The Amateurs (18 page)

S
TEVIE 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.

‘Are you OK?’ Stevie asked, the golf bag over one shoulder, their player registration forms in his free hand.

‘Aye, fine.’

Up the stone steps and into the polished wood and thick carpeting of the clubhouse lobby. Stevie strode towards the registration desk set up at the end of the long lobby, Gary following behind, his gaze flickering around, catching faces, faces he knew well.

There was Torsten Lathe (
fucking Nazi wank baws
) talking to Kevin McKerrick (
ooh ya dirty Fenian prick ye
).

It felt like his head was buckling under the nerves and stress, his interior monologue becoming a blur of obscenities, every one horribly shaped to fit with whatever he looked at. He bit his lip and tried to keep his head down.
Just keep following Stevie
. But
he couldn’t help it. He glanced to his right–Bent Hendricks (
fanny fuck poofy name fuck
) explaining something to commentator Rowland Daventry (
FuckEnglishtitscunt
). Gary began to twitch and had to clamp a hand over his mouth to stifle a yelp. He looked around to see if anyone had noticed and there was Montgomery Hymen
(fuckingbignoseJewFUCK)
laughing at something James Honeydew III (
wankYankwank
) was saying.

Stevie handed Gary’s registration documents over to a smiling middle-aged lady. ‘Ah yes,’ she said, handing over a form. ‘Could you fill this in please, Mr Irvine?’

‘Ah, aye…f—’ He was flushed, sweating. Stevie looked at him.

‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

‘Yeah, just…hot.’ Gary glanced to his left. The world number seven, the black American player Cyrus Cheeks–six and a half feet tall and bald as a schemie’s tyre–was checking in next to him. He looked down at Gary and smiled.

That did it.

‘OWW!’ Gary yelped. The woman behind the desk jumped a little and everyone looked at him.

Oh shit
, Stevie thought.

‘Are you OK, fella?’ Cheeks asked.

‘Fuckingprick,’ Gary said in a thick, rapid accent. ‘Fucking golfprick.’

‘Excuse me?’ Cheeks said, still smiling uncertainly.

‘Sorry,’ Stevie said, turning Gary away from him, ‘he’s just excited. Can,’ Stevie said to the woman behind the desk, ‘can we just–’

‘Big tits,’ Gary said.

‘
I beg your pardon?
’ the woman said.

‘Sorry! Fucking big-titted hoor jugs spunk FUCK!’

The woman gasped, everyone in the place looking at them
now. Cheeks leaned in towards them. ‘Hey, what’s the problem here?’

Gary turned to face Cheeks, a man whose game he’d admired for years, and said, ‘Fucking massive darkie ye!’ ‘Darkie’ pronounced ‘Dorr-kay’ in the full Ayrshire manner and incomprehensible to Cheeks’ ears. ‘Sorry! Shit! Fucking Malteser-heeded cunt. FUCK! Grrrrrrr!’

‘What’d he say?’ Cheeks asked Stevie.

‘YA FUCKING BLACK B—’ Gary began.

Before he could finish the sentence Stevie booted Gary in the balls as hard as he possibly could and he went down growling in agony in front of everyone in the clubhouse lobby.

‘Sorry about that, folks,’ Stevie said, helping Gary to his feet and towards the door. He turned back to the woman on the desk, her jaw lolling on the table among her passes, badges and forms. ‘Thanks for your help. We’ll come back and sort it out later.’

The woman watched them go. She recovered her composure and reached for her telephone.

After Pauline moved in with Katrina, in recognition of the fact that their relationship–while still secret–was moving onto a new level, Masterson gave her the loveliest thing he had ever given her, a beautiful artefact that made Pauline’s heart leap in her chest: a new credit card. Gary’s calls went unanswered on her new mobile (ice blue, slim as her new credit card) and his messages unchecked. When he did cross her mind over those first few days it was in the form of an abstract problem she had yet to fully solve.

As often as he could manage it, Masterson would come over to visit her, arriving after dark and parking a little way along the street. (And Ben’s reaction to the first time he
observed Masterson defiling Pauline was a super-fury of such ferocity–his snapping jaws inches from Masterson’s pale buttocks–that Pauline realised Ben may have
loved
Gary all along.)

‘Do we have to live here?’ Pauline asked him in bed one night. ‘I thought we could maybe move somewhere a bit more…cosmopolitan.’

The thought of living anywhere other than Ardgirvan had never crossed Masterson’s mind. Where else was there?

‘What, like…Ayr?’ he said cautiously.

‘I was thinking maybe Glasgow?’

‘Glasgow?’ he repeated, managing to make it sound like ‘Uzbekistan’.

‘Yeah. There’s some beautiful new houses being built on the South Side, near Shawlands? Private development. Katrina and I had a wee nosy in the estate agent’s the other day.’

‘Aye, well. Let’s think about it, eh?’

‘I’ll get them to send the house details for us to have a look at. Maybe we–’

‘Jesus Christ, Pauline! Like I’ve no got enough on my plate the now?’

Silence. The same silence that always arose whenever the subject of Leanne swam near the surface of the conversation. Pauline had not asked exactly what Masterson had decided to do in connection with Leanne, but she knew they weren’t getting a divorce.

In the mind of the sociopath, subjects like this are dropped into a box labelled ‘UNPLEASANT’. The box itself is then firmly sealed and tucked away in a distant corner of the vast, dark, spider-filled warehouse of the unconscious. The conscious mind is then furnished with a pretty confection that is presented to the world as ‘truth’, this ‘truth’ gradually
becoming reality in the mind of the sociopath. In Pauline’s case this process was already quite far along.

Leanne really was going to have some kind of ‘accident’.

‘Sorry,’ Pauline said. ‘I was just trying to think about our new life together.’

‘Aye, ah’m sorry too. Ah didnae mean to snap at ye, hen,’ he said, pulling her naked body closer to him in the warm bed.

B
ORN FROM THE
S
OCIETY OF
S
T
A
NDREWS
G
OLFERS AND
awarded royal status in 1834 by King William IV himself, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews is the historic and venerable body responsible for overseeing the rules and etiquette surrounding the sport. In its long and distinguished history the R&A has grappled with issues as varied and intricate as the acceptable dimensions of golf balls, the appropriate dress code for players, and the notion of exactly what constitutes excessively slow play on the course. It had never had to deal with an issue like the one now before R&A Chairman Jeremy Park and his four-man disciplinary committee in the small conference room at Royal Troon.

Stevie and Gary sat before the committee like schoolboys in front of the headmaster, Gary twisting his visor in his hands.

Did players swear and indulge in violent displays of temper during competition play? Yes, of course they did. The miscreants were fined and admonished, but such outbursts were regarded as a necessary by-product of a sport that could turn
a man from a striding god into a salivating mental patient in the 1.4 seconds it took to swing a golf club. But, a player swearing at an official in the clubhouse? Making lewd and unsavoury sexual comments towards her? Insulting other competitors, making racist comments, and then being physically assaulted by their own caddie? Park had never heard the like.

‘I’ve never heard the like,’ he said, turning left and right to look at his fellow committee members. ‘And you claim this is a medical condition? Something called…Tourette’s syndrome?’

‘Yes, Mr Park. Sir.’ Gary couldn’t look him in the eye. ‘I, when it happens, I don’t even know that I’m doing it. Fffff—’ With great effort he stopped himself.

‘Extraordinary,’ one of the other committee members said. Stevie looked along the line of blazers, ties and grey faces.

‘And what,’ one of them asked, ‘are we to make of this?’ He held up a copy of the sports section of that morning’s
Daily Standard
: a photo of Gary, raising his club after finishing his round at Musselburgh. Above the photograph the headline screamed: ‘
HOLE IN WAN-KER
!’

He tossed the paper across to them. April had been thorough; the accident, the Tourette’s, the Kluver-Bucy, the eighteenth green at Ravenscroft. ‘Your pal, the tabloid journalist,’ Stevie said as Gary looked at the little photo of April at the top of the page.

‘We’re very sorry for your…afflictions,’ Park said, leaning forward and clasping his hands together, ‘but we have to think about the risk of an outburst of this sort damaging the reputation of the Open. We have to think of your playing partners too. How might they be affected if, during their backswing, you decided to shout something like–what did you
say to Mrs Porter?’ Park picked up a sheet of paper, squinted at it and swallowed as he read the words ‘
big-titted whore jugs spunk fuck
’. ‘Yes, I’m afraid we have no option but to disqualify you. I’m really very sorry.’

Gary burst into tears.

Park and the disciplinary committee looked on astonished as he fell to his knees, wringing his hands, the words coming out in gasps between the sobs:
‘OH GOD! Oh p-please…l-let me…p-play!’

‘On what grounds are you disqualifying him?’ Stevie said loudly enough to be heard over the sobbing, looking directly at Park, ignoring Gary.

‘On the grounds that he might disrupt the competition,’ Park replied.

‘Might?’ Stevie said.

‘Well, yes.’

‘I don’t believe it’s legal to punish someone because of what they “might” do. If that was the case half the bloody country would be locked up.’

‘Legal?’ someone said.

‘Also, and correct me if I’m wrong,’ Stevie continued, ‘but didn’t Drew Keel “disrupt the competition” when he smashed a driver in half at Hoylake three years ago? Didn’t Calvin Linklater “disrupt the competition” when he told a spectator he was going to “break his fucking nose” for trying to take a photo during his backswing last year? Didn’t–’

‘Yes, yes,’ Park said impatiently, ‘but these were all one-off incidents. Completely unforeseeable. In this case there’s medical…evidence that–’

‘There’s what?’

‘Medical evidence.’

‘Tourette’s syndrome is not “medical evidence” of anything.
It’s a
handicap
. The kind of handicap recognised by the British Medical Association.’ Stevie let this sink in for a moment before continuing. ‘There’s a load of journalists from all the Scottish papers out there.’ Stevie jerked a thumb in the direction of the outside world. ‘How do you think they’d like a story about the R&A disqualifying a local boy–someone from just along the road who’s made it all the way through the qualifying process–just because he suffers from a recognised disability?’

‘We…’ Park began and then stopped.

On the floor Gary had stopped crying. He dried his eyes with his sleeve, looking up at them like a wretched, beaten animal.

‘Now,’ Stevie crossed his legs and continued in the same even tone, ‘if you want to take away a young man’s lifelong dream, if you want to tarnish the whole idea of what the “Open” championship is supposed to be about, then go ahead and disqualify him before he’s even hit a ball. But make no mistake, my friends–you will be entering a shitstorm of negative press like you wouldn’t believe. You’ll think that a front-page story implying you’re all kiddie fiddlers is a positive development.’

Park exhaled a long breath through his teeth. He tapped his pen on his notepad. He turned to the man on his left and they whispered. He turned to the man on his right and they whispered. He cleared his throat and looked down at Gary, still hunched on the floor.

‘One further incident of this nature…’ Park began.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ Stevie said, extending a hand to help Gary up from the carpet and leading him off towards the door, looking very much like a circus entertainer leading a shambling chimp by the hand. The door closed behind them.

‘Extraordinary,’ the man on Park’s right said.

‘Make sure he’s off the tee very early for the first two rounds,’ Park said. ‘Before the TV coverage really starts.’

‘And then?’ another man said.

‘Come on,’ Park said, ‘the chances of him making the cut are about a thousand to one.’