CHAPTER TWELVE #2
I look at them. The camera sees me looking. Claire sees. The sound operator — not Saskia, someone else — adjusts their equipment with the practiced nonchalance of a professional who has watched interviewees fall apart before.
"The putting became difficult approximately eighteen months before the withdrawal," I say.
My voice is steady. My hands are not. The disconnection between the two — the composed voice and the trembling fingers — is the precise visual representation of what the yips felt like from the inside. A body at war with itself.
"Can you describe what it feels like?"
I should answer. The question is reasonable. The interview is structured to allow me to describe the experience in my own language, which is exactly what Saskia recommended.
I look at my hands. They're shaking. On camera. Recorded. Preserved. Another clip to join the four-million-view archive of Nerys Quillan's broken machinery.
"I'm sorry," I say. "I need to stop."
I stand. Remove the lapel microphone. Walk out of the conference room.
Twelve minutes. I lasted twelve minutes.
·
That evening. My hotel room. The door is locked.
The curtains are closed. The lights are off.
I'm sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark pressing my palms flat against my thighs, trying to force the tremor into submission through pressure and will, the same strategy that has never worked and that I continue to attempt because the alternative — accepting that my hands shake when I'm afraid and that shaking is not a mechanical failure but a human response to overwhelming stimuli — requires a revision of self-concept I have not yet managed.
Tala knocks at nine fifteen.
I know it's her. The knock is three beats — quick, firm, specific. She knocks the way she swings: with confidence and without preamble.
"Nerys."
I don't answer.
"Nerys, open the door."
"I'm not someone you should see right now."
Silence. I hear her breathing through the door.
I hear the small rustle of clothing as she shifts her weight.
I hear her think — and Tala's thinking is not quiet; her body adjusts when her mind is working, a physical correlate of mental effort that I've catalogued over weeks of standing beside her on golf courses.
"Okay," she says.
I hear her sit. The soft compression of a body lowering itself to the corridor carpet, back against the wall beside my door.
She doesn't say anything else. She doesn't knock again.
She doesn't argue or cajole or attempt the spectacular emotional recovery that has historically been her response to anything she can't fix with a single dramatic gesture.
She sits.
I remain on the bed. She remains in the corridor. The hotel operates around us — footsteps, distant conversation, the elevator's mechanical respiration. The minutes accumulate.
After an hour, I open the door.
She's sitting on the floor. Legs extended.
Head tilted back against the wall. Her eyes are closed and her hands are resting on her thighs and she looks like a woman who has been practicing patience in a hallway for sixty minutes and has discovered that the practice is bearable when you know why you're doing it.
She opens her eyes. Looks up at me. Doesn't stand.
"Can I come in?"
"Yes."
She stands. Enters. I close the door.
The room is dark. I don't turn on the lights. She doesn't ask me to.
She sits on the bed beside me. Not facing me — beside me. Shoulder to shoulder. The same position we held in the cottage, the same three inches of space, the same deliberate proximity that offers contact without demanding it.
She takes my hand. The right one. The shaking one. She holds it in both of hers.
She doesn't speak. She doesn't tell me the interview was brave. She doesn't tell me my hands will stop shaking. She doesn't tell me the documentary will be worth it or that the footage doesn't define me or that I'm stronger than I think.
She holds my hand in the dark. She breathes beside me. She stays.
After twenty minutes, the tremor subsides.
Not because she cured it. Because the sustained presence of a person who does not require me to be steady in order to remain seated beside me allows my nervous system to register safety, and safety is the only environment in which my hands have ever reliably stopped shaking.
We don't have sex. We don't discuss it. She lies down beside me, fully clothed, and I lie beside her, and her head finds my shoulder and my arm comes around her and we sleep in the dark room in the Scottish hotel while the wind outside rearranges the world for tomorrow's tournament.
·
The tournament resumes. Two rounds. The course is transformed by the storm — the wind has dried the greens faster than expected, the bunkers have been raked but the sand is different, the fairways hold moisture in unexpected places.
I adjust the strategy between rounds. Tala follows every adjustment. Every recommendation. Every club selection. She plays the course the way we mapped it at dawn — with her feet as well as her eyes, reading the hidden slopes, feeling the changes the storm carved into the terrain.
She shoots sixty-seven in the third round. Sixty-nine in the fourth.
She finishes the tournament in fourth place. Three shots behind the winner, a Swedish player named Elsa Lindgren who has been ranked second in the world for two years and plays links golf like she was born in a bunker.
Fourth place. Consistent. Disciplined. Smart.
Tala signs her scorecard in the tent. I wait behind the ropes with the bag. She walks toward me across the practice green, hat off, hair blowing in the coastal wind, looking tired and satisfied and like a woman who has run a race at a pace she chose rather than a pace imposed by panic.
"You are becoming the player I knew you could be," I tell her.
She stops. Looks at me. The scar on her lip catches the light.
"And you're becoming the woman I knew you were."
The words are quiet. Directed at me, not at the golf.
Not at the strategist or the caddie or the former champion.
At the woman who sat in the dark last night with shaking hands and a locked door and was found — not rescued, not repaired — found, by a person willing to sit on a corridor floor for an hour rather than walk away.
I take the bag. We walk to the car park. We don't touch. We don't need to.
The course behind us is ancient, patient, and entirely indifferent to what any two women feel about each other while walking its grounds.
But we feel it anyway.
And for the first time since the collapse, I'm not afraid of what I feel.
I'm afraid of what happens if I stop.