Nice Jumper

by Tom Cox

  ‘Ooh, not bad. The odd good round,’ he replied. Then he paused, as if considering something right under his nose for the first time. ‘Of course, there’s always the problem of numbers.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘How many under-eighteen players have you got at the moment?’

  ‘Ooh … let me think,’ he replied. ‘Eight, I reckon. Yes, that’s right. Eight. Seven or eight.’

  ‘NO! NO! WHAT on earth are you talking about? No! Of course I’m not drunk. It’s eight in the fuckin’ morning … Will you just get off my case, for once in my life? … What are you talking about? What? Why do you have to be the most boring person in the world? Can you not just be, you know, cool, just for five seconds of my stupid life? Tell me. Can you? Mmm? Look. You’re embarrassing me. I’m here with my friends and you’re embarrassing me … No – of course I don’t have to tell you. In fact, I don’t have to tell you anything. I’m almost fifteen!’

  The dream had started serenely enough: the American professional Fred Couples had called round at my place, as usual, wondering if I fancied a swift nine holes at the luxury Pebble Beach complex in California. There’d been a bit of trouble getting permission from my mum and, frankly, I thought the seat belts on Fred’s Lear jet could have been better designed, but Fred said he had a surprise in store, so I went along with it and as we stepped onto the tarmac (Fred had his own reserved landing spot in the clubhouse car park) we were greeted by the cast of the movie Mondo Topless, who explained that they would remove one item of clothing for every birdie we made … But, now, suddenly, the dream had slipped from my control. Someone – Fred Couples? – was shouting at me, and I couldn’t understand why.

  I bolted awake as the phone slammed into its cradle. ‘Parents, huh?’ grumbled a voice. It seemed a bit feminine to belong to Fred Couples, but it was definitely the same one that had been yelling at me, even though its tone was surprisingly pleasant now. Removing a piece of sock fluff from the corner of my mouth, I traced my way through the rubble of beer cans, underwear and golf balls at eye level in an attempt to locate the voice’s owner. Every time my gaze stretched beyond the three feet of carpet directly in front of me my head rattled like a quarter-full piggy bank, but I wasn’t going to be discouraged. With a gargantuan mental shove, I looked up, and saw a girl – not a member of the cast of Mondo Topless, but not unattractive – clad in ripped jeans and a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Cool As Fuck’ emblazoned across the front.

  ‘Morning,’ she said droopily.

  Reaching deep inside the piggy bank, I found that I could dredge up three salient facts about her: that her name was Letitia, that she was famous for being unusually nasty to her mum in public, and that, of all Mandy Routledge’s friends, she was the one I felt most comfortable about the concept of getting off with. That must have been her mum on the phone. Whether or not I had got off with Letitia was as yet unclear, since the events of the previous night were being pushed through the slit in the piggy bank at an excruciatingly slow speed.

  Was it really only three hours since I had passed out on the living-room floor? At least, I assumed I had passed out on the living-room floor, since that was where I’d woken up. Data was arriving at the piggy bank not only slowly but also at random. I remembered Robin gently inserting a golf glove into Bushy’s snoring mouth. Elsewhere was a foggy recollection of Jamie sabotaging some pampas grass in the garden of whosever house this was, while Mousey dementedly recited the jingle to a soft drink ad – ‘drink it in the sun’ – intermittently substituting the word ‘mum’ for ‘sun’. Abruptly, it struck me just how funny these things were. Not just snigger-snigger funny, but belly-laugh hilarious. We really were genuinely amusing people. I shook my head at our genius, then dimly remembered that the girl sitting across from me – Letitia, that was it – had made a comment aimed in my general direction.

  Surmising that, since I’d forgotten what it was she’d said, it couldn’t have been important, I brushed myself down and made the wobbly ascent to a vertical position, removing the small furry elephant that was, for some unfathomable (but, I could rest assured, very funny) reason, stuffed down the back of my shirt. I grinned enigmatically at Letitia – because, if you thought about it, she was pretty funny as well – and stopped at the bottom of the stairs, hearing giggling from one of the upstairs rooms. Then, stealthily, cheekily – this, too, was a stunningly humorous thing to do – I let myself out the back door of whosever house it was and set off in the direction of Cripsley, thinking, If I hurry, I might just make my 8.36 tee time in the Saturday Medal tournament.

  I’d spent most of the previous three years doing my best to ignore Mandy Routledge. We all had – including, it frequently seemed, Mandy herself. With a voice that made Mousey sound like James Earl Jones and a habit of blending in to any social function to the point of invisibility, she didn’t do herself any favours. She always acted, I thought, particularly shy around me. If she hadn’t been Cripsley’s only significant girl player, it’s quite possible we might have been forced to overlook her existence entirely, mistaking it for a shadow or a particularly light breeze. It wasn’t that Mandy wasn’t pretty or graceful or sweet; she was all these things. But the bottom line was: she played golf. This in itself made her an asexual being in our eyes. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to hang around with girls who played golf; we just didn’t want to hang around with the kind of girls you found at golf clubs (British golf clubs, anyway; Portuguese ones were an exception). Mandy, from the little we knew about her, seemed precisely that kind of girl.

  ‘Look at Mandy. She wants you,’ we would taunt one another, rolling our eyes mock-seductively, upon registering Mandy’s nervous presence on an adjacent fairway. The concept of Mandy wanting anything beyond a My Little Pony and a skipping rope seemed quite frankly obscene. ‘See those eyes. She’s gagging for it.’

  Most of the time we were hard pushed to see anything beyond the odd arm or leg. Where Mandy went, her mum went first, considerably more boldly. Mandy’s diametric opposite, Georgina Routledge was a corpulent, battleworn woman with the kind of complexion custom-made for midwinter gang fights in northern market towns. She was also one of the few Cripsley members who wasn’t afraid to tell the club president just where he could shove his men-only bar. If we were perfectly honest with ourselves, belittling Mandy was our own way of pretending Georgina didn’t scare the living trousers out of us.

  News of the first party arrived from Georgina, punctuated with infinitesimal squeaks of enthusiasm from Mandy, who was standing behind her at the time. ‘We’re not taking any excuses,’ Georgina warned, cornering three of us in the clubhouse car park. ‘You don’t want to let my Mandy down, do you? We’re expecting you all to be there. And that means you too, Tom.’

  ‘So,’ I asked Robin, Bushy and Ashley later. ‘You gonna go?’

  ‘Neh. Can’t be arsed.’

  ‘Fuck that. Top Gun’s on TV.’

  ‘Do I look like a cradle snatcher?’

  The following Saturday, five virgins in Joe Bloggs jeans and too much Old Spice arrived at the front door of a sixties semi off Cripsley High Road, jostling and jesting with one another with the special kind of bravado that only the truly sexually apprehensive can flaunt. The decision to relent and give Mandy’s party a try had been made for me – and, I would guess, for my friends – by a reluctant process of elimination. That is to say, I had gradually eliminated every attractive female I thought I had a chance of snogging, until I could provide no rational argument for not turning up at Mandy’s. With Tina Williams promising to go out with me ‘just as soon as you get a Harley’ and Wendy Morrisall still mooning over Mr Hope, the student English teacher, my best bet for a date had been Joanne Hardy, a chunky blonde who’d paraded the shortest skirts in 5G, but my relationship with her had been getting more and more baffling for weeks. The previous Sunday, to my immense excitement, I’d found myself invited up to her bedroom to evaluate the new Erasure album. ‘You’re my bosom buddy. I hope you know that, Tom,’
she had informed me, before complaining of the heat, and suggesting that it might be a good idea if she removed her top. ‘You’ve got to promise not to look, though,’ she added. I’d pondered the situation for a moment, before falling back on the advice offered to me by Ian Flack, an experienced sixth-former of the world: ‘When dealing with a woman, Tom, honesty is always the best policy.’ ‘Joanne,’ I explained, opening my heart, ‘I can’t promise not to look at your chest.’ The top stayed on and by Wednesday I’d heard from a close friend of Joanne’s that I’d been dumped for a more ‘mature’ man. His name? ‘“Flackie”, I think they call him.’

  All of which left me with two options: going to Mandy’s, or watching Tom Cruise performing un-realistically hygienic big-screen sex with Kelly McGillis.

  ‘Might as well see how it goes,’ Robin had agreed.

  ‘We can always bugger off to the pub if it’s shit,’ concurred Bushy, who by that point had been getting served for three years.

  ‘She might have some fit friends,’ reasoned Mousey.

  Though we always reassured ourselves that we were stooping to make a semi-ironic, semi-benevolent gesture by attending Mandy’s parties, we were actually extremely fortunate. Mandy was educated privately at one of the Midlands’ most elite all-girl schools, which meant her typical social acquaintance tended to be a uniquely sympathetic kind of fifteen-year-old girl who, though perhaps not a golfer herself, wouldn’t feel sullied by the prospect of being chatted up by one. The key participants were Marcy, a secretly naughty redhead who gave the outward appearance of being even more squeaky and shy than Mandy; Camilla, who, though initially agreed to be the most ‘up for it’ of the group, turned out to be permanently insecure about the intentions of everyone around her; Cecilia, who picked relentlessly at her lip and, in a gesture preemptive of the teenagers of the late nineties, had a habit of turning ordinary statements into questions?; Mandy herself; and Letitia, the mum-basher. Nothing palpable seemed to bind these girls in close friendship beyond their collective ability to titter once every twenty-four seconds.

  Somewhat less giggly were Georgina – who, armed with a row of non-alcoholic lagers, set up camp on the leather chair outside the living-room door – and Tracy, Mandy’s nineteen-year-old cousin, a fearsome automaton of a girl known to us as the Transformer (Robots in Disguise) who seemed to be in attendance in the interests of security. At least, so we hoped. The unthinkable prospect that Tracy might view us in a carnal way was enough to prompt the kind of nightmare visions that would have David Cronenberg quivering behind his autoerotic gearstick.

  The parties invariably unfurled in four stages. As the overconfidence of our arrival mysteriously dissipated, the initial sixty minutes would be a mixture of nervous laughter and nervous golfspeak, with both sets of friends clumsily attempting to justify their presence. The bridge to the carefree second stage was provided by an alliance of the drinks cabinet and Robin’s limbs, and could never arrive quickly enough.

  It would begin with an awkward silence, and a smattering of giggles, as we all anxiously wondered – boys on one side of the room, girls on the other – what to do or say next. Then, promptly, Robin would be at our rescue, squatting in the middle of the living-room rug, wrapping his neck around his little toe.

  His repertoire of positions was awesome, light years beyond everyday double-jointedness. There was the Pylon, a convoluted manoeuvre which required Robin to bend his legs and arms backwards, yet somehow seamlessly meld them until they became one, while simultaneously keeping them perpendicular to his spine and putting his entire body weight on his genitals in order to stay upright. Also known as the Evil Weeble, this position was just a warm-up. Authentic crowd-pleasers like the Octoprong and Spatula Joy would, for any other supple human being, have required a team of highly qualified plastic surgeons, a DC Comics editorial meeting and several tons of Plasticine.

  From here on, the alcohol began to kick in, and the two sexes converged around Robin in the centre of the room. The third stage would last from now – nine-ish – until about two in the morning, and involve anything from dry humping to re-enactments of the 1990 Dunhill Cup via the medium of spoons, and encompass vomit fights and kitchen utensil theft along the way. Traditionally, around midnight, Jamie and I would wrestle, as – stirred up by seven cans of Red Stripe – our bottled rivalry fought for expression, spilling over into the street outside. Then, after Jamie finally outran me, I would pass out in the middle of the cul-de-sac, returning to consciousness intermittently to hum the BBC golf theme tune and ask anyone who happened to be in the vicinity if they had ‘seen my caddy’. Georgina appeared to be utterly thrilled that all this mayhem was in some vague sense revolving around ‘her Mandy’, and watched proudly from her seat. Tracy’s was the sole slightly grumpy presence, but she was essentially tolerant, as long as we didn’t vomit on her body parts (I guessed she was worried about them rusting).

  Then, when it was all over, we would all get into bed with one another.

  It’s important that I clarify a few details here. By ‘get into bed’, I do only mean ‘get into bed’. By ‘bed’ specifically, I mean the king-size one belonging to Georgina. And by everyone, I mean everyone except Georgina and Tracy. Stripped down to its intrinsic elements, the whole ritual made pre-teen games of mummies and daddies look licentious. The most surprising thing is that, in a whole year of parties, it never really progressed to anything. Clothes remained stringently a part of proceedings, and at the first sign of any furtive unzipping, unbuttoning or unstrapping, the offender would be put into a headlock by a couple of Robin’s elastic limbs (Robin’s pliability dictated that he could also apply this rule to himself if the need arose), then locked in Georgina’s wardrobe for anywhere up to two hours. There was tickling, and the odd intrepid hand, but never much else.

  That said, I couldn’t say for sure, since my time under the covers was usually short-lived. After ten minutes of suspect odours and knee–mouth interfaces, it became clear that even Georgina’s Emperor of all Beds couldn’t comfortably house the writhing hormones of ten hyperactive teenagers, and Camilla and I were customarily the first to seek refuge in the spare room: Camilla, because by this point she would be convinced that the whole house was involved in some grand conspiracy to alienate her, and me, because I couldn’t stand the smell of Ashley’s feet.

  ‘Mandy hates me,’ Camilla would confide, as the two of us attempted to get settled, a slim partition wall away from all the fun. ‘They all do! Do you think I’m fat? I’m not as fat as Marcy, and they don’t hate her! And why’s Robin so bothered about Letitia and so horrible to me? She can be a real cow, you know. You wouldn’t think it, but it’s true. She gets forty quid a week allowance. Can you believe that? Even more than Mandy and she—’

  ‘Nobody hates you, Camilla,’ I would cut in. ‘You’re not fat. And I like you a lot.’

  But I wasn’t going to get off quite so lightly.

  Over the following two hours, Camilla would talk, while I dredged up everything in my Sensitive Potential Boyfriend repertoire, right from ‘Mmmm’ to ‘No – I really don’t think Kylie Minogue’s figure should be seen as a benchmark for the young female of today’. Every so often, a lewd enquiry would be thrown in our direction from the other bedroom, along the lines of, ‘You getting any in there, TC?’ This would start me wondering if they were getting any in there, and if I was a fool to miss out on it. Around daybreak the house would at long last fall silent and I would drift off for two hours with Camilla’s head on my shoulder, before unaccountably waking up on the living-room floor with a mouth lined with an obscure stringy substance and Robin attempting to stuff a stale leather golf glove down my shirt.

  Those, at least, are the things I like to remember about Mandy’s parties.

  The darker side usually stays well suppressed, beneath the clutter of selective memory, but it’s there too, and I can’t deny it. Sometimes I’ll wake up with a jolt in the witching hour, too terrified to peek under the covers on the
off chance that my wife is wearing plus fours. Other times, the Fear will manifest itself in a series of images. A boy running through a suburb, lost, glancing desperately over his shoulder. Laura Davies, the celebrated WPGA professional, in suspenders. A mouse. The pink fluorescent shaft of a ladies’ eight-wood.

  I knew Mandy fancied me. Even as the kind of person who needs to be felt up in public – twice, if at all possible – before he knows someone fancies him, I knew she fancied me. Her mum made it obvious. What I mean is this: after three years of Georgina buying him drinks, winking in his general direction, making up cuddly nicknames for him and gently coaxing him into the seat next to her daughter, a crash test dummy might have got the hint that he was being lined up for something.

  Dissociating Mandy from Georgina seemed to me like removing some exotic seafood from its shell: fiddly, messy and probably not worth the unpredictability of the end result. Where some girls had big noses or food allergies or bad dress sense, Mandy had Georgina. I was pretty sure that I didn’t fancy Mandy, but it was hard to get past the mum imagery and properly work it out. It wasn’t so much that something was missing, more that something wasn’t missing.

  Right from Georgina’s ‘and that means you too, Tom’ speech, I’d begun to get the creepy feeling that these parties were an elaborate ruse to get Mandy alone in the same room as me. I didn’t dare voice these concerns to my friends, and told myself I was being paranoid, but even in my most misty drunken states I kept my foglights on and was always precisely aware of Mandy’s whereabouts. While I’d like to think I comforted Camilla out of an innate warmth and generosity, or even because she had a nice bottom, the truth was she provided a perfect excuse for me not to end up in the same bed as Mandy.

  I lasted out until the fifth party.

  I don’t remember where I’d been immediately before it happened – destroying some pampas grass or hiding a sieve behind the cistern in the downstairs toilet, probably – but I remember suddenly being trapped between the front door, Georgina, Tracy and the living room, where Mandy was sitting, alone and expectant.