Nice Jumper (21 page)

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.

‘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’ to 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.