Just when I thought the evening couldn’t get any better, we go on to win our second match of the evening too.
Afterwards, we climb into Barbara’s Volvo and drive back to Roebury, full of adrenalin and post-match cake and with ‘We Are The Champions’ by Queen on the stereo. As I look out of the window, a smile overtaking my face, I realise that I’ve finally got an answer to a question I asked myself a very long time ago.
This is it. The reason I’d been looking for.Thisis why I play tennis.
Chapter 43
In the event, the win Lisa and I had turns out not to be a one-off. I have another win with Rose in our next fixture, then win both of my matches again the following week.
I realise that before each event I never seem to get any less nervous. But I now have a drill, which goes something like this. I wake up in the morning and if my stomach is churning I tell myself I’m not allowed to be anxious until lunchtime. When that time comes, I don’t fight the feelings. I let them fly, do their worst. Then I accept the idea that this is just who I am and that, whatever happens at the match tonight, it will all be forgotten by tomorrow.
It doesn’t just take the sting out of the whole thing. It allows me to reframe this variant of stress as a positive one. Something I should welcome. Because it means Icare– and this is exactly the thing that will fire me up, carry me through and just occasionally make me win. I cannot tell you how stupidly good it feels when that happens, to high-five my partner and bask, albeit temporarily, in our shared elation. Even if the rest of the day has turned to shit, this single inconsequential triumph is enough to make everything better. And I mean everything.
So I don’t freak out when I receive a photo of my daughter taking part in her new favourite sport: rock climbing. In the space of three days, she has gone from enthusiastic to obsessed, thanks to a handsome Dutch instructor she has been spending a lot of time with lately. A few months ago,
I wouldn’t have slept for a week after learning this, lying awake so I could trawl the internet for last year’s statistics on bouldering-related deaths.
Now, after satisfying myself with a brief glimpse of his professional website, I wean myself off Find My iPhone and leave my daughter to it. Even if I don’t entirely buy the idea that their relationship is platonic. I’m hardly in a position to push the issue when I have thisthinggoing on with Sam.
We have been texting each other every day of his trip and, once he’s back at his hotel in the evenings and connected to the Wi-Fi, I can usually expect a flurry of texts, each one causing a delicious fizz in my stomach.
I am rooting through my tennis bag one evening and discover a pair of sunglasses that he’d let me borrow on the night we’d played tennis, as I was struggling to serve against the sun. I’d absent-mindedly put them in my own bag rather than returning them.
When I message to apologise and let him know I’ve got them, he replies saying, ‘No problem. Now, I’ve got an excuse to see you the moment I get back x’.
Just thinking about him makes me feel happy and light in a way I haven’t for years, like I’m harbouring some distant holiday-romance feeling that is lasting long after our return from La Manga.
The other feeling always comes back sooner or later though. That niggling conviction that something about this just isn’t right. Occasionally, it creeps up slowly; at other times it hits me like a freight train – like one morning when I wake from a dream about Sam, not Ed, and feel itchy and unsettled for the rest of the day.
Just like Nora suggested, I try not to think about where this is going. In my head, I am trying to reconcile myself with the ‘friends with benefits’ concept, even if that doesn’t feel like an idea I am brave enough to discuss with Sam himself.
The week Sam is due home, I offer to collect Bella from Scouts as Jeff and Andy both have late meetings and when I drop her off, my brother refers to Sam as ‘my boyfriend’.
‘He isnotmy boyfriend,’ I say.
Jeff frowns. ‘Then what is he?’
‘He’s just Sam,’ I say, irritated.
‘What does thateven mean?’
‘Why does it need to mean anything?’ I ask.
Jeff looks at me like I’ve completely lost the plot. But I refuse to be pinned down by my brother or anyone else. I am just happy to be sleeping at night and for my list of irrational worries to have dwindled to a mere handful, if that.
‘You’re in a good mood,’ Kayla says, as we’re heading back to the office after walking to the sandwich shop together at lunchtime the next day. ‘Lottery win?’
I’m hit by a flashback of Sam kissing me on my doorstep before he left for Malawi and something pleasant twists inside my core. ‘I won my tennis match this week. Almost as good.’
Strictly speaking, this may not have been what put the smile on my face, but it’s true: my winning streak has left me feeling like I can’t imagine tennisnotbeing in my life again. It’s become my drug of choice, the crutch on which I lean. Even accounting for its capacity to drive me quite mad with frustration, picking up a racquet is the one thing guaranteed to make my day better.
‘If you say so,’ she says, scrunching up her face. ‘Well, you’re not the only one feeling positive today.’
‘Oh? Developments on Match.com?’
‘Yes,’ she says, triumphantly. ‘I’ve cancelled my subscriptions. Every. Last. One.’
‘Are you serious?’
