The man then enters the driving gallery, a curved row of booths or stalls or traps facing a seemingly endless and expanding area of mown grass. Advertising hoardings masquerading as distance markers are positioned at fifty-yard intervals all the way to infinity, carrying the brand names of golf-related products as well as the relevant number. And balls, hundreds, perhaps thousands of gleaming white balls, litter the grass. Under the floodlights they shine with the colour of polished teeth. The floodlights are on because it is dark, because it is night. It is like theatre. It is a performance. A show.
The man chooses his booth, leans his handful of clubs against the wall, then goes through a number of warming-up exercises, such as a prolonged but ultimately failed attempt to touch his toes and several long, slow intakes of breath with his eyes closed. It is a reminder of the importance of mental fitness. It is about concentration, focus, the whetting and sharpening of the most important club in any golfer’s bag - the mind. It is art. It is Zen. He places the first of his balk on the raised rubber tee and hammers his first drive of the evening as hard as he possibly can, irrespective of loft, direction or even length. The first one is all about animal emotions and raw lust. All about release.
In their booths, every man is invisible from the waist down. Bobble hats can be seen, and shirts and sweaters are on display. A quick eye can make a momentary study of back-swings and follow-throughs as the silver clubs flash through their arcs. But below that line is a secret. Whatever takes place between a man and his ball at the moment of contact is a matter of privacy, and happens at such speed and in such a fraction of time it remains a mystery even to the man himself. It is religion and ballistics rolled into one. It is whiplash and prayer combined in a single act. From each booth comes the swish of carbon graphite through air, the cracking of heat-hardened metal against dimpled polymer resin. Then balls. Tiny white bolls streaming upward and onwards, beyond the upper range of the floodlights and into the night sky.
Our man is no professional. Only a small percentage of his balls stream upward or even onwards, and in all his days as a driver of golf balls, those shots of his which have indeed raced like comets across the firmament of heaven can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Perhaps they were dreams. In the booths to either side of him, some men are worse. Some-hit grubber shots or daisy-cutters that bobble along the surface of the grass and dribble to a halt well short of the first board. Some hit shots that are instantly overcome by lethargy and fatigue. Some hook to the right or slice to the left, and one man, near the fire escape, hits several balls that never appear at all but can be heard cannoning around the padded inside of the booth itself. But most men are better. Their swings make a more clinical sound. Their bodies cut a cleaner shape. Their shots are straight and true. And some men… some men are just special. Superhuman. Beyond belief. The back-spin imparted by their short irons can stop a golf bail dead in its tracks, as if its name had been called. Their long irons are nothing short of deadly weapons, toileting balls across vast distances with fatal accuracy and machine-like regularity. And their woods. Their woods launch shots which are still on an upward trajectory as they escape not only the perimeter fence but the gravitational pull of the planet, and are never seen again, having disintegrated while re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. These men are not golfers - they are Drivers. They travel to Florida and hit balls as far as they can for large sums of money. Their clubs are made of special minerals found only in distant galaxies. They cannot be spoken to. They can only be talked about and admired.
Every couple of hours at the range the harvester emerges from its depot. Driven by two excitable and probably intoxicated youths earning a few pounds of drinking money, the harvester makes thirty or forty sweeps of the fairway, collecting its crop of ripe white balls in a converted sprout-picker towed by a vehicle which is one part stock car and two parts armoured tank. The windows are protected by wire mesh and the reinforced body panels to all sides have suffered a number of impacts. Among the more gentlemanly players, of whom there are very few, it is considered courteous to refrain from driving until the harvester completes its circuit, and also affords the opportunity of a cigarette and a drink. Among the regulars, however, its appearance is an opportunity not to be missed. Upon seeing it trundle into view, even the most casual golfer feels a new sense of urgency and purpose, and fires an increased frequency of shots in the direction of the vehicle. A direct hit brings about a cheer from the whole of the gallery (excepting the gentlemen golfers, with their cigarettes and hip flasks) and a pomp on the horn from the two pissed youths navigating and steering their way through the barrage of flak.
Normality descends. The evening progresses. Short and long, high and low, wonky and straight, glorious or utterly crap, men disseminate their stock of tiny white missiles into the night, each one a symbol of their worth, a particle of their essence and an object of hope.
4
Felix preferred to work in the office at the beginning of the week, making calls, sorting out paperwork and so on, and to save any home visits until Friday. If he set off on his rounds on Friday morning, no one really expected to see him again until Monday. If he made good time, he could be home by four at the latest, and mow the lawn or tinker around in the shed before Abbie came back.
The Moffats lived on the Lakeland Estate, a maze of yellow-brick three-storey houses built on the steep side of a north-facing hill above the town. Thrown together in the early 1980s by the same planners responsible for the Horseshoe roundabout, the estate had been advertised as an executive paradise, where the upwardly mobile could park their throaty sports cars in the downstairs garage and sip their aperitifs while enjoying the view from the upstairs lounge. For a split second in the middle of the night, behind the eyelids of a town planner flitting from one vision to the next, it must have seemed like a good idea. But as the sun came up over the horizon, it was doomed. Those in the town with even the slightest upward inclination had set their sights a little higher than the Lakeland Estate, despite its altitude, and those mobile enough to get to the train station had done so and had not come back. Pretty soon the Lakeland development had become a dumping ground for every dysfunctional family and malfunctioning individual within a ten-mile radius. There were two shops on the estate, one an off-licence, the other a bookmaker’s, each being nothing more than a freight container of the type seen on the back of articulated lorries or cross-Channel ferries, and both operating through small hatches cut out of the corrugated metal. The only other commercial enterprise was a mobile shop known as the Big Blue One. Like a kind of military personnel carrier or something left over from the miners’ strike, the Big Blue One was a thirty-year-old coach with grilles at the windows and thick rubber skirts protecting the tyres. The navy-blue bodywork was pockmarked with what could only have been bullet holes, including one spectacular pattern of shotgun spray just under the driver’s window. The roof was painted with tar and rimmed with curls of barbed wire. The Big Blue One carried no number plate and avoided paying any kind of road tax or insurance by keeping off the actual road. It could often be seen churning up the grassy play area in the middle of the estate or crawling along the pavement. Not that the police visited the Lakeland Estate very often, and if they did they rarely got out of their cars, and certainly not to check the road-worthiness of an old coach. Besides, if people could get what they wanted on the estate, it meant they didn’t have to come looking for it in town, and there were plenty of people within the strata of Prospect House who were happy with such an arrangement. Felix had never been inside the Big Blue One but nearly all of his clients had, and although he couldn’t be certain what was on sale behind the reinforced doors and the painted-out glass, he presumed it was something more stimulating than Marmite and wet fish. As he turned down Grasmere Drive into Coleridge Avenue, the Big Blue One passed him in the other direction, trundling along a strip of dried mud and broken fence posts that had once been gardens.
Of all the forces at work against the Moffat fa
mily, gravity had affected them most. A stand-up fridge freezer outside on the lawn had tumbled over and strange liquids were oozing from underneath. Half a dozen daffodils in a milk bottle had wilted and slumped. With their brownish-yellow heads lying dry and inert against the peeling windowsill, they looked like a litter of kittens or rabbits born dead. In the porch, coats and jackets were strewn on the floor, and of the seven or eight wellies and leather boots left in a comer, not one had managed to stay upright. On the kitchen table, a full bag of cement had become a permanent fixture. The bottom half was glued to the Formica through various spillages. The top was solid, ringed with coffee stains and bum marks, and had become a convenient work surface as well as an impromptu telephone directory, judging by the names and numbers scrawled on the paper sack. From the kitchen ceiling, the plaster bellied downwards, stained with the brown tidemarks of several floods and other accidents in the bathroom above. Mrs Moffat, a tired-looking woman in her early fifties, offered Felix a drink, but he said no. And even though he was bursting, he decided not to ask for the loo, because, looking past the sink and the fridge, he could see the downstairs toilet, and not just the room often referred to as the toilet but the off-white pot itself with its cracked wooden seat. For reasons that were not obvious, me door to the smallest room in the house been removed and both partition walls as well. It was entirely open-plan and barely a yard from the oven.
‘Sorry for the mess. It’s a nightmare.’
‘Don’t worry, I understand.’
‘With the gang and everything.’
‘Are you… your boys… in a gang?’
‘Oh, well, it depends who’s asking, doesn’t it? If you’re from the dole, then they’re all on the sick. Bad backs, the lot of ’em. Runs in the family. We’ve got X-rays to prove it. And it’s being in the gang that’s done ’em in. Years of it.’
‘I see.’
‘But you’re not from the dole, are you?’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Well, that’s all right, then.’
‘So they’re in a gang?’
‘Aye. A black gang.’
Felix looked blank. There were only a handful of black families on the estate and even if they’d formed a gang, it seemed unlikely the Moffats would be in it. The Moffats were not black.
‘Gets everywhere,’ she added.
‘Does it?’
‘And the white. They do some white as well. That comes off though, but not the black.’
‘I see.’
‘You don’t know what the hell I’m on about, do you, love?’
Felix shook his head. Mrs Moffat pointed to a thick black smudge on the lino, then to another smear of blackness a couple of feet away, then to a dark-brown mark on the light switch, then to the white plastic kettle, which was covered in dirty fingerprints, as was the door of the fridge. Her hand invited him to continue looking around the kitchen. There wasn’t a single object or square foot that wasn’t daubed with the same kind of stain.
‘Tar,’ she explained.
‘Oh, I see.’
‘They do the tarmac. Filthy stuff it is, and sticks like shit to a blanket. I tell ’em to leave their gear in the porch, but when you’ve been grafting all day you don’t want some woman going on at you, eh?’
‘Do they work on the motorways?’
‘Motorways, yards, driveways, anything. And bloody dangerous it is too. We’ve lost one, our Donny. Hit by a lorry on the Ai. The white’s more dangerous - painting lines down the middle of the road with those bloody great trucks thundering past. But at least the white comes off in the wash.’
Ruby was in the front room, watching television. Felix had asked Mrs Moffat to sit with them while they talked, but she had too much to do and said she’d listen from the kitchen. ‘Walls are so bloody thin - you can’t smile in this house without someone hearing you.’ Felix asked Ruby why she thought she’d been excluded from school, but she didn’t answer. In her short denim skirt and with her red hair tied in a bun, she looked older than eleven, but her body language was that of a child, and when Felix asked her another question she pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head.
‘Ruby!’ her mother shouted from next door.
‘Don’t you like school, Ruby?’ asked Felix.
Inside her hood she shook her head.
‘Why not?’
‘Boring.’
‘Mr Roderick said…’
‘You mean Rubberdick?’
‘Mr Roderick said that you were doing well up to a few months ago, then suddenly there was a problem.’
She switched the telly over with the remote, then started flicking through the satellite stations, moving from one programme to the next every few seconds. Felix asked about her friends, if she was in any kind of trouble, if there was anything she wanted to talk about, but from inside the sweatshirt there was no answer. He stood up and put a card down on the arm of the chair.
‘Phone me whenever you want, if you want to. And I’ll arrange for you and your mum to come and see me in the office, early next week. OK?’
He detected a nodding motion inside the hood and, taking this as a minor breakthrough, asked one last question. ‘Do you want to say anything about the spiders?’
Again she said nothing, but held her thumb on one of the buttons on the remote so the programmes scrolled past in a rapid succession of adverts, cartoons, interviews, newsreaders, football, skydiving, doctors, soldiers, adverts, adverts - until interference filled the screen and a message popped up advising those subscribers having difficulty receiving a picture to call the helpline. Ruby ejected herself from the armchair and stormed out of the room. There couldn’t have been any carpet on the stairs, because every footstep sounded wooden and hollow, like someone jumping on an empty box. Then a door slammed in a room above. Mrs Moffat stuck her head through the serving hatch.
‘Said the magic word, did you?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Don’t worry, that’s the third time today she’s done her nut. This morning one of the lads put a plastic one in her cornflakes and she just went berserk. I’ve told ’em to stop teasing her. Speaking of which.’
A horn sounded outside on the road. Through the window, Felix watched as a flat-back van drew up carrying seven or eight men and what looked like a witch’s cauldron, steaming and encrusted with shiny black tar. The last man was still climbing down through the tailgate as the first walked into the house. They filed past Felix, some of them nodding, others saying, ‘How do’ or ‘All right’, but none of them interested enough to ask who he was or what he was doing there. Felix thought he recognized a couple of the younger ones from juvenile court in days gone by, but he could have been wrong. Even though it had been a cool day they were all in T-shirts; their hands and faces were black with bitumen and smoke, and their arms were tanned and healthy from a life outside, under the sun.
‘This is Teddy, my eldest,’ said Mrs Moffat.
Teddy held up his right hand to show it was too dirty to shake, then stuck his head under the cold tap. From beneath the flow of water, he said, ‘Tha’s come to sort out our Ruby, an’t yer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, if anyone’s plaguing her I’ll fucking nail ’em. We all will. What about Rubberdick down at the school? He were a right twat when I were there.’
‘Actually it was Mr Roderick who referred her to us.’
‘No smoke wi’out fire.’
‘Do you know what’s troubling her?’
‘Nope. One minute she were fine, next news she’s gone bananas. Mind you, she’s female, in’t she? That usually explains it.’
Mrs Moffat attempted to swipe him around the head with the tea towel, which he yanked from her hand to dry his head. A smaller, older man with a wild mane of grey hair threw a set of car keys on to the bag of cement on the table and pushed through the kitchen.
‘Tony, this is the chap from Social Services, about our Ruby,’ said Mrs Moffat.
But he didn’t r
espond, and by the time Felix had turned around to introduce himself, Mr Moffat was already positioned above the toilet at the end of the kitchen and was undoing his trousers.
On the way back to his car, Felix heard .a whistle and looked up to see James Spotland leaning out of his kitchen window, motioning him to come in. Felix had first met Jimmy in a custody case after his wife had run off to Blackpool with the kids, and still bumped into him two or three times a year. He waited while locks and chains were undone on the other side of the door, then followed Jimmy up through the garage, which was piled to the ceiling with boxes, crates, sacks of plaster, building equipment and over-stuffed bin bags bulging with mystery objects.
‘Keeping yourself busy, then, Jimmy?’
‘Oh, sure. You know me, never let the grass grow.’
‘So what are you up to?’
‘I’m in the distribution business. Product reassignment. You know how it is. What about yourself? Seeing the Moffats, were you?’
‘Just a routine visit. Do you know them?’
‘Everybody knows everybody on this estate. Unless the police come round. Then you don’t know anyone.’
Felix moved a pile of Loot and Auto-Trader magazines from a leather swivel chair and sat down. Jimmy had gone behind the breakfast bar and pulled a pinny over his head - a glossy plastic one bearing the image of a topless woman wearing a black lace corset. ‘I was just knocking up something to eat. Want anything?’
‘No thanks.’
He turned the flame up under a frying pan. As a knob of butter began to sizzle, he reached into the fridge and lifted out a thick slab of red meat, which he lowered on to the bubbling fat. He pulled the cork from a half-drunk bottle of plonk with his teeth, poured a couple of glugs into the pan, then took a swig from the neck and replaced the cork, all in one seamless move while turning the meat over with a spatula in his other hand. He was a small man, not more than five and a half foot. When Felix had first met him he was scrawny and pale, with a nondescript haircut and a mouthful of rotten teeth like half-chewed toffees. These days he shaved his head, wore dentures and sported a thick gold earring in each lobe. His paunch made a comical bulge below the pair of bull’s-eye breasts on his apron.
The White Stuff Page 4
