I am delighted to say that Tom has delivered the manuscript of Villager and work has started on the editing. We just wanted to say thank you to everyone for backing the book and thought you might like to read a brand new extract . . . 

Mathew Clayton (Head of Publishing at Unbound)

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The summer Mark and I found the man in the woods, Mark was sixteen and I was a year younger. We’d been playing a lot of golf that year and nobody much admired us for it. After our rounds and long practice sessions were complete, we’d walk home along the lane, carrying our clubs, and the inhabitants of passing vehicles would beep their horns and shout profanities at us. Considering it was a quiet lane where you’d only see about twenty cars per hour, it occurred with startling regularity. One time someone hurled a half-full Fanta can from a passenger window and it hit me in the eye and drenched the front of my polo shirt. When my mum saw the bruise, she refused to believe I had not been fighting. After that, Mark and I started taking a different route, over the corner of the beacon, and down through the woods by the river. Some of the paths weren’t public but Mark worked out a shortcut and was fairly confident we wouldn’t get into trouble. 

The golf course had two personalities, and no smooth segue between them was in evidence. It threw visitors off balance, left them hot, gorse-scratched and irritated. Many who had begun the day in a positive frame of mind declined to visit the clubhouse for a drink afterwards, instead hurling their clubs into their car boot, not even bothering to change out of their spiked shoes, blowing out of the car park in a plume of exhaust smoke and a loud scrape of metal against speed bump, like people who’d stolen their own cars. For the first nine holes, everything was very polite and neatly mown, a sculpted suppression of nature that, were you blindfolded and dropped onto it, would have been hard to distinguish from a million other golf courses. But after the ninth green, players followed a steep, tunnelled path through a small city of gorse and skyscraper ferns and emerged into a primal, unwashed other place that they had to trust, going by what the map on the back of the scorecard told them, was the tenth tee. Quarter-sheared, mad-eyed sheep and horned cattle roamed the fairways and tees indiscriminately. Jangly nerved salesman and insurance brokers backed off their putts as large, dark, winged shapes wheeled overhead, mocking them with shrieking, beaked laughter. Balls struck sweetly from tees ricocheted off assorted hidden rocks into tussocky bogs, never to be seen again. These balls soared unpredictably owing to the dung caking their surface and sudden corridors of Satanic wind coming down off the moor. It was not uncommon to see visitors holding up play by attempting to herd sheep, cattle and ponies out of their playing line. Regulars were more nonchalant and casually floated their drives over the animals’ heads, but even they were not exempt from pastoral strife. Believed to be assured of victory in the 1989 club championship as he strutted the mounds of the final fairway, Tom Bracewell threw away his advantage when a heifer sat on his ball and refused to move. A crowd soon gathered around the cow, the competitors who had been awaiting the result of the event in the clubhouse bar gradually filtered out to watch, until over a hundred of us stood staring at the animal. Christine Chagford, who before taking her job behind the bar at the club had spent a lot of time in close proximity to cattle, finally managed to sweet talk the cow into giving way and letting the group behind play through, but not before she’d planted a sweet kiss on its forehead and posed for several photos which would later be framed and hung on the wall of the Men’s Bar. Rattled, Bracewell racked up a triple bogey seven, putting him in a sudden death play-off with Christine’s cousin, Tony, which Bracewell subsequently lost. Two years later, it was agreed that he had still not recovered: a pallid, stooped figure, seen, if seen at all, staring forlornly at competition result boards and handicap tables in the back room of the clubhouse or down on the bottom practice ground at sundown, scratching his chin and assessing the balls spread diversely in front of him, some or other mail-order teaching contraption abandoned on the ground behind him.

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 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 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.