We jockey back and forth for the next three holes. On the fifth, a short par three, me and Nodge hit mediocre shots well short of the green. Colin does an air shot, missing the ball completely, and we let him have another go for free. He’s going to lose anyway. Then Tony does exactly the same thing.
One stroke, says Nodge.
Bullshit, says Tony.
You can’t play one set of rules for Colin and another for me.
One stroke, I say firmly. I’m thinking of the mulligan I never got.
Tony turns on me, spreads his hands and speaks evenly as if he were patiently explaining something to an idiot child.
That’s not fair, Frankie. No one ever counts air strokes. Not once – not once – since we started playing together has anyone ever counted an air stroke. And now, suddenly, air strokes count.
Big-boys rules, Tone. It’s only fair, says Nodge, looking stern.
How can it be fair when you give Colin a free stroke and not me?
Nodge and I don’t say anything.
Colin fidgets with his tees and says, Look, I’ll count my air shot. Then we –
That’s not the point.
Tony almost spits when he says this.
Nodge and I are shaking our heads with, as it happens, almost perfectly synchronized movements. Tony pulls himself up to his full height – over six foot – reaches into his pocket, takes out a wad of notes and peels off three, rolls them in a ball and throws them on to the ground. The wind begins to move them; neither of us makes a move to pick them up.
If the betting money is so fucking important to you, here it is.
With this, Tony shoots his club into the bag and makes as if he’s going to walk off the course.
The money’s got nothing to do with it, says Nodge quickly. It’s the principle of the thing.
Look, says Colin irrelevantly, I said I’ll give up the air shot.
No one seems to hear him. I start to plead with Tony. It’s gone too far now.
Don’t walk off, Tony. Finish the game.
But he grabs the handle of his trolley and begins to walk.
I feel myself beginning to crumple. Tony’s gone for the nuclear option and I’m not up for it.
OK, look, take the shot.
Nodge says nothing. Tony pauses momentarily. You can tell he doesn’t want to go through with the walk-out either.
For fuck’s sake! shouts Colin.
We all look in amazement at him. He’s gone red in the face. For one awful moment, I think he’s about to cry.
Why can’t we just be… just be mates? Why have we got to go through all this? I mean, I don’t know… it’s pointless. Can’t we just stop it? Please?
The whole situation is getting out of kilter now. There’s a danger, the worst of all dangers. The danger that we’re going to be embarrassed.
I look towards Colin and say, You’re right. Colin’s right. It’s stupid. Tony, take the stroke. Come on. Take the stroke.
Nodge also nods, albeit reluctantly. He doesn’t want a scene either.
Sure. Whatever. Go ahead.
Tony’s almost mollified, but not quite. It’s a long way back from the place where he’s ended up.
I don’t want the stroke. Not if you’re going to be pissy about it. Not if it’s just because of… of… crybaby here.
Crybaby. The memory of Colin’s debagging all those years ago comes back to me in a horrible flash. Colin recoils, like he’s been slapped. But Tony has stopped moving his trolley and playing with the head of his three iron. You can see he doesn’t want to go, but he doesn’t want to stay if it means losing face.
Look, why don’t we all start again? I say. My shot and Nodge’s were pretty crap anyway. We’ll just pretend we’ve all arrived at the hole for the first time and we’ll go from there.
OK, says Nodge tentatively, whose shot, although crap, was better than mine.
OK then, says Tony, as if he’s doing everyone a big favour.
Colin nods and immediately begins to tee up the ball again.
We each hit off from the fifth again. Tony this time hits a beautiful ball, which bounces on the green six feet from the flag. Nodge also gets on the green and even Colin makes the rough on the edge. Feeling the pressure of three good shots in front of me, I fluff completely and send the ball skewing off into a patch of woodland. It’s all I can do to keep from hurling my club after it.
Bad luck, says Tony.
He’s embarrassed now, but pleased none the less. I make my face into a neutral mask and head towards the clump of trees. When I reach it, there’s no sign of my ball. The rough is very deep, and cut grass, dead and brown, adds to the impossibility of the task. I hack about with an eight iron, trying to uncover it, but three minutes of searching yields no results.
I see Tony and Colin heading back towards me to help me look. My body is hidden by the horizontal branches of a monkey puzzle tree. Nodge calls, and Colin and Tony momentarily look back towards him. Something in me gives and I reach in my pocket and fish out my spare ball, hesitate for a second, then let it drop. I tell myself this isn’t cheating, just levelling the pitch. Tony shouldn’t have got the free shot. When I look up again, Tony still has his head turned away from me, but Colin has resumed walking in my direction. I gesture with a thumbs up.
It’s OK. I’ve found it.
Tony turns and raises his hand in acknowledgement. Colin doesn’t move and holds himself towards where I’m standing. He stands like this for several seconds, then slowly turns and makes his way back towards the green.
I look down. I pick up the eight iron that I’ve been using to search for the first ball, stand to one side and take a slow swing backwards. The down stroke connects beautifully. The ball loops up into the air, hangs for a second, then drops on to the green. A single bounce takes it past the hole six inches for what should be an easy uphill putt.
Tony and Nodge putt out, Nodge jammily sinking an improbable twenty-footer after his ball is diverted towards the centre of the hole by a stray twig on the green. Colin goes down in two and I sink mine. I’m standing level with Tony now and two behind Nodge, with four holes to play. The atmosphere between us is tense and hostile.
For the next hole, you have to drive over a small stream. Me, Colin and Tony all clear it easily, but Nodge mishits and drops the ball straight into the middle. Above, the sky is getting darker and darker. There is a distant rumble of thunder.
We walk down to the bank of the stream. Incredibly, the ball has skimmed off the water and is resting on a hollow in a flat rock. The stream is only one or two feet deep, but it flows fast and the ball is clearly unplayable.
You’d better drop one, I say, in a tone that I calculate to be sympathetic but which comes across as mocking.
I don’t think so, says Nodge.
He bends over and begins taking off his shoes.
What are you doing?
Playing the ball.
You can’t play the ball. It’s in the middle of the fucking river.
So?
The shoes are off now. He’s hitching up his trousers to knee level and reaching for what looks like a high iron. Silver fish dart past the rock where the ball balances. Droplets of water fill the dimples that punctuate the sphere of the white globe.
We watch Nodge lower himself over the bank into the shallow stream. Tony and me exchange disbelieving glances.
You two are always too competitive. It spoils things, says Tony sarcastically, parodying Nodge’s complaint at the first tee.
Nodge doesn’t answer. He hasn’t rolled his trousers up far enough and the stream is catching the gathered material just below his knees, turning the pale thread dark. The floor of the river is uneven and he’s finding it hard to keep upright. He makes it as far as the rock where the ball is, then tries to straddle either side of it. He half falls in the manoeuvre and, struggling to keep balance, drops his club, which sinks immediately.
The outline of the club can be seen clearly on the bottom, s
hifting slightly in the movement of the water in a soft bed of mud. He bends down and fishes it out, and begins wiping it on his shirt to dry the handle. Great brown streaks appear on the material as the mud comes away. Nodge’s face remains composed in a rictus of concentration and intense determination. None of us speaks for fear of provoking him.
Again he straddles the rock, this time finding what appears to be firm footing. He tries to line up the club head with the ball, taking short, awkward strokes that stop a couple of inches short of contact. I feel suddenly in my bones that he’s actually going to pull it off, that famous luck of his coming like the cavalry to save him once more.
He goes for the real swing. There’s mud on his shirt and his trousers are soaked. The motion of the stream is rocking him back and forth on his heels slightly. The club goes back slowly, for no more than a half-swing. Nodge has his eyes fixed on the ball, which shivers in the slight breeze.
He takes the club back to the end of the arc, then begins to swing it down in a sudden rush. His head comes up, eyes leave the ball. The counter-motion of the club pushes him backwards, and the club head misses the ball almost completely, just catching it with enough of a whisper to send it dribbling off the rock and into the water. Very slowly, Nodge’s body collapses backwards. Trying desperately to balance himself, he waves the club in the air, but to no avail. Top-heavy, he goes over in an almost perfect reverse head-over-heels and collapses into the water. Immediately his head surfaces, spitting out scraps of moss and pond life.
There is a moment’s hiatus, then Tony’s laugh begins to catch, then ignite. Lower than usual, since it is unusually spontaneous, it still sends birds flying from the trees. It starts me off in a gasping counterpoint, and Colin chimes in with that silly, girlish giggle, and it builds as a trio until we are all incapable of speech. I am doubled over and clutching myself. Tony has sat on the grass for relief, and Colin’s giggles have opened out into something full-throated and almost hysterical.
When I finally manage to bring my eyes into focus, Nodge’s face seems at first to be composed into a kind of visible crucible of feeling. It is almost as if, in sequence, frame by frame, I can see the possibilities advertise themselves across the small muscles of his face, then sink back into the milky distance out of which they have floated. At first there is shock at the recent impact of the cold water, which recedes, as if in a lick of transparent flame, to be replaced by something like morbid humiliation. Droplets of water and dilute mud trace paths down the features of his face as they undergo these transformations.
The look of humiliation, which is the most fleeting, is overcast by something approaching naked, unbridled rage. His chest begins to heave up and down, his fists tighten on the club, the skin rouges. The face goes tight, as if something is going to actually burst through the skin and obliterate us all. This lasts very visibly for some seconds, but I see that it is not an emotion Nodge can allow himself because it does not sit with his image of who he is; mature, wise, supremely sensible. With great difficulty, he fights it back down, then there is a moment of neutrality.
Finally, a smile appears on his face. It is a convincing smile, wide and even, which seems to announce that this moment of farce has wiped out all wrongs. With poetic symbolism, the sun appears from behind a cloud and makes Nodge squint. This throws the accomplished smile out of joint slightly, and I see the effort that is going into maintaining it. But I say nothing, as Nodge apparently recovers himself and his composure. He makes a stab at laughing at himself.
Wrong club, he says drily.
Colin and Tony laugh again, and Tony reaches out a hand to help him out of the river. I smile cautiously. I know Nodge better than Colin or Tony, and I think Nodge is still furious. What’s more, he’s furious at me in particular, though I can’t say exactly why. I think it is something to do with the fact that he suspects that… not that I can see through him, but that I think I can see through him. He hates that about me more than anything.
Nodge blows the hole completely, while Tony and I both make par. Now we’re joint leaders, one point ahead of Nodge, with three holes to go. Tony and me bogey the next two, while Nodge makes par on the eighth, so at the tee for the ninth and last we’re all even.
Superficially, since Nodge’s dousing in the stream, the atmosphere has improved. We’re all talking to each other again at a low level, about the hazards, the wind, which clubs to use. But it’s smokescreen. The weight of the bet presses down harder than ever and bad blood still pumps just below the skin. The three of us look tense, but Colin looks simply miserable, although he has nothing more to lose and has given up the game. A childhood spent with parents screaming at each other has left him paralysed by any display of conflict.
Colin goes to tee off first. It is against etiquette – leader tees off – but since he’s dropped out of the real game, he’s outside the rules. He spends a long time addressing the ball, as if he can’t concentrate, then looks up with a pleading face at the three of us standing to the side of the tee and says, Can’t you just call it a draw?
No one answers.
Then he says it, his last hopeless attempt to rescue the situation, It’s only a game, after all.
I feel like groaning. Tony and Nodge shuffle their feet and look away.
Colin, I say, reaching for my three wood from the bag. Who on earth ever told you that?
Well, it’s true, he says desperately, as if wishing made it so.
Nothing, I say, is ever only anything.
The ninth is the longest hole on the course, a good 400 yards, trapped with bunkers down the middle and woodland to the right and left. It’s a par five, and I’ve only ever made par on it once. If Tony’s long swing catches the ball right, it will give him a big advantage, but there’s a lot of luck on this hole; and that’s Nodge’s speciality. I’m relying on staying steady, staying calm under pressure. At this moment, losing the game seems simply unacceptable. Tony and Nodge have both stuffed me, and I’m going to stuff them right back. That’s the real game. It’s called friendship. The continuation of table football, of Go! and Risk and Monopoly and Snakes and Ladders by other means.
I tee off and rush the shot. The ball skews off hopelessly to the left fifty feet, then stutters to a stop an inch past a gaping rabbit hole.
Shit!
I throw my club to one side, where it buries itself vertically in the earth. I can see quite clearly that Tony is fighting down a smile, while Nodge is keeping a stern straight face. Colin is twenty yards away, picking slivers of the bark of a dead oak tree.
Tony goes next and hits a perfect drive, three foot beyond a range of fairway bunkers. Nodge also hits well but falls short of the bunkers by fifteen yards. Colin has lost heart and given up.
I hit my second shot cleanly to take it parallel with Nodge’s ball, twenty feet to the left. When I arrive at the spot where my ball is, Nodge is dithering over which club to choose. He goes for a safe iron instead of the more difficult wood, but intimidated by the proximity of the bunkers, his shot hits the ground in front of the ball and sends it trickling into the sand. He grunts in frustration.
Twenty yards ahead, Tony hits another big one, but the wind catches it and veers it wildly off to the right and into the trees that flank the fairway. His head goes down. Anyone’s game now.
My next shot is straight and true, down the centre of the fairway, in front of a second and final set of bunkers. Nodge hits out of his bunker remarkably well and lands about twenty feet away from me, maybe 200 yards from the edge of the green. I can tell from a scream of frustration to the right that Tony has muffed again. That means he’s out of it.
I take my fourth shot, with a four iron, my favourite club. I catch it absolutely beautifully. I clear the bunkers, sail right up into the air and plop on to the edge of the green, twenty yards from the flag. Nodge grunts again. With hardly any hesitation, he hits too. His ball lands three feet from mine. We both have one very difficult putt to make par.
We walk solemnly
towards the green. Tony has picked up now. Apparently he hit it twice against a tree; Tony and Colin stand either side of our two balls on the green. I am slightly closer, which means that Nodge goes first.
The thunderclouds have gathered together again. I look up and notice that the sky has turned black. I can actually see sheet lightning on the horizon. Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, and torrentially, it begins to rain – a driving, massive, drenching rain that almost blocks out vision entirely, that stings the skin like maddened, tiny wasps.
None of us speaks or changes expression. Nodge, already drenched and soggy from his fall in the river, addresses the ball. Droplets of water fall from the edge of his nose as he bends over to strike, legs slightly apart, wrists locked. Colin is attending the flag with the formality of an undertaker. We all stand perfectly still in the rain, blurred, pale, as if in a Polaroid photograph before the colours have fully developed.
Then, finally, Nodge takes a backswing and strikes the ball. It would have been perfect a minute ago, but the drenching has softened the ground and the ball, right on line, runs out of steam and halts a foot from the hole. A gimme, pretty much unmissable.
I am also soaked through, but am barely aware of the cold driving rain. Everything is focused on getting it right: not too tense, not too relaxed, not too fast, not too slow, not too hard, not too soft. Everything’s balance. Don’t wait too long to hit it. Don’t hit it too quickly. I stand over the ball, stare at it as if asking it to reveal to me what stroke to take. I inspect the ground a last time, try to take into account Nodge’s last shot and give it a bit of extra welly. I wait a second, take a soft, even backswing, rivet my eyes to the ball and make sure that my head stays still, then let it go.
The ball leaves the club, travels past sodden daisies, a small unnoticed sweet wrapper. It goes past where Nodge’s ball was, travels directly towards the hole. I hold my breath. It is going fast, too fast. I see that I have overcompensated, that it is going to swing wildly past the hole, leaving me maybe ten feet past. It’s not on line. It’s going to miss, then take me far out of range.