17

Every morning of their lives Billy Parsonage and his wife Matty played nine holes of golf at Knightswood Park Golf Course on the west side of the city. Billy had retired fifteen years ago from his position as assistant manager at a city branch of the Clydesdale Bank, and Matty had given up her career as personnel supervisor at the House of Fraser department store in Buchanan Street the same year.

Like some long-married people, they’d come to resemble each other; each had a small round rosy face set in a permanent frown, as if they mutually disapproved of the world. Golf was their passion. Matty was the better player. Billy was a stranger to coordination. He studied golf improvement books, and watched instructive videos, but nothing helped. He was cack-handed, doomed to mediocrity.

On the fourth tee he sliced his drive and the ball went wide of the fairway. He lost sight of it.

Matty said, ‘Not so hot, Billy. Not so hot.’

It’s the wind,’ Billy said.

‘Knocked you off balance, did it?’ Matty played a lovely shot. The ball rose straight and true in the direction of the green.

Billy Parsonage fumed quietly. He dragged his bag and followed his wife along the fairway. The wind puffed up the sleeves of his rainproof jacket.

‘It’s coming out of the east,’ he said.

‘What is?’

‘The wind, woman. The wind is.’

‘And how is this significant?’

‘It interferes with the flight path of the ball, obviously.’

Matty Parsonage thought her husband sometimes talked utter ballocks. He was a bore of the first order, a self-proclaimed expert on meteorology, the global economy, the Kennedy assassination, and the ventilation of buildings. He just blethered on. She didn’t listen much. It would be more fun to read a book about embalming than listen to Billy.

She located her ball in line for the green. ‘You’ll have to look over there,’ she said, and she pointed firmly with her club towards a scrubby clump of bushes. ‘That’s where your ball came to rest, Billy.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I saw it fall.’

Billy stalked off in the direction of the bushes. He muttered to himself furiously about the horrible gloating pleasure Matty took in his misdirected shots. He contemplated the possibility of getting up very early one morning and catching a plane to a faraway place. Alone. Rio came to mind. So did Kuala Lumpur. Matty would never find him. She might not even look for him.

That thought worried him.

He rummaged in the bushes. He snagged his skin on a thorn and said, ‘Dammit.’ He sucked the back of his finger, where blood had broken his skin.

He’d never leave Matty, he thought. It was just something to dream about. She still had shapely legs despite the fact she stuffed them into asexual opaque stockings and wore two-tone brogues and tweed skirts and looked for all the world like the retired headmistress of a certain kind of private academy that no longer existed.

He wished they’d had children. He missed his job at the bank.

He spotted the ball and reached for it.

His eye fell on something else. He failed to recognize it at first – some kind of dark organic matter, he wasn’t sure. He peered closer, parting the thorn bush very carefully. An eye looked back at him, red and swollen and human and dead.

His mouth filled with tepid saliva. He dropped his ball and went running towards his wife, calling her name. Matty would know what to do in a situation like this.

Whatever this situation was.