Loopy (4 page)

“That bunker is a bloody disgrace. Full of pebbles. A man could spend the rest of his life down there trying to get out of it. I won't be long in giving the groundsman a piece of my mind. Give me the putter like a good man.”

Larry knew about putters. It was the shortest club in the bag with a face as flat and as smooth as that of a hurley stick. He plucked it from the bag and handed it to O'Hara, who took three strokes with it before the ball finally disappeared into the hole. As they walked off the green and made for the next tee, O'Hara explained, “I'll give myself a seven there and that's being kind. If I hadn't hit it off the fairway, I would have probably made a four, and that is the par for that hole. Does any of this make any sense to you?”

Larry shook his head and grinned. “Not really, sir.”

“Fair enough, I'm probably making the whole business of golf sound too complicated. It's not that bad, once you know the basics. A bit like geometry and Mr. Euclid, eh?”

Again Larry forced a grin. As far as he was concerned, geometry and golf were much the same. One was as boring and complicated as the other. O'Hara was speaking again.

“The next hole is a wide-open one. Why don't you try to play a bit. Might help you understand why I play this game. Anyway, there's no one around to see you. Normally you have to be a member, but who is to know?”

O'Hara selected a wooden club and smacked the ball down the fairway. Then he handed the same club to Larry and teed a ball up on a wooden peg, saying, “Now try to hit it like I did.”

Larry missed it completely. He was about to launch another furious attack on the tiny white ball when O'Hara intervened.

“Hold it right there a second, young man. Grip the club as if you're shaking hands with it, then give it the same hit as if you were using a hurley. Keep your head still and don't look up after you've hit the bloody ball. And for God's sake, swing
easy!
”

Larry did as he was told. There was a solid click as club met ball. Remembering not to look up, he had no idea where the ball had gone. O'Hara was watching its progress with amazement. He uttered three words Larry had never heard him use before.

“Jaysus Christ Almighty!”

CHAPTER TWO

The weather seemed to change from minute to minute on the winding road to Lisbeg. A giant patchwork quilt stretched out before them toward the distant hills, its tiny green squares stitched together with gray stone walls. On the other side of the road lay the ocean, slate gray today with white sea horses prancing across its foam-flecked waves.

One moment the wind would chase away the clouds, sending their giant shadows scurrying across the landscape only to drown in the vast Atlantic. The waves trapped shards of light, causing their crests to sparkle like a scattering of diamonds in the afternoon sun. The next moment a dark thundercloud, shot through with rain and hail, loomed overhead, painting land and sea a dull, battleship gray.

Now the hailstones beat a tattoo on the roof, and the lone wiper struggled to keep the windscreen clear, as the driver, Mick Corkery, slowed his bus down outside Lisbeg.

“There it is, Mick,” growled Seamus Norbert, “plain as the nose on your face!”

A billboard advertising the new call center with its promise of sixty new jobs for Lisbeg stood proudly in the middle of a green field.

“Not much doing there yet.”

“That's not the point, Mick.” Norbert shook his head furiously as he explained patiently, as if to a backward child, “That call center was as good as promised to Trabane last year and no more about it!”

A voice from the back of the bus interrupted, “I heard Lisbeg gave them the site for nothing and that's what clinched it.”

Norbert shrugged his shoulders and abruptly changed the subject. Now his voice rose and strengthened as he got up from his seat in the front and turned around to address the Trabane team and substitutes seated behind him.

“Now, men, we all know why we're here. I want every single one of you to go out on that pitch and play your heart out. There is not one of you here that needs reminding Lisbeg Rovers have got the better of us for the past few years. Okay, so we were robbed by that blind bastard of a referee last year, just as we were robbed of that call center we have just passed. What's past is past and there's damn all we can do about it. But the game today is the most important one any of you have ever played up to this. You're playing not just for the honor and glory of Trabane Gaels.” A ragged cheer from somewhere near the back was silenced by Norbert's scowl. “It's going to take more than a few shouts to beat the Rovers on their home ground. We need to come out fighting and be prepared to spill every drop of blood in our bodies so that we can bring the cup back to Trabane.”

The bus slowed to make the turn into the hurling pitch. The slender goalposts at either end of the muddy pitch swayed in the gale as Larry retied the laces of his boots. The team had already changed before they got on the bus in Trabane. The last time they had played in Lisbeg, during the short walk from the dilapidated changing rooms to the pitch, they had been pelted with not merely abuse but assorted missiles. Their center forward was bleeding from a cut on the side of his head even before the game began, the result of a well-aimed coin.

This time the bus, on Norbert's instructions, had driven almost onto the pitch so that his team did not have to run the gauntlet of Lisbeg supporters. Just before he left his seat, Larry crossed himself, then ran out onto the pitch to a mixture of cheers and catcalls.

Though the hail that had peppered the bus earlier on had stopped, an icy wind cut through players and spectators alike. It was a hard-fought battle, frequently interrupted by stoppages for injuries. The Lisbeg team was bigger, which gave them an advantage of four points when the whistle blew to end the first half. This deficit seemed not to trouble Norbert as he urged his team to stick to their game plan.

“Keep on playing the ball out to the wings every chance you get. That way you'll run the legs off their backs. Most of 'em are too big to stand the pace in the mud right to the end. Mark my words, they'll run out of steam very soon, and that's when ye'll get the better of them.”

For once, Norbert had read the game correctly. The Lisbeg team started to flag noticeably in the last quarter as the hail slanted across the pitch, pricking exposed flesh like steel knitting needles. As they tired, some of the Lisbeg players resorted to fouling their opposite number in an effort to stop the lighter and faster Trabane team from passing them with the ball. Larry counted himself lucky to avoid serious injury from the flailing hurleys and crunching shoulder charges that became ever more frequent as the final whistle approached.

Over the noise of the wind screaming in off the Atlantic, Larry heard the shrill blast of the referee's whistle. First he thought it was to indicate that the game was over, but instead it signaled a seventy in the dying seconds of the roughest, dirtiest match of his young life. Now, all of a sudden, the outcome of Lisbeg Rovers versus Trabane Gaels depended on him alone. With the scores level, his arms and legs were aching from the pounding he had got all through the match from his opposite number, a stocky sheep farmer almost twice his age. Seamus Norbert was rushing backward and forward along the sideline, screeching like a dervish. His cap had blown off his head, again throwing his strands of hair into total disarray.

A mocking voice from deep within the Lisbeg crowd screamed, “For Jaysus' sakes, will ya take a look at baldy running over to his pet boy to tell him what to do!”

Larry wasn't sure what this “pet boy” thing meant, but instinctively he didn't like it. He had little time to brood on it, however, for Norbert was screaming in his ear, “There's nothing left on the clock. The ref'll blow full time after you've hit. Go for the point and be sure to aim to the left a bit to allow for the wind. We're depending on you!”

As Larry placed the ball on a tuft of grass for a cleaner contact between it and the hurley stick, he tried hard to ignore the wind and rain. He knew he must be positive and focus instead on the hours of practice he had put in, often in weather as bad as this, for just this moment. Plucking a sodden leather ball off the wet ground with a hurley, flicking it upward as though tossing a pancake before striking it in midair, was difficult enough. In taking the free there would normally have been two options. He could aim to drop the sliotair in front of the Lisbeg goalmouth and hope that one of the Trabane forwards would redirect it past the goalkeeper and into the net for a goal and three precious points. This the forwards had signally failed to do all afternoon, hence Norbert's insistence that he go for the winning point with only seconds left. But in this weather it was a tall order. Even when dry, a leather sliotair could not always be relied on to fly straight and true. Having been battered and scuffed for the entire match, and now sodden and slippery as a bar of soap, it would require a superhuman effort and not a little good fortune to send it between those distant posts, barely visible through the driving rain.

The referee, out of breath like the players, was standing close by. “Take it quick, young fella. I'm blowing time in twenty seconds.”

Larry readjusted the sliotair on the tuft of grass to make it sit up a fraction more off the muddy ground. He paused and sucked air deep into his lungs as he took dead aim at the red mark on the cross bar, midway between the posts now bending in the vicious crosswind. Trying to keep his head still, he stooped to pick up the ball with the hurley, then tapping it upward much as a tennis player might toss up a service ball, he swung the hurley back over his shoulder in a slow, looping arc. At the top of his swing, he paused for a fraction of a second before pulling it downward with both hands and allowing his wrists to flick the hurley at the dropping ball in a blur of speed. The sound of polished ash meeting damp leather echoed around the ground as the sliotair arched skyward. It seemed to hang in the wind for an eternity, pinned against the gray overcast by the anxious gaze of players and spectators alike. Larry was confident that he had hit it hard enough, but had he allowed enough for the wind?

Two white-coated umpires stationed behind the posts watched closely as the sliotair drifted erratically in the wind far above their heads. One raised a flag to indicate that the ball had passed between the posts and that Trabane Gaels had won the match by a single point. The other hesitated, then, as if in response to the barrage of abuse and catcalls coming from the Lisbeg section of the crowd, waved his flag parallel to the ground. This signaled that the ball had gone wide of its mark.

The referee had to decide now, but before he could, all hell broke loose. Norbert, marooned on the wrong side of field and separated from the Trabane supporters by the width of the pitch, was set upon and flung to the ground. As Larry rushed to his aid, he was felled by a vicious, slashing blow to the thigh from the hurley of the sheep farmer. Larry fell instantly, and the last thing he remembered before losing consciousness was the referee, ignoring the protests of both camps, signaling that the match had been abandoned with only seconds left on the clock before the final whistle.

The decision pleased no one, yet it averted an almost certain riot. Tempers eventually cooled as the crowds made their way out onto the road. Norbert got back to his feet and called for a water bottle—which he emptied over Larry's head and neck. When Larry came to, Norbert asked him how he felt.

“I think my leg is broke.”

He was lifted gingerly into the back of someone's car and rushed to the local doctor. He examined the injured, thought nothing was broken, but made an appointment to have it x-rayed the following Wednesday just in case. He gave Larry a painkilling injection, strapped up the thigh, and told him to rest it as much as possible before escorting him to the door of Corkery's bus. Norbert paid the doctor, then helped Larry along the narrow aisle to the seat at the very back. It was the only seat long enough for him to lie down on, as if in bed.

The players' disappointment was almost as pervasive as the smell of damp, sweating bodies. Their hurried departure from the pitch meant that they had not changed out of their wet playing gear.

“The bloody ball was between the posts for sure and certain,” Norbert assured his charges, now muddied, bruised, and bristling with resentment. As the steam rose from them, forcing the driver to clear the mist from inside the windscreen with the sleeve of his coat, whispered plans were being made to give the Lisbeg players a warm reception at the ceili.

“We'll appeal to the County Board of the GAA, of course!” Then, turning to Larry, huddled in the seat next to him, Norbert added in a voice so low that no one else could hear, “For all the good 'twill do us! Now, listen to me, young man, no matter what that nurse said, rest or no shagging rest, you had better turn up for the ceili tonight. I promised that the teams would be there, and Seamus Norbert is a man of his word!”

Larry protested in vain. In Trabane he climbed gingerly out of the bus and into Norbert's car. When Brona saw her son, supported by Norbert, limping across the cobblestone yard, she felt as though her worst nightmares had come true. Larry was crippled for life, she told herself, leaving her—and her alone—to run the farm. Norbert tried to reassure her in a torrent of words, each one stumbling over the next.

“Only a small bit of a bruise, missus. Nothing at all to worry about. He'll be right as rain in a day or two. That's what the doctor said, missus. Isn't it true for me?”

For a brief moment Norbert scowled fiercely at Larry, as if daring him to contradict what he had blurted out, before pressing on doggedly, “Sure, like I said, he'll be right as rain in a day or two. 'Twas well worth it, I promise you, missus, if only to see the look on the faces of them Lisbeg supporters. Savages, every single one of them. We'd have won only for that blind bastard, in pardon to you, missus, of an umpire. As it was, the ref abandoned the game, may he roast in hell for all eternity.”