Villager, page 3
That was what made Mark different to everyone else at the golf course: he just never appeared all that bothered. When I consider what would have been happening to him hormonally at this point in his life, this now strikes me as more remarkable still. Golf, so our schoolfriends told us, was a limp old man’s game, a bollockless sport devoid of fireworks or passion, but every week we saw it transform men three times our age hailing from supposedly respectable echelons of society into swearing, club-hurling cavemen, grey hooligans spinning in enraged circles halfway up a hill. You’d no more try to strike up a conversation with these directors of sales and funerals, these commodity traders, these spiritually beige number-crunchers while they were on a bad run of putting than you’d try to stroke a hyena who hadn’t eaten for a fortnight. One week, we bit into our sleeves to stifle our laughter as a retired headmaster greeted a triple bogey seven by taking off one of his shoes, marching several yards into the undergrowth and hurling the shoe into the roaring current of the river. The next, we bit harder still on the fabric as we witnessed an esteemed Plymouth solicitor lose the last of the twelve balls he’d started the day with, turn to a crowd of nearby sheep, and shout, ‘MOTHERFUCK EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU.’ We learned to play alongside those who made their living in outdoor professions if we could: the thatchers, the lumberyard proprietors, the deputy garden centre managers. They were a little less flappable. Still, like the others, many of them questioned why we spent so much time at the club, which was not in fact appreciably more time than the time any of them spent at the club. ‘Don’t you boys have homes to go to?’ the grey hooligans in their pleated slacks would ask, in what, for me, was an early lesson in the fact that, when somebody attacks you out of the blue for something you’re doing that isn’t hurting anyone else, they’re more than likely talking about a wrongness in their own lives. ‘Yes, sir, you are correct: it is strange, us spending our free time playing a sport, in our mid-teens. What must our wives think? Don’t we have livings to earn, mortgages to pay, kids to feed?’ It was as if we were briefly on some upside-down planet, where adults, not children, were expected to misbehave, and indulged for it. Being together on this planet united Mark and me, fortified the walls of our City of Two. And that’s really what we were. Other kids were often around, kids from more affluent families than ours, but they never stayed long, never challenged for competitions. In May, there was a proposal – thankfully quashed, in a rare moment of sanity – at a committee meeting to reduce the number of days junior members were permitted to play at the club. The proposal was talked about as if there were juniors everywhere, vast armies of them, running up the fairways every evening, farting on blackbirds and kicking over bins. But it was mostly just me and Mark. Then, after I broke my arm the following month, it was Mark, all alone, fending for himself amongst the grey yobs.
Up to this point, I’d not knowingly heard any genuinely offensive remarks directed towards Mark at the club. But, now he was winning more tournaments and shooting up in height, he was becoming more widely noticed, and I know his appearance would have been perceived as an extra threat by many of these men who nudged one another and muttered under their breath when they saw him take the prizes at their tournaments, this lanky mixed-race child from who knew where, with his untucked school shirt and hand-me-down equipment and that hair springing higher and higher above his head, towering above their combovers. Mark was good at saving the little money he earned from his paper round, and could no doubt have bought the standard kind of polo shirt most golfers wore, or even got his granddad or his mum to buy him one for his birthday or Christmas, but it would simply have never occurred to him as being important. Mark virtually never spoke to me about his parents. It had been close to a decade since he’d last lived with them. I knew from him only that his dad now resided in France. My parents, meanwhile, had told me that Mark’s mum was currently ‘living in Weston-super-Mare and having some difficulties’.
How did I break my arm? I think the official cause could be cited as ‘having shit for brains’. My cousins were down from Walsall for the weekend, we’d taken a dozen cans of cheap lager up to the rocks on top of Underhill tor, and I was showing off. I took a run up and attempted to vault the gap between the two tallest rocks, the top ones on the bit that looks like stairs, and didn’t quite make it. Truth is, I was lucky not to hurt myself a lot more severely, as it’s pretty high there, and in the crevices between the clitter the granite sticks out like broken crowns in an old mouth. Even with my arm in its cast, I continued to follow Mark up to the practice ground once every few evenings. That’s how pleasurable it was to watch him hit balls. That’s what we loved: hitting balls. Not the shoes or the handicap system or the cut glass or the silverware or the single leather gloves or the wood panelling or the tee pegs or the gold shafts or the handshakes or the reserved parking spaces or the Eric Finch Foursome Matchplay Bowl or the Garden Room or the Men’s Bar or the sixty-degree Tom Watson beryllium copper sand irons or the patriarchal badinage but the pure nirvana of metal cleanly strikingly rubber at high speed with minimum effort. I’d played tennis, and football, and squash, and badminton, and table tennis, but nothing quite compared, contact-wise. When you got it right, you felt like hitting golf balls – and here I mean hitting golf balls as a separate entity to the game of golf – was another preordained human need, like eating or breathing, something that was always meant to be here and always would be here. That was why Mark and I were here, at least four days out of seven, every week. That sensation, like sap rising up our arms, blossoming in our necks and shoulders, flowering in our brains like a million of the most vivid poppies all at once. I chased it in the way that later, in the mess of adult life, I’d chase the memory of my most transcendental orgasms. The elusive nature of the pure strike made it all the more appealing. It didn’t actually happen that often, for me. But with Mark, it occurred in long, sustained bursts. He hit a sweet zone of rhythmical calm. He was a great player on the course, but on the practice ground, without the distractions of competition, he was an ethereal one, an alchemist, a Zen wizard. I could have watched him forever.
One night in late June, after he’d hit balls until we no longer could see where they landed, we took our usual route home over the jutting, unimpressed elbow of the tor. The last purple streaks of the sun toasted the hilltops and owls made lewd suggestions to one another down in the woods by the river. Mark, however, had not been the last man swinging. That honour went to the Irish Doctors, whose trolleys could be seen very slowly approaching the seventeenth tee in the mauve half-light. At the club, nicknames stuck like dog hair to merino wool. A wiry, anxious weekend player called Phil who’d once missed a crucial putt when he was distracted by the call of a skein of Canada geese overhead was thereafter known to all as ‘Quack’. Carl Marchwell, who was infamous for telling all of his playing companions in great detail about his week and lacked the skill of self-editing, hadn’t been called ‘Carl’ by anybody at the club for years; he was always ‘Jackanory’. Ian Welcombe, who liked to bet big money on foursome matches but had never, to anybody’s knowledge, actually won, was ‘The Bank’. Jill, Ian’s wife – one of the few female members of the club who actually seemed to enjoy the game – was not ‘Jill’ but ‘Mrs Bank’. Recently I’d overheard people talking about somebody called ‘Jam Jar’ but I was yet to find out who that was. The Irish Doctors, however, were just the Irish Doctors. No nickname, collective or otherwise, could have been more definitive or catchy than their quintessential Irish Doctorness. There were six of them in all, although legend was that there had at one point been eight. Generally, playing in groups of more than four was severely frowned upon, but special, unspoken dispensation was given to the Irish Doctors, who always operated as a gang. This – and the fact that each of them was in his ninth decade – meant their pace of play was very slow and they spent a large amount of their round standing aside and letting other groups through. Mark and I liked the Irish Doctors, who were the jovial antithesis of the grey hooligans a generation or two beneath them, and we’d have both been happy to play alongside them, were it not for the fact that, not being Irish doctors ourselves, that would have been an affront to the natural rhythm of the earth, and would have made their progress even more excruciating. As was usually the case, today they would not hole their final putts before the light had totally vanished.
We passed through clouds of midges as we came down the back side of the tor and along the sunken track leading down to the river, watery rubble under our feet, the metal in Mark’s bag pounding out a clanking beat several yards ahead of me. We always carried our bags on our shoulders, never resorted to a trolley and, as with many child golfers, the spinal damage it caused would be evident in my posture later in life. I heard a distant cry of ‘Cracking shot, Seamus!’ and a faint, delayed thud of a ball being propelled a modest distance forward by frail hands, then I rounded a sharp bend and all was silent, beside the chorus of the water. I found Mark sitting on the old packhorse bridge, rolling a cigarette, and joined him.
‘Look at that,’ said Mark, pointing to the liquid beneath our dangling feet, rushing clear over the black rocks and coppery pebbles. ‘It’s magic, that is. That’s what it is. Think of all of what’s up on the moor every day: all the dead sheep bones, all the pony shit, and peat, all our pollution, being sucked up into the clouds then rained down back into the streams. But it still comes down here every day, looking like that. You know what I do, the first thing I do, every time I’ve been away from Devon? I rush straight to the tap and fill a glass. It always tastes so good.’
‘My dad said the water in London is full of women’s pills and cocaine,’ I said. ‘So every time you have a drink out of the tap there, you’re doing drugs and stopping yourself getting knocked up.’
‘You know it’s all bullshit, this? All wrong. Well, not this. Definitely not this. But that.’ He gestured back up the sunken track, in the vague direction of the course.
‘All what?’
‘Just because there are cows and sheep and ponies there, just because they didn’t get rid of some of the rocks. It doesn’t mean it’s real. If grass had a choice, it wouldn’t do what it’s doing up there. It was never meant to be like that.’
‘But if it was never meant to be like that, maybe this footbridge wasn’t meant to be like this, either?’
I had made a den close to here one time when I was little, a few hundred yards closer to the village, using an old mattress and a few other mouldy abandoned household bits and bobs I’d found. When I told my mum, she told me to avoid abandoned freezers because children climb into them then can’t get the door open again and die.
‘I dunno. There’s natural and there’s natural. You know the shit they pour onto that golf course. You know how many insects it kills? I’m just saying. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently.’
‘I’ve got to have a piss.’
I was always careful where I had a wee when I was outdoors. It was one of those ways in which golf made me an adolescent with a little more decorum than most. An older playing partner had told me it was very important to choose a surreptitious spot, in case any lady members were nearby, and my habit of doing that carried over into any pissing that I did in the fresh air, even beyond golfing parameters. I mention this because, had I not been so careful about picking my spot, I might not have pissed on the stranger’s hand at all. I’d been pissing for several seconds before I heard him – or, as it seemed, the brambles and bracken in front of me – groan and as I did I leapt sideways, spraying urine on my left trouser leg and shoe in the process. ‘Mark! Fucking hell!’ I shouted, which in retrospect shows me just how much I looked up to my friend, viewed him as, in some way, my protector.
He rushed over and, careful not to touch the foliage that was still wet with my spray, parted the leaves and fronds to reveal a long male body, supine in the mulch below them. The body’s eyes were closed and, when Mark asked the face on the end of the body if it was OK, it grunted, as if in dreamy reassurance. In a way the face seemed a bit like the faces of lads just a few years older than us but the paperiness of its complexion and the colour of the stubble on it made me perplexed about how old its owner was. A camera, quite an old one, hung around the man’s neck by a strap. He did not look what I would have called healthy and seemed unable to open his eyes yet there was a sense that the reason he was not able to open them was that he was in a very delicious sort of sleep that he was reluctant to emerge from. Mark asked him some questions, including ‘What is your name?’, ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘How did you end up here?’, and when the stranger only answered with more oddly tranquil grunts and did not move, it was agreed that I would head into Underhill to get help. My arm, being still only half-healed, impeded my progress and it took me close to half an hour to reach the village.
My intention was to go home and call for an ambulance but part of me wondered if that would be time-wasting, as the man didn’t actually seem hurt in any way, and on my way past the Co-op I bumped into Steve Clayton, who’d narrowly beat me in the club matchplay last year and used to be in the army. Steve obviously noticed that I looked flustered and asked me what was wrong and I told him about the man and he said he’d come back down the path with me. Steve was strong and I decided that with the help of Mark and both of Mark’s working arms he could probably carry the man back to the village if it came to that. What had been confusing to me when I’d first met Steve was that, despite him being very muscly, Steve couldn’t hit his golf ball very far at all, and the strongest part of his game was his putting. But since then I’d found out that obvious physical strength counted for nothing in golf. It was all about rhythm and timing and you often got blokes who looked like Tarzan or He-Man who barely hit the ball anywhere and people like Mark who only weighed nine and a half stone but could lamp it into the next county. Steve’s massive arms were a moot point anyway, though, because when we arrived back at the spot where I’d done my wee neither Mark nor the stranger were anywhere to be seen. Now I was embarrassed and felt like Steve probably thought I was lying again, because last winter he’d asked me what kind of putter I’d used and it was a Wilson but I’d said it was a Spalding but only because I’d forgotten and when we played together he saw the putter and said, ‘I thought you had a Spalding?’ He was OK about being dragged out there, though; he just looked at me a bit queryingly, and said he had to get back to the shop and get some steaks for his missus to cook that night, and that it was dark and I should get home soon but that I should call him if anything else happened or I couldn’t find Mark and he would call his mate John who worked for the police. I didn’t walk back down the path with him because I felt like it might be weird and we might run out of things to talk about. Instead I went and stood by the packhorse bridge for a while, listening to the water and thinking about what Mark had said about it. I could hear a cuckoo up in the woods round the back of the tor, the first one of the year. My mum had said there had been loads when she was a kid. I walked back a different way, past a ruined barn above where my gran said they used to hold the old fayres, which always gave me the creeps, like something bad had happened there.
Something about the way Mark was, how thoroughly OK he always seemed to be, made me sure he’d be OK now, and I didn’t feel like there was anything very scary or threatening about the man on the ground, but I was still a trolley of nerves for the couple of hours after I arrived home, doing my best to hide that from my mum and dad while also trying Mark’s home number every ten minutes and getting no answer (Old Boy was clearly also out). Finally, just as I could hear the theme tune from the News at Ten coming from the telly downstairs, he picked up.
‘What happened? Where did you go?’ I asked, without even saying hello.
‘Nothing. Well, some stuff. But nothing bad. He was OK. He got up after we left. We went back to his house. Well, it’s not a house. It’s a tent. In the woods. He’s from California. We smoked some stuff he had. He plays guitar. He’s cool. He has a bad head, he says, and it makes him sleep in weird places. But he’s OK. It’s OK. He coughed a lot, though. I was about to call you.’
‘Steve Clayton might have told the police.’
‘Steve Clayton? Why Steve Clayton? Doesn’t matter. Don’t tell me. It’s fine. If they come round I’ll just tell them it’s OK, and he went on his way. I’m not telling them where his tent is, though, as I don’t think it’s supposed to be there. He’s such a fucking sound bloke. He wants all the rivers to be clear and nobody to be able to own land.’
That was the summer Mark left school, which was one of the reasons that our friendship drifted a little after that. He chose to not come back for the sixth form and instead attend a further education college a few miles closer to the coast, which meant that much talked-up ambition of his to drive Old Boy’s car all of seventy yards to attend classes was never realised. By September my arm had recovered sufficiently to begin golfing again and I called Mark a couple of times to see if he fancied a round but he was always busy. I got the impression he was making new friends at the college, people far more exciting than me, probably, who knew more about interesting leftfield music and films. I played some of my best golf that autumn and early winter but it all felt a little hollow with nobody to enjoy it with. ‘You could be a pro, lad, if you put the work in,’ some of the kinder adult members would tell me at the end of our rounds. But I was wise enough to know that there is a very big difference between being one of the best players at a provincial club in Devon and actually being able to make a career from the game. Also, I was beginning to get distracted by a new nagging feeling in my loins. That November on the Geography field trip to Bodmin, Martha Leigh Price, sitting in the coach seat behind me on the way back, leaned over and draped her arms over me and nothing was ever the same again. The following April I forgot to watch the US Masters tournament for the first time in three years. I started listening to The Smiths and, having seen Morrissey do it on an old TV clip, took to walking around with gladioli in the back pocket of my jeans, which failed to cause any of the stir I’d hoped it would with anyone, save for my mum, who – always obsessed with all matters olfactory – told me that Morrissey ‘looked like a smelly person’ and that at my age with my whole life in front of me I should be listening to music that felt less sorry for itself.
