Divan, Divan

It was freezing cold in my room, because the window was always open if anyone was smoking. We smoked a decent bit of pot in my room, looking back. I never thought of myself as a stoner, but I guess I thought of a lot of my friends that way, and this probably should have clued me in. I wouldn’t say I fit the mould, exactly. I guess what set me apart from all the people who just tried it once or twice [which, by the way, is everyone], was that I really kind of liked it. I liked it for what it was, and not for what it represented.

I remember the first time I tried it. Frank introduced me, of course.

‘Wanna try a joint?’ he asked me, nonchalantly.

‘Yeah, okay.’ I said.

‘Let’s go back to my room and skin,’ he replied. I had no idea what that meant.

Frank meticulously constructed a joint in his en-suite New Hall bathroom, as I watched wide-eyed. I recall it with the strange duality of the known and unknown. I know how to roll a joint well enough these days,  although Frank would still say that I didn’t. But I remember the way he made that one joint, before I knew how a joint was made, as a process in abstract. In my memory of the night, all of those steps are still arcane and unfamiliar.

‘Now what?’ I asked, when he proudly held it up to the light. It looked like a cheap firecracker.

‘Now we smoke it,’ Frank said. Then, seeing that I was still mystified, he added ‘like a cigarette.’

‘OK.’

‘Not in here, though. Smoke alarm.’

We went out for a walk, over the North Haugh, almost to the Old Course, and lit up just off the main road. It was quiet, dark, the stars were bright. My hands were shaking. I thought I could hear dogs barking.

I was always very nervous about smoking hash, which is to say that the thought of getting busted with a spliff sent me spiralling into an almost feral panic. Sure, I didn’t see anything particularly wrong with smoking it, but the law does not always accord with common sense. I was much more afraid of getting on the wrong side of the law than of getting on the wrong side of common sense, which is something for which I’ve got an established coping strategy.

I sometimes wonder why I made such an effort to do something that put me so much on edge. I guess that was something of a theme, at the time. But also, it made things seem alright as well. It put me on edge, but it settled me down. It conflicted me, but also relaxed me. Made me calm and terrified.  And it somehow seemed to make all the difference at a difficult time, though I suppose it wasn’t the smoking so much as the company that mattered.

When I was at my worst that first year, when I stepped right out of line, when I said the wrong things out of spite, or ignorance, or desperation – even when I said those things right to Frank, spat them in his face – he would roll us a joint, we’d take a walk in the night, and we would talk about any other things.

I bought a tiny bit of it towards the end of the year, and kept it like some kind of a prized trophy. I held on to my little block all summer, like a little super-dense piece of the sun, with my tiny world still revolving round it.

When we got back for the second year, Frank was uproariously happy to see that I’d kept a souvenir of the first, because he had run out at the start of the summer, about five minutes before getting into his Dad’s car, and being driven home to the East Coast. Apparently it had taken the edge off delivering the news that he’d failed his first preclinical year, but not nearly by enough.

We smoked a joint each day, till the stuff was gone, and didn’t even feel the need to go out on a huge hike to find some secluded spot, like we did back in the New Hall days. We smoked right in the room, and even I was happy with that.

Dylan was the first of the Randoms that we really got to know. He caught the smell of it, and came to join us. Dylan was kind of the poster boy for being stoned. He was thin. He was a genius. He was a philosopher mathematician. He was Zen as fuck. He had long, wavy hair, and reportedly looked American. [Or like a Cocker Spaniel, depending on who you believe. I think it’s the dimple in his chin that does it; the American thing, that is.] We’d sit together with some of his psychedelic tracks on, and figure we were in the most peaceful place on earth. There was a kind of detached freedom to Fife Park, that gave me peace. The house was a home, not a room. It was ours to enjoy.

I was not entirely comfortable, of course. I left the window open day and night, and there was an occasional burst of paranoia, a mild fear of being caught in the act, but nothing like I would get when Frank decided to skin up in the toilet of a bar, or casually light up while walking into town. In FifePark, I felt like I was at home to please myself.

That was until Craig’s parents turned up with a cellophane wrapped mattress, and poked their heads around the door while I was skinning up.

‘Hi,’ I said, my hands wavering over the tray for a moment. We used to roll up on a circular green plastic tray which moved about between Frank’s and my room, depending on who’d rolled up last.

‘Hi,’ Craig’s mother waved, unenthusiastically. Her eyes dropped to the tray on my lap.

‘Yeah,’ I said, in answer to the silence, but the conversation was already over.

They took the mattress next door, dropped off Craig’s takeaway, and solemnly left. I mentioned it to Craig later, but he was nonchalant.

‘I’ve already told them that you smoke loads of gear.’

‘Betrayed,’ McQueen pronounced, authoritatively. ‘You are not the Eggman.’

Then he picked up Craig’s old mattress, dragged it into the hallway, and threw it downstairs.

The mattresses in FifePark were a joke. They were stuffed with harsh, revolting horsehair. [We know, because Frank jumped on one, and split it down the side, spewing the coarse, hairy mess onto the floor of my room.] The real irritation, though, was that they were laminated in some kind of waterproof plastic which made it almost impossible to keep a sheet on. FifePark must have seen a lot of bedwetters the year before, because they’d all been bought to order. The whole Park had these things, brand spanking new, brand spanking awful. You could pour a whole can of Irn Bru onto one of those mattresses, and it would just run off. We know, because we saw it done. [Ah, who am I kidding? It was us.]

The worst thing about them was that they were sticky, clammy, and foul smelling – even through a sheet or two, which would invariably ride up and come off during the night, in any case. No matter what preventative measures you resorted to – doubling the sheets up, taping them down, or covering the bed with an oriental throw – still you were virtually guaranteed to wake up with your face stuck to plastic. We hated those mattresses, but we all made shift with them – all except Craig.

Craig’s parents visited him every Tuesday night. They lived in Dundee, only fifteen miles away. [I say ‘only’.  It turns out that this can be quite a long way, depending on the circumstances.] They collected his laundry, and invariably brought him some form of takeaway – usually a Chinese. By the second week of the semester, they had also brought him a new mattress, because he didn’t like the old one. They brought a standard single mattress, but it hung an unreasonable distance over the side of the bed beneath it, just going to show how small those FifePark beds were.

McQueen spent at least an hour in the stairwell with the old mattress, proceeding to repeatedly launch himself down the stairs on it with little regard for self-preservation, before clambering back up to the top for another go.

One time, he veered too far to the right with one of his parasuicidal leaps, and wound up wedged between planks of the thin wooden banister. He gave a couple of high pitched squeals of surprise, and managed to struggle out from his lodgement – but to no avail, because the mattress was too slippery for him to gain any purchase. In the end, he had to pull himself up the length of half the staircase on the banisters alone, all the while laying on his side. He referred to this as a ‘superb commando effort’ and redoubled his attempts to do himself massive internal injury on the stairwell. I know, because I stood and watched – I was the very picture of vicarious maternal concern.

These hijinks were brought to a sudden end when one misjudged gauntlet run had him slide down the stairs, rather than the mattress, on his belly, before cracking his head into the fire extinguisher at the bottom of the flight. The sound of this went something like Thump, Thump, Thump, Thump, Ding!

‘Ow,’ he reported placidly, and then wandered into the kitchen.

That’s one thing worth mentioning about Frank; his tolerance for pain is exceptional. He took a lot worse than that before the end of the year, and never voiced more than a passing concern.

For my part, I tried to avoid pain at all costs. I took the mattress back to my room, and stacked it on top of my own. A double thickness of Fife Park’s best probably wasn’t as good as a single, ordinary honest-to-goodness mattress intended for people with shoulders and bladder control, but it did mean that I could just pull the spare one out and have an extra bed on the floor of my room, which came in handy on countless occasions.

[Well, it came in handy twice, then Frank jumped on it with both feet, and the resulting explosion covered us in dust and hair, and made my room smell like a stable at mucking out time.]