Games People Play (16 page)

I’d thought we were fine, living out our futures together, taking the rough with the smooth, the mundane with the exciting. But it couldn’t have been fine, could it? Eva had broken us up, therefore there must have been something seriously wrong with our relationship. How could I not have noticed what it was?

‘Cheer up,’ said the man in the shop, a hairy blond Australian, when I got to the head of the queue. He handed me a pair of boots in my size, but so ludicrously large and heavy I could barely lift them, then added, predictably, ‘It might never happen.’

I made a face at him as I shoved my feet hard into the plastic casing, and allowed him to haul them shut. I felt as though I had concrete blocks on my feet – and that was before I’d even been given the skis.

Eventually we were all kitted out, and waddling in an ungainly manner back along the road towards the piste. My skis clanked together in my arms in an unwieldy fashion, and I felt sick with nerves. I couldn’t even carry the damn things properly, let alone ski on them.

‘Hold them like this, Mum,’ Rachel instructed, showing me how to clip them together and carry them on my shoulder with my hand wrapped around their tips. When we reached the slope, the group dropped their skis on the snow and stamped on them to fasten them. Then they set off, flying away like chicks out of a nest, laughing and whooping. Their skill varied – Camelback Man just leaned over as if he was about to do a pike dive, and stayed in that position, shooting down the mountain immobile and lethal in his trajectory. Even I could tell that wasn’t a technique recommended in any ski school.

Pretty soon only Robin, Rachel and I were left. I was teetering on the edge of my fear as if it were a knife blade on which I was trying to balance. I’d managed to attach the skis to my feet, and scissor my legs back and forth on the spot, but the idea of actually going anywhere on them was too frightening.

‘Come on, Mum,’ Rachel said kindly.

The piste looked so steep. Dusk had long ago swallowed up the rest of the group. Robin was trying to be chivalrous but I could tell he was getting impatient, shifting from foot to foot.

‘Go, really, please,’ I said, mortified. ‘And you, Rach, I’ll be fine.’

Rachel laughed. ‘Don’t be daft. I’m not leaving you to come down on your own.’

At that moment I saw the minibus, empty now save for its driver and a couple of crates full of our outdoor shoes, executing a reckless three-point turn, skidding around the icy road as if demonstrating an ice dance. The driver had a cigarette hanging from his mouth and was eating popcorn out of a large bag whilst talking out of the open window to one of the men in the ski-hire shop, but he could’ve been driving blindfolded for all I cared: the prospect of a lift down the mountain with him was still more appealing than the thought of skiing in the ever-encroaching darkness.

I stuck out my arm and yelled at him, like I was hailing a cab on Fifth Avenue, and he screeched to a halt by my right ski. Popcorn scattered across the dashboard as he leaned over and opened the passenger door for me.

‘I don’t want to hold you both up any more,’ I said decisively to the others. ‘I’m getting a lift back with him.’

Robin’s look of relief was transparent. ‘OK, see you later. Shall we go then, um, Rachel?’

‘I feel like such a failure,’ I said in an aside to Rachel, tears stinging my eyes again. At least now I could pretend they were due to the icy wind, but I don’t think Rachel was fooled.

‘Mum, so what if you’re not as confident a skier as the rest of us? Who cares?’ She kissed my cheek, her lips bloodless and cold. ‘Look, I’d better shoot, if you’re sure. See you back at the hotel.’

I watched her and Robin launch themselves off with their poles, skating their legs wide in order to build up momentum, and then they were away, already vanishing in the half-light. Robin was a decent skier, but Rachel was effortless, with a smooth, hip-swaying rhythm of parallel turns which instantly assuaged my fears about her safety. She looked totally in control. I’d never seen her ski before, except in photographs. It was another part of her life I’d completely missed out on. Once more I got the feeling of a baby bird flying the nest – but my Rachel had flown long ago. I felt utterly depressed.

‘Let’s go!’ called the minibus driver cheerfully in a German accent, flicking his cigarette butt out of the window. I managed, with difficulty, to release my skis and manouevre them into the back of the minibus, encumbered by the huge rigid ski boots, and slide clumsily into the front seat next to him.

‘You did not want to ski?’

‘No,’ I said dully. ‘I was afraid. I am not an experienced skier. In fact, I’m a total beginner.’

He turned and smiled at me, popcorn crumbs on his chin which I itched for him to dash away. He had thick sandy hair and eyebrows, and an interesting mouth. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed him on the way up.

‘And it is getting dark,’ he said consolingly. ‘What is your name? I’m Karl.’

‘Susie,’ I replied, feeling marginally better. ‘Thanks for the lift.’

‘No problem.’

‘You’re not Italian,’ I said, cringing at the inanity of the comment. ‘Do you live here permanently?’

‘No, not permanently,’ he said, taking a sharp bend so fast that I was thrown against his side. I looked for a seatbelt, but there didn’t appear to be one. The feeling of uneasy trepidation this induced in me was not a new one, I realized. It was the same feeling I’d been living with ever since I’d seen Billy and Eva holding hands in the deli.

‘My sister is married to Paolo, who owns the hotel. I help them out sometimes. But my main business is wine importing, in Germany and Italy mostly, sometimes England. And a little bit of selling magnets, you know, for health, also.’

Living in Lawrence, I did know what he meant. I was already au fait with the notion of utilizing magnetic forces to aid recovery after muscle damage. My friend Audrey was a great believer in it. She suffered from arthritis, and was always festooned with various different sized magnets which she swore alleviated the pain. I used to joke that if I didn’t hear from her for a while, I’d have to come and check that she wasn’t stuck to her refrigerator door.

‘My friend uses magnets a lot for arthritis,’ I said. ‘She has a magnetic mattress on her bed.’

‘
J
a, ja
, very good,’ he said, nodding vigorously.

‘Could I have some of your popcorn, please?’ I asked as we hurtled round the next bend and the open packet skittered across the bench front seat, scattering more of its contents.

‘Sure, help yourself.’

I took a large handful and stuffed it into my mouth.

‘I’m absolutely starving,’ I said. ‘It’s another reason I didn’t want to ski. I’ve been travelling for almost twenty-four hours, and I’ve got no energy left.’

‘I don’t blame you. I too cannot do anything when I don’t eat.’

He smiled at me again, and I decided I liked him very much. Too young for me, though. I wondered if he was single. He’d make a lovely boyfriend for Rachel.

‘Do you stay at the hotel too?’ I blurted.

‘
Ja
, I live there for now.’

Right, I thought. Let Operation Matchmake commence. It was about time I did
something
for my daughter.

In the end, I was very grateful that I hadn’t skied down. When Karl dropped me off, it was so dark that the headlights of his minibus illuminated my way into the hotel. Most of the group were already back, but a few stragglers were still clunking up the road from the bottom of the ski slope, silent and chilled-looking. I felt anxious when I didn’t see Rachel among them.

‘It’s so dark,’ I heard a middle-aged woman say, over and over, as she went into the boot room by the hotel’s front door. The woman was wearing a pink ski suit, with greasy blonde hair pulled back with pink hair-clips, and the tip of her nose was exactly the same shade of pink, as if it was an additional accessory. ‘They made us ski in the
dark
.’

No one spoke to me as they passed me, padding upstairs in their socked feet. I felt excluded, that I’d missed out on the bonding which had taken place as they felt their collective way down the ski slope. But judging from the look of shock on most of their faces, I was still glad I hadn’t succumbed to peer pressure. I never had been particularly good at being part of groups. I preferred one on one. And so what if I didn’t make any new friends this week? I had so much catching up to do with Rachel, I didn’t need anybody else.

At that moment, Karl staggered through the hotel door, weighed down by the box of shoes for which most people had given up waiting. He beamed at me as if he’d known me forever and was genuinely pleased to see me and, whilst I was still worried about Rachel, something inside me thawed a little. He was nice. It was good to know that there were genuine, decent men out there...

Although
Billy
was a genuine, decent man, so perhaps there was no hope for me. He had let me down so spectacularly that I felt I’d never trust anyone else as long as I lived. It would have been much better, I thought, if I’d always suspected Billy of a spot of illicit flirting; perhaps erotic text messages or the occasional one-night stand. Then I wouldn’t have been so surprised. I would have expected nothing less of him; known that he could never be mine forever.

‘Mum!’

Thank goodness, I thought, snapping out of it. There she was, skis over her right shoulder, bursting through the doors pink-cheeked and exhilarated. Robin came in behind her, unsubtly admiring her backside as he manouevred his own skis through into the boot room.

The boot room reminded me of school changing rooms: chilly concrete floor, faintly foot-scented, with damp slatted benches and high pegs.

‘Hi, honey,’ I said to Rachel, grabbing her round the waist for a hug as she passed me. ‘I was just starting to get worried about you.’

‘Oh, you do surprise me, Mother. What’s to be worried about? Skiing in pitch dark on an icy run with no one else around is nothing to be
worried
about…’

It was the first time I’d seen her animated. She was her old sarcastic self.

‘So you enjoyed it then,’ I said, leaning on the doorframe and watching her and Robin trying to pull off their boots. I delved into the box of shoes and passed Rachel’s Caterpillars over to her.

‘Thanks, Mum. Yeah, it was fantastic. I’d forgotten how much fun skiing is,’ she enthused, and I relaxed.

The holiday had been the right thing to do after all.

Robin smiled up at me as he tugged at his left boot. His red ski socks made him look somehow vulnerable. ‘Your daughter’s quite the athlete, isn’t she?’ he said.

‘We’d have been back much sooner, only she had to keep stopping to help me when I fell over.’

I liked him a little better for saying that. I’d put him in the category of a man who’d hate to admit that a woman could beat him at any sport.

‘Well, it’s a good thing
I
didn’t ski,’ I said, smiling back at them both. ‘You’d both have been stopping every ten yards. We’d still be out there.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Rachel. ‘But you’d better get ready. You’re skiing tomorrow, and no excuses.’

Right. Damn. The smile fell off my face, like an icicle falling off the eaves of a roof. I realized I’d discovered the problem with skiing holidays, for me, at least. You had to ski.

Rachel

The best thing about skiing is the freedom of it. I can go fast, but it doesn’t matter if I’m not the fastest. It’s not a competition. I owe it nothing except the exhilaration of the experience.

I felt really miserable when the plane landed at Verona airport, even though I was looking forward to seeing Mum. It
is
lovely to see her, but however familiar her face still is to me, she’s a stranger too. I didn’t want to be sitting on a coach with her as she eyed up all the men; she’s lucky to have a man already, I thought, what does she need to look at other men for? For a moment I felt resentful: I wanted to be going on holiday with
Mark
, not my mum and a bunch of people I’ve never met, and am not sure that I ever want to meet...

Mark and I talked about going away somewhere together. We were thinking of Northern Spain, or perhaps a mountainous Greek island. Somewhere rural and hot, without a tennis court; perhaps just ping pong or boules, or something else to quench Mark’s insatiable thirst for competition. I would have let him make love to me, all night if he wanted. Even if we didn’t make love, just to be in a bed cuddled up next to him till morning would have been so amazing. We hardly spent any whole nights together – Dad always quizzed me so relentlessly about where I was if I was out all night, and he saw Kerry every day on court, so I couldn’t use her as an alibi more than once or twice. Plus I think Mark found it difficult to be in bed with me without doing anything.

It still makes me so bloody angry that I let Dad dictate the terms of my love life. I suppose because he runs everything else in my life, at the time it didn’t seem all that weird that he had a say in whom I went out with too ...Never again, though. If I ever manage to get another boyfriend, I don’t care what Dad says, I’m doing it my way.

Mum and I are sharing a room. How weird is that? The beds are low and hard, with synthetic orange blankets tucked in too tightly, and the room so dimly lit that it will be difficult to read after dark. It’s also stifling hot, until you swing open the window and then of course it’s arctic.

‘Have we ever shared a bedroom before?’ I ask her when we are settling in after that initial run down the mountain. I’m standing in my thermals, having taken off my boarding pants and jacket, and draped my wet ski gloves on the heavy old radiator. Mum is fussing around, unpacking a vast cosmetic case on to the dressing table. Honestly, sometimes I feel like she’s the teenager and I’m the mother: I only brought one eyeshadow and a lipstick and some Vaseline, and she’s got enough crap in that vanity case of hers to turn the Statue of Liberty into a drag queen. The case opens out into several stepped layers, and each layer seems to be overflowing with little pots and tubes and pencils.

She laughs, in a tired sort of way. ‘Have we? Let me think...not since you were a baby. It’ll be fun! I bags this bed.’ She presses down on the mattress of the bed nearest her, and it yields soggily.

‘It was when we came back to England,’ she continues. ‘We stayed at Gordana’s for a couple of years while Ivan was on tour. She was great with you: taking you out for walks in the pram, and down to the tennis club to show you off to her friends. I don’t know what I’d have done without her.’

That’s right; I remember from before that Mum always refers solely to Gordana, as if poor old Pops doesn’t even exist. Strictly speaking, it’s
Pops’s
house, not Gordana’s – he’s the one who earned the money to buy it and maintain it. But Mum has always adored Gordana. In inverse proportion to the way she feels about Ivan.

‘I’m so looking forward to catching up with Gordana. I’ve got so much to tell her,’ she says, a bit too wistfully, in my opinion. I wonder what she has to tell Gordana that she can’t tell me. But I suppose Gordana’s like that. She’s just the best person to tell your problems to – everyone does it. Except perhaps Ivan, who, ironically, is the only one whose problems she really
wants
to hear. She’s the tennis club’s agony aunt, the Problem Guru. I feel a surge of love for her, and pride that in our fractured little family Gordana is the constant, the hub of a rather wonky wheel.

‘What’s this for?’ I ask curiously, picking up a little triangular wedge of sponge. ‘Do you seriously need all this junk?’

‘It’s all right for you, Rachel, you’re young and beautiful and you don’t need any help. But you wait till you get to my age, and
then
you’ll see how vital it all is,’ she says gloomily.

‘But Mum, you’re only forty-four, and you look great. I’ve got more wrinkles than you have!’ I go over to the mirror and screw up my face, fracturing the skin around my eyes into dozens of fissures. Sighing, I flop down on the bed instead.

‘You certainly don’t. Besides, any lack of wrinkles on my face is due to Botox, not nature.’ She instantly blushes and looks horrified, as if she’s momentarily forgotten to whom she is speaking.

‘
Mum!
You don’t inject that poison into your face, do you? I don’t believe it!’ I am far more horrified than she is. I’ve always known she was vain, but because I also know how critical Ivan was, somehow I’ve never blamed her for it before. But she’s with Billy now.

‘Does Billy know?’

I can’t get my head around Mum getting Botox. She surely couldn’t do it for Billy’s benefit – Billy is such a space cadet, he wouldn’t notice if his fiancée grew a full beard.

Mum turns away and begins to remove immaculately folded thermal vests from her suitcase, placing them in neat piles in the top of the three drawers underneath the television. When she speaks, it sounds as if her throat is constricted.

‘No. He doesn’t. I didn’t do it for him; I did it for me. It’s no different to spending a fortune on facials and useless creams – except it works.’

‘Can you even
get
Botox in Lawrence, Kansas?’ I am curious. Lawrence, from what I remember of the time I visited it, is terrific if you’re after a dreamcatcher, a tie-dye T-shirt, or any amount of paraphernalia featuring a stupid-looking blue bird, mascot of the Jayhawks football team (or basketball, or perhaps both); but I wouldn’t think it would be bursting with beauty salons offering high-tech non-cosmetic surgery.

‘Actually, I go to a little place in Kansas City,’ she says, still not looking at me. ‘Could we please drop it. I’m sorry I mentioned it.’

‘Of course,’ I say, clasping my hands behind my head and staring at the varnished wooden strips on the ceiling. I feel suddenly awkward. I don’t know my mother at all.