by John Niven
‘You can get yourself something nice for your golf, can’t you? I wouldn’t have a clue.’
‘Aye, great, that’s brilliant. C’mere–’ He reached out towards her as she crossed the room. Pauline kissed him primly on the forehead, but, before he could pull the towel off, she twirled away out of reach, across the landing towards the bathroom.
Calm. Keep calm. Don’t paw.
He slipped his T-shirt off, lifted the duvet with one hand and the elastic waistband of his boxer shorts with the other. Fuck sake–look at the state of that. A cat couldnae scratch it. Suddenly he sneezed, the starburst of the sneeze falling tingling and sparkling over the length of his near-naked body.
Take your mind off it for a minute.
He grabbed the remote control and thumbed through the channels until the screen turned a familiar comforting green and he heard the swish and clank of metal driver hitting ball: the Golf Network, a preview of the Masters, which started the following week. The camera roved over the lush green fairways and rich forestry of Augusta National in Georgia (arguably the most photogenic golf course in the world) with stirring, dramatic music playing and an American voice saying ‘where the greatest players in the world will be teeing it up to compete in the first major championship of the year’. Now a quick compilation clip of some of the greats–Brett Spafford, Torsten Lathe, James Honeydew III, Drew Keel–before the commentator’s voice shifted down a gear dramatically and he said, ‘including, looking for his tenth major title,’ and then the screen was filled with the image of a man.
A man? The Man. The Big Man. The Don.
‘The world number one…Calvin Linklater.’
Calvin Fucking Linklater.
A shot of Linklater slashing an iron from thick rough at St Andrews the previous summer, on his way to winning his second consecutive Open. Gary had been in the crowd, managing at one point to get close enough to the ropes to shout ‘Go on yerself, big man!’ as Linklater passed. Gary felt the familiar ripple of awe he always felt when he watched his hero at work. For Linklater was not just a man to Gary. He was a god.
They were the same age.
They had both taken up the sport when they were five years old, taught by their fathers.
They both played Spaxon balls.
They were both golfers. (Indeed, Gary had even been named after a golfer–the great South African pro Gary Player. His father had been much taken with Player’s compelling victory in the 1974 Open at Royal Lytham & St Anne’s, where the black-clad dynamo had led the tournament from the first day.)
Actually, to say that Linklater and Gary were both golfers was a little misleading. Like saying that Jimi Hendrix and a busker cranking out the three chords of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ on an out-of-tune acoustic guitar were both musicians. Linklater was a golfing machine. The youngest major winner in history. Arguably the greatest putter in the history of the sport. Owner of the smoothest, most faultless swing since Ben Hogan; a swing that had brought him over fifty million dollars in career earnings (and many times that in ancillary income) and nine major titles.
Gary’s handicap was eighteen. He was capable of routinely whiffing two-foot putts and he could always, always, be counted on to choke in a crunch situation. (If he had ten pence for every time he had uttered the words ‘Sorry, partner’ he would be richer than Linklater.) Gary’s swing was so terrible that many golfers at the club refused to watch it in case they became contaminated by its uncountable faults. It had, as they say, more moving parts than Terms of Endearment and it had brought him a pen and a single golf ball in career earnings (both token prizes given to any junior member who had finished the Junior Medal in a terrible rainstorm twenty years ago) and more heartbreak than any man should have to endure. Linklater was one of the very few whom the Golf Gods chose at birth to bestow incredible talent upon. Gary was one of the very many whom the Golf Gods devoted their immortality to tormenting.
As he lay in bed listening to the punditry–who was on form, who wasn’t, who was struggling around the greens and so forth–Gary became aware that he had been stealthily massaging his cock and that his erection was now of torturous proportions. Suddenly a thrill of panic shot through him–what if she…?
No. No way, man. It was his birthday! She wouldn’t…
Still, he could hear the blast of the hairdryer being usurped now by the drilling of her electric toothbrush–the morning symphony of Pauline’s machines–and he thought, Best not leave it too late.
Pauline came back into the bedroom, humming to herself, turned to the chest of drawers in the corner, and dropped the towel. As they always did at such moments Gary’s thoughts went something like–How the fuck did I pull this off?
Pauline was tall–a couple of inches taller than Gary–and dark-skinned for someone from the west coast of Scotland. (Italian grandmother on her mother’s side.) Her nose flicked up at the end–forming a little button that Gary delighted in but which its owner regarded as an imperfection–and her hazel eyes were flecked with tiny mint-green shards. Moving down, the breasts–larger and heavier than her slender body would lead you to expect–were capped with glossy mahogany nipples. Down over the stomach–flat and fluted from hours at the gym, or in the spare bedroom with the cycling machine and the weights–and onto the long, tapering legs that were permanently slick from their monthly waxing. But it was Pauline’s bum that stole the show. It jutted out so prominently it bordered on comic. ‘Christ,’ Gary once overheard a guy in the Annick saying to his mate as Pauline sashayed by them on her way to the Ladies, ‘ye could sit yer pint oan that.’ Gary possessed a clean soul, a decent soul, and was not given to jealousy. So he felt no anger, only mild pride, when strangers ogled and commented on his wife’s body.
He watched her shimmying into a pair of translucent champagne-coloured knickers. ‘Are you still having lunch with your mum?’ Pauline asked, her back to him.
‘Yeah. We’re going to the Pepper Pot.’
‘Nice.’
‘Errr, Pauline…’ Gary said huskily.
‘Mmmm?’ she said without turning.
‘Pauline?’
She turned round, topless, her thumbs snapping out of the band of her knickers, as Gary patted the space beside him on the bed, grinning shyly.
‘Oh,’ Pauline said.
Oh? Fucking oh?
‘Look,’ she said, fishing a bra out of the drawer, ‘I haven’t got time.’
‘But…it’s only half seven! It’s not going to take you–’
Don’t say ‘it’s my birthday’, don’t say ‘it’s my birthday’…
‘It won’t take long,’ he said instead.
‘Great,’ Pauline said flatly. Her green sparkly tights were on now and she was pulling up the green sparkly tutu.
‘But–’
‘Listen, tonight we’ll–’
‘But…it’s my birthday!’
Pauline gave him the look–a disappointed headmistress staring down a hopeless miscreant after yet another transgression–and said, ‘I knew you were going to say that,’ as she pushed her feet into the green felt slippers. She was now dressed head to foot as Tinkerbell.
‘Fine,’ Gary said.
‘Oh, don’t sulk. Tonight. I promise.’
A scuttle of paws across wooden boards, a low growling, and Ben shouldered his way into the bedroom. ‘Aww, hello, boy! Hello!’ Pauline said, kneeling to greet him. ‘Come here! Come here!’ She buried her face in Ben’s neck, nuzzling him and shrieking delightedly as his tongue basted her face.
Gary loved his wife, he really did. However, right at this moment, lying there in bed, abandoned and bereft on his birthday, with an aching erection pressing into his belly and sick lust running uselessly through his veins, he was certainly enjoying watching her French-kiss a dog who had just eaten a huge pile of shite.
‘Christ, I’m late,’ Pauline said. ‘See you tonight. Have a good day.’ Then her feet on the stairs, Ben pounding after her, the front door closing, her feet on gr
avel, the car door slamming, and she was gone.
Gary leapt out of bed. He scampered naked through to the spare bedroom (‘home gym’ ma fucking baws) and opened the third drawer of the metal filing cabinet. Halfway down the stack of golf magazines he found the crackly copy of Spunk Sluts. Back into bed, on autopilot now, flip straight to page 32–a blonde in riding gear reclining on a hay bale, her jodhpurs pulled down and her blouse ripped open, one hand tugging an enormous breast greedily towards her mouth–and heigh-ho let’s go.
Actually, he was so worked up that the pornography was a totally unnecessary addition. Approximately twenty seconds in and already his balls were tickling his lungs and trying for further north. His toes began curling as he felt the semen–and it felt like deep-core stuff, heavy sediment dredged up from the testicular floor–beginning to pump into the base of the shaft. Heigh-ho, let’s g—
Fuck! The new sheets!
He feverishly scanned the bed for something, anything, within arm’s reach that could be pressed into service, his hand now clamped around his twitching prick like it was an unstable nuclear device. Nothing. Not a tissue or a sock or a pair of underpants. He looked through the open bedroom door and across the landing into the bathroom: the open, willing mouth of the toilet bowl.
Carefully inching out of the bed–if a butterfly beat its wings within three inches of the tip of his penis right now it would all be over–he crept towards the door. He began crossing the landing. To his right a short staircase led straight down to the small hall and the front door. As he came shuffling across–naked, bone-hard cock in hand–he heard the letter box clank and looked down.
There, looking up the stairs through the glass panel that ran down the side of the front door, was the postman. Gary stopped in his tracks as they made perfect eye contact.
Gary’s fist jerked involuntarily.
A butterfly beat its wings.
Gary closed his eyes and shuddered as he felt the warm drops spattering onto his right foot.
Caught wanking by the postman? No, scratch that, caught ejaculating by the postman.
Definitely the most humiliating start to a birthday Gary Irvine could remember.
As Gary wiped and dabbed, the golf ball that would soon change his life beyond all recognition was on its way up the M42 in the back of an articulated goods lorry. The ball–a Spaxon V–was in a sleeve of three, packaged in a box of twelve, which was in a crate along with 199 other boxes of Spaxon Vs, which, along with various other bits of golf equipment, were being freighted from Oklahoma Dan’s Discount Golf World warehouse in London to the branch in Glasgow.
2
PAULINE DROVE FAST THROUGH THE STREETS OF Ardgirvan, heading for the bypass that ran around the town centre and then south towards the larger town of Kilmarnock. She shifted down from fourth to third to overtake a dawdling pensioner and, as she experienced the minimal acceleration of the jeep’s feeble engine–the increase in noise easily outweighing the increase in speed–she thought to herself, Christ, I hate this car.
Pauline was first-generation Ardgirvan. She was born here shortly after her parents moved to the town in the mid-seventies. (Unlike Gary, who could probably trace his roots right back to the first peasant who ever tilled this miserable soil, Pauline thought.)
Historians of Ardgirvan–a rare and unlikely breed–could slice the town’s development into two distinct phases: pre and post New Town. The oldest streets and buildings dated back to the thirteenth century, when the town was a bustling port, serving Glasgow, thirty or so miles up the coast. Later, as Glasgow prospered under the Victorians–those canny old tobacco barons, sugar lords and spice dons–so did Ardgirvan.
Handsome sandstone villas went up along the main roads into town and shops thrived on the high street. A fine wrought-iron bridge spanned the River Ardgirvan in the town centre and tall, ornate street lamps threw orange-yellow pools of gaslight across the broad avenues and cobbled streets. Great shipments of coal and lumber from the local mines and sawmills were loaded at the harbour and sent up the water to help build the great ships on Clydeside.
The first half of the twentieth century was harder all round–as it was for pretty much everybody–but the place chugged along well enough. Plentiful council housing sprung up after the war–brown pebble-dash terraces with little squares of garden behind them for the veterans to grow carrots. Then, in 1966, it was decided that Ardgirvan was to become Scotland’s last New Town: one of the poured-concrete paradises designed to help ease overpopulation in the big cities. Hundreds of acres of woodland vanished under the steel treads of diggers as roads were improved, roundabouts and bypasses were built, and fresh estates of council houses–these ones white as Polo mints–went up around what had been the outskirts of the town. Government money was used to build factory units to house the companies that–drawn by sweet rental deals and cheap local labour and about to be surfing the mid-seventies economic boom–would surely flock to the town. Glasgow was invited to send its poor huddled masses down the coast for a better life.
Well, the Glasgow people came all right. But the mid-seventies economic boom was more reluctant to show its face. In fact, it decided to skip the party altogether. Instead of reverberating with the bustling sound of small companies growing bigger, the huge prefabricated units were soon echoing to the tinkle of glass, the crinkle of the glue bag and the snake-hiss of the aerosol can as the vandals delighted in their new-found playgrounds. What did come along at the end of the seventies, when Pauline was taking her first steps, was something entirely different. Gary–two years older than Pauline–could dimly remember his mum saying that it might be a ‘nice wee change’ to have a lady prime minister.
She didn’t think that for very long.
Gary’s mum’s potted history of the town went something like this: Ardgirvan was an idyllic coastal community filled with happy Hobbits who knew and trusted each other, a place where you left your doors and windows open when you went away on holiday (presumably, Pauline thought, so that your neighbours could pop in and water your flowering money trees) and where there was no poverty or violence. After a hard week digging coal or sawing timber the men would drink two pints of beer on a Friday night before going home to dutiful wives and happy children, children who ran laughing through sunlit woodland glades and whose rare bouts of apple-scrumping were the only crimes in this unfallen Eden.
Then the Glasgow people came.
And they brought knives and guns and drug-dealing and gangs and prostitution and devil dogs and Aids and gambling and ram-raiding and graffiti and mugging and Indian restaurants and video nasties and greenhouse gases and power cuts and the three-day week and unemployment and paedophilia.
How could the Hobbits survive these savages?
Although it stemmed from very different reasons, Pauline’s dislike of Ardgirvan New Town was the only thing she had in common with her mother-in-law. (Gary, of course, loved living here, in this golf-studded stretch of Ayrshire that ran from Largs in the north to Ayr in the south.) Pauline–impatient at the lights now–had been the May Day Queen. Her family’s house had been festooned with ribbons and streamers. There had been stories about her in the local paper. On the big day itself she had travelled at the head of the great procession in a horse-drawn carriage, waving at the throngs who turned out to cheer her royal progress and take her photograph. As the flashbulbs crackled against the spring sky, for one glorious afternoon, the fourteen-year-old Pauline had felt like she was at the centre of the universe, exactly where she was meant to be, her future glittering ahead of her like a diamond path lit by fireworks.
This was not the way she had been feeling lately.
Lately, as she thumbed through the pages of Babe! or Hot!, seeing these women–women no more attractive than she was, no brighter, no more driven–wearing dresses that cost more than her car (her stupid bloody car), with their own perfumes and fitness videos, their four-figure handbags, their first-class flights and their silicone cleavages, Pauline had begun
to feel an odd sensation, not exactly jealously or avarice, but something closer to terror.
How were these things going to happen for her now? Here? In Ardgirvan?
As she turned onto the dual carriageway a removal lorry shuddered past her. Removal lorries caused Pauline to feel vaguely uneasy. The first time she’d seen one she’d been ten years old. It had pulled up in front of their house and the men had started taking things out to it. But they weren’t moving anywhere. Pauline remembered her mum crying and trying to stop the men. It had all been something to do with her dad’s business. It was years later before Pauline heard the full story. Before she heard the word ‘bankrupt’.
She couldn’t really remember Gary from school. He was just one of the older boys whose nervy gaze flittered over her as she walked along the corridor. She’d really noticed him for the first time a year or so later, in Annabel’s, the disco in town. He’d already left the school and was working at Henderson’s. He wasn’t drinking. He was driving. It was the first time that a boy had given her a lift home in his own car. She’d blinked and now here she was–thirty-one, with no marketable skills and married to a man who was unlikely to be making six figures any time soon. She had been the May Day Queen and she was going to end up living in an ugly little house, driving second-hand cars and maybe going on holiday twice a year.
So Pauline set up Kiddiewinks–‘North Ayrshire’s Premier Children’s Entertainment Service’, as her Yellow Pages ad proudly proclaimed. She had been at a friend’s party for their five-year-old and happened to find out what they were paying the idiot who came along and made balloon animals and told stories to the kids. It sounded like a lot. Pauline’s original vision had been to establish the company and then take a purely managerial role as the cash poured in. Sadly this hadn’t quite happened yet–children’s entertainers were thin on the ground and paying them was severely cutting into Pauline’s profit margin. So, for now, it was just her and her seventeen-year-old assistant, Derek, and long hours and lots of driving.
