The Amateurs

by John Niven

  £1.22.

  The net worth of Lee Irvine, thirty-five.

  Two pints in the Bam, even at the lunchtime happy-hour rate, would still be three quid. With a sick lurch he realised there was nothing else for it.

  He sprinted out the living room, up the stairs and into the tiny bedroom shared by his sons Delta and Styx, the journey from one corner of their council house to the other taking six seconds. On entering this room most people would have assumed it had been the site of a recent dirty protest, a violent burglary at the very least, but Lee tuned out the mess as he waded through a pile of video games and reached up onto the shelf beside the bunk beds.

  Styx’s piggy bank was a plastic model of Darth Vader that spoke to you and waved its glowing light sabre when you put money in it. ‘Impressive…most impressive,’ Vader would say as the coins went in. The rubber stopper in the bottom came off with a sucking sound and Lee carefully spilled the contents onto the Rangers bedspread and began sifting through the tangy-smelling pile of nickel and copper, hoping, praying, to feel the chunky heft of a thick pound coin under his fingers.

  No such luck, but he did quickly find four fifty-pence pieces, the silver heptagons emerging dazzling from the brown slush. Half a dozen twenty-pence pieces and a few tens followed. Fine. Say four quid he owed Styx. (Or was it a bit more? There had been that time the week before when he’d needed fags…) Anyway, he’d slip it back before the boy knew it was gone. Even stick a bit more in. As he slammed the piggy bank back onto the shelf he triggered the mechanism buried in the base of the plastic casing.

  ‘Impressive…most impressive,’ Vader rumbled at the man stealing his child’s savings.

  ‘Shut yer mooth, ya fucking prick,’ Lee growled back.

  He hurried out of the bedroom and stopped to check his reflection in the mirror on the landing. He was wearing jeans, trainers and a frayed Armani sweatshirt. His hair was short, with the fringe plastered across his forehead in a succession of kiss curls. There was a thin gold chain around his neck, a chunky fake Tag Heuer sports watch on his right wrist and two gleaming sovereign rings on the pinkie and third finger of his right hand. Lee was tall, close to six foot, and thin, wiry, having never put the weight he’d lost in prison back on. He checked his fingernails (he’d just about got all the dirt out of them after another useless morning digging in the woods), made a minute adjustment to his fringe, taking care not to meet his own eyes, the eyes of a man who’d just stolen money from a six-year-old boy, and was coming down the stairs when he heard the front door opening and then Lisa and Amazon were in the hall.

  ‘Daddy! Ah found a dolly at the swings!’ His daughter, his youngest, was brandishing a filthy, naked plastic doll.

  ‘Fuck sake!’ Lee said, ignoring Amazon and turning to his wife. ‘Whit ye letting the fucking wean pick up shite in the fucking street fur?!’

  ‘Ah fucking tried tae take it aff her, right?’ Lisa said, lifting her dirty-blonde hair from her face. She was still a good-looking woman–despite having had three kids by the age of thirty. Three kids by Lee Irvine. ‘She was greeting her fucking face aff. Ah’m gonnae fucking gie it a wash in a minute!’

  ‘Don’t play wi that, hen,’ Lee said, snatching it from Amazon. His children were all named after rivers. Lisa’s idea. Delta, their eldest boy, and Amazon were named after rivers Lee had heard of. (The Delta: in America. Something tae dae wi Mississippi and aw that. The Amazon: wi aw they mad darkies that nae cunt hud ever seen.) He’d never heard of the Styx but Lisa had assured him that she’d read somewhere that there was definitely a river called that. Maybe in Australia or somewhere.

  Amazon burst into tears.

  ‘Ah fucking told ye!’ Lisa said.

  ‘Well, fucking wash it then!’ Lee said, tossing her the doll and moving around them to open the front door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Lisa asked.

  ‘Ah telt ye. Ah’ve goat a meeting.’

  ‘Meeting?’ Lisa said witheringly. ‘Meeting ma fucking erse.’

  ‘Fur fuck sake, Lisa, gie’s peace. Ah’m late.’

  ‘Who’re ye meeting?’

  ‘Nane o’ your fucking business, right?’

  ‘Aw, fuck off then.’

  ‘You fuck off!’

  Lee slammed the door and hurried down the path. Fucking Lisa–whit happened tae that lassie? Non-stop moaning. She’s a short memory too, Lee thought, fishing in his pockets for cigarettes. Wisnae that long ago–just before Christmas, when ah did that wee job over in Ardrossan–ah was walking in the door wi a couple o’ grand oan ma hip. Hang on though. That was the Christmas before last. Truth be told things had been tight for a while. Lisa kept asking him when he was going to get a job. Shite like that. Turning into his fucking mother so she was.

  Realising he had no cigarettes he checked the comedy Tag–1.15. Wouldn’t be that late to meet Sammy if he hurried. He could buy one round, Sammy the other, and then Lee would make his excuses. (Or maybe better to try and get Sammy to buy the first round, then he could buy the second and he might get a third pint out of Sammy.) Part of Lee resented going along to spend the last four pounds he (or rather, his son) had in the world until the broo cheque arrived next week, just to listen to someone moan, but he needed to reassure Sammy that–despite his frustrating morning in the woods–everything would be OK.

  Anyway, Lee reasoned, you had to speculate to accumulate.

  6

  DRIVING RANGES; FLOODLIT CITADELS OF CONCENTRATED torment where the damned gather to toil in collective silence, the only sounds the swish and clang of metal drivers meeting chunks of balata, the swish and crump of irons chunking into AstroTurf mats, the occasional agonised moan or growled curse, the even rarer whistle of appreciation as the Golf Gods throw the suckers a sweet connection, just enough hope to keep them coming back.

  The range Gary used was up at Stone Cairn, just off the bypass, and had been built four years ago to cater to the unstoppable flood of amateur golfers desperate for new means to inflict pain upon themselves. Eighteen floodlit bays looked out onto a green strip of land 150 yards wide and just under 300 yards long, the far end marked by a metal sign, red paint on white saying ‘250 YARDS’. There were more distance signs at 200, 150 and 100 yards, then, about fifty yards out, the little nets, about the size of a car bonnet, for hitting practice chips into. The rusting hulk of an old Land Rover sat smack in the middle of the field: a comedy target that would occasionally reverberate as a ball clattered off its roof or doors. Thousands of golf balls lay dotted all across the range, almost every one representing the fallen hopes of a madman.

  Gary wanted to work on his long irons, the three and four, for most amateur players the hardest clubs in the bag to hit well. He fed five pound coins into the squat metal monster that sprayed out the balls. There was an ominous rumbling from the depths of its steel guts and then thunder as it unleashed a torrent of balls into Gary’s green plastic bucket. He walked to the far end of the near-empty range, choosing the very last bay, the one furthest away from his fellow players. He lifted the chequered metal lid on the floor of the bay and poured the balls in. There was the faint grinding of underground machinery and–magically, comically–a white ball rose up out of the ground, trembling on its rubber tee peg. Gary slipped his golf glove on, took off his sweater and pulled the four-iron from his bag. He threaded the club through the crook of his left elbow, across the small of his back, and then through the crook of his right elbow. He rotated left and right, loosening up the muscles, and then repeated the exercise with the club across his shoulder blades and his arms hanging over the ends–a parody of crucifixion. In his head he ran his new swing thought over and over, ‘Relax and release, relax and release, relax and release…’

  The swing thought–a simple key phrase that golfers mantra to themselves as they make the swing–is designed to calm the mind and to simplify the many variables of the swing down into a single essential. Gary had read widely of the swing thoughts of the professionals: ‘No stop at
the top’ reminded you that, although there is a slight lag, or pause, at the top of the backswing, there should be no definite stop. But Gary didn’t like the negative connotations of the word ‘no’. He’d read an interview with the huge-hitting American tour pro Cyrus Cheeks where Cheeks said his swing thought was: ‘Let the clubhead be the first thing to move away from the ball.’ What a mouthful! By the time Gary got all that out his ball was often already well on its way. ‘Back and through’ was simpler, but a wee bit dull. When he was playing particularly badly the swing thought would sometimes morph into ‘You. Fucking. Cunt.’ Or–on truly terrible occasions–‘I. Am. A. Cunt.’ But, again, this really was very negative and, having recently frowned his way through top golf psychologist Dr Emil Koresh’s new book Banish Negativity, Gary was trying to, well, banish negativity. Koresh recommended ‘relax’ on the backswing and ‘release’ on the downswing.

  A warm, clear afternoon, a fresh ball on the tee, the afternoon off work, shirtsleeves. Could there be a finer feeling in the world? Gary was glad to be alive, almost smiling as he stepped up to the ball, waggled the clubhead and settled his breathing.

  Relax and release.

  He brutally shanked fifty-six balls in a row.

  They bulleted diagonally rightwards across the range–the last one ricocheting off the wooden frame of his bay and nearly killing the astonished schoolboy a few bays along. Gary bit his left hand until his teeth went through the glove and drew blood and then ran to the car fighting tears, leaving the remaining balls unspent in the underfloor chamber. He’d gone from glad-to-be-alive to a gnashing, weeping madman in a little over twenty minutes.

  Only golf can do this.

  As Gary ran for his car (ignoring the stares and chuckles of his fellow players), high above him, above the clouds, above the vaporised jet trails, above the sky itself, the Golf Gods roared with helpless laughter as they tossed another shrieking corpse onto the blazing pyre. The pyre was fashioned from the wretched souls of the fools they had damned to live as golf spastics. It was a thousand miles high and hotter than the sun.

  The shank–the amateur’s biggest nightmare, golf cancer–is caused by the ball being struck not with the clubface, but with the hosel of the club: the point where the blade joins the shaft. This type of misstrike causes the ball to fly off to the right (for a right-handed golfer) at the most violent angle imaginable. The shanks come in bouts, striking the weak, the tired, the feeble-minded, the careless. Like the hiccups, once in the grip of a bout it is impossible for the afflicted to do anything else: no matter what modifications are made to the swing the end result remains the same–the sickening misconnection followed by the ball rocketing off diagonally to the right.

  It is said that the insane asylums of the world are filled with men–good men, men who had careers, wives and families–who were taken down with the shanks. They cry all day and rend the night air with their dreadful screaming. They struggle against their bonds, wriggling in hot straitjackets and clawing at the cool walls of their padded chambers with their toenails. An enormous percentage take their own lives, gratefully placing their spittle-drenched lips around the smoking exhaust pipe or oiled gun barrel that will deliver them to the green fairways of heaven, where never a shank was struck.

  You will sometimes hear people saying that the difference between hitting a shank and hitting a perfect shot is a matter of millimetres. This is like telling a man with a three-inch penis that the difference between him and King Dong is less than a foot. Of course, Gary Irvine, sitting weeping in his car now, knew all this. How well he remembered his father’s bout of the shanks back in ’82.

  One summer evening his father stormed into the house from the course, dragging his golf bag behind him like a policeman might drag a howling anarchist towards the Black Maria. He marched straight through the hall and out to the back garden. He fetched a hacksaw from the garage and he sawed the head off of every club in the bag while Gary, Lee and Cathy looked on in mute horror. There were thirteen clubs. It took quite a while. When he was finished he began digging a hole and the whole family–and a couple of the neighbours–watched, darkness falling now, as their dad hurled the severed clubheads in and leapt up and down on the makeshift grave. He came into the kitchen, washed his hands with the viscous green-black Swarfega he kept by the kitchen door, and went to bed.

  Two weeks later he bought himself new clubs and the incident was never spoken of.

  The golf swing, the single most complex action in sport, was once described by Valentine Stent–1920s tour pro and one of the sport’s most respected early theorists–as ‘a miracle, a physical wonder’. Almost every muscle and fibre in the human body is used at the same time–some twisting and pulling in opposite directions–to deliver a metal blade, with a sweet spot smaller than a penny, to a ball a little over four centimeters wide, administering enough force to launch the ball at speeds approaching two hundred miles an hour at a target which often lies perhaps a quarter of a mile away. There are as many different golf swings as there are golfers, but the King, the key thing, the absolute priority, is repeatability: if you can make the same swing every time, if you can keep delivering the clubface to the ball the same way no matter the external pressures, you will win golf tournaments.

  Gary’s swing was indeed a ‘miracle’–a miracle of bad engineering, wasted energy and poor physics. It was composed of four separate parts, beginning with the takeaway, where Gary started to move the clubhead away from the ball. This part was slow and careful, very slow and careful, as though Gary was trying not to disturb a caterpillar which had crawled onto his clubface and fallen asleep. The next section of the backswing saw a dramatic increase in speed, as if trying to suddenly compensate for the laziness of the takeaway. Then, stage three, he stopped at the top of the backswing. Not a pause, not the graceful, power-gathering lag you saw some of the top players incorporate. No. Gary just kind of stopped swinging for a few seconds, as though he’d changed his mind, as if he’d come to his senses and realised that swinging this golf club was a bad idea, possibly the worst idea he’d ever had in his life. Stage four–the downswing–really had to be seen to be believed. It was as though Gary had suddenly realised that the ball was not an innocent sphere, but that it was, in fact, a hand grenade minus the pin. He had to get it out of here. NOW! Consequently, stage four was just an insane blur, a demented lunge, as Gary swung so hard he generated almost as much clubhead speed as Calvin Linklater himself.

  However, there the similarities with Linklater ended. Linklater’s swing brought the clubface back to the ball exactly where it had left it, right on the sweet spot, pinching off a neat postage stamp of turf and sending the ball rocketing off on a true line. Gary wasn’t so sure where the clubhead would land because he would often have his eyes closed by this point.

  Golf, it has often been pointed out, is like sex. You don’t have to be good at it to enjoy it. But when you were as bad at it as Gary was…then why? Why keep coming back? The truth was that Gary–like millions of other unfortunates around the globe–had hit just enough good shots to facilitate a lifelong, soul-destroying addiction. Like the monkey-typewriter-works-of-Shakespeare principle, if an amateur plays enough golf he will, at some point, hit one like Calvin Linklater or Gram Novotell. Gary told himself what all the poor, deranged fools told themselves: ‘If I can do it once, surely, with enough practice, I can do it all the time?’ Alas, while it is one probability that, if you leave your regiment of monkeys alone for a few millennia with a bank of word processors and unlimited recourse to coffee and doughnuts, then eventually one of them might come excitedly screeching and hopping up to you, grinning its chimp-grin and holding a few badly chimp-typed sentences from King Lear, it is another probability altogether that they will ever produce the complete works.

  He needed a drink, some comfort. Respite from the heartbreak. He dried his eyes, started the car, and went to see Stevie.

  7

  IN ROOM 411 OF THE HOSPITALITY INN NEAR THE harbour,
more heartbreak was unfolding.

  The green, sparkly Tinkerbell tights were balled on the floor while, on the bed, Pauline enveloped a scrotum in her mouth and circled her tongue around the bursting balls within it. She came up, tracing the tip of her tongue up the length of the cock, and took it in her mouth, causing him to cry out, ‘Oh doll, oh fuck, that’s fucking magic so it is!’

  Fearing it might all be over too soon, he looked around the room, trying to take his mind off things. He took in the nondescript hotel furniture and fabrics–soft oranges and muted reds–and briefly wondered who supplied their carpeting. Big contract that. Then he looked back down at Pauline–her eyes closed as he slid in and out of her mouth, the tips of her heavy breasts visible below her face.

  Findlay Masterson thought to himself: Result.

  About three months ago was it? Sometime in mid-January, just after Rangers lost at home to…anyway, whenever, they’d had a birthday party at the house for wee Jake, his wife’s sister’s boy. (Leanne was always throwing parties for her friends and family: none of them had a house for entertaining like the Mastersons had.) Leanne had booked some company to do the entertainment for the weans and Masterson had been surprised when he opened the door to find Pauline on the doorstep, beaming and dressed as Minnie Mouse. He’d been expecting some fat clown, some sad old alky-paedo. Even so, he hadn’t taken much notice of her until later that afternoon. Several bottles of wine had been drunk, the spirits had been cracked open, and the party had definitively swung towards the adults. Masterson had been in the kitchen mixing drinks when she’d come in and said, ‘I think your TV adverts are really funny.’