Nice Jumper (7 page)

Five minutes later, as we performed a lap of honour in the Allegro, I admired my work. The bin had been too cumbersome to fit on the nymph’s outstretched arms, but with it on its head the nymph looked somehow more human and contented. Returning to the scene of the crime hadn’t been part of the original plan, but a slight uncertainty as to whether our adversary had witnessed my brazen vandalism led us back for fear of anticlimax: it was important that Mrs Carry On knew precisely who she was dealing with. You might not think it possible to fit five lanky, wriggling adolescents, a full-size golf bag, and a life-size cardboard tour professional into an Austin Allegro, but you’d be wrong, particularly if two of the adolescents happen to be sticking their legs out of the side windows. By the time we’d screeched up outside Mrs Carry On’s drive, executed a handbrake turn, sounded Nick’s customized Dukes of Hazzard horn and jeered obnoxiously (I don’t remember what we shouted; it’s not normally important in these situations, provided you shout
something
), she was probably quivering with terror behind her Laura Ashley curtains, vowing never to mess with
us
again.

‘We underestimated you, Tom,’ declared Trevor, as
we
hurtled towards our next assault on the dreary adult society that sought to repress us.

Doing my best to blank out the image I’d seen a couple of seconds earlier through the rear window – of a rather confused elderly Asian gentleman puzzling over why anyone would want to adorn his prize statue with an oversized hat – I concluded that it would hardly be in the spirit of the moment (or, for that matter, of my burgeoning popularity) to bring up the likelihood that we had defaced the wrong driveway.

Once again, the Cripsley Law – commit a tiny misdemeanour and get severely bollocked for it, do something really mischievous and get away with it – prevailed. As Nick had predicted, we never saw Mrs Carry On again, and heard no sign of a repercussion from the direction of the captain and committee. Either the sheer unlikeliness of our behaviour was making us invisible, or the adult membership were making notes and stockpiling our crimes for rainy day retribution. Whatever the case, we decided there could be no harm in continuing to take advantage of the situation. Now we started to feel properly invincible. Two days after Derek Plunkett, a moonfaced ten-handicap electrician, nipped to the pro shop toilet and Nick replaced the dozen brand new Maxfli balatas in his bag with hollow practice balls, Plunkett arrived at the pro shop for his next game as jolly and credulous
as
ever. When one of Mousey’s ‘HELLO! …
twat
’ greetings came dangerously close to becoming a ‘
hello
… TWAT!’, greens committee chairman Pete Churchley’s ear canal seemed miraculously to fill with cotton wool. Then there was the day when the ladies’ vice-captain walked blithely through a daily pro shop game of Eight-iron Tennis (objective: to throw your eight-iron hard enough at your opponent to make them die) as if Nick and I were ghosts that her rational golfing brain refused to process.

My paranoia about Mousey’s role in the shop hierarchy, incidentally, turned out to be premature. In the end, the truth was disappointingly straightforward: Mousey spent his school lunchbreak cycling down to McDonald’s for Nick, Mike, Trevor and Terry; as payment, he received their wisdom and personal guidance. Granted, he got the odd free Chicken McNugget, but I liked to think that my initiation rights had involved a greater level of daring and ingenuity.

My ‘work experience’ continued. Over the remainder of it, I discovered that the pro shop is a bad place to learn how to become a golf pro but a good place to learn the art of fencing with snapped club-shafts. The days were balmy and long, filled with handbrake turns, Big Macs and apple fights in the neighbouring orchard. Back from Middlesbrough, Mike Shalcross, away from his role as club careworker, was a less than effective disciplinary influence, and
quick
to pick up the rules to such shop pursuits as Tarzan (a climbing and bombing game, involving concealing oneself among the club racks on the shop ceiling), Thief (one competitor attempts to take money out of the till before his opponent has the chance to shut his hand in the drawer), Catch, Fucker (one competitor belts two-hundred-yard four-iron shots while his opponent stands twenty yards in front of him attempting to catch them) and Meths Gun (a self-explanatory squirting game). Roy surfaced only intermittently, instructing me to clean an old set of clubs or sweep the doorstep, then vanishing in the direction of the practice fairway.
¹
Goths were nowhere near as prevalent as I’d been led to believe from Jamie’s estimation; when they did surface, Nick asked me to keep a lookout while he retired to the cellar with them to work on his ‘follow-through’. After school, Nick and I were joined by Ashley, Bushy, Ben Wolfe, Mousey and Jamie. Alienated by the cold stares, rigid dress codes and stilted small talk of the clubhouse, Cripsley’s junior section made the pro shop its official base.

The unruliness rarely stopped after that, but my work experience did. I signed off by breaking one of
the
windows in the club repair room in a turbulent satsuma fight with Ashley. I knew I’d get away with it. Nick blamed the incident on ‘a thick bird that flew into the window’. Roy, who was just on his way out, seemed to accept this, and then I was free. Estimating that Mike’s decision not to pay me for my two weeks of graft could only have been an act of pure forgetfulness, I stashed a box containing a dozen Tour Edition golf balls in my bag, locked up, looked out onto another gorgeous evening in my adolescent Utopia, and homed in on a muffled desire on the back shelf of my mind. There was something I had to do, which I’d been forgetting to do for far too long. Something I knew was as essential to my everyday existence as eating and sleeping but which I’d somehow neglected.

I needed to play golf.

¹
This behaviour was not exclusive to my work experience: even when I
wasn’t
working in the shop, Roy had a habit of instructing me to sweep the doorstep, then vanishing.

AS A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD
, I might have ceased caring about school, but I was still aware of the need for survival and the importance of an artfully chosen schoolfriend. I knew the rules, and I knew that, ultimately, all those hundreds of personalities I saw in the playground boiled down to two clearly defined categories: the kids who were good at football or fighting, and the kids who weren’t.

With the kids who weren’t good at football or fighting, I entered into a mutually beneficial business arrangement, where, in exchange for the vicarious thrill of sitting next to someone who was half-decent at football and fighting, they let me copy their homework, with the underwritten clause that I was allowed to pretend not to know them at breaktime. With the football kids, I tried half-heartedly to cling to some tenuous secondhand aura of cool as my credit rating dwindled
–
I hadn’t been in a fight since the second year, my interest in football had been on the wane since Mark Walters left Aston Villa and evening golf meant I found myself excluded from most after-school gossip – and my mates began to address the issue of exactly what they were gaining from their friendship with a golfing weirdo who couldn’t quote from the best slaughter scenes in
Robocop
.

Gary McFarlane was different. Gary wasn’t good at football, fighting
or
homework, and he hadn’t even
seen Robocop
. Miraculously, though, the fact that he studiously avoided physical activity of any kind, and, when forced, indulged in it with all the élan of a mannequin with sunburn, didn’t alter his status within the school hierarchy one iota. Gary was no one’s hero, everyone’s friend – one of those kids who just slid through trouble as if it wasn’t there. It was hard to pinpoint the precise root of his popularity, but I gathered it had something to do with his dad owning a Ferrari dealership and a rumour flying around school that his gorgeous, panda-eyed live-in au pair, Francesca, would let his sleepover mates watch while she showered.

Our friendship began when we both coincidentally sustained identical, fake leg-injuries during a school skiing trip. A day later, Gary ingenuously described to me an erotic dance Francesca and a group of scantily clad friends had performed for him during a bored Sunday afternoon, and the two of us became
soulmates.
Here was a new breed of friend: popular, well-dressed, rich, devious, crap at sport and never short of female attention. The other unusual thing about Gary, who wouldn’t have known a pitching wedge from a garden trowel, was that he was one of the few schoolmates I could talk to about my golfing exploits without feeling like some kind of six-headed social deviant.

‘In other words, if you play off nine handicap, that means you’re expected to go round in nine over the par for the course?’ Gary would ask.

‘Yeah, but that doesn’t really reflect how good I am. I’m a bit of a bandit actually,’ I would reply.

‘A bandit?’

‘Yeah. In golf, a bandit is someone who’s a better player than their handicap indicates.’

Another schoolfriend might have found it irresistible to use the similarity between ‘bandit’ and ‘arse bandit’ as an excuse to cast aspersions on my sexual orientation. But the ever inquisitive Gary would scratch his chin attentively and probe on. At last! I thought. Someone from the humdrum outside world who gets something approaching the true measure of how fascinating golf is – and by extension I am.

‘I expect the clubs must weigh a bloody ton?’

‘Yeah, but you get used to it.’

‘And seeing as you are so good, you probably get loads of people offering to caddy for you in tournaments.’

The answer, in all truthfulness, was no. Thus far in my amateur career I’d found the levels of enthusiasm and loyalty among the caddy ranks to be little short of contemptuous. Upon being informed that he would be rewarded via the medium of my practice ball collection for his day’s work, my first baghandler, eleven-year-old Paul ‘Raz’ Berry, had looked at me like I’d just stolen his favourite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, before vanishing from my employ on a permanent basis. It wasn’t as if he had even come close to fulfilling his obligations. On numerous occasions during the day I had rolled the grip of my driver around in my hands to find it hadn’t been rubbed to the essential level of tackiness. Moreover, I felt his ideas about club selection covertly undermined my ability, and the recalcitrant look on his face when I requested that he retrieve my four-iron lob (I’d lobbed the four-iron, not the ball) from a holly bush to the left of Cripsley’s sixteenth green hadn’t exactly been a buoy for my confidence at a critical moment in my round. After Raz and I had gone our separate ways, I attempted to replace him with a couple of Cripsley’s other eleven- and twelve-year-old members, but was barely met by the level of wide-eyed fervour I expected.

That left my grandad, who had burned his caddying bridges by putting the flagstick to the eighth hole in my golf bag by mistake, and Bob Boffinger, my regular caddy in Nottinghamshire junior and youth events.
The
problem with Bob was that I couldn’t help viewing his habit of running off, mid-hole, to offer assistance to fellow Cripsley juniors as an act of gross infidelity. I had, after all, been on Bob’s bag for fifty pence a round during my first few months at Cripsley, and now, with our roles reversed, I wondered if there wasn’t a little residual bitterness. Granted, Bob was fifty-eight. But I couldn’t help suspecting that he nurtured his own small but perfectly formed dream of marching up the final hole at St Andrews in the 1990 British Open to a standing ovation with faithful little Tom Cox on his bag. By running off up the parallel fairway to find out how Jamie was scoring when, at two over par with four holes to go in the first round of the Midland Youths Championship, I needed him to help me find my ball, perhaps he was paying me back. Whatever the case, I made sure it was the only kind of payment that
was
happening.

Not that I was going to tell Gary any of this.

I could see what my new friend was driving at, and it required some serious thought. I played golf in an aspirational middle-class suburb, the kind of place where couples in sandals hold hands in front of estate agent windows; I went to school, on the other hand, in an evolutionary cul-de-sac with closed-circuit TV surveillance on its main street: a place whose principal form of boredom-prevention was an annual event involving semi-paralytic, eighteen-stone men racing
prams
down hills, seeing who could drool the furthest, then passing out. If my brain was a mansion for my interests, then golf luxuriated in the opulent master bedroom, while school was stuffed away neglectfully in the servants’ quarters. The two passed one another on the stairs occasionally, but were on nodding rather than speaking terms. Sure, I gave my teachers and fellow pupils absolutely no doubt that they were in the presence of a legendary swinger-to-be and that they should be grateful I was magnanimous enough to attend the same classes as them. But when it came to actual interaction, I knew the two worlds should be kept roughly three solar systems apart. I had found this out, to my mortification, via an English oral assessment the previous term, during which, while dressed in a Lyle and Scott sweater, slacks and sun visor, I attempted to explain the intricacies of such golfing terminology as ‘stiff shaft’, ‘rimming out’, ‘sweet spot’ and ‘tradesmen’s entrance’ to thirty fourteen-year-olds who viewed double-entendres as a synonym for comic genius.