Therapy

computer, tapping out this. Where was I yesterday? Oh, yes. Sport.
     
    Roland says I shouldn’t do any sport until the symptoms have disappeared, with or without another operation. I’m allowed to work out on some of the machines in the Club’s multi-gym, the ones that don’t involve the knee, and I can swim as long as I don’t do the breaststroke — the frog kick is bad for the knee-joint, apparently. But I never did like working out — it bears the same relation to real sport as masturbation does to real sex, if you ask me; and as for swimming, the breast-stroke happens to be the only one I can do properly. Squash is right out, for obvious reasons. Golf too, unfortunately: the lateral twist on the right knee at the follow-through of the swing is lethal. But I do play a bit of tennis still, wearing a kind of brace on the knee which keeps it more or less rigid. I have to sort of drag the right leg like Long John Silver when I hop around the court, but it’s better than nothing.
    They have indoor courts at the Club, and anyway you can play outdoors nearly all the year round with these mild winters we’ve been having — it seems to be one of the few beneficial effects of global warming.
    I play with three other middle-aged cripples at the Club. There’s Joe, he’s got serious back trouble, wears a corset all the time and can barely manage to serve overarm; Rupert, who was in a bad car crash a few years ago and limps with both legs, if that’s possible; and Humphrey, who has arthritis in his feet and a plastic hip-joint. We exploit each other’s handicaps mercilessly. For instance, if Joe is playing against me up at the net I’ll return high because I know he can’t lift his racket above his head, and if I’m defending the baseline he’ll keep switching the direction of his returns from one side of the court to the other because he knows I can’t move very fast with my brace. It would bring tears to your eyes to watch us, of either laughter or pity.
    Naturally I can’t partner Sally in mixed doubles any more, which is a great shame because we used to do rather well in the Club veterans’ tournaments. Sometimes she’ll knock up with me, but she won’t play a singles game because she says I’d do my knee in trying to win, and she’s probably right. I usually beat her when I was fit, but now she’s improving her game while I languish. I was down at the Club the other day with my physically-challenged peer group when she turned up, having come straight from work for a spot of coaching. It gave me quite a surprise, actually, when she walked along the back of the indoor court with Brett Sutton, the Club coach, because I wasn’t expecting to see her there. I didn’t know that she’d arranged the lesson, or more likely she’d told me and I hadn’t taken in it. That’s become a worrying habit of mine lately: people talk to me and I go through the motions of listening and responding, but when they finish I realize I haven’t taken in a single word, because I’ve been following some train of thought of my own. It’s another type of Internal Derangement. Sally gets pissed off when she twigs it — understandably — so when she waved casually to me through the netting, I waved back casually in case I was supposed to know that she had arranged to have coaching that afternoon. In fact there was a second or two when I didn’t recognize her — just registered her as a tall, attractive-looking blonde. She was wearing a shocking-pink and white shell suit I hadn’t seen before, and I’m still not used to her new hair. One day just before Christmas she went out in the morning grey and came back in the afternoon gold. When I asked her why she hadn’t warned me, she said she wanted to see my unrehearsed reaction. I said it looked terrific. If I didn’t sound over the moon, it was sheer envy. (I’ve tried several treatments for baldness without success. The last one consisted of hanging upside down for minutes on end to make the blood rush to your head. It was called Inversion Therapy.) When I sussed it was her down at the tennis club, I felt a little glow of proprietorial pride in her lissome figure and bouncing golden locks. The other guys noticed her too.
    “You want to watch your missus, Tubby,” said Joe, as we changed ends between games. “By the time you’re fit again, she’ll be running rings round you.”
    “You reckon?” I said.
    “Yeah, he’s a good coach. Good at other things