41-Love, page 7
Then a vision appears. She is thin, tall, and dressed in an Adidas tennis outfit I recognize from the Australian Open. She is carrying the biggest tennis bag I have ever seen. I thought I was a bit stuck-up with my two racquets in a matching bag, but this woman’s bag is like something off the TV. It is red and silver: the latest Wilson bag, designed to carry at least six racquets and a change of clothes. I am terrified just looking at her. She must be an awesome player to have a bag that big. If I put my stuff in a bag that big everyone would just laugh at me, right? At last, though, some glamour. Is she my opponent? I really hope not. There’s a Black girl with a crew cut warming up on Court 2. She has a guy with her; he’s feeding her balls and she’s swatting them back like something from Tomb Raider. Maybe I’d even rather play her than this professional-looking woman who has just arrived. But no, she is put on to play against a slim Asian-looking girl who looks even more nervous than me.
The glamorous woman is put on to play against a sturdy-looking Black girl with glasses and wild, impressive hair. The glamorous woman’s good-looking boyfriend pulls a chair as close as possible to the glass screen to watch her. I wish Rod were here to watch me. I ache for some love, some reassurance, someone to care about my performance. Everyone else here seems to have someone. Most of all, at this moment, I want a gang. It has become clear that the girl with the crew cut and the girl with the wild hair have arrived together. Also in their entourage: several cool guys and a well-built Spanish-looking woman with long dark hair and a blue Nike T-shirt over some sloppy shorts. This must be Natalia Lozano, my opponent. I have been stalking all the players on the LTA website and I remember that Natalia was the one with the 7.2 rating but no actual matches played, which means she gave the rating to herself. Which might mean—I hope it means—that she is really shit but quite up-herself.
On Court 1, the woman with the huge bag is about to serve. She throws the ball up—not very high, I note—and then something bizarre happens. After a flurry of racquet and a blur of green, the ball is rolling awkwardly on the ground in front of her and her left fist is all scrunched up and her knees sort of buckle and she looks as if she might cry. She is so nervous that she has not hit the ball. Her second serve goes into the net. Her hands are shaking. She curses herself, quietly. The boyfriend is on the edge of his seat, visibly willing her on. She glances at him from time to time, looking unhappy and still on the verge of tears. Soon it becomes too embarrassing to watch. She can barely hit the ball, and her opponent—who also seems to fluff a lot of shots, not that it matters—beats her 6–0, 6–1. The one game the woman gets is due to four double faults from her opponent. But this is all very interesting. It turns out you can have a great outfit and a huge bag and actually be extremely shit. I file this information away to think about properly later. I wish I had been playing her. If I had been playing her, I would now be through to the second round of my first-ever tournament.
Brad Gilbert is going around my head like something at a Grand Prix. All his neat examples of the things you can do to prepare for your match are scrambling in my mind. The guy who, before a match, arrives at the venue and secretly hits with a coach before having a stretch and a shower and appearing, ready for his match (with a final twist, which Brad disapproves of, where he deliberately arrives late and suggests going straight into the match with no warm-up). I would do that except there is no coach, and no showers. I’m tired. My muscles feel stiff. I’ve spent the day building up to this, but none of my preparations have come to much. I’m not even warm. At this moment, when I am surely due to go on any minute, I am not even warm. Not even slightly. For fuck’s sake. I go downstairs for a pee. The loos are next to the gym. There is nothing stopping anyone from going to the gym. I get my bag and go to the gym. My stomach churns, nervous with acid.
My current playlist is full of stuff from the Girls soundtrack. There’s a Rolling Stones song, “Fool to Cry,” that I listened to all the time when I was going through my Stones phase when I was sixteen or seventeen. Listening to it now, I wonder why on earth I was obsessed with something so sad, so, well, taboo. It’s about a kid comforting her father. I tend to avoid things to do with fathers, especially girls and their fathers. Sad fathers. Missing fathers. Anxious fathers. Then I realize that all those years ago I thought the lyric was about someone named Danny, not Daddy, and that’s why I liked the song. Guess I missed the bit where the protagonist puts daughter on his knee, the bit I hear so clearly now through my Bluetooth headphones, and she says, “Daddy, you’re a fool to cry . . .”
The day they told me that Gordian was my father is kind of a blur. In some versions, Steve has not yet left for America; in others, it’s because he’s left that they think it’s the right time to tell me, as if fathers worked a bit like revolving doors: one out, one in. I’m twelve. It happens in Chelmsford, in the study filled with books about Freud and post-structuralist theory. Perhaps we’ve already played tennis that morning, or will later. I play tennis with Couze all the time, of course, but playing with Gordian is a special weekend treat. Sometimes Couze and Gordian will play together; occasionally my mother plays too, all giggly and unrealistically competitive. I always feel left out of their adult world, with its incomprehensible dynamics.
Given this, I might even be wearing my favorite tennis outfit: a pleated white skirt with a little metal clasp, a matching white polo top, and matching white sweatbands for my wrists and forehead. Couze will know that something big is happening, and he will be doing something supportive in the kitchen: tea for everyone, or prepping the Sunday roast.
I’m probably sitting on the faded red beanbag. Mum and Gordian are on antique chairs, brimming with secrecy. There’s something credulous and naïve about me. Mum says, “There’s something we want to tell you.” Dramatic pause. “Steve isn’t your father.” And here’s where I’m a bit stupid, or maybe it’s the screenwriter in me coming out early. “Who is?” I say, not really doing the math; not really thinking about who’s in the room. And so Gordian gets to say his line, the one he must have been rehearsing in some way for the last twelve years.
“I am.”
Afterward, walking up the stairs to my bedroom, I recall finding myself frustratingly unchanged. I wanted to feel like a fairy-tale princess, or like a character from the YA books I read, but instead I was experiencing something that still happens to me when I get good news (and at the time, this was very good news, because Steve was weird and wore black clothes and could be a bit violent, while Gordian was kind and exotic and brought me expensive presents). I felt a bit flat, slightly crushed, anticlimactic. The now-familiar thought: Can I live up to this, or will I let everyone down somehow? And How do I become the perfect daughter of this man, rather than the other one? Steve wanted me to like computers and video games and punky, counterculture things. He took me to Hells Angels parties where I once even got to (and let’s not think about this too much) kiss a musician named Buster Bloodvessel. And of course there’s Couze, who wanted me to be sporty and intellectual and understand French and philosophy. What will this third father want from me?
Now, in Leicester, I flick my playlist forward and listen to Sugarman instead. My legs go round and round on the elliptical as I try to get warm without getting too tired but fail. I am so nervous. I wish this would end. I wish it would begin. I go back upstairs and then almost immediately have to come back down for another pee.
Finally, at around 3:45, I am given a tube of three—only three!—balls and told to go to Court 3. We’re to play “short sets.” WTF? The guy with the clipboard explains that this means the sets are to four games rather than six, clear by two games, with a tiebreak on 5–5, if it comes to that. Oh no! So I have come all this way and paid all this money and got a hotel and now we’re playing short bloody sets with only three balls. I try to act as professional and confident as possible, although I have no real idea what this means any more. I have three bottles of drink: electrolyte water, plain water, and Coke. I take them out and put them where I can easily reach them on changeovers, but really, I want to cry. Natalia starts chatting about her job in London and how she’s just got back into tennis after playing as a kid and this is her first tournament. Remembering all Brad’s advice, I say nothing. I let Natalia lead the warm-up. I can only vaguely remember how you do it. In Brad’s world this means I have already lost, but there’s nothing else I can do. The ball bounces strangely on the carpet. Natalia hits it hard, early, with a lot of topspin. When I accidentally lob her, she hotdogs the ball back. This is so incredibly cool, or would be if I weren’t about to play her. A hotdog! Dan occasionally does these; Josh does them all the time. It’s where you’ve run to the baseline for a ball but don’t have time to turn around, so you hit the ball back between your legs. Federer hits winners like this. I have never seen a girl do one.
Dan’s best shot is a killer forehand that he times perfectly and—thwack!—the ball is so fast it is unplayable, wherever it lands on the court. He does this shot sometimes in coaching or in the Reccy sessions, to indicate he’s bored, or just to show off, and it’s the coolest thing I have ever seen. To stop him doing it against me when we play for points, I have to keep the ball deep. Later I will learn how to play to his backhand and eliminate the shot altogether—although by then I will often be able to get it back. But this is the forehand I want. This is the forehand for which, if I met some shady character in a dark forest late at night who offered it to me for some price, I would pay that price, any price. I would almost—will almost, but we’ll come to that—die for this forehand. Just to hit it once. Natalia has this forehand. She hits it a few times in the warm-up.
She wins the toss, decides to serve (Brad says you should always receive, of course, and so I think this means she is tactically inept, which surely means I am in with a chance?). Her first serve: an ace. Her next one: an ace. It’s 30–0. Next serve in the net. Joy! Next serve: an ace. I manage to return her serve on 40–0. It’s a pathetic backhand down the line, but at least I have hit the ball. She does the forehand of doom right back at me. There’s so much topspin on it, and the carpet plays so fast, that the ball only bounces once before thwacking hard into the heavy curtain behind me. By the time I even try to play the ball, it is long gone. Oh lord. But it’s OK! Brad says that everyone is beatable: you just have to work out how to beat them. Natalia will have a weakness; I just need to find out what it is.
Now I am to serve. I plonk it in the box and—thwack!—it’s that forehand again, down the line on my backhand side, quick bounce and then straight into the curtain. I serve to her ad side and it’s the same again, although this time the forehand is crosscourt and it hits the netting separating us from Court 2. It’s the same again for the next two points, and the first set is over in a blur. I think I win maybe one more point when she hits the ball out. She takes the first set 4–0. Oh dear.
Natalia serves like Dan. In fact, she does everything a bit like Dan. She serves according to where you stand. I have only read about this in books and seen it on TV, but it actually exists. I told myself I could not possibly meet someone as good as Dan in a tournament like this, but here she is. In the second set I concentrate as hard as I can. My serve is working, although it feels like a huge effort of strength and concentration. But all my safe hesitant shots are simply blasted down my backhand side behind me. I know that the only way I will win is if she dies or breaks her leg before the end. But I somehow take two games off her.
She has a grunt, too. Natalia’s grunt is professional and amazing. It sounds like “lick-air.” A couple of times I think she’s calling my serve long, but she’s just exhaling loudly as she returns it. Lick-air. Indeed. It’s what her forehand does.
•
It’s dark and cold and I’m into the consolation draw. My next opponent is Charanya Ravi, 9.1. She is a sweet, slightly frail-looking student who apologizes during the warm-up that she’s rubbish at feeding volleys. She has just been double-bagelled by the crew-cut girl, Meredith. We really need the warm-up. We have been sent outside onto a court that is, improbably, just more carpet but a kind of outdoor green version. A worm is dying in the deuce court service box. I want to help it, but I can’t. There is no real earth here. When I run for a backhand I slip and almost do the splits. In a bad way, not at all like Djokovic. This crunchy stuff? Yes, it’s frost. I am playing on frozen Astroturf. I wear several layers, leg warmers, and my woolly hat. Charanya wears all of this and gloves. I can’t remember what any of my tennis books say about wind, but there is some. It means that in the first game Charanya’s first serve sort of stops in the service box and then goes backward. The balls become soggy, then fluffy. I wonder if eventually they too will freeze.
She’s not a bad player, but somehow I win 4–2, 4–1. I only got up to the net against Natalia once, but with Charanya I manage it a good handful of times. I even win three or four points from my planned pattern. This match is slower (and colder and windier), but it also goes past in a bit of a blur. There are not many long rallies. I am sure that if I move too fast I am going to slip and fall, but I never feel like I really hit out or lose myself in a point. I am painfully aware of the score at all times. I rescue several break points. I am tenacious. I am freezing cold. I am also ignoring Brad and chatting. I find out that Charanya is a student at Oxford, although I don’t ask what she’s studying. She says she’s surprised that this tournament even went ahead. Apparently they don’t usually get enough entrants to run the ladies’ singles events in Grade 5s. People drop out at the last minute, Charanya says. They do it all the time.
I’m in the consolation draw final! I have a cup of tea and warm up inside, but Kevin Clipboard seems to think we should play outside again. It is now 6:00 p.m. and we are in the East Midlands on February 2. I begin nicely, almost a tiny bit flirtatiously. “Please, please don’t make us play outside again. It’s so cold and dark and icy.” When this fails to move him, I add darkly, “and dangerous.” He says he’ll try to find us an indoor court, but unfortunately the tournament organizer has accidentally only booked the courts until 6:00 p.m., not 8:00 p.m. People are turning up for their evening hit about. Natalia is playing Crystal (6.1) on Court 2 in the ladies’ final. But we can’t have that next because Kevin wants to put the men’s final on it. He walks around with his clipboard for a while. Rings Simon, the tournament organizer. Talks to a David Lloyd person.
“Right,” he says. “According to Simon you don’t actually have to play the consolation draw final. You’re only guaranteed two matches. We don’t have to give you a third one. So unless you want to play outside . . .”
We agree to play outside. But once Sally, my opponent, has gone to get changed, I have a bright idea. I ask Kevin if anyone would be willing to give us their court for £20. Perhaps sensing how desperate I really am not to go outside, he magically finds us a court. It’s been booked from 6:00, but the people haven’t shown up. It is booked again at 7:00. It is now 6:10. If the people who have booked it show up, then they are within their rights to kick us off the court.
I am furious—pleased of course that I don’t have to go outside again, but furious that I have paid my match fee and traveled here and got a hotel and basically done my bit only to be faced with lackluster organization and a sense that what I have come here to do does not matter to anyone. In order to have any chance of playing singles seriously, I have had to travel to Leicester. But what I was looking for isn’t here. I should have pulled out when I was unable to get a hit on the surface beforehand.
I’m not yet totally crushed, but it is not my best self that goes into the final with Sally Foster, 8.2. I am particularly anxious about being thrown off the court. And I never do well when I am being treated badly. I tend to step up when there is glamour, pizazz, any kind of audience and excitement and pressure. Here on Court 5, away from the show courts, the only people around are a dad teaching his son to grunt while playing his badminton shots. “Just like a tennis player,” he says. But I am not grunting. Grunting is on my list of things I must do but I am not doing it.
But I do enjoy my match against Sally. She is a pusher—someone who plays steadily and waits for you to make a mistake—and a good one, which means at least we can have long rallies. We are both nervous, and have both lost some concentration. Afterward, she admits to shaking with nerves. I’m not doing that any more. I can serve without stage fright and everything. But I am still—still—not hitting out. I am not finishing my shots. I am not grunting. I am hitting the ball middle and deep and she is standing in the middle and I am standing in the middle and we middle-and-deep the ball back to each other and could this be the first time I have been bored playing tennis? A few moonballs. I try to work my way up to the net a few times. I win a few points this way, but she passes me a couple of times and lobs me.
Sally is a confident, tight player. And I do enjoy those rallies, when I am not glancing at the door to see if we are about to lose our court. She wins her first service game and then I win mine and then she breaks me and wins the set 4–1. I serve a couple of double faults. I am tired, not so much physically but mentally. I start serving flat because I can’t be bothered to change my grip for my spin serve. Still, I do get it where I want to a lot of the time, including out to the backhand on the ad side, which is a new serve for me. But Sally gets them all back.
