by Voss, Louise
I eventually lay down and closed my eyes, willing my overactive imagination to put a sock in it. I tried to sleep by conjuring up my alternative, imaginary family, but somehow they wouldn’t come, not tonight.
They were as flat and lifeless as paper dolls. Then I tried listing all the former Wimbledon Ladies title winners, chronologically, in my head.
Just as I got back to Billie Jean King, and was finally drifting off to sleep, the elderly Blu-Tack holding up my signed Steffi Graf poster gave up the ghost. One corner drooped down with a disconsolate flapping sound next to my head, which woke me up again with a jerk. I sat up, peeled off the dry grey lump and squeezed it to try and activate some life into it, then pushed the poster back up into position over my bed.
For heaven’s sake, I’m twenty-three years old today. I ought to be investing in some proper art, not sticking posters on walls like the naïve kid I was when Steffi signed it for me.
It occurs to me that Mark didn’t mention my birthday when I saw him earlier. The Swisscom tournament in Zurich is a WTA one, so of course he won’t be entered in it; which means that unless he seeks me out at training tomorrow – today – I won’t see him until I get back. Great …not.
Perhaps I’ll skip training, for once. It’s my birthday, after all. And I’m flying in the afternoon. I have a deep yearning to slob about at home all morning in nothing but a T-shirt, knickers, and big socks.
Through the dim light cast by the fluorescent numbers on my clock radio I can just make out the outline of Steffi, her arm stretched out in a lethal drive volley, her black-scrawled name written over the net.
She looks distinctly shabby now – I’ve never even had time to put her into a proper frame. But I can’t bring myself to take her down.
I think about her career, and how I envy her her numerous Grand Slam titles. That’s what Dad and Gordana want me to be. That’s who I want to be, and maybe still might. If I keep training, and playing, and keeping positive. I can do it. I know I can. The prize money for the winner of the Swisscom tournament is 189,000 dollars. Just imagine. One single win would probably pay back everything anyone’s ever invested in my whole career. It would be so wonderful…
Chapter 7
Susie
Ivan was right, of course, as he always liked to be: I did get to know him. After the awful day of Raylene’s brunch, we started to see more and more of each other.
He would ring me up, very non-committal, at odd times of day and night: midnight, or seven a.m, and invite me out places with him – an early breakfast at Perkins, the big diner on the edge of town, or to see his favourite band at Cogburns, an eye-wateringly terrible cod-reggae act called Penury Wanks. Sometimes we went to Harbor Lites, a bar on Massachusetts Street to drink beers and watch fat bikers in flares playing pool; a couple of times he let me come and watch him play tennis (which greatly impressed me. He was so fast on court, so agile and accurate. He took my breath away). But for the first few months he seemed to do it under sufferance, as though someone was laying a big guilt trip on him for not looking after me properly. I often felt like saying, ‘You don’t need to do me any favours, you know.’ But I liked his company – and I was crazy about him.
Besides, my room-mate Corinna was well and truly ensconced with her Rasta, and I didn’t have anyone else to hang out with.
Ivan didn’t kiss me again, not for weeks, and I began to wonder if he might be gay, but he didn’t seem to hang out with anyone else. And the way he looked at me sometimes, so intensely, through narrowed eyes as though he was weighing me up – well, it wasn’t the way that any of my other friends, gay or straight, had ever looked at me before.
‘I have to focus on my tennis,’ he said abruptly one night as we sat in the Jazzhaus at two in the morning, drinking White Russians. There was a candle stuck in an empty wine bottle on the table in front of us, and I was breaking off bits of warm, soft wax and moulding them into little cubes. ‘I don’t have time for more than one friend.’
‘I’m flattered,’ I replied sarcastically, lining up my wax cubes, but he just nodded as if to say, ‘So you jolly well should be.’ I rolled my eyes and shook my head.
‘What?’ he said, that edge of irritation never far from his voice.
I didn’t know what to say. If I told him I wasn’t really flattered, he’d be offended. And the truth was, I was flattered. I loved being Ivan’s only friend. I loved hanging out with him when he wasn’t away at tournaments: being nostalgic about England; laughing at the way Kansans described a weekend trip to Kansas City or Wichita as a vacation, or the way they put Ranch dressing on everything, or the way that people always seemed to lock their truck doors but leave the windows rolled down …We shared a common amusement at the foibles of our temporary home, and it united us. I thought it was more than that, though. I wanted to believe that the sexual tension between us was intense, that something was brewing that neither of us would be able to control when it finally happened, and that Ivan was as afraid of it as I was.
Either that, or he didn’t actually fancy me at all, and that moment when I woke to find him on top of me had merely been part of my drug-induced hallucination.
‘Can I come to one of your tournaments some time?’ I asked, emboldened by my fourth White Russian. I’d been dying for him to invite me, but as yet no such invitation had been forthcoming. I knew that he drove for miles to get to some of these tournaments, and thought it would be a good opportunity to really talk to him. ‘I don’t mind missing a couple of days of classes. And I could keep you company.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, although he smiled at me as he said it.
I couldn’t wait to be stuck in a car with him for hours, chipping secrets like diamonds out of him, so much more valuable for the difficulty of their extraction. If his team didn’t win, though, the journey home again might be a bit of a nightmare. Ivan was always so down for a day or so after he lost a match.
There was one particularly bitter defeat that the KU tennis team had recently suffered in Kansas City, only up the road – which I think made it worse, it was practically a home match – and he’d been so down in the mouth and grumpy that I told him he had ‘the Kansas City blues’. Apt, I’d thought, given the city’s musical heritage. It stuck, anyway, and became an epigram to describe Ivan’s bad moods.
Although he was gradually getting better at talking, at least late at night, there was still so much more I wanted to know. He hardly talked at all during the day, but after a couple of drinks he would speak a bit about his mother, Gordana, and stepfather, Ted; how Ted had brought him up as his own son, and how he, Ivan, had never met his real father but didn’t have any inclination to seek him out. Ted was kind and generous, and rich: Ivan had learned to play tennis on the court in his back garden, and then Ted had paid to send him to a very expensive private school, where he’d further concentrated on his game until, at the age of ten, he was the best Junior player in Europe.
It was funny, though, the way he was so monosyllabic during the day. We’d meet for sandwiches in Wescoe cafeteria, or a walk by the pond, and I was almost afraid of him at those times, he seemed so distant. But gradually I realized it was just the way he was. I stopped worrying about it, and would blatantly ignore him right back again, burying my head in my History of Art textbook, or scribbling notes for a term paper. I used to try and make him smile, or tell him snippets of information he might find interesting, but in daylight hours it was tough.
‘Have you heard of Jean Arp?’ I asked, and Ivan looked bored. Sorority girls on the next table nudged one another and whispered about how gorgeous he was, and if he happened to glance in their direction they would blush and pretend to pick at their salads.
‘Arp was a Dadaist, and he went through a phase of being obsessed by navels. Anything vaguely circular, for about a year, in any context, became a navel to him. Look at these: “Mountain, Table, Anchors, Navel”; “Man, Moustache and Navel”. I love that!’
If that had been an evening conver
sation, Ivan would have laughed too, I swear. But because it was lunchtime, he moodily slurped his juice and pointed at the illustration of ‘Frond and Navel’.
‘That looks like a wishbone and two dots. Doesn’t look anything like a bloody navel. It’s crap. Modern art is crap.’
I sighed. But even Ivan grumbling at me was better than Ivan not talking to me at all. I was as riveted by him as the sorority girls; I’d let him get away with any amount of monosyllablism or even downright rudeness, just to be able to look at the way his eyes changed from dark gold to hazel to dark brown and back again as the light fell in them, and the dimple which flickered in and out of his cheek when he talked.
‘What are you doing this afternoon?’ I asked, almost nervously.
‘Team practice,’ he said, screwing up his juice carton and flicking his hair out of his eyes. ‘Come and watch if you want.’
He stood up, noisily scraping his chair legs. Every woman in the room gazed at him.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I was going to go and work on my Gertrude Stein paper …but OK, I’ll come.’
Chapter 8
Gordana
I look at myself in the mirror after Yolanda has just set my hair the way I like it: with a curl, but not an old-lady curl like Elsie’s perm. Yolanda dyes it to cover up all the grey, and I wonder why any woman would want to keep her hair with grey in it. I look so much younger. So, I look, and I smile good-graciously, and I think: Yes, Gordana, you have done well.
Nobody my age at home look this good, I bet. Last time I went back it seemed that every woman over forty-five had grey hair. They cannot afford to have the dye done every six weeks.
It’s nice to have money. I chose well with my Ted; it has turned out so well for the girl with such a humble origin. I want Ivan and Rachel to know how it was for me, so I tell them this story many, many times. Rachel loves it. She always asks me to tell her again.
I came to Dagenham from Croatia with my parents when I was seven, in 1949. When I left school at sixteen, I went straight to work as a punch-card operator at the Ford Motor Company, the same job at the same place – although a few years earlier – that this singer Sandie Shaw had done, before Adam Faith discovered her. Sandie was only there for a short time though, while I must endure seven years of it until Ted rescued me.
I was not happy when Sandie’s career was launched; in fact, I was as sick as a parrot (or is it pigeon? I never can remember). Years, I had been slaving away in that factory, just waiting for the time when my singing career could begin for real. Like Sandie, I used occasionally to sing on stage with the local dancehall bands in Ilford and Dagenham. I even had tickets to the Hammersmith Odeon show where Sandie – when she was still plain old Sandra Goodrich – pushed her way into Adam’s dressing room to sing to him, but I was not able to attend. Why? Because I was at home, fetched back there by my mama because little Ivan was throwing up. I think from the Spam sandwich he had eaten earlier. My mother didn’t mind looking after Ivan during the day when I was at work, but she drew the line at allowing her daughter to be out gallivanter-ing while Ivan sprayed all the surfaces of the house with his vomit.
‘How will I ever find a husband if I can’t go out?’ I wailed.
‘Well,’ my mother said, in Croatian, ‘it serve you right for getting yourself knocked up by that useless butcher’s boy, doesn’t it now?’
‘That useless butcher’s boy’ was Paul Tyler, son and heir of Tyler’s Butchers in Dagenham, eighteen at the time, spotty and very complaining. He hated working in a butcher’s shop but his father insisted that he would only inherit the empire by starting at the bloody sawdust and fake parsley of the shop floor, and working his way up to the filets mignons later. Ivan has never even met his father, and says he never want to. I don’t blame him, really. All I remember is the acne and bad moods, those awful StayPress slacks and the Adam’s apple which look like it belong on a giant.
We met in 1959 when Paul began to chat me up each time I go in for the family mince. Before long he is pressing me up against closed gates in back alleys, sucking lingering raw meat kisses from my smudged lips. I kept it a secret but the truth was I had never been kissed before. Sweet seventeen, and I thought it was quite nice, but I couldn’t help visualizing the big fat ox tongue in Tyler’s window. And besides, Paul’s Essex accent was so difficult for me to understand that kissing – the Universal Language of Love – was easier than talking.
We had sex within a month, in the shed on Paul’s dad’s allotment, squashed in between an upside-down wheelbarrow and a black plastic tray of purple sprouting potatoes. I was left with a spider’s web draped on my beehive, blood on my pantygirdle, and an Unwanted Pregnancy: a tumbling ball of cells which was to become Ivan. My relationship with Paul Tyler did not last long – he ran off to join the Navy the day after I told him he was going to be a daddy, and I haven’t seen him since.
By the time Ivan started infant school, I was still at the factory, but Sandra Goodrich had changed her name, been photographed barefoot, and released her first single. When it flopped, I was happy. I wanted Sandie to come back to Ford’s, shod and sorry, so that I would no longer have to suffer such torments of jealousy. But it was not to be. Sandie shoots to Number One with ‘Always Something There to Remind Me’, which she follows up with a string of top ten singles, churning them out like they were shiny Cortinas rolling off the assembly line.
‘That could have been me!’ I wailed when Sandie was voted Best New Singer of 1964. I remember wailing a lot at that time. Ivan was behaving badly at school, and had taken to opening his bowels on the floor at home, and I must spend hours on my knees with a knife and gritted teeth, scraping poo from between the floorboards. It was not how I imagined my life.
When Sandie came back to Ford’s the next year for a visit, to see how her old mates were getting on, I locked myself in the Ladies’ toilet and cried and swore with my father’s handed-down Croatian swear words.
That’s why I was missing from the group photograph in the local paper, a blurry shot of all the girls in Sandie’s department clustered adoringly around their former colleague.
‘It should have been me,’ I cried when I read in the papers that Sandie got to go to a party at Princess Margaret’s place, when I was yet again stuck at home.
That time, Ivan had mumps – not that it would have made any difference if he’d been healthy – it was still Sandie, not me, hobnobbing with royalty.
In the long evening hours after I’d scraped poo and tucked Ivan up in bed, I would sit silently in the living room dreaming and plotting possible means of escape.
But even this I couldn’t do in peace, as I no longer had a room of my own: Ivan slept on a fold-out bed in the corner of my childhood bedroom, in the place formerly occupied by my precious gramophone. I’d had to sell that years before, to buy a cot and a pram.
Frequently, I wished that my mama and papa had made me do what many other parents in those days did: insist that I give the baby up for adoption. I could have gone away for a couple of months, perhaps pretend I had gone back to Croatia to stay with relatives, and returned with nothing more to show for my silly foolishness than a lot of baggy skin on my tummy and a problematical pelvic floor.
My parents thought I was watching TV with them every night – when I wasn’t scraping poo, of course –but had no idea that in my head I was twirling on stage in a sequinned minidress, Number One in the hit parade, Sandie Shaw left behind, an unpopular nobody unable to struggle out from behind the shadow of my talent and glamour…
One rare night Mama and Papa (Mr and Mrs K, to their English friends) were out at a neighbour’s drinks party (I am not invited. People take pity on my poor suffering parents, who work so hard to establish themselves in the community, and then have to put up with the illegitimate grandson – but they have no sympathy for me, the brazen hussy), and I was listening to the wireless as loudly as I could without waking Ivan, who never slept good. I thought of the music filtering through the fli
msy walls of our terrace, and it was my own small act of rebellion. I made myself a large Campari and soda, put on my best dress – cherry gingham, with a ribbon under the bust – and lit a cigarette, jiving around the living room to the sounds of Les Swingle Singers, tears of rage and frustration beginning to roll down my cheeks. I was on my third big drink, liking the fact that the red of the Campari nicely matched with my outfit, when there was a knock at the front door.
I wiped my face and went to answer it. It was a man, older than me and balding, but not that old, and quite modish. He was clutching a bottle of something, which he pushed towards me.
‘Not too late, am I?’ he said, smiling and showing teeth which were crooked, but not unattractively so. If he’d bitten into an apple, it would have left Dracula-style puncture marks. I guessed he was in his early thirties. He stepped inside the hallway and held out his hand. ‘We haven’t met before, have we? I’m Ted Anderson.’
I was more than a bit tipsy from the three drinks, and I didn’t know what to say. At first I thought he must be friend of my parents who had decided to call round unannounced. ‘Gordana Korolija,’ I said, transferring the bottle into my armpit to shake his hand. ‘Do come in.’
I liked him immediately for not saying ‘Eh? Come again?’ as did most people when I spoke my name. Ted Anderson followed me into the front room, where he stopped, with a slightly confusedness. ‘Where is everyone, then?’ he said.
‘My parents are out, I’m afraid,’ I replied in my best English accent, putting my shoulders up straight and sticking out my breasts in their tight bodice. The broderie anglaise along the low neckline of the dress tickled and itched, and I resisted the temptation to stick my hand down the front of it and scratch. ‘What may I get you to drink?’
