Nice Jumper (24 page)

Stegley met me and immediately saw a younger version of himself. Personally, I couldn’t quite see it. Not only did my new employer have a Ford Cortina driver’s moustache, pudding-bowl hair, at least six stone of excess blubber and an annoying habit of singing Christmas carols into your face in their entirety, he was also the special breed of cretin who doesn’t just say ‘pacifically’ when he means ‘specifically’ but bristles with pride about it. In short, I’d have rather been adopted by Jim Davidson.

‘Listen, Tom. I’ve been sixteen. I know how it is. To be pacific, I’m saying you’re young, you’re horny, your
mind
isn’t quite on the job. You don’t want to be cleaning cutlery. You want to be out on the town, sniffin’ around. But one day you’ll be the one telling some other lackey to clean the cutlery. And how will you feel then? You’ll feel like me. And that feels good, let me tell you. Stick with me, fella. We’re going to make you a star. You could be head waiter by the time you’re thirty.’

Prior to my first day at the Cresthouse, I’d envisaged myself sashaying into a room full of inferior beings, boggling their minds with my tales of golfing excellence, then moving on, safe in the knowledge that I’d made a necessary pit stop on the road to fame and expended precious little unwarranted energy in the process. What I hadn’t envisaged was being turned into someone’s
project
. What did the guy see in me? I was sullen, monosyllabic, and smashed an average of three plates per shift. Yet here I was, my hours getting ever longer, leaving less time for parrot bonding and golf. This couldn’t go on. But I’d promised my parents I’d be working until at least the end of February, so resigning was out of the question.

‘You enjoying working here, Tom?’ enquired Stegley, as I slouched inefficiently against the kitchen hotplate, tugging at my bow tie.

‘Well, I—’

‘I knew you were! That’s a lad. Keep up the good work!’

There was only one thing for it: I was going to have to get myself fired.

This wasn’t as easy as it sounds. In Stegley’s eyes, a smashed plate coming from me wasn’t so much a costly error as a vital stumble on the rocky road to catering utopia. Try as I might, I couldn’t do a thing wrong. If a sous chef told me, ‘Cheer up! It might never happen!’, and I replied insolently, ‘It already has: my hamster was run over by a JCB this morning,’ Stegley would choose that exact moment to hotfoot it in the direction of a burning sausage on the opposite side of the kitchen. If I hid the head chef’s favourite ladle in the fork drawer, I’d return three minutes later to find it returned to its rightful place in the kitchen. If I offended customers, or used condiments to daub modern art expressions on their tuxedos, I was let off like an overzealous child at a family barbecue.

Gathering that my actions were invisible to the people around me, I opted for the indelible mark of ink, graffiti-ing Stegley’s beloved Carvery Diary with entries as diverse as: ‘3 p.m. Watch
Lovejoy
with Norwich City Reserve Squad’ and ‘4.20 p.m. Make Sheffield Town Hall burst into tears’. Nobody seemed to notice.

Then, just as I was at my most worn down, I saw my chance.

I knew I recognized the curly-haired, Jewish-looking man with the John Lennon glasses from the moment
he
walked in, but it wasn’t until I spoke to him that I realized he was David Baddiel. This was back around the time of the first series of
The Mary Whitehouse Experience
, long before Baddiel became a reluctant lad icon, but I knew him all right. I’d seen his show – I think I was waiting for a video of the 1988 USPGA Championship to rewind at the time – and even laughed at it. But I wasn’t going to let that stand in the way of my masterplan.

‘Can I take your order? Our starters today are the soup and the prawn cocktail,’ I said to Baddiel and his dining partner.

‘I’ll have the soup please,’ said Baddiel.

Obediently, I transported Baddiel’s order into the kitchen, opened one of the huge tureens on the worktop and slopped a couple of ladlefuls of steaming vegetabley slush into a bowl. I then opened one of the small fridges used primarily for cream and slotted the bowl on the top shelf. After that, I went behind the glass cleaner and began working on my backswing.

My problem recently had been a tendency to let my hands slip slightly behind the ball at the address position. So, keeping an eye out for chefs, I went to work on that. I felt I had the trouble truly licked after ten minutes or so, and returned to the soup.

I dipped a finger (scrupulously clean: don’t worry, David) into the brown murk. It was edging beyond
lukewarm,
verging on deathly: perfect, in other words. I gave it a stir anyway, for good luck. Making double-sure that Stegley was at his favoured front-desk post, only three or four yards to the right of Baddiel’s table, I prepared a starter for Baddiel’s friend, returned to the restaurant floor, set the trap, and snuck away to wait for the inevitable.

It took about thirty seconds.

‘Er … Waiter?’ said Baddiel.

Ever alert, I scuttled back over to his table. ‘Yes? How can I help?’ I said, ensuring this was loud enough for Stegley to hear.

‘Er, this soup you’ve brought me is cold.’

‘Really,’ I said. ‘Are you sure? This really is extremely good soup!’

‘It really is very, very cold. It doesn’t taste like it’s been heated up at all!’ exclaimed Baddiel, getting slightly upset now.

‘Actually, you’re right. I know! I’m really sorry! Let me get you some more!’

Seconds after I’d crashed through the heavy kitchen doors, Stegley was on me – just as I’d planned.

‘What was all that about?’ he asked.

‘Cold soup,’ I replied.

‘Yes, I realize that. Why is it cold? The soup in the tureen isn’t cold, is it?’

‘No.’

‘So why is it cold?’

‘Because I left it for a few minutes while I was practising my backswing.’

‘Practising your what?’

‘My backswing. For golf.’

‘What the hell were you doing that for when you should have been working?’

‘I was bored.’

‘You haven’t got time to be bored. Do you know who that guy is you’ve just given cold soup to?’

‘Yeah, he’s David Baddiel. Off the telly.’

‘And do you know what happens when we serve cold food to people off the telly? They tell other people off the telly how rubbish our restaurant is, and then nobody off the telly ever comes here.’ He crouched and put an arm around me, lowering his voice. ‘Now – I don’t want that to happen again. But, having said that, I’d also like to congratulate you. That show of his is crap. Load of bloody student rubbish!’

As he turned to walk away, still chuckling, he remembered something. ‘Oh, and Tom? I’ve put you down for an extra eight-hour shift next week. Hope that’s OK.’

The following day, I admitted defeat, and handed in my notice.

The important thing now was keeping my parents under the impression that I was still in gainful employment for as long as was humanly possible. It wasn’t really that I needed somewhere warm to eat and sleep, more that I needed a taxi driver for competitions, at
least
until I gained my driving licence later (hopefully) in the year. The subterfuge was elaborate, but I slipped into a routine easily enough. Five days a week, my dad would drop me at the trade entrance of the Cresthouse. And, five days a week, I would wave goodbye, count to twenty, then nip around the corner to catch the number thirty-five. My ‘shifts’ lasted exactly as long as I fancied staying at Cripsley, plus an hour for the bus journeys. Clubs weren’t a problem; I kept them up at Cripsley, in my locker.

For the moment, money was tight, but I knew I could survive. I had roughly seven hundred pounds saved. Allowing for board, entrance fees and petrol money, I reckoned that would enable me to remain a man of leisure until around early May, at which point I’d look for another waiter’s position, hopefully without career prospects. The season would start in earnest in just over two months. The chart on my bedroom wall, where I’d neatly (I normally have the handwriting of a five-year-old, but for some reason not when it comes to golf planning) mapped out next year’s fixtures, beckoned. Soon we would see if all this practice was worth it. I still had Cripsley virtually to myself. Ken was still on his perch (on the first fine day of spring he would mysteriously fly away for ever). The other juniors seemed to be permanently indoors, giving me a head start. The quiet was deafening. I wore big trousers and felt invisible and picked up my practice balls with a
plastic
tube that went ‘klop’. The spikes on my shoes made a satisfying clack as I walked across the car park asphalt. I could hit my six-iron like Davis Love III. I was a liar, a charlatan and a quitter.

Golf would never feel so special again.

I WAS THE
first to spot the Mercedes behind us, as we descended the hill to Mapperley Golf Club, the venue for the 1992 Nottinghamshire Junior County Trials. The way it swerved from one grass verge to the other could have passed for ballet in some far-off, apocalyptic era. Later, my dad would lower his voice in a cod-mystical way and say that as soon as he saw the car in his rear-view mirror, he had sensed that something terrible would happen. Not a premonition, just a recognition of bad driving, I realize now. At the time, however, I didn’t care. I had my own premonition: I was going to be in that car before the end of the day, even if it meant deceiving my parents even more than I had done already.

Long before the driver’s face began to crystallize, I knew there was only one man who could be behind the wheel. Since the demise of the old pro shop, Nick
Bellamy
had been an enigmatic figure in my life, slouching into view in all the least likely places to boast of implausible golfing and sexual accomplishments, then vanishing for weeks, even months, on end. Was he still a member of Cripsley? What precisely did he do for a living? The answers to questions like these were no less elusive than the meaning of life itself.

He certainly wasn’t here to play in the junior county trials: he was too old and, besides, he’d always lampooned the county golf scene. So what
was
he doing here? I sneaked another look out of the back window. The Merc’s front bumper was now a matter of inches away from the Sphincter’s rear one. Arms flailing, Nick was moulding his features into a familiar expression – familiar, because it was the one that Nutty Graham, the man in the dirty overcoat who stood outside my school gates soliciting pupils for spare milk, used to adopt just before shouting, ‘Full cream! No semi-skimmed today!!’ at passers-by. I knew he was trouble (Nick, that is; Nutty Graham was harmless by comparison). If I was going to consolidate my winter’s practice in this, the first important tournament of the season, I’d do well to keep him at fairway’s length. Today, after all, was what I had been working so anti-socially for, what I had been waiting virtually for ever for. The Official Dawn of New Tom. The exact thing that I’d made my fingers bleed and served David Baddiel cold soup for. From here to my thirteenth and
final
British Open victory, in the summer of 2022, this was a job, not a hobby, and I needed pointless distractions like I needed a future waiting on tables for a living.

‘Hi, Nick!’ I said, bounding across the car park. ‘Nice wheels. Wanna caddy for me?’

Over the winter, as a supplement to my practice routine, I’d pored over the printed works of history’s greatest thinkers: Jack Nicklaus, Nick Faldo, Seve Ballesteros, Tom Watson. Mindful of the very determined way in which these men had sacrificed their adolescence in order to realize sporting perfection, I had begun to see myself as the archetypal loner: the kind of kid who would quite happily turn down a ride in a flashy car or an invite to a happening party for the chance to practise his mid-length bunker shots in a hailstorm. What I hadn’t realized was how easy it was to see myself this way when nobody
was
offering me a ride in a flashy car or an invite to a happening party (or a ride in a happening party or an invite to a flashy car, for that matter). Now that someone
might
have been about to, I had a choice: knuckle down like a total square, or piss about like any normal sixteen-year-old? Having always believed in going with your gut feeling, I took marginally under three seconds to opt for pissing about.

I played the first nine holes as if I’d spent the winter working preternaturally hard on my badminton, then
things
really started to come apart. While Nick regaled me with details of Trevor the DJ’s latest public urination and mimicked my playing partners, I made an abortive attempt to compile some sort of half-respectable score, then began to rationalize my ineptitude: the course was badly maintained, with the architectural intricacy of a sheep farm. The county trials was a pointless event. Regardless of who did what on the day, everyone knew that the top places in the squad would go to Worksop players. I’d probably make the team regardless, as an also-ran, but if I was truly self-disciplined in my role as loner, I shouldn’t care either way. ‘Making it’ to me didn’t mean craving the approval of the sycophantic Notts Union of Golf Clubs in-crowd; it meant achieving a handicap of zero – the elusive scratch – by the end of the year.