The Amateurs (16 page)

I
N
S
COTLAND
, M
AY AND
J
UNE CAN OFTEN BE THE MOST
incredible months. Winter loosens up its long grip and the whole country erupts in a starburst of flora, fauna and T-shirts. Another blessing: in the fields, in the grassy banks along rivers and lochs, in the tall grass beside the ponds on golf courses, the midges still slumber; tiny embryonic grains dreaming of the days soon to come when they will emerge in their billions and feast upon the plump, blood-rich flesh of tourists.

Dr Robertson signed a sick note which entitled the bearer to three months off work and for Gary Irvine the early summer became a torrent, an incredible blur, of golf, marred only by the local newspaper’s report of his breaking the course record, which chose to focus on the more unfortunate part of the achievement. Cathy cancelled her lifelong subscription to the
Ardgirvan Gazette
the same day. ‘Ah…ah cannae believe it,’ Cathy sobbed, the copy of the paper spread out on the breakfast bar between her and Gary. There on the cover was the same photo of Gary they’d run when he’d been in hospital.
Sadly, above the photo, was a different headline from the one Cathy had been hoping for (‘
LOCAL MAN BREAKS COURSE RECORD
!’). It simply said: ‘
MASTURBATED
!’

‘Bloody journalists. Scum o’ the earth so they are.’ Cathy sobbed. There was a quote from Senga the barmaid highlighted in bold:
‘He got it out and just started doing it right in front of us.’

‘Aye, bloody Senga Syme,’ Cathy snorted. ‘Sure there’s a good few stories ah could tell ye about her bloody family…’

Gary didn’t care. Rising with the sun just before six (hearing only a soft moan of protest from the sleeping Pauline), he packed water and bananas–pausing only to masturbate in the downstairs toilet, the act itself mechanical and joyless, a physical necessity required so he could jam himself behind the wheel of a car before he motored out to the driving range where he could work on fine-tuning his new gift.

It was a constant process of discovery and amazement. Before the accident, had he made ten attempts to fade the ball with the driver, moving it from left to right in the air, it might have gone like this: three balls would be mega-slices that curved crazily to the right; two would fly absolutely, maddeningly, straight; two or three attempts would start off looking promising before moving dramatically rightwards–fades, becoming cuts, becoming eye-watering slices. One or two shots would be utter mishits with the topped ball rattling along the ground in front of him. Perhaps, on a very good day, one ball out of the ten would do what it was intended to do: rocket upwards on a penetrating trajectory, gracefully sailing from left to right as it descended.

Now? Christ, now he found he could control the
degree
to which the ball moved in the air. He could hit huge booming draws that finished twenty yards to his left. He could punch
irons low into the wind or, by placing the ball further forward in his stance, he could produce incredible height: his five-and six-irons landing soft as wedges.

As for the wedges–he found that he could finally do what every amateur golfer dreams of, what they salivate over when they watch Linklater, Spafford or Novotell, what they see themselves doing in their feverish golf dreams. He could create
back-spin.
With the sand wedge he could throw the ball a hundred feet in the air and have it plop down, hop forward, pause, and then spin backwards two, three, four yards towards the hole.

Around nine o’clock other golfers would start to appear–some of them gathering to watch in awe as Gary drilled three-irons all the way to the end of the range–and it would be time to head up to the golf course.

On weekdays the course was quiet in the mornings and he would usually play the first round by himself–hitting extra shots, experimenting, trying out different ways of coming at the greens–before having lunch in the clubhouse and then heading out for a second round in the afternoon, often a four ball with Bert and a couple of the retired boys.

Pauline protested. There were rows and fights. If he was well enough to play golf all the time shouldn’t he back at work? The old Gary would have capitulated. The new Gary shrugged and headed for the course.

The erections remained near constant. As did the swearing, although usually it was just the odd word bubbling up into a sentence, or quickly added as an afterthought. There was, thankfully, no recurrence of the incident on the eighteenth green. (‘
His wee turn
’, Cathy called it.)

Within a couple of weeks a fresh problem became apparent. Given his new-found power (his 300-yard drives, his 140-yard sand wedges), Ravenscroft, with a layout that used to be as
humbling and challenging to Gary as St Andrews or Brookline would have been, was no longer any kind of test. The longest hole on the course, the 510-yard par five tenth, was now driver, six-iron for him on a good day.

‘Ah think you need tae stretch yer wings a wee bit,’ Bert said.

And so they did. Driving south from Ardgirvan they explored the string of great links courses along the Ayrshire coastline: Glasgow and Western Gailes, Kilmarnock Barassie, Old Prestwick, Turnberry…

These were not municipal pitch-and-putts. These were real golf courses, with teeth and claws and poisonous spines on their backs. Courses where you stood on the tee and looked out over hundreds of yards of wild scrubland, heather and gorse bushes and burns and sand dunes, to where a red or yellow flag shimmered in the distance, signalling that there was indeed a green out there somewhere, an oasis of calm in this maelstrom of nature.

Then, when you actually got to the green, you found that it was sixty or seventy yards wide and nearly a hundred long. You routinely had eighty-foot putts that went uphill
and
downhill, moving through several breaks across grass like a laminated-wood floor. When the breeze got up you often found yourself having to putt while standing in the mouth of a wind tunnel.

And all this time Gary thought he had been playing golf.

At first he was astonished at how easy, how effortless it was, to make bogey, to make double and triple bogey on these courses. A frown from the Golf Gods–a bad bounce, a few yards extra roll on the fairway–and you were suddenly in your own personal Vietnam: sweating and blooded by thorny gorse bushes, sand in your hair, mouth and eyes as you tried
for the second or third time to launch your ball over the sheer face of a bunker that towered seven feet above you. The bunkers, Jesus Christ, some of these bunkers were like hatches to Hades.

But Auld Bert’s counsel was wise. ‘The key to links gowf, son–stay out of the sand. If ye cannae drive over them, pull an iron and play well short.
Don’t just hit the driver and hope for the best.
’ Gary quickly found his scores improving–from the low 80s to the mid 70s to par and better.

Meanwhile, back at Ravenscroft, he was setting new kinds of records. He won the Monthly Medal in May and June. Almost every day for six weeks straight he handed in scorecards with scores of 68, 67, 69, 65 or 66. Finally, on a bright, hot Saturday morning towards the end of June, he walked through the locker room and up to the Handicaps Board. He read quickly down the list of names–Hamilton, Howe, Ingram–and there it was. The most beautiful inscription he had ever seen in his life:

Irvine, G: O.4

From 18.7 to 0.4 in a little under six weeks: the fastest anyone in the history of British golf had ever had their handicap cut.

He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there staring at the magical combination of words and digits when he heard something behind him. He turned round to see Bert standing there smiling.

‘Congratulations, son.’

‘Aye. Thanks, Bert. Fuck.’

‘Yer a scratch golfer now.’

‘I know. Ah–baws, big baws–I can’t believe it. I wish ma dad was, y’know…’

‘Aye.’ Bert nodded. He was holding something. ‘Well, there’s lots of things scratch golfers can do that others cannae…’ He handed Gary a sheaf of A4 papers: six sheets, black and white, stapled together.

On the top sheet was a picture of the oldest, most famous prize in golf, the Claret Jug, white silhouetted against a black circle.

Beside the jug: ‘The Open Championship’.

Below it: ‘Royal Troon, 19, 20, 21 and 22 July’.

At the top: ‘Entry Form–Regional Qualifying’.

Gary looked at Bert.

‘Has to be in by tomorrow,’ Bert said.

‘T
HE
O
PEN
R
EGIONAL
Q
UALIFIERS
?’ A
PRIL
T
REMBLE
spat the words out like they had scalded her mouth. She found they tasted no better the second time.

McIntyre and Devlin both nodded eagerly.

‘Good wee story,’ said Alan McIntyre, the
Daily Standard
’s editor, his tie thrown over his shoulder as he resumed tucking into his lunch: roast-beef-and-onion sandwiches brought up from the pub on the corner. Two o’clock on a Friday afternoon and he was just starting lunch at his desk. Fucking newspaper business today. At fifty-one Al McIntyre was old enough to remember when Friday-afternoon lunch would have started around noon and continued until the late afternoon: bottles of Bull’s Blood in the subs’ desk drawers and not a secretary in the building who wouldn’t have popped down to the Albany Hotel with you for the night. Not like now, he thought, looking up at the sleek figure of April, her hands on her hips, her head cocked sideways.

April was twenty-six, five nine in the heels she rarely wore
(
rarely wore skirts either
, McIntyre reflected), a clear-skinned beauty with bobbed auburn hair and a degree (‘
a first-class honours degree
’ as she never tired of reminding them) in Journalism from Napier University. She was the first female sports reporter the
Standard
had ever had; an editorial decision designed to refute allegations of entrenched sexism at the paper and, hopefully, to draw a few female readers into opening the sports section before they passed it to their husbands or boyfriends.

‘Just a few hundred words, doll,’ said Tam Devlin, the sports editor, unwrapping his ham and cheese, ‘local interest, stars of the future, you know the sort of thing.’

‘Stars of the future? What fucking planet are you two on? I mean, what’s it like? Is the atmosphere breathable? You want me to spend the weekend in the middle of nowhere watching a bunch of nobodies trying to break par? Tell me, Tam, who was the last golfing superstar to emerge from the Open Regional Qualifiers?’

‘Er…’ said Devlin.

McIntyre’s office was on the top floor of the
Standard
building on the northern bank of the Clyde. Through the long window the dun river snaked away towards the east and lunchtime traffic crawled across the Kingston Bridge.

‘Exactly. Come on,’ April moved in and perched on the edge of the big desk, ‘there’s the World Match Play down in Hertfordshire that weekend.
Linklater
’s playing. I could–’

‘Donald’s covering that,’ Devlin said through a mouthful of white bread and plastic cheese.

‘Donald! That fucking old wreck! Look at him!’ April pointed through the glass panelling that separated McIntyre’s office from the rest of the floor, towards where an enormously fat man sat with his feet up on his desk and his back to them.
Donald Lawson, Senior Sports Reporter. ‘He’s probably asleep right now!’ April added.

‘Scottish Sports Writer of the Year two years running,’ Devlin said.

‘Aye, 1977 and 1978. Fucking hell, Tam, what’s the point in sending Donald? He’ll just sit in the media bar all week, getting pissed, stuffing his face, and then filing copy cribbed from the daily press releases, occasionally wandering out to watch someone sink a putt on the eighteenth. I’d do a good job.’

‘Sorry, April,’ Devlin said, ‘R.H.I.P. Donald has relationships with lots of the players.’

‘Aye, on the seniors tour,’ April said, turning to McIntyre. ‘Come on, Al, don’t give me all this “Rank Has Its Privileges” shite. I’m worth more than this.’

‘Tam’s call,’ McIntyre said.

‘So that’s it, is it?’ April stood up, hands back on her hips. ‘Jobs for the boys? Business as usual?’

‘Jesus, April,’ McIntyre sighed. ‘Does everything have to be an Emily bloody Pankhurst situation with you? You’ve only been here a year. All good things to those who wait.’

‘Yeah. Like you two’ll be waiting until thirty seconds before the paper goes to bed for that alky’s miserable, clichéd-rammed fucking copy.’

McIntyre’s desk phone started ringing and he squinted at the caller ID. ‘Sorry, April. Conference call. We’ve got to take this. Call transport and they’ll sort you out a hire car and a hotel. Enjoy Midlothian. It’s a beautiful part of Scotland, you know.’

She looked at them: two fat, middle-aged sexist bastards who probably thought she was angry because she wasn’t getting enough.

‘You’ve got mayonnaise on your tie, Tam,’ she said, turning on her heel.

‘Bastar—’ Devlin dabbed at his tie with a napkin and McIntyre picked up his phone as April–not gently–closed the door behind her.

Devlin pulled his mobile from his pocket and hit the red button, terminating the call he had been making to McIntyre’s desk phone.

‘Thanks, Tam,’ McIntyre said, turning the TV on and getting European football on Sky. ‘It’s a shame, with all the attitude and that. She’s actually no a bad wee writer.’

‘Aye,’ said Devlin. ‘And the body on it? Ye’d ride it till the wean pushed ye oot.’

‘Chance would be a fine thing.’

‘Whit, ye think she’s…?’ Devlin made an ‘O’ with the thumb and forefinger of each hand and started banging the two ‘O’s together.

‘Either way,’ McIntyre said, turning the volume up with a mustard-smeared thumb, ‘she’s probably no getting enough…’

It had taken a fair bit of thinking. He hadn’t wanted it to look too obvious. He thought about attending some carpet conference or convention, but Leanne knew how much he hated those. Or maybe a trip with the lads to see Rangers play away somewhere, but the summer had started and there weren’t any suitable games any time soon. Finally he hit upon it.

Leanne found it
slightly
odd that her husband had decided to make a trip up to Glasgow for a night of ‘father-and-son bonding’, but she was pleased. He spent little enough time with the boy. The university was on holiday but Keith had
got a job in Glasgow for the summer, working at some computer games store and keeping his flat on in the west end. Two weeks on Thursday–17 July–Masterson would drive up to the city, get a hotel room and they’d go out to dinner, maybe see a film. ‘You’ll be OK on your own?’ he asked her.

‘Of course ah will,’ Leanne said.

Later, Masterson drove into town on the pretext of picking up some beers. Using a payphone in the shopping centre he made one short call.

Ranta hung up on Masterson and made another short call.

Alec hung up on his father and punched a number up on his mobile. He said the date, repeating it very clearly twice.

‘A’right,’ Lee said. He was going to say more, maybe something reassuring like ‘don’t worry’, or ‘leave it to me’, but there was just a click as Alec hung up.

‘
The Open Regional Qualifiers?’

Pauline had been using her incredulous tone so much recently that it was beginning to sound normal to her. Every other word seemed to be coming out of her mouth in italics these days. ‘Where?’

‘Musselburgh. It’s in Midlothian. Up near Edinburgh. Shut up, Ben!’ Gary did not look up from the bag he was packing.

‘But…you…you’re off work because you’re sick.’

‘Have you seen my toilet bag? The wee black one?’

‘No! Shut up, Ben!’

‘Never mind, I’ll just–

‘No–not the fucking toilet bag, I mean
no
! You’re not going off to play in some stupid bloody golf competition. If you’re well enough to bugger about playing golf then you’re well enough to go back to work. Will you
ever fucking shut up, Ben
!’

Gary stopped packing and turned to her, a pair of black socks in his hand. Ben continued to growl at him, circling around behind Pauline as the argument paused–her enforcer, her praetorian guard.

How many times had he attempted to defy her in the past? There had been that stag night to Dublin he’d wanted to go on, some guy from work, back in ’97…an argument about the extension to the house a few years ago. Not much over the years. Pauline looked at him. They were the same eyes, blue and clear. But it wasn’t him any more. Something fundamental was different and she felt a sudden unease, as if the rules had been changed without her consent, as if the same opponent she had beaten countless times before had somehow acquired a new technique, a new level of confidence.

Given how things were progressing with Masterson, Pauline was surprised at how angry she was. What did she care if he wanted to waste his life farting about on a golf course? But every relationship has its comfort zones, its normal way of doing things, and Gary was increasingly transgressing the boundaries laid down over the years. His golf was a pleasure Pauline tolerated as long as it was understood that there was to be guilt attached to it, that it was to be fitted in here and there and could be curtailed whenever Pauline saw fit.

Gary placed a hand on her shoulder, guided her to the edge of the bed, and sat down beside her. He began very gently. ‘Pauline, listen. Shite, fud, cunt. You don’t understand. Whatever’s happened in here–’ he tapped his temple, the indented bruise still visible–‘I can do something I’ve always wanted to do. I can imagine a shot, I can see it in my head, and then I can do it. I can make it happen almost exactly like I see it. Not now and again, or once in a blue moon–paps–But nearly every single time.’

‘So what are you saying? You’ve had a bump on the bloody head and so you’re going to pack your job in and go off and become a professional golfer?’

‘No. Don’t be daft. I just want to…take this a bit further. Can’t you understand that?’

A car horn sounded from outside.

‘That’ll be Stevie,’ Gary said, getting up. ‘He’s caddying for me.’

‘Do you want to leave me?’

‘Leave you? No, God. Of course not.’

‘Because if you walk out that door and bugger off to play fucking golf for the weekend–’

‘Can’t you just let me do this? Can’t you be happy for me?’

Pauline tried to picture herself being happy for Gary. Being happy that he was out swinging a golf club in the sunshine, laughing and enjoying himself while she had a party to do: six-year-olds shrieking and screaming and running around crying their eyes out. She felt a sickening rage twisting in the pit of her stomach. ‘If you walk out that door I…’

He reached out and put a hand on her cheek. This would be the point where the old Gary crumbled. Where he fell apart and said, ‘I’m sorry,’ or ‘OK.’ The new Gary smiled softly. ‘Och, Pauline,’ he said, ‘don’t be so fucking melodramatic.’

She listened to his feet pounding down the stairs, the metallic clank of his golf bag being picked up, and then the front door was slamming behind him. She heard him exchanging greetings with Stevie, the boot and then the car door slamming and the two of them driving off.

So, it was war, then.