Captain's Day (11 page)

“
What?” said Darren.

“
Grover's wife! She hasn’t got any tits!” He quoted from memory, “Grover, Betty. Nike Sweaters, bust 32, A Cup. Betty Grover hasn't got any tits, Darren!”

“
I beg your pardon!” came an outraged voice from behind him.

Tobin wheeled round. Standing there was Millicent Fridlington, her body quivering with indignation, her face absolutely livid.

His mind fully occupied with getting Darren's artificial breasts positioned correctly, followed immediately by the realisation that Betty Grover had no breasts to speak of and therefore couldn’t have done to Grover's sweater what Grover had alleged they had, Tobin had failed to notice Millicent enter the shop. When he did, courtesy of Millicent’s outburst, he knew immediately that he was in trouble. Big time. If it had been a male member whom he had just informed that Betty Grover had no tits he might have got away with it, and even some of the lady members might not have been too concerned, especially the ones who did have tits, indeed they might even have been pleased; but it wasn't a male member, it was that bloody dragon Millicent Fridlington, the wife of Mr Captain!

“
S....Sorry, Mrs Fridlington,” Tobin stammered. “I didn't see you there.”

“
I would have thought that was entirely obvious,” Millicent stormed.

“
Or I would never have said it.”

“
Oh, so if I hadn't been here it wouldn't have stopped you saying that horrible thing about poor Mrs Grover?”

“
Wh….what?”

“
Or fondling that young boy in that disgusting manner, like some perverted paedophile?”

By this time Tobin was floundering like a freshly caught mackerel in the bottom of a fishing boat. “Wh….what?” he stammered. “No. I mean….well it just slipped out, Mrs Fridlington, I didn’t mean anything by it. Of course Mrs Grover has got tits....breasts….bosoms. Not that I go around looking at women’s....And I wasn't fondling Darren, I was just....”

Millicent interrupted him, raising her hand like a particularly officious traffic policeman. “You can save your ridiculous excuses for my husband. Although I doubt very much it will do you any good.” With that she turned on her heel and walked out of the shop, a far happier woman than when she had walked in. The opportunity to get rid of Tobin had presented itself. It would be taken, and without delay.

Garland, Harris and Ifield reached the top of the hill at the third and started the descent that led to the hollow in the fairway some hundred or so yards away. All three had hit decent tee shots and fully expected to find their balls on the fairway, although Garland's shot had been a little farther left than he had intended, and with the bit of accidental slice he usually put on the ball he thought he might just have ended up in the fairway bunker placed there for that very purpose. On the walk to their balls Ifield and Harris conjectured on this likelihood. “I wonder if the gentleman is in the bunker,” said Ifield, “or if the bastard is on the fairway?”

In fact, when they arrived in the hollow Garland was neither.

“
That's odd,” said Garland. “I didn't think I was all that far off line.”

“
Must have got a bad kick,” said, Harris. “Threw the ball into the rough probably.”

The three of them searched around in the long grass between the fairway and the boundary wall but without success, except that Ifield found a ball he had lost there the last time he played, which he said was 'just his bloody luck', and the five minutes allowed by the rules for searching for a lost ball were almost up and the frustrated Garland was about to set off on ‘The Green Mile’, the long and lonely walk back to the tee to play another ball, when Jason coughed.

It wasn't a very loud cough, not much more than a clearing of the throat, but it was loud enough to attract Garland's attention.

Making as little noise as possible Garland crept over to the wall and peered over the other side. His luck was in. Had he been a few yards farther on or back Jason would have seen him and escaped, but the boy was directly in front of him, and before he could make a run for it Garland grabbed him by the hair.

“
What have we here then?” he said, in triumph.

“
Ow, you're hurting me!” protested Jason, squirming and trying to unclamp Garland's hand from his hair. “Let me go, you’re sodding hurting me!”

“
Shut it you little toerag,” said Garland, tightening his grip on Jason’s locks. He dragged him bodily over the wall, took him by the scruff of the neck and frog-marched him over to the fairway where Harris and Ifield were waiting with interest. “The little sod’s pinched my ball,” he explained to them.

“
I haven’t and you can’t prove it,” said Jason.

Garfield grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him round. “Empty your pockets!”

“
I'm going to report you for child abuse. You’re not allowed to do things like that nowadays, you’re not even allowed to touch me.”

“
Shut your ugly little cakehole and empty your pockets!”

“
No, and you can't make me,” said Jason, defiantly, jutting out his bottom lip.

Garland shook him violently. “I said empty your pockets you little twat before I empty them for you!”

There was no way Jason was going to empty his pockets, his mobile phone was in there for a start, and he certainly didn't want the man getting hold of that, adults could be mean, and this one looked very mean and he might damage it just for spite or even pinch it. He put his hand in his right hand trousers pocket and pulled out the golf ball. Garland snatched it off him and identified it as his own. “Just as I suspected.” He glared at Jason. “This is mine. You’ve just nicked it off the fairway.”

“
I thought it was lost.”

“
You'll wish you were lost when I've finished with you, you horrible little turd.”

“
What are you going to do with him, Mr Vice?” asked Harris.

Garland thought for a moment. “Have either of you got any rope on you?”

“
Christ you're not going to hang him are you?” said Ifield, not completely convinced he was speaking only in jest. “That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?”

“
Don't tempt me, Justin. No, I'm going to tie him to my trolley until we get round to the ninth if I can find anything to tie him with, then turn him in.”

“
I've got a spare pair of shoelaces in my bag,” offered Harris.

“
They'll do.”

Mrs Quayle, Mrs Rattray and Mrs Salinas were by now nearing the thirteenth green.

“
Eight ounces of cheese,” said Mrs Salinas. “Two ounces of....”

Mrs Quayle, a stickler where the accuracy of recipes was concerned, butted in. “What sort of cheese?”

“
Sorry Miriam, I forget exactly the cheese that Delia stipulated.”

“
Blast.”

“
It will need to be a mild cheese, though. Nothing too overpowering. Certainly not parmesan or a blue cheese. I used Wensleydale.”

“
Oh Harold and I went there a few weeks back, Wensleydale,” said Mrs Rattray.

“
Beautiful, isn't it,” said Mrs Quayle.

“
Absolutely lovely,” said Mrs Salinas.

Due no doubt to being distracted by the sight of Carter being chased by the teenager with the enviable penis it wasn't until he was approaching the second green that Armitage realised he hadn't eaten the space cake.

Armitage, although he had reached his thirty fifth year some months ago, had not until the previous week, and unlike the vast majority of people of his age, ever experimented with drugs. It wasn't that he had anything against drugs - he didn't mind other people taking them, if that's what turned them on that was their affair, let them get on with it and good luck to them - it was just that he had never felt the need of them. And this state of affairs would probably have remained for evermore had he not visited his brother Brian in Nottingham the week previously.

During the visit Brian had asked him if he had ever had a space cake. Armitage hadn't even known what a space cake was and if he’d had to hazard a guess would have said it was part of the rations carried by astronauts, or maybe some sort of confectionary with a space in the middle of it like a doughnut. However on being informed by Brian that it was a chocolate brownie fortified with cannabis Armitage said that no he hadn't, nor did he want to have one thank you very much. Brian said that was the way he himself had felt about space cakes until he'd been persuaded into trying one by a friend, and that following on from it, and whilst under the influence of it, he had played the best game of snooker in his life. He had put it down to the relaxing influence of the cannabis freeing up his cue action to such an extent that it had the effect of making even quite a difficult pot seem easy. “The pot made it easier to pot,” he had remarked at the time.

Armitage, a keen snooker player himself when not on the golf course, but about as skilled a practitioner of the sport as he was at golf, which was somewhere between distinctly average and not very good at all, wondered if a space cake might do the same for him. There was only one way to find out.

When he returned home the following day, armed with one of the half dozen space cakes generously donated by Brian, he made the local snooker club his first port of call. After eating the space cake and giving it half-an-hour to get fully into his system, as directed by Brian, he then played a frame of snooker. The result was nothing short of miraculous. All his senses were now enhanced, everything was much bigger and brighter. He felt so light; not light-headed – heavier-headed if anything – but light on his feet, as though walking on air. In his hand the cue didn't feel more like a broom handle than a snooker cue, as it usually did, but like a magician's wand, and like a magician's wand it soon began to weave its magic. He couldn't credit just how much the relaxing influence of the space cake had improved his game. The impossible shots became merely difficult, the difficult shots considerably easier, and the easier shots a walk in the park. His previous highest-ever break, compiled over twenty two painstaking minutes, five of which had been spent in the lavatory where he’d had to go to relieve himself due to the excitement of getting past twenty for the first time, had been thirty one, and was only that high because he’d fluked a red off three cushions when he was on fifteen. He passed that humble score in two minutes flat. He didn't achieve his first-ever fifty break, but only because he got a little too cocky and tried to pot an almost impossible pink off two cushions, left-handed, when the brown or blue would have been much a much easier option.

A cautious man by nature, Armitage wondered if perhaps the whole thing was a coincidence, and that he might have performed just as well even if he hadn't had the space cake, that it had perhaps acted as a placebo, so the following day he went back to the snooker club and played a frame without having the advantage of a space cake inside him. He was absolutely terrible; the wand had disappeared, the broom handle was back in place. However a space cake soon put that right, as after re-racking the balls and playing another frame he found that he was as good as he was the day before, better in fact, as on this occasion he cut out the fancy stuff and made a break of seventy eight. There was no doubt about it then, a space cake, simply by relaxing you and heightening your senses, did absolute wonders for your snooker.

It wasn't long before Armitage got to wondering if what held good for snooker might also hold good for golf, which was why he was now approaching the second green having just realised he’d forgotten to eat one of the space cakes before setting out on his round. He now reached into the ball pocket of his bag, in which he had stowed a couple of the cannabis-loaded sweetmeats, took one out and quickly ate it. Suitably charged he now looked forward to breaking the course record.

“
Wasn't it Macbeth?” said Mrs Quayle?

“
Hamlet, I think,” said Mrs Salinas.

“
It was certainly one of the tragedies. I'm sure it was Macbeth.”

“
No, it was
Wharfedale
,” said Mrs Rattray, rejoining the others from the private world in which she had been dwelling for the last minute or so.

Mrs Quayle and Mrs Salinas looked at her in surprise. “What was?” asked Mrs Quayle.

“
Where Harold and I went the other weekend. It wasn't Wensleydale, it was Wharfedale.”

“
Oh that's very nice too,” enthused Mrs Salinas. “And less sheep.” She thought for a moment before continuing, “Of course they don't have the cheese there. If you want beauty
and
cheese you have to go to Wensleydale.”

“
Or Marks and Spencers,” said Mrs Quayle.

“
Or Marks and Spencers,” agreed Mrs Rattray.

9.40 a.m.

S Cuddington (24)

G Treforest (24)

R Jones-Jones (24)

The next three gentlemen to grace the first tee with their presence at Sunnymere that day were Sylvester Cuddington, Ged Treforest, and Rhys Jones-Jones. Like many club golfers throughout England’s green and pleasant land, and probably every other land where golf is played, green, pleasant or otherwise, the three friends invariably played together in club competitions. What was different about Cuddington, Treforest and Jones-Jones however was that in addition to sharing each other's company they also shared afflictions, although not the same one - Cuddington was a hunchback, Treforest had a club foot, whilst Jones-Jones, perhaps appropriately in view of his surname, had a stutter - and it was these physical handicaps, along with their respective long golf handicaps, that had drawn and bonded them together. Gallows humour is by no means a stranger to golf clubs and collectively the three were known throughout the club as 'Casualty'.