Nice Jumper Read Free Page A

course’s practice ground – it is downright unacceptable.
    ‘I mean it,’ I say, unhooking my seat belt. ‘I’m getting out now. Now . You may as well stop, because if you don’t stop, I’m going to jump out anyway.’
    ‘Well, if you insist. But I don’t understand why. I was hoping that maybe I could stand outside the clubhouse and watch you tee off.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘You know – just quickly, and then go. I wouldn’t try to talk to anyone or anything.’
    ‘No. No chance. Please, please, please, could you stop the car now, and let me out.’
    ‘Well, all right, but—’
    ‘ Now! ’
    Slamming the car door a little more forcefully than intended, I turn to check on my artillery.
    One 1979 Slazenger golf bag, gut pink, passed on from friend of friend of grandfather.
    One thirties seven-iron, custom-made – for a Smurf, judging by the length of its shaft.
    One half-set of scuffed, randomly orphaned irons, on loan from junior coach.
    One seventh-hand putter, closely resembling a boulder on a stick.
    Sixteen and a quarter wooden tee pegs.
    Two cartons of Happy Shopper orange ‘drink’.
    One ‘Hollyhocks of the British Isles’ tea towel, ’borrowed’ from kitchen drawer.
    Five second-hand two-piece golf balls, procured from undergrowth beside second green.
    I appear to be all set …
    The short ad in the local paper boasted ‘Free Golf Lessons for the Under-fifteens’, and nobody ever seems able to agree upon who spotted it. My mum claims I did, but I’m pretty sure the likelihood of me at thirteen reading a newspaper would have been about as high as the likelihood of me today putting on a pair of muddy jogging bottoms and nipping across the road with a football under my arm to ask if my 84-year-old neighbour, Clara Woodbridge, is ‘playing’. My grandad claims that he placed the ad himself, but tends to undermine the authority of this statement by shortly afterwards claiming that he single-handedly overthrew Hitler’s Germany. My dad, whose memory is the best out of the three, recalls the ad being pushed under the front door one morning by an anonymous source. It’s the last explanation that seems most appropriate, but my own guess is that my parents spotted the ad together.
    They needn’t feel ashamed about this. They weren’t to know that golf would be the One. I forgive them, and can totally understand their thought processes. It probably appeared to them that, between the ages of nine and thirteen, I’d worked my way through every sport in the average teenage boy’s lexicon. I was good at everything, brilliant at nothing, and brilliant was the only thing I cared about being. The positive aspect of having an athletic kid, from my parents’ point of view, was that it kept me away from the Village Gang. The Village Gang was something I drifted in and out of, depending upon whether I was just getting into, or just getting out of, a new sport. It was led by Sean Ryder, who not only had nearly the same name as Shaun Ryder, the lead singer of the Manchester indie dance group Happy Mondays, but nearly the same face as well. Several years after I stopped hanging around with Sean Ryder, I saw Shaun Ryder performing on Top of the Pops and was stunned to discover that my old friend had opted for a cooler way of spelling his name and made something of his life, but then I checked the chronology and realized that at the exact time Happy Mondays were mastering their 1988 album Bummed , Sean Ryder would have been engaged in dangling Mark Spittal off the Swingate bridge by his ankles in an attempt to bribe him into lending out his maths homework.
    I imagine that around the time my parents saw the ad, I was going through one of my dejected stages – I seem to remember it was the same summer I failed in my attempt to secure a place on the county table-tennis team – and spending a little too much time in Ryder’s company for their liking. Golf probably seemed like a potentially effective distraction: a