I tried to hold it in, but having downed three glasses of champagne over the last few hours, I was always going to need the loo mid-flight. Marcus hadn’t moved for the last twenty-five minutes, so I’d sneakily carried on with my research, trying to find an angle, something I could use to convince him that appearing inLuxewould be as beneficial for him as it would be for me. I didn’t have much to go on: he was born near Manchester, in a mid-sized town without so much as a municipal tennis court; he’d won a scholarship to some tennis academy in Spain and had travelled all over the world since turning pro at the age of eighteen. There were a couple of pics of him with his mum in the early days, an attractive, tired-looking woman with dyed blonde hair and pretty brown eyes like Marcus’s, but she was strangely absent in the shots I could find from the last eight or nine years. He was currently ranked twelfth in the world, having reached the quarter-finals of both the US Open and Queen’s last year, and was the British number one. As he’d been quick to pull me up on, he had indeed won a Grand Slam once – but that had been eight years ago. Apparently, he’d come out of nowhere to win it, got the British press and public all excited and thenhad failed to live up to the hype, getting knocked out of Wimbledon in the second round that same year. I wondered what had gone wrong – why another big win had eluded him, whether he wanted to beworldnumber one, whether his Australian Open win was a fluke and whether deep down he knew it was. Other than the tournaments I’d heard of, there were lots of other less prestigious events all over the world that Marcus seemed to travel to, and I was struggling to get my head around what they all meant – if there was a way to write my profile on Marcus without totally immersing myself in the game of tennis itself, I was damn well going to find it.
Closing my laptop, I undid my seat belt and shuffled about in my seat a bit, hoping to alert Marcus to the fact I needed to get up. He didn’t stir. Aaargh, how was I going to sneak past without waking him? Then I thought:tough. Everyone gets woken up on flights, you can’t expect undisturbed sleep when you’re sharing a metal cylinder with three hundred other people, can you?
‘Excuse me,’ I said, standing up, surprised to note that there was actually room to do that in Business.
Absolutely no movement.
I cleared my throat.
‘Marcus, sorry, can I get past?’ I said, upping the volume a bit.
He stirred, pushing his eye mask over his forehead. It took him a second or two to focus, his eyes eventually landing on mine.
‘Really?’ he said.
‘Really, what?’ I countered, purposely holding his gaze. I wasn’t going to grovel. It was a perfectly reasonable request that hemove.
He sulkily prised himself out of his seat, making a huge deal of unbuckling his seat belt and taking off his precious eye mask, huffing and puffing the entire time.
‘Thanks,’ I mumbled, careful not to touch him as I slid past.
When I returned to my seat, Marcus’s headphones were nowhere to be seen and he was scrolling absent-mindedly through his phone, stroppily standing up as I squeezed past. I reminded myself what was at stake here. Working forLuxewas my dream and this was probably my one and only chance to impress Amanda Eddington. Clearly, I was going to have to try even harder to get Marcus Taylor on side. Perhaps if he knew what I was trying to achieve ...
‘Would you like to read some of my work?’ I suggested. ‘I could show you a couple of my articles right now, if you like?’
‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ sneered Marcus.
Right, then. That hadn’t worked. Maybe if I let him think he had a bit of editorial control?
‘Why don’t I tell you what I thought my angle could be for the story? How we could approach the article. Together. For example, we could talk about your pre-match preparation. How do you get yourself in the right mindset to play a tournament like the Rolex Monte-Carlo Masters and what does an ATP 500 event like this mean to you?’
Marcus turned in his seat to look at me.
‘I think you’ll find the Monte-Carlo Masters is an ATP 1000 tournament. Tut tut,somebodyhasn’t done their homework.’
Suddenly, a seat in economy had never looked so appealing.
‘Slip of the tongue,’ I said. Damn. I really thought I’d got a grasp of the ATP levels thing.
He raised one slightly unruly eyebrow at me, the only imperfect thing on his otherwise perfect face.
‘Do you even know what the ATP is?’
‘Yes,’ I lied.
‘Go on then.’
‘Oh sorry, are we testing my tennis knowledge here or talking about the article I’m supposed to be writing aboutyou?’
‘As I’ve said at least twice now, I won’t be participating in any articles, especially not written by so-called journalists who know absolutely nothing about tennis.’
‘Well, that would be because my family couldn’t have afforded to pay for tennis lessons, even if I’d wanted them. And in fact, I think you’ll find that the entire stuffy tennis scene is set up so that privileged kids can thrive, much like most other things in life, and so no, Marcus, I don’t know anything about it. I can think of far more exciting sports.’
‘Like what?’ he deadpanned.
At least he didn’t seem too insulted by the fact I’d said tennis was boring and had practically called him a posh knob.
‘Yoga,’ I said.
