Five of Seven

My room was freezing cold, pitch black half the time, and there was usually someone semi-conscious sprawled out on the bed. Often this was me. Despite this, my room was the most popular in the house, not counting the kitchen. This was almost certainly because of my open-door policy, because there were slightly fewer pairs of dirty boxer shorts on the floor than in Frank’s room, and because I had the best computer by a country mile.

Craig also had a computer, and quite a good one, but he did not operate an open-door policy. In fact, he used to close his door and repeatedly lock and then unlock it for fifteen straight minutes, until he was satisfied that it was locked. Then he’d do the same thing with the light switch. From outside the house, it probably looked like he was hosting a very small and lonely rave.

Craig kept his room like a boot camp. Every surface was cleaned and dusted, he used his own crisp linen on the bed, and the room permanently smelled of polish, air freshener, fabric softener, and cologne. We were only rarely granted access. I was actually beaten from the room with a rolled up newspaper for farting on one of the few occasions I managed to infiltrate the citadel.

By contrast, people came and went with my room, and usually I liked that arrangement. [On the other hand, it smelled of man-sweat and smoke, which I could take or leave.] For all the time I spent in my bed, there would usually be at least one person sitting at my desk. The computer would always be doing something; if nothing else, it would be playing music. Second year caught Napster on the rise, and so we were never short on tunes. [Original Napster, yo.] Frank signed up for a Yahoo! ID at the start of the year, which he used to play chess and insult Americans.

That came as something of an epiphany for me. I had always guessed that the vast majority of jerks on the internet were backwards twelve year olds, high functioning morons, puerile incompetents with nothing better to do with their lives than incite petty hate mail and create discord, future night-porters and garage attendants to a last man. In short, the very sort of people who are most unlikely to find themselves studying medicine.

Frank McQueen was an above average chess player, and also an internet jerk extraordinaire. He’d go into teen chat rooms as ‘SonOfSaddam’, and insult three shades of crap out of anyone who was trying to be nice. He’d get on side with a conversation for a couple of minutes before turning tail, and insulting anyone who agreed with him. If there was a point or reason to any chat room, Frank would argue the opposite, with expletives on top. He even insulted people while he was playing them at chess.

‘Good move!’ he would say. ‘You fucking cunt.’

I cringed with embarrassment at some of the propositions he made in the ‘Romance’ groups. I hid my head in shame when he infiltrated the ‘Book-Lovers’ group. And I absolutely could not condone some of the things he said in the Christian chat rooms, but hell if those Christians didn’t give as good as they got. Usually minus the swearwords; but not always. I guess that’s what Frank was hoping for and, against all expectations, it was pretty compulsive viewing.

The mid-year implementation of ‘voice’ chat may have been Yahoo!’s most significant error of judgement. Buying a microphone was mine.

‘Dude, are you Irish?’ one confused debutante asked, shortly before being subjected to a tirade that might have reduced lesser ‘Girl Talk’ chatters to tears.

‘East Coast,’ Frank said, making a gang sign. ‘Of Scotland, bitch.’

Pretty soon I signed up for a Yahoo! ID of my own. I made up my name from the side of a bottle of tonic water that was sitting on my desk, and then got down to some abuse of the service. It was liberating enough, but I could never get any conviction into my insults, and it didn’t feel like me, so I gave up and started to take it all seriously, instead.

‘You are such a fucking jerk,’ people would tell Frank.

‘I am the Eggman,’ Frank would say, if he was feeling mellow. Then he’d light up and put on a few tracks.

Sometimes we’d hear Craig screaming wild obscenities from his room. At first we thought he was getting in on the game, too, but later it turned out that he was generally asleep at the time. Frank started locking his door at night for a while after that came out. Even people who don’t give a fuck have limits.

I asked Craig recently why he thought he had been so anal retentive in Fife Park, whether he thought he genuinely had OCD, and whether he thought he’d mellowed out these latter years. He didn’t, as it happens. His exact statement, word for word, was:

‘If my recollection serves, you were a nut. 100% so. Lived in the dark, died your hair semi ginger, wore the worst clothes, smashed up your guitar, and had strange issues. So... it’s all down to interpretation.’

It’s hard to argue with that comeback. For one thing, it’s all true – so it would be kind of an uphill struggle. For another, he’s right - this is my interpretation. Who else would I look to? Please understand, I’m not making any great claims to my own mental health, but if it’s really all down to interpretation we won’t be using Craig as the benchmark for fucking apple-pie ordinary.

True, I did smash up my guitar, but not until much later in the year. Also true, I dyed my hair, with limited success, and this had a lot to do with the guitar getting smashed. But taken out of context, that gives kind of a false impression. It makes it sound like I was being pretentious and post-punk, but actually coming off like an asshole. In fact, I skipped the facade entirely – I was being a straight-up asshole, with no subterfuge. It was an emotional time, and I handled it with my usual aplomb. But I’ll get to that.

Guilty as charged on most of the other stuff, as well. The clothes, for example. I was going through kind of a flamboyant phase that I’d nurtured during first year. It wasn’t about fitting in with any social group, or any style as such. I didn’t ascribe to any ethos regarding dress sense or personal politics, and if I’m honest it’s probably because I didn’t really know how. I had a lot of half-formed opinions; some of them might even have been interpreted as ‘strange issues’.

Unlike Frank, I wasn’t out of control because I thought life was more fun that way.  I was just one of life’s bad drivers, swerving all over the road, desperate to be in control. Fuck, I wasn’t thrilled to be all angles at all times. I was happy, but I was frantic. I was happy, but I didn’t think things were right. They felt like they were, but I knew that they weren’t.

How can I even describe that feeling? I’m looking to get it back; I don’t even know what it is. It felt like calm, while I was raging round it.

Craig doesn’t think this book tells the truth.

‘It’s all down to interpretation,’ he says.

He must be right, because I think it does.