The Amateurs

by John Niven

  ‘Ah know, hen. Ah want that too. Do ye think ah don’t? But…if ah divorce Leanne she’ll take me tae the cleaners so she will. Ah know her. She’s a vindictive bitch so she is. Maybe in a few years when the kids are older, then it wouldnae, y’know, be so bad.’

  Pauline nodded, still fixed on the cigarette lighter when suddenly another image came to her, not of a past reality but of a possible future: her and Gary old together in a small council home; him in a wheelchair while she spoon-fed him some sort of gruel. In Pauline’s vision she was badly dressed and she had no credit cards.

  She burst into tears.

  ‘Aww, come on, hen. It’ll be all right.’ Masterson embraced her and felt the pulse in his groin. Would it be out of order to…? Naw. Come tae fuck. Play the white man. That would be totally out of order.

  ‘I know it’s terrible and I’ll probably, I don’t know, burn in fucking hell or something,’ Pauline spoke through her tears, ‘but…but…I just keep wishing that Leanne wasn’t, wasn’t…’

  ‘Wasn’t what?’

  She pulled her wet face away from his chest and got her breathing under control.

  ‘Around,’ Pauline said.

  They looked at each other.

  Pauline threw herself at him and they started kissing feverishly, his dark, bristly moustache tickling her nose.

  This is bad, some part of Masterson was thinking. Fuck sake. Man lying in the hospital an aw that. But this voice was very small and feeble and he wasn’t really listening to it as Pauline clawed at his belt buckle with trembling fingers.

  18

  GARY WAS PLAYING LIKE A DREAM. IN HEAVEN HIS SWING WAS smooth and rhythmic and grooved, his irons boring straight and true. His drives booming and accurate. By the time they walked off the ninth green he and his dad were two holes up on Hogan and Jones.

  They were taking a quick break on the tenth tee: Hogan and his dad were lighting up, Bobby Jones was buying drinks and snacks from a man in a little cart while Gary stood a little way off from the group, staring into one of the deep, dark pools that dotted Augusta. He turned to see Bobby Jones approaching, holding something out. ‘Soda?’ Jones said.

  ‘Thanks, Bob.’ Gary took the green can. Something called ‘Mountain Dew’. It was cold. ‘It’s something, this course of yours.’

  ‘Why thank you. Yeah, I like it here.’

  ‘Bob,’ Gary said hesitantly, fiddling with the ring pull, not looking at Jones, ‘are…are you God?’

  Jones laughed and tilted his head back. ‘Oh Lord no. But he’s a member. Good player. Helluva temper sometimes. You know when you get thunderstorms down there? He’s missing four-footers up here.’

  ‘It can do that to you, can’t it?’ Gary looked over towards his father, laughing on the tee box with Hogan.

  ‘It can, son. It surely can.’

  The two men stood there quietly for a moment, looking down into the pool. Something flashed through the black water, something grey-white and huge. Gary thought he saw an eye. Teeth. He turned to Bobby Jones.

  ‘Did…did you just see a shark in there?

  Bobby Jones looked at him oddly.

  ‘The shark isn’t called Jaws, is it?’ Stevie said to Lee. They were sitting on plastic chairs at the foot of Gary’s hospital bed. Pauline, Cathy and Gary’s Aunt Sadie, Cathy’s sister, were in the comfier seats by the window. Sadie was wearing a powder-blue velour leisure suit. Cathy sported a similar number in black. ‘I mean,’ Stevie went on, ‘no one in the film says, “Jaws is coming to get us!” do they?’

  ‘Aye, awright, fuck sake!’ Lee said.

  ‘The shark doesn’t say, “Hi, I’m Jaws by the way.” Does it?’

  Cheeky fat bastard, Lee thought. If it wisnae for his wee brother lying there in that bed he’d tan his fucking jaw. ‘Ye ken whit ah fucking mean but,’ Lee said.

  ‘Jaws is the name of the film.’

  ‘Jesus, who cares?’ Pauline said, reaching for her handbag. ‘You’re giving me a bloody headache.’

  ‘Aye, shut it, ya fucking sac,’ Lee said, grateful for the support.

  ‘Touché,’ Stevie said.

  ‘Boys! That’s enough!’ Cathy said, looking up from her book–a bulky potboiler called, appropriately, A Mother’s Strength.

  ‘Aye,’ Sadie agreed, ‘gie’s peace, the pair o’ ye!’

  Lee and Stevie shut up. They were all getting a little cabin-feverish, cooped up in this room night after night for nearly a week now, drinking endless cups of plastic coffee. Eating boiled sweets and grapes.

  Pauline took out a packet of painkillers and began popping a couple from the foil. Sadie eyed the packet suspiciously. ‘Pauline hen, how much did ye pay for thon tablets?’

  Pauline looked at the pack. ‘Umm…’ Christ, here we go.

  ‘Cause ah’ll tell ye,’ Sadie said, levelling a sovereign-ringed finger at her, ‘see they paracetamol?’ She took great care over the word, stringing the full five syllables out on a rack: parah-sea-tah-moll. ‘It’s the biggest rip-aff ever. Two pound eighty-nine they’re wanting fur a packet o’ twelve at the chemist’s shop. Ah can get twenty-four o’ Toler’s own brand fur ninety-nine pee!’ For Aunt Sadie the opening of the new no-frills, ultra-budget, ultra-basics Toler’s hypermarket on the outskirts of town at the beginning of the year had been a moment of epiphany as intense and powerful as anything religion had to offer. Standing in the freezer aisle that glorious morning, hefting a one-kilo pack of minced beef priced at £1.34 in one heavily ringed fist and a box of twelve choc ices for 99p in the other, she had felt the light of God streaming upon her as radiantly as it had shone upon Moses on Sinai. From that day forward she had gone forth into this world to spread the gospel according to Toler’s.

  ‘Uh, really?’ Pauline would as soon have shopped at Oxfam as Toler’s.

  ‘Aye, hen. It’s aw packaging an that.’

  Cathy went over to the bed and mopped Gary’s brow. She ran a finger along the seam of his fresh bandages. There’d be a small scar just below the hairline.

  Someone coughed in the doorway and they all looked up. Auld Bert Thompson was standing there. Billy Douglas was behind him, twisting his bunnet nervously in his hands.

  ‘Hullo, Cathy hen,’ Bert said. ‘Ah, Billy here wanted to come and–’

  ‘Ah’m so sorry, Mrs Irvine,’ Billy began, advancing slowly into the room. ‘I didnae…’ Now Billy saw Gary–the tubes, the monitors, the bandages–and he started to cry. ‘Aw God. Whit have ah done?’ Cathy was crying too as she embraced him. She had known him vaguely for years. Nice wee buddy. No a bad bone in him.

  ‘Naw, Billy, c’mon. It’s no your fault. It was just wan o’ those things.’

  Billy took a seat in the corner, where he sat quietly, dabbing his eyes and shaking his head while Bert stood in the middle of the room, his hands in his pockets. ‘How did the operation go, Cathy?’ he asked.

  ‘Aw, the doctors seemed happy enough, Bert,’ Cathy said, managing a smile. ‘We’ve just tae wait and see now.’

  Gary looked back down into the pool and, as he turned his head, he thought he caught a glimpse of a great tail sweeping away into the depths. Why would they have sharks in the water hazards here? The course was difficult enough. He turned as his dad approached. ‘Hi, Dad,’ he said. ‘Are we ready to finish these guys off?’

  ‘Not today. We’ll have to play on as a three ball.’

  ‘How come? Who’s leaving?’

  ‘You are, son,’ his dad said, placing a hand on his shoulder. ‘Time to go.’

  ‘But…’ Gary looked into his father’s eyes, the same blue as his. Suddenly he realised that his lip was trembling. Here he was trying to talk his father into letting him stay out on the golf course with the grown-ups. He felt eight years old again. ‘I want to stay here with you.’

  ‘I know. Ah’d like that too. But not yet.’ Gary nodded miserably, a child accepting its fate handed down by a higher power. ‘It’ll be a while before you’re a member here.’

&nbs
p; His father embraced him–Old Spice, the sandpapery rasp of silvery stubble, Embassy Regal and the Grouse that was famous–and suddenly it was getting colder here under the Georgia sun. More than anything, he did not want to leave this delicious dream.

  ‘Say hello to your mum for me. And try and keep an eye on that brother o’ yours…’

  ‘When will I see you again?’

  ‘Not for a wee while, pal. But I’ll be watching ye.’ His dad smiled. ‘Now remember,’ Jones and Hogan were waving goodbye from the tee box, ‘keep your head still and get through that shoulder turn. You listen to whit Bert’s telling ye now.’

  Bert. The practice session. Six feet, four feet…

  ‘Cheery-bye, son.’

  Suddenly Gary remembered how he got here. And, in the instant of memory, he was leaving, everything–his father, Jones and Hogan, the magnolia and eucalyptus of Augusta–swirling and dissolving as, with the sensation of rushing upwards, rising very fast from deep black water into warm blue shallows and then exploding through the surface, he was back on the second hole at Ravenscroft with Bert Thompson, the nine-iron coiled around him, holding his finishing position and watching his perfectly struck ball rolling towards the hole, oblivious to the Spaxon coming towards his head at 280 feet per second. His ball rolling closer, closer…

  Gary shot bolt upright in the hospital bed, pulling a monitor over and sending it crashing onto the floor.

  ‘YA FUCKEN BEAUTY!’ he roared in a hoarse, desiccated voice that no one had heard in six days.

  Pauline and Sadie screamed.

  Cathy fainted.

  Lee instinctively reached for his chib.

  Billy Douglas clutched at his heart.

  Bert jumped two feet off the ground.

  Stevie dropped his coffee and came very close to shitting in his pants, but it was he who spoke first.

  He looked his friend right in the eye–Gary was sitting upright now, panting, eyes wide open, arms raised above his head in classic scoring-winning-goal-in-Cup-Final fashion–and said, ‘Look who’s up!’

  19

  THE OCHILPARK ARMS, SITUATED AT A CROSSROADS ON the Barrhead Road, the old Ardgirvan to Glasgow road, was quiet. Since the motorway had been extended, taking all the passing trade away, it was about the most out of the way pub in the whole county. Masterson, at a table by the window with his Daily Standard and his lager top. He looked around the place: a couple of old farmer boys with pints of heavy at the bar with the landlord, a massive red-faced guy in his fifties cleaning glasses, their talk of Glasgow Rangers and the horse racing on the telly above the bar drifting over. He looked down at his glass and realised it was almost half-empty already. He was nervous, drinking too fast. Better slow down.

  When had he last seen the big man? Properly sat down with him that is, not just seeing him from a distance down the town, going into the bookies, or emerging from the Bam or the Boabby? Seven or eight years ago was it? At someone’s wedding?

  There had been a time, the 1970s, when they were teenagers, living a few houses away from each other on Wilton Terrace, when they saw each other every day. They stole the same cars, they fought the same gangs–exchanging beatings with the Cumbie and the Young Apache–and they broke into the same schools, factories and houses. Then, as friends sometimes do over the years, their tastes started to move in different directions: Masterson, shifting cheap offcuts of carpet bought down south from the back of a van, discovered that he had a talent for selling and that he could make money without the worrying possibility of jail. Similarly, somewhere in his mid-twenties, his friend realised that his real talent lay in violence. Not the random, amateur-hour violence of their teenage years, but in controlled, strategic displays of astonishing force and power.

  And, think of the devil, here he was now, the floor shaking and the old boys at the bar turning from the horse racing.

  Christ, Masterson thought, he’s bigger.

  ‘A’right, ya fucking auld prick?’ Ranta said cheerfully, the time-honoured greeting of Ayrshire men who have not sat down together in nearly a decade.

  ‘Ranta. Fucking hell, ye look well.’

  ‘Aye, yer maw, ya cunt. Whit ye drinking there?’

  ‘Er, lager top.’

  ‘Top? Away tae fuck. Ah’ll gie ye top, ya cunt. The top o’ ma boabby up yer fucking night-fighter.’

  ‘Aye, a’right, fuck sake. Make it a lager then.’

  ‘Haud oan a minute.’ Ranta checked his watch and walked over to the bar, looking up at the TV where the next race was about to start. ‘Ho, auld yin, do us a favour and turn that tae Sky Sports 2 fur a minute.’

  ‘Away tae fu—’ the landlord began to say. Then he turned round. He didn’t know who Ranta was, but he could tell what he was. ‘…we’re watching the racing.’ The sentence had come in like a storm trooper and gone out like a cripple.

  Ranta looked at the man and said simply, ‘The gowf’s oan.’

  ‘Oh,’ the landlord said, taking a sudden deep interest, ‘is it?’ He thumbed the remote and the screen lit up green: Torsten Lathe, lining up a putt.

  ‘Ye been watching any of this?’ Ranta shouted over to Masterson. ‘Yer boy Linklater’s going well–ah’ve got a fucken grand oan him tae win it–but this Nazi bam here might just dae it. No a British player anywhere oan the leader board of course, useless pack o’ bastards so they ur.’

  Like most people who caught the golf bug late in life the results for Ranta had been serious. He’d played a bit as a kid–everybody did around here–but it was only a few years ago, when he went out to play a few holes with one of his boys, that he hit the shot, the one that made a bell ring in his chest: a sweetly fading six-iron that came right out of the socket and flew nearly 170 yards before curling up near the pin. Ranta felt as though God had spoken to him.

  They watched as Lathe’s putt–a snaking fifty-foot monster that would tie him for the lead–dribbled downhill, turning closer and closer to the hole. ‘Ooh, hello…’ the American commentator cooed from the TV.

  ‘Get tae fuck, get tae fuck,’ said Ranta, trying to will Lathe’s putt out of the hole. The ball crept nearer and nearer, but always looking like it would never get there. The crowd began to moan.

  ‘Has he hit it?’ the commentator asked. The ball paused on the edge of the hole for a split second and then dropped into the cup. ‘Yes he has!’

  ‘YA FUCKEN BLOND-HAIRED NAZI WEAN-RIDING BASTARD YE!’ Ranta screamed, then, turning to Masterson, completely calm again, he added, ‘Sorry, Fin, was it a lager ye wanted?’

  They drank and caught up on the last ten years: two lads from the wrong side of the tracks made good. Two successful independent businessmen swapping stories, bitching about manpower issues, supply costs and the like. And their problems were not so different: errant, ungrateful employees, aggressive competitors, shrinking profit margins. However, Masterson’s commercial difficulties were rarely resolved by throwing people off bridges, or burning them alive in the boot of a car or–on one occasion–inserting a greased shotgun into a man’s rectum and pulling the trigger.

  Finally, somewhere into the third pint, Ranta asked the question Masterson had been waiting for: ‘And how’s the wife? What’s her name again?’

  ‘Leanne.’

  ‘Aye, Leanne. That’s right. Sorry, pal. Fucking memory oan me sometimes.’

  ‘Well, tae be honest, Ranta, that’s no so good.’

  ‘Naw?’

  ‘Naw. We’ve just, ye know, drifted apart.’

  ‘Och, ah’m sorry tae hear that, Fin,’ Ranta said, eyeing his pint, regretting asking now.

  ‘Aye. In fact, ah’ve been seeing somebody else. Young bird.’ He was surprised at how quickly it was all coming out.

  ‘Aye?’ Ranta himself had been happily married for over thirty years. But he passed no judgement on Masterson. He only wondered if they were drawing close to whatever they were really here to talk about. People rarely called up someone like Ranta out of the blue just to swap stories about
old times. And it couldn’t be for a loan–one of Ranta’s other key business activities–because Findlay was minted.

  ‘Aye. Ah want a divorce but Leanne would take me tae the fucken cleaners so she wid.’

  ‘Fuck. Bad wan.’

  ‘Aye, fucking bad wan is right. So ah’ve been thinking…’ He looked at the carpet. ‘Ah know this sounds bad, but…’

  ‘Whit?’ Ranta said, setting his pint down.

  Masterson came right out and said it.

  Ranta took a long swallow of lager and looked around.

  ‘Fucking hell, Fin,’ he said finally.

  20

  ‘AYE, BUT WAS THAT NO THAT SAME WEE MAN THAT used tae work fur Donaldson the electrician’s? Mind?’

  ‘Naw, you’re thinking o’ Robert Fraser, he was engaged tae that wee lassie fae Saltcoats. Nice wee lassie that was kilt in thon explosion at Ardeer. Ah’m meaning Robert Ferguson. Anyway, oor Hugh sees him outside the wee Paki shop at Calder Road, eleven o’clock oan, wis it Tuesday, Danny?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Tuesday morning and he’s drunk oot his mind so he is. In buying the carry-oot. By Christ, oor Hugh thought, wid ye look at the state o’ that. I–’ Aunt Sadie suddenly broke off, distracted by a glittering bauble on Pauline’s dresser. ‘Sorry, hen, dae ye know where your Pauline got thon wee jewellery box?’

  ‘Och, somewhere in Glasgow ah think, Sadie.’

  In the bed Gary drifted up from sleep. He recognised the three voices–his mum, Aunt Sadie and Uncle Danny.

  ‘It’s lovely so it is,’ Sadie said. ‘Ah could do wi wan o’ them fur oor Margaret’s birthday. Anyway, whit wis I saying?’

  ‘Aboot Robert Ferguson?’

  ‘Naw, before that.’

  ‘Oh, thae beans?’

  Gary lay there listening with his eyes closed. Voices he’d been hearing all his life, as comforting, as meaningless, as the gentle burble of a mountain stream.

  ‘So then ah says tae her,’ Sadie continued, ‘but hen, Toler’s ain brand are the same thing, jist cheaper. But ye ken her, Cathy, she’d argue wi ye till yer blue in the face. Mind you, her mother was the same. She disnae take it aff a stane dyke. Anyway, ah makes them and diz oor wee Sam no eat the lot and say “That wiz lovely, Nana!”? Ah!’ She cackled delightedly, ‘It wiz aw ah could dae no tae say tae her “Ah bloody telt ye, madam”, away spending money at Saintsbury’s thinking yer the bee’s knees. Don’t get me wrang now, Cathy.’ Here Sadie laid a dramatic hand on her sister’s arm, as though Cathy had been about to get Sadie very, very wrong. ‘There’s some things ah don’t mind spending the money oan. The likes o’ yer, oh whits that ice cream ah like, Danny? That H…Hogan-Daaz?’