Games People Play (44 page)
Authors: Louise Voss
‘Ah, there you are, Ted,’ says a cheery voice, and Gordana’s friend Esther sticks her head around the door. ‘I see you’ve found our bench, then.’
‘It’s lovely,’ says Pops in a choked voice, tracing the words with his forefinger as if he is tracing the lines on Gordana’s face. ‘Thank you all so much.’
‘No need to thank us!’ she said brusquely. ‘No need at all. Now come on, this is a party, and she wanted us to dance: so let’s dance!’
She pulls Ted up by the hand and leads him back inside.
‘Life goes on,’ says Karl, squeezing my shoulders.
‘For us also, I think.’
‘Alt-zo’. Mum told me once how she loved the way Karl said that.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘For us alt-zo.’
We sit together in silence for a while longer, and then, hand in hand, we go back to the party.
THE END
Thanks are due to lots of people for this one, for generous help with research, or just vital moral support:
For tennis-related information and fact-checking, big thanks to Danny Sitton, Tony Marshall, Anne Keothavong and Heather Purchase from Ace Magazine.
For enormous amounts of help on internet-related crime, thanks very much to Dr Neil Barrett and Rob Welling.
For all the gory details about ‘significant fractures of the tibial plateau’ (first-hand!) thanks to Alison Meredith.
Thanks to the usual suspects, my friends and fellow writers: Jacqui Lofthouse, Linda Buckley-Archer, Jacqui Hazell, Stephanie Chilman, Sharon Mulrooney, Claire Harcup and Mark Edwards.
For this edition, thanks to Pete Aves for proofreading and trying to banish all the Kindle-inserted hyphens and odd line breaks that have been driving me crazy.
Huge thanks also to Henry Steadman for very kindly giving me permission to use all the original jacket designs, and to Claire Ward at Transworld for sorting it out for me.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the copyright owners.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, brands, media and incidents are either a product of the authors' imagination or are used fictitiously.