Will
Will’s unstable girlfriend dumped him early in the year, which distinguished him as the only person in the house to have been given the heave by a certified mental. He didn’t make any fewer trips back home afterwards, which really showed that he was in it for the horses.
Will’s big night came at the Fencing Club dinner. Fencing was a big thing in Fife Park 7. Gowan and Will had joined at the start of the year and displayed an immediate proficiency with the foil, or at least an immediate passion for hurting each other with anything shaped vaguely like one. The competition between them bred a special kind of aggression, which could only be satisfied by a hole left in something or someone.
They used to face off along the downstairs corridor whenever they were drunk, fighting with whatever offensive weapons they could lay their hands on. In fact, as we later discovered, that’s what had happened to the doors of rooms two and three, even before Frank got involved.
The dinner was an annual event for the Fencing Club, and books could probably be written solely about that. In fact, on the strength of a couple of the stories, combined of course with my longstanding desire to be a Jedi Knight, I joined the Fencing Club myself – too late though, for the club dinner that year, at which Will went for a thoroughly ambitious rebound fling.
[Most people, even people in the club, don’t realise that there’s actually a genuine, directly traceable Kevin Bacon style connection between St. Andrews University Fencing Club and Darth fucking Vader.]
He got very, very drunk, found two ladies of remarkable girth and, unable to choose between them, chose rather to take both girls home and divvy up whatever was left of his libido at the end of a hard night’s drinking. It was, apparently, not very much. Both girls left heartily unsatisfied with proceedings, and Will passed out shortly afterwards.
The next day, Gowan stencilled the word ‘some’ after the large 3 on Will’s door. It was okay, because we all knew that the door was going to need replaced by that point.
Funnily enough, after hooching up on White Lightning that night, we caught a taxi into town whose driver was unable to resist telling us about his largest ever fare.
‘My axle was creaking, I swear,’ he said of the three costumed fornicators who had lately occupied his vehicle. ‘A real skinny guy in the middle, but mind there wasn’t a spare inch on the seat. All dressed like schoolgirls, they were.’