Fifty/Fifty and Other Stories (6 page)

When I went to university I started playing again with friends, something I had not really done for a long time. And as a student, I had developed a whole new approach to the game. I learnt many things studying psychology which I was certain translated straight to golf. Things like how practising a movement leads to increased accuracy - scientific evidence for the need for several practice swings. How muscle memory worked – an explanation for why a good swing feels just right. Perception and proprioception – the way human physiology and neurology has evolved in such a way that we innately target things.

In fact, most of the things I learned were immediately considered for their potential benefit to my game. I stopped worrying about how I took the club away from the ball, where my hands were at the top of my back-swing, how I tucked my shoulder under my chin. My golf improved dramatically.

We lived just across the river from Fife, the Kingdom of Golf. On Sunday evenings we drank in the pubs of St Andrews, and afterwards we lay on our backs in the sand and smoked cigarettes in the bunkers on the 16th fairway of the Old Course. The lights from the hotel shone out towards the sea, and made us invisible to the patrons inside.

We played in November when the cold Scottish winter freezes the air in the lungs and solidifies the nose. The wind in that part of the world comes down from the Arctic and pushes you and your golf ball every which way. A bad shot stings the hands, and is taken sideways by the wind at Mach-speed. Many times we walked in off the course in the dark, unable to see where the holes had gone.

We played in June when the ground is sun-hardened, the heather thick and unforgiving as the course we liked to play at was prepared for qualifying for The Open. The forests in deepest Fife are dense, and trees lined the loamy fairways, the springy ground seeming to move beneath your legs. One of the fairways on the front nine was cratered from a Second World War bomb, 50 miles off target from the shipping and military installations on the Firth of Forth. A perfect bowl, fifty feet across and twenty feet deep. The local rule - play it as it lies.

When I returned home and began to play with my father again, I played for one thing: the feeling when you connect the centre of your golf club to the bottom of the golf ball, and feel it fly into the air, penetrating, rising, soaring. The whoosh of the dimples parting the atmosphere, the blades of grass swept up into the air, the plough of a good-shaped divot into the earth. I don’t think he has ever quite understood, consistent with the majority of people I have ever had a friendly game with, where my pleasure in golf comes from . I know that they enjoy hitting good golf shots as much as I do, but they don’t really get that I am not competitive. I don’t mind playing against an opponent, but neither do I genuinely care if I win or lose. My satisfaction comes from how I play, which is not necessarily the same thing as how well I have scored. A pure strike, sending the ball into the ether at a velocity and with a trajectory near perfection will leave me grinning like an idiot for days.

In the five years I had been away, I had grown as a person, and golf was a way to reconnect with my father. We walked the course together, just a few hundred yards from where he had grown up, becoming friends as we did so. I don’t play with him as much as I should. When I come home from a long day, I don’t feel like I have the energy to hike the foothills where our club is situated Most of the time going out and playing will clear my head, and striding down the first fairway, I am instantly wide awake and super-aware. But the odd time, I find myself zig-zagging around the course, unable to find my sweet spot, my true swing. It puts me in a bad mood for days, and this is why sometimes I make excuses.

These days, when I catch up with the friends I played with at university, I find that I have turned into one of those dads at the barbecue, talking swings and technique. The golfing wisdom which I like to impart however, and which has been working successfully for me for quite a few years now, in so much as that I enjoy playing, is very, very simple. The ball. Hit the ball. Just hit the fucking ball. Don’t talk to me about the latest club technology and 45 quid for a dozen balls. Titanium, ceramic, new-and-improved launch angle, spin velocity, straighter, truer, change your life oh my god our golf clubs are so amazing, buy them! I don’t need to hear about your new grip, or the swing plane you saw on TV.

Hit the ball. That is all.

Fifty/Fifty

O
n a wet Tuesday night in July I was called out to an attempted suicide on the Forth Rail Bridge. We get these calls a few times a year, except that it is always on the road bridge, which has a pedestrian walkway making it easy to access, and so is a favourite spot for jumpers in central Scotland. This is partly why South Queensferry has a larger police contingent than a place of its size would usually need.

We have a laminated plastic folder which sets out the protocols for dealing with suicides, attempted or otherwise. There are bullet points and bold lettering to emphasise the important sections. Above all we are told not to put anyone else’s safety at risk. Usually, the hardest part is preventing pile-ups on the bridge as cars and trucks slow down to see what is happening. Getting permission to close the bridge takes too long, and is generally a bad idea, as the traffic builds up very quickly until there is suddenly a huge audience.

In my short career, I have attended six such call outs. Three have jumped and three have been talked down. Page one of our manual tells us that we must establish a rapport by assigning one person to be the negotiator. On the two occasions where I have been the negotiator one has jumped and one came down. I am currently fifty/fifty.

The one who jumped was a man in his forties. He only spoke to me for around ten minutes before he went. He had lost his highly-paid job in the banking sector, and then when he couldn’t find another one he had taken to sitting around the house drinking. His wife had left him and taken their three kids, and was now living down south with a man she had befriended over the internet. The jumper’s name was Albert Scott. He told me to call him Scotty. I’ll never forget the despair in his eyes.

The psychologist at the mandatory assessment told me that even if I had managed to stop him then, he would have tried again and again until he succeeded. His was not a cry for help.

At his funeral the two oldest children wept openly, whilst the youngest, who was only two or three, held his mother’s hand. She was stony-faced throughout, and stared at a spot on the ground a few feet in front of her as the empty coffin was lowered into the earth. Judging by their expressions, Albert Scott’s extended family did not appear to be letting grief get in the way of anger. The last words anyone ever heard him speak were, simply, “Tell them all I’m sorry...”

The one who came down was a younger guy, only twenty-three. We talked for ninety minutes before I got him back onto the walkway and into a pair of handcuffs. The handcuffs are necessary for everyone’s safety. Page four of the manual.

His name was Bernard, and he had driven from Stirling in his mother’s car. Over the course of an hour and a half he told me that his girlfriend of four years had left him six months previously. She hadn’t given him any reason at all, and so Bernard had followed her around the country for weeks until he saw her with someone else, sharing a kiss in the back of a Costa Coffee on Princes Street in Edinburgh. He wasn’t really suicidal; he just wanted the girl to know how much her betrayal had hurt him.

When I arrived he was hysterical, demanding that she be found and brought there to listen to him or else he would jump. We contacted Bernard’s mother instead, and when she arrived she talked to him as softly as one would a baby, and the instant we had him on the ground she battered him around the ear with a closed fist and swore at him until she was purple with rage and Bernard was crying in lumps. There is no doubt in my mind that Bernard will not be making any more romantic gestures like that.

On the rainy Tuesday night in July the call came in around half nine in the evening, dusk beginning to settle on the Firth of Forth. The rain clouds meant that it was a little darker than it would usually be at that time of year and the two bridges were already lit up, the road bridge with the lights of the traffic over its back and the rail bridge with spotlights from below. The driver of a southbound train had spotted someone walking along the other track and had raised the alarm.

My partner and I parked the patrol car at Dalmeny Station and dropped down from the platform there onto the tracks and started towards the bridge. John and I have been teamed together for just over a year now, and we get on well. You have to be able to trust your partner completely in a job as unpredictable as ours. He is 42, with 2 children, the oldest just about to start university in the autumn. It is difficult to faze him after twenty years in the service, as he has seen it all before, several times. Like most policeman of his age, he is overweight, and just 5 minutes into our bridge walk he was breathing heavily. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead when my torch caught his face.

At that end the bridge towers over Deep Sea World. There is an old quarry pit far below which is filled with sludge-coloured water, steep sided walls reaching up towards the burnt red-orange of the bridge. The car park at that time of night was almost deserted, and somewhere down below a seal barked up at us. There was a fishy smell in my nostrils as we walked along an access path with our torches swinging across the tracks.

The call had gone to the rail network headquarters to stop all trains, but no sooner had we made it onto the superstructure of the bridge proper than I felt a building vibration through my feet as everything began to shudder, a train roaring and thundering down at us. The noise of its wheels and the rush of air as it went past was enough to turn my knuckles white as I clung to the railing around the service gangway. We had almost two metres to spare, but one slip on the wet metal underfoot amid the disorientation of the passing juggernaut could have spelt disaster.

It took what felt like twenty minutes for the three-carriage train to pass us, and then it was gone, rumbling on down the tracks towards Edinburgh. John and I stood still for several minutes, with barely a word between us. It was the first time I had ever seen him look scared.

“
You good, John?” I asked.

“
Aye,” he said. “Hope there’s not too many more of those.” He got on his radio, berating the dispatcher for not having stopped traffic on the bridge. There was a swift apology, a crackle of static and then nothing but the rushing of the wind through the bridge.

“
Keep an eye out,” I said, “We must be getting close.”

The bridge is a mile and a half long, but the height and the repetitive pattern of the sleepers, girders, and rivets made it very difficult to judge how far we had come. It was almost completely dark now, and we relied on our torches to find our footing. As we reached what I guessed to be the midpoint of the bridge there was a shout from the dark.

“
Don’t come any closer!” It was a woman’s voice. “I swear, I’ll do it, don’t come any closer.”

“
Do you want to do it, or shall I?” asked John in a low voice.

“
I’ll talk to her,” I said. I could tell the long walk across the bridge had taken its toll on him, and he seemed jittery, either from the height, or the close encounter with the train. 

“
Miss.” I said. “Stay where you are. I’m a police officer, and I’m here to help. What’s your name?”

“
I don’t need any help!” she shouted.

“
Please Miss, just stay where you are. My name is Tom, what’s yours?” I was edging towards where I thought she was, but the angle meant I couldn’t see her past one of the girders.