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.

‘Well, I sort of knew that,’ she said.

‘Yeah.’ I said. ‘So I’ll see you tonight.’

‘Probably.’

‘Right.’

I didn’t mention the shirt. Blouse.

‘Shine on you crazy diamond,’ Craig said, when I told him. ‘That’ll make this evening comfortable.’

‘It had to be done,’ I said, and believed it for a moment.  I didn’t tell Frank.

The really pathetic thing is that I thought I was brave for making a point of blurting it out like that. When, really, I was just too scared to keep up the act that is courtship for more than a few seconds at a time. The things we realise years too late. One could write a book about it.

I wore the blouse.

Evening rolled around, we got dressed. I had a fucking headache, like storm clouds coming in. It was actually quite a clear night, but the air was muggy.

Scarface and the Dork were security on the door, on a loaner from the Vic. They recognised us as their regulars, and waved us in with nary a look at our tickets. We sat down and started quaffing plastic pints of lager, student-style. There were party poppers and someone filled my pint with pink and blue streamers. I drunk it anyway, with a straw. We passed around a disposable camera and clowned for it.

We walked around a bit, but although there were a lot of little stalls, there wasn’t much to do. The air was dead, and there was no one else we knew around. We were all oddly uneasy. Every conversation stopped before it really started, every drink tasted foul and made us feel worse. Darcy arrived with Vikki late on and Craig dragged her off to dance. He threw her around out there like he was trying to save her from choking. Or induce it. Or both.

I talked to Vikki a bit at our table and it was a normal, boring conversation. I kept wondering when the magic was going to happen. [It wasn’t. Obviously.]

‘Hey,’ I said eventually. ‘Funny story about this shirt.’

Her face soured for a moment, as if the elephant in the room had just pinched one off on the table.

‘Yeah,’ she said, getting up. ‘Excuse me, though.’

She dragged Darcy off to the bathroom, and Craig shot me a look as they passed him. His lips turned up at the edges. He walked over to me.

‘Apparently, you’re a stalker,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I just…’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I just heard it from the horse’s mouth. So what is wrong with you?’

I didn’t have an answer. It was fucking stifling in there. I’d been aware of it all night, but it suddenly felt like every breath had a ton of bricks attached.

Frank was smoking outside when I went to get some air. He looked like he was also getting some air. He looked like he wanted it to be different to mine.

‘You followed her into work, and told her you wanted some of it,’ he said.

Fucking Craig.

‘It’s not like that,’ I said. ‘I told her I liked her.’

‘Liked her,’ he said. ‘Like what? She your sister or something?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You like her because you want her,’ he said. ‘And there’s no difference between that and saying it.’

‘Well fucking so what? You didn’t like her and you still fucking…’

‘Don’t bother,’ he said.

‘Well.’

‘Don’t bother. I’m fucking sick of it.’

‘I told you I liked her,’ I said. Whined, actually.

‘And? Don’t pretend like you were ever going to do anything about it. What, am I supposed to hang around while you put an option on every chick in town?’

‘It was only one,’ I said.

‘This month.’ Frank said. ‘It was your academic sister last month, yeah?’

‘Dude, that is not fair.’

‘Do you know what Vikki thinks of you Quinn? Not a fucking thing. She barely knows you. I see her every day.’

‘What?’ I said, genuinely surprised. ‘Left field comment, much?’

‘That’s…fuck’s sake. That’s how things happen. I swear you don’t know a fucking thing about anything, Quinn.’

He turned his head away and spat into the tarmac. Resigned. But I goaded him one last time.

‘You’re way out of line telling me who I can and can’t see,’ I told him.

Frank went very quiet. Then, so I could hardly hear, he said:

‘Fine, I give up. I fucking give up with you. You can have my fucking cast-offs, Quinn. Just make sure you seal the deal instead of stalking her all over town, because frankly I think it’s freaking her out.’

I don’t know if it was the words or the tone, but I knew it was fighting talk, where before it had been a kind of tired pity. I knew it, because I didn’t have to know a thing about people to know it. That kind of rage is automatic.

‘I’ll fucking kill you,’ I told him. ‘I’ll fucking kill you!’

I lunged to get a hold of his throat, but he held me at bay like a leaky bin bag. He didn’t hit back. He already looked badly over it. But Craig appeared over his shoulder, right on time.

I don’t know how long he’d been watching us. I know him, though.

‘How could you misunderstand it all so badly?’ Craig asked, shaking his head. Lips still curled in an amused smile.

‘You too, Craig. I’ll fucking do you, too.’

Smile didn’t go anywhere. Cruel motherfucker.

The fight was all out of me anyway, but Scarface pulled me off Frank, started waving his finger at me. Doing the bouncer thing. He was surprisingly bad at it for a man with a four inch knife wound across one cheek. Then again, maybe that’s why he got stabbed in the face.

‘Can’t you see I’m fucking done here?’ I told him, backing away with my hands raised. Then I shrugged my shoulders like a petulant child and stormed off home.

I sat bolt upright in bed for hours, back at New Hall, trying to come up with a better comeback than ‘I’ll fucking kill you’. Permutations of the evening running through my head. Apparently I didn’t know a fucking thing about anything. How could I misunderstand things so badly? What was wrong with me? It was four in the morning when the pictures in my head turned on their side, and I saw it all out of context, with myself as the crazy, irrational, socially-retarded stalker.

Thank God for that moment. An hour later, that was how things were, they’d always been that way, how could anyone not understand that? But it was six in the morning before the right comeback fell into place.

I was wearing my dressing gown when I banged on Frank’s door. Took him a while to open it.

‘Fucking hell Quinn,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. Can I come in? I need to say some things.’

Frank waved me in, and I sat on a pile of shirts in his chair. But all I said was ‘I’m sorry,’ again.

‘It’s fucking 6am,’ he said, getting back into bed. ‘Why aren’t you sleeping it off?’

‘I’ve been up all night,’ I said. ‘I just feel so bad.’

‘You were pretty fucked.’

‘I mean, about what I said.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Quinn,’ he said.

I could feel the guilt burning in my stomach, and apologising wasn’t making it go away.

‘Look,’ Frank said. ‘What I said about Vikki, too.’

‘Yeah, it was shitty,’ I said. ‘But I was so out of line. I just…’

‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘It’s done.’

‘But, I just feel so bad.’

‘That’s how it is,’ he said, with an exasperated sigh. ‘Go to bed.’

‘Is it OK, though?’ I said.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ he told me. ‘Go to bed. Get out of here, you big Cunter.’

‘…Yeah,’ I said.

It wasn’t OK. But Frank wouldn’t call just anyone a Cunter.