Nice Jumper (12 page)

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.