by John Niven
Who’s to know?
22
GARY HAD THE DRIVING RANGE TO HIMSELF.
He propped his golf bag up on its metal legs and ran a hand over the clubheads. What to hit? He knew he shouldn’t really be doing this at all, so probably best not to overdo it. No trying to smash the driver, nothing more than, say, an easy nine. Nine-iron–the last club he had swung before the accident.
He pressed the button on the plastic panel set into the wooden wall of his bay and, with a faint hum of machinery, the white ball rose up on its rubber tee peg. After a couple of practice swings, his body feeling stiff and rusty, he sighted down the range and picked out a target: the old rusted-out Land Rover just short of the 150-yard marker.
He settled the clubhead behind the ball. Something felt different as he began his backswing, the club coming back smoothly, his left arm straight, his left shoulder pointing straight down at the ball. There was the slightest lag, a barely perceptible pause at the top of the swing, as his weight began to transfer from his right side to his left, and then the clubhead was whipping down, faster than he had ever swung it before, faster than he could ever have controlled before.
The clubhead whipped through the ball in a perfect transfer of energy and Gary was turning, his upper body coming round so that he was standing square to the target. He couldn’t see the ball for a second. He had to look up. And then up again. He had never hit a golf ball that high in his life. The ball was pausing now, over a hundred feet in the air, and beginning its descent, falling right for the tractor. Gary watched as it fell to earth–maybe ten yards beyond the Land Rover but right on line with its rusted metal roof, whumping into the turf and hopping forward a couple of yards before coming to rest. Gary looked at the number engraved on the sole of the club: ‘9’. He thought for a second he might have pulled out the six, but no. He slipped it back into the bag and pulled out the pitching wedge, a club he should hit ten to fifteen yards shorter than the nine. Another smooth swing and again the ball flying straight and high. He watched, holding his finishing position, posing, as the ball came falling down.
‘P-TANG!’–the hollow sound of the ball clanging off rusted metal reverberated around the empty range as Gary’s wedge found its target: the roof of the Land Rover, a piece of metal not much more than five foot square.
He did it again.
And again. And again.
After he’d hit the thing six times he sat down heavily.
What was going on here? Maybe just the break, the time away from the game. Sometimes you played really well when you hadn’t hit the ball for a while. You swung the club freely and unselfconsciously and you had no expectations and the tensions they created. That was probably it.
Aye, yer maw, a voice said to him.
Also, he reasoned, he was hitting with the wedge, one of the easier clubs in the bag. How would he get on with a club he was on less than speaking terms with? A club he routinely thinned, skulled and shanked? A club he had pulled from his bag maybe three times in the last year?
A club like the two-iron, say?
He pulled the two out of the bag, took his stance and sighted towards the 200-yard marker: 200 yards, about his best ever distance with the two-iron, and that on only a handful of occasions. He didn’t hold back, really bringing the club down hard.
For a split second he thought he might have completely misswung and missed the ball altogether, for there had been no resistance, barely any sensation of the club hitting anything at all. Then he saw his ball dotted against the horizon and travelling in an absolutely straight line, sailing towards the battered metal sign saying ‘200 yards’.
He kept watching the 200-yard sign.
He was still watching it when he heard a ‘KA-LANG’ and, looking further down the range, saw his ball rattling off another sign.
The 250-yard sign.
These markers are wrong, was his first thought. Because this was ridiculous. He couldn’t carry a bloody two-iron 250 yards. No human being could.
Only a professional golfer could do that.
Hit a few more, he thought. You’ll start fucking them up and with that will come the reassurance that everything is still the same.
He creamed a dozen two-irons down the middle, catching one or two a bit thin, one off the toe of the club, but all of them landing soft and true in the patch of ground between the 200-and the 250-yard markers, four of them clanging right off the 250-yard sign itself, leaving deep dents in the metal.
It was with a dry throat and a slightly trembling hand that Gary pulled the driver from the bag.
The heavy artillery. The lumber. The Big Dog.
In something like a trance now–pumped up and confident and swinging free and hard–he pulled the club so far back on his backswing that its fat head actually touched his left buttock. He unloaded and the sound as metal ate ball was deafening. It seemed to take three minutes for the shot to begin falling to earth, to come whistling down and embed itself in one of the holes in the wire mesh at the very end of the range–about 270 yards away.
The second drive didn’t touch the fence–it sailed straight over it, coming to rest among the blooming rows of potatoes in the farmer’s field behind the range, a good 310 yards away from where Gary stood.
He sat down again. His hands were shaking. This was crazy. He’d never hit the ball this well in his life. Maybe a few dozen times in over twenty years. Not a few dozen in twenty minutes. Just a fluke, he told himself. Probably never hit it like this on the actual golf course.
No, something has happened to you, the other voice said.
Well, only one way to find out.
The Monthly Medal this Saturday…
23
LEE IRVINE WALKED INTO THE TINY KITCHEN. AMAZON was sat on the floor–patiently pulling arms and heads off of a pile of dolls and throwing the severed limbs all over the place. Styx hurtled screaming through the room en route to the ‘garden’ (twelve square feet of concrete, Lee had paved it over as soon as they moved in. Grass was just too much bother) closely followed by Delta, the latter screaming, ‘Ah’m gauny kill ye, ya wee prick!’ Lisa, smouldering Club in one hand and tea mug in the other, was watching something slowly revolving in the microwave that didn’t quite work properly–you had to give it a bang every now and then to keep the turntable rotating–while listlessly repeating her tired, halfhearted mantra: ‘Stop that, you two, don’t dae that, Amazon, gie’s peace…’ Biscuit wrappers, crisp packets and empty three-litre plastic bottles of supermarket own-brand super-strength cola were strewn all over the floor, their sugary contents now barrelling through the veins of the children.
Normally Lee might have gone mental. But tonight he was in a fine mood. Expansive even, with three double vodkas in his veins, cocaine still humming in his nose and close to one and a half thousand pounds in his jacket pocket.
‘A’right?’ Lisa said to him.
‘Fine, hen.’
The microwave pinged cheerfully. Lisa popped the door open and the kitchen was flooded with the smell of melting plastic. ‘Ah was just getting oor tea ready,’ Lisa said, shoving a pile of dirty washing along the counter to make room for the bubbling platter of nuked chicken-and-pineapple frozen pizza. ‘And, Styx, you need tae eat yer pizza, ye hear me?’ Turning from son to husband she added, ‘Ah don’t know whit’s wrong wi’ that boy. He willnae eat a thing. He’s even aff his crisps and ginger–’
‘Fuck that. Ye can gie that shite tae the dug,’ Lee said, nodding at the pizza. ‘We’re all going oot fur dinner. Tae the China Garden.’
‘Really, Da?’ Delta said.
‘Aye.’
‘Whit…sit in?’ Lisa said uncertainly. The China Garden was the good Chinky, the dear one up the top of the high street.
‘Aye. Only the best fur the best.’
‘Magic!’ the children chorused.
‘Here…’ Lee said, handing his wife the carrier bag he was holding. She looked inside: a bottle of Smirnoff–a whole bottle–and a
bottle of Coke. ‘You make us a couple of wee voddy and Cokes. Ah’m away fur a shower.’ He kissed her on the cheek, Lisa looking at him in awe and wonder.
‘Da,’ little Amazon was saying, ‘can we get starters? Can we get spring rolls?’
‘You can get anything ye want, doll,’ Lee said, ruffling his daughter’s hair. He headed upstairs, the sound of familial celebration–excited children’s chatter, glasses clattering from the cupboard–sounding good in his ears.
Lee could still not quite believe the change in his fortunes the day had wrought. When Alec Campbell’s car had pulled up beside him this afternoon he’d thought he might be limping in the door tonight in a very different state.
He turned the shower on–it took ages to get warm. Maybe he’d buy a new one–and then crossed the landing to the bedroom, pulling his T-shirt over his head.
It’s a woman, Alec had said. Is that a problem?
‘No if the price is right, Alec,’ Lee had said suavely, sipping his second double (Alec was buying) in the shadows of the Boot. And, by Christ, was the price right. Five grand? Obviously Alec was taking the two and a bit Lee owed him for the speed plus interest out of this. It still left nearly three thousand quid. ‘Half now,’ Alec said, slipping an envelope under the table, ‘and half when we’re done.’
Taking his jeans off Lee remembered the wrap in his back pocket. You finish it. Call it a wee signing-on bonus. Nearly a gram in there. Good gear too. With an ear cocked to the kitchen, Lee quickly racked out another wee line on the dressing table. Put one out for Lisa? Naw, put her aff her dinner. He’d surprise her later, after the kids were in bed. It’d been a while. He honked the line up and licked the bitter residue off the edge of his Silver Screen Video card. The coke and the booze were proving excellent help in preventing him thinking too far ahead, which was good news because when he did think ahead he kept coming up against a pretty big problem: contrary to what Alec Campbell believed, Lee had never killed anyone in his life.
Tits McGee? It happened like this…
Lee had met Tits to buy an ounce of speed which Lee was going to cut with some novocaine he’d got from Archie Boyd, who had got it from some boys that broke into the chemist’s on Calder Road. Lee was then going to sell the speed/ novocaine mixture as cocaine down at the Southport Weekender, offloading it at about three in the morning when every cunt was too cunted to tell the cunting difference. Deal done, Tits had been driving Lee to the bus stop when he got a call on his mobile and said he had to make a quick diversion, some boys from Glasgow he had a bit of business with. They pulled into a lay-by up near the Annick woods and Tits walked off to a car parked nearby. Lee had watched Tits stick his head in the window and start talking to someone. Then a white flash in the night, a bang, and Tits falling backwards with half his face missing. Lee had felt the quick hot spurt in the trough of his pants and then, before he knew what he was doing, he was out the car, jumping the fence behind the lay-by and running headlong through the pitch-black woods, the dreadful sensation of cooling, viscous diarrhoea spilling down the back of his legs.
Lee had lain low for a few weeks, terrified that whoever had killed Tits would realise they had left a witness to the crime. In the meantime, the point-blank ‘gangland’-style execution became a big story: a brief report on the evening news, the Daily Standard running a faintly celebratory piece along the lines of ‘one less drug dealer in Scotland’. Wee Audrey Harrison had seen Lee and Tits driving through Kilwinning a few hours before the shooting and gradually the Chinese whispers escalated–Lee and Tits had gone off to do a deal, they’d got into an argument and Lee had shot Tits in the head at close range. Lee was pulled in for questioning but they had nothing really.
Suddenly he found he was afforded respectable elbow room at the bar in the Bam. Sly nods and hushed whispers in his direction. As the police seemed to have little interest in bringing the killer of Tits McGee (drug dealer and rumoured beaster of girls a little under the legal age of consent) to justice, Lee decided it would do his rep no harm at all to let the story grow. The truth–that he had soiled his pants and ran off through the woods–would have been far less flattering.
Are ye carrying anything these days? Alec had asked him.
Naw, Alec. Ah’m no daft, Lee said, shaking his head.
OK, Alec said. We’ll get ye a piece.
Lee Irvine had done some bad things. He’d sold drugs to teenagers–bad drugs, drugs cut with laxative and baby powder and brick dust and grit. He’d broken into homes and taken people’s property, creeping through dark gardens with video recorders and jewellery boxes under his arms. He’d stolen cars and been involved in low-level fraud, money laundering and passport theft. Yes, some bad things. But, kill a woman? Some poor woman he didn’t even know?
When Lee pictured his father in heaven he thought of him as reclining on a big, fluffy king-size cloud watching television and reading the paper. He thought of him now, watching his eldest son taking an envelope stuffed with fifty-pound notes out of his jacket, peeling off four of them and hiding the envelope deep in his sock drawer. Then he thought of his father–someone who had worked hard all his life in return for very little–realising where the money had come from. What it was for. Lee had never seen his father cry and was unable to picture it now. Instead, he saw his father glowering and angry, the way he had seen him many times in the last years, after Lee’s life had begun to go off-track: the wrong friends, the first arrests. The image helped: it was easier to defy the angry than it was to defy the sad, the heartbroken. Something else was helping too–Lee snorted, pulling a thick string of numbing cocaine down his throat, and the vision of his father popped and evaporated, like bursting a plump, soapy bubble when you were a kid, that faint sting on your face as it sparkled away into nothingness.
In his boxers now, tingling from the cocaine, he roamed the upstairs of his house. Well, it was the council’s house. And it wasn’t much of a roam: bathroom and three tiny bedrooms. Delta’s school trousers were hanging over the back of a chair–the knees long worn through and stitched up. One of Styx’s trainers, the sole flapping away from the bottom, gaping at him like a fish’s mouth. Amazon’s broken pink bicycle in the hall downstairs. The DVD player that no longer worked. The last two loan payments they’d missed. The holidays they never took. Aye, things were fraying at the edges of his little kingdom and no mistaking. Still borrowing money off his mum and his wee brother all the time? At his age? Jesus fuck, it was bad news.
So, kill a woman? Some poor woman he didn’t even know?
Absolutely.
24
‘NEXT MATCH…PRENTICE, ALEXANDER, IRVINE AND Mason,’ the starter’s voice trebly and sibilant through the ancient tannoy, drifting over the heads of the usual Saturday-morning crowd, thirty-odd members milling around the first tee. Bert stood double-fisting bacon roll and coffee in a square of sunshine by the door to the locker room.
As Gary took to the tee there was the usual murmur through the waiting players, the usual bets being laid off: a pound he slices it out of bounds, a pound he shanks it, a pound he misses the ball altogether. As he pushed the wooden two-and-three-quarter-inch tee peg into the turf Gary was aware of a strange sensation. Or rather, an absence of sensation. Because the emotions which usually trilled through his body when he teed off in the Monthly Medal–quivering nausea, fear, light sweating, the chest-crushing panic which had almost induced semi-blindness on a few occasions–were all gone. His head–usually a blare of noise, of layered voices, of half a dozen caffeine-jacked coaches all screaming contradictory advice (Keep your head still! Turn your shoulders! Let the left heel rise! Just hit the fucking thing!)–was as still and quiet as a winter field at dawn.
He stepped back and stood behind the ball. In the distance, 350 yards away, the yellow flag was flapping gently to the left. So, slight breeze coming off the right. He could just make out a copper-coloured patch of grass fifty-odd yards in front of the green.
Roll it over that.
&nb
sp; In his head he saw the trajectory of the shot: a very slight draw, the ball just curling left, bouncing in front of the discoloured patch and rolling left. He addressed the ball and had one final coherent thought before he began his backswing: I’m going to melt this.
Rab Forest was whispering to Wullie Ellis, a ferret-faced seven-handicapper, ‘Bet ye a pound he–’ when Gary connected with the ball, the KEEERACK! so loud that Bert spilled his coffee.
‘Fuck me,’ said Wullie Ellis.
‘Jesus wept,’ said Forest.
‘Where did it go?’ someone else said.
‘Intae bloody orbit,’ Bert said.
Gary’s ball landed just to the right of the patch of grass he’d been aiming at, bounced twice and rolled, curling left and finishing up against the fringe of grass ringing the green. Three hundred and ten yards if it was an inch.
The stunned silence lasted three or four seconds.
It was Bert who started the clapping.
Ravenscroft is a very decent municipal golf course. But a municipal course nonetheless, designed with the average mid-handicapper in mind. The golf courses that normal human beings play on are gentle affairs of motorway-wide fairways, light rough and small, slow greens. They bear about as much resemblance to the fearsome layouts played on the professional circuit as the drunken pub brawler bears to the heavyweight champion of the world. For golfers at the very top of their game a course like Ravenscroft is, in all honesty, a glorified pitch-and-putt.
It was in exactly this manner–driver, wedge, putter–that Gary birdied the first three holes straight, just missing an eagle at the second when his fifty-yard sand wedge lipped out, drawing a gasp from his tiny gallery–his playing partners, plus Bert and another pair of old boys from the club who’d watched him tee off and decided to tag along for a few holes.