Nice Jumper (22 page)

Our nickname for Nigel, who was sharp-featured, was ‘Fez’. He looked more like a stoat than a ferret, but ‘Stoaz’ didn’t have the same ring to it. We called Nigel ‘Fez’ behind his back until the end of his first fortnight at Cripsley, by which point Fez’s Fezness had become so extreme that calling him anything else to his face required a level of mental effort we didn’t have the stamina for.

‘Hi, Fez!’ blurted Mousey one day, as we piled into the shop.

‘WHAT? WHY ARE YOU CALLING ME THAT?’ said Fez.

‘’Cos Tom says you look like a ferret,’ said Mousey.

‘Bollocks, did I!’ I said.

‘THAT’S NICE. I FEEL SO MUCH BETTER ABOUT MYSELF NOW,’ said Fez.

‘We don’t mean it in a horrible way,’ I said, cushioning the blow.

‘HOW CAN YOU CALL SOMEONE A FERRET AND NOT MEAN IT IN A HORRIBLE WAY?’

‘Some ferrets can be nice. People have them as pets. We just like to give everyone nicknames. It’s affectionate, really. We’ve got one for Steve, too.’

‘WHAT’S THAT?’

‘Squiz.’

‘WHY?’

‘’Cos he looks like a squirrel.’

‘DO YOU THINK SO?’

‘Well, he’s got ginger hair.’

Gradually but irresistibly Fez developed until the only thing Nigel had in common with Fez was the body they shared as a vessel. Nigel continued to go about his business of impersonating a human bouncy castle for the egos of Cripsley’s adult membership, but the instant they left Fez would come out, slurping at his upper lip, sniffing the air malevolently and evaluating which members of Cripsley’s bridge team he’d most like to ‘DO IT’ with. The Cripsley juniors might have frequently talked in mock lustful terms about Mandy and Cripsley’s younger lady members, but for Fez no decrepitude, political inclination, age bracket or brightly coloured waterproofs could represent a barrier. One of his favourite hobbies was ‘Grunking’, an act which involved his desk, the open drawer of his till, and a series of violent pelvic thrusts. Grunking usually took place not long after a highly regarded member of the ladies’ committee had left the shop. Fez was never anything less than ferocious while grunking, and excitement was displayed in quantity rather than brute force. Between twenty and thirty grunks usually meant that Molly Ripdale, a 73-year-old
cataract-sufferer
who captained the ladies’ greensome team, was in the vicinity.

‘I’D SHOW HER A THING OR TWO ABOUT MIXED DOUBLES!’ Fez would snarl.

A moment later the door would open and Molly’s husband, John, would arrive, bringing news of an unfortunate tangle with a conifer to the rear of the thirteenth tee, to which Nigel would make his immediate, mundane, ear-splitting return.

‘DON’T WORRY, JOHN. GOOD SCORE, THAT – IN TODAY’S CONDITIONS!’

As far as Fez was concerned, it wasn’t so much that we’d created a monster, more that we’d been perceptive and benevolent enough to put a name to an inner beast struggling for expression. At the exact same rate that Fez flourished, however, Nigel’s luck ran out. As Steve settled into a work rate more becoming of a club professional, Nigel began to slave harder and longer for his forty-eight pounds a week. When he did get to play – usually for no more than half an hour, in the kind of light where it was quite possible to mistake anything from a hedgehog to the Starship Enterprise for a flagstick – his golf became a comedy of terrors, encompassing the whole spectrum of afflictions from ‘the shank’ (a shot notorious for flying off the club destructively to the right, at right angles to the target) to the ‘Oh shit, I’ve just hit the clubhouse roof’ (a shot
notorious
for instilling fear into the hearts of the bridge team). Additionally, he drove his dad’s Vauxhall Astra into a lamppost, causing several thousand pounds’ worth of damage, and his childhood sweetheart dumped him, complaining of the late hours and the smell that lingered on his clothes after a twelve-hour-day dripping petrol into rubber grips in the club repair room.

Naturally, we all found the whole thing heartbreaking, and did our best to help limit the damage Nigel could do to himself.

‘I MAY AS WELL JUST CHUCK THIS THING IN THE BIN!’ cried Nigel after yet another shank, casting aside his favourite club, a deleted, highly sought-after 1987 model sand iron forged half from copper, half from titanium.

‘I’ll give you a fiver for it,’ I said, making a swift detour from the opposite side of the fairway.

‘YOU MAY AS WELL. IT’S NO GOOD TO ME.’

‘OK. Let’s call it two pounds fifty.’

Yet there was only so much we could do. With Nigel programmed to self-destruct, it would have been impossible to resist the temptation to take advantage of the gaps in his concentration every so often. And besides, Fez, when around, would actively encourage it. There was no escaping the truth: Fez was a more fun person to be, and be with. While Nigel would have never opened up a tab for the junior section behind
the
cash register, Fez told us to go ahead and help ourselves. With Nigel on patrol, the shop’s one remaining inner sanctum, the club repair room, remained strictly off-limits for juniors. With Fez at the helm, it became the number-one party venue.

The dangers would arise when a lightning character change became necessary. As the bell on the shop door tinkled, Fez would race away, employing the back staircase in the same way that Superman employs phone booths, and leaving us alone with an array of solvents, solutions, concoctions and obscure implements worthy of Heath Robinson’s tool shed. By the time Fez reached the top of the stairs, he would have settled into the persona of Nigel again. His inherent patience and the insatiable whims of his customers meant we could find ourselves alone in the repair room for anywhere up to an hour. It wasn’t long before we began to experiment. What would we get if we poured this sticky stuff into this acidic stuff and garnished it with this dusty stuff? we wondered. The answer was always the same: A big load of sticky, acidic, dusty stuff. But that didn’t discourage us from producing several gallons of it.

It was Ashley who happened upon the blowtorch. We didn’t even realize that it
was
a blowtorch at first, I don’t think; it just looked like something good for pointing at people. The fact that fire emerged from it was a bonus in every way, initially just as a prop for
deranged
cackling noises, and then for full-blown impressions of Arthur Brown. It wasn’t until our third session with it that anyone actually caught fire.

Nigel had been upstairs at the time, listening to Magda Norris complain about her new six-wood and the trouble she was having potty-training her grandson. I had been standing with Ashley and Mousey, observing as Jamie used the blowtorch as a device to enhance the telling of a ghost story. The story was one we’d all heard before, but with a slightly different theme. Jamie had just got to the bit where the driver finds the hitchhiker’s jacket on the gravestone, when I noticed the golden flicker in his hair. What’s funny about watching someone’s head catch fire is how long it takes them to notice, hence the first instinct isn’t always to shout, ‘Watch out! Quick! Your hair’s on fire!’ so much as to think wryly, Isn’t that weird? His hair’s on fire, yet he’s still telling that ghost story, as if nothing’s wrong.

‘Jamie. There are orange things coming out of your hair. I think they’re flames,’ I observed, finally.

As Ashley and Mousey began to beat Jamie’s head with a tea towel, I decided it was my job as junior captain to take the situation into my own hands, which is exactly what I did. I did it by going into an unbridled panic and shouting ‘Quick!’ and ‘No!’ and ‘Get some water!’ Then I remembered: at the top of the stairs, I’d seen a fire extinguisher. I’d always wondered what it was for. Now I knew.

As I hurtled to the rescue, hydrant at the ready, I congratulated myself on my quick thinking and pragmatic approach in a crisis. Jamie would thank me for this later, and the outcome could be a more symbiotic edge to our golfing rivalry. There was just one slight problem: I’d never operated a fire extinguisher in my life. Still, it couldn’t be that difficult, I surmised. After all – wasn’t the thing designed for situations when a few vital seconds could make the difference between a full head of hair and first prize in a Duncan Goodhew lookalike contest?

I looked down and assessed my options.

The extinguisher had been constructed with physics professors in mind. It appeared to be a matter of releasing the nozzle on the left, and pushing the button on the right, but what did the nozzle in the middle do? And what was that twiddly thing for? I vaguely remembered someone on TV saying something about not pulling something when using a fire extinguisher or something else would explode in your face. I wished I’d been listening harder when they said it. I took a wild guess, and pushed the button on the right.

A drip of water eased out of a hole and plipped onto the floor in front of me in slow motion.

I looked up. My friends were staring at me quizzically. As far as I could tell, Jamie’s hair had been fire-free for several moments.

These were the slipshod days that other teenagers spend on street corners. Though we spent as much time at Cripsley as we ever had, we played golf infrequently, and disdainfully, unappreciatively. Whole weeks were frittered away in the shop, filled with countless Cokes and Mars Bars on the tab, impressions of Mousey (some days we were so bored even Mousey did impressions of Mousey), Eight-iron Tennis, and the kind of teenage playfighting that starts in hotheaded frustration and ends in twice as much hotheaded frustration. Golf had never been something we were openly proud of, but until now neither had it been something we actively scorned. What brought about the change in attitude? Was it that we were now on holiday from school, and some of us had been relieved of its trials for ever, and access to the course was unlimited, so golf had lost its mystique? Or had my post-Par-adise disenchantment been infectious?

Whatever the case, I knew I was letting myself down. Suddenly, even my parents seemed more enamoured with the game than me.

‘How did you play today? Any good?’ my dad would ask, as he picked me up in the Sphincter in the fading light.

‘All right, I s’ppose,’ I would answer sheepishly, thinking about all those five-irons I could have been hitting while I was making prank calls to the international operator.

I felt like a fraud. Essentially, my desire to be the best golfer ever wasn’t any weaker than it had always been, so why couldn’t I summon the discipline? Had I forgotten about that first British Open victory? No. So why couldn’t I leave my friends in the shop overdosing on sugar and lethargy and spend the afternoon on the practice fairway? It wasn’t even as if the atmosphere in the shop was stimulating, or exciting (at best, it was sluggish and anarchic). Would my friends respect me any less if I gave it a miss? Probably not, in the long run. So, why?

In the autumn, I was due to start taking my A levels. I didn’t particularly want to take my A levels. I’d agreed to do so only to placate my parents, in the aftermath of GCSE results that probably wouldn’t have been noticeably worse if I’d recruited a selection of plant life to sit the exams in my place. Getting down to some further education would keep the folks off my back, and give me chance to retake my failed Maths GCSE, which I needed to pass in order to become a run-of-the-mill club professional, if I ever had to fall back on that (I hoped not). My college had been selected with two criteria in mind: proximity to Cripsley’s first tee, and proximity to Cripsley’s bottom practice fairway. On my day of enrolment, I timed the walk from the college gates to the pro shop. It took me nine minutes, going at a good clip, which I figured I could live with.

As the beginning of term loomed, golf miraculously regained its importance. Out of the blue I was once
more
playing like my life depended on it, notching up three home victories in the final weeks of August and a couple of top fives in Midlands junior events. Within the space of a few rounds, I remembered that I was an extremely good player, in the grand scheme of things, whether I was worthy of Par-adise and Worksop or not. I was sixteen. I had a handicap of three. One digit lower, and I’d be eligible for the regional qualifying rounds for the British Open. Two weeks before my college education started, I’d be defending my club champion’s title, as favourite, with at least four of my friends snapping at my heels.

What happened next couldn’t have been less convenient if it had been orchestrated by a committee set up precisely to bring about our downfall.

You might say we deserved it, of course. Setting fire to one another’s hair and corrupting an innocent club professional’s employee is no way to go about your business as upstanding members of a private golf club, and I concede that in some ways we needed to be taught a lesson, if only to remind us to get our minds back on the game. But, to our knowledge, nobody on the club committee knew what was going on in the pro shop, beyond the fact that we spent an unhealthy amount of time in it. And anyway, if they did, that wasn’t what they decided to punish us for.

No. They decided to punish us for playing
too much
golf.

The jibes started coming thick and fast in the weeks leading up to the club championship. ‘Don’t you lads ever go to school?’ carped Steve Berry, a locksmith, from the sixteenth green, at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon. ‘It’s not surprising you won the tournament, when you’re up here all hours of the day,’ griped Clark Allydyce, from the green of his twenty-eighth hole of the morning. ‘One day you’ll realize what it’s like to go to work. Then it will hit you that these were the best days of your life, and you’ll be sorry,’ lectured Ernie Files, sipping a midday gin and tonic on the clubhouse veranda. ‘Don’t you have homes to go to?’ huffed Jack ‘Net Man’ Mullen, as he reluctantly gave up the spot in the practice net that he’d occupied for the preceding two hours. As the prospect of another junior victory in the club’s most important event drew closer, the undercurrent of bitterness in these comments turned into an overcurrent, until it was obvious to all of us: at least half of the adult membership would be happier people if we didn’t win.