Free Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia by Tom Cox

give myself a pat on the back for completing that. As if on cue, my clubs fell off the back of the buggy.
    Five minutes later, in the car – I’d avoided the clubhouse and locker room, unable to face my beloved leaderboard, with its ‘DISQ’ alongside my name – I thought of the four hundred or so hopeful young Euro-pros, here in Essex and at the other three Stage One Qualifying School venues, in Bedfordshire, County Durham and Cumbria. Most of them still had two rounds to go – five, if they were lucky enough to be one of the 240 players who made it to Stage Two of qualifying, at Frilford Heath in Oxfordshire. But for me it was all over already. On the other hand, my contemporaries were on a cold golf course, battling with their minds, whereas I was in a warm car, the most pressing thing in my immediate future the question of whether I would spend an unexpectedly free half-day reading the new John Irving novel, catching up on sleep or rewatching a couple of Will Ferrell fil … Crapping hell! What in God’s name was that smell?
    I’d first noticed it when I was loading my clubs into the boot. In fact, now I came to think about it, maybe it had infiltrated my nostrils quite a while before that, when I’d been too busy with more pressing matters to properly take it on board. Edie had been suggesting I change my golf shoes for a few months now, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t them. Not quite damp enough. It had a slightly oaky quality to it … yet it was sort of … acidic, too. You might almost have mistaken it for cat piss. I leaned around the headrest and put my nose a little closer to the canvas of my flimsy Maxfli bag – the one I had bought from Bluewater shopping centre in a half-price sale two years ago, and which I still thought of as ‘brand new’ – and gagged slightly.
    Replaying the moments before I’d left the house this morning, I began to put two and two together. In fact, I began to put three and two together. The way Bootsy’s tail looked unusually upright when she came into the entrance hall. The subsequent, sniffing arrival of her cretin brother, Pablo , and finally of my oldest cat, The Bear, aka Colostomog, never a big advocate of change in any form. It was entirely possible I could be dealing with more than one brand of urine here. Maybe if I’d been equipped with a stronger sense of smell, or hadn’t been so focused on my golf, I would have detected the transgression earlier, but perhaps it was for the best that I hadn’t. After all, I could have taken it for a negative sign, and as everyone knows, that kind of thing can really mess up a person’s round.
    1 The idea being to blank out interfering thoughts and instil rhythm by counting ‘One’ on the backswing and ‘Two’ on the downswing … and to keep your voice low enough so the person in the adjacent bay doesn’t hear you and mistake you for a simpleton.
    2 One wonders, sometimes, how the pro golf world would react if anyone said anything genuinely controversial, or if it would actually just have a collective embolism and cease to exist.
    3 A ridiculous activity, not just because cleaning the grooves of a club is usually intended to promote backspin and what I needed from my four-iron, at the present time, was topspin, but also because the grooves didn’t actually contain any dirt.

Three
Patch Work
    To: [email protected]
    From: [email protected]
    Hi Tom,
    Thank you for your enquiry.
    I’ve had a look at our database and there is no such record as ‘Shortest Ever Pro Golf Tournament Debut’. I’ve also discussed the idea with our record management team and they feel the idea is too specific and more of a unique occurrence rather than a record.
    I hope this information is of your help.
    Thanks,
    Amarilis Espinoza
    Communications Officer
    Guinness World Records
    184–192 Drummond Street,