Free Nice Jumper by Tom Cox Page B

of my ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’ T-shirt and hoofed it over to the tee. I arrived in time to see a faultless grip, followed by a swing which only one word would do justice to. ‘Conformist’? Almost, but not quite. ‘Textbook’? That was it.
    ‘Still sticking rigidly to that warm-up routine, I see, Tom,’ said Gary.
    As his playing partners teed off, the two of us caught up on our edited highlights of the preceding half decade. Gary had packed in college and, supported by his dad’s Ferrari business, was dedicating his life to the amateur golf circuit, with a view to turning pro. I, on the other hand, had packed in the amateur golf circuit and, supported by the state, was dedicating my life to drinking myself stupid, punishing my eardrums with discordant rock music and chasing after girls in Nirvana T-shirts, with a view to getting laid and having an extremely good time.
    I walked down the fairway of the par four opening hole with Gary and watched his second shot rocket towards the flagstick. I said goodbye, and watched from a distance as he strode resolutely towards the green – even his walk was textbook – and couldn’t help wondering if he was as hard on himself as he once was on me. Then, gently encouraged by a greying administrator in a bottle-green suit, I moved the Sphincter out of the space marked ‘Club Captain’ and changed into some more appropriate attire for the day’s events.

MY FIRST IMPRESSION was that it was a shelter for ailing guinea pigs.
    The configuration of twigs and branches before us, where we hunkered in the bushes to the left of the eighteenth fairway, could also have been mistaken for a latent bonfire, but it was doubtful that even the most highfalutin arsonist would have had the patience for something of this complexity. There was the additional suggestion of an animal’s nest, but what animal, bar the most overdeveloped chimp – of which you didn’t get a lot in suburban Nottingham, and which, besides, didn’t nest – was this dexterous? No: this was art. It had layers, meanings. If you bumped into it on a black night, while camping on an ancient burial site for Indian warriors, you would be very, very scared.
    As it was, we bumped into it in broad daylight, a few feet to the right of an ancient burial site for pet cats, hence weren’t very scared at all. It didn’t take us long to work out who was behind it.
    ‘I’m going to boot it down,’ announced Jamie.
    ‘No – don’t. He might have set a trap in there,’ I said.
    ‘It’s probably where he lives,’ mocked Ashley, relishing the snap of the first twig.
    ‘Does he really think he can keep us away by building these?’ I said.
    ‘He’ was Stig. And this was one of his masterpieces: an edifice designed entirely, it seemed, to trap lost golf balls – though not particularly effectively. It was far from the first example of Stig’s creations we had encountered, and it had all the hallmarks of his postmodernist style: the ‘portcullis’ formation of twigs on the roof, the big diagonal branch across the entrance, the overall sense that anyone over the age of three would be able to destroy the whole thing with one swipe of the hand. This was the third piece of Stigart we’d destroyed in the last three hours, and we were starting to wonder why he bothered. If he was really trying to keep us away from the stray balls of Cripsley’s members, surely he could have used a more effective contraption – a rabbit trap, say, or a twenty-foot-deep viper pit with a net and some leaves over the top of it.
    Stig, who looked like Norman Mailer might do if he took baths in the local pond and tailoring tips from the skip to the rear of Allied Carpets, was one of Cripsley’s greenkeepers. This meant he was paid somewhere between seventeen and ninety-four pence per week and naturally inclined to supplement his income. He did this with a sideline in balls. The system worked something like this: Roy Jackson sold brand-new,