Read Online The Last Weekend by Blake Morrison - Free Book Online Page A

I drove off first at the next tee) had lost his cool.
As my drive sailed down the middle on the fifth, I realised how much I loved golf, and how foolish had been my reasons for not playing more regularly. It was time I got over the class thing. The men on golf courses these days were garage hands, factory workers, plumbers, electricians, blokes in white vans. As a primary-school teacher, though, I had another inhibition: that a golf habit, like a pornography habit, would send out the wrong message. In order not to alienate my fellow teachers (all female), parents, pupils and the local education authority, I’d kept my golf a dirty secret, using the driving range in Derby, where no one knew me, or travelling to courses even further afield. Of course, I didn’t play often. And playing on my own was no fun. But it had been worth keeping my hand in for the pleasure of playing with Ollie today. As I putted for a half on the fifth green, his moody silence was distracting — but not so much that I missed. Three up with four to play.
A curlew called from a nearby field. The blue sky was faintly skimmed with white. Yellow gorse fringed the sixth tee. I couldn’t have been happier. And that was a cue — hubris? complacency? lack of concentration? — for my game to deteriorate.
Perhaps it wasn’t that I got worse but that Ollie had finally found his groove. At any rate, he took the next two holes with pars.
One up with two to play: I had rarely pushed Ollie this far. In victory he used to mask his exultation with a polite handshake and ‘Well done'. He would not be so condescending today.
Eight’s a lucky number for me, and the eighth was an ‘easy’ par four, so Ollie said. I watched him as he stood over the ball, getting in his own space as he used to describe it, before it became a cliché of sports psychology. ‘Watch how I address the ball,’ he’d say, tutoring me. ‘When I’m in my own head, nothing else counts.’ I used to feel patronised and would look away. But now I did watch, positioning myself at the edge of his eyeline. His methods were unchanged in twenty years: two easy, swishing practice swings, then the long readying of himself for the real thing, his legs trembling, his forefingers and thumbs across each other in a double V, his eyes drilled viciously down as though the ball were some hideous offence to nature. But the twitch in his cheek was new. And the pause before he struck seemed too strung out. Surely no one could concentrate so intently for so long. I relaxed, coughed, stretched my legs, expecting him to step away and recommence his pre-shot ritual; I’d seen him do that many times before. Instead, he rushed the club back and crashed it down — an ugly stab, not a smooth swing. The ball flew high and wide, in a steepening curve that sliced it rightwards to the course’s one water hazard,where it landed — plish! — mid-pool. He gave me a look as he replaced his tee and set a second ball there.
‘Lost ball,’ he said, as though it were my fault.
Had I spooked him? Was I still spooking him, since his next shot wasn’t much better, fetching up in a prairie of docks and thistles wide left of the fairway? Surely not. If he’d lost his concentration, the problem wasn’t me coughing, scratching my nose or shuffling my feet, it was him. Still, I felt jumpy as I stepped up for my shot — for fear not of messing up but of humiliating him. I drew the wood back and hit down and through. The drive wasn’t just the best I played that afternoon but my longest and straightest ever, rolling up to within fifty yards of the green. From there, with Ollie marooned behind me in the rough, I surely couldn’t lose the hole.
I didn’t, though I failed to win it, fluffing my first chip and then three-putting, while Ollie holed a twelve-footer for a half. One ahead with one to play; the worst I could do now was to tie. Ollie said nothing as we walked to the last. I read his silence as fury, not with me but