Nice Jumper (25 page)

Tossing my card dispassionately onto the county selector’s desk, I could think of several reasons not to hotfoot it out of Mapperley, none of which were as persuasive as the feeling in the pit of my stomach that if I stayed in the place a moment longer or was forced to reveal my score to one more Worksop parent I might have to start breaking furniture. If you’re behaving like a proper sportsman in golf, etiquette suggests that, even if you’ve played like a moron, you should stick around and don your blazer for the prize-giving – support others, in the way you hoped they would support you, in other words. I decided, just this once,
etiquette
could swivel. In the car park, I ran into Mousey, who, having notched up a score of ninety-three and fallen out with both his playing partners (they said he talked like a girl; he hid some sheep shit in their bags), expressed similar sentiments.

‘Bloody Mickey Mouse course, isn’t it?’ I said. Whenever we messed up on a particularly hilly or difficult course, we said, ‘Bloody Mickey Mouse course.’

‘I would have scored better halfway up Ben Nevis,’ said Mousey.

‘You boys fancy a lift?’ said Nick, who’d popped up out of nowhere. He was back at the wheel of the Merc, and it was the offer I’d been waiting for. I looked longingly at the flawless curves, the gunmetal finish, the proud grille and headlights. It belonged to Nick’s dad, of course, but that didn’t make it any less impressive. Why couldn’t my dad have a car like that, which he’d let me drive to tournaments in which I had no interest, for no apparent reason?

The plan had been for me to get a lift back with Bob Boffinger, who would be leaving in another hour or two. I thought about the final part of my conversation with my dad as he dropped me off that morning. (Dad: Now, you’ll get a lift back with Bob, won’t you? Me: Of course. Dad: You promise you won’t go with Nick? Me: Don’t be silly. You know me better than that. He’s a maniac.) Then I picked it up and put it into a
cupboard
at the back of my mind marked ‘Give A Shit?’, which I’d been using a lot lately.

I turned to Nick, unable not to smile. ‘What the hell do
you
think?’ I said.

Watching from afar as Nick manoeuvred an Austin Allegro into a wheelie bin on a peaceful private cul-de-sac was one thing; sitting directly behind him as he hurtled down a heaving, narrow suburban street in a 2.5-litre death machine was something else entirely. If you discounted a couple of visits to Silverstone and Castle Donington, I had until this point only had one first-hand experience of genuinely fast driving: the time when I was four and my appendix burst, and my dad, foot stapled to the floor, had bravely risked the Sphincter’s life in order to save mine. But next to this, that was an underwater slug race. As we careered towards them, the red lights seemed to change shape and show deference to the Merc, like normally hardhearted bouncers spotting an esteemed punter in the queue. In our wake, pensioners didn’t so much jump out of the way as freeze in the manner of mortal souls dealing with a paranormal force. As we clasped corners and shaved bends, gravity seemed to suck extra-hard in empathy.

After twenty minutes of illegal right turns, screeching brakes and obscure T-junctions, we rounded a corner and finally found ourselves back in front of
a
familiar-looking gate. On top of the gate was a sign. It said: ‘Mapperley Golf Club’.

Out of it came a red Ford Fiesta XR3i, containing three members of the junior team from Sherwood Forest Golf Club.

‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ asked Nick.

I knew what was coming next. This was no longer sheer hedonism; this was pride. Sherwood Forest juniors had beaten us in the league every year since 1982, and, if you ignored Worksop, probably represented Cripsley junior section’s archest enemies. So what if we didn’t even know the names of the kids in the car? This wasn’t about specifics; it was about revenge. Through four red lights, we stayed glued to the Fiesta’s tail. Lorries, bollards, no-waiting zones, pedestrians – these things were just scenery. At the junction with Carlton Hill, we nosed in front. But these boys clearly had local knowledge on their side. As we passed the Public Hair barbers’ shop, we realized they’d dangled a right-only-lane carrot in front of our noses.

Now they were a couple of car lengths in front. At the pelican crossing before Gedling village, Nick decided it was time to get mean, swerving neatly around a Chihuahua and edging back level with the XR3i. By the time we reached the turn into Richmond Avenue, there was a very real possibility of us going past on the bend, where the road opened up for the bus
lane.
As Nick floored the accelerator and whipped around a bollard, I saw that it was actually happening: Cripsley were finally beating Sherwood at something! As we scorched past, hollering out of the open window, the Fiesta seemed to slow and admit defeat. From the back seat, I turned to give our enemies one final two-fingered salute.

And saw that they had stopped for fish and chips.

His adrenalin undiminished, Nick pressed on. I surreptitiously checked the speedometer: seventy now, in a forty-mile-an-hour zone. It was obvious he could handle it, but my big worry was the hairpin bend, coming up in about half a mile, where Mapperley turned into St Annes and the downhill slope to the city centre kicked in. Having been to primary school nearby, I’d seen the aftermath of smash-ups there: spacious family estate cars transformed into fun-size runabouts with one flippant tap of the accelerator. I thought about pointing this out to Nick, but concluded it would make me look squarer than a paving slab. Still, I decided now might be as useful a time as any to put my seat belt on.

‘What’s the matter, Tom?’ asked Nick, clocking me in the mirror. ‘You getting scared? Don’t worry. I’ve driven on a professional rally track, y’know.’

He hardly had time to finish the sentence when we went in to the spin.

I remember it all in a series of freeze-frames now –
the
wheels seemingly slipping out from underneath us, the Volvo looming, the surprisingly soft and yielding impact, the big stone wall a couple of inches from my nose. The collision wasn’t remarkably scary, or life-altering, or dissonant, just remarkably slow even though, since Nick was driving at seventy-five miles per hour at the time, it cannot have taken more than a second or two. It was only when I stumbled out onto the pavement and went over the facts that I realized how lucky we’d been.

1. We had been in a high-speed, head-on collision with a Volvo.

2. We were all unharmed, if you ignored Nick’s whiplash and Mousey’s temporary loss of the power of speech.

3. I’d buckled my seat belt approximately point two of a second before impact.

4. The Volvo’s exterior suggested that it had crashed at speed, but into a paper aeroplane.

5. The Merc looked as if a giant had picked it up, folded it in three, used it as chewing gum for twenty minutes, then spat it out.

6. If you drove past the scene, you’d look solemnly at the Merc in the knowledge that anyone who had been in it was going to spend the rest of his life in unbearable agony, but only if he was very lucky.

7. Nick might be doing precisely that, when his dad found out about this.

For a moment, we were bona-fide local news: cars slowed, passengers stared, police and ambulancemen comforted, pedestrians lingered. It was tempting to make the most of the attention and complain about a partially fractured throat, but that would have been dishonest. I was no more shaken than I might have been if I’d fallen out of a dodgem. In fact, after the commotion dissipated, the entire experience swiftly became about as mundane as any other occasion when you have to spend an hour sitting on a mashed-in stone wall staring at the launderette across the road. I occupied myself by planning a way to keep all this from my parents, and wondering how I’d get home. After that, all I could do was wait for the inevitable: Bob Boffinger rounding the corner on his way back to Cripsley, double-taking at the view out of his side window like a man discovering he has woken up in the arms of a horse, and very nearly causing yet more heartache for Nottingham’s overworked emergency services.

Then, one by one, we were all at it. First Ashley in the wheezing seventy-quid Fiesta his dad bought him for Christmas, then Robin in an obscure Japanese monstrosity known only as the Tank, then myself in the inherited Sphincter, then finally – quite a lot later – Jamie in (typical!) the brand new Vauxhall Corsa his parents presented him with on his seventeenth
birthday.
If Nick’s crash passed quickly into Cripsley folklore, we learned approximately nothing from it. No matter how painstakingly our parents or driving instructors had grilled us on the rules of the road during our time as provisional licence holders, from the moment we passed our tests our frame of motoring reference stretched only as far as the space between the Dukes of Hazzard and Starsky and Hutch. Anything else was for grandads. We drove like rave musicians, not golfers. We all crashed and burned (almost literally in Ashley’s case: he narrowly escaped when his Fiesta caught fire on the way back from a tournament in Staffordshire). We all wanted to. We all screamed things like ‘Sheep’, ‘Gigolo Whippet’ and ‘Skirting Board’ out of the window at passers-by while we did it.

Then, when we had done that, we started driving really, really slowly. Not safe slowly, but stupid slowly. The kind of slowly where you pack eight teenagers into the car, drive at eleven miles per hour in a forty-mile-per-hour zone for no sensible reason, wait while a queue of thirty or so cars builds up behind you, wait again until one of them tries to pass you, then, as they do, suddenly start driving
very very quickly
and pulling faces at them.

When we tired of the simple pleasures of holding up traffic, props were introduced. These were usually random plastic body parts, brought along by Ben, whose dad taught Biology at one of Cripsley’s
comprehensive
schools. A fully reclined seat and a carefully placed endoskeleton could cause havoc in a traffic jam, but timing and placement could make the all-important difference between a convincing ghostly driver and a clavicle in the face. Far simpler yet equally satisfying was Wave Hello, Say Goodbye, the game where the driver turns the steering wheel from below with his real arms, while simultaneously waving to the car next to him with his fake ones. Failing that, there was always Spleen Throwing. This was the most adaptable game, in that all it involved was a good throwing arm, a car (parked or moving – it didn’t matter) with an open window or sunroof, and one of the apparently limitless number of plastic spleens that Ben’s dad brought home from work. We didn’t always hit our target, but even the best basketball players miss the hoop sometimes. And, besides, they have an advantage: they’re throwing balls, not spleens.

When I look back and try to pinpoint the moment in my life when I first felt more man than boy, I don’t think of stubble or voting slips or fumbling teenage sex; I think of driving at thirty miles over the speed limit, fifteen minutes after passing my driving test. One of the indignities of being an obsessive junior golfer is being made to feel that you’re a lot younger than you are. At eighteen, you can conceivably still be a lowly ‘junior’; at twenty-one, an only marginally more impressive ‘youth’. Long after your college lecturers
have
started to respect you as an adult and your school uniform has gone to the charity shop, your golfing superiors are admonishing you for wearing trainers and talking down to you in the kind of tone that warns of after-game detentions. In space, no one can hear you scream. In a golf club, no one can hear your voice break. The introduction of a screech of teenage brakes into this environment is louder than bombs. By driving up to the golf course by our own volition, we were saying many things to the old grouchbags at Cripsley that our golf had only hinted at: ‘Fear me! I’m coming up behind you! I’m bigger than you now, and soon I’m going to be even bigger than that!’ It wasn’t a coincidence that all but a couple of us passed our driving test before our eighteenth birthday. It was a downright prerequisite. Without a car, we were trapped in a mini-kingdom where we could be punished for anything from an overhit three-wood to a wayward denim shirt. With a car, we were free.

Adults always talked approvingly about cars that would get them ‘from A to B’. We didn’t see much fun in that. We wanted vehicles that would get us from D to M, via C, X and, if at all possible, G. Every journey, whether it was to McDonald’s in Cripsley town centre or the Sandmoor Future Masters in Leeds, was an adventure. I had longed for a driving licence to liberate me from reliance on my dad for lifts and furnish me with the independence to stay at the golf course for as
long
as I pleased. Countless times I had spread out my competition entry forms on my bedroom floor and dreamed of the time when I could take off to any amateur golf tournament I fancied. I’d looked at the course names – Beau Desert, Coxmoor, Whittington Barracks – and pined for pines, gorged on gorse. What exactly was a desert doing in Staffordshire and where did a beau fit into it? What was a barracks doing on a golf course? I felt like the answers to questions like these could change my life. But I hadn’t even guessed at the unadulterated thrill of cramming five of your best friends into a vehicle that you’re not responsible for and driving to your local garden centre for no obvious purpose besides seeing how many handbrake turns you can do before you make your tyres bald. I’d also overlooked the way a fragile ego can feast on the superficial popularity that can come from being the Man with the Lifts. Most heinously of all, I’d neglected to allow for the caprices and flaws of adolescent will-power. Again.

However, perhaps I’m being a little harsh on myself. On all of us. Was driving more fun than golf? Sometimes. But, in the long run, probably not. We probably sensed, deep down, that before long we’d look upon it in the same way as our parents did, and get behind the wheel with the awe drained from our soul and replaced by a sense of grim inevitability. Golf, on the other hand, would be here for ever. If
it
wasn’t, why would so many of the living dead play it?