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Published by Windmill Books 2014
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Copyright © John Niven 2009
Extract of Kill Your Friends copyright © John Niven 2008
John Niven has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by William Heinemann
Windmill Books
The Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Windmill Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781409061793
Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by John Niven
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Two
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Part Three
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Part Four
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Epilogue
Author’s note
Extract of Kill Your Friends
Copyright
MASTERSON THUMBED INTO ‘Messages’ and swiftly deleted Pauline’s most recent text before crossing the patio and going through the open French windows into the kitchen. It was a huge room – the cooking end was separated from the dining area by a black marble island that incorporated twin sinks and a battery of gadgets. Leanne was at one of the sinks washing an apple. ‘I’m just making some fruit salad, do ye want some?’
‘Naw, ah’m awright thanks, doll.’
Aye, right. Fucking fruit salad? Soon as ah’m oot that door the biscuit jar’ll be getting a right fucking panelling . . .
He watched her waddling towards the huge, stainless-steel fridge-freezer, the loose grey material of her sweatpants flapping from monstrous cheek to monstrous cheek, each buttock easily weighing in around the same as a newborn baby, and thought to himself – How the fuck did it get tae this?
He had loved her once, this monster.
Her weight gain had been stealthy enough through her thirties and early forties, but the last few years, now the kids were out of the house, now she literally had nothing to do, had seen a mammoth escalation. Every few months a new diet was launched – protein shakes, low-carb, no-carb, soup-and-salad, steamed food only – and then quietly decommissioned.
A few months back he’d gone over to Ayr to have lunch with Simon Murphy at Murphy, Mills & Harrington. Divorce – what was the worst-case scenario? Over expensive pasta Murphy laid it out for him: they’d been married for nearly twenty-five years. Raised two children together. Leanne had been there since before the business was worth anything. Forget her getting half of everything he’d made in the last two decades – she might get all that and be able to make a case against any of his future income.
‘Fucking whit?’ Masterson growled through gnashed teeth.
‘Well, they could argue that by taking care of raising your children and running the household, Leanne enabled you to focus on making the business a success, which in turn led you to the financial position you’re in today, where you have the capital to take advantage of further opportunities. Listen, Findlay, I’ve got a client in Glasgow, TV writer, about your age. He got divorced and she’s getting a piece of everything he makes for the next ten years on the grounds that he might have had some of his ideas while he was married to her! The cunt’s working his nuts off just to break even.’
‘You mean,’ Masterson said, ‘if some hoor puts your dinner on the fucking table every now and then, and slaps a tit intae the mouth of a crying wean here and there, then she gets a chunk of your fucking dosh for the rest of her life?’
‘Just cheat,’ Murphy had said, pouring them more Rioja. ‘Because, you’re what, fifty-one?’
‘Fifty.’
‘Whatever. Listen.’ He leaned in, lowering his voice. ‘There’s a girl I use over in Prestwick. Two hundred quid for the hour. Twenty-two years old and she could suck the chrome off a bumper. You could do that every other night for the rest of your life and it’d still work out cheaper than divorcing Leanne. I’ll give you her number.’
Masterson didn’t take the number.
He met Pauline shortly afterwards.
‘DELTA! STYX! AH’M NO FUCKING KIDDING YE, IF YOU TWO DON’T FUCKING BEHAVE AH’M GONNAE LEATHER THE FUCKING PAIR OF YE! RIGHT? AMAZON! FUCKING STOP THAT! LISA – WHERE’S MA FUCKING CAR KEYS? FOR FUCK’S SAKE!’
A normal evening chez Lee and Lisa: Delta was smashing his younger brother’s face off the wall. Amazon was grinding a crayon into the living-room carpet. Lisa was in the kitchen, surrounded by an Everest of ironing, and Lee was late. Lee hated hospitals. Had she said visiting was six till eight? Or eight till ten? Or . . . maybe he shouldn’t have had that last joint.
Lee couldn’t believe the timing. He’d been lying on the sofa all day, heroically smoking hash to try and get himself into the right frame of mind to call his little brother and ask him if he could borrow a lot of money. By late afternoon he was just about there – stupefied to the point where he didn’t really care what he was doing, not quite stupefied enough to be unable to speak. (He had to watch his temper too. Gary was always nice and usually lent him the money but sometimes he could get a bit cheeky. Asking Lee what it was for and stuff like that. Lecturing him. Lee had once rung Gary intending to borrow money and had somehow wound up offering to cut his throat. The fucking temper on him. Like his old boy, Lee thought.) Lee had actually been reaching for his new mobile when it rang. He’d looked at the caller ID: ‘BAWBAG’. It was Gary, calling him from home. Unbelievable. For a second Lee entertained the thought that Gary was calling just to offer to lend him some money. Out of the blue. No strings attached. It was this thought that made Lee realise how very stoned he was. But it hadn’t been Gary. It had been his mum in tears, calling from Gary and Pauline’s with the news about the accident.
‘LISA! WH—’ As he went to shout (all communication in their tiny house was conducted by shouting, it was almost unthinkable that someone would enter the same room as the person they were conversing with) he spotted his car keys on the mantelpiece.
‘Da! Da!’ Something tugging at the hem of his jacket. He turned and looked down to see Styx’s crying face. ‘He keeps calling me a fucking poof!’
‘Naw ah don’t, ya lying prick!’ Delta shouted from the hall.
‘You two watch yer fucking language!’ Lisa shouted from the kitchen.
‘Fuck!’ Amazon shouted squeakily from the living room.
‘SEE!’ Lisa shouted.
‘If he does it again,’ Lee said to Styx, ‘just lamp him wan.’
‘LEE!’ Lisa shouted.
‘Ah’m away up the hospital tae see ma brother!’ Lee shouted.
The breeze and the silence were blessed relief as he slammed the front door behind him. Then he looked up.
Alec Campbell and the Beast were walking up the garden path.
‘Alec,’ Lee began, ‘I was just coming to –’
The Beast punched Lee hard in the stomach, his thumb jutting stiffly between his index and middle finger, and Lee went down. Alec lounged against Lee’s ancient, battered Nova while Lee fought for breath. After a moment he said, ‘Ye want tae try again?’
Lee got unsteadily to his feet, his legs trembling. ‘Ah . . . ah just had a wee bit of a delay offloading the gear. Ah just need a few more days, Alec.’
‘See? That wisnae so hard, was it?’ Alec said. ‘A dialogue is what we’re having here. As a responsible borrower you need to inform your lender if you’re having difficulty meeting your obligations. Then we can decide on the necessary course of action, eh?’
‘Aye, aye, ah’m sorry, Alec. I just, ma brother –’
‘Here’s the deal – you’ve got two weeks. If ah don’t have the money or the gear by then you’ll just be dealing wi Frank, OK?’ Alec slapped a hand on the Beast’s massive shoulder, having to reach up half a foot to do so. The Beast wasn’t even looking at Lee, like it was beneath him. ‘And Frank doesn’t do dialogue.’
‘Aye, Alec. Two weeks. Fine. Ah swear oan ma wean’s life.’
Finally the Beast spoke to Lee. ‘Are ye sure about that, son?’ he said.
GARY is a sweet and decent man. Only two things would improve his life – having children with his gorgeous wife Pauline, and a lower golf handicap. Both are unlikely.
PAULINE is wondering how she ended up living in an ugly little house, driving a second-hand car and making a living dressing up as Tinkerbell. She’s planning to leave Gary for a self-made carpet millionaire.
FINDLAY, the Carpet King of Scotland, wants to trade in his obese wife for a younger model. But if he goes for a divorce she’ll take him to the cleaners. If only there was some way she could be made to disappear . . .
LEE, Gary’s luckless brother, has botched one too many drug deals. Local crime overlord Ranta Campbell gives him one more job – one last chance to get it right. Lee’s done some bad things – but murder?
When Gary gets smashed on the head by a golf ball and miraculously develops an absolutely perfect swing, everyone finds their fates rest on the final day of the Open Championship . . .
John Niven was born in Irvine, Ayrshire. He read English Literature at Glasgow University and spent the next ten years working in the UK music industry. He has written for the Sunday Times, The Times, Scotland on Sunday, Esquire and many other publications. He is the author of six novels including Kill Your Friends and Straight White Male. He lives in Buckinghamshire.
ALSO BY JOHN NIVEN
Music from Big Pink
Kill Your Friends
The Second Coming
Cold Hands
Straight White Male
The Sunshine Cruise Company
Here, in Scotland, golf was not an accessory to life, drawing upon one’s marginal energy; it was life, played out of the centre of one’s being.
John Updike, ‘Farrell’s Caddie’
He rallied, my tears being in unsurpassably bad taste, and said, ‘Look here, it’s only a game.’
Trying to speak softly so the children wouldn’t hear, I said, ‘Fuck you!’
Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes
For my father, John Jeffrey Niven, and my son,
Robin John Niven. Golfers who never met.
They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.
Alexander Pope
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
THE SMELL OF the place was incredible. So many scents dusting the warm air – pine, camellia, crab apple, jasmine, juniper, flowering peach, white dogwood, azalea and, of course, magnolia. Magnolia everywhere. In a daze Gary followed the gravel path through the groves of eucalyptus trees towards a beautiful building – a two-storey, whitewood structure with a veranda and balcony capped with a grey slate roof.
Heaven certainly looked a lot like Augusta National, Bobby Jones’s immortal masterpiece, the most photogenic golf course in the world.
And there was Bobby Jones himself, standing on the first tee and waving Gary over. Jones was talking to someone, another golfer, who had his back to Gary. The man had a driver threaded through his arms and was stretching from side to side, warming up, and Bobby Jones was laughing at something he was saying. A third man stood at the back of the tee, slightly apart, taking graceful, precise practice swings with an old-fashioned persimmon-headed driver. His swing was picture-perfect. Of course it was. It was Ben Hogan.
The Georgia sun was warm on Gary’s face and bright in his eyes and he had to shield himself against it with his hand as the man with his back to him began to turn round. He knew those shoulders and the thick, seamy sunburned neck. He knew who this golfing legend was before he saw his face.
‘Hello, Dad,’ Gary said.
‘Hullo, son,’ his dad said pleasantly, casually, as though he had only seen him the day before. ‘Yer cutting it fine, are ye no? This is Boab.’ Bobby Jones extended a hand and a warm smile,
‘Pleased to meet you, Gary,’ Jones said in his buttery Southern twang, ‘I kinda feel like I know you already, your dad talks so much about you.’
‘And this –’ his dad turned as Ben Hogan strolled towards them extending his hand – ‘is Ben.’
‘Mr Hogan,’ Gary said, shaking hands, his throat dry.
‘You can call me Ben, son. Now, are you boys ready to play some golf?’
‘Mugs away,’ Gary’s dad said, gesturing to the tee box. Hogan strode onto the tee, ball in hand, and Gary turned and looked down the first fairway at Augusta – its woods and waterways glittering green and silver in the morning sun.
‘Now,’ Gary’s dad whispered, leaning in close to Gary’s ear, ‘ye huv tae watch Ben. Total bandit. Always trying tae do ye on the handicaps. He’s just after trying to tell me and big Boab here he reckons he’s aff plus 1 these days. Aye, his erse in parsley. Mair like plus 3.’
Gary nodded and looked at his father. His hair had not yet gone grey, it was the thick black it had been when Gary was a little boy. ‘Dad, your hair, it –’
‘Shhh.’ His father pressed a finger to his lips as Hogan unleashed a ferocious drive, almost splitting the fairway but running too far, catching the thick right-hand side rough.
‘Oooh, nae luck,’ Gary’s dad said. ‘Heavy in there.’
Gary could hear music, faint but distant, some words about your heart being black and broken . . . seeming to come from nowhere, from the cloudless sky above them, as Bobby Jones drilled a three-wood up the middle – safe as houses, but he’d left himself a longish approach shot. ‘You’re up, son,’ Gary’s dad was saying, and now Gary was walking towards the tee, taking a ball he couldn’t remember putting there from his pocket and recognising the music now. ‘Can anyone hear the Stone Roses?’ he said.
‘Son,’ Ben Hogan said, ‘what the hell is the Stone Roses?’
‘I’m sorry, you’ll need to turn that down a wee bit.’
It was the elderly nurse with red hair, the one who Stevie liked, who’d asked him if she could bring him a cup of coffee the first night he was here.
‘Sorry, Nurse. I was just . . .’
Stevie reached over and twirled his finger around the luminous dial of his milk-white iPod, wheeling the volume down, the track fading down to background level. The little speakers were set up on the bedside tables on either side of Gary’s head. Fucking Apple, fucking Steve Jobs, Stevie thought. Self-aggrandising, hippy-face-of-corporate motherfucker. Still, yer whole CD collection oan yer hip 24/7? Cannae be arguing with that. ‘Was that one of his favourite songs?’ the nurse was asking.
‘Actually, no,’ Stevie said, standing and stretching. ‘I’m trying to wind him up. Annoy him awake.’
‘Christ, friends like you . . .’ The nurse laughed as she walked off.
The Stone Roses second LP had been responsible for one of the few serious fallings-out they’d ever had: Gary taking the party line that it was a disappointment on a par with finding out that Miss Kirk, their twenty-three-year-old, blonde third-year English teacher, was a Tory, while Stevie (perversely, always a big fan of raising his hand and saying ‘Hang on a minute’ when a consensus was forming) decided there was much to enjoy on the record. This track, for instance, ‘Ten Storey Love Song’, was as good as anything on the first album. ‘Baws,’ Gary had said. Nearly fifteen years ago now and today, after three or four pints, they could still get into it. One of those arguments that helps to define a friendship, that neither party wants resolved because it was too much fun to keep on having.
Stevie looked around the empty hospital room (Cathy had finally been persuaded to go home and get some sleep) and closed the door. He came back to the bed and looked down at his best friend, his chest rising and falling in the heavy, rhythmic pattern of someone in a deep sleep. There wasn’t so much as a flicker beneath the eyelids. Stevie ran a hand down Gary’s arm, along the plastic tube feeding him glucose, and swallowed. Not easy this: Stevie believed in no God and was not much given to Cathy-like displays of emotion. The only time he’d cried in the last ten years was when Celtic got beaten 3–2 in extra time in Seville.
‘Um . . . listen, Gary, ah, uh, Christ, ah feel like a total fud.’ Humour paving the way, leading him towards what he needed to say. ‘I know you can’t hear me by the way, but, anyway. I . . .’ But he was already realising that he was talking to himself, that there were things he needed to hear himself say about his friend. ‘I was just thinking, maybe you’re right. Second Coming . . . it’s no all that, is it? Well, maybe ‘Tears’ and ‘Love Spreads’ and ‘Tightrope’, but a lot of it’s just Led Zep knock-off, isn’t it? And . . . och,’ Gary’s hand warm in his now, the plastic valve jutting out the big vein feeling horribly alien and intrusive. ‘This is –’ Stevie tried to laugh, but it was the other thing that was on the way now, his bottom lip curling back into his mouth and his top teeth sinking down into it. ‘Just wake up for fuck’s sake, pal.’
And here they came, Stevie’s tears, making their first appearance since that terrible night in the Estadio Olimpico.
They were parked in a remote spot, a small car park between the dunes at the back of the beach. The wind was up, the first bad weather for a couple of weeks, and the Irish Sea was fairly whipping against itself, a frothing slate-grey mass tipped with white breakers. Gulls struggled to hold their positions, or were thrown hard at dramatic angles across the dark afternoon sky.
‘I mean, Jesus Christ, whit’s the chances?’ Masterson was saying, ‘Wan in a million. Tae hit a wee baw nearly, whit, three hunner yards ye said? And huv it hit someone oan the heed? Wan in a million. Stupid bloody game anyway if ye ask me.’ Masterson, having no soul, did not care for golf.
Pauline pressed her cheek against the cream leather of the passenger seat of the Mercedes and fixed her gaze on the cigarette lighter set into the walnut facia. She wasn’t really listening to him. She was thinking about when she was little and they had had to sell Harriet, her pony, after her dad went bankrupt. ‘Bye-bye, Harriet. Bye-bye,’ Pauline had said, crying and looking out the back window as the car pulled off down the long driveway from the stables. ‘Ah wis glad ye called, doll,’ Masterson went on. ‘Ah’ve been going aff ma fucking nut this past week, so ah have. Ah miss ye like fuck.’
‘I miss you too,’ Pauline sighed. ‘I just wish . . . I know it sounds terrible, with him in the hospital and everything, but I wish we could be together properly.’
‘Ah know, hen. Ah want that too. Do ye think ah don’t? But . . . if ah divorce Leanne she’ll take me tae the cleaners so she will. Ah know her. She’s a vindictive bitch so she is. Maybe in a few years when the kids are older, then it wouldnae, y’know, be so bad.’
Pauline nodded, still fixed on the cigarette lighter when suddenly another image came to her, not of a past reality but of a possible future: her and Gary old together in a small council home; him in a wheelchair while she spoon-fed him some sort of gruel. In Pauline’s vision she was badly dressed and she had no credit cards.
She burst into tears.
‘Aww, come on, hen. It’ll be all right.’ Masterson embraced her and felt the pulse in his groin. Would it be out of order to . . . ? Naw. Come tae fuck. Play the white man. That would be totally out of order.
‘I know it’s terrible and I’ll probably, I don’t know, burn in fucking hell or something,’ Pauline spoke through her tears, ‘but . . . but . . . I just keep wishing that Leanne wasn’t, wasn’t . . .’
‘Wasn’t what?’
She pulled her wet face away from his chest and got her breathing under control.
‘Around,’ Pauline said.
They looked at each other.
Pauline threw herself at him and they started kissing feverishly, his dark, bristly moustache tickling her nose.
This is bad, some part of Masterson was thinking. Fuck sake. Man lying in the hospital an aw that. But this voice was very small and feeble and he wasn’t really listening to it as Pauline clawed at his belt buckle with trembling fingers.
GARY WAS PLAYING like a dream. In heaven his swing was smooth and rhythmic and grooved, his irons boring straight and true. His drives booming and accurate. By the time they walked off the ninth green he and his dad were two holes up on Hogan and Jones.
They were taking a quick break on the tenth tee: Hogan and his dad were lighting up, Bobby Jones was buying drinks and snacks from a man in a little cart while Gary stood a little way off from the group, staring into one of the deep, dark pools that dotted Augusta. He turned to see Bobby Jones approaching, holding something out. ‘Soda?’ Jones said.
‘Thanks, Bob.’ Gary took the green can. Something called ‘Mountain Dew’. It was cold. ‘It’s something, this course of yours.’
‘Why thank you. Yeah, I like it here.’
‘Bob,’ Gary said hesitantly, fiddling with the ring pull, not looking at Jones, ‘are . . . are you God?’
Jones laughed and tilted his head back. ‘Oh Lord no. But he’s a member. Good player. Helluva temper sometimes. You know when you get thunderstorms down there? He’s missing four-footers up here.’
‘It can do that to you, can’t it?’ Gary looked over towards his father, laughing on the tee box with Hogan.
‘It can, son. It surely can.’
The two men stood there quietly for a moment, looking down into the pool. Something flashed through the black water, something grey-white and huge. Gary thought he saw an eye. Teeth. He turned to Bobby Jones.
‘Did . . . did you just see a shark in there?
Bobby Jones looked at him oddly.
‘The shark isn’t called Jaws, is it?’ Stevie said to Lee. They were sitting on plastic chairs at the foot of Gary’s hospital bed. Pauline, Cathy and Gary’s Aunt Sadie, Cathy’s sister, were in the comfier seats by the window. Sadie was wearing a powder-blue velour leisure suit. Cathy sported a similar number in black. ‘I mean,’ Stevie went on, ‘no one in the film says, “Jaws is coming to get us!” do they?’
‘Aye, awright, fuck sake!’ Lee said.
‘The shark doesn’t say, “Hi, I’m Jaws by the way.” Does it?’
Cheeky fat bastard, Lee thought. If it wisnae for his wee brother lying there in that bed he’d tan his fucking jaw. ‘Ye ken whit ah fucking mean but,’ Lee said.
‘Jaws is the name of the film.’
‘Jesus, who cares?’ Pauline said, reaching for her handbag. ‘You’re giving me a bloody headache.’
‘Aye, shut it, ya fucking sac,’ Lee said, grateful for the support.
‘Touché,’ Stevie said.
‘Boys! That’s enough!’ Cathy said, looking up from her book – a bulky potboiler called, appropriately, A Mother’s Strength.
‘Aye,’ Sadie agreed, ‘gie’s peace, the pair o’ ye!’
Lee and Stevie shut up. They were all getting a little cabin-feverish, cooped up in this room night after night for nearly a week now, drinking endless cups of plastic coffee. Eating boiled sweets and grapes.
Pauline took out a packet of painkillers and began popping a couple from the foil. Sadie eyed the packet suspiciously. ‘Pauline hen, how much did ye pay for thon tablets?’
Pauline looked at the pack. ‘Umm . . .’ Christ, here we go.
‘Cause ah’ll tell ye,’ Sadie said, levelling a sovereign-ringed finger at her, ‘see they paracetamol?’ She took great care over the word, stringing the full five syllables out on a rack: par-ah-sea-tah-moll. ‘It’s the biggest rip-aff ever. Two pound eighty-nine they’re wanting fur a packet o’ twelve at the chemist’s shop. Ah can get twenty-four o’ Toler’s own brand fur ninety-nine pee!’ For Aunt Sadie the opening of the new no-frills, ultra-budget, ultra-basics Toler’s hypermarket on the outskirts of town at the beginning of the year had been a moment of epiphany as intense and powerful as anything religion had to offer. Standing in the freezer aisle that glorious morning, hefting a one-kilo pack of minced beef priced at £1.34 in one heavily ringed fist and a box of twelve choc ices for 99p in the other, she had felt the light of God streaming upon her as radiantly as it had shone upon Moses on Sinai. From that day forward she had gone forth into this world to spread the gospel according to Toler’s.
‘Uh, really?’ Pauline would as soon have shopped at Oxfam as Toler’s.
‘Aye, hen. It’s aw packaging an that.’
Cathy went over to the bed and mopped Gary’s brow. She ran a finger along the seam of his fresh bandages. There’d be a small scar just below the hairline.
Someone coughed in the doorway and they all looked up. Auld Bert Thompson was standing there. Billy Douglas was behind him, twisting his bunnet nervously in his hands.
‘Hullo, Cathy hen,’ Bert said. ‘Ah, Billy here wanted to come and –’
‘Ah’m so sorry, Mrs Irvine,’ Billy began, advancing slowly into the room. ‘I didnae . . .’ Now Billy saw Gary – the tubes, the monitors, the bandages – and he started to cry. ‘Aw God. Whit have ah done?’ Cathy was crying too as she embraced him. She had known him vaguely for years. Nice wee buddy. No a bad bone in him.
‘Naw, Billy, c’mon. It’s no your fault. It was just wan o’ those things.’
Billy took a seat in the corner, where he sat quietly, dabbing his eyes and shaking his head while Bert stood in the middle of the room, his hands in his pockets. ‘How did the operation go, Cathy?’ he asked.
‘Aw, the doctors seemed happy enough, Bert,’ Cathy said, managing a smile. ‘We’ve just tae wait and see now.’
Gary looked back down into the pool and, as he turned his head, he thought he caught a glimpse of a great tail sweeping away into the depths. Why would they have sharks in the water hazards here? The course was difficult enough. He turned as his dad approached. ‘Hi, Dad,’ he said. ‘Are we ready to finish these guys off?’
‘Not today. We’ll have to play on as a three ball.’
‘How come? Who’s leaving?’
‘You are, son,’ his dad said, placing a hand on his shoulder. ‘Time to go.’
‘But . . .’ Gary looked into his father’s eyes, the same blue as his. Suddenly he realised that his lip was trembling. Here he was trying to talk his father into letting him stay out on the golf course with the grown-ups. He felt eight years old again. ‘I want to stay here with you.’
‘I know. Ah’d like that too. But not yet.’ Gary nodded miserably, a child accepting its fate handed down by a higher power. ‘It’ll be a while before you’re a member here.’
His father embraced him – Old Spice, the sandpapery rasp of silvery stubble, Embassy Regal and the Grouse that was famous – and suddenly it was getting colder here under the Georgia sun. More than anything, he did not want to leave this delicious dream.
‘Say hello to your mum for me. And try and keep an eye on that brother o’ yours . . .’
‘When will I see you again?’
‘Not for a wee while, pal. But I’ll be watching ye.’ His dad smiled. ‘Now remember,’ Jones and Hogan were waving goodbye from the tee box, ‘keep your head still and get through that shoulder turn. You listen to whit Bert’s telling ye now.’
Bert. The practice session. Six feet, four feet . . .
‘Cheery-bye, son.’
Suddenly Gary remembered how he got here. And, in the instant of memory, he was leaving, everything – his father, Jones and Hogan, the magnolia and eucalyptus of Augusta – swirling and dissolving as, with the sensation of rushing upwards, rising very fast from deep black water into warm blue shallows and then exploding through the surface, he was back on the second hole at Ravenscroft with Bert Thompson, the nine-iron coiled around him, holding his finishing position and watching his perfectly struck ball rolling towards the hole, oblivious to the Spaxon coming towards his head at 280 feet per second. His ball rolling closer, closer . . .
Gary shot bolt upright in the hospital bed, pulling a monitor over and sending it crashing onto the floor.
‘YA FUCKEN BEAUTY!’ he roared in a hoarse, desiccated voice that no one had heard in six days.
Pauline and Sadie screamed.
Cathy fainted.
Lee instinctively reached for his chib.
Billy Douglas clutched at his heart.
Bert jumped two feet off the ground.
Stevie dropped his coffee and came very close to shitting in his pants, but it was he who spoke first.
He looked his friend right in the eye – Gary was sitting upright now, panting, eyes wide open, arms raised above his head in classic scoring-winning-goal-in-Cup-Final fashion – and said, ‘Look who’s up!’
THE OCHILPARK ARMS, situated at a crossroads on the Barrhead Road, the old Ardgirvan to Glasgow road, was quiet. Since the motorway had been extended, taking all the passing trade away, it was about the most out of the way pub in the whole county. Masterson, at a table by the window with his Daily Standard and his lager top. He looked around the place: a couple of old farmer boys with pints of heavy at the bar with the landlord, a massive red-faced guy in his fifties cleaning glasses, their talk of Glasgow Rangers and the horse racing on the telly above the bar drifting over. He looked down at his glass and realised it was almost half-empty already. He was nervous, drinking too fast. Better slow down.
When had he last seen the big man? Properly sat down with him that is, not just seeing him from a distance down the town, going into the bookies, or emerging from the Bam or the Boabby? Seven or eight years ago was it? At someone’s wedding?
There had been a time, the 1970s, when they were teenagers, living a few houses away from each other on Wilton Terrace, when they saw each other every day. They stole the same cars, they fought the same gangs – exchanging beatings with the Cumbie and the Young Apache – and they broke into the same schools, factories and houses. Then, as friends sometimes do over the years, their tastes started to move in different directions: Masterson, shifting cheap offcuts of carpet bought down south from the back of a van, discovered that he had a talent for selling and that he could make money without the worrying possibility of jail. Similarly, somewhere in his mid-twenties, his friend realised that his real talent lay in violence. Not the random, amateur-hour violence of their teenage years, but in controlled, strategic displays of astonishing force and power.
And, think of the devil, here he was now, the floor shaking and the old boys at the bar turning from the horse racing.
Christ, Masterson thought, he’s bigger.
‘A’right, ya fucking auld prick?’ Ranta said cheerfully, the time-honoured greeting of Ayrshire men who have not sat down together in nearly a decade.
‘Ranta. Fucking hell, ye look well.’
‘Aye, yer maw, ya cunt. Whit ye drinking there?’
‘Er, lager top.’
‘Top? Away tae fuck. Ah’ll gie ye top, ya cunt. The top o’ ma boabby up yer fucking night-fighter.’
‘Aye, a’right, fuck sake. Make it a lager then.’
‘Haud oan a minute.’ Ranta checked his watch and walked over to the bar, looking up at the TV where the next race was about to start. ‘Ho, auld yin, do us a favour and turn that tae Sky Sports 2 fur a minute.’
‘Away tae fu—’ the landlord began to say. Then he turned round. He didn’t know who Ranta was, but he could tell what he was. ‘. . . we’re watching the racing.’ The sentence had come in like a storm trooper and gone out like a cripple.
Ranta looked at the man and said simply, ‘The gowf’s oan.’
‘Oh,’ the landlord said, taking a sudden deep interest, ‘is it?’ He thumbed the remote and the screen lit up green: Torsten Lathe, lining up a putt.
‘Ye been watching any of this?’ Ranta shouted over to Masterson. ‘Yer boy Linklater’s going well – ah’ve got a fucken grand oan him tae win it – but this Nazi bam here might just dae it. No a British player anywhere oan the leader board of course, useless pack o’ bastards so they ur.’
Like most people who caught the golf bug late in life the results for Ranta had been serious. He’d played a bit as a kid – everybody did around here – but it was only a few years ago, when he went out to play a few holes with one of his boys, that he hit the shot, the one that made a bell ring in his chest: a sweetly fading six-iron that came right out of the socket and flew nearly 170 yards before curling up near the pin. Ranta felt as though God had spoken to him.
They watched as Lathe’s putt – a snaking fifty-foot monster that would tie him for the lead – dribbled downhill, turning closer and closer to the hole. ‘Ooh, hello . . .’ the American commentator cooed from the TV.
‘Get tae fuck, get tae fuck,’ said Ranta, trying to will Lathe’s putt out of the hole. The ball crept nearer and nearer, but always looking like it would never get there. The crowd began to moan.
‘Has he hit it?’ the commentator asked. The ball paused on the edge of the hole for a split second and then dropped into the cup. ‘Yes he has!’
‘YA FUCKEN BLOND-HAIRED NAZI WEANRIDING BASTARD YE!’ Ranta screamed, then, turning to Masterson, completely calm again, he added, ‘Sorry, Fin, was it a lager ye wanted?’
They drank and caught up on the last ten years: two lads from the wrong side of the tracks made good. Two successful independent businessmen swapping stories, bitching about manpower issues, supply costs and the like. And their problems were not so different: errant, ungrateful employees, aggressive competitors, shrinking profit margins. However, Masterson’s commercial difficulties were rarely resolved by throwing people off bridges, or burning them alive in the boot of a car or – on one occasion – inserting a greased shotgun into a man’s rectum and pulling the trigger.
Finally, somewhere into the third pint, Ranta asked the question Masterson had been waiting for: ‘And how’s the wife? What’s her name again?’
‘Leanne.’
‘Aye, Leanne. That’s right. Sorry, pal. Fucking memory oan me sometimes.’
‘Well, tae be honest, Ranta, that’s no so good.’
‘Naw?’
‘Naw. We’ve just, ye know, drifted apart.’
‘Och, ah’m sorry tae hear that, Fin,’ Ranta said, eyeing his pint, regretting asking now.
‘Aye. In fact, ah’ve been seeing somebody else. Young bird.’ He was surprised at how quickly it was all coming out.
‘Aye?’ Ranta himself had been happily married for over thirty years. But he passed no judgement on Masterson. He only wondered if they were drawing close to whatever they were really here to talk about. People rarely called up someone like Ranta out of the blue just to swap stories about old times. And it couldn’t be for a loan – one of Ranta’s other key business activities – because Findlay was minted.
‘Aye. Ah want a divorce but Leanne would take me tae the fucken cleaners so she wid.’
‘Fuck. Bad wan.’
‘Aye, fucking bad wan is right. So ah’ve been thinking . . .’ He looked at the carpet. ‘Ah know this sounds bad, but . . .’
‘Whit?’ Ranta said, setting his pint down.
Masterson came right out and said it.
Ranta took a long swallow of lager and looked around.
‘Fucking hell, Fin,’ he said finally.
‘AYE, BUT WAS that no that same wee man that used tae work fur Donaldson the electrician’s? Mind?’
‘Naw, you’re thinking o’ Robert Fraser, he was engaged tae that wee lassie fae Saltcoats. Nice wee lassie that was kilt in thon explosion at Ardeer. Ah’m meaning Robert Ferguson. Anyway, oor Hugh sees him outside the wee Paki shop at Calder Road, eleven o’clock oan, wis it Tuesday, Danny?’
‘Aye.’
‘Tuesday morning and he’s drunk oot his mind so he is. In buying the carry-oot. By Christ, oor Hugh thought, wid ye look at the state o’ that. I –’ Aunt Sadie suddenly broke off, distracted by a glittering bauble on Pauline’s dresser. ‘Sorry, hen, dae ye know where your Pauline got thon wee jewellery box?’
‘Och, somewhere in Glasgow ah think, Sadie.’
In the bed Gary drifted up from sleep. He recognised the three voices – his mum, Aunt Sadie and Uncle Danny.
‘It’s lovely so it is,’ Sadie said. ‘Ah could do wi wan o’ them fur oor Margaret’s birthday. Anyway, whit wis I saying?’
‘Aboot Robert Ferguson?’
‘Naw, before that.’
‘Oh, thae beans?’
Gary lay there listening with his eyes closed. Voices he’d been hearing all his life, as comforting, as meaningless, as the gentle burble of a mountain stream.
‘So then ah says tae her,’ Sadie continued, ‘but hen, Toler’s ain brand are the same thing, jist cheaper. But ye ken her, Cathy, she’d argue wi ye till yer blue in the face. Mind you, her mother was the same. She disnae take it aff a stane dyke. Anyway, ah makes them and diz oor wee Sam no eat the lot and say “That wiz lovely, Nana!”? Ah!’ She cackled delightedly, ‘It wiz aw ah could dae no tae say tae her “Ah bloody telt ye, madam”, away spending money at Saintsbury’s thinking yer the bee’s knees. Don’t get me wrang now, Cathy.’ Here Sadie laid a dramatic hand on her sister’s arm, as though Cathy had been about to get Sadie very, very wrong. ‘There’s some things ah don’t mind spending the money oan. The likes o’ yer, oh whits that ice cream ah like, Danny? That H . . . Hogan-Daaz?’
‘Aye,’ Danny said.
‘Aw God, that’s tae die fur so it is. See, ah’ll pay the money for the likes o’ that but for yer basics? Naw. She’s trying tae tell me that a wean kin tell the difference between two cans o’ beans? Aye, pull the other wan, it’s got bells on it. The wean jist sat doon quite the thing and ate the lot o’ it. Did he no, Danny?’
‘Aye.’
Uncle Danny had been hearing this story, or ones very like it, for over forty years now. His AutoAye facility was superhuman, as sharpened and attuned as the senses of a tiger in the dark, wet heart of the jungle. Just by faintly monitoring Sadie’s conversations (or rather, monologues) he could sense when a response was required from him, the depth of sincerity, curiosity or surprise his ‘Aye’ would have to convey (‘Aye’ or ‘Aye?’ or ‘Aye!’), and – most crucially – whether the situation was so severe he would actually have to look up from the paper or away from the TV set.
‘Mind you, wee Sam’ll eat anything. Like his faither. Oor Hugh?’ Sadie looked off dreamily into the mid-distance, her eyes misting and her chest swelling with motherly pride for her staunchly stomached elder son. ‘. . . Oor Hugh would eat shite.’
Gary yawned and stretched in the bed.
‘Oh, Gary son, huv we wakened ye up?’ Aunt Sadie said.
‘No, it’s OK, Sadie.’
‘You’ve been sleeping a while, son,’ his mum said, coming over to him. ‘How are ye feeling?’
‘No bad.’
‘Ye were making some noise in yer sleep. Whit were ye dreaming about?’
‘Putting, I think. Baws,’ Gary said.
‘You an yer bloody golf,’ Cathy said, smiling.
‘Aye, just like his faither,’ Uncle Danny said.
‘Are ye hungry? It’s near teatime. We were just going tae have a cawfee and a wee craw sant . . .’
‘I’m starving. I quite fancy a Chinese. I think there’s a – fuck – menu by the phone in the kitchen, Mum. Fucking slut.’
Cathy flinched, but did not respond to the insult. ‘Aye, the doctor said your appetite would be coming back. What would ye like, son?’
‘Ah, chop suey? Maybe some spare ribs? Hoor. Sorry!’
‘Chop suey and spare ribs. No bother. We’ll away doonstairs. You shout if ye need anything, son. Pauline’s away oot working. She said she’d be back tonight.’
‘Aye, thanks, Mum. Tits. Fuck. Sorry, sorry, Mum.’
‘That’s OK, son. Ye cannae help it.’
Cathy, Sadie and Danny went downstairs, to their coffee and croissants. Gary listened to Ben’s barking sharpen as they neared the kitchen, exploding into full pitch as they entered it. He lay back and regarded the bedroom ceiling.
It had taken them a few days to notice how bad the swearing was. Tourette’s syndrome, Dr Robertson said. A side effect of the neurological damage he’d suffered. ‘Post-traumatic. It’s quite rare, but not unheard of.’ It manifested itself in several ways. Sometimes Gary seemed to use random single-word swearing as punctuation in sentences – ‘So if I have to – fuck – stay in bed for the next . . .’ Other times whole phrases would be rapidly jammed in there, almost as stand-alone asides. ‘Could you pass me the – cuntyafuckinghoorye – water please?’ Sometimes the swearing had sexual overtones: a large-breasted nurse they had passed in the hospital corridor on the way down to the coffee shop one morning had been greeted with ‘Ooh, jugs, ya spunky boot! Big tits fuck.’ Occasionally it had been chillingly specific: two maintenance men – one Indian and one very overweight – had arrived in his hospital room one morning to fix a radiator to be greeted with ‘Fuck. Fucking Paki fat bastard ya fat cunt and Paki ye.’ Stevie had taken the astonished janitors outside. Sometimes the swearing was also accompanied by animalistic grunts, barks and yelps.
Robertson explained to Cathy and Pauline that all of it was involuntary, a spasmic reaction not dissimilar to hiccups, and that often he would be completely unaware that he was doing it; although they noticed that sometimes Gary would insert a hurried apology into the outrage, or would swear consciously, through frustration at the condition. A sentence like this might go something like ‘Hi, Mum, I was just – OW! Ya nuddy boot, fuck – Sorry! – fucking cow, sook ma – FUCK! – sook ma dook. SHIT! SORRY! Grrrr!’
Upsetting though Cathy found all this, she took it as a small price to pay for having her son delivered back to her from the dead. Whenever a string of obscenities flurried from Gary’s mouth she simply chose to hear hiccups.
Pauline was less stoic. ‘How long will he be like this?’ she’d asked immediately.
‘It’s hard to say,’ Robertson said. ‘Hopefully, it’ll gradually fade as the brain recovers from the trauma.’
Jesus, Pauline thought. Jesus fucking wept. Another sick hand life had dealt her.
Stevie thought it a strangely appropriate affliction for a golfer to suffer from. Stand on any busy golf course when the wind was blowing in the right direction and you would be forgiven for thinking that half the population suffered from Tourette’s syndrome.
They’d kept him in for observation for a week before sending him home: two weeks minimum of absolute bed rest.
Gary took a grape and rolled it around his mouth, testing its thin skin with his teeth, making his mouth water, while he listened to the house noises around and below him: a door creaking, water rushing in copper pipes, a faint ping from a radiator, his mum and Sadie talking in the kitchen, the scrape and scuttle of Ben’s talons on the wooden floors as the monster lurched from room to room, his perma-growling routinely breaking into a series of sharp barks. (Gary sometimes pictured the dog doing this when he and Pauline were both out: Ben eyeballing a door, or staring out a cushion – literally trying to pick a fight in an empty house.)
The enormity of his boredom struck him when he realised he was counting the number of DVDs they had in the rack next to the TV. (Sixty-eight, but did you just count box sets as one?)
Another week of this?
He crossed the bedroom and looked at himself in the full-length mirror inside Pauline’s wardrobe. He lifted the corner of the turban of bandages a little and gingerly pressed the tip of his pinkie into the indent on his right temple: a concave hollow about the diameter of a ten-pence piece, with tiny dimples. The exact impression of Billy Douglas’s golf ball. The bruising was still a vivid purple at the centre, fading into a deep green, into a funky yellow as it reached the hairline.
Gary had a little notebook next to the bed in which Dr Robertson had asked him to record the occurrence, frequency and severity of a number of symptoms, from headaches, to butterflies in his stomach, to experiences of déjà vu, to unusually intense perceptions of smells. There had been the odd headache, but none of the others. Oh, there was one thing, but Robertson hadn’t mentioned it and Gary was in no rush to share it with anyone so it hadn’t made it into the notebook yet.
The erections.
There was the run-of-the-mill Morning Glory that greeted him warmly every single day. There was the sudden and vicious Afternoon Delight that appeared out of nowhere, the Ferrari of erections, taking his penis from plasticine to the kind of metal they use in space in 3.2 seconds. There was the more gradual Slow Burner, a mild pulse in his groin, followed by a lazy, yawning semi, followed by a kind of three-quarter erect twanginess that could last for several hours.
Then there was the Fury, an agonising madman of a hard-on that arrived during sleep and had the power to drag him from the bed and send him groaning and stumbling to the cold-water tap. It felt like mad cock-scientists had grafted a concrete tube with a titanium core onto his crotch while he slept. There had even been a couple of terrifying occasions where the Fury had lasted all night, finally colliding with the arrival of Morning Glory somewhere around dawn, the two joining forces in a hands-across-the-ocean deal to create the perfect storm of erections, an unassailable super-hard-on. Unwankable. The kind of boner that would take a wanking and just keep smiling right at you. Most erections, Gary reasoned, saw the jettisoning of semen as the end result. Not the Fury. Even after you had ejaculated, it just stayed there, trying to suck your testicles up into your stomach.
But maybe, he thought, this was all just a side effect of being in bed all the time, yawning and scratching, his hands forever absent-mindedly scampering down the front of his pyjamas. Nothing to trouble the doctors about.
God, he was bored.
In the corner of the bedroom, leaning up against the wardrobe, was one of his old putters. He got out of bed and crossed the room. On the floor of the wardrobe he found his putting practice machine – a plastic horseshoe with a green faux-felt cup that fired the ball back to you – and a few stray golf balls. He set the putting machine on the beige carpet at one end of the bedroom and walked to the other. One, two, three, four, five paces. Five yards. Fifteen feet. He lined up the first ball. Open stance, wrists forward, and commentator Rowland Daventry’s voice in his head – Here he is now, a tricky fifteen-footer to clinch the Open. Downhill. Gentle touch needed here. Gary made a smooth pendulum stroke and the ball trickled across the carpet and rolled neatly into the cup. Click. Rrrrrrp. Ting: the machine spat the ball straight back to him.
He set up again. Final of the World Match Play Championship. He needs this to stay in the game. This is a must make . . . Click. Rrrrrrp. Ting.
A chance here to secure the Ryder Cup for Europe . . .
Click. Rrrrrrp. Ting.
This for birdie –
Click. Rrrrrrp. Ting.
A long eagle putt –
Click. Rrrrrrp. Ting.
Can he possibly –
Click. Rrrrrrp. Ting.
Gary made fourteen putts in a row. He was oblivious to the doorbell, to the bedroom door opening, until he looked up and saw Stevie was standing there. ‘Aye aye,’ Stevie said. ‘Shouldn’t you be in bed?’
‘I’m making putts. This is for fifteen on the bounce.’
‘Fiver ye miss it.’
Click. Rrrrrrp. Ting.
‘Impressive,’ Stevie said, ‘most impressive. But –’ Stevie paused.
Gary looked at him. ‘But what?’
‘But you?’
‘Eh?’
‘But you are not a Jedi yet! Fucking hell, what’s wrong with you?’ Stevie said, handing the fiver over.
‘What films did you bring?’
Stevie produced a pair of DVDs from his carrier bag. ‘We have two Michaels – the new Haneke or the director’s cut of Heat