Games People Play (6 page)

‘So where is he?’

‘He’s upstairs. In bed. He had a migraine. He got home about five and went straight to bed. You know what he’s like when he gets one of his heads. He said he wanted to sleep it off so he’d be fit for Zurich tomorrow.’

‘Oh. So ...did he say what he was doing today?’ I asked, but already I felt relief draining through me. He couldn’t have been arrested if he was going to fly to Switzerland with me tomorrow. They didn’t let you leave the country when you were on bail, did they?

‘No, he didn’t,’ she said shortly – fair enough, since she never knew anything about Dad’s movements. I decided not to ask her outright if he’d been arrested. It seemed faintly ludicrous now that I was home, and Dad was simply upstairs asleep. And anyway, if the Jehovah’s Witness story was a cover-up, she wouldn’t admit the truth to me. She was ridiculously loyal to Dad.

‘Well, never mind. I’m just going to ring Gordana – we were worried when he didn’t show up – and then I’m going to bed too. I’ve been up since half five this morning.’

Later, after I’d placated Gordana, had a shower, and climbed gratefully into my single bed, I heard Anthea whirring away on the exercise bike in the spare room.

She was at it for hours. I thought I could hear a faint moaning sound too, although that could have been the bike’s mechanism. It was like being haunted by a manicured ghost. She’s going to collapse with exhaustion if she carries on like this, I thought; or else exercise herself into oblivion. I had a vision of breaking down the door to find nothing left of her except a pair of false eyelashes floating in a puddle of sweat, next to an empty crumpled Chanel tracksuit.

Clearly all was not well with her and Dad. I felt a surge of anger as the whirring kept me from sleep: Dad ought to get his nose out of
my
love life and concentrate on his own for a change. But I still wondered if it had anything to do with Dad’s early visitors. Feeling guilty at my annoyance – poor Anthea, I felt sorry for her really – I got up and made her a cheese sandwich, which I left outside the spare bedroom door with a glass of milk, for when she eventually finished exercising. I called through to tell her it was there, but received no answer.

It took me ages to get to sleep. My room seemed too big and too empty as I sat up in bed in the dark like a child waiting to be tucked in. I wished that I’d accepted Gordana’s offer of company. She was always such a rock – I once overheard Mum saying that the hardest thing about moving back to Kansas was not having Gordana’s shoulder to cry on any more. (I was quite put out by that, actually. Surely, bearing in mind I stayed with Dad because of my career, it ought to be
me
she was upset at being apart from?) All of us in different places, not being there for one another: Mum in Kansas with Billy; Dad in a place somewhere inside his head that nobody has access to; Gordana at the club getting drunk; me here with old Anorexic Annie – although she’s about as much support as a custard bra.

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…

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 conversation, 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.’

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.