Leaves

A Tennis Fairy Tale

Music:

Scheherazade- Rimsky-Korsakov

Chichester Psalms, Mv. II: Adonai-Roi ("The Lord is My Shepherd")- Leonard Bernstein 

Content Warning:

Explicit Sex References, Strong Language, Homicide/Infanticide References  

Transcript

Leaves

A noise. 

“Ladies and gentlemen, please do not call out between first and second serve,” the chair umpire reprimanded. “Thank you.” 

Her amplified voice resounded throughout Centre Court and, in reply, there followed a brief, approving applause- which further delayed Fedova’s second serve. She took it, a scowl of burning loathing on her face. The toss was a little wayward but the ball still went in. It shot right down the T at ninety-four miles an hour. Her opponent returned without too much difficulty and the two fighters- in their white lady-like armour- were once again plunged into sudden life, into anguished combat on the lawn battlefield where they had already spent two hours and fourteen minutes. The score: one set all, third set.  

Fedova ended up winning the match. She won the first set comfortably, lost the second narrowly, and won the third on a tiebreak which went to 19-17. That forty minute tiebreak broke some all-time record or other, Fedova didn’t pay attention to which.  

After a breathless on-court interview, and a few hasty autographs and ball-signings, Barbera Fedova was escorted to her residence by a female official in striped trousers, navy blue jacket, and beret- exactly the same livery as the lines-people used to wear, before they were abolished. The only remnant of the absent lines-men and -women were their recorded voices. The electronic line calling system spoke in the ghostly accents of these departed people and it was as though they continued to haunt the battlegrounds they once tightly surveyed but from which they had been exiled by technological advance. The last year of the lines-judges, what should have been a time of elegy and nostalgia and fond farewell, had instead been sullied by a scandal involving a lines-woman with Down’s Syndrome. Despite assurances from officials that she was fully qualified and had only been offered the position after rigorous aptitude tests, three gentlemen and two ladies in the singles draw refused to play if this particular lines-woman was scheduled for line-calling at their matches. Then, when it came to recording the voices of the lines-judges for the digital line calling system, the lines-woman with Down’s wasn’t picked to provide her voice. It was a pity. Not only did she possess solid instincts and a keen eye, but she always used to shout the words OUT and FAULT with indescribable beauty, in a high, angelic, slightly melancholic kind of way. Anyway, this news was two years old now. Fedova walked quickly, the official following without acknowledgment from the tennis star and not expecting any.                

Fedova was very fond of the apartment she had been allocated. She had stayed there for the first time in 2014 and had requested it every Wimbledon since. This request had only once been denied. These lavish and spacious quarters were Fedova’s for the tournament’s duration. Whenever defeat should come, there was no expectation that she immediately vacate. 

For the tenth time, she was through to the last sixteen. The satisfaction of this most recent victory proved ephemeral and the uphill task of the ensuing match soon loomed, large and daunting. Ahead of the tournament, her third round opponent had only just entered the top one hundred and had never reached the fourth round of a grand slam. Fedova on the other hand was a former world number one, a three-time slam winner. She pondered the match she had just won: It should have been easier; it should have been simpler, she chanted to herself, sotto voce. She was allergic to the successes, to the component victories of the other player. She was allergic to the tangible aspirations of the underdog, those bouts of play when her opponent was able to win the affections and audible support of the crowd, when the majority of those gathered in the stands seemed to share the dream of Fedova being defeated. Fedova hated it. But she loved transcending these rocky passages and re-earning the stadium’s admiration and backing.

Approaching the residencies with their green- and purple-flowered balconies, climbing the short flight of stairs where one occasionally passed a fellow, frowning competitor in a dark tracksuit, something else was on Fedova’s mind: the noise, the strange call that had sounded between her first and second serve, near the beginning of the third set, the one which the umpire had responded to directly. Fedova’s concentration on her game had been fierce and almost nothing could disturb it. But now that the match was over, this small, odd detail did return to obsess her. It had not sounded like a person, that was the strange thing. It wasn’t a shout of support, nor any sort of put-down; it wasn’t a bird-call- crow, gull, pigeon. Pheasant? They produced a strange kind of cough, didn’t they? No. No, the sound had been some kind of bizarre, apparently meaningless wail, humanoid rather than human.

The official, whom Fedova abruptly noticed was very fat, parted wordlessly from her in the foyer.          

Fedova reached the door to her room, sought and found the electronic door-key in her bag, and unlocked the door. 

She went in, placing her racquet-bag on a beautiful, floral-patterned piece of upholstery. She went to the potted orange tree by the balcony and picked an orange. The oranges were only little but so sweet and fresh. The silver-green curtains were open, tied on both sides in a sash of the same shade. From behind Court 1, the setting sun threw the last of its radiance over the grounds. On the grass of the courts, the shadows of trees and seating and nets and towel stands and umpire chairs were long. It would soon be twilight, and then night and darkness. Barbera opened the balcony doors but drew the curtains. She stripped. A soft, July breeze gingerly intruded and caressed her skin. 

Nude, except for the medical tape on her right calf and right side of her abdomen, it wasn’t very long at all before she realised that she ached. There was nothing left of euphoria or relief. Just aches. She ached bad. Her breasts ached, her arms ached, her shoulders ached, her neck ached, her flanks ached, her legs ached. Her hands ached. Her hands hurt most of all. The racquet-grip had dug in and left a pattern in the skin. She had suffered a slip, quite near the end of the match, and she noticed that there was blood beneath the nail of her left-hand ring finger. She showered.

There were many messages of congratulation on her phone, three of which came from Artur and were pleading in tone. One of the messages concerned a fellow player on the WTA tour, Ilse Fuchs. Fuchs was a stunning blonde woman, with long athletic legs, and a sexily severe, imperious visage. She always wore long-sleeves, even in scorching conditions- that was her one, well-known quirk. Artur wanted to know if Barbera had “bumped into her”. Why? she texted back. No reason. 

At one time they had all been friends, had dined and drunk together. Barbera was suspicious of Fuchs, and she was suspicious of Artur’s apparent fondness for her. Barbera had been making a concerted effort to avoid thinking about Ilse; frankly, she didn’t even know whether Fuchs was playing at Wimbledon this year. Ilse was injury-prone, not like some players on the tour, but she had taken an injury-related hiatus last year that spanned Monte Carlo, Wimbledon, the US Open.    

Though he had reached the semi-finals at India Wells, Artur hadn’t been awarded a Wimbledon wildcard this year and his arrogance wouldn’t allow him to enter the tournament through the qualifiers. He’d decided to remain in Miami, train for the US Open. Failing that, Delray, or one the ATP challenger events scheduled later that year. He had been moody since receiving this news about Wimbledon, moping around the house. He had adopted a sour-grapes attitude towards Wimbledon. One day the story was that he hated playing on grass, the next that he hated the tournament’s fusty atmosphere, and then that he hated England and the English in general. 

After her shower, Fedova communicated by text with, variously, her coach, her hitting partner, an arsehole from Adidas, John MacEnroe, Tim Henman, Sabalenka, Badosa, Tatjana Maria, a tournament official, and her mother. After that she was worn out. She tried to watch the television. She searched for something diverting, something amusing, she would even have settled for something brainless and soporific but, combing the channels for anything that might sustain her interest or relax her into sleep, every programme suggested to her the same sluggish banality and unimportance and, as usual, she found that all she wanted to think about was tennis, as though it were the only thing in the universe that mattered. She could peruse player statistics, match statistics, for hours at a time. Five, six, seven, eight hours. Ten and a half was her shameful record. Sometimes she even researched decades-old matches, decades-retired players. Just so she didn’t have to suffer the torture of not thinking about tennis. She had been diagnosed with some kind of anxiety disorder about a year ago but she could remember which. Anyway, it sounded made-up to her. Basically, the counsel was that if she ever found herself with the urge to go on a “stats binge” she should just do something else- anything else. But what else?         

She had to be very careful of what she ate, alcohol was out of the question during tournaments, computer games were unwise, online gambling even more unwise, and reading simply impossible. Even sex was boring to her. She scrolled through months-old, years-old messages from Artur, masturbatory messages. She encountered the same misspelt statements and repetitive motions, invariably expressed in that same tone of stupid amazement: I’m cumming. I just cum. I cme so hrd. I jst camel. There was even a video: his right hand, the same he used to grip his Dunlop Techni-fibre racquet on court, the same with which he occasionally served one-hundred-and-thirty-mile-an-hour aces and often hit forehand winners and very seldom hit backhand winners, grasping his big, pale cock, pumping furiously until it “went off” and those four, familiar threads of “jissom” made their appearance, to successive coos of quietening satisfaction. 

For all the clichés, for all the impermanence and transient meaning of their passions, the evidence was plenty that the two of them had once been very much in love. There was a feeling of distance now, a willingness to be apart. When they were together, their being together came with a heavy sense of reality. The feeling that this is what it was really like, this is what their being together would be like forever. They didn’t like it, that was the reality, and they both didn’t like that they didn’t like it. It was therefore easier to supplant reality with unreality, with perceived slights, conflicts over things that didn’t really matter, and the insistence that their relational problems, sexual or otherwise, were really just the result of their busy tennis schedules, the demands of their sport: with the right professional successes, with the right periods of time off from the ATP and WTA tours, all other issues would resolve.             

It wasn’t late but Barbera liked to be asleep before ten o’clock. 

At last, having successfully persuaded her mind and body that it was where she belonged, she dropped into deep slumber.

At practice the next day, news of a bizarre occurrence reached Fedova and her entourage. The news spread quickly, like wildfire. It slithered, at a whispered volume, throughout the All England Club, through every court and practice court, through every bar and lounge and office and residence. The news was of a miracle, a natural anomaly without precedent: a tree had sprouted at the centre of Centre Court. The tree was a bright angelic white, with a white trunk, white boughs and branches. Its leaves had budded, spread, wilted and fallen all in the course of a single night. A little autumnal litter of brown and yellow leaves lay on the grass of Centre Court, mostly on the north side, where Fedova had started yesterday’s match. She had lost the coin-toss at the start of her third-round match which meant her opponent got to choose whether to serve or receive but Fedova got to choose which side of the court she started on. Her opponent chose to receive- which suited Fedova’s game well, and Fedova chose the court’s north side, the non-royal box side.  

            A team of groundsmen were sent in to remove the tree, sweep up the leaves, and remedy any cosmetic damage to the court surface in time for the first scheduled match of the day. The BBC filmed them doing this. Claire Balding commented on proceedings in her usual tone of charismatic incredulity.

That evening, Fedova returned to her room. She opened the door and gasped in surprise. All over the floor, there were leaves. There were thick trails of brown and rusty red and yellow leaves. In places the leaves were rotten, moist and odorous.

            There was a breeze in her room. It hovered and uttered sibilance like a living thing, or the ghost of a living thing. The curtain-sashes were undone and the curtains were blowing, they lifted nearly diagonally in this strange windiness.

            Barbera was initially intrigued but quickly angered about the leaves. She stormed downstairs and spoke crossly to the security official watching over the lobby:

            “Excuse me,” she said. “My room is full of leaves.”

            “What?” the security man said, rubbing his weary eyes. He was a man of colour, with a strong African accent, who worked very long hours.

            “My room is full of leaves. There are fucking leaves all over the floor…”

            The official didn’t react immediately. He looked at Fedova with an expression of forlorn loathing. Knowing that she was powerful enough to make his life a living hell, he picked up the phone.

            “One minute,” he said, and then, after a few just-audible rings: “Hello. There’s been an incident. Nature: breach. Code 109. Please come over to…PR2, quick as possible. Thank you.”

The leaves were swept up, security checks were conducted, security footage was analysed. Nothing of any help turned up. The leaves simply came into the room and settled of their own accord. The CCTV revealed no imposter of any kind. No-one could do anything more for Fedova than the quiet woman with the dustpan and brush who went all over the apartment and made sure that it was as immaculate as it had been before.

Barbera slept for a few hours. Then, at six minutes past two in the morning, she was woken. She was woken by a spirit, by something invisible but alive, a spectral sibilance, a caress, a presence. She went from the bedroom into the adjoining sitting room. Carpets, unholstered furniture, a desk, a mantlepiece. Walls with framed portraits of famous tennis players: beautiful Stefi Graf, young, intense Sharapova, Jimmy Connors- his face lined with consternation, bespectacled Billie Jean King, a painting of a Spartan-profiled Rod Laver, an amazingly kinetic photograph of the 2008 Nadal-Federer final: Nadal, in his sleeveless whites and various sweat bands, crippled downwards into the earth by the tremendously powerful left-handed serve he had just taken; Federer flying upwards on one leg to return the ball, the ball spinning furiously and shooting high from its place of bounce in the deuce court. The French windows that opened onto the balcony were shut. Fedova opened them and stood on the balcony, enwombed in the trellis of green and purple flowers, of white orchids in pots. 

In the distance, the centre of London glowed. It never slept, emitting a constant murmur of hubbub and light. A single owl called, once, twice, again. Again. Her lonely syllable glided across the dormant grounds of Wimbledon. It was a harsh, forbidding place at night- in the daytime too, of course, in a different fashion. Fedova admired the grand, green saucer of Court 1, the dark, silent huddle of Centre Court, and the other courts too, all of them deserted and tarpaulined in case of rain. There were a few lost souls, a few nocturnal human beings, wandering about at this hour. There were footsteps, a few screeches of brief and joyless laughter. Voices sounded, from Henman Hill it seemed. Of course, the voices could not actually be coming from Henman Hill at this hour of the night- unless they were trespassers. Maybe they were trespassers. How hard would it be to trespass, here, at Wimbledon? Barbera didn’t know. Very hard, she assumed.   

            With a sudden shiver of disgust and alarm, she realised that she was sleepwalking. No, she couldn’t be sleepwalking because she was awake. It was a state of near-somnambulism, a dream-like calm she had hardly ever experienced in her life. But she wasn’t asleep. She never permitted herself such states of half-sleep; it frightened her, this unexpected loss of perfect control.  

She could not remember a time before tennis. If such a time ever existed, it was a time she shuddered to envisage. She had always lived in a state of uninterrupted awareness, she never switched off. She had a match tomorrow. The last sixteen. Against? She couldn’t even remember. She knew it was there, somewhere, in her head. She had naturally been keeping a close eye on the third round matches. Who was she booked to battle tomorrow, who was her opponent? Court 2 or Court 3? She found that she couldn’t remember, as though none of it mattered. But of course it mattered! To her, winning Wimbledon mattered more- she presumed- than anything else had ever mattered to anyone. What on earth was she doing- wandering about, gazing out at the grounds at such hours as these, at such small hours…? Her sleep schedule was of the utmost importance, she lived to preserve it, she had never allowed anything to upset it- not even the death of her father, the suicide of one of her closest friends, her sister’s stay in intensive care during the pandemic.

            All at once, something touched her on the shoulder. She was afraid to turn around. Why? Why should she be afraid? 

It came to her, abruptly, that there were no stars in the sky. The night’s starless violet stared back at her. She sniffed. There was a damp, earthy smell in the room. Leaves. There was a sound like footsteps on leaves, leaves which were dry enough to crackle. These crackles pierced the quiet, sharply. Fedova held her breath. The thing behind her held its breath. They bristled together. Her heart was pounding. She half-believed she could hear it, its deep thuds of protest thundering across the silent battlegrounds of Wimbledon. So many battles lost and won: and all those winners and losers made somehow the same, indistinguishable under the equity of night. Magnanimous night. She was so nervous, so tense. She had never been this nervous, not before any match, not even at championship point, not even while bouncing the ball at the start of some match-salvaging set two service game.

            Then, she felt it. The pierce of texture, the probing, papery enquiry of this leaf-spirit and the answer of her strong, white neck. She was arrested into submission by this thing, this spectral shower of leaves, this leafy incubus, and bullied into bed.

            He, hovering and amorphous, was the seducer but she consented to his seductions and together they made love with equal, with matched intensity.

Next morning she woke feeling strange, full of post-coital languor. She stirred and became immediately aware of some unusual texture in the bed with her. She found both the inside of her bed and her body littered with dead leaves. There were leaves on the bed sheets, leaves smeared onto her body as though she’d been knocked unconscious and rolled into some ditch or gulley. There were leaf fragments in amongst her tousled pubic hair. She showered and the leaves slid from her body in the running jet of water. They collected in the drain strainer and caused a blockage. 

            The Wimbledon bathrobes, also referred to as towelling gowns, were of extraordinary quality. They bore the small, circular Wimbledon insignia on the left breast and were woven with ultra-soft super-absorbent fibres. Barbera put on one of these white towelling robes and tightly tied the sash across her stomach. She swaddled herself in the robe’s state-of-the-art excellence. 

She sat down at the desk and consulted the day’s order of play. Her eye drifted over the unimportant doubles and mixed doubles matches, over all those dizzying pairs of pairs, doubles specialists whose progress she never paid much attention. Then she noticed the Court 6 match: Fuchs versus Tomjanovic. Ilse Fuchs. She couldn’t believe that Fuchs had made it this far. Fedova had obviously been under some misapprehension, or had allowed imagination to get the better of her. She was sure Fuchs had been defeated in the first round. Where had she got this information from? Had someone in her team told her a lie to keep her focused? Who would do such a thing? Whoever it was, they’d never work in tennis again. 

Fisk, the sports counsellor, had encouraged her to devote all her mental focus to her own matches and to put all others from her mind. How’s the stat-surfing? he would so often ask in his godawful American way. God grant me the serenity… etcetera. 

Still, she couldn’t believe Fuchs was through to the third round. Fedova strained to remember Fuchs’ statistics: Roland-Garros quarterfinal in 2021, Australian Open semifinal in 2023. Other than that…round two, round two, round two, round one, the occasional round four. She hoped fervently that Tomjanovic would dispense with Fuchs quickly on Court 6. Straight sets, humiliating, one-sided scores. With relish she imagined the commentators tutting over her stats: a low percentage of first serves in, four or five or six or seven double faults, no break points won, a huge, unexpected proliferation of unforced errors. A double bagel was unlikely but game, set, match Tomjanovic, 6-2, 6-1- there was nothing fantastic about that result. She said it out loud to herself, in her best umpire voice. Game, set, match: Tomjanovic, 6-2, 6-1. The more she said it the realer it became, the more possible, the more probable. Manifest the reality you want. Tennis players are susceptible to superstition. Djokovic’s pseudoscientific beliefs, Rafa’s obsessive-compulsive rituals. Fedova had had her own issues in the past with tea leaves. There was a brief, dark chapter in which she really did believe that her destiny might be written down somewhere; that, if she could only acquire the necessary knowledge to interpret them, tea leaves might really tell her whether her next match would be a win or a loss. And then she could love tennis again, she could enjoy it, again, because the future would be certain and she would know that she was powerless to alter it: it would no longer matter what she did- there would be no consequences, no penalisations, no great costs. She could just do what she liked, what she felt like, play, hit balls, have fun. Unfortunately, that wasn’t who she was, that wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to win. And, of course, the road to winning is not fun.     

This was once a kind of madness in her, this need to know the future. No, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. From my mind the golden ointment rained. I was, myself, the compass of that sea. What time was the Fuchs match? 2 pm. She could tune in on the iPlayer. Her own match wasn’t until half-four. She poured herself a glass of fine, Wimbledon lemonade. She filled the glass about two thirds full and dispensed a small amount of ice into the liquid. The ice dispenser produced an ungodly five seconds of noise.       

Fuchs won her match against Tomjanovic. The final score was 6-2, 7-6, with a 12-10 tiebreak. 

            In her own match, Fedova lost the first set 6-1. 6-1, to a lucky loser! Someone she’d never even heard of. She only narrowly won the second set 7-5. In the third, she lost her first service game and then broke back, winning the deciding set 6-3. This performance, this mediocre victory, did not bode well. 

But, as it turned out, Barbera won the ladies singles contest at Wimbledon that year. She won Wimbledon and it wasn’t very difficult. In fact, it was absurdly easy.  

She defeated Fuchs in the quarter finals, 7-6, 6-2: a tiebreak of 8-6 concluded the first set. Fuchs wore her typical long sleeves but she was unusually distant, withdrawn. She was cagey, she was elsewhere during the match, and she avoided eye-contact with Fedova throughout. She certainly did not play her best tennis. 

To conclude that quarter-final match, as at the end of every match- (except for that period in 2023 when Ukrainian players were permitted not to shake hands with Russian and Belarussian players after matches)- Fedova and Fuchs converged at the net and shook hands. There was even the beginnings of an embrace, an embrace which Fuchs instigated but which Fedova politely rebuffed. Their remarks to each other were briskly cordial: well done, well-played, good luck. Then they shook hands with the chair umpire. Fuchs was frosty with the umpire. From her high triangular seat, the umpire extended her hand down to Fedova, and then to Fuchs. Fuchs took the umpire’s hand eagerly and did not let it go. She could be quite intimidating when she wanted to be: “Do you want to say sorry?” she said. Pardon, the umpire replied. 

FUCHS: Do you want to say sorry to me? 

UMPIRE: Ilse, I understand that we disagree but if you were in my shoes you would have done the same. 

FUCHS: Okay, fine- but you won’t be refereeing any of my matches in the future- in future I will insist on this.

UMPRE: Well, Ilse, that’s your right, but I can assure you they are not going to be sympathetic to your point of view. 

FUCKS: Go fuck yourself then. 

UMPRE: You’ll regret this, Ilse. 

And finally, in German, she said: Suck my dick, umpire. All this agitation concerned a time violation Fuchs had been given during one of her service games. Fuchs’ serve was one of her best weapons and she required perfect stillness in the court to deploy it with full efficacy. She claimed that someone in the stands was talking and distracting her. The umpire replied that she couldn’t hear anything. So, recalcitrant Fuchs just stood there, spinning her racquet in her right hand, clasping three balls in her left. Play was stopped and the only way the umpire could get it moving again was to give Fuchs a time violation. Barbera said nothing throughout. Tennis crowds love antics and controversy. Fedova had no interest in such things. Fuchs could not believe that this time violation was anything other than an immense injustice and it weighed heavily upon her for the rest of the match. Naturally, when she lost she reached for something or someone on which to blame her loss, and this, of course, was the thing closest to hand.

Barbera Fedova defeated the ultra-competitive twelfth seed, the American Myra St John, in the semis. 2-6, 6-3, 6-1. St John’s grunting noises broke the decibel record at that year’s championships. She hit a few net cords and, rather than offering the standard apology or courteous lift of the racket, an admission that the point was won by luck rather than skull, she celebrated them noisily and this irritated Fedova quite a bit.    

Her opponent in the final, held as usual on Centre Court on the last Saturday, was a player famed for her graciousness, her smile and sportswomanship. The reigning French Open champion, the Italian Flora Musetta. Still, there was something eerie about her resignation, about the smiling tranquillity with which she lost the battle and accepted defeat. 

The match was disrupted by a number of major disturbances. At one point, a shower of leaves fell in the BBC’s commentary box. They fell from nowhere in a rustling autumnal deluge upon the commentators and the console before them. John MacEnroe was furious. 

Stationed behind the right service line- the side of the court on which Fedova started- there was a particular ball boy who, throughout the match, seemed pale and unwell. He seemed to secrete bits of leaf and twig, and, instead of sweat, his palms produced a sticky, sap-like deposit. Whenever he fed balls to Fedova, the ball would invariably be sticky, with bits stuck to it, like it had been lobbed or struck long ago into a thick patch of woodland and then, before being recovered, left for a long time among thicket and earth and rotten leaves and fallen sycamore seeds and rain puddles and mushrooms and mud where badgers and foxes and squirrels made footprints and left their excrement. Any balls he touched became unusable and new ones would need to be procured. They went through six boxes of tennis balls in a single set. At the end of set one, the ball boy was sent to the medical bay and replaced. Throughout the match, Musetta was patience itself, even when an ugly, rowdy spectator had to be removed by security, even when the Centre Court roof had to be closed because of an unprecedented phenomenon: leaf-rain. 

After the second game of the second set, it began to rain. And with this rain came a cascade of red and brown and yellow leaves. Leaf rain. The grass grew wet, the court became tarnished, compromised, swept in a russet mess of leaves. Where had they come from? All the trees in England were in leaf, in green, amazing leaf. Autumn was so far away. 

The great white roof crept slowly across the stadium. The shadow sluggishly edged across the spectators in the stands, across the court, across the impermanent grass- now scuffed and brown with the two weeks of travail it had endured. The white, symmetric geometries of the battleground had been resprayed that morning and therefore looked perfectly intact, they seemed eternal. But the grass beneath, the grass surrounding and contained by the bright white grids and tramlines, was so fragile, so mortal and temporary by comparison. To restore the court’s integrity and make it match-fit again, a battalion of ball boys, a deputation of officials, and a volunteer team of the guards stanchioned around Centre Court, all rushed onto the court with dustpans and brushes. The leaves kept coming, deluging onto the court through the gap that remained. The gap took a long time to shrink. The retractable roof slowly slowly crawled across the sky, stretching its full cover over the court, shutting out the clouds and the gentle natural sunlight. The sweepers all swept with frantic enthusiasm, with a desperate and fierce devotion to the salvaging of the match and the resumption of unhindered play. 

At last the roof was fully extended and the elements kept at bay. The court had been given time to dry and cleared of all leaves. The match could now be resumed. 

The battle was lost and won in only an hour and nineteen minutes. Musetta did not play well. Her return of serve was characteristically stellar but she hit very few winners, made many unforced errors, served five double faults, and- for a good volleyer such as herself- won an atypical minority of net points. 

Fedova came close to racquet abuse a few times. Even though she was always ahead on the scoreboard, there were three extended rallies which she lost in the same fashion each time. Her two-handed backhand, normally a great strength, seemed to be failing her. Three times, concluding these impressive fifteen, sixteen shot rallies in Musetta’s favour, she hit the ball into the tramlines by the tiniest margin. No chance to challenge, only the chance to replay. She availed herself of this opportunity on the third of these frustrating points and the hawk-eye showed an out-margin of only four millimetres. She felt the trembling urge to abuse her racquet on the surface of the court. But she looked at the grass, so brown, already so wounded with human intensity. And then she thought of leaves. Dying and dead leaves. She recalled the touch of the leaves, their smell. She recalled the special, sacred tickle of her private leaf lover, the orgasms he had given her. Every night since that first night they had made love, he had returned to her and they had repeated their coitus, replicated their passions. And, at the coming of each morning, she had swept away what remained, what remained of her leaf lover, his moist remnants, his residues. She found, suddenly, that she had no desire to strike the grass, to abuse her fresh-strung racquet.

She won the match in straight sets, 6-3, 6-2. The finalists converged at the net, the champion and the near-champion. Musetta had the biggest, happiest grin on her face. There was not an iota of hatred or combat or resentment or disappointment in her face. It was strange.  

Musetta took Fedova’s hand and then took her shoulder. She leaned in close, so close that Fedova could smell her. Notes of perfume and sweat commingled; Fedova smelt an intense fennel-like fragrance. Fedova recognised it as a fine Wimbledon-brand ladies perfume from the press conference gift-baskets. Representatives of Boss, Rolex. The money was obscene. A sales-rep had offered her a sniff of the perfume; she had sprayed it on her wrist and held the wrist up to Fedova’s nose. No thank you, Fedova had said. The scent was one Fedova reacted against. The fennel-smell clutched slightly at her throat, inspired nausea. She feared she might never forget it: the scent. Musetta reeked of it. And Barbera couldn’t get away from it. She attempted to politely withdraw from Musetta’s one-armed embrace, she tried to free herself from it as efficiently as she could without seeming to recoil. But Musetta kept her there, with oppressive friendliness. And, leaning in close enough and uttering it quietly enough that no-one could hear it expect Barbera, Musetta whispered in Fedova’s ear:

“Artur fucked Fuchs.”

Fedova heard exactly what she said. The Italian pronunciations prickled against her skin, her breath burned.

“Sorry?” Fedova said.

“Artur and Ilse fucked.”

They parted from one another and shook hands with the umpire. The commentators commentated on the charm and sportswomanship of their embrace at the net. Fedova had never felt so lonely. At the centre of all this hullaballoo and jubilance and noise, she was completely alone, solely burdened by the oppressive weight of this revelation.                    

In any case, she had won. Wimbledon. Her fourth grand slam. Two Australian Opens, one US Open, and now Wimbledon. Three Wimbledon finals and at last her bid to be the ladies champion had been successful.

The closing pieces of ceremony, the handshakes, the announcements, the awardings, all took place at Annabelle Croft’s dictation. Once Musetta had received her ugly runner-up plate, Fedova received the magnificent Venus Rosewater dish from Kate Middleton. Barbera held it aloft. The stands thundered with applause, she couldn’t even hear her own name on the loudspeaker system, the spectators were all bellowing and whooping before Annbelle Croft had finished speaking. Fedova fingered the embossed panels of the salver: scenes of elegance, nourishment, and triumph rendered in silver. The moment was both public and intimate. She glowed and tingled with a feeling of supremacy. 

And then, as soon as she was alone, she threw up. 

A year later, Fedova gave birth to a strange child. The child’s eyes did not open fully. The doctors told her to expect developmental disability, impaired brain function. The child secreted a sticky, sap-like residue. Its skin came off all the time in papery flakes, leaves of soft rustling yellow and rusty red. When it grew hair, its hair was leaves. Regenerating leaf-hair. Tongues of golden leaf which accumulated into a mop but then browned, and died, and fell when they were ready. And then, of course, they grew back. There were no genitals, so sex was indeterminate. The doctors predicted a hard road ahead. 

            Barbera never revealed to Artur what Musetta had told her. 

The signs of pregnancy became obvious in the weeks after Wimbledon. For a while, while Artur believed the baby was his, it seemed like there was hope and excitement on the horizon.

But very quickly, doubt set in and their life together became bleak and windswept. In their grand Miami mansion there was only a crashing, booming sense of absence and loneliness. One morning, Barbera came downstairs and found Artur eating pancakes off the Venus Rosewater dish. When he was finished, she washed the Venus Rosewater dish as she would any plate. She cleansed it, dried it, and replaced it on her trophy shelf.    

Artur trained hard for the US Open. He managed to increase his ranking and was seeded thirtieth in the singles draw. He lost in the first round. It was a lengthy and upsetting four set loss. He won the first set comfortably, then lost the second on a tiebreak. And then he lost the third. And then the fourth. He was soaring and then he wasn’t; he was flying and then he wasn’t; he was something and then he was nothing. 

Fedova watched the loss on television. As the inevitability of Artur’s loss dawned on her, as it dawned on all those watching in the stadium, she was alarmed to discover that she pitied him. However strong her hatred for the loser of a tennis match, she could not help pitying them a little. It was a hardship with which she could not fail to empathise, a punishment she could never wholly delight in.     

            Artur drank to excess that night and got it into his head that the baby in Barbera’s womb wasn’t his. It couldn’t be his.

            He decided that he was going to kill them both, mother and foetus. She, Barbera, was the cause of his misery. He would free himself from her and then he would run to Ilse, he would run into Ilse’s arms, into her bosom, into her great strong legs, into the intense sunlight of her hair.

            But a ferocious and enraged force prevented Artur from hurting them, mother and child. Artur had a strong grip. He put on white gloves and prepared to take Barbera’s neck in his hands. He approached the bed, approached the long pale sleeper, pregnant, respiring with double the usual noise and strength. He was going to strangle her, he was sure of it. Then he heard a whisper. From a corner of the room, or just outside it, there was a whisper. A pierce of sibilance, loud even when uttered softly. Then there was a rustle, a rustle like so many leaves. And then he glimpsed, or thought he glimpsed, a small male figure, frail, dark and spectral, advancing with intention. And then a crescendo. A rumble of pure rage, a bellow of wind, a tempest of leaves.

            This angry, gale-like force lifted Artur up and plunged him down into the earth. It planted him in the garden, a seed. It folded him into the earth and he groaned continuously. All night, no-one heard him groaning, no-one passing could help him, and by morning he was silent. 

In what was left of the night, he grew into a tree, a dead, wintry tree with two bare, jagged branches. These branches were like arms, like two handless human arms outstretched in alarm or disbelief. He was utterly leafless, always leafless. Through every season, nothing could coax even the tiniest sign of growth or life from his gaunt, aghast frame. 

That morning, the sun came up and Barbera discovered the tree. She recognised it. She recognised it as Artur, saw something of Artur in its cold, sharp barrenness. She waved to no one, she thanked the air, the sky. The baby kicked in her womb. A whispering, rustling force came down and touched her on the shoulder. It wanted her to know that it was there. 

            Her leaf-lover no longer visited her, not in the way he used to. But she had no doubt that he still existed, that he was out there, somewhere, that he was watching over his human lover and his leaf-child.  

Three years have passed. Fedova has still not returned to tennis. She never watches it, never looks up results or statistics. In many ways, she has grown, she has healed. She does not ache like she used to ache. She is listed as an inactive rather than a retired player. But she knows, just as the commentariat know, that she will never go back. Artur’s fate remains a mystery, a secret kept from the world. No-one misses him really, he was never that special. Ilse Fuchs misses him, sometimes. On occasion. 

The ever-dead tree remains in the garden. Sometimes its arms relax, fall down to its sides. Sometimes they shift position more subtly, almost imperceptibly. Sometimes they seem to reach for something, seem to crane towards the garden lawn where a tennis racquet or a tennis ball might have been left. Sometimes the leafless tree seems to crane towards Barbera, as if it desires to caress her. It knows that it can’t reach her but it still wants to show her how much it longs to touch her, to speak to her, how it pines for her. Despite its unchanging deadness and angularity, it often seems tender, regretful, full of apology. Anything he has to say, Fedova will never understand. But her leaf-child might, in time.

They love lonely places. It is autumn. The world is full of dead leaves. Fedova and her leaf-child are walking through a wood. The leaf-child often laughs. It is an otherworldly, disconcerting laugh, uttered in moments of confusion and delight. The leaves are falling. Red, yellow, brown. A red squirrel scurries up a tree; another pursues it. The alacrity is amazing, the vertical speed. Things are dying all around, they are dying so beautifully. The leaf-child has never seen this before, these scenes are new to it. A hawk scampers fast over their heads. Its wings flap furiously, it sends a hideous and passionate shriek through the woods and across the water, as far as the pines, the hills, the distant snowline. In just a few short seconds, it seems to traverse the earth.     

Occasionally people pass them on the path, a dapper couple perhaps, in long coats and red scarves, and they think they recognise Fedova. Their heads turn as she and her leaf-child amble past. They stare, perhaps, at the leaf-child. They glare. They are aware of Fedova’s achievements but they know nothing about her, not really. She passes with ghostly serenity, the leaf-child stumbling ahead. They do not disturb her by saying something like Excuse me, are you Barbera Fedova? Didn’t you win Wimbledon a few years back? No. They leave her alone; they pay her this small, appreciated courtesy. They help to preserve the peace she has found, here, among so many leaves.