A Year in Fife Park (12 page)

Periodically there were signs above my head with the number of the Bridge Services Department emblazoned across them. I wanted to turn back, but felt that I must be closer to the other side. I don’t know at what point that stopped being wishful thinking. It never occurred to me then that crossing the bridge would be the shortest part of the journey.

I cannot stress enough how fucking freezing I was. It was not a thick shirt that I was wearing and as it turns out, warm colours aren’t, particularly. I didn’t even have my tie. Sandy was probably still cradling it, on the bus, halfway back to St. Andrews. All the way back maybe. He could have been asleep by then.

It wasn’t much warmer when I finally reached the other side, but there was less wind. There was, thankfully, no gate at the other end. There would have been no one to open it. I had to crawl up a gigantic sloped embankment to find the road again. I muddied my jeans falling on my knees. I muddied my hands picking myself back up. I was determined. I walked across the middle of a large roundabout.

It was already too late to really be a decision by then, but that was when I decided, in a fool state, that I would get Ella out of my system once and for all by walking back, and thinking things over. There was all the time in the world. I’m sure I did my share of thinking, but I don’t remember a whit of it. I do remember gritting my teeth to stop them banging off each other.

I walked along embankments where the road had embankments. Sometimes they were muddy, and sometimes they were hard to walk on because of hidden stones or thick tufts of grass. Often I walked straight down the middle of the road. I tried to stay between the lanes. Sometimes I walked down the middle of those, too. I kept my ears pricked up for traffic, but there was precious little of it. I was more afraid than comforted when it passed. I felt safer alone, but then I was afraid of the dark. Quite afraid, I remember. There were sometimes animal noises, lowing and barking, the sound of the countryside, which made me feel as  small as the dark is large. I was in the middle of it, miles and miles into the middle of it, and there was nothing to do but try and get out of it.

The first time I needed a piss, I went off-road. I walked up a little hillside. At the top was a small wooded section. It was extremely foreboding, but once again I refused to turn back. I pissed against a tree with massive satisfaction.

When I turned around,  I heard something else moving.

‘Oh shitting fuck,’ I said.

It heard me, and whatever it was broke into a run. I couldn’t tell if it was coming towards me or running away.

‘Fucking fuck me.’ It was a whimper.

My throat closed up and my heart lurched. But there was nothing to do about it. I was terrified of something in the dark, and unlike in a nightmare it was
really
there, only I couldn’t see it.

The running noise got quieter. I stood in the same spot until I couldn’t hear anything but rustling leaves. It was probably a deer, because when I came out of the other side of the wood, I trod in shit and I’m almost certain it wasn’t my own. There were several large piles of it, and I reckon I found them all. I swore a lot, and looked at the stars. I carried on walking.

The road never seemed to change, but the night was getting old. Sometimes I half fell asleep, but I was always walking when I opened my eyes. I remember stopping at the roadside, and wondering whether I should lay down. I started to feel cold right into my bones, and my whole body jolted with it, and so I ran until I warmed up. I don’t know how much running I did. I’ve never really been able to run. Next time I had to piss, I just did it in the road. There was no fucker around for miles.

I could just about read the road signs as I reached Leuchars. I took a wrong turn, and I thought that I was walking through the airbase, but it was just chain link fences on either side of me. I hit the right road after the train station, on the way into Guardbridge. I knew those roads, and knew St. Andrews was only seven miles further down them. That made it seem close. The sky grew gradually lighter, and traffic picked up.

The last hour was the longest. The sky went from inky to mild grey down the long road into St. Andrews. I could see the pattern of lights marking the Golf Hotel for near an hour before I reached it. One of my hips hurt. It felt like it was grinding in the socket.

I was sobering up, and starting to see things for what they were. The temptation to try and hail one of the passing cars grew into an urge. But by that time, it was a journey almost done. I had started to feel kind of good about things. I wanted to finish the walk, and be able to say that I had walked it. I didn’t particularly want to say that I had gotten into some shitty red Fiesta on the last leg of the journey.

Eventually I was opposite the Golf Hotel, back in St. Andrews, and suddenly the walk was just a walk from the Golf Hotel to Fife Park, and not an insurmountable goal. I walked down the back path, behind New Hall, and into FifePark. I had a few glasses of water in the kitchen from an unrinsed glass as the sun blazed into my eyes through the window. It was only just a fraction above the horizon and it had turned the ugly walls of the kitchen bright orange. I could feel the warmth of the sun on my chest, and its cool absence on my back. Ella seemed a million miles away, at the end of a tunnel. So did the whole of the night.

‘Is that you Quinine?’ I heard Frank call, as I reached the door to my room.

Frank is the only person who calls me by my full first name, pronouncing it like
Kwin-in
.

‘Leave me the fuck alone,’ I said. I went to my bed.

The next afternoon, when I woke up, I felt stupid. But also slightly smug. The world felt more like a place I was in than it had the night before. I walked from town to town – a seemingly impossible feat. I had never walked from one large town to another before. I’d never done it by day, let alone by night; never even biked it. Towns and cities have always seemed like separate worlds that can only be reached along thin interconnecting roads, by rocket-fuelled modes of automotive transport. It comforts me, even now, to think that it can still be done. It calms me to know that everywhere is somewhere you can walk, give or take.  It is
so
comforting to think that if all the world’s fuel ever runs out, I won’t find myself stuck for the rest of my life in, say, Hull.

The Dudes

Craig moved out after the first semester. For some reason or other, after Craig moved out, the house matured into a loafer’s paradise. Our last vestigial standards went the way of the dodo: the kitchen stopped getting cleaned at all, drunken people messed things up and sober people left the mess where it was.  It was an odd situation because I swear Craig never washed up more than twice in the whole time he was in FifePark, but the kitchen was always cleaner when he was there.

They don’t like wasting space at Residential Services; ask the bunk-bed generation, who had to study at their shared desk in shifts and still find enough time to cry themselves to sleep. We all understood that we’d get a replacement housemate. We still joked that we’d get a German exchange student called Helmut.

None of us guessed that he would be American, even though that was probably the most obvious option. St. Andrews has a permanent neon-lit olive branch at the other side of the pond, and the place itself was always highly Americanised, with the golf, Semesters, and the perpetual stream of tourists. Accordingly, there’s an influx of single-semester exchange students who bubble into St. Andrews at the beginning of February. We got Brad. We called him Helmut, behind his back.

Brad was a huge American, from Vermont. He had slightly thinning, curly, strawberry-blonde hair, and looked like he could bench a Buick. I don’t know how old he was, but he looked rugged enough that I reckon you could have cut him in half and counted the rings. He sported a stubbly ginger beard most of the time. He used to go out every day for runs, and would wear a bandana when he exercised. He used to go to the gym, which made him as far removed from, say, Frank McQueen as some of the higher primates.

He also routinely spent an hour in the bathroom taking a shit and reading the papers. The first time he did it, and the mellow stink wafted over the stairwell and infused the house with the aroma of poo, we all thought that something had gone seriously wrong.

‘Dude, I think Brad shat himself to death,’ I announced. Frank was opening a can of tomato soup.

‘Isn’t it amazing,’ Frank began, ‘how a tin of tomato soup fits exactly into one of these bowls?’ He carefully manoeuvred the rim-full bowl into the microwave and then threw a couple of slices of bread into the toaster.

‘So what’s it like upstairs with Helmut?’ Gowan asked.

[We even managed to convince Will that he was actually called Helmut, for the first three days.]

‘Well, not very pleasant precisely right now. But, ah… he seems okay. Just different, maybe. He doesn’t understand anything I say. We’re kind of talking at cross-purposes. You know he leaves the door open when he takes a shit?’

‘Right open?’

‘Ajar. Just enough to let things circulate. But he leaves his bedroom door open when he’s naked.’

[Brad hadn’t been entirely in the buff when I had walked in on him, but it was still a shock. He was unpacking his suitcase, in a pair of boxers. Brad had brought four books with him and little else it seemed. Three were guides to Scotland, including some awful-looking A-Z, and the last was Trainspotting.]

Just as the microwave pinged ready, none other than Brad walked into the room, evidently on a quest for a manly greeting of some sort. He chose Frank.

It should be said that Brad’s greetings were typically rugged and outdoorsy, with just a twist of frat boy, and therefore notable not least for their latent homoeroticism. Forewarned, this could have been a stimulating moment of pure cultural exchange. Frank never even saw it coming.

I was in a fortunate position, insomuch as that I could not only see Brad draw back his arm and swing it round in an exaggerated motion, before finally grabbing a hold of Frank’s derriere with a raucous slap, but that I could also see McQueen’s face, the picture of which will remain with me forever.

‘Hey, man,’ Brad said.

Frank was gingerly holding a bowl of bubbling soup, which was full enough that any motion whatever might have caused a burning spillage of hot tomato lava. He didn’t move an inch, in fact, but you could see in his eyes the exact moment at which Brad’s beefy paw impacted with his rump.

It was the look of an angry bull, but also the look of a frightened rabbit. It was the classic eyes-wide look of a cartoon animal who, forgetting himself, has just run off the edge of a cliff and is only too late realising the implications of this. Most of all, it was the look of a big hairy man, with another big hairy man’s hand on his arse, shocked out of his skin, and yet desperate not to spill boiling soup over himself.

‘I’m off into town, guys,’ Brad told us, leisurely removing his hand. ‘We’ll be drinking in Lafferty’s if you boys want to catch up with us later.’ And with that, he was gone.

There was an actual point at which you heard Frank start to breathe again.

‘Did you see that?’ he whispered. ‘Right on my arse? And, I mean, I’m not exactly a small man. There’s a lot of arse to get hold of.’

‘Well, he got most of it, mate.’

‘Did you see
that
? Did you see it?’ Frank kept asking over and over, in a small voice.

‘I’ll skin up,’ I consoled him.

It was all he could do to muster a subdued ‘mumble-mumble-something... Eggman.’

The Americans in St. Andrews usually stick together, the exchange students almost exclusively, and Brad was no exception. He rooted out a posse within hours of his arrival and, from then on, they were his crew.

We dubbed them ‘The Dudes’, and romanticised their better points. They, above all other punters, were truly Random.

We hung out with them a few times, but to little avail. If Brad had arrived speaking only Japanese, we would have found more things in common. Sadly, our apparently shared language seemed to be the greatest barrier to communication. We assumed at the time that we were using it to the same ends, but I think we were mistakenly taking that for granted.

Thank fuck for Dylan; he came into his own when the Dudes arrived. It was as if he’d been born in their midst. He could speak the dialect effortlessly, and we’d look to him for occasional guidance and translation. He even shrugged off his usual reserve and made out with one of them in the Vic one night.

‘She said that I was sick,’ he said. ‘That’s a good thing.’

The rest of us were hopeless. In conversation there was always the feeling that we didn’t quite understand each other, signalled by an array of awkward pauses, and trailing sentences. I got the impression after chatting with Brad that almost every aspect of our worldview was irreconcilable; that we were fixed in totally different paradigms; and that there was no way we could ever hope to communicate frankly. I’ve spent a lot more time with Americans since then, and I have nothing to add to this but my gratitude. Life would be a lot less fun if we were all on the same page.

Of course, alcohol being the leveller that it is, we got on famously if we ever made it out of the house. For the most part, they took their ales a lot better than I had expected, mainly because they were so big. Shots were another matter.

It wasn’t just Brad – most of the Americans, the lads at any rate, were gigantic. I don’t mean that they were fat; I mean that they had the physical build of redwood trees. Big ‘Bear’ Pete, for example, was an immense man and as solid as a mountain. He was one of Brad’s better friends and we often saw him around the house. We got on with him pretty well in the scheme of things. Brad and Pete made ‘Scotch Pies’ together one night, and we all had a beer and a laugh.

Pete used to wear a shaggy red and black plaid jacket that made him look like a lumberjack. He had massive amounts of scruffy dark hair and also sported a thick, close-trimmed beard. Pete was fucking
built.
When you call a Scottish guy ‘built’, you tend to mean that he can swallow more than his fair share of pints, swing his full weight, and has probably got no neck.