Nice Jumper

by Tom Cox

  Put it this way. If I had been looking to cause some trouble that night, it wouldn’t have been my weapon of choice.

  Accompanied by Mousey, I was staying over at Ashley’s place, which was only five minutes’ walk from the course. The golf trousers were an unfortunate by-product of a last minute sleepover invitation. I was sure, though, that if I wore my shirt loose, put my hands in my pockets, and introduced a slight strut into my gait, I could just about pass myself off as a non-golfer.

  Having tired of ordering pizzas and pest control for Ashley’s unwitting neighbours, we’d decamped a mile down the road to Stablebridge, where Ashley’s uncle lived. Ashley didn’t call Stablebridge ‘Stablebridge’; he called it ‘Stabbo’, just like every other affluent Beeston kid who went there to convince himself that he was three times as tough as he really was. ‘Stabbo’ was Nottinghamshire’s answer to the Bronx, but without the swagger – the kind of place teenagers visit under the illusion that it is ‘happening’, and the rest of the world visits only to buy secondhand cars, and only if nowhere else is selling them.

  Ashley’s uncle, Lanky John, lived dead in the heart of Stabbo, on a street (I noted silently) where my dad claimed he had been thrown into a hedge during early sixties gang warfare. It’s not beyond the boundaries of possibility that Lanky John was the person who pushed my dad into the hedge. My parents, who’d grown up in places like this, had warned me about ‘Stabbo’ and people like Lanky John – which of course was exactly why I was here.

  No one seemed to know what Lanky John did for a living, but Ashley, Mousey and me could only imagine it was something important and exciting. His place was a council house masquerading as a theme park. Our guided tour of his home entertainment began with a television set the size of a small cinema screen, took in a cellar full of brand-new sports equipment (all mysteriously still in its boxes), bypassed a ‘Scalextric room’, took a couple of detours via a mini bar, and finished up in a heated swimming pool. An hour later we were back on the street, unanimous in the notion that we were going to be just like John as soon as we were old enough to get a driving licence, a Filofax full of underworld contacts and a fast getaway van.

  I wondered why my parents couldn’t be more like John. Why didn’t we have a pool room and four hi-fi systems? I didn’t understand my mum and dad. Their working-class youth had been spent in places like Stabbo, surrounded by the salt of the earth, but having been to teacher training college and circulated among Nottingham’s hippy community, they had moved to more affluent, middle-class areas where people wouldn’t beat you up for owning a copy of Jean de Florette. What was their problem? Why did they have to go and make me middle class, when it was clearly much more fun to be working class? Stabbo wasn’t so bad. If they lived in a cheaper house in an area like this and bought fewer books, they too could afford a Super Nintendo and a globe-shaped drinks cabinet.

  Well, I decided, I was going to be different. I wasn’t going to make the mistake of thinking that I was ‘above’ Stabbo. So its housing estates looked like good places to go and get murdered? So what? Pierce the surface of these monotone buildings and you found proud, ace-laugh blokes like Uncle John, with their infinite supply of games rooms and goodwill.

  Yes, I mused. This was my place, populated by my people, and if I did happen to get thrown into a hedge while I was there, I wasn’t going to let it make me feel any different. Sure, I thought, as I double-checked my polo shirt was untucked, you might get into a few scrapes while you were in a place like this. But that’s the law of the jungle. That’s what it’s like in the real world. Some of us can hack it. Some of us can’t.

  Golf Tom had worked for a while, but the persona was starting to have its limitations in terms of parent-bothering, in the same way that trying to out-amplify my dad’s Rolling Stones records with Bing Crosby would have its limitations. This, though, this – the very thing my mum and dad had been part of, and fought to get away from – could work. Right here, in Stabbo, I might have found the very thing that would unravel my infuriatingly placid parents. I looked across at my friends, swaggering along beside me: Ashley to my right with his polyester jumper sleeves drooping over his arms and a pitchmark repairer between his teeth, Mousey to his right with his sideways-on baseball cap. Oh, yeah. We were heavyweight. And we knew it.

  The funny thing about the tee peg was that I didn’t feel myself take it out of my pocket. I don’t even remember the act of flicking it being a conscious one. Even when it made contact with the window of the terraced house to our right, I’m not sure I even noticed, it all seemed so inconsequential – mere static in the background of whatever conversation the three of us were having at the time.

  This perhaps accounts for my decision to stand my ground, two minutes later, when the large man with steam coming out of his ears began charging down the road after us.

  ‘Tom, run!’

  Why did we need to run? We hadn’t done anything.

  ‘Come on, Tom!’

  With the passing years, the image of his face has blurred into that of generic primate, but I remember his acid breath – a fusion of Special Brew, burning tyre and senile dog – as if I was in its fragrant presence today. To say he was a heavy man wearing the clothes of an even heavier one, he arrived in my face alarmingly quickly.

  ‘Tom!’

  ‘Right, you little fucker, you’re coming with me.’

  ‘Oeeeeoooowwww!’

  Everyone has seen the classic cartoon image of an adult dragging a bothersome kid by its ear, but they assume that’s exactly what it is – a cartoon image, not something that happens in real life. I, on the other hand, know better. I couldn’t work out which was worse: Dog Breath’s dog breath, or his lughole lock. One thing was for certain: I wasn’t wriggling free without seriously jeopardizing my future as a music lover.

  With the world spinning and my head at right angles to its customary position, I wondered at first why Dog Breath was leading me back to Lanky John’s house. Then I remembered that all the houses on this road looked the same; we were going back to his place. His unrelenting grip suggested coffee wasn’t on the agenda. I could live with that – it probably smelled of dog anyway.

  After being dragged roughly through a room that didn’t even hint that it might contain a Scalextric track then up a flight of stairs, I found myself locked in Dog Breath’s bathroom, alone. From a cursory glance, I took the colour scheme to have been inspired by a large, diverse meal and a particularly bumpy fairground ride. As I got intimate with the rubber ducks, I strained my remaining good ear to pick up snatches of conversation from downstairs.

  ‘Lock all the doors.’

  ‘He’s only a kid, Barry.’ This from a considerably less ominous, feminine voice.

  ‘That little bastard threw a fuckin’ brick at our window.’

  ‘Now, Barry, I doubt if it was anything as big as a brick.’

  ‘I ought to take my belt to the little pissbag.’

  ‘Now, Barry, remember what the doctor said about your ticker.’

  A couple of moments later, the bathroom door swung open, revealing first Barry then, cowering behind him, a woman offering me the kind of nervous smile that suggested she was sorry her sadist husband was imprisoning me in her bathroom but there honestly wasn’t too much she could do about it. I took this to be Mrs Barry.

  ‘So – what have you got to fuckin’ say for yerself?’ enquired Barry.

  That it’s illegal to hold innocent people captive in badly decorated bathrooms. ‘Not much.’

  ‘What do you think you’re doing, going around throwing bricks at good people’s windows?’

  Well, we guessed from the stonecladding on the front of your house that it was a bad person’s window, but we obviously got it wrong. ‘It wasn’t a brick.’

  ‘Fuckin’ sounded like a brick. Nearly bloody smashed the bloody thing.’

  ‘It was a tee peg.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘You use them for golf.’

  �
��Are you taking the twating piss? I ought to pissing smack you one. I’m calling the fucking police.’

  I would like to say that I sprung into decisive action at this point, attacked Barry with the loofah, slipped nimbly around Mrs Barry, then escaped to the safety of Ashley and Mousey, emptying the remaining tee pegs from my pocket onto the hall floor and offering an insouciant, ‘That’s what you get for messing with the Golf Boys, you fat prole!’ on my way out. I would like to say that, but the somewhat more cowardly truth is that for the next thirty minutes or so I remained locked in Barry’s bathroom, intermittently quivering and re-enacting the most gripping scenes from the 1989 US Masters with the help of the rubber ducks (I assumed these belonged to Mrs Barry; something told me Barry wasn’t a duck kind of guy). During this period, the doorbell rang twice. Firstly to announce the arrival of Ashley and Mousey, who’d finally worked up the courage to try to rescue me. Secondly to announce the police.

  Eventually, after what seemed like several hours of muffled exchanges, the bathroom door opened.

  ‘Oh … hi, Tom. How’s your arm?’

  Sergeant John Trevanean certainly looked more imposing in uniform than he did in his Slazenger pullover, yet somehow less ominous than he did with a fairway wood in his hand. I’m sure he was as surprised as I was to be meeting up with his ex-golfing opponent in a bathroom in Stablebridge, but no one was more taken aback by this development than Barry. It’s perhaps a measure of the severity of his disorientation that his reaction managed to exclude the words ‘piss’, ’bastard’ and ‘twathead’.

  ‘You two acquainted, then?’

  From here Barry’s case, not that strong to begin with, began to lose more steam than a just-opened dishwasher. I was amazed and proud at how quickly Ashley and Mousey – who’d been detained in the spare bedroom after trying to persuade Barry to set me free – and I turned on our Frightened Golf Kids personas, as Barry began to look more and more like an irrational old slob. Trevanean, whose twenty-three years on the force had obviously never prepared him for homicidal tee-peg hurling, was remarkably professional about the whole thing, and his poker face as Barry revealed the offending missile – ‘They threw … this!’ – was a testament to his self-possession under extreme pressure. Having assured Barry that we would be dealt with ‘appropriately’, he – with the assistance of his constable – did a good job of getting us out of there as quickly and tidily as possible.

  The journey home in the panda car was a quiet one, the three of us in the back still reeling from Barry’s body odour, the two officers in the front finding it hard to summon the appropriate words with which to tick us off. With thoughts of sleepovers a thing of the past, we were dropped back one by one at peaceful, tasteful houses with the faint aroma of Shake N’ Vac and potpourri. Mine was the final call of the night, and I was struck by how welcoming my home looked. I also found myself experiencing the hitherto unknown emotion of not dreading the prospect of being forced to watch Manon des Sources by my mum and dad. As we pulled up alongside the Sphincter, Trevanean finally voiced something that clearly had been bothering him for some time.

  ‘You’re all nice boys, from nice homes. You love golf, and it’s not as if you’re struggling for ways to spend your time. What I can’t understand is: what on earth were you doing walking the streets in a place like Stablebridge?’

  While one part of me pretended to think it was a narrow-minded thing to say, somewhere deeper down I was asking myself a similar question.

  EVEN IN THE days before his petulance became legendary, it didn’t take a trained nursery nurse to deduce that Colin Montgomerie was a stroppy so-and-so. While his fellow European Tour players milled contentedly around Wentworth’s practice putting green, efficiently carrying out their pre-round warm-up routines or sharing the odd ‘witty’ observation (‘If Clarky keeps chipping like that he’ll be deep-fat frying by the end of the day!’), Colin stood disconnected, on the edge of the action, hands on hips, shooting that I-flipping-dare-you stare at some maddeningly inconsiderate object in the middle distance – a ladybird which had presumed to use the line of his shot as a runway, perhaps, or an umbrella displaying a colour scheme not quite to his liking. He was definitely pissed off. Or perhaps he always looked like that. Whatever the case, Mousey and I made a snap decision not to like him.

  ‘What’s the matter with that mardy git?’ I asked my friend.

  ‘I think someone’s stolen his pram,’ peeped Mousey. Then, a little too loud for my liking: ‘Don’t cry, Colin!’

  Somewhere between Colin’s left jowl and the edge of his nose, a just-perceptible muscle performed a spasm. Slowly, coldly, the eyes rotated in our direction. Somewhere to our left, a ladybird let out the deepest, most relieved breath of its short life.

  ‘D’you reckon he heard you?’ I whispered.

  ‘Do you think I give a shit?’ said Mousey, picking up the pace of our escape.

  For Mousey, spitting insults at European Tour professionals was the logical extension of saying ‘HELLO… dickwit’ to Cripsley’s adult members. By the time he warned Colin Montgomerie not to cry at Wentworth, he’d already urged Jesper Parnevik to ‘Get a new hat!’ at Fulford, squeaked insensitively about Eamonn Darcy’s jelly-limbed backswing at Woburn, and – perhaps most boldly of all – honked ‘Good shot!’ after watching Sam Torrance plonk a straightforward iron into a lake at the Belfry. Some of us thought we heard Sam mutter ‘fuck off’ under his breath, but on the whole the most Mousey would get would be a fleeting arctic stare or exasperated sigh. In terms of player–spectator stand-offs, though, that was the golfing sphere’s equivalent of Eric Cantona kung fu-kicking his way into the family stand at Selhurst Park.

  ‘We’re severely fucking about!’

  Puberty might have finally left its mark on Mousey’s scrawny physique, but it had somehow managed to overlook his vocal chords. Now that he was almost as big as the rest of us, his voice’s similarity to that of an orphaned sparrow seemed more apparent than ever. His impudence made us cackle malevolently along with him, but it didn’t stop me, Robin and Jamie from derisively cheeping ‘Don’t cry, Colin!’ at him all the way back up the M1 in the back of Bob Boffinger’s executive sports car.

  In all fairness, it wasn’t surprising that the professional arena was a place where Mousey felt the shackles of his runt status more keenly than ever. His introduction to European Tour spectatordom had hardly been dignified. During our first pro tournament, the 1990 PGA Championship, five of us had cut across Wentworth’s deserted east course in an attempt to bypass the crowds and sneak a seat by the eighth green on the west course, where the nub of the tournament action was taking place. ‘Last one to the green is Steve Rider’s bastard love child!’ Mousey had cried, and streaked off up the fairway – at which point, obviously, the remainder of us had stopped dead in our tracks and watched, waiting to see precisely how long it would take him to realize he was on his own. He had progressed about seventy yards when the lower half of his body abruptly disappeared from view.

  It took only two of us to pull him out of the swamp in the end, and he claimed that the leeches on his leg didn’t hurt all that much, but his day’s misfortune wasn’t quite over. Two hours later, on another illusory short cut through Wentworth’s scrubland, we encountered a brook: not a particularly wide brook, but nevertheless the kind of brook that demands you to engage your brain before you hurdle it. In theory, Mousey’s idea of lobbing his bag over the water first as a precaution had been sensible enough, but the throw itself was pitiful, executed with the level of brute force one of the railway children might have summoned in an encounter with an abnormally persistent feather. Mousey had watched, open-mouthed, as the bag rolled and bumped its way down the far bank in comic slow motion, before finally plunging into the water with an emphatic ‘plop’. The rest of us, true friends that we were, waved goodbye sarcastically as rucksack and current became one and began to meander their way in the rough direction of Heathrow. We knew the rucksack didn’t contain
Mousey’s house keys or wallet, since Mousey kept all his valuables tight to his waist in a bum bag.

  It did, however, contain the sun visor that Mousey had gone to great lengths to get Seve Ballesteros to autograph earlier in the day.

  I couldn’t help feeling some of Mousey’s pain, in this instance. I’d been with him – and several other over-eager teenagers – earlier, behind the eighteenth green, waiting for Seve to emerge from the scorer’s hut, and I’d seen how my friend’s behind-the-ropes bravado had mutated into unsophisticated awe upon being plonked within a five-yard range of a bona fide legend. No sooner had we seen the flash of Seve’s Slazenger logo in the morning sun than we were on him, Mousey leading the chase.

  ‘Seveseveseveseveseve! Pleaseseveseveseve! Pleaseseve pleaseseve pleaseseve pleaseseve pleaseseve!’

  You had to give the Spaniard credit. For a man with sixteen rabid adolescents hanging off his back, he made an impressive attempt at walking in a straight line. Baseball caps, pens, giraffe-shaped headcovers, visors and tournament programmes were thrust towards every one of his orifices. He moved quickly but signed neatly, in his own capsule of calm. I now realized where he developed the composure to hole all those pressure putts.

  ‘Seveseveseveseveseve!’

  The poor bloke was going to be lucky to swing a club at all after this. It was disgusting and barbaric, I remember thinking, as I kicked a nerdy-looking blond kid out of the way and made a desperate grab for the star’s earlobe.

  ‘Seveseveseveseveseve!’

  Unlike Mousey, I still have my signed visor. I force it on bemused house guests occasionally, and can never decide which I’m more proud of: the autograph itself, or the bloodstain – my bloodstain – alongside it.

  Every so often, during our day trips to these tournaments, we stopped mucking around and remembered that we were there to watch some golf. When we did, it always made me wonder why I ever spent my time doing anything else. Without exception, every professional we saw close-up – even those who appeared to swing the club like a born lumberjack on telly – made the game look effortless. ‘How on earth can they hit it so far,’ I wondered, ‘when their arms seem to be moving at the pace of a doped-up turtle?’ Even the quick swingers looked like they were hyper-aware of the club’s position at every point of its vortex. The slow swingers, meanwhile, were pure show-offs, with deft hands that seemed to linger with the ball at impact, savouring the compressed succulence of the strike. If I was more subdued than my friends on the journey home from a long day at Wentworth in Surrey, or the Belfry near Birmingham, it was because I was trying to retain that sense of ease so I could still reach for it in my back garden later that night. ‘I’ve found the answer,’ I would announce upon my arrival home, brushing past my parents in the hallway, declining their offer of some suppertime couscous. Then, with the perfect mechanics of my backswing illuminated by the patio floodlight, I would spend the following three hours undergoing a religious affirmation of everything I believed about the game and my innate ability to master it. Golf was life. Life was golf. God was in the swish of blade against freshly clipped turf. Around midnight, my swing, freed up immeasurably by the mental image of the player’s swing I’d seen earlier in the day, would reach its ultimate groove. It was all so easy.