Nice Jumper by Tom Cox Page A

without so much as a swerve of wheels or shriek of brakes. Satisfied with their afternoon’s work, Terry, Trevor and their gothic friend headed for the pro shop to bring Nick news of their triumph, but somewhere on the way found the bin’s owner on their tail. ‘It was bloody terrifying,’ Trevor recalled. ‘One minute, there was only a squirrel in my rear-view mirror. Next minute, there’s that fat woman from Carry On Matron , waving a huge stick at me.’ Whether this really was ‘that fat woman from Carry On Matron ’ remains to this day very much up for debate, but Trevor’s imagery left none of us in any doubt that it had been a wise move to duck into the pro shop as swiftly as possible.
    As Nick and Trevor guffawed, Terry masticated enthusiastically and the goth did her best to look more cheerful than Christopher Lee’s manic depressive granddaughter, I sensed a personal dilemma arising: one of those situations where, purely from participating in group laughter, you’ve been half accepted into a social circle, but need that one final push, the perfect audacious comment or gesture. I quickly gathered some options. So, Nick. That delayed wrist action you were showing me was really cool . No. Nick was with his street mates now – he didn’t want to talk about golf. Trevor, baby. I hear you were caught urinating once in a nightclub. Can we be friends? Come on . I told myself to think, quick. I thought. I came up with blank. I thought again. A brief anecdotal lull swiftly turned into a pivotal silence, all eyes on me to break the deadlock.
    ‘I dare you to go back.’ A voice said this, though it didn’t seem to belong to Nick, Terry, Trevor or Gothilda. It sounded a bit like my voice. Or, rather, it emerged from the same place that the words I spoke normally did, but I didn’t feel it come out.
    Silence returned. Terry, for the first time, put Greg Norman’s head to one side.
    ‘Whaddayousay?’ asked Trevor.
    ‘I said, “I dare you to go back.”’ Definitely my voice this time: brittle, diluted.
    ‘The little squirt’s got balls the size of lemons,’ said Nick, badass again now.
    There was a pause, as a silent jury drank me in.
    ‘OK, OK,’ said Trevor. ‘We’ll go back. She doesn’t scare me. I’ve seen scarier old bags in my tea. We’ll go back, sure.’
    ‘Yeah,’ said Nick, reading Trevor’s thoughts. ‘But there’s just one condition …‘
    ‘Right,’ said Trevor. ‘She wants her wheelie bin back, so I think under the circumstances, Tom, it’s the least you can do to give it to her.’
    From where Trevor, Terry and I crouched in the ditch with the wheelie bin, we were afforded a first-rate view of the driveway of the house belonging to the woman who might have been the woman from the Carry On film. From what we could see so far, there was no sign of life, unless you were of the opinion that three garden gnomes and a porcelain duck represented sentient beings. The wheelie bin rested in the ditch with us, where Terry and Greg Norman amused themselves by sifting through its contents. (‘Wicked! This month’s Cosmopolitan .’) Nick and Gothilda watched from the pro shop, a hundred yards or so away. The five of us waited, as a dog walker faded into the distance. I didn’t recognize him, but I felt I might have done. That was the thing about the residents of Cripsley Drive: even if they weren’t members of the golf club, they always looked as if they should have been.
    As I waited for the coast to clear, my attention kept returning to a concrete nymph at the front of Mrs Carry On’s house. Something disturbed me about it – not just the fact that it was hideous and tasteless; something else, beyond that. Something about its outstretched pose. The nymph – a singularly unhappy nymph – seemed to be searching with its arms for some invisible object: the very object, perhaps, that would restore its happiness.
    Suddenly, I knew what I had to do.
    I sauntered out into the open,