Chip, unhappy to see the distress he had caused. 'It's really not a difficult game if you stick to the basics. Eye on the ball, head still, swing easy. Piece of cake.'
It was clearly well intentioned, but to Joe it sounded like telling a man bound to a stake before a firing squad to watch out for flying bullets. He picked up the golf bag. It weighed a ton, but that didn't make much difference when your legs felt they were anchored in lead. Suddenly his determination not to get anywhere near the first tee blotted out everything else in his mind.
He emerged into the bright sunlight. He worked out that if he turned left and moved quick, he could be back at his car and using his phone to ring Woodbine and ask him what the shoot was holding him up before the Triangle noticed his disappearance.
But Tom Latimer was waiting for him just outside the door.
'This way, Joe,' he said. 'Thought we'd play the first two then cut through the woods by Jimmy Postgate's house and play ourselves in over the last three. See if you can carry the corner on the sixteenth like Chris sometimes does.'
The mockery was almost open now.
Bastard! thought Joe.
The adrenaline surge of the hatred gave him strength to move forward with the man down a steep pathway toward what he guessed was the first tee. Surtees and Rowe were there already. They watched his approach with smiling bonhomie. It should have been a comfort to think that soon they'd be getting their comeuppance, but somehow he'd lost all confidence in his theories. He suspected that the only reason Willie Woodbine was going to make contact with him was to vent his fury.
'Now how shall we do this?' said Latimer as they reached the tee. 'High-low takes, that all right with you, Joe? Means you'll have to carry me, but that's the penalty of excellence. OK by you?'
Joe didn't answer. He was staring down the tree-lined fairway which stretched away to a green so distant, he had to screw up his eyes to make out the flag.
Then he heard a murmur of voices and a ripple of laughter and, looking up, he saw to his horror that their path had taken them round the side of the clubhouse and the first tee was positioned right beneath one end of the terrace where so recently he'd been sitting sipping iced coffee. Directly above him, the ornate balustrade was lined with spectators, drinks in hand, like Romans in the Emperor's box, waiting for the gladiators to start the slaughter.
'By rights it should be low man's honor,' said Latimer. 'But as it's your first time here, Joe, we'll let these bandits show us the way, shall we?'
Joe looked at him blankly. Now was the time to have his heart attack, but somehow the presence of all these people looking down from above, while making it even more imperative that he put a stop to this farce, made it even harder to do so.
Rowe was on the tee. He placed a ball at his feet, then without ceremony and with very little evidence of effort, sent it soaring greenward. It took one mighty bounce, a couple of skips, then rolled forever and finally came to a halt right in the middle of the fairway at a distance that Joe's good eye reckoned as two eighty or two ninety yards.
There was a ripple of applause from above.
Surtees took his turn. More methodical than Rowe, he had three studied practice swings before cracking his ball away to finish some fifteen yards behind his partner.
Now it was Latimer. He was a real fusspot, standing behind his ball as if taking very precise aim, before doing some stretching exercises followed by half a dozen practice swings. Above, someone yawned audibly and there was a snort of quickly stifled laughter. Finally he addressed the ball and after staring at it for what even to Joe, who was happy to wait forever, seemed a hell of a long time, he swung.
It wasn't a bad hit; a bit misdirected, so that at first it looked like it was heading toward the l eft-hand trees, then it curved back into the fairway, bounced, ran to the right-hand edge, and came to a halt some thirty yards back from Rowe's ball.
'Sorry about that, Joe,' said Latimer, shaking his head in rather stagy disappointment. 'Lucky I've got you to put things straight.'
Joe advanced on to the tee. Each step was the last before his dodgy knee buckled beneath him. Each second was the one before he had his seizure. But somehow he kept taking the steps and somehow the seconds kept ticking by. Perhaps it was his certainty that he physically couldn't do this that kept him going. Why fake illness when any moment now you really were going to collapse in a heap?
But the collapse never came and finally here he was, adrift in space, looking down at that little white orb so many light years away, and waiting in vain for a black hole to open and swallow him up.
The silence was absolute. Not a sound from the terrace above. His three companions stood behind the tee still as statues. Even the birds had stopped singing.
But there was sound in that silence. Now he could hear it, though he doubted if anyone else could. The sound that Porphyry had told him about, the sound that was less intrusive than the music of the spheres to normal human hearing but disruptively cacophonous to the golfer, destroying all his powers of concentration and co- ordination.
He could hear the roar of the butterflies in the adjacent meadow.
Time for the farce to end. All he had to do was step back and say in front of everybody, Listen, you bastards, you may have stitched up poor Chris Porphyry, but you ain't going to make a fool out of me.
He took a deep breath and tried to persuade his feet to take that step back. Nothing happened. Oh shoot. Collapse was one thing, petrifaction was another. Maybe they'd all just tiptoe away and leave him be. Maybe in years to come people would pay cash money to come and see the famous statue of the man who turned to stone at Royal Hoo.
Maybe…
He said a prayer, but he doubted if it could be heard beyond the stars, so loud now were the butterflies.
But somehow it got through, for from high above he heard a voice reply.
'Joe!' the voice called. 'Joe!'
He looked up and wouldn't have been surprised to see a circling dove or two.
There were no doves, but he beheld an infinitely more welcome sight.
It was indeed the voice of god, a Young Fair God, holding up a mobile phone.
Yes, still young and fair, but now Christian's face was the face of a very vengeful deity.
'They found him, Joe. They found him. They're on their way.'
Even as he spoke, Joe realized that the faraway sound that had so paralyzed him wasn't a roar of butterflies or anything else. It was the high-pitched, rhythmic wail of sirens, still a long way away but approaching fast, and now detectable by the terrace spectators, who broke their own expectant silence with speculative chatter.
Joe turned his head and looked at the Triangle. They too had heard and their faces were twisted in fearful speculation.
He smiled at them. Now at last his muscles unlocked and he felt he had the strength to step away.
On the other hand, there was a YFG above him, and Joe knew from his upbringing that while God might not dish out His grace too frequently, when He did, there was no stinting and a wise man filled his boots.
He brought to mind what Chip Harvey had said.
Eye on the ball, head still, swing easy.
He swung so easy, without any sense of contact, that for a second he was convinced he must have missed. Except that the ball that the eye in his perfectly still head was on wasn't there.
On the terrace the spectators forgot about the sirens and fell silent again, a silence quickly broken by the hiss of in-drawn breath. Of many in-drawn breaths.
He looked up and saw his ball. At least he saw someone's ball, though it was so distant and receding so fast he couldn't really believe it was his.
It was still high in the air when it passed over Latimer's, it made first contact with the ground a yard or so beyond Surtees', its first bounce took it past Rowe's, and it continued for a good fifty yards before finally coming to rest in the middle of the fairway.
From the terrace above came a rattle of applause, a rumble of cheers, and even, despite the fact that this was the Royal Hoo, a skirl of appreciative whistles that turned into gasps of horror as the first police car appeared,
