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Chapter One

Navel gazing is said to be an aimless pursuit. Not to me, Jolyon Jacks. I was gazing at the navel of Sasha Cremorne from Sydney and my aim was plain. And I succeeded in my aim, which occupied most of the ensuing night.

 This is embarrassing to explain, but Sasha was already an item, not with me. She had arrived in England a couple of months previously to join her boyfriend Trevor, and the two had been obviously together as Trevor travelled from one PSA tournament to the next, on the opposite side of the world from his Sydney home.

PSA? Professional squash, squash racquets to give it its full name. A minority sport where the rewards for even the leading athletes are disproportionately small, in the context of the enormous effort needed to reach and stay near the top. A thoroughly physical game with a number of physical essentials at the international level: one, years of exhausting conditioning; two, thousands of hours of on-court routines; three, regular weight training; four, interminable stretching to ward off stiffness; five, whole seasons of hard competition; six, the ability to ignore the pain of countless minor injuries; seven, meticulous attention to diet; and eight, no booze. In other words, continuous monkish dedication.

Oh yes, one more: nine, all important: you had to have a good night’s sleep before a big match. The next day I was due to play Sasha’s boyfriend.

Squash Times, January 2nd

PSA World Series FINALS

The finals of the Professional Squash Association World Series return to London next week at the Queen’s Club. World number one, American Julio Mattaz, leads an invasion, with the eight competitors reading like a who’s who from the top of the world game.

The tournament is played in two leagues of four players. The winners go through to semi finals on Friday, with the final on Saturday evening. In the Mattaz pool are the world number four, the Egyptian, Magdi Gamal, another Egyptian, Hosni el Baradei, ranked six and Frenchman Armand Darnaud, who recently broke into the top ten. Darnaud comes in as a last minute replacement for his compatriot Serge Colson, who had to withdraw with an eye infection.

Pool B consists of the former world champion, South African Jan Berry, ranked two, the Australian Trevor Cooper at three, world number five, Mansoor Ali Khan from Pakistan, and the new English sensation Jolyon Jacks, aged only nineteen. Jacks has burst onto the scene this season and has already beaten Cooper twice in World Series tournaments.

“’ey Jolyon, do you want to ’ave somesing to eat?”

I vaguely realised someone was talking.

“Jolyon, wake up you stupid galah.”

It was the evening before the World Series finals and we were sitting around in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel. I had a great mix by Andy C turned up on my iPod and hadn’t been paying attention to the general conversation. It was Trevor Cooper shaking me by the shoulder, “Wake up, mate.”

Off with the Bose headphones, bought earlier in the year with my first big tournament winnings; I’d upset the seedings by winning in Chennai. Everyone was looking at me.

“Armand’s trying to say something.” This was the Trevor Cooper, no less. Only a year ago I had merely been reading about Trevor in squash magazines and watching him on Sky or the PSA live feed. Now we were in the same tournament, playing each other the following day.

“Armand’s dad’s here. He’s offering to take us for a pizza.”

Marcel Darnaud was a legend in squash circles. His son’s rise up the world rankings had been almost as rapid as mine, and it was rare to see Armand at a tournament without his father. Plus there was his coach, Lou Kiefer. Lou Gubrious as he was known behind his back, the life and soul of the graveyard. Anyway, Armand’s dad was good news, even if he sometimes embarrassed his son with his raucous support and his loud comments on reffing decisions. I knew the Darnauds quite well, having spent some time a couple of months before at their base in Aix-en-Provence, training with Armand.

“Yeah, sounds great,” I said. “We going now?”

“We’re going in five.”

“My fuzzeur come soon,” Armand explained as we stood up. His English was rudimentary, but, I had to concede, ahead of my non-existent French.

“And it would be diplomatic to leave your music at home.”

Older statesman Trevor. I wasn’t sure about Trevor, but let it go.

“’Course, I’ll get my jacket.” Another recent purchase. People had disapproved of my hoodie, so I’d bought an expensive but totally uncool grey anorak.

When I returned to the lobby the group had expanded; news of Marcel’s offer had spread. Marcel himself was talking to a young, curvy girl with lots of make-up and rings in her nose and ears and eyebrows. It was almost easier to list where she didn’t have rings. Then there was my coach, Sailor McCann. Sailor had strictly no make-up on, and even more strictly, no rings, apart from a proudly worn wedding band. Sailor’s opinion on cosmetic hardware in the face registered high on the Richter scale. Among the others in the lobby, the Aussie Trevor Cooper was standing to one side in a cool suede waistcoat. Zoë Quantock, three times women’s world champion no less, was chatting with a woman I didn’t know, next to Julio Mattaz.

Marcel’s English, in contrast to his son’s, was pretty good. “Hey, Jolyon, good to see you, that’s everyone, let’s go.”

Ten minutes later we were seated in an Italian restaurant, with a couple of introductions made, studying menus. The dark haired woman, who had been with Julio and Zoë, turned out to be Ruth Mattaz, Julio’s missus. She was quietly American, the complete opposite to her husband. No one actually addressed Mattaz as ‘Julio’. He was universally known as Razza or Razz. It hadn’t taken me long to find out why once I’d met him: a more vibrant character didn’t exist in the squash world. Probably not in any other world. The girl who had been chatting with Marcel was Sasha Cremorne, possibly Trev’s girlfriend. She was the younger sister of Ryan, world number twenty five, part of a group of squash-playing Aussies in Europe.

Sailor was talking to Zoë on my left. Zoë looked great I knew, even when she was red-faced and sweaty in the middle of a training session. Now with her hair sorted and some make-up on she was sensational. Razz was opposite Sasha and I was happy to watch her beside me and listen in.

“What do you think of London so far, Sasha?” As always, Razza radiated energy; the way he posed the question, London had to be one of his favourite spots.

Not one of Sasha’s. “Cold and wet. It’s summer in Sydney and for sure it’s light years better than this. I’m into the beach. Your famous River Thames? Ugh, the water’s black. It could be crude oil. Give me Coogee Beach, no contest, I’m like, why did I come over to this country?” She theatrically hugged herself and I couldn’t help thinking that she needed long arms to get them round everything she had to hug.

“It’s your first time in England?”

“Yes, Trev said why not come over, he’ll show me round. He’s some rellies outside London and he’s going to do a month’s training here after the World Series. Before going to New York. Ryan too. For some reason they’ve decided not to go home to train. I think they’re mad.”

“It can be colder where we come from,” Razza said. “Ruth’s from New York State and my family’s from Salt Lake City.”

“I know about New York,” Sasha said. “But where’s Salt Lake City?”

It was to become clear through the evening that Sasha had bunked off most of her geography lessons. With Coogee Beach nearby, you probably would. A lot of the rest of her schooling seemed to have gone the same way. Not that I could boast about my own school record. The gritty Sussex shingle near my south coast private school hadn’t drawn me away, but doing badly with exams had been an effective way of aggravating my mother. Always a powerful motivation.

“Salt Lake City’s in Utah,” Razza explained. “The western USA, in the Rockies.”

“It’s a great place for skiing,” Ruth said.

Razza laughed. “And not much else.”

“Aw come on Razz. You always say it’s good for training.”

“A New Yorker coming to the defence of little ol’ Salt Lake City! But I guess it’s true. Nothing else to do there, and forty seven hundred feet, you make your own EPO.”

To be fair to Sasha, she appeared to recognise these items as three from a set that totalled twenty six. “EPO, what’s that?”

Trevor rolled his eyes. “Oh come on, Sash. I told you about EPO.”

Sailor pricked up his ears at the mention of something to do with training and physiology. And hardness. “EPO. It’s a hormone that increases your red corpuscles.” He noticed Sasha’s big eyes glazing over. “Ye could say it strengthens the blood. Good for athletes. Any aerobic sport.”

To Sasha’s Aussie ear Sailor probably sounded no stranger than I did with my south of England vowels. Me, I often struggled to make out Sailor’s guttural utterances. You needed to have grown up in a Glasgow tenement to understand the accent, let alone the vernacular. Sailor looked short and abrasive. That was how he was. Toilet brush abrasive, though I wouldn’t put it to him like that. I nearly died every day during his training routines and I didn’t want the ‘nearly’ to disappear.

In height Sailor would have been able to look Sasha straight in the eye. That’s if he’d had the strength of will to keep his eyes off her chest. Will was something Sailor didn’t lack. I knew that all too well from the gym and the weights room and the four walls of the court where we did our lung busting training routines. We did? I did, though I’m sure Sailor could have kept up if he’d wanted to.

Sailor went on, “It’s a natural hormone, erythropoietin. It’s used by middle distance runners and cyclists, especially cyclists. Ye’ll know the Tour de France, that sort of thing. Cheating. You inject it. It increases your red blood cells. Then your blood can carry more oxygen and you can run or cycle faster. Or play squash.”

“Just another illegal drug,” Razza explained.

Sasha looked at him with those expressive blue eyes. Perhaps Sailor would after all aim his gaze at them; they were far from her worst feature, in the middle of fierce competition. “And you make your own EPO? How do you do that?”

“No, only joking,” Razza said. “At altitude, like Salt Lake City, you produce more red blood cells naturally, to compensate for the thin air. None of us take anything,” he looked round, “do we, fellers? Anyway, the testing’s too strict these days. You’d be caught, bound to.”

With that the pizzas arrived, baking hot and, to my nose at least, smelling wonderful. As the waiter proudly placed Razza’s in front of him Ruth asked, “You’re absolutely sure there’s no nuts in these? You did check with the chef?”

“Yes, I spoke to him.” The waiter, in his mid twenties, sounded as though a PhD was the least of his qualifications. “The chef’s very particular with his ingredients. No nuts, guaranteed. No chance.”

“Oh Ruth,” Marcel exclaimed, “you should have told me. Do you have a nut allergy?” He seemed really concerned.

“No, it’s not me, it’s Razz.”

“Yeah, it’s no big deal,” Razza said. “I’m always careful. And Ruth is twice as careful for me. And I always have my EpiPen.”

“Have you ever had to use it?” Sailor asked.

“A couple of times when I was a kid. Driver of the school bus helped once. My dad was in the military; we travelled around. That’s how I got started with squash. Most of the US bases had courts. Anyway, I was new on the base. I’d told the kids but some of them were horsing around with a Snickers bar. Never again. They were more scared than I was. I promise you, one of them wet himself.”

“You have to be careful,” said Marcel. “I had a patient once, a young woman. She changed her handbag. No EpiPen.” He shrugged, a Gallic understatement that hinted, I remembered from a briefing by the school matron, at slow suffocation and a reduction of Marcel’s patient list by one.

“Me, I’ve an allergy to training.” Everyone laughed. Brett Hammond hadn’t said much up to then. “Supplementary oxygen, EpiPens, you name it, I need it.”

“What artificial support do you have, Jolyon?” Trevor asked. “New English wonder kid. What’s in the wonder regime?”

I hadn’t believed Sailor when he’d predicted that Trevor would start needling me. Come on, Sailor. That’d be pathetic. I was surprised to encounter it now, it seemed so childish. I’d never felt that Trevor would become a friend, no chemistry, but he’d been all right up to then, and he was always fair on court in spite of my two wins against him. Fairness on court, I’d learned in my brief time on the circuit, and indeed as a junior, couldn’t be guaranteed.

“I just dance hard at raves, Trev, and,” I turned to look at Sasha, “avoid being distracted by sexy women. It seems to have worked so far. Oh, and there’s the little matter of Sailor, of course.”

“Well this is where the big times start, mate. We’re going to find out over the next week.”

Fortunately we were interrupted by Sasha-the-sexy-woman, who asked with real interest. “Do you go to raves? Proper, like, illegal raves?”

“Legal, illegal, you can always argue about that. But yeah, you won’t find me paying out a fortune for Reading or Glastonbury. Corporate crap. Nothing beats a good DJ, a couple of turntables and ten thousand watts blasting out over a field. Shattering the sheep. You get sound systems as big as houses, Sasha, no exaggeration. Welcome to England’s green and pleasant land. Don’t worry about the River Thames.”

“I’ve read about that stuff. Sounds great and there’s nothing quite like that back home. What sort of music are you into?”

“Drum’n’bass, some techno. Not so much gabba.”

Her eyes lit up. This appeared to be familiar territory. “I just downloaded this fantastic drum’n’bass mix, something Rat, Ratpack I think...”

“Ratpack? Yeah, I know them. Well, I’ve met them, in Brighton. They’re legends. Been around that long. If you’ve never seen them, you’ve never seen nothing.”

“It’s a them? You know them?” I reclassified Sasha’s eyes upwards from strong provincial to genuine international, right up there with her boobs. This was influenced by the fact that they were trained directly on me.

But there’s always a but and, on cue, Sailor butted in. “Jolyon used to spend more time raving, if that’s the right word, than training. Not any more, eh, Jolyon?”

It was more a statement than a question.

“No, Sailor.”

Chapter Two

I can remember every metre of the Redbrook Senior Steeplechase that year. I’d started cross country running in the summer, when I was fourteen. My mother wanted me to concentrate on tennis and suddenly I’d had enough of being organised by her. I was the prize exhibit, flashy in the latest Wimbledon kit. My son’s better than yours. AND he looks smarter than your freak on court. Aces all round, for the proud parent that is, big brownie points in the ladies’ section at the club. I’m his mother! Status for me! Kudos for me! Glamour for me!

Stuff that.

The problem was, I’d done well in junior tennis tournaments and everyone was feeding off it. Me, I didn’t care. I wanted to win my tennis matches but I didn’t collapse, or throw tantrums, Timmy, if I lost. I just liked to flog the ball as hard as I could like the tennis gladiators on TV, grunting with each shot, spinning round with a mighty follow through on either side, shirt twisting, shoes scraping. It all came easily to me, forehands, backhands, one handers, two handers, volleys, overheads. It was pure, simple, physical fun.

Running on the other hand, or rather on my two rather small size seven feet, was something I did just for myself. Running was unglamorous: fifteen love to me, mother dear, in your Harvey Nicks knickers. Wet mud was involved: thirty love to me, mother dear, in your four hundred pound per foot Jimmy Choos. In the summer, after 10K, the white areas of dried sweat stood out on unglamorous tee shirts, no good at all in the forensic detail of your Harrods videocam: forty love to me, mother dear. Add in the occasional splashy puke during interval training: ho ho, game to me! As in tennis, some runners wore wristbands. Here it was to wipe away not just sweat, an acceptable secretion in the poncy middle England world of tennis, but snot, the branded fashion statement tick smeared with silvery golly.

Running I loved from the day I took it up. Running was downmarket. Running didn’t attract a great coop of clucking mother hens, led by the head rooster, my mother.

And I was good at it. The problem with running for me soon turned out to be the others in the school Colts squad, the under sixteens. They weren’t much good at it. It soon became a chore as I left them behind in training. I didn’t want to stay in the pack; there was something I loved about pushing on. Something about fighting through the tiredness, feeling the calves stretch up the hills round Redbrook, feeling the quads strain as you went down the steep gradients. The chalk hills of the South Downs were pretty in picture postcards. They were comfortingly English as illustrations in the Redbrook College prospectus. My mother had persuaded my usually absent father of the attractions of Redbrook soon after I was born, on the basis of her friends’ admiration of the glossy brochure. But for cross country running, or even just hiking, the Downs made a tough challenge.

My father was hardly ever around to see me play my sports. That was the Navy. For tennis at least, my mother was never not around. That was a pain. Often her being around would involve a haranguing for my coach, especially if I wasn’t getting twice as much attention as everybody else. It was embarrassing even when I was small, and her unpopularity with the other kids spilled over onto me. On regular occasions at tournaments she acted as an unofficial line-caller, invariably to my benefit. She would never do anything to favour my opponent. 

My mother’s support didn’t extend to cross country, what a surprise. Not even for the highlight of the school running year, ‘Steeplechase Weekend’. Strangely, at Redbrook this wasn’t one of the big inter-schools races. It was the main house competition in mid November. Running was a major sport at Redbrook, up there with football and cricket for boys, and for girls just as important as netball and hockey. Winners of the four races, the girls’ and boys’ Junior and Senior Steeplechases, had their names celebrated on boards in the main assembly hall, in gold Gothic lettering. The winning houses were also celebrated there. The Junior Boys’ Steeplechase, for under sixteens, was a race worth winning, three and a half miles of exposed, undulating downland. The Senior Steeplechase was longer, nearly six gut-busting miles, 10K in the modern jargon, with, in all, more than three hundred metres of ascent. The girls’ races were shorter, still with the up and the down of the half accurately named Downs, and run on the following day.

It was my housemaster, the pompous Mr Middleton, who gave me the idea of entering the Senior rather than the Junior Steeplechase.

“I see you’ve been going well in the junior cross country squad, Jolyon. We haven’t won the Junior Steeplechase since I’ve been housemaster. Eight years now, and it’s about time. You’re the one.”

Stupid fart, ‘you’re the one’, time for a puke. Mr Middleton’s bonhomie (I thought of it then as his Ha-Ha-Harry behaviour) masked a highly competitive attitude within the school. Mr Middleton didn’t want his pupils to do well for themselves. That was secondary. More important was how they did for Tudor against the other houses. Tudor House, Mr Middleton: Mr Middleton, Tudor House. In the end what he craved was success – for Mr Pompous Middleton. Exam results, sports competitions, top numbers of exclusions for smoking, fewest pupil pregnancies, it didn’t matter. Mr Middleton had to be top of the stats. You would hear him boasting to parents or fellow members of the Common Room about Tudor. I couldn’t stand the man.

Well, I’d show him. I always got on well with the teachers in the PE Department. Since I’d started running I’d found a friend in Sarah Bristow. Sarah was there three times a week to coach the running. She was a tiny woman, wiry, with amazing bulging gastrocnemius muscles. No amount of slow cooking could ever turn them into a tender stew. Mrs Bristow, Sarah to us runners, had been an international eight hundred metre athlete. I suspect she ran for the exhilaration more than the competition, the joy of running. Maybe she saw something of that in me.

I was jogging alongside Sarah as we warmed down after a session of intervals, up the side of a South Down and back again, over and over. Ten minutes ago I’d been fantasising that the Down would be found to contain rich seams of gold and precious stones. It would be levelled by giant diggers to yield its bounty. Someone had made the joke that it should have been called a South Up.

“The Junior Steeplechase is going to be a bit of a doss, Sarah. ’Specially now Byron’s injured. I was wondering whether I could go in for the seniors.”

“But you’re sure to win the juniors, think of it. Why do you want to change?”

“It’s a bit of a foregone conclusion. I don’t mean to be a big head, but what’s the point? I’d love to see where I could come in the seniors. Top half, I hope, and I’d have to push myself. It’d be far more fun.”

“I suppose you could. I think Alistair Morgan did it a few years ago. Didn’t work though. He pulled a muscle and never finished. You know the other problem, don’t you?”

“Yes, Mr Tudor. I mean Mr Middleton.”

She laughed. “That’s right. Mr Middleton expects you to win the juniors, and it’s not impossible Tudor’ll win the team prize, too.”

“We wouldn’t win the team prize if I pulled a muscle.”

This time she merely smiled. “Leave it with me. My monthly tea in the Common Room is coming up and I’ll talk to him then. In a friendly way.”

Emphasis on the friendly. Even at fourteen I suspected I knew what she meant.

It turned out that Ron Clarke, the captain of cross country, was more of a problem than Mr Middleton. My being in the Tudor House Senior Steeplechase team, Sarah’s decision in the end, meant that Ron’s mate Jasper Connaught would be out. Jasper was at the centre of the school’s high society; he was the innest of the in crowd. Ron and Jasper were always together in their arrogant world at the top of the school. Ron liked to throw his weight around as a sports captain so he mounted a campaign to have Jasper reinstated.

“There’s no way that boy will do better than Jasper,” he repeated to anyone who wanted, or didn’t want, to listen. “It’s a strong team and we can’t let our results be diluted by a passenger.” Spoken like a good A2 Chemistry ***, I remember thinking; dilution as one of the metaphors we’d just been learning about in English lessons.

At the team meeting before the race, with Jasper’s exclusion by then well and truly irreversible, Ron was typically hostile. “We’ll bunch on the way up to the water tower; don’t wreck yourselves in the first K. Then you can set your own pace.” He looked at me, “And I’m not talking about the children. Make sure you don’t get in the way, jolly little Jolyon.”

Ron turned away from me. “I’m going to stay with Shu Tung and Jeremy and the others until Senior Heartbreak and then push on. Remember to save a bit for the run in after Senior Heartbreak. You can pick up several places through the wood. Everyone’s knackered then. Especially as the forecast’s grim.” He turned back to me. “And you, boy, for ***s sake don’t come last.”

Someone said, “Oh come on Ron.” Ron glowered at him.

No, I was not going to come last. Especially after that. I was secretly hoping to be in the top fifteen, in front of the two weakest runners in Tudor’s team of six. On my side was the weather. I didn’t mind running in the gales that were a feature of cross country in the South Downs. The prevailing wind helped you in the largely easterly direction of the first half of the race and then pushed you back as you headed westwards towards the finish. What was worst, the wind blew straight into your face on the two heartbreaks. But there was a sort of pleasure in the struggle with the heartbreaks. It wasn’t you against other runners or against the stopwatch. It was you against Nature. Nature had the gradient and Nature had the awkward flints on the track. Nature had the slippery mud. Often Nature had the wind. Against this, you had the knowledge that the wind was Nature’s best chance of beating you, and it wasn’t going to happen. You had a beautiful bouncy pair of New Balance shoes, with grip to spare. You had the good biochemistry Sarah Bristow had explained, which after all your training kept you efficient and aerobic. You had legs and lungs that ignored the pain. Above all you had two hearts, the literal one that kept on pumping strongly because pushing out volumes of blood was what it was designed to do, and the metaphorical one that wouldn’t let you give up, because losing to Nature was unthinkable.

And because you’d been taunted by a puckered brown hole like Ron Clarke.

The weather forecasters turned out to have been right. It was a grey, bitter, sleety afternoon as people milled miserably around at the start of the course, most jogging to and fro in an attempt to keep warm. The wind was astonishing even in the lee of Bright’s Hill. My friends in the junior race had gone off fifteen minutes earlier. I’d reluctantly taken my tracksuit off no more than sixty seconds before the start of the senior race. The wind had already once whipped my baseball cap off. I’d looked up at the fast moving clouds and a gust had caught the brim. My mother, who had supported me to every tennis tournament I’d ever played in, no exception, was notably absent. I couldn’t really blame her. And my grandfather, who had always been there when I was small, was too old for this.

The bang of the starting gun was almost lost in a fierce gust that gave all sixty competitors a boost as they got under way. I was well to the right, out of harm’s way, and let most of the field charge ahead. As expected they set off much too fast for a 10K race. I heeded Sarah’s words, and indeed those of Ron Clarke, and held back, comfortably in the second half of the field. That’s where I stayed until we reached the top of the Downs.

The first couple of kilometres were bliss, before the pain started; a piece of piss with the gale behind. I began to overtake the runners around me in an easy rhythm. After twenty minutes, the route plunged off the top of the grassy Down in a steep, chalky five hundred metre decline towards a sharp right turn over a stile. Taking stock for the first time I saw that I had about twenty runners in front of me. At the front, two hundred metres ahead, was a tight bunch of five. That must be Ron and the other ‘professionals’, as they saw themselves, looking relaxed, arms out for balance on the descent, scanning the track ahead for flints.

The stile marked the end of the soft part of the race. The right turn took you in a southerly direction and for the first time you faced the wind. I couldn’t believe the strength of it. What’s more, this was still valley, still sheltered. All you could do was put your head down and avoid coming to a complete halt in the fierce gusts. The rain, maybe it was sleet, it was hard to tell, physically stung the skin of your thighs. The runner in front of me was hardly able to get going after the stile and I went round him, ignoring his ‘fuck this’.

Along the bottom it was easier if you were right behind someone and I restrained myself from going past the next runner, a big fit rugby player called Lawrence Connaught. But Lawrence was no help when we turned right again after a couple of minutes, over another stile, and faced the bottom of Junior Heartbreak.

Here the wind was worse, slightly from the left. Connaught’s main enemy though, I guessed, was his weight, handy if you were a centre three-quarter but the last thing you needed running up a hill. I went past him in thirty metres and then it was just the grind, you against Nature, up the rest of the four hundred metres. I must have gone past seven or eight runners on Junior Heartbreak, but that didn’t interest me. I knew now, a happy certainty, that I’d be in the top fifteen at the finish. I wasn’t going to be beaten by Nature’s strongest weapon, that wind.

The juniors carried straight on at the top of Junior Heartbreak but, directed by an unfortunate teacher posted to make sure no one went in the wrong direction, the seniors turned right again, inland, down another descent, relatively out of the wind, into another fold of the Downs. At the top of Junior Heartbreak I was utterly out of breath, almost retching. I peered forward through the sleet that was now sweeping in white waves across the Downs. The leading bunch had split up. In front now there were only three together, the tall Ron, the tiny Shu Tung and it was probably Charlie Greene, it was hard to tell. Ten metres back was the next runner and ten further away Jeremy De Montfort, who seemed to be going poorly.

The hill down was some relief after the long ascent, with the wind briefly helping again. I went past several of the runners who were between me and Jeremy and regained my breath. Next there was a short flat section before a metal cattle grid and the dreaded left turn at the bottom of Senior Heartbreak.

I don’t know who had given the two big climbs their name. They were part of school folklore; everyone talked about the heartbreaks. As I went through the gate just behind Jeremy, I thought the guy who named this had nailed it. He must have coined the name on another horrible November day.

Senior Heartbreak is nearly six hundred metres, something like a ten percent gradient, oblique across the steepest of the local Downs. It’s a straight, featureless track where again you needed to take care to avoid the flints, which had twisted many an ankle, and the sheep droppings. There were no sheep about that day; they weren’t completely stupid; it was just the intelligent humans, I thought, who were out there.

I rounded Jeremy as I set off up Senior Heartbreak and took up pursuit of a figure I could now see was Jim Hines, bent forward, hardly more than walking. I didn’t mind whether I caught Jim or not. I’d use him as a tool in the struggle to get to the top, a trick to take my mind off the prospect of another five hundred and fifty metres of this.

I did soon pass poor Jim, only just picking out his gasped ‘fuck this’, a unanimous opinion it seemed. Now I was fourth. Amazing, fourth! And I didn’t think many, or indeed any, would catch me. Now I could see Charlie Greene, maybe forty metres ahead. He’d been dropped on the heartbreak by Ron and Shu Tung. I used Charlie as the next distraction, focussing on his muddy running shoes, splattered calves and saturated shorts. Halfway up, when he was only five metres ahead, a shocking gust literally stopped us in our tracks. I managed to get going quicker than him and saw the surprise on his face as I went past.

In spite of the wind I was just able to hear a unique message for that afternoon. “Well done,” Charlie shouted.

“Yeah,” was all I had breath to shout back.

Keep going, keep going. I took a rare look ahead. It was depressing to see how far I still was from the top. My thighs were aching and my lungs were burning. The sleet was lashing my face. The next target was distant.

But look, some good news. Shu Tung Lee, the studious little Malaysian whom I had heard had won a scholarship to Oxford, had got away from Ron Clarke. Ron had told everyone that this year he would win for sure. He had been in an amazing dead heat the previous November with Jim Hines. Jeremy de Montfort was third only a pace behind. For some reason the dead heat had rankled with Ron. This year, he promised, his extra training would let him pull away on Senior Heartbreak, ‘if anyone has been able to stay with me until then’.

Heartbreak indeed, on and on. Gut break. Above all lung break. I just couldn’t get my breath in the wind. It had reached the stage where I could hardly bring one foot past the other and I was frequently being blown sideways off the track. I didn’t look up again on the hill, concentrating on the grey mud just in front of me. Come on. Get your head down. One slippery apology for a stride. Then another. And then another.

When I finally reached the top I felt so awful I thought about giving up. But wow, what a surprise. There was Ron Clarke, hardly ten metres away, hands on knees, throwing up. How could I be so close? Maybe he’d been forced to walk some of the hill. He wasn’t even managing a walk now.

Ron must have seen me out of the corner of his eye and his look of sheer shock when he saw me was comic. And worth all the effort of that afternoon, no matter what happened. Seeing who it was galvanised Ron and he set off again at a speed I couldn’t match. Soon he was twice as far ahead, but this didn’t trouble me. The look had been enough.

The last part of the Redbrook steeplechase course descends gently for six hundred metres through a large wood, Bright’s Down Wood, which provides shelter from the worst of the weather. What a relief. I expected Ron to go further away now. His basic speed was way ahead of mine. But he seemed to be in poor shape. It was hard to tell from behind. You always slipped and staggered when it was wet in Bright’s Down Wood. The track was maximally muddy; there were tree roots to negotiate; many of the hazards were hidden by autumn leaves. Ron was navigating like a clown. The strength had gone from his legs and he was moving as though he was drunk.

Not that I was much better. My legs were so tired it was hard to take advantage of the shelter of the trees. But I was developing an unaccustomed feeling. There was a chance I could get past Ron. After the way he’d treated me it was one I wanted to take. This wasn’t the joy of running any more. It wasn’t Nature I wanted to conquer, it was a single competitor, human, physical. I wanted to humiliate Ron Clarke. What a pleasure, I visualised, to look back at him when I’d passed, and later to laugh about the result in the presence of Sarah Bristow and the others in the running club.

So I forced myself down the twisting track, and started to reel Ron in. I caught him before we were out of the wood and came alongside at a place where the track narrowed. I turned to him to enjoy the moment. If Ron hadn’t looked good from behind, he looked dreadful when you saw him close up, slime all over his upper lip, his cheeks an unnatural pink and his eyes screwed in a comic scowl. I knew I had him and started the pathetic acceleration that would take me away.

That was when Ron tripped me.

The bastard! He knocked my trailing foot sideways in the classic children’s trick and it caught the back of my other leg. Down I went, skidding for a couple of metres across the leaves before feeling an agonising pain in my hand and rolling over in a deep, flinty rut. Ron’s scowl morphed into a twisted smile as he went past and away.

I hardly had the strength to stand up. My right hand had hit a root or a flint and was hurting fiercely. There were no spectators, no one to tell what they’d seen and no one to help me on my way. I heard a runner approaching behind. It was Charlie Greene.

“You okay?” he said as he went past, then a half shouted, “Come on.”

It was what I needed. I must have looked a terrible sight when I emerged from the wood. I negotiated the last hundred metres in front of a line of cagouled and anoracked fellow pupils, and a few Burberryed parents. Not a single umbrella had survived. I staggered to the line, enjoying the applause but feeling an incandescent fury. I should have been second, not fourth. And it would have been so sweet to have beaten Ron *** Clarke.

Sarah Bristow was ministering at the finish, her small wet face an exposed oval in a tightly tied waterproof hood. “Well done, Jolyon, fantastic. But look at you, what happened?”

“I slipped in the wood. Seem to have hurt my hand.” I’d already decided not to go into the details. Ron would deny it, obviously. But I knew. And he knew. And I’d remind him whenever I felt like it.

REDBROOK COLLEGE MAGAZINE – WINTER TERM

...Cross Country

The surprise result came in the Senior Steeplechase. It was an appalling November day with a gale coming up the Channel, perfect to test the mettle of the hard guys. The three stars of last year, Ron Clarke, Jim Hines and Jeremy De Montfort, who had fought out that marvellous finish in ‘The Great Race’, as it has become known, were in the line up for the last time, together with two other county junior athletes, Charlie Greene and Shu Tung Lee. De Montfort was dropped halfway, on Junior Heartbreak, and Greene on Senior Heartbreak. The few hardy spectators were wondering whether another dead heat might be on the cards with Clarke and Lee locked together as if on a training run. But Lee pulled away and went on to win in the slowest time ever recorded for the winner, 42 minutes and 27 seconds.

The surprise package was fourteen year old Jolyon Jacks, who controversially had asked to be moved up from the junior race. At one time Jacks was up to third place, on the killer final stretches of Senior Heartbreak. He eventually finished fourth behind Greene.

After the race Shu Tung congratulated all his fellow competitors. “Everyone who finished was a winner today.” A disappointed Clarke said angrily that the conditions had favoured the small runners like Lee and Jacks.

Sore loser.

Chapter Three

“Mum, you know Dave Kemball, the guy who beat me at the South of England Juniors?”

“All squash players look the same to me.” Ever the enthusiast, my darling mother.

“Oh come on, why are you always so negative? I thought you saw the end of that game when you came to collect me.”

“I was having a coffee. I didn’t like to see you losing. You never seem to make it past the quarter finals. Not in any of these squash tournaments.” ‘Squash’ said as if it was a specimen bound for the STD clinic in Brighton. “You used to win tennis tournaments. I don’t understand you, Jolyon. Just don’t understand.”

I did the big eye roll. “Look, Mum. It’s less than a year since I started playing. I’m fifteen and I’ve beaten some of the top under seventeens. And Dave was first seed in the Souths. And it was five games, I really pushed him. I beat Gordon Wheating the round before. He was eighth seed and everyone said he should have been higher. I’m doing okay.”

“You’re doing okay? On a path to where? Sweaty squash club changing rooms. All over England if you’re half decent at it, which anyway I doubt. I’ve always encouraged you, Jolyon. And Adam, he does too.”

“Dad? The absent parent. He’s hardly ever here.”

“Yes him. Your father. The man who pays for your education, remember. Money doesn’t grow on trees. He actually likes the idea of you playing squash, I can’t see why. Me I’m not having it, not if it ruins everything else. Of course we both want you to do well. But your GCSEs! So disappointing. Disgraceful actually, considering the fees we pay. And you’d seemed to be doing well at Redbrook, the last two years. Until this, this... this business of squash.”

Oh dear, the squash rant. Combined of course with its current bosom pal, the GCSE rant. Two rants for the price of one, special offer. They were both so tediously familiar I could recite them myself. And, sure enough, my mother was quickly into her stride. Next would be the A Stars section.

“A Stars are what matters at GCSE.” Bingo! “That’s what they pay attention to at Oxbridge. B grades, C grades, they’re way out of it.”

A Stars? No I didn’t get twelve A Stars for twelve exams like two of the girls in my year, so what? Tedious little swots, those two. The idea of Oxbridge didn’t appeal to me, anyway. Stuffed up toffs. Why can’t I live my own life, mother dear? But brace yourself now, Jolyon. Here comes the Junior Science Prize section.

“Your father and I were so disappointed you didn’t win the Junior Science Prize.” Ding, ding, jackpot, Jolyon can predict the future. “Mr Rutherford was convinced you would after your mocks.” And look who won it instead. This was mother’s real problem. “That puerile little shit Jimmy Baines got it, didn’t he? I can’t stand his mother.”

No, I hadn’t won the Junior Science Prize. Jimmy B had, not a bad sort for a nerd, an absolute whiz with electronic music. He’d hacked into the school network and installed a pirated version of UltraMixer, and he was doing stuff for several London DJs. And no, I hadn’t won the Art prize, either. What’s that? The Nobel prize? No, another one that had mysteriously eluded me, sorry to effing disappoint you again, mother. I’d got two A Stars, Maths and English. And I hadn’t failed anything. And what’s wrong with some Cs anyway?

What’s wrong with Cs? We know the answer to that, don’t we? The nub of the problem. We can’t brag about Cs at the tennis club, that’s what’s wrong. We can’t agonise over what university golden Jolyon should apply to. Should it be Oxford or should it be Cambridge? What a quandary. Oh the poor darling, he’s finding it hard to make up his mind, Brasenose, that’s Oxford or Braised Ears, I think that’s Cambridge. Or something. The Isis, darling, that’s Oxford. Or the Cam, that’s Cambridge. I thought a cam was something in a car engine. Think of the May Balls! What balls? March bollocks to the May Balls. ‘My Jane’s doing six ASs and she’ll probably follow them all through to A2s. The school’s going to change the entire curriculum, just for her.’ The Jane referred to, that particular goody goody Jane with a habit of squeezing zits in public and absolutely no boobs, is going to be a nuclear scientist and a top diplomat and an airline pilot all at the same time. And pull the Duke of Westminster. Dream on. The only success Jane’s got coming, Missus, is in the WBC, the World Bulimia Championships. Dead centre of the bowl every time. Huurp! Splash! Awesome, clean as a whistle, not a drop spilt. Your daughter’s world class, Missus. That particular Jane had told me she’d been tutored from the age of two to make sure she got a scholarship to Redbrook Junior School. I hadn’t admitted that exactly the same thing had been inflicted on me, alphabets, counting, left to right across the expensive paper with the fine art marker pens, all with my mother looking on. She used to scold me if my attention wandered for as much as an instant.

A little bit of my mother’s GCSE angst may have been justified, I had to concede. Squash had certainly got me hooked. Squash was so easy. By the end of the summer term, less than a year after I’d started, on a regime of playing all the time, and yes I have to admit that some of that time was GCSE revision time, I’d not only reached a level above anyone else in the school, I’d started to do well in open junior tournaments.

That was where Dave Kemball came in. I’d been furious on losing to Dave at the South of England. For all of five minutes. Unlike most of the juniors after a game, Dave offered to buy me a drink.

“What sort of poison would you like? Strychnine or cyanide?” It wasn’t really very funny. It was the way Dave said it, with his easy grin.

“***. Both of them, in a bottle of coke.”

Then at the bar I discovered that we liked the same music. Most times it was difficult to talk to Dave. He was always on his iPod, a blank look in his eye, jigging to whatever was playing. He sometimes listened to music when he was knocking up by himself.

After he’d bought me a drink I asked, “What’s happened to your iPod?”

“Left it at the hotel. I think. Hope I haven’t lost it.”

“What do you listen to?”

“Techno, some drum’n’bass. Mixes my mates have done. Or stuff I’ve done myself.”

“Who do you like?”

“You into techno? Rachett. The Geezer. Ant.”

“No way! I saw Ant last week in Brighton. It’s only a small club but he’s mates with one of the organisers. Where do you live?”

“Manchester.”

“Is there much on there?”

“Some good nights not far from where we live. Outdoor raves in the summer. I can sometimes get to Leeds, Liverpool, yeah even Nottingham, there’s a lot going on.”

“Cool. One of my friends spent a year in Nottingham. She was always going on about the Firefly nights.”

“Firefly? I’ve been to one of those. Getting there’s the problem. I’ll get a provisional on my birthday. It’ll be easier when I pass my test.”

“You into mixing?”

“Is the sky blue? I got my first decks three years ago.”

“What have you got?”

Dave’s reply would have made a professional DJ drool. “Technics 1210s, Ortofon needles, Pioneer DMJ 500, Sennheisers.”

“Nice. I’ve got second hand. My stuff’s rubbish, Citronics decks and a Behringer mixer. Have you recorded anything?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’d play you some if I had my iPod.”

The only problem with Dave was Manchester, a long way from Sussex. So the offer of spending the second half of the summer holiday staying at his house and training with him was immensely attractive. It would be a great place to be and home was a great place not to be.

“It’s perfect,” Dave said. “I go along to the English Institute for Sport. The Commonwealth Games site.”

“What, the Man City ground, Eastlands?”

“That’s it. It’s where England Squash’s based. Really good facilities, plenty of courts. And I get some help from the guys who train the top players. I’m not in a squad or anything, not yet, so it’s unofficial. We could practise every day if we wanted.”

“I could bring my vinyl.”

“Yeah there’d be lots of time. There are some good parties coming up, too. I could easily get you some sets. I know most of the organisers.”

“I’ll have to speak to my mother.”

We exchanged mobile numbers, and I promised to get back to him. I didn’t realise what a battle it was going be on the home front, and I had no idea how trivial this battle would seem compared with the one that was to follow.

“Can I go and stay with Dave Kemball in Manchester?”

“Who’s he? Oh I know. He’s the one who beat you the other day.”

“That’s right, he’s a good guy.”

I was helping my mother unpack the monthly ten tons from Waitrose.

“Well your Aunt Phyllis is coming this weekend. But I don’t suppose she’d mind if you weren’t here.” Her voice dropped. “She’d probably be pleased.”

“It’s not just for the weekend. It’s for the rest of the holidays. So we can train together.”

“What do you mean the rest of the holidays? You’re coming with your father and me to Tuscany. In case you’d forgotten.”

Oh dear, I’d put that out of my mind. The annual summer trip with my parents. Somewhere around the age of twelve I’d stopped enjoying holidays with them. One year it had been Geneva, where I speculated my mother had provided a bright scientist from CERN with the inspiration for the Large Hadron Collider. This time Tuscany. My mother had pedantically explained that Tuscany would mean all the glories of Florence. Whoever the fuck Florence was, ha ha. Tuscany. Stuffy nights in uncomfortable hotel rooms, complaints from my parents about the clothes I wanted to wear, everyone wears shorts for heaven’s sake, and no, they don’t belt round the waist. Museums, galleries, uunghhh. Culture! The thought of it made me cringe. There’d be the embarrassment of my inability to communicate in spite of my Grade C GCSE Italian. ‘Oh Jolyon, you’re such a disappointment.’

“I just don’t want to come.”

“We won’t even discuss it.”

“I was so bored last year.”

“Paris. Boring?” She looked to the heavens. “Give me strength.”

“You and Dad would be far happier by yourselves.”

“I told you. It’s not an option. Now, put this sack of potatoes in the shed.”

“Mum, I’m sixteen years old. I’ll be seventeen in March. No one goes on holiday with their parents when they’re sixteen.”

“You’re being ridiculous, Jolyon. And bloody ungrateful. Most children would give their eye teeth for an opportunity like this.” No, mother. Faced with this opportunity, the ‘children’ I knew would unanimously hold on, not just to their eye teeth but their molars, their incisors and everything else in their mouth, and opt for the pleasures of home.

“I’m not a child, Mum.”

“Well I’ve booked everything. I can’t change it. So that’s the end of it.”

Why oh why? I was furious. Why did I have to live the life my parents wanted? Not wanted, determined. Dictated. My friends didn’t have to. They didn’t go away on family summer holidays. Unless it was somewhere cool, Yosemite, Mallorca maybe. Or unless they had brothers and sisters, that was different. It was possible to find holidays where there were kids of your own age. I could cope with that. The Jacks? We never went anywhere you’d find other kids. Well, not quite true. There had been Mary-Lil in the hotel in Paris, all the way from Washington. No, I should say as she instructed, all the way from Washington DC. Trouble was her father had almost caught us indulging in some pelotage, as Mary-Lil had gigglingly described it. Her French was far more advanced than mine. Anyway, that was the end of her as a distraction. The whole family had checked out the following morning. Paris dalliance dents Atlantic alliance. My mother had given me a stern talking to, that sort of behaviour is simply unacceptable, and my father something slightly less stern.

“Well I’m not coming. You can’t make me. I’m staying at home.”

My mother’s reply was almost a shout. “You ungrateful boy. I’ll speak to your father. You’re coming with us.”

“No way.”

“Jolyon, come back here. We’re going to finish this conversation.”

No way!

I slammed the door and thirty seconds later had lost myself in a mix in my bedroom, with the sound turned up to a level I knew would infuriate, cursing the scratchy fader on my piece of *** of a mixer, cursing my bad luck in having such an unbending dragon for a mother and finally just effing in time to the music.

The next morning the saga continued.

“I’ve had a message back from your father, and he agrees. Obviously we can’t force you to come with us. Not physically. But if you don’t come you’ll have to pay us back for the air ticket and the hotel room. And you’ll have to pay for yourself while we’re away. I’m not subsidising your, your rebellion.”

“That’s not fair. You never asked me if I wanted to go to Tuscany. You didn’t even tell me you were buying the tickets. And it’s not as if you’d make me pay for my food on holiday.”

“It’s no use arguing. I’ve made up my... we’ve made up our minds. If you want to stay at home you can fend for yourself.”

It wasn’t promising. It wouldn’t cost much if I stayed at home while my parents were away, just whatever it took for entertainment plus topping up my pay-as-you-go plus some occasional weed. There was plenty of food, and I did shifts as a dogsbody at the local supermarket. Specifically not Waitrose; I didn’t want to bump into my mother and her friends. But I’d need more if I went to Manchester. I did have some money saved from weekend shifts. I was trying to put together enough for a decent set of decks, eleven hundred pounds for the Technics 1210s that Dave had. I didn’t know what the tickets to Italy would cost, if my mother followed through with her threat. Money would be a problem, definitely.

But I couldn’t not go to Manchester. Missing out on the joys of Florence, six hundred years of historic tedium, was an end in itself. The chance to practise squash every day, more than I’d dreamed of. And someone to mix with, on good gear. There was no argument.

So my next discussion with my mother, when I rolled into the kitchen at midday the following morning, wasn’t an easy one. “I just can’t believe it,” she said. “You’re being absolutely ridiculous. I’m lost for words, Jolyon.” Three statements, none of them accurate, or certainly not the last. Sure enough, the words she’d lost turned up again pronto. They reappeared in Kalashnikov bursts through the rest of the day. I paid as little attention as I could, but some of the practical ones penetrated.

“And don’t expect any help from me getting you to Manchester.”

That was a blow. I hadn’t thought through the journey to Dave’s home.

“Oh Mum. At least you could give me a lift into Brighton.”

“Your father and I would be perfectly happy to take you to Gatwick with us. You can still change your mind.”

“That’s not fair.”

“It’s your decision.”

So it was a blagged lift into Brighton early the next morning, slow coach to Victoria because it was cheaper than the train, and an even slower coach from Victoria all the way to Manchester where I was met in the early evening by Dave and his father, who introduced himself as Russell.

“Well done, Jolyon. That’s a bit of a mission. Coach all the way from the south coast?”

“It was okay. I slept a lot of the way. Only trouble was, coming like this, I couldn’t bring any vinyl. Too heavy.”

“I wouldn’t worry. Dave’s getting new stuff every other day. I know because he uses my credit card. That reminds me, you owe me twenty quid, Dave.”

“I get paid tomorrow. I’ll give it to you then.”

“What work do you do?” I asked.

“Filing, tidying, general dogsbody at the local surgery. My Mum’s a doctor there.”

“She uses him if there’s a patient who’s asked for euthanasia. One look does it.”

“Very funny, Dad, very funny.”

I felt relieved. Dave’s Dad at least was a million miles from my Mum, and by the sound of it his mother was okay too.

Chapter Four

“Hey Jolyon, this way, I want you to meet someone before we head home.” It was Russell calling as Dave and I emerged from the changing rooms at the English Institute for Sport. The EIS, I’d discovered, was more or less in the shadow of the Man City football stadium.

“We’ll stop off at the canteen before we go. Sailor McCann’s there. You must have come across Sailor? The pair of you may be able to get some advice from him, routines and so on. He’s not part of the England Squash set up but he’s based here and he looks after several top sportsmen, and women. Squash is his main interest, though. It’d be worth meeting him anyway.”

“What’s he called? Sailor? Does he do white water rafting?”

“Keep any remarks about his name to yourself. You’ll see why when you meet him.”

Dave’s further information about this dude as we walked round to the canteen made me more interested. “You might have seen him at one of the women’s tournaments. He’s Zoë Quantock’s coach.”

“Zoë Quantock, flippin’ heck! The guy’s big time then.”

Russell laughed. He had apparently been a county player, strictly amateur, way back, and he was still involved in Lancashire squash. He played occasional matches, he said, for a club called the Jesters. He seemed to know a lot of what went on in the squash world.

“Zoë spent her first year here at about the same age as you. What, it must be nearly five years ago now, well before she broke through. She was already a top junior. Sailor liked the way she played. The main thing he did with her was conditioning. Relentless. But she lapped it up. Four years later, bingo, world champion. A year on from that, the start of this year, world number one.”

Anyone who knew anything about squash knew about Zoë Quantock. She had come to the attention of a wider audience too. She was invariably the player that Squash England used in its publicity, golden girl, big time glamour on court, how could anyone so lovely be so tough, et cetera et cetera. She’d quickly progressed from three lines in a bottom corner of the sports pages, the usual place for women’s and indeed men’s squash, to glam pics not far from page three.

It was the middle of the day and the canteen, adjacent to the indoor athletics track, was busy with recreational players. We picked up some drinks and Russell led us across to a table round the side where a small guy in a tee shirt and tracksuit bottoms, number one haircut, was saying something emphatically to an average looking girl in tennis gear. Nice brown legs though. She obviously spent time outside in her shorts because the brown turned pale halfway up her thighs.

“Hi Sailor,” Russell said. “Mind if we join you?”

“Russell, be my guest. This is Sarah Wilkins.” By the time he’d reached the word ‘guest’ Sailor had branded himself. He was Scottish. By the time he’d finished ‘Wilkins’ even my short sixteen years’ life experience let me conclude that he wasn’t from some poncy sandstone house in Edinburgh. Nine floors up in a Glasgow tower block was more like it.

Russell finished the introductions as we pulled up some more chairs.

“My son, Dave, and this is Jolyon Jacks, all the way from Sussex.”

“Jacks,” Sailor looked hard at me. “I know a Jacks. Your father wasn’t in the Navy, was he?”

“Still is.”

“Submarines?”

“Yes, that’s him.”

“Lieutenant Jacks, stap me vitals! I thought so. You look like him.”

“He’s a captain now.”

“Aye, he’s a good man. I’m no’ surprised.”

“Where did you know him?”

“Faslane. Mebbe fifteen years ago. I was a petty officer on The Renown. Couldn’t stand it. Got out as soon as I could.”

“He loves it. He’s due to retire next year. Says he doesn’t know what he’ll do.”

“Aye, that’s the problem for some of them.”

“How did you end up here?” Russell asked.

“End up? I used to play squash for the Navy.” A slight swelling of the chest. “Won two Navy championships. I went into the Fleet Protection Group. Then four years as a PE instructor after that. Covert forces, special techniques. Hard men.”

“That’s right. Aren’t you a black belt or something?” Russell asked.

“Aye, but I don’t use that on Sarah.”

Sarah smiled and Dave laughed. “What about on Zoë Quantock? She’s awesome.”

“Ye don’t need anything special for Zoë. Protection from her, mebbe. I’ve never met anyone so focussed. I spend more time holding her back than pushing her on.”

Russell made a joke that Dave and I were soon to regret. “These two need pushing. Could they join your light squad through August?”

I was to become accustomed to the look Sailor gave first Dave, and then me. He had blue eyes that would have appeared tough in a little old nun. Set as they were in his small, hard face, underneath his greying number one, they made an immediate statement about their owner’s personal philosophy. Compromise? What’s compromise? Giving up? Giving what? There was something that frightened me about Sailor McCann’s eyes.

“No problem. Three of the squad have dropped out. Summer holidays.” He made taking a holiday sound as acceptable as moonlighting on the dole. “It’s three times a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Nine o’clock sharp. We start at the courts, finish at the gym. Stop at one.

“And,” he looked at us, “make sure you have a decent breakfast. At least an hour before you come.”

That was the moment the squash system started to suck me in. Many, I came to learn, would be spat back out. It might only take a month. That was probably best, not too much lost, no scars. Some lasted a year; it was sad if it took that long for you to realise that you couldn’t cope. Some took even longer, before being undone by injury or the realisation that no matter how hard they tried, they had a deficit in talent.

Funnily enough, it had been Ron Clarke, the dreaded tripper, who had confirmed my taste for squash.

I had started completely by chance. In the spring following my first Senior Steeplechase, one of the girls in my house at school had challenged me to a game.

“Oh come on, Siobhan, not squash, it’s gay.”

“No it’s not. It’s a lot harder than cross country, trust me. You play tennis, don’t you? You should be good at squash. And you need to be fit.”

“Why would I want to play squash? Running around in circles in a small room.”

“Afraid you’ll be beaten by a girl?”

Well I wasn’t afraid of that. That wasn’t going to happen. That I knew.

But, oh dear, a few days later, specifically that happened. I was beaten by the self same Siobhan, who was indisputably a girl. Squash was so different from tennis, and Siobhan knew what she was doing. For one thing she kept on playing the ball into the side wall first so it went at an angle towards the front wall and ended up a long way away, too far for me to reach. Then when I stood further up the court to counter this she hit the ball high to the back. I tried hitting it to the back too but it bounced out. Aaarrgh!

That wasn’t all. I found when Siobhan hit the ball deep it was different; it caught the side wall first and ended up too close to the back for me to scoop it out. Then she’d play the ball tight to the wall so I couldn’t return it without smashing my racquet. When I fluked one close to the wall myself she unerringly picked it off with the end of her much more expensive-looking racquet, back down the wall. Where hooray, I’d miss it.

The worst part, most embarrassing, was the exhaustion. Under Sarah Bristow’s direction I could do repeat shuttles up the side of Bright’s Down off sixty seconds for twenty minutes. That was gut busting, but I could easily do 5K afterwards across the Downs. I’d done a 20K charity run and felt fine all the way through. I’d beaten the school record in the bleep test. Now as I scrambled with increasing desperation after the nasty little black ball, which Siobhan always seemed to hit to the furthest part of the court, I started to run out of strength. My legs weren’t bulky but I always prided myself on their strength. Not now. There was no better phrase, they were turning to jelly.

It was embarrassing afterwards over a can of soft drink. “So that was gay, was it? I thought you were supposed to be fit. Cross country and all that.”

“Well I need to practise. It’s different from tennis. I couldn’t get used to that shot you played onto the side wall.”

“That’s called a boast. Don’t know why.”

“A boast, huh. Maybe I’ll have a hit by myself. Practise a few boasts. Then I’ll play you again.”

I liked Siobhan but I didn’t like her next suggestion. “Not unless you admit, in the lesson tomorrow, that squash isn’t gay.”

“As long as you don’t brag about the result.”

“Well I can hardly say you won.”

The humiliation in class the next day was worse than I expected. Never mind the result. Never mind the amusement of my friends that I’d lost to a girl. I was so stiff. I’d never been that stiff. My thighs were stiff, my calves were stiff, my left arm was stiff. And these were trivial compared with how stiff I was in my bum. It was crippling. I moved around the school like a geriatric.

“What did she do to you?”

“I hear you lost to Siobhan at karate.”

“Hail the hard guy, squashed by a girl.”

“Unexplained teen suicide at Sussex school.”

“And after that shameful experience Jolyon Jacks, at the age of only fifteen, made up his mind to become a monk.”

Strangely, the monk notion would return a couple of years later, big time. But I had no idea of that then. And as for being squashed by Siobhan, in a physical sense I wouldn’t have minded, but she was a year older than me and interested in some dude in the sixth form.

We played again the following week. This time instead of a tracksuit Siobhan was wearing a tight little dress, and I had to fight to maintain a greater interest in the black ball than her white knickers. The small crowd in the gallery, mostly my classmates scenting a humiliation, became an ally: in front of them I couldn’t do anything other than try, rather than ogle my opponent. Which I knew they’d be doing from up above, the ***. At least my angle was better down here.

The result was the same. I did win a few more points, mostly with short straight shots that had the twin advantage of being too far up the court for Siobhan to reach and making her bend a long way in the attempt. I always seemed to end up behind her in the rallies. It was my first lesson in squash tactics, the most important one of all, get in front of your opponent. Not that I realised it then.

“That was a bit better,” Siobhan said afterwards.

“Oh, thanks,” I replied, “you’re hardly warmed up and I’m a river of sweat.”

“Girls don’t sweat,” she said primly. “We perspire.”

“Can we have another game?”

“Okay, but after half term. There’s a junior county weekend, and then we’re going skiing.”

The interval to our next game worked to my advantage. Another early lesson that would stand the test of time, the more you prepared the better your results. My father was home at half term. Some Navy planner must have got things wrong and let him out for a change.

“Hey, Dad, I’ve been playing a bit of squash. You couldn’t give me a lesson or two, could you?”

“Oh not squash,” my mother said. “It’s such a sweaty, proletarian little game. Why don’t you get back to tennis, Jolyon? You could still be really good at tennis.”

“Come on, Mum. Why is it tennis, tennis, tennis all the time?”

“You’re wasting your talent. Rodney Fairbanks said he’d never seen a junior hit the ball as well as you. Bar none. And you’ve no idea what pleasure it gave me when you beat Jasper von Liebig in that final. His horrible German mother, turning up in her leather trousers. Lording it all over the club.

“You’re wasting your talent, can’t you see that.”

Rodney Fairbanks was employed by the tennis club, lottery funding or something, to coach the juniors. Not my cup of tea, smooth Rodney. Nor were the other boys in the squad.

“How many times do I have to say? I just don’t like the other kids. They’re all posers.” I could have added that their parents were all posers, but that was too close to home. “And so what if I can hit better shots than them. I just don’t care. They’re all cheats anyway.”

The cheats thing was another reason I’d stopped tennis. I’d first noticed it at a big under-eleven tournament in Eastbourne. I’d been having a terrific game, a semi final, against a boy from Shropshire. Quite a few people were watching, including of course my mother. I’d won a long rally to win the first set but my opponent had called my shot out. It had certainly been close to the line but I’d seen it as in.

“That was never out,” my mother exploded. “That was your point, Jolyon.”

What the heck, I thought. It may have been out. “It’s all right, Mum. I’m okay.”

Maybe the boy from Shropshire was encouraged by this. His parents tried to shush my mother as she protested more and more loudly at his calls, some of which even I could see were ridiculous. I battled away and managed to reach match point in the third set. My opponent fizzed a ball past me and it landed on the outside of the line.

“That was out,” my mother shouted. “Well done, Jolyon.”

I was embarrassed. “No, it just caught the line, Mum.” It was lucky that she and the other parents were on opposite sides of the court.

Five minutes later I lost, to another dodgy call.

“This is ridiculous,” my mother shrieked in a manner that my opponent’s parents would have heard if they’d remained in Shropshire. “You should be ashamed of yourself.” I heard later that she’d been reported to the Sussex LTA. Not my opponent, though. What he did was the norm. The cheating took off as we got into our tennis teens. First one or two of the kids did it, encouraged it seemed to me by their parents. Then it became an epidemic.

“Well what’s this about squash then,” my mother went on in our wasting-your-talent discussion. “Why squash? Why do you care about that?”

“Squash is just a bit of a lark. One of the girls at school, she’s a county player. She persuaded me to have a game. Then she beat me.”

My father had been looking on with an amused air while my mother and I bickered. “It can’t do any harm, Shirley. And it won’t be long before Jolyon thrashes me at everything, so I ought to take advantage.”

“I don’t know. It’s such a miserable little sport. It’s for people who can’t make it at tennis. Anyone can hit a squash ball. You’ll soon tire of it, Jolyon, mark my words.”

I was to get tired that day, but not in the way my mother imagined. My father had been a good player before the absence of courts on nuclear submarines had led him instead to an obsession with working out in gyms. He was also patient when explaining things. I can remember when I was small, learning all about ships, of course, and space shuttles, and bird migration, and indeed when I was a bit older the X chromosome and the difference it makes. ‘You find the X in sex, son, and Y, Y is for willie, so to speak.’ Plus a lot of far more subtle stuff that I only started to appreciate years later when my testosterone levels had finally fallen below the teenage acne threshold.

So while we were driving to the club my father gave me the basics of squash.

“The secret of running less on the squash court,” he said, “is to be in the middle of the court, at the ‘T’, so your opponent has to run round you.”

“I’ve seen that already. I always seem to be behind Siobhan when we’re playing.”

“Well, what you’ve got to learn is to hit the ball tight down the wall. Make sure it goes to the back. Don’t hit it across the court. Straight shots good, cross court shots bad. It’s as simple as that.”

Perhaps it was the simplicity of what my father showed me that day. It really appealed to me. He hit the ball down the wall as he’d explained, and I tried to do the same. I was exhausted after just ten minutes but we played on till the lights went out.

“Well done, it’s not going to take you long,” my father said as we came off court. “Now you need to work on that.”

Two more sessions with my father cured me of any tendency to get stiff, and among other things I came to terms with the need to move away backwards after playing a shot. My father explained the rules in more detail than Siobhan had. His parting words as he headed off for a week of briefings in Portsmouth were, “Keep playing the volleys. If you can volley rather than let the ball go to the back you’ll tire your opponent out.”

It was all so simple, and so obvious. In theory. I finally managed to fix another game with Siobhan and felt excited on the day, all the way through my morning’s timetable, English and Maths, my two least unfavourite subjects. My friends were predictably mocking.

“The only lamb in history that actually returns voluntarily to the slaughter.”

“A mutton for punishment.”

“Schoolboy in bizarre assisted suicide experiment.”

“We’ll be there as witnesses. Blake has been nominated to contact the emergency services, if they’re needed.”

“When they’re needed, not if.”

I enjoyed the banter because I was confident of winning. Nervous though. It was clear that Siobhan had been playing well within herself during our first two games. How much better would she be when she was pushed? I hoped I hadn’t underestimated her.

Disappointingly Siobhan turned up in a tracksuit. I’d been imagining an improved version of the dress.

“Hi Jolyon. Cool shoes.”

On my father’s suggestion I had bought a pair of proper squash shoes. “No expense spared in pursuit of victory.”

Siobhan hit the ball dauntingly well in the knock up. Some of her friends had come along, as well as our classmates, so the gallery was full.

I started the game doing exactly what my father had taught me. And it worked. Siobhan soon peeled her tracksuit bottoms off to reveal a nondescript pair of shorts, boo. And her international class legs, hooray. At game point I hit another accurate short shot. Yesss, got you!

“Let please.”

“Uh?”

“Can I have a let. I couldn’t get through.”

It didn’t seem right but I could hardly argue. “All right. Ten eight then?”

I was pissed off, and angrily drilled her return of serve into the tin. Siobhan to serve, an opportunity gone.

Calm down, remember what Dad said. So I did and moments later won the first game. Siobhan was decidedly pink-faced too, surely a good sign. It hadn’t been easy, but I was exhilarated. It was the first game of squash I’d ever won.

In the first point of the second game Siobhan was quite far forward. I followed the usual recipe and hit the ball deep. In trying to get back she bumped me with her shoulder, sadly not one of her soft bits.

“That’s a let.” It was as much an accusation as a clarification, with Siobhan looking directly at me, hand on hip.

Again, it didn’t seem right, but I’d no experience of when lets could be claimed. I’d never seen a serious game of squash.

“Okay.”

I managed to win the replayed point, but I didn’t win another till near the end of the game. Whenever I gained the upper hand Siobhan would contrive a let. She won the game eleven five.

I had to keep my temper, I could see that. The whole thing was going wrong, made worse by cheering in the gallery, all from my friends, and all for Siobhan. Some friends. Three things on the credit side: first, my legs were still feeling good. Second, Siobhan’s shade of pink was intensifying. And third, her shapeless tee shirt was starting to get sweaty and clingy.

In the middle of the next game, the next hiccup. Siobhan made no effort to get out of the way when I was set to win the point.

“Is that a let for me?”

“Could you have reached the ball?”

“Reached it? Of course I could.”

“All right, let then.”

Keep your temper.

I did, just, and overcame what seemed to be a steady stream of injustice to reach ten eight, game ball. Siobhan’s movement had started to become laboured, and next point, hopelessly out of position, she lunged into me with her shoulder instead of making a move towards the ball.

“That’s my point.”

“Your point? What do you mean?”

The hand on the hip again. “You’ve got to give your opponent every opportunity to reach the ball. And if they’re prevented from hitting a winning shot it’s their point.”

“I can’t believe this. You’d never have got that up.”

“I was there.”

Slow clapping started in the gallery. “Surely it’s only a let, at most.”

“Not when it’s so clear cut.”

Keep your temper?

Not a chance, not this time. Ends and tethers, internal eruption, I was gone. I might have dealt with Siobhan without an audience. Normally I could deal with my mates taking the ***. Combined, the provocation was too much. I lost the third game quickly and in the fourth consistently slammed the ball into the tin, losing it eleven nil.

Match to Siobhan. To boos from the gallery I refused to shake hands and left as quickly as I could.