Free Chop Chop by Simon Wroe Page A

confidence pinched her.
    â€œSee who’s laughing when the checks stop,” she said, running her hand along the hem of a bedroom curtain.
    â€œLook how he eats,” she’d say loudly across the dinner table as my father wolfed down helping after helping. At which Mother would shush her crossly and Father would grin, because there was plenty, and what did it matter what the old woman thought?
    But Grandma was proved right. A horrible type of validation, at her daughter’s expense. She could take no joy from it. Seven years after the wedding, top three finish on the cards at The Open, acomfortable half million predicted in sponsorship deals that year alone, and my father forgot how to play golf. Forgot, or perhaps remembered too much. Applied too much focus, monitored those delicate, implicit sporting movements too closely. The familiar suddenly became unfamiliar. A misfiring of neurons somewhere in his brain stopped him from converting thought into action. He locked up. Hooked a shot off the tee on the eighteenth. Dropped another shot in the bunker. Then couldn’t putt a two-footer to close it. The damn club would not connect with the ball. His impulses denied. Eventually he dragged it wide. A spectacular choke. My father preferred to say he had lost his rhythm. A one-off, he told his young family, but the touch never returned. Even in training his swing was labored; even when it meant nothing he played as if it meant everything. He tried the overlap grip, changed his posture, but his thinking had become too rational, too analytical. Too sensitive. Who’d have thought that would be my father’s tragedy?
    As he fell down the rankings, the tournaments stopped calling. He ceased playing professionally. For a while he poured his ambitions into my brother and dragged him round the holes, but his expectations were too high; there was anger on both sides.
A Randall never quits
, he would shout at Sam, though that was exactly what he had done. Unable to face his colleagues at the club, he canceled his membership and looked to sell up. But the jerry-built homes of Silver Hills had paled next to newer, slicker developments and my father could not afford to take the loss. So beside the golf course we remained, its cool expansive greens looking in, mocking quietly. Sometimes the sliced shots landed in our garden: a bright white ball sitting in judgment on the lawn. These my brother and I hid. Well, my brother hid them. I watched. I was always watching him, waiting for his lead. Sam had that effect over all the neighborhood children: they fell in line behind my brother, those kids I toiled after.
    Weeds came up. Jean stopped talking about what was proper in Silver Hills, started talking about what wasn’t. My brother changed to a school where you didn’t wear a cap. In the scrublands next to the golf course, previously unanimous decisions about water fights or bike races met with mumbles of dissent. Some gang members suddenly became studious, and could not be extracted from their homes. Our TV got smaller, our family unfamiliar.
    My mother, who had believed in my father even more than he had, was forced to take a job at a nearby nursing home. Her girlish mannerisms became tired and prim. She watched the bitterness growing inside my father. His ruddy cheeks blotched and scowling, those athletic limbs setting thickly. That exuberant appetite now selfish, parasitic. The mother’s daughter, observing. She watched him become the man he is today. Lying on the sofa eating dry cereal with a bent pound shop spoon (miserly with the shopping yet prodigal at the bookmaker’s), cutting his toenails (still oddly vain, my father, though disheveled in spirit), muttering at The Masters on TV, unwilling to find work since that short stint as a double-glazing salesman when people kept asking if they had seen him somewhere before. You could call it a tragedy. But let’s be clear: it’s not the tragedy of