Mike Read online

  It was while he was setting up the ball gun to deliver some crosscourt shots so that he could work on his backhand that Floyd had realized he was being watched. A glass balcony ran along one end of the room, and when Floyd looked up, he saw Mike staring down at him. He wasn’t particularly bothered, but he did think it was odd that someone should be there so early in the morning, and wondered how he had gotten into the building.

  The next morning Mike was there again. And the morning after that, while Floyd was gathering up balls to refill the hopper on the gun, he appeared, not on the balcony, but standing by the wall at the far end of the court.

  Floyd decided to go over and ask him who he was.

  “I’m Mike,” said the figure, looking slightly surprised, as if it was something he had expected Floyd to know. Looking closely, Floyd did have the feeling he had seen him somewhere before.

  “Have I played you at tennis or something?” he asked.

  “No,” said Mike. “I’m not that interested in tennis.”

  “So why are you here?”

  Mike did not answer.

  “Because, frankly, I’d prefer it if you went somewhere else,” said Floyd. “I’m here to practice, and you hanging around like this is kind of distracting.” He turned on his heel and went back to finish loading balls into the hopper. When the machine was ready and he was walking to the other end to continue his practice, he was relieved to notice that, although he had not heard him leave, Mike was gone.

  “You told your parents about all this?” asked Dr. Pinner.

  “I did that time,” said Floyd.

  “And what did they do?”

  “Everything.” Floyd sighed. “They contacted the police. The headmaster from the school came and talked to me and said if Mike ever turned up again I was to call him directly …”

  “And did he? Turn up again?”

  “No.” Floyd shook his head. “Dad came with me to practices after that. Mum was out of the hospital, and Mike never came back. Well … not to the gym.”

  “But … ?”

  “He started coming to matches. If I was playing in a tournament or a competition, I’d see him sometimes in the crowd, watching.”

  “And you told your parents about that, as well?”

  “Not always,” said Floyd. “Mum thought he was a stalker who was going to knife me or something. It made her really … upset.”

  “But you didn’t worry about that yourself? That Mike might hurt you?”

  “No. No, I didn’t.” Floyd couldn’t say why, but he had never thought of Mike as someone who would harm him in that way.

  “Then yesterday,” Dr. Pinner continued, “he not only came to watch a match, but walked out onto the court, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And that was the first time you realized that you were the only person who could see him.”

  “Yes.” Floyd looked down at his hands. “I’m not going crazy, am I?”

  Dr. Pinner smiled. “I don’t think so. You’re not the first person this has happened to, you know. There are lots of cases on record. They even made a movie inspired by one of them. Called Harvey. With James Stewart. Have you seen it?”

  “Who’s James Stewart?” asked Floyd.

  Dr. Pinner was about to answer when there was a soft beeping sound and he looked down at his watch.

  “I’ll tell you next time.” He stood up. “I’m going to suggest to your mother that she bring you in for three sessions a week starting as soon as possible. Would that be all right with you?”

  “Sessions?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does that mean? What do I have to do?”

  “You sit in that chair and we talk,” said Dr. Pinner.

  “That’s it?”

  “It’s usually enough.” The psychologist was moving toward the door. “If it isn’t, I may have to fall back on the magic green pills, but the talking usually does the trick.” Dr. Pinner reached the door but paused before opening it. “I meant to ask. Did he say anything to you?”

  “What?”

  “Mike. Yesterday. Did he say anything when he walked out onto the court?”

  “He suggested we go for a walk,” said Floyd. “By the sea.”

  “Anything else?”

  Floyd thought for a moment before answering. “Yes. He said there was no need to worry, because he was a friend.”

  “Well, that’s encouraging, isn’t it?” Dr. Pinner was smiling again. “Always good to know you have a friend.”

  When they got home, Floyd’s father was waiting impatiently for details of how the day had gone, and listened carefully as his wife told him about Floyd being an exceptional racehorse, and how nearly all top athletes could expect the occasional mental disturbance. Then Floyd repeated what Dr. Pinner had told him about how seeing people that no one else could see had happened to lots of other people in the past.

  “They even made a film about one of them,” said Mrs. Beresford. “It was the one with James Stewart talking to a six-foot rabbit, remember?”

  “You’re not seeing rabbits as well, are you?” asked Mr. Beresford.

  “No,” said Floyd.

  “But the story was based on a real case,” said his mother. “Everyone thought James Stewart was crazy, but he wasn’t.”

  “And Dr. Pinner says I’m not crazy,” said Floyd. “He reckons if I go to these sessions, we can find out who Mike is and then he’ll disappear.”

  “That’d be good,” said Mr. Beresford. “What happens in a ‘session,’ exactly?”

  “We talk,” said Floyd.

  “You talk? That’s all?”

  “Dr. Pinner says that’s all it usually takes.”

  “Well, I suppose he’s the expert …” Mr. Beresford pulled thoughtfully at an ear. “Did he say anything about training?”

  “He advised Floyd to go carefully for a bit,” said Mrs. Beresford. “He said he should stay in third gear until this has all been sorted out, and not push himself too hard.”

  “So we have to keep this racehorse in third gear, do we?” Mr. Beresford put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “A mixed metaphor like that’s not going to be easy!”

  “He reckons mostly I can continue as normal,” said Floyd. “I can train, do tournaments … do whatever I usually do.”

  “And what happens if Mike turns up again?”

  “If he does, Dr. Pinner says I should just treat him like I would anyone else. I can talk to him, or ignore him, or if he gets in the way or something, I can just ask him to move.”

  Mr. Beresford thought about this. “Maybe we should ease up a bit,” he said eventually. “Start a half hour later in the morning, perhaps. And we could scratch the club tournament tomorrow. It’s not as if it’s important.”

  Floyd insisted he was fine and there was no need for either of these things, but he did agree to see how he felt the next day before deciding whether or not to play in the tournament, and that he would try starting the morning training half an hour later to see if it made any difference.

  “We’ve been driving you pretty hard for a couple of years now,” said his father. “Maybe too hard. Perhaps you need a chance to catch up with yourself.”

  After supper, Floyd’s parents presented him with a blue-ringed angelfish. It was astonishingly beautiful, with a coppery body and luminous blue lines sweeping up toward its tail.

  “But I didn’t win,” he said. “I only get a fish when I win.”

  “Your father and I thought,” said his mother, “that what you’ve been through the last couple of days was a lot harder than winning any tennis match. You deserve it.”

  “We’re both very proud of you,” said Mr. Beresford. “You know that, don’t you? I don’t think either of us could have coped with what’s happened as calmly as you have.”

  Floyd took the fish to his room and began the process of transferring it to his aquarium. First, he let the bag float on the surface for a while so that the temperature of the water could ad
just to the warmth of the tank, then he tipped the bag on one side and allowed the fish to swim out. He watched as it explored its new surroundings, and came to the decision that he would train tomorrow exactly as normal.

  Whatever the doctors at the Altringham clinic might say, he knew that he felt fine. He wasn’t stressed or tired and he saw no reason why he shouldn’t continue training and playing matches exactly the way he had always. He felt inside himself a fierce determination not to let this thing beat him. He didn’t care who Mike was or what he wanted. If he turned up again, Floyd would ignore him and continue what he was doing, regardless. And he would play in the club tournament tomorrow. He would play and he would win, as he was supposed to do, with invisible spectators or without them.

  The one thing he was not going to do was let someone that only he could see ruin the plans of a lifetime.

  “So, how’s it going?” asked Dr. Pinner, when Floyd returned to the Altringham clinic two days later for his first session with the psychologist.

  “All right, I think,” said Floyd. “I’m sort of getting used to the idea, you know?”

  “Good, good …” Dr. Pinner motioned him to the armchair. “Any more signs of your friend?”

  “He turned up yesterday evening,” said Floyd. “I was playing in a tournament at the local tennis club, and he was there, watching.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No.”

  “He was just … enjoying the tennis?”

  Enjoying was not quite the right word, Floyd thought. Mike didn’t actually look as if he disliked being there—he had given a little nod and lifted a hand in greeting when Floyd first saw him—but there was no sign that he was enjoying himself. He looked more as if he was waiting for something.

  “Perhaps,” said Dr. Pinner, “the next time you see him, you could ask him to join us for one of these sessions here. Or all of them, if he’d like.”

  “Join us?” Floyd could not keep the surprise out of his voice. “Why?”

  “So we can talk to him,” said Dr. Pinner. “Ask him what he wants.”

  “I don’t care what he wants,” said Floyd. “I just need him to go away.”

  “And I think the quickest way to make that happen,” said Dr. Pinner, “will be to talk to him. So if you get a chance, please tell him he’d be very welcome—and that he’d be perfectly safe. Nothing anyone says in this room leaves it without your permission. He has my word on that.”

  Floyd couldn’t help thinking how odd it would look if he were to walk up to someone that no one else could see and invite them to a session with his psychologist. It was a bizarre idea, but then so was everything else about Mike, and if Dr. Pinner thought it would help …

  “OK,” he said. “If I see him, I’ll ask.”

  “Right. Though I doubt if you’ll actually have to ask him.” Dr. Pinner picked up a notepad and pen and lay down on a leather couch so that he was facing Floyd. “He’ll probably turn up here whether you want him to or not. Did you win?”

  “What?”

  “Yesterday. You said you’d played in a tournament. I wondered if you’d won.”

  The cat jumped up onto the couch, settling itself on Dr. Pinner’s stomach.

  Floyd had won—easily—but that was only to be expected at a small club like the Sandown. He was too busy to play there very often these days, but occasionally his father suggested he take part in a competition they were holding, and he always enjoyed being back among people who had known him all his life, who still followed his career with a proprietorial interest, and referred to him, proudly, as “our Floyd.”

  “Yes, I won,” he said, and after a lengthy pause added, “you said we have to talk in these sessions, didn’t you?”

  “That’s the general idea.” Dr. Pinner stroked the cat’s ears and it purred loudly.

  “So what do we talk about?”

  “Well, I usually let you decide that,” said Dr. Pinner, “but if nothing in particular springs to mind, how about you start with the tennis? When did it all begin?”

  Floyd had no real memories of when the tennis had begun, but he had been told that, before he was two years old, his father started teaching him how to hit a sponge ball over a piece of string tied between the dining room table and a chair on the other side of the room, using a racket with half the handle sawn off so that it wasn’t too heavy. By the time he was three, they had graduated to the tennis court in the backyard and were using real tennis balls.

  There was a tennis court in the backyard because Floyd’s parents owned a business building tennis courts—his mother ran the office while his father organized the actual construction—and throughout Floyd’s childhood, Mrs. Beresford had always made sure there was time for a little back and forth with Floyd at several points during the day. Then, when Mr. Beresford got home from work, he would take his son down to the court and together they would flick balls at each other over the net, seeing how long they could keep a rally going, seeing if they could do a rally with only backhands, or only forehands, or only volleys.

  Floyd had loved it. And he was good at it, as well. Astonishingly good. And his parents watched his progress with delight and considerable pride.

  At the age of five, they entered him in his first tournament at Sheffield’s Sandown tennis club. The man organizing the tournament laughed when they said they wanted Floyd’s name down for the Under-10s competition. The boy was still so small he could barely see over the net, and the man thought there must have been some mistake. Mr. Beresford assured him that there wasn’t and pointed out that there was no rule saying you had to be more than five. Only that you had to be under ten.

  Floyd’s opponent laughed as well when he saw him, but he stopped laughing once the game had begun. Floyd played with an intense seriousness, and a disconcerting ability to put the ball in exactly the place his opponent was least expecting. It was only a little club tournament, but Floyd played three matches that day and won them all.

  As a reward, his parents took him to a pet store and told him he could choose anything he wanted. To their surprise, Floyd asked if he could have a fish, and chose a creature of dazzling yellow and blue that the assistant said was a cherub. As he paid for the fish—and the tank and the gravel and the air pump that went with it—his father promised to buy Floyd another fish every time he won a competition, and his mother said in that case they would soon need a bigger tank.

  “Was she right?” asked Dr. Pinner. “About needing a bigger tank?”

  “Oh, yes!” Floyd smiled. A picture of his room at home flashed into his mind. There were five tanks now, all much larger than the one his father had bought originally, and all teeming with fish—guppies and loaches, scissortails and bitterlings—the living tracery of ten years of victory on the tennis court.

  In any event, Floyd did not have to invite Mike to the next session with the psychologist at Altringham House. He simply turned up, as Dr. Pinner had suggested he might.

  Floyd had spent most of that session describing how his tennis career had unfolded so far. He had sat in the armchair and told Dr. Pinner how, when he was seven years old, his father had brought in his first professional coach—old Mr. Palliser—and how these coaching lessons had grown longer and more frequent. First a midweek coaching hour had been added, which took place after school, and then an additional session on the weekend.

  By the time he was thirteen, Floyd’s schedule had developed into the full-blown routine of a professional athlete. Each weekday he would be up at six and out on the court by quarter past. In winter, or any time it was too wet, he and his father would drive to an indoor court in the gym loaned by a private school two miles away and do their training there. Floyd practiced his serves, played a few rounds of flash tennis, and then spent the remaining time returning the lobs, backspins, and volleys that his father fired at him from the ball gun.

  After two hours, there was just time for a quick shower and some breakfast before bicycling to school. Two days a week
there was another two-hour session on the courts after school, along with some weight-training. On Wednesdays there was a session with his new coach, Mr. Ableman, and on the other two days Floyd went swimming because it helped with his fitness and flexibility.

  It sounded, Dr. Pinner commented, like a lot of work. Floyd agreed, but it was work that had paid off. At thirteen, he had won his first international tournament in Lisbon. A year later, at the European championship in Stuttgart, he made it through to the quarterfinals, and the following January at the Orange Bowl Championship in Florida—the world championship for Under-18s—he got through to the third round before being knocked out by someone almost five years his senior.

  Now the main target in Floyd’s sights was the U.K. Junior Championship at Roehampton, and despite his age, he was confident he would win. He would take the Under-18s national title, leave school, turn professional, and then …

  “And then what?” asked Dr. Pinner, lying on the couch, idly pulling the ears of the cat on his stomach.

  “And then … well … Wimbledon … ,” said Floyd.

  “That’s the dream, is it? To play at Wimbledon?”

  “Not play at Wimbledon,” Floyd corrected him. “Win.”

  “And you think you can do it?”

  Floyd had been about to reply that he knew he could when he heard the sound of movement. Turning, he saw Mike sitting at the window. His black coat was trailing on the floor, his chin was in his hands, and he was staring intently at Dr. Pinner.

  “He’s here?” said Dr. Pinner when Floyd told him. He pushed the cat to the floor and sat up. “Where?”

  Floyd pointed to the window seat.

  “And what’s he doing?”

  “He’s not doing anything. He’s just sitting there, looking at you.”

  “Well …” Dr. Pinner stood up and walked over to his desk. “Shall we ask him?”