Games People Play (32 page)

Rachel

I managed to get the bus all the way to Dad and Anthea’s, but it was more traumatic than I’d envisaged it would be. Partly because I timed it badly – I left it till mid-afternoon, and the schoolchildren had all just come out. The bus was a blur of off-white shirts, wonky ties and talk of bands I’d barely even heard of: McFly and Busted. A backpack in front of me was painted with the words ‘50 Cent’ in big white letters. Was that a band or a solo artist? Kerry would know. I was worried that my crutches would slide to the floor and trip someone up, or that someone would accidentally kick my bad leg.

I listened to the teenagers’ conversations with interest, as I always do when around non-tennis players. Until the accident, I found it hard to imagine how people not on the tour managed to occupy their time. What did they think about if they didn’t have first-serve percentages to improve, or core stability to increase? What did they say to one another? What the hell did they
do
all day?

When I wasn’t playing matches myself, but watching my friends or rivals from the stands, I used to love eavesdropping on crowd conversations, too. They gave me clues about what preoccupied people. Sure, a lot of those conversations pertained to the match, and were hilarious enough to listen to in their erroneous suppositions about the players or the technique, but what I really liked was the staggering inanity of many of the non-tennis related ones. After I got knocked out in the second round at my last British tournament, I sat in front of two middle-aged women who occupied an entire game of a thrilling quarter-final between Kerry and Tatiana Garbin in a discussion about jelly.

Garbin was an Italian player ranked fifty-second in the world, and it was Kerry’s biggest match to date. She’d done really well to get that far, and it went to three sets before she succumbed, so I felt quite outraged on her behalf that these two women weren’t paying more attention.

‘Do you like jelly?’ one had asked the other. ‘I make a lot of jelly at home, you know, with the cubes that you melt. Although I’m not so keen on the lemon sort.’

She continued in this vein for some time, with her friend agreeing or disagreeing on the relative merits of different flavours, until the score in the game reached a fourth deuce, the crowd was biting its collective nails, hollering and gasping, and her friend said conclusively, ‘We eat a huge amount of yogurt in our house.’

Perhaps it was because they didn’t have anything more important than jelly to concern them. I fear that kind of existence; the thought of being unemployed, or trapped at home with babies or dependants, makes me feel ill with itchiness.

Although now I’ve had several weeks of it, I do feel a little differently. I can understand how days pass in cycles of small activities. Time just moves more slowly, that’s all. The physio’s going well, and I have filled two entire sketchpads with my drawings. I feel really good about that. So perhaps life doesn’t have to be an endless round of extreme stimulation in order to be fulfilling. Perhaps I am beginning to understand how little things can matter too: a few hours chilling out in the company of a loved one; a good soap opera; a nice cup of tea ...Oh Rachel, listen to yourself! You sound about ninety-seven.

‘Excuse me,’ said an uncertain voice, accompanied by a tap on my shoulder.

I automatically shuffled across towards the window, thinking that the voice’s owner, an acne-ridden skinny boy in his early teens, was asking me to move up so he could sit down in the other half of my seat. But he remained standing in the aisle, weighed down with sports kit and backpack and racket bag, blushing furiously.

‘Are you Rachel Anderson?’ he said, looking from side to side of him to make sure his mates weren’t witnessing this exchange.

‘Yes,’ I replied equally cautiously, instinctively reaching my hand down to shield my knee. Tennis nerd, I thought.

He thrust a grubby scrap of paper at me. ‘C’n I have your autograph? I saw you play at Surbiton last year. You beat that big French bird, didn’t you, in the second round? Great match, that was. She was ranked much higher than you, too, wasn’t she?’

I was impressed and flattered. It had, actually, been a great win for me. I’d got knocked out in the quarter-finals by a Japanese girl ranked thirty-eight in the world, but my win against the French player had upped my own ranking by quite a few places. And Mark had been watching the match, beaming all over his face when I hit a good passing shot or put away an overhead.

It all seemed like a lifetime ago.

I signed his paper for him, although the bus’s movement made it come out rather wobbly. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘There you go. Although it’s probably not worth that much, not now my ranking will have dropped to the low hundreds.’ I was trying to be funny, but realized that it just sounded self-pitying.

The boy looked as sympathetic as a teenager was able –
i.e.
not very. ‘So is that you out of tennis for good, then, or what?’ he asked bluntly, apparently noticing my crutches for the first time. He was blushing again because his friends had stopped their conversations when they saw him chatting to an older woman, and were beginning to heckle and whistle.

‘No,’ I said. ‘At least, I don’t think so. But it’ll be a while yet till I can play again.’

‘Oh. Right.’

I could tell he was itching to get away now, so I decided against asking him about his own tennis prowess. Mercifully, the bus jolted to a halt and he gathered up his things to leave. ‘Ta, then,’ he said, turning and bumping his way back down the aisle to the door, banging into all the other passengers with his various bags. When he got off the bus, he shot me a sideways glance from under his fringe, and the faintest traces of a smile, while his mates shoved him scorn-fully and pointed through the window at me. He’ll be quite good looking in about five years’ time, I thought, smiling back at him.

By the time I have hopped on my crutches the short distance from the bus stop to Dad’s house, my good leg is tired from the exertion, and my injured leg aches badly. I told myself that I could handle distances, but it is a bit of a shock that a short walk – hop – feels so debilitating.

The house looks empty and forlorn, the windows need cleaning, and the two wheely bins are abandoned haphazardly in the front garden rather than being stored neatly out of sight down the side of the house. I’m surprised: Anthea, whilst not being a great one for your actual cleaning, is a stickler for neatness and order. Dad’s car isn’t there, but Anthea’s turquoise Fiat Punto is.

I realize with a slight shock that I haven’t seen Anthea at all since before Mum and I went to Italy – and I hadn’t even noticed. She sent me a get-well card, but hasn’t bothered even to ring me at Gordana and Pops’s. It kind of confirms to me that she would much prefer that I wasn’t such a fixture in her life. Well, I won’t be for much longer, not if I can get a place of my own.

I let myself in with my key. ‘Hello?’

There are three bulging suitcases standing in the hall, arranged like the Three Bears in order of size, all neatly trussed with Anthea’s initialled luggage straps.

Something looks different about the place, and I have to concentrate to think what it is, before working out that things are missing: the striped hall rug and the framed floral prints which had been on the walls.

‘Anybody home?’

Mystified, I go through into the back room. The French windows opening out on to the garden have been flung wide, and an assortment of objects is piled in the middle of the lawn. At the edge of the pile I can see the bread machine, the Hoover, a large stack of glossy magazines, a bicycle, the clothes-drying rack and the Swiss ball she gave me.

Anthea appears through the back gate, which is also wide open, followed by a fat man in a stained T-shirt. ‘Put that in next,’ she commands over her shoulder, pointing at the bicycle. Behind her back, the fat man rolls his eyes and gurns at the back of her head. I can’t help smiling.

‘Hi,’ I say, coming into the garden. ‘Having a clear-out?’

Anthea jumps with fright, and her expression is one of utter shock. She looks like she’s seen a ghost. ‘Rachel!’

It’s more than shock, though. Guilt and rage are clearly written on her face, too. What on earth is going on?

She comes towards me and embraces me, stiff-armed. When I look at her closely, I see that her face is a mask; her makeup is applied in twice the usual quantities, and with the sort of precision which implies great attempts at disguising emotions. Her eyeballs are shot through with red spidery blood vessels, and face powder has settled in the deepening wrinkles on her cheeks.

‘I wish you weren’t here to witness this, Rachel, but I’m afraid I’m leaving your father.’

I gape at her. ‘What? Why?’

She struggles to remain composed, and just about succeeds. The fat man comes back up the garden empty-handed, picks up the clothes rack and a bubble-wrapped mirror, and waddles towards the gate again, bumping the edge of the mirror against the side of the garage as he passes it. His bum crack clearly shows between the top of his saggy jeans and the bottom of his T-shirt.

‘You’ll have to ask Ivan that.’

‘Where is he?’

She shrugs. ‘He said he’d be out all day. Something about seeing his solicitor, I believe. Actually, no, I never know what to believe. He could be anywhere. Excuse me, Bob,’ she calls. ‘Please be more careful with that mirror. You’ll have to pay for it if it’s broken.’

She turns back to me. ‘Anyway, I intend to be gone by the time he gets home.’

‘Does he know you’re going?’

‘No. And that’s how I want it. I don’t want any scenes.’

‘Anthea, are you sure about this? You two have been together for ages. I know Dad’s not easy, and he’s got a lot on his mind at the moment, but—’

She holds up an imperious hand. ‘Please, Rachel. Just don’t. There are things that you aren’t aware of, but it’s not up to me to tell you what.’

‘Can’t we sit down and talk about it over a cup of tea?’

‘No. I’m afraid I have to get on. I only have the van and that man booked for one afternoon, and all this stuff has to get to the storage facility by six o’clock.’

‘But where are you going?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that either, except that I will be out of the country for a few weeks. Rest assured I will inform your father of anything he needs to know.’

She’s changed, I think to myself. I recall the woman who stayed up all night frantically trying to pedal her tension away on the exercise bike when Dad had been arrested. This is different. She seems harder; stronger.

I wonder how Dad will react, and my heart goes out to him: this, on top of everything else. But then I remember the way he had split Mark and me up. The way he never invited Anthea to tennis club functions. The way he’s so mean to Gordana, and so rude about Mum. He’s brought it all on himself, the silly old sod.

I still feel sorry for him, though.

‘How is Gordana?’ Anthea asks abruptly. ‘I’d like to have come to see her, but you know, I think it’s better for ill people not to be pestered by visitors all the time when they’re trying to focus on getting better.’

Isn’t that up to the ill person to decide? I think to myself, knowing how much Gordana loves a good chat and some company. She would so loathe the thought that people were keeping away from her because she was unwell.

‘She’s doing well, thanks,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell her you asked after her. The chemo’s not affecting her too badly; not yet, anyhow. Her tennis club friends pop in quite a lot, and that keeps her spirits up.’

Oops, I think, that was a little bit too pointed. But Anthea doesn’t seem to have noticed.

‘Good,’ she says. ‘I was terribly upset to hear that she had ...that she was ...um, you know.’

‘That she has cancer,’ I say bluntly. I hate it when people pussyfoot around, not mentioning the ‘C’ word as if to speak it out loud is somehow inappropriate or embarrassing.

‘Yes. Well, I must get on.’ Anthea licks her middle finger absently and smoothes down her thin eyebrows, as though eyebrow-grooming is an essential element of

‘getting on’. Then she steps back inside the house and, uninvited, I follow her.

‘I’ll, er, leave you to it, then,’ I say. ‘I’m just going to get some clothes from my room...’

I don’t know what else to do. I silently beg her not to make me promise not to tell Dad, and thankfully she doesn’t. I suppose she thought he’d be home in a couple of hours anyway, and by the few objects remaining on the lawn, I assume she and Fat Boy are almost ready to go.

I can’t say I feel sad about the prospect of Anthea no longer being in my life. But it’s another change, in a year which has so far held so many scary changes for all of us, and I’m worried about how Dad will take it.

‘Well…’ I’m not quite sure what to say, and I feel almost shy. ‘For what it’s worth, Anthea, I’m really sorry. I hope you’ll be OK. Keep in touch, won’t you?’

For the first time, her eyes fill with tears, and she half stretches out a hand towards me, before dropping it back down by her side again. She has got so thin that her rings are twisting around on her fingers. But then the sorrow on her face swells into a rage so potent that it appears to stream through her body. It must be my imagination, but it seems even to fill out her fingers, momentarily fixing the rings. She is puffy with anger.

‘I expect I will be OK, Rachel, eventually. But your father has really hurt me, and I’m afraid it is going to take me some time to get over that.’

‘Sorry,’ I repeat awkwardly. ‘But he says he didn’t do it ...innocent until proven guilty, and all that. I thought you were standing by him?’

She takes the bunch of dusty blue fabric flowers out of the vase on the dining table, and begins to wrap them in a couple of sheets of newspaper that she picks off the floor. I’ll be glad to see the back of those stupid flowers.

‘I’m not referring to the charges against him, Rachel,’ she says, and I can’t suppress a wave of antipathy which sweeps over me at her frosty tone. ‘I have discovered something else. Something more personal . . .’