Anika's Entry

By the time the clinician said I could return to competition, I had stopped asking at every appointment.

The fast work had come back in pieces. First I could take a ball out of the air, then recover without thinking about the calf, then make the same movement at the end of a long session. Ivo had fed me the ugly balls, the ones a player reaches with a body already going the wrong way. I had stopped when a session ended even if the last shot had gone badly. The clinician assessed the progression, heard what I could and couldn’t do, and gave me a return plan with no guarantee about the result of the first match.

I left her room with permission to enter an event and no particular person waiting for me to do it with.

Anika was at the Vale. She had finished the event I had turned down weeks earlier and was taking a practice set against Devika. I waited at the fence until they were done. I could have sent her a message. I wanted to ask her while she could look at me and decide whether she believed I was ready.

“You found another partner for that week,” I said.

“I did.”

“Do you have one for Northmere?”

“Not yet.” She drank from her bottle. “Are you asking me to play?”

“One event. I’ve finished the return progression. I can’t promise we’ll be good in the first set. I can promise I’ll tell you what I can do before we start.”

“That’s more useful than promising a result.”

She thought for less than a minute. “Yes. Let’s practise twice before we send the entry. I don’t want to discover our middle at Northmere.”

“Neither do I.”

Devika heard us and offered to take the other side for the first practice. Anika asked her not to go easy on us. I had spent weeks imagining what it would feel like to ask another woman to stand beside me. It felt like arranging work, with the added fact that I was a little frightened and had told her so.

I went home and told Mara before I told anyone else. She had been home for weeks, between the second and third of Jules’s events, and had asked whether we could spend the evening at my flat rather than going out. I waited until we had eaten and she had put her phone away.

“I’ve been cleared for competition,” I said. “Anika and I are going to enter Northmere if our practices go well.”

Mara sat up. She put down the cup she was holding so carefully that I could see how much the news had caught her.

“Northmere is my third event with Jules,” she said.

“I know.”

“You’ve asked Anika?”

“She said yes. We want two practices before we send it in.”

“Good.”

I had heard her say the word at an entry desk, when it had cost me to hear it. This time I knew her well enough to wait for the rest.

“I’m pleased you can play,” she said. “I thought I might be there with you when you came back.”

“I wanted that too. You gave Jules three dates. I gave myself this one.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to hold it.”

“I know. You can still wish it had worked out differently.”

“I do.”

We sat with the two true feelings. She reached across the sofa. I took her hand without having to check whether she was offering it as consolation.

“If the draw puts us opposite each other,” I said, “I won’t give you an easy ball.”

“I would be offended if you did.”

“We know each other’s patterns.”

“So does Jules, some of them. Anika knows yours better than I do now.”

“I don’t tell you what she says about our plan. You don’t tell me Jules’s.”

“Agreed.”

The professional boundary made the rest of the evening easier. I didn’t need to turn Mara’s hand in mine into a scouting report. She was free to want me beside her after the event and try to beat me during it. I could do the same.

Our first practice with Anika was terrible for twenty minutes. She expected me to cover the space Mara took without asking, and I expected her to call a crossing she could see in my shoulders. Devika put three balls between us while we discussed whose fault each one had been.

“It isn’t either of you,” she called after the third. “You’re playing with a memory. Tell the person who is here where you’re going.”

Anika laughed, then told me she wanted the middle when she was serving to the left. I told her I needed an earlier call when she came across on my return. We made a system with words anyone could understand. I did not tap my racquet twice. That signal belonged to an agreement Mara and I had made, and I didn’t need to borrow it to prove I was myself with Anika.

We tried again with Devika serving. Anika stayed near the net and told me to take the return that came between us. I took it, hit too high, and Devika put the next ball away. Anika said she could have moved if I’d called earlier. She was right. She was also using “earlier” to mean the moment before I knew whether the return would reach us.

“I can’t promise you a ball I haven’t read,” I said.

“I don’t need a promise. I need to know which way you’re starting.”

“Then watch my left foot. I’ll plant it if I’m coming through. If I don’t, the middle’s yours.”

“Can you say it too?”

“I can say it when I know.”

Devika served again. I planted, called mine and took a difficult ball that might have been easier for Anika. We lost the point. On the next serve I kept the foot where it was. Anika went across and made a volley she had been waiting all morning to try. I had expected Mara’s style of advance notice from a woman whose strength was waiting until the ball arrived. Anika had expected me to move as the player she knew from the other side of a net. We had both watched the wrong partner.

At the break she asked about the calf, plainly and once. I told her the clinician had cleared me for this stage, that I was recording how each session felt and that if the tightness returned I would stop and tell her before another point. She did not ask for a guarantee that I could finish Northmere. She asked whether I wanted her to take the first wide return if I was late. I said yes. It was not a plan for my failure; it was a plan for a ball that might come tomorrow.

By the second practice we were winning enough points to be honest about the ones we didn’t. My calf did what I asked of it. When we were done I wrote down how it felt, the same as after every return session. Ivo asked whether we wanted him to watch one more set. I said no. Anika agreed. We sent our entry together.

The draw came two days later. Anika called while I was in the supermarket and told me to find somewhere to stand still before I opened it. I went behind the shelves of flour, where nobody was trying to buy anything, and read the names.

If both pairs won the first round, we would play Mara and Jules next.

Anika said, “We have to win our own match first.”

“I know.”

“Can you do that without playing the one after it in your head?”

“Ask me after our first practice at Northmere.”

“Fair.”

I bought the flour I had not needed and took it home. Mara was there, packing for the trip. She saw the bag and asked if I had decided to bake for the whole draw. I told her what it said. She had already seen it on her phone.

“We have to get there,” she said.

“I know. Anika said the same thing.”

“She’s right.”

“You may need a new opening line if we meet.”

“I have several. I won’t give you one now.”

She took the flour and put it on the counter, then came back and kissed me. She asked how my leg felt after the two practices. I told her it had held up and that I had recorded the work. She accepted the answer without searching it for a promise about next week.

At Northmere we would arrive as four players with two entries and no way to decide the draw from my kitchen. At home, she stayed while I made dinner. It was an ordinary evening with a match-shaped future waiting outside it. I wanted both.