A Year in Fife Park (13 page)

Pete was built in quite a different sense – he looked like he had been manually constructed out of industrial materials. He was all torso and no gut; a genuine Desperate Dan. Dylan suggested that it was to do with the amount of hormones they inject into cattle in the States. There was no hard science backing that up, but you could just imagine that Pete was seething with bovine power.

It might have been the ‘Scotch Pie’ night that most of Fife Park 7 went out on the town with Brad and Pete. The two Dudes, still in a perverse kind of tourist mode, had bought a decent bottle of Scotch that Bear Pete was carrying around in his lumber-jacket. On him, it made no more of a bulge than a deck of fags on any other man.

When we were all pretty inebriated, we went out to the union and played drinking games for an hour or two. It wasn’t normal for us to play drinking games when we were out, although we’d done it a few times in first year, but it gave us a common purpose and an opportunity to get pissed up with the Dudes, which was always welcome. The plan was to eventually meet with yet more Dudes who, we were assured, had a late-night housewarming on the cards and we’d wangled invites on the side.

I don’t quite remember the rules of the game we played in the union, but it was something to do with flipping a coin from your fingertips into a pint glass, and then having to drink, or not to drink, or something to that effect. I do remember that Pete’s hands were so big that he didn’t so much have to flip the coin as merely drop it into the pint glass. This would have put him at an unfair advantage, but for the fact that he was already so fucked that he missed the rim of the glass more often than not. Brad had huge hands too, as we knew only too well, but his coordination was also insufficient for victory.

We got through a few pints that way and then Pete downed a fresh pint in Olympic time, just because we were ready to leave and all assumed that he couldn’t do it. Every one of us was in a rare state by the time we left.

On the way out to the Badlands, the Dudes kept pulling out their whisky and chugging away at it, offering us a couple of swigs which we accepted in the name of friendship. By the time we made it to the top of Bridge Street, Pete and Brad were leaning on each other for support, and Frank was babbling on incoherently about being out with the Dudes.

‘Hanging with the Dudes!’ he shouted, to no-one in particular.

Enthused by this, Brad and Pete momentarily gained enough energy to high-five each other and jump around a bit. The effect of this was not lost on McQueen, who immediately demanded to know, amongst other things, ‘Who’s the man?’

Once again, the Dudes were briefly impassioned, leaping into the air and shouting out such delirious non-sequiturs as ‘Yeah,’ and ‘Alright, man.’

After inciting them to kick a few wheelie bins and traffic cones that were temporarily in place on Bell Street, Frank fell back a few steps and lit a cigarette. Pete and Brad once again fell into each other’s arms, for support.

‘Keeping it real!’ Frank called out, experimentally. Again, the dudes jumped, swung and kicked out at various inanimate objects before winding down.

After that, McQueen didn’t even bother to make the effort. Satisfied with his new found control, he dropped to a slower pace, keeping ten feet behind the Dudes and proffering more random, inane, sentiments whenever it suited him.

‘C’mon! Hanging with the
Dudes!’

‘Who’s the man?’ Brad demanded at one point, catching the rest of us off guard.

‘You’re the man,’ Frank offered, immediately.

‘Yes, definitely you,’ I ventured.

‘C’mon!’ Frank called out, grinning as they flailed and danced. ‘Keeping it real.’

The Dude-flat was on

Nelson Street

; a group of fresh exchange students had rented a private place out, instead of plumping for a simple university residence. It was a typically self-motivated move on the part of the Dudes. If there is one thing I admire about Americans in general, it’s their willingness to have things their own way, and not merely settle for the serving suggestion. [Although there’s a damn fine line between confidently asking for something and sincerely believing that you deserve to get it.]

It was a decent house as well, not the typical student flat. There were screen doors in the dining room, plush sofas and a coffee table in the lounge, and a hardwood fitted kitchen with the kind of integrated dishwasher that serves to highlight the futility of middle class success. It had an overflowing fruit basket, to which we were entreated to help ourselves by various Dudes.

There were five or six of them in the house, but I don’t remember any names. Bryan, perhaps, was a short cropped Dude and instigator of the party, and there was a girl with frizzy black hair and a remarkably square jaw called Sam, or Sharon, who was Pete’s first target.

Pete immediately and systematically began victimising the occupants of the lounge. He was a restless drunk and wasn’t happy in an empty chair. Instead he sprawled anywhere that somebody else was trying to sit, clambering on top of them, his crushing weight suffocating whomever was beneath him.

When they had stopped moving, or in some cases breathing, he’d jump to his feet and pick a new playmate, only to crush them half to death as well, all the while laughing, tickling, jabbing and poking at them with enough force to crack a rib. He made a great drunk, it has to be said.

On the strength of Pete’s vitality, we soon found out what kind of a party it was: it was the kind that wasn’t. Some of Bryan’s flatmates were already objecting, particularly the flattened ones in the lounge and a ratty-faced studious Dudette who seemed to hate everybody and lived on her own upstairs.

‘I don’t know why you’re even here,’ she said. ‘But can you fucking keep it down?’

As a matter of fact, nobody knew why we were there, which was in equal parts amusing and concerning. Stripped of the context of an invitation, it appeared to all intents and purposes that we had turned up at a random household in the middle of the night and started assaulting people.

Eventually somebody came into the room and took Pete away, leading him by the hand. We didn’t see him again, and the ‘party’ cooled off immediately. Dylan went and helped himself to the fruit basket, and chatted ‘Dude-talk’ in the kitchen for a while. What had happened, he discovered, was that Bryan Dude had casually invited Brad and Pete back for drinks, and Brad and Pete had drunkenly over-interpreted the suggestion. All told, the Dudes had been pretty hospitable.

It was pretty obviously time to go. Frank wanted to apologise for all the noise we’d made so we decided to write a quick note and leave it on the coffee table. Dylan was the only one of us sober enough to hold a pen, but that didn’t stop Frank from wanting his say.

‘Sorry about the noise…’ Dylan began, before the pencil and paper were eagerly snatched away from him. In the end, the note read:

‘Sorry about the noise… bUt PeTE was FuCKeD.’

In fact Pete had so well disguised how fucked the rest of us were, that we didn’t even really notice it until we left the house, and Frank instinctively tried to steal the Dudes’ wheelie bin.

‘No Frank,’ we tried to explain. ‘We were just at their house. They’ll know it was us.’

‘They won’t!’ he argued, moments before Bryan Dude opened the door and told us to bring their fucking bin back.

Beasting

Spring, and the early weeks of second semester, mark the official Beasting Season in St. Andrews. It’s a time when old relationships are broken or renewed, and when fresh couplings can occur at a rate of several per week.

In celebration of this festive time, I bought a leg of Beast. This was thanks to Tesco’s move to shift otherwise unwanted Turkey legs for 99p a shot. I could immediately see the possibilities ahead.

At a uniform price, it seemed like only good sense to go for quantity, and so I selected a drumstick of such awesome magnitude that it might rather have been used as a siege weapon, and dragged it home caveman style.

‘It is the Beast,’ I informed Frank, presenting it with a flourish. He needed no more convincing. Making a few hasty calculations, we were able to deduce that

1.
      
The Beast Leg must, at one time, have belonged to a bird that meant business, and

2.
      
The Beast Leg would take at least a fortnight to cook, plus marinade time.

‘Better put the oven on, mate,’ I said.

Luckily there were some primitive cooking instructions printed on the back of the styrofoam pack which rounded that figure down to somewhere pleasantly more in the region of two hours, so we prepared an oven tray and greased it up.

‘I’m going to Fred Flintstone that badboy,’ Frank said, cheerily.

We grabbed a few beers, and I tooled up an episode of Futurama or two. The air of anticipation was tangible. There may well have been some smoking, which would help to explain that tangible air, and also what happened next – if by ‘next’ you take me to mean ‘two hours later, when Frank went down to the kitchen’.

The howls of rage and anguish were heard the length and breadth of the house. I thought at first that Frank must have poured boiling turkey fat over himself, perhaps as a result of some further Dude greeting. I wondered if maybe he had even collapsed under the sheer weight of the Beast, and was struggling to free his mangled legs from the wreckage. For all the commotion, it would have been as easy to imagine that the rest of the turkey had come back for revenge.

What had happened, in fact, was merely what had not happened; Frank had not, at any time, put the Beast into the oven. He was sitting crumpled in a chair, whimpering quietly to himself by the time I got down to the kitchen, his rage entirely replaced by impotent resignation.

‘That’s a new one on me, mate,’ I informed him. ‘I mean, not turning the oven on, fair enough. We’ve all been there. But… this?’

‘It’s raw,’ he said, poking at the Beast as if willpower alone would be sufficient to cook a drumstick the size of Bristol. ‘Fucking hell, Quinine.’

‘I wondered what that mighty piece of chicken was doing out of the fridge,’ Gowan said. ‘Just sitting on the side like that.’ We held Frank back.

‘It’s turkey,’ Dylan said.

‘It is the Beast,’ I told them, authoritatively.

Brad

Brad was the first of us to embrace the seasonal Beast. He obviously fancied himself as something of a player, and plunged into the Dude movement with both feet, spending an inordinate amount of time with a spunky Dudette called Sallie. She had a boyfriend back in the states, but they were ‘seeing other people’; almost all of them, in the analysis. It took a while for Brad to charm her, but I was rooting for him in a vaguely disapproving sort of a way.

I inadvertently helped out one night by inviting them both back to FifePark for a nightcap, thereby providing them with an acceptably flimsy pretext to engage in intercourse. There were three of us in Brad’s room, which was undeniably a crowd.

Taking secret pleasure in the thought that it had once been Craig’s meticulously clean surface, I rolled a fat badboy and put my feet up. I outstayed my welcome somewhat by actually wanting to smoke the thing.

Brad took about three tokes and Sallie pretended to pass out, so I took the hint and left. I took my spliff with me. Frank and the randoms were asleep, so I played videogames for a while. Brad and Sallie were definitely, noisily awake for the next few hours.

Dylan and Frank came in to my room and complained, first thing next morning. They were both tired and grumpy. In some way, apparently, Brad’s insatiable penchant for fucking was all my fault.

I’d actually been less disturbed than they had, which is to say that I had managed to fall asleep to the vibrant tune of two horny Yanks pumping, and not that it didn’t deeply upset me in the psychological sense. That they were still at it when I got up in the middle of the night for a pee was the truly disturbing thing.

‘It must’ve been all those cow hormones,’ I said, as Frank stuck ‘Mustang Sally’ on at full volume.

‘That’ll teach them,’ he said.

‘
How are you and Sallie?’ someone asked Brad, later that week.

‘Oh, you know,’ he said. ‘It’s a girl thing, you know.’

We got Dylan to translate. He took it to mean ‘not good’.

True to form, Brad was on some other girl’s case by the end of the week, and Sallie seemed to have taken it upon herself to ‘see’ as many people as possible, within the narrow confines of her lifetime.

Gowan
.

Gowan has a certain charm, you’ve got to give him that. He’s got a bad history of one night stands on his record, including the Raisin Sunday affair in first year where he broke a ping pong table on which he was somewhat athletically screwing his academic sister. Poor Gowan never saw a deposit back in four straight years at St. Andrews.

After one of the early spring balls, Gowan satisfied an age-old desire of his which was, apparently, to make it with an Asian girl. On hearing this news, Mart very frankly declared that he didn’t find Asian girls attractive, and I struggled to decide whether it was more racially prejudiced to maintain a blanket dislike of Asian women or go out with the express intention of screwing one.

The case in question was moot because Gowan did not succeed in hooking up with a particularly attractive Asian girl, which is a choice that translates well across most cultural barriers. He spent some time making out with her in FifePark, and then escorted her home.

‘I’ve always wanted to pull a hot Asian,’ Gowan said, poking his head into the kitchen and giving us the thumbs up. I bit down the urge to wish him better luck next time. Dylan and I watched them leave, through the kitchen window.

‘It takes all sorts,’ I said, eventually.

‘Yeah, and so does Gowan,’ Dylan replied.

Will

Will’s unstable girlfriend dumped him early in the year, which distinguished him as the only person in the house to have been given the heave by a certified mental. He didn’t make any fewer trips back home afterwards, which really showed that he was in it for the horses.