A Year in Fife Park (4 page)

‘They’ve got like a fucking aisle and a half, in St. Andrews,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘These tiny
provincial
branches only stock the popular stuff, and that means that people with unconventional colours are out of luck.’

‘You have unconventional colours,’ I said in a monotone, unsure of the appropriate inflection.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And you’ve got to know your strengths. Take red for example. I can’t do red, especially not on the lips. It makes me look like a harlot! I can’t do
any
reds.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘You wear
pink
lipstick.’

‘You know,’ she said. ‘You haven’t the first idea about any of this.’

‘No.’

‘Well, what’s it like living with him?’

‘He’s a pain in the arse,’ I said.

‘I know, right?’ she said. 

‘He’s so fucking particular. He demands we put the vegetables into the stir fry in a precise order, or he refuses to eat it.’

‘More for the rest of you.’

‘Or pay for his share.’

‘Oh.’

‘And he’ll bitch about it all the next day.’

‘You liking Fife Park?’ Darcy asked. ‘I thought it was a shithole.’

‘It is,’ I said. ‘But it’s cheap, and...’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘At least it’s cheap.’

‘No, there’s something about it,’ I said. ‘Something really different. Not like other places I’ve stayed. It feels like freedom.’

‘Well, it’s kind of like camping,’ Darcy said.

‘It’s not that bad,’ I said. ‘Hell, you can live anywhere, if you get on with the people.’

‘You know he wanted us to move in together,’ she said, suddenly.

‘I didn’t know,’ I said.

‘That’s why he was dragging his heels over getting the place with you guys.’

‘I didn’t know. He never said.’

‘That boy hates himself,’ she told me.

‘He hates a lot of things,’ I said. ‘Let’s not start drawing lines.’

‘Frank’s lovely,’ she said. ‘He’s so nice. You know he’s the only person who’s said ‘Hello’ to me since we got back this year.’

‘Apart from me.’

‘Mart crossed the street to get away from me.’

‘Mart just doesn’t know what to say,’ I said. ‘He’s not good with awkward situations.’

‘It is awkward,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad you came in for tea. It’s not awkward now you’re here, right?’

‘Well, there’s knickers all over the place,’ I told her.

‘They’re not mine,’ she said. ‘I haven’t done laundry yet.’

Somehow that made it easier to look at them.

‘Done your Phil essay, yet?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘And neither have you. Even though it’s a week late.’

‘I’ve got to worry about Psychology, first,’ I told her. ‘Fucking stats is my kryptonite. What’s your excuse?’

‘Better than yours,’ she said. ‘Saw the dick in English yesterday. Didn’t even look my way.’

‘That’s your excuse?’

‘No, fool. I was just saying.’

We sipped our tea, slurping a little at the same time. She laughed. I took another biscuit.

‘I remember the first night I knew you guys were in trouble,’ I said. ‘The James Bond Ball, back at the end of first year?’

‘We’d been in trouble for weeks, by then.’

‘Yeah, well. That was the first night I knew. You were frosty.’

‘Like a Bond villain? I was a bit of an ice queen.’

‘Yeah, but you still went through all the boyfriend-girlfriend stuff. Buying each other ice creams and playing games. You weren’t into it, though. It was just obvious.’

‘Like we were at each other’s throats, secretly.’

‘No, worse. Like you were desperate to save it and overcompensating.’

Darcy didn’t say anything.

‘It was just… sad.’ I fumbled for words, wishing I hadn’t started in on it all. ‘You were all over each other, but it was empty. And not like because you didn’t mean it. That’s why it was sad. Because you really did mean it, but it didn’t matter.’

‘Well,’ she said, eventually. ‘I’m sorry our break up was so traumatic for you.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It was.’

‘Well,’ she said again, more lightly, ‘It’s not all roses, all the time.’

I grinned. ‘I may never love again.’

‘Hey, you had your little crush back then, do you remember?’

That brought the colour to my cheeks.

‘Remember?’ I said. ‘I was wearing a fucking blouse.’

I raised the tea to my lips, and got the cold dregs of the mug. How circular life is.

Thunderballs

The James Bond Ball, a.k.a. Thunderball [Ha fucking ha] in First Year was the single worst night I had in St. Andrews. I don’t blame the organisers, although it was a bit lacklustre. I don’t blame the venue, although the Younger Hall could suck the life out of an orgy with extra tits. No, I blame myself, and I’m glad to have had the opportunity to do so. I should mention that I also slightly blame Craig and McQueen for being such pricks about it all. Later on, I threatened to kill them.

But, if it wasn’t for that night, I might never have realised what a precipitous gulf so obviously separated me from adulthood. And I’m not talking about sex or money, here. Those chapters come later and, fortunately, separately. I’m talking about your obvious, usual, common or garden goddamn motherfucking social graces.

At that time I was into a medic called Vikki. She was cute as a button. Button nose. Round cheeks. Wide smile. Really pretty. I really didn’t know her at all, but fuck it all, I was still a teenager. I was also an emotionally-stunted idiot.

I had my one big falling out with McQueen over Vikki. It was an old chestnut, thoroughly roasted; McQueen knew that I was into a certain girl, and he wasn’t. But when she went for him, he returned the favour. For the fuck of it, I guess, because he unceremoniously dumped her a week later. Just long enough for it to feel insulting both ways.

‘The problem is not me,’ McQueen said. ‘The problem is you.  You’re the one who made this into something.’

‘But you didn’t even
care
,’ I said.

‘And you don’t even know her,’ he replied. ‘So how could you?’

I can’t even remember how I followed up on that, but I did. I must have, because it didn’t end there by a long way. I didn’t listen to Frank. He didn’t listen to me. But I don’t think we could have understood each other even if we’d been trying.

Of course, for some reason that obviously didn’t seem like a double-standard at the time, the logic about Frank not interfering with my potential love interests did not apply the other way around, to myself and his previous ones. I know this because I was still inexplicably determined to make it with Vikki, around the time of the Thunderball. And hell, I reasoned, she was single. Again.

This is what I’m talking about. Who would not just give it up as a bad job by this point? Who would not, for the mere avoidance of awkwardness, drop a stupid and uninvested crush like a hot stone the minute it became inconvenient? All I can offer is that sudden, ridiculous, capricious and unrealistic infatuations are the mark of a young man. If he is also a cunt.

So, the morning of the ball, I went down to the Oxfam on Bell Street, rounding the corner with a spring in my step. Bell Street is possibly my favourite street in St. Andrews. I have no idea why, other than that Aikman’s used to be on it. I just always feel a bit brighter on Bell Street. Oxfam on Bell Street was one of my prime haunts for shirts of mass destruction.

I had a thing for shirts that were unorthodox, garish, tasteless, loud, psychedelic, frilly, or whichever combination of the above most narrowly trod the line between ‘quietly assured eccentricity’ and ‘offence punishable by law’. I recognise that this is a character flaw. I’m told that it’s the guilty pleasure of many who crave just a bit of attention, but can’t offer a compelling reason for anyone to give it. It was a sort of game, and I called it Shirt Attack. That was a stupid name. Orwell would have called it “EyeCrime”.

[That would also have been a stupid name, but at least he would have been able to claim it was satirical.]

Nice place, St. Andrews. But apart from the students, virtually everyone there is pensionable. You can see why; it might be a lovely place to study or to retire, but St. Andrews holds about as much excitement for your average adult human as a soggy Ryvita. Because of this, the town has a population that consists almost entirely of people who get up at noon, take up interminable residence in coffee shops, and are permanently strapped for cash.  Charity shops have flourished. And so did my wardrobe because, frankly, you would be surprised at how much stuff in places like that might set alarm bells ringing in most airports.

[It’s a commonly held misconception that old people love charity shops, but I’ve never found that to be the case. Old people shop there out of necessity. Virtually everything in a charity shop belonged to somebody who
was
old, and is now dead. Nobody
wants
to shop in that kind of environment. Imagine if Sainsbury’s did a 2-for-1 on soap, with the slogan ‘maybe you’ll be dead before you need any more soap’. That would have to be some seriously cheap soap, on a day you really needed more soap.]

Don’t get me wrong; I wouldn’t just wear any old tasteless thing. It had to be
special.
In second year, I found a shirt that looked like it was made of glitter and mother of pearl, and held together by the silvery excretions of an excitable pixie. That became a staple for a while. My first year favourite had been in orange and blue, and looked like one of Picasso’s ‘angry period’ works. It met a grim fate the night I fell down a nightclub’s biggest flight of stairs to what was very nearly my death. I was drunk and arsing about. [My greatest regret is that the scar under my eye has such a worthless back-story.] It was a narrow escape from a fairly typical first-year fatality. The shirt was not so lucky, sustaining a mortal wound that unthreaded it wear by wear until it simply fell apart some time after the start of second year.

Oxfam on Bell Street was also where Vikki did her volunteer shift, which was cynically calculated on my part and, looking back, a bit creepy. I saw her at the checkout on the way in, and almost tripped over my own feet like the suave motherfucker I’ve always been. I went straight to the shirt racks, and collected myself while browsing through. As usual, a Geiger counter would have been useful. I found some kind of green, blue and violet paint-splashed nightmare of a shirt [it was pretty rad, ba-dum tish] and, hoping it would be a talking point, I took it up to the checkout.

‘You going to the ball tonight?’ I asked.

‘The James Bond one,’ Vikki said. ‘Yeah.’

‘I think it will be a lot of fun,’ I said, in what would turn out to be the least accurate prediction of the day.

‘Hope so,’ she said, disinterestedly. ‘You getting this shirt for tonight?’

‘Yeah, I think it will go with my suit,’ I said, in what would turn out to be the second least accurate prediction of the day. Vikki didn’t even look at it. 

‘That will be three pounds, please,’ she said. I handed it over.

‘Thanks,’ I said. Then the conversation was over. I had been looking forwards to it all morning, and it was just a brutal transaction. I walked out of the shop in a daze. The door jangled on the way out, just like it does on the way in.

When I got home, I tried the shirt on. The buttons were all on the wrong side.

‘That’s because it’s a blouse,’ Craig said. ‘They button up differently.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah, girls button up everything the wrong way,’ McQueen confirmed. ‘What you’ve got there is a blouse.’

‘Shit. I can’t not wear it.’

‘Whatever.’

‘No, I told someone I would have it on tonight.’

‘That’s between you and your blouse,’ McQueen said.

‘You, your blouse, and a whole bunch of guys, who you will be fucking,’ Craig added, ‘if you wear a blouse.’

I went back into town, blouse in a carrier bag, wondering whether to ask for my money back. Three pounds. From a fucking charity shop. A student’s life is full of such dilemmas.

I sat on the low wall opposite the Union for about twenty minutes, feeling unsatisfied and watching people going in and out of BESS. It’s a town small enough I recognised most of the faces. It’s a town too small to make the kinds of huge social mistakes I’d already made my share of. I went back to Oxfam, and told Vikki that I was well into her, and wanted to be more than friends.

‘Well, I sort of knew that,’ she said.

‘Yeah.’ I said. ‘So I’ll see you tonight.’

‘Probably.’

‘Right.’

I didn’t mention the shirt. Blouse.

‘Shine on you crazy diamond,’ Craig said, when I told him. ‘That’ll make this evening comfortable.’

‘It had to be done,’ I said, and believed it for a moment.  I didn’t tell Frank.

The really pathetic thing is that I thought I was brave for making a point of blurting it out like that. When, really, I was just too scared to keep up the act that is courtship for more than a few seconds at a time. The things we realise years too late. One could write a book about it.

I wore the blouse.

Evening rolled around, we got dressed. I had a fucking headache, like storm clouds coming in. It was actually quite a clear night, but the air was muggy.

Scarface and the Dork were security on the door, on a loaner from the Vic. They recognised us as their regulars, and waved us in with nary a look at our tickets. We sat down and started quaffing plastic pints of lager, student-style. There were party poppers and someone filled my pint with pink and blue streamers. I drunk it anyway, with a straw. We passed around a disposable camera and clowned for it.

We walked around a bit, but although there were a lot of little stalls, there wasn’t much to do. The air was dead, and there was no one else we knew around. We were all oddly uneasy. Every conversation stopped before it really started, every drink tasted foul and made us feel worse. Darcy arrived with Vikki late on and Craig dragged her off to dance. He threw her around out there like he was trying to save her from choking. Or induce it. Or both.

I talked to Vikki a bit at our table and it was a normal, boring conversation. I kept wondering when the magic was going to happen. [It wasn’t. Obviously.]