We found a way over a fence using a handy tree, used a sort of tunnel through the whin that was probably a deer route and got to the edge of the twelfth fairway to find there was only one group of golfers within sight, heading away from us. We’d probably have been fine except that Dom, who always had been one of the class bampots, suddenly decided it’d be the height of wit to deposit what he described as ‘a big steamin tolley’ down the nearest hole (which happened to be the eleventh). The rest of us, in our twelve-to-thirteen-year-old wisdom, had thought Dom had grown out of this sort of frankly childish nonsense, but obviously not. Dom spent most of his time indoors playing computer games so maybe all the fresh air had gone to his head.
‘Aw, Dom, for fuck’s sake!’
‘Dinnae be fucking daft, man!’
‘I am
‘You’ll get the jail!’
‘Fuck this.’
‘Naw, ah am. Ah’m drappin one in that hole, so ah am. An youse are comin wi me.’
That would be, in order: me, Al, Ferg, Wee Malky, me again and then Dom talking there.
Dom was the biggest, bravest and most fighty of us, and so when he said we were coming with him we would naturally tend to do as we were told. However, I’d put on a significant growth spurt that summer and I’d beaten Dom in an impromptu wrestling match in his garden the day before, and while wrestling never had counted as a definitive skill when it came to settling seniority in a bunch of Stonemouth kids — not the way a proper fight did — it still meant something.
It was a fluid kind of time around then anyway; fights — whether in the playground or in parks or waste ground after school — were starting to go out of fashion, as some of us decided it was a rough and uncivilised way to decide who was top dog. A few radicals even suggested that the defining trait ought to be who had the best exam results, but that was obviously taking things too far so we’d sort of opted for whoever was most cool, and fighting was just starting to look a bit uncool. Anyway, I was the only one who didn’t go with the main squad towards the eleventh green, up on a slight rise to our left. I just jogged off for the shelter of the long rough and whin on the far side of the fairway, shaking my head. Dom looked like he was about to run after me and tackle me, but we already knew I was a faster runner than he was, so he stayed where he was. The rest stayed too.
‘You’re fuckin dead, Gilmour!’ Dom shouted after me.
‘Aw, Stu, dinnae. Come on.’ That was Al.
‘You’re
‘You’ll get the jail!’ (Wee Malky, confusingly.)
And so I was able to watch from the perfect cover of a little whin-covered hillock as the next group of golfers appeared over the rise just as Dom got his trousers down and started squatting over the hole. Al was holding the pin.
The four golfers stood open-mouthed for a moment, then yelled, abandoned their bags and charged. Worse, there was a pair of green keepers in a sort of wee, fat-tyred flatbed truck just behind and to one side of the group of golfers. The wee truck overtook the golfers before they made the green.
Dom was no problem; he was still trying to get his trousers back up, and fell on his face when he tried to run. The greenkeepers shot past him and raced after the rest of the gang. They’d made the elementary mistake of keeping together and running back the way we’d come, rather than splitting up, so while they made it as far as the gap in the whin and piled into it with the sort of alacrity rats up drainpipes could only dream of, the greenkeepers were right behind them. They caught Wee Malky by the ankles and dragged him straight back out again. The fastest of the pursuing golfers held the now howling Wee Malky while the two greenkeepers disappeared into the deer run; you could watch their progress by the line of shaking whin bushes. Two of the other golfers were sitting on a raging and shouting Dom, just off the green. One of them was skelping him across his still-naked bum with a golf glove. Tad fruitily, I thought. I saw Ferg and Al make it as far as the fence; the green-keepers caught them while they were frantically trying to climb it.
Wee Malky wriggled free and made a dash for the same gap in the whins he’d already been pulled out of, but fast — and desperate — though he was, his wee legs couldn’t outrun the long adult strides of the golfer who’d caught him; he was scooped off the grass and held firmly, wriggling and wailing, against the guy’s chest. I’ve thought back on that final, minor detail of the whole sorry adventure many times since then, and seem to remember that there was something in equal parts heroic and hopeless in Wee Malky’s stubborn refusal to accept he’d been caught, and in his attempt to get away a second time; something somehow life-affirming but ultimately tragic about his struggle to escape his fate.
