by John Niven
The Mastersons’ house was the last one on the street, the hedge bordering the property giving onto a small field that contained a couple of grazing piebald ponies. (Fucking rich pricks. Fucking ponies fur their weans.) The field gave directly onto the thick expanse of Annick woods, and the woods–as Lee knew from bitter experience–wound all the way down the hill to the bypass.
So: in after dark–she’d be alone in the house–tie her up and gag her while he quickly trashed the place to make it look like a robbery, two shots minimum in the head and then off out the back door, through the field, over the fence into the woods and down to the dual carriageway where he’d have left the motor in a lay-by.
Bob’s yer uncle and Fanny’s yer aunt.
He turned and strolled back towards the car. Glancing left over a low section of hedging he caught a glimpse of her–blonde, fat, beige top; ‘the Target’, as Lee was trying to think of her–standing at one of the downstairs windows and, for a second, he thought she was staring at him. He made much show of tugging on the lead and calling to the dog until he noticed that she had a phone pressed to her ear and she was talking, so she wasn’t really looking at him at all, just staring into space. Lee tried to think of something hard to bolster his nerves, something like, ‘Aye, enjoy yer phone call, ya rich hoor. It’ll be yer fucking last,’ but it didn’t feel right, so he just hurried on back to the car, pulling Bastard along behind him.
30
‘I’M REALLY SORRY,’ GARY SAID FOR THE THIRD TIME, I can’t help it. It’s a side effect of the accident. I don’t even know I’m doing it. Hoor. Shite! Sorry!’
‘It’s OK,’ April said. ‘To be honest, I work in an environment where someone with Tourette’s would fit right in…’
By the seventeenth she’d been very glad she’d followed his match. Because this guy Irvine was really something. He had a crazy, untutored eyesore of a swing for sure, but it worked. Chipping and putting lights out too–he’d posted a fairly incredible round of 64. They would have to wait until the scores were in from all the other Open Qualifying courses to see if it would be incredible enough. All the same, April thought, 64? Definitely worth interviewing him. So here they were in a corner of the clubhouse bar, April’s Dictaphone on the low table between them along with their glasses and the plate of cheese-and-ham sandwiches Gary was working his way through. He was a little self-conscious at first about talking while the little red light on the machine glowed at him, but he was loosening up. Definitely cute too, April thought. But she was struggling to keep a straight face with the swearing. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘what was I saying? Oh yeah, you were an eighteen-handicapper before the accident?’
‘Aye, well, eighteen point seven, so nineteen really.’
‘So was it a gradual thing? I mean, did you find you were swinging a bit better when you came out of the coma and then you just worked on it until–’
‘Not really. The first time I went to the range after the accident I…I just couldn’t make a bad swing.’
‘Really?’ April said, reaching for her soda water, trying not to look as excited as she felt, the adrenalin all good reporters feel when a brilliant story falls into their laps kicking in now. ‘But your swing…it’s pretty, um, unorthodox, eh?’
‘Yeah. But it’s–fucking cocks and baws, sorry–repeatable…near enough.’ Gary grinned through a mouthful of sandwich and April noticed again that he had nice eyes, blue and clear.
‘Can I ask you–I saw you at registration this morning, in the lobby. What was all that stuff about?’
Gary coloured, his freckles standing out as his cheeks flushed. ‘It’s…fuck fuck fuck, another thing, since the accident. I…it’s called Kluver-Bucy syndrome.’
‘How do you spell that?’
‘Sorry, can we not talk about it?’
‘Sure,’ April said, writing Clue Ver Bucy in her notebook.
‘You’re not going to write about that stuff, are you? I mean, my mum reads the Daily Standard. My friends, my wife…’
April looked at the gold band on his left hand and smiled. ‘How long have you been married?’
‘Ah, eleven years next month.’
‘Wow. You must have been quite young?’
‘I suppose so. We’d known each other since school.’
Christ, childhood sweethearts, April thought. They probably still mate for life down in Ayrshire. Like lobsters. Or was it turtles?
‘What got you into golf?’ Gary asked her.
‘My dad,’ April said. ‘He took me to the Open for the first time when I was eight. 1990 at St Andrews, when Faldo won his second. He shot eighteen under par that year, the lowest winning score since–’
‘Tom Watson at Turnberry in ’77.’ Gary said, finishing the sentence for her. They smiled at each other, Gary thinking how strange it was to be sitting talking golf trivia with a woman, a very pretty woman, her pale skin gradually turning pink in the warmth of the bar. ‘That was my first Open. My dad took me. I was only two.’
‘Wow,’ April said, ‘imagine if you qual—’
‘Yeah. It’d make quite a story, wouldn’t it?’
‘Heart-warming, as my editor likes to say.’
April signalled the waiter for the bill. ‘How come your dad wasn’t here cheering you on?’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘That’s OK. It was a long time ago.’
‘Well, I’m sure he’d have been very proud watching you out there to–’
‘HO!’ They both turned to see Stevie, coming into the bar through the doors that led out onto the patio. He had grunted disapprovingly when April introduced herself as a tabloid journalist but now he was beaming. ‘Scores are in,’ he said.
‘No,’ Gary said simply.
‘Fucking aye,’ Stevie said. ‘You’ve qualified. We’re going to the Open.’
Gary leapt to his feet and he and Stevie started jumping up and down hugging each other. April reached down and turned the Dictaphone off. Quite a story is right, she was thinking.
31
LEE WALKED ON PAST THE CLEARINGS WHERE SO recently he had dug frantically, heading deeper into the trees. He came to a large clearing deep in the woods and sat down on a fallen tree trunk. He was breathing hard, a ticklish rasping in his chest. Fucking fags. He took a half-smoked joint from behind his ear, lit it and swung the knapsack down off his shoulder.
The gun was black with a chequered-wood grip, the wood warm and natural against the palm of his hand, the metal trigger guard icy cold against the back of his forefinger. Lee pushed the release forward with his thumb and the cylinder sprang out–six empty chambers facing him. He sat the weapon on the knapsack and took out the cardboard box. He counted out the bullets, surprised at how heavy they were, and loaded six into the gun, pleased at how snugly the brass cartridges slotted into their individual compartments. He tried to flip the chamber shut with a flick of his wrist, the way you saw them do it in the films. Three of the bullets fell out. Lee picked them up, reloaded and closed the chamber carefully.
He reached back into the knapsack and took out the copy of the Sun he’d bought on the way up here. He flipped through and found a full-page photograph of some Hollywood actress, some daft hoor that Lisa liked. Lee tore it out, walked across the clearing, and used his penknife to stick the page to the trunk of a big tree. He walked away from the tree, counted off twenty paces and turned round.
The woods, the gun, target practice: it all reminded him of some film he’d seen once, years ago, with his dad. Some mad cunt trying to assassinate the president of Spain, or some mad fucking place. He shot a melon or something with this mental bullet and the whole thing blew up. What was the name of the film? Fucking memory oan him. No real.
Lee took a last heavy drag on the spliff, raised the gun in his right hand and pulled back the hammer with his thumb. It took a surprising amount of strength. He closed his left eye and squinted down the barrel, over the sight and towards the target. S
lowly he squeezed the trigger.
CRACK! Birds flew from the branches overhead and Lee’s hand jerked up and back.
The photograph, the entire tree, remained untouched.
Tongue out in concentration now, Lee took the pistol in both hands, crouched down into a shooting stance and fired again.
Coughing through the acrid gunsmoke, sweating, his ears ringing from the concussion, Lee saw that both photograph and tree remained unscathed.
He edged a few paces nearer, stuck the gun out and tugged the trigger angrily. A third bang and still not a mark on the photograph.
‘FUCK YOU, YA FUCKING HOOR!’ Lee screamed as he ran up to the tree and fired three times at point-blank range into the photograph, bark splintering everywhere, the girl’s face disappearing in scorched newsprint. Lee slumped down at the foot of the tree, panting.
Later, on the drive home, the needle living triumphantly in the top half of the petrol gauge since his meeting with Alec, it back came to him: The Day of the Jackal, that was it. That was the bloody film. Lee couldn’t be sure, it was a long time ago and his memory wasn’t what it was, but he had a feeling it hadn’t ended too well for the Jackal cunt. It hadn’t been his fucking day at all…
‘When ah think of all the hours you had tae work to pay for aw the stuff she wanted done tae that bloody house,’ Cathy said, busy with the corkscrew, ‘and then she walks out oan you, son…’
He’d known something was wrong as soon as he walked in the front door (tired and hung-over, he and Stevie had hit the bars of Musselburgh pretty hard to celebrate his qualification) and there was no barking. He’d put his golf bag down in the hall and walked through to the kitchen. ‘Ben?’ he’d shouted to the empty house. Then he saw it–the single sheet of A4 notepaper on the kitchen table, covered in Pauline’s girlish handwriting. How many hearts have been destroyed in such a fashion? He scanned it quickly, the key words leaping off the page: ‘my own space for a while…drifting apart…unhappy…’
He’d been dying to tell her that he’d got through. That it hadn’t been a waste of time.
He went round to see his mum, and here she was, cooking and–in her own fashion–comforting.
‘Her own space for a while,’ Cathy repeated, rereading the letter while she poured them both some wine. ‘Me and your father were together nearly thirty years. We never needed oor own bloody “space”! Has she no got enough bloody space? All the money ye spent oan that extension?’
‘Things are–fuck, ya cunt ye, sorry, Mum–different nowadays, Mum,’ Gary said, not really sure what he meant. Back home with his mum, in the house he’d grown up in. They were eating dinner at the little table at the back of the living room: chicken grilled on Cathy’s ‘Magic-Griller’, a plastic and metal clamp which magically removed all fat from the meat as it cooked it, less magically removing all flavour too. The pale, dry breast came accompanied by peas, potatoes and carrots, all of which Cathy appeared to have been boiling since before decimalisation.
‘Where’s she gone?’ Cathy asked.
‘She’s staying–HOOR!–with her pal Katrina.’
‘Och, that wan’s a fine example. Is she no divorced aboot three times herself?’
‘Twice, Mum.’
‘And have ye tried calling her?’
‘Her phone’s off. Fucking boots, ya slut. Sorry.’
‘Aye,’ Cathy sighed, ‘it’s some state of affairs right enough.’ Her eyes misted over as she gazed into the mid-distance. ‘Ah’m only glad he’s no here to see this. One of you separated from your wife and the other one…God only knows what’s going to happen tae that boy. Just recently I had to lend him two hundred pounds to pay this loan the two of them took out–to buy that new sofa and that stupid big telly they didnae even need–and that wisnae the first time ah’ve lent him money recently, let me tell you…’
‘Mmm,’ Gary said, a significant and long-standing creditor of Lee’s himself.
‘Anyway, last night, naw, night before last it was. He came in and says he’s got some job he’s doing. Pays me it back! Two hundred pound in cash. Counts it right oot oan the kitchen table.’
‘What kind of–flaps–job? Pishflapsyaboot.’
‘Och, he said something to do wi his pal Scooter and that tyre business he’s got. Selling a load of tyres tae some place in Glasgow.’
‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it?’ Gary said with a positivity he did not feel. ‘Christ, Mum, you’re worried when he borrows money off you–fucktitsbaws–then you’re worried when he pays it back!’
‘Ah just…ah worry he slips back into his old ways. Starts hanging aboot wi aw they druggies and God knows what again. Ah couldnae take it he had to go…away again. See, the nights I lie in ma bed and I think aboot…’
And Cathy was off; a torrent of worry, fear and paranoia roped together into a wine-hazed monologue. Gary switched to AutoAye, reading the paper and saying ‘Aye’ and ‘Aye?’ while he tried to convince himself that it really was possible that Lee was enjoying fruitful employment in the world of wholesale radial tyres.
Meanwhile, up in Glasgow, in the gathering dusk of the news-room, April was finishing off her story. A little bit of googling had yielded her the full Ardgirvan Gazette story–Gary’s ‘incident’ on the eighteenth green at Ravenscroft. She’d rung the reporter for a few more details, the hick being mightily impressed to have someone from the big leagues calling. She moved the cursor up onto the little disk and clicked to save. She sat back, lit only by the soft grey-white light from the screen and chewed on a ragged thumbnail while she thought. A moment passed and then a grin began spreading across her face, a grin known to subeditors across the world. April quickly typed the headline in above the piece and hit ‘Save’ again.
Devlin would wet himself.
32
STEVIE INCHED THE CAR ALONG THROUGH THE CROWDS towards the golf course. The week before the Open and the world had descended on the little coastal town of Troon, which swelled from around 10,000 inhabitants to nearer 60,000 during the championship. The competition began on the Thursday morning, but the course was opened to players for practice play on the Sunday before. Already there were throngs of people wandering through the streets, heading to the course for the opportunity to watch the world’s most famous golfers getting to grips with the turf and the weather.
There were TV stations from every major nation on earth, with their miles of cabling and their camera towers and their microphones like big furry pills. There were journalists, caterers, course marshals, punters, pundits and, of course, the players and their entourages–their teams of head doctors, swing gurus, putting consiglieres, managers, agents, personal trainers, personal chefs and personal assistants.
The big guns had rented the finest private houses close to the course. The players a little further down the ladder–the journeymen, the everyday tour pros who performed supporting roles in the superstars’ movie–were in the nicer hotels. The few amateurs took their chances in bed and breakfasts.
Gary and Stevie had managed to find a twin room in a tiny B&B on the outskirts of town for the week. He’d be glad to be out of the house. It was strange without Pauline. The place lay dead around him, the rooms silent, no roaring of her hairdryer from the bedroom, no chattering of her electric toothbrush from the bathroom. His things stayed in the sad heaps where he put them until he moved them himself. He felt no impulse to cook for himself, choosing to eat out–or even round at his mum’s house–rather than sit in the living room waiting to hear the three icy digital beeps from the microwave, Morse code telling him that now he was going to die alone. He even missed Ben, that eternal engine of pain, with his ceaseless snuffling, growling and whining.
They pulled up at the booth guarding the entrance to the clubhouse car park and a man in a fluorescent yellow security jacket approached them, walkie-talkie crackling. ‘Come on, boys, you’ll have to move tha—’ Stevie calmly held up the orange vehicle pass. ‘Oh, sorry,’ the guard said, instantly softening. ‘Please
, just follow the road around towards the clubhouse and park anywhere you like.’
‘Thank you,’ Stevie said pleasantly, grinning at Gary as he pulled away. Two years ago, when they’d gone up to St Andrews to watch the Open, they’d ended up parking about two miles out of town and walking the rest of the way. Now here they were, pulling up right in front of the clubhouse, in a row of spaces marked ‘PLAYER PARKING ONLY’.
Gary got out and looked up at the long, low sandstone building. Just as he was trying to fully comprehend that he was about to register as a competitor in the Open, he caught the eye of a passing stranger and his world was knocked completely off its axis by five words. The words were ‘Hi there, how ya doing?’ and the speaker, the passing stranger, was Gram Novotell–two times winner of the US Open. It took a few seconds for Gary to register this, which was just as well because Novotell was swiftly down the steps and had folded his six-foot-three-inch frame into a waiting courtesy car before Gary, his face flushing, had time to splutter his panicked response. ‘Ooohyabigcuntye!’ he stammered at the boot of the departing car.
‘What?’ Stevie said over his shoulder, hauling the golf bag from the boot, oblivious to who had just passed them by.
‘Shit!’ Gary said, clamping his hand over his mouth. Calm down, get a hold of yourself. Obviously there’s going to be famous golfers here. It’s the Open for fuck’s sake! It’s no big deal. They’re just guys like you.