She remembered her friend Ines talking about how, after her divorce, she’d constructed a desk from an IKEA flatpack on her own while playing ‘I Am Woman’, but then, after she was done, all she’d wanted to do was call her ex and tell him about it.
Brooke felt the same desire to call Grant and tell him she’d got through a migraine on her own. How pathetic. Her migraines were no longer of interest to him. Perhaps they never had been of interest to him.
‘Are you postdrome, my darling?’ her mother would say if she saw her this morning, because now, thanks to her podcasts, she recognised symptoms and spoke the lingo with jaunty ease.
Brooke wanted to snap: You don’t get to use the lingo, Mum, if you’ve never had a migraine.
But her mother would be so remorseful, and Brooke couldn’t stand it. She knew her mother wanted exoneration, and she didn’t think she was deliberately withholding it, but she certainly wasn’t giving Joy what she needed.
‘The thing is,’ Joy would say, ‘I was so busy that year, the year the headaches started, I mean the migraines, when your migraines started, that was a really bad year in our family, a terrible year, our “annus horribilis”, as the Queen would say, I might be mispronouncing it, my grumpy old Latin teacher, Mr O’Brien, would know how to pronounce it, he drowned, the poor man, on Avoca Beach, not swimming between the flags apparently, got caught in the rip, so no-one to blame but himself, but still, anyway, that year, that bad year, there was just a lot . . . and we thought we might lose the business, and both your grandmothers were so sick, and I had no idea what you were going through –’ And Brooke would cut her off, because she’d heard all this so many times before, right down to the drowning of the Latin teacher.
‘Don’t worry about it, Mum. It was a long time ago.’
Her mother had too much time on her hands. That was the problem. She was going a little dotty. She spent hours looking at old photos and then ringing her children to tell them how little and cute they’d been and how sorry she was for not noticing it at the time.
The truth was, Brooke didn’t even remember her mother dismissing her migraines. She had no memory of the ‘unforgivable’ time when Joy yelled at Brooke for coming down with a migraine when they were running late.
What she remembered was the extraordinary, astonishing pain, and her fury with her mother for not fixing it. She didn’t expect her dad or the doctors to fix it. She expected her mother to fix it.
Brooke managed her migraines now: efficiently, expertly, without resentment. Watch for the symptoms. Get on to the medication fast. This had been the first in six months. She was responsible for the incarceration of a monster, and sometimes the monster broke free of its shackles.
‘Last Tuesday, retired tennis star Harry Haddad revealed that he is planning . . .’
The radio announcer’s words slid into her consciousness. She flicked up the volume.
‘. . . a return to professional tennis next year. The three-time grand slam champion retired after a serious shoulder injury four years ago. He announced his plans on social media last Tuesday and today posted a picture of himself working out under the guidance of his newly appointed coach, former Wimbledon champion Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan. Haddad, who is reportedly soon to release his autobiography, is obviously hoping for one last exciting chapter in the story of his incredible career.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Harry,’ said Brooke.
She changed the radio station to show her disapproval. He was making a mistake. His shoulder would never be the same and Nicole wasn’t the right fit. Former greats didn’t necessarily make great coaches. Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan was a beautiful, single-minded player but Brooke suspected she didn’t have the patience for coaching.
She tapped her fingers against the steering wheel and murmured, ‘C’mon, c’mon,’ to the traffic light. Her dad had no patience with traffic lights either, or children who took too long to put on their shoes, or romantic scenes in movies, but he had all the patience in the world when it came to coaching.
Brooke remembered how he used to watch and analyse a student, eyes narrowed against the glare – he refused to ever wear sunglasses on the court; it had been a historic moment when he let Brooke wear them in a fruitless attempt to combat the migraines – and then he would beckon the player to the net, holding up one finger while he thought it out: What do I need to say or do to make it click in this kid’s head? He never gave the same lesson twice.
Brooke’s mother had been good with the group lessons, keeping the little kids running and laughing (she wore glamorous oversized sunglasses when coaching, although never when playing), but she didn’t have the passion or patience for one-on-one coaching. She was the businesswoman, the brains behind Delaneys, the one to start the pro shop, the café, the holiday camps.
Joy made the money and Stan made the stars, except they’d lost their shiniest star: Harry Haddad.
Stan could have taken Harry all the way and much further, although some would argue that three grand slams were as far as he was ever going to get. Not her dad. He believed Harry could have flown as high as Federer, that Harry would be the Australian to finally break the Australian Open drought, but they would never know what could have happened in the parallel world where Harry Haddad stuck with his childhood coach, Stan ‘the Man’ Delaney.
The light changed and she put her foot on the accelerator, thinking of her poor parents and how they’d be feeling about this news. They must surely know. The announcement was made last Tuesday. If they hadn’t seen it on the news, someone in the tennis community would have told them. It was strange that her mother hadn’t called to talk about it, and to worry about Brooke’s dad and how he’d feel seeing Harry back on the court.
It was painful to watch her dad watch Harry Haddad play tennis on television. He quivered with barely contained tension through every point, his shoulders up, his face a heartbreaking combination of pride and hurt. The whole family had complicated feelings about their most celebrated student. Multiple Delaneys Tennis Academy players had done well on the circuit, but Harry was the only one who’d made it all the way to the Promised Land. The only one to kiss that magical piece of silverware: the Gentlemen’s Singles Championship Trophy at Wimbledon. Not once, but twice.
Brooke’s dad had discovered Harry. The kid had never held a racquet, but one day Harry’s dad won a one-hour private tennis lesson at Delaneys Tennis Academy in a charity raffle and decided to give the lesson to his eight-year-old son. The rest, as Brooke’s mother liked to say, was history.
Now Harry was not just a beloved sporting icon but a high-profile philanthropist. He’d married a beautiful woman and had three beautiful children, one of whom had been very ill with leukaemia, which was when Harry became a passionate advocate for childhood cancer research. He raised millions. He was saving lives. How could you say a bad word about a man like that? You couldn’t.