‘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.

  ‘They’re not mine,’ she said.

  ‘We can wash them.’

  ‘Thirty seconds,’ she reminded me.

  Pop. It took thirty-eight.

  ‘Shit,’ I said, sitting back. ‘We’re going to feel that.’

  Even she looked like she thought it would be enough.

  ‘How are you doing?’ she asked, eventually.

  ‘We drank a bottle of wine in half a minute.’

  ‘Generally, I mean. We haven’t talked for days.’

  ‘Huh, really?’

  ‘Yes, really,’ she said, sourly. ‘Glad you noticed.’

  ‘I’ve been busy.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘I’m into this girl, Ella.’

  ‘Tell me about her,’ she said.

  I did.

  ‘She sounds nice,’ Darcy told me.

  ‘Think she’s in the Vic tonight,’ I said. ‘With all the guys.’

  ‘That bastard there, too?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘All of them.’

  ’You’re missing out?’

  ‘See how much I care?’

  ‘Enough to drink wine with me, instead of beer with the girl of your dreams?’

  ‘That much. Exactly right, except I would be drinking Gin and Tonic.’

  ‘Aww,’ she said. ‘I’ll buy you a Gin and Tonic some time.’

  ‘To be honest, I asked her out and she said no. Ella, I mean.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last week maybe? The week before? I don’t know.’

  ‘But you’re still into her?’

  ‘She’s nice,’ I said. ‘Like I described her.’

  ‘Not that nice, if she turned you down.’

  ‘I’ve turned people down before,’ I said. ‘She was nice about it.’

  She punched my shoulder.

  ‘You fucking pushover.’

  ‘You don’t know her,’ I said.

  ‘Still think you’re in with a chance?’

  ‘Who knows.’

  ‘You seem different,’ she told me. ‘Have you lost weight?’

  ‘Doubt it,’ I said. ‘I’ve got this plan, though.’

  ‘To lose weight? You don’t need to.’

  ‘To seem different. No, I mean, to be different.’

  ‘Huh,’ she said. ‘Oo-kay.’

  ‘Telling,’ I replied.

  ‘No, it’s not that,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to change.’

  I looked at her. She looked at her feet.

  ‘My decision, anyway,’ I said.

  ‘Go on. Tell me about your plan, then.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I cleared my throat. ‘Well, basically you can choose how you behave, but not how you feel, right?’

  ‘Sometimes you can choose how you feel.’

  ‘Yeah, but basically, you like some things, you don’t like others, you’re good at some things, bad at others, and so on.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Well, I think that if you pretend to feel a certain way for long enough, it can start to be how you actually feel, not just what you pretend.’

  ‘So if you feel sad, but you pretend to feel happy, then you’ll feel happy eventually?’

  ‘No, it’s more like... Well, OK, maybe. That’s an OK example I guess.’

  ‘Yeah, I don’t think so. I think that if you bottle things up and pretend they’re different, it can make you sick inside.’

  ‘Well, something else then. Little things. Just like, your body language can tell your mind how to feel, almost as much as the other way round, so you just act like something, and it can happen. If you pretend not to be nervous, sometimes it will go away. Or if you pretend to like beer for long enough, you might actually start to like it.’

  ‘What if you feel tired?’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe you can ignore it. You might get a second wind, or something. I don’t think it’s the same sort of thing.’

  ‘But eventually you’ll fall asleep or die, or whatever.’

  ‘What I’m saying is that some things, like the way you react to things, might just be something you can train yourself to react differently. So if you’re always panicking, you can just pretend to be calm, and it might work.’

  ‘Except, if you’re panicking, you won’t remember to do anything you decided to do. That’s what panic is.’

  ‘Well, I’m talking about if you’re just not confident. You could just pretend to be confident. You could just act all laid-back, and not caring, and relaxed, and maybe eventually you’ll just feel that way. It sounds calm, and like a pretty cool way to live.’

  ‘Wow,’ Darcy said, bored. I’m not sure that I was finished, but she obviously was.

  ‘Yeah, well. That’s the plan.’

  ‘You know it makes no sense,’ she said. ‘Not really.’

  ‘I’ve been told as much,’ I said. ‘And you sounded just like him.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘I think it’s a great plan,’ I said. ‘It all fits together.’

  ‘Are you just pretending to be Frank?’ Darcy asked.

  ‘No,’ I lied. ‘But there’s more to it, anyway.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Cause Frank doesn’t want anything, and I do.’

  ‘Well, I just think you just need to grow up,’ she told me, sadly.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I don’t mean that in a harsh way. I just think you need to grow up, and it will happen by itself.’

  ‘Well, that’s good you don’t mean it in a harsh way,’ I said. ‘Because it sounded like a bitch-slap.’

  ‘You know, I think of girlfriends my age as women,’ she said, abstractly. ‘But all the boys are still boys.’

  ‘That’s sexist as fuck,’ I said.

  ‘It’s just what I think. Boys mature later.’

  ‘Not always.’

  ‘Well, do you feel like a man?’ she said.

  ‘It’s not for you to say.’

  ‘That’s why I’m asking you.’

  ‘It’s not for me to say, either.’

  ‘Oh, convenient. So who?’

  ‘Well, when it’s true it’s just obvious. Nobody has to make a fucking decision on it.’

  ‘Well, there’s your answer.’

  There was a tang of sulk in the air that probably didn’t help my case.

  ‘Fine, but that doesn’t automatically make you a woman.’

  ‘Oh come on, Quinn,’ she said, leaning over and slurring.

  I turned away.

  ‘Alright, look,’ she said, conciliatorily. ‘Let’s go out there and get you some Gin and Tonic.’

  ‘Right now? Seriously?’

  ’Yeah, it’ll be fucking hilarious. We’ll just pretend it’s an ordinary night out, and go get some drinks in down at the Vic,’ she said. ‘Just imagine what they’ll think when we waltz in there together, like nothing happened.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s the wine talking,’ I said.

  ‘Doesn’t make it a bad idea.’

  ‘What about Craig?’

  ‘Meh,’ she said.

  ‘But you’re sure you won’t regret it?’

  ‘Blah, blah, blah.’

  She made a ‘chatty’ hand motion.

  ‘Whatever. I’ll get my coat.’

  We sauntered into the Vic like we had a point to prove. Darcy was dead right about the reaction, I wouldn’t have credited it. Mouths dropped open. Pints hovered between face and table. Lance’s fag went out in the ashtray. Eventually the silence started to seem kind of rude. Mart stepped up to insulate the awkward.

  ‘Fucking hell, Darcy,’ he said. ‘How in the hell are you?’

  ‘You know,’ she said. ‘Getting on.’

  ‘Alright Craig,’ I said.

  ‘Quinn.’

  ‘Frank not out?’

  ‘Medics,’ Craig said. ‘Frank’s doing all the first year socials again.’

  ‘And the second year ones,’ Lance said.

  ‘What have you been up to?’ I asked.

  ‘Beers,’ Lance said. He raised his pint, grinning.

  ‘Look,’ I started.

  ‘This is not cool, Quinn,’ Craig said. ‘Not cool at all.’

  I looked round. Darcy was at the bar.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing, don’t get riled.’

  ‘What are you fucking doing with her?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s alright,’ I said. ‘Just some drinks.’

  ‘She’s a waste of fucking space.’

  ‘Too harsh, mate.’

  ‘Easy,’ said Lance. ‘She’s right there.’

  ‘You’re being a dick,’ Craig said.

  ‘We’re all of her friends right here.’

  ‘Whose fucking fault is that?’

  ‘I don’t fucking know. Not all hers.’

  ‘What about her other friends? Julia?’

  ‘Who fucking knows what happened there?’

  Those two had switched poles right at the end of the year, and gone from inseparable to repulsed by each other, over fuck only knows what personal bullshit.

  ‘Mate, she’s just not worth it,’ Craig said.

  ‘It’s not an effort,’ I said. ‘I’m going to help her with the drinks.’

  Darcy was counting small change out of a huge purse at the bar.

  ‘Is it weird?’

  ‘How would I know?’ I said.

  ‘Does it seem weird?’

  ‘Fuck, yes.’

  ‘Should we leave? Should I just go?’