A Year in Fife Park (10 page)

Mostly, though, we drank tea and talked about the things we had in common. We didn’t have all that much in common, though, so Darcy used to just blether on as if I was interested in whatever else came into her head, and I did the same, and eventually I realised that’s just what people do. Darcy really didn’t have any girl friends left, at the start of second year. I reckon I was a nutritional supplement for that, a human vitamin if you will, which is to say that I’m pretty sure that Darcy just pretended I was a girl. This worked surprisingly well, because one of the few things we had in common was Craig and, as far as I can tell, he did the same thing.

So Darcy would have me round for tea, and she’d bitch about her ex-boyfriend, and then talk about food, and not eating food, and going to the gym – all of which were big issues in my life as well, again mostly thanks to the ex-boyfriend. For my part, I got to learn which bits of Cosmopolitan magazine to take seriously, and which bits nobody takes seriously, which is still probably the most valuable object-lesson I’ve had in sex.

[In short, Cosmo is probably a subtle parody masquerading as a garish rag. Failing that insight, the simplest explanation is the best one: it’s just a bit shit.]

We’d sit up in her room and chat because it was, by virtue of being only slighter larger than Pavarotti’s coffin, de facto
cosy
, but also because Darcy’s flatmates were twisted eldritch abominations of the worst variety. They were not her first choice in flatmates.

All of Darcy’s housing plans had fallen through over summer, torn asunder by broken friendships, and she’d taken what she could get in the first week of term. In St. Andrews, what you get if you’re looking for accommodation in the first week of term is fucked in the trash pipe.

Darcy paid a King’s ransom for a box overlooking the all night garage, with a pair of undead flatmates who ate her food and then left disparaging remarks about its quality though the medium of magnetic fridge poetry.

It was one of that pair of murderously kitsch ghouls who let me in, the day I met Cassie.  We didn’t stand on ceremony by then, so I never gave it a second thought when Darcy didn’t answer the door. Her flatmate waved me inside, all white highlights like the Bride of Hammer Horror. She never said a word to me.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

She nodded, up the way. I looked at the shadowy staircase.

‘Right,’ I said, hoping that’s where Darcy was.

The bedroom door was open, so I knocked casually and stepped into the sunlit space within. Strange eyes met me as I crossed the threshold, deep and green, but what hit me was the contempt. I took a step back.

Cassie was overweight, with milky skin and tired features. She flinched when I moved, her mouth- shape sour with fear and blame. I felt like I’d walked into a wall, it was so strong I was almost dizzy with it.

‘Get out!’ Darcy said, shooing me like a dog. I hadn’t even noticed her, sitting on the bed. ‘Go on, now.’

‘Uh,’ I said, feeling winded. ‘ Should I wait for you?’

‘Just go, fucking go,’ Darcy said. ‘Get out right now.’

Her silent partner stared me into oblivion. Ghostlike, I faded from the room. The only thing I could feel was my cheeks, burning red. I went back downstairs in a jumble, and fell out of the door.  I sat on the steps outside for a couple of minutes, feeling rejected and indignant.

When I got back to Fife Park, the Randoms were playing Monopoly in Gowan’s room, with Frank. Frank was out, but wouldn’t give his share of the money back to the bank, which was causing a minor financial crisis. I sat on Gowan’s bed. It was too late to join, but they passed round the cider. Frank gave me a thousand pound note.

‘You look like you need cheering up,’ he said. ‘Don’t spend it all at once.’

The War of the Randoms

Noises came from downstairs. Sometimes they were loud, and violent. There were sounds of banging, clattering, thumping, laughter, screams, and the odd distinguishable obscenity. As our friendship with the Randoms still hung by a thread, we feared the worst.

The Randoms were Gowan Crimp, William Pace and Dylan Tellgood.

By November, we had started to use these names, instead of just calling them the Randoms and, in kind, they had stopped ignoring us and introduced themselves properly.

Gowan was a small, athletic guy, who was always on the lookout for a good time. He had round cheeks, boyish, appealing looks – which have never really left him – and an easy, comfortable manner. He had a roguishly casual attitude to sex, which served him well and infuriated those of us who took sex very seriously indeed and consequently weren’t getting any.

Will was a lithe and good looking blonde guy, with an eighty quid haircut. He went home every weekend in his decrepit Golf to ride horses and visit a girlfriend who we never met. It had been a High School romance, and her half of it still was, either because she was inappropriately young, or desperately re-sitting her way out of the Sixth Form. Will didn’t drink with us often but, when he did, he used to get very drunk, very quickly. Getting him home was always a nightmare, partly because he had a penchant for exposing himself, but mostly because if he came across anything taller than himself he’d climb it and refuse to come down until morning.

I confronted Gowan about the noises at one point, but he countered that noises also came from upstairs, that he often heard people screaming at Americans, and that he was perpetually disturbed by what sounded like something being dragged across the ceiling of his room late at night. He insinuated that it might have been something
awful.
I didn’t pursue the matter.

Usually the disturbances were short-lived in any case, so much so that none of us had made it down in time to see whatever was causing them. Usually the only signs of trouble were minor surface damage. There was a hole in Gowan’s door one day, for example, and then a slightly larger hole in Will’s the next.

One night the noises started and didn’t die down, so I was nominated to investigate. As I got to the bottom of the stairs, I was almost knocked off my feet by Gowan rushing into the house with his arms full of damp and fusty autumnal leaves. He was in hot pursuit of Will, who managed to shut his bedroom door just too late to stop the first barrage of dirty brown leaves from entering in his wake.

The kitchen was in a state. It looked like people had been throwing things at each other. Arguably that wasn’t unusual, although to the trained eye there was definitely something amiss. Outside the house, the damage went further. Will’s Volkswagen had been attacked with peaches, eggs and flour. At that time, tinned peaches were down to such an unreasonably low price that they were cheap enough to use as either a light snack or as light artillery.

‘Grab some eggs!’ Gowan encouraged me, running into the kitchen. ‘There’s still a few clean spots on Will’s car!’

‘No,’ Will called, holding him down, ‘go and get some leaves, and put them in Gowan’s bed…’

‘I was just coming downstairs for a yoghurt,’ I lied.

‘That’ll do!’ Gowan said, feverishly. ‘Throw it over the windscreen.’

The struggle continued as I went upstairs, yoghurt in hand, to report back to Frank and Craig. They both pronounced the Randoms insane, which certainly seemed possible. I don’t know what Craig thought about that, but I think Frank rather viewed it as a challenge.

After it became clear that Gowan and Will were all kinds of trouble, Frank made easy headway with them. Next time they went crazy, he was right there with them, albeit principally in an advisory capacity. Crazy wasn’t worth making too much of an effort over in Frank’s book.

‘Use the chair!’ he said, when Will locked himself in his room.

Gowan pounded another hole in Will’s door with a chair leg.

‘Pour water in his bed,’ he advised Will, after Gowan had finally passed out.

‘He’ll have a fucking heart attack if I pour cold water over him,’ Will objected.

‘Hmm,’ Frank said, a trace of disappointment in his voice. ‘I’m almost sure that won’t happen.’

Will went to get a bucket.

That was the beginning of the end. After Frank switched sides, there was no point trying to keep the house in order, and even Craig let himself go a bit. The next week, while making pancakes, we had what began as a food-fight.

It was just a minor ruckus, started when Craig, out of curiosity, poured cocoa powder into the mixing bowl. I poured one into the pan, but it didn’t cook right. So we grabbed a few handfuls of stodgy half-cooked mix, and threw them at each other. Also at the ceiling because, remarkably, they didn’t come down again. The fight left the kitchen, and pretty quickly escalated into something more.

Sometimes we were all in it together. At one point, we poured several litres of water downstairs, just to see what it would look like. [Like a wet Slinky.] 

But then sometimes it was a battle. I took it like a man when Frank threw water over the balcony at me, but I hid in the downstairs bathroom when the bottles it had been in came down, too. They were followed by soap powder, a few bathroom copies of
The Saint,
some cardboard and a thick woolly blanket.

I was in the bathroom for quite a long time. Craig danced about on the rug madly, working everything into a lather. We left everything exactly where it was when we went to bed.

The Crack of McWinslow

Euan McWinslow was a damn contradiction. He was a thoroughly right wing conservative, who loved American surf punk and smoking weed. He started University at sixteen, but carried himself like a middle aged banker. He had a weak constitution, pale skin and strawberry hair, but he partied harder and longer than anyone else I knew, and threw himself into one extreme beach sport after another. [For Euan, vomiting was a form of punctuation.] One night I saw him ad lib a six minute rap about a plush toy lizard. [The inimitable ‘Gecko Superstar’.]  Later he spent two hours explaining rent control, with no noticeable dip in enthusiasm.

We knew Euan from New Hall, but he went to Gatty when we went to Fife Park; same shit, different end of town. We knew Euan well enough to like him, and also well enough to know that his dial-to-eleven speaker system was better off at the other end of town. I visited maybe twice all year. True to form he lived in a punk rock house, where he studied economics fastidiously.

The other thing about Euan that I remember vividly, is that Darcy Loch fell for him in a big way.

‘How
hot
is Euan?’ she asked me, one day. ‘Those pecs are devastating, and his ass is like some kind of dimpled rock formation.’

That was the first I knew of it. It did not please me to consider Euan in this fresh new light.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We’re probably not going to find a lot of common ground here.’

‘Oh come on, it’s not like you can’t tell who’s the best looking amongst your friends.’

‘I
can
tell,’ I said. ‘But I don’t. Just like I don’t check out their baloney at the froth-trough. This is the way of things.’

‘I bet you do, sometimes,’ she said.

‘You know nothing of men.’

‘Fine,’ she grumped. ‘I was just saying.’

‘He’s nice,’ I conceded. ‘You could do worse. Don’t mention his rocky Greco-Roman arse dimples again.’

‘I didn’t say Greco-Roman.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘I’m almost sure you did.’

‘Do you think he’s too young for me?’

‘Fuck, you’re the one who talks about maturity. Whatever.’

‘He doesn’t seem too young, but then sometimes he does. He’s like, forty going on seventeen.’

‘You better like loud music something chronic. That’s the worst I can say.’

‘He’s
sooo
hawt
. That party we had last week.’

‘The Gecko Party,’ I said.

‘You could feel the tension.’

‘Huh,’ I said.

It was a
huh
moment. I guess I thought we had the corner on sexual tension. But, obviously, ours was the back burner kind.

‘Like, all electricity and hotness, and wow!’

‘I don’t think I know that feeling,’ I said; a half truth.

‘I almost ripped the pants off him right there,’ she said. Then she said it again.

‘Huh,’ I said.

I could sense the frustration in her voice. And I was winded by my own bilious jealousy.

‘I don’t care,’ I said. Out loud, but to myself. Firmly. ‘I don’t care. It’s none of my business.’

‘What, you don’t think I should?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I think he’s into you. It’s all good.’

‘Well, I didn’t mean to make things all weird...’

‘No,’ I said.

‘If it’s because he’s your friend or something,’ she started.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Why does everybody think that matters?’

‘Doesn’t it?’

‘I guess. Look, though. He’s a good one. You’ll have fun.’

‘You think it’s probably just a thing?’

‘Everything’s just a thing.’

‘I mean, you think he’d see it as just fun?’

‘I don’t know. I guess it depends how you play it.’

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I get it. You don’t want to talk about it.’

‘No, it’s not that. It’s just... are
we
alright? Are we properly friends?’

‘Totally,’ she said. ‘Really good friends.’ Her voice went up a pitch, frank with worry. ‘Why? What’s wrong?’

‘No, we’re fine,’ I said. ‘If you say so, we’re fine. There’s nothing wrong. Only I just don’t know what happened, you know, the other week.’

She took a deep breath.

‘Cassie,’ she said.

‘That her name?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did I do to deserve that?’

‘Sorry I was a bitch,’ she said. ‘You just had to go is all, and I didn’t know how else to say it so you would.’

‘Yeah, fine,’ I said. ‘You were a bitch. But I was talking about her.’

‘Quinn,’ she said.

‘Did you even see the way she looked at me? It was like she wanted me to die.’

‘Quinn, she’s not well.’

‘As in ‘mentally fucking ill’ not well.’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I was just kidding around.’

‘She has trust issues with men. That’s all you need to know.’