Nice Jumper

by Tom Cox

  ‘We’ve been looking for you, Tom,’ said Georgina.

  ‘Well, here I am,’ I slurred.

  ‘Tom?’ asked Tracy. ‘Why don’t you like Mandy?’

  ‘I do like Mandy,’ I said, fumblingly.

  ‘Well,’ said Georgina, ‘in that case, why don’t you kiss her?’

  ‘I just … don’t.’

  I was struck with the sense that the rest of the party had deserted me. Upstairs – from where I could hear Letitia yelping and Camilla, Jamie and Marcy laughing – seemed like an adjoining country.

  ‘Are you saying there’s something wrong with my daughter?’ asked Georgina.

  ‘Of course not,’ I replied.

  ‘Is it that you think Camilla’s prettier?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well then …’

  ‘She’s waiting for you,’ said Tracy, who seemed to be gaining a more formidable, metallic quality by the second.

  ‘Go on,’ urged Georgina. ‘You just go in there and give her a great big kiss on the lips.’

  I looked into the front room, towards the settee, where Mandy was perched. ‘Heee-hee-heee,’ she said.

  ‘Be a man about this, Tom,’ said Tracy, taking hold of my elbow. ‘You know it makes sense.’

  I was cornered, and in a few seconds, I would be more than that – I’d be alcoved. I told myself I had three options: push Tracy away, fling open the door, and make a run for it; sit down and talk this through calmly with the three of them; or enter the living room and face the music.

  What was I talking about, three options?

  I turned, fumbled for the door knob (unlocked: phew) and scrambled into the night, wibbling for my life.

  * * *

  I’ve asked but no one can tell me what I did for the next six hours. My memory offers up flash sessions of the sixteen-year-old me running along Cripsley High Road, perspiring; sitting in the hut to the rear of seventh green; kneeling in the central reservation of the A43; being thrown out of a pub which I hadn’t had the chance to enter by a bulbous-faced bouncer; but these images make no sense, come in no particular order and, besides, could quite possibly be borrowed from another drunken golf night. What I know for certain is that, at 7 a.m., I woke up in Ashley’s living room with a confused-looking Ashley standing above me, and my clothes – all my clothes – in a neat pile beside me. A pile far too neat to have been arranged by someone who had consumed eleven cans of Red Stripe the night before.

  ‘How did I get here?’ I asked Ashley, whose mum and dad always left their back door unlocked.

  ‘I was just wondering the same thing,’ he replied.

  ‘Who took my clothes off?’ I asked.

  ‘I was wondering that, too,’ he said, handing me my boxer shorts.

  I never did broach that night with Ashley’s parents (who, Ashley assured me, were both at home for the entire duration of my bender) but, walking past piles of fresh ironing in his utility room at various points over the following couple of years, would often get obscure pangs of déjà vu and come down with an unaccountable attack of goose pimples.

  It was some time before I spoke to Mandy and Georgina again, and, when I did, the subject of that night remained off-limits, beyond Georgina’s comment to Bob Boffinger that I made a ‘surprisingly expressive drunk’. I still sometimes made illogical detours via the clubhouse car park in order to avoid the Routledges, but on the whole I felt less threatened, and gathered that they’d passed into a less spooky era of mother–daughter relations. Sometimes we would even see Mandy on her own, making people properly aware of her presence by forming fully intelligible phrases like ‘good shot’, ‘fine, thank you’, and ‘Have you seen my pink sun visor anywhere?’ A couple more parties were arranged. I found excuses not to attend – Rain Man was on TV – and learned to live with overexcited reports from Mousey of Letitia’s mum turning up at three o’clock in the morning only to be chased out into the street by her daughter, and Robin ‘unhooking Marcy’s bra strap’.

  Mandy and I had known one another half a decade – our entire teenage life, more or less – by the time we engaged in what the average person would recognize as a conversation. It happened in a nightclub in Nottingham town centre, at a birthday gathering for Ben’s older brother, Alistair. By this point the Cripsley junior gang had become a less cohesive unit, and I wasn’t helping matters with my unfathomable habit of quoting from art-house films and listening to scuzzy rock music conceived in outside lavatories. My friends were baffled by what I was becoming, and I was starting to notice it. Having just lectured Jamie on the idiosyncratic brilliance of the dance scene in Hal Hartley’s Simple Men, I found myself wandering pointlessly, feeling strangely out of place, and happened upon Mandy. Within two minutes of talking to her, I was immediately struck by how wrong I’d been to write her off, how confident she seemed compared to my acne-ridden, parochial mates, and – even more shocking – that she was the only person at the party who knew who Soundgarden were.

  I still didn’t fancy her, and she’d probably long since lost interest in me, but that was fine. We both agreed upon how ridiculous it was that it had taken us this long to get to know one another. I felt stupid, but she seemed to as well, which had the culminative effect of making us not feel stupid at all. We cackled contemptuously at our former selves – selves that, in truth, we’d only just left behind – laughed about her mum, and talked excitedly about the forthcoming Screaming Trees tour. I haven’t seen her since, but the rumour is that she now has a well-paid job in military intelligence.

  WHEN I SEE my teenage golf-life, I see a bucking bronco, and I see it in two ways. In the first way, which is the way I see it now, golf is the horse, and I’m on the back of it, trying to maintain my grip. In the second way, which is the way I saw it as a teenager, I’m the horse, and it’s golf that’s struggling to rein me in. The one consistent factor is that the further I progressed towards adulthood, the more jerky, frantic and slippery everything became for both of us.

  When I was denied membership of Par-adise, I could have tightened up my practice routine, donned the psychological armour and, like many more convincing rebels before me, shown the men in suits what I was made of. The idea certainly occurred to me, but I lacked the strength and austerity of mind to carry it through. Instead, I turned the crime in on myself. I simply hadn’t been good enough, I concluded. The only deception here, I decided, was my own act of thinking that I was somehow ‘above’ my fellow Cripsley juniors, that I, alone, deserved a better course, simply because I had the lowest handicap at the club. My way of making this up to my friends was to spend the following few weeks squandering too much time in the back of the pro shop, wasting too many practice balls in games of Ching!, secreting the furry head-covers of the septuagenarian membership in deep shrubbery, and attempting to ‘find myself’ by playing golf while still drunk from the night before. This is what hard-living rock and movie misfits describe as a ‘lost weekend’. They have loose women, cocaine and sports cars. Mousey, Jamie and I had tee pegs, Fanta and motorized buggies. If you ignore the discrepancy in resources, the levels of excess were almost identical.

  Right in the middle of this period, the professionals’ shop vanished. That is to say: the shell of the building remained more or less intact, but everything else about it was irrevocably altered. Where there had been ancient decomposing mashie niblicks, newfangled irons winked under fluorescent lighting. Where there had been dust and dark and porn, there were top-of-the-range waterproofs. Where a caramel-coated rat’s skeleton had guarded the entrance to an arcane storage chamber, a hi-tech swing improvement unit stood proud and chaste. Roy Jackson and Mike Shalcross were gone for ever, without a goodbye, like eloping retailers in the night. The only remnant of the old regime was Nick, who would turn up every so often during the weeks following Roy’s departure and sit in the new shop, eyeing the new staff incredulously, recounting a legendary blow-job he’d received on the lower practice ground or announcing that he was ‘this close’ t
o qualifying for the European Tour – a comment with little foundation since to our knowledge he hadn’t played more than five holes of golf in the preceding twelve months.

  If the powers-that-be were trying to smoke us out, we were determined that it wasn’t going to work. If the new shop wasn’t going to be so easy to hide in, then we would just have to be more vigilant in the way we arsed about. As for the new pro and his staff, they’d come around to our way of thinking – eventually. We’d make sure of it.

  The first obstacle arrived in the form of Cripsley’s new teaching professional, Steve Kimbolton. Steve’s first unique quality was his habit of soundtracking his every movement with an unusual low humming sound, the noise a cat and a hive of bees might produce while in the process of becoming friends. His second unique quality was his walk, which gave the impression of a man so laid-back as to be involved in a permanent belly-dance. Clearly nobody had ever told him anything about the traditional duties of the club pro, since he seemed quite content to fill his hours passing on his technical skill, repairing clubs, selling equipment and offering psychological tips to members. Unfortunately for us, this meant he was nearly always in the shop, unless he was out on the practice fairway taking a lesson. Even when he returned prematurely with his charge to find half a dozen of us sprawled out with the contents of his new Mizuno display window scattered around us, he remained unfazed. At least with Roy Jackson a sense of volatility had lurked beneath the absent-minded surface. Steve just belly-danced right through us in slow motion. We wanted a sense of risk. Instead we got this noise: ‘zmmmmunnznnnzmmm’. Finding ourselves infuriatingly not even wanting to upset him, our pranks tended to backfire. On one occasion we used the shop phone to book a high-class sheepdog trainer for his Jack Russell/whippet hybrid, but having shortly afterwards met the dog in question, which turned out to be almost as docile as its owner and utterly adorable, we lost sight of our original motivation and jogged to the nearest payphone to cancel the appointment. Another time, Mousey, in one of his more obnoxious moods, had pilfered one of a consignment of Nick Faldo-endorsed Pringle sweaters, only to feel bad about it and sneak it back onto the shelf the next day.

  Thankfully we didn’t have to expend so much energy on Nigel, Steve’s assistant. Nigel arrived at Cripsley in 1991 as a conscientious nineteen-year-old, the possessor of a warm smile, a rapidly improving handicap and hopes of getting his professional’s card before the end of the same year, with a view to competing at the highest level in the not too distant future. He left three years later as a jaded, sex-obsessed twenty-two-year-old, with a considerably worsened handicap and an imminent interview for a factory job sorting women’s pants. It’s quite possible that Nigel’s destiny was always in lingerie and not golf, and that there was nothing anyone could do to prevent him fulfilling it. It’s also equally possible that he was hounded and goaded by Cripsley’s junior section until he saw no other way out.

  ‘GOOD SCORE IN TODAY’S CONDITIONS!’ Nigel would shout, as I arrived back in the shop after my round. Nigel would bellow, ‘GOOD SCORE IN TODAY’S CONDITIONS!’ whether I had achieved a mediocre score on a calm midsummer’s afternoon, a good score in a hurricane, or my worst score ever on a course I’d specially set up in my own living room with buckets substituted for holes. It was his catch-phrase. His other catchphrase was, ‘WELL, THAT’S RIGHT!’ He said this to adult members regardless of whether they had just made a pithy observation, uttered something Nigel couldn’t understand at all, or expressed the opinion that all gay and black people should be gunned down in cold blood. Nigel would still have said ‘WELL, THAT’S RIGHT!’ to them if they had just confided that they were planning to put a bag of cat litter forward for role of vice-captain next year. It wasn’t as if there was any choice for him in the matter. He was, after all, an assistant pro.

  Our nickname for Nigel, who was sharp-featured, was ‘Fez’. He looked more like a stoat than a ferret, but ‘Stoaz’ didn’t have the same ring to it. We called Nigel ‘Fez’ behind his back until the end of his first fortnight at Cripsley, by which point Fez’s Fezness had become so extreme that calling him anything else to his face required a level of mental effort we didn’t have the stamina for.

  ‘Hi, Fez!’ blurted Mousey one day, as we piled into the shop.

  ‘WHAT? WHY ARE YOU CALLING ME THAT?’ said Fez.

  ‘’Cos Tom says you look like a ferret,’ said Mousey.

  ‘Bollocks, did I!’ I said.

  ‘THAT’S NICE. I FEEL SO MUCH BETTER ABOUT MYSELF NOW,’ said Fez.

  ‘We don’t mean it in a horrible way,’ I said, cushioning the blow.

  ‘HOW CAN YOU CALL SOMEONE A FERRET AND NOT MEAN IT IN A HORRIBLE WAY?’

  ‘Some ferrets can be nice. People have them as pets. We just like to give everyone nicknames. It’s affectionate, really. We’ve got one for Steve, too.’

  ‘WHAT’S THAT?’

  ‘Squiz.’

  ‘WHY?’

  ‘’Cos he looks like a squirrel.’

  ‘DO YOU THINK SO?’

  ‘Well, he’s got ginger hair.’

  Gradually but irresistibly Fez developed until the only thing Nigel had in common with Fez was the body they shared as a vessel. Nigel continued to go about his business of impersonating a human bouncy castle for the egos of Cripsley’s adult membership, but the instant they left Fez would come out, slurping at his upper lip, sniffing the air malevolently and evaluating which members of Cripsley’s bridge team he’d most like to ‘DO IT’ with. The Cripsley juniors might have frequently talked in mock lustful terms about Mandy and Cripsley’s younger lady members, but for Fez no decrepitude, political inclination, age bracket or brightly coloured waterproofs could represent a barrier. One of his favourite hobbies was ‘Grunking’, an act which involved his desk, the open drawer of his till, and a series of violent pelvic thrusts. Grunking usually took place not long after a highly regarded member of the ladies’ committee had left the shop. Fez was never anything less than ferocious while grunking, and excitement was displayed in quantity rather than brute force. Between twenty and thirty grunks usually meant that Molly Ripdale, a 73-year-old cataract-sufferer who captained the ladies’ greensome team, was in the vicinity.

  ‘I’D SHOW HER A THING OR TWO ABOUT MIXED DOUBLES!’ Fez would snarl.

  A moment later the door would open and Molly’s husband, John, would arrive, bringing news of an unfortunate tangle with a conifer to the rear of the thirteenth tee, to which Nigel would make his immediate, mundane, ear-splitting return.

  ‘DON’T WORRY, JOHN. GOOD SCORE, THAT – IN TODAY’S CONDITIONS!’

  As far as Fez was concerned, it wasn’t so much that we’d created a monster, more that we’d been perceptive and benevolent enough to put a name to an inner beast struggling for expression. At the exact same rate that Fez flourished, however, Nigel’s luck ran out. As Steve settled into a work rate more becoming of a club professional, Nigel began to slave harder and longer for his forty-eight pounds a week. When he did get to play – usually for no more than half an hour, in the kind of light where it was quite possible to mistake anything from a hedgehog to the Starship Enterprise for a flagstick – his golf became a comedy of terrors, encompassing the whole spectrum of afflictions from ‘the shank’ (a shot notorious for flying off the club destructively to the right, at right angles to the target) to the ‘Oh shit, I’ve just hit the clubhouse roof’ (a shot notorious for instilling fear into the hearts of the bridge team). Additionally, he drove his dad’s Vauxhall Astra into a lamppost, causing several thousand pounds’ worth of damage, and his childhood sweetheart dumped him, complaining of the late hours and the smell that lingered on his clothes after a twelve-hour-day dripping petrol into rubber grips in the club repair room.

  Naturally, we all found the whole thing heartbreaking, and did our best to help limit the damage Nigel could do to himself.

  ‘I MAY AS WELL JUST CHUCK THIS THING IN THE BIN!’ cried Nigel after yet another shank, casting aside his favouri
te club, a deleted, highly sought-after 1987 model sand iron forged half from copper, half from titanium.

  ‘I’ll give you a fiver for it,’ I said, making a swift detour from the opposite side of the fairway.

  ‘YOU MAY AS WELL. IT’S NO GOOD TO ME.’

  ‘OK. Let’s call it two pounds fifty.’

  Yet there was only so much we could do. With Nigel programmed to self-destruct, it would have been impossible to resist the temptation to take advantage of the gaps in his concentration every so often. And besides, Fez, when around, would actively encourage it. There was no escaping the truth: Fez was a more fun person to be, and be with. While Nigel would have never opened up a tab for the junior section behind the cash register, Fez told us to go ahead and help ourselves. With Nigel on patrol, the shop’s one remaining inner sanctum, the club repair room, remained strictly off-limits for juniors. With Fez at the helm, it became the number-one party venue.

  The dangers would arise when a lightning character change became necessary. As the bell on the shop door tinkled, Fez would race away, employing the back staircase in the same way that Superman employs phone booths, and leaving us alone with an array of solvents, solutions, concoctions and obscure implements worthy of Heath Robinson’s tool shed. By the time Fez reached the top of the stairs, he would have settled into the persona of Nigel again. His inherent patience and the insatiable whims of his customers meant we could find ourselves alone in the repair room for anywhere up to an hour. It wasn’t long before we began to experiment. What would we get if we poured this sticky stuff into this acidic stuff and garnished it with this dusty stuff? we wondered. The answer was always the same: A big load of sticky, acidic, dusty stuff. But that didn’t discourage us from producing several gallons of it.