Games People Play (14 page)

Rachel

Incredibly, I
am
doing really well in this tournament.

Kerry got knocked out in the second round by a beefy American girl, but, four days after our arrival in Zurich, I have played my socks off, and found myself in the quarter finals. I am relieved I didn’t give in to the temptation to stay in bed and not even get on the plane, because the two-odd hours’ duration of each of my matches has been the only time I haven’t been pining for Mark. I’ve found I can turn off the insistent wail of misery inside my head, and focus.

Dad and José are really happy with my performance too, although I still can’t talk to Dad. I take all my pre-and post-match advice from José, and roll my eyes like a stroppy teenager whenever he says: ‘Ivan told me to tell you . . .’

Via José, Dad has plenty to say about all my matches – insider knowledge of my opponents’ games, tips on shots,
etc.
– but, oddly, when it comes to the day of the quarter-final, he doesn’t say a word. Even though I’m refusing to be within a ten foot radius of him, I can immediately tell that something about this match is spooking him. Perhaps he believes I’ll be way out of my depth, and this thought makes me even more determined to win. Unfortunately, I woke up this morning feeling really ropy: exhausted and queasy. I put it down to a slight hangover, and nerves.

My opponent is a twenty-five year old Hungarian girl called Natasha Horvath. She is my height, and beautiful in an intense kind of way, with straight blonde hair knotted up as if she’d fantasized about twisting my arm behind my back when she did it. She seems vaguely familiar, although I’m sure I’d have remembered if I’d played her before. Every time I look at her, I get a cold uncomfortable feeling in my back, and my shoulderblades tighten up.

She is really unsettling me. She’s been glaring at me from the start, not just with the common-or-garden steely aggression that we all employ to try and psych out an opponent; but with a raw, naked hatred which is coming at me in waves from the far side of the court.

It’s throwing me off my stride, making the sweat dripping down my face just a little more cloying, and for a while all my volleys go straight into the net.

The warm-up is brutal, like she is trying to score points off me already. When I feed her some smashes, I swear she is trying to put them all straight through me. I’m jumping out of the way, under fire. This does not seem normal. I glance over at Kerry, sitting at the front of the stands, and she makes a face at me, then grimaces in Natasha’s direction. José, who is next to her, gives me the thumbs up, but when I look over at Dad, he is gazing at Natasha with a strange but unmistakably lustful expression on his face. As soon as he catches me looking, he jumps and shakes himself slightly, acting insouciant – but the damage is done, and it just makes me even more angry. Bloody Dad, he’s like a dog on heat. It’s embarrassing. Could he not stop thinking about pulling, even for a second? As if a gorgeous woman like Natasha Horvath would look twice at my dad, with his lived-in face and thinning hair ...He might have been a catch twenty years ago, but no one thinks that now, except Anthea and a few menopausal and bored housewives at the tennis club.

All in all, I am in an extremely bad mood by the time the warm-up has finished. But this is good. I want to be angry. I want to be in control, and vicious, and as intimidating as Natasha is being to me. I make myself stop glowering at Dad, and glare right back at Natasha, the ferocity of my gaze trying to disguise the fear that she somehow manages to instil in me. She’s like an automaton. The crowd must be able to see, or sense, the tension, because the atmosphere is unusually sober, with people sitting as taut and still as the few remaining empty flip-up chairs of the stands. Huge television cameras gaze at us with blank lenses, waiting.

Natasha wins the toss, and chooses to serve. Her first serve lands just wide of my service box. I look up at the umpire, waiting to hear her call, but Natasha assumes – or decides – she’s aced me, and has already moved across to the left side of the centre T, ready to serve the second point.

‘Wide!’ I protest, pointing at a non-existent mark on the hard court and wishing we were playing on clay so I’d have my proof. The umpire shakes her head. I blink with disbelief – the very first point! I put my hands on my hips. ‘That was
wide
.’ My voice sounds small and squeaky with outrage in the echoey stadium.

‘
Funfzehn–zero
,’ says the umpire impassively. She is a stocky middle-aged woman who looks like she’ll never be able to get out of the umpire’s chair without the aid of a crane.

A faint smirk brushes across Natasha’s lips. I hate her. I hate the umpire. Three more aces follow – genuine ones – and I’ve lost the first game without scoring a single point. Natasha’s serve is a nightmare: hard, unpredictable, left-handed. I have the strangest feeling that this is more than just competitive; it feels personal. What can I possibly have done to Natasha to make her hate me this much?

I manage to salvage a couple of my service games, but the first set is a write-off: six–two. When I glance across at Kerry, she has her feet on the back of the seat in front, and her head buried in her knees. I feel sick again, and swallow hard. Imagine the humiliation of puking on court! I’d emigrate if that ever happened.

Nervously, I glance over to the exit, calculating how fast I could get there in the event of an imminent vomit.

At the set break, Natasha sits on her chair at the side of the court with a towel over her head. Her fists are clenched, and the towel is moving as she appears to be shaking her head under there; giving herself a pep talk, I presume.

An image of Mark springs into my head, the way he’d encourage me in my matches. I miss him, sitting up there mouthing, ‘
go on
’, at me, nodding his support, telling me he loved me with his eyes. He used to say that the urge he got to jump up and down and scream for joy when I hit a good shot was awful; as was the way he felt like punching the umpire when there was a bad call. I know what he means. You have to sit and watch impassively, especially when there are TV cameras present, and it’s so hard.

Dad was dreadful like that when I was younger. Impassive was not a word in his vocabulary. He actually did leap up and roar, regularly; and more than once he was asked to calm down or leave. Sometimes he shouted at me, sometimes at the umpire. For years, I lived in terror that he’d become one of those tennis dads who got such a bad reputation on the circuit that most of the press their daughters received talked of nothing else. Analyses of their match play was more about how the dad had behaved than how the offspring had played. Especially since Dad had been quite good in his heyday. The tennis press – and sometimes the nationals, if I was doing particularly well – never failed to point out that I was more successful than he’d ever been. And unsurprisingly it never failed to go down like a lead balloon in our household.

Second set. I’ve been shaken, but I tell myself that this is a fresh start. I’ll look at the annihilation of the first set as the warm-up. Now I mean business. The umpire calls time, and we walk back to our respective ends of the court. When Natasha turns to face me, waiting for my serve, she looks like a bulldog chewing a wasp. Her expression contorts and darkens her pretty face, but this time I refuse to be intimidated. I serve hard and fast to her forehand because her backhand is stronger, and she slightly mis-hits the return. It is almost the first weakness she’s shown, and I’m on to it immediately. She chip-charges – runs up to the net after the shot – but a fraction of a second too late, and I lob her with ease.

Fifteen-love. This is better. Kerry gives me a discreet thumbs-up. I allow myself a brief, fleeting image of Mark; I pretend he is sitting next to her, waiting till I win to rush down to the changing room to give me a big cuddle outside the door...

My next serve is even better. Fast, but with a spin which sends the ball
ricocheting
away from Natasha’s racket, and she barely scrapes it back into my court. I am there waiting for it, and slam it past her into the far corner. Why could I not have done that in the first set? Sometimes tennis bemuses me. You know perfectly well what you ought to do, you’ve practiced it a million times, so why are there times when you just can’t do it? It’s at moments like these when I wish I had a nice, easy, non-challenging job, like a manicurist or a house painter.

But for the rest of that set, I couldn’t be happier to be a tennis player. I am all over her, triumph and attitude in every one of my shots. I serve harder, run faster, return better than I ever have before. I feel as if wings have sprouted from the sides of my Nikes, and I’m barely even out of breath. Natasha hates it, but she can’t do anything about it. Perhaps she became complacent at winning the first set so easily, but something almost imperceptible floats skywards out of her game: its departing soul. She fights hard, of course, and we have some brilliant rallies, but the points are mine. I feel as if I own them before the words are out of the umpire’s mouth.

The crowd sits forwards and puts away their sandwiches, and I feel them urging me on. It is euphoric. I wish Mark could see me now. I wonder if there is any chance this match is being broadcast on Eurosport. I’ll do it for him. I have another fleeting fantasy, that he’ll have jumped on a plane and is, even as I think it, cheering me on silently, one of the blur of faces before me.

I win the second set 6-1. Natasha tries desperately to maintain her expression of undiluted evil, but I can see I’ve upset her badly. Her brow is a furious furrow of concentration, and I can almost see her marshalling her strength to fight back.

We start the third a little more cautiously, gauging each other’s respective fatigue and fury but, despite my queasiness, I still have the edge. I am 3-1 up, at thirty–all, waiting to receive Natasha’s serve.

She suddenly kneels down and does up her shoelace – I’m sure it wasn’t undone, but it is a stalling tactic – and I make the fatal mistake of glancing into the crowd. Hearing a man’s voice calling, ‘Go on, Rachel!’ clear as a bell and sounding just like Mark. I even think I see him, sitting there, beaming at me: my wish fulfilment fantasy.

By the time Natasha straightens up again, I’ve realized with disappointment that of course it isn’t Mark at all, just somebody who sounds like him, but it is enough to tip the balance of the match again. She aces me; and what makes me catch my breath isn’t the loss of the crucial point, but the acute pain of the loss of Mark. My concentration is shot.

I haven’t realized that I am holding my breath until I begin to feel literally vertiginous, but as Natasha moves across to serve, at forty–thirty, and aces me again, it is too late to simply exhale. Suddenly I feel very, very unwell, rather than just the under-the-weather sensation I’ve had throughout the match. The court beneath my feet begins to rock slightly, and I know I have to sit down immediately, before blackness creeps up over me.

‘Three-two to Miss Anderson, third set. One set all,’ says the umpire, in German, and I realize with overwhelming relief that I have one minute to sit down and get myself back together. I sip cold water, dry the sweat off my face, put my head between my knees, and breathe as deeply as I can, feeling my ribcage expand and push against the tops of my thighs. It’s not over. I’m still winning, just. She held her serve, that’s to be expected. I’ve broken her once in this set. I can do it again. I just have to not let her break me in this game. She is not having this game, no way. I mutter to myself in the damp quiet between my trembling knees. It’s as if the crowd has vanished, and I know this is good, because if they aren’t there, then Mark can’t be there either, and I need him not to be there because his absence – or his imaginary presence – is putting me off.

‘
Zeit
,’ says the umpire. Time. Time to forget about feeling ill. I’ve got all evening for that. Time to work. Time to win.

Thankfully, I’ve stopped feeling dizzy, but despite my pep talk, I lose the next game; and the next. It’s my serve, and if she breaks me again, it’s all over.

I don’t serve well, but she makes a couple of unforced errors, and I’m thirty–love up. Then, after a long rally, she runs up to the net to take my drop shot, skids and slips up, her long legs splaying out on the court in different directions. The ball goes in the net and she bangs her racket head on the ground in frustration. We are both desperate.

She’s not hurt, although she takes her time walking back to the baseline. I serve for the game – right into the net. Gritting my teeth, I put a huge spin on my second serve, sending the ball curving up and away, bouncing so high that she has no chance of returning it. The game is mine. Four-all. I wipe my face with my wristband, grateful that I’ve stopped feeling sick. Two more, I think. Two more games, then I can go and lie down and cry for my beautiful Mark.

I feel like a gladiator in an amphitheatre, fighting to the death. Natasha wants to kill me, so I must kill her first. It’s weird – it’s not as if I’m playing the world number one, or somebody who’d boost my ranking hugely. Beating Natasha would hike it up a bit, but it’s not about points or rankings or getting through to the semis, or even winning this tournament.

I just want to beat
her
, and I feel almost grateful that she hates me enough to get me this worked up.

Perhaps she did hurt herself when she fell, or perhaps she’s just cracking under the pressure, but in the next game I break back again, with relative ease. Five-four. The match is within my grasp at last, and it’s my serve. As we change ends, I look up and see José, Kerry and Dad like the three wise monkeys, all leaning forwards in their seats, rigid with pressure; and somehow this reassures me. I’m not on my own. I can do this. As long as I don’t think about Mark’s face at the airport.