by Voss, Louise
At that moment, I decide that I really hate Dad. But the next moment, I am gripped with a new panic: maybe what he said was right. How could Mark have said all those lovely things to me if he could just give up on us so easily? Oh, I knew it was because I wouldn’t sleep with him…
I do not once peek inside the red paper bag with the raffia handles until we arrive at the hotel in Zurich and I lock myself in my room. I had to lie to the woman at the airport checkin desk, saying no, nobody had given me anything to carry, and although lying usually makes me itchy with discomfort, I hadn’t even cared.
When I laid the bag flat on the black rubber conveyor belt to pass through the X-ray machine, I permitted myself a glance at the outlines of its contents as they showed up black and white on the monitor screen. The bare bones of a relationship, which I had managed to break as surely as if I had dropped the bag and heard them fracture. I couldn’t work out what anything was, amongst the several mystery objects on the screen, although there was one small box which looked like it might contain an item of jewellery.
On the plane I pushed the bag underneath the seat in front for take-off and landing, but for the duration of the rest of the flight I sat with it between my feet, feeling the scratchy thick paper chafe my ankles, wondering – with no excitement, just a dull curiosity – what Mark had given me. When he had wrapped those presents, he’d still believed he loved me. By the time he handed them over to me, he no longer did.
I unwrap them as soon as I am alone in my room, fingers trembling as I peel the sellotape off the packages and fold the used wrapping paper into neat squares. I was right about the little box containing jewellery: it was a necklace, a little silver star with a tiny chip of diamond in the centre, on a delicate silver chain. The note on the box says, ‘ For my very own star’. Also inside the bag is a bottle of my favourite perfume, the one he said made him want to rip my clothes off whenever I wore it; and a book called Will To Win, which I flick through and then throw violently at the wall separating my room from Dad’s. I feel like I don’t have the bloody will to live, let alone to win anything. I’ve always been so positive about everything – you have to be, to be a pro tennis player. You have to believe in yourself. But right now I feel that all the positivity has leaked out of an unseen part of me, like a puncture in a paddling pool.
The last gift is a bright pink low cut T-shirt with ‘Babe’ spelled out in sequins across the breasts. It isn’t really my sort of thing, but I immediately go across to the mirror and hold it up against my body, even managing a very brief smile at my reflection as I see myself through Mark’s eyes.
I pick Will to Win off the floor, straighten the cover where it has creased, and lay it carefully on the bed with my other presents in a neat semi-circle. Then loneliness descends, and I slide down the side of the bed until I am sitting on the carpet. I start to cry and don’t stop until my eyes are swollen and my chest hurts, and there is someone banging at the door. I ignore it, thinking it is Dad, but the person won’t stop knocking. Despite the bleary aftermath of tears impairing my hearing, I can make out a reedy insistent voice calling my name.
I wipe my face on the dusty fringe at the corner of the bedspread, stagger wearily up, and open the door.
‘Rachel! What’s the matter, babe?’
Babe. The name I wanted to call him, but couldn’t. I imagine Mark in Top Shop, fingering the racks of tshirts until he found the one he thought I’d look sexiest in. Or then again, I think, full of bitter self-pity, perhaps he was visualizing the porcine lead character in the film Babe. If he could just throw away our relationship so easily, perhaps that was how little he thought of me.
Kerry stands on tiptoe to hug me, gathering me awkwardly up in her arms in the doorway. I feel like a sack of potatoes, unwieldy and lumpy. All cried out, I just lean my head miserably on Kerry’s bony shoulder. She is dressed for a night out: boots and a miniskirt, lots of jewellery and pink lipgloss. It is comforting to see her, but I still wish I was at home with Gordana and not hundreds of miles away in yet another nondescript hotel bedroom.
‘Mark finished with me,’ I say dully, and a maid pushing a trolley down the patterned carpet of the corridor gives me a nervous look. The trolley is piled high with covered plates, and it smells of school dinners.
Kerry squeezes me tighter. ‘ What? On your birthday? Bastard, wait till I—’
‘He came to the airport to give me my present, and Dad gave him a hard time.’
‘He chucked you because Ivan had a go? What’s the matter with him?’
‘No. It was my fault. He ended it because I told Dad, in front of Mark, that I wasn’t serious about him.’
‘Oh.’ Kerry heaves me into the room and closes the door, scrutinizing my doubtless ravaged-looking face. ‘What did you do that for, then?’
I don’t answer. Depression, heavier than gravity, pulls and tugs at me, making me long to sink back down on to the floor again. The thought of playing a tennis match in the morning fills me with despair and a leaden fatigue. I want to sleep for a month.
‘I’m sorry, Rach. I know how much you liked him.’
‘Yeah. Well. Thanks for coming over, Kerry, and I suppose I’ll see you on the bus tomorrow, but I really think I’m going to write today off and go to bed—’
Kerry puts her hands on her hips and raises her eyebrows. ‘No way.’
‘What?’
‘I said, no way. We’re going out.’
‘Kerry, I’m not going out.’
‘You are.’
‘Oh come on, look at the state of me! Anyway, it’s Sunday night. Nothing’ll be going on.’
‘You’ve got ten minutes to put some make-up on and get changed. I’m not taking no for an answer. Clubs are open on Sundays, you know. What do you think I’m all dolled up for? It’s your birthday! Which reminds me …Here, before I forget: happy birthday, pet.’
She rummages in her backpack and brings out a flat square, wrapped in silver paper with ‘Many happy returns’ all over it in glittery writing. The halogen spotlights in the ceiling above us catch the glitter in a sparkly dance as I tear off the giftwrap. It’s a CD: Kelis’s album. I’ve never heard of them.
‘She’s really good,’ Kerry says, a little self-consciously. So it’s a she, not a they. I hope ‘she’ isn’t a rap act. Kerry is into rap, lots of swearing and posing and swaggering. Not my cup of tea at all.
‘Thanks,’ I say, my eyes filling with tears again. I pick the cellophane off the CD case so I can examine the booklet inside it, and put off the moment when Kerry was going to make me go out. It doesn’t work, but at least the album doesn’t look like a rap record.
‘So come on then, let’s go,’ she says bossily. ‘And don’t give me that early night stuff; you know you wouldn’t sleep if you went to bed now…Plus I want to hear what’s going on with Ivan.’
I have to think for a moment even to remember the big drama of Elsie’s arrest allegations, and the not-quite-ringing-true story about the migraine and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Mark’s desertion is such a shock that everything else has been completely superseded in my mind.
‘Oh yeah, that,’ I say, sitting down heavily on the bed. I catch sight of myself in the mirror and shudder: my nose and eyes are bright red, cheeks deathly white, and hair like a Brillo pad. ‘Kerry, do I have to go out?’
Kerry walks over to my holdall, unzips it, pulls out my jeans and my washbag and holds them out to me.
‘Ten minutes,’ she said, looking pointedly at her watch and gesturing towards the bathroom. ‘No excuses.’
Half an hour later we are walking through Zurich’s picturesque old town, which is bustling with people out on a Sunday evening. It is a cold, crisp night. I feel convalescent, wrung-out; but deep down I am grateful to Kerry for forcing me out.
‘Where are we going? Couldn’t we just have had a drink at our hotel?’
Kerry snorts derisively. ‘That hotel bar was like a morgue. Anyway, me and José met this gay guy from Portu
gal on my flight. He fancied José, and told us about this really buzzing hotel near here; he was really trying to get José to say he’d come down tonight. It’s called the, um, Goldenes Schwert, and it’s got a nightclub in it.’
I manage a smile. ‘Was José horrified?’ I ask. José’s dark curls and flawless olive skin have made him a bit of a gay icon, and women and gay men alike jostle for his attention, although no one has ever known him to have a partner. Kerry and I long ago decided that he was one of those asexual men, like Action Man. Any hint of sexual innuendo throws him into such a state of confusion that he’s been known to walk headfirst into floodlight poles in his haste to escape. This gauche charm is what makes him so appealing. He also has an endearing habit of classic spoonerisms on court, oft-quoted by us and the other members of our squad: ‘Take a little breast,’ he once said, getting ‘rest’ and ‘breather’ mixed up. But our favourite is ‘Shit your hot’ instead of ‘Hit your shot.’
‘Well, you know what he’s like – he didn’t admit it if he was. But he told me that he was just staying in his room tonight, reading. Such a waste.’
‘Who for: men or women?’
‘Who knows?’ says Kerry, linking arms with me. ‘Maybe one day we’ll find out; or maybe he’s got a secret double life that we don’t know about.’
‘Talking of which,’ I say glumly, looking in at the lit-up windows of candlelit restaurants and red-carpeted theatre foyers, ‘Elsie the Battleaxe, you know she lives in our road? Well, she swore in front of everyone at the social supper the other night that she saw Dad getting arrested at seven in the morning. Gordana nearly punched her lights out.’
Kerry stops in her tracks, causing a large man leading a small dog to walk into the back of her.
‘Entschuldigen,’ she says to him over her shoulder – we all know a smattering of words from most countries we play tournaments in; and of course how to score a match in many different languages – and then, to me: ‘Arrested? What the hell for?’
‘Well, of course it’s not true. But I think something else is going on, because he’s being very cagey about it. Claims it was Jehovah’s Witnesses, whom he just happened to know from school, so he invited them in for a two-hour chat. I mean, how implausible does that sound?’
‘Very,’ says Kerry with feeling.
‘The worst thing about it was bloody Elsie, slandering Dad like that in front of everyone. Gordana was really upset. Elsie wouldn’t have done it if Dad had been there, but he didn’t turn up – which of course she took as added proof. He had a migraine, and hadn’t bothered to let me or Gordana know he wasn’t coming. But everyone in the room stopped to listen. They were like a flock of vultures.’
‘I don’t think you have flocks of vultures.’
‘Well, whatever. They couldn’t get enough of it. I was half expecting them all to stand up and start chanting fight, fight, fight. It was awful.’
I remember the feel of Mark’s bulky torso pressing me against the fence on Court Four, and the warm bare skin of his stomach against mine in the cold night air when our Tshirts had ridden up as we kissed. My voice falters.
‘It was awful,’ I repeat, banishing the memory. ‘And I don’t know what’s going on with Dad. I think it must be some secret business deal or something, but it’s obviously not going well. He’s hardly said a word to me since – apart from sticking his oar in with Mark, of course.’
‘Blimey,’ says Kerry, steering me around a corner. ‘Sorry, tell me the rest in a minute – this is Marktgasse, so the place should be down here. Number fourteen, the guy said.’
‘There’s nothing more to tell.’
I point at a typically Swiss-looking square town-house, with shutters and awnings and window boxes bravely trying not to look past their prime. We edge past the hardy souls sitting at tables outside the hotel and make our way through the lobby to the nightclub.
It’s early, and almost completely empty inside, which suits me. We sit down on tall stools at a table around a pillar, and order two vodka cranberries from a pretty boy with lithe honey-coloured legs in tight white shorts. Coloured lights swoop and bounce across the deserted dance floor, and the Seventies disco music has an echoey quality to it
‘Is this a gay club?’ I whisper after he takes our order.
‘Duh …what do you think, Einstein? That Portuguese guy on the plane was as camp as a row of tents, and just look at our waiter. I wonder if Goldenes Schwert means Golden Showers?’
Tears threaten to overcome me again. What the hell am I doing in a nightclub after Mark has left me? I should have done the decent thing and climbed into bed and pulled the covers over my head. That’s what one does when one’s world crumbles, surely. I yearn for that white cotton haven; could feel the cave I’d create for myself: the cold sheets which my breath and body heat would heat up until it was a damp, dark place of safety. Although that’s not right though, either, I think. If I’m going to be under covers, I want Mark’s big solid body there with me, his skin almost burning me with its warmth and security. My own body heat isn’t enough. The thought fills me with panic.
‘I don’t want to be here,’ I say frantically. ‘There’s no way I can play tomorrow.’
‘You can. You’ll be fine, Rach. Just keep focused. I’ll hit with you first, and José’ll be there. And your dad—’
‘He’d better not show his face. I don’t know why he even bothered to come.’
‘What’s he doing tonight?’
I shrug. The waiter sashays over with a tray, places our drinks and the bill on the table with a flourish, then stands with his hand on his narrow hip, gazing pointedly off into the middle distance while Kerry fumbles for money, squinting at the Euros in her purse.
The DJ puts on ‘Crazy in Love’ by Beyoncé – or so Kerry tells me, otherwise I wouldn’t have known – and the waiter absently raises and lowers alternate shoulders and clicks his fingers, as if he is about to suddenly launch himself off across the empty parquet dancefloor like the little welder girl in Flashdance. I watch him, wishing fleetingly that I had a job which involved no more pressure than not spilling frosty drinks and giving people the correct change.
‘Dad? I don’t know. He usually goes to his room straight after dinner, but I didn’t have dinner with him. In fact, I haven’t seen him since we arrived.’
I wonder if Dad heard me crying earlier. I’d heard the sound from the television in the room to the other side of mine, so the walls were clearly fairly thin; although I had been trying to cry quietly. Part of me wanted him to rush round and comfort me as he used to when I was a little girl (although he never comforted me for anything tennis-related: injury, defeat or humiliation) and part of me couldn’t have borne it if he had. But there was no sound at all coming from his room.
After two drinks on an empty stomach, I feel both better and worse. My head is beginning to whirl slightly, like the coloured lights, and to add to my existing emotions of grief, shock and bitterness comes another unwelcome addition: the guilt I always feel if I’m not completely abstemious before a tournament.
But, as Kerry pointed out, a couple of drinks the night before my first match in these particular circumstances was probably far less harmful than staying in my room, crying and not sleeping.
The lights in the club become dimmer, the music louder, and a glimmer of something more positive gradually begins to shine back in my head: I’m going to do well in this tournament. I’m not even aware I said this out loud until Kerry laughs. ‘Of course you are!’ she bellows in my ear, over the top of the thumping bass of the music, making me recoil with pain. ‘You’re the tenth best woman player in the whole of the country, and you’re on the way up. You’re going to rock.’
‘Kerry.’ I turn on my stool and lean both my hands on Kerry’s lap, which earns me an approving glance from a group of three lesbians at the bar. ‘I thought I wouldn’t be able to do it without Mark. I was even starting to wonder if that was why I’d stayed on the circuit, but at least I kn
ow it’s not. Sod him. I don’t need him.’
Kerry hugs me. She knows that I don’t often express such confidence in my game out loud, and, although I am by nature quite a positive person, I’ve often wished I had her stubborn persistence: Kerry keeps going, even though she is ranked a few places below me, because she really believes that she is the best, and soon everyone else will realize it too. OK, so it has taken a bit longer than she’d planned, but she’s had some bad luck: a nagging back injury, bad draws, opponents on better form in crucial matches…Whereas with me, although I’m fiercely competitive on court, it’s been commented on that I always seem more surprised than anyone else when I win.
Kerry starts to say something else, but suddenly stops, gaping with astonishment, her eyes fixed on the door of the club.
I turn and look too, but can’t see what she is looking at, other than the spectacle of lots of extremely attractive and well-groomed men bumping and grinding together on the dance floor.
‘I could have sworn …’ Kerry squints through the sequinned and shady disco light, then shakes her head.
‘What?’
Kerry drains the rest of her drink, her straw momentarily sticking to her top lip. ‘I thought I just saw Ivan. Or somebody very like him, at least.’
I manage a laugh. There is more likelihood of seeing Osama bin Laden in lederhosen, snogging George Bush on the dance floor, than there is of seeing my father in a nightclub, particularly a gay one. Dad loathes any loud music recorded later than the mid 80s, refuses on principle to pay more than the equivalent of two pounds in any currency for a drink, can’t dance to save his life, and not very secretly disapproves of homosexuality. I think idly that becoming a lesbian myself would be the ideal way to really piss him off. I glance over at the three girls at the bar, and, unless I’m imagining things, they all give me sultry looks. But then the memory of the feel of Mark pressing himself up against me makes me realize that I’d never want to make love with a woman. I never want to lose my virginity to anyone if I can’t have Mark.
