by John Niven
‘What we got to the flag?’ he asked.
‘Two hundred and five to the stick,’ Snakes said. ‘What you thinking?’
‘I’m thinking we need birdie putts every hole from here on in or this thing is over.’
‘You got that right.’ Snakes looked over to where Gary and Stevie stood, the silver tape on Gary’s mouth glinting in the sunlight.
‘Gimme the four,’ Linklater said, hitching up his sleeve.
‘Dial in, boss,’ Snakes said, passing him the club.
Linklater would later say it was one of the purest golf shots he ever hit: a long, low, stinging four-iron into a stiff wind, the ball bouncing once in front of the green, again right in the middle of the green’s elevated bank, the second bounce killing the ball’s energy and allowing it to roll the last forty feet, curling up eleven feet from the hole. The champion acknowledged the cheers of the crowd with a raised, gloved hand, head down as he passed the club back to Snakes. ‘Follow that in,’ Snakes said quietly as the spotlight shifted over to Gary.
Communication between Gary and Stevie was now being conducted with grunting and pointing. Gary grunted and pointed at the five-iron. Stevie shook his head and proffered the four. Gary grunted and reached for the five.
‘Are you aff yer fucking heed?’ Stevie said. ‘Two-hundred-odd yards? Intae this wind? Elevated green? Pin at the back? The big man just hit a four for fuck’s sake.’
‘Mnnghh!’
‘Your funeral.’ Stevie passed him the five-iron and stepped back.
Gary had never felt so pumped up in his life. It was as though the gag was stoppering up all the energy that would normally have been released by the Tourette’s. As if every fuck, cunt, balls, hoor, flaps, wank, tits, spunk and fanny that should have been coming out of his mouth was now being channelled through his veins and into his muscles, like his body was literally being supercharged by the unreleased expletives. Ominously, that strange sensation in his head returning; a tingling of the scalp, not completely unpleasant, as though the excess adrenalin was bubbling up through the top of his skull.
He swung the club so hard he nearly fell off his feet, but the connection was good, the ball coming down right at the green. It bounced once right in the middle of the elevated bank and hopped forward, stopping quicker than any five-iron had a right to, finishing perhaps a foot behind Linklater’s ball.
The crowd went berserk.
‘Jesus,’ Snakes said as they headed off towards the green. ‘What you gotta do to beat this guy?’
There was something inevitable about what happened next. Gary’s putt slammed into the cup for his sixth birdie of the day while Linklater’s grazed the lip and curled around the hole before coming to rest above ground. ‘Fuck it,’ Linklater growled through gritted teeth as he walked forward to tap in, frustration beginning to show now.
‘Go on, bro!’ Lee shouted.
‘My Gawd…oh my Gawd!’ Cathy was shrieking. ‘He’s gonnae do it. He’s gonnae win!’
Ranta was hyperventilating. Still reeling from Leanne’s phone call, he was watching the golf equivalent of a race where his horse was twenty furlongs ahead of the field with five furlongs left to go. Still, Ranta had gambled long and viciously enough to know that horses had lost races from such positions. So, with an eye on the finances and the worst-case scenario (and business was business after all), he decided to cover his bet.
The Beast was enjoying being on the bypass, getting the foot down. It had taken forever to get out of Troon. He glanced at Masterson in the passenger seat; out cold, paralytic, his head against the window, his hair greasing up the glass. The reek of bevvy aff the cunt. Maybe he should give him a slap, tell him to sit up. Naw, he wis an auld pal of the boss’s. Better play the white man.
The Beast’s mobile trilled into life. ‘Ho,’ he said.
‘Where are ye?’ Ranta asked.
‘Oan the bypass. Took fucking ages tae get aff the course and oot the toon so it did.’
‘How’s oor friend?’
‘Cunt’s lying here spark out, boss. Fucking steamboats so he was. We’ll be at his place in about ten minutes.’
‘Might be a wee change o’ plan…’ Ranta said.
58
FRUSTRATED, PUSHING TOO HARD TO MAKE SOMETHING happen, Linklater overhit his tee shot at the fourteenth–the par-three Alton–and wound up scrambling to make par. Both players parred the fifteenth. Gary birdied the sixteenth while Linklater notched up another par. They walked towards the seventeenth tee, the crowds ecstatic now, some singing ‘Flower of Scotland’, impromptu celebrations breaking out, Gary’s victory seeming assured, inevitable. So far Stevie and Gary had managed to avoid looking at a single leader board. Finally they looked up at one of the towering yellow walls. It said:
IRVINE G (A)–11
LINKLATER C–4
RODRIGUEZ J–2
LATHE T–2
They looked at each other. Gary pointed at the strip of tape, at his mouth. Stevie looked around. They were at a safe distance from the spectators. Linklater and Snakes were ahead of them, upwind and out of earshot, Dawkins and Morton safely behind them. Stevie nodded and Gary stripped the tape from his mouth.
‘FuckjesusfuckyacuntoohSteviefatbastardweefatbastardye!’
‘Easy, nearly home. Nearly there.’
‘Stevie-fuckcuntstits-ma-hoormasterflapspishbaws-head’sersemawrodeyermaw-sore.’
‘Your head’s sore?’
Gary nodded, rubbing the crown of his head–a gallon of boiling lemonade in there now.
‘Oh fuck,’ Stevie said.
‘And ah cannae–oohyacuntyefuckingblackbastard–stop it’
‘Stop what? The swearing?’
‘Aye–fuck. OW! Prick. Big pricks. Baws ya fat cunt ye. Slutboothoornail.’
‘Shit. Look, it’s just two holes tae go. Do ye think ye can keep it together that long?’
Gary took a deep breath and nodded. ‘But, Stevie?’
‘Aye?’ Stevie noticed that he looked very scared.
‘Whit if–fuckingslutyacuntsookmabawsgrrrBASTARD!–ah’m like this–PRRRRRRICK!–forever?’
‘It…it’s probably just the stress. This is a pretty fucking unusual situation here. Try and relax. But, in the meantime–’ Stevie glanced towards the pathway, where Dawkins and Morton were waiting for them, Morton looking at his watch–‘there’s no sense in us getting disqualified this close to finishing, eh? Sorry, pal, no be long now.’ He reaffixed the makeshift gag firmly across his friend’s mouth.
‘This is just a fucking nightmare now, so it is,’ Alec said to Ranta. The crush and press of the enormous crowd was so great that it was impossible to get anywhere near the action. All they’d seen the last couple of holes had been the odd clubhead popping up above the sea of people, then the crack of metal on ball, followed by heads turning as one to follow the shot.
‘Aye, right enough,’ Ranta agreed. ‘Come on and we’ll go and watch the last couple o’ holes on the big screen in the bar. Get a pint.’ He was rubbing his hands briskly together. ‘The boy’s got this in the bag anyway. Seven shots ahead wi two tae play? Ho ho!’
‘Whit aboot laughing boy?’ Alec said, nodding towards where Lee was standing with Lisa, cheering as Gary and Linklater passed by.
Ranta, a man who was capable of feeling more affection for a winning racehorse than he was for certain family members, looked over at Lee, thinking. He smiled.
‘Ach, fuck it. We’ll let this wan go. Let the boy stay and watch his brother. We all make mistakes, eh?’
‘Christ, how much did you put on this cunt?’
Ranta tapped the side of his nose and winked conspiratorially. ‘You just leave it tae yer auld da, son. He’ll see ye right. Come on, ah’m gasping fur a bevvy so ah um.’
‘Another fine pair of tee shots,’ Daventry said as, on television, Gary and Linklater walked up to the seventeenth green. ‘Both players on the green at this very demanding par three. But, you’d have to say, Bob, it looks
like it’s all over bar the shouting.’
‘And I’ll tell you something,’ Torrent added, as the screen filled with a shot of Gary, walking along, head hung, mouth taped, ‘there’s going to be some shouting in a minute for this lad…’
Gary had made the front of the green and was still looking at a putt of nearly seventy feet. Linklater was closer, with maybe a fifty-footer for birdie.
Stevie chewed his nails nervously as he watched Gary line his putt up. They were no longer conferring on putts. Gary’s mind seemed to be reading them with superhuman intuition. Although his swearing was inaudible now, the muffled words hammering against the tape were coming thick and furious, in a near-constant stream. He was red-faced and sweating and seemed to be developing a slight tremor, a flicker, in his right eye, the eye beneath the indentation on his temple where the ball struck him. It seemed to Stevie like his golf was reaching a crescendo of perfection along with the swearing. As the round had progressed he’d swung more easily and relaxed almost in direct proportion to the magnitude that the swearing had increased by. Stevie wished he knew more about the human brain, about what could be happening in there, what fusing and rewiring of cortex and cerebellum had happened, how one thing might be affecting the other.
The crowd fell silent as Gary assumed his putting stance. Seventy-three feet, left-to-right. He aimed a foot and a half left of the hole and pulled the trigger. The ball snaked across the green, curving slightly right as it reached the halfway point, turning towards the hole. It was so sweetly struck, on such perfect line, that it looked like the ball was running along a little channel dug into the green, leading directly into the cup and seen only by Gary.
‘Shit,’ Linklater said, crouching by the side of the green.
‘Aye, yer fucking maw,’ Stevie said.
‘I say,’ Daventry said as the moan of the crowd began to escalate and sharpen in pitch.
‘AYE! AYE! AYE! AYE!’ Ranta was shouting, up on a table in the beer tent now.
Golf fanatics all around the world were yelling all of these things and more at their television sets in over seventy different languages.
The ball broke a final few inches to the right, bang on line but slowing, slowing, slowing. It reached the lip and stopped, half of the ball teetering over the cool dark below, half of it somehow remaining on the grass.
‘GO OAN, YA FUCKING TOTAL HOOR YE!’ Ranta screamed.
The ball dropped into the cup and the crowd erupted. Even Linklater was smiling now, shaking his head in what-can-you-do? fashion.
‘My goodness,’ Daventry said.
Gary ran into the middle of the green and ripped the gag off. ‘AAGGHHHH!’ he screamed. ‘YA FUCKING DIRTY BIKE BOOT SLUT YE OOHH YA CUNT FUCKING BASTARD HOOR BAWS SPUNK SHITE SHITE SHITE! COCKS YA FUCKING PRICKS!’
The astonished crowd gradually stopped cheering. As the silence fell, Gary’s volume increased, or rather it became much more apparent, and his outburst became more rapid. He was now atop a greenside bunker, screaming right into the faces of the crowd.
‘FUCK FUCK FUCKING TITS FANNY PISH FLAPS…BENDERS! FUCKING GOBBLING DUGS!’
People’s jaws falling.
Parents covering children’s ears.
‘CUNT…CUNT SUCKING ON THE TEATS OF A HOOOORRR!’
On television they quickly cut to footage of dogs scampering on the nearby beach while Daventry improvised. ‘And, er, there seems to be something of an…unusual celebration going on there. I’m sure we’ll come back to it when things have…umm…calmed down a wee bit.’
Back on the green: ‘SOOK IT SOOK IT! HONK MA FUCKING BOBO, SMOKE MA DOBBER! BITE MA BANGER! BITE IT, BITE IT…’ Gary was scrabbling at his trousers now, unbuckling, unzipping, just feet away from a horrified knot of pensioners.
Stevie started sprinting across the green.
‘BITE IT, YA FUCKING CUNNNNNTSSSS!’
An old woman fainting.
Stevie was almost upon him when Gary turned, one hand down the front of his trousers, clamped around the root of his titanium erection, about to haul it out.
‘BITE IT–’
He stopped in mid-sentence, a strange expression on his face, as if he’d just remembered something important. A trickle of blood ran from his right nostril. Stevie stopped.
‘Gary?’ he said.
Gary’s eyes were screwed shut, like he was about to sneeze.
Something burst in the middle of his head.
A thick spurt of blood sprayed out of his nose, gushing down his chin and across his shirt. The crowd gasped.
‘SON!’ Cathy screamed.
Gary toppled backwards into the bunker, everything going milky, then black, as the screaming and shouting of the crowd faded away, and soon there was nothing at all.
59
HE KNEW WHERE HE WAS THE MOMENT HE INHALED. HE opened his eyes and looked up into the trees, listening to water splashing over stone, to the crickets thrumming. A bee–body as big as a grape–lurched drunkenly overhead. Amen Corner: the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth at Augusta National, one of the most challenging stretches of holes in golf. And one of the most beautiful: Rae’s Creek runs through it, burbling around the greens and across the fairways, the green water caressed by the weeping blossoms of golden bells. He became aware of another sound; the rhythmic swish and click of well-struck golf balls.
He followed the sound along the gravel path through the trees and, rounding a huge reddish-pink rhododendron bush, he saw his father alone on the twelfth tee, the short par three. He was hitting balls over the creek and onto the green. There was a bag of balls at his feet and a pale blue plastic cooler nearby. He watched as his father pulled another ball towards him with the toe of the club.
Swish click.
The ball floated gracefully up into the sky. It looked good for a moment, but, as it came down, it drifted, splashing into the water, short and left of the green.
‘Bastard!’
‘You pulled it, Dad.’
‘Dae ye think?’ his father said sarcastically, his back still to Gary. He hit another shot, smoother, straighter. ‘That’s mair like it,’ his father purred to himself as he watched it. He turned round and pushed his hat back on his head. He was sweating. ‘Morning, son, some day, eh?’
Gary stepped up onto the tee, his dad lighting a Regal now, and together they looked downhill, along the fairway, striped with bars of the morning sun, and across the creek onto the velvet grass of the immaculate green.
‘No half,’ Gary said.
‘Here, ye thirsty?’ his dad said. ‘There’s some cans o’ juice in there. Come on and we’ll get a wee seat.’
They sat down on a wooden bench at the back of the tee. The Coke was cold and sweet and they sat there quietly, savouring their drinks in the shade. After a while Gary said, ‘Dad?’
‘Mmmm?’
The ‘Dad?/Mmmm?’ exchange, one he had heard thousands, millions, of times in childhood. One that seemed as routine and dull as it was possible for something to be, but which now sounded as delicious to Gary’s ears as the sweetest poetry.
‘Am I a member here now?’
‘Well, you’re damn sure going the right way about it.’
Silence. Bees and crickets.
‘Dad?’
‘Mmmm?’
‘Did you love me more than Lee?’
‘Naw. If anything it was more the other way.’
‘What?’
‘Hey, you asked! You’re not allowed tae lie up here. Ye get barred.’
‘But–’
‘Look.’ He sighed. ‘You were always a sensible wee boy. Worked hard at school. Got a good job. We always knew you’d be fine. Do you no understand, son? Love goes where it’s needed.’
Gary thought for a moment. ‘Maybe I should see him more.’
‘Well, that would be a start.’ His dad took a long swallow of Coke and burped happily.
‘Do you know how much Mum misses you?’
His dad smiled.
‘Ah watch over your mother every day. Every night ah float down above her bed and smell her hair and kiss her cheek as she falls asleep. She thinks she’s daft. Thinks she’s dreaming it, so she does.’ A frown crossed his dad’s face. ‘But listen, tell her tae get that boiler in the bedroom cupboard looked at, would ye? It’s making an awfy noise in the middle o’ the night.’
‘Do ye regret anything, Dad?’
‘Ah wish we’d had more children. Ah’d have liked a wee girl. And ah’d have taken better care o’ ma teeth. But everyone says that.’
‘What’s God like?’
‘He looks a bit like George Raft, ye remember him? Yank actor. Bit before your time, ah suppose. Well.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Looks like it’s about that time.’ His dad stood up. ‘Come here, son…’
They embraced, Gary drinking in the Dad smell: golf-sweat and Old Spice and Regal and the faint perfume of the Grouse that was famous, the blending scents bringing on a slide show, fragments of his whole childhood wheeling in front of his eyes: running on Ardgirvan beach, a football game in the back garden, him and Lee staring in the shop window at the Airfix models and their mum buying them unasked, a cinema–their dad cackling so hard at the film, their mum crying when they broke the portable telly, the menus for the Christmas dinner their mum got them to write (‘prawn coktail…fish in white sawce…turrkey with al the trimmings’), a snowball fight–their dad’s snowballs packed hard and flying fast as bullets, the same Airfix models built and waiting for them on the living-room table in the morning, Saturday night, waiting for their dad to come home from the golf–steak and onion rings and mushrooms and chips, their dad singing ‘My Brother Sylvest’ (‘He’s got a row of forty medals on his chest–BIG CHEST!’) and all of them laughing, going somewhere in the car in the summer, their parents young and dark-haired and in love and him and Lee in the back, play-fighting on warm leather seats.
Gary crying now.
His dad saying, ‘Go on. Shhhh. That’s enough. There’s only one thing the dead have tae say to ye.’ Whispering now, close to his ear. ‘Live, son. Live.’
