Chapter 70

chapter seventy

It was a cold blue sunlit August morning. Hard to imagine a deadly virus in this crystal-clear air.

Stan Delaney diligently went through the stretching routine prescribed by his daughter to protect his crappy knees before he went on the court. He and his wife were going to have a hit. Just a gentle hit.

‘You two have never had a gentle hit in your lives,’ Brooke said.

Joy was next to him doing her own Brooke-prescribed routine when his mobile phone rang.

‘For heaven’s sake.’ Joy rolled her eyes. She complained that he was too attached to his phone. He had it in his pocket all the time and placed it right next to his plate when they ate. She said that was poor etiquette. He thought that was the point of the damned thing.

Stan peered at the screen. ‘It’s Logan.’

‘Quick, quick, answer it, then!’ Joy would never let a call from one of their children go unanswered, especially not now, after everything that had happened. They might laugh over it one day, but their laughs would always be tinged with horror.

‘Dad,’ said Logan. Stan clenched the phone tight. Logan didn’t sound like himself. ‘Yeah, mate?’ He steeled himself for death or disaster.

‘You remember my friend Hien?’

‘Of course I remember him.’ A car accident? Did Hien have the virus?

‘He has a son. Six years old. Hien has been asking me to come and watch him play tennis for months now, and I’ve been putting it off, but this morning I thought, Oh, to hell with it, the kid has been stuck at home doing online learning. So anyway, I finally did, and, Dad –’

He paused, and in the pause, hope rushed like mercury through Stan’s veins.

Logan said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

Stan watched the hair on his arms stand up. ‘He’s pretty good then, is he?’

‘Yeah, Dad, he’s pretty damned good.’

The first time Stan saw Harry Haddad play – a kid who had never set foot on a court before – it was like seeing one of the world’s natural wonders. Only a coach sounded the way Logan sounded right now, and Stan knew that Logan was a natural-born coach even if the fool boy didn’t seem to know it himself.

‘So, I know it’s been a long time,’ said Logan tentatively.

Don’t ask me.

Please don’t ask me.

Do it yourself, son, do it yourself, please say you want to do it yourself.

Logan lowered his voice as though he were sharing a shameful secret and said, ‘I think I want to coach him.’

It was the high of an ace or a perfectly executed smash.

Stan silently fist-punched the air.

‘What?’ said Joy. ‘What is it?’

Stan waved her quiet. He kept his voice controlled.

‘He’d be lucky to have you,’ he said.

There was silence and the next time Logan spoke his voice had firmed. ‘You think I can do it?’

‘I know you can do it.’

‘He listens,’ Logan said.

‘Yeah,’ said Stan. ‘It’s satisfying when they listen.’

The true talents were thirsty for anything you could give them. They listened and applied. They flourished before your eyes.

‘I think he’s going to go all the way, Dad.’

‘He might,’ said Stan. ‘You never know. He might.’

He wanted to say that it didn’t matter if the kid did or didn’t go all the way, that all that really mattered was that Logan was participating in his life again. He wanted to say that being a coach wasn’t second best or a fallback or a compromise and that Logan could still be part of the beautiful world of tennis, that everyone counted, not just the stars but the coaches and umpires, the weekend warriors and social players, the crazy-eyed parents and the screaming fans whose roars of appreciation lifted the stars to heights they would never otherwise reach.

But that would have taken more words than he had to spare, so he hung up and told Joy, who had a lot of words to spare about Hien, and Hien’s mother, who’d never played tennis as far as Joy knew but did have an athletic way about her, so Joy bet that was where the grandson had inherited his talent, and she hoped the boy wasn’t naughty, because Hien had been very naughty as a child.

Eventually Joy ran out of words, and they went out on the court and began to warm up and Stan’s crook knee felt good. They moved to the baselines, got into a rhythm as easy and familiar as sex, and Stan found himself thinking of his own father and their secret Friday afternoon matches, which had gone on for years, like the secret assignations of a double agent.

Of course, they couldn’t play on the backyard court his dad had built with his own hands. After he left, his dad had never crossed the threshold of his own home ever again.

They met instead at a crummy local court surrounded by scrubby bushland near a seedy scout hall. The surface was cracked, the net sagged, but the tennis was beautiful.

Stan’s father said that one day he’d see his son play at Wimbledon. He said it as if he’d been given inside information.

When Stan was sixteen his father died on a train platform waiting for the six forty-five am to Central. Instantly dead. Just like old mate Dennis Christos. ‘No great loss,’ said his mother, who believed that Stan had not seen his father for years and would not have comforted her son for his loss even if she’d known the truth. She was not a mother who gave comfort. When his boys were children and got fevers and Joy tended to them, her hand stroking their hair, Stan sometimes felt a deplorable ache of envy. His sons accepted their mother’s love in such a cavalier fashion, as if it was their birthright, and maybe sometimes he was tougher on them, Troy especially, because of his envy.

For many decades he rarely thought of his father and he never spoke of him, not until the day he and Joy went to Wimbledon and he heard his father’s voice, so clear and deep in his ear, as if he were sitting right next to him, ‘Well, isn’t this something for a boy from the bush.’

That was the first time in Stan’s life that he could remember his body overreacting to a feeling, to a mere thought in his bloody head. He never told Joy what he felt that day. They both pretended it was some strange, unspecified illness that had struck him down. How could he tell her that being at Wimbledon didn’t just cause him to grieve his own lost career, and his children’s lost careers, but the long-ago loss of the kind, loving man who so notoriously assaulted his mother?

It was his father who taught him to be on guard for the ghastly apparition of a man’s temper.

‘This is what you do,’ he told him, more than once, as they sat sweating companionably in the shade after each Friday afternoon match. ‘If you ever lose your temper with a woman or child, you must leave. Walk out the door. Don’t stop to think. Don’t say a word. Don’t come back until you’re calm again. Just walk away. Like I should have done.’

Stan took that advice literally, precisely, with death-like seriousness. He believed a man’s temper to be his most hideous flaw. When Troy jumped the net and attacked Harry Haddad all those years ago, Stan knew he’d failed, and when Troy made stupid decision after stupid decision, Stan wiped his hands of him. He had done what he told his children and students to never do: he’d given up. You never give up. You fight to the last ball. The match isn’t over until the last point is played. But he gave up on his son.

Recently, he’d begun listening to one of Joy’s podcasts about trading. Joy said it was boring and she was right, but Stan persevered and yesterday he’d called Troy and said, ‘How’s work?’

‘Work is good, Dad,’ said Troy tersely.

Stan took a breath, took courage, and said, ‘I guess the market is like your opponent. Is that it? You’re competing against the market? Trying to predict what it does next?’

There had been such a long silence that Stan felt the colour rise on his face. Had he said something so unbelievably stupid that Troy was rolling about laughing? Because his old man was as thick as a brick?

But then Troy said slowly, ‘Yeah, Dad, it’s exactly like that.’

‘Right,’ said Stan. ‘So –’

Troy interrupted him. He said, ‘You know when I got really good at this, Dad?’ and he didn’t wait for Stan to answer. He said it all in a rush. ‘When I stopped being a show pony. When I put my ego away. When I got consistent and strategic.’

He said, and it was hard to understand him because his voice went a bit wonky for a moment, ‘Every single thing you taught me on the court, Dad, I use every single day of my life.’

He’d never taught the boy to get fucking pedicures, but still, it was nice to hear that.

It had been bloody nice to hear that.

A plane flew above, and Stan tipped back his head and watched it streak across the sky. It was possible he might never step on board a plane again, which was fine with him, he was happy down here.

Joy came to the net. She wore her hair in a young girl’s ponytail when she played. She still had the best legs he’d ever seen. Her volley still needed work but she wouldn’t listen. Her cheeks were flushed from exertion and the cold air. She loved the sport as much as he did, as much as he loved her, which was more than she would ever know. He’d had no interest in playing doubles until he met her. They were better players together than apart.

Each time she fell out of love with him, he saw it happen and waited it out. He never stopped loving her, even those times when he felt deeply hurt and betrayed by her, even in that bad year when they talked about separating, he’d just gone along with it, waiting for her to come back to him, thanking God and his dad up above each time she did.

Joy shielded her eyes to watch the plane disappear on the horizon. She dropped her hand and looked back at Stan.

She said, ‘Let’s play.’