Mark explained to me that he was on a mission, and that mission was to shag Christine before his seventeenth birthday. ‘I’m working up to it and slowly getting her interested until one day she just won’t be able to stop thinking about me,’ he said. ‘Is she not a bit old for you?’ I asked. ‘She’s sort of thirty or something, right?’ Mark waved the question away. ‘Twenty-six. I’m tired of the girls our age. I don’t want an immature idiot who writes the name of her favourite band on her pencil case then crosses it out next week when she changes her mind. I want a woman who knows who she is.’ I was often dehydrated by the time Mark and I had completed eighteen holes, especially in what had been a very hot summer, and would have liked to have gone directly from the final green into the Men’s Bar to order a pint of Coke with ice, but Mark always insisted that we followed protocol and visited the locker room to wash our hands and change into our soft shoes beforehand. I soon became aware that Mark, who was otherwise rarely guided by protocol, was driven by an ulterior motive on these occasions, which was to make sure his hair was adequately gelled before he saw Christine. ‘How do I look?’ he would ask me, after liberally applying the gel from one of the circular plastic tubs of it he worked his way through each week. ‘Really good,’ I would reply, more admiring Mark’s hair as a whole than specifically its gelled state. So far, if the gel was having an impact on Christine, she was keeping her cards very close to her chest. To date, the only sentence she’d said to Mark, besides ‘Thanks’, ‘What can I get you?’, ‘Pint or half’ and ‘With ice or without’ had been ‘Ooh, big shot!’ – this being in response to the time Mark paid for two pints of Coke with a fifty-pound note, which he’d got purposely from the bank that weekend, after exchanging it for his birthday money and a month’s wages from his paper round.

Mark’s other goal for his seventeenth birthday was to learn to drive and, when he had done so, very quickly purchase a car and drive it to school where, by which point, he would be attending the sixth form. The comic genius of this plan, we recognised, was that everyone knew that the small council house where Mark lived with his granddad was only seventy yards from the school car park. It was, in fact, the closest house of all to the school.