The Amateurs

by John Niven

  ‘Older. He’s…Anyway, how about you? Brothers? Sisters?’

  ‘Both. He’s a lawyer, she’s a doctor. I’m the black sheep, the evil tabloid journalist.’

  ‘I quite fancied university,’ Gary said. ‘I got an offer from Glasgow.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go?’

  ‘Well, I got offered a pretty good job. Pauline wanted–we both wanted–to buy a house, get on the property ladder. You know. Being a student, three or four years with no money…it seemed like a long time back then.’

  To April the thought was incredible: make a decision about who you were going to spend the rest of your life with while you were still a teenager? Christ, she was twenty-six and she’d only recently decided what her favourite drink was, in the way that she knew automatically what she was going to have in the pub. ‘Is she going to be here this week? Cheering you on?’

  ‘Ah, I don’t think so. She’s moved out for a wee while. Staying with a pal of hers. We’ve been having some problems.’

  ‘Oh,’ April said, embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s just, since the accident, with all my…stuff and everything. It’s been a lot for her to cope with.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll sort it out.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They sat down on the shite pipe and looked out to sea, at the grey mound of Ailsa Craig, an island of rock jutting up in the Firth of Clyde. A few hundred yards along the beach a woman in a pink tracksuit was jogging down the surfline.

  ‘Ailsa Craig,’ April said.

  ‘Aye, they’ll take ye away tae Ailsa,’ Gary said.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘There used to be a mental hospital in Ayrshire called Ailsa. If you were acting up when you were a kid your mum and dad would say they’d come and take you away to Ailsa…’

  ‘You know something?’ April said, turning to face him. ‘You haven’t sworn at all since we’ve been down here.’

  ‘Well, the doctors said I was less likely to have outbursts in situations I was comfortable with…’

  ‘So you’re comfortable with this?’ April said.

  ‘Yeah, I am,’ Gary said, smiling.

  Just then the jogging woman slowly passed by them a few yards away, her jog not much more than an exaggerated walk. She was a big girl, the best part of fifteen stones, April reckoned, with a tangled mop of curly brown, sweat-drenched hair. They were the only three people on the stretch of beach and she waved cheerily to them, mouthing the word ‘hello’. April smiled and waved back.

  ‘FAT PINK HOOR!’ Gary screamed.

  He clamped his hand over his mouth. ‘Sorry! Christ.’ But April was laughing, having already seen the white headphone wires trailing up into the thick nest of the woman’s hair.

  ‘You’ll get sent to Ailsa,’ April said.

  PART FOUR

  THE OPEN

  The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen.

  Claude Debussy

  Not being a machine, you simply can’t hold onto ‘perfect’ form at golf for very long. The game is thus a continual balancing act.

  Jack Nicklaus

  DAY ONE OF THE OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP

  35

  GARY AWOKE AT 6.15 WITH BLOOD HURRYING THROUGH his veins, a squalling pit of butterflies in his stomach, and a life-threatening erection tenting the sheets. Stevie was already gone from the other twin bed, doubtless downstairs cramming a full English into himself. Briskly, Gary masturbated, showered, shaved and dressed and was sipping coffee down in the lounge when Stevie pulled the car around at exactly6.45. He went out and threw his clubs into the back seat. ‘Are we ready?’ Stevie asked, looking at him very seriously as he climbed in.

  ‘We’re ready.’

  ‘Are we mean?’

  ‘We’re mean.’

  ‘What are we?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Christ–we’re mean and ready!’

  Stevie whirled the volume knob on the stereo all the way to the right and the opening chords of ‘Complete Control’ filled the car at deafening volume as they screeched off.

  The roads quiet and the Clash loud as they drove through the Ayrshire summer morning, just the cows yawning in the fields around Troon, a milk float and a fat-bellied jet lumbering in over them on its way to Prestwick.

  Through the town, a couple of eager lads already out and coming down the first fairway at Dalry as they came along the road leading towards the seafront, the Royal Troon clubhouse proud on their left as Stevie flashed their pass and pulled into the car park.

  ‘Fuck,’ Gary said as they got out the car and looked down towards the sea.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Stevie.

  Stevie was not one to be often moved by the majesty of nature (and a golf course was not exactly nature either, it was nature shaped and coerced so that a few square miles of it ran parallel with some men’s twisted idea of a good time) but, right at that moment, it was as though God Himself had run a gentle hand over this stretch of the Scottish coastline, caressing and finessing what was already beautiful into something incredible. A translucent sheen of dew sparkled over the whole course, broken here and there by the zigzagging tyre tracks of the green staff’s vehicles as they crisscrossed the course, making last-minute checks and adjustments, reraking sand and combing tiny stones from the greens. A silver mist hung over the sand dunes that marked the boundary of the course and the beach. The air was cool and still, not even a breath of wind to ruffle the flags.

  Their start time was so early that there was a grand total of five spectators gathered around the first tee when they walked onto it. There was Cathy and Aunt Sadie, grinning and thumbs-upping. Next to them, giving Gary a sombre nod, was Auld Bert, attending his first Open since the late seventies. Dr Robertson smiled. He’d taken the time off work to be there. Just in case. And there, next to Robertson, waving with a silver Thermos of coffee, was April. ‘Good luck, son!’ Cathy shrieked over the thin trickle of applause.

  A man walked over and shook Gary’s hand in businesslike fashion. He was in his late forties and wore check trousers and a bright red sweater vest, his accent was American, springy and Southern. ‘Crawford Koon,’ he said simply. Gary placed the name–an old-school journeyman pro. He’d been on the tour since the early 1980s. Never won anything big.

  The third member of their three ball was a young English professional who’d come through the qualifying process. Dean Coffey was in his early twenties and decked out in the requisite fluorescent chinos and polo shirt. Like Gary, it was his first Open.

  ‘Awright, mate!’ he said, shaking Gary’s hand.

  ‘How ye doing?’ Gary said.

  ‘Facking shitting meself, mate!’ Coffey replied.

  ‘Gentlemen?’ the starter said. ‘If you’re ready…’

  Stevie handed Gary the driver. ‘Nothing fancy, just knock this one up the middle,’ he said.

  ‘On the tee now, from Ravenscroft Golf Club, Ardgirvan, amateur competitor, Mr Gary Irvine!’

  Whooping and whistling as Gary walked onto the tee. ‘You go on yourself, Gary son!’ Sadie said. ‘Gary! Gary!’ his mum chanted. Gary grinned sheepishly at them.

  ‘Got the fan club here, then?’ Coffey said.

  Gary teed up his ball and everyone fell silent. He took a few loose easy practice swings, feeling for the tempo, and then sighted down the fairway. The first hole at Royal Troon, ‘Seal’, is a par four that runs away from the clubhouse and doglegs slightly left. The penalties are severe if the tee shot is offline; thick gorse and marram-grassed hillocks abound. With the sea hard by on the player’s right, many a round has been wrecked early on with a sliced–or even slightly pushed–drive spiralling into deep trouble. Gary cracked it hard down the right-hand edge of the fairway. They watched as it started to fall to earth drawing slowly to the left.

  Too slowly.

  It landed on the edge of the fairway, took a crazy b
ounce to the right and vanished.

  ‘Uh-oh’, Stevie said, using the two-syllable golf shorthand for despair for the first time that day. Oh well, Gary thought, so the first shot hadn’t gone their way. No big deal…

  ‘So, aye,’ Masterson was saying, ‘Ah’ve just checked in. We’re going tae go fur a walk up around the university this morning. Some buildings up there the boy says. Right fucking…old. Ancient an aw that. Then we’ll go and see some film and then oot fur something tae eat. The boy fancies this bloody Japanese place so he does. Raw fucking fish. Ah telt him there’s no way ah’m eating that pish, but he says they’ve got chicken and rice and stuff so ah’ll get something so ah will. Aye, so, er, yer no going to go out tonight then?’ he said.

  ‘No. I told you, Karen’s away on holiday,’ Leanne said, ‘Audrey’s not well, I’m just going to get a film out and have a night in by myself.’

  ‘Aye, right enough, hen. Ye did tell me. So ye did. Aye.’ Masterson was standing up by the blue-tinted, floor-to-ceiling windows of his suite on the twenty-second floor of the Glasgow Hilton. From the adjacent bedroom he could hear the crashes and bullets of the billion-dollar atrocity his son was watching on Pay TV. Always had to be spending bloody money. Couldnae sit and watch normal telly for an hour. He didnae even like the football. Sometimes Masterson wondered if his son was…naw, no way. No fucking danger. ‘Well, have a nice night then, doll. Ah’ll try and phone ye later.’

  ‘Don’t call after eleven,’ Leanne said. ‘I’m going to have an early night.’

  Another one of her early nights. He pictured it–her away over on her side of the bed, her back to him, grunting or tutting if he kept the telly on a minute past eleven o’clock. Christ, Leanne bored him. All the same, this would probably be the last time he ever spoke to her, to this woman he’d once loved. Should he have something profound to say?

  ‘Aye, right, well, bye then, hen.’

  ‘Bye.’

  Click. That was that.

  Masterson hung up. He badly wanted a drink, a big glug of whisky or something, but it was barely ten o’clock in the morning. He realised there was no way he was going to get through this day sober. Would there be a bar at this cinema? Maybe no. He’d have to make sure this fucking Jap restaurant was licensed. He dialled Pauline’s number but it went straight to voicemail. Where was she going today? To look at some house or other? Maybe she was right. Maybe they should move away. Think about Pauline–that was the way to get through this. Think about those breasts, the arse cheeks. All his. Forever. Keep thinking about that. He stood there and pressed his forehead against the cold glass, his temples going numb as he watched the traffic flowing in and out of the city.

  Leanne walked through the big, empty house towards the kitchen, thinking that there had been something weird about the phone call, other than the fact that it was unusual for him ever to call her without a specific reason. ‘Just for a chat.’ It was a few minutes later, as her hot-cross bun was bouncing up out of the toaster, that she put her finger on it.

  Nervous.

  He’d sounded nervous.

  36

  A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER AND NOTHING WAS GOING their way. It was unbelievable. Stevie had no idea a golf course could change so much in the one day it took to move from practice play into the first round of competition. From a relatively benign stretch of turf, a difficult yet solvable succession of problems, to a hostile, malicious living thing–a sentient creature hell-bent on your personal destruction–within less than twenty-four hours. They’d made four bogeys in the first six holes and (almost) none of them had really been Gary’s fault.

  Now they trudged towards the seventh green in silence, four over par. For the first time in the round all three players had found the green in two regulation strokes, but they were all a good distance from the hole on an enormous green baked lightning fast by the weeks of warm weather.

  As they walked across the green towards Gary’s ball (both of them conscious of the fact that it took thirty-four paces to cover the distance from hole to ball. 1 pace = approx. 1 yard, 1 yard = 3 feet, so a putt of over a hundred feet) Gary noticed the unmanned TV cameras around the green, shrouded in polythene, their eyes black and lifeless and pointed at the ground, ready to be activated as soon as a match worth televising came around the course.

  He crouched down behind the ball, trying for a read. It was hopeless: downhill, breaking left to right and then, about two-thirds of the way to the hole, turning uphill and breaking right to left and then–maybe–back the other way again as it got to the hole.

  ‘What do you think?’ Gary asked Stevie, who was crouching behind him.

  Stevie tried to read the putt, but it was Sanskrit. Hieroglyphics. In lieu of something intelligent to say about the line of the putt he tried to think of something more general and inspirational. What would Martin Luther King have said? What would Strummer have said?

  ‘Nice and firm up the middle,’ Stevie said.

  They both felt like what they were: two chancers who shouldn’t have been there.

  Gary sighed and settled the putter head behind the ball. Not really caring at this point, he just made a nice easy slap, ignoring the break and sending it straight up the middle. The ball charged at speed downhill, looking like it had been massively overstruck. It started to veer right, looking like it would end up twenty yards offline. It turned left as it began heading uphill, slowing down dramatically now, looking like it would never reach the crest of the incline. But it did, rolling slightly downhill now, gathering pace and changing course a third time as it turned gently towards the hole. At this point, at exactly the same time, Stevie and Gary both said, ‘Aye, yer maw.’

  The ball hit the cup very hard, hopped three inches into the air above it, and then plopped down into the hole with a satisfying rattle to give Gary his first birdie of the day. His little gallery burst into spontaneous cheering and applause. Stevie and Gary looked at each other and simply burst out laughing.

  Suddenly Gary’s mind was racing, utterly transformed in the second it took for the ball to drop into the cup. From a hellish four over par to three over in a heartbeat. Three over wasn’t so bad. He still had eleven more holes to play. He only had to make three more birdies and he’d be level par–a fresh start from which anything might be possible. And suddenly the eleven holes that still lay before him had been transformed from an ordeal to be survived into a flowering paradise overflowing with birdie opportunities.

  This feeling of transcendent power and potential was to last approximately three and a half minutes: the time that elapsed between sinking his putt on the seventh and striking his tee shot on the eighth. The eighth at Royal Troon.

  The Postage Stamp.

  One of the most famous holes in golf, at just 126 yards long it is the shortest hole on the Open rota and earns its name from the size of its tiny green. The green itself is surrounded by bunkers–deep fearsome maws which have devoured many less than perfectly struck tee shots and wrecked many a man’s round and sanity.

  A German amateur by the name of Herman Tissies, playing in the 1950 Open Championship, found one of the left-hand bunkers with his tee shot. Five shots later he managed to launch his ball out of the bunker…and into another one. Another five shots and he succeeded in dislodging his ball from this bunker, sending it flying back into the original bunker. Tissies managed to get out of this bunker in only three shots and holed out for a card-incinerating 15.

  Even Calvin Linklater had once carded a dreadful quintuple bogey nine here.

  Incredible that a straight, simple 126-yard par three–just a slap with the sand wedge if the prevailing winds are favourable–could be responsible for so much misery and fury.

  Of course, Gary Irvine knew all these stories and more. However, as he climbed the wooden steps to the eighth tee, still basking in the post-birdie glow, he chose to forget them. A slight headwind blowing into his face made his hand wander over the sand wedge and pull out the pitching wedge.

 
The moment he hit it, he knew he had overstruck it, and he watched, a rising nausea in his chest, as the ball hurtled down towards the back of the green, took one bounce and disappeared.

  ‘Unlucky,’ Stevie said.

  37

  FUCK IT, LEANNE THOUGHT AS SHE ALLOWED THE upended wine bottle to drain into her glass, one of those massive goblets that easily held half a litre. She had long since lost interest in the movie she’d rented–some American romcom thing, the kind of film the wee fat guy who ran the video shop on the high street always made some comment about when you took it up to the counter. Cheeky bastard. But he hadn’t been working tonight, so she’d gone ahead and got it anyway.

  Using the remote she flipped from DVD to AUX and Dido softly flooded through the speakers. She stretched out on the couch, propped up on the cushions, resting her brimming glass on her stomach (God, she’d have to get back down that gym soon), a bit sleepy now from the wine, alone in the big living room, in the big house, as the summer darkness finally gathered outside. The day had been hot enough to move her to leave windows open all round the place and the chatter of swallows and thrushes darting in and out of the big maples that lined the street intertwined with the music to create a peaceful murmur.

  It was lovely to have the place to herself.

  Leanne sipped her wine, splashing a little down her front and not really caring and realising that that meant she was drunk.

  From the kitchen, a noise. Like something falling over.

  She turned the music down and listened. Nothing.

  Kitchen. Maybe time to make herself a wee snack. Starving. With some difficulty she levered herself up from the couch and headed down the hall. She stopped in the doorway and peered into the dark room. She thought she could smell something odd, something sweet and fragrant, and, just for a second, she felt a tiny current of fear. Then logic–buffered by a bottle of Chardonnay–kicked in. ‘Stupid,’ she said out loud as she turned the lights on.