Games People Play

by Voss, Louise

  Gordana grasps my hand. ‘Elsie has gone too far this time,’ she says coldly.

  Elsie sniffs. ‘I’m only describing what I saw,’ she replies.

  ‘Shall we go into the kitchen? Or outside, for a walk?’ I ask, trying to drag Gordana away by her sleeve whilst looking at everyone else in the room and hoping that my expression says, For heaven’s sake, show a little discretion, please.

  It seems to work, since a stilted sort of chat breaks out again, enough that I can talk to Gordana without the entire room hearing. She shakes off my hand and continues to glower at Elsie

  ‘What did she see?’ I whisper.

  ‘It is slander and vicious gossiping without any truths,’ she replies, rather inarticulately. When Gordana is distressed, her standard of English slips dramatically.

  ‘I merely asked,’ says Elsie, ‘why two men and a woman would come to your house at ten to seven in the morning, stay for two hours, and then take Ivan away with them again, if they aren’t police officers conducting a raid?’

  She pats her perm, so triumphantly that I want to smack her too. Then, belatedly, I realize that she’s talking to me; that it’s my house she’s referring to.

  ‘Well, Elsie, firstly, I have no idea. But obviously if they were police officers conducting a raid, we would have been informed by now. Secondly, I don’t think Dad, when he turns up, is going to be too happy to hear what you’ve been implying about him in front of everyone. Lastly, and most importantly, it is absolutely none of your business, and Gordana and I would thank you to keep your nose out of our family affairs.’

  My knees are shaking when I finish this little speech, and I can feel the sweat pressing dark under my arms. I have never had a confrontation like this before with anyone, apart from Dad, and it makes me feel sick. But Gordana’s stricken face is enough to make me lose my rag. I can tell she feels totally humiliated, in front of all her friends.

  ‘Come on,’ I say to Gordana again, ‘let’s go and get some air.’ This time she allows me to steer her towards the door. As we pass, most people’s eyes drop towards the dusty floor, although a few smile tight little sympathetic smiles in our direction. Elsie sits down again, but I notice that everyone on our table leans away and studiously ignores her.

  Once outside, I drag Gordana into the car park and we hide conspiratorially behind a large and muddy Range Rover belonging to the captain of the Midweek section, Miranda Matheson.

  ‘Where is he?’ she hisses at me.

  ‘I don’t know. When did you last speak to him?’

  ‘Yesterday, here. He seem OK then. You?’

  ‘Last night. He and Anthea were still up watching TV when I went to bed. I was out early this morning. He hasn’t been here all day.’

  We stare doubtfully at each other. ‘It can’t be true,’ says Gordana.

  ‘Elsie wouldn’t completely make it up, though, would she? And why hasn’t he told us?’

  Gordana leans against the spare wheel of the Range Rover, which is mounted on the back door of the car like a trophy. She is still clutching her wine glass.

  ‘It does not mean they arrest him. Maybe it is early business meeting.’ Then she grabs my arm with her free hand. ‘No! It cannot be raid. If it was raid, they take stuff out of house. Elsie didn’t say they take anything.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘And what would they be raiding the house, for anyway? Illegal money? White slaves? Anthea’s diet pills?’

  But Gordana didn’t smile. ‘We must ring Anthea,’ she said, balancing her wine glass on top of the Range Rover’s spare wheel and pulling out her tiny silver phone. ‘Ivan’s telephone has been off all day.’

  She dials, as expertly as a City trader, and waits a moment. ‘Yes, Anthea, it is Gordana. Is Ivan there?… No, he is not here either…Where has he been today?…Out where?…You don’t know. Was anyone in the house today, this morning, I mean, early? Elsie say she saw some people… Right. I see. Please tell him to ring me when you see him. Thank you.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘She say Jehovah’s Witnesses.’

  ‘At seven in the morning? Aren’t there usually just two of them? And why would he leave with them?’

  ‘I don’t know. She say she went out early too and when she come back he is not there. Something is not right.’

  The club’s adopted cat, Timothy, trots up to us and rubs himself against my legs. I think briefly of Mark.

  ‘I’m going to go home,’ I say, extracting my bike lights from my backpack. ‘We can’t lurk about in the car park all night. Are you going back inside?’

  Gordana draws herself up to her full height, I guess already mentally preparing to face Elsie again.

  ‘She’s just a silly, bitter, bored old woman with nothing else in her life,’ I say. ‘Don’t let her get to you. You know that nobody likes her, and they all love you. She hates that. And she’s jealous of you.’ I hug my beautiful grandmother as if she is my best friend. Which, in many ways, she is.

  ‘Very well,’ says Gordana, sniffing delicately, then stooping to stroke Timothy. ‘Ted is not coming to collect me until eleven-thirty. Will you ring me when you get home, and let me know…what is going on?’

  I sigh. ‘Of course, if I find out.’

  I clip the lights on to my bicycle, unlock the padlock, and cycle home, past the lighted, steamy windows of the pub Mark and his mates are in. I consider going in to tell him what’s happened, but decide against it. I’m too anxious to get home and find out for myself.

  Entirely selfishly, my heart sinks as I realize that if Dad’s really been arrested, he won’t be able to fly to Zurich with me tomorrow. It’s potentially a really big tournament for me – I haven’t had to qualify for it, since my current ranking means I’ve been automatically seeded. It would be hard to go without Dad.

  Even though he is no longer my coach, he comes to almost all my tournaments – it’s cheaper than paying José to come, and more often than not, Dad has his own players in the same tournaments, so we all travel together.

  I cycle on for another ten minutes through the dark quiet back streets, gulping in deep harsh breaths of cold, wet, air, the thrumming rotation of the wheels and the whiz of tyres on tarmac calming me down. It’s starting to hail. I hear the little stones rattling on my bike helmet and see them bouncing on the road around me.

  I’m sure he hasn’t really been arrested, and this whole thing is a ridiculous storm in a teacup.

  Chapter 4

  Gordana

  What has he done? What has my silly, silly boy done?

  Oh, I knew there was something going on. He has been in funny mood for ages now. Elsie is a bitch and a gossip but she would not invent such a story. Those people came and took him away.

  No, Gordana, wait.

  It doesn’t mean he has done something bad. Think. Many explanations. Business meeting? Maybe. No way can it be Jehovah’s Witness, Ivan would shut the door in their faces, never invite them in for two hours. Maybe it was secret meeting he didn’t want to have at club. Yes. He will be so angry with Elsie for saying it, if that’s the case.

  I go back inside but everybody now is looking at me like it is me who is a criminal. Rachel has gone away on her bicycle. I should have rung Ted and told him to come now. I don’t want to be here, although my friends are trying to cheer me up: they talk too loudly about the proposed plans for the new court surfaces; they peek anxiously at me over the rims of their wine glasses as if suddenly they are worried I will explode, pffff, and shower them all with my criminal tendencies – for of course whatever evil is in Ivan has come from me.

  Listen to me. Shame on me, for assuming my Ivan really has done something bad. It’s probably a complete misunderstanding. Ivan has made mistakes in the past, but that was in the past. I don’t even think about those now, unless I have to remind him of something. I think basically he is honest. So honest that he would buy a Permit to Travel on a train platform at night when he knows there will be no inspector on board th
e train. That’s how I brought him up. I smacked his bum over and over, that time he stole a water pistol from the toy shop; smacked him right there in front of the shop owner. He never did it again.

  It’s part of life, to make mistakes. I make big mistake by letting that butcher’s boy get me pregnant, when I was young and silly and didn’t know any better. Ivan make mistakes too…like when he went to live at that university in Kansas and came home with a wife and a baby, so young himself and his scholarship down the drain. But still, that baby was Rachel, and I wouldn’t be without Rachel for any of the tea in China. Sometimes mistakes work out for the best. My own mistake turned into Ivan, didn’t it?

  Yes. If it is not a misunderstanding, it is more likely to be a mistake than a dishonesty.

  I tell this to Andrea and Maureen. Then to Liz and Lorraine, and Esther and Helen. They all nod and purse their lips and put their heads to one side with sympathy. I have another glass of wine. Nobody will speak to Elsie, and she sits on her own until a little Indian man comes inside and tells her the taxi is ready, then she goes and no one except Humphrey says goodbye. Humphrey loves Elsie, even though she once told him she has a garden gnome who is the spitting image of him.

  I feel better now…but still something niggles at me. I don’t like to not know everything that is going on with my son.

  It is only after Ted has picked me up, at eleven-thirty on the spot, and I am in the car telling him everything about this awful night, and how after all that Rachel rang to say Ivan is in bed with migraine, when I suddenly stop and clap my hands over my mouth.

  ‘What is it, Dana?’ says Ted, looking worried.

  ‘I left my wine glass on Miranda Matheson’s car,’ I tell him, and burst out with something, which I’m not sure is laughing or crying.

  Ted shakes his head, and drives on.

  Chapter 5

  Susie

  The first time I came to live in Lawrence was in 1979.

  I was nearly twenty, on an exchange programme with my British university, where I was halfway through a degree in American Studies. Myself and another girl, Corinna, were allocated places at the University of Kansas, and, boy, were we ever pissed off. Everybody else on our course got to go to one of the various colleges of the University of California: surfers’ paradises, home of the stars, year-round sunshine…We got Kansas. All we knew about Kansas was that it was bitterly cold in winter, boiling hot in summer, and in the middle of nowhere. Wheat, tornadoes, rednecks, Toto, the Wicked Witch of the West.

  Corinna was distraught. She had visualized herself spending a year in a bikini, on a beach, surrounded by gleaming bronzed hunks, and with a pop of a pitchfork that bubble burst. She tried to cheer herself up by imagining handsome cowboys and lewd acts in the back of straw-strewn flatbed trucks, but she was devastated at the loss of her very own American dream, and moaned about it all the way through the flight to Kansas City. I was none too happy about it either. We believed our exile to be a punishment for being the worst students, a cruel joke by our lecturers for being the ones who always handed in their essays late and who missed the most tutorials.

  I met Ivan the week after Corinna and I moved into our rented house: small, grey, clapboard, as all the houses were (we wondered for ages why nobody ever had firework or bonfire parties, until somebody pointed out that it’s not the wisest form of entertainment when the whole town is built of wood). It had a square, scrubby yard, and a noisy airconditioning unit which hung precariously out of the living room window. Kansas was in the grip of an Indian summer, and we found it hard to stay cool in our new home, especially after the climate-controlled halls of residence we’d stayed in when we first arrived. We ran the aircon day and night, until our ears rang with its constant watery roar.

  It was our remarkably inquisitive mail-carrier, Raylene, who occasioned the initial meeting between Ivan and myself. In the process of delivering our letters from back home, she noticed the British post-marks and thereby deemed us interesting enough to invite to Sunday brunch. It was how she’d met Ivan, too.

  Corinna and I were a little taken aback to be invited to lunch by our postwoman, but since we were woefully short of any better offers, we decided we’d go along. Corinna got all dolled up in her best gypsy top and glitter socks, and I put on my turquoise satin jacket, although neither of us held very high hopes of the gathering.

  Raylene’s house was not dissimilar in size and shape to our rented one, but whereas ours contained the bare minimum of rented furniture, every conceivable inch of surface space of Raylene’s was full of clutter: newspapers old and new; cassette tapes, LPs, posters. Piles and piles of letters and papers littered the floor, and cut-out articles and cartoons were sellotaped all over the walls. A small table was balanced perilously in the middle of the living room, covered with plates of strange-looking cold meats (which I later discovered included pastrami and salt beef); various salads, and baskets of bread, but none of the several guests present had touched any of it.

  ‘What a lot of magazines you must subscribe to,’ said Corinna politely as we came in. There was the inevitable chorus of, ‘Oh my gahhd, I LOVE your accent!’ but she ignored it – we were already getting used to the reaction.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Raylene gaily. ‘I don’t subscribe to any of them. I’m a mailwoman. I get them free.’

  Corinna and I exchanged glances. ‘How come?’

  ‘Well, you know how things can get “lost” in the mail,’ Raylene said, tapping the side of her nose. ‘Let me introduce you to some folks. This here’s Calvin, and Patty, Brandon and Sara, and a fellow European – Ivan.’ They all raised their plastic cups of beer and nodded or said hi, except Ivan. He barely even bothered to turn around from where he was kneeling (on a messy pile of Calvin and Hobbs cartoons clipped out of theNew York Times, flipping through a stack of LPs.

  Calvin was a tall Rasta with bloodshot eyes and bedraggled dreadlocks, but he had a cute face, and Corinna immediately engaged him in conversation, then led him away into the kitchen. I felt annoyed and abandoned, but at that moment Ivan straightened up, holding out a Velvet Underground album. I took one look at his thick black hair, lanky, muscular body and arrogant eyes, and promptly fell madly in love, instantly forgetting about Corinna’s defection. It goes to show, doesn’t it? You should never trust love at first sight.

  ‘Cool,’ I said, like an over-enthusiastic Labrador puppy, ‘I love the Velvet Underground.’ I watched him intently as he held the LP between his middle fingers and dropped it delicately over the spike in the centre of the turntable.

  ‘So where are you from?’ I cringed as I said it. Corinna and I were already fed up with being asked that, but I couldn’t stop myself bouncing round his feet asking questions.

  ‘England. Like you. But my mother is Croatian, from Yugoslavia.’

  ‘I know where Croatia is,’ I said, forcing a high laugh into my voice so he wouldn’t think I was criticizing him.

  ‘Yes. Sorry. I’m used to Americans asking me. Most of them have never heard of it. I’m here on a tennis scholarship.’

  ‘Oh.’ I might know that Croatia was part of Yugoslavia, but I’d never heard of a tennis scholarship. ‘So that means you must be pretty good at it?’

  Ivan looked at me through half-closed eyes, as if he thought I must be joking.

  ‘I turned professional two years ago,’ he said with an air of finality, implying that was all I needed to know. In fact it didn’t enlighten me much further. How good did you have to be, to be professional?

  ‘Do you play?’ he asked, sounding bored, as if he already knew the answer.

  ‘No.’ I glanced at the table of food, realizing that I was starving, but still nobody else was eating. Odd: I hadn’t been hungry when I arrived. I decided that it must be all that lust coursing through my veins.

  Raylene and Sara came up to us. I was about to broach the subject of lunch when Sara produced a huge joint, held a match to it and inhaled. She handed it wordlessly to me, and for a moment I
considered dropping it. It seemed like such a fierce, uncontrollable thing, and I’d never held one before. But I didn’t want to appear naïve or square, so I held it tentatively to my lips and puffed. Raylene engaged Ivan in conversation, and I looked away, disappointed. Ivan had turned his back on me with such alacrity that I thought he’d probably been dying for an excuse to escape.

  The smoke went straight to my head, but in a pleasant way, so I took another drag. My hunger instantly left my stomach and swam up towards my brain instead, where it circled gently for a while. It was quite a nice feeling, I decided. I looked for Corinna, to offer her the joint too, but she was ensconced in the kitchen, laughing with Calvin. Their heads were almost touching, and the sight of his black dreads was striking against her bleached blonde crop. They looked good together, and I wondered if she was feeling better about not going to California.

  The small, cluttered room seemed to be getting a bit stuffy, so I excused myself and went to stand on the porch for a while.

  It was so hot, even in mid-September. I hadn’t got used to the particular sort of cloying heat that blew in across the wheatfields and prairies, as if an enormous oven door had been opened somewhere. Baking hot, literally. I’d never been in a house with airconditioning before either, and kept forgetting the thirty-degree hike in the temperature every time I stepped outside.

  Raylene’s street was a neat block of detached cube houses, but there was nobody about – as usual. I rarely saw people walking. It clearly wasn’t the done thing to walk anywhere. Occasionally a huge, low-slung car, usually containing at least five people, would drag itself past, as if the heat affected acceleration; otherwise everything was still, bleached out, exhausted.

  I began to feel ill. My mouth dried up, and my legs started to jiggle and weaken, like someone was unfastening nuts at my knees. I sat down, too suddenly, in the stillness, and felt the rough planks of the porch under my thighs. I was embarrassed – two puffs of a joint and I was out of it? Pathetic. I groaned, and felt worse. I wanted my mother, but she had died six years earlier.