The Yips

‘Get the fuck off!’ Noel screeches, snatching for the belt on his trousers (which are already alarmingly low-slung), but his response is too slow, and the trousers slip down, with virtually no resistance, from his hip-bones to his knees.

Nessa clings on to the concertinaed fabric, giggling, delighted. Valentine struggles to contain a wan smile.

‘Enough!’ Noel hisses, raising the back of a warning hand to the child. Nessa promptly lets go and Noel yanks the trousers up again, cursing. Valentine pulls the toddler back towards her and embraces her, protectively.

‘MUM!’ Noel bellows – effortlessly displacing his irritation (principally, admittedly, with himself). ‘Could you put a bloody sock in it, please?’

His mother sings – if possible – still louder.

‘I said could you put a sock in it?’ Noel repeats (an added edge of menace in his voice this time).

‘She’ll carry on for hours at this rate,’ Valentine mutters (with a strong element of ‘and I can’t say I’d blame her if she did …’).

‘She’s been singing that damn thing, non-stop, since we left the day centre,’ Noel gripes. ‘It’s driving me round the twist.’

‘Let it go, Bro’,’ Valentine advises him, stifling a yawn.

‘I had to remove her filthy hand from my thigh, twice, in the car on the drive home,’ Noel hisses. ‘She’s absolutely, bloody disgusting!’

‘I’ll have a word with her about it, later,’ Valentine promises, untangling one of Nessa’s bright, blonde curls with a distracted finger.

‘So where’s your client?’ Noel demands, suddenly glancing around him.

‘Gone.’ Valentine shrugs. ‘I called her a cab.’

‘Jeez. That was one hell of a turnaround,’ Noel murmurs (cheerfully ignoring the fact that he’d promised, faithfully, to transport her himself). ‘Was she happy with the end result?’

‘I dunno … Yeah’ – Valentine nods – ‘so far as I could tell. She was shy. Her English wasn’t great, but she cried when she saw it in the mirror.’

Pause.

‘Did she pay in cash?’

Her brother tries to appear disinterested.

‘By cheque …’

Valentine starts to remove Nessa’s other shoe.

‘I thought we had a strict rule about that,’ Noel grumbles.

‘We do …’

Longer pause.

‘… but she needed some of the cash she’d put aside to pay for her ride to the airport.’

Noel turns to glower at his mother again (who is now banging along in time to her ditty on the wooden banister).

‘So how’d it look?’ he demands, turning back to face her.

‘Fine. Nice. Good. Although I was so knackered by the end of it that I could hardly …’

‘But she was happy?’ he repeats.

‘Yeah. So far as I could tell. The skin was incredibly delicate – unusually delicate. I really had to hammer away at it.’

‘Did you get a photo?’ Noel demands.

‘For my portfolio?’ Valentine asks, fixing him with a dry look.

‘Why else?’ He shrugs, grinning.

‘Why else,’ she echoes, smiling back.

‘So did you?’ he persists.

‘Nope.’ Valentine shakes her head. ‘It was difficult to get her to trust me and relax. I mean after all the fuss at the hotel …’

Noel raises a tentative hand to his throat.

‘And – like I said – her English wasn’t all that great. She was really stressing out about making her flight in time. She’d lied to her husband about taking the trip. She’d told him she was visiting her sister in Osaka. She didn’t want him getting suspicious. She was planning to surprise him for their anniversary …’ Valentine pauses for a second, cradling Nessa’s tiny shoe in her hand. ‘Then, just when I was about to take the plunge and ask her, this guy turned up to read the meter and walked in on us by mistake –’

‘Hang on a second,’ Noel interrupts, alarmed. ‘Which guy? Not the hotel guy?’

‘Hotel guy?’ Valentine echoes, confused.

‘He said he’d come to read the meter?!’

Noel snorts, derisively.

‘The hotel guy?’ Valentine repeats. ‘Which hotel guy?’

‘To read the meter?!’ Noel rolls his eyes. ‘Are you having me on?’

‘No.’ Valentine shakes her head, defensively, then she pauses. ‘Although …’

She glances over towards the meter, frowning. ‘I’m not sure if he actually got around to …’

‘And you thought he was credible?’ Noel demands.

‘Credible?’ Valentine’s starting to look paranoid. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Did he have all the official documentation and shit?’

‘Documentation?!’ Valentine exclaims, almost irritated. ‘He came to read the meter, Noel. He was perfectly nice and polite and professional …’

‘So you saw his badge?’ Noel jumps in.

‘His badge?’

‘You checked his badge?’

‘Yes. Yes. I saw his badge.’ She flaps a hand at him, dismissively. ‘I checked his badge. Of course I did. I’m not a complete idiot. He had a clipboard and this tiny –’

‘Although an impostor could forge a badge, easily enough,’ Noel reasons.

‘You think an impostor would have a tiny torch?!’ Valentine’s almost deriding him, now. ‘And a special, little mirror inside an old powder compact?’

‘Yeah. Sure. Why not?’ Noel bristles.

‘Well he wasn’t an impostor, Noel.’ She scowls. ‘He was just some guy. And if you’d come home on time, like you promised …’

Noel glares at her, balefully.

She rubs at her eyes, exhausted, as the child coyly whispers something into her ear.

‘Nessa needs the toilet,’ she murmurs. ‘Would you mind taking her up while I get started on some sandwiches?’

‘Can’t she use the potty down here?’ Noel groans.

‘Absolutely not!’

Her voice is suddenly implacable. ‘We’re trying to encourage her into a set routine, remember?’

Noel gazes down at the child, malevolently. Nessa grips on to her genitals, twists her legs together and grimaces.

‘I’ve got a headache,’ he mutters, thickly, ‘and I feel like shit.’

‘You’ve got a hangover, Noel,’ Valentine corrects him, almost tenderly, ‘and an extremely beautiful and brilliant two-year-old daughter’ – she pushes the child forward, very gently – ‘who really, really needs to do a wee.’

‘John Daly?’

Stanislav battles to place him, mentally: ‘Isn’t he that fat, alcoholic red-neck with the weird, pudding-bowl haircut?’

Ransom turns and inspects the boy with a haughty, almost pitying eye. ‘When I was a kid your age,’ he tells him, ‘there was only one golfer I ever gave a damn about. No one else even came close. The others weren’t fit to lick his shoes. He was a god in human form – a golfing deity. He single-handedly re-wrote the game’s rule book. D’you know who I’m talking about?’

Stan shrugs. ‘Faldo?’

‘Faldo? Faldo?!’ Ransom’s horrorstruck. ‘Are you swinging on my dick?! It was Seve, you fuckin’ dipstick! Seve! Seve Ballesteros! It’s like …’ Ransom frowns. ‘One of the defining moments in my life was the birth of my daughter, Chelsea – four years ago, in Santa Barbara – but I can honestly say – with no word of a lie – that the defining moment – and I mean the defining moment – was watching Seve sink that final putt in the 1984 Open Championship at St Andrews. I must’ve been around …’ Ransom ponders. ‘I dunno, ten, eleven years old at the time. Man …’ – he shakes his head, almost forlornly – ‘I fuckin’ idolized Seve as a kid. I wanted to be his double. Seve was my hero, my role model. I wanted to be an artist, just like Seve was. Because Seve was the real deal. He was the Big Cheese. He was the golfing gorgonzola and I wanted to play exactly like he did – you know? All that amazing spunk and fire and recklessness? I dreamed about painting on the greens with my putter, the way Seve could. Because at his best, Seve was – without doubt – the most brilliant, the most explosive, the most creative player that gololf has ever …’

Ransom pauses for a second. ‘Gololf,’ he backtracks, cautiously, ‘glol-ol-o-ol …’

Then he sneezes.

Stan stares at him, perplexed.

‘And a real dude, to boot,’ Ransom continues (pulling at his nose and sniffing). ‘Totally sharp. I mean totally sharp – an absolute Geezer, a Face. Seve was like the Sean Connery of golf …’

He sneezes again. ‘… the Salvador fuckin’ Dali of golf …’

He sneezes for a third time. ‘Bollocks!’ He shakes his head, blinking.

‘Is he still playing today?’ Stan wonders.

‘Seve was wild to the fuckin’ core.’ Ransom grins (ignoring the question). ‘Unruly – tempestuous. He redefined the game’s parameters. He broke the mould. And I loved him for it, man, I worshipped him for it, because I’ve always been a lawless, little bastard myself. A firebrand. I guess I’m just anarchic by nature …’ Ransom shrugs, then inspects Stan for a second, speculatively. ‘How about you, Poland?’

‘Pardon?’

(Stan is momentarily thrown by his new moniker.)

‘Are you anarchic?’

‘Me? Uh. Oh. Yeah. Of course I am.’ Stan nods, emphatically.

‘Too fuckin’ right, you are!’

Ransom ebulliently high-fives him. The high-five is accompanied by a sharp tearing sound (as one of the jacket’s armpits finally gives way). The golfer’s brows rise (his expression a combination of admiration and surprise – as if he thinks the teen has just discharged a loud fart). Stan returns his gaze – slightly bemused (plainly thinking the same thing about the golfer).

‘I mean I’ll make no bones about it,’ Ransom returns (with enviable focus) to the subject at hand, ‘I was almost too anarchic back then. I was pretty much completely, fuckin’ feral. I just flew by the seat of my pants. And if my pants had holes in ’em – which they generally did – then I flew by the hair on my fuckin’ balls.’

Stan winces, fastidiously.

‘One thing’s for sure’ – Ransom starts ransacking his pockets for cigarettes again – ‘while I was always pretty obsessed by the game of golf …’ – he twitches his nose but doesn’t sneeze this time – ‘it certainly wasn’t …’ – now he sneezes – ‘the be-all and end-all for me back then. Not like it is today. It was definitely more of a means to an end than anything else. Surfing was my true passion. I was deadly serious about it – spent the best part of ’90, ’91 bumming my way around the planet, catching waves in all the world’s top, surfing hotspots: Morocco, Australia, the Indian Ocean … In fact I was just starting to garner some serious recognition on the amateur circuit when I fractured this’ – Ransom cuffs his hip, irritably – ‘in a motorcycle accident: Kommertjie, South Africa. February 5th, 1992.’ He shakes his head, forlornly. ‘I’ll never forget that date, long as I live. A yellow Kawasaki 200cc scrambler. Borrowed it off a mate. No mudguards, no mufflers. Pair of cut-off jeans, no shoes, no gloves. Popped a wheelie – just showing off to some beach babe – then hit a fuckin’ pothole and flipped the damn thing. I’m still carrying the red dirt from that road under the skin of both elbows …’

Ransom shoves up the sleeves of the military jacket (with some effort).

‘So your surfing career was over?’ Stan asks, neglecting to acknowledge the (fairly impressive) scars Ransom has just revealed.

‘Nah-ah. The injury wasn’t serious enough to ground me for good. I almost wish it had been, with hindsight. Life just got in the way there for a while …’ Ransom delivers Stan a warning look. ‘It has a nasty, fuckin’ habit of doing that.’

Stan – perhaps prompted into action by Ransom’s tone of foreboding (and an equally powerful urge not to acknowledge it) – silently recommences uncovering the vehicle.

‘I never quit, not officially,’ Ransom continues, ‘in fact I don’t think I would’ve been mentally capable of quitting at that stage. Surfing was my life. My dream. I just played a few holes in the Cape while I was on the mend, came second in an amateur event there, flew to Jamaica – on a whim – with the prize money, hung out for a while, got stoned, got laid, got dumped, got ripped off, got into a bit of financial strife, then hustled on a couple of courses to raise my fare home. Got into more strife.’ He rolls his eyes, exasperated. ‘Don’t even ask …’ (Stan wasn’t intending to), ‘and eventually got deported.’ He shrugs. ‘Then, when I finally arrived back home, the whole thing kinda steamrollered. Two years later, I’m number one on the British amateur circuit. Turned pro in ’93 and entered the Big Time, wholescale. Everyone said it was too early, but what the fuck? It was wild. It was a blast! I didn’t really have the first, bloody clue what’d hit me.’

By the time Ransom’s potted biography has concluded, the tarp has been removed and an old, military Hummer with immaculately maintained camouflage paintwork has been revealed in all its glory. They stand and silently appraise the vehicle together. Ransom kicks a wheel.

‘She’s a beaut’.’

‘Yeah.’ Stan nods. ‘She was my dad’s, originally. He ran a war games shop in the centre of town. Used it for publicity. But the business went bust last year, so he flogged it to Gene for a couple of hundred quid before his creditors could get a hold of it. Gene’d helped him to do it up and stuff. Mum hates having it stuck out here. She says there’s no room to barbecue, but we never barbecued anyway …’

Ransom tries the door handle but the Hummer is locked.

‘I had this dinky, little military jeep in the early nineties,’ he muses. ‘Haven’t thought about it in years. It was nuts. Looked like something out of Mad Max. I totalled it about five times but it just kept on going. People would stand in the street, their mouths hanging open, pointing at it and laughing. It was completely fuckin’ wrecked. God, I loved that vehicle … I remember I was driving it around Paris with Karma this one time …’

‘Karma?’ Stan’s head jerks around. ‘Not Karma Dean?’

‘Huh?’

Ransom’s still thinking about his old jeep.

‘Did you check out the huge poster in my room?’ Stan demands, excited.

‘Poster?’

‘In my room. The massive poster. The massive Karma Dean poster.’

‘A Karma Dean poster? Uh … no.’ Ransom slowly shakes his head (plainly irritated by the teen’s sudden, high levels of engagement).

‘Oh.’

Stan looks disappointed.

‘I guess what people generally tend to forget,’ Ransom mutters (his mind turning back, momentarily, to Jen, and the previous night in the hotel bar), ‘is that Karma was basically a nobody when she and I first hooked up. Just another very boring, very ambitious French model in a long line of very boring, very ambitious French models. I was never serious about her. I’d recently split with Suzanne Amour. Karma was essentially just rebound fodder …’

Ransom pauses to gauge Stan’s reaction to the Suzanne Amour revelation (there isn’t one).

‘Now Suzanne really was sensational,’ Ransom persists. ‘Really crazy. Really wild. Had the weirdest, cutest little vagina you ever saw, kinda like an inside-out flower, like a sea-anemone …’

Ransom describes the shape of Suzanne Amour’s strange vagina in the air with his finger.

‘A complete one-off. In all my years of pussy, I’ve never seen another like it – not even when I fucked her sister.’

Stan looks slightly uneasy.

‘She was probably a little before your time …’ Ransom shrugs. ‘An exotic dancer – the former girlfriend of Plastic Bertrand.’

Stan now looks utterly bemused.

‘The punk singer. “Ça Plane Pour Moi”?’

Stan shakes his head, apologetically.

‘Yeah. Well the point I’m trying to make here is that Karma was pretty much a nobody back then. She’d done an advert for this second-rate brand of pantyhose. She had a great pair of legs. Amazing legs. In fact she still has great legs – although the tits are a complete fabrication. The tits are just a big, old lie, a huge lie, I can promise you that … Anyhow, the truth was that I was the big star at that stage. Aside from Faldo, I was basically the biggest thing to happen in European golf for years …’ He pauses for a second, thoughtfully. ‘Though – credit where credit’s due – Karma always really believed in herself. It’s like – I dunno – people sometimes say that to be a star you have to think like a star, and Karma always thought like a star. She always acted “The Star”. She was ridiculously, high-maintenance, even back then. My old jeep was the bane of her life. She loathed that jeep. In fact …’ – Ransom scowls as he remembers – ‘no … She actually loved the jeep to begin with. Yeah, typical female – she fuckin’ loved the jeep. And I’m like the wild, crazy, English kid with the jeep. She thinks the jeep is brilliant; it’s so funny and cool and eccentric. Then the next thing you know, we’ve been dating for about a week and she’s griping on about her hair getting messed up every time we head out in the damn thing …’

‘So you didn’t get to check out the poster?’ (Stan just wants to make absolutely sure.)

‘What?’

Ransom’s momentarily thrown off his stride.

‘In my room. The huge film poster? It covers an entire wall.’

‘Nope.’ Ransom shakes his head, then winces. ‘I didn’t actually see anything. I just dragged myself out of bed and stood shivering under the shower for half an hour …’ He massages his temples. ‘For the record: the water pressure in your bathroom is completely, fuckin’ abysmal.’

‘It’s from Lady Spellbound,’ Stan elucidates, ‘the Polish version. My dad got it for me on a trip to Warsaw. He has a friend who runs this independent cinema over there.’

Ransom looks blank.

‘Lady Spellbound?’ Stan reiterates. ‘The first of The Vala Chronicles? The original merchandise from that film is worth a small fortune now. English versions sell for, like, three thousand pounds on eBay …’

‘Lady …’ Ransom frowns for a second and then, ‘Oh God – yeah. Now I’m with you. I’ve actually never seen the thing.’

‘Never seen Lady Spellbound?!’ Stan parrots, astonished.

‘Nope.’ Ransom shakes his head. ‘But isn’t it meant to be really terrible?’

‘Oh … uh …’

Stan quickly reassesses the situation. ‘Yeah … Well I mean it’s basically just a kids’ film’ – he shrugs – ‘although Bill Murray’s pretty good in it. Has this great cameo …’

‘I played a pro-am tournament with Murray once,’ Ransom recollects; ‘he’s actually a very handy player. On the third day he turned up at the clubhouse wearing this long, blonde wig, the hair all …’

Ransom gesticulates, wildly. ‘Man. I laughed till I bawled.’

‘Because he wore a wig?’ Stan frowns.

‘Duh!’ Ransom’s patently astonished at the kid’s ignorance. ‘He wore it as a piss-take, obviously!’

‘A piss-take of what?’

Stan’s still frowning.

‘Of what?! Are you crazy?! My hair, Dumbo! A piss-take of the legendary Stuart Ransom coiffure!’

Stan looks lost for a few seconds and then, suddenly, ‘Oh yeah. Yeah …’ A slow grin starts to ambush his face. ‘Weren’t you nearly chucked off a tournament once because it was such an unbelievable bird’s nest?’

‘Bingo!’

Ransom high-fives him again.

‘And then you claimed in all the papers that you couldn’t brush it because some loopy fan had …’

‘Stolen my hairbrush! Yeah!’ Ransom’s beatific. ‘And I was deadly, fuckin’ serious. She had stolen it. But they still refused to let me compete, so as a compromise, I plaited it. Two plaits. The plaits were like this massive sensation. Everyone went wild about them. I was front page news in all the papers for about a week. Got a huge spread in Playgirl. Ridiculous, really, when you actually come to think about it …’

‘Crazy,’ Stan agrees (perhaps too readily).

‘Although this was way before Beckham had his mohawk,’ Ransom rallies. ‘Way before all the drama with the sarong. It was the German Open. I actually won that year.’

‘Stealing a hairbrush …’ Stan muses (apparently very taken by the idea). ‘That’s seriously deluded.’

‘Yup. Mandy Pope.’ Ransom rolls his eyes. ‘Canadian Druid. Total fuckin’ nutter. Stalked me for seven years. I had a restraining order out on her. She’d break into my flat while I was off on tour, steal my jockeys and leave these weird, little messages inside my coffee jar …’

‘A Canadian Druid …?’ Stan ruminates. ‘That’s retarded.’

‘Tell me about it!’ Ransom clucks. ‘Total fuckin’ headcase, she was. But it only gets better,’ he continues. ‘I saw a list of the hundred most visited sites on the internet a while back and nearly puked when I saw her blog close to the top of it.’

‘No way!’

Stan’s impressed.

‘You’d better believe it, kid. Mandy fuckin’ Pope. Gets arrested for stealing my jockeys one week, the next she’s at the head of an international fuckin’ faith empire.’

‘That’s sick!’ Stan’s deeply amused.

A short silence follows as they both appraise the Hummer again.

‘So your dad’s a Pole?’

Stan nods.

‘You speak any Polish?’

‘Some.’

‘Can you get me a coffee, please?’ Ransom demands.

‘Get your own, Monkey-knob,’ Stan responds.

‘Not bad!’ Ransom nods, approvingly.

‘Thanks.’

‘Are you studying it at school?’

‘Nope. At tech. My school doesn’t currently have –’

‘Brilliant,’ Ransom interrupts. ‘So shall we take this little beauty out for a quick spin now, or what?’

Stan turns to stare at him, shocked.

Ransom leans forward and tries the handle on the door for a second time. The door is – unsurprisingly – still locked.

‘I bet I can get this thing moving without a key,’ Ransom brags.

Stan, meanwhile, is reaching into the pocket of his baggy jeans and feeling around for something. He eventually locates what he’s looking for and withdraws it.

‘You know, basketball’s one of the few sports I’ve never really followed,’ Ransom ruminates (sensing imminent defeat on the Hummer front). ‘The skill sets are just so different to those in golf. Although I was playing this tournament in the Dominican Republic a while back …’

He peers over at Stan and then abruptly falls silent. Stan is carefully unfolding a clean, white, cotton handkerchief. Lying in the middle of it is a long, fat, neatly pre-rolled joint.

‘It’s really good shit,’ he confides, proudly, as Ransom reaches out to grab it with a delighted whoop. ‘I got it at Christian camp.’

Chapter 3

‘Leave it. It’s fine. It doesn’t need mending.’ Gene tries to grab the jacket from her. ‘It’s not like I ever wear the thing – it’s just a keepsake …’

‘So when were you planning to tell me, exactly?’

His wife refuses to give the jacket up. She plumps it down on to her lap and starts rooting around inside an old biscuit tin for a reel of thread in an appropriate colour. She is still wearing her dog collar, but her hair (usually drawn back into a scruffy bun) has been recently washed and hangs down in loose, damp curls across her shoulders. Her face – generally calm but serious, even solemn – currently looks drawn and stressed. Gene notices dark rings around her brown eyes, which – as always – are utterly devoid of make-up.

‘I mean if that girl from your work hadn’t phoned …’ She frowns. ‘Jess. Jane …’

‘Jen.’

He notices some tinges of grey around her temples. He inspects her eyebrows. They are thick and un-plucked, but their line is still good, still shapely and graceful. She is attractive, he decides, but in a natural way – unadorned – homely.

Homely? No. He frowns. Not homely.

Powerful? Yes.

Charismatic? Certainly.

Austere? Well …

His frown deepens.

Handsome, then?

Handsome?! He almost smiles. Why not? With that strong mouth, that straight nose, that no-nonsense set to her jaw …

He inspects her face, fondly.

Handsome? He ponders the word for a moment, perturbed. Isn’t handsome the kind of adjective you’d use to describe a brusque but peerlessly efficient ward matron of uncertain vintage? A dashing, Oxbridge undergraduate (male)? An admirably proportioned Arabian stallion?

She is perched on the stool of her dressing table with the reel of cotton clenched tightly in her fist and a needle held – delicately suspended – in the corner of her mouth.