by Tom Cox
‘Where’s Nick?’ hissed Trevor.
I told him.
‘Give me the keys. Now!’ hissed Trevor.
I reached up to the counter, found the keyring and slid it over to him. He locked the door. I scanned the surroundings, immediately registering four pairs of legs: mine, Trevor’s, Terry’s, and Greg Norman’s. Greg Norman wasn’t actually in the room with us, but his promotional cardboard replica was. Further inspection of the room revealed two more legs, pale and apparently female. Where had these come from? Had Terry sneaked them in in his voluminous ski jacket? I wondered if they were attached to a body, and, if they were, how I hadn’t noticed it before.
If you ignored the sound of Terry chewing Greg Norman’s cardboard ear and the distant thwack of ball against practice net, we were engulfed by silence. After what felt like several hours of this, I resolved, as acting shop manager and sole Cripsley member, to take decisive action. I did this by staying very still and silent under the desk while trying to stop my leg from shuddering.
‘Boyyys.’
The voice seemed to come from outside the door.
‘Boyyys.’ Louder and more severe this time.
‘Shit,’ hissed Trevor.
‘Boyyys? I know you’re in there, boys. You forget, boys, that the professionals’ shop car park is clearly visible from my upstairs window. I know this is where you go. I’ve seen the things you do here. Now, boyyys, come right out and explain to me why—’
‘Go lay an egg, you old bag.’
‘—you’ve just driven my wheelie bin several hundred yards down Cripsley Drive.’
There came a pause, during which I heard two sounds – teeth masticating cardboard, and something soft and squishy, up in my ears, drowning out rational thought: my heart. It just couldn’t seem to find its moorings today.
‘Now, boyyys, you may not know me, but I’m very dear friends with the club captain,’ declared the voice. ‘I know you’re in there, and though I might not know all of you, I certainly know one of you. Richard Coombs, can you hear me? I know you’re in there.’
At this, Trevor and the mystery pair of legs erupted into giggles. Richard Coombs was one of the junior section’s posh kids – he attended the local private school, seldom took advantage of his membership at Cripsley, probably thought ‘anarchy’ meant turning up with less than the regulation amount of spikes on his golf shoes, and would probably spontaneously transmogrify into a lemon meringue if the likes of Terry, Nick and Trevor so much as exhaled in his general direction. Moreover, he definitely wasn’t here.
She blabbered on. ‘… and you’ve got a choice, Richard. You can come right out here, pick my litter up off Cripsley Drive and return the wheelie bin, or I can tell the captain about your little game.’
Finally, we heard her retreating footsteps, followed shortly by Nick’s approaching ones. I picked myself up off the floor, inconspicuously, careful to be the last to do so, and properly identified Trevor, Terry, and the owner of the legs, a stick-like, blank-eyed girl with the translucent-yet-unremarkable complexion of an Addams Family extra.
‘What the fuck was all that about?’ asked Nick, as Trevor let him in.
What I had been witnessing, I discovered, was the aftermath of a game Nick had devised called Granny on Wheels. I listened as Nick, slightly miffed not to be included in his own invention, outlined the rules.
Granny on Wheels didn’t actually require a granny on wheels, or even a granny. In fact, I couldn’t really see where the granny bit came in at all, but I wasn’t going to tell Nick this. Granny on Wheels, he explained, could only be played on a Tuesday, when the residents of Cripsley Drive, the affluent road that ran parallel to the course, left their wheelie bins out for that week’s refuse collection. Wheelie bins, which had been introduced by the council the previous year as a fuss-free alternative to traditional, stationary bins, had already provided countless hours of revelry for the teenagers of the East Midlands, inspiring such games as Death Race 2000, Dalek Dodgems, and Drop the Local Sissy in the Wheelie Bin (Upside Down). Nick’s game was considerably more sophisticated, since it required the competitor to edge his Austin Allegro up the pavement until its front bumper was resting on the bin, then, more carefully and slowly still, use clutch control and subtle steering techniques to edge it out into the open road. The rules, after this, became more open-ended. In order to complete Granny on Wheels successfully, the competitor could choose from a number of equally tempting options, including finding a steep gradient down which to release the bin, nudging the bin into the path of an oncoming vehicle, shunting the bin into a drive several yards away from the one belonging to the original bin owner, and – simple but classic – stamping your foot down abruptly on the accelerator and sending the bin hurtling down the road ahead of you. The winner was the one who came up with the most innovative way of dispatching the bin, or made the most mess.
In this heat, it seemed, Trevor, as designated driver (from what I could gather, Trevor, Nick and Terry shared the Allegro – I can only assume they ‘acquired’ it together, each assuming equal responsibility, and thereafter agreeing upon joint ownership), had manoeuvred the Granny on Wheels into the path of an oncoming cement truck, which had duly dispatched it into a ditch without so much as a swerve of wheels or shriek of brakes. Satisfied with their afternoon’s work, Terry, Trevor and their gothic friend headed for the pro shop to bring Nick news of their triumph, but somewhere on the way found the bin’s owner on their tail. ‘It was bloody terrifying,’ Trevor recalled. ‘One minute, there was only a squirrel in my rear-view mirror. Next minute, there’s that fat woman from Carry On Matron, waving a huge stick at me.’ Whether this really was ‘that fat woman from Carry On Matron’ remains to this day very much up for debate, but Trevor’s imagery left none of us in any doubt that it had been a wise move to duck into the pro shop as swiftly as possible.
As Nick and Trevor guffawed, Terry masticated enthusiastically and the goth did her best to look more cheerful than Christopher Lee’s manic depressive granddaughter, I sensed a personal dilemma arising: one of those situations where, purely from participating in group laughter, you’ve been half accepted into a social circle, but need that one final push, the perfect audacious comment or gesture. I quickly gathered some options. So, Nick. That delayed wrist action you were showing me was really cool. No. Nick was with his street mates now – he didn’t want to talk about golf. Trevor, baby. I hear you were caught urinating once in a nightclub. Can we be friends? Come on. I told myself to think, quick. I thought. I came up with blank. I thought again. A brief anecdotal lull swiftly turned into a pivotal silence, all eyes on me to break the deadlock.
‘I dare you to go back.’ A voice said this, though it didn’t seem to belong to Nick, Terry, Trevor or Gothilda. It sounded a bit like my voice. Or, rather, it emerged from the same place that the words I spoke normally did, but I didn’t feel it come out.
Silence returned. Terry, for the first time, put Greg Norman’s head to one side.
‘Whaddayousay?’ asked Trevor.
‘I said, “I dare you to go back.”’ Definitely my voice this time: brittle, diluted.
‘The little squirt’s got balls the size of lemons,’ said Nick, badass again now.
There was a pause, as a silent jury drank me in.
‘OK, OK,’ said Trevor. ‘We’ll go back. She doesn’t scare me. I’ve seen scarier old bags in my tea. We’ll go back, sure.’
‘Yeah,’ said Nick, reading Trevor’s thoughts. ‘But there’s just one condition …‘
‘Right,’ said Trevor. ‘She wants her wheelie bin back, so I think under the circumstances, Tom, it’s the least you can do to give it to her.’
From where Trevor, Terry and I crouched in the ditch with the wheelie bin, we were afforded a first-rate view of the driveway of the house belonging to the woman who might have been the woman from the Carry On film. From what we could see so far, there was no sign of life, unless you were of the opinion that three gar
den gnomes and a porcelain duck represented sentient beings. The wheelie bin rested in the ditch with us, where Terry and Greg Norman amused themselves by sifting through its contents. (‘Wicked! This month’s Cosmopolitan.’) Nick and Gothilda watched from the pro shop, a hundred yards or so away. The five of us waited, as a dog walker faded into the distance. I didn’t recognize him, but I felt I might have done. That was the thing about the residents of Cripsley Drive: even if they weren’t members of the golf club, they always looked as if they should have been.
As I waited for the coast to clear, my attention kept returning to a concrete nymph at the front of Mrs Carry On’s house. Something disturbed me about it – not just the fact that it was hideous and tasteless; something else, beyond that. Something about its outstretched pose. The nymph – a singularly unhappy nymph – seemed to be searching with its arms for some invisible object: the very object, perhaps, that would restore its happiness.
Suddenly, I knew what I had to do.
I sauntered out into the open, looking about as cool as it was possible to look while dragging a four-foot-by-two portable refuse unit in your wake. I took a single look behind me – Trevor was giving me the thumbs-up, while Terry and Greg remained submerged in Cosmopolitan – but other than that, I was in a cocoon of concentration that even Jack Nicklaus might have found a little on the intense side. I peered down a mental tunnel at my target. My thoughts were occupied by two things, and two things only: nymph and wheelie bin. Nymph. Wheelie bin. Nymph. Wheelie bin. Two inanimate objects with gaping holes in their essential make-up that only I could simultaneously fill.
Five minutes later, as we performed a lap of honour in the Allegro, I admired my work. The bin had been too cumbersome to fit on the nymph’s outstretched arms, but with it on its head the nymph looked somehow more human and contented. Returning to the scene of the crime hadn’t been part of the original plan, but a slight uncertainty as to whether our adversary had witnessed my brazen vandalism led us back for fear of anticlimax: it was important that Mrs Carry On knew precisely who she was dealing with. You might not think it possible to fit five lanky, wriggling adolescents, a full-size golf bag, and a life-size cardboard tour professional into an Austin Allegro, but you’d be wrong, particularly if two of the adolescents happen to be sticking their legs out of the side windows. By the time we’d screeched up outside Mrs Carry On’s drive, executed a handbrake turn, sounded Nick’s customized Dukes of Hazzard horn and jeered obnoxiously (I don’t remember what we shouted; it’s not normally important in these situations, provided you shout something), she was probably quivering with terror behind her Laura Ashley curtains, vowing never to mess with us again.
‘We underestimated you, Tom,’ declared Trevor, as we hurtled towards our next assault on the dreary adult society that sought to repress us.
Doing my best to blank out the image I’d seen a couple of seconds earlier through the rear window – of a rather confused elderly Asian gentleman puzzling over why anyone would want to adorn his prize statue with an oversized hat – I concluded that it would hardly be in the spirit of the moment (or, for that matter, of my burgeoning popularity) to bring up the likelihood that we had defaced the wrong driveway.
Once again, the Cripsley Law – commit a tiny misdemeanour and get severely bollocked for it, do something really mischievous and get away with it – prevailed. As Nick had predicted, we never saw Mrs Carry On again, and heard no sign of a repercussion from the direction of the captain and committee. Either the sheer unlikeliness of our behaviour was making us invisible, or the adult membership were making notes and stockpiling our crimes for rainy day retribution. Whatever the case, we decided there could be no harm in continuing to take advantage of the situation. Now we started to feel properly invincible. Two days after Derek Plunkett, a moonfaced ten-handicap electrician, nipped to the pro shop toilet and Nick replaced the dozen brand new Maxfli balatas in his bag with hollow practice balls, Plunkett arrived at the pro shop for his next game as jolly and credulous as ever. When one of Mousey’s ‘HELLO! … twat’ greetings came dangerously close to becoming a ‘hello … TWAT!’, greens committee chairman Pete Churchley’s ear canal seemed miraculously to fill with cotton wool. Then there was the day when the ladies’ vice-captain walked blithely through a daily pro shop game of Eight-iron Tennis (objective: to throw your eight-iron hard enough at your opponent to make them die) as if Nick and I were ghosts that her rational golfing brain refused to process.
My paranoia about Mousey’s role in the shop hierarchy, incidentally, turned out to be premature. In the end, the truth was disappointingly straightforward: Mousey spent his school lunchbreak cycling down to McDonald’s for Nick, Mike, Trevor and Terry; as payment, he received their wisdom and personal guidance. Granted, he got the odd free Chicken McNugget, but I liked to think that my initiation rights had involved a greater level of daring and ingenuity.
My ‘work experience’ continued. Over the remainder of it, I discovered that the pro shop is a bad place to learn how to become a golf pro but a good place to learn the art of fencing with snapped club-shafts. The days were balmy and long, filled with handbrake turns, Big Macs and apple fights in the neighbouring orchard. Back from Middlesbrough, Mike Shalcross, away from his role as club careworker, was a less than effective disciplinary influence, and quick to pick up the rules to such shop pursuits as Tarzan (a climbing and bombing game, involving concealing oneself among the club racks on the shop ceiling), Thief (one competitor attempts to take money out of the till before his opponent has the chance to shut his hand in the drawer), Catch, Fucker (one competitor belts two-hundred-yard four-iron shots while his opponent stands twenty yards in front of him attempting to catch them) and Meths Gun (a self-explanatory squirting game). Roy surfaced only intermittently, instructing me to clean an old set of clubs or sweep the doorstep, then vanishing in the direction of the practice fairway.1 Goths were nowhere near as prevalent as I’d been led to believe from Jamie’s estimation; when they did surface, Nick asked me to keep a lookout while he retired to the cellar with them to work on his ‘follow-through’. After school, Nick and I were joined by Ashley, Bushy, Ben Wolfe, Mousey and Jamie. Alienated by the cold stares, rigid dress codes and stilted small talk of the clubhouse, Cripsley’s junior section made the pro shop its official base.
The unruliness rarely stopped after that, but my work experience did. I signed off by breaking one of the windows in the club repair room in a turbulent satsuma fight with Ashley. I knew I’d get away with it. Nick blamed the incident on ‘a thick bird that flew into the window’. Roy, who was just on his way out, seemed to accept this, and then I was free. Estimating that Mike’s decision not to pay me for my two weeks of graft could only have been an act of pure forgetfulness, I stashed a box containing a dozen Tour Edition golf balls in my bag, locked up, looked out onto another gorgeous evening in my adolescent Utopia, and homed in on a muffled desire on the back shelf of my mind. There was something I had to do, which I’d been forgetting to do for far too long. Something I knew was as essential to my everyday existence as eating and sleeping but which I’d somehow neglected.
I needed to play golf.
1 This behaviour was not exclusive to my work experience: even when I wasn’t working in the shop, Roy had a habit of instructing me to sweep the doorstep, then vanishing.
AS A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD, I might have ceased caring about school, but I was still aware of the need for survival and the importance of an artfully chosen schoolfriend. I knew the rules, and I knew that, ultimately, all those hundreds of personalities I saw in the playground boiled down to two clearly defined categories: the kids who were good at football or fighting, and the kids who weren’t.
With the kids who weren’t good at football or fighting, I entered into a mutually beneficial business arrangement, where, in exchange for the vicarious thrill of sitting next to someone who was half-decent at football and fighting, they let me copy their homework, with the underwritten clause that I was al
lowed to pretend not to know them at breaktime. With the football kids, I tried half-heartedly to cling to some tenuous secondhand aura of cool as my credit rating dwindled – I hadn’t been in a fight since the second year, my interest in football had been on the wane since Mark Walters left Aston Villa and evening golf meant I found myself excluded from most after-school gossip – and my mates began to address the issue of exactly what they were gaining from their friendship with a golfing weirdo who couldn’t quote from the best slaughter scenes in Robocop.
Gary McFarlane was different. Gary wasn’t good at football, fighting or homework, and he hadn’t even seen Robocop. Miraculously, though, the fact that he studiously avoided physical activity of any kind, and, when forced, indulged in it with all the élan of a mannequin with sunburn, didn’t alter his status within the school hierarchy one iota. Gary was no one’s hero, everyone’s friend – one of those kids who just slid through trouble as if it wasn’t there. It was hard to pinpoint the precise root of his popularity, but I gathered it had something to do with his dad owning a Ferrari dealership and a rumour flying around school that his gorgeous, panda-eyed live-in au pair, Francesca, would let his sleepover mates watch while she showered.
Our friendship began when we both coincidentally sustained identical, fake leg-injuries during a school skiing trip. A day later, Gary ingenuously described to me an erotic dance Francesca and a group of scantily clad friends had performed for him during a bored Sunday afternoon, and the two of us became soulmates. Here was a new breed of friend: popular, well-dressed, rich, devious, crap at sport and never short of female attention. The other unusual thing about Gary, who wouldn’t have known a pitching wedge from a garden trowel, was that he was one of the few schoolmates I could talk to about my golfing exploits without feeling like some kind of six-headed social deviant.
‘In other words, if you play off nine handicap, that means you’re expected to go round in nine over the par for the course?’ Gary would ask.
