The War of the Randoms

Noises came from downstairs. Sometimes they were loud, and violent. There were sounds of banging, clattering, thumping, laughter, screams, and the odd distinguishable obscenity. As our friendship with the Randoms still hung by a thread, we feared the worst.

The Randoms were Gowan Crimp, William Pace and Dylan Tellgood.

By November, we had started to use these names, instead of just calling them the Randoms and, in kind, they had stopped ignoring us and introduced themselves properly.

Gowan was a small, athletic guy, who was always on the lookout for a good time. He had round cheeks, boyish, appealing looks – which have never really left him – and an easy, comfortable manner. He had a roguishly casual attitude to sex, which served him well and infuriated those of us who took sex very seriously indeed and consequently weren’t getting any.

Will was a lithe and good looking blonde guy, with an eighty quid haircut. He went home every weekend in his decrepit Golf to ride horses and visit a girlfriend who we never met. It had been a High School romance, and her half of it still was, either because she was inappropriately young, or desperately re-sitting her way out of the Sixth Form. Will didn’t drink with us often but, when he did, he used to get very drunk, very quickly. Getting him home was always a nightmare, partly because he had a penchant for exposing himself, but mostly because if he came across anything taller than himself he’d climb it and refuse to come down until morning.

I confronted Gowan about the noises at one point, but he countered that noises also came from upstairs, that he often heard people screaming at Americans, and that he was perpetually disturbed by what sounded like something being dragged across the ceiling of his room late at night. He insinuated that it might have been something awful. I didn’t pursue the matter.

Usually the disturbances were short-lived in any case, so much so that none of us had made it down in time to see whatever was causing them. Usually the only signs of trouble were minor surface damage. There was a hole in Gowan’s door one day, for example, and then a slightly larger hole in Will’s the next.

One night the noises started and didn’t die down, so I was nominated to investigate. As I got to the bottom of the stairs, I was almost knocked off my feet by Gowan rushing into the house with his arms full of damp and fusty autumnal leaves. He was in hot pursuit of Will, who managed to shut his bedroom door just too late to stop the first barrage of dirty brown leaves from entering in his wake.

The kitchen was in a state. It looked like people had been throwing things at each other. Arguably that wasn’t unusual, although to the trained eye there was definitely something amiss. Outside the house, the damage went further. Will’s Volkswagen had been attacked with peaches, eggs and flour. At that time, tinned peaches were down to such an unreasonably low price that they were cheap enough to use as either a light snack or as light artillery.

‘Grab some eggs!’ Gowan encouraged me, running into the kitchen. ‘There’s still a few clean spots on Will’s car!’

‘No,’ Will called, holding him down, ‘go and get some leaves, and put them in Gowan’s bed…’

‘I was just coming downstairs for a yoghurt,’ I lied.

‘That’ll do!’ Gowan said, feverishly. ‘Throw it over the windscreen.’

The struggle continued as I went upstairs, yoghurt in hand, to report back to Frank and Craig. They both pronounced the Randoms insane, which certainly seemed possible. I don’t know what Craig thought about that, but I think Frank rather viewed it as a challenge.

After it became clear that Gowan and Will were all kinds of trouble, Frank made easy headway with them. Next time they went crazy, he was right there with them, albeit principally in an advisory capacity. Crazy wasn’t worth making too much of an effort over in Frank’s book.

‘Use the chair!’ he said, when Will locked himself in his room.

Gowan pounded another hole in Will’s door with a chair leg.

‘Pour water in his bed,’ he advised Will, after Gowan had finally passed out.

‘He’ll have a fucking heart attack if I pour cold water over him,’ Will objected.

‘Hmm,’ Frank said, a trace of disappointment in his voice. ‘I’m almost sure that won’t happen.’

Will went to get a bucket.

That was the beginning of the end. After Frank switched sides, there was no point trying to keep the house in order, and even Craig let himself go a bit. The next week, while making pancakes, we had what began as a food-fight.

It was just a minor ruckus, started when Craig, out of curiosity, poured cocoa powder into the mixing bowl. I poured one into the pan, but it didn’t cook right. So we grabbed a few handfuls of stodgy half-cooked mix, and threw them at each other. Also at the ceiling because, remarkably, they didn’t come down again. The fight left the kitchen, and pretty quickly escalated into something more.

Sometimes we were all in it together. At one point, we poured several litres of water downstairs, just to see what it would look like. [Like a wet Slinky.] 

But then sometimes it was a battle. I took it like a man when Frank threw water over the balcony at me, but I hid in the downstairs bathroom when the bottles it had been in came down, too. They were followed by soap powder, a few bathroom copies of The Saint, some cardboard and a thick woolly blanket.

I was in the bathroom for quite a long time. Craig danced about on the rug madly, working everything into a lather. We left everything exactly where it was when we went to bed.