A Year in Fife Park (17 page)

‘That’s not why.’

‘Why then?’ I asked.

‘Because I trusted you.’

She crossed her legs, put her feet up onto the couch, grabbed one in each hand. She fidgeted with her toes. We sat there, quietly, taking in what meanings we could snatch from the cloud of our half sentences.

‘How could a feeling like that be a bad thing?’ I said, at last.

‘It depends on who you are,’ she told me.

‘How
do
you think of me?’ I asked her.

She shrugged, and took a sip of tea. Looked into the mug.

‘You said
loved
,’ she said.

‘I think that kiss broke a kind of balance,’ I told her.

‘Yes.’

‘We needed different things, from different directions.’

‘We’ve passed each other by,’ she said. ‘It’s over, maybe.’

‘We’re friends,’ I said. ‘We’re going to be, still.’

‘It’s never going to mend completely,’ she said.

‘It’s not really about being mended,’ I told her.

Somewhere in it all was the truth that I didn’t spot for years to come. I walked back to Fife Park as the horizon rolled over and turned blue again. The sky is so large in St. Andrews.

The East Nuke

We came back to the house to cap a night off, late some time in April. Mart was with me, Craig had declined as usual. Fife Park was dead to him, apparently.

Frank had been away with medics all night. We couldn’t see in the kitchen as we came over the lawn; the windows were all steamed up. But there was movement. There were raised voices. One raised voice, anyway.

Mart ran upstairs to use the john, and I went to investigate. In the downstairs hall, one of the Randoms had his door half open and was peering round it. Kitchen door was shut, as were the other two rooms. If the other Randoms were home they weren’t showing.

‘Hey Dylan,’ I said.

‘I think Frank went crazy,’ he said.

‘Mmm.’

‘He broke half of everything, I reckon.’

‘You been in there?’

‘Almost. Look, can you speak to him, before he breaks everything else?’

‘I don’t know what to say. Did you speak to him?’

‘He wouldn’t answer me.’

‘I don’t know what I can tell you,’ I said.

‘Just, he might listen to you.’

I stepped up. My hand reached out for the handle, but I couldn’t bring myself to open the door.

‘You fucking cunting bitching fuck.’

With each expletive, there was a bang. As if someone were hitting something in time with their own rage.

‘You cunting fucking mothercunting shit fucker!’

‘Who’s he shouting at?’ Mart asked, appearing behind me. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It is what it is.’

‘Very Zen,’ Mart said. ‘You should get in there. He might hurt himself.’

I pushed the door open, and a spray of porcelain flew past my nose, right to left. It was
my
porcelain. Another mug hit the door before it was half open. I poked my head around the door.

‘Hello,’ I said.

Frank was standing over by the cooker, with half a plate in his hand.

‘This fucking plate,’ he said. He threw it at the floor, where it shattered, the fresh pieces mixing with the wreckage of half our crockery.

‘And this mug,’ he said.

He hefted it into the air almost gently, but quickly spun the golf club round to intercept it. I pulled my head back into the hallway just in time. I could hear tinkling pieces of it hitting the floor. I shut the door.

‘Fucking bastarding shiteating cuntbreathing fucking cocksores.’ Frank’s voice was muffled, but still loud.

‘Cocksores, huh?’ Mart said.

‘Are you alright in there?’ I shouted through. No answer.

‘Hello?’ Mart called.

I looked in again. The cupboard doors were off, lying on top of a pile of broken bowls and plates. Frank rested his hands on the work surface for stability, and then kicked out at the drawers. It took one kick for each of them to lose their facades. Pots and pans spilled out onto the floor, and crunched onto broken porcelain.

Frank turned around, angry wildness in his eyes. He scanned the room, and found his golf club leaning up against the table. He grabbed it, grimaced for a moment, and then smacked it into the counter.

‘OK, Frank,’ I said. ‘OK.’

I stepped out of the room, neatly, and shut the door for the last time. There was nothing in that room I cared about apart from Frank, and he was on his own path.

‘We’re going to let him work it out,’ I said.

Mart nodded.

‘Whatever it is. I don’t care about the kitchen,’ I said.

I never knew what drove Frank, and I never knew what he cared about. One night he went crazy with a golf club, and I still don’t know why. I asked him about it later, but he was coy. He was embarrassed. God, that took the edge off things. The man who didn’t give a fuck getting shy on me.

He didn’t want me to talk about it, he didn’t want it to be his story, didn’t want it to be in this story; the night that Frank went nuts and trashed the place. I wouldn’t even write it down, except that it is so much a part of
my
story. How much it changed my own perception of the place.

Once that happened, there was no way that things were how I thought they were. And though I’ve thought about it for years since, I still don’t know how they were. It’s just shit that happened.

‘I reckon he caught his Dad cheating with another woman,’ Craig said, later.

‘He probably failed another year,’ Mart said.

‘Could be a girl thing,’ Dylan said. ‘I mean, we don’t know.’

‘I don’t think we really know at all,’ I said.

‘You never really know people.’

‘You could take someone apart piece by piece, and still never know them,’ Craig said. He looked like he thought it might be a good side-project.

‘Maybe that’s Frank and Fife Park,’ Mart said.

‘I hope he found what he was looking for,’ Dylan said. ‘If not, I reckon it’s probably in pieces by now.’

May Dip

We’d all done it in first year. I had been particularly drunk, and wound up on the beach more or less by accident, while looking for my door keys. At the time, I hadn’t even heard of the May Dip, let alone brought a towel, but I was entering that subtle state of suggestibility that comes at the end of a long day and a lot of alcohol. Hell, I would have gone in fully clothed if Mart, who coincidentally had just the door keys I was looking for, hadn’t advised me to strip at least to my boxers.

Considering myself a May Dip veteran, I thought that we would be off the hook in second year. I was dead wrong, as Frank mindfully insisted that we hadn’t done it properly the first time, and would have to go again. Knowing Frank, I had an idea of what ‘doing it properly’ would entail.

‘You mean in the buff, right?’ I asked.

‘Why stop short?’

‘Because, at the top of a long list of reasons, other people will see my penis.’

‘That’s happened on all my best nights,’ Frank said.

‘Yeah, it’s just not a good idea.’

‘Medically, it’s the running into the sea that I’d come down against,’ Frank said. ‘Nudity never hurt anyone. Well, probably some people who work with heavy machinery, or deep fat fryers or something.’

‘Well, I’m not doing it,’ I said. ‘I mean, I’ll do the dip again if I have to, but not with my bollocks on display.’

‘I think you should,’ Frank said.

‘Yeah, well, I don’t care.’

‘Fine,’ Frank said. ‘But there’s no point pretending to be all wild and free, and running into the sea waving your arms like you just don’t care about anything, if you need a pretty little pair of frilly pink panties on to do it.’

‘That sounds even more crazy,’ I said.

‘That was a bad example,’ Frank said. ‘But do whatever you want. Obviously, I just thought that you were the one who was all interested in pushing his limits and not giving a fuck and all that jazz. But that’s fine.’

‘I don’t really see how this pushes...’ I began.

‘Also, can I just say that if you don’t do it, you’ll be bottling it. Properly,’ Frank added.

Once I had agreed to it in principle, there was no going back.

The meat of the tradition known as the ‘May Morning Dip’ is short enough to relay in a single sentence: at the first break of dawn on May 1
^st
, run screaming into the ocean from the beach of Castle Sands. All other worthy aspects of this insane annual observance can be summed up with a single corollary: immediately run out again, screaming, if possible, louder.

We decided to have a bit of a party leading up to the event, partly because any excuse for a few drinks was a good enough one, but mostly because we were all adamant that 4.37am should come firmly towards the end of a day, and never anywhere near the beginning of one. Also, when you’re talking about running bollock naked into the North Sea in the glow of the breaking dawn, sobriety is the only real handicap.

The rendezvous was at Euan McWinslow’s place in Gatty, where we were also celebrating the birthday of a guy called Dick, whose major party piece was leaping out of the upstairs window into a bed of roses next to the front door. It wasn’t the best trick I’d ever seen, but it sure made people shit themselves when they rang the doorbell.

It wasn’t the first time I’d hung out with Euan, since that night with Darcy, but it was the first I hadn’t been expecting an ass-kicking. They were still together. Euan had been surprisingly cool about it, which put me hugely on edge at first, until I realised there was just no sucker-punch coming.

The party was loud, and the house was rocking. In fact, the party was too loud, because Euan is a man who likes to show people what his stereo can do. He is also incapable of judging which of his friends will appreciate that sort of thing. We all generally get blasted, first by his unstoppable enthusiasm for new punk and hefty speakers, and then by what feels like a brick wall with a decibel sign after it. The enthusiasm is a good thing, and you can’t knock it, but after a few drinks it becomes absolutely unwaning. When we finally got Euan to put the volume down we were able to hear only our own tinnitus. Eventually, people from other houses came round to complain. We couldn’t hear them.

There was some smoking going on, Dick showed me a couple of his guitars while he was still sober enough to hold them, and Frank pulled his usual special move – drinking relentlessly in an armchair.

After a while Darcy showed up, and played a fast game of catch up, both with me and with the drink. We chatted and hugged, and things seemed back to normal for the first time in weeks. I watched her canoodling with Euan through my pint glass and didn’t really feel anything, other than drunk. It was good to be merely merry again. It was a relief to stop being serious.

Eventually Dick was sick into a bucket in the lounge, and Darcy took over and mothered him for a while, before knocking the bucket over onto her feet and getting half-sick herself, and then passing out in Euan’s bedroom. We all left the pungent lounge post-haste, Frank and I to chow on the leftovers of a Chinese carryout in the kitchen.

Somewhere along the way Dick disappeared, too, and when it was time to hit the beach only a handful of us remained, Frank, Euan, and myself, as well as a couple of girls who had broken the rules and changed into swimming costumes.

There was a crowd, a choir, and a piper on the beach. Some people were singing, some were in fancy dress, others were wandering around with confused looks on the faces. It could have been the scene of an eclipse at a village fete, possibly during Oktoberfest. A few brave souls were already splashing about a bit, but most were standing on the beach, idly chatting and watching the horizon.

I hadn’t brought a towel, for the second year running. I had gone one better and brought a tatty green full-length dressing gown. I was all for the skinny dipping, but I wasn’t going to stand around on the beach afterwards; the intention was to hide my shame as quickly and completely as possible. I didn’t much care for people seeing my cock on the way in, but I sure as hell didn’t want them to catch a glimpse on the way out.

I changed on the beach in true British form, slipping off my boxer shorts underneath the protective cover of the gown, exposing not one unnecessary inch of flesh. Then I  blew my cover completely, by discretely trying to fondle some warmth back into my nether regions. Frank eyed me, distastefully.

‘It’s the size of a peanut,’ I protested. ‘How cold is it, already?’

‘Don’t be a pussy,’ he remonstrated. ‘You’re not here to show off.’

He was right. I definitely was not there to show off. Not my pasty white ass, and not my quickly receding scrotum. I was not there to show off at all. Standing barefoot on the beach, cupping my balls through the soft towel cloth of my dressing gown, staring into the inky black of the north sea, I began to question why exactly I was there.

‘This is a fucking laugh, eh?’ Frank said.

That was it. It was a laugh.

‘I can’t feel my dick, anymore,’ I shivered.

‘You should stop trying,’ Euan said, with a frown.

And then it was dawn. It was an amazing thing. I have always been a night owl, and I have seen my fair share of sunrises. I am still amazed by the speed of a dawn. That objects as immense as the sun and earth should relate in human time sends me reeling. Students ran like lemmings into the ocean. Some of them cried out in what could only have been real physical pain.

‘I’ll hold your towels, guys,’ I said, looking down at my cold, cold feet.

Euan and Frank ran into the ocean, too. There was much laughter and splashing. It might as well have been the public baths, as far as they were concerned. Except that, running out of it again, side by side, they were hit by a solid wall of flash photography. I blinked a few times, and handed them their towels.

‘That was wicked,’ Frank said. ‘Are you bottling it, Quinine?’

‘No,’ I said, lying. ‘I just didn’t want to be caught on candid camera.’

‘That was wicked,’ Frank said again. ‘I couldn’t see a thing. Come on, Quinn – this is your chance to Man Up.’

‘I don’t give a fuck,’ I said, defiantly. But as I said it, I realised that it was true.