‘You talked for a long time,’ I said, reproachfully.

  ‘She’s getting a fucking pilot’s license. Jesus.’

  ‘I think it’s time I tried talking to a girl,’ I said, frowning.

  ‘Yeah, well I think it’s time to leave,’ Craig replied.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think this could go on all night’.

  ‘Not really,’ he said, pointing. ‘The police are here.’

  They stood in the doorway, tearing the drinks out of people’s hands, and throwing them to the floor. I wondered how I hadn’t noticed them come in.

  ‘The party is over,’ one of them shouted into the room. ‘Everybody needs to leave, right now.’

  We watched them for a couple of minutes, and then snuck out to go home.

  Darcy Loch’s Whey Pat Flat

  I met Darcy in town the next morning, at around two p.m.

  ‘Afternoon, Quinn,’ she said.

  ‘Yeahyeahyeah,’ I whimpered, unconvinced.

  I have no idea what I was in town for, but I remember that I was in pain.

  ‘Fancy a cup of tea?’ she asked.

  ‘You had me at tea,’ I told her.

  ‘That was the end of the sentence.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘There’s biscuits, maybe.’

  ‘You had me at tea,’ I said, clutching my head.

  Darcy was Craig’s ex. Things had gone South, and they had treated each other pretty fucking badly in the death throes of the relationship. Neither of them had much good to say about the other.

  ‘How’ve you been?’ I asked.

  ‘Shitty,’ she said. ‘Just awful.’ She took a deep breath and smiled, with a sharp, bracing exhale.

  The previous year had taught me the range of my emotional intelligence, and I knew that I wanted to work up to other people’s break-ups.

  ‘I don’t know, maybe I should leave you to it?’

  ‘No,’ she said, reaching out suddenly. ‘Come see my flat.’

  She pulled her arm back before it touched mine, but it hovered urgently.

  ‘Where are you staying this year?’

  ‘There,’ she pointed.

  ‘In the Whey Pat?’

  ‘Above it. Behind, it, sort of, but round a corner. Come on.’

  ‘Alright,’ I said.

  We walked down the side of the Whey Pat, past a cute little garden with hanging baskets, and through a little gate, along a wall, around a corner, and back up some stairs to a main door. There was nobody else home.

  ‘There’s an old lady in the flat below,’ Darcy said. ‘You better take your shoes off, because she complains when we walk around.’

  ‘At night?’ I said. One of my socks had a hole in it at the big toe.

  ‘No, then it’s fine. She sleeps like a log. Just in the day. She’s always banging on the floor.’

  It was a dinky looking place from the entry way, but there were stairs going upwards. There were clothes drying all the way up the banister. We went into the kitchen, which was also awash with damp laundry, and the hot sickly smell of a freshly run load.

  The kitchen overlooked the cute little garden we had passed on the way in. I looked out of the window, while Darcy pottered at the counter. On the opposite side of the road was an old folk’s home.

  ‘There’s always someone up at night, sitting in that lounge, no matter what time it is,’ she said. ‘I guess it doesn’t matter what time it is when you’re old.’

  ‘Old people sleep less,’ I said.

  ‘Not less than you.’

  ‘Not less than me.’

  ‘Bourbons okay?’ she asked.

  I turned back into the room. She was holding a packet of biscuits. I nodded.

  ‘I think I would find it comforting to see them there,’ I said, indicating out of the window with my thumb. ‘I sometimes just feel like I need to see other people when I can’t sleep.’

  ‘You can see me, sometimes,’ Darcy said. ‘I don’t sleep so well, either. Just give me a call.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. But I didn’t mean it, at least not right then. You can’t call someone at five in the morning on the off chance they’re still awake.

  Darcy put the tea down, and brought over a plate with biscuits on. I had forgotten that Darcy knew me well enough. But she’d been with us, ostensibly one of our group, for most of the first year. She had been Craig’s girlfriend, after all. I still felt like she was a stranger.

  ‘I feel like we’ve hardly talked for ages,’ Darcy said. She settled into a high-backed chair on the opposite side of the kitchen table. She cupped her mug with both hands.

  ‘Well, there was the summer,’ I said. ‘And all the stuff with Craig.’

  ‘He’s such a bastard,’ she said.

  ‘There’s a healthy reflex.’

  ‘Sorry, I know he’s your friend,’ Darcy said.

  ‘He can be a jerk.’

  She sighed, and shrugged.

  Darcy wasn’t beautiful. Her features were just a bit too round and cherub-like to really be striking and a bit too ordinary to be girl-next-door attractive. But she did have a certain appealing way about her, a certain air that sometimes made her seem like she was really something. At any rate, I could certainly imagine fucking her, so I did that for a while.

  ‘What are you giving me that dopey look for?’ Darcy asked.

  ‘Just checking out your eyeliner,’ I lied, immediately, while one half of my brain screamed at me that I didn’t know what eyeliner was, or if she was wearing any.

  ‘Oh, yah,’ she said. ‘It’s a really nice colour, hmm? It’s just from Boots, but I had to go out to Dundee to find one big enough to stock the colours that suit me.’

  ‘They’ve got like a fucking aisle and a half, in St. Andrews,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘These tiny provincial branches only stock the popular stuff, and that means that people with unconventional colours are out of luck.’

  ‘You have unconventional colours,’ I said in a monotone, unsure of the appropriate inflection.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And you’ve got to know your strengths. Take red for example. I can’t do red, especially not on the lips. It makes me look like a harlot! I can’t do any reds.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘You wear pink lipstick.’

  ‘You know,’ she said. ‘You haven’t the first idea about any of this.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, what’s it like living with him?’

  ‘He’s a pain in the arse,’ I said.

  ‘I know, right?’ she said.

  ‘He’s so fucking particular. He demands we put the vegetables into the stir fry in a precise order, or he refuses to eat it.’

  ‘More for the rest of you.’

  ‘Or pay for his share.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And he’ll bitch about it all the next day.’

  ‘You liking Fife Park?’ Darcy asked. ‘I thought it was a shithole.’

  ‘It is,’ I said. ‘But it’s cheap, and...’

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘At least it’s cheap.’

  ‘No, there’s something about it,’ I said. ‘Something really different. Not like other places I’ve stayed. It feels like freedom.’

  ‘Well, it’s kind of like camping,’ Darcy said.

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ I said. ‘Hell, you can live anywhere, if you get on with the people.’

  ‘You know he wanted us to move in together,’ she said, suddenly.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I said.

  ‘That’s why he was dragging his heels over getting the place with you guys.’

  ‘I didn’t know. He never said.’

  ‘That boy hates himself,’ she told me.

  ‘He hates a lot of things,’ I said. ‘Let’s not start drawing lines.’

  ‘Frank’s lovely,’ she said. ‘He’s so nice. You know he’s the only person who’s said ‘Hello’ to me since we got back this year.’

  ‘Apart from me.’

  ‘Mart crossed the street to get away from me.’

  ‘Mart just doesn’t know what to say,’ I said. ‘He’s not good with awkward situations.’

  ‘It is awkward,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad you came in for tea. It’s not awkward now you’re here, right?’

  ‘Well, there’s knickers all over the place,’ I told her.

  ‘They’re not mine,’ she said. ‘I haven’t done laundry yet.’

  Somehow that made it easier to look at them.

  ‘Done your Phil essay, yet?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘And neither have you. Even though it’s a week late.’

  ‘I’ve got to worry about Psychology, first,’ I told her. ‘Fucking stats is my kryptonite. What’s your excuse?’

  ‘Better than yours,’ she said. ‘Saw the dick in English yesterday. Didn’t even look my way.’

  ‘That’s your excuse?’

  ‘No, fool. I was just saying.’

  We sipped our tea, slurping a little at the same time. She laughed. I took another biscuit.

  ‘I remember the first night I knew you guys were in trouble,’ I said. ‘The James Bond Ball, back at the end of first year?’

  ‘We’d been in trouble for weeks, by then.’

  ‘Yeah, well. That was the first night I knew. You were frosty.’

  ‘Like a Bond villain? I was a bit of an ice queen.’

  ‘Yeah, but you still went through all the boyfriend-girlfriend stuff. Buying each other ice creams and playing games. You weren’t into it, though. It was just obvious.’

  ‘Like we were at each other’s throats, secretly.’

  ‘No, worse. Like you were desperate to save it and overcompensating.’

  Darcy didn’t say anything.

  ‘It was just… sad.’ I fumbled for words, wishing I hadn’t started in on it all. ‘You were all over each other, but it was empty. And not like because you didn’t mean it. That’s why it was sad. Because you really did mean it, but it didn’t matter.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, eventually. ‘I’m sorry our break up was so traumatic for you.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It was.’

  ‘Well,’ she said again, more lightly, ‘It’s not all roses, all the time.’

  I grinned. ‘I may never love again.’

  ‘Hey, you had your little crush back then, do you remember?’

  That brought the colour to my cheeks.

  ‘Remember?’ I said. ‘I was wearing a fucking blouse.’

  I raised the tea to my lips, and got the cold dregs of the mug. How circular life is.

  Thunderballs

  The James Bond Ball, a.k.a. Thunderball [Ha fucking ha] in First Year was the single worst night I had in St. Andrews. I don’t blame the organisers, although it was a bit lacklustre. I don’t blame the venue, although the Younger Hall could suck the life out of an orgy with extra tits. No, I blame myself, and I’m glad to have had the opportunity to do so. I should mention that I also slightly blame Craig and McQueen for being such pricks about it all. Later on, I threatened to kill them.

  But, if it wasn’t for that night, I might never have realised what a precipitous gulf so obviously separated me from adulthood. And I’m not talking about sex or money, here. Those chapters come later and, fortunately, separately. I’m talking about your obvious, usual, common or garden goddamn motherfucking social graces.

  At that time I was into a medic called Vikki. She was cute as a button. Button nose. Round cheeks. Wide smile. Really pretty. I really didn’t know her at all, but fuck it all, I was still a teenager. I was also an emotionally-stunted idiot.

  I had my one big falling out with McQueen over Vikki. It was an old chestnut, thoroughly roasted; McQueen knew that I was into a certain girl, and he wasn’t. But when she went for him, he returned the favour. For the fuck of it, I guess, because he unceremoniously dumped her a week later. Just long enough for it to feel insulting both ways.

  ‘The problem is not me,’ McQueen said. ‘The problem is you. You’re the one who made this into something.’

  ‘But you didn’t even care,’ I said.

  ‘And you don’t even know her,’ he replied. ‘So how could you?’

  I can’t even remember how I followed up on that, but I did. I must have, because it didn’t end there by a long way. I didn’t listen to Frank. He didn’t listen to me. But I don’t think we could have understood each other even if we’d been trying.

  Of course, for some reason that obviously didn’t seem like a double-standard at the time, the logic about Frank not interfering with my potential love interests did not apply the other way around, to myself and his previous ones. I know this because I was still inexplicably determined to make it with Vikki, around the time of the Thunderball. And hell, I reasoned, she was single. Again.

  This is what I’m talking about. Who would not just give it up as a bad job by this point? Who would not, for the mere avoidance of awkwardness, drop a stupid and uninvested crush like a hot stone the minute it became inconvenient? All I can offer is that sudden, ridiculous, capricious and unrealistic infatuations are the mark of a young man. If he is also a cunt.

  So, the morning of the ball, I went down to the Oxfam on Bell Street, rounding the corner with a spring in my step. Bell Street is possibly my favourite street in St. Andrews. I have no idea why, other than that Aikman’s used to be on it. I just always feel a bit brighter on Bell Street. Oxfam on Bell Street was one of my prime haunts for shirts of mass destruction.

  I had a thing for shirts that were unorthodox, garish, tasteless, loud, psychedelic, frilly, or whichever combination of the above most narrowly trod the line between ‘quietly assured eccentricity’ and ‘offence punishable by law’. I recognise that this is a character flaw. I’m told that it’s the guilty pleasure of many who crave just a bit of attention, but can’t offer a compelling reason for anyone to give it. It was a sort of game, and I called it Shirt Attack. That was a stupid name. Orwell would have called it “EyeCrime”.

  [That would also have been a stupid name, but at least he would have been able to claim it was satirical.]

  Nice place, St. Andrews. But apart from the students, virtually everyone there is pensionable. You can see why; it might be a lovely place to study or to retire, but St. Andrews holds about as much excitement for your average adult human as a soggy Ryvita. Because of this, the town has a population that consists almost entirely of people who get up at noon, take up interminable residence in coffee shops, and are permanently strapped for cash. Charity shops have flourished. And so did my wardrobe because, frankly, you would be surprised at how much stuff in places like that might set alarm bells ringing in most airports.

  [It’s a commonly held misconception that old people love charity shops, but I’ve never found that to be the case. Old people shop there out of necessity. Virtually everything in a charity shop belonged to somebody who was old, and is now dead. Nobody wants to shop in that kind of environment. Imagine if Sainsbury’s did a 2-for-1 on soap, with the slogan ‘maybe you’ll be dead before you need any more soap’. That would have to be some seriously cheap soap, on a day you really needed more soap.]

  Don’t get me wrong; I wouldn’t just wear any old tasteless thing. It had to be special. In second year, I found a shirt that looked like it was made of glitter and mother of pearl, and held together by the silvery excretions of an excitable pixie. That became a staple for a while. My first year favourite had been in orange and blue, and looked like one of Picasso’s ‘angry period’ works. It met a grim fate the night I fell down a nightclub’s biggest flight of stairs to what was very nearly my death. I was drunk and arsing about. [My greatest regret is that the scar under my eye has such a worthless back-story.] It was a narrow escape from a fairly typical first-year fatality. The shirt was not so lucky, sustaining a mortal wound that unthreaded it wear by wear until it simply fell apart some time after the start of second year.

  Oxfam on Bell Street was also where Vikki did her volunteer shift, which was cynically calculated on my part and, looking back, a bit creepy. I saw her at the checkout on the way in, and almost tripped over my own feet like the suave motherfucker I’ve always been. I went straight to the shirt racks, and collected myself while browsing through. As usual, a Geiger counter would have been useful. I found some kind of green, blue and violet paint-splashed nightmare of a shirt [it was pretty rad, ba-dum tish] and, hoping it would be a talking point, I took it up to the checkout.

  ‘You going to the ball tonight?’ I asked.

  ‘The James Bond one,’ Vikki said. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I think it will be a lot of fun,’ I said, in what would turn out to be the least accurate prediction of the day.

  ‘Hope so,’ she said, disinterestedly. ‘You getting this shirt for tonight?’

  ‘Yeah, I think it will go with my suit,’ I said, in what would turn out to be the second least accurate prediction of the day. Vikki didn’t even look at it.

  ‘That will be three pounds, please,’ she said. I handed it over.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. Then the conversation was over. I had been looking forwards to it all morning, and it was just a brutal transaction. I walked out of the shop in a daze. The door jangled on the way out, just like it does on the way in.

  When I got home, I tried the shirt on. The buttons were all on the wrong side.

  ‘That’s because it’s a blouse,’ Craig said. ‘They button up differently.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah, girls button up everything the wrong way,’ McQueen confirmed. ‘What you’ve got there is a blouse.’

  ‘Shit. I can’t not wear it.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘No, I told someone I would have it on tonight.’

  ‘That’s between you and your blouse,’ McQueen said.

  ‘You, your blouse, and a whole bunch of guys, who you will be fucking,’ Craig added, ‘if you wear a blouse.’

  I went back into town, blouse in a carrier bag, wondering whether to ask for my money back. Three pounds. From a fucking charity shop. A student’s life is full of such dilemmas.

  I sat on the low wall opposite the Union for about twenty minutes, feeling unsatisfied and watching people going in and out of BESS. It’s a town small enough I recognised most of the faces. It’s a town too small to make the kinds of huge social mistakes I’d already made my share of. I went back to Oxfam, and told Vikki that I was well into her, and wanted to be more than friends.