THE GOLFERS

When my older brother Alfie left school for good he got a job collecting up the balls out at the airbase golf range. He couldn't learn how to drive the little electric cart they normally used but he helped out on foot, lugging a great sack behind him like a baby-faced Santa, ducking too late when anyone sent a ball close and bothered to yell. I think they took him on as a favour to my mother's boyfriend from those times, a pink-skinned, sandy-haired sporting type whose name I can't recall now. Anyway, this boyfriend drank and golfed with some of the airmen who practiced there. Or maybe it was my older sister Carol who fixed it for him. She drank with plenty of airmen too.

In late July of that year sudden, incredible rains flooded the river and all the brooks around town and then, just as suddenly, a freakish, continental heat set in. The air felt baked and stifling, not just in the day but for hours into the dark. At thirteen, the feel of that weather was entirely strange to me, and ominous. I've never forgotten it. In all the back yards giving on to water a kind of eggshell glaze, pale orange from iron oxide in the local streams, topped the fine silt left behind from the floods. There was a wide expanse of it left at the foot of the empty schoolyard, a place I often escaped to in the summer holidays. I spent one wholly absorbed morning there, treading out long careful lines of footprints in the weirdly perfect, pastel casing that covered the black asphalt and sports markings. It was like breaking the crust of some virgin, alien world.

Like any sudden change, the strangeness of the weather was bad for Alfie. Early one morning I wandered into the kitchen and found him transfixed at the window, sweating in the sun. He was waiting for Carol to take him out to the golf range on her way to work. Only his right arm was moving, like part of some machine – jerking up and down between his throat and hip, a spasm every few seconds. Each time the hand went up, the big pink fingers went fluttering over the tight collar button of his shirt. His round face was sheened over and puffy and he grunted quietly each time he touched the fastening. His eyes were bulging, almost glassy, but he never went open-collared, not even at home. Not even in pyjamas. I watched him for a minute or so.

Oh just open it for Christ's sake, I said at last.

But then Carol yelled through from the hall – Alfie, I'm going! Get in the car! And he went, lunking past me same as he always did like I hadn't said a word.

* * *

Later that same day Jez and Fisher call round. I'm hiding from the sun, living room curtains drawn tight, sweating into the sofa and sipping from one of my mother's bottles of sweet blue liquor. Both Jez and Fisher are Alfie's age, three years older than me, and only sometimes want me around. When the doorbell rings – one heavy, drawn-out chime – I know it's Jez. My head's swimming a little from the drink, making it hard to stand up quickly. The bell goes again, even slower this time – someone's finger grinding on the face of the button. Once, a single fat turd came through our letterbox on Halloween, and whenever Jez rings the d