A Year in Fife Park (2 page)

I value my friendship with Craig tremendously. At the darkest fringes of myself, he understands me. I wonder sometimes if we are similarly broken in some way. We do not talk about such things, but we joke, casually and confidently, about the worst of human nature. Craig exudes confidence, but does not do many things casually. He is stubborn, uptight, and controlling. He’s clean, particular, and demands order. We found a tube of Anusol in the bathroom one day, and he didn’t even
pretend
it belonged to anyone else. He held out surprisingly well in Fife Park, all things considered.

Frank McQueen, on the other hand, was a big, hairy man. There’s no fairer way to put it. He wore a hooded top back before that was grounds for an ASBO, and wasn’t afraid to wear it with the hood up. Frank had a dark and tousled mess of shoulder-length hair, which was as thick and intractable as the very real man-rug poking up through the V of his collar. He owed his style as much to the Unabomber as to Ché Guevara, but the effect was all his own.

‘I am the Walrus,’ Frank would say. He would say this several times a day. It was unquestionably the case, and a source of great pride.

Frank was a medical student. There are two kinds of medical student in the world, and I’ve lived with  both. On the one hand you have the type who are certain that most things that aren’t book shaped are going to kill them, who wash their fruit before eating it and dial Emergency if they swallow a couple too many aspirins in a 24 hour period. They study conscientiously, get early nights, and believe everything they read in textbooks.

And then there’s Frank McQueen, somewhere just behind the vanguard of the opposing side; the medics who have realised that the human body is virtually indestructible and that it takes a hell of a lot more than pesticide and bird shit to take the wind out of your sails. They tend to drink, smoke, party on obscure drugs that don’t even
have
vernacular names, and crave anything that will push them closer to that little bit of life’s speedometer that would usually be coloured in red.

It would be an injustice to call Frank easygoing. When Craig finally snapped and put in his request to move out of Fife Park, the last-straw event he cited was stepping on Frank one night, barefoot with the lights off. Frank, who had passed out face down three feet from the door of his bedroom, was naked. He didn’t even stir.

In our First Year, Craig and Frank had lived next to each other in the Pink Prison that is New Hall, thrown together by the fates, or by whatever system of assignment the fates had delegated to Residential Services. [I’ve always thought the official name showed a stunning lack of either optimism or foresight on the part of its constructors. Perhaps they’ll rename it when it starts to show its age. If so, I hope they open it to nominations.] I don’t think any of us realised how little this had prepared them for each other.

The Randoms lived downstairs, in rooms One, Two, and Three. We called them The Randoms, as a collective, even after we had been properly introduced. We called them The Randoms long after they had expressed annoyance with this.

They had all been to school together, and had all elected to live together. They all came from in, or near, the same small and unexalted village of Strathblane. I have since been to Strathblane precisely once, and can confirm that it was most likely founded according to traditional local principles: by hammering together a couple of Scottish-sounding syllables and then building a pub. [Strathblane is just a handful of miles north of Milngavie where, given the dichotomy between spelling and pronunciation, they presumably built the pub first.] 

‘Quinn, you know they’re all from the same village?’ Frank asked me, late the first night. ‘
Strathblane,
apparently.’

We downloaded Duelling Banjos, and played it with the volume up.

Five of Seven

My room was freezing cold, pitch black half the time, and there was usually someone semi-conscious sprawled out on the bed. Often this was me. Despite this, my room was the most popular in the house, not counting the kitchen. This was almost certainly because of my open-door policy, because there were slightly fewer pairs of dirty boxer shorts on the floor than in Frank’s room, and because I had the best computer by a country mile.

Craig also had a computer, and quite a good one, but he did
not
operate an open-door policy. In fact, he used to
close
his door and repeatedly lock and then unlock it for fifteen straight minutes, until he was satisfied that it was locked. Then he’d do the same thing with the light switch. From outside the house, it probably looked like he was hosting a very small and lonely rave.

Craig kept his room like a boot camp. Every surface was cleaned and dusted, he used his own crisp linen on the bed, and the room permanently smelled of polish, air freshener, fabric softener, and cologne. We were only rarely granted access. I was actually beaten from the room with a rolled up newspaper for farting on one of the few occasions I managed to infiltrate the citadel.

By contrast, people came and went with my room, and usually I liked that arrangement. [On the other hand, it smelled of man-sweat and smoke, which I could take or leave.] For all the time I spent in my bed, there would usually be at least one person sitting at my desk. The computer would always be doing something; if nothing else, it would be playing music. Second year caught Napster on the rise, and so we were never short on tunes. [Original Napster, yo.] Frank signed up for a Yahoo! ID at the start of the year, which he used to play chess and insult Americans.

That came as something of an epiphany for me. I had always guessed that the vast majority of jerks on the internet were backwards twelve year olds, high functioning morons, puerile incompetents with nothing better to do with their lives than incite petty hate mail and create discord, future night-porters and garage attendants to a last man. In short, the very sort of people who are most unlikely to find themselves studying medicine.

Frank McQueen was an above average chess player, and also an internet jerk extraordinaire. He’d go into teen chat rooms as ‘SonOfSaddam’, and insult three shades of crap out of anyone who was trying to be nice. He’d get on side with a conversation for a couple of minutes before turning tail, and insulting anyone who agreed with him. If there was a point or reason to any chat room, Frank would argue the opposite, with expletives on top. He even insulted people while he was playing them at chess.

‘Good move!’ he would say. ‘You fucking cunt.’

I cringed with embarrassment at some of the propositions he made in the ‘Romance’ groups. I hid my head in shame when he infiltrated the ‘Book-Lovers’ group. And I absolutely could not condone some of the things he said in the Christian chat rooms, but hell if those Christians didn’t give as good as they got. Usually minus the swearwords; but not always. I guess that’s what Frank was hoping for and, against all expectations, it was pretty compulsive viewing.

The mid-year implementation of ‘voice’ chat may have been Yahoo!’s most significant error of judgement. Buying a microphone was mine.

‘Dude, are you Irish?’ one confused debutante asked, shortly before being subjected to a tirade that might have reduced lesser ‘Girl Talk’ chatters to tears.

‘East Coast,’ Frank said, making a gang sign. ‘Of Scotland, bitch.’

Pretty soon I signed up for a Yahoo! ID of my own. I made up my name from the side of a bottle of tonic water that was sitting on my desk, and then got down to some abuse of the service. It was liberating enough, but I could never get any conviction into my insults, and it didn’t feel like me, so I gave up and started to take it all seriously, instead.

‘You are such a fucking jerk,’ people would tell Frank.

‘I am the Eggman,’ Frank would say, if he was feeling mellow. Then he’d light up and put on a few tracks.

Sometimes we’d hear Craig screaming wild obscenities from his room. At first we thought he was getting in on the game, too, but later it turned out that he was generally asleep at the time. Frank started locking his door at night for a while after that came out. Even people who don’t give a fuck have limits.

I asked Craig recently why he thought he had been so anal retentive in Fife Park, whether he thought he genuinely had OCD, and whether he thought he’d mellowed out these latter years. He didn’t, as it happens. His exact statement, word for word, was:

‘If my recollection serves, you were a nut. 100% so. Lived in the dark, died your hair semi ginger, wore the worst clothes, smashed up your guitar, and had strange issues. So... it’s all down to interpretation.’

It’s hard to argue with that comeback. For one thing, it’s all true – so it would be kind of an uphill struggle. For another, he’s right - this
is
my interpretation. Who else would I look to? Please understand, I’m not making any great claims to my own mental health, but if it’s really all down to interpretation we won’t be using Craig as the benchmark for fucking apple-pie ordinary.

True, I did smash up my guitar, but not until much later in the year. Also true, I dyed my hair, with limited success, and this had a lot to do with the guitar getting smashed. But taken out of context, that gives kind of a false impression. It makes it sound like I was being pretentious and post-punk, but actually coming off like an asshole. In fact, I skipped the facade entirely – I was being a straight-up asshole, with no subterfuge. It was an emotional time, and I handled it with my usual aplomb. But I’ll get to that.

Guilty as charged on most of the other stuff, as well. The clothes, for example. I was going through kind of a flamboyant phase that I’d nurtured during first year. It wasn’t about fitting in with any social group, or any style as such. I didn’t ascribe to any ethos regarding dress sense or personal politics, and if I’m honest it’s probably because I didn’t really know how. I had a lot of half-formed opinions; some of them might even have been interpreted as ‘strange issues’.

Unlike Frank, I wasn’t out of control because I thought life was more fun that way.  I was just one of life’s bad drivers, swerving all over the road, desperate to be in control. Fuck, I wasn’t thrilled to be all angles at all times. I was happy, but I was frantic. I was happy, but I didn’t think things were right. They felt like they were, but I knew that they weren’t.

How can I even describe that feeling? I’m looking to get it back; I don’t even know what it is. It felt like calm, while I was raging round it.

Craig doesn’t think this book tells the truth.

‘
It’s all down to interpretation,
’ he says.

He must be right, because I think it does.

Raspberry Canes, Nineteen Eighty-Six.

You maybe think I’m a miserable person already, because of how I introduced myself. I’m actually kind of fun most of the time. At least, I hope so. Regardless, I’m pretty easy to entertain. And if the last couple of thousand words haven’t clued you in already, I’m pretty easily distracted, as well.

For example, I’m going to talk about something that happened over twenty years ago in this chapter, which even the most patient of us would admit is almost completely unnecessary. On the other hand, I explain things best by points of reference.

Where am I? Literally, right now, I’m thirty, I’m at my desk, in my flat, in Edinburgh, and I’m trying to remember being twenty, because I think there was something worth knowing back then. Something worth feeling, at any rate. You remember how I came in on that? Now, I know what you’re thinking, if you’re thinking at all, and if you’re anything like me.

How do I know that what I am searching for was ever really there?

You’re wondering, maybe, if I’ve deluded myself about the wonderful year I spent in Fife Park. Maybe you’ve even seen Fife Park for yourself. Maybe, you’re thinking, I’m just wearing my rose tinted glasses.

That’s a good point. Sometimes, even I’m given to wondering if I was ever really as happy as I remember. After all, it’s been a while. And Oscar Wilde famously said that ‘Nothing ages like happiness.’ What if I’m only remembering the good, and discarding the bad?

I’m quite sure that’s partly true. I don’t see that as too much of a problem. Good riddance to the shitty times, I say. There were a few of them, after all. But I’m also quite, quite certain that, perhaps against probability, I am not just making something out of nothing. There really was a special feeling to those days that underpinned it all.

How do I know? Because I remember it, sure. But not just because I remember it, but because I have one perfect, unalterable memory of it - and it is a memory which is not subject to the usual distortions and the decay of time. This memory cannot lie, because it is as much a message as a recollection. It was constructed out of purpose.

I have only a handful of such memories across the whole of my life, and they are all special to me.

The first now seems to be almost from a different world. When I was seven years old, I wondered how memories might work. I knew that I did not remember everything, but that important moments were prone to stand out.

Sitting on the low wall near our raspberry garden I felt the setting sun on my back, on my side, and the chill of the early evening pinching lightly at my bare legs. As I balanced on the wall, so I balanced between warmth and cold, day and dusk, aglow with contentedness. It was a beautiful moment, in an ordinary day. But it was a moment I decided to keep.

So I committed to keep that memory forever. I took the moment apart, piece by piece in my mind’s eye, and swore to myself that I would remember it for the rest of my life. I made it the most important thing in my mind, and I sat there running it over and over in my head, till I felt like it was burning behind my eyes. I kept it going until long after the moment had passed, until it was nearly dark. But I don’t remember the dusk coming on, or how I went inside, or what I did before bed. I remember sitting there, in that moment, warmth on my back, making a message in a bottle, in a mind. And it’s funny because, though the time between then and now seems like twenty times forever, I know I am the same person.