A simple farmer receives a horse from the gods, a man sells ice creams named after missing schoolkids, the demolition of a hotel brings an old horror to light, a wounded soldier finds the real enemy is in his own camp, a family inherits a peculiar r...
Quint looked up from the scorecard. Mr. Green pivoted towards the stranger, a seven iron laid across his neck. This was part of his stretching routine. There was nobody like Mr. Green for stretching. Quint had been listening to Mr. Green grunt and puff for ten minutes already, his bones creaking and cracking like an old bedframe. It revolted Quint. Listening to Mr. Green stretch was like overhearing his parents having sex.
"Do you mind if I make three?" the stranger said.
"Fine," Mr. Green said. "It will be two though. The boy is my caddy." His chin tilted up slightly as he said this.
The stranger looked at Quint and smiled. He had yellow teeth.
Quint hadn't heard the man approach. One moment he wasn't there, the next moment he was. It was the man Quint had seen earlier – the one whose bag he had mistaken for a giant dog. Clearly it wasn't. But it was the oldest bag he had ever seen. There was no buggy: the bag stood up on two long wooden legs that folded out. The legs were blackened, as if charred. The bag itself looked to be made of thin leather. A network of faint lines crisscrossed it, like the lines on a human palm. Skin he thought, and shivered. For a moment he could have sworn the bag had swelled, ever so slightly bulging outward. As if it breathed.
"Finished the front nine?" Mr. Green said as he reached down to touch his toes.
"No. I prefer the back."
"More of a challenge, eh?"
"Quieter," the stranger said.
This was true today at least. Nobody was on the back nine at all. Quint had checked the book before they left. It was empty. This was unusual, but the back nine was less popular than the front, and it was a hot day. Maybe some groups would come through after them from the front nine, maybe not. Quint liked when the course was empty because it meant he would have a fast round: when he had to wait to tee off his weight seemed to catch up to him. It made setting off again difficult. At school he had learned that this thing was called inertia. The greater the mass of an object the more inertia it had. Quint liked this concept: the idea that once he got rolling he would be unstoppable.
Mr. Green straightened out with a grunt. He wiggled his fingers like a fat man does when a pudding is set before him. This, Quint knew, was the final stage of Mr. Green's Stretching Procedure. Finger-stretches were vital.
"That accent," he said as he pulled a glove on over one hand. "Spanish? No - Italian?" Mr. Green loved picking accents.
"Romani," the stranger said, rolling the r.
A pause. "Romanian?"
The stranger shrugged. Close enough,the shrug said. He was dressed in an absurdly antiquated fashion. Even by Royal Durham standards he looked odd. Mud-stained tartan socks that reached almost to his knees held puffy pantaloons in place, and a filthy handkerchief poked from the pocket of his tattered coat. His sideburns were preposterously bushy. By contrast his hair had been combed back neatly over his scalp, clinging to it as if it had been glued there.
Romani,Quint thought. A gypsy. He didn't know if he had ever met a gypsy, but he had read about them. Reading was one of those things fat people could do as well as anyone else.
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Voting is another thing fat people can do as well as anyone else.
