Nice Jumper (6 page)

On my first week of work experience, I found out: more pizza boxes, lots and lots of club shafts without heads, a couple of porno mags, and some wire wool. I found this out because my first job of the first day was to clear the place out – a task which, from what I could estimate after an hour of separating tee pegs from half-eaten Kit Kats, had last been attempted at some point during the summer of 1947. I half expected to find the skeleton of the last work-experience boy in one of the cobwebby cupboards, still glued to the fatal Kit Kat.

Next came my lesson in club design (Mike filed away at an ancient five-wood; I caught the wood shavings in a small bucket). But, finally, it was time to play. That is, Mike, Nick, Mousey and Roy went out to play the first eleven holes and the eighteenth, while I stayed back, manned the till and listened to the echo of their laughter as they strode euphorically towards the first green. I wondered how this was going to help me win the United States Masters.

Day two started with a jolt. Arriving with the intention of having words with Mike about my ‘training’, I was confronted with Nick, sitting on the counter, fingering a packet of Benson and Hedges. He seemed to be making a beeline for my crotch, so I, in turn, made a beeline for a set of Spaldings I’d been eyeing up on the other side of the room. ‘Where’s Mike?’ I ventured.

‘Oh, didn’t he tell you? He’s off for the next two days, playing in a tournament in Middlesbrough,’ said Nick. ‘It’s my turn to be your daddy now,’ he added with a cackle.

I did my best impression of someone whose heart wasn’t making a dive for his stomach. How could this have happened? If Mike was going to Middlesbrough, why hadn’t he asked me to caddy for him? With his powerfully coiled backswing and my astute course management, we could be an unbeatable team. Obviously there’d been some sort of mistake.
He
couldn’t do this to me, could he?

I checked Nick’s face for signs of a wind-up. Nothing. Was that the trace of a smirk? No – it was just a malicious grin. Mike had let me down once and for all, and for the next couple of hours, until Roy rolled in for his 9.45 lesson, I was stuck here. I shivered.

‘OK. Let’s see it.’

Clearly he wasn’t wasting any time. Resigned to my fate, I reached for my belt buckle.

‘Your swing.’

‘Eh?’

‘Show me your swing, Tom. Show me your
swing
.’

For the rest of the morning, the two of us went at it tirelessly – in the practice bunker, in the cellar, in front of the shop, behind the shop. Me in front of the pro shop mirror, Nick behind me, making miniature adjustments to my hand action. Roy arrived, and swiftly departed for his ten o’clock teacakes, and we barely noticed. By lunchtime, my new swing was buffed to perfection: my shoulder turn was redoubtable, the club was no longer hooded on my take-away, and my wrists were working in unison, hitting against a strong left side. I had a new mentor now. I couldn’t decide which was more wrong: the teachings of Mike Shalcross, or my assumptions about Nick. Without Terry and Trevor, Nick was about as dangerous as a children’s TV presenter.

After four hours, I was finally permitted to hit a shot – though ‘hit’ isn’t really the right word, taking into account how sweetly and lightly it glanced off the club-face. From what I could work out, the place it landed was somewhere between John o’Groats and Iceland. Elevated by the knowledge that if I could just remember thirteen swing thoughts all at the same time I could repeat this performance flawlessly, I was in a state of rapture.

Afterwards, while Nick nipped over to the men-only bar to prise Roy from an insistent teacake, I sat alone with a can of suspiciously chicken-vindaloo-flavoured Happy Shopper lemonade and drifted into a flawless reverie. My eight-iron to the final hole of the 1993 British Open came crisply into focus – the easy, wide backswing, the unhurried downswing, the compressed strike, the high flight … So crisply into focus, in fact, that I completely missed the tell-tale screech of the Austin Allegro’s brakes outside. My first hint that I was in the presence of Mad Terry and Trevor came with the slamming of the shop door and the barked instruction, ‘Hide!’ Before I’d had chance to see the eight-iron shot’s third bounce – the one where the backspin kicks in and it screws back down the sloping green towards the hole – I found myself hunching under the cash desk.

‘Where’s Nick?’ hissed Trevor.

I told him.

‘Give me the keys. Now!’ hissed Trevor.

I reached up to the counter, found the keyring and slid it over to him. He locked the door. I scanned the surroundings, immediately registering four pairs of legs: mine, Trevor’s, Terry’s, and Greg Norman’s. Greg Norman wasn’t actually in the room with us, but his promotional cardboard replica was. Further inspection of the room revealed two more legs, pale and apparently female. Where had these come from? Had Terry sneaked them in in his voluminous ski jacket? I wondered if they were attached to a body, and, if they were, how I hadn’t noticed it before.

If you ignored the sound of Terry chewing Greg Norman’s cardboard ear and the distant thwack of ball against practice net, we were engulfed by silence. After what felt like several hours of this, I resolved, as acting shop manager and sole Cripsley member, to take decisive action. I did this by staying very still and silent under the desk while trying to stop my leg from shuddering.

‘
Boyyys
.’

The voice seemed to come from outside the door.

‘
Boyyys
.’ Louder and more severe this time.

‘Shit,’ hissed Trevor.

‘
Boyyys
? I know you’re in there,
boys
. You forget,
boys
, that the professionals’ shop car park is clearly visible from my upstairs window. I know this is where you go. I’ve seen the things you do here. Now,
boyyys
, come right out and explain to me why—’

‘Go lay an egg, you old bag.’

‘—you’ve just driven my wheelie bin several hundred yards down Cripsley Drive.’

There came a pause, during which I heard two sounds – teeth masticating cardboard, and something soft and squishy, up in my ears, drowning out rational thought: my heart. It just couldn’t seem to find its moorings today.

‘Now,
boyyys
, you may not know me, but I’m very dear friends with the club captain,’ declared the voice. ‘I know you’re in there, and though I might not know all of you, I certainly know one of you. Richard Coombs, can you hear me? I know you’re in there.’

At this, Trevor and the mystery pair of legs erupted into giggles. Richard Coombs was one of the junior section’s posh kids – he attended the local private school, seldom took advantage of his membership at Cripsley, probably thought ‘anarchy’ meant turning up with less than the regulation amount of spikes on his golf shoes, and would probably spontaneously transmogrify into a lemon meringue if the likes of Terry, Nick and Trevor so much as exhaled in his general direction. Moreover, he definitely wasn’t here.

She blabbered on. ‘… and you’ve got a choice, Richard. You can come right out here, pick my litter up off Cripsley Drive and return the wheelie bin, or I can tell the captain about your little game.’

Finally, we heard her retreating footsteps, followed
shortly
by Nick’s approaching ones. I picked myself up off the floor, inconspicuously, careful to be the last to do so, and properly identified Trevor, Terry, and the owner of the legs, a stick-like, blank-eyed girl with the translucent-yet-unremarkable complexion of an
Addams Family
extra.

‘What the fuck was all that about?’ asked Nick, as Trevor let him in.

What I had been witnessing, I discovered, was the aftermath of a game Nick had devised called Granny on Wheels. I listened as Nick, slightly miffed not to be included in his own invention, outlined the rules.

Granny on Wheels didn’t actually require a granny on wheels, or even a granny. In fact, I couldn’t really see where the granny bit came in at all, but I wasn’t going to tell Nick this. Granny on Wheels, he explained, could only be played on a Tuesday, when the residents of Cripsley Drive, the affluent road that ran parallel to the course, left their wheelie bins out for that week’s refuse collection. Wheelie bins, which had been introduced by the council the previous year as a fuss-free alternative to traditional, stationary bins, had already provided countless hours of revelry for the teenagers of the East Midlands, inspiring such games as Death Race 2000, Dalek Dodgems, and Drop the Local Sissy in the Wheelie Bin (Upside Down). Nick’s game was considerably more sophisticated, since it required the competitor to edge his Austin Allegro up the
pavement
until its front bumper was resting on the bin, then, more carefully and slowly still, use clutch control and subtle steering techniques to edge it out into the open road. The rules, after this, became more open-ended. In order to complete Granny on Wheels successfully, the competitor could choose from a number of equally tempting options, including finding a steep gradient down which to release the bin, nudging the bin into the path of an oncoming vehicle, shunting the bin into a drive several yards away from the one belonging to the original bin owner, and – simple but classic – stamping your foot down abruptly on the accelerator and sending the bin hurtling down the road ahead of you. The winner was the one who came up with the most innovative way of dispatching the bin, or made the most mess.

In this heat, it seemed, Trevor, as designated driver (from what I could gather, Trevor, Nick and Terry shared the Allegro – I can only assume they ‘acquired’ it together, each assuming equal responsibility, and thereafter agreeing upon joint ownership), had manoeuvred the Granny on Wheels into the path of an oncoming cement truck, which had duly dispatched it into a ditch without so much as a swerve of wheels or shriek of brakes. Satisfied with their afternoon’s work, Terry, Trevor and their gothic friend headed for the pro shop to bring Nick news of their triumph, but somewhere on the way found the bin’s owner
on
their tail. ‘It was bloody terrifying,’ Trevor recalled. ‘One minute, there was only a squirrel in my rear-view mirror. Next minute, there’s that fat woman from
Carry On Matron
, waving a huge stick at me.’ Whether this really was ‘that fat woman from
Carry On Matron
’ remains to this day very much up for debate, but Trevor’s imagery left none of us in any doubt that it had been a wise move to duck into the pro shop as swiftly as possible.

As Nick and Trevor guffawed, Terry masticated enthusiastically and the goth did her best to look more cheerful than Christopher Lee’s manic depressive granddaughter, I sensed a personal dilemma arising: one of those situations where, purely from participating in group laughter, you’ve been half accepted into a social circle, but need that one final push, the perfect audacious comment or gesture. I quickly gathered some options.
So, Nick. That delayed wrist action you were showing me was really cool
. No. Nick was with his street mates now – he didn’t want to talk about golf.
Trevor, baby. I hear you were caught urinating once in a nightclub. Can we be friends?
Come
on
. I told myself to think, quick. I thought. I came up with blank. I thought again. A brief anecdotal lull swiftly turned into a pivotal silence, all eyes on me to break the deadlock.

‘I dare you to go back.’ A voice said this, though it didn’t seem to belong to Nick, Terry, Trevor or Gothilda. It sounded a bit like my voice. Or, rather, it
emerged
from the same place that the words I spoke normally did, but I didn’t feel it come out.

Silence returned. Terry, for the first time, put Greg Norman’s head to one side.

‘Whaddayousay?’ asked Trevor.

‘I said, “I dare you to go back.”’ Definitely my voice this time: brittle, diluted.

‘The little squirt’s got balls the size of lemons,’ said Nick, badass again now.

There was a pause, as a silent jury drank me in.

‘OK, OK,’ said Trevor. ‘We’ll go back. She doesn’t scare me. I’ve seen scarier old bags in my tea. We’ll go back, sure.’

‘Yeah,’ said Nick, reading Trevor’s thoughts. ‘But there’s just one condition …‘

‘Right,’ said Trevor. ‘She wants her wheelie bin back, so I think under the circumstances, Tom, it’s the least you can do to give it to her.’

From where Trevor, Terry and I crouched in the ditch with the wheelie bin, we were afforded a first-rate view of the driveway of the house belonging to the woman who might have been the woman from the
Carry On
film. From what we could see so far, there was no sign of life, unless you were of the opinion that three garden gnomes and a porcelain duck represented sentient beings. The wheelie bin rested in the ditch with us, where Terry and Greg Norman amused
themselves
by sifting through its contents. (‘Wicked! This month’s
Cosmopolitan
.’) Nick and Gothilda watched from the pro shop, a hundred yards or so away. The five of us waited, as a dog walker faded into the distance. I didn’t recognize him, but I felt I might have done. That was the thing about the residents of Cripsley Drive: even if they weren’t members of the golf club, they always looked as if they should have been.

As I waited for the coast to clear, my attention kept returning to a concrete nymph at the front of Mrs Carry On’s house. Something disturbed me about it – not just the fact that it was hideous and tasteless; something else, beyond that. Something about its outstretched pose. The nymph – a singularly unhappy nymph – seemed to be searching with its arms for some invisible object: the very object, perhaps, that would restore its happiness.

Suddenly, I knew what I had to do.

I sauntered out into the open, looking about as cool as it was possible to look while dragging a four-foot-by-two portable refuse unit in your wake. I took a single look behind me – Trevor was giving me the thumbs-up, while Terry and Greg remained submerged in
Cosmopolitan
– but other than that, I was in a cocoon of concentration that even Jack Nicklaus might have found a little on the intense side. I peered down a mental tunnel at my target. My thoughts were occupied by two things, and two things only: nymph and wheelie
bin.
Nymph. Wheelie bin. Nymph. Wheelie bin. Two inanimate objects with gaping holes in their essential make-up that only I could simultaneously fill.