Authors: Tom Cox
If that summer seems relatively uneventful now, it is perhaps because it will forever stand trial next to the return leg the following Easter. Bob Boffinger should have seen the portents at Heathrow – Ben very nearly getting arrested for pulling the stuffing out of a chair in the departure lounge, me getting searched at Customs then discovering that a bottle of shampoo had exploded in my rucksack, Bushy almost eloping with a stewardess – and admitted defeat. But if there was one thing Bob Boffinger wasn’t good at, it was admitting defeat. We were his boys. We were going to do our club and country proud.
If ever there was a look that said, ‘Yes, I have heartlessly disposed of your mum’s homemade lunches, and I know you have now found out about it, but I hope we can still be friends,’ then Alfonso, upon greeting me at the airport, exhibited it. He displayed his gratitude for my tactful circumlocution of the whole sandwich issue by treating me to a ‘moving’ rendition of ‘Hey, Jude’ on his Bontempi organ, an interpretation whose only true flaw was the substitution of ‘you’ for ‘Jude’. I couldn’t work out if this was because the song was directed at me, or because Alfonso didn’t know the words, so decided it was best to grit my teeth and mime enjoyment. However, these festivities didn’t provide
any
guarantee that Alfonso’s family wasn’t going to pay me back for poisoning their son. Until I stayed at Mr and Mrs Alfonso’s place I hadn’t realized that the real point of fondue was to kill the offending animal
in
the fondue set, while deftly keeping it as pink as possible. From here, things got progressively rawer, until I half expected the final supper of the holiday to be staged in the local zoo, with spears substituted in place of forks.
While it is the golf courses in the south of Portugal that attract the tourist trade, not their more barren northern equivalents, Oporto’s local links was opulent enough, with lush, serpentine fairways and billiard-table greens. Oporto’s corpulent businessmen members had the best of both worlds: on one side of the course was a private beach, providing unlimited sunbathing; on the other side was a shanty town, providing unlimited greenstaff. I’ve never seen so many dark faces surrounding a golf course, and might have found this refreshing had they been holding putters and not shovels.
Alfonso’s dad, much like mine back home, provided a tireless taxi service to and from the club. I was grateful for the lifts, but slightly less grateful for the stops he performed en route. It was always the same. ‘My father is going to stop here for five minutes. We will wait in the car,’ Alfonso would explain, on the way back from another long day at the club. Four hours later, Mr Alfonso would emerge, with the sunny demeanour of a
man
who had no idea it was three fifteen in the morning, and we would proceed home, me feeling like the only person who thought there was anything unusual about this. The alternative was hitching a lift with Alfonso’s friend Rico, who drove a Renault Five with one of its back passenger doors missing, thought red lights were for girls, and had only one tape in his car stereo, which consisted of Supertramp’s ‘Dreamer’ recorded, as far as I could work out, twenty-four times.
‘You like Supertramp in England, Tom?’ Rico asked, hurtling over a level crossing, looking at me, in the back seat, rather than at the school bus looming in his windscreen.
It was all too much. Before I’d even got my bearings in Portugal, I found myself in a state of sleepless, half-starved, nervous delirium. This shouldn’t serve as an excuse for my irrational, incautious behaviour over my fortnight there, of course. But I’m going to use it anyway.
It was her swing that drew me to her initially. Long. Rhythmical. Suggestive. From three fairways away, it whispered through the grass to me. I’d fallen for her long before I set eyes on her face, but the fact that her face was framed by a bob of fair, silky hair and had a look that was earthy and slightly naughty didn’t exactly discourage me.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked Alfonso.
‘That’s Shue. She is a – how you say in England? – “big girl”. Ha, ha. You want to meet her? Ha, ha. I sort it out.’
Shue was Oporto’s star girl player. Why no one else in the predominantly male Oporto junior section had already snapped up this nine-handicap beauty was one of the great mysteries of the western world to me, but I gladly took up the offer of an introduction, and acted quickly on Alfonso’s suggestion that I should offer to caddy for her in a local girls’ tournament the following day. Shue’s English was patchy, so the two of us communicated almost exclusively through the language of club selection. She was exactly what I was looking for – which, during this point in my life, meant she had a solid swing, blonde hair and bigger-than-average breasts. Although she never told me in words we were an item, she seemed fairly happy in my company, flashed me plenty of shy smiles and was clearly impressed with my all-round technical knowledge and course management.
Now I simply had to get a job, learn the language, and find a flat to rent in the locality. But – no hurry – there was a good week and a half yet to sort all that out. For the moment, I was happy to watch her hit shots on the Oporto practice ground.
Five days of the Portuguese holiday were to be taken up with a trip to Lisbon. Under normal circumstances, this would have meant the opportunity to test out my
swing
on some of the most intricate and pampered courses in Europe. With the chance to make my virginity a thing of the past, however, golf was rapidly losing its significance. Besides, these courses had buggies for hire, and – let’s face it – that was infinitely more exciting than any number of carpet-like fairways, elevated tees and triple-tier greens.
At Lisbon’s handsome Aurora golf course, Robin and I worked out a fuss-free way of deciding who would drive our buggy. Every three holes, the two of us would race from the previous green to the vehicle, while simultaneously punching one another in the leg; the one who reached the steering wheel first got to drive. We came out about even over the full round. While Robin, ever the one-trick pony, perfected the art of driving
extremely fast
at pine trees then swerving out of the way
right at the last minute
, I opted for the less conservative approach, slinging our vehicle at full speed towards anything and anyone in our path, then attempting to figure out how to use the brakes. Not content with running over the feet of Bob Boffinger’s wife Marjorie, I then proceeded to make Aurora the only course equipped with seventeen and a half ball-cleaning units. Ball-cleaning units, for those who don’t know, are circular metal contraptions, mounted on plastic sticks, containing a brush and soapy water: labour-saving devices installed on the tees of your better class of golf course for individuals who find the
act
of spit ‘n’ polish uncouth. The ones at Aurora were particularly futuristic in design and particularly solidly made, but evidently not quite solidly enough to stand up to a fifteen-mile-per-hour wallop from a golf buggy. What’s most memorable about the incident is not the satisfying ‘Snap!’ of the collision so much as my decision to bail out four yards before impact, leaving my passenger alone and frozen in terror.
From that day to this, Robin has never travelled in a car driven by me. This, I sense, is no coincidence.
During the evenings in Lisbon, we were served barely dead animals and cheap red wine at a mysterious hut a couple of hundred yards from our hotel. This was better than having to pay to wait an hour for a bowl of chips in the hotel – the lone meal we’d ordered there we’d had to march into the kitchen and rescue from the hot plate ourselves – but far from ideal. The meat (horse? baboon?) we pushed doubtfully around our plates. The wine we necked theatrically. Then we headed back to monopolize the second floor of the hotel and find out more about one another than we probably wanted to.
Robin, who, while sober, was about as near as any of us came to responsible, lost all pretence of fatherliness under the influence of alcohol, and thought nothing of singing along to Madonna’s ‘Borderline’ at the top of his voice at 2 a.m. The rest of us, in turn, thought nothing of joining in at the top of our voices,
despite
the facts that a) most of us didn’t know the words, and b) the song was being broadcast through the miniature headphones of Robin’s personal stereo. After two Bacardi and Cokes Jamie, who could be cold and backbiting, became everyone’s easiest-going confidant. Ben, entrepreneurial and off-the-wall normally, stayed more or less the same but only talked about Pringle’s latest range of sweaters three times per hour, instead of the customary seven. Mousey became even more desperate to prove himself than usual, but typically passed out before he had done so. I’m not sure about myself, but going on my current drunken persona, I’m pretty sure I shouted a lot more than usual, told complete strangers I loved them and viewed the act of hiding a pint glass in someone’s bag as worthy of a Bafta for comic innovation.
No one went through a more dramatic character overhaul, though, than Bushy, who, possibly dissatisfied with his role as the ‘quiet one’ in our group, took to leading the charge of the rabid ape warrior through the corridors of the hotel. The beauty of Bushy’s drunken marauding was that it didn’t matter whether the remainder of us were part of it or not; he was off in his own magical land of self-discovery. If I never sit alone on a Yorkshire moor under a full moon, that first night in Lisbon is probably the closest I’ll ever come to seeing a man get perceptibly hairier in a matter of minutes. For every glass of rancid red wine Bushy
downed,
his stubble seemed to grow an additional centimetre until, finally, he became Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
.
Several times on one particular night I rode up and down in the hotel’s lift with Bushy. Bushy’s favourite thing about the lift was that it had a huge mirror stretching the length of its rear wall. ‘Oh, it’s you again!’ he would growl at his own reflection, mesmerized. This was funny the first time but even in my inebriated adolescent state had started to wear thin by the time the two of us embarked on our eighth journey up to the fifth floor, so I left Bushy and his alter ego to it. He was last sighted at around midnight, by Ben, who remembered seeing him running off into the bushes, making tormented but strangely overjoyed howling noises.
Ordinarily Bushy returned to the room he was sharing with Mousey at around 4 a.m. and promptly puked in the bidet. No one, least of all Bushy, can account for his whereabouts in the preceding four hours, the only clue being the faint smell of pig lingering on his Lyle and Scott sweatshirt.
It wasn’t until the final night in Lisbon that I located the room that Shue, along with two of the other Oporto girls, was sleeping in. While a normal person might have opted for a more direct manoeuvre – say, asking the question, ‘Shue, what number room are you staying in?’ – I decided that the best way to locate her room was to crawl, accompanied by Mousey, along the
hotel’s
air vents until I saw something resembling a female leg through the wire grid. It strikes me now that, having gone to this convoluted effort, it might have been a good idea to stick around and make the most of the view, but in the event it only took the faintest glimpse of a bra hanging on a chair to send the two of us scurrying back to our friends, anxious to reveal our discovery.
The two hours that followed this are a blur of hormones, crap wine and cowardice, but I can say for certain that at around midnight I found myself alone, rounding a corner in the hotel corridor, and discovering a disconsolate Shue, arms folded, leaning on the wall opposite the door to her room. Why I happened to be rounding this particular corner – this corner, which led only to Shue’s room and concluded in an emphatic dead end – is unclear to me now, but suggests a) that I might have been in the area for some time, and b) a general lack of coincidence.
‘Shue, what’s the matter?’ I said to Shue.
‘Oh, Tom, it is terrible. I have lost my key and my friends, they are sleeping. I do not want to wake them up and I do not know what to do.’
This was too good to be true. ‘That
is
terrible,’ I said to commiserate.
‘I will have to sleep out here in the corridor.’
Yes! And I will too! ‘Don’t be silly. We will find a way to get back in.’
‘Oh, but how?’
‘Well, I don’t know. I suppose, er … Well, you could always come back to my room.’ What was I thinking of? My room had two single beds, and Robin was in one of them. We weren’t going to get up to anything in there, and, anyway, Shue didn’t look like a Madonna kind of girl.
‘I don’t think I should.’
So, instead, we stayed where we were. We sat in that corridor together in perfect harmony (sexual frustration) for what felt like hours (ten minutes). Side-by-side, hand-in-hand, then – eventually, inevitably – mouth-in-mouth. We kissed as only teenagers can, or – more accurately – as only two people can who believe there is a hidden sexual organ located to the rear of the tonsils.
What can I say? It was intense, it was sloppy, it was … quick.
Then, very quietly, Shue knocked on the door of her room, and I skipped back to my room in a daze, already garnishing the encounter in preparation for my friends.
I didn’t kiss Shue again. Not properly. She said she found it hard to express her true feelings in English but that she ‘needed time’. Unfortunately, time was what I had least of: I had to catch a plane back to Heathrow in three days. Comprehending that the
situation
was a lost cause, I made the noble decision to spend each of these three days mooning around and kicking my heels in the rough vicinity of her apartment, while my friends raced buggies and hid the golf shoes of ingenuous Portuguese stockbrokers.
To his credit, Alfonso did his best to lift me out of my fug, taking me out on the town and introducing me to a succession of local teenage lovelies, all of whom had one fundamental shortcoming: they weren’t Shue. I do question his motives, however, on introducing me to Michaela, a six-foot-one, fourteen-stone neighbour of his who’d clearly won at least three heavyweight titles, then unsubtly nipping around the corner to ‘buy some chocolate’ – for forty-five minutes. Michaela couldn’t have looked more pleased with her day’s catch if she’d been sitting in front of a human-size spider’s web, rubbing her hands together.