Games People Play (13 page)

‘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 know 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.

‘No chance,’ I say. ‘You must be drunk. In fact, I am, a bit, and I’ve got a headache. Can we please go back to the hotel now?’

Susie

I was sitting near the top of the stairs, a half-full basket of dirty laundry on my knees, still pondering the logistics of going on a skiing holiday with Rachel in Italy. Did I need to take ski gear with me, or hire it there? Would I need a visa? How many lessons should I have? Thoughts whirled round my head like washing in a tumble drier, making me dizzy. It suddenly seemed far too great an undertaking. I couldn’t handle it. Perhaps I’d just stay where I was, instead. Perhaps I wasn’t ready to be that proactive yet...

A rattle of the screen door made me jump up, hoping against hope that it might be Billy. I ran down the stairs, spilling laundry all the way, to find a man standing in the kitchen – but it was only Flamingo Dan. Disappointment rose up from my belly to meet my sinking heart, and I retraced my steps, collecting up my dirty tights and work clothes. One advantage of being on my own was at least three times less laundry to do, I mused, not even bothering to greet Dan straight away. Not that he’d noticed. He’d gone straight to the fridge and helped himself to some juice.

‘No cranberry, man,’ I heard him complain.

Of all Billy’s oddball, acid-casualty friends, Dan was the worst. For no apparent reason, he was obsessed with flamingos. He had a selection of representations of them all over the inside of his tiny house and dotting his front yard: plastic ones, ornamental ones, tiny ones on swizzle sticks, huge inflatable ones. Oh, and he was afraid of mushrooms – the edible kind, not the magic variety, naturally – and allegedly puked whenever he touched velvet. Go figure, as Billy used to say.

As I picked up a bra strewn over the banisters, I suddenly decided that I was definitely going to organize this skiing holiday after all, if random visits from Dan were all I had to look forward to for the foreseeable future. Sod it, I’m off, I thought. I want out of here.

Dan even looked like a flamingo: long, skinny legs, beaky nose, and a predilection for pink. Billy and I used to joke about him: ‘Where’s Dan?’ one of us would say, and the reply would be, ‘Hmm, I don’t know. Wait, isn’t that him over there, standing on one leg in the pond?’

‘Hi, Dan,’ I said, carrying the basket into the kitchen and dumping it at the top of the basement steps, where the washer and drier were housed. I then instantly moved to the far side of the kitchen island, so he didn’t try and embrace me as per usual. ‘What’s up?’

‘Hi, Susie,’ he droned, his pupils so dilated that his eyes looked black. ‘You know, nothin’ new. Just lookin’ for Billy.’

I put my hands on my hips. I could have done without this.

‘Dan, Billy moved out a month ago. He left me. You must know that. I saw you out with him and’ – I couldn’t bring myself to say Eva’s name – ‘his
whore
last week.’

It was true. I’d seen the three of them through the window of the Freestate Brewery, laughing and chatting at a table, a half-full pitcher of beer and a plate of nachos in front of them. I’d gone home and got straight into bed, cold with misery, although there was a small part of me which cheered at the thought that
I
no longer had to endure drinks with Flamingo Dan. I couldn’t believe that Eva would enjoy his company either. Rumour had it that she was pretty smart. She was halfway through her first semester as a graduate student doing a PhD, something geological, my friend Audrey said. I hoped that it meant she was so academic that she’d soon get terminally bored with Billy and Dan’s riveting conversations about spark plugs or which of the Grateful Dead’s albums was the best.

‘Oh. Yeah. Right. Sorry, I guess I forgot.’

‘How could you forget?’ I wasn’t sure why I asked that, since it was fairly self-explanatory.

‘You know. I just forgot that Billy told you already, that’s all.’

I digested the implications of this in silence for a moment.

‘So, let me get this straight ...you’d known for some time about him and – that woman – and you just didn’t know that I knew?’

Dan looked confused. ‘I guess so.’

‘Oh, that’s just great, Dan, really great. So who else knew that my fiancé was sleeping around behind my back?’

Dan’s eyes opened up wide with panic. Even his eyelids were avian-looking, bald and a bit scaly.

‘I guess I don’t know, Susie. Sorry. Er, I’d better be off then. What time will Billy be back?’

I gritted my teeth. ‘Dan,’ I said, trying my hardest not to whack him around the head with the bread board, ‘
HE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANY MORE
. Now, if you don’t mind, I have things to do. I have a vacation to organize.’

‘Cool!’ said Dan, his panic forgotten. ‘Are you guys going anywhere nice?’

Stronger tactics were required. I suddenly remembered Dan’s mushroom phobia.

‘Hey, Dan,’ I said, in an affectedly cheerful voice, opening the fridge door and removing the pack of four huge meaty flat ones I’d bought on my trip to Dillons that day. ‘Want to stay for supper? I’m making stuffed mush—’

He was out of the door and gone before I’d even finished the sentence. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did neither. I didn’t fancy the mushrooms much myself, either, so I put them back in the fridge and made myself two pieces of toast, spread with the chocolate body paint that Billy and I had only got halfway through, laboriously warming it and applying it in sticky sensual lines and patterns on each others’ bodies. The cats wove circles of warm sympathy around my shins as I ate.

‘Seems a pity to waste it,’ I said, through a mouthful of crumbs.

Later that evening, I rang my friend Audrey to tell her of my plans.

‘Skiing?’ she said with disgust and fear, as if I’d told her I was going to dance naked on a minefield. I heard her take a deep drag of her Camel Light, and then she laughed throatily. ‘
Europe?
Why in hell do you wanna do a thing like that?’

‘Because it’s fun. Because my daughter lives in Europe. Because I’m tired of entertaining Flamingo Dan. Because it’s good exercise, and a challenge, and I want to see some nice mountains. We don’t see many mountains here, do we?’

‘Mount Oread’s good enough for me, honey, and I don’t see why it ain’t for you. Hell, if it snows I’ll take you tobogganing down it on a tea tray, that do you?

Why would you want to spend a thousand bucks for some fancy ski resort where they don’t talk English and you gotta fly for days to get there?’

‘It’s not days. It’s only about ten hours or so, and I want to get away . . .’

I wondered why I was having to defend myself to her. Then I realized that what I was actually doing was telling her about the holiday in the hope that she would mention it to at least three other people (which she undoubtedly would) and that it would get back to Billy within days.

I wasn’t going to call him and tell him myself, so I’d have to rely on the Lawrence grapevine. There was Raylene, who was still working as a mail carrier in town, twenty-five years later; and Audrey was on her round, so that was a dead cert. Raylene knew Billy, of course, and anyway, once Raylene knew, it may as well be on the front page of the
Lawrence Journal-World
. Everyone would know.

Audrey was somewhat more positive about the life coaching idea, though, and agreed to feed the cats while I was gone, for however long it ended up being.

‘Don’t tell anyone I might be away for more than a couple of weeks, will you?’

I didn’t want Billy to know that much. He’d probably be pleased that I was going out of town for a few months, and he wouldn’t need to worry about bumping into me in the Bottleneck or the Freestate Brewery. And Eva would be ecstatic.

For a moment I almost ditched the idea. There was something to be said for hanging around being a fly in the ointment – Lawrence was a small town, and I usually managed to glower at her at least three times a week, once I’d seen them together enough times for me to be able to recognize her. It had become quite a hobby. I was getting it down to a fine art: lurking around stop signs when I spotted her car and looming up to the driver’s window to stare menacingly at her.

She was small like me, but much frailer-looking. I could take her out, any day. Could come back from the skiing holiday tanned and fit, and Billy would realize what he was missing.

No. Stop it, Susie, I told myself after I hung up from Audrey. This wasn’t a very constructive behaviour pattern for a potential life coach, was it now? Staying in a place specifically for the purpose of intimidating your fiancé’s new girlfriend probably wasn’t a particularly positive life goal. Skiing would be much better.

Sod ’em. She’d soon get fed up with Billy picking his toenails at the dinner table, and I’d be sailing down a vast white piste while a gorgeous instructor gazed admiringly at my rear view.

I went to write my resignation letter to the boss of the real estate agency, and to pay the balance on the skiing holiday before I could change my mind again.