Nice Jumper Read Free

around a field with a big metal stick! For no apparent reason! And guess what else? The whole time, he didn’t do any rude or sexy stuff with a girl, not once.’
    If it comes down to a choice between the written word and a packed Soho bar, I’ll take the coward’s option every time.
    Yet, simultaneously, I wonder if the written way isn’t the most frightening way of all. I’m not just composing a teenage memoir here; I’m opening up the gates to a life that stopped feeling like my own several aeons ago, but which, at the same time, despite everything I’ve told myself in the past, might be the same life that formed a vast part of who I am. Once I begin coming clean, I wonder what kind of terrifying personal truths I might uncover. I embark on this mission fully aware that when it’s over I probably won’t be the same person I was when it began, and that I have no way of predicting the extent of the changes that might take place. Similarly, I’m conscious that while the first three reasons for writing about my life as a teen golf alien are logical and persuasive enough, it’s the fourth and final reason that’s the most visceral and dangerous.
    And that’s the fact that somewhere, somehow, I know I kind of miss it.

‘ IF YOU COULD just drop me here, that would be perfect.’
    ‘Don’t be silly. You don’t want to be lugging that great big bag all the way up the hill.’
    ‘No, honestly, I could do with the walk. My head feels a bit stuffy, actually.’
    It’s September 1988, and I’m in my dad’s car, trying to break it to him as tactfully as possible that I would prefer it if, from this point on, we weren’t related. It’s nothing personal, he has to understand. In fact, some people might say that his corroding 1975 Toyota Corona is quite a tasteful automobile. But not me. And certainly not the people I’m about to mix with. I’m praying that I won’t have to resort to a ‘tough love’ strategy here, hoping that the grinding of my teeth and the sight of my hand hovering anxiously over the door handle will subtly yet vehemently transmit the message that if he doesn’t stop the car within the next thirteen seconds he is going to render the rest of my life an abject nightmare.
    ‘Are you sure? I mean, I don’t see why I can’t just take you up to the top of the road and drop you there.’
    ‘I’m sure. Please .’ The vehicle is still moving, but I am now inching the door open.
    Two weeks ago, I was somehow granted membership at Cripsley Edge, one of the East Midlands’ more exclusive golf clubs. My dad tells me he is glad about this, but knows nothing about golf – has never played or wanted to play. The game is probably as alien to him as an expenses-paid weekend at a Rotary Club convention. For two months, drawing on all my reserves of patience, I’ve just about managed to deal with these fundamental character flaws. He has unquestioningly taxied me up to my new Utopia for my weekly practice sessions, parked the main family car, a 1986 Vauxhall Astra, surreptitiously on the gravel behind the professional’s shop, avoiding the members’ car park and clubhouse, and kept interference into my golf life down to an acceptable minimum. But today is different. I can sense a change in him, a new curiosity. What’s more, in a singularly unfortunate bit of timing, my mum has taken the Astra to the local garden centre, and we are travelling in the family’s very own emergency vehicle, a tin-can-on-wheels known to anyone who has ever been intimately associated with it as the Sphincter – a car which, if driven at over 21 miles per hour, makes a noise suggestive of a giant, senile mechanical pig struggling to free a knot in its colostomy bag. All this would have been tricky enough on its own, but since today is the very day I am scheduled to play my first competitive round – the culmination of three months of coaching, three months of waiting and fantasizing from the vantage point of the