A Year in Fife Park (7 page)

‘Schlong says you should just get in there and pull her,’ Lance said. He did a hand motion, that was not an analogue to pulling someone.

‘Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and file that under controversial advice to be followed as a last resort.’

‘Fine, we’ll go to the union, just for Quinn,’ Mart said.

‘No pressure,’ Frank told me.

‘Can we at least wait until it’s busy, though?’ Mart asked.

‘Reasonable request,’ I said. ‘What’s on tonight, anyway?’

As usual, this was a stupid question to ask in St. Andrews. [By the third year, we would often ask ‘What’s on… in Dundee?’]

‘I think they’re having a Cheesy night at the Bop,’ Craig said, without much enthusiasm.

‘Great,’ Mart sighed. ‘How will we tell?’

The Bop, like most events, was in decline in our second year. In the first year, people had made an effort with the events. There had been bands and comedians that we had heard of, and they had even hosted foam parties some nights. [Mart had cracked his chin open while sliding around one night, and then there were no more foam parties.] It was an euphoric but short lived phase of our lives although, to be honest, the foam parties were pretty rank. At the height of the foaming we were looking at about a half an inch coverage of wet suds, which dissolved into a slippery mess less than thirty seconds after they turned off the foam sprayers. Luckily, we weren’t measuring fun by volume of foam.

The important thing about those days wasn’t that they were particularly good; it was that people were willing to throw themselves around in filthy wet shite until injuries took them out of the game. By our second year, everything was just a little bit more reserved, and everyone had just a little bit less enthusiasm. The Bop itself had devolved into three hours of bad music with three people dancing to it. We went every week.

‘Guys, are we really going to do the
Bop
again?’

‘What else?’

‘Fuck’s sake,’ Mart said. ‘St. Andrews is just so fucking
lame
.’

Craig caught my eye.

‘The eight-fifteen from Downersville is a little early into the station tonight,’ I said, nodding at Mart.

‘We should get him over to the union before he starts challenging authority,’ Craig agreed.

We got into the Union without too much trouble. Mart got IDed, and refused to show his student card until the bouncer had let Mart identify
him
. Fortunately the guy on the door was new, and thought this was a gag.

‘You’re going to have fun, here,’ Craig told him, as he let us pass.

‘We’re just a bunch of loveable jokers,’ I said, giving him a thumbs up.

‘You know what’s a joke?’ Mart asked. Craig hurried him through the door before he could finish. ‘The fucking service around here,’ Mart said triumphantly, to the foyer. I glanced back at the doorman, but he was onto the next bunch of customers.

‘Jesus,’ Craig said. ‘He’s all yours, I’m going for a slash.’

The queue for the Bop was all around the main doors, and folded back on itself till it was almost into the main bar. It’s always fucking all or nothing.

‘Better get in the queue,’ I said.

I saw Ella towards the front of the queue, and waved.  She waved back.

‘I’m going to ask her out,’ I said to Mart.

‘Go for it,’ he said.

‘Everybody knows you’re into her,’ Lance said. ‘All her friends, too.’

‘Ah, good,’ I said. No chance for a quiet, private moment of failure then. I took a deep breath. The queue was good for another half hour at least. Plenty of time to steel myself.

I think I asked Ella out three or four times, in second year. I don’t know, it didn’t seem nearly as pathetic and drippy in person. There was always a good reason to have another shot, or at least it seemed like that. Anyway, I’m a firm believer that we should measure ourselves by our progress and, as such, I consider my numerous and abject failures with Ella as amounting to a kind of success.

For example, I certainly didn’t follow her around like a drooling puppy, and I credit myself with having reached a stage of emotional development where this was an obvious decision. I was also able to conduct a conversation of any required length with Ella.

This was more down to her than to me. Ella was always happy to chat, even if I did sometimes make a fool of myself. It was a while before we got to be really
good
friends, I guess this kind of stuff has to be behind you before that can happen. But we were friends. It was nice.

I only remember the first and the last time she turned me down. This was the first. I walked over to her and said a few things, and she cut me down in seconds. I expected to feel horrible about it, but actually it really didn’t seem so bad.

‘I’m not really at that place in my life,’ she said.

It was a good answer, but it was not an answer to the question I had just asked. I had asked her if she knew what our friends were saying about us. Which was lame, I guess. But I wasn’t expecting a stock reply quite so soon. It was over already.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Sure, OK.’

It kind of was OK, as well. We were still chatting, I hadn’t threatened to kill anyone yet, and I wasn’t even close to being labelled a sex pest. Then she offered me a really awful roll-up that she’d tried to make. It smoked pretty good, considering. I don’t know what we talked about after that, but it didn’t seem like the worst conversation I’d ever had. When I finished the smoke, I stood up.

‘See you later,’ I said. She smiled. I smiled back, completely despite myself.

‘How’d it go?’ Mart asked, when I got back.

‘She’s washing her hair,’ I said. ‘For the foreseeable future.’

‘Really?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But she might as well be.’

‘Bummer,’ Frank said.

‘I guess. She likes me, though. Not like
that
, but as someone to talk to. I can tell.’

‘I hate to break it to you mate,’ said Mart, ‘but I’m pretty sure that goes for everyone. She’s a real talker.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘So I’m as good as everyone else at talking. That’s a fucking start.’

‘You’re not as good as her,’ Frank said. ‘I ran into her in Woollies the other day, and I couldn’t get away.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Lance said. ‘I tried to bum a fag off her last week. Should have just gone to Off Sales.’

‘Gonnae give up while you’re ahead this time, Quinn?’ Frank said, a note of worry in his voice.

‘Yeah,’ I said, meaning it. That was when it felt worst, right there. ‘Let’s talk about something else. Where’s Craig?’ 

‘Being more successful than you,’ Frank said. He pointed.

Craig stood a few feet away, beer in hand, chatting to Elizabethe, the girl he met in Freshers Week.

‘I think he’s in there,’ Lance said. He made another hand sign. It was a pretty good analogue for being ‘in there’.

‘He’s been standing there like that since we got our bop bands,’ Frank said.

As it happens, Craig stayed right there until closing time, stuck in the same spot, barely even shifting his weight, like some immoveable pillar at the centre of the Beer Bar. Elizabethe was
not
a talker. Craig was not a talker, either. It was not a conversation. It was a battle of wills that would rage for an eternity. Craig gets drawn into things, and will not let them go. He didn’t like her much, or so he always said, but he wound up seeing her on and off for the next four years. If it had been any kind of relationship it would have been the most enduring one of his life.

‘I don’t know how he does it. Why can’t I just strike it lucky, Frank?’ I said.

‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘But you’re doing it wrong. Asking a girl out shouldn’t feel like sitting a driving test.’

‘Still doing it wrong,’ I said. ‘Fuck.’

‘I let them come to me,’ Frank offered. ‘That way I know they’re bothered.’

‘Shit, Frank,’ I said. ‘I’ve been waiting two decades, I figured it couldn’t hurt to make some kind of an effort.’

‘Yeah, but you were wrong though,’ he said. ‘Hurts like a bitch.’

‘And, what? I should stop caring? That’s what you’ve got? That’s bullshit.’

He looked at Craig.

‘Well, you could try being more of a cunt.’

We didn’t speak to Craig for the rest of the night, and he disappeared with Elizabethe during the last song. Later we found out that he’d invited her out for dinner, and he summarily took her, just a few days later. He took her to the Vine Leaf, hoping to impress her. He was to be sorely disappointed.

He came home at five in the morning complaining that she’d cost him a bona fide fuckton to wine and dine and hadn’t, so far as he could tell, actually fucking noticed. Apparently she was horrendously snobby, and her parents had a house the size of New Hall. Then he announced that he had experienced a ‘most random night’, more to make us jealous than anything else, and went to bed ‘shagged out’. I didn’t feel all that jealous. Frank didn’t even look up from the game he was playing on my computer.

I don’t know why we were up at five am when he came back; I think that perhaps we just usually were.

Theme Park

The Fife Park year was all change. Maybe change is the theme of this book. But if that’s true, then it’s a cop out, because change is the theme of life, and the theme of fiction, and the theme of causality, and the theme of reason and the theme of love and growth and time and friendship and joy and work and everything else that is not the same as it was, which is pretty much everything.

If I could pick a theme for my own book, it would be this mysterious
glow
I’m looking for. It would be that happy, joyful, electric excitement that I felt running through everything back then. It would be that eagerness, that willing, that enthusiasm. But that would imply a level of control that I don’t have. Does anybody really choose their own theme?  I hardly even think we choose our lives, let alone the narrative.

Back then, I found a project for change, and for years I credited it with success. It was a pop-psychology solution pieced together from cereal packets and lecture notes, and I thought I had it all figured out. If I’d written this book aged twenty-five, it would have been central to the story: how a man can change. Fuck me, I might have even called it that. [
How a Man Can Change
, that is, not
Fuck Me
. I might yet write that one.]

But I was carried away with the illusion of control.  Now I’m more sceptical. Change is a wild, untameable thing. There is romance in the idea that people change out of will, that they can be made whole again by effort. But I don’t believe it.

Sure, you can make a change. You can always make a change. You can’t look for something and find nothing in this life, it is too full. But it is just any change, desultory and undirected. Serendipity is the Queen of change; you almost never get what you are looking for.

Maybe you sense the paradox in this book. Why am I looking for what I used to be, if I don’t believe I chose it even then? What is the point of looking for what can’t be found? When finding it would be no guarantee of understanding it. When understanding it would bring me no closer to reviving it. Why trace over old footsteps, if the path will always be a lost one?

Well, maybe finding anything is better than not looking. Or perhaps looking for something is that specific thing I am looking for. Who doesn’t love a paradox? Maybe that fluidity, that flexibility, is its own release. And, I suppose I just wonder, if I am
looking
for serendipity, what will I find?

Darcy Loch’s Pub Golf Hole-in-one

Fuck me, but Darcy Loch could drink.

Still does, but we don’t feel the same about it now. When you’re nineteen, it’s a badge of honour at worst. The people with the problems and the people without are indistinguishable to a nineteen year-old.

She’s a city girl these days; fits right in, holds down some high-powered job, makes things happen, hires and fires and wins awards, takes the pressure. Drinks it all in, like it was a chilled Sancerre. I don’t know her any more, but I still know her. We go way back.

The first time we got wrecked together was sometime right before Raisin Weekend. It was a dark night, late autumn, kitchen of her flat. I was still crushing hard on Ella. Darcy was still bitching on about Craig half the time. I got snobby with a bottle of nasty chardonnay and refused to let it sit in the glass.

[The best white wines are Chardonnays. And so, overwhelmingly, are the worst. ‘Three for a tenner’ deals put you at the gag-reflex end of the spectrum.]

‘Fucking awful,’ I gagged. ‘I’ll be glad when we’ve finished it.’

‘You are
such
a woman, Quinn,’ Darcy said.

She filled my glass, and topped up her own, with all the wobbly determination of the drinker. She poured until the bottle was vertical. There was nearly enough room in the glass.

‘Woah, woah,’ I called, as it began to overflow.

A brim of golden-green liquid hung on the rim of the glass like olive oil before breaking ranks and flowing thickly over the edge. Darcy ran her finger up the side of her glass, catching the greasy rivulets until they overflowed onto her pink painted nails.

‘Down it,’ she said, raising the glass to her lips, shakily. ‘And quit bitching.’

I did, getting chunks of dry cork in my throat. I choked. Wine went down the front of my shirt, which fortunately did not look out of place.

‘You total arse,’ Darcy said, slamming my back.

‘Well, the red will be better,’ I told her between breaths.

‘Want to see if we can drink that one faster?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘
Woman
.’

‘Nothing like a bit of peer pressure,’ I said.

‘It’s got to be all gone less than thirty seconds from pulling the cork,’ she told me, screwing in the opener.

‘Why?’

‘Because it’ll put hairs on your chest,’ she said. ‘I swear, you wouldn’t last five minutes in Ireland.’

‘I’m so glad I spent all that time picking it out.’

‘You are such...’

‘Just fucking open it,’ I said. I got bigger glasses from the cupboard.