41-Love Read online

  “What are you doing tonight?” he asks me.

  “Why? I mean, nothing, but why?”

  “Good. You’re playing tennis with me. I need a doubles partner.”

  “OK.” Breathe. Don’t die. Breathe. “My knees are a bit crap at the moment.”

  “That’s OK. I’ll do all the running for you. 7:00 p.m.?”

  I am so happy I could vomit. Immediately a voice in my head points out that this is quite short notice and he has probably asked literally everyone else in the entire world, but it’s only 2:00 p.m. The match isn’t until 7:00 p.m. There are five hours’ worth of people he has not yet asked. This is one of the best, most exciting things that has ever happened to me. Dan thinks I’m good enough to play in a league doubles match with him. Oh, God. Oh, God.

  The coaching session that follows is the best I’ve ever had. I’m hitting the ball hard and deep but keeping it in. A couple of my crosscourt shots are so good that Dan makes a kind of whistling noise. He hardly ever praises me. I feel amazing. He has me on the forehand side hitting crosscourt into the tramlines, because I’ll be playing forehand tonight. I am in training for something! It is real. I keep playing better than I ever have before. After the session is over, I rush home and tell Rod what has happened. I have a bath. Stretch. Eat scrambled eggs. I am so nervous I feel a bit sick. Apart from Bromley, I have never played a league match before.

  We hit up with other members of our team. I feel like I am fifteen years old and trying to buy something cool from the Our Price record store in Chelmsford. Walking feels strange. Speaking feels strange. The others seem so relaxed, but I keep netting the ball or hitting it to the wrong side of the court. I’m sure it will stop when we begin playing, but it doesn’t. It gets worse. I am a disaster. An embarrassment. Why did I think I could do this? I fluff most of my shots, but Dan rescues the whole thing and we somehow win our first match, 6–3, 6–3.

  “It should have been love and love,” he tells me in the break.

  I take a deep breath. “Look, I’m really sorry I’m so nervous and . . .”

  “You’ll be all right,” he says, not quite making eye contact.

  The next pair are much better. The man intercepts at the net. It’s hard to get anything past him. Still, since we’ve won the first match, I’ve relaxed quite a lot. I even manage to hit a nice shot down the tramlines behind the man when he moves the other way to poach a ball he thinks is coming crosscourt.

  “Shot!” says Dan. We fist-bump. This is fun, suddenly.

  The ball comes to me on the forehand side. I hit a good lob over the volleyer. The server, the woman, has to run to her backhand side and try to get it back, but her shot is weak and it’s a very, very easy overhead for Dan to just . . .

  Put straight in the net.

  WTF? To me Dan is the Best Tennis Player Ever, but in this match he makes more and more errors. My confidence is going up and so, apparently, is his, but every serve he goes for is intended to be an ace. In one game he double-faults three times. He tries to poach at the net and misses. I can tell he’s tired. I guess he’s been coaching all day. He’s playing on the ad side, the left, because in doubles the strongest player always goes on the ad side. During one long deuce, though, I notice we are getting to advantage on my point and then back to deuce on his. Am I playing better than Dan? If so it’s only for a few minutes, but . . . I’m not exactly keeping track of the score but I know I’m suddenly enjoying this. Dan and I have never played together before and we won our first match and we’re doing OK against good opponents in this one. We fight for the first set but lose 6–4. That’s OK, right? We lose the next one 6–2.

  Dan lies on the ground afterward, not meeting my eye.

  OK. So.

  He keeps lying there. I put my stuff away. He goes to the office.

  When I get home I feel low, childish, sour. I tell Rod all about the matches and how well I played toward the end, but when I try to tell him how upset I am because Dan didn’t say anything to me afterward, he doesn’t get it. Maybe Dan was tired? Undoubtedly. He could have said thanks, though. He could have said I did well in my very first mixed doubles match ever. He’s my coach, right? I feel miserable all weekend. On Monday evening I go along to the club night that Dan runs.

  “You know,” I say to him, “that was the first time I have ever played mixed doubles in my life. I mean in an actual match. And—”

  He’s bounding along with a basket of balls.

  “Well, you’re playing again on Thursday,” he says.

  •

  I recently left my literary agent. He was a nice person, a good friend. We used to go to polite places and I would drink wine while he had sparkling mineral water and talked about training for marathons. My new agent goes around in an anorak clutching grubby, suspicious-looking bags of books and vaguely menacing all the people who bother him on the Tube. He meets his authors in a variety of terrible dives ranging from YO! Sushi to sticky Soho pubs. He is always late. I once invited him for afternoon tea. “Tea? I do not drink tea,” was the response. He is one of the best readers I have ever encountered and represents all the most exciting authors in the UK, even though some of them remain so poor that they plead with him to get them in prison.

  I’m not sure whether moving to him was the right choice, but it’s too late now. I did it on a whim. My long-term agent had taken too long to reply to an email and so I did one of those things I now often do when I’m angry: something random and unkind and completely undoable. I DMed David Miller on Twitter and suggested a coffee. We met at Paddington station and I felt like I was embarking on an affair and I didn’t care.

  It’s January 2014. I have recently delivered my new novel and so we are meeting for dinner. Because I live in Kent and David is based in London, he has suggested meeting at a halfway point, in Ashford, where another of his authors set one of her novels. “No,” I’d said. “They have no wine in Ashford. And no food.” I’m still quite into wine and food. I suggest meeting in Blacks, my private members club in Soho. My current favorite wine at Blacks is called Cunto and costs £42 a bottle.

  “Where does your train come in? St. Pancras?”

  He knows a pub near St. Pancras, although “near” turns out to be over the other side of Kings Cross toward the Guardian building. It’s cold and raining, and this is too short a distance to get a cab or a Tube. The pub is busy but at least the wine is OK. David is forty minutes late, which means I have one glass of wine and then another and another. We walk in the rain to a restaurant on the Euston Road where the most expensive bottle of wine is £12.99 and everything comes with fries. I’m tired from work and tennis and a bit drunk. We should have gone to Ashford, but it’s too late. David wants to talk about the novel I’ve just delivered. He says he thinks it is all about love, which is true: it is. But I can’t get properly in the mood. In fact, I suddenly want to tell him about something different. I take out my iPad and bring up the piece about the Christmas Tournament from the East Kent Mercury. There’s a picture of me holding my trophy next to pictures of Amie Tonkiss and her father with their doubles trophy. I’m smiling broadly. My hair is scraped back. I’m wearing my best Stella McCartney white warm-up jacket, and I’m pleased that I remembered to put lipstick on for the photo.

  David scans the piece. There is no expression on his face. Then he laughs.

  “Hilarious that there’s another Scarlett Thomas in East Kent,” he says.

  “That’s me,” I say.

  “What?”

  “That’s me.”

  “That’s not you. You’ve got cheekbones.”

  I roll my eyes. “I was playing sport. With my hair up.”

  He takes my iPad again. Scrutinizes the story more closely.

  “Look,” I say, waving my fingers. “Same color nail polish.”

  He frowns. “But your face is so fat in this picture.”

  I roll my eyes again. “OK. Look, I won this trophy last month. I’m forty-one. I think I could have been a great tennis player but I had nowhere to play seriously when I was a kid. Basically, I’m going to write a tennis book. I’m going to spend 2014 playing tennis and I’m going to see how far I can get. In a year. As a forty-one-year-old. And I’m going to find out whether I would rather have been a tennis player than a novelist—”

  He nods. Sighs. “All right,” he says. “OK. How far could you go?”

  “Sorry? What, do you mean like in tournaments?”

  “Could you, in theory, get to Wimbledon?”

  “In a year, no. At my age, no. In theory, though, yes. Sort of.”

  “You could get to Wimbledon?”

  “Anyone could get to Wimbledon. It’s one of the good things about the LTA system. If I went out now and just won all my matches, eventually my rating would get higher and then I’d get into better tournaments and eventually, yes, there’s no reason—well, apart from all the obvious ones—why anyone couldn’t get to Wimbledon.”

  Like Baby with her dancing, and four-year-old Tony with his house.

  “Anyway, I’m going to get massages and stay in places like the Leicester Hilton and, I don’t know, try to see a part of the world that most people don’t get to see. Are there other fortysomething women out there trying to do sport at a high level? Who are they? What are they like? And what about me? Can I do it? What will it feel like to win?”

  David frowns. “Travelodge,” he says.

  “What? No way, I’m—”

  “It’ll be a far better story if you stay in a Travelodge.”

  •

  Did I really never play tennis in all those years, between giving it up at fourteen and taking it up again at forty-one? Of course I played. There was always a racquet in the back of a cupboard, and always a new boyfriend to beat. I could beat people, even in those wilderness years, because I am fast and good with a ball, and something of those coaching sessions in Mexico stayed with me forever. But it was nowhere near enough. There was the day when a good friend whose major flaw was misogyny (which didn’t apply to me, of course, just all other women) told me of a fight he’d had with his soon-to-be ex-wife, where he’d said that any man could beat any woman at tennis, and she’d said all right then, let’s play, and he’d gone out and thrashed her. He said she’d deserved it. Come on then, I’d said, I’ll beat you now. And I did. With horrible shots and underspin—underspin!—but really just by being able to play the ball in places where he wasn’t. The ball would come and I would visualize what I wanted to do with it, and then it would go out or in the net. But I still got more points than he did.

  In 2007 I had a bestseller for the first time and so I took my mum on holiday to Gozo. After a few days I got bored lying around in the sun (and felt fat, always worried about feeling fat) and I so desperately wanted to run, I wanted to hit something, I wanted that thrill of competing, even if not in a real competition. So I booked a coach and got a really shit racquet from behind the hotel desk. I wore a beach wrap and espadrilles. I looked utterly ridiculous. I didn’t care. You could be quite good, the coach said in broken English. Let me show you how to . . . But I didn’t want to be shown how to. In these precious sixty minutes, dwindling all the time to fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven, just like life, ticking down, receding, all I wanted to do was play tennis. I just wanted to hit the ball. I didn’t care how.

  When I got back from Gozo I joined the Canterbury Tennis Club. I could afford it, and the £25 Slazenger racquet that I later used for my first session with Dan. After my first mix-in session, the best player there wanted to chat with me. I’d played a couple of—I’ll say so myself—pretty awesome shots as part of my rusty, slightly humiliating performance, and assumed that he wanted to talk to me about that. But no, he just wanted to show me his photographs, which became more explicit once all the other players left. When I realized I was on my own at the wrong end of a sports club in the rangy Kent countryside, with this guy showing me pictures of a woman who was by then not only topless but bottomless too, I left and never went back. I wasn’t so upset about the photographs—it wasn’t the first time this kind of thing had happened to me—but more that my shots were so crap. I would never, ever get back whatever it was I’d had as a kid, that I maybe never even had anyway. It was really over this time.

  •

  January 2014. It’s less than two weeks until my Leicester tournament. My train tickets have arrived. I have booked a room in the Leicester Hilton, which has a gym, swimming pool, and sauna. I’ve been stalking my opponents on the LTA website, finding out what year they were born and what other tournaments they’ve played. This is not helping at all. Someone I could play against has a national ranking of thirteenth in her age group. What will it be like actually playing one of these people? I start planning my coaching and hitting sessions for the week beforehand. I am organized, focused. I send an email to the tournament organizer asking if he can put me in touch with any local coaches so I can have a hit on the surface for an hour before the tournament begins. He sends me the number of someone named Dave. Before I leave, I particularly want the ball machine for a couple of hours on Sunday, but the courts in the Indoor Tennis Centre are all booked up for tournaments and matches.

  “But since you’re free on Sunday,” begins Margaret.

  This time I have to bring cold meats.

  We are playing Bearsted IV. They turn up grumpy from the journey and wet from the storm outside. They are wearing fleeces that say things like MAIDSTONE HARRIERS or simply BEARSTED LTC. The whole thing is supposed to begin at 2:30 but there is a kids’ mini-tournament that’s running over and, on Courts 3 and 4, the slap, slap, thwack of two regional boys’ under-16 semifinals. I’ve already been down that end of the tennis center by accident and I watched the boys for a few minutes before the umpire glared at me and made it clear I should leave. These boys play the kind of tennis I want to play. They serve hard, wallop the ball around the court, and fling their tennis racquets at the wall when they make a mistake. They are focused. They are grunting. One of them does it loud, like Nadal. He is beautiful.

  I have my period. And a hangover.

  Bearsted IV are being passive-aggressive about the time delay. They let us know that even though they are not enforcing a penalty (which I think might be a set in their favor), they could. Despite the period and the hangover, I have been to the gym and warmed up as usual. Five minutes on the bike followed by twenty minutes of stretches and running on the spot and pretending to be Victoria Azarenka. But now, in the vast unheated space of the Indoor Tennis Centre, I am freezing again. Margaret is trying to free up another court. When we do eventually get Court 3, we are delayed further because the nets are set up for singles rather than doubles. Once we take down the singles sticks, the net sags to a ridiculously low height. Hannah and I start trying to find both the winding thing for making the net go up and down and the measuring stick to make the net the right height.

  Bearsted IV’s first pair are tutting and sighing. I have period pains. I am now on six ibuprofen a day pretty much every day, because if it’s not period pains it’s my knees or my lower back. We get the net the right height. I arrange the chairs and get out my small pink Lucozade and my large Evian and consider pointing them at the court like Nadal does, but don’t. We begin hitting up. I tell myself to touch my back with my racquet as I finish each forehand. To leave space between me and the ball. I pose like the Statue of Liberty after each backhand. They have won the toss and decided to serve. Their serve is by far the weakest aspect of their game, but a lot of people choose to serve first just because it is what big men with big serves do. It is what Pete Sampras would have done. We take the first game easily.

  I am serving next. Last time I played Dan I really worked on my serve, trying to outthink him, trying to make something happen. In the heat of contest, I developed a lovely new serve out wide to the backhand on the ad court, but I can’t serve that here because Hannah’s head is in the way. In doubles there is always someone or some part of someone in the way. It is one of the things I most hate about it. I have never really bothered to work on that doubles serve where you go out really wide to get the angles. I usually just aim for the T and try to baffle the opposition with a choice of two serves: spin or no spin. Anyway, today my serve has deserted me. In one game we get stuck on deuce for about thirty-five minutes. Hannah has to get back to Sandwich for a dinner party at 6:00 p.m. We begin to worry. But then my serve comes back and we win the first set easily, 6–2.

  I am volleying well, feeling confident and happy at the net. I even play a couple of really good overheads. I am fast and aggressive, but my ground stroke game feels wrong. I just keep plonking it back to the baseline player and trying to avoid the one at the net. And they have clearly decided to step it up in this set. They match us game for game until we break them and I serve for the match on 5–4. I find I am horribly nervous through the two match points that we lose, one to a double fault. I keep thinking This is match point, and it doesn’t help. We lose my service game, which means we’ve gone from match point to having to win another two games to take the set 5–7. But this doesn’t happen. Instead, we end up on a tiebreak at 6–6.

  Kent Slazenger Inter Club Leagues matches are decided on the best of three sets, but the third set is always a championship tiebreak, which is first to ten points. This means that if we lose one tiebreak, we will have to play another immediately. And after we lost two match points! If Bearsted IV’s first pair win one tiebreak, the momentum will go with them and we will lose the next one as well. This dreadful thought stays with me until we are 0–5 down and I decide to do something about it. I’m not sure exactly what changes. I hate losing; I think that is the main thing. Suddenly I am much more aggressive. I am following everything I play into the net and swatting away the returns. Hannah is playing well too. We are particularly good with her keeping it steady at the back and me slamming them away at the front. We make it to 5–5 and all the momentum is back with us. They win one more point but we take the tiebreak 8–6 and the set 7–6 and the match 2–0.