41-Love Read online

  My next singles opponent is Netball Hannah. She has just been bagelled (lost 6–0) by Amie Tonkiss and she isn’t happy.

  “I’m just so sick of being beaten,” she’s saying to Margaret and Dan. “I feel like such a bloody loser. I might just go home, to be honest. Why does everyone have to take it so seriously?” She looks at me. “It’s just a bit of fun, right?”

  “Er, yeah.”

  After I beat her 6–0, she does go home. Do I feel bad? Sort of. I’ve played my worst, slowest, most drippy tennis against her, which does make me feel pretty awful. I also have this strange new hunger in me: I would have felt like a loser had I dropped even one game to her. I am also convinced by the argument in The Inner Game of Tennis that you should go out and play your best every time, regardless of your opponent’s level of skill or expectations. I suppose there’d be the odd exception. Perhaps playing a child. Although when I was a child I played tennis against my stepfather, Couze, and he beat me 6–0 most of the time. Every point I won against him meant something. If I took a game to deuce, it was a big achievement. My biggest problem at that age was that I couldn’t bear the embarrassment of beating my friends, or random girls with names like Julie or Tracey, so I used to deliberately let them have points here, games there, until it was a more respectable 6–4. Although often this would go wrong and I would underestimate their actual ability and they would beat me.

  A colleague of mine, feminist theorist Jan Montefiore, once told me about playing table tennis with one of her sons. “It was extraordinary,” she said. “I was winning by nineteen points and then he came back to beat me 21–19.” I remember thinking at the time how sweet this was, that she didn’t know what had really happened, but as I write it now I realize that of course she must have known. People always know when they are being controlled and manipulated, even if it is meant in kindness. I hate it when Dan plays down to me in our coaching sessions. It’s so unsatisfying. You never know if you have won a point on your own merit or because someone has taken pity on you. Luckily, Dan doesn’t do it very often. Indeed, he bagelled me a couple of days before this tournament, to teach me something—probably humility. I point this out to Hannah before she leaves. There’s no shame in it; it happens to us all.

  “Yeah, well, just make sure you beat her,” she says, nodding at Amie Tonkiss.

  Someone tells me that Hannah barely took a point off Amie.

  But next I have to play Kofo. She hits the ball hard—much harder than anyone I’ve played so far—but she makes a lot of errors. Still, she rushes the net a few times, and so do I, and there are lobs and volleys and passing shots and a bit of cheering from the audience, which is nice. It feels as if she is winning more points than she is, but in the end I beat her 6–1 in something of a blur. Rod has gone home long ago, unable to take the cold of the tennis center for the whole day, but now I text him to tell him that I am playing in the equivalent of a final. Although it’s a round robin tournament, Amie and I are both unbeaten so far, so this will be the decider. In fact, if I win this—I won’t, but if I do—I will have beaten everyone.

  Rod and I only live around the corner from the ITC, and so he arrives, breathless and excited, about four minutes later. The match that follows is somehow more of a blur than the last one. Amie blitzes me in the first game and I know my winning run is about to come to an end. I relax at that point—and then I win my serve. She wins her next one and I win mine. We are level, which is a surprise. And then, suddenly, I break her serve. The type of steady tennis that I will spend the next year trying to stop playing works against Amie. I return the balls and she tries to hit winners. Sometimes they work, but more often they don’t. I suspect she’s having an off day but, extraordinarily, I am beating her quite easily. Rod shifts in his plastic chair. He looks more like he is watching rugby than cricket, even quietly cheering from time to time.

  I win, 6–2.

  So I have won the ladies’ singles. I can’t believe how happy I feel. It’s definitely as good as publishing my first novel. Way better than my first kiss. I still have some doubles to play—against Amie and her father, which they win easily, and against Lee and the old lady with the blanket, which we do manage to win. Rod goes home to put a half bottle of champagne in the freezer. We will drink a further bottle of red in the local French restaurant afterward. When I tell him what it was like being given my trophy, he gets tears in his eyes and so do I.

  It goes on the mantelpiece, right in the middle, and as I look at it there, I realize that at this moment, even with my new novel finished and my next promotion—the one that will make me a professor—almost due at the university, all I really want is another tennis trophy.

  This is what is going to almost kill me.

  •

  The day after the Christmas Tournament I am in London for my new literary agency’s party. One of my best friends, the novelist David Flusfeder, has like me recently defected to this agency. We meet in a pub beforehand and I tell him about my win, and what it means to me. He’s not that sporty, but he gets it. After a couple of glasses of wine, he asks me whether I would rather win the Nobel Prize for Literature or score the winning goal in the FA Cup.

  “You first,” I say.

  “But there’s no question for me,” he says.

  “What, the Nobel?”

  “No,” he says, “the goal. I’d much rather score the goal.”

  He doesn’t even play football, as far as I know. He’s more likely to be found in a casino in Las Vegas taking part in a poker championship.

  “I don’t play football,” I say. “I’m not sure I even like it.”

  “What about winning Wimbledon then?” he says.

  Oh God. What indeed? What about that? Well, still the Nobel, right?

  But when I ask people over the next few days and weeks, everyone—great feminists, choristers, academics, editors—chooses the FA Cup goal. A couple of them, Rod included, have to have it upgraded to the winning goal in the World Cup, but still choose the goal. But everyone in my family chooses the Nobel.

  •

  It is 12:45 p.m. on January 11, 2014. The match begins at 1:00 p.m. I am standing on Court 4 in the cold, hard, green emptiness of the Indoor Tennis Centre, entirely alone. I am wearing Stella McCartney for Adidas. I have painted my fingernails dark pink to artfully clash with my bright red shoes. I have taped my probably infected toe and put Band-Aids on the worst pressure points on each foot. My black Adidas bag is packed with knee braces, spare sweatbands, electrolyte pills, magnesium spray, arnica gel, more Band-Aids, chocolate, water, and more ibuprofen than you could safely ingest in a week. I have been warming up in the gym for the last half hour, listening to uplifting music, or my idea of uplifting music: mainly The The and clubby, drug-reference-heavy stuff from the early 1990s. I spent yesterday icing various parts of myself while reading a book called Think to Win. I have meditated, stretched, visualized. Sort of. I am ready to play tennis.

  12:55. Still no one. I check my phone to see if someone has texted me to say the match has been canceled, but I’m pretty sure it has not. I arrange our two courts carefully. Eight plastic chairs altogether: two on either side of both ends of the net, with spaces left in the middle for where the umpires would go, if there were umpires. Once I finish scraping chairs around, the only sound left in the tennis center is from the kids in the park outside throwing rocks at the fire doors. At 12:59 there are faint sounds from the stairwell. It’s the away team, arrived from somewhere near Rochester. At least, I assume they are the away team. I have never seen any of them before. But I don’t really know who is playing on our team. They could even be our team, except there are four of them. I mumble things about water and toilets until our captain, Fiona, turns up. She has two tins of Head Championship balls pressed into her chest and a bag full of cakes and baguettes dangling from her wrist. She is also holding a piece of paper.

  “I’ve got the match balls,” she says. “But this is the wrong form, apparently, and I don’t know how to fill it in.”

  “This is the away team,” I say.

  “Oh, hello,” she says. “Long journey?”

  One of my favorite tennis books at this moment is Winning Ugly by Brad Gilbert. I just got it for Christmas and devoured it on my parents’ sofa between bottles of Vacqueyras wine and hot, frenzied games of table tennis. I read it on the train back, still drunk on my recent success, ready to slurp up anything, anything to do with tennis, my new love, my passion, my life. It was so good that when I got home, I read it again. I made notes. It explains in detail how to approach a competitive tennis match. It tells you what to pack in your bag, how to warm up, and why you should never serve first. It explains how many tennis racquets you should bring to a match and how they should be strung. It also cautions strongly against chatting with your opponents until after the match, but by the time we begin, everyone has looked at pictures of French Florence’s puppy and the away team have started eating the baguettes that are supposed to be for afternoon tea. I was put in charge of cheese and biscuits, and these are sensibly stashed in the fridge in the café upstairs. One of our team has some pâté and cold meats at the bottom of her sports bag. It is impossible to tell how long they have been there.

  I also have a book on doubles strategy, which is fascinating, although almost entirely irrelevant when playing with someone you have never met, let alone practiced with. Is it weird of me to think that the normal thing for a team to do in this situation would be to turn up half an hour early, decide who is playing with whom, warm up, get a bit of team spirit going, rock the home advantage? If it were up to me, each doubles pair would not just have played together before but would have trained together, probably going halves on a few coaching sessions involving traffic cones and diagrams. If it
were up to me, my partner and I would be playing the Australian formation. We would fist-bump after every point. We would wear matching outfits, perhaps with tiaras. OK, not tiaras, but we might have a theme song. And we would certainly have a mantra. The person at the baseline would call soft but clever instructions to the person at the net . . .

  “Does anyone have a spare tennis racquet?” asks Fiona. “I’ve left mine at home.”

  I have a spare tennis racquet. Of course I do. Brad Gilbert says you should always have a good spare (rather than your crappy ex-racquet) in case a string breaks during a match. This means I have two black Wilson 104 Blades, each strung at 55 lbs. (I have no idea what this means, but it looked good on the website.) Am I going to lend one of these racquets, my beautiful prized possessions, to Fiona? No, of course not. I am never going to let anyone touch these racquets apart from me. Venus and Serena use Blades. I bet they don’t lend their racquets to other people. Or maybe they do. Maybe when you go through forty-one restrings in two weeks, as Serena did in Wimbledon 2013, or crack open a newly strung racquet whenever there are new balls, as most pro players do, you feel differently about them.

  Did I ever kid myself at the beginning of all this, when I bought myself a tennis coaching session for my birthday last summer, that I wanted to play “social” tennis? I think so. I think I told myself that tennis would be a good way to meet new people in this strange seaside town in which I have felt cold, exposed, and isolated, sometimes to the point of tears. But I’d forgotten how competitive I am, and how much I want to win. And I know that this is my last chance to do the thing I love, the thing that I was always best at, as well as I can. Do I want to play ladies’ doubles on a cobbled-together team and then sit down with the other players to eat cake and sandwiches afterward? Sort of. I mean, I definitely did when I started. Only two months ago I drove all the way to Bromley for my first-ever league match with a terrified partner—Netball Hannah—who admitted she was only really interested in the afternoon tea. When I started playing tennis again, only last July, the idea of playing in any kind of league felt impossibly thrilling. Like publishing a book (if you haven’t), or becoming a professor. Now what I want to know is which league, and with whom, and will the results affect my rating and my ranking? And I’d much rather it was singles than doubles. And if everyone could please, please just take it a bit more seriously . . .

  Today I’m playing with Schoolteacher Hannah (different from Netball Hannah). We are playing Gemma and Linda from Somewhere-Near-Rochester. They are good but have not warmed up and are not used to this surface. We take the first set quite easily. I am nervous, of course, but also Gemma is so oddly beautiful that I’m having trouble concentrating. She has dark, shiny hair, piercing blue eyes, and a straight nose. Will this sound weird? Here goes anyway: She looks a bit like me. Perhaps fifteen years ago when I was younger, thinner, and prettier. She is wearing a proper tennis outfit—matching top and skirt. Everyone else apart from us is just wearing mismatched tracksuit bottoms and any old top, but she looks as if she has dressed up for this. Her arms are nicer than mine. She has a more beautiful forehand, which she plays early and with plenty of topspin. Oh, and she does that little kick with her right leg as she strikes the ball. She looks quite posh. I am almost falling in love with her—I mean, not really, but you know—when we change over before the third set tiebreak. They have just come back from 0–4 down in the second set to take it 6–4. I should stop looking at Gemma. I should hit the ball harder and more aggressively. I should stop thinking and let myself play . . .

  This is when Hannah admits, to all of us, to sharing a bottle of wine with her husband last night and I, rather against what I think would be Brad Gilbert’s advice, admit to doing the same with my partner. It seems Linda has similarly indulged. But then Gemma pipes up, in a voice that certainly does not match her outfit, “I done two bottles of wine with my boyfriend last night.”

  After this, of course they beat us. It is genius. It is beyond Brad. I am gutted. Then we beat the other pair 6–0, 6–0 and feel a bit better. Then we all sit down to have what’s left of the tea and Hannah tells me all about how she had to go to the back of beyond the week before to play with someone named Lucille who was apparently so good that everyone complained. I want to be so good that everyone—in fact, just one person would be fine—complains. But I am not that good. I was a child prodigy, sort of, but I have not played for years and years. I am trying to pick up where I left off on a remote school tennis court back in 1986, when I had hair like Madonna and an accent not unlike Gemma’s.

  More pictures of the puppy are going around.

  It is January 11, 2014. This, I have decided, is going to be my year of tennis. I am going to see how far I can get as a forty-one-year-old woman tennis player, and I’m going to write about it. It’s my new project. My new life.

  •

  Since I’ve started playing tennis again, I have realized that very few people play singles. It’s too hard, too intense. The local leagues only offer doubles matches. People are impressed when I tell them that I play league tennis, but I know the truth—doubles is for fat losers who can’t run. The next—and as far as I know only—local singles tournament is the Indoor Tennis Centre Spring Tournament. It’s different from the Christmas one. It’s rated as a Grade 4 on the LTA website, which means it’s county standard. That means that the person most likely to win it will be a county-level player, not me.

  You sign up for the tournament on the LTA website. You need a BTM—British Tennis Membership—number to enter proper tournaments like this one. I should have a BTM number, and should have provided it at the few league doubles matches I have already played. I have filled out a form and Margaret has sent it somewhere. Nothing has happened. I have chased it, only to be told that these things are sometimes slow but it will come through eventually. Without the number I can browse tournaments on the LTA website but cannot enter any. I also cannot have a rating or a ranking. At this moment all I want in life is a rating and a ranking. I want numbers that tell me how good a tennis player I am, and then I want to devote my waking life—and maybe even my dreams too—into making those numbers better. I can get a BTM myself, instantly, by paying £25 on the LTA website. But I am not to do this, I am told, because if I just wait I can have the number for free.

  And then one night I do it. Of course I do. It’s probably the best £25 I have ever spent. It means I can turn my life into a sort of video game. And fuck, I suddenly think, all those stupid years I spent playing video games because they were cheap and easy when I could have been doing this. I was younger and my muscles were looser and my reactions were faster but of course I had no money for shoes or lessons, and instead I had all those deadlines and panic attacks and cigarettes. Breathe. Yes, OK, though, the thing I did like about video games is also the thing I like about this. I am going to get a rating and then I am going to play other people with ratings and I am going to win or lose and my rating is going to go up or down and between matches I will power up and learn special skills and work on my sword and . . .

  And I can enter the Spring Tournament. I will have my own “competition calendar.” I can’t remember the last time I was this excited about anything. Speaking in front of five hundred people at the Sydney Writers’ Festival last year, I just wished it would be over so I could go and eat oysters and drink wine, but things are different this year. This year I am going to be fierce and thin and a champion. But when I go on to the LTA website to enter the Spring Tournament, it tells me that I can’t enter online and have to do it at the tennis center. So I have to sheepishly admit to Margaret that I paid £25 to join the LTA—which I don’t mind, I stress, I don’t mind at all—but that it won’t let me enter the tournament. While she waits for the website to load so she can check what’s gone wrong, because you should be able to enter online, should be able to put the tournament in your “shopping basket” as if it were just another strategy book or sports bra from Amazon, I ask if it’s going to be another round robin like the Christmas Tournament. It can’t be, Margaret explains, because she is expecting around eighty people to enter. I guess that’s men and kids as well as women. But even so . . .