A Year in Fife Park (11 page)

‘At last someone thinks I’m a fucking man,’ I said.

‘Jesus, Quinn!’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I fail to see how it’s my problem.’

‘It’s not your problem, but have a bit of human compassion. You’re being a prick.’

‘OK, well how should I be about it?’

‘Patient,’ she said. ‘Well, I have to be patient. You have to be gone, and that’s just how it is.’

‘What did I ever do that she gets to decide when I go?’

‘Nothing. But don’t bother playing the discrimination card, here, Quinn. You don’t fit the demographic.’

‘Oh, so I can’t feel bad about it, now, either.’

‘Get over yourself, Quinn. Really.’

‘Whatever.’

Darcy looked at me. Bit her lip. Decided to spill the beans.

‘When she was younger, every man she knew abused her. All of them, seriously. Her whole family. I’m not going to talk about how. I shouldn’t even be telling you this.’

‘Shit,’ I said.

I had probably figured it was something whiny and inner-child up to that point, because I remember the sinking, evil feeling I got when Darcy opened up.

‘She got ‘rescued’, when she was twelve. I’ve been looking out for her a bit this year. But it’s hard fucking going, and you’re making it harder.’

‘Fuck.’

I rubbed my forehead with my fingertips.

‘She’s not ever getting better, is she?’ I realised.

‘It’s really not about better.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Fuck.’

‘Puts things into perspective.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know where it even fits in.’

‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘Even though you don’t know a thing about anything. I mean, honestly, not a thing. Sometimes I think you’re a blank slate.’

‘I’m better at some things than others,’ I said.

‘Yeah.’

We just sat there in silence after that. I don’t know how she felt, but it wasn’t a deliberate act of respect or gravity that kept me quiet. I would have talked, if I could. I would have gone right on and rated every one of my male friends by buttock firmness rather that sit there in silence. It just didn’t seem like there was anything you could follow it up with that wouldn’t be out of place.

And I remember thinking that it would probably be hours before I could tell another stupid joke, or make some comment about boobs. And I remember thinking ‘Time will fix this awkward moment just fine. But some people are broken.’ And there were a million things I didn’t think. There could have been a neon sign, and I would have missed it, but I never even wondered how Darcy met Cassie, or where.

Wallow Man

Craig, at about this time, announced his intention to move out. I don’t know which part of it all that he didn’t like. It might have been the mess. It might have been the noise (the walls were
made of cardboard after all). It might have been the relative lack of creature comforts. It might have been a single incident, like the time that Frank pinned raw fish fingers to the kitchen noticeboard.

He might have been hurt by my burgeoning friendship with Darcy, or just nonplussed enough to leave. He certainly never liked his room, although he had landed one on the sunny side.

We didn’t really want Craig to move out. Frank, of course, didn’t
seem
to give a shit, but I asked Craig to stay on behalf of both of us. Fife Park didn’t tolerate empty rooms for long, and the overseas income of Semester II was fast approaching.

‘We’ll get some random German called Helmut!’ I pleaded.

But Craig went to see the warden, all the same; that corpulent pie-muncher Dorian Tombs. Never before, in all my experience, had such a sour faced man, in charge of a place of so little significance, approached any task with such great pomp. Dorian Tombs was king of the molehill.

The first time that the pie-muncher came around to see us personally was less than a week after the washing powder fiasco. This was no coincidence. The cleaning staff came around every fortnight and made themselves tea in our kitchen. They never said a word to us, or cleaned anything for that matter. However, they made a point of reporting all house discrepancies back to the warden, like some kind of ugly, pensionable, secret police force.

Dorian came around while Craig was in the shower. The blanket, newspaper, and soggy, frothy, washing powder mix still festered outside the door. That week particularly stands out in my memory; I recall leaping over the caustic mess every morning and scrambling for safety. Craig, of course, wore his flip flops into the shower and foresaw no difficulties on that particular morning. He was the only person in the house, at the time.

Tombs cased the joint, no doubt, before knocking at the door of the bathroom. Craig ignored him, for a while. The knocking grew more insistent, so he called out:

‘Fuck off!’

Dorian Tombs did not fuck off. Dorian Tombs kept knocking.

Craig eventually got out of the shower, threw a towel around his waist, and opened the door. He found himself looking into Dorian’s shiny, bald pate. He probably saw the future, or at least part of what it held.

‘Oh,’ said Craig. Then I rather suspect that he asked something along the lines of ‘Can I help you?’

I doubt, quite seriously, that he told him to ‘fuck off’ again.

Dorian had a Polaroid camera hanging around his neck. He was a great collector of ‘evidence.’

‘Only perverts have Polaroid cameras,’ Frank said, later.

I think that there’s a lot of truth in that. Polaroid spent a lot of money in the eighties trying to dissociate themselves from the pervert image. They used to sell on the merit of ‘fun’ and ‘convenience’. They didn’t, of course, distance themselves from the perverts completely. There’s a lot of money in perverts; there’s a lot of them around.

[It was an interesting development that Polaroid had to pull out of their main market when digital cameras took off, but it wasn’t the most interesting development I’ve seen, thanks to Polaroid.]

At any rate, I can say from experience that Dorian Tombs never exuded an air of fun or convenience. It was quite simply not his way. He led Craig into the kitchen, and waved around with his hand.

‘You live like pigs,’ he told him.

‘Yes,’ Craig said. ‘I’m planning to move out. I’ve already been to see you about it.’

That took the wind out of his sails.

‘Why is there food on the ceiling?’ Dorian asked, after a long pause.

That took the wind out of Craig’s sails, and the fat bastard left without saying much else. There were no threats but from then on we were marked men.

Constitutional

In theory, the New Hall Christmas party was a really decent night out. Like good empiricists, we laboured to revise that theory to meet the available facts; namely that it was a decent night out for people who weren’t us.  In the first year, Frank and Mart drank four bottles of white wine between them before setting off and respectively puked on the bus, and sat in puke on the bus – and not as unrelated incidents, I might add. In the second year, I made my final catastrophic attempt to romance Ella, and then risked death to forget it. I also trod in deer shit, which was really not on the radar at the start of the evening.

The party was annually hosted at a bona fide, genuine nightclub called Enigma, although the real mystery was why anyone would want to spend a night in the scary part of Dundee. [Which is all of it.] After the buses pulled up, a bunch of wasted local kids hurled abuse at us and, later, chips. Graffiti on the dirty bricks of the nightclub itself depicted a sex act that, despite close to two decades of unfettered internet access, I have still never seen reproduced in porn.

That night I was wearing a flamboyant and ill-chosen shirt, the entire merits of which consisted in its being of, at least in part, a festive colour. I was also wearing a ‘Jingle Bells’ musical tie, which must have been the result of a gentlemanly wager of some sort because even at that point in my life I wouldn’t have stooped so close to a total suicide of dignity. It had a little Santa with flashing red LED eyes.

I don’t know why I was asking Ella out again. I wish I could remember, because it seemed mostly reasonable at the time. It was all undone in the execution, of course: I’d come to the conclusion that if it wasn’t going to happen with the aid of mistletoe, then it wasn’t going to happen at all. With hindsight applied, the cautious application of Occam’s Razor might have saved me some time, as well as the fifty pence I spent on a plastic sprig of New Hall committee’s party-approved mistletoe substitute.

The club was dark, but bright with it. Neon nights glared into the smoky air. Could have been dry ice, probably it was just cigarettes. It was all gaudy and cyberpunk, and I guess it felt like somewhere you could have a good time.

‘I’ve got a tattoo!’ Ella said, when I sat next to her.

‘I’ve got a scar under my eye,’ I said.

‘That’s not the same.’ 

‘I guess not.’

‘Do you want to see it?’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Did it hurt?’

She leaned forwards, and brushed her long hair to one side. Her low back dress showed it off, a tiny thing on her left shoulder blade.

‘A bit. I got it done with my friend, in Glasgow. She had an ankle one. That was
really
sore.’

‘Why the butterfly?’

‘I just liked it. It was in the book.’

‘Huh,’ I said.

‘What’s up? You look sick.’

‘I was going to ask...’ I said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Uh, I have this mistletoe,’ I said, words falling out of me. ‘If I hold it above your head, would you kiss me?’

‘No,’ she said, firmly.

She held up a hand. It called her No, and raised it an additional Stop Right There.

‘Huh,’ I said, again.

I was mostly surprised. I really don’t know what I expected. It just seemed kind of unsporting to say no to mistletoe. I pushed the cheap sprig into her hand, and stared up at the ceiling, as if for inspiration. There was no mistletoe up there amongst flashing lights and ventilation pipes.

‘Well that’s going to be embarrassing in the morning.’

She nodded.

‘I won’t ask you again,’ I said.

‘OK.’

‘Look,’ I said. ‘This is the only time you’ve never had anything to say to me. I don’t want to make it like this. Honestly.’

She got up. Hovered awkwardly for a second. I looked at the floor, shook my head. When I finished my bottle I went to the bar. Mart was there.

‘Buy me a beer,’ I told him. ‘It has not been a good day for the Empire.’

He did. He’s a generous sort when he’s pissed. I bought him one back, and then a couple more to tide us over.

‘Double-fisting,’ Mart said, with a grin. ‘The gentleman’s alternative to sexual success.’

‘You saw that, then?’ I asked him.

‘Saw what?’

I raised a bottle, and clinked it with one of his.

‘I’m going to drink till I can see the funny side of that.’

My next memory, which could be from hours later, is of sitting at a little round coffee table full of empty bottles, by myself, on a stain-cushioned horseshoe bench. Almost by myself: Sandy Bertrando was sitting five feet away, looking like I felt and for some reason that I will never know, cradling my musical tie to his ear and repeatedly tormenting himself with its festive banshee death wail. [a.k.a. Season’s Greeting.] I watched with a kind of distracted fascination. Santa’s demon eyes glared back at me.

Looking back over to the bar, I saw Ella getting chatted up by one of our local sports stars. He was leaning in. She was responding well. I felt a bitter, helpless surge of jealousy. He put his hand on her shoulder, she touched her mouth. I kicked the coffee table, hard, and it overturned, scattering bottles and beer dregs over the sticky carpet. It was time to leave.

When I got outside, there were no buses waiting. A bunch of students were milling at the local kebab shop. I walked past them. There would be other buses.

I walked downhill a few blocks, until I reached the bank of the Tay. There was a huge, old fashioned boat moored up: Discovery. I didn’t know which way I was going at that point, but straight on looked wet and I wasn’t going back.

I tried to follow the water towards the bridge because I figured that as long as I was always walking towards it then I couldn’t help but get there eventually. I guess the same thought applied to Fife Park in a wider sense. I didn’t know how I was getting back at that point. There was no plan. There was just the anti-plan that was putting distance between myself and that fucking club.

I couldn’t follow the water. There were obstacles in my path. There were fences, buildings, passes, flights of stairs, shopping centres which were closed past eight in the evening. I remember walking down a long dark corridor which was most decidedly indoors in some manner that I don’t quite understand. I remember shimmying along a thin pipe. Eventually I got to the Tay Bridge.

There was a manned tollbooth back then. Cars were passing on either side. I walked up to the booth, and asked if there was some way to cross on foot. There was, in the form of a small service path running between the lanes of traffic with safety barriers on either side. I patiently waited at the booth as an old geezer was hailed on some kind of two way radio. A few moments later, I saw him huffing out of a terminal over the road.

The barrier had to be opened with a key. I remember vaguely hoping that this wouldn’t be an issue once I reached the other side of the bridge. The guy unlocking the gate challenged me, half-heartedly.

‘I live on the other side of it,’ I told him. ‘And I want to go home.’

I don’t know why he opened the gate and let me cross, but he did. Maybe there’s some legal right of way – even if you’re a man in just his shirt sleeves in the middle of December, pissed out of his mind, ranting, stumbling, and barely able to speak. Also, I guess it’s always possible they thought I was a local.

As I walked out onto the bridge – in  fact, at the very moment that the gate closed behind me – I felt a rush of cold wind as the first returning bus passed me. It was full of drunk students. It looked like the party was still going on inside, glowing with energy, and pressing a warm, yellow luminance into the darkness. It was very fucking cold when that bus was out of sight. I finally realised, in the light of new and overwhelming evidence, that I was not going to get home before my fellow partygoers. After the bus, there was no more traffic on the bridge for minutes on end. It was just me, stumbling along, bouncing off the rails on either side of me, and never seeming to get any closer to the other side, partly because it is a fucking long bridge and one bit of it looks pretty much like another, and partly because I was walking sideways as often as forwards.