A Year in Fife Park (15 page)

I wasn’t going to be that guy. No fucking way was I going to be the person everyone thought of as the worrier. And, I guess it was just coincidence, but I was finding it increasingly harder to be worried as new information emerged.

Maybe a bit of Frank was rubbing off on me after all, but it just seemed so unlikely that anything bad would happen. You can’t swallow a comedy sized pill and die, I thought. That just doesn’t make sense. That would be like choking to death on a clown nose.

‘I think that you’re probably going to die,’ I said to Craig. The words felt light on my tongue.

It was a curious mix of possible and improbable. It was funny. Craig thought so, too.

‘So I’m going home,’ I said. ‘Nothing to do, here.’

‘Well, night mate,’ he replied.

‘You going to shut the door?’ I asked.

‘No, no. I think I might just leave it.’

‘Right.’

‘New level,’ Sandy added.

‘Well, then. I think I’m going back to bed.’

‘Right.’

‘Bye,’ I said.

The next day, shopping for peaches and toothpaste in Tesco, I caught sight of a shelf full of bubble bath. I don’t know why I was drawn to it. There weren’t any baths in FifePark. I couldn’t get it out of my head. It was on special, I guess. Later on in the day, I turned up on the DRH landing with a bottle of bubble bath and a towel.

Craig was fine. Sandy was stressing about something, which was as fine as he was going to get in essay season. I went and had a nice long soak. We never figured out what the pills were, but I suppose it doesn’t matter.

Smoking Gun

When I was in Fife Park, smoking wasn’t the big social taboo that it is these days. Some people smoked and some people didn’t, and those that did were just smart people doing a dumb thing. A lot has changed in a decade. I heard some five year old ask ‘Mummy, why is that man smoking?’ on the street a few weeks ago. And she replied ‘Because he’s a bad man.’

The bad man was me, on another weeklong lapse in my commitment to not smoking. It started with that one fucking joint I smoked. Seems like nothing comes without a price these days.

‘I am
not
a bad man,’ I said to the kid.

Not that I really know if that’s true, but I’ll be damned if a cigarette’s going to inculpate me. There was an awkward pause.

‘Well, I’m not,’ I told the parent, who was looking at me like I was a rapist offering her gardening tips.

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she said. ‘You’re not a mother.’

‘Well shit, you’re not a smoker,’ I told her, which was the exact point at which I realised that I was going to have to go through the hassle of quitting again.

‘Ah, fuck it,’ I said.

‘Fuck!’ the kid said. ‘Fuck it, bad man!’

The kid was right. I have studied the art of quitting smoking for years, and I can tell you that ‘Fuck it’ justifies anything and stands for nothing. Fuck it, you say, and light another.

I remember one time I asked Frank what it felt like to need a smoke, long before I ever touched a deck of fags.

‘It feels like you need a cigarette,’ he said.

‘But is it like hungry?’ I pressed. ‘Or more like thirsty?’ He considered it for long enough to give a reasoned answer.

‘It just feels like you need a cigarette,’ he said. He lit up.

It didn’t sound so bad, and I let it creep up on me. It’s all meaningless until you’re there, of course. Most things are. For me, it is a little like thirst; maybe I put the idea into my own damn head. Whatever, it’s only there when you’re feeling the physical withdrawal, right when you’d be about to have another. That passes in days; a thirst of no consequence. Then, well done, you’ve quit.

But it doesn’t feel like thirst when you want one after that. When you want one every day – weeks after, months after, even years after, because sometimes it feels like it was all you ever really looked forwards to doing. Then it feels like a raw bitch.

Sure, you sometimes forget about cigarettes when you’ve stopped smoking them, but only till you remember. That’s when you get taken by surprise, and then you’re halfway to the filter before you realise what you’re holding.

I always quit again. It’s not the fear of cancer. You can take that for granted, and it doesn’t mean a thing. You get the odd panic attack or hurts-to-breathe scare, and then you get right back to it. Hardly any smokers can connect with the smoker’s death, not directly. It’s not the thought of dying that makes me quit.

It’s the embarrassment. The shame of it. The shame in my head when I imagine telling the people I love that I am sick or dying because a small pleasure was more important to me than everything else I’m worth. 

That works. I can’t easily see my death, but that I can see. That dark vignette is somehow too
real
to be my future, and then I think,
how much more real is actually dying, than merely being in awe of it
? That’s the break point. Then the whole dark, sticky, spewing end is made real through other eyes than mine, and in that reflection I can stare down the gorgon. And I don’t want it.

This unhardy sense of mortality is new, and not new. When I was 20 years old I was unlived in as a person. Every cigarette or joint was as safe as the first, which was safe enough for a while. But I had my eye on the future, even then. I was afraid of the things unlike myself that I might become, and maybe did, which is a kind of death.

Well, I don’t want to be the same person I was then, any more than he wanted to be me. But I want to feel his passion, his willing, his daily excitement. And I would like one concrete thing I can point at, and tell him why he was wrong to be afraid.

The Wood and The Burn

The hallway of FifePark Seven was littered with drinking trophies. There were road signs, bar signs, poles and sticks, and one night Frank even brought back a full rotary clothes line, which he erected over my bed, while I was sleeping. Then he pegged an old pair of pants above my nose.

Frank was not a discriminating poacher. While Gowan and Will were the steeliest of scavengers, with a discerning eye for genuinely ambitious trophies, Frank would simply uproot whatever was largest and nearest to him on the way home, and leave it somewhere funny or inconvenient.

Because I was, according to various reports, ‘weak sauce’ or ‘a total pussy’, I did not bring home trophies. I have a personal rule about not stealing. [I’m so averse to the idea of stealing, that I’ve even been known to
unsteal
, by making copies of things like movies, games, music...] I guess I must have been missing out on the thrill of dragging some weighty object home, and the resulting satisfaction of the age old hunter-gatherer instinct, because one night, I broke my rule – and possibly some others, too.

Frank and I had been drinking together in the Tudor, avoiding local trouble as best we could, but we got out of there before closing time. I suggested that we take two gigantic wooden constructions that were leaning against a skip on Greyfriars.

‘Nobody wants them,’ Frank said, but that was beside the point, and false in any case, since
I
wanted them.

So Frank acquiesced, if nothing else because of their sheer size. That was his style, at least. They were at least eight or nine feet long, and looked like different sides of the same construction project. They looked like rafters, or the blades of some gigantic wooden sled, but they were made of a fairly light wood, and we could easily manage one each.

‘Want to go home a well wicked way?’ Frank asked.

‘Maybe?’ I said, wondering if it would involve anybody’s garden.

‘Down by the KFB,’ he told me. ‘There’s like this secret path. I went home that way last night. It was well scary.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Can we take the wood?’

‘Yes, Quinine,’ Frank conceded. ‘It’s a crazy way, though. I was well freaked out walking back last night. It’s really dark.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Enough, mate. You sold me on it already.’

I figured that I was holding an eight foot piece of timber, which certainly put me in the ballpark of formidable. Frank was equally well equipped, and furthermore, he was apparently also the Walrus. It seemed obvious that if there were to be a meeting of two parties on this secret way, then I had probably picked the best side.

The ‘secret way’ turned out to be a wide and well trodden footpath, running alongside the Kinnessburn. It was neither dark nor foreboding, but did provide enough space for Frank to swing his wood at more or less arm’s length. He did just that for a few minutes, until it began to tire him. Then, standing at the edge of the path, he raised the artefact above his head with both hands, and announced ‘I am the wood!’

Unfortunately, on this particular occasion, Frank was not the wood. Nor was he in any way at one with the wood, or even particularly aware of how the wood was getting on. It was overbalancing him, in fact, so that he had to take a small step backwards to counter the effect.

Behind Frank there was a slope. He had to take a slightly larger step backwards to counter its influence on his centre of gravity. The slope did not stop after that step, and neither did Frank. He continued to fight for his balance, seemingly in slow motion, until he reached the bottom of the slope, at a pace I’ve never seen him approach before or since.

Behind the slope was a ten foot drop, at the bottom of which lay only the Kinnessburn and some sharp rocks, and not necessarily in that order. Frank did a backwards roll into the void, sending his wooden Waterloo spinning into the air alongside him. There was a sickening crunch as Frank landed on the rocks, and another slightly less sickening ‘whump’ as the wood landed on Frank. Then there was silence.

I ran to the top of the slope without pausing for thought, to find Frank floating face down in the burn.

‘Frank,’ I shouted. ‘Fuckmefuckmefuckme. Frank!’

Scrambling down the slope on my butt cheeks, I reached the drop in a matter of seconds. I struggled to let myself down to the burn, trying as best I could to keep the human casualties down to one.

‘Fuck,’ Frank said, standing up.

‘Fucking hell, Frank,’ I said, ‘I thought you were dead. Are you alright?’

He didn’t reply. He just turned his head from side to side, scanning the scenery and looking for all the world as if he had woken up on Mars. He waded into the middle of the burn and looked around, before patting his pockets down. He found what he was looking for in his shirt.

‘Thank fuck,’ he said, reaching into the deck. ‘My cigarettes are dry. I really fucking need a cigarette.’

I sat on the bank, while Frank stood in the burn, murky water flowing around his knees. He stood there for minutes on end, finished his smoke before he made any effort to move. He looked strangely thoughtful.

‘Let’s go home,’ he said. ‘I’m fucking soaked.’

‘Are you hurt?’ I asked him. ‘Are you concussed?’ There was blood in his hair.

‘Dunno,’ he said, climbing out of the water. I grabbed the wood and followed him.

Frank’s secret way narrowed until it ran through what looked like somebody’s garden gate and, from there, went on to Lade Braes. We walked along the path as it goes parallel to Hepburn Gardens and along the top side of Cockshaugh Park, and eventually came out a short traipse from Fife Park.

We dropped the wood in the hallway, and went into the kitchen. Dylan was making something with cheese, so we recounted the story for him, and then again when Gowan came in.

Frank, standing in the burn, knee deep in running water, blood dripping from his matted hair, smoking a cigarette like nothing could have hurt him; that’s the moment I remember from that year. That’s what I wanted to be, what I sometimes felt I was. Defiant, vigorous, and immortal.

‘He’s still bleeding,’ Gowan said.

‘Tell Will the bit about the backflip,’ Dylan said.

As I talked it up, Frank interrupted every so often, swearing that there had been an old style bathtub in the burn, and that he had thought for just one moment that he could climb into it and sail off down the stream.

There might have been, I’ll say that much, but I certainly never saw one.

The Tortoise and the Hare

I mostly pretend my life began when I got to St. Andrews. It takes the edge off being thirty and it’s easy to believe, because I hardly did a thing until I was twenty. I never knew what I was missing.

I hung with the wrong crowd at school and not in the cool way, where everyone smokes behind the bike sheds,  but in the uncool way where you’re a geek with no social skills and most of your friends are into collectible card games or masturbation. It was a time of insecurity, panic and confusion.

I hated every fucking minute of it. I spent a lot of time in the school library. I went right home at the end of the day, kept my head down all the way. I played video games and read books all night. I only kept in with a few friends after it was all finished up, and I thought the place and every memory of it could burn.  I was, essentially, a non person for two decades. I missed out on every good story the kids used to tell about those days.

I never felt anyone up on a pile of coats. I never made a crowd cheer. I never danced without a care. I never danced and made anyone else care. I never started conversations. I never got laid, never went out with girls, never dressed up, or got wild. I never let my hair down. I never grew it long. I never calibrated against the social scale.

And, even when I got to St. Andrews, I still didn’t know what I was missing; but I knew it was late in the day to be missing it. Something Darcy said brought all of this back to me.

‘You’re going fucking
bald
!’

She pronounced the word ‘bald’ as if it might have been of interchangeable credulity with ‘Clive, the incredible death-defying mongoose’.

‘Thanks, Darcy,’ I said. ‘It’s your sensitivity that I appreciate most.’

‘Seriously,’ she said. ‘There’s a patch as big as my fist with, like, no hair at all.’

I know, it doesn’t seem like much.

But it made me realise that I was at the end of being a teenager, and I still hadn’t done a single thing that teenagers are good for, except maybe sleeping too much and whining about the pain of being alive. There was clearly a world of shit to catch up on, some of which was always going to be a stretch, and some of which could be as easy as a trip to Superdrug.