Nice Jumper (27 page)

‘Barry, Roy,’ I said, picking my ball up. ‘I’m going in.’

‘You’re going in where?’ said Barry and Roy.

‘In from the course. Away from here.’

‘Oh,’ said Barry and Roy.

And that was all it took.

As I walked back to the car, I kept checking behind me, but nothing exploded. Odder still, no one struck me down into a blazing pit to roast for Satan’s delectation.
It was all so easy
. Moreover, it felt
good
.

Journeys back from tournaments with my dad invariably involved an extensive post-mortem – me berating my fortune and self-discipline, my dad trying to help in whatever psychological way he could, while simultaneously dropping subtle hints about a return to college. This one was an anomaly. Why break the peace inside my head with inane chatter? For once, it felt
glorious
to shut the sodding hell up, and it was only as we passed back over the Nottinghamshire border that one of us finally punctured the silence.

‘I’ve got a spare ticket to a concert tonight, if you fancy it,’ said my dad.

He could have said it was for David Byrne. He could have said it was for Val Doonican. He could have said it was for an inanimate carbon rod. By then, it didn’t matter. I was his.

Once unlocked, the floodgates slid open with ease. David Byrne begat Neil Young, who begat Sonic Youth, who begat (much to their own chagrin, I’m sure) Smashing Pumpkins. Within a month, I’d quit my job at the theme pub, enrolled for a Media Studies course at South Nottinghamshire College, and raided every vaguely bohemian, rebellious record collection I could lay my sweaty, deprived mitts on. I’d shut music out of my life for the entire period that most people spend discovering it, and now I had some serious catching up to do. Having spent the previous few months ricocheting between the personalities of a seventeen-year-old (in the pro shop), a thirteen-year-old (in the clubhouse) and a thirty-five-year-old (on the course), it came as a comfort to find out that, with music by my side, I could be seventeen all the time.

A jumped-up little git, in other words.

For so long, I had wondered if I was the one who was
wrong
for feeling uneasy about the prospect of wearing baggy slacks and ridiculously tight polyester sweaters. I had seen the half-mocking, half-bewildered looks on my friends’ faces and fretted about the doomy, out-of-kilter songs my dad made them endure as he drove us to tournaments. I had puzzled over whether it was just me who put his sun visor on, looked at his reflection in the mirror, and thought, You look a bit of a tosser, don’t you? I had asked myself if it was me alone who heard echoes of the Third Reich in the ritual of sucking up to an estate agent from Southwell and calling him ‘Mr Captain’. Rock music helped clear up these issues for me, reassured me that I might have been right after all, and left me a more self-assured individual. But it did more than that, too. It made me a missionary for its cause.

Recently, I’ve gone back to some of the songs that soundtracked the transitionary period of my life that followed my seventeenth birthday. The vast majority sound bloody awful – the equivalent of several heavy pieces of furniture falling down some stairs while a pissed-off teenager shouts about the eternal injustice of being made to tidy his bedroom. The odd few still sound terrific, but even those are somewhat different to how I remember them. Sonic Youth’s ‘Teenage Riot’ now sounds like a song about a teenage riot, where I could have sworn it used to be about a teenage riot at a golf club. And someone seems to have doctored my
vinyl
copy of Soundgarden’s ‘Rusty Cage’ and edited out the bit where the golf officials get strung up by their legs from the iron bars.

Back then, it all sounded like the Truth or, better still, My Truth. Music had shown me the way, and I knew it could show others too. It was just a simple matter of conversion.

‘What do you reckon?’ I asked Ben and Jamie, as my copy of Smashing Pumpkins’s ‘Gish’ kicked into gear in the antiquated tape player that Fez kept in the basement of the pro shop.

‘Sounds like a couple of warlocks fighting to the death over a flank of dead cow,’ said Ben.

‘I know. Brilliant, isn’t it?’

‘No. It’s shit.’

I knew I’d get them hooked in the end, if I persevered. The problem was that they obviously didn’t think I was serious. I could see their point: for the last few years, they’d known me as Tom, their golf buddy. A slightly obsessive golf buddy, with curiously un-competitive parents, perhaps, but, all the same, not one given to launching into anti-corporate diatribes inspired by the lyrics of New Radiant Storm King. Acknowledging this, I decided I needed to go to extremes and show my commitment to the cause in every facet of my appearance. I let my hair grow, and bought the most profane band T-shirts I could find, wearing them on the car ride to the golf club and
showing
them off in the general vicinity of the place for as long as my courage would allow, before hurriedly changing into my golf clothes in the locker room.

‘WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOUR HAIR?’ asked Fez as I scuffled into the shop one day. ‘YOU LOOK LIKE DOUGAL FROM
THE MAGIC ROUNDABOUT
.’

‘I’m growing it,’ I explained. ‘It’s much cooler to have long hair. Haven’t you
seen
Evan Dando?’

‘EVIL DILDO? WHO’S HE?’

‘
E-van Dan-do
. He’s the lead singer of the Lemonheads. I’ll do you a tape of their album if you want.’

‘NEVER HEARD OF THEM. WHY ARE THEY CALLED THE LEMONHEADS?’

‘They just are. It’s far-out.’

‘SOUNDS PRETTY FUCKING STUPID TO ME.’

‘Do you like my T-shirt?’

‘“TOO DRUNK TO FUCK”. WHY ARE YOU WEARING THAT?’

‘It’s a Dead Kennedys T-shirt. They were an eighties anti-fascist punk band from San Francisco. You should hear them. I think they’d change your life.’

‘WELL, I’M NOT SURE I’D WANT TO GO ROUND WEARING A T-SHIRT SAYING THAT. IT’S LIKE GOING ROUND WEARING A T-SHIRT SAYING “MY NOB HAS SHRIVELLED UP”.’

By now I had started college again and bought the full student lifestyle package, with its accompanying set
of
slightly arty mates: a group of people I was quick to portray to my golf friends as at least six times more fascinating than it really was. This included Matt, Richard and Karina, all of whom – though known to get mildly annoyed from time to time – might be surprised to find themselves classed as ‘raging, anarchic punk subversives’. With them, I would attend gigs at Nottingham’s Rock City, a venue most notorious for the adhesive quality of its floor and the sadism of its bouncers. ‘Gigs’ here would normally consist of an indistinguishable sonic mudstorm played by men in plaid shirts, topped off with a face full of sweat courtesy of the crusty with the arse-length dreadlocks who had been standing directly in front of us. This, the four of us agreed, was Living.

I was, in brief, an indie elitist tosser of the highest order. I had seen a couple of rancid, whinging scuzz-rock bands, and bought the badly made, off-the-shoulder bootleg T-shirt, and as a result I thought I was Johnny Rotten, acerbically spitting my rage at everything bourgeois and bloated. What did these pathetic little golf people think they were doing? I scoffed to myself from the front seat of the Sphincter, surveying the scene as I hared across the clubhouse car park to the strains of Mudhoney’s ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’. What were they gaining with their big cars and afternoons off, and motorized buggies, and healthy lifestyles? Didn’t they know there was
more
to life waiting out there?

Confusion was my weapon, and I wielded it in the general direction of the golf course like a giant, out-of-control combine harvester, stopping only to replace my divots and ensure that my polo shirt was tucked in. As my hair crept below ear-level, I could see the strange looks intensify. Passing my driving test helped immeasurably, too. What is this …
thing
, with its screeching brakes, complaining music and elongated speeches cribbed from arthouse movies, and why is it corrupting our green Utopia?, I could see them thinking. Well, either that, or, Who’s that self-righteous little tosser?

‘Didn’t get in ‘til three a.m. last night,’ I told Nick Crawley, a nine-handicap landscape gardener, by way of greeting, as we teed up together for the St John’s Bowl. ‘Went out to see Pavement last night. They were, y’know, really
angular
.’

‘Oh,’ said Nick Crawley.

My sole ally seemed to be Robin, who, complete with flowing locks, now looked more like the lead singer of Soul Asylum than Chesney Hawkes. He probably didn’t know who Soul Asylum
were
, of course, but I could live with that, since I sensed an anti-establishment thunder within him that I could feed off.

Together we would delight in arriving at Cripsley via the back entrance, adjacent to the thirteenth tee, in our ‘disguises’: Robin in ripped jeans, backward baseball cap and oversized trainers, me in Dinosaur Jr T-shirt, cut-off Rupert the Bear trousers and Doc
Martens.
There we’d wait, outside the iron gate, feeling like Leisure Rebel and Alterno-Man, until a group of members arrived on the tee. No matter how many times we acted it out, the scene that ensued was always the same, and just as much fun.

The voice would pipe up as we clanked through the iron gate.

‘Er, boys?’ it would say.

‘Yes?’ we would reply, continuing towards the clubhouse.

‘I suggest you stop right there. This is a private golf club, don’t you know?’ it would say.

‘We’re fully aware of that, sir,’ I would say.

‘Well, I suggest you leave as quickly as possible,’ it would continue, and, if it was feeling particularly haughty, ‘and trundle on back to whatever scumhole you crawled out from.’

‘Well, sir, we would do exactly that,’ Robin would say, putting on his poshest accent, ‘were it not for the fact that we’ve paid our membership fees and very much planned to have a game of golf here today. If you’d like to verify this fact, I suggest you look on the list of past winners of the club championship. On it, you’ll find the name of my friend here, Tom Cox. It’s mounted above the men’s bar door, if you’re in any doubt.’

This would provoke a stutter at best, a stunned silence at worst, and we’d move on, past the bushes, through to the eighteenth tee. Once there, we’d
quietly
erupt, high-five one another, and throw a couple of balls from the spud bag back over the bushes onto the thirteenth fairway, just to confuse the old buggers even more. Then we’d tear along the path that ran adjacent to the first hole, scramble up the locker-room stairs to get our clubs, clang our metal locker-doors shut with a force that would wake the dead (or at least some of Cripsley’s more senior members), run-walk over to the first tee, and play some of the best golf of our life. Sneering, punk-rock golf, punctuated with elaborately constructed fantasies about thrashing Lee Westwood and his hi-tech weaponry in front of the national junior selectors while armed with only a hickory-shafted forties seven-iron, then turning down the chance to play for England as ‘a statement’. Golf that, by rights, should have been out fighting a revolution, directing a student theatre group, or raising funds for sick animals.

Jesus, we were pretentious.

¹
My family and their friends didn’t use phrases like ‘a swing like whipped cream’, but, nevertheless, this was how I imagined it.

WHEN I WAS
seventeen years old, there was a chillingly real possibility that I knew Cripsley Edge better than I knew myself. Whether I was in or out of love with it at the particular moment you asked me, what I couldn’t tell you about the place could have been written on the bottom of a tee peg. After four years as part of the scenery, I’d hit my ball into every dyke, nest, swale, trap and furrow that nature could fling at me. I knew every short cut, slope and hiding place. I could have told you which particular dignitary’s wife was jealous of his curvy young mixed-doubles partner, pointed out the precise gorse bush the senior vice-captain favoured when stopping for his mid-round piss, and briefed you on the exact time on a Friday that the head greenkeeper and his wife usually chose to stage their weekly quarrel. If a scrap of gossip was skittering through the undergrowth, the chances were I’d be on a fairway,
under
a tree or upside down in a holly bush somewhere within earshot. I knew all the rumours. The one about the Reg Varney lookalike who offered the clubhouse barmaid eight hundred pounds to come back to his place to look at his ‘etchings’. The one about the application for the government grant to extend the clubhouse, and its subsequent rebuttal, owing to the golf club committee’s refusal to abolish the men-only bar. The one about the millionaire official who, charged with the responsibility of getting a bell to alert players that the eighth fairway was clear, chose not to put his hand in his pocket, but to ring round local schools for cast-offs instead. I could have told you it all.

What I couldn’t have told you, though, was how to make a dignified path from the tool shed at the back of the eighteenth green to the car park, via the main clubhouse door, while not wearing any trousers.