That was what made Mark different to everyone else at the golf course: he just never appeared all that bothered. When I consider what would have been happening to him hormonally at this point in his life, this now strikes me as more remarkable still. Golf, so our schoolfriends told us, was a limp old man’s game, a bollockless sport devoid of fireworks or passion, but every week we saw it transform men three times our age hailing from supposedly respectable echelons of society into swearing, club-hurling cavemen, grey hooligans spinning in enraged circles halfway up a hill. You’d no more try to strike up a conversation with these directors of sales and funerals, these commodity traders, these spiritually beige number-crunchers while they were on a bad run of putting than you’d try to stroke a hyena who hadn’t eaten for a fortnight. One week, we bit into our sleeves to stifle our laughter as a retired headmaster greeted a triple bogey seven by taking off one of his shoes, marching several yards into the undergrowth and hurling the shoe into the roaring current of the river. The next, we bit harder still on the fabric as we witnessed an esteemed Plymouth solicitor lose the last of the twelve balls he’d started the day with, turn to a crowd of nearby sheep, and shout, ‘MOTHERFUCK EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU.’ We learned to play alongside those who made their living in outdoor professions if we could: the thatchers, the lumberyard proprietors, the deputy garden centre managers. They were a little less flappable. Still, like the others, many of them questioned why we spent so much time at the club, which was not in fact appreciably more time than the time any of them spent at the club. ‘Don’t you boys have homes to go to?’ the grey hooligans in their pleated slacks would ask, in what, for me, was an early lesson in the fact that, when somebody attacks you out of the blue for something you’re doing that isn’t hurting anyone else, they’re more than likely talking about a wrongness in their own lives. ‘Yes, sir, you are correct: it is strange, us spending our free time playing a sport, in our mid-teens. What must our wives think? Don’t we have livings to earn, mortgages to pay, kids to feed?’ It was as if we were briefly on some upside-down planet, where adults, not children, were expected to misbehave, and indulged for it. Being together on this planet united Mark and me, fortified the walls of our City of Two. And that’s really what we were. Other kids were often around, kids from more affluent families than ours, but they never stayed long, never challenged for competitions. In May, there was a proposal – thankfully quashed, in a rare moment of sanity – at a committee meeting to reduce the number of days junior members were permitted to play at the club. The proposal was talked about as if there were juniors everywhere, vast armies of them, running up the fairways every evening, farting on blackbirds and kicking over bins. But it was mostly just me and Mark. Then, after I broke my arm the following month, it was Mark, all alone, fending for himself amongst the grey yobs.