The Amateurs

by John Niven

  Memorise it.

  ‘42’, like four-four-two formation with one of the fours taken off. ‘Riverside’, the River Ardgirvan that flowed under the shopping mall, on its banks, its sides, the pitch-and-putt course and the putting green.

  He pulled his lighter out and set it to the corner of the photograph. He held it out of the car window, watching as it burned, the glossy paper flaming blue and then pink and then orange as Leanne Masterson’s face crumpled, smoke wreathing away from Lee on the breeze, the ashes fluttering around him like grey-black snowflakes. Lee remembered something he hadn’t thought of in a long time–running down the first fairway at Ravenscroft, him and Gary, throwing their father’s ashes into the air from a gold plastic tub.

  26

  FACING GARY AND PAULINE ACROSS THE DESK IN THE antiseptic consulting room was Dr Robertson and a short, bespectacled man in his forties wearing a beige corduroy jacket. He looked more like a teacher to Pauline than a doctor. ‘Yes, congratulations!’ Robertson said. ‘Sixty-one! I heard you nearly holed a seven-iron at the eighteenth?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Gary said. ‘From about 170. Fud. Rolled to about three–OW!–inches.’

  ‘My goodness!’

  ‘Yeah. It was–’

  ‘Sorry,’ Pauline interrupted, ‘can we just…?’

  ‘Yes, sorry, anyway, this is Dr Fuller–’ Robertson extended a hand towards him–‘from the neurology department at Glasgow University.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Fuller said cheerfully, leaning across the desk to shake their hands.

  ‘Hello,’ Pauline said.

  ‘Hi. Cunt. Speccy cunt, ye,’ Gary said.

  ‘Gary!’ Pauline said.

  ‘Fascinating,’ Fuller said, scribbling a note.

  ‘Sorry!’ Gary said.

  ‘Dr Fuller,’ Robertson went on, ‘has a bit more experience than myself with these kinds of cases.’

  ‘Oh,’ Pauline said, ‘with the Tourette’s, you mean?’

  ‘Not specifically the Tourette’s,’ Fuller said. ‘I’m leading a team researching behavioural abnormalities as a result of head trauma.’

  ‘Oh,’ Pauline said.

  ‘Big tits, ya fud ye. Sorry,’ Gary said.

  ‘Mr Irvine,’ Fuller began.

  ‘Gary’s fine,’ Gary said, before adding, ‘cunt.’

  ‘Gary, is it fair to say that this performance on the golf course was far in excess of your usual capability at the, um, game?’

  ‘Well, my handicap’s eighteen. Grr. So yeah,’ Gary said.

  ‘Mmmm,’ Fuller said, chewing his biro while he reviewed Gary’s file. ‘I see here that just before you were struck on the head by the golf ball you were, in fact, practising golf. Can you recall exactly what happened before the ball hit you?’

  ‘Umm, I’d been hitting it really badly, shanking them all over the place. And then I–tits–made an absolutely perfect swing. Spunk. Nine-iron. Baws. Hoor. Right out of the socket. I saw it land, it was rolling towards the hole–rodeyerfucken-mawyacunt–and then–bang! Goodnight Vienna.’

  ‘I see, I see,’ Fuller murmured, scribbling away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Pauline cut in, having had just about enough of all this, ‘but what’s all this got to do with what he…did the other day?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll come to the masturbation,’ Fuller said casually, as though it were common or garden enough, ‘but as regards the golf performance, what I think might have happened–and I must stress this is only conjecture–is that the trauma of the cerebellum Gary suffered has served to dramatically reinforce the successful performance of a specific physical action.’ Fuller got up and went to a chart on the wall–a detailed cross section of the human brain. ‘The cerebellum is attached to the stem of the actual brain.’ He pointed it out with his pen. ‘Among other things it’s responsible for orchestrating and fine-tuning movement and is integral in performing intricate actions like, for instance, threading a needle or–’

  ‘Swinging a golf club,’ Robertson said.

  ‘Exactly. Any information to be passed to your muscles is passed first through the cerebellum. Now, when a physical action produces a good, successful outcome this sensation is reinforced in the cerebellum. What I think may have happened in your case,’ he came back to the desk, genuinely excited now, ‘is that the trauma caused by the impact of the golf ball has somehow massively reinforced the sensation you experienced when you struck the shot perfectly, or “right out of the socket”, to use your words. Consequently every time you swing the club now, it’s possible that your brain is following, well, a burned-in template of how a successful swing should be executed. I’ve never come across anything quite like it before. There have been instances of head-injury patients suddenly displaying mathematical abilities they never had previously, but this would seem to indicate physical and ment—’

  ‘Hang on.’ Gary interrupted, unable to quite believe what he was hearing. ‘Are you saying that I can’t make a bad swing?’

  ‘It’s possible. What do you think, Dr Robertson?’

  ‘I think,’ Robertson said, staring enviously at the fading indented bruise on Gary’s temple, thinking about the millions of amateur golfers gnashing and weeping their way around the world’s courses every weekend, ‘that if we could market this as an operation we’d all be bloody billionaires!’

  ‘Right,’ Pauline said, finally losing patience. ‘Can we just forget about the bloody golf please? What about the fact that he…’ What was the right word to use in front of doctors? ‘…interfered with himself in front of all those people?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Fuller said, ‘it’s very likely that Gary is suffering from a neurological condition called Kluver-Bucy syndrome.’ His tone of voice was that of a geologist who had gone from discussing a rare gemstone to talking about coal.

  ‘Klu…’ Pauline began.

  ‘Kloo-ver-Boo-sey,’ Fuller enunciated. ‘It was first observed by scientists studying how various degrees of lobotomy-affected–’

  ‘Lobotomy?’ Gary said.

  ‘–affected monkeys,’ Fuller continued. ‘They found that after performing bilateral temporal lobectomies–which, of course, caused separate lesions of the amygdala, uncus and temporal cortices–a startling variety of behavioural changes were observed in the monkeys.’

  Pauline and Gary stared at him.

  ‘Although naturally,’ he said, looking to clarify, ‘it was simply the bilateral amygdalotomies–and the resultant damage to their outflow tracts, the diagonal band of Broca and, um, stria terminalis–that resulted in the clinical picture.’

  Christ, Robertson thought. He cut in and explained it simply.

  ‘What kind of “behavioural changes”?’ Gary asked.

  ‘Hyperorality, dietary abnormalities, emotional blunting and, of course, hypersexuality.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Gary said. ‘Bloody monkeys is one thing, but how–sookit–I mean, do humans get this?’

  ‘Oh, it’s pretty rare,’ Fuller said happily. ‘In over twenty years I’ve witnessed just two or three cases. One of them, a young woman who was involved in an RTA–’

  ‘Road traffic accident,’ Robertson said.

  ‘–had a GCS score of 7, rather more severe than yours,’ Fuller continued, nodding at Gary. ‘She was in a coma for twelve days. When she regained consciousness she displayed a range of Kluver-Bucy behaviour, including the marked hypersexuality.’

  ‘What kind of umm…hypersexuality?’ Pauline asked.

  ‘Oh, the usual things, attempting to take her clothes off, inappropriate touching–grabbing doctors’ genitals–excessive and often public masturbation.’

  ‘Christ,’ Pauline said.

  ‘What happened to her?’ Gary asked.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘The girl. What happened to her?’

  ‘Oh, she died.’

  Fuller said this in exactly the same tone he might have used for ‘she’s fine’. Robertson closed his eyes.

  ‘But, but,’ Fuller said
, ‘there are several documented cases of patients making a full recovery. You see, I think there’s a good chance that you may be suffering from a relatively mild form of Kluver-Bucy syndrome known as post-traumatic KBS. There’s a good chance you’ll make a full recovery.’

  ‘How…how long will that take?’ Gary asked.

  ‘Oh, the literature records cases resolving themselves in anything from a week or two to a year.’

  ‘A year?’ Pauline said. ‘He could be like this for a year?’

  ‘Like what?’ Robertson asked.

  ‘Like wanking in the bloody high street!’ Pauline said.

  ‘Well, it’s possible,’ Fuller said. ‘However, we have found that the worst incidences of that kind of thing seem to occur when the subject is placed in situations of unusually high stress or tension. So I’d avoid those.’

  ‘I can play golf though, can’t I?’ Gary asked.

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake–’ Pauline said.

  ‘Well, I suppose so. But I–’

  ‘Dick,’ Gary said.

  ‘I’d try to–’

  ‘Big dicks.’

  ‘Try to avoid–’

  ‘Strapafuckendicktome.’

  ‘Avoid the kind of high-pressure situation you found yourself in the other day.’ Fuller smiled. ‘You know, just play for fun!’

  Gary and Robertson–the two golfers in the room–looked at each other, both of them thinking; ‘Fun? What the fuck is this boy talking about?’

  27

  IN SCOTLAND, MAY AND JUNE CAN OFTEN BE THE MOST incredible months. Winter loosens up its long grip and the whole country erupts in a starburst of flora, fauna and T-shirts. Another blessing: in the fields, in the grassy banks along rivers and lochs, in the tall grass beside the ponds on golf courses, the midges still slumber; tiny embryonic grains dreaming of the days soon to come when they will emerge in their billions and feast upon the plump, blood-rich flesh of tourists.

  Dr Robertson signed a sick note which entitled the bearer to three months off work and for Gary Irvine the early summer became a torrent, an incredible blur, of golf, marred only by the local newspaper’s report of his breaking the course record, which chose to focus on the more unfortunate part of the achievement. Cathy cancelled her lifelong subscription to the Ardgirvan Gazette the same day. ‘Ah…ah cannae believe it,’ Cathy sobbed, the copy of the paper spread out on the breakfast bar between her and Gary. There on the cover was the same photo of Gary they’d run when he’d been in hospital. Sadly, above the photo, was a different headline from the one Cathy had been hoping for (‘LOCAL MAN BREAKS COURSE RECORD!’). It simply said: ‘MASTURBATED!’

  ‘Bloody journalists. Scum o’ the earth so they are.’ Cathy sobbed. There was a quote from Senga the barmaid highlighted in bold: ‘He got it out and just started doing it right in front of us.’

  ‘Aye, bloody Senga Syme,’ Cathy snorted. ‘Sure there’s a good few stories ah could tell ye about her bloody family…’

  Gary didn’t care. Rising with the sun just before six (hearing only a soft moan of protest from the sleeping Pauline), he packed water and bananas–pausing only to masturbate in the downstairs toilet, the act itself mechanical and joyless, a physical necessity required so he could jam himself behind the wheel of a car before he motored out to the driving range where he could work on fine-tuning his new gift.

  It was a constant process of discovery and amazement. Before the accident, had he made ten attempts to fade the ball with the driver, moving it from left to right in the air, it might have gone like this: three balls would be mega-slices that curved crazily to the right; two would fly absolutely, maddeningly, straight; two or three attempts would start off looking promising before moving dramatically rightwards–fades, becoming cuts, becoming eye-watering slices. One or two shots would be utter mishits with the topped ball rattling along the ground in front of him. Perhaps, on a very good day, one ball out of the ten would do what it was intended to do: rocket upwards on a penetrating trajectory, gracefully sailing from left to right as it descended.

  Now? Christ, now he found he could control the degree to which the ball moved in the air. He could hit huge booming draws that finished twenty yards to his left. He could punch irons low into the wind or, by placing the ball further forward in his stance, he could produce incredible height: his five-and six-irons landing soft as wedges.

  As for the wedges–he found that he could finally do what every amateur golfer dreams of, what they salivate over when they watch Linklater, Spafford or Novotell, what they see themselves doing in their feverish golf dreams. He could create back-spin. With the sand wedge he could throw the ball a hundred feet in the air and have it plop down, hop forward, pause, and then spin backwards two, three, four yards towards the hole.

  Around nine o’clock other golfers would start to appear–some of them gathering to watch in awe as Gary drilled three-irons all the way to the end of the range–and it would be time to head up to the golf course.

  On weekdays the course was quiet in the mornings and he would usually play the first round by himself–hitting extra shots, experimenting, trying out different ways of coming at the greens–before having lunch in the clubhouse and then heading out for a second round in the afternoon, often a four ball with Bert and a couple of the retired boys.

  Pauline protested. There were rows and fights. If he was well enough to play golf all the time shouldn’t he back at work? The old Gary would have capitulated. The new Gary shrugged and headed for the course.

  The erections remained near constant. As did the swearing, although usually it was just the odd word bubbling up into a sentence, or quickly added as an afterthought. There was, thankfully, no recurrence of the incident on the eighteenth green. (‘His wee turn’, Cathy called it.)

  Within a couple of weeks a fresh problem became apparent. Given his new-found power (his 300-yard drives, his 140-yard sand wedges), Ravenscroft, with a layout that used to be as humbling and challenging to Gary as St Andrews or Brookline would have been, was no longer any kind of test. The longest hole on the course, the 510-yard par five tenth, was now driver, six-iron for him on a good day.

  ‘Ah think you need tae stretch yer wings a wee bit,’ Bert said.

  And so they did. Driving south from Ardgirvan they explored the string of great links courses along the Ayrshire coastline: Glasgow and Western Gailes, Kilmarnock Barassie, Old Prestwick, Turnberry…

  These were not municipal pitch-and-putts. These were real golf courses, with teeth and claws and poisonous spines on their backs. Courses where you stood on the tee and looked out over hundreds of yards of wild scrubland, heather and gorse bushes and burns and sand dunes, to where a red or yellow flag shimmered in the distance, signalling that there was indeed a green out there somewhere, an oasis of calm in this maelstrom of nature.

  Then, when you actually got to the green, you found that it was sixty or seventy yards wide and nearly a hundred long. You routinely had eighty-foot putts that went uphill and downhill, moving through several breaks across grass like a laminated-wood floor. When the breeze got up you often found yourself having to putt while standing in the mouth of a wind tunnel.

  And all this time Gary thought he had been playing golf.

  At first he was astonished at how easy, how effortless it was, to make bogey, to make double and triple bogey on these courses. A frown from the Golf Gods–a bad bounce, a few yards extra roll on the fairway–and you were suddenly in your own personal Vietnam: sweating and blooded by thorny gorse bushes, sand in your hair, mouth and eyes as you tried for the second or third time to launch your ball over the sheer face of a bunker that towered seven feet above you. The bunkers, Jesus Christ, some of these bunkers were like hatches to Hades.

  But Auld Bert’s counsel was wise. ‘The key to links gowf, son–stay out of the sand. If ye cannae drive over them, pull an iron and play well short. Don’t just hit the driver and hope for the best.’ Gary quickly found his scores improving–from the low 80s
to the mid 70s to par and better.

  Meanwhile, back at Ravenscroft, he was setting new kinds of records. He won the Monthly Medal in May and June. Almost every day for six weeks straight he handed in scorecards with scores of 68, 67, 69, 65 or 66. Finally, on a bright, hot Saturday morning towards the end of June, he walked through the locker room and up to the Handicaps Board. He read quickly down the list of names–Hamilton, Howe, Ingram–and there it was. The most beautiful inscription he had ever seen in his life:

  Irvine, G: O.4

  From 18.7 to 0.4 in a little under six weeks: the fastest anyone in the history of British golf had ever had their handicap cut.

  He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there staring at the magical combination of words and digits when he heard something behind him. He turned round to see Bert standing there smiling.

  ‘Congratulations, son.’

  ‘Aye. Thanks, Bert. Fuck.’

  ‘Yer a scratch golfer now.’

  ‘I know. Ah–baws, big baws–I can’t believe it. I wish ma dad was, y’know…’

  ‘Aye.’ Bert nodded. He was holding something. ‘Well, there’s lots of things scratch golfers can do that others cannae…’ He handed Gary a sheaf of A4 papers: six sheets, black and white, stapled together.

  On the top sheet was a picture of the oldest, most famous prize in golf, the Claret Jug, white silhouetted against a black circle.

  Beside the jug: ‘The Open Championship’.

  Below it: ‘Royal Troon, 19, 20, 21 and 22 July’.

  At the top: ‘Entry Form–Regional Qualifying’.

  Gary looked at Bert.

  ‘Has to be in by tomorrow,’ Bert said.

  PART THREE

  I’m gonna be a woman, not a news-getting machine. I’m gonna have babies and take care of them! Give ’em cod liver oil and watch their teeth grow!