Dead Golfers

The strange obsession of Hamilton Severiano Driver

Having the surname Driver in the small Ayrshire town of Troon, home to nine golf courses, one an Open Championship venue, had always been an issue. When teachers at the local secondary school, Marr College, found out his middle name was Severiano, they would chuckle, snort or dismiss his father, who had forced the name past an aggrieved short-lived motherly presence, as one of the Ayrshire town’s many golf obsessives. 

And as if living with the ghost of Sevvy Ballesteros, legendary Spanish superstar of the wayward tee shot, wasn't enough, there was musical theatre to contend with: 

“Hamilton,” Mr Franken, Geography and registration teacher had muttered that first day at Marr College, and then burst into a kind of tuneless, warbling. “Abilene, Abilene, prettiest town I've ever seen. Women there don't treat you mean…”

The entire class had half-giggled in that dumbfounded way nervously ignorant kids did. Hammy’s blank stare must have communicated with the vicious old bastard. “Not country music fans, then, your parents? George Hamilton the Fourth, clean-cut king of country? Or possibly named for the Hamilton in Lanarkshire, home to the Academicals, a poor to mediocre football club?” Hammy stared stonily ahead. He knew he’d been named after a local legend from the Bogside and Ravenspark clubs in Irvine, along the coast, a hard-gambling miner called McInally who had won every competition open to him in the 1930s. But he told no-one.

Golf. He hated it. He loved it. He hated it.

To impress his dad, a roll-ups-and-whisky-flask player who was out on the municipal Lochgreen course three times a week, he’d pretended, displayed a grim passion. Right up until age 14 and the arrival simultaneously of sex (Lena Ervine, two years older, into badminton and The Strokes; hand-job behind the whins bordering Ottoline Drive; jaggy) and exposure to the wilder excesses of the Jesus and Mary Chain. He couldn’t imagine either of the Reid brothers in Pringle. Older pop stars, they had flirted, some very seriously with the game: Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, Lloyd Cole. But as he delved into the ancient history of the Velvet Underground, became obsessed with that other Reed, he couldn’t see Lou with a sand wedge, languidly excavating a bunker. John Cale, maybe, that lantern jaw and the build of a craggy Welsh second row forward.

That he’d abandoned the game having just come second in the Scottish Boys Open at Belleisle in Ayr was clearly a hormonal decision. He’d lost the final matchplay pairing three and two after a disastrous series of out-of-bounds chip shots  at the 17th that saw an enraged demolition of a nine iron and a nearby spectator’s umbrella (a much-prized pre-Trump Turnberry souvenir). That the nearby spectator was his father hadn’t helped.

It was all a long time ago and this particular balmy summer night, all west coast glimmer and glow, Hammy had other things on his mind. Notably, the reaction of someone to receiving and unwrapping a cardboard box containing 30 squashy green plastic bags, all full of dogshit.

The excrement came from a young Labradoodle called Bono, a name that annoyed Hammy almost as much as U2’s clangy yearning and yowling. He had seen the band once with a guesting Jim Kerr from Simple Minds at the Hydro in Glasgow, dragged there by a woman called Diane he’d abandoned soon after she issued a wild Celtic cry,  plunged through the standing area at the front and began trying to crowdsurf. He’d walked up to Finnieston, gone for a leisurely pint and a malt at the Ben Nevis, and still made it back in time to find her wandering in a delighted daze out of the horrible hanger. She’d dumped him soon afterwards for a Runrig fan, which was a relief.

Bono (or Bonio, as Hamilton thought of the beast) was owned by a man called Andrew Havelock, initially known to Hammy only as Prick-In-BMW. It was an SUV, late model, plug-in hybrid, and every weekday morning since the beginning of May, or every weekday morning at 7.00am that Hammy was up and about, the car stopped outside Driver’s ground floor flat in Wood Court, on the Troon seafront. Out from the hatcback would leap Bono, inevitably unleashed and prone to causing passing vehicles to swerve violently, and an enormous turd would, after some sniffing and peeing, be deposited on the grass that bordered the rocks and led to the great harbouring sheltering mound called the Ballast Bank. 

“Bono! Here boy! Good lad!” The cry was poshboy Glaswegian. Havelock suited and booted out of Slaters like a downmarket footballer. A Hamilton Academical maybe. Back into the car went the dog and then they were off. No poo-bag. No attempt to pick up Bonio’s doings, which were always copious. Gelatinous and a light khaki tennis colour, with reddish flecks of what looked like carrot. Vegan dogfood, thought Hammy, one of those ridiculous personalised-for-your-pooch things you could buy online. Veggiemutt. Boneless bilge for Bonio.

Back in the car went Bonio, and off Prick-in-Beemer sped. Hammy ran the plates at work, found Havelock’s home address and, over a month which was too quiet and boring for anyone’s good, began picking up Bonio’s shite and storing each bag of ordure in a sealable plastic box. Vengeance was on his mind.

He recognised that it was unhealthy, vindictive and the kind of thing that could get you at the very least seriously disciplined. He was, after all, a detective sergeant and Police Scotland were known to disapprove of vigilantism in the force, even if it only involved secreting  a few bags of Boniojobbie behind Havelock’s sofa in his lower conversion on South Beach. Which had been Hammy’s first idle idea for retribution.

But as the days passed, Havelock showed no indication of improving his stance on picking up Bono’s doings, and gradually Hammy’s thoughts on how to respond grew more and more elaborate. He could break into the South Beach apartment, unscrew a wall panel or a floorboard and empty the raw dog sewage into the gap before reattaching. He had heard a famous newspaper editor had done something similar  with rotting fish to an ex-lover who was trying to sell his house. Or perhaps simply placing them in the spare wheel compartment of the BMW. Or hiring a group of renegade weans from Muirhead to pelt his windows with the bags…

In the end, he’d bought a self-assembly cardboard box from the Post Office, placed all the (triple wrapped in clingfilm) green-wrapped doings inside and addressed it to Havelock at his workplace, which turned out to be the newest Troon golfing kid on the block: the ‘new’ course called Lord Darnley. This was the former Darley municipal links, sold by a desperate South Ayrshire council to a development company who were well on the way to transforming what had been the most rugged and unforgiving of the three Troon public courses into a ‘luxury golf  destination ‘ with a hotel, spa, helicopter landing pad and on-site brothel, or so it was said. Like Turnberry only ‘with a better range of facilities’ was the advertising spiel.

Hammy had been keeping the accrued shite in his Bradan road lock up, along with all the detritus of a failed marriage and dead father. Sets of golf clubs, their design ranging from the oversized modern forgiveness specials his late dad had ended up using, things it was impossible to miss the ball with, to the hickory-shafted affairs he’d started out with and his dad had failed to throw away. And now Hammy couldn’t either, despite the ache of fear and disgust they evoked. Two mountain bikes, from when he and Stefanie had decided to get fit by cycling along Troon’s mountainously flat and comprehensively boring seafront prom. That had stopped after Stef ran over a pug. The vet bills had been horrendous.

Now he was gazing at the addressed box of dog dung and wondering if he had entirely lost his mind. Bereavement and divorce were powerful emotional forces, and he began to admit to himself that he may have become a bit obsessive about Mr Havelock and his dog’s excreta. Just a bit.

His mobile vibrated.

“Driver,” he muttered. 

“You in Troon, Hammy? Moping about wishing you were out on Lochgreen or flopping a wee perfecto onto the Postage Stamp? Fine night for the gowf, eh?” Inspector Graham Lexington, 10 handicapper, knew Hammy hated golf and resented the fact he’d once been good at it. Hammy sighed.

“Aye, sure sir. Off shift, due in tomorrow bright and early.”

“Aye, well. Seeing as you’re on the spot, local knowledge, all that, thought you could maybe nip over and reassure the natives. Cleaner, actually, phoned it in. Seems she found a body. A dead one.”

“Really? Another ancient Ayrshire retiree popping their clogs after a lifetime of deep fried mutton pies, missed putts and stress?”

“Don’t think so. Cleaner at the Lord Darnley golf and leisure  extravaganza reckons it’s somebody called Havelock. Andy, or Andrew, works in membership sales and PR for that bunch of upstarts. Probably coked out after work and had a wee thrombosis.” Lexington was a member at Glasgow Gailes; he despised the arriviste glare and gloss of the Lord Darnley links and all the buggy drivers the course was trying to attract. Golf for overweight Trumpians “Thing is, there’s a dog in the office with him, some kind of poodle, I think. Might have to call in the SSPCA. It’s scaring the cleaner, anyway. Made a bit of a mess too. I mean, you’d have thought a cleaner would be OK about cleaning about some doo-doo.”

“Context, I suppose. Andrew Havelock?” Hammy was gazing at the name written in Sharpie on the cardboard box at his feet.

“That’s right? Know him? Nice guy? Member of the Troon bourgeoisie?”

“No,” said Hammy. “We’re not acquainted.”

“Not yet,” said Lexington. “Anyway, head over there and hold the fort. Call in who you think you need if there’s anything dodgy. And watch that dog.”

“I will,” said Hammy. 

“It’s probably a load of shite,” said Lexington.

Driver said nothing.

To be continued, possibly…