by John Niven
‘Whit the fuck am ah meant tae dae with a fucking key o’ billy?’
‘Fuck knows. Ah’ll speak tae ye later.’
‘Hey, don’t you hang up oan me, ya pr—’
Click.
‘DON’T FUCKING HANG UP OAN ME YA FUCKING PRIIIIIIIICK!’ Lee screamed into the empty phone, in the empty house. Then he hurled the mobile into the wall and watched it smash into several pieces.
Gary whistled appreciatively as Bert’s ball soared high and dropped softly onto the back of the green–about ten yards past the pin.
‘Naw,’ Bert said, ‘caught it a bit thin.’
They were stood in the light rough along the left-hand side of the second fairway, about 150 yards away from the green; a good green to practise approach shots to–big and welcoming and slightly downhill from them. There was a carrier bag full of old golf balls at their feet: fifty for a tenner, purchased by Gary down at the entrance to the gyppo camp that very morning. It was a nice additional income stream for the gyppos: selling mishit golf balls back to the people who mishit them.
‘Not a pure golf shot,’ Bert was saying, pulling a fresh ball towards him with the toe of the club. ‘Ye know whit it feels like when ye catch it right, don’t ye?’
Even a golfer as terrible as Gary knew this: the feeling of energy perfectly released into the centre of the universe.
Bert teed the ball up on a tuft of blonde grass. ‘Now what you’re not doing is getting a full shoulder turn. You’re freezing up because you’re already scared something bad is going to happen. You can’t play golf like that, son. Ye need tae…’
Bert swung again, simple and elegant, effortlessly pinching the ball cleanly off the ground and sending it arcing towards the green, fading slightly from left to right as it came down. ‘Ye see what ah mean?’ Bert said, still watching his shot as he stepped back and motioned for Gary to try. Gary reached into his golf bag.
‘Whit ye got there?’
‘Seven.’
‘Naw, son, try the nine.’
‘Eh? I can’t hit the nine-iron 150 yards.’
‘Whit?’ Bert said. ‘Away and don’t talk rubbish. Look at ye! Look at the muscles oan yer forearms. Yer like bloody Popeye! Ah’m an auld man and ah can hit a soft seven-iron through the green fae here. You’re telling me you cannae get there wi the nine? C’mon now.’
With a shrug Gary let the seven-iron fall back and pulled out the nine.
Nearly three hundred yards away, to their right and uphill from them, Billy Douglas and his playing partners walked onto the first tee.
Gary addressed the ball. He flexed his knees. Sit down into it. He swung back carefully, his left shoulder dipping down and pointing at the ball, but, as he began to bring the club down, the thought proved impossible to resist–never get there with a nine. He accelerated crazily and, in trying to hit the ball far too hard, succeeded only in topping it, sending it skittering off along the ground and coming to rest a miserable fifty-odd yards away.
‘Christ, sorry, Bert–
‘Shhh, come on now.’ Bert was already placing another ball at his feet. ‘Don’t swing so hard. Find the rhythm. You’ve plenty club there.’
Billy Douglas reached into the pocket of his golf bag. He took out the silver-and-orange cardboard sleeve containing three new Spaxons. He opened the tube and the number 3 saw the light of day for the first time.
Gary swung again. This time he buried the clubhead into the turf two inches behind the ball, the force of the thwarted energy vibrating up his arms horribly, the ball skittering forward a few inches.
‘FUCK IT!’ Gary screamed, his voice carrying far over the crabgrass and trees.
Billy Douglas and his playing partners looked up into the distance. ‘Who’s that?’ one of them asked, looking across to their right, towards the tiny figures over on the far side of the next fairway across. ‘Somebody practising,’ Billy said, teeing up the Spaxon.
Bert laid a hand on Gary’s shoulder. ‘Calm down, son. It’s no the Open. We’re just out here hitting a few balls. Don’t take it so seriously.’ Bert knew this was ridiculous advice. Golf was indeed like a love affair: if you took it seriously, it would break your heart. If you didn’t take it seriously–what was the point? ‘Just try and empty your mind. Ye want a bit of a draw here.’ A draw: moving the ball right to left in the air. Gary understood how this was done. He had read countless articles on the subject. He just couldn’t make his body do what his head understood. He set up his stance again anyway, aiming slightly right of the green. He regripped the club. He was breathing hard.
Bert’s hand was on his shoulder now and the old man’s face was close to his. ‘Come on now, son.’
Gary looked up into Bert’s eyes. The irises were pale blue, the whites rheumy and flecked with crimson. ‘Breathe easy,’ Bert said. There was something hypnotic in his voice now and the green world around them seemed to be shimmering and softening. ‘Loosen up your grip. Like you’re holding a bird.’ Gary hadn’t realised he’d been gripping the club so hard, like a madman. He let go. Bert felt the tension drain from his arms. ‘Good boy,’ he said.
Up on the first tee Billy Douglas completed his practice swings and addressed the ball properly. New ball. First tee. Billy told himself–Ah’m gonnae smash this intae next week.
‘Just relax.’ Bert was almost whispering now. Gary felt a strange serenity descend as he looked towards the green–the pin was exactly 148 yards from where he stood. ‘See the shot.’
Professional golfers have the ability to see exactly the shot they are intending to hit before they hit it. Gary often tried to do this, but he knew his efforts were poor–crude line drawings, a child’s sketch, rather than the detailed blueprints the pros see in their heads. But now, with Bert whispering to him and the whiff of whisky washing gently across him, reminding him of his father, he looked up towards the green and he could see the ball in flight–a high, penetrating arc, drawing slightly into the gentle breeze. Bert sensed that Gary wasn’t there any more. He’d gone somewhere in his head. He stepped back and Gary’s world was peace and silence as he drew the club back.
On the first tee Billy Douglas brought the driver down with all the fury of golf. The Spaxon rocketed off the tee and for a split second it looked as though the shot might be good. Then the ball started to veer offline, slicing violently to the right, the crazed trajectory a combination of the slice Billy had hit and the tiny flaw in the ball’s unevenly weighted core. One in a thousand. One in a million. ‘Christ,’ one of his partners said.
Gary uncoiled, bringing the club down, elegant and muscular, looking like a different golfer. He didn’t even feel the contact. It was like the ball wasn’t there.
A perfect connection.
He looked up to see the ball silhouetted against the sky, seeming to pause at the top of its trajectory and turning now, drawing right to left, just as he’d visualised, and beginning to drop towards the green.
‘Gowf shot.’ Bert whispered the greatest compliment in the sport.
‘Fuck me,’ Gary said, holding his finishing position, the club cocked elegantly around him and his jaw dropping.
‘FORE!!’ Billy Douglas screamed. He was 280 yards away. Downwind. Inaudible.
Gary’s ball dropped onto the green twelve feet short and right of the flagstick. It bounced once and began to roll left towards the hole. Six feet, four feet…
‘By Christ, that’s close,’ Bert said.
‘GO ON, YOU F—’ Gary began.
The viciously sliced Spaxon sizzled by Bert’s right ear, missing him by two inches, and smashed into Gary’s right temple at 186 miles per hour. Everything went black and the ground came rushing up to meet him.
He couldn’t see Billy Douglas running down the gentle slope of the first fairway towards them.
He couldn’t hear Bert shouting his name over and over.
He couldn’t see his ball falling into the hole.
Nothing.
PART TWO
The brain is the ultimate organ of adaptation. It takes in information and orchestrates complex behavioural repertoires that allow human beings to act in sometimes marvelous, sometimes terrible ways.
From Neurons to Neighborhoods, Jack P. Shonkoff and Deborah A. Phillips (eds)
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
14
NORTH AYRSHIRE GENERAL HOSPITAL, BUILT IN THE early 1980s, is a sprawling structure of white and chocolate that sits less than ten miles to the east of Ardgirvan, just on the outskirts of the larger town of Kilmarnock. NADGE, as the locals call it, was not a place of fond memories for Cathy Irvine.
Here, in the gift shop, when the hospital was sparkling and new, she had bought sweets and bright plastic toys to entertain her young boys while her father died upstairs. Here, in the cafeteria, she had drunk endless cups of sour black coffee–occasionally going out through the automatic doors to supplement these with fiercely smoked cigarettes–while her husband had his chemotherapy. Here, sitting on a hard plastic chair in a white corridor surrounded by the bitter hospital smells and the squeak and rattle of trolleys, she had looked up from the paper tissue she was tremblingly shredding as the doctor approached, his face already telling Cathy that they were done with the chemotherapy now.
Cathy’s mind effortlessly replayed all these terrible memories as she walked along and turned a corner. Several private rooms lay to her right and she glanced in as she passed them, catching little snapshots of the very ordinary hells old age and random calamity lead us to: an old man sleeping, silently watched by an old woman with a fat, unread thriller on her lap. Another man watching television, a game show, as blood and urine dangled around him in plastic pouches. A younger man with his head in some kind of metal cage–bolts and studs actually going into his forehead–but still managing to joke with his friends. ‘Hi, boys,’ Cathy said, returning their waves. They were nice boys. Car crash one of them had been in.
Cathy reached the fourth room along and entered with her coffee and muffin. ‘Hi, son!’ she said brightly. ‘Sorry I took so long. I bumped into Margaret from up the road. Ye know Margaret? She’s in here with…’
Cathy talked on, her enthusiasm unmarred by the fact that her son had been unconscious for three days now.
Gary lay on the bed, his head near-mummified by white bandages. Clear tubing–no, not quite clear, a bluish tint to it–ran into his nose, into his arms and the corner of his mouth. A little dried blood was visible at the seam of the bandages, above his right eye, and his face around the same eye was iridescent with bruising–green and purple and yellow and blue.
When Cathy had first walked into this room three days ago, when she first saw Gary like this, she had automatically flashed on another image of him: six years old and dressed up for Halloween as the Amber Gambler, the man from the TV adverts who drove through yellow lights. She remembered his wee face smiling through the hole in the middle of the ketchup-stained bandages and him saying, ‘But do I look scary, Mummy?’ As Cathy moved closer to her sixties her mind increasingly had a mind of its own. It kept replaying memories from twenty, thirty, forty years ago, like it was asking her to rate them: Is this important? Do we want to keep this one? It was like someone preparing to move house, clearing out all the junk and trying to decide what was worth taking on to the next place. Cathy’s mind clearly thought that Halloween 1981 might be important–for she could see Gary in the living room that night as clearly as she was seeing him now in this hospital bed.
Cathy settled down in a chair next to the bed–as close as she could get given the phalanx of warm machines guarding him–and started to read the evening paper to him, providing her own commentary on the news stories as she went. The reports themselves were read out in the slightly hesitant, formal voice Cathy used when reading aloud and then her commentary on the events followed in her own natural voice.
‘“Three men were sentenced to a total of fourteen years in prison at Glasgow Sheriff Court yesterday after it was revealed they had masterminded a heroin deal worth an estimated three million pounds.” Och, ah hope they throw away the bloody key! The scum o’ the bloody earth so they are!’ She turned the page. ‘“My life is hell, claims Hollywood actress.”’ Cathy snorted. ‘Aye, hen, see, if ah’d yer bloody money sure ye’d no hear me complaining!’ She turned the page.
There was no self-consciousness on Cathy’s part. The doctor had said it might help if they talked to Gary, that coma patients had been known to respond to voices they recognised. So Cathy, being of a generation that listened to doctors, talked to him. Indeed, if the consultant had told her that there was a one in two billion chance that it might help Gary if she stripped off, stood on a chair and punched herself repeatedly in the face all day then right at this moment she would have been perched on a stool, buck naked and punching away until either her face or her knuckles gave out.
It was true: Cathy could only express her feelings in Hallmark-card poetry, in fridge-magnet philosophy, in platitudes and commonplaces; but her feelings were no less real for having been expressed as clichés. The grade, the quality of love she felt for the boy was something the childless, unconscious Gary was still many emotional miles from understanding. As she dabbed with a wet wipe at the dried saliva crusted at the corner of his mouth, his three-day stubble scratching the underside of her wrist, Cathy reflected on how gladly she would have taken his place, for her love for the boy was fathomless and her will for him to live weighed more than her own soul. So Cathy talked, leaving his bedside only to fulfil the bare essentials of her existence: toilet, nicotine, caffeine.
She put the paper down and looked at her watch. The consultant, Dr Robertson, should be in soon. They’d been operating on him again this morning, to drain some fluid or something. Where the hell was P—
‘Hi, Cathy. Sorry I’m a wee bit late.’
‘Hi, Pauline hen,’ Cathy said, standing to embrace her daughter-in-law.
‘How is he?’
‘He’s fine. Still sleeping.’ Sleeping. Cathy had never said the word ‘coma’. Like when Lee had simply been ‘away’, Pauline thought.
Pauline nearly hadn’t answered when the call came on Saturday afternoon. She’d been in the house, alone, on her mobile, mid-sentence with the pleading Masterson, and the phone had just kept on ringing and ringing. Finally she’d leaned over the bed and picked it up, recognising the golf club number (Gary had it on speed dial) and then some old guy was telling her about an accident, a golf ball, an ambulance. The explosion of guilt she’d felt when she’d first seen him in here had surprised her.
‘Hi, Mrs Irvine, Mrs Irvine.’ Dr Robertson was in the doorway. A friendly man, tall and thin. Clever-looking, Cathy thought. A golfer too, as he’d told them when they’d first met.
‘Hello, Doctor,’ Pauline and Cathy chorused.
‘How is he this evening?’ Robertson asked, picking up the chart. The question was rhetorical and he only half listened as Cathy started talking about reading the paper to Gary. You had to give them something to do. You told cancer patients to drink plenty of fruit juice–like trying to ward off a Pershing missile with an umbrella. But you had to give people some raw material from which to fashion hope. ‘Good, good,’ Robertson said. ‘Have a seat please, ladies.’ He gestured for them to sit down and took his position leaning against the window, a Manila file clasped to his chest and a beautiful spring evening through the glass behind him.
How to explain? A large part of Robertson’s job involved explaining the intricacies of complex medical traumas to people who struggled to understand the plotlines of Hollywood blockbusters. He scanned the file–‘pterygoid…torn middle meningeal artery…extradural haemorrhaging…GCS of 10…raised intracranial pressure…temporal lobe…burr hole…’–then reached down for the language as he held a blue-white X-ray of Gary’s skull up against the window. ‘So, the operation went very well,
’ he began.
Cathy sighed with relief.
‘Unfortunately–’
Her blood, refreezing.
‘–the golf ball hit Gary on the temple, where the skull is thinnest, and it damaged the artery that runs beneath the temple, causing bleeding into this area between the brain and the skull. Which is this dark spot you can see here…’ He used his fountain pen to point out the area to them.
‘Aww my God,’ Cathy said, starting to cry.
Pauline awkwardly put an arm around her mother-in-law and shushed her. Robertson gave them a moment before continuing, tapping the pen against his teeth.
‘Now, we performed a craniotomy and–’
‘Sorry, Doctor, what is that?’ Pauline asked, slowly recrossing her long legs.
‘We opened up the skull–’
‘Aww my God!’ Cathy wailed. Her beautiful son, his brain all exposed to the world. She was really starting to get on Pauline’s tits.
‘–and drained off the blood.’
‘Is…is it fixed?’ Cathy asked, sniffling through a tissue.
‘Well, it’s too early to say really. I think we caught the worst of it. If the bleeding had continued, it would have put more pressure on the temporal lobe and would eventually have affected other areas of the brain. If it hasn’t done so already.’ He hadn’t meant to say this last part. Got away from him. Maybe neither of them would…
‘What do you mean?’ Pauline asked, looking him straight in the eye.
‘I…it’s possible areas of the brain may already have been…’ don’t say damaged, don’t say damaged, don’t say damaged, ‘…affected.’
Cathy blinked, not comprehending.
‘You mean damaged?’ Pauline said.
‘Possibly.’
‘Brain-damaged? AWW MA GOD!!’ Cathy unleashed a fresh peal of tears. A golf ball. A stupid wee golf ball. How the hell could something that size cause…