Chapter Six #3
Ninety minutes later, I was beginning to regret my rather premature declaration to Marcus, but of course pride prevented me from leaving now, because he’d only accuse me of not being able to cut it and would use it against me.
So I ignored the fact that the slats of the wooden bench had officially turned the backs of my thighs numb, and that the sun had moved overhead and was now beating down on the top of my (hat-less) head, and I studiously took notes about Marcus’s game.
If nothing else, it was keeping my mind off of Charlie, which could only be a good thing.
Marcus was right-handed – I’d made a note to ask Patrick/Marcus if this was an advantage or not – and he had a cool serve: he effortlessly tossed the ball into the air in the exact same position each time, casually stepped his feet together and then out of nowhere he sort of launched himself off the ground like a jet taking off.
Was this a normal technique, or was there something different about the way Marcus served, I wondered?
Something else I noticed was that Patrick kept telling Marcus to ‘go into the net’, which he seemed to have an aversion to.
From what I could tell, he appeared to be happiest when he was slamming balls from one baseline to the other, his shoulder muscles rippling beneath his T-shirt, his biceps engaged as he brought his racquet through to make contact with the ball.
His white shorts had already turned a subtle shade of orange, stained by the clouds of dust flying off the court every time the ball ricocheted off the clay.
While Marcus and Patrick took a break to talk and – in Marcus’s case – glug about two litres of water, I began mapping out the introduction to my article.
It always felt good to get words on a page, even if they weren’t particularly good words.
At this stage in the process I liked to write down anything that came into my head, with a view to finding the natural tone of the piece.
Since nobody would ever read it and barely any of it would appear in the finished article, I felt free to note my honest impressions of Marcus and the elite tennis circles he moved in (spoiler alert: they weren’t good).
Marcus Taylor: International Tennis Star. World Number Twelve. British Number One. Absolute Tool. These monikers have all been used to describe the man I’ve been assigned to shadow for three months between April and July – and on first glance, I don’t disagree with a single one of them.
Our initial meeting unexpectedly took place on a British Airways flight to Nice – unluckily for me, the one and only upgrade to Business I was likely to blag in my entire life was somewhat hijacked by the fact that Marcus Taylor had been seated next to me.
What are the odds?! It quickly became clear that he’s not a fan of journalism.
He also appears to detest his fans, refusing to engage, sign autographs, take photos or show appreciation to people who have potentially travelled thousands of miles – and spent their hard-earned money – to see him play.
Ignorant doesn’t cover it. Arrogant is an understatement.
And utterly obnoxious pretty much sums it up.
And perhaps it’s actually an industry-wide problem, because from my limited contact with male tennis players so far, I’ve never witnessed a group of men with such fragile egos in my entire life – one missed serve and their tightly coiled little world comes crashing down around them.
In the case of Marcus Taylor, toddler tantrums are likely to ensue, involving racquet smashing, bag throwing, generalised stomping and red-faced tirades aimed at anyone from a teenage ball boy to a spectator whose only crime is to have quaffed a few too many glasses of Pimm’s.
The tennis scene is shockingly toxic and unsurprisingly privileged and my opinion of Marcus Taylor in particular can, quite frankly, only improve from here.
Pleased to have at least made a start, I put away my notebook and picked up my phone.
I’d not looked at it once since we’d arrived on court because it would hardly look professional, and also I was finding the training session slightly more engaging than I thought I would.
But as we neared the two-hour mark, I didn’t think a subtle scroll would hurt, even if Marcus would no doubt take it personally if he caught me looking at anything other than him and his tennis prowess.
I flicked through Gmail, Insta and TikTok, reassured that I wasn’t missing out on anything whatsoever, finally scanning through WhatsApp where there was a message from Amanda’s assistant, Ruby, presumably with some last-minute info about the tickets I needed to collect from the press office for tomorrow’s match.
I scanned through it, surprised to see she’d sent me a link to an article entitled: Marcus Taylor’s Secret New Girlfriend!
Ruby had added a few words underneath: This just popped up on an obscure digital celeb gossip column I follow. Could be useful to know for your piece?
This was surprising. As far as I’d worked out from my research so far, he’d never even been in a relationship lasting more than about five minutes.
Glancing at Marcus, who was now practising volleys at the net, I sighed, clicking on the link – I supposed I was going to have his achingly beautiful girlfriend hanging around now when I was supposed to be spending time alone with Marcus and getting to know him intimately (in a professional capacity, of course) for my piece.
Which was why it took me several beats to acknowledge the full horror of the blog-style column, culminating in my phone dropping out of my hand, landing face down on the clay and sending my own cloud of dust fluttering into the air.
With a few people – Marcus included – looking over, no doubt wondering why this strange woman had just launched her phone into mid-air, I bent down to sweep it up, cleaning the screen with my sleeve and immediately regretting it because now my white jumper was smeared with orange clay too.
With a slightly shaking hand and a head that was literally spinning (this was not just a turn of phrase), I made myself look at the photos and headline again.
Concentrate, Ava, I told myself. This could not be what I thought it was.
Could it? Because from where I was sitting, the insinuation seemed to be that Marcus’s secret new girlfriend was .
. . well, me!! For reasons I didn’t have time to unravel, I felt the tiniest sense of relief that at least this meant he didn’t have an actual girlfriend to put a spanner in the works, an emotion that was swiftly followed by sheer, unadulterated panic.
What if somebody I knew also subscribed to this column?
! I immediately thought of Charlie, and while there was no way he’d be interested in celebrity gossip, any number of the other teachers at his school might be.
And my parents and sister would think I’d lost the plot entirely – I’d only met Marcus five minutes ago and now I was supposed to be embroiled in some sort of passionate love affair with him?
It made absolutely no sense! I swiped manically through the handful of pictures accompanying the story – the first was of me and Marcus sitting on the plane, which I presumed had been taken by that sly French woman.
I bet she’d been snapping away before she’d even approached us!
In the grainy shot, I was being all expressive with my hands and Marcus was looking at me with disdain (there had been a lot of those moments, it could have been any of them).
The ‘source’ had quoted that we’d had a ‘heated argument’ but soon made up, ‘cosying up over a glass of champagne’.
Cue a second picture of me holding a glass of bubbly.
In this shot, we were looking at each other in a way that could easily have been mistaken for romantic longing, if you didn’t also know what was going through my head at the time – i.e.
, wondering how I was going to get this egotistical man on side so that I could write the damn article I was being paid to write.
In a split second, my entire obsession with celebrity gossip was shot to pieces – if they’d got this so wrong, was any of it true?
And then I spotted the killer photo – the proof, if you like, that ‘Racquet Man’ and his ‘exotic brunette lover’, a description I’d never in a million years have come up with for myself, were in fact going public.
Because there, in technicolour, my face as clear as day, were the paparazzi shots of Marcus and me entering the arrivals hall together.
And the short exchange we’d had about whether or not I was stalking him had somehow given the impression we were engaged in an actual conversation, like any couple might be.
A sort of: let’s go and find our taxi, darling!
Or: shall we stop off at a romantic cliffside restaurant for lunch before we head to our delightfully luxurious hotel?
There was absolutely no indication that he’d accused me of following him on purpose, or that I was desperately trying to make him not hate me enough to agree to being interviewed for my story.
The paparazzi – nay, the entire media industry – was an absolute joke!
And why hadn’t Ruby warned me, instead of casually sending me a link to photos of my just-off-a-flight face splashed across the web?
It took me a few moments to remember that Ruby and I had never met – I’d never even been into the Luxe office, so in reality she had absolutely no idea what I looked like, and, of course, the writer of the column hadn’t known my name.
Ruby hadn’t connected the dots at all and how could I blame her?
I slung my phone into my bag, my chest rising and falling with indignation as adrenaline rushed through every muscle of my body.
Even the tips of my fingers were tingling as I tried to open my bottle of water.
Was I going to faint, I wondered? I closed my eyes, tempted to put my head between my knees but realising that would attract the kind of attention I currently did not need.
Marcus was going to go mad when he saw the pictures.
He wasn’t going to do the article now, was he, and my one chance to impress Amanda Eddington at Luxe had been ruined.
My career-defining moment was about to be whipped out from under my nose because of a handful of stupid, misleading, incriminating photos, and right now it felt as though there was absolutely nothing I could do.
Marcus would not, under any circumstances, want to be romantically linked to someone like me.
And now I was going to have to face him.
And if, by some miracle, Dean hadn’t already seen the story, I’d have to break the bad news to him, too.
I looked back at Marcus charging around on court, an oblivious Marcus who wanted nothing more than to focus on the tournament and probably dearly wished that he’d never set eyes on me in the first place.