The Last Weekend (7 page)

‘You’ve always hated games,’ she said, heaping bol onto spag in our steamed-up kitchen, ‘ever since that time in the park.’

‘Don’t remind me,’ I said, though what I meant was don’t remind my father, who luckily couldn’t hear us over the television.

‘But it’s true, pet. I’ll never forget it.’

It was a story she liked to recount, even though she’d not been present. I must have been about five, and my dad was teaching me to ride a bike in the local park. Unlike most kids, I wasn’t allowed stabilisers: ‘The more you fall off,’ he said, ‘the faster you’ll learn.’ That didn’t prove true, of course, but I’d finally got the hang and was wobbling along a path beside the rec, near one of the goals, when a ball came from nowhere, smacked me in the face and sent me flying. ‘Come on, son,
you’re not dead,’ my dad said as I lay there. Between my howls, I was aware of a teenager in football shorts approaching sheepishly. I waited for my dad to shout at him or beat him up. Instead he picked up the ball and handed it back. ‘Not to worry, lad, it were an accident.’ The hurt of that made me howl louder. I was still howling when we got home. ‘You take the fucking little wimp,’ my dad said, handing me over, ‘I’ve had it with him.’ My mother sat me in her lap and wiped my face with a kitchen towel. ‘There, there, sweetheart, whatever’s happened?’ Eventually my sobs ebbed and I told her.

The episode convinced my mother that I was too ‘sensitive’ for rough games. We began making trips to the local library – a place of sanctuary, unlike the park. Though no great reader herself, she encouraged me to think that I was. Each week we’d borrow some new title – an encyclopedia, picture dictionary,
I-Spy
book or hobby guide – to satisfy my supposed intelligence. While other kids played cricket and football in the street behind our house, I sat at the kitchen table making cardboard pirate masks or reading about the Incas. Later I moved on to Airfix kits. And there were always jigsaws, the pieces growing smaller as I grew bigger. I remember one puzzle which showed racehorses jumping over a high fence – an especially difficult puzzle, because of all the browns (brushwood, saddles, manes and tails). Finally I cracked it and showed it to my dad, thinking the subject might interest him. ‘Very good,’ he said, without looking up from his paper.

The only close friend I had in those years was Rod, who turned up halfway through primary school: he’d come from a village somewhere down south and my mother approved of him because he said ‘please’ and ‘thank you'. She might have been less approving if she’d known about his penknife. Rod was keen on wildlife and found it wherever we went: in the
park, by the lock-up garages, down at the canal. In truth, the wildlife he was keenest on was dead: a rubbery fledgling tipped from its nest, a pigeon milling with maggots, a flattened tomcat. He used his penknife only to dissect corpses, not to create them, but he was adept and had a strong stomach, stronger than mine. Over time, I too saw the appeal of things that were dead, which couldn’t bite or sting or hurt you. I was sorry when Rod went away again, as suddenly as he’d come; my mother thought his dad must have got a job somewhere. I was sadder still because we’d had an argument, down by the canal, the last time I saw him: I’d asked to borrow his penknife overnight but he wouldn’t let me and we started fighting. After Rod’s disappearance I went back to books, jigsaw puzzles and Airfix kits. Later I was given a Rubik’s cube, a Christmas present from Uncle Jimmy, which I keep on my desk to this day.

At primary school the other kids didn’t seem to care when I came top in maths and spelling tests: the worst they called me was ‘swot’ and ‘teacher’s pet'. But at secondary school being a clever clogs became a major liability and I sometimes got things wrong deliberately. Sport might have been a way to gain some kudos. But the games teachers didn’t give me a chance. And when the bald little gym instructor, Mr MacPresley (MacPress-Up as we called him) sneered at my lack of coordination, I was happy to join the ranks of the obese, skeletal, myopic, couldn’t-be-bothered and last-to-be-picked – a ‘spaz’ and ‘malco'. My mother wrote notes to get me out of swimming lessons, claiming I was allergic to chlorine. But that still left football and cricket, and the torments they brought with them: a wet towel slap-flicked against my buttocks in a wintry changing room, or the slow descent of a hard red ball towards my hiding place out on the boundary. When you’ve been told you’re rubbish at games, you believe it. Not until Ollie’s golf
lessons, and those summer evenings after work at the jam factory, did I realise that sport could be enjoyable.

The sense of well-being didn’t last. When Ollie returned to uni in late September, Achilles heel mended, he had no time for me. Rugby took up his weekends and evenings, and our choice of second-year law courses failed to overlap, so I barely saw him, despite sharing the same house. We did occasionally manage nine holes (my earnings from the jam factory had gone into buying a set of clubs) and even the odd game of squash. But the companionship of the previous term was gone. His bedroom was next to mine but he left early and returned late, without a knock or hello. It was as if he’d thought better of our friendship.

The low point came one Saturday night. Ollie’s team (the firsts, of course) had won at rugby that day, down in London, and he got back in a good mood around eight thirty. I was on my own at the house as usual. Taking pity, he asked me to join him for a drink. There was a pub right across from our house, but he insisted on driving us to the university, on the grounds we’d have more chance of meeting girls there. To my knowledge he’d never brought a girl home, but I’d seen how they looked at him and didn’t doubt he’d had a few. As he drove he talked about playing the field. ‘Play your cards right and we’ll both score tonight,’ he grinned. I told myself I’d been paranoid about his recent aloofness: here we were, in his Mini, on a lads’ night out.

I doubt he knew that the rest of the rugby team would be in the union bar. What I did object to was his behaviour when they called across from their loud and beery table: after a futile attempt to introduce everyone (as if I could possibly recall fourteen names, let alone ones like Slammer, Rancid, Chucky, Stewpole, Oggy and Bean), he sat down to join them, and left me to my own devices. Although there was a seat for
me, and one of the team (Oggy, I think) tried to make conversation, it wasn’t the evening I’d anticipated, excluding as it did the chance to be alone with Ollie while also meeting girls. It became even less of the evening I’d anticipated at closing time, when the entire team took itself off for a curry. Ollie invited me to join them but I could tell it wasn’t a genuine invitation. ‘Fine, suit yourself,’ was all he said when I declined. Nor did he offer to drive me home again, just left me to walk back alone.

For a few weeks, I didn’t speak to Ollie. Not that he was around much not to speak to, but whenever I passed him I let him know with a cold stare what I thought of his conduct. Perhaps it’s as well he was so preoccupied with himself that he didn’t notice. Over time our relationship healed, like his tendon, and by the end of the second year, we were friends again. To him, we’d never
not
been friends.

‘You sound so gay,’ Em says, when I talk about that time. ‘Anyone would think you were lovers and he jilted you.’ She has a point. But though I was hurt by Ollie, then and later — hurt past all surgery — I’m not someone who bears grudges and honestly had no wish to hurt him back. We were friends. We did stuff. We even played golf together.

The first hole at Sandylands is a par-four dog-leg: from the tee, you drive uphill, over an earth mound, towards a narrow strip of fairway, to the left of which is bracken and to the right an alder copse deemed out of bounds; then from the crest (supposing you’ve reached it) you hit your second leftward and downhill, to a two-level green, the risk being that you’ll overshoot and fetch up in the hidden bunker at the back. I had never played there, of course; but during the journey in his MGB Ollie described each hole in detail. He’d not played much lately, he said, but for him, ‘not much’ probably
meant twice weekly. And he had the advantage of knowing the course from years before. He could still remember a thirty-foot putt on the par-three third, and his father’s pride and envy when he holed it. He told me this as he drove, with the roof down and the breeze fraying his hair. It might just have been the wind but his eyes watered as he spoke — less from the memory of his father, I suspected, than from recalling the trueness of that putt.

I was wearing the clothes I’d come in: baggy shorts, a T-shirt and trainers. Ollie had shorts, too, but they were tailored. The rest of him — shoes, socks, collared shirt, glove — was impeccably dress-code.

‘Your honour, I believe,’ he said.

According to Ollie there are four kinds of sportsmen: those who think they’re good and are; those who think they’re good and aren’t; those who think they’re bad and aren’t; those who think they’re bad and are. Though I put myself in the last category and Ollie in the first, he has developed a cautious respect for my game. But to suggest I tee off first, on the grounds I’d won the last time we played, was ridiculous. (Surely he remembered: it was in Surrey and he had beaten me five and four.)

‘No, yours,’ I said, in the hope that Ollie would screw up.

His ball pinged sweetly, soared two hundred yards or more, and landed perfectly on the hillcrest.

There was no one around to watch me drive off. But my hand shook as I placed the ball on the tee and Ollie reiterated the rules of our contest. Scoring by holes won rather than total shots taken; one mis-hit tee shot to be discarded without penalty; maximum of eight shots on any hole; any putt of less than three feet to be conceded — that’s to say a gimme.

They were the rules we’d always played by, and they stopped you missing nine-inch putts or reaching double figures at a
single hole. But that didn’t make me any less nervous as I settled, or failed to settle, to the ball.

I topped my first drive into the earth fifty yards away. The second sliced into the alder copse.

‘OK,
two
discarded drives without penalty,’ Ollie said, finally remembering how bad my golf is. ‘And I’m giving you a two-hole start, remember.’

He’d always given me a start but this time he hadn’t made it clear. Perhaps he’d been waiting to see how out of practice I was before committing himself.

‘Sounds fair enough,’ I said, and it was, more than fair. But he played (or used to) off a handicap of twelve whereas I wasn’t good enough to
have
a handicap. Even with an eight-hole start, I would probably lose.

My third drive flew weak but straight, to land just below the hillcrest, fifty yards behind his.

I lugged my clubs to where my ball sat, while Ollie trolleyed onward to his. A three-iron struck properly would have got me to the green but there was no power in my shot — without the help of the down-sloping, sun-hardened fairway, I’d have reached only halfway instead of ending up a mere thirty yards short. Ollie was less lucky: his ball landed right by the pin but didn’t hold up, bouncing and running on into the bunker. From there he wedged his sand shot to within five feet, whereas my pitch veered off wildly, to the far left edge of the green. But my long putt finished close to the hole — a gimme — whereas his short one caught the lip and slipped away. A half, then. Though my five shots were really seven, I didn’t argue. I needed all the help I could get.

‘Beginner’s luck,’ I said to Ollie, imagining I’d used my quota. But his arcing drive on the second tee took a freakish bounce into tangled rough, whereas mine kept low and ran on nicely. Two underhit shots from me, and a retrieving slash
and perfect six-iron from him, and our balls sat close together on the green. His putt teetered on the brink but failed to drop. Mine, wildly overhit, would have run thirty feet past but, being straight, hit the cup en route, bobbled up and plopped down three feet away. Another gimme. Another half. ‘Good stuff,’ he said, as we walked to the par-three third.

Ollie’s tee shot looked a beauty, heading green-centre, but a sudden gust took it left into a bunker. Mine was under-strength, but the same west wind — now getting up — saved it from a clump of gorse bushes and the grassy mound beyond nudged it diagonally to the nearside of the green.

‘What club did you play?’ Ollie asked, as I plucked my tee from the earth.

‘A three-iron.’

‘A three-iron,’ he said, giving me a look like one I’d recently had at the gym, when some muscled freak saw how few weights were on my triceps bar. ‘It’s only 150 yards to the green!’

‘You know what I’m like, Ollie.’

‘I’d forgotten. But it’s coming back.’

I’d always suspected that he liked playing golf with me as a break from serious competition — because he didn’t have to push himself to win. Still, as we walked up the third in the late-afternoon sun — the heather simmering with heat haze and bees — I realised I’d got him worried. I heard him cursing in the rough as his first pitch squirted ten feet and his second flew over the green. He recovered well from there, almost holing out with a chip, but meanwhile I’d three-putted, ineptly but safely, for a four. Third hole to me, which because of the two-hole advantage I’d been handed at the start put me three up with six to play.

Even if I lost in the end — and win or lose didn’t really matter to me — I was making a game of it.

The fourth was a par five, 450 yards, about 400 yards too
far for my liking. Both our tee shots were lamentable, mine sliced, Ollie’s hooked, but he was the less lucky since his ball — which I crossed the fairway to help him look for — couldn’t be found. That meant him dropping a shot, as well as playing out of tangled rough, so he was on four before reaching the fairway. For a moment I imagined winning this hole, too. But my second shot was topped, my third found the ditch, and the fourth, fifth and sixth failed to get me out of it, so I was still 200 yards short of the hole when I played my eighth, the maximum number of strokes permitted by Ollie’s system. I pocketed the ball. After his wretched start, Ollie’s fifth and sixth shots were beauties, and he’d a ten-foot putt for the double bogey that would win him the hole. He missed — just. I was still three ahead.