‘No, I think people are adjusting.’

  ‘It’s like they don’t even know me.’

  ‘They’re on edge,’ I said. ‘They don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Is Ella out?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘At the far table, with the DRH lot.’

  ‘Let’s go over,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Fucking, shut up. I’m not going to embarrass you. But you have to introduce me.’

  ‘Introduce you?’

  ‘Yes, and do it properly.’

  ‘Alright,’ I said. ‘I hope you’re in the mood for a proper conversation.’

  She didn’t get that, but it didn’t take long.

  ‘Hey Quinn,’ Ella said.

  ‘Ella,’ I said. ‘This is Darcy. She’s a friend of mine. She wanted to meet you.’

  ‘Oh, nice. Hi Darcy. Why do you want to meet me?’ Ella said.

  ‘She wants to meet all my friends,’ I said. ‘Because she is completely wasted.’

  ‘Quinn!’ Darcy said.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘It’s OK. We’re all wasted here.’

  ‘Well, I’m alright,’ Ella said.

  ‘Fuck. Of course you are. Why wouldn’t you be?’

  ‘Quinn,’ Darcy said, pulling me to one side.

  ‘Darcy, this is a terrible idea. I think she’s fucking sober.’

  ‘You are a fucking moron, Quinn,’ Darcy said. ‘I’ll fix this, you just keep your mouth shut.’

  ‘Yeah, OK.’

  ‘Ella,’ Darcy said, with a flourish. ‘Aren’t you in our Philosophy class – The Good Life?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ella said. ‘I just put in the essay today.’

  ‘Us too,’ Darcy said. ‘This fool helped me after my PC ate the file. It’s fucking handy having a geek around. ’

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ Darcy said. She turned back to Ella. ‘He so is.’

  ‘And it is a thankless fucking task,’ I muttered.

  ‘What did you write about?’’ Ella asked.

  ‘Eudaimonia,’ Darcy said. ‘It’s a looooad of bollocks.’

  ‘Change,’ I said. ‘Question 3.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ella said. ‘Me too. Change, I mean. I wrote about how most people want things to be different but hate it when things change.’

  ‘I reckon most people want things that don’t make sense,’ I said, meaningfully.

  ‘And then philosophers put them into words,’ Ella said, clapping her hands together.

  I walked Darcy home that night, arm around her shoulder. We went the long way, which is to say that we went the short way, with a lot of zigzagging. Darcy was unusually quiet as we came up on the Whey Pat. She rubbed her eyes.

  I was half scared she might pass out completely, leave me dragging her like so much dead weight down City Road. She used to do that, clock off like a light going out, be properly unconscious for hours. We used to think it was something that just happened to her, but I think it’s something that happens to anyone, eventually.

  ‘They won’t be my friends,’ she wailed, suddenly.

  ‘They still like you,’ I said. ‘Mind the steps.’

  ‘It’s not the same,’ she said, stumbling.

  ‘Mart was really genuine.’

  ‘It’s never going to be the same.’

  ‘You never know,’ I said.

  She looked at me, appreciatively. But also like I was an idiot.

  ‘You’re like my Dad, sometimes,’ she said. ‘He’s such a smart man. He does whatever he wants.’

  ‘I don’t do what I want,’ I said.

  ‘He just tells people how it’s going to be, and then they do as he says. He was always telling us stories about his work.’

  ‘He sounds nice,’ I said.

  A chill wind hit, as she stood at the top of the stairs to her flat. I stood at the bottom, looking up. She shivered for a second, and then smiled again.

  ‘Ella’s so lovely.’

  ‘So lovely,’ I said.

  She pushed the key into the door on the third try, and stepped inside.

  ‘See you,’ I said.

  ‘Night, hun.’

  Media Sift

  I found some old chat logs in a lost folder of my Fife Park archive. You never really remember anything, right. I spent hours poring through my youthful conversations looking for gold, but it was all mundane and teenage.

  I found my old Final Fantasy 8 save games; that’s where February went, in the Fife Park year. I’d forgotten that. I found a box of photographs. I looked happy, of course. Sometimes I was thinner than I remember ever being.

  I used to skip meals, for days on end. I remember it as a montage, some Rocky-style weight loss video, all fast cuts and motivating music. But, now I think about it, I kind of tortured myself. For months, for nothing, because I didn’t realise that my weight had fuck all to do with how likely I was to get laid, to meet someone, to be popular.

  I found old emails from Darcy. And emails to Darcy. She would send me a page of nothing at all, and I’d try to be precocious when I replied. It’s nothing like I remember. Every time I think of myself, I look differently.

  I’ve still got the music, too. I keep that folder of pirate MP3s safe as houses, backed up across a multitude of sites, because it is the most direct line I have to these memories.

  These memories put me in the mood for more than just memories. I’m remembering things, but also feelings, and some old feelings can be bought for a price. I put out the word that I wanted some cannabis.

  It has been years since I bought dope. I’ve hardly even touched it since St. Andrews. Took about two fucking weeks to get some, so nothing new there. I don’t know any drug dealers, or have any friends with pretensions to know any. But somebody sorted me out.

  I didn’t specify the type. I went through a friend of a friend who didn’t even know there were types. So, when it came, it was a little mystery gift. I almost forgot I’d asked for it. I kind of hoped it would be hash, but of course it was skunk. What else is there?

  I made a single joint and smoked half of it before putting it out. Later I smoked the rest. McQueen would have called me a lightweight. I can hear his voice in my head, just imagining it. But I have always been cautious, and one of the main reasons is because, just occasionally, I haven’t been cautious enough. I wanted to be pretty stoned, of course. I wanted to remember that feeling, and all the little things that go along with it.

  It was still the same.

  The much and too much of it; the shivering, hysterical diaphragm, all giddy butterflies and nerves; the discretion of noise – those noises! The willingness and ability of the ears and the mind to put some hundreds of echoes of small sounds back into the mix, the drops and tinkles and audio also-rans that the senses would otherwise completely discard, but which cannabis makes sound so rich, and seem so planned.

  I have had this feeling a lot of times.

  It is its own thing. It sinks me into a very unique contentedness. But it wasn’t the feeling I was looking for. It’s not the answer to the question that is this book. The happy pleasantness of cannabis is just a holiday from whatever you’re feeling right when you smoke it. If I’m honest, that’s why I smoked it in the first place. Even in Fife Park, there were times it made sense to take a break from everything else. Heck, maybe especially in Fife Park. It was a learning curve, for all its well-aged warmth.

  I threw on some music, feeling like a tourist in my own stories. Tried to think what would sound best, what would bring it back most. That’s when I remembered what I’d been listening to, on the night I left a note for myself, jotted down on a square of blue paper, and wedged under the feet of my Hi Fi.

  I put on Media Sift… and closed my eyes.

  Green Themes

  We made a lot of stir fries in Fife Park, which is to say that Craig and I made a lot of stir fries. We made one almost every night for the first few months. Craig was especially particular about how to prepare his stir fries, and we laboured together each day to meet those exacting standards.

  Cooking a stir fry in Fife Park was an exercise in patience. On their maximum settings the hob rings turned a kind of mild orange in colour and heated things more or less to the point they’d eventually dry out, if not cook in any conventional sense of the word. We’d spend an hour or more of our day devoted to the preparation of such a meal, with a good sauce, making it all from scratch out of basic ingredients. They were healthy, substantial meals and damn tasty, but the main point in their favour was that they were not pasta. After the first year, pasta needed to spend a while off menu.

  I was glad of the stir fries because, despite Craig’s insistence on perfection, it was good to get something healthy inside me. Frank, for example, did not eat stir fries. Frank used to eat Tomato Soup and toast. Sometimes he would eat nothing else for days. Occasionally he’d splash out and pour a can of baked beans over a four pack of sausage rolls.

  But for the Grace of God, I say; if it weren’t for Craig, I doubt I would have fared even so well as that. I am an atrocious animal. Left to my own devices, I would probably have eaten Frank’s leftovers with a tin of Tesco Value peach slices. […which were down to nine pence a tin during the price wars of ’99/2000.]

  I eat bad things. I eat wrongful things, in the name of hunger and of discovery. I will eat things that are barely even food, things that don’t look like normal food, things of unknown provenance and uncertain status, things, in short, that normal people would probably not want to touch with their bare hands.

  That’s how, one mild autumnal night, after eating a stir fry and a semicircle of cremated pizza, I got more stoned than ever before. It was a very interesting experience. It wasn’t entirely pleasant, and I was glad when it was over. Afterwards, I wanted to do it again.

  On the night in question, Frank had decided to crumble half a nub of resin and use it to season his thin-and-crispy margarita. Inside of a few minutes, the kitchen smelled of gear. In fact the whole house and a good proportion of FifePark smelled of gear. It was a wholesome, herby smell. I think that was the first time that I ever thought of hash as a plant product rather than some evil concoction made in a lab somewhere by some post-modern Jekyll.

  On the other hand, it was also quite a recognisable smell, and I was worried that someone else might recognise it. I opened a lot of windows and hoped for the best.

  ‘Quinn, it’s getting cold in here,’ Frank said. ‘Will you shut those?’

  ‘But,’ I motioned, while whispering forcefully, ‘the whole house smells of gear.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s good isn’t it? Don’t you think that it’s a lovely smell, Quinn?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, taken aback. ‘Yeah. It’s nice. But what if someone else smells it? What if the warden comes round?’

  The warden kept walking past the house. He kept walking right in front of our windows. I shut them.

  ‘Fuck that fat pie-eating cunt,’ Frank said, as he passed once again. And that was that.

  I went up to my room for a while, to calm my nerves. Frank looked after the Pizza.

  Sadly, as he’d already spent the afternoon smoking the rest of the block, Frank’s idea of time was not in accordance with the pizza’s requirements. By the time he opened the oven door to ‘check it out’, it would be fair to say that it was the pizza itself that had checked out, and gone up to the great Kinness Fry Bar in the sky. What remained was nothing more than a small, sooty disc with melted cheese in the middle. One charred semicircle looked halfway edible, and Frank set to it. I had the rest.

  Fresh off the back of that, and long before it would have any chance to kick in, Frank suggested we hit up some awful homemade bong. I agreed to this, for whatever fool reason I had at the time.

  [The only other time I’d seen smoke so thick and yellow was when I had tried to reheat a French loaf in the microwave. Within a few seconds it had set itself on fire. You could carry the smoke outside in a bucket. The house stank for a day. The bread, on the other hand, tasted okay, as long as you avoided the parts where it had turned black and shrivelled up.]

  Then, after about forty minutes, with the gear coming at me from both directions, we decided to go into town with some of the DRH crew. There was one man too many for the taxi, so I volunteered to walk it. I didn’t think I could handle a taxi ride. It was coming on pretty strong, and I wanted some fresh air. The walk was interesting, although not the most interesting walk of the night.

  I got to the Vic, eventually. I felt a little sick. Craig and Frank were playing table football, and I tried to join in but the sheer stimulation of the speed and the movement was too much. I went to the bar to get a drink. A vodka and coke, I decided. Small, sweet, easy to drink. My mouth was dry.

  The bar was incredibly orange. The glowing electrical lights hit the creamy walls behind the bar and turned my vision orange. Everything that I looked at, while it retained its original colour, had been tinted with this orange. The bar staff didn’t serve me for a long time. I was probably not making eye contact.

  I looked around, and the whole place felt like it was outside me, in a brand new way. Outside me, but so was I. Unimportant. Just a part of an evening, no longer the subject. Not even my own protagonist. It is odd to have your whole conception of the world turned on its tail, to the degree that your whole life in front of you suddenly seems to have only the importance of a vibrant mural adorning the wall of a popular student pub with badly painted Scottish celebrities. [They’ve painted over the mural now, but I’m still here. I call existential victory.]

  Eventually I got my drink and the paranoia hit bad while I was waiting for my change. I had an overwhelming urge to run away. I felt like I was about to be caught for some heinous crime and locked away for it. I can’t imagine that there would have been much worse than locking me away in a state like that. I dug in my heels, and collected a handful of coins. I pretended to check them.

  ‘Act normal,’ my subconscious was screaming at me ‘and you might just get away with it.’

  I went back into the next room, and hunched up in a corner, with my vodka and coke within arm’s reach. The next thing that I knew, Paedo was talking to me about quake. Paedo’s real name was Pedro. I think he had been badly introduced to us in a noisy room, and the name had stuck.

  Now he was talking to me about Quake. Paedo still played the original Quake, and don’t be deceived; that was almost as old-school then as it would be now. Not many people were still spending five hours a day playing Quake in their rooms at the turn of the millennium. My mouth was dry. I couldn’t reply. I took a sip of the mixer.

  I tried to dig my feet into the ground and say something, but the room had sloped off into the distance. My eyes watered. My tongue felt heavy in the bottom of my mouth. I started to talk to him, and then stopped in mid sentence. I knew that I hadn’t finished speaking, but there was simply no movement in my mouth. A moment later, I had forgotten what I was trying to say.

  ‘Dude,’ Paedo said, as he often did, ‘You’re wasted.’

  I was aware of every square millimetre of my thumb and finger skin in contact with my cool glass of vodka coke. My head was tight and felt oppressed. The stimulation from simply talking, moving and breathing was too much. I felt claustrophobic. I could feel the material of my jeans moving against the inside of my legs in a rhythmic timing with my drawn out breaths. Every neuron seemed to be firing at once, and nothing was being filtered out. There was just too much to process.

  ‘Fucked,’ I said. ‘Going home.’

  It was one of the crazier walks of my life. [And I’m known for that.] Every sound on the street seemed to be magnified in amplitude and would echo inside my head for just a fraction of a second. I could see perfectly, but the world that I was seeing seemed to be a very long way away, and quite outside of my reach. It was like it was happening somewhere else.

  Shadows seemed to move at the periphery of my vision, reminding me of the time that I had stayed awake to see three sunrises in a row. On the last night, I had seen things. In the shadows, at the edges of my vision, where nothing was very clear, things had been moving. This was even more intense. Where I might once have stopped and wondered if I had seen something in the shadows, now it was writhing and squirming, even when I turned to look directly at it.

  Eventually, those things moved out of the shadows. They weren’t that terrifying, as it turned out. One of them was a red bike, moving horizontally across the road. I cannot explain how that made sense, but at the time it was perfectly understandable. That was how that bike worked. Why question it?

  I had thoughts, as I walked. Deep theological and philosophical musings. They flitted in and out of my mind at massive speed, barely forming themselves into words, often appearing merely as pictures.

  Answers came, and went as quickly. The thoughts raced, but I couldn’t hold on to them, they rushed through me like a river, each with the force of a previously unknown universal truth, vanishing downstream. Like rivers of the mind; never the same, always present, never the same. Meaning infusing the least pattern, the least moment, and then gone.

  It was like hearing a new a tune as you drift into sleep, and wanting to remember it, but knowing that you have no way to write it down, and that its memory will be gone by morning. I had these thoughts, these answers¸ so it seemed, and I knew that they would all be gone in a split second. I tried to turn one of them into some kind of mantra that I could repeat, and likely remember. I could keep it by repeating it, over, and over.

  It’s very easy to see why some people feel attuned to God, in that state – or come to believe in some kind of universal, spiritual oneness. But it’s not evidence of God’s unadorned closeness to humanity. If it shows anything, it shows how many levels must exist between us, and how unsurpassable might be the void. Especially when you’re fucked.

  I half-ran the rest of the way back to the house, and scribbled the mantra down on the first piece of paper I could find. It was a blue post-it note. Satisfied, I stuck on some music and got into my bed.

  The music was incredible. Like nothing I had ever heard, incredible. I listened to music that I’d always listened to and it sounded totally different. It was like I had the world’s most selective graphic equaliser in my head. All sorts of different sounds, some of them little more than background noise in the track, became a part of the music. Instruments were all connected and moved in time with each other, moved through each other. I listened to a few random tunes, I listened to a couple of Hendrix tracks, and then – finest of all – I put on all of OK Computer. The bass lines passed through the melodies, sweeping the other instruments in and out of the limelight, and I felt at that moment that I had never heard anything so well conceived or created.