Up to this point, I’d not knowingly heard any genuinely offensive remarks directed towards Mark at the club. But, now he was winning more tournaments and shooting up in height, he was becoming more widely noticed, and I know his appearance would have been perceived as an extra threat by many of these men who nudged one another and muttered under their breath when they saw him take the prizes at their tournaments, this lanky mixed-race child from who knew where, with his untucked school shirt and hand-me-down equipment and that hair springing higher and higher above his head, towering above their combovers. Mark was good at saving the little money he earned from his paper round, and could no doubt have bought the standard kind of polo shirt most golfers wore, or even got his granddad or his mum to buy him one for his birthday or Christmas, but it would simply have never occurred to him as being important. Mark virtually never spoke to me about his parents. It had been close to a decade since he’d last lived with them. I knew from him only that his dad now resided in France. My parents, meanwhile, had told me that Mark’s mum was currently ‘living in Weston-super-Mare and having some difficulties’.