The boys slouched away slowly, still facing him, their body language an insult. One of them was making an obscene gesture with both hands so he looked as though he was trying to do one-fingered juggling with an invisible object. Jackson turned the alarm off and unlocked the car. Nathan got in the car while Jackson gave Dido a leg-up into the back. She weighed a ton.
As they drove out of the car park they overtook the trio of boys, still sauntering along. One of them was imitating an ape – oo-oo-ooo – and tried to climb on to the bonnet of the Toyota when it crawled past them, as though they were in a safari park. Jackson put his foot down hard on the brake and the boy fell off the car. Jackson drove off without looking back to see if there was any damage done. ‘Wankers,’ he said to Nathan.
Albatross
The Belvedere Golf Club. On the green were Thomas Holroyd, Andrew Bragg, Vincent Ives. Butcher, baker, candlestick-maker. Actually, the owner of a haulage company, a travel-agent-cum-hotelier and a telecom-equipment area manager.
It was Vince’s turn to tee off. He took up a stance and tried to focus. He heard Andy Bragg sighing impatiently behind him.
‘Maybe you should stick to crazy golf, Vince,’ Andy said.
There were different categories of friends in Vince’s opinion. Golf friends, work friends, old school friends, shipboard friends (he’d been on a Mediterranean cruise a few years ago with Wendy, his about-to-be-ex-wife), but friend friends were harder to come by. Andy and Tommy were in the golf-friends box. Not with each other – with each other they were friend friends. They had known each other for years and had a relationship so tight that Vince always felt as though he was on the outside of something when he was with them. Not that he could put his finger on what it was that he was excluded from exactly. He wondered sometimes if it wasn’t so much that Tommy and Andy shared a secret as that they liked to make him think they shared a secret. Men never really left the snigger of the schoolyard, they just grew bigger. That was his wife’s opinion, anyway. Soon-to-be-ex-wife.
‘The ball won’t move by telepathy, Vince,’ Tommy Holroyd said. ‘You have to hit it with the club, you know.’
Tommy was a big, fit man in his forties. He had a brawler’s broken nose which didn’t detract from his looks, indeed seemed to add to them where women were concerned. He’d started to run to flesh a bit, but he was still the sort you’d definitely want in your corner rather than in the other bloke’s. He’d had a ‘misspent youth’, he laughed to Vince, leaving school early and working the doors on several of the rougher northern clubs and hanging around with ‘the wrong people’. Vince had once inadvertently overheard him refer to ‘protection work’ – a vague term that seemed to cover a multitude of either sins or virtues. ‘Don’t worry, those days are over,’ Tommy said with a smile when he realized that Vince had heard what was being said. Vince had raised his hands meekly as though he was surrendering and said, ‘No worries, Tommy.’
Tommy Holroyd was proud of being ‘a self-made man’. Although wasn’t everyone self-made, by definition? Vince was beginning to think that he hadn’t made much of himself.
As well as being a bouncer, Tommy had been an amateur boxer. Combat seemed to be in the family – Tommy’s own father had been a professional wrestler, a well-known ‘heel’, and had once beaten Jimmy Savile in the ring, at the Spa Royal Hall in Brid, something his son boasted about on his father’s behalf. ‘M’dad beat the nonce to a pulp,’ he told Vince. ‘If he’d known what he was really like he’d have killed him, I expect.’
Vince, for whom the world of wrestling was as arcane and exotic as a Chinese emperor’s court, had to google the word ‘heel’. A villain, an antagonist, someone who cheated or showed contempt. ‘It was a role,’ Tommy said, ‘but m’dad didn’t have to do much acting. He was a nasty bastard.’ Vince felt sorry for Tommy. His own father had been as meek as a half of Tetley’s Mild, his favourite tipple.
Tommy’s narrative continued its rapid upward climb, from boxing to promoting, and when he’d made enough money from the ring he acquired an HGV licence and bought his first truck