Free Chop Chop by Simon Wroe

place, a place where learner drivers come to reverse park, where small tangles of wasteland hide beneath the flyovers and pavements run out abruptly. A place of golf courses and other manicured turfs. Proximity to those links appealed to my father, I think. His dream was always to be a pro in the golf world.
    It would have happened
, he used to say,
if your brother hadn’t taken ill the way he did
.
    A convenient excuse, though if we are being honest his career had already dried up by the time Sam got sick. Not that I ever challenged him on this point. My father has insulated himself in many layers of denial. Also he is spiteful, with a long memory for acts oftreason against him. It is a very tough thing to accept that your dreams did not happen because you were not good enough. And even though he has become a sort of nemesis to me (he sits on the list with Tod Brightman, that disgustingly young novelist), when it comes down to it, a sympathetic urge stops me from picking apart all his fabrications.
    My father was a born winner who worked his way down. Great-grandfather Charles, a cattle auctioneer, made a fortune when the railways arrived. The business expanded. Randall’s, the Midlands’
quality supplier. Ten thousand head of cattle through the door every week. Millionaires with shit on their boots. In his ruddy cheeks and lumbering stride you could see my father’s country stock, though he was of the greens, not the fields. A natural with the stick. Single-figure player from the age of ten. A consistent par-frightener. As a cadet, he hit drives so cleanly he did not disturb the tee. His swing was effortless, or so he tells it. At nineteen, when he met my mother at a country ball, he was already amateur county champion. Why should she be impressed? Golf meant nothing to her. But the potential coursing through him was obvious to all. Such people seem to shimmer, like water about to boil.
    But grandmother didn’t want heat and light. She wanted some security for her only daughter. “A game for idlers,” was how she put it. “You can’t eat trophies.” She sulked through the wedding. The band was too loud. The icing was margarine. He was a dubious character in her eyes, not much in the way of a provider. How did she know this then, of a young man with the easy confidence of one who believes it’s all coming to him? A young man, ostensibly, of means: his own car, roofless but roadworthy; his own lodgings, restricted but respectable. To my mother he always behaved the gentleman. When Sam was born my father moved the family out of the bedsit to the new development at Silver Hills. Sponsorship dealstook care of half, and there would be more in time to pay off the mortgage. They were so young; they had not had time to accumulate things, or to cultivate their own tastes. So they bought the show home. Right down to the doormat. They used to joke about the photo of the woman that had come with the picture frame on my father’s side of the bed. He would kiss the picture good night and my mother would scold him happily.
    The neighbors liked them at the beginning, my mother claims. Jean next door was a keen gardener, and she and my mother became quite competitive as to whose borders were the straightest, whose begonias bloomed first. Over the fence they traded cuttings and tips. Jean explained what sort of thing was proper in Silver Hills. The lawn in the center of our garden was always trimmed short and watered every evening. My father began teaching Sam to putt out there when my brother wasn’t much taller than the golf club. He never bothered to teach me though. I was left to help mother with her gardening.
Nasturtium. Rhododendron. Love lies bleeding. Chrysanthemum.
She taught me the names. She intoxicated me with language first. Her pruning away at the clematis while I watched father and Sam. A happy scene, from the outside.
    But Grandma had a hunch about my father. His easy