A young boy in a grubby Hawaiian shirt hefted Morgan’s clubs onto his shoulder. He had transferred some of Adekunle’s gleaming beauties into his own well-worn plastic and canvas golf-bag as he had been unwilling to attract amused comment on speculation over Adekunle’s monstrosity, which was of such generous proportions that it could have functioned happily as a great-dane’s kennel or motorbike garage when it wasn’t being transported round a golf-course. Besides, he was sure it would have taken at least two caddies to lift it anyway, and he wanted as little company as possible today. He moved slowly over towards the first tee. Many golfers had made an early start as the tournament was intended to wind up around lunchtime. In fact, he and Murray were driving off third from the end. Morgan nodded and smiled at those he knew, and he received many curious glances in return. He was aware that he looked a little peculiar, what with his frizzy teddyboy quiff (flattened for two minutes with a water-loaded comb, springing perkily back up as it dried), one eyebrow replaced by an oblong of elastoplast, red eyes and a shiny pink nose. He slipped on a transparent green sun-visor to protect his tingling sensitive face from the increasingly hot glare. Halfheartedly he rehearsed his bribe speech like a nervous best man at a wedding, but the words refused to form themselves into any convincing order, and when they did he thought he sounded like some oily dockside pimp: ‘hey meester, you want feelthy peectures.’ That sort of approach would never work with Murray. Generally speaking he was finding it increasingly hard to concentrate on what he had to do later in the course of the morning. The trauma of Innocence’s death, the body snatch, the…whatever the opposite of body snatch was — the body drop, the mind-blowing confrontation with the Duchess, had robbed him of any satisfaction he had planned to derive from this symbolic act of corruption. It had now become a simple exercise in self-defence, in skin saving, because he knew — more than ever now — that in order not to lose control irretrievably of his life he had to hold on to his job.
Also he felt terrible. The tensions of the last two nights plus the strenuous drinking had combined to produce a hangover of mythic proportions. It seemed as if his entire body had been tenderized by one of those jagged wooden mallets used for bashing steaks. His tongue felt twice as large as normal, as though it was striving to loll out of the side of his mouth like a dog’s and he had a neuralgic headache that loosened every tooth in its socket and made his sinus passages hum like tuning forks.
He swished a golf-club around experimentally. He hadn’t played golf for three months or more and he heard his back and shoulders creaking and clicking under the unfamiliar strain. Checking up on his backswing he suddenly saw Murray walking past the caddie cage towards him and felt his heart lurch with nerves and panic. Then he saw Murray’s son and the sickness turned to irrational anger. Why had he brought his wretched kid along with him?
Murray came up. He smiled evenly.
‘Merry Xmas, Mr Leafy. I see we’ve been drawn together.’
‘Yes, quite a coincidence, don’t you think?’ There was a pause. ‘Ah…look, by the way, I wanted to apologize about the other night…the phone call. I was a bit upset. You know, the dead body and, well, everything, generally. I didn’t realize your position exactly.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Murray said. ‘I haven’t been.’
‘Good. No hard feelings then.’
‘No feelings at all, Mr Leafy.’ He looked closely at Morgan. ‘Your face all right?’
Morgan laughed. ‘Slight accident with my gas cooker. Blowback I think they call it. Ha-ha.’
‘I see.’ Murray looked closer. ‘Gives you a curious expression.’ He paused. ‘I hope you don’t mind my son coming along — playing some of the shorter holes?’
‘Not at all,’ Morgan forced a smile in the boy’s direction. ‘Have a good Christmas?’ he asked.
♦
Morgan played very badly. The fairways were burnt almost white from the sun and were as hard as a road. He developed out of nowhere a curling fading slice on almost every shot including his putts. The small greens, known as ‘browns’ because of their tar and sand surfacing — proved elusively hard to hit, the balls skittering over them again and again, refusing to slow down on the baked ground. Murray agreed to call him Morgan, chatted amiably enough and coached his son with a professional brevity and acuteness. Because of the boy playing some of the shorter holes they waved through the twosomes that were coming behind and soon they were at the tail-end of the tournament, which, Morgan thought, actually suited him quite well.
They completed the first nine holes by midday and paused at a fairway drink-shack to slake their thirst. Morgan had scored a dire 63 on the outward nine — Murray a useful 37—and it was shaping up to be his all-time worst-ever round of golf in more ways than one. He had imagined that, after everything he had been through, bribing Murray would turn out to be a piece of cake, but as ever the physical presence of the man unsetded him. He felt nervous, adolescent and drained of self-confidence.
The first nine holes had sent them up one side of a river valley and back down the other. The second nine branched out into the thick forest that surrounded Nkongsamba. There was a sharp dog-leg after the eleventh, and they wouldn’t see the clubhouse or the outskirts of the town again until the sixteenth. Morgan watched Murray drive off easily and fluently. The ball sailed a straight two hundred yards and bounced another fifty leaving him within easy range of the brown. Morgan squared up to his ball. He decided to give it everything he’d got, show this old man how to hit a golf-ball, pretend it was Fanshawe’s head he was striking. He took a prodigious swing and cracked the ball with all his force: it shot off and out in a steady curve to his right, plunging into dense and thorny rough.
‘Shit!’ he swore, then apologized for the boy’s sake.
‘You shouldn’t try to hit it so hard,’ Murray advised. ‘Relaxation’s the key to this game.’
‘That’s the fiendishly annoying thing about golf,’ Morgan complained, knowing relaxation was just about the last state he could achieve at the moment. ‘It’s such a, you know, controlled game. Everything’s held back, sort of restrained. You can’t thrash away at things, soak up the aggression, tire yourself out like you can in other sports. Every time I wind myself up for a massive effort I know it’s going to be disastrous.’
Murray looked at him quizzically, as if this admission held the key to his character. ‘But that’s what it’s all about though, isn’t it? Knowing when to hold back. Staying in control. Using the head and other wooden clubs.’
Morgan laughed uncomfortably: he didn’t welcome the implied criticism. ‘I suppose I’m just the wrong personality for the game,’ he said ruefully.
‘Don’t give up so easily,’ Murray said as he walked over to the rough with him. ‘Keep at it. It may come right one day.’
They poked around in the tangled thorny bushes looking for Morgan’s ball. They threw up thick clouds of dust, flies, tics, grasshoppers, uncovered a calcined coil of human faeces, but no ball.
‘Do you like it out here?’ Morgan asked Murray as he hacked at the undergrowth with his club head. ‘Dust, heat, stink…impenetrable jungle.’
‘Well enough,’ Murray said. ‘I probably like it as much as I’d like anywhere. It has its advantages as well as its disadvantages.’
‘You’re quite content then,’ Morgan established a little belligerently.
Murray released the bush he was pulling back. He smiled. ‘Is anybody quite content?’
‘Well I know for a fact I’m not,’ Morgan confessed. ‘But you seem to be — of all the people I’ve met.’