41-Love, page 30
Back when I used to be into video games, I couldn’t play anything where you had to go through the game with one life and when you were dead you were out, like in a tennis tournament. High-pressure stuff in arcades where you’d put in your quarter and see how far you could get on it? Totally not for me, not with my nerves. Each GAME OVER meant starting from the beginning again, which I could not bear. I preferred games where you could shore up extra lives. If I had a new Super Mario game, the first thing I’d do was to gather ninety-nine extra lives, the maximum you could have. Only then could I start. But if I lost even one life, I’d get so worried and I’d become obsessed with replacing it, much more so than actually going on with the game.
10
The Walmer Open
I’m on the phone to the LTA at 9:08 on Monday morning. For someone who is afraid of phone calls, this is really something. The nice young guy I speak to tells me that I won’t be able to jump up to a 7.2, but he can certainly take me to an 8.1 now, and I could still get 7.2 in the end-of-season ratings run. I worry that one of my wins was a retirement, which the LTA site said wouldn’t count in this situation. But I also have my box-leagues win against a 7.2 man, which, although not officially countable (according to the website you must only beat people of your own gender), must mean something. I am ready to negotiate on the nitty-gritty of this.
I can hear keyboard clicks in the background as the guy brings up my record.
“Oh,” he says. “Right. Well, I can’t see any sign of these wins yet.”
I assure him that they are real, but very recent and so might not yet be—
“Oh,” he says again. “Wait. You actually have three qualifying losses this season?”
Fuck. Of course. Sutton: Rachel MacDonald and Alexandra Groszek. Canterbury: Sarah Philips. All 9.1s. Shit. It was only after all that, when I started working properly with Josh, that I started winning. It seems so long ago now that I was losing. But yes, it was during this summer season and so I am still trailing these losses. So I’m not going up to an 8.1 now, and if I want to go up in the end-of-season ratings run I will need two more qualifying wins. I am an idiot for ringing up the LTA like this. I feel really, really stupid.
I go upstairs and settle down to the final edits on my novel. I put in a famous tennis player character and some more meditation scenes, which feel like the only things I can write about at the moment. The tennis player in my book is having a meltdown because he can’t win any more, and my hippie-wellness character, who should be satirical but is instead just perfect, tells him to simply breathe. If he breathes, then everything will be OK. Can I still do that?
My next session with Josh is hot and intense. We’ve moved on to two-hour slots now, and he seems to enjoy pushing me to exhaustion. He feeds me ball after ball that I hit down the line, and then I have to do another basket crosscourt before I’m allowed a break. We’re training for Walmer but also, crucially, for Wimbledon. I’m sweating so much that I’ve started worrying about losing minerals and cramping again like I used to, so I now bring about three liters of water to every session. It is all the pale pink color of that stuff you rinse your mouth out with at the dentist, because of the electrolyte tablets I put in. When did I last go to the dentist? Who needs that normal life crap?
“Are you excited for Walmer?” Josh asks in one of our breaks.
I shrug. “I don’t know. I mean, there’s no ranking or ratings in it, so.”
“Literally everyone is there. To be honest, it’s the highlight of my year,” he says. “People call it the East Kent Championships.”
It’s true. Margaret was moaning about this just the other day. She, like me, wants all tournaments to be overseen by the LTA, but the LTA won’t let Walmer hold official tournaments because they won’t relent on their dress code. On this, I think I’m with Walmer. If you have perfectly manicured grass courts, why wouldn’t you want the people who play on them to look perfect, all dressed in white?
A daddy longlegs has been bobbing and looping around our table. Josh catches it in his hands. At first I think he’s going to put it outside—the doors are open after all—but instead he comes over and puts it in my hair.
“Oh my God,” I squeal. “Josh! Get it off me!”
He giggles like crazy. And the weird thing is that I sort of like this. Is it because this is the kind of thing he’d do to Becky Carter? But would he really? Wouldn’t he be too scared of her ice-cool sexiness? But me? On the one hand I’m old and past it, etc. But boys don’t usually put insects in the hair of the elderly and the unsexy.
“You know there was a black widow living in here all last year?” he says. “I used to feed it and everything.”
“No you didn’t. What the fuck would you feed a spider?”
“Little flies.”
“Don’t lie.”
Josh has now got the daddy longlegs out of my hair. I think he’s going to take it to the doors and release it, but instead he crushes it in his hand and drops it on the floor. Is this more or less cruel than me, later that day, “innocently” telling Dan that Josh put a daddy longlegs in my hair, and Dan understanding that Josh and I are proper friends now, and that I might even like him more, with his powerful forehands and his cold eyes and his childish laugh?
•
A week or so before the Walmer Open, Josh invites me for a hit with him on the grass at Walmer, where he’s a member. I’m so nervous all day. Josh is unpredictable. One minute he’ll be acting about twenty years older than he is, calmly telling me exactly what’s going wrong with my forehand, but the next minute he can morph into a ridiculous schoolboy, telling me that I need to open my legs more (while this is true, it doesn’t stop it from sounding dirty the way he says it). At times he makes me feel attractive—he admires the different-colored bits of KT tape I’ve started wearing to support my wrist—but at other times he just straight-up laughs at me. Then there was the weird time he told me all about trying to get off with one of the receptionists and what he said made it pretty clear he’s still a virgin. WTF?
We are meeting straight after my session with Dan. Of course I don’t tell Dan where I’m going. He wants to talk timetables—everything’s changing now it’s the summer holidays—but I tell him I have something urgent to do in town.
“What?” he says.
“Just something,” I say as I rush out of the door and upstairs to get changed into my whites. This feels thrilling and secret but also sort of wrong. What if Dan saw me? He’d know exactly where I was going just by what I’m wearing. But I’m safe as I rush out of the leisure center and get in my car.
The elegant wrought iron gates at Walmer Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club open this time—with just a touch of authentic creak—and I feel as if I am in Brideshead Revisited. Josh meets me at the gates wearing whites and his usual knowing grin. Is he laughing at me or with me? It remains uncertain. There are an indeterminate number of elderly people sitting on chairs watching the tennis on Courts 1 and 2. Just beyond Court 7, where we go to start hitting up, some more elderly people are playing croquet. Josh is carrying a plate of cupcakes and sandwiches. He seems to sort of offer them in my direction.
“Thanks,” I say. “But I don’t really eat gluten, so.”
He laughs his cruel laugh. “I wasn’t offering them to you,” he says. “You think I’d give my cakes—that Margaret made especially for me—to you?”
And yet again, I feel twelve.
I worry that I’m going to be too nervous to even hit the ball. Regardless of the giggling and the cake thing, Josh is doing this for free, as a—sort of, I hope—friend, and I am determined not to let him down. Is there any way a player of Josh’s standard could ever enjoy hitting with someone like me? I know Dan does; our knockabouts make sense for him too. But for Josh this is just kindness, which is sort of uncharacteristic, and therefore confusing. Still, as we get going, I play well. And I find I really like the grass. I win several genuine points from Josh, a nice backhand crosscourt flick past him at the net and a couple of backhands down the line. In fact, I realize afterward, on grass it’s my one-handed backhand that seems to be doing the most damage. It was the same in Nottingham.
•
“I hate to say this,” says Josh during our next session, “but I think on grass it’s all about your one-handed backhand. Especially given your opponent.”
Josh has already texted me a picture of the draw currently pinned up on the Walmer LTCC notice board (but of course not on the internet). I’m playing Sarah Luckhurst, who beat Margaret 6–1, 6–1 in our Aegon match. That was the day when I beat Cathy in the championship tiebreak and my fortunes seemed to begin to turn. Cathy and I were both the highest rated in our teams, which is why we played each other. Does that mean Sarah Luckhurst is not as good? No, it just means she does not play LTA tournaments and so her rating is always “wrong,” in the way that Lucille’s rating is wrong.
Sarah Luckhurst was born in 1975, three years after me, and is built like a female rugby forward. Josh and I think that my only real chance is to move her around the court a lot, at least Josh does. Still high from my Nottingham successes, I somehow believe I have more than just a faint hope of winning. In fact, I’m not sure why no one has been in touch with the people who do the draw at Walmer to point out that they have inadvertently put together two very strong players in the first round. Anyway, today we work on how to actually move someone around a tennis court. Josh encourages me to drop balls in low. Not drop shots exactly, just balls that will die mid-service court. I was sort of embarrassed when I did this at Nottingham, but actually it’s a good tactic on grass and nothing to be ashamed of. Get someone back on the baseline and then see if they can run in to catch a falling ball. At one point a dog runs in from the grass outside—it’s so hot we have the emergency fire doors open—and even he can’t get to one of these balls before it dies.
I get home, exhausted, still thinking about my first match on Sunday. I’ll need to have a rest day before then. I also need to time my gym sessions so I put on the maximum amount of muscle before then but without leaving myself sore and tired. The other thing is my novel. I’ve been slow with my edits, very slow, but I really need it done this month, ideally before the Walmer Open begins. In my mind August is all about the Walmer Open, then Tunbridge Wells, then the big one: Seniors’ Wimbledon. I’d like to be free of the novel by then. But the more I’ve worked on it over the last couple of weeks, the more I have started loving it again. It has to be right. But it also has to be done soon.
I start some short-grain brown rice cooking for dinner and go upstairs for my shower. One missed call on my phone. From Gordian. God. We haven’t spoken for a long time; I haven’t seen him since Steve’s funeral in 2011. My heart immediately feels heavy. Something must have happened. Could it be Ruth? She’s like ninety-something now. All the regret and sadness I feel about that whole part of my life curls into a ball somewhere deep inside me and I go to the bathroom and have my shower. I guess if Ruth’s dead he’ll leave a message or call back.
If Ruth’s dead, will I have to go to the funeral? Will I have to face the brother and sister that I have never known? I’m supposed to be thinking about my novel. Supposed to be teasing out the last knotted strands of plot. But now I’m wondering whether my sister is beautiful and how I will ever explain to her how eighteen years went past just like that and I never got in touch with her once. And also how I got that email from Ruth at midnight one Thursday after yoga back in 2009 that told me not to contact my brother and sister until they were ready: for Alexander this would be before university, for Katherine, afterward. But I should try to make myself available more for Gordian, the bright flame that had no oxygen, the potential philosophical and intellectual star who instead ended up as a bloodstock agent who read commercial thrillers for fun. I cried all night. Then sent her an email reminding her that the main reason I had no relationships with that part of my family was her and her dreadful meddling. She once told me that my stepmother had always hated me. She also made a habit of reminding me that I was not really a part of the Troeller family. Once her “real” grandchildren arrived, interest in me waned. I pointed all this out in my email. I wasn’t that nice about it.
If she is dead, of course, it’s too late to send a card saying sorry.
I’m not sorry, but I would like us to make peace before she dies.
Too late, too late, says the water in the shower.
I go downstairs, fluff the rice with a fork. The phone rings. It’s my mother.
“It’s Gordian,” she says. “He’s got lung cancer.”
Fuck.
Oh fuck.
I ring Gordian. As always when we speak, it’s as if we last spoke two days before, not two years ago. He’s scared and sad. He’s going into Guy’s Hospital to have part of his right lung removed. I say I’ll come and see him. Ask him if there’s anything he needs, anything at all I can do. His voice shakes as he tells me he’s trying to give up smoking, and how very hard it is, and how his wife has said she will actually leave him if he doesn’t give up this time. I suggest a macrobiotic diet and some exercise. He says he can’t exercise because he literally can’t breathe. I don’t really believe him. Anyone can exercise, and exercise cures everything.
•
In my next session with Josh, the Friday before Walmer begins, we work on my serve. I have a real breakthrough.
“You know the way you bend your knees first and then throw the ball up in the air?” says Josh. “Well, that’s a completely redundant movement. You do a little bob—like this—and then, whoop, the ball goes up and then you hit it, sort of plop, like this, but if you bend your knees after throwing the ball up, then . . .”
He demonstrates. And yes, I can instantly see that springing up into the strike, rather than the toss, makes so much sense. I realize that my serve is still more or less the one I had when I was twelve, which I probably developed by imperfectly copying famous tennis players and people in the local park. For a while I added Dan’s tomahawk idea, where you sort of “throw” the racquet and use it to slice across the ball, but I prefer a flat first serve. Anyway, now I try bending my knees after I’ve thrown the ball. Instantly my serve—which was pretty quick anyway, even when it was totally wrong—is about twice as fast. It feels amazing. I do it again. And again. And again.
“Well, there’s your first serve,” says Josh. I do a few more.
“If you can hit the back curtain after just one bounce,” Josh says, “that’s what we count as a really fast serve.”
I’m a foot or so off. I keep going. Some children who have been playing outside come and stand at the open fire doors to watch. Three little boys and a girl.
“See if you can hit one of the children,” Josh says.
The kids seem to love having balls aimed at them, and giggle and run around fetching any that stray out beyond the fire doors, but of course I don’t have the power to actually hit one of them.
“Right,” says Josh. “Now I’ll have a go.”
I am amazed when he steps up to serve and the children arrange themselves in a line like little plastic ducks at a fairground. I’m just as surprised when Josh unleashes a full first serve at them. It bounces off the service court line and then hits the girl. For a terrible moment I think she might cry, but she simply squeals and shrieks with pleasure and does a couple of little pirouettes before resuming her plastic duck position.
“Again, again!” they say, and from this moment onward whenever I want to do a wide serve out on the ad side I will tell myself, “Hit the children.” No one ever said sports psychology was pretty.
I serve and serve and then we go back to ground strokes. But suddenly something is wrong: My sacroiliac joint, which caused me all that trouble last summer but which has been fine for so long. I really don’t like the way it’s feeling, not at all.
•
That evening Rod and I go and stay with friends in London. I’ve been difficult about this arrangement. I’ve demanded gluten-free bread and non-dairy milk. Now I moan that the bed will probably make my back worse, with only two days before the Walmer Open. We don’t drink that much alcohol but it’s still somehow too much. I eat stuff that is not in my nutrition plan. I completely flip out when one of our hosts suggests that Andy Murray isn’t really that good. What exactly is everyone’s problem? A person gets to be in the top ten in the world for something. The top fucking ten. In the actual entire world. Out of seven billion people this person is in the top ten and yet any idiot at a North London dinner party can dismiss him as “not that good” because he is not number 1.
•
Back home, and it’s the night before the Walmer Open. I’ve DVR’ed a couple of documentaries that are on because of the Commonwealth Games. One is about the Kenyan 800-meter runner David Rudisha’s relationship with Brother Colm O’Connell, his Irish coach. The other looks more lowbrow, but still fun: Dan Hoy goes around trying to find out what makes people successful at sport. The Rudisha documentary has not recorded properly and I spend a long time trying to work out how to download it instead, but in the end we get both programs and sit down with a bottle of red to watch them. Should I be drinking this much before the Walmer Open? Well, my first match isn’t until 2:00 p.m., and drinking a bit the night before didn’t hurt in Nottingham. And it worked for John McEnroe, don’t forget. And Andre Agassi had his wild crystal meth years, not that he won much during those.
