Upstairs
Fife Park, at the time, was the cheapest student accommodation in the UK. [We paid around twenty-nine pounds per week, a figure which will become less connected to reality with every passing year, until one day I’ll simply have to refer to it as ‘old money’.] That does not make the final repair bill, which eventually tallied up at significantly more than a year’s rent, any less impressive.
The park is a shitty set of early 1970s buildings, modelled on your average pebble-dashed, papier-mâché suburban Scottish council estate. At the time of writing, Fife Park is fast approaching its final year on this earth, and has been around nearly forty years longer than I would have expected it to last in the brisk winds of Fife.
Each house has six bedrooms; three up, three down; two toilets (with one shower between them); a kitchen which can comfortably seat four, as long as nobody is trying to cook; and a hallway, with a flight of stairs. At the top of the flight of stairs is a sheer drop, made ‘safe’ by a little wooden barrier which cuts off just below the average person’s centre of gravity.
The walls are made of painted cardboard. The rooms, and the two miniature corridors separating them, were carpeted in some kind of rough green hair which, barefoot, was oddly painful to walk on. The upstairs toilet was floored with something blue and slightly spongy.
We had the upstairs of Fife Park Seven. I was in Room Five. My partners in crime at the start of that year were Craig McCartney, and Frank McQueen.
Craig has the physical build of the undead. Tall and broad-shouldered but utterly emaciated, he carries himself with a slight shrug, and arms that suggest they are reaching out towards you, even when at his side; a posture that makes him seem permanently ready to spring.
He’s got just a trace of that bad guy streak that women like. This is fundamentally because he is a bad guy. It is also, in part, because he is highly, and deliberately, mysterious. It was no surprise when he announced his mysterious past – in as many words – and then shortly into the year started dating a mysterious girl. Years later, he got a mysterious job. This also came as no surprise, although if the job is anything like the girl, he’d have been better off staying at home and stabbing himself with a fork from nine to five.
Craig once told us he had left Dundee because he killed a man. Anyone can say they killed a man. Some guy called Robin told us he killed a man, one night. We called him Bobby Bullshit for four years on the back of that. We didn’t call Craig a damn thing, just in case.
Craig is also capable of the unexpected – or perhaps it would be more fair to say that he never ceases to amaze me. The unexpected was something we both celebrated, back then. We would drink to Random together, and Random would find us. Looking back, I can see how much this meant to me. It is the paradox of the gambler; when something is random, there is hope beyond one’s own means. At nineteen, that was probably just the hope that I’d get laid, or at least home. But ten years on, finding myself desperate and hoping for hope itself, I wonder if it would be as easy as raising a glass with a friend, to feel so free again.
I value my friendship with Craig tremendously. At the darkest fringes of myself, he understands me. I wonder sometimes if we are similarly broken in some way. We do not talk about such things, but we joke, casually and confidently, about the worst of human nature. Craig exudes confidence, but does not do many things casually. He is stubborn, uptight, and controlling. He’s clean, particular, and demands order. We found a tube of Anusol in the bathroom one day, and he didn’t even pretend it belonged to anyone else. He held out surprisingly well in Fife Park, all things considered.
Frank McQueen, on the other hand, was a big, hairy man. There’s no fairer way to put it. He wore a hooded top back before that was grounds for an ASBO, and wasn’t afraid to wear it with the hood up. Frank had a dark and tousled mess of shoulder-length hair, which was as thick and intractable as the very real man-rug poking up through the V of his collar. He owed his style as much to the Unabomber as to Ché Guevara, but the effect was all his own.
‘I am the Walrus,’ Frank would say. He would say this several times a day. It was unquestionably the case, and a source of great pride.
Frank was a medical student. There are two kinds of medical student in the world, and I’ve lived with both. On the one hand you have the type who are certain that most things that aren’t book shaped are going to kill them, who wash their fruit before eating it and dial Emergency if they swallow a couple too many aspirins in a 24 hour period. They study conscientiously, get early nights, and believe everything they read in textbooks.
And then there’s Frank McQueen, somewhere just behind the vanguard of the opposing side; the medics who have realised that the human body is virtually indestructible and that it takes a hell of a lot more than pesticide and bird shit to take the wind out of your sails. They tend to drink, smoke, party on obscure drugs that don’t even have vernacular names, and crave anything that will push them closer to that little bit of life’s speedometer that would usually be coloured in red.
It would be an injustice to call Frank easygoing. When Craig finally snapped and put in his request to move out of Fife Park, the last-straw event he cited was stepping on Frank one night, barefoot with the lights off. Frank, who had passed out face down three feet from the door of his bedroom, was naked. He didn’t even stir.
In our First Year, Craig and Frank had lived next to each other in the Pink Prison that is New Hall, thrown together by the fates, or by whatever system of assignment the fates had delegated to Residential Services. [I’ve always thought the official name showed a stunning lack of either optimism or foresight on the part of its constructors. Perhaps they’ll rename it when it starts to show its age. If so, I hope they open it to nominations.] I don’t think any of us realised how little this had prepared them for each other.
The Randoms lived downstairs, in rooms One, Two, and Three. We called them The Randoms, as a collective, even after we had been properly introduced. We called them The Randoms long after they had expressed annoyance with this.
They had all been to school together, and had all elected to live together. They all came from in, or near, the same small and unexalted village of Strathblane. I have since been to Strathblane precisely once, and can confirm that it was most likely founded according to traditional local principles: by hammering together a couple of Scottish-sounding syllables and then building a pub. [Strathblane is just a handful of miles north of Milngavie where, given the dichotomy between spelling and pronunciation, they presumably built the pub first.]
‘Quinn, you know they’re all from the same village?’ Frank asked me, late the first night. ‘Strathblane, apparently.’
We downloaded Duelling Banjos, and played it with the volume up.