The Amateurs by John Niven Read Free Book Online

lunge, as Gary swung so hard he generated almost as much clubhead speed as Calvin Linklater himself.
    However, there the similarities with Linklater ended. Linklater’s swing brought the clubface back to the ball exactly where it had left it, right on the sweet spot, pinching off a neat postage stamp of turf and sending the ball rocketing off on a true line. Gary wasn’t so sure where the clubhead would land because he would often have his eyes closed by this point.
    Golf, it has often been pointed out, is like sex. You don’t have to be good at it to enjoy it. But when you were as bad at it as Gary was…then why? Why keep coming back? The truth was that Gary–like millions of other unfortunates around the globe–had hit just enough good shots to facilitate a lifelong, soul-destroying addiction. Like the monkey-typewriter-works-of-Shakespeare principle, if an amateur plays enough golf he will, at some point, hit one like Calvin Linklater or Gram Novotell. Gary told himself what all the poor, deranged fools told themselves: ‘If I can do it once, surely, with enough practice, I can do it all the time?’ Alas, while it is one probability that, if you leave your regiment of monkeys alone for a few millennia with a bank of word processors and unlimited recourse to coffee and doughnuts, then eventually one of them might come excitedly screeching and hopping up to you, grinning its chimp-grin and holding a few badly chimp-typed sentences from King Lear , it is another probability altogether that they will ever produce the complete works.
    He needed a drink, some comfort. Respite from the heartbreak. He dried his eyes, started the car, and went to see Stevie.

7
    I N ROOM 411 OF THE H OSPITALITY I NN NEAR THE harbour, more heartbreak was unfolding.
    The green, sparkly Tinkerbell tights were balled on the floor while, on the bed, Pauline enveloped a scrotum in her mouth and circled her tongue around the bursting balls within it. She came up, tracing the tip of her tongue up the length of the cock, and took it in her mouth, causing him to cry out, ‘Oh doll, oh fuck, that’s fucking magic so it is!’
    Fearing it might all be over too soon, he looked around the room, trying to take his mind off things. He took in the nondescript hotel furniture and fabrics–soft oranges and muted reds–and briefly wondered who supplied their carpeting. Big contract that. Then he looked back down at Pauline–her eyes closed as he slid in and out of her mouth, the tips of her heavy breasts visible below her face.
    Findlay Masterson thought to himself: Result.
    About three months ago was it? Sometime in mid-January, just after Rangers lost at home to…anyway, whenever, they’dhad a birthday party at the house for wee Jake, his wife’s sister’s boy. (Leanne was always throwing parties for her friends and family: none of them had a house for entertaining like the Mastersons had.) Leanne had booked some company to do the entertainment for the weans and Masterson had been surprised when he opened the door to find Pauline on the doorstep, beaming and dressed as Minnie Mouse. He’d been expecting some fat clown, some sad old alky-paedo. Even so, he hadn’t taken much notice of her until later that afternoon. Several bottles of wine had been drunk, the spirits had been cracked open, and the party had definitively swung towards the adults. Masterson had been in the kitchen mixing drinks when she’d come in and said, ‘I think your TV adverts are really funny.’
    ‘Oh aye? Making an arse of maself is mair like it,’ Masterson said, although really he was flattered. The TV ads hadn’t run for a couple of years, but a surprising number of people still recognised him from them. He’d been dressed up in a robe and crown for them– ‘the Carpet King of Scotland’. Stupid idea. Dreamed up by a couple o’ benders from that ad agency in Glasgow he’d hired. Still, folk seemed to have liked it.
    ‘And you have a lovely home,’ Pauline