Games People Play (12 page)

Rachel

Mark made me feel good about everything. I could train longer, play harder,
know
that I was the best – because he told me I was. Because he’d stroke my face and sigh with pleasure; because he took me dancing, when nobody had ever taken me dancing before; because he cooked for me – nothing fancy, just a baked potato and some chicken in a packet sauce, but it was the best food I ever tasted.

I’ve messed it up by being weak and pathetic and not even realizing. It’s second nature to me to say the things Dad wants to hear. I just slipped up by saying them when Mark was there. He’s never been there before when I’ve been placating Dad, so I suppose I wasn’t used to editing what I say. What an
idiot
I am.

I’d bet any money in the world that if we had started sleeping together, he wouldn’t have let me go like that.

I was so close to giving myself to him. So sure that he was the One. Who wants a twenty-three year old virgin? No-one, and certainly not a gorgeous red blooded male like Mark. I should have let him, ages ago. Perhaps the sighs I thought were sighs of pleasure were actually frustration. Mark isn’t used to not getting what he wants.

Now he’s going to get it somewhere else, because I’ve messed everything up.

Once we are finally on the plane and I have to sit next to Dad, speechless with fury and sorrow and disbelief, he tries to console me. He puts his big fat stupid hand on my forearm and squeezes it, and I can’t believe what he says. He says: ‘You’re best off without him, love. If he really loved you he wouldn’t have let me come between the two of you. Look on the bright side, eh?’

I want to punch him, but instead I grit my teeth and concentrate on not crying, knowing that once I start, I won’t stop for a long, long time. I force myself not to think about Mark, and the feel of his arms around my waist or his warm sweet breath in my ear. I stare out of the plane window as the plane hauls itself airborne and watch everything on the ground get smaller: cars into dots; houses merging into squares and curves; roads into string. I wish the plane was like the Challenger space shuttle, going higher and higher until it exploded and nothing was left of anyone’s troubles except a bright firework of loss in the sky, fading into smoke and then into nothing.

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 Portugal 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.’