The Next Entry

Mum came to the Vale on a Tuesday when no one had a match.

She had seen footage of Mara playing with Jules once and had spent most of it telling me the camera had found the wrong half of the court. I had told her that was how doubles worked. She’d said she knew how cameras worked. Now she stood at the fence with a tin of biscuits she had made and watched Mara feed me a basket of balls.

“She’s not your coach,” Mum said when we stopped.

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“I wanted to be sure you had.”

Mara heard her. She brought the empty basket over and shook Mum’s hand as if the months between that first exhibition and today hadn’t included a clinician’s room, a missed final, several difficult telephone calls and my mother’s suggestion that Mara ought to learn to make a decent cup of…