need. I’m getting to know some standard doubles plays now. The moonball over the head of the volleyer that draws the baseline player out wide. The sneaky shot down the tramlines. The whole thing is so enjoyable. I feel sorry for Sandwich, though. We win all our sets against them either 6–1 or 6–2.
The only problem is the mosquitos. I hadn’t realized, but Sandwich, with its big river and all the greenery, is notorious for them. I keep reapplying repellent, but I’m not sure it’s working. The main problem are the bites I got last week in Canterbury, which still seem a little bit itchy. After we finish playing I sit down on the wooden bench and text Dan. We won! I say. I played on the ad side!!!
Of course, he doesn’t reply.
He definitely got the message, though.
In our session on Wednesday he has plenty to say about it.
“If I played against you and you were on the left I’d blast you with aces on your backhand side.”
“Right.”
“Why would this Nick guy want the lady on the left?”
“Maybe he’s not a sexist dickhead?”
“I’d annihilate you if you played on the ad side against me.”
“Yeah, you said that.”
Today we work on serves. I’m given a basket of balls and told to practice throwing the ball higher, which is an issue for me. My throw is way too low. Dan videos me in secret and I think I’m watching a real tennis player for quite a few seconds before I realize that the athletic-looking woman with the amazing shoulder muscles on his phone is me. But he’s still being weird about my match. He doesn’t seem at all happy that I won. And this thing about me playing on the left has clearly bothered him. He keeps going on about it.
“If you had ten chances with this serve,” I say. “You know, this ace that you say you’d blast me with if you encountered me on the ad side? How many do you think you’d get?”
“Ten,” he says.
“OK,” I say. “Let’s do it.”
Forty or so serves later he gives up. Of course the odds are in my favor. I know a big serve is coming, and I know it’s going to be to my backhand. I hit some nice returns as well as edging and netting a few. But I get my racquet on all of them.
On Friday, Josh asks me where I think my level is, compared with Dan.
I shrug. Um and ah a bit.
“I think you’re the same level,” says Josh. “And soon you’ll be better.”
On Saturday, I wake up and find my body fat at under 30 percent for the first time in years. 29.8 percent! I want to run around with my knickers on my head. I feel so inspired. Are things finally starting to work at last? There’s no tennis today, so I go off and have a great session in the gym. But that evening while Rod and I are watching the amazing women’s final of the French Open, with Sharapova just edging it against Simona Halep with the most beautiful, powerful ground strokes, despite double-faulting all the time and looking like she might cry at any moment, my insect bites from last week start to really hurt. When I look, I see that these weird circles have developed around all three bites. All night my leg itches and burns. The next day I have a large, angry rash on my left ankle. In the Guardian the next day, Kevin Mitchell describes Sharapova’s performance as the “vortex of suffering.” My ankles feel a bit like that too.
On Sunday we have our next Aegon fixture, at home, against Tunbridge Wells Ladies. I’m playing with Margaret, and Hannah Martin is playing with Fiona. And of course we are all playing singles, too. I’m up first playing against a nice woman named Catherine Kirwen—Cathy—a fifty-year-old 9.1. Somehow, she’s their highest-rated player, although apparently Sarah Luckhurst is pretty fearsome. Cathy’s friendly and chatty, and I am too. I’ve completely dispensed with all of Brad Gilbert’s advice.
Josh and the young assistant coach Adam have been playing a men’s doubles, and they are having their afternoon tea right by where I’m playing. I do love an audience. I’m channeling Sharapova and thinking that if I am going to get beaten I’m going to do it in style, with my own vortex of suffering. Kind of dark, gothic, sexy tennis. Why not? Hannah and Fiona have been bagelled, or as good as, while Cathy and I have been wrapping up our first set, 6–3 to her. Fuck it, I think as we begin the second. I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m going to go for the lines and hit as hard as I can.
Cathy moves me around the court a lot, but I am fast and I am fit. She isn’t going to break me down. In fact, I am possibly fitter than her? What happens if I move her around the court a bit? What happens if I just—yes—blast a ball down the line when she’s not expecting it? We trade service games and then, on 2–2, I break her serve and then win mine. This is all it takes for me to go 4–2 up. Josh is leaving, but miming at me to text him my result. No one is expecting me to win, of course—no one here ever wins in Aegon singles, apart from Josh—but he wants to know the final result and how close it was.
Cathy wins the next game, so it’s 4–3 to me. On the changeover she asks me where I got my skirt. It’s actually the same one Simona Halep has been wearing in the French Open: it’s purple, with orange shorts underneath. I’m wearing skirts with no leggings fine now, just like Halep and Sharapova. And although Halep is my favorite player on the tour this year, it’s Sharapova that I continue to channel as Cathy and I go back on court. That beautiful, tragic desperation. Standing with my back to my opponent, looking at the black curtains, trying to compose myself before I serve. The only thing putting me off is that my insect bite rashes seem to have started to ooze green stuff. When I look more closely, it’s tennis ball fluff stuck to the hydrocortisone cream I put on this morning. I win my service game.
I feel loose and relaxed. Aggressive, sharp. It’s 5–4 to me and Cathy’s serving. I am really going for it now: I blast my returns of serve past her and my balls kiss the lines hard and I keep thinking of Sharapova. I play every shot for a winner. Remarkably, many of them are winners. My grunt gets louder. The remaining men are sitting having their afternoon tea and if any of them glance over, I want them to see me fierce and strong and winning. I want them to hear me winning. I do little fist pumps. I turn my back on Cathy and check my strings before she serves. It’s hot and I love it.
I win the second set 6–4.
As we go into the championship tiebreak, I am determined to keep my momentum going. It doesn’t matter if I lose. Everyone else has lost. I don’t at this point know Cathy’s rating, but I assume it’s higher than mine. The final score is another 10–8, but this time to me. To me! The first thing I do is call Rod, sweat and melted makeup dripping onto my iPhone, and tell him all about it. Then I text Josh. When I come back, it turns out Margaret has lost one and one to Sarah Luckhurst, even though her match seemed to be going on for a long time. She starts talking about all the deuces they had. Fiona and Hannah talk about their losses, how hard the opposition hit the ball, how we had no chance with them. They all look at me, and I realize that I am now supposed to say something about my loss, that I am supposed to complain about something too.
“I won my match,” I say quietly.
“Sorry?” says Margaret.
“I won,” I repeat. You won? they all say. It’s the same when I give Margaret the score. I have to say it a couple of times before it sinks in that I did actually win my match. But I did. I won.
•
I’ve been playing a lot of tennis lately. So has Josh. On Monday morning we’re both complaining about being knackered. It’s 9:00 a.m. and we’re still having sessions in secret.
“But at least we both won our matches,” he says.
“Yeah.”
We’re talking about singles of course. In the doubles, Margaret and I lost love and one.
Josh’s coaching sessions are hot and grueling. He feeds me balls that I hit down the line again and again and again. We do fast volleying sessions at the net.
“Next time can we maybe do two hours instead of one?” I say.
“Sure,” says Josh.
One hour of tennis is just never enough for me now.
At around 9:45 a man comes in and starts warming up vigorously, running around in little circles and hitting a ball against a wall like something from a sketch show. He’s clearly anxious to get on. He even helps pick up the balls from my session. I’m just getting my bag together to leave and I hear Josh saying, “You seem full of energy this morning, Graydon!” and Graydon saying back in a kind of North London drawl, “Yeah, that’s because I didn’t do any fucking drugs last night.”
An hour later Josh texts me to say he’s exhausted already: so much for starting the week so virtuously at 9:00 a.m. It’s like having a friend. A normal one who actually remembers to text me. I really feel like an insider at the ITC now.
I’m off to work to do some admin and I stop at the Canterbury Sainsbury’s on the way in. They have a good pharmacy there, and I’m far too busy to go to the doctor. My rash is now very red and very big and has started up on the other leg too, around the other mosquito bite. It’s itching and burning like wildfire. I can’t touch it. I feel a bit ill, too. The pharmacist says it’s a fungal infection caused by the mosquito perhaps having been on a cow pat or something equally gross just before landing on me. He gives me cream and antihistamines, but by the end of the day I feel so bad I don’t even consider going to tennis. When I try to imagine throwing a ball up above my head and then hitting it across the net, I just can’t do it. I feel so exhausted all of a sudden. I go home and have a terrible night’s sleep with my legs hanging out of the bed. They are so very hot, and so very itchy. It really is as if they are on fire.
Awake in bed, I keep thinking about my win against Cathy. I find myself haunted by a feeling that I didn’t really win, that it was a mistake. It was very close, after all. Did I cheat? That wide serve she did on the ad side. It was out, and I called it out, but what if it was in? What if I saw it wrong? Since I won on a tiebreaker, there were only two points in it. Does that mean if I made two wrong line calls in the match that I didn’t really win it? Then again, she called some close ones out too. There was the point we had to replay because she wasn’t sure, but I was: I knew my shot was in.
I thought it would be great to finally be able to tell people that I have won something, but it turns out that most people are more interested in loss. I guess that’s what I teach all the time: how much more drama there is in suffering, how no stories are happy. Who wants to read about happy characters? And telling happy stories isn’t as much fun either.
•
On Tuesday I cancel Pilates and tennis and go back to Canterbury in search of my old homeopath Elaine, whom I haven’t seen for a long time. I can’t concentrate on anything at all, so I go in much earlier than I have to and walk around Fenwick, my favorite local department store, feeling like a zombie. I wonder if I’ll be asked to leave because my legs look so dreadful. I hadn’t intended to try anything on, and I can’t bear the thought of anything going near my leg, but there is quite a nice dress that would only involve me removing the top half of what I’m wearing. OMG. I have lost weight. In the changing room mirror I see an athletic-looking woman with really a very nice bum, firm or firm-ish in places that were not firm before. I realize for the first time that although on the scales I have moved what seems only very slightly from around 153 lbs. to 149 lbs. (give or take) and from around 34 percent body fat to just under 30 percent, my body shape really is changing. I am so happy I even forget the burning in my legs for about two minutes. In the end I don’t buy the dress, but because of it, not me.
Elaine doesn’t like the look of my rash. She thinks it’s cellulitis, a serious bacterial infection of the skin and the tissue beneath the skin. Unusually for a homeopath, she tells me to go to the ER or urgent care immediately. It’s now too late for the trial and error sometimes needed to get the correct homeopathic remedy. I almost certainly need antibiotics before this gets even worse, before I end up in the hospital. All this from three little mosquito bites.
When I get to urgent care, I explain what happened to a nurse who can’t believe it, has never seen anything like this before. She calls in another nurse—the one who gave me the dressing for my toe months ago. She’s dyed her hair blonde. Neither of them know what it could be. Spiders, maybe? The town has apparently had an infestation of false widows in the last few years. But isn’t it too early for spiders? Anyway, I was out in the open, not rooting around in a basement or a shed.
The nurses admire the patterns formed by the rash. On the left leg in particular the rash has formed something like a ring around the original bite, as if it were a tornado or crop circle. And it’s spreading by the minute, down my leg toward my ankle. On my right leg the crop circles have merged and my skin is becoming more and more purple and swollen. They don’t have a doctor at urgent care, so I’m sent down the hill to a GP who gives me antibiotics, strong steroid cream, and two types of antihistamine. What if these don’t work? Then it’s the hospital, for an antibiotic drip. But they do work, and quite quickly. By the next morning the itching has reduced and by the afternoon it is gone. But the ghost of the rash will stay on my legs for weeks. Perhaps it’s all a coincidence, but I won’t feel quite right again for almost three years.
9
Nottingham
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.
