The Over-The-Hill-Gang & San Bushman!

Cheated today – had the morning off and lunch at the golf club. Sounds posh but isn’t. However, did me a power of good to step back from writing books and blogs for a couple of hours. Glad I went. So was Victoria, my long suffering wife. Hope you see the funny side of things...

*

Monday morning – golf day. Four minutes late for tee-off; having parked my car, changed my shoes, lashed together trolley and bag I merge with the rest of the over-the-hill-gang.

‘You’re late again.’

I give Geoff my best ‘so-what’ look and mouth obscenities at him without the others cottoning on.

‘A quid on the game?’

Everyone nods. Geoff looks surprised, even though it’s been a quid as far back as anyone of us can remember.

Les has got his blue, thermal vest on; the sleeves are sticking out from his shirt. When he laughs his eyes water and his top teeth drop; he’s eighty one forchrisakes! Pipes and tubes, tablets, teeth and sprays. I can’t wait to get that old – so much fun to look forward to.

I pinch my nostrils closed and mimic Peter Alliss; ‘On the first Tee from...’ wherever – doesn’t really matter and I get another dirty look from Geoff.  I guess waiting for whichever god he worships is driving him nuts.

So this is it. Now is the moment; one that we have dreaded and dreamed of since last Monday. Trolleys of varying colours, makes and price tags are parked and preened like Mayfair Rollers. Batteries are coupled, engines revved and wheels checked for fear of flying off halfway down the Glorious Fourth.

‘Show us the way, Tiger!’ I grin at Geoff and egg him onto the first tee.

Geoff glowers at me for talking and with a driver modelled on Picard’s Starship Enterprise lurches at a little ball no bigger than a pullet’s egg. 

‘Great shot!’ I lie and get muttered at when Geoff’s ball makes a spiteful swerve for squirrel country. Now he’s sucking his teeth and glaring. I can see by the accusation in his eyes that his crappy shot was my fault.

‘Do you ever stop talking?’ he asks me. My reply of ‘only when having an orgasm’ has obviously offended him because his grip on the driver is really tight now.

Eventually, we’re off. Most are in the trees but there’s a lone ball on the fairway. Ian, being dragged at breakneck speed by his temperamental electric trolley is first to reach it. He checks the logo and dribbles venom.

‘It’s yours.’

‘Titleist 3?’

‘Yes,’ he growls and the urge to stamp on my ball turns his ears red. 

‘Behind that tree,’ I point to his ball. ‘I think that’s yours.’

It is and another gargantuan slash with the Callaway equivalent of a Scottish broadsword squirts his ball towards the pond, skips it three times on the water and sticks it into the bank. I daren’t repeat what Ian said for fear of being locked up. However, an hour and three quarters later with spikes off we all traipse into the golf club dining room.

Les orders for all of us; always the same – soup, roll and a cup of tea. Four mushroom soups – four ageing men on the verge of a feeding frenzy. Ian flashes a smile at the waitress; not impressed by his Brad Pitt, plastic lookalikes she twirls her pencil and stares through him.

The soup arrives; hot enough to melt down Chevy engine blocks. Geoff burns his mouth and shouts out something that rhymes with duck. The waitress laughs, Geoff threatens to eat her liver, drops his spoon in his soup and leaves it there.

‘Time for another nine, then?’ 

The sun’s come out through a hole in the clouds, startlingly bright just above the tenth green; maybe God’s sending someone down for us. There’s no one else on the course; ‘millionaire golf’ everyone points out. Same as they pointed out last week. The air is fresh – the colours stunning. I shrug off the inevitability of me reaching my own life’s ‘final hole’ and with the rest of the over-the-hill-gang trundling along behind, walk as a grumpy old git of a golfer down towards the light...

*

Sons of Africa; an extract:

... ‘You carry the spear and axe of a great fighter, yet your hands tremble like those of a girl?’

‘But you hide from me?’ Mhlangana hissed. ‘If you are neither spirit nor wizard; step into the sunlight.’

‘Then give me your word, Induna.’

Mhlangana tightened his grip on the assegai and with his right hand, hefted the wicked battle axe up to his shoulder.

‘Step from your hiding place. On your life do not try to deceive me.’

Like a quick wind, a man, barely the height and build of a pubescent, Matabele girl darted from the forest. In his hand he clutched the hunter’s bow, its entire length no bigger than a child’s plaything – a slender, bone-tipped arrow nocked and readied for flight.

‘I am N’go; the caterpillar!’

‘UMuthwa!’ Mhlangana recalled the name given to the Bushmen by Zulu mineworkers on the Kimberley diamond fields. Only once before had he seen these little, amber skinned people of the deep Kalahari. Small eyes; thinly slanted as those of a snake – the poison that tipped their arrows just as deadly. As forest wraiths they would appear from nowhere. Like ghosts, fleet as desert winds, on sinewy legs they would match the stamina of any antelope – with a jackal’s cunning and an unmatched hunter’s eye they would strike at will.

‘This is not your place, UMuthwa. Where is your clan?’

Bird-like, N’go perched to the crest of a boulder; as a nervous finch he was ready to dart for cover. He arched a slender arm towards the west.

‘Makgadikgadi.’

‘The Great Thirst.’ Mhlangana knew of the name; as a small boy hunting ostrich with his father, he had seen the Bushman’s strange and shimmering land, a full twenty day’s march further west into the driest heartlands of the Kalahari – six thousand square miles of arid scrub and parched earth; where vast migratory herds once wallowed in the shallows of a great lake, now, set apart from the lush oasis of the Okavango, only the giant salt pans of Ntwetwe, Sua and Nxai with their islands of igneous rock remained.

N’go stared down from his stronghold. His eyes now those of the meerkat; watchful of the cobra’s every move. In the time it would take for an owl to blink he could release the arrow and as a puff of wind be away inside the forest.

‘Why does a son of the Matabele come alone into the wilderness?’

‘Perhaps I am not alone, UMuthwa.’

‘You are alone. For two suns I have followed your spoor.’

‘Then you also are alone.’

‘Perhaps.’ He freed the arrow from its bow-string and without taking his eyes from Mhlangana, slid the precious tool back inside a quiver cut from the bark of the Kokerboom. ‘Perhaps as the wind my people are everywhere.’

Mhlangana lowered his axe. A single, yellow butterfly hovered undecidedly over the Bushman’s head; then, soft as yellow sunlight it touched his nose and alighted there.

‘Uvemvane!’ N’go whispered, delighted by the tiny creatures preference. Cross-eyed he watched the yellow wings fold and then extend. Like a child he raised a little hand and gently brushed the creature away...

*