A Year in Fife Park (5 page)

‘Hey,’ I said eventually. ‘Funny story about this shirt.’

Her face soured for a moment, as if the elephant in the room had just pinched one off on the table.

‘Yeah,’ she said, getting up. ‘Excuse me, though.’

She dragged Darcy off to the bathroom, and Craig shot me a look as they passed him. His lips turned up at the edges. He walked over to me.

‘Apparently, you’re a stalker,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I just…’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I just heard it from the horse’s mouth. So what is
wrong
with you?’

I didn’t have an answer. It was fucking stifling in there. I’d been aware of it all night, but it suddenly felt like every breath had a ton of bricks attached.

Frank was smoking outside when I went to get some air. He looked like he was also getting some air. He looked like he wanted it to be different to mine.

‘You followed her into work, and told her you wanted some of it,’ he said.

Fucking Craig.

‘It’s not like that,’ I said. ‘I told her I
liked
her.’

‘Liked her,’ he said. ‘Like what? She your sister or something?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You like her because you want her,’ he said. ‘And there’s no difference between that and saying it.’

‘Well fucking so what? You
didn’t
like her and you still fucking…’

‘Don’t bother,’ he said.

‘Well.’

‘Don’t bother. I’m fucking sick of it.’

‘
I told you I liked her
,’ I said. Whined, actually.

‘And? Don’t pretend like you were ever going to do anything about it. What, am I supposed to hang around while you put an option on every chick in town?’

‘It was only one,’ I said.

‘This month.’ Frank said. ‘It was your academic sister last month, yeah?’

‘Dude, that is not fair.’

‘Do you know what Vikki thinks of you Quinn? Not a fucking thing. She barely knows you. I see her every day.’

‘What?’ I said, genuinely surprised. ‘Left field comment, much?’

‘That’s…fuck’s sake. That’s how things happen. I swear you don’t know a fucking thing about anything, Quinn.’

He turned his head away and spat into the tarmac. Resigned. But I goaded him one last time.

‘You’re way out of line telling me who I can and can’t see,’ I told him.

Frank went very quiet. Then, so I could hardly hear, he said:

‘Fine, I give up. I fucking give up with you. You can have my fucking cast-offs, Quinn. Just make sure you seal the deal instead of stalking her all over town, because frankly I think it’s freaking her out.’

I don’t know if it was the words or the tone, but I knew it was fighting talk, where before it had been a kind of tired pity. I knew it, because I didn’t have to know a thing about people to know it. That kind of rage is automatic.

‘I’ll fucking kill you,’ I told him. ‘I’ll fucking kill you!’

I lunged to get a hold of his throat, but he held me at bay like a leaky bin bag. He didn’t hit back. He already looked badly over it. But Craig appeared over his shoulder, right on time.

I don’t know how long he’d been watching us. I know him, though.

‘How could you misunderstand it all so badly?’ Craig asked, shaking his head. Lips still curled in an amused smile.

‘You too, Craig. I’ll fucking do you, too.’

Smile didn’t go anywhere. Cruel motherfucker.

The fight was all out of me anyway, but Scarface pulled me off Frank, started waving his finger at me. Doing the bouncer thing. He was surprisingly bad at it for a man with a four inch knife wound across one cheek. Then again, maybe that’s why he got stabbed in the face.

‘Can’t you see I’m fucking done here?’ I told him, backing away with my hands raised. Then I shrugged my shoulders like a petulant child and stormed off home.

I sat bolt upright in bed for hours, back at New Hall, trying to come up with a better comeback than ‘I’ll fucking kill you’. Permutations of the evening running through my head. Apparently I didn’t know a fucking thing about anything. How could I misunderstand things so badly? What was
wrong
with me? It was four in the morning when the pictures in my head turned on their side, and I saw it all out of context, with myself as the crazy, irrational, socially-retarded stalker.

Thank God for that moment. An hour later, that was how things were, they’d always been that way, how could anyone not understand that? But it was six in the morning before the right comeback fell into place.

I was wearing my dressing gown when I banged on Frank’s door. Took him a while to open it.

‘Fucking hell Quinn,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. Can I come in? I need to say some things.’

Frank waved me in, and I sat on a pile of shirts in his chair. But all I said was ‘I’m sorry,’ again.

‘It’s fucking 6am,’ he said, getting back into bed. ‘Why aren’t you sleeping it off?’

‘I’ve been up all night,’ I said. ‘I just feel so bad.’

‘You were pretty fucked.’

‘I mean, about what I said.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Quinn,’ he said.

I could feel the guilt burning in my stomach, and apologising wasn’t making it go away.

‘Look,’ Frank said. ‘What I said about Vikki, too.’

‘Yeah, it was shitty,’ I said. ‘But I was so out of line. I just…’

‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘It’s done.’

‘But, I just feel so
bad
.’

‘That’s how it is,’ he said, with an exasperated sigh. ‘Go to bed.’

‘Is it OK, though?’ I said.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ he told me. ‘Go to bed. Get out of here, you big Cunter.’

‘…Yeah,’ I said.

It wasn’t OK. But Frank wouldn’t call just
anyone
a Cunter.

Moving and Shaking

So that was me, at my worst. As much of my worst as I can stand to tell, at any rate. Maybe you’re thinking that, despite my best efforts, I’ve come off as a whiny prick. If so, I wouldn’t worry about it. The only thing you need to worry about now is that you’ve made a minor commitment to reading a book about someone who started out as a whiny prick. I feel your pain. Could be that it seems like this is going to be a long read, and for all you know the twist at the end is that I don’t have a character arc. I’ll do my best to mitigate that.

Let’s not forget that you’ve seen my friends at their worst by now, as well. And, you can trust me, they turned out alright. Frank, who can at times seem cavalier and indifferent is charming exactly because he’s so low maintenance, his heart so genuine, his friendship so unshakeable.

And Craig, as particular, fussy, and demanding as he can be… well. I guess the thing about Craig is that he’s unshakeable in a different way. Craig is like the Gym teacher who always demands more than you think you have, takes no quarter, has no time for weakness, but leaves you surprising yourself all the same. Although, unlike with the Gym teacher, there is no revelatory moment of acceptance or praise with Craig; you never actually make the grade. [There’s also slightly less inappropriate touching, but not so you’d notice.]

I don’t hold it against him. He was so consistent and exhaustive in his dissatisfaction, I rather think it might have been its own punishment. Besides, he was good for me. He was very fucking motivating company, and that shouldn’t be underestimated.

Craig pushed me constantly, and I needed it at the time. It doesn’t matter that he would have done it anyway, even if I hadn’t needed it at the time, or if I only sort of needed it or, hell, if I was just passing. Talk about a moot point. None of it would have been the same without him. I still need him, truth be told. I bet he’d shake me right out of this funk with a few days of belittling and coerced physical exercise.

‘It’s the gym for you, Butterball,’ he’d say. ‘Get your bag’.

Later he’d question the quality of my food intake, and then my parentage.

Craig was a peculiarly complementary personality [well, in one sense of the word], but not a role model. Much as I valued his presence in those formative years, I wouldn’t have wanted to emulate him. Frank, though, I don’t know. I was jealous of Frank. Frank didn’t get fazed, ever, by anything, and I desperately wanted that quality.

Outwardly, Frank had nothing to teach, and he was anything but motivating. He was just a mate, but he always seemed to have the answer. And the answer was always to worry less. Mostly I found it impossible to worry less, but I liked the idea of it. Frank was a reluctant mentor.

‘Quinn,’ he said, during one tellingly metaphysical chat, ‘firstly, the very fact that you’re asking for help chilling out worries me so, as you can see, no man is an island. Secondly, if I
were
in a position to offer that advice, it would be – in the nicest possible way – to shut the fuck up and stop listening to the voices in your head, which is also what I’d say if your request made no kind of sense to me, or if I thought you were basically crazy.’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘That wasn’t advice,’ Frank said. ‘That was why I’m not giving you any advice. My advice is to roll yourself a man-sized joint, and by yourself I mean us. Gear’s on the table – Doctor’s orders.’

Divan, Divan

It was freezing cold in my room, because the window was always open if anyone was smoking. We smoked a decent bit of pot in my room, looking back. I never thought of myself as a stoner, but I guess I thought of a lot of my friends that way, and this probably should have clued me in. I wouldn’t say I fit the mould, exactly. I guess what set me apart from all the people who just tried it once or twice [which, by the way, is everyone], was that I really kind of liked it. I liked it for what it was, and not for what it represented.

I remember the first time I tried it. Frank introduced me, of course.

‘Wanna try a joint?’ he asked me, nonchalantly.

‘Yeah, okay.’ I said.

‘Let’s go back to my room and skin,’ he replied. I had no idea what that meant.

Frank meticulously constructed a joint in his en-suite New Hall bathroom, as I watched wide-eyed. I recall it with the strange duality of the known and unknown. I know how to roll a joint well enough these days,  although Frank would still say that I didn’t. But I remember the way he made that one joint, before I knew how a joint was made, as a process in abstract. In my memory of the night, all of those steps are still arcane and unfamiliar.

‘Now what?’ I asked, when he proudly held it up to the light. It looked like a cheap firecracker.

‘Now we smoke it,’ Frank said. Then, seeing that I was still mystified, he added ‘like a cigarette.’

‘OK.’

‘Not in here, though. Smoke alarm.’

We went out for a walk, over the North Haugh, almost to the Old Course, and lit up just off the main road. It was quiet, dark, the stars were bright. My hands were shaking. I thought I could hear dogs barking.

I was always very nervous about smoking hash, which is to say that the thought of getting busted with a spliff sent me spiralling into an almost feral panic. Sure, I didn’t see anything particularly
wrong
with smoking it, but the law does not always accord with common sense. I was much more afraid of getting on the wrong side of the law than of getting on the wrong side of common sense, which is something for which I’ve got an established coping strategy.

I sometimes wonder why I made such an effort to do something that put me so much on edge. I guess that was something of a theme, at the time. But also, it made things seem alright as well. It put me on edge, but it settled me down. It conflicted me, but also relaxed me. Made me calm and terrified.  And it somehow seemed to make all the difference at a difficult time, though I suppose it wasn’t the smoking so much as the company that mattered.

When I was at my worst that first year, when I stepped right out of line, when I said the wrong things out of spite, or ignorance, or desperation – even when I said those things right to Frank, spat them in his face – he would roll us a joint, we’d take a walk in the night, and we would talk about any other things.

I bought a tiny bit of it towards the end of the year, and kept it like some kind of a prized trophy. I held on to my little block all summer, like a little super-dense piece of the sun, with my tiny world still revolving round it.

When we got back for the second year, Frank was uproariously happy to see that I’d kept a souvenir of the first, because he had run out at the start of the summer, about five minutes before getting into his Dad’s car, and being driven home to the East Coast. Apparently it had taken the edge off delivering the news that he’d failed his first preclinical year, but not nearly by enough.

We smoked a joint each day, till the stuff was gone, and didn’t even feel the need to go out on a huge hike to find some secluded spot, like we did back in the New Hall days. We smoked right in the room, and even I was happy with that.

Dylan was the first of the Randoms that we really got to know. He caught the smell of it, and came to join us. Dylan was kind of the poster boy for being stoned. He was thin. He was a genius. He was a philosopher mathematician. He was Zen as fuck. He had long, wavy hair, and reportedly looked American. [Or like a Cocker Spaniel, depending on who you believe. I think it’s the dimple in his chin that does it; the American thing, that is.] We’d sit together with some of his psychedelic tracks on, and figure we were in the most peaceful place on earth. There was a kind of detached freedom to Fife Park, that gave me peace. The house was a home, not a room. It was ours to enjoy.

I was not
entirely
comfortable, of course. I left the window open day and night, and there was an occasional burst of paranoia, a mild fear of being caught in the act, but nothing like I would get when Frank decided to skin up in the toilet of a bar, or casually light up while walking into town. In FifePark, I felt like I was at home to please myself.

That was until Craig’s parents turned up with a cellophane wrapped mattress, and poked their heads around the door while I was skinning up.

‘Hi,’ I said, my hands wavering over the tray for a moment. We used to roll up on a circular green plastic tray which moved about between Frank’s and my room, depending on who’d rolled up last.